martinsslaves writes "Shanghais' Fudan University have made some considerable progress in their endeavors in learning robots, with their new "Fudan Intelligent Robot" looking a whole lot more polished than their previous Fudan-1 model. The goal is for the robot to learn new tasks by following voice commands, which the researchers hope could eventually allow the robot to help the elderly or become a "good household mate" for families. Among other things, the bot can currently can plot out its own map of its surroundings and remember specific locations and, of course, change TV channels at your command (or, as you can see above, even serve as a TV itself)."

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This is what blogging is all about.

A platform for a person to tell their story.

NJ (NakedJen) is a NBB (Natural Born Blogger).

njdube sent in this Space.com story about the money behind SETI that opens, "It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off. So is searching for intelligent creatures on unseen worlds worth the candle? After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"

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The various patent lawsuits against Vonage have been a perfect example of almost everything that's wrong with the patent system. Vonage was the clear leader in this space -- being the first to successfully get this type of product to a widespread audience, even as the idea had been talked for years. Vonage's success had nothing to do with its technology acumen. The concepts behind VoIP services were widely known and widely discussed. The problem facing the space had always been an inability by any company to package it up in a way that people would buy it. Vonage figured that out. And for it, it got sued into oblivion by all the companies who were unable or unwilling to figure out. Just the fact that there were so many patents covering the basic concepts of "VoIP" (even when there was so much prior art) should have been a warning sign that perhaps most of those patents were bogus. However, once Vonage's investors started pressuring Vonage to just settle the cases, things only got worse. Vonage settled with Verizon and Sprint and even with some small patent holder very few people had heard of. With Vonage quickly trying to settle any such lawsuit, you can bet that plenty of companies went hunting through their patent portfolios, looking to see if they had anything related to VoIP which they could use to sue Vonage over. AT&T quickly found something and sued Vonage, knowing the company would quickly cough up some money. And, cough it up, it did. Vonage has agreed to pay AT&T $39 million. Anyone else have a VoIP patent? Might as well sue while Vonage's wallet is wide open...

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fifthace writes "A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby. The technology uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power when no video signal is present. With political parties all over Europe calling for a ban on standby, this small development could end up as one of the most significant advances in recent times. The British Government estimates eight percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby."

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William Patry points us to an article covering the debate going on in Japan about whether or not the country should extend copyright terms to life plus 70 years, rather than life plus 50 years. If this sounds familiar, it's because plenty of other countries, including the UK, have recently gone through similar debates. The problem is that in the 90s Disney freaked out that the copyright on Mickey Mouse was going to go into the public domain. So, it pushed for Congress (via Sonny Bono) to extend copyrights out an extra 20 years. This made very little sense. After all, the purpose of copyrights is to create an incentive for the creation of new works. If the incentive is sufficient at the time of creation, then clearly it worked. There is no reason to then extend that incentive long after it succeeded -- other than if you incorrectly believe that copyright is actually a welfare system for content creators. As the article points out, does anyone really believe that some people will only create content if they know it will be protected to 70 years past their death rather than 50? And, if that's true, then why don't the laws only protect newly created content? The content that was already created was created under the bargain that it was life plus 50. It would appear to be a violation of the pact that was made with the public (who give up the content from the public domain) to change those terms after the fact.

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ancientribe writes "There's a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow the notorious Storm away in size and sophistication, according to researchers, and it's a direct result of how Storm has changed the botnet game, with more powerful and wily botnets on the horizon. This article provides a peek at the 'new Storm' and reveals the three biggest botnets in the world (including Storm) — and what makes them tick and what they are after."

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Cat in the Hat writes "Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'"

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Seattle's Roq la Rue Gallery has a killer triple bill show opening this Friday with new work by Scott Musgrove, Brian Despain, and Ryan Heshka. The opening is 6-9pm and all three Pop Surrealist sensations will be in attendance. The show runs through December 1 and the art is also viewable online. Seen here, from left to right: Musgrove's "Untitled," Despain's "The Discovery," and Heshka's "See." Link

sertsa writes "A tongue-in-cheek article just published by the Archaeological Institute of America hypothesizes that the formation of ancient Egypt is linked to recurrent Predynastic zombie attacks due to outbreaks of Solanum virus. 'From the very beginning of Predynastic research, Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie reported several headless, but seemingly intact, burials during his famous excavations at Naqada in 1895. Further excavations at Gerzeh and other sites revealed more of these curious burials, but no satisfactory explanation could be proposed at the time. More recently, excavations in the non-elite cemetery at Hierakonpolis (HK43), undertaken from 1996 to 2004, have uncovered more of these strange headless burials in addition to 21 individuals whose cervical vertebrae bear cut marks indicative of complete decapitation. The individuals include men and women ranging in age from 16 to 65. The number and the standard position of the cut marks (usually on the second-fourth cervical vertebrae; always from the front) indicate an effort far greater than that needed simply to cause the death of a normal (uninfected) person. The standard position also indicates these are not injuries sustained during normal warfare.'"

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Another "web security firm" (I'm not going to give them undeserved publicity by naming them but you can click the link if you care) is getting some easy publicity by announcing the results of a survey finding that half of their customers block MySpace or Facebook surfing at work. That's not too surprising, since this was a survey of the customers of a company that sells blocking software. We covered a similar publicity stunt back in August (and indeed we've been debunking these stories for years). That study found that 43 percent of workers are blocked from accessing Facebook at work. But the latest study finds that only 25.6 percent of the firm's customers block Facebook. There are a couple of ways we might interpret this data. One is that Facebook blocking is actually falling, and that we can extrapolate no Facebook blocking at all sometime next May! The more likely explanation, though, is that these numbers are totally meaningless and self-serving. Of course, these stories inevitably go on to quote a company executive about how personal surfing at work is a "growing concern." In the latest story, the company predicts that two-thirds of companies would be filtering by next year. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the company is selling the software companies would need to do that filtering.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Travis Corcoran, the founder of the very useful SmartFlix service, which rents instructional DVDs of all kinds, has started a "mashup of Amazon.com-for-comic-books." It's a great idea, and will have:

Facebook-style social networking (we'll likely support the OpenSocial API at some point), and a few other things. We've got tons of things that no other comic book sites have: personalized RSS feeds, free shipping on every order (no matter how small), reviews on authors, artists and titles (not just issues), a recommendation engine, profile pages, "friends" lists, blurbs, mini-blogs, etc. We're going to have tons more features in the near future.

Shown here: Giant Teen Titans Annual 1967, which will be republished in December.

HeavyInk.com is now in public beta.

Link

Lucas123 writes "The average price of notebook hard drives tumbled to $53 in the third quarter of 2007, from $86 in the same period during the previous year, according to a survey by a market research firm. The price drop can be accredited to competition among six vendors, enormous demand for PCs and consumer electronics as well as evolving flash memory drives. 'Lower-capacity notebook drives showed smaller price drops, while newer high-capacity drives saw massive price drops ... Notebook drives with 320GB of storage will drop as a result of the addition of new features, while prices will stabilize on lower-capacity notebook storage devices like 80GB hard drives.'"

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An anonymous reader writes "Consumers seem to be paying more attention to the possibility of fixing gadgets instead of sending them to the landfill. It may be because 10gb in your iPod is more than enough for any normal person, it may be a deep, abiding love for the environment or it may just be the price. A New York Times article explores how new sites like FixYa and old standbys like Macintouch can aid the average user in restoring their 'slightly used' gear. Practically every gadget has their own website devoted to helping owners help each other deal with problems that arise. I personally like AVS Forum for my living room needs. From the article: 'Most other gadgets come with batteries that are easy to replace without custom tools. Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices' manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less. Companies offering replacement batteries for iPods often offer better batteries with higher capacities and longer lifetimes. Ipodjuice.com, for instance, sells a 1,200-milliamp-hour battery that will replace the 600-milliamp-hour battery that shipped with a fourth-generation iPod -- an improvement that lets the Web site claim that the repaired iPod will "last 100 percent longer."'"

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Whenever technology begins to take over, there are those who worry about what's "lost" in relying too heavily on technology. Remember people who said that kids wouldn't understand math if they used calculators? Or those who are now afraid that kids won't be able to write because they spend so much time typing? Or those fears that we're all so used to Google being available all the time, that we're letting our memory go? Along those lines, Wired is asking if all of the next generation of safety features in cars means that we're becoming too complacent as drivers. After all, with new technologies that effectively take over for a driver if it looks like a crash is about to happen, or at the very least try to alert the driver of that possibility, perhaps people will start relying on the technology too much. When it comes to driving, we've certainly seen a few too many examples of drivers trusting their GPS devices over their own eyes. So, it's not out of the realm of possibility (especially with technology being as unreliable as it often is) that people will become so reliant on these technologies that they'll become somewhat more careless, but that hardly seems like a good reason to stop this type of technology from moving forward. After all, you could take it to the extreme, and note that if everyone drove around with giant spikes on their steering wheels instead of airbags, everyone would drive a lot more carefully -- but no one wants that to happen.

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Kipkay bought a model of the Star Trek phaser and installed a blue diode laser in it. Here's his video of how he made it. Link

Andrew Peleikis of Toronto made a video to show us how to install a "Frankenstein" knife switch to control the 12V lights he bought at Ikea.

So for a little home-improvement hacking this time, I installed a sweet knife switch to turn on/off the ikea lights i put up in my kitchen.

You can use a switch that has bare contacts like a knife switch as long as the power that is running through the circuit is SAFE - 12 volts or so - and even then, don't short the contacts with a fork or what have you, because it will still make a big spark and scare the children.

Link