Ostracus writes "The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to 'develop a software/hardware suite that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject. The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject ... Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.'" To be fair, they plan to use the Multi-Robot Pursuit System for less nefarious-sounding purposes as well. They note that the robots would "have potential commercialization within search and rescue, fire fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical and radiation sensing with mobile platforms."

p1234 writes "Though no direct evidence for wormholes has been observed, this could be because they are disguised as black holes. Now Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, is suggesting a possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart. His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called "phantom matter", which has been proposed to explain how wormholes might stay open. Phantom matter has negative energy and negative mass, so it creates a repulsive effect that prevents the wormhole closing. 'US expert Dr Lawrence Krauss, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, points out that the idea rests on untested assumptions. He told New Scientist magazine: "It is an interesting attempt to actually think of what a real signature for a wormhole would be, but it is more hypothetical than observational. Without any idea of what phantom matter is and its possible interactions with light, it is not clear one can provide a general argument."'"

An anonymous reader writes "Google's tech-heavy solution to advertising has worked wonders on the internet, and made it a friend to bloggers everywhere. The low-tech nature of traditional radio, though, has caused some conflicts with Google's radio ad service. The impersonal nature of online ads are very different than the one-on-one personalized service that radio advertising normally uses. While Google ads are running on some 700 radio stations, that's a very small part of the market. They are committed to improving, but onlookers think it will take a change in pitch. 'Whether Google can succeed in radio "is questionable, because you do need relationships with radio stations to give you something of value. If you don't have radio-focused personnel...you'll get the low-hanging fruit but may not be able to grow the market," said Maribeth Papuga, senior vice president and director of radio buying for Media Vest, a part of ad firm Publicis Groupe. "Their challenge is going to be having a broad enough list of markets and stations to make it a viable enough player on a national scale."'"

munchola writes "MySQL has quietly changed the license it uses for its database to avoid being forced to move to the forthcoming GPLv3. CBRonline is reporting that Kaj Arno, MySQL VP of community relations, revealed the license change on his blog, noting it was made 'in order to make it an option, not an obligation for the company to move to GPLv3.'"

jkwdoc writes "The crew at [H] Consumer got a hold of a Durabook sample from Twinhead and got the green light to hold Twinhead to their word about what kind of abuse the unit can withstand. Twinhead originally claimed that their unit could survive 26 drops from 29 inches. A cracked LCD and busted hard drive later, they changed their tune. Complete with video!"

Systems Librarian writes "Linux.com is running a story entitled 'Librarians stake their future on open source'. It details a group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service that have developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run. The system is Evergreen. The element of this project that has the participants especially excited is the speed. Previously, if users wanted changes to their systems, they'd be put into an 'enhancement queue'. Now, some features are implemented overnight. From the article: 'In fact, the catalog has many features and innovations that are lacking in non-free systems. It does on-the-fly spellcheck and gives search suggestions and adds additional content, such as book covers, reviews, and excerpts. The Shelf Browser shows items ordered along a virtual shelf built out of the holdings of the entire system. Patrons can create bookbags, which are lists that contain a selected collection of annotated titles. Bookbags can be kept private or shared as a regular Web page or as Atom or RSS feeds.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

VE3OGG writes "There has been ample hype over the last several years that Apple's iPhone was just around the corner. (Though a product named iPhone was just recently released by Cisco / Linksys.) Well, while Apple fans continue to salivate at the thought of a phone powered by the company-of-cool, the index-everything-while-doing-no-evil company may be setting itself up to produce their own Google phone in partnership with Orange."

Tony Parisi writes "Remi Arnaud and Mark C. Barnes' Collada: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation is a great first book on a new technology for entertainment applications. Collada is a file format for the exchange of 3D game and interactive content, developed by a consortium of companies including Sony and leading digital content creation software vendors. Collada acts as an intermediate format between DCC tools and end applications — thereby promising to solve ages-old productivity issues in the 3D content pipeline. The authors have done a thorough job explaining this problem, and how Collada solves it, in an introductory book that is well suited for a technical audience building advanced 3D tools and applications." Read the rest of Tony's review.

gone.fishing writes to tell us that a new lawsuit is challenging the government's right to read your e-mail. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is reporting that a seller of "natural male enhancement" products sued after a fraud indictment based on evidence gleaned from his electronic mail. Federal prosecutors say they don't need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else's computer."

An anonymous reader writes "AutoCAD is by far the industry standard CAD tool for engineering drawings. When I was an engineering student it was on every computer in the college of engineering. Autodesk, the makers of the AutoCAD software, are attempting to quash an effort to reverse-engineer the proprietary binary format used by AutoCAD. Looking at the court order, their whole argument revolves around something called TrustedDWG that basically looks like a digital signature that verifies the file was created by an Autodesk product."

eldavojohn writes, "A University of Utah researcher and his team of German colleagues have shown that it is possible, using electronics, to read data stored as nuclear 'spins'. The lead researcher in the experiment was Dr. Christoph Boehme and his team's letter is available via Nature Physics (at a cost of $18 unless you are a subscriber). This is looking to be a large advance in quantum computing because prior to this, measuring the number of spins of a single phosphorus nucleus was very difficult." From the article: "The researchers used a piece of silicon crystal about 300 microns thick — about three times the width of a human hair — less than 3 inches long and about one-tenth of an inch wide. The silicon crystal was doped with phosphorus atoms. Phosphorus atoms were embedded in silicon because too many phosphorus atoms too close together would interact with each other so much that they couldn't store information. The concept is that the nuclear spin from one atom of phosphorus would store one qubit of information. The scientists used lithography to print two gold electrical contacts onto the doped silicon. Then they placed an extremely thin layer of silicon dioxide — about two billionths of a meter thick — onto the silicon between the gold contacts. As a result, the device's surface had tiny spots where the spins of phosphorus atoms could be detected."

phil reed writes "University of Washington physicist John Cramer is attempting to send a signal back through time." From the article: "We're going to shoot an ultraviolet laser into a (special type of) crystal, and out will come two. lower-energy photons that are entangled," Cramer said. For the first phase of the experiment, to be started early next year, they will look for evidence of signaling between the entangled photons. Finding that would, by itself, represent a stunning achievement. Ultimately, the UW scientists hope to test for retrocausality — evidence of a signal sent between photons backward in time. The test will involve sending one of the photons down 10 miles of fiber optic cable, delaying it by 50 microseconds, then testing a quantum-mechanical aspect of the delayed photon. Due to quantum entanglement, the non-delayed photon would need to reflect the measurement made 50 microseconds later on the delayed photon. In order for this to happen, some kind of signal would need to be sent 50 microseconds back in time from the delayed photon to the non-delayed photon. (Confusing? Quantum physics is like that.)

An anonymous reader writes "Google recently released Tesseract as open source. Originally developed at the HP Labs from 1985-1995, it has been touted as one of the most accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs available. Having sat on the shelf gathering dust for so many years, Google cleaned up some of the more outdated portions of the code and released it for general consumption. You can download Tesseract over at Sourceforge.

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a CNN Money story about the future of U.K. telecommunications. British Telecom is planning on rolling out an $18 Billion new system in 2010, and the first location to get the hook up is Cardiff, in Wales. From the article: "What's really cool about what will happen in Cardiff - and eventually the rest of the U.K. - is that BT is creating an open, standards-based platform for which anyone can develop new applications. In other words, the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services."