Blog: A report reviewing a handful of state bills endorsing open document formats finds that none has survived.

Filed under: GPS, HDTV

The folks over at The Inquirer sneaked up on an Ferrari-branded Acer c500 and snapped this grainy picture before getting kicked out of the booth by the camera-shy Acer peoples. At least we're almost positive it's the c500, The Inq wasn't able to get any specs or a model number, but this shiny bugger looks to be the exact unit we saw hit the FCC a few weeks ago, which features WinMo 5, a 2.8-inch QVGA touchscreen, a 300MHz Samsung 2442 processor, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and a decent complement of storage and RAM. We're guessing we'll know more about this sucker soon enough, Acer was never one to keep a random and possibly ill-conceived Ferrari-based concept under wraps for long.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Tech-savvy voyeurs are cobbling together DIY infra-red scanners for less-than-noble uses. For every offense, however, there is economic opportunity. From Crave, CNET's gadgets blog.

Interesting: ...despite the use of encryption, a passive eavesdropper can still learn private information about what someone is watching via their Slingbox Pro. [...] First, in order to conserve bandwidth, the Slingbox Pro uses something called variable bitrate (VBR) encoding....

Since the beginning of the year, we've seen news story after news story about how Canada supposedly had a huge camcording problem, with people apparently making unauthorized copies of movies for sale after taping them with a camcorder in the theater. This left out a few important things. First, camcording is increasingly a minor problem for movie studios, as the copies you see online and on counterfeit DVDs are more often leaked from studio prints or early released DVDs, rather than the weak quality camcorded versions, complete with audience coughing and heads blocking the bottom of the picture. Second, the numbers the industry kept claiming didn't add up, and the MPAA refused to provide any proof for the numbers they kept claiming about the problem (and those numbers kept changing). In fact, Canadian politicians have said they've relied on these questionable numbers rather than asking for any independent studies. Third, the press and the MPAA almost entirely ignored the laws in Canada that already made it illegal to tape movies. Fourth, the US had stronger laws passed already, and there's no evidence that it's done anything to decrease incidents of camcording. Of course, why let facts get in the way of a few lobbyists and campaign contributions? As expected, Canadian politicians have introduced a much stricter anti-camcording bill that will include jail time (two to five years) for those caught camcording. Michael Geist notes that the bill is on the "fast track" and may not even have any debate before being approved. This seems clearly a case of politicians bowing down to corporate interests (even those outside their own country). No, there's no defense for camcording a movie -- but if it's not a huge problem and existing laws can handle it, why waste government, law enforcement and judicial time and money over what's really a corporate problem?

A new game from Grubby Games returns Professor Fizzwizzle to his old stomping grounds -- puzzle-solving platforms.

New research suggests that arsenic trioxide -- marketed as Trisenox -- significantly improves patient survival when coupled with standard chemotherapy treatment in newly diagnosed patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia, or APL.

Discarded crab and lobster shells may be the key to prolonging the life of microbial fuel cells that power sensors beneath the sea, according to new research.

A new study shows that the alternating treatment of two drugs before autologous bone marrow transplantation improves the post-transplantation response. The largest anti-myeloma effect of drugs was assessed in the earliest periods of medication, and this fact sets the basis for new research lines on the reduction of the total number of treatment cycles in order to allow an earlier transplantation. This would result in costs and medication reduction.

Scientists have proposed a new faster way to determine accurate time. Very precise time keeps the Internet and e-mail functioning, ensures television broadcasts arrive at our TVs and is integral to a network of global navigation satellites (such as the Global Positioning System) used for precision mapping and surveying, environmental monitoring and personal location-based services. But time can only be useful if it is the same for everyone.

A duck and a turkey don't make a swan

Comment One man's "merger of equals" is another man's "merger of disasters." In the case of XM and Sirius, US regulators need to figure out just what kind of men they are. And nothing less than your rights to, well, sound will hinge on their decision.