U.S. regulators released a blueprint for upgrading Internet access for all Americans, with Internet speeds up to 25 times the current average, expanded coverage and more airwaves for mobile services.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission plan released on Monday comes as the Internet increasingly delivers everything from telephone service to movies, music and banking services.

Nearly 200 million Americans had fast Internet access at home last year, but about 100 million do not, says the FCC document. “Like electricity a century ago, broadband is a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life.”

Full report – FOX News

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A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

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It’s true that we use signs in tandem with personal navigation systems today, but that may not always be the case.

Experts envisions a future in which we trust digital directions so completely that we no longer make much use of real-world cues.
This theory would have sounded crazy—well, crazier—five or 10 years ago, when these technologies were first coming into their own. Early personal navigation systems were bulky and sometimes doled out bad advice.

Although digital maps and the personal navigation devices that they power have yet to reach their full potential, they’re already changing the way we get around. The first thing designers have noticed is that personal navigation tools limit our ability to learn routes. The cell phone, with its handy digital directory, has eliminated the need for people to remember telephone numbers. GPS seems to have a similar effect on our navigational skills.

Source – Slate

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RealNetworks just screwed us all by settling lawsuits in which it might have lost–but which might also have given some new life to fair use for digital media.

The post-RealDVD world means that unless there’s a major change to the law surrounding copy protection, there will never be a legal way to perform legal acts of copying or shifting protected movies, music, and games.

Take it from a guy who has a special E Ticket. The major movie studios can never sue me nor four other individuals ever for a variety of media-moving activities that you and 300 million other Americans could be subject to lawsuits over. It’s like a superpower. More on how we got this pass later.

The suits in question revolve around RealDVD, software Real introduced in September 2008 that would copy the full contents of a video DVD to a file that could be played back on a Windows system. RealDVD is not a DVD ripper: those programs use one of many methods to strip the Content Scramble System (CSS), the DRM that wraps up DVD content, and other defensive techniques.

CSS and its ilk aren’t precisely defended by technology–the standards are too weak or poorly executed–but by law. The much-excoriated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits “circumvention” of software that’s designed to prevent copying. Breaking DRM encryption breaks the law.

But Real went through the steps to obtain a license from the DVD Copy Control Association (DCCA), which controls CSS on behalf of the movie industry. RealDVD decrypted the DVD, copied it, and then locked it tight. Up to five PCs licensed by the same person could play back the discs. (Real also broke through a couple of unrelated protection efforts.)

RealNetworks must have calculated that as a company with a large war chest, it could succeed where others didn’t dare to tread. As soon as it released RealDVD, it preemptively sued the DCCA and several studios to establish that it had the right to use CSS in the way RealDVD did. The studios and DCCA sued in return, and got software sales halted. The studios won in August 2009; Real appealed.

The settlement on Monday clears all the suits by RealNetworks agreeing to never sell the software again, refund the money to about 2,700 RealDVD purchasers, disable an associated metadata service, and pay $4.5 million to several movie studios, its Rhapsody partner Viacom, and the DCCA to cover legal and other expenses.

Some people may truly hate RealNetworks for its mediocre RealPlayer software (once a technical miracle) that was bundled with poorly disclosed third-party adware programs. But RealDVD was a thin blade trying to shimmy open the door of fair use.

Fair use is a maddeningly ambiguous set of rules enshrined in copyright law that mention nothing whatsoever about personal use and copying. Court decisions have shaped fair-use exemptions to copyright laws. Congress has passed extremely narrow copyright exclusions for personal use as well.

Without testing specific ideas about fair use or copyright scope in court, there’s no sure way to know whether your particular software program, Web site, tweet, or steampunk-based laser decrypter isn’t in violation. When the MPAA or a studio sues you, you could potentially plow through millions of dollars with no idea of the outcome.

You can always be sued, but you want to make sure that you have some basis on which to defend yourself, especially if the law and court decisions firmly back you up.

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The idea of a microwave oven or a washing machine running Android might seem like a bit much, but the company behind these two concepts, Touch Revolution, actually has a pretty clever product.

Their Android-powered NIM1000 Touch Module can be integrated by an OEM into a wide range of products (hence the proof of concept microwave and washing machine on display) adding gesture-based touch controls to almost any device.

Source

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