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The Seattle-based company on Tuesday previewed a set of new software tools that aims to give developers a simpler way to design robots and to create and test programs that operate a wide range of machines -- from toys to floor sweepers to those used in factory production lines. "We believe this is a key part of the future of computing," said Microsoft Robotics Group general manager Tandy Trower, who called robots the next evolution of the personal computer.

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All of these practices are costing honest businesses untold sums. The World Intellectual Property Organization reported earlier this year that the number of cybersquatting cases it handled rose 20 percent in 2005, and the disputes have involved most of the 100 largest international brands by value. Pharmaceutical, hospitality and telecommunications companies--all of which have a large number of customers who are harmed by online scams perpetrated by domain name registrants--are among the most aggressive enforcers of intellectual property online. Identifying, prioritizing and pursuing bad Web site owners already is a resource-consuming task for these companies; any new restrictions on the Whois system would only cost them and, therefore, their customers more.

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A security bar has also been added to Opera 9, a response to the prevalence of phishing scams and identity theft. The security bar aims to reduce users' encounters with phishing scams and also includes technology to strengthen blocking of pop-up advertisements. Opera 9, which is offered as a free download, runs on a variety of platforms, from Windows to Mac to Linux. It also supports BitTorrent's file distribution technology.

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That voluntary warning may not be enough if a bill backed by the Bush administration becomes law. Under the Stop Adults' Facilitation of the Exploitation of Youth Act--or Internet Safety Act--introduced last week in the U.S. Senate, all "commercial" Web site operators who fail to flag each page containing "sexually explicit material" could risk fines, up to 15 years in prison, or both.

Said By The Article

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 "utterly ineffective." "MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online," said Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, parent company News Corp. and Pete Solis, the 19-year-old accused of sexually assaulting the girl.

Said By Mike

Sure, there should be intervention. BUT, its the responsibility of the PARENT to supervise their children, not some company or society. Society as a whole have fallen into the routine of expecting others to take care of our children, and fallen down on the job of being parents.

This child's parents are to blame for not policing their child's online activities. She herself shares some of the blame, as it was SHE that allowed a stranger to pick her up and molest her.

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The experiments, conducted jointly by IBM and Georgia Tech, are part of a project to explore the ultimate speed limits of silicon germanium (SiGe) devices, which are said to operate faster at cold temperatures. Ultrahigh-frequency SiGe circuits have potential applications in commercial communications systems, military electronics, space and remote sensing. The research could make possible a new class of powerful, low-energy chips that will deliver future applications like HDTV and movie-quality video to cellphones, automobiles and other devices.

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Evolution is an incredibly versatile email/calendar/PIM that took the Linux world by storm a few years ago. It has been called an 'Outlook replacement' by every tech site from ZDNet to InfoWorld. Evolution played a major roll in allowing the Linux desktop to move into the enterprise by giving being able to connect to Microsoft Exchange Server and schedule/accept Microsoft Outlook Meetings.

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He says programmatic risk is not the same as risk to the crew, arguing that Discovery's seven astronauts have safety options that were not available to Columbia's crew. They will inspect the underside of the orbiter with cameras during launch and when they first reach space. And if they find a small hole or crack in the heat shield, they have rudimentary repair methods that might be able to fix the problem. If the damage was serious, they could also stay on the International Space Station until a shuttle came to pick them up. Shuttle Atlantis is being prepared for its next flight in August but could be called upon for a rescue mission.

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The less (as in "not") noticed event relates to the passage of an important economic stimulus bill that for months had been stalled while Beacon Hill legislators debated a universal health coverage bill with a higher priority. The passage of the bill, of course, was widely reported. What wasn't noted (except by IBM's Bob Sutor at his blog and few, if any, others) is the fact that a certain amendment that had been added to the Senate version of the same bill last fall did not survive the final reconciliation of the Senate and House versions of the legislation. That amendment, if approved, would have dramatically curtailed the power of the State CIO to set IT standards policies (or any other IT or CT policy, for that matter). You can read all about that saga in this and a number of later entries in the OpenDocument blog entry folder.

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The idea is to draw more of Microsoft's technical minds into the process of planning for the future. "It will be a SharePoint wiki thing internally so people can say where they disagree or we're missing something," Gates said. It's part of Microsoft's effort to make the company less dependent on any particular individuals, including Gates.

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H.264 hardware decoding, HDCP support, multi-monitor support, HD audio and automatic detection of a connected HD audio device, Serial ATA 2.5 support, 50MB NV cache on a hybrid hard drive with at least 8MB/sec write and 16MB/sec read in mobile devices, support of USB flash drive booting, Windows Vista green button on the computer remote, and a Green driver quality rating.

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Digital radio laws would limit automatic recording to set programs, time periods or channels. You won't be able record an individual song, and you won't be able to separate individual songs from a recorded session and play them in a different order. You won't even be able to burn the music onto a CD or send it to another device. Digital radio would be shackled into historical feature sets that analog radios have had for decades with little room to innovate. Music fans will be cheated out of the benefits of digital technology.

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Anti-virus vendor Symantec said Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT and Windows 2000 computers are also at risk. Symantec was the first to raise a red flag about the attack, which includes the use of a Trojan horse program called Trojan.Mdropper.J. The Trojan arrives as a Microsoft Excel file attachment to a spoofed e-mail with the following name: "okN.xls."

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They argue that by effectively reducing the potential gains, people and companies may not have such a great incentive to obtain their livelihood by sitting on patents until they can find a company to sue for infringement. Misener also called on politicians to outlaw the practice of awarding compensation for estimated lost profits to patent holders who don't offer a product that competes directly with the company they're accusing of infringement. Those who "do not compete in (the) marketplace are not entitled to lost profits but instead to a reasonable royalty," he said.

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The company announced that Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect and begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, to ensure a smooth transition. Similarly, Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie will immediately take the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will work closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company's research and incubation efforts; Mundie also will partner with general counsel Brad Smith to guide Microsoft's intellectual property and technology policy efforts.

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SA Video Technology Corp., a small technology firm that holds patents for the digital delivery of media, said on Thursday it has filed a suit against top U.S. cable operators over their video-on-demand services. The Old Lyme, Conneticut-based company said it sued Time Warner Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., alleging the cable operators violated its patent with their video-on-demand services offered to subscribers.

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Besides showing a picture, the BlackAngel.B code makes several modifications to the system, which include closing different security applications (antivirus programs, firewalls, etc.) to avoid detection. It also tries to close a number of windows (Windows Task Manager, Control Panel, Registry Editor, System Configuration Utility, System Restore) so that the user cannot use operating system configuration tools, according to Panda.

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The DQR system relies on scores to indicate a driver's quality level, and it derives those scores from user-submitted crash reports. Microsoft's Online Crash Analysis Team will analyze crash reports to determine the ratio of crashing systems to non-crashing systems. Drivers that rarely cause crashes will be rated "Green," while moderately problematic drivers will be rated "Yellow." The horrid stuff gets a big, fat "Red" rating. (Microsoft has not revealed the exact methodology for determining these scores, only that "Green" maps to 7-9 points, "Yellow" 4-6, and "Red" 1-3.) Furthermore, to achieve a "Green" status, a driver must have been released and in use for at least 120 days (starting on June 1, 2007), and must maintain its stability throughout time. Driver manufacturers (or OEMs) must rectify any problem that causes a driver's rating to fall to "Yellow" or "Red" within 90 days, or suffer the consequences. For drivers of this sort, updates must be made available through Windows Update, as well.

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Unlike other homebrew games Beggar Prince is sold as a physical Genesis cartridge. For $46 shipped you can be talking to random townsfolk, casting walls of flame and meet the obligatory cute helper monster in Beggar Prince.

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As the future of video gaming services comes into focus, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are all enhancing their online gaming services in a bid to offer gamers richer, more challenging interplay experiences than they can find when playing just by themselves.

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The delegation's walkout from Wednesday's opening of a two-day meeting in the Czech Republic escalated an already rancorous struggle by China to gain international acceptance for its homegrown encryption technology known as WAPI. It follows Chinese accusations that a U.S.-based standards body used underhanded tactics to prevent global approval of WAPI.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

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"The three major suppliers of the players of these new next-generation discs will be the PC industry, consumer electronics and gaming machines," Locker said. "If you look at the volumes, PCs are now more than 50 percent of that total space, so we'll have a big say on who wins."

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For instance, a DRM system may allow a CD to be played on a PC but would not let tracks from that album be copied so they can be listened to on a portable player such as an iPod. The MPs' report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

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The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?

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Sweden's domestic intelligence agency said it would probe why the government's Web site crashed on Sunday amid reports hackers had sought revenge for a crackdown on alleged online piracy. The government Web site went off line in the early hours of Sunday. The Internet home page of the national police crashed in similar fashion on Thursday.

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The Mars rover Opportunity is working to free itself from a patch of loose soil it got stuck in on Monday. But rover scientists are hopeful it will escape relatively easily, since it got out of a similar predicament last year simply by spinning its wheels backwards. The rover was attempting to drive along a trough between the crests of ripples in the Martian soil when it got stuck. But it is not mired as deeply as it was in April 2005, when it was trapped for about five weeks on a 30-centimetre-high ripple of soil, nicknamed "Purgatory Dune".

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The thruster residue that might be on the Kromka plate is toxic. The residue can cause damage to the eyes, so spacewalking astronauts were supposed to put a plate from the experiment in a bag that snaps tightly shut like a clamshell. But the crew could not find that bag when they were collecting together their spacewalking gear on the station. So they may use another bag, close it with bungee cords and then put it inside several other bags.

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Space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank appears to be safe to fly the next mission on 1 July, according to shuttle managers and engineers who completed a two-day review on Wednesday. NASA still expects some of the orange foam insulation to come off the external fuel tank during launch, but nothing as big as that shed during the last two shuttle flights.

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The software giant is launching a subscription service aimed at providing better protection for the Windows operating system, which has been vulnerable to Internet attacks. Windows Live OneCare will protect up to three computers for about 50 dollars a year.

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I'd like to propose a further extension to this conventional wisdom, applying it to the U.S. economy. There is clearly no case for the small hardware store in Woodside, Calif., to continue to exist. The fact that the clerks are helpful, courteous and know where everything in the store is located isn't relevant. There is no logic to why the store continues to be in business when there is a "good enough" mega-store just a few miles down the road. In fact, the whole economy, with its boundless energy and diversity, should be an abomination to the proponents of the "good enough" theory.

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Ubuntu 6.06 LTS introduces functionality that simplifies common Linux server deployment processes. For system administrators setting up large numbers of web, mail and related servers, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS offers the fastest and most consistent path to deployment, combined with the availability of global commercial support where needed. "Ubuntu has a reputation for working well out of the box on desktops, and we have worked to bring that same ease of deployment and configuration to the server marketplace" said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project. "Based on our analysis of the ways people were already deploying Ubuntu on servers, we have aimed to streamline their experience while expanding the range of software available to people deploying Ubuntu in the data centre."

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Can the search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Technorati really be so hazardous to our computers' health? Sadly, the answer is yes. So why do we click on hyperlinks with such wild abandon? The answer is that most of us have been taught that as long as we're not accessing pornography or illegal file-sharing sites, and as long as we keep our antivirus and anti-spyware updated, we're safe. It's time for a reality check.

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Complaints about the "crapware," as Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens put it, are prominent in discussion forums and blogs related to PCs. But last week's deal between Dell and Google to install Google software on new Dell PCs shows that more and more of the real estate on the PC is for sale to application vendors, as PC vendors continue to look for new sources of revenue to boost their margins.

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Black holes of various masses are thought to have sprung into existence within 1 second of the big bang, as elementary particles clumped together at extreme energies. But Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the smallest of these "primordial" black holes should have already evaporated, through a quantum process called Hawking radiation.

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The maria were formed after large impacts from meteors carved out basins in the lunar crust. When the Moon was volcanic, magma seeped to the surface, filled the basins and eventually hardened, resulting in the relatively smooth flat areas seen today. Scientists can tell this happened recently, in geological terms, because the maria have fewer impact craters than the highland areas.

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The company already knows of some problems and expects others. Only about 40 percent of Windows XP applications can run without any modification, for example. A good chunk of the remainder require only very slight tweaks. Many of those incompatibilities have already been fixed, either through workarounds put in place by Microsoft or in collaboration with the application's maker.

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Virgin, one of the first providers to offer such a service, hopes the service will appeal to its often cash-strapped customers, 65 percent of whom are younger than 30 years old. "Very practically speaking a lot of our customers are value conscious. They manage budgets that are finite," said Howard Handler, the company's chief marketing officer.

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The RIMVS is based on a diagnostic tool that dates back to the 1980s called a Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope. This instrument projects a laser onto the back of the eyeball to test whether any light-sensitive retinal cells may still work. When Goldring's optometrist used one to probe her eyes, she realised the potential of the device for people with vision loss. The RIMVS is similar but is less complicated and uses an LED instead of a laser. This has brought the cost down from $100,000 to $4000.

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Quasars can also vary in brightness. And such fluctuations can appear in different lensed images at different times because light from the quasar takes such different paths through the gravitational lens to produce each lensed image. "Suppose one image brightens for three days," says Keeton. "That same event might happen a month later in one of the other images, but the time delay can be years or even decades," depending on the mass contained by different parts of the lens.

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Some routine operations have already been affected by ageing of the network. For example, corrosion on a sub reflector of the 70-metre dish in Madrid led to a communications outage during a key phase of the comet-crashing Deep Impact mission in July 2005. Programme managers shifted to back-up ground stations, but that resulted in other missions being sidelined at that time.