Invisibility is Really Here
Duke scientists successfully cloak copper cylinder
by Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press
Washington, D.C. 10.20.06- Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before - to develop a Cloak of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. James T. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and could show the way to more sophisticated designs.
In this first successful experiment, researchers from the United States and England were able to cloak a copper cylinder.
It's like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky.
"We have built an artificial mirage that can hide something from would-be observers in any direction," said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical and computer engineering department.
Read More. . .
Google sees profits almost double
BBC News
10.20.06- Internet search giant Google has confirmed its ongoing market domination by announcing that its third quarter profits have almost doubled.
During the three months until the end of September, its net income was $733m (£390m), a 92% increase on the $381m it made in the same time last year.
With advertising sales soaring, Google's revenues rose 70% from a year ago to $2.7bn.
The figures comes a week after Google bought YouTube for $1.65bn.
Read More. . .
Google Offering Free Software Package
Associated Press
Mountain View, Ca. 10.11.06- Google Inc. is making its word processing and spreadsheet programs available for free to all comers on its Web site, marking the Internet search leader's latest effort to provide an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s dominant software applications.
The software package, expected to be available Wednesday, combines a spreadsheet application that Google introduced in June with a word processing program called Writely that the Mountain View-based company bought for an undisclosed amount in March.
As part of the expansion, the Writely name will disappear. The new package will be called Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Read More. . .
Hewlitt-Packard Insiders Facing Indictments
Associated Press
10.04.06- California's attorney general will seek criminal indictments against former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Patricia Dunn and four others involved in the corporate spying scandal, according to news reports.
Citing people familiar with the case, The New York Times and BusinessWeek reported that Dunn, Kevin Hunsaker, HP's ousted chief ethics officer, and Ronald DeLia, a Boston-area private investigator, would each face criminal charges. Two other outside investigators — Joseph DePante of Melbourne, Florida and Bryan Wagner of Littleton, Colorado — were also being charged, the Times said.
They each will face four felony charges: use of false or fraudulent pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility; unauthorized access to computer data; identity theft; and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes.
Read More. . .
China Jails 9 in Anti-Piracy Crackdown
Associated Press
Beijing, 10.20.06- Nine people convicted of selling illegally copied DVDs and other goods have been jailed for up to 13 years in China's biggest anti-piracy crackdown to date, a news report said Friday.
The sentences were the longest reported since China stepped up penalties for product piracy in mid-2005, imposing jail time in addition to fines that Washington and other governments had complained were inadequate to stop the thriving underground industry.
The latest crackdown was launched July 25 against producers of unlicensed copies of goods ranging from movies and software to designer clothes and sporting goods.
Read More. . .
Libya to Buy Laptops for Kids
Associated Press
New York 10.11.06- The government of Libya has reached an agreement with an American nonprofit group to provide inexpensive laptop computers for all of the nation's 1.2 million schoolchildren, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
With the project scheduled to be completed by June 2008, Libya could become the first nation in which all school-age children are connected to the Internet through educational computers, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child project, told the newspaper.
The $250 million deal, reached Tuesday, would provide the nation with 1.2 million computers, a server in each school, a team of technical advisers, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.
Read More. . .
Is the End of Impersonal Internet Communication Near?
Tech-Generation Youth Go Offline
Associated Press
Chicago 10.06.06- For some, it would be unthinkable -- certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account.
No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he had accumulated were really just acquaintances. He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos -- all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.
Read More. . .
![enlarge [+]](index.php?imagepopup=3/20061006-InterComm.jpg&width=266&height=400&imagetext=enlarge+%5B%2B%5D){kind=link}