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Microsoft

MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order 179

Posted by Soulskill from the wrist-slap-complete dept.
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
The Internet

Virgin Media To Trial Filesharing Monitoring In UK 280

Posted by timothy from the deep-pocket-inspection dept.
Shokaster writes "The Register reports that Virgin Media are to begin monitoring file sharing using a deep packet inspection system, CView, provided by Deltica, a BAE subsidiary. The trial will cover about 40% of customers, although those involved will not be informed. CView's deep packet inspection is the same technology that powered Phorm's advertising system. Initially Virgin Media's implementation will focus on music sharing and will inspect packets to determine whether the content is licensed or unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry. Virgin Media emphasised that records will not be kept on individual customers and that data on the level of copyright infringement will be aggregated and anonymised."
Medicine

Babies Begin Learning Language In the Womb 250

Posted by Soulskill from the no-time-like-the-present dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports findings from a new study which suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, long before their first babble or coo, and are able to memorize sounds from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech (a.k.a. 'motherese'). 'The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation,' said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany. Wermke's team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. The recordings of 2,500 cries as mothers changed babies' diapers, readied babies for feeding or otherwise interacted with the youngsters show an extremely early impact of native language, with analysis revealing clear differences in the shape of the newborns' cry melodies, based on their mother tongue."
Moon

2 Companies Win NASA's Moon-Landing Prize Money 110

Posted by timothy from the what-happened-to-$150k? dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA said it will this week award $1.65 million in prize money to a pair of aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again. NASA's Centennial Challenges program, which was managed by the X Prize Foundation, will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace for successfully completing the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge."

Submission + - Peak Oil Could Hit Soon, Report Says (guardian.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
chrnb
chrnb writes: "There is a "significant risk" that global oil production could begin to decline in the next decade, researchers said today.
A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could "peak" and go into terminal decline before 2020 – but that the government was not facing up to the risk.

Falls in production will lead to higher and more volatile prices, and could encourage investment in even more polluting fossil fuels, such as tar sands, which "need to stay in the ground" to avoid dangerous climate change as a result of carbon emissions, the researchers said.

The new report said there was too much geological, political and economic uncertainty to predict an exact date for peak oil, which would not lead to a sudden decline but a "bumpy plateau" with a downward trend in extraction.

But Steve Sorrell, chief author of the report, said while those who forecasted an imminent decline had underestimated oil reserves, more positive forecasts suggesting oil production will not peak before 2030 were "at best optimistic and at worst implausible"."
Portables

Making Safer Lithium-Ion Batteries 77

Posted by timothy from the for-some-values-of-safe dept.
itwbennett writes "Exploding iPhones may be a thing of the past. Researchers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute have developed a new polymer, STOBA (that's self-terminated oligomers with hyper-branched architecture to you and me), that is added to the cathode material inside a lithium-ion battery to keep them from overheating. 'Fires or explosions in these batteries are caused by short circuits,' said Wu Hung-chun, a researcher at ITRI, explaining that even minor mishandling such as dropping the handset could result in damage causing a short circuit. 'The technology is ready for lithium-ion batteries used in electronic devices, mobile phones, laptops,' said Wu. And ITRI has started testing STOBA on electric car batteries."
Privacy

Personalized In-Game Advertising In Upcoming Titles 244

Posted by Soulskill from the brought-to-you-by-frungy-the-sport-of-kings dept.
Scythal writes "In-game advertising provider Massive Inc., acquired by Microsoft in 2006, has signed up or renewed contracts with several publishers, notably EA, Blizzard Entertainment, THQ, and Activision. Eagerly anticipated games like Need for Speed: Shift will feature the technology that continuously collects 'anonymous' information about users, sends them to the Massive database for analysis, and downloads advertisements to be shown in the game. All that happens insidiously, without the users' explicit consent and out of their control, which raises further concerns about privacy, security and quite frankly, customer abuse. Would you feel concerned about software that collects personal information and sends it so that you get more personalized ads in a game you paid for?" (More, below.)
Government

James Murdoch Criticizes BBC For Providing "Free News" 703

Posted by timothy from the you-don't-trust-the-gov't-to-report-news-fairly? dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "News Corporation's James Murdoch says that a 'dominant' BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK and that free news on the web provided by the BBC made it 'incredibly difficult' for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news. 'It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,' says Murdoch. 'The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision.' In common with the public broadcasting organizations of many other European countries, the BBC is funded by a television license fee charged to all households owning a television capable of receiving broadcasts. Murdoch's News Corporation, one of the world's largest media conglomerates, owns the Times, the Sunday Times and Sun newspapers and pay TV provider BSkyB in the UK and the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Fox News TV in the US." Note that James Murdoch is the son of Rupert Murdoch.
Data Storage

Why Size Matters For Your SSD Purchase 175

Posted by kdawson from the taking-out-the-trash dept.
Vigile writes "Performance analysis on solid state drives is still coming into clarity as more manufacturers enter the fold and more of the drives find their way into users' hands. While Intel's dominance in the SSD market was once undoubted, newer garbage collection methods from Indilinx and Samsung are now balancing performance across the the major players. What hasn't been discussed in great detail yet is the effect that drive capacity can have on overall performance. Some smaller drives (64GB versus 128GB) will actually use fewer data channels from the controller chip and thus will have lower transfer speeds. The article compares drives using controllers from Indilinx, Samsung and Intel." Note that PCPer greedily spans this review over 12 pages. Next time maybe they can keep it down to something more reasonable.

Comment Shoot it down (Score 2, Insightful) 287

by The_church_of_funzie (#29076285) Attached to: Airborne Laser Successfully Tracks, Hits Missile
Being able to aim a laser turret at moving object for a few seconds is impresive, but shooting it down another beast altogether. Protective coating from dense material or ablative coating for missile is pretty easy to make, all you really need is another booster stage to compensate for extra mass. Making missile spin to reflect heat better is also pretty simple. Moore's law makes computational power necessary to spin a missile faster, easyer then makeing a more powerfull laser. Air borne laser is also infrared, it will not travel far through the atmosphere. Does anyone have some hard numbers? Or is this another cost understated, ability underated, "Flying Edsel" funded by Republican party, just for sole purpose of being "Strong On Defence" ?
Communications

Facial Expressions Are "Not Global" 137

Posted by kdawson from the look-me-in-the-mouth dept.
An anonymous reader sends in a BBC report on new research out of Glasgow University, which detected differences in how facial expressions are read between Westerners and East Asians. Using eye tracking, the researchers determined that "people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression. East Asians participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth." Interestingly, the researchers point out that the emoticons used online by the two groups reflect this difference.
The Courts

Submission + - Has The Pirate Bay been shut down? 4

Submitted by shaitand
shaitand writes: As of Monday 8/10/2009 4:46PM The Pirate Bay, a search engine site that is well known as a champion of free speech and copyright reform advocacy, appears to be inaccessible from the treasure coast Florida via AT&T. The Studios recently submitted a request to take down the site. Did the judge grant the request or is this outage due to another problem?
Communications

Submission + - East Africa gets high speed Internet access (stanford.edu)

Submitted by
umarkalim
umarkalim writes: "With the 2010 Soccer World Cup fast approaching the Seacom undersea fibre optic cable, plugging East Africa into high speed Internet, went live on Thursday July 23, 2009 — as reported by the BBC and CNN. Such a cable should dramatically reduce the cost of bandwidth measured in $/Mbps, reduce the Round Trip Times (RTT) from >~ 480 ms for a geostationary satellite, down to 200-350ms by using shorter distance terrestrial routes, and by increasing the capacity reduce the losses and jitter. In this case study we look at the current state of Internet access for Africa as measured by the PingER project and also at the effect of the new submarine cable connections on the RTTs to countries of Africa as seen from the SLAC National Accelerator Center near San Francisco. The main effects seen so far are on the RTTs for selected sites that have converted to using the terrestrial links. As the new routes stabilize and more and more customers, e.g academia and commercial organizations, subscribe to the service, we can expect to also see lower losses and jitter and higher through-puts together with a wider impact on deployment."
Businesses

Submission + - G.M. selling new cars on e-Bay

Submitted by
lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: "The government-rescued automaker General Motors announced on Monday that it is starting a trial in which consumers can buy new cars through eBay, the online sales site, allowing buyers to purchase Chevrolets, Buicks, GMCs or Pontiacs before they set foot in a dealership. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081001739.html"
The Courts

AT&T Makes Its Terms of Service Even Worse, To Discourage Lawsuits 412

Posted by timothy from the even-more-fine-print-to-read dept.
techmuse writes "AT&T has changed its terms of service (including for existing contracts) to prevent class action suits. Note that you are already required to submit your case to arbitration, a forum in which consumers are often at a substantial disadvantage. Now you must go up against AT&T alone." This post on David Farber's mailing list provides a bit of context as well.

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