Can you force your ISP to pay for loss of access to an Internet connection?
Apparently yes, at least in Germany, where a Federal Court of Justice awarded a plaintiff €50 ($65) per day for the period his was unable to use his DSL, fax over IP and VoIP services, Computerworld UK reports.
The rationale: the Internet has been a crucial part of people’s economic living… read more
“To go from the 1 gigawatt of generation capacity that we have now [in the United States] to the 170 to 200 gigawatts called for by 2030 amounts to a 26 percent compounded annual growth rate over the next 20 years,” according to John Lushetsky, program manager of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technology Program for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Lushetsky predicted that the solar energy… read more
MIT researcher Drew Harry designs virtual spaces that don’t look like the familiar world–his virtual meeting room looks more like a football field than like a conference room. He says his goal is to stop mimicking the physical world and start creating a new kind of space.
His virtual meeting room arranges people based on their allegiance. Where an avatar stands signifies whether a person agrees or disagrees with… read more
Researchers in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory at the University of Illinois in collaboration with German scientists have been using bioinformatics techniques to probe the world of proteins for answers to questions about the origins of life.
Proteins are formed from chains of amino acids and fold into three-dimensional structures that determine their function. According to crop sciences professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, very little is known about… read more
Radar Networks’ Twine, a Web organizer based on semantic technology, launches publicly today.
Twine is part bookmarking tool, part social network, and part recommendation engine, helping users collect, manage, and share online information related to any area of interest.
Twine uses machine learning and natural language processing to parse the contents of Web pages and extract key concepts, such as people, places, and organizations, from the pages that… read more
Artificial intelligence needs a reboot, according to experts at MIT’s Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium, calling for a return to the style of research that marked the early years of the field, one driven more by curiosity rather than narrow applications.
Patrick Winston, director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, blamed the stagnation in part on the decline in funding after the… read more
The men who want to be cryonically preserved — like Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University — and the women who sometimes find it hard to be married to them.
Duke University chemists have developed a method of growing one-atom-thick cylinders of carbon (nanotubes) 100 times longer than usual, while maintaining a soda-straw straightness with controllable orientation. Their achievement solves a major barrier to the nanotubes’ use in ultra-small nanoelectronic devices, said the team’s leader.
Duke University chemists have developed a method of growing nanotubes 100 times longer than usual (4 mm.), while maintaining straightness with controllable orientation and cross-connecting nanotube grids. The achievement solves a major barrier to nanotubes’ use in ultra-small nanoelectronic devices.
TED has just released the video of MIT scientists Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry unveiling their “Sixth Sense,” a wearable device with a projector, as in Minority Report — the buzz of TED.
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes riddled with defects and impurities on the outside could replace some of the expensive platinum catalysts used in fuel cells and metal-air batteries, according to scientists at Stanford University.
“Platinum is very expensive and thus impractical for large-scale commercialization,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford and co-author of the study. “Developing a low-cost alternative has been a… read more
By slicing open carbon nanotubes, Rice University and Stanford University researchers have devised simple methods for unfurling carbon nanotubes to make “nanoribbons” of graphene, which could be used to create electronics faster than those made of silicon.
Intel Corp. has re-positioned its “tera-scale” processor R&D efforts, moving towards a more mainstream, x86-based multicore design instead of a proprietary technology.
Intel has demonstrated an experimental, 48-core processor–or “single-chip cloud computer” (because it resembles the organization of datacenters used to create a “cloud” of computing) based on a 45-nm process using high-k and metal-gate technology.
In the future, Intel’s “single-chip cloud computer” processor could be powerful enough… read more
In a new book, scientist James E. Lovelock has come under attack from some environmentalists for his support of nuclear power as a way to avoid runaway “global heating” — his preferred alternative to “global warming.”