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TOKYO — A Japanese court on Friday rejected patent claims made by Apple against Samsung, a victory for the company after its crushing defeat in the United States last week and a reminder of the global scope of the patent war between the two technology giants. While Apple prevailed over Samsung in the United States, winning an award of $1 billion in damages from a federal jury, the two companies remain neck-and-neck in legal disputes in almost a dozen countries. A judge in South Korea, where Samsung is based, for example, handed down a split decision in a patent case...

The jury in Apple vs. Samsung, doubtlessly eager to be out by the weekend, rushed their way through the approximately 26 pages and 55 questions of their instructions and decided that Samsung did indeed violate some of Apple's patents just over a billion bucks. Impressive? Not really. This is not the end. This verdict doesn't even matter in the long run. This was just another clash. This case was going to be appealed, no matter who won, the second it started. This is just one more encounter on the case's way to the Supreme Court. Samsung has lost this skirmish,...

Apple scored a big victory in its smartphone patent infringement case vs. Samsung late Friday afternoon as a jury awarded the victor $1.05 billion in damages. But does the closely watched verdict mean anything to consumers? No–at least not for now. Why? * This case no doubt will be appealed. That means little is likely to change anytime soon, at least until Apple files for injunctions against the Samsung products involved. And those are by no means all of Samsung’s products, let alone other Android smartphones. You won’t have to surrender your Samsung smartphones or tablets or worry that some...

Samsung attorney probes industrial design expert Peter Bressler's qualifications to judge whether Samsung phones infringe Apple's patents. Samsung attorneys drew a bead on Apple's claims about the uniqueness of its iPhone design Monday, with stronger counterclaims about preceding designs or "prior art," citing three patent applications that preceded the iPhone. Two Japanese patents and one Korean patent show a rectangular phone form with a large glass face and rounded corners. The glass face varies in size from one patent to the other, but all are much larger than older generations of phones. All three resemble the form of the iPhone,...

Astronomers at Arizona State University have found an exceptionally distant galaxy, ranked among the top 10 most distant objects currently known in space. Light from the recently detected galaxy left the object about 800 million years after the beginning of the universe, when the universe was in its infancy. A team of astronomers, led by James Rhoads, Sangeeta Malhotra, and Pascale Hibon of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU, identified the remote galaxy after scanning a moon-sized patch of sky with the IMACS instrument on the Magellan Telescopes at the Carnegie Institution's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile....

Four billion years from now, the Milky Way galaxy as we know it will cease to exist. Our Milky Way is bound for a head-on collision with the similar-sized Andromeda galaxy, researchers announced today (May 31). Over time, the huge galactic smashup will create an entirely new hybrid galaxy, one likely bearing an elliptical shape rather than the Milky Way's trademark spiral-armed disk. "We do know of other galaxies in the local universe around us that are in the process of colliding and merging," Roeland van der Marel, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, told reporters today. "However,...

A surge in Galaxy smartphone sales fuelled earnings at Samsung Electronics to a record high in the first quarter, usually a tough season for the global consumer electronics industry, outshining handset rivals such as Nokia. Samsung sold more smartphones in the first three months of the year than Apple and raked in more than 70% of its operating profit from mobile businesses. Shares in Samsung shot up nearly 3%. Net profit nearly doubled from a year earlier to a record 5.05 trillion won (£2.75bn) for the quarter to 31 March. Operating profit also hit a record high, at 5.85 trillion...

The Hubble Space Telescope has found a UFO, but this one is filled with stars instead of little green men. The iconic space telescope snapped an amazing new photo of the "UFO Galaxy" — a galaxy 35 million light-years from Earth that is officially known as NGC 2683. "NGC 2683 is a spiral galaxy seen almost edge-on, giving it the shape of a classic science fiction spaceship," NASA officials wrote in a recent image description. The galaxy was originally discovered on Feb. 5, 1788 by famed astronomer William Herschel. It is located in the Lynx constellation in the northern sky....

Life as we know it exists on a cozy planet in a stable orbit around a sun shining brightly in its sky. But a new study hints that the most common life in the universe might exist deep inside eternal-night worlds far from any star, adrift in the icy dark of interstellar space. Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University estimate that "nomad" planets, ejected from their home stellar system and now free-floating through the Milky Way, could outnumber stars by as many as 100,000 to 1. Earlier estimates were more like a...

U.S. scientists studying "runaway" stars tossed out of our galaxy at great velocities say they've confirmed the same thing can happen to planets. The first runaway star was discovered seven years ago, heading out of the Milky Way at 1.5 million mph, and new research says planets must be doing the same thing -- at speeds up to 30 million mph, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reported Thursday. "These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our galaxy," astrophysicist Avi Loeb said. "If you lived on one of them, you'd be in for a wild ride from...

ESO's VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a treasure trove that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early Universe as well as for many other science projects. The telescope has been trained on the same...

UPS came today and delivered a pkg I wasn't expecting. I called the wife to see if she had ordered something and she said it was my present, and that I should open it to make sure it worked as advertised. It's a Tablet! Specifically, it's a Pandigital SuperNova DLX. And, wow, thing has nearly everything. The specs... 8” Capacitive Touch Digital (Multi-touch) TFT LCD Resolution 600x800 pixels Dimensions Outer case: 6.25”w x 8.5”h Screen: 8” Android OS Version 2.3 Adobe Flash Player Version 10.3 Compatible Media Sources Up to 32GB microSDTM (SDHC) card Compatible File Formats Kindle eBooks =...

NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the oldest galaxy on record, the space administration announced Tuesday. The space administration said it has captured an image of a group of galaxies located 13.1 billion light years away. The team said the galaxies represent a cluster in the initial stages of development. “These galaxies formed during the earliest stages of galaxy assembly, when galaxies had just started to cluster together,” said Michele Trenti of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. “The result confirms our theoretical understanding...

Narrowed it down to two.Been looking at tablets,like the Kindle Fire because I have a Kindle,purchase things from Amazon,no problems,Kindle Fire would be easy,less expensive,yet the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 has me intrigued?

U.S. judge rejects Apple bid to halt Galaxy sales By Dan Levine Sat Dec 3, 2011 10:22am IST (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O) failed to convince a U.S. judge to block Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) from selling some Galaxy smartphones and tablets in the U.S. market, depriving the iPhone and iPad maker of crucial leverage in a global patent battle between the two companies. In a ruling released late on Friday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California denied Apple's request for a preliminary injunction against Samsung. Representatives for Apple and Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for...

Apple, Samsung Dispute Likely To Turn On 1994 Knight-Ridder Tablet Jeff Roberts A leading design patent expert predicts that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) will be unable to stop Samsung from selling its Galaxy tablet in the United States in the near future, and says the press has misunderstood a dramatic moment in the patent trial taking place between the tech giants. Court filings unsealed this week in California suggest he is right. Recall that, in October, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh waved two tablets in the air and asked Samsung’s attorney if he could tell which was the Galaxy and which...

Cambridge, MA - In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy. "We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for...

Too beautiful not to post. What you're looking at is a close-up shot up of the central bulge of a giant spiral galaxy viewed edge on. Can you see it? The bulge, that is? It's that glowing lens-shaped mass that's trying unsuccessfully to hide behind those dark foreground clouds. Yes, of course, it's the central bulge of our own Milky Way Galaxy! :-) We're looking at the "lens" edge-on from our vantage point here in the Orion Spur (a minor spiral arm) of the Milky Way, 30,000 light years from the galaxy's center. Some "close-up," huh? We see the central...

Explanation: Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy's bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane. An assortment of other background galaxies is included in the pretty field of view, with neighboring galaxy NGC 4562 at the lower right. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans...

Galaxy Arp 220, located 250 million light-years from Earth, is home to seven different supernova explosions all going on at the same time. We've never seen so many stars exploding simultaneously in the same galaxy. A team of astronomers at Chalmers and Onsala Space Observatory found that all seven supernovas went off in the last sixty years (allowing for the 250 million years for the light to reach Earth, of course). In cosmic terms, that's pretty much no time at all, as European Southern Observatory astronomer Rodrigo Parra explains: "In Arp 220, we see far more supernovae than in our...