It seems that a recent survey of global broadband practices by Harvard's Berkman Center at the behest of the FCC has stirred the telecommunications hornet's nest. Both AT&T and Verizon are up in arms about some of the conclusions (except the ones that suggest offering large direct public subsidies). "Harvard's Berkman Center study of global broadband practices, produced at the FCC's request, is an 'embarrassingly slanted econometric analysis that violates professional statistical standards and is insufficiently reliable to provide meaningful guidance,' declares AT&T. The study does nothing but promote the lead author's 'own extreme views,' warns a response from Verizon Wireless. Most importantly, it 'should not be relied upon by the FCC in formulating a National Broadband Plan,' concludes the United States Telecom Association. Reviewing the slew of criticisms, Berkman's blog wryly notes that the report seems to have been 'a mini stimulus act for telecommunications lawyers and consultants.'"

Barence writes "Netbooks are more likely to fail within the first year than their more expensive laptop brethren, according to new research. SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analyzed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties. It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than $1,000. The research also raises question marks over the legendary reliability of Macs. Three PC manufacturers — Asus, Toshiba, and Sony — boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate. HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years."

pickens writes "The EFF is reaching out for help after a company called Volomedia got the Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to 'a method for providing episodic media' that could threaten the community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. 'It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years,' writes Rebecca Jeschke. 'Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners.' To bust this patent, EFF is looking for additional 'prior art' — evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use (PDF) before November 19, 2003. 'In particular, we're looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.'"

eldavojohn writes "In a town-hall-style Q&A with (hand-picked) Chinese students in Shanghai, President Obama made several statements knocking China's firewall and censorship. Quoting: 'I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity. And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.' The Washington Post notes that the event was broadcast only on the local level, and in fact Chinese authorities removed from view what little coverage it had gotten, after about an hour. But at least American news media are gobbling it up."

rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"

theodp writes "In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with remarkable similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech. E-mail obtained by the NY Times shows that lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. Genentech, a subsidiary of Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. ... The statements were not intended to change the bill, which was not open for much amendment during the debate. They were meant to show bipartisan support for certain provisions, even though the vote on passage generally followed party lines. ... Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: 'This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.'"

An anonymous reader writes "If you buy a smartphone through Verizon, be prepared for an increase in the early termination fee. Verizon is doubling the phone-subsidy to $350. What's more, is that Verizon also actively charges customers for accidental data transmissions of as little as 0.02kb. 'They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch 'Get it now' or 'Mobile Web'—usually a single key like an arrow key. [...] The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn't matter; they've told me that ANY data--even one kilobyte--is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.'"

nam37 writes with this BoingBoing snippet "The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."

theodp writes "Some people love how CNN employs Twitter to engage its audience. Not Steve Dahl. 'I am not interested in the take of @stinky on the Fort Hood shootings or any other current events,' complains Dahl of the access the media gives to Internet know-it-alls. 'I am watching CNN because I expect them to gather the news, not act as a clearinghouse for any bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion.'"

Yesterday the Guardian ran a story based on two anonymous sources inside the International Energy Agency who claimed that the agency had distorted key figures on oil reserves. "The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the [IEA] who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves." Today the IEA released its annual energy outlook and rejected the whistleblowers' charges. The Guardian has an editorial claiming that the economic establishment is too fearful to come clean on the reality of oil suppplies, and makes an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.

eldavojohn writes "A new award-winning thesis from an MIT computer science assistant professor showed that the Nash equilibrium of complex games (like the economy or poker) belong to problems with non-deterministic polynomial (NP) complexity (more specifically PPAD complexity, a subset of TFNP problems which is a subset of FNP problems which is a subset of NP problems). More importantly there should be a single solution for one problem that can be adapted to fit all the other problems. Meaning if you can generalize the solution to poker, you have the ability to discover the Nash equilibrium of the economy. Some computer scientists are calling this the biggest development in game theory in a decade."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a recent FAQ released by Oracle outlines the plans for many of Sun's popular products like GlassFish, MySQL, and NetBeans. Many are worried at some of the possible avenues the decisions outlined could lead to, especially with respect to NetBeans. "What should have happened, Oracle should not have missed a beat and should have announced work on Oracle plugins for NetBeans and active Oracle support of NetBeans. This type of announcement would have brought a large and some-what skeptical NetBeans community much closer to Oracle. It would have been a big win for Oracle. NetBeans will continue to grow either way - but Oracle has missed a big chance to really change perceptions and at the same time move their tools to another level. What JDeveloper lacks is buzz, a wealth of community developed plugins, a wealth of support for other languages and a very, very large community. And of course it does not offer a platform in the NetBeans and Eclipse sense of the word. This is a huge missed opportunity for Oracle."

Greg George writes "Researchers at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology have announced that they have found an enzyme that helps nerves to grow in areas damaged after trauma. In typical injuries, scar tissue forms around the damage point and the body removes the tissue so that new muscle and nerves can regrow in the damaged area. In spinal cord injuries, scar tissue forms and that is the end of the story. Special chemicals form that stop the body's cells from moving in and removing the scar tissue and then allowing the healing process to start. Studies have been done attempting to bypass the scar tissue, but none has been successful in large-scale repair of injured muscle and nerves in the spinal column. The researchers for this paper have found that sugar proteins near the damage point stop the healing and that an enzyme can be used to break down these proteins so that the body can then begin repairs. The enzyme, chondroitinase ABC (chABC), is sensitive to heat, and breaks down quickly in a human body. To stop that process they found that by replacing the ABC with another sugar called trehalose, they were able to stabilize the ABC, allowing it to break down scar tissue over a large area. The gel formed by these sugars is stable for up to six weeks in the bodies of test animals, allowing the research team to inject growth factors that increased the healing, to the point that the animals started to use their limbs again. The work is still in the beginning stages." Reuters reporting adds a few more details: "...many other approaches will be needed to repair spinal cord injuries in humans, including controlling inflammation, which can cause additional injury, stimulating nerve fiber growth, and getting nerves to reconnect and communicate with the brain."

elREG writes to mention that Sun's ZFS now has built-in deduplication utilizing a master hash function to map duplicate blocks of data to a single block instead of storing multiples. "File-level deduplication has the lowest processing overhead but is the least efficient method. Block-level dedupe requires more processing power, and is said to be good for virtual machine images. Byte-range dedupe uses the most processing power and is ideal for small pieces of data that may be replicated and are not block-aligned, such as e-mail attachments. Sun reckons such deduplication is best done at the application level since an app would know about the data. ZFS provides block-level deduplication, using SHA256 hashing, and it maps naturally to ZFS's 256-bit block checksums. The deduplication is done inline, with ZFS assuming it's running with a multi-threaded operating system and on a server with lots of processing power. A multi-core server, in other words."

Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star, have arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other. A detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirmed Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving. Some theorists had suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others — in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales. Until now such quantum gravity theories have been untestable because ordinarily you would have to see details as small as the so-called Planck length, which is vastly smaller than an atom — to test these theories in order to discern the bumpiness of space."