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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 23 declined, 14 accepted (37 total, 37.84% accepted)

Space

Submission + - Using Lasers and Water Guns to Clean Space Debris (wsj.com)

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "The collision between two satellites last month has renewed interest in some ideas for cleaning up the cloud of debris circling the earth. Some of the plans being considered: Using aging rockets loaded with water to dislodge the debris from orbit so it will burn up in the atmosphere, junk-zapping lasers and garbage-collecting rockets."
Medicine

Submission + - Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking (wsj.com)

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought. Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice, writes WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz."
The Internet

Submission + - Why Good Data Can Be Hard to Find Online (wsj.com)

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "Here's a data dilemma for companies: Are the customers and users they engage with representative of the population at large? That question is common online, where it's cheaper to find people but harder to ensure they represent Internet users as a whole — let alone all Americans. Two examples surfaced this week, writes Carl Bialik on The Numbers Guy. An Internet-monitoring firm's estimate of Google's first-quarter performance appeared to have been contradicted by Google's earnings report. Meanwhile, an Amazon unit, which provides popular but widely criticized measures of online traffic, updated its algorithm because the people it was tracking weren't typical of the Web at large."
Upgrades

Submission + - 'Til Tech Do Us Part (wsj.com)

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "Marriage often requires coping with the loss of some individuality, whether it's adopting a spouse's last name or setting up a joint bank account. Now, some couples say it can be equally tricky to navigate intimacy in the digital sides of their lives. They are running into thorny questions regarding how much to share and how much to keep separate in areas ranging from email addresses to online calendars. For some young newlyweds, this means a debate over whether to combine their blogs. Longtime spouses, meanwhile, say perennial arguments about who has more closet space are now joined by bickering over which TV shows get deleted to make room on the TiVo."
Handhelds

Submission + - Walt Mossberg Reviews the iPhone (wsj.com)

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "Walt Mossberg tested the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the U.S. His verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough hand-held computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though the lack of physical buttons can be a hindrance."
Communications

Submission + - Intel Dials Up Business Calling

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "Intel is mounting a long-term campaign to turn personal computers into more reliable tools for calling and conferencing, writes Don Clark. Instead of exploiting the Internet to lower communications costs, the next phase is about adding new features, says Steve Grobman, an Intel director of business-client architecture involved in the effort. Among the benefits for business: broader access to online meetings with advanced features such as TiVo-style playback, instant captioning of conversations — or even translation into multiple languages, Mr. Grobman says."
Google

Submission + - Congress Must Make Clear Copyright Laws

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "WSJ's Walt Mossberg looks at what's wrong with the DMCA and DRM given the recent lawsuit brought against Google's YouTube by media giant Viacom —
Under fair use, as most nonlawyers have understood it, you could quote this sentence in another publication without permission, though you'd need the permission of the newspaper to reprint the entire column or a large part of it. A two-minute portion of a 30-minute TV show seems like the same thing to me. But why should I have to guess about that? What consumers need is real clarity on the whole issue of what is or isn't permissible use of the digital content they have legally obtained. And that can come only from Congress. Congress is the real villain here, for having failed to pass a modern copyright law that protects average consumers, not just big content companies."
Communications

Submission + - Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "The growth of services like Twitter and Dodgeball, which tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication, elicits mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel "too" connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
Handhelds

Submission + - Legislators Ponder BlackBerry Pileups

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "During the morning rush hour on Dec. 5, the driver of a blue Dodge Caravan was traveling north on Interstate 5 outside Seattle when he took his eyes off the road to scan an email on his BlackBerry, the State Patrol says. And that's how he hit the white Mazda, which clipped the green Honda, which rammed the black Toyota SUV before spinning into the other lane and plowing into a city bus. Nobody was seriously hurt. But the episode sparked a chain reaction of a different sort in the state legislature, in the form of a bill that would make it a crime to "operate a motor vehicle while reading, writing or sending electronic messages."
Forget DWI. The big new traffic-safety issue is DWT: driving while texting. As electronic devices become ever more important in people's lives, lawmakers are wrestling with a whole new class of modern "distracted driving" issues."
Music

Submission + - iTunes Staffers Becomes Music's New Gatekeepers

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "From their Silicon Valley cubicles, Apple staffers have become music's unlikely power brokers. A look at how Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing — notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. Still, behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers."
Data Storage

Submission + - Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips

Submitted by
WSJdpatton
WSJdpatton writes: "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."

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