MikeChino writes "Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that a mix of zinc oxide crystals, water, and noise pollution can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil. To generate the clean hydrogen, researchers produced a new type of zinc oxide crystals that absorb vibrations when placed in water. The vibrations cause the crystals to develop areas with strong positive and negative charges — a reaction that rips the surrounding water molecules and releases hydrogen and oxygen. The mechanism, dubbed the piezoelectrochemical effect, converts 18% of energy from vibrations into hydrogen gas (compared to 10% from conventional piezoelectric materials), and since any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport."

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Svippy writes "As revealed last summer, Futurama will be returning this year, and while there were conflicts about the cast of the show in the late summer of 2009, a deal was eventually secured. Last week, Comedy Central confirmed the airing of the first episode, 'Rebirth,' will be 24 June 2010. Several other details related to plot and production have surfaced over the months, and for those interested, a full article is available on the subject."

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Microsoft gets crunchy

Microsoft has airbrushed the Windows Phone 7 Series into a Timotei-style web commercial that glosses over the operating system's limitations.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

www.sorehands.com writes "In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names.Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)"

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'Deeply disappointing'

Despite a surge in sales, Palm CFO Doug Jeffries predicts that the smartphone maker's immediate future won't be a happy one.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

Sanity enters 'sexting' crusade

A federal appeals court rebuked a Pennsylvania district attorney who threatened to file felony child pornography charges against teens who were photographed semi-nude unless they attended an "education program."…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."

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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Google, Inc. accused Viacom, Inc. of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday." As "statements from the corporate counsel's office" go, this post on the YouTube blog is pretty hot reading.

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Virtual desktop mashup with Citrix

Microsoft and Citrix Systems hosted a virtual desktop love-in Thursday, talking about how their respective desktop virtualization products mesh well and how the companies will continue to cooperate in the future. Microsoft also lifted the veil on upcoming service packs for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, which have features to improve server and desktop virtualization.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

An anonymous reader writes "Banks will be offering a new service at the end of the year that will let customers take a photo of a paper check and have it be deposited in their bank accounts, making the smartphone one step closer to an ATM."

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Turned IBM around, predicted GM's demise

Jerome York, the financial mind and turnaround expert who most recently shared his business acumen as a long-serving member of Apple's board of directors, died Thursday morning of a brain aneurysm suffered Tuesday. York was 71 years old.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags."

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bonch writes "Agencies under the Obama administration cite security provisions to withhold information more often than they did under the Bush administration. For example, the 'deliberative process' exemption of the Freedom of Information Act was used 70,779 times in 2009, up from the 47,395 of 2008. Amusingly, the Associated Press has been waiting three months for the government to deliver records on its own Open Government Directive."

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lee1 writes "It turns out that the U.K. has a DNA database — for dogs. And this database was recently used to apprehend a South London gang member who used his dog to catch a 16-year-old rival and hold him while he stabbed him to death. The dog was also accidentally stabbed, and left blood at the scene. The creation of human DNA databases has led to widespread debates on privacy; but what about the collation of DNA from dogs or other animals?"

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Techman83 writes "After years of changing between AVG Free + Avast, it's coming time to find a new free alternative for friends/relatives who run Windows. AVG and Avast have been quite good, but are starting to bloat out in size, and also becoming very misleading. Avast recently auto updated from 4.8 to 5 and now requires you to register (even for the free version) and both are making it harder to actually find the free version. Is this end of reasonable free antivirus, or is there another product I can entrust to keep the 'my computer's doing weird things' calls to a minimum?"

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An anonymous reader writes "D-Shape, an innovative new 3-D printer, builds solid structures like sculptures, furniture, even buildings from the ground up. The device relies on sand and magnesium glue to actually build structures layer by layer from solid stone. The designer, Enrico Dini, is even talking with various organizations about making the printer compatible with moon dust, paying the way for an instant moonbase!"

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mikesd81 writes "In the first federal appeals court opinion dealing with 'sexting,' a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled Wednesday that parents could block the prosecution of their children on child pornography charges for appearing in photographs found on some classmates' cellphones. Miller vs. Mitchell (PDF) began in 2008 when school officials in Tunkhannock, Pa., discovered seminude and nude photographs of some female students on other student's phones. George Skumanick Jr., the DA at the time, said the students and their parents could be prosecuted if they did not participate in an after-school 'education program.' The unanimous ruling of the judges, Thomas L. Ambro, Michael A. Chagares and Walter K. Stapleton, criticized the district attorney's reliance on the girls' presence in the photographs as a basis for the potential charges. 'Appearing in a photograph provides no evidence as to whether that person possessed or transmitted the photo,' said the opinion, by Judge Ambro."

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Not deeply enough

IBM has been mum about when its high-end servers based on the eight-core Power7 processor are going to come to market.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

SpuriousLogic writes "A team of researchers have created a 'quantum state' in an object billions of times larger than ever before. From the article: 'Such states, in which an object is effectively in two places at once, have until now only been accomplished with single particles, atoms and molecules. In this experiment, published in the journal Nature, scientists produced a quantum state in an object billions of times larger than previous tests. The team says the result could have significant implications in quantum computing.'"

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eldavojohn writes "Two months ago, Tim Berners-Lee unveiled a UK Government data project with the goal to make government data more useful for everyone. Today he is calling on the rest of the world governments to become more transparent with their nonsensitive data. After only a few months, his project boasts around forty applications for using government data (screen shot example here). The BBC article notes the interesting uses of public data in India and Brazil that are disappointingly lacking in other countries — even the United States. Hopefully the US's data.gov will evolve to hosting apps instead of just data."

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