morpheus83 writes "It's all of 3.5-inches but this LCD screen from Sharp features an integrated optical scanner that could be used to scan business cards, but also be used as a method for multi-touch input. The prototype was seen at the Ceatec exhibition. Possible uses include the ability to recognize fingers or other objects and as biometric lock on your phone. And since each pixel has a scanner it may as well be a multi-touch screen."

Music publishers are stepping up their campaign to remove guitar tablature from the Net. Recently Guitartabs.com received a nastygram from lawyers for the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. These organizations want to stretch the definition of their intellectual property to include by-ear transcriptions of music. Guitartabs.com is currently not offering tablature while the owner evaluates his legal options.

TropicalCoder writes "The LiftPort Group, founded four years ago with the lofty dream of building a stairway to heaven, has seemingly reached the end the line. The dream was to develop a ribbon of carbon nanotubes 100,000 km long, anchored to the Earth's surface and with a counterweight in space, providing a permanent bridge to orbit. Elevator cars would be robotic 'lifters' which would climb the ribbon to deliver cargo and eventually people to orbit or beyond. Now LiftPort has all but run out of funds, and the State of Washington's Securities Division has entered a Statement of Charges (PDF) against LiftPort Inc. dba LiftPort Group and founder Michael Laine."

morpheus83 writes "Akustica today introduced the first High Definition Microphone that enables HD voice quality in laptop PCs and other broadband mobile devices. The AKU2103 is a digital-output microphone with a guaranteed wideband frequency response. It is the first digital microphone to guarantee compliance with the TIA-920 audio performance requirement for wideband transmission in applications such as Voiceover-Internet Protocol (VoIP)."

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spo0nman writes "The PythonOnPlanes release team has just published PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. 'the SuperSunday' release. For those in the know PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association DataMapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.'Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the *PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer* officially debuting on the x86 platform.'"