The net as 'Government regulated monopoly'

What will the internet look like in 20 years? No one knows. But this morning at the Stanford Summit, an annual tech industry conference in Palo Alto, a panel of Silicon Valley experts laid down a few guesses.

The way children rapidly learn a vocabulary may be down to the structure of language - but critics say the theory can't explain adults' slower progress

A reversal of tectonic plate motion between Acapulco and Mexico City in the last half of 2006 probably didn't ease seismic strain in the region or the specter of a major earthquake anticipated there in the coming decades, says a University of Colorado at Boulder professor.

Researchers made a porphyrin-like ring that can do something its paper analogue can't: the new molecule can switch back and forth between the one-sided Möbius topology and a "normal" two-sided state (Hückel topology) -- without breaking the ring.

An experimental gas turbine simulator equipped with an ultralow-emissions combustion technology called LSI has been tested successfully using pure hydrogen as a fuel -- a milestone that indicates a potential to help eliminate millions of tons of carbon dioxide and thousands of tons of NOx from power plants each year.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Continuing its strange obsession with unveiling products by the flocks, Philips has yet again given us numerous things to juggle at once. This time around it's a trio of iPod-friendly music / AV stations, two of which also include Bluetooth support. The $199 three-piece BTM-628 iPod speaker station conveniently docks and plays your jams from either the DAP or your BT-enabled cellphone, plays back MP3 discs and CDs, shows caller ID and enables handsfree conversations, and also includes a USB port and SD / MMC slot for playing back tunes from a flash card; the BTM-630 steps it up by adding a CD writer that can create MP3 discs from music stored on flash media. The $399 DCD-778 undercabinet system touts an AM / FM tuner, DVD player, ATSC TV tuner, 8.5-inch LCD, flip-down iPod dock, and the ability to play back videos stored on your Apple. Look for these goodies as well as an iPod clock radio to land sometime this fall.

[Via T3]

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

Video: Exec also discusses accessing eBay 'anywhere'. At the eBay Developers Conference, Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of platform and disruptive innovation, talks about the growth of the company's Web services. He also discusses the important relationship between eBay and its developers, and the experience of accessing eBay "anywhere."

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Storage

Much to the dismay of those Macheads who've started hitting size limits in Tiger's HFS+ file system (all ten of you), Apple has confirmed to InformationWeek that Leopard will not in fact adopt the more capacious ZFS alternative as promised last week by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS Brian Croll told IW point blank that "ZFS is not happening," contradicting Schwartz's assertion that his company's 128-bit file system would be bringing goodies like built-in data integrity and virtual storage to the iMac and friends. Meanwhile, Sun had no comment on the matter. Of course for most users creating an average Word or Photoshop document, this reversal really doesn't mean much, and may in fact be beneficial when we consider the higher processing demands made by the so-called 'Zettabyte File System." For changes in Leopard that are actually, like, real, you can check out our roundup of the new features right here.

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

Connecting directly to the brain's auditory nerve dramatically improves the performance of a "bionic ear" - giving a much wider tonal range, while consuming less power

'Hadn't only drunk water', insinuates Belgian TV

French TV declined to show a clip of French big cheese Nicolas Sarkozy looking a bit worse for wear at the G8 conference, but that didn't stop the Belgians broadcasting a press conference which, inevitably, has found its way onto YouTube: