walterbays writes ""The FCC voted 5-0 to require that cable operators must continue to make all local broadcasts available to their users, even those with analog televisions." I don't understand how AT&T manages to deliver U-verse without any analog channels. Did they get it classified as not-cable and exempt from existing rules? Or as a result of this vote, will they suddenly have to drop 50 SD channels to make room for 5 NTSC channels?"

markmcb writes "Brandon Hansen considers the statistical accuracy of popular on-line weather forecast sources and shows who's on target, and on who you probably shouldn't rely. Motivated by a trip to a water park that was spoiled with hail despite a 'clear sky' forecast, he does a nice job of depicting deviations, averages, and overall accuracy in a manner that stats junkies are sure to love."

Hippie Hippie Shake writes to mention that Google has just lost the right to use the name 'Gmail' in Europe, according to the EU. "Daniel Giersch, a German-born 32-year old entrepreneur, has just announced that his company received a positive ruling last week from the Harmonization Office supporting his claim that "Gmail" and his own "G-mail" are confusingly similar. G-mail is a German service that provides a "gmail.de" email address, but also allows for a sort of "hybrid mail" system in which documents can be sent electronically, printed out by the company, and delivered in paper format to local addresses." It looks like "Google Mail" from here on out, at least in the Old Country."

seriouslywtf writes "The AACS LA, those responsible for the AACS protection used by HD DVD and Blu-ray, has issued a statement claiming that AACS has not been compromised. Instead, they blame the implementation of AACS on specific players and claim that the makers of those players should follow the Compliance and Robustness Rules. 'It's not us, it's them!' This, however, does not appear to be the entire truth. From the Ars Technica article: 'This is an curious accusation because, according to the AACS documentation reviewed by Ars Technica, the AACS specification does not, in fact, account for this attack vector. ... We believe the AACS LA may be able to stop this particular hack. While little is truly known about how effective the key revocation system in AACS is, in theory it should be possible for the AACS LA to identify the players responsible for the breach and prevent later pressings of discs from playing back on those players until they are updated. As such, if the hole can be patched in the players, the leak of volume keys could be limited to essentially what is already on the market. That is, until another hole is found.'"

Dee writes with word of a Canadian study indicating that lifelong bilingualism delays the onset of dementia by 4 years. The scientists were reportedly "dazzled" by the results. From the article: "The researchers determined that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years. This difference remained even after considering the possible effect of cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender as influencers in the results. "

anaesthetica writes "The American Mathematical Society is featuring an article with an in-depth explanation of the type of mathematical operations that power PageRank. Because about 95% of the text on the 25 billion pages indexed by Google consist of the same 10,000 words, determining relevance requires an extremely sophisticated set of methods. And because the links constituting the web are constantly changing and updating, the relevance of pages needs to be recalculated on a continuous basis."

eldavojohn writes "What makes a planet a planet? Slashdot covered the great debate about whether or not Pluto qualified and Space.com now has up an article explaining why we'll never have the term 'planet' defined to a point that everyone can agree on. Divisions in the scientific community currently stand over whether or not it has to be in orbit around a star, the dynamics of the body in question and apparently the country you come from plays a part in it too. Some feel the United States is the dominant deciding factor on the definition but the IAU has not turned to democratizing the definition yet." From the article: "In the broadest terms, a planet could be thought of as anything from an 800-kilometer-wide (500-mile-wide) round rock orbiting a dead star to a colossal gas ball floating alone in space."

An anonymous reader writes "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the ultimate speech translation engine project that would be capable of real-time interpretation of television and radio programs as well as printed or online textual information in order to be summarized, abstracted, and presented to human analysts emphasizing points of particular interest." If combined with the tower of babel project we discussed earlier, it could only lead to awesomeness.

[TheBORG] writes "The U.S. military has been testing software on laptops that translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English to have conversations with Iraqis without the need to have a Arabic linguist on hand. 'This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.'" (See this related story from last year about this daunting machine-translation task.)

holy_calamity writes "Natual Language Programming researchers have developed a tool called Zeitgeist that can discover the meaning of new words for itself using Wikipedia. It looks for entries for words not in the WordNet database and works out their meaning by looking for known words linked to them. Development of the tool is focusing on using it to understand what bloggers (using slang and neologisms) are saying about companies' products."

moterizer writes "After some 20 years of work and five years behind schedule, OpenCyc 1.0 was finally released last month. Once touted on these pages as "Prepared to take Over World", the upstart arrived without the fanfare that many watchers had anticipated — its release wasn't even heralded with so much as an announcement on the OpenCyc news page. For those who don't recall: "OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine." The Cyc ontology "contains hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other, forming an upper ontology whose domain is all of human consensus reality." So are these the fledgling footsteps of an emerging AI, or just the babbling beginnings of a bloated database?"

fooby12 writes "According to the Univeristy of Toronto instant messaging does not hurt the grammar of the people who use it. From the article: "With 80% of Canadian teenagers using instant messaging and adopting its unique linguistic shorthand, many teachers and parents are concerned about the medium's potential to corrupt kids' grammar. But instant messaging doesn't deserve its bad reputation as a spoiler of syntax, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.""

Mark Owen writes "With technology buzzwords becoming so commonly used in daily life, Webster and Oxford have both begun to include some new terms in their latest editions. Some of their newest additions include: adware, biodiesel, codec, digicam, google (as a verb), geocaching, hacktivism, mash-up, rewriteable, ringtone, spyware, and texting."

digitalhermit writes "I guess many folks are of very little brain, and big words bother them... There's a push for simpler spelling. Instead of 'weigh' it would be 'way.' 'Dictionary' would be 'dikshunery' and so forth. Dunno if it's a joke, but it seems in earnest. Mark Twain must be spinning around somewhere." Twain is often credited with the satirical call for spelling reform called "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling," though according to Wikipedia, Twain was "actually a supporter of reform," and the piece may have been written by M.J. Shields. Benjamin Franklin was another champion of spelling reform, and even came up with a phonetic alphabet to implement such reform.

lowrydr310 writes "Western Union is blocking money transfers to people with Arab names. They have delayed or blocked thousands of cash deliveries on suspicion of terrorist connections simply because senders or recipients have names like Mohammed or Ahmed. 'In one example, an Indian driver here said Western Union prevented him from sending $120 to a friend at home last month because the recipient's name was Mohammed.' Western union claims they are merely following U.S. Treasury Department guidelines that scrutinize cash flows for terrorist links. I agree that Western Union shouldn't allow anyone supporting terrorism to use their service, however I'm fairly certain there are millions of people named Mohammed or Ahmed who aren't terrorists. I wonder if any other financial companies such as banks are doing the same thing."