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- Apple Stores still selling screen protectors, but not for long
Reports have been swirling that Apple plans to ban screen protectors from its brick and mortar retail stores, but for the time being, the items seem to be plentiful throughout many store locations. Several Apple Stores we contacted Thursday afternoon assured Ars that there were currently "plenty" of screen protectors in stock, and did not indicate that this would change anytime soon. (One sales associate went as far as listing off all the variations that were in stock.) None of the outlets mentioned anything about the impending ban or removing the product from inventory in the future.
Rumors of Apples supposed ban started Wednesday when iLounge reported that several companies had been informed that, starting in May, Apple would no longer carry screen protectors in their retail stores. According to iLounge's sources, stand-alone solutions as well as those bundled with cases will eventually be removed.
There were so many pundit theories about what could have sparked the decision that iLounge wrote a follow-up article to address them. The conspiracy theorists came up with all kinds of reasons: Apple is making room for iPad accessories, Apple wants you to ruin your phone so you have to buy another, the iPhone is too classy for a flimsy piece of plastic, etc. Our personal favorite theory was that Apple might be planning a new product or technology that doesnt work properly with the film applied. iLounge even got an e-mail from an Apple Store employee, suggesting that the ban might be due to the difficulty in applying the protective layer. Apparently, this employee's store barred employees from doing this for customers some time ago.
In our experiences here at Ars, the iPhone screen is extremely hard to scratch, though some of us have admittedly had much better luck than others. It seems much more likely that an iPhone screen will crack due to a fall than it will develop noticeable scratch. In that case, no amount of thin, flimsy, plastic is going to save your device from that.
What Apple is up to is really anyone's guess. We would like to think that Apple is coming out with its own line of overpriced iPhone screen protectors, but it's more likely they are just more trouble than they're worth for Apple. Screen protectors may still be available at Apple Stores, but probably not for long. Don't worryyou can get the exact same thing for your iPhone from places like Best Buy, Fry's, and almost any other outlet that sells iPhone accessories.
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- Years late, Universal cuts CD prices to combat poor sales
Sales of digital downloads have not been enough to make up for the decline of CD sales since its peak in 2000. Universal Music Group plans to soften the fall of CD sales by dropping prices across the board, to a maximum of $10.
The company plans to test lower prices beginning next month and continuing throughout 2010. Nearly all of UMG's CDs will priced between $6 and $10. UMG is hoping that increased volume will make up for the price drop, and the company plans to create more higher-priced "deluxe" versions for more hardcore fans.
"We think [the new pricing program] will really bring new life into the physical format," Universal Music Group Distribution president and CEO Jim Urie told Billboard.
Retailers have been clamoring for lower retails prices, with many believing that $10 is the magic number to spur sales. (I'll admit, I rarely buy a physical CD for more than $10 these days). A recent test from Trans World Entertainment showed that a $9.99 price point doubled CD sales in over 100 of its stores.
Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan thinks labels may have to consider pushing prices as low as $5 to further slow the decline of CD sales. "The CD is a dying music product format, but it has some life left in it because downloads haven't generated the format replacement they were expected to," he wrote. "With all previous music formats the successor format was firmly in the ascendancy by the time its predecessor was in terminal decline."
However, digital downloads won't ever generate format replacement. Music on CDs is already in digital formatif you own the CD already, there's no benefit in "replacing" it with a digital download. Furthermore, it will be hard to justify spending $10 on a compressed digital download over $6 for an actual physical disc that can be ripped into iTunes or any other media software in a matter of minutes, and can be done using lossless encoding (if so desired).
iTunes LP, thought by the record labels to help save the digital album from succumbing to single track downloads, isn't making much of a splash with consumers, either.
Effectively, what UMG is doingand what other labels will do if they also decide that lowering prices will prop up dying CD salesis giving consumers the expectation that albums should cost even less than $9.99. Because once consumers become accustomed to getting a whole album in physical form for $6, you'll have a much harder time convincing them to buy downloaded albums for more money later. Lowering prices on CDs will increase sales in the short termgood for labels because CD sales still account for about 65 percent of their revenuebut it will only slow its demise, and slow the uptake of digital as a primary format.
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- feature: Smoking guns, dark secrets aplenty in YouTube-Viacom filings
Court documents in the $1 billion lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube were unsealed today, finally shedding some light on key questions: did Viacom have "smoking gun" evidence that YouTube was deliberately profiting from 62,637 Viacom clips that were watched more than 507 million times on the site? Was Google aware of the copyright infringement problems when it purchased YouTube in 2006? Were YouTube's own founders involved in uploading unauthorized materials?
On all three counts, Viacom says yesand it offers up a host of e-mails to prove it:
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- HTC: we're ready for a big fight with Apple
Apple both publicly and privately warned smartphone makers that it wouldn't tolerate its intellectual property being infringed upon, and the company made its first move against Taiwan-based HTC earlier this month with a federal lawsuit and a complaint to the International Trade Commission. HTC says it doesn't plan to give up without a fight.
"HTC disagrees with Apple's actions and will fully defend itself," HTC Corporation CEO Peter Chou said in a statement. "HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible."
HTC cited the company's numerous firsts to market as proof of its innovation, including selling the first Windows Mobile smartphone in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008. (It also lays claim to the "first gesture-based smartphone" released in June 2007, but that's also the same month that Apple released the original iPhone.) It also noted that Fast Company and MIT Technology Review have both recently named HTC as one of the top innovative companies globally.
The company is confident that its own patent portfolio will prove useful in its defense. "We've been in business since 1997 and a pioneer in the smart phone space," HTC America VP Jason Mackenzie told Forbes. "We absolutely have our share of patents."
However, Deutsche Banks analyst Chris Whitmore noted recently that Apple has amassed a much larger patent portfolio than HTC, or even Google, whose Andriod operating system is believed to be the real target of Apple's legal ire. Since 2000, Apple has been awarded over 3,000 patents, compared to Google's 316 and HTC's 58. Prior to the launch of the iPhone, HTC actually filed zero patents with USPTO. Sheer numbers don't guarantee a slam dunk for Apple, but they do certainly give Apple a much larger cache of ammunition to draw from.
Many have criticized Apple for "competition by litigation" by filing complaints against HTC, but as The New York Times recently reported, lawsuits are not at all uncommon in the mobile space. Apple believes it has a right and duty to protect its own innovations, apparently just as other companies in the mobile market do. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said earlier this month.
Furthermore, Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said the lawsuits are merely a sign that the modern smartphone market is still in its early stages, and that this particular lawsuit won't stifle innovation as some believe. "The smartphone market is still in a nascent state; much innovation still lies ahead in this field," he wrote in an analysis of Apple's patent litigation. "In all nascent technology markets, there is a period early where IP rights will be sorted out."
Unless Apple and HTC come to an out-of-court settlement, we could be waiting until at least 2012 to hear a decision from either the ITC or US district court on the matter.
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- Android set-top box may be coming to a living room near you
Google is looking to take the Android operating system to the big screenthe one in your living room, anyway. The company has partnered with Intel and Sony in order to bring a more interactive viewing experience to the TV in the form of (you guessed it) set-top boxes. The idea behind it is giving users the ability to seamlessly switch between Web apps and video entertainment, though there's already plenty of competition in this space. Or is there?
According to the New York Times, Google plans to treat this platform in the same way it treats Android for Mobileit will open the platform to developers "within the next couple of months" and products could hit the shelves sometime this summer. That means third-party apps could show up on TV just as easily as they do on our mobile phones, from Twitter apps to games to Wikipedia browsing and more. It also means, however, that there's potential for an overflow of apps to be available (hello iPhone App Store).
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- Report: Xbox 360 to gain support for USB storage
The Xbox 360 all but requires a hard drive to download games, patches, movies. Indeed, all the features of a modern console can become very dependent on having large amounts of memory. Microsoft has long required users to buy expensive and proprietary memory devices and hard drives, but documentation obtained by Joystiq shows that you may soon be able to use your own USB storage on the device.
Image courtesy Joystiq
It's still not a perfect solution. If the data here is to be believed, and Joystiq is claiming it has been verified by two sources, you'll be able to use up to two devices, and up to 16GB of storage on each one. That means you'll max out at 32GB of storage, but you can use that storage for anything that you'd use the hard drive for. "USB storage devices may, however, have far greater memory capacity than [memory units] (at the date of writing, the largest MU is 512 MB), and may therefore support previously infeasible operationssuch as installation of a full disc-based title," the documentation says.
Joystiq guesses that with rumors and images of a slimmed down motherboard floating around the Internet, we may soon see a version of the system without slots for memory units at all. Whatever happens in the future, USB storage has become cheap; this news may cause a newfound interest in the Xbox 360 Arcade hardware.
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- Metro 2033 review on PC: inching towards sunlight
When you pull a gas mask over your head in Metro 2033, you adjust a dial on your watch to let you know how many minutes of breathable air you have left before you asphyxiate. Your flashlight has a charger that you have to manually pump to make sure you can see where you're going. Every bullet you find can be used as currency, but you're also operating in an incredibly hostile environment. Every round you fire limits your ability to buy what you need.
In other words, you are going to have to try very hard to survive, and the game reminds you constantly of how brutal and desperate your existence is. The game takes place in Moscow, after the bombs drop. You live in a small pocket of civilization underground, but the attacks from mutants have been growing in frequency. If that wasn't enough, there is something worse in the tunnels. Something that sings beautiful songs, and then steals your mind. This is not your average first-person shooter.
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- Hands-on: Kindle books finally come to the Mac desktop
Amazon's Kindle software for Mac has finally arrived, a hair over six months after its Windows counterpart. The free application allows Mac users to read books from the Kindle Store on their desktops and sync their items across other devices, including actual Kindles, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Windows machines using the Kindle software. Since we gave the PC version a (semi-successful) run through, we thought we would take a look at Kindle for Mac as well.
Once you download the software and log in with your Amazon account, the Kindle software presents you with an essentially blank "Home" screen and an "Archived Items" tab. If you have already downloaded books to read on other devices (I'm an active Kindle 2 user, for example, so I have plenty of books already), then the Archived Items tab should be filled with everything you have ever bought.
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- Nanoscale optical antennas inspired by old-school TV aerials
A paper published in Nature this week details how researchers have taken a common antenna design and replicated it on the the nanoscale level. When a regular TV aerial that handles radio frequencies is scaled down to nanometer sizes and slightly modified, the result was a tiny antenna that could direct light of nanometer wavelengths. The resulting optical antenna array could help improve the design of nanoscale sensors and detectors.
Those old TV antennas, consisting of multiple crossbars, are called Yagi-Uda antennas, named for their inventors. The design of Yagi-Uda antennas is based on a simple principle: a metallic wire resonates strongly if its length matches half of the relevant wavelength. To tune into TV and radio wavelengths, which are around a meter long, the Yagi-Uda uses bars of half that length to pick up the appropriate signals. The design proved to be popular because it is highly directional and can receive or broadcast a strong signal.
To make the design work at the nanoscale level, scientists made tiny crossbars, about a hundred nanometers long, and arranged them in the Yagi-Uda configuration. They made a slight alteration in the design so that the feed bar was tilted 45 degrees, allowing it to be excited by an electric field in a manner that is independent of the other bars.
Once arranged, the nano-antenna array was able to direct visible light on the scale of its tiny antenna bars. The resonant wavelengths were around a few hundred nanometers, corresponding to the orange and red sections of the spectrumthat's a larger multiple of the antenna bar length than the standard Yagi-Uda antenna, but still quite useful. The nano-array's creators hope that the itty-bitty antenna will find wide use in optical nanotechnology.
Nature Photonics, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.34 (About DOIs).
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- Nokia asks the Internet to help design a phone
Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.
The website has a set of sliders that can be used to select a desired phone configuration within certain parameters. When the user has selected their optimal configuration, they can click a "submit" button to send their choices to Nokia. The company will tabulate the results and use the information to design the new device concept. There will be several rounds during which a separate set of parameters will be put up for voting.
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- Open Video Alliance launches Wikipedia video campaign
The Open Video Alliance (OVA), a group that seeks to promote adoption of standards-based open video technologies, has launched a new campaign encouraging users to upload videos to the Wikipedia website. The goals behind this new campaign are to visually enrich the online encyclopedia and promote awareness of the value that open video technologies can bring to the Web.
The OVA's members include open video platform company Kaltura, Yale's Information Society Project, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). To get the party started, the PCF is making available a new software tool for Windows and Mac OS X that can convert videos into the open Ogg Theora format. The OVA has rolled out a new website with simple instructions that describe how users can download the software and start participating in the campaign.
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- "The same markup" won't come any time soon on WinPhone
One of the most appealing parts of the iPhone is its Web browser. Mobile Safari is powered by the WebKit engine, and this same engine also powers the desktop browser. The result is a Web experience that, while not identical to the desktop experience, is not far off. Windows Mobile, on the other hand, has a browser that's roughly derived from Internet Explorer 6. The result? A decidedly second-rate Web experience. Windows Phone 7 Series will improve things somewhatto approximate parity with Internet Explorer 7but it remains behind its desktop counterpart.
Microsoft emphasized the desirability of using "the same markup" when demonstrating Internet Explorer 9. But this objective is thoroughly undermined by having a mobile Web browser that's so incapable of using "the same markup."
A similar situation exists with Silverlight. Third-party 7 Series development will use Silverlight and XNA, underpinned by an updated, extended, .NET Compact Framework. The Silverlight version will be a hybrid of sorts; it contains more than Silverlight 3, but less than Silverlight 4.
This is something that Microsoft plans to address. Unlike the current situation, where the mobile platform has to a great extent been divorced from developments on the desktop, with Windows Phone Microsoft wants to aggressively unify the platforms. This obviously won't happen overnight, and features wll be prioritized to reflect the needs of the platform (printing support, for example, is a rather lower priority on the phone than the desktop) but the company understands the desirability of getting the two in sync.
With the lack of native code development, it's unlikely that we'll ever see Opera or Firefox on Windows Phone 7 Series. This makes it even more important for Microsoft to bring its mobile browser up to par. The excellent Opera Mobile provides succour to frustrated Windows Mobile Web users, but that's not going to be an option for 7 Series.
So for now, the Web experience on 7 Series still falls some way short of that on the desktop. "The same markup" might be the goal, but it's certainly a ways off.
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- "Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders
For years, we've heard complaints about using the term "piracy" to describe the online copyright infringementbut most have come from Big Content's critics.
As noted copyright scholar William Patry argued in his most recent book, "To say that X is a pirate is a metaphoric heuristic, intended to persuade a policymaker that the in-depth analysis can be skipped and the desired result immediately attained... Claims of piracy are rhetorical nonsense."
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- NBP: FCC proposes "video.gov" public archive
Say what you want about the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan. You like it. You don't. Its proposals will work. They won't.But one thing is clear: this FCC loves video. IP video, video conferencing, mobile video, video devicesthe NBP can't talk about video enough, and the hope is obvious. While Internet TV watching only represents a very small percentage of total broadband consumption at this point (2 percent of all time viewing), it has the potential for huge expansion over the next decade, driving broadband growth.
So passionate is the FCC for video that the Plan recommends that the White House launch video.gova platform to house the federal government's public digital video content of today and yesteryear. "All agencies should be encouraged to release as much video content as possible onto Video.gov," the FCC recommends. "Additionally, Congress should consider making a one-time appropriation to fund the creation of this federated collection of national digital archives."
The site isn't up yet, even in beta form. But it's part of the FCC's grand master plan to drive both broadband adoption and civic engagement. And pursuant to that, the NBP also asks Congress to modify the Copyright Act to make it easier for broadcasters to hand over their archival materials to a digital national archive.
"Today, public media and much of broadcast media sit on a wealth of Americas civic DNA in the form of millions of hours of historical news coverage of wars, elections and daily life," the agency notes. "This archival content could provide tremendous educational opportunities for generations of students and could revolutionize how we access our own history."
Happily, one broadcast venue isn't waiting for Congress to act on this issue. C-Span unveiled its new video library on Wednesday160,000 hours of politics covered by the service since 1987. I got so excited about the site that I forgot that I was writing this story! (And now, back to the videos...)
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- feature: Rube Goldberg competition gets teens excited about STEM
In recent years the US has begun to lag in education for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and a number of efforts are underway to address this issue. We know that giving kids hands-on experience is one of the best ways to spark and keep their interest in STEM-related fields, and to this end, high schoolers all over the country are getting an opportunity to learn and apply STEM knowledge by participating in the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.
Rube Goldberg, who was himself an engineer, is most famous for his cartoons that depicted contrived, complex contraptions for executing the most mundane tasks. The cartoons were meant to serve as a criticism for the encroachment of technology in our lives during the early part of the 20th century, and the tendency to favor "exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results." Rube Goldberg machines, named in honor of these cartoons, typically involve complex arrangements of levers, pulleys, balloons, ball bearings, mouse traps, and other mechanical means that could accomplish something as simple as starting a phonograph.
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- NBP: Broadband for everyone by 2020, but who foots the bill?
"Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing," opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan titled "Availability."
What would that mean in terms of performance? "An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access," the NBP says. The document calls this the "National Broadband Availability Target."
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- Microsoft to appeal $106 million VirnetX patent verdict
VirnetX, a software corporation founded in 2005, has prevailed in a patent-infringement lawsuit accusing Microsoft of willfully infringing on two patents for automatic and secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. The Texas jury recommended an award of $105.75 million, which is less than half of the $242 million that VirtnetX asked for. Still, the verdict was a very positive one for VirtnetX. "Our clients are very happy with today's verdict," said VirnetX counsel Douglas Cawley in a statement. "We hope this decision sends a clear message to patent infringers everywhere that they will be held responsible for wrongly profiting off the hard work of others."
Microsoft is not happy with the decision and plans to fight on. "We are disappointed by the jury's verdict," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "We respect others' intellectual property, and we believe the evidence demonstrated that we do not infringe and the patents are invalid. We believe the award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict." The case was tried in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the favored venue for patent infringement cases.
In its original lawsuit filed in February 2007, VirnetX alleged that Microsoft Office Communicator included technology covered by its patent No. 6,502,135 and that Windows Meeting Space infringed its patent No. 7,188,180. The $105.75 million breaks down as $71.75 million for the former and $34 million for the latter, according to the Scotts Valley, California company. VirnetX acquired the rights to the patents from the government-contracting company Science Applications International in 2006. Microsoft accused VirnetX of being a patent troll during the trial, and it was revealed that the company's business model was based on winning the lawsuit, though it does have a licensing agreement with VeriSign.
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- iMacs expected to boost desktop market growth in 2010
Mobile computing has taken over as the main driver of growth in PC sales for the past year, with notebooks overtaking desktops in late 2008 and sales of desktops declining for the last two years. However, Caris & Company analyst Robert Cihra is expecting desktops to show a small positive growth this year, due in large part to brisk sales of Apple's iMac.
Cihra still expects notebooks and netbooks to account for 90 percent of overall growth in the market for the current year. But the increased demand driven by emerging markets, a slight increase in corporate IT spending, and "power gamers" should result in a 3 percent uptick in desktop sales over last year.
"[B]elieve it or not," Cihra wrote in a note to investors, "we estimate Apple's iMac accounting for a full one quarter of ALL desktop market growth in calendar year 2010."
The number isn't so surprising when you consider that the iMac pushed an impressive 70 percent year-over-year growth in desktop Mac sales for 2009. Contrast that with a 12 percent drop in overall sales of desktops for the same time frame.
Apple's second fiscal quarter sales are already looking healthy, with sales up 36 and 43 percent year over year for January and February respectively. Those figures led Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster to peg Mac sales at about 2.9 million for the quarter. That's less than the recent record quarters of late, but would still mark a 31 percent year-over-year growth compared to the second quarter last year. Sales of iMacs resumed in earnest recently after manufacturing problems with the large 27" LCD panels caused some delays.
Cihra also praised Apple in his note for its ability to drive growth without sacrificing average selling prices or margins. ASPs for desktop and portable Macs have decreased slightly over the last year, while ASPs for HP and Dell have dropped more dramatically. Meanwhile, Apple's tight control on costs have driven increased operating margins that exceed even the gross margins of HP, Dell, and Acer. It's worth noting that while Acer has seen explosive sales growth over the last yearin particular due to low-cost netbooksthe company's operating margins hover around 3 percent while Apple's are just over 25 percent.
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- PlayStation Move ad mocks Natal, attacks Nintendo Wii
The PlayStation Move was just announced, but Sony is wasting no time before going on the attack. The first advertisement for the peripheral makes fun of the Nintendo Wii, attacks Microsoft's Project Natal, and basically buries the entire message under a thick layer of smarm with a side order of smug.
Yeah, this commercial is pretty much awesome.
We were lucky enough to spend some serious time with the PlayStation Move at GDC this year, and you can read all our thoughts and impressions in our latest gaming feature.
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- Google intros Exchange migration tool for small businesses
Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud.
According to Google's Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There's even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there's too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after Google announced its acquisition of DocVerse, a company that allowed Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. Both companies said that they had a "shared vision" for enabling Office users to edit documents online, and Google is undoubtedly planning to integrate DocVerse's features into Google Docs. With its Exchange migration tool and the acquisition of DocVerse, Google is definitely treading on Microsoft's territory and trying to make it even harder for small businesses to resist "going Google."
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- After Google dustup, should the US ban Chinese computers?
Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: "If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on."
The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice. Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post, Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocityand that the US has opened its markets while China has not.
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- iWork.com improves public URLs, adds iPad compatibility
Apple's iWork.com document sharing and collaboration service still carries the beta tag that it has worn since it was introduced with iWork '09 last January. (Perhaps it's just another hobby, like Apple TV?) Still, with the iPad ready to launch in a few weeks, Apple has added a few improvements to iWork.com.
One improvement is an update to the way documents can be shared publicly. A simple toggle turns public sharing on or off as needed, and a "Show URL" button rolls down a drop-down sheet with the URL selected for easy cutting and pasting. The new public URLs don't show comments or notes, according to Apple. The company also noted that it makes sharing documents via social networks easy, though adding buttons to "Tweet this!" or "Post to Facebook" would more likely get users to post documents to such sites.
The other improvement is that Apple has created interfaces that are optimized for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Functionality on Apple's mobile devices is quite limited, but you can access documents that you have shared via iWork.com and view them within Safai. On the iPad, documents can be edited using the new iPad versions of Pages, Numbers, or Keynote if they are installed. Both new views have interfaces optimized for touch input, but the iPad's screen makes viewing documents much more pleasurable.
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- NBP: Time for a new copyright notice!
Critics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we're not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use.
The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We'll see if the FCC's network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to "encourage" ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow.
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- 'Net addiction at a new level: users update from bed, dinner
Nearly half of Internet users check for or post updates to Twitter and Facebook after they have already gotten themselves tucked into bed, during the night, or first thing when they wake up, according to a new report from Retrevo. The study asked more than a thousand Internet users about their own behaviors when it came to social media and gadget usage, and discovered that many of us are just flat out addicted.
According to Retrevo, 55 percent of users over the age of 25 must check Facebook at least once a day. That's not that freakishyet. Eleven percent said they can't even go more than a couple of hours before popping onto their favorite social network, and when users under 25 are taken into consideration, that number went up to 18 percent.
People are fine with being interrupted by electronic messages, too. Almost half of those under 25 said they're cool with being interrupted during a meal and 11 percent said they're fine with it during sex (those over 25 were less OK with these things, at 27 percent and six percent respectively).
Whether Internet (and subsequently social media) addiction actually exists is a topic that remains under debate. Still, for those of us who find ourselves tapping out messages in the middle of the night, there's no question that we could benefit from cutting back a bit.
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- Scientists drag quantum mechanics into the visible realm
All sorts of counterintuitive behavior happens with regularity in the quantum realm, but very little of that bleeds over into the world of classical mechanics that the human senses occupy. We can register the effects of the quantum behavior of electrons and atoms, but the actual objects that undergo tunneling and entanglement are invisible to the naked eye. In the last couple of years, however, researchers have started working with mechanical oscillators that can display quantum behavior in some circumstances. A paper that will be released by Nature now provides pretty unambiguous evidence for quantum interactions between a standard qubit and a piezoelectric device that's roughly 50µm longlarge enough to be seen with the naked eye.
This isn't the first paper to describe quantum behavior in a mechanical device, but it seems to be one of the cleanest. For the most part, the work has focused on microscopic levers, where the vibrational modes can be characterized in terms of a quantum mechanical unit called a phonon. The number of modes accessible increases rapidly as temperature goes up, which is why vibrations never appear to be quantum mechanical in our day-to-day experience.
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