Technology

Instead of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, celebrity-seekers had to settle for crooner Tony Bennett. And instead of blockbuster news from Apple Vice President Philip Schiller, attendees got new iTunes pricing and software upgrades.

Nine sites in the central Pacific will be set as sanctuaries for marine life and bases of research for scientists, President Bush said Tuesday.

As a candidate, Barack Obama promoted hybrid cars.

China has released a blacklist of 19 major online portals and Web sites, including Google and Baidu, that it claims provide and spread pornographic or obscene content, state media reported.

A satellite tracking device that will plot a child's location to within 10ft is being launched by a British firm. The Nu.M8 digital watch uses GPS satellite technology like car sat nav systems.The watch can be securely fastened to a child's wrist and will trigger an alert if forcibly removed. Parents can then track their children on a website.

Lenovo's IdeaCentre 600 is a pretty splashy debut: Its first ever all-in-one is a simple curved slab that's supposedly the thinnest all-in-one in the industry.

People will buy anything with an Apple logo. In fact, we?ve proposed a few new markets Apple should look into before calling all the big MacWorld announcements off?

We?ve got some cutting edge technology in place that allows us to index both our site?s content as well as the content within the show?s episodes! So if you?re looking for that review of Crysis on The Totally Rad Show? Just type in ?Crysis? in the search box on the top of the page, and boom! You get every mention of ?Crysis? on our shows.

So, the season of giving has just come and gone, and you?ve received a Linux-based netbook?the popular new class of ultra-cheap, ultra-portable computer. By definition, netbooks are very limited in what they can do; they?re primary meant for accessing the web as well as some moderate office and multimedia use. Their low-speed processor and minimal

nandemoari writes " Not long after we first heard murmurs Microsoft may be ready to lay off as much as 17 per cent of its workforce, the popular Consumer Electronics Show, held every year in Las Vegas, is rumored to be shrinking alongside the global economy. The Consumer Electronics Association, host of the CES, estimates that the numbers of both exhibitors and visitors will be down in 2009. The CEA expects about 130,000 people will attend this year, down 11,000 from last year. And about 2,700 exhibitors are expected to attend, down from 3,000 in 2008."

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txmadman writes "Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant storage, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose SD card was whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen SD card 'wallets' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Oprah Winfrey, or to be more precise, Oprah's Book Club, is being sued by the inventor/patent attorney Scott C. Harris for infringing upon his patent for 'Enhancing Touch and Feel on the Internet.' So Oprah's Book Club is now one of many people and entities being sued over this patent because they allow people to view part, but not all, of a book online before purchasing it. Mr. Harris also sued Google Books for infringing upon this patent. He actually was fired from his position as partner at Fish & Richardson for that, because Google is a client of that law firm and they had conflict of interest rules to uphold." It would be entertaining to see Oprah give very wide and mainstream publicity to the abuses enabled by our current patent system.

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The Recording Industry of America's favorite courtroom lawyer, Tom Perrelli, who has sued individual file swappers in multiple federal courts, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the third in line at the Justice Department. CNet's Declam McCullagh explores the background of the man who won the RIAA's lucrative business for his DC law firm: "An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board — and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo," not to mention Pandora and Radio Paradise. NewYorkCountryLawyer adds, "Certainly this does not bode well for CowboyNeal's being appointed Copyright Czar."

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rohitm918 writes "A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): '...low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.' They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes ($3.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. 'Even though it harvests "free money," phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.'"

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