WASHINGTON (AP) - John Dunbar:
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday his agency has all the authority it needs to prevent Internet service providers from discriminating against Web surfers and that new legislation is unnecessary.

The FCC has conducted two hearings on "network management" following admissions by Comcast Corp. that it sometimes delayed file-sharing traffic for subscribers as a way to keep Web traffic flowing.

Large network owners like cable and telecommunications companies are opposed to network neutrality legislation, saying it would add a layer of regulation that will hurt consumers. They say it is unnecessary and amounts to a solution in search of a problem.

So, exactly how will consumers be hurt?

Dunbar:
The hearing included some star power, with the appearance of Justine Bateman, best known for her role on the TV sitcom Family Ties. Bateman is now a founding partner of a new online media venture.

Did I read that correctly? "Star power"?

Network Neutrality - Senators debate future of Web

Everyone knew it was coming, they just didn't know when. Well, now we know: On April 15th, Sony will issue firmware version 2.3, which will add support for the DTS-HD Master Audio (MA) and DTS-HD High Resolution (HR) to the PlayStation 3 (PS3). In combination with the recent BD-Live firmware, this allows the PS3 to play all Blu-ray titles at their optimal functionality.

Fox and New Line exclusively use the DTS-HD MA format on their Blu-ray releases to ensure a "master quality" reproduction of the sound. Similar to Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA takes the audio directly from the master and compresses it in a way that maintains the same audio fidelity in a much smaller file size. Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, and PCM are considered the ultimate way to experience a film soundtrack.

Brian Towne, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Consumer Division at DTS commented, "We are extremely pleased that Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) is adding the full spectrum premium DTS-HD Master Audio codec into the PS3 so that more than 10 million owners of one of the best selling computer entertainment systems can have the best sounding, most efficient and flexible audio technology available system as well. DTS-HD Master Audio is fast becoming the must-have feature for high definition entertainment enthusiasts."

PS3 Getting DTS-HD Master Audio Support

PC Magazine
Sascha Segan
March 17, 2008

What is really going to change the way our society works in the next 75 years? Will it be biotech? Quantum computing? Let's place some long bets.

The French railway system makes our poor Amtrak want to hide out in a freight yard somewhere, crying. Guillaume Pepy, the president of the French railway company SNCF, once explained to me why: To build decent infrastructure, he said, you need to have a 50-, 75-, or 100-year plan. With Amtrak constantly fighting for its life a year at a time, of course it's going to decay.

What does infrastructure have to do with thinking green? It's all about planning for the future. Green means sustainable, which means looking beyond short-term goals to see where we want to be in 75 years and how to get there. Otherwise, our environment and society will end up a lot more like Amtrak than like the French TGV.

Before you start mocking that there's no way we can predict or plan based on a 75-year time frame, think about radios, telephones, and highways. We're still working basically with the radio spectrum regulation system set up in 1927. The system of copper wires that gives our homes last-mile connectivity was set up more than a hundred years ago. Car culture is 100 years old. The national highway system you drive on daily was conceived in 1922.

Long-term plans aren't fixed, of course; they change with the times. But they give us goals and a focus beyond just pillaging resources in search of next-quarter profits. In a 1907 issue of Broadway Magazine, writers proposed a long-term plan for the Port of New York. They figured that much of New York's wealth comes from its port, and that by the year 2000 the city would have a population of about 15 million, with 19 million in the metro area. So they proposed moving the port from crowded New York Harbor to a huge new complex on Jamaica Bay.

That's a perfect example of how a 50-year plan can actually pan out. By 2000, New York had 8 million people in the city, but 21 million in the metro area. And much of the city's position as a world hub came from a huge port on Jamaica Bay: JFK Airport, which grew to its present proportions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Unfortunately, our political and economic systems are not designed for 75-year plans. Increased public ownership of companies, the day-trader stock-market culture, and flip-focused investors who want to pump and dump stock make for a society focused on short-term profits. To execute even one 75-year plan, we need a country of investors in it for the long haul. And in the area of tech, we need not one, but four 75-year plans.

The Plans

INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN. Thank goodness for the telecoms' frenzy of the late 1990s. The fiber they laid then gave us a leg up into the 21st century. But we need a serious plan for replacing copper and shoring up network backbones for massively more bandwidth-hungry services than ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

What's Our 75-Year Tech Plan?

AP Friday February 22, 10:56 am ET

Bill Gates Says Microsoft Is Pushing Touchscreen and Speech Technology to Replace Keyboards

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said. "It's one of the big bets we're making," he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University. Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy must become even more advanced. "They're dealing with so much information that ... the need for machine learning to figure out what's going on with that data is absolutely essential," he said.

Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments but also with reseachers in other scientific areas "to help us understand where new inventions are necessary," Gates said. Gates plans to retire as Microsoft's chief software architect in July and focus on philanthropy.

I hate touch screens, so I guess I'll be one of the last holdouts. "...from my cold, dead hands."

Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards

Ever wonder what that cop is doing in his cruiser that's parked behind your car with lights flashing -- while your heart is pounding and you're searching for your license and registration? Most likely, he's researching you on his laptop, and finding a surprisingly large amount of information. According to Lt. Paul Shastany of the Framingham, Mass., Police Department (FPD), laptops in the unit's 24 patrol cars are the most important recent technology innovation that aids police work.

Backup is especially crucial for police departments, where lack of data can make or break a court case. "We back up everything constantly," Burman says. Once per month, he goes out to the cars and copies report data to CDs. The information is also stored on the department network, and the system is backed up every night onto the town hall network.

For even more redundancy, the police department and fire department run identical Keystone applications on identical servers connected by a fiber-optic network, so each department can back up the other's data. If there's a crash on the FPD server, Burman can change his server's IP address to the fire department's server and the police department is back up and running.

Police tech: How cops use IT to catch bad guys

bold = Stefanie's

from the please-explain-why? dept

Every time you think that the tide is turning and people are beginning to realize the ridiculousness of overly burdensome IP laws, some politicians start doing the dirty work of Hollywood's worst lobbyists. The latest may be the most ridiculous yet -- though, it certainly wasn't unexpected.

Remember how NBC Universal execs started whining about how law enforcement's priorities were all screwed up, since they were focused on pointless things like burglary and bankrobbing rather than copyright violations? That was merely the starting point in a lobbying campaign for the new PRO IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act) bill that has been introduced with backing of both top Republicans and Democrats.

As the bill's not particularly subtle name makes clear, this law is all about giving Hollywood much of what it has been asking for. Rather than decreasing the ridiculous fines that can be handed out for copyright infringement, this law would increase them. But, more importantly, it sets up a brand new gov't agency within the executive branch to help crack down on "piracy." This despite increasing evidence that "piracy" isn't a problem for the economy at all -- but rather a problem for a few big companies with obsolete business models (who just happen to have tremendous lobbying clout) who are too lazy to even bother trying to adapt to a changing market place.

This bill isn't just corporate welfare. It would be creating an entire government agency whose sole job it would be to protect the unnecessary and obsolete business model of a few dying companies while stifling innovative tools and services at every turn. It would help to kill off our creative industries by falsely assuming that creativity needs to be funneled through a few big companies. It's a disgusting travesty of the political process.

Bipartisan PRO IP Bill Turns White House Into Hollywood's Private Enforcement Agency

Microsoft announced Thursday it has released the first beta of its Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor, previously codenamed "Viridian." It wasn't expected until early next year. The first beta release runs on the x64 version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. Microsoft released pre-beta code in the form of a community technology preview, or CTP, for what's now known as Hyper-V in September.

Each VM can also support up to four virtual SCSI drives and 64GB of memory per VM, according to company statements. Additionally, beta integration components are available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 x86 and x64 Edition.

Microsoft’s Hyper-V Beta Arrives Early

Another cool toy...

Welcome to Celestia... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

It's similar to Stellarium, which Jello mentioned back in September.

EDIT: ...and apparently, possibly noteworthy linked this site back in May (before my time). Still, it's worth mentioning again. :)

Celestia

British defense researchers have invented an invisible tank — or at least a way to make a tank invisible. London's Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Sun all report on tests conducted by the Ministry of Defence last week in which a tank rolled across a field, completely invisible to observers standing at a certain point.

"This technology is incredible," an unnamed soldier was quoted by the Daily Mail and Sun. "If I hadn't been present I wouldn't have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees — but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun."

Before bloggers start making comparisons to Harry Potter and Romulan spacecraft, it must be noted that the "technology" relies on heavy use of camera and projectors. Basically, a camera films the background, which is then projected upon a special surface applied to something in the foreground — in this case, a tank.

A Japanese guy in a translucent raincoat has become very popular on YouTube demonstrating something similar, as you can see here.

One person was willing to go on the record in all three British newspaper stories — theoretical physicist Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London, one of the world's leading experts on surface reflectivity and lead author of a widely reported paper last year that said a "cloak of invisibility" would theoretically be possible.

"The drawback at the moment is the dependence upon cameras and projectors," the Sun quoted Pendry, who did not confirm an implied connection with the defense project. "The next stage is to make the tank invisible without them — which is intricate and complicated, but possible."

My initial reaction was "Cool!" ...until I realized that traffic cops eventually will be using this technology for speed traps. :(

British Defense Researchers Create Invisible Tank

The rest of the article isn't very funny, but this line (regarding the iPhone) gets my vote for quote of the year.

If I'm going to pay $300 for a telephone, it better be a really nice phone... strapped to $275.

Slow Down, Technology!