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The first space mission to orbit and land on the surface of a comet has been called off because of concerns over the safety of the mission's launch vehicle. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft would have needed to launch before 30 January in order to rendezvous with comet Wirtanen in 2011. A handful of other comets are now being studied as possible replacement targets. But ESA has not revealed specific candidates or said when a rescheduled launch might take place.

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NASA's shuttle fleet is considered a symbol of US financial and technological prowess and therefore a major terrorist target. Thursday's mission STS-107 will also carry an Israeli astronaut into space, potentially adding another motive for an attack by Arab terrorists. Ilan Ramon, previously a fighter pilot in the Israeli army, will make history by becoming his country's first ever astronaut.

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One set of researchers announced last week the discovery of 34 newly detected supernova, all found with the help of the Internet. A wireless Web connection allows images from Caltech's Palomar Observatory to be quickly fed into a database at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A new image is sent every 30 seconds. At the LBNL, the images are compared to other data to confirm supernovae from a list of candidates.

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The bright, blue Retech Model 150 Plasma Lab Furnace, which arrived at the lab in the fall, will melt just about anything, Jones said. It generates temperatures higher than 10,000 degrees Celsius or more than 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

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According to a study conducted by GartnerG2, 78 percent of respondents claimed they found pop-up ads "very annoying." In contrast, only 49 percent of participants applied the same rating to banner ads.

Yet pop-ups had click-through rates almost twice as high as those of banner ads, meaning they're probably going to stick around for a while. Indeed, Nielsen/NetRatings' online-advertising rating, AdRelevance, found that pop-up impressions jumped from 1.2 billion to 4.9 billion between January 2002 and September 2002.

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As the demand for transmitting and storing digital data continues to increase, so does the need to secure these operations, especially when managing confidential information ranging from personal passwords and financial records to proprietary business data and national security secrets.
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Providing secure storage of certificates and keys used for the authentication or encryption of confidential data for wired and wireless transmissions is a critical challenge facing the computer industry and end users. The storage of such information must be tamper-resistant. Current solutions, such as Smart Cards and the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance's (TCPA) Trusted Platform Module (TPM), are external components that add cost and increase both design complexity and system space requirements.
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Transmeta's hardware support for DES, DES-X and Triple-DES is designed to accelerate security applications such as file and disk data encryption and the Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) algorithm commonly used in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to secure both wired and wireless data transmissions. Transmeta will provide interfaces to this hardware encryption engine via cryptographic instructions that are an extension to the x86 instruction set architecture. Named the Transmeta Security Extensions (TSX), these instructions will support key preparation and the DES, DES-X and Triple-DES ciphers. TSX instructions allow programmers to leverage Transmeta's encryption acceleration hardware for increased performance when protecting data.

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Under the settlement terms, one-third of any unclaimed rebates will revert to Microsoft. The remaining amount will go to California public schools in a mix of cash and donated Microsoft software.
Such a settlement lets Microsoft off easy, Apple said Monday, because history shows that less than one-quarter of qualifying recipients actually claim refunds, thereby reducing the real cost to Microsoft.
At the same time, Apple said school donations would help Microsoft expand its market share in education. Apple once led the education market, but has been surpassed by PC maker Dell Computer.

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"When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out," Safari Engineering Manager Don Melton wrote. (KJS is KDE's JavaScript interpreter.) "Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects."

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Inside the 13-story rocket's nose cone were ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite) and CHIPSat (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer), a spacecraft duo in which ICESat was the primary cargo and CHIPSat -- a smaller University Explorer Class probe -- was basically along for the ride.

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The faint light of 26 young galaxies and three quasars, objects thought to be powered by supermassive black holes, were observed at a distance of some 13 billion light-years, at the time the universe was less than a billion years old and apparently just emerging from an epoch of utter darkness. Scientists said the observations could provide important clues to when and how the lights came on all over the cosmos.

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Astronomers announced today the discovery of three previously unseen moons orbiting Neptune, bringing the total of satellites around that planet to 11. The moons are the first found at Neptune since the Voyager II mission in 1989 and the first detected from the ground since 1949. Each is roughly 18-24 miles (30-40 kilometers) in diameter. The research was led by Matthew Holman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and JJ Kavelaars of the National Research Council of Canada.

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On Thursday, Columbia is to lift off on a 16-day research flight crammed with more than 90 experiments and investigations that will mean round-the-clock duties for its seven-member crew, which includes the first Israeli astronaut. The countdown began today.

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SoloTrek XFV is a VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft that a person steps on, straps on, and flies in an upright position. The POC prototype achieved its first controlled hover flight on Dec. 18, 2001 and has since continued to undergo rigorous testing and further development. As a condition of sale, the successful bidder will have to execute an agreement warranting that they will use the aircraft for static exhibition and educational purposes only.

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Big Blue was awarded 3,288 patents during the past year, making it the top recipient among private sector companies for the 10th year in a row, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Canon ranked second during in 2002 with 1,893 patents.

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"The bottom line is this: I love the company and will do whatever I can to make it successful. I believed in America Online when we built it; I believed in AOL Time Warner when we created it; and I continue to believe in the great potential of this company and its people," Case said. "While my role will change, my enthusiasm for what this company can accomplish won't diminish."

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The company's SanDisk Connect range, which was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday, initially includes two combo cards: a CF card that combines Wi-Fi and 128MB of memory and an SD card that combines Wi-Fi and 256MB of memory. The former will be available in March at a price of $130 and the latter will be available in the middle of 2003 for $150.

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MontaVista said its new product, known as MontaVista Linux Consumer Electronics Edition 3.0, is aimed at advanced devices rather than traditional 8-bit and 16-bit fixed-function appliances. Instead, the software targets 32-, 64- and even 128-bit systems that are network-connected and relatively complex. Initially, it will target device-specific CPUs, such as the Texas Instruments OMAP 1510 and 5910, as well as the IBM PowerPC 405LP, with others set to follow.

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"Given that Sharman's (Kazaa) software has been downloaded more than 143 million times, it would be mere cavil to deny that Sharman engages in a significant amount of contact with California residents," Wilson wrote. Also, he said, "many, if not most, music and video copyrights are owned by California-based companies."

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Among other tasks, the chipset creates a data path, or system bus, between the processor and a computer's memory. Speeding it up increases both the rate the processor can obtain data and the amount that can be transferred.

The imbalance between processor speeds, which top out at 3GHz, and memory and system buses, which are far slower, has made the system bus look more like a street than a freeway because of the imbalance. Often, processors hum along in idle mode because of a lack of data. Likewise, latency, the time gap between when a chip has requested data and when it arrives, has grown.

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Be, which was dissolved as a company last year, has alleged it was excluded from competing in the market for computer operating systems when Microsoft pressured computer makers not to ship computers with two operating systems. Be sold its operating system to handheld device maker Palm in 2001.

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Although a relatively small company, Newisys comes to the market with some interesting strengths. For one thing, rather than try to make money by building and selling machines itself, the company primarily plans to license its designs to partners that will manufacture the product under their own brand names.

So far, about 50 of the machines with test versions of AMD's Opteron chip have been seeded out to various companies. Newisys said that three top-tier U.S. server makers are evaluating its design.

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Images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have yielded several distance records in recent years. The newest record-setting quasar is seen as it was when the universe was only about 800 million years old, or roughly 13 billion years ago. This means its light took 13 billion years to reach us.

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Last month, a crack was discovered in the plumbing of shuttle Discovery. The surface crack was in a 2.25-inch (5.7-centimeter) metal ball located in a liquid oxygen line; the sphere allows the line to flex at the joint.
Engineers have spent the past month conducting tests to see whether such a crack would impair the propellant lines or cause metal fragments to be sucked into a main engine during liftoff.

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A RADIATION-PROOF superbug which could survive a nuclear holocaust with ease has given up its secrets to scientists.
The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand 1.5 million rads of ionising radiation - more than 1,000 times higher than the lethal level for all other forms of life.

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Companies including Microsoft, RealNetworks and Apple Computer have developed advanced codecs to take advantage of the widening adoption of digital media, with quality improvements at each step of the way; and all the companies are jockeying for dominance in PC and non-PC markets. But while Microsoft is pushing for adoption of its proprietary technology by consumer-electronics manufacturers and content owners, Apple and RealNetworks have turned to support of MPEG-4.

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Linux has caught on in lesser computers that handle tasks such as dishing up Web pages or storing files. But a new study this month from investment bank Goldman Sachs said that Linux, benefiting from a foundation of less-expensive Intel hardware, is headed toward the Unix realm where customers are demanding, computing tasks are intense and prices are high.

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The wandering star, T Tauri Sb, lies 450 light years away in the constellation Taurus. Astronomers have plotted its course for nearly 20 years. At first it seemed to be orbiting a pair of larger stars, T Tauri Sa, in an off-centre ellipse.
In 1995, T Tauri Sb passed about as close to T Tauri Sa as Mars is to the Sun. After this, "the shape and velocity of the orbit changed dramatically", says Laurent Loinard of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
T Tauri Sb's speed doubled, from 10 to 20 kilometres per second. Instead of curving back towards the T Tauri Sa pair, it is now heading away from them, Loinard told the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Seattle.

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Black holes love to feast. Among their favorite food is gas. Today, astronomers announced they've made the most detailed observations ever of giant clouds of gas very near a colossal black hole.
On the black hole's dinner plate was carbon monoxide. Some of it will almost surely be consumed, the researchers say. Scientists have struggled to observe these final stages of consumption, because black holes are far away and because the eating generates a lot of light that drowns out what's happening.

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How much astronomy do you know? I mean, really know. Completely, self-assuredly, bet-your-bottom-dollar, 100 percent absolutely certain you know.

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Astronomers used the gravity of the galaxy cluster Abell 1689 to zoom in on the objects behind it. They think they may have spotted galaxies 13 billion light years away, from when the Universe was 2 billion years old.

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The fastest Pentium 4 designed for notebooks, Intel's 2.2GHz Pentium 4-M, lists for $562. The desktop version of the same chip costs $193, while Intel's 2.53GHz Pentium 4 lists for $243 and its 2.8GHz for $401.

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Also on Wednesday, Evolution introduced a prototype personal robot, the ER2. The machine, a small, stout robot with a camera eye, earlike appendages and a video screen on its chest, comes with VSLAM technology and can carry out tasks ranging from home security to reading with children to videoconferencing, the company says. Evolution is seeking a manufacturing partner to mass-produce the robot, Louvat said. He expects it to reach the market either this year or next year with a price ranging from $1,000 to $2,000.

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In Japan, game magazine publisher Mediaworks said Thursday it estimated GameCube sales at 409,747 units in the period from October 28 to January 5, less than half the PlayStation 2's 966,089 tally. Only 62,718 Xbox consoles were sold in Japan during the period, the publisher said.