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A bully finds a pulpit on the web Shopping online in late July, Clarabelle Rodriguez typed the name of her favorite eyeglass brand into Googles search bar. In moments, she found the perfect frames made by a French company called Lafont on a Web site that looked snazzy and stood at the top of the search results. Not the tippy-top, where the paid ads are found, but under those, on Googles version of the gold-medal podium, where the most relevant and popular site is displayed. NY Times
Apple to unveil new iPad in January, new MacBooks in April As December approaches and 2011 looms, Apple is juggling a lot of balls up in the air. Of course, everyone's expecting the iPhone 4 to hit Verizon in early 2011, a move which should only serve to increase already booming iPhone sales. And now comes word via Three Guys and a Podcast that Apple has two special events planned for the first quarter of the new year. Edible Apple
Rage developer interview: John Carmack Wolfenstein. Doom. Quake. The list of franchises produced by John Carmack and id Software reads like the DNA of the First Person Shooter. Not only are Carmack and id credited with inventing the genre, they went a long way to revolutionising it on the PC platform. Telegraph
Copyright lawyers sue lawyer who helped copyright defendants Attorneys for the U.S. Copyright Group have filed a lawsuit against a lawyer who sold "self-help" documents to people who had been sued by the USCG, demanding that he pay the costs involved in dealing with the people who used the documents he sold. The Escapist
LGA 775 still makes up 65 percent of Intel's market today It is something that you dont see every day, and something that catches you off guard. In Q4 2010 a massive 65 percent of all Intel desktop CPUs are socket 775 based. This is the Core 2 Duo / Quad and current Celeron socket. Fudzilla
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41327-weekend-tech-reading-why-sony-turned-down-kinect.html
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A new report from research firm GfK shows that loyalty in the smartphone market is a hard thing to command for handset manufacturers with 56% of 2,653 people surveyed admitting they were keeping their options open as to which phone they would buy next.
As smartphone manufacturers scramble to innovate their handsets, offering the best high-resolution cameras, super clear displays and support for the next generation mobile networks, smartphone owners are leaving their options open, especially now that manufacturers are moving towards open-sourced operating systems like Google?s Android software, leaving a phones hardware as its key differentiator.
Only a quarter of people surveyed planeed to stay loyal to the operating system of their phone, although 59% of Apple users admitted they would be likley to stick to Apple smartphones in the future. Only 21% of Microsoft smartphone users would stay loyal to its operating system but this has only been available for little more than a month and is most likely representing results from Windows Mobile 6.x users.
BlackBerry users (35%) would stay loyal to handsets from RIM, only 28% of Android users likely to remain using Google?s OS and 24% for users of Symbian.
As the smartphone market booms, manufacturers are regularly refreshing their product lineups to reflect the very best hardware that is available to them at the time. With more and more vendors looking to Google?s Android operating system to power their devices, profit margins are lowering as competition increases and prices decreasing.
By keeping a year between its product iterations, Apple is ensuring it can release new products that consistently push the boundaries as to what is possible to include on a smartphone. This seems to be paying off for the Cupertino-based company, where nearly double the amount of Apple customers are staying loyal to their brand over companies like RIM and companies using Google?s Android software.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/11/29/in-the-smartphone-market-apple-users-remain-the-most-loyal/
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But Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who played that role long before it had a brand name, is standing against his party on a number of significant issues at a politically dangerous time to do so.
A reliable conservative for decades on every issue, he nonetheless fought President Ronald Reagan ? and prevailed ? on apartheid penalties and over the Philippine presidential election. He went head to head with Senator Jesse Helms in the 1990s over the nomination of William F. Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, as ambassador to Mexico.
Now, in the heat of the post-primary lame-duck Congressional session, he is defying his party on an earmark ban, a bill that would create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants, a military spending authorization bill and an arms control treaty with Russia.
He even declined to sign a brief supporting state lawsuits against President Obama?s health care law because he saw it as political posturing.
Now Mr. Lugar?s willingness to buck his party is leading to talk that he will face a primary challenge from a Tea Party candidate when he runs for re-election in 2012. It is a possibility that Mr. Lugar, who said the current environment in Washington was ?disappointing? and ?without a doubt? the most polarized he had seen since joining the Senate in 1977, understands clearly even as he declines to modify his positions.
?I?m always optimistic,? he said in an interview in his office on Wednesday, ?that good reasoning, good will and proper spirit is going to lead to constructive results even as I describe, as I have, intense polarization that I think is currently there.?
Even after the midterm rout that will remove many long-serving members from Congress, the idea that Mr. Lugar would be vulnerable to a primary challenge is a chilling notion to many Republicans, a symbol of symbolism gone too far.
?If Dick Lugar,? said John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, ?having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.?
Mr. Danforth, who was first elected the same year as Mr. Lugar, added, ?I?m glad Lugar?s there and I?m not.?
Mr. Lugar has a long history of carefully chosen battles. He had a deep admiration for Reagan, with whom he worked closely on several military issues, yet at times opposed him.
In the 1980s, Mr. Lugar pressed legislation with tough sanctions against South Africa intended to help end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela, a bill vetoed by Reagan.
?I had the sad responsibility as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee then leading the debate to overthrow his veto,? Mr. Lugar said. ?The net result of this in due course was the freedom for Nelson Mandela,? he said, adding that he felt vindicated when Mr. Mandela visited the Capitol for lunch. ?At the time, not everyone in Indiana agreed with this.?
Further, as a United States representative to monitor the Philippine election between Corazon Aquino and Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Mr. Lugar publicly disagreed with Reagan, who said at the time that voting irregularities had occurred on both sides, while Mr. Lugar saw fraud only on behalf of the Marcos campaign.
As such, disagreeing with his colleagues these days on legislation backed by Democrats seems like small change. ?There is nothing going on presently that seems to me that has the significance to the world or in terms of foreign policy as those two events,? he said.
The exception, he added, is the New Start treaty, under which the United States and Russia would pare their nuclear arsenals and resume lapsed mutual inspections, a signature foreign policy goal of the Obama administration. Republican colleagues have opposed the treaty and would prefer to push the matter into the 112th Congress, which begins in January, potentially dooming it.
This has upset Mr. Lugar, who called on his colleagues to ?do your duty? before they broke for Thanksgiving. Nuclear disarmament is an issue Mr. Lugar has pursued most of his career; in the 1990s he teamed with Sam Nunn, then a Democratic senator from Georgia, on their own program to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Obama became involved in the Nunn-Lugar efforts as a senator and traveled with Mr. Lugar to Russia in 2005.
Mr. Lugar?s recent breaks with his party have stirred the attention of Indiana Tea Party groups, who have him in their sights. ?Senator Lugar has been an upstanding citizen representing us in D. C.,? said Diane Hubbard, a spokeswoman for the Indianapolis Tea Party. ?But over the years, he has become more moderate in his voting.?
Removing him ?will be a difficult challenge,? Ms. Hubbard conceded. ?But we do believe it?s doable, and we think the climate is right for it and we believe it is a must.?
Mr. Lugar said he understood that despondence over the economic crisis, a sense that government is more intrusive and a fear that the country?s position on the global stage is becoming more precarious ?are the underlying concerns? of partisan troubles. But, he said, ?The people speaking to them are speaking to them in extremes.?
While Republicans enjoyed much success in the midterms in Indiana, most winning candidates had tenuous or no ties to the Tea Party movement. One thing going for Mr. Lugar about 2012, said Matt Bergbower, an assistant professor of political science at Indiana State University, ?is the Tea Party here has been sort of secondary in nature.?
Mr. Lugar will leave nothing to chance. He conducted an internal poll after the election that showed that his popularity was high, and wrote a three-page letter to a family he saw featured in a newspaper, identified as Tea Party supporters, explaining his background as a small-business man and an observant Methodist.
?I?m very conscious of it,? Mr. Lugar said of a primary threat. ?I?ve been in public life a long time.?
But in the end, he said, ?I will continue to be Dick Lugar, and I will try to do the best job I can? in explaining his positions to the people of Indiana. ?It?s not my nature to simply seek controversy.?
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e881036def2b6280b0c22457220c83b1
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Crytek is currently working on Crysis 2 for all three platforms. The original Crysis was an exclusive for the PC. That being said, Crytek has already stated that Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC.
"As long as the current console generation exists and as long as we keep pushing the PC as well, the more difficult it will be to really get the benefit of both," Cevat Yerli, founder, CEO, and President of Crytek, told the latest issue of Edge, according to CVG. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks."
Developers have very low sales expectations for the PC, compared to consoles. It's a vicious cycle: the PC market doesn't give the same revenue as the console market, so companies don't spend much on the PC version of a game. This is certainly true for games like Unreal Tournament 3: it would have been much better had it been released as a PC exclusive.
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Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.
Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.
So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.
Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression
Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.
This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.
He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.
This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.
"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.
That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick
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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=023b7ec7200686447ca34d68f025ac14
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As online shopping became more mainstream, and for many a necessity, dozens of star retailers on many different categories have emerged. You have Zappos for buying shoes, Steam/Impulse for games, iTunes for music, Expedia/Orbitz or any other of the numerous travel sites, Fandango for movie tickets, and the list goes on. Amazon has also remained a pioneer in the industry and today you can buy nearly anything you could possibly want from their site, either direct or from smaller retailers using Amazon's impeccable logistics.

* Graph used for illustration purposes only. Source: Lifehacker, Permuto, US Census Bureau.
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41326-weekend-open-forum-where-do-you-buy-online.html
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And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots ? none of them particularly human-looking ? are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.
In a mock city here used by Army Rangers for urban combat training, a 15-inch robot with a video camera scuttles around a bomb factory on a spying mission. Overhead an almost silent drone aircraft with a four-foot wingspan transmits images of the buildings below. Onto the scene rolls a sinister-looking vehicle on tank treads, about the size of a riding lawn mower, equipped with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.
Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.
The machines, viewed at a ?Robotics Rodeo? last month at the Army?s training school here, not only protect soldiers, but also are never distracted, using an unblinking digital eye, or ?persistent stare,? that automatically detects even the smallest motion. Nor do they ever panic under fire.
?One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second,? said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.
Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.
?Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs? as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.
Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach?s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.
This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.
But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers ? and even some human rights advocates.
?A lot of people fear artificial intelligence,? said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. ?I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force.?
Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.
His faith in machines is already being tested.
?Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines,? Dr. Arquilla said. ?We think that that?s the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs.?
Automation has proved vital in the wars America is fighting. In the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft with names like Predator, Reaper, Raven and Global Hawk have kept countless soldiers from flying sorties. Moreover, the military now routinely uses more than 6,000 tele-operated robots to search vehicles at checkpoints as well as to disarm one of the enemies? most effective weapons: the I.E.D., or improvised explosive device.
Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design ?ethical? robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=efbbfec42f2480a081113e9fbd4a1287
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As online shopping became more mainstream, and for many a necessity, dozens of star retailers on many different categories have emerged. You have Zappos for buying shoes, Steam/Impulse for games, iTunes for music, Expedia/Orbitz or any other of the numerous travel sites, Fandango for movie tickets, and the list goes on. Amazon has also remained a pioneer in the industry and today you can buy nearly anything you could possibly want from their site, either direct or from smaller retailers using Amazon's impeccable logistics.

* Graph used for illustration purposes only. Source: Lifehacker, Permuto, US Census Bureau.
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41326-weekend-open-forum-where-do-you-buy-online.html
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