Microsoft has sicced its lawyers on the OnLive Desktop -- an internet service that streams Microsoft Windows onto the iPad -- but this won't stop another free-thinking startup from sending Microsoft's flagship operating system onto Apple's tablet by way of the proverbial cloud.
When reports of Apple's third iPad first started emerging, the prospect of the tablet including a 9.7-inch Retina Display seemed slim to none. Fast forward to Wednesday, and the Retina Display is reality. So how did Apple pull it off?
Almost one-third of Americans believe the ancient Mayan prediction of global calamity this December are "somewhat true," according to a recent National Geographic poll. The prediction is based on a huge stone calendar wheel but exact nature of the disaster is an open question. Why are such rampant notions of the validity of nonsense claims so firmly established in our culture?
co-star and guitar goddess Carrie Brownstein that she doesn't have to feel like a fraud anymore.
Susan Crawford discusses Comcast, Verizon Wireless and the state of internet access in America.
Ready, set, hatch! The first California condor to hatch on live webcam will poke through its egg's shell this weekend, possibly as early as Saturday.
Fresh on the heels of Amazon Web Services and Google announcing a new round of cloud price cuts, Microsoft on Friday cut its prices on Azure storage-as-you-go and "XSmall" compute services. Will the cloud price war end up like the burger wars?
The secret base-within-the-base was the first sign that I was about to see something special. It was early February at a snow-encrusted NATO compound on the outskirts of Kabul. I'd come at the invitation of a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to Special Forces Task Force 10.
The personal cloud that exists today is mainly about file synchronization across devices and the virtualization of client/server web apps and services. This is great stuff, mind you. But this week I focus on an ambitious next-generation idea that's being implemented by a company called Kynetx and that's described in Phil Windley's new book
Twitter is now serving up pages over Google's improved web protocol, making the site a bit speedier in Chrome and (soon) Firefox. Google is hoping that its SPDY protocol, pronounced "speedy," will one day speed up not just Google and Twitter, but the entire web.
is a film for everyone who caught themselves dancing in public to the music in their headphones and just didn't care. It's also a piece of visual art painted with the colors of New York City, where the residents don't even blink when a goofy girl in a windbreaker starts dancing like a crazy person right through a park in broad daylight.
Bees have different "personalities," with some showing a stronger willingness or desire to seek adventure than others, according to a new study.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes would like to reinvest in and reinvent 98-year-old liberal magazine for tablets and the web.
Dredged from the dark depths of Nordic folklore, the Huldra shares a common trait with other characters from sci-fi, fantasy and cartoons: a rather conspicuous posterior appendage.
A volcano in Colombia that hasn't erupted in over 20 years seems headed toward a potential revival. Volcanologist and Eruptions blogger Erik Klemetti explains what recent activity could mean and delves into the mountain's deadly history.
Let's get one thing out of the way: isn't as bad as some were worried it might be. In fact, the movie's pretty good. But that doesn't mean it's great, and the two-hour-plus Martian epic's main shortcoming may be its ambition.
As most recently seen in faster-than-light neutrino measurements caused by a loose cable, science is difficult at the edge of the unknown -- and neutrinos are especially tricky. More often than not, neutrino experiments have returned perplexing results, challenging scientists and helping them learn ever more about the universe's rules.
Now that Megaupload is gone, some filesharers may have tapped the brakes on their downloading, but mostly, they've just moved on to other websites that let them do the same thing. "If you look after the takedown, you see some other folks taking up the slack," says Chris King, a director of product marketing with Palo Alto Networks.
The video for , does all it can to make you think that the we've come very close to the end of our tenure here on earth. By matching lo-fi digital production with their apocalyptic soundscapes, they show that craftsmanship matters more than gloss.
Right now, soldiers can't do much once a rocket careens their way besides maneuvering and hoping for the best. But the Pentagon is trying -- yet again -- to give them something to shoot the thing right out of the sky.
When people contract the seasonal flu virus and devastating MRSA, or methicillin-resistant , the combination can be deadly. Superbug author and blogger Maryn McKenna reports on a new string of deaths in Maryland.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Infinit's first mid-engine sports car is a range-extended electric sports car, providing yet another glimpse at the direction premium luxury sports cars are headed.
A band of anarchist drummers transform an operating room, and its bewildered patient, into a digi-funk orchestra in Wired's exclusive clip of the Swedish-French crime comedy .
After announcing the new iPad will feature the same awesome camera found in the iPhone 4S, Apple celebrated the immediate availability of iPhoto for iOS. The new app has separate iPad and iPhone iterations, and while one shows potential, the other makes you want to give up photography altogether.
One day I?m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I?ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world?s largest collections of personal data.
It's practically a Silicon Valley proverb: Build your user base, and the money will follow.
An otherworldly narrative is playing out at TapJoint.com through coded messages transmitted using a virtual telegraph machine. The unknown sender tells of a city's resistance movement gearing up for a revolution on Illumination Day, an annual holiday celebrated March 9th.
Just in case you haven't seen the memo: Drones are coming to a city near you. Why now? Under a fresh mandate from Congress, the FAA will begin to relax its restrictions around the domestic use of "unmanned aerial systems," leading to greater use of drones by public agencies and, eventually, the private sector. The FAA?s primary concern is safety. But civil liberty groups are worried about what they see as a greater danger: the specter of massive surveillance.
coondoggie writes "Lockheed Martin says the prototype system it is developing to track all manner of space debris is now tracking actual orbiting space objects. The Space Fence prototype includes new ground-based radars and other technologies to enhance the way the U.S. detects, tracks, measures and catalogs orbiting objects and space debris with improved accuracy, better timeliness and increased surveillance coverage. 'Space Fence will detect, track and catalog over 200,000 orbiting objects and help transform space situational awareness from being reactive to predictive. The Air Force will have more time to anticipate events potentially impacting space assets and missions. Our net-centric design approach allows Space Fence to be easily integrated into the broader U.S. Space Surveillance Network of sensors already operated by the Air Force.'"
redletterdave writes "On Friday, President Barack Obama appointed Todd Park, a 39-year-old former entrepreneur and data scientist, to be the new Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Park takes over for Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. CTO, who resigned earlier this year. Park was formerly the CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 2009, where he helped bring 'big data' to healthcare by helping create an open health care data platform similar to the National Weather Service, which could feed data to commercial websites and applications. Before joining the Obama administration, Park helped co-found AthenaHealth and Castlight Health, and also served as a senior adviser to Ashoka, a global incubator for social entrepreneurs. One of his ventures, Healthpoint Services, won the 2011 Sankalp Award for the 'most innovative and promising health-oriented social enterprise in India.'"
jones_supa writes "California has added 4-methylimidazole (a caramel coloring) to the list of carcinogenic compounds that require an explicit warning when added to foodstuffs. Incidentally, this has entailed the big two cola producers to modify their recipe to decrease the amount of the substance — just enough to avoid the warning. The change to the recipe has already been introduced in California but will be rolled out across the U.S. to streamline manufacturing. The American Beverage Association noted that there is not enough evidence to show the coloring to cause cancer in humans."
itwbennett writes "French computer company Bull Group is looking to sell off the Internet spying software business of its subsidiary Amesys. The Eagle system, which was 'designed to build databases supporting lawful interception activities on the Internet,' has an interesting pedigree, having been 'developed for Libya after signing a 2007 contract with the regime there,' according to the WSJ."
silentbrad writes "/Film (as well as IGN and A.V. Club) reports about Topher Grace's fan re-edit of the Star Wars prequel trilogy into a single, 85-minute film titled Star Wars: Episode III.5: The Editor Strikes Back.' Quoting /Film: 'His idea was to edit the Star Wars prequels into one movie, as they would provide him a lot of footage to work with. He used footage from all three prequels, a couple cuts from the original trilogy, some music from The Clone Wars television series, and even a dialogue bit from Anthony Daniels' (C-3PO) audio book recordings. He even created a new opening text crawl to set up his version of the story.' It continues with what stayed and what was cut. It's just too bad it was a one-time-only screening."
ananyo writes "LSD has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a comprehensive retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo. Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse (PDF), compared to 38% of people who received a placebo. The study adds to the weight of evidence that hallucinogenic drugs may have important medical uses, including, for example, the alleviation of cluster headaches."
Hugh Pickens writes "The Atlantic has assembled a high-profile panel of experts, including a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran, a Senior Vice President at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Deputy Head of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, and a military correspondent at Haaretz, to periodically estimate the chances of conflict with Iran. The Iran War Clock is not designed to be pro-war or anti-war. Instead, the purpose is to estimate the chances of conflict in the hope of producing a more informed debate. Each panelist makes an individual estimate about the percentage chance of war and we report the average score and based on this number, the Iran War Clock is adjusted so that the hand moves closer to, or further away from, midnight. 'On the one hand, the panelists are highly knowledgeable. On the other hand, there are sufficient members of the panel that any individual error should not have an overly negative effect on the aggregate prediction.' If there is a zero percent chance of war, the clock hand is at 20 minutes to midnight. Each extra 5 percent chance of war moves the hand one minute closer to midnight. 'We're humble about the accuracy of this prediction, which is really a collective "gut-check" feeling. But it may be closer to the truth than the alternative forecasts available.' The panel's first estimate puts the odds of war in the next twelve months at 48 percent, consistent with predictions market Intrade.com, which estimates a 40 percent chance of a U.S./Israeli strike by December 2012."
garthsundem writes "I disagree with this article's opening line: 'Within a decade, personal robots could become as common in U.S. homes as any other major appliance.' Haven't we been promised this since the 50s? But I'm fascinated by the rest — how do you teach humans to teach robots? Or, more precisely, how can you teach robots to teach humans to teach robots? The idea that designers can put a flexible platform in a robot, allowing users to determine functionality, is pretty interesting. The lead researcher for this project said, 'People are not so good at teaching robots because they don't understand the robots' learning mechanism. It's like when you try to train a dog, and it's difficult because dogs do not learn like humans do. We wanted to find out the best kinds of questions a robot could ask to make the human-robot relationship as 'human' as it can be.'"
An anonymous reader writes "This weekend may be the last chance for Canadians to fight back against SOPA-style laws being added to Canadian copyright law, with the final hearing scheduled for Monday. In recent days, the copyright lobby has demanded website blocking, warrantless access to subscriber information, and unlimited damage awards. Michael Geist has the details on who to contact and Open Media has launched a campaign to encourage Canadians to speak out before Monday's Bill C-11 meeting. The group makes it easy to speak out against SOPA style reforms, harms to fair dealing, and unduly restrictive digital lock rules."
Zothecula writes "Getting into space is one of the harder tasks to be taken on by humanity. The present cost of inserting a kilogram of cargo by rocket into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is about US$10,000. A manned launch to LEO costs about $100,000 per kilogram of passenger. But who says we have to reach orbit by means of rocket propulsion alone? Instead, imagine sitting back in a comfortable magnetic levitation train and taking a train ride into orbit."
Mr. Shotgun writes "According to CBS, 'Hundreds, or even thousands, of drunk driving convictions could be overturned because the San Francisco Police Department has not tested its breathalyzers, officials said Monday. For at least six years, the police officers in charge of testing the 20 breathalyzers used by the Police Department did not carry out any tests on the equipment. Officers instead filled the test forms with numbers that matched the control sample, said Public Defender Jeff Adachi, throwing countless DUI convictions into doubt.' Apparently this has happened before."
mikejuk writes "You may have have thought games like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and so on were hard at the time you were playing them, but you probably didn't guess they were NP-hard. Now we have some results from computer scientists at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that many classic games contain within them an NP-hard problem. It has been proven that the following game franchises are NP-hard (PDF): Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Pokemon. At least you now have an excuse for your low scores."
An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak reports that Swedish authorities are gearing up for another raid on the servers of The Pirate Bay. The site was raided once before, in 2006, and the evidence gathered at that time was sufficient to convict its founders. 'The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved. Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched.'"
bizwriter writes "A patent filing made public last week suggests that Google may be trying to implement a motion-detection interface, like Microsoft Kinect, for portable electronic gadgets. The patent application is for technology that turns a mobile device's camera into a motion-input system. In other words, it could be goodbye to fingerprints and streaks on the front of your tablet or smartphone. Google could incorporate such a feature into Android in general or keep it as a differentiating advantage for its acquisition of Motorola."