suraj.sun writes to mention that Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks may have just gotten a boost over WiMax in the battle for wireless broadband dominance. A group of telecom companies has created the "One Voice" initiative, designed to promote a standard that will provide interoperability for broadband voice and SMS. "LTE has been fine at supporting data, which uses IP-based packet switching. But it's faced challenges trying to incorporate traditional circuit-based switching voice and SMS services onto IP-based networks. One Voice is the group's attempt to resolve that issue. The new specification will use existing functionality known as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which already defines how to provide data, voice, and other content over an IP-based network. IMS was established by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a group comprised of telecom industry associations trying to set standards for 3G mobile networks."

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Michael J. Ross writes "Of the leading content management systems used by developers for creating websites, Drupal is highly regarded for many characteristics, including a much smaller initial footprint, compared to Joomla and other CMSs. Yet some developers find this a disadvantage as well, because one of the most common criticisms leveled against Drupal is its lack of built-in support for images and multimedia elements — thereby forcing new Drupal developers to choose from the thousands of contributed Drupal modules those that would be optimal for implementing their websites' multimedia functionality. Aaron Winborn's book Drupal Multimedia is intended as a guide to help such developers." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

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coder4hire writes "Of the leading content management systems used by developers for creating websites, Drupal is highly regarded for many characteristics, including a much smaller initial footprint, compared to Joomla and other CMSs. Yet some developers find this a disadvantage as well, because one of the most common criticisms leveled against Drupal is its lack of built-in support for images and multimedia elements — thereby forcing new Drupal developers to choose from the thousands of contributed Drupal modules those that would be optimal for implementing their websites' multimedia functionality. Aaron Winborn's book Drupal Multimedia is intended as a guide to help such developers." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

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An anonymous reader writes "WarMouse has announced their new multi-button OpenOfficeMouse for OpenOffice.org at the 2009 OOoCon in Orvieto, Italy. The mouse, which features 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and an analog joystick, has double-click functionality on every button and stores up to 63 application and game profiles in its 512k of flash memory. The OpenOfficeMouse runs on Windows, Linux, and OS/X; its customization software will be released as free and open source software." We couldn't decide if this was a protest against Apple's new magic mouse, an elaborate practical joke, or just plain insanity run amok. In any case, it is hard to imagine a world in which so many tiny buttons on a mouse make sense.

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In a recent college recruiting tour, Microsoft's Craig Mundie was able to showcase some of the experiments coming out of their Research division. Among some of the interesting projects were another pass at the Minority Report interface, eye-tracking, intelligent data sorting, a global carbon-climate model, and several other software and hardware experiments. A video and supporting slideshow are also available via Microsoft's press site. "Mundie also will discuss the kinds of computers students will soon be using – machines that will respond to gestures through new natural user interfaces; deploy the power of new microprocessors; migrate data to the cloud; and use live data to drive new simulations and visualizations. He’ll center on an environmental theme to show what it might be like to be a research scientist working on zero carbon energy in the future using new interactions with data and computers to increase insight."

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Why is the FCC still funding rural phone companies in areas where unsubsidized cable operators offer IP telephone service? The cable industry is proposing a sweeping measure to simplify the nation's subsidy system for rural phone service providers

YouTube has announced it is to partner Will Ferrell's comedy website Funny Or Die, offering up a channel featuring a boatload of the site's comedic content.Funny Or Die has been around since 2007 and is the brainchild of Will Ferrell and writer Adam McKay. The site has garnered something of a cult following.

CNETNate writes "You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer."

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Techdirt has pointed out yet another cable exec that just doesn't quite get it. Comcast's COO, Steve Burke, recently urged the TV industry to find ways to "get consumers to change" rather than figure out better methods to cater to demand. "'An entire generation is growing up, if we don't figure out how to change that behavior so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors, we're going to wake up and see cord cutting.' How many consumers, in any market, are focused on 'respecting' vendors' revenue streams? How, exactly, does he propose to effect this sea change? And why not just develop products that consumers will willingly pay for, rather than trying to change consumer behavior in such a fundamental way?"

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Trailrunner7 writes "Two separate bills that would require organizations to notify consumers when their personal information has been compromised have made their way out of committee in the Senate, a critical step toward the creation of a national data-breach notification bill. But the Data Breach Notification Act, S.139, exempts federal agencies and other organizations subject to the bill from disclosing a breach if the data involved in the breach was encrypted. This is a clause that has caused some controversy, as some experts say that simply encrypting data does not render it useless. Also, S.139 would grant an exemption for data that 'was rendered indecipherable through the use of best practices or methods, such as redaction, access controls, or other such mechanisms, that are widely accepted as an effective industry practice, or an effective industry standard.' That is a very broad exemption that could become a sticking point as the bill moves along. The terms 'access controls' and 'other such mechanisms' encompass a huge number of technologies."

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alphadogg writes "AT&T has created different mobile calling models for every major city in America as it tries to improve a network that has come under fire for poor performance as the data-friendly iPhone has proliferated, an executive said Thursday. Other carriers just use one nationwide calling model to plan for all cities, claimed CTO John Donovan, speaking at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The nation's second-largest mobile operator has had a hard time planning for bandwidth needs in the rapidly changing mobile world, Donovan said. AT&T has seen rapidly growing mobile data usage — and much criticism over its 3G coverage — as the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US. 'If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there,' Donovan said. 'You put all you can in the ground, and they eat it all up, and then you put more in there, and they eat it all up.'" The story notes that mobile data at AT&T has grown 4,932% over the last 3 years.

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Social networking sites MySpace and Facebook have apparently fixed coding errors that could have allowed an attacker access to all of their users' data and photos. The simple coding errors are alarming considering the extent to which social networks have gone to reassure their users that their data will be safe. The problem involved....

Greg George writes "Researchers at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology have announced that they have found an enzyme that helps nerves to grow in areas damaged after trauma. In typical injuries, scar tissue forms around the damage point and the body removes the tissue so that new muscle and nerves can regrow in the damaged area. In spinal cord injuries, scar tissue forms and that is the end of the story. Special chemicals form that stop the body's cells from moving in and removing the scar tissue and then allowing the healing process to start. Studies have been done attempting to bypass the scar tissue, but none has been successful in large-scale repair of injured muscle and nerves in the spinal column. The researchers for this paper have found that sugar proteins near the damage point stop the healing and that an enzyme can be used to break down these proteins so that the body can then begin repairs. The enzyme, chondroitinase ABC (chABC), is sensitive to heat, and breaks down quickly in a human body. To stop that process they found that by replacing the ABC with another sugar called trehalose, they were able to stabilize the ABC, allowing it to break down scar tissue over a large area. The gel formed by these sugars is stable for up to six weeks in the bodies of test animals, allowing the research team to inject growth factors that increased the healing, to the point that the animals started to use their limbs again. The work is still in the beginning stages." Reuters reporting adds a few more details: "...many other approaches will be needed to repair spinal cord injuries in humans, including controlling inflammation, which can cause additional injury, stimulating nerve fiber growth, and getting nerves to reconnect and communicate with the brain."

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blackest_k sends along a Wired piece on EMI's successful suit to get Beatles music off the Net. Here is the judge's ruling (PDF). "A federal judge on Thursday ordered a Santa Cruz company to immediately quit selling Beatles and other music on its online site, setting aside a preposterous argument that it had copyrights on songs via a process called 'psycho-acoustic simulation.' A Los Angeles federal judge set aside arguments from Hank Risan, owner of BlueBeat and other companies named as defendants in the lawsuit EMI filed on Tuesday. His novel defense to allegations he was unlawfully selling the entire stereo Beatles catalog without permission was that he — and not EMI or the Beatles' Apple Corp — owns these sound recordings, because he re-recorded new versions of the songs using what he termed 'psycho-acoustic simulation.' Risan faces perhaps millions of dollars in damages under the Copyright Act. And copyright attorneys said his defense was laughable and carries no weight."

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The MySpace social media network’s traffic has dropped so much that it will fail to satisfy a minimum traffic level crucial to parent company News Corp’s three-year $900 million advertising deal with Google, inked in 2006, that made Google the exclusive search advertiser on MySpace — then the world’s most popular social network.

Chuck Anderson, creator of Windows 7's laid-back, cerulean-cool default wallpaper and login screen, showed me the evolution of his work --including Easter eggs, avoiding Mac tropes and why flaming skulls didn't make the final design.

Steve Hoefer has taken his microcontroller and, along with a piezoelectric speaker, a gear reduction motor, and some PVC pipe, programmed it to listen for a preset sequence of knocks -- a secret knock, if you will -- and unlock the deadbolt upon hearing the right combination.

Several readers sent in an update on DTN, the interplanetary Internet protocol that Vint Cerf has been working on for many years (and we have been discussing for nearly as long). The news now is that Cerf has added a DTN stack to the open source Android code, seeing uses in mobile applications for a protocol that does not assume a continuous connection.

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CWmike writes "The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an effort this week to better and more easily track for H1N1 and other seasonal influenza activity throughout the US. The CDC said it is now tracking data on 14 million patients from physician practices and hospitals stored on a database hosted by GE Healthcare. The data is submitted daily from physician's offices and hospitals that use GE's electronic medical record system. The data is then uploaded to GE Healthcare's Medical Quality Improvement Consortium , a database repository designed with HIPAA-compliance parameters of patient anonymity and best practices, where it can be the subject of medical data queries. The CDC can perform queries to look for flu-like symptoms being reported by physicians, and then disseminate the data for health care providers and local government officials throughout the country, who can alert businesses and others about flu outbreak hot spots. The CDC also hopes its analysis of the data helps it better understand the characteristics of H1N1 outbreaks and to determine who is most at risk for developing complications from the virus. Prior to implementing the new system, the CDC relied heavily on tracking insurance claims data, which could take days or weeks to make its way to the agency's medical staff for analysis. The medical data is normalized so that fir example reports of hypertension, HTN, and high blood pressure all mean the same thing when a researcher enters a query against the data."

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Hugh Pickens writes "Evidence that the smell of fear is real was uncovered by US scientists last year who studied the underarm secretions of 20 terrified novice skydivers and found that people appear to respond unconsciously to the sweat smell of a frightened person. Now the Telegraph reports that researchers hope a 'fear detector'' will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good. ''The challenge lies in the characterization and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear, especially the fear in relation to criminal acts,' says Professor Tong Tun at City University London who leads the team developing security sensor systems that can detect the human fear pheromone. The project will look at potential obstacles to the device, such as the effects of perfume and the variances in pheromone production and if the initial 18-month feasibility study is successful, the first detectors could be developed in the next two to three years. ''I do not see any particular reason why similar sensor techniques cannot be expanded to identify human smells by race, age or gender to build a profile of a criminal during or after an incident,'' Tong added."

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