It’s election night, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer is in New York talking to an Obama campaign strategist in Chicago. But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain [...]
Standing atop the 400-acre 1-E landfill, you get a panoramic view of the Meadowlands sports complex to the north and the New York City skyline to the east. You’re also standing on a critical part of New Jersey’s, and the nation’s, energy future. Decades’ worth of household trash, construction waste and assorted refuse buried in the landfill are providing electricity to thousands of homes. “It’s like you’re buying back your own garbage, but in a [...]
It’s a well-known and painful fact that Apple elected to drop FireWire from the new aluminum MacBook announced Oct. 14. While many have suggested that Apple was just being fashionable or out of touch with customers, something else altogether is happening. While there are lots of ways to characterize Apple’s decision — the decline of FW400, space/cost on the motherboard and external connectors, corporate arrogance — I see the move as a tendency by Apple [...]
Sony issued a recall Friday for roughly 100,000 notebook batteries. Conducted in partnership with the U.S. Consumer Product and Safety Commission, the recall affects laptop users worldwide. The lithium-ion batteries can overheat and pose a fire and burn hazard to users. There have been 19 reports of batteries overheating, including 17 instances in which flames or fire were reported, according to the USCPSC. Two consumers received minor burns as a result. The news follows massive [...]
On occasion, Google’s Gmail service has gone dark, in some cases for hours at a time. Predictably, users of the free service flipped out and took to the Web to sound off. Google’s response, up to now, has merely been to issue apologies and get the system up and running again. However, for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition — a cloud-based suite that includes business-oriented messaging and collaboration apps, along with support and [...]
About 30 years ago, we Earthlings sent a probe to check out Mercury, the tiny planet closest to the sun, and concluded that it was just a big hot rock. But after poking around on the moon and Mars for a few decades, we decided to take another look at Mercury. Messenger, the probe that has now passed Mercury twice, has sent back a collection of photos that shake up our earlier assumptions about the [...]
Not all iPhone owners are among the most well-to-do Americans, according to a new report. While 43 percent of iPhone owners earn more than $100,000 a year, the strongest growth in users is now coming from those who earn less than country’s the median household income. iPhone adoption since June 2008 rose 48 percent among those earning between $25,000 and $50,000 per year and by 46 percent among those earning between $25,000 and $75,000, according [...]
Yahoo has rolled out a platform for third-party developers to build applications and widgets for its portal. Called “Y!OS,” it is part of Yahoo’s larger Open Strategy — a go-to-market approach the company unveiled earlier this year with the goal of becoming a more inclusive — and more trafficked — Web site. “We’re officially cutting the ribbon for talented developers everywhere,” Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of Yahoo’s Open Strategy, wrote in a corporate blog [...]
Just one day after notifying an Internet registrar notorious for allowing massive spamming that it would terminate its registrar accreditation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has given the registrar a temporary stay of execution. ICANN sent a letter to EstDomains on Tuesday, informing the company that its ICANN accreditation agreement had been terminated because EstDomains’ president, Vladimir Tsastsin, was convicted of credit card fraud, money laundering and document forgery in Estonia. Tsastsin [...]
It’s been called the “rapture of the nerds,” but such derision didn’t stop an estimated 500 enthusiasts from showing up to the Singularity Institute’s conference in San Jose, Calif., last weekend to discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence overtaking that of humans. That’s the concept of technological singularity, popularized by author and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Talking about something that might happen, will be world-changing and can’t be predicted is quite the task. Yet some speakers [...]
