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A pair of motorised roller skates that cancel out a person's steps could let users naturally explore virtual reality landscapes in confined spaces. The "Powered Shoes" were developed by Hiroo Iwata, Hiroshi Tomioka and Hiroaki Yano at the University of Tsukuba in central Japan. The shoes will be demonstrated at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies, which takes place in Boston, US, between 30 July and 3 August. Each shoe is mounted on top of a set of three motorised rollers and is connected by cable to a computer on the user's back. This computer controls...

BEIJING (Reuters) -- Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have breached the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in colluding with China to censor the Internet, Amnesty International said on Thursday. The three publicly traded companies are ignoring their own stated commitments -- which in Google's case includes corporate motto "Don't be evil" -- and are in denial over the human rights implications of their actions, the group said. "All three companies have, in one way or another, facilitated or concluded in the practice of censorship in China," London-based Amnesty said in a report. "All three companies have demonstrated a...

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today's conventional chips -- and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass. The finding, which represents the first time a so-called "wet" semiconductor device has bested traditional, more costly grown-crystal semiconductor devices, is reported in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature."Traditional ways of making computer chips, fibre-optic lasers, digital camera image sensors – the building blocks of the information age – are costly in time, money, and energy," says Professor Ted Sargent of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department...

July 18, 2006 K Subrahmanyam, the doyen of Indian strategic affairs thinkers, assesses India-US relations a year after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington, DC A year has passed since the signing of the Joint Statement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United States President George W Bush. If it had been a routine Joint Statement between two heads of governments there would have been no need to review the progress achieved on it. It was not a routine statement, but the beginning of a global effort led by the US to reshape the international order by incorporating India...

Sydney, Jul 8 (ANI): An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD's which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete. "What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," ABC quoted Prof. Renugopalakrishnan, a BSc in Chemistry from Madras University...

PHOENIX (AP) - Students who placed second in a national underwater robotics competition won't be going to next year's contest because of the possibility of their illegal status in the United States. The students, from Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, recently beat out high school and college students from across the country, including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fell only to the reigning champs from the Marine Institute of Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. On the heels of their success, the students learned that next year's contest will be held in Canada, and that they won't be...

The idea that small is beautiful seems to have been lost on the aviation industry. But while most attention is lavished on the Airbus A380, the giant pterosaur of the skies, many think that the new, diminutive Eclipse 500, a mere bumblebee by comparison, is the aeroplane with the real potential to transform air travel. The Eclipse 500 is the first of a new kind of small aircraft called the very light jet (VLJ). It seats five passengers and a pilot, weighs 3,536lb (1,603kg) when empty and is so petite that seven of them could fit along the wings of...

An exotic form of silicon that can be stuck together and then peeled apart has been developed by German researchers. The material, dubbed "silicon Velcro", could be used to manufacture microprocessors and devices that manipulate fluids on microscopic scales. Researchers at the Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany created the material from "black silicon". This is generated when normal silicon is hit with a powerful laser beam or bombarded with high-energy ions, producing a dense, microscopic array of needle-like structures on its surface. Light bounces around between the needles without escaping to give the material its black appearance. The German...

TAMPA - Customers can pay with cash, plastic or their index finger at a new Coast to Coast Family Convenience store here. Taking a big step beyond the ease of the Mobil SpeedPass, Coast to Coast has installed what's claimed as Florida's first biometric payment system. There are no cards or PIN numbers to remember. Just stick your finger in the scanner and be on your way. While applications are available to process credit and store loyalty card transactions by fingerprint, this one is limited to processing only debit account transactions. "People either love it or think it's a sign...

Hello fellow freepers. First, I apologize for the vanity but I need a bit of help. My church just purchased a computer and a projector to use during our worship services. We had man come down and hook everything up, install all the software etc. and everything worked fine. Now we can,t get the projector to project. Everything with the computer, programs and all the connections is fine but for some reason we just can't figure out how to get the projector to turn on. Is there a setting that needs to be changed in the computer in order for...

What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting)...

America Online (1989-2006)RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)Microsoft Bob (1995)Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)Pressplay and Musicnet (2002)dBASE IV (1988)Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)PointCast (1996)IBM PCjr. (1984)Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)Iomega Zip Drive (1998)Comet Cursor (1997)Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)OQO Model 1 (2004)CueCat (2000)Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)Apple Pippin @World (1996)Free PCs (1999)DigiScents iSmell (2001)Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)

Is DRM just a consumer rights issue effecting your record collection? A UK board is treating it as such. But it's much more important than that. Before Gutenberg, copyists, using pen and ink, duplicated written political dialogue laboriously. Only the wealthy and the church could afford to employ copyists, and during this period the paucity of communications limited the exercise of democracy to small groups. The advent of Gutenberg's press made the mass distribution of written political dialogue possible. People vote based on what they hear and read, and the improvement in communications brought by the press made egalitarian mass...

Military scientists are putting the finishing touches to a Batman-style set of 'wings' that could enable troops to glide undetected into enemy territory. According to a statement by the developers of the new technology, German firm ESG, the wings can enable paratroopers to glide up to 25 miles after being dropped from a height of over 30,000 ft. "Parachutists can penetrate into areas that are difficult to reach without their transport planes having to fly into a danger zone," a spokesperson for ESG explained.

Toshiba Reaches 200GB Milestone Stroage, storage, storage. That's what a media center laptop needs and Toshiba's new 2.5 inch hard drive gives you just that. The 200GB dual-platter MK2035GSS is Toshiba's first Perpendicular Magnetic Recording drive to incorporate tunnel magneto-resistive recording (TMR) head technology (no, we don't know what that last bit means either, but it sounds impressive). PMR technology enables bits of data to be stored in a perpendicular format rather than longitudinally and, thus enables the magnetic disc to store significantly more data in the same space.The new drive sets a density record, says Toshiba, although the outright...

Is there a way to convert photographs in PDF files to JPG images, without a bunch of expensive software? I'm not trying to steal someone's pics, just need the images in JPG.

Two prescriptions for an invisibility cloak have been unveiled by physicists in the United Kingdom and the United States. The researchers say that in principle the technologies needed for building these devices already exist. "Invisibility is visibly close," says Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, one of the researchers behind the proposals. He and John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, and their co-workers have independently described similar ways to create an invisible 'hole' in space, inside which objects can be hidden. They say it is possible to guide light around the hole, rather like water...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Nike Inc. said on Tuesday that its shoes will now be able to talk to Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod music players about how far anathlete has run with a new wireless system called Nike+iPod. Shares of Nike rose nearly 4 percent. Using a Nike+iPod Sports Kit, expected to retail for about $29, consumers will be able to access distance, time, pace and calories burned on the screen of a nano version of the iPod via a sensor inside the shoes that communicates with the digital music player. The kit will be available in stores within two...

Dell Inc. said Thursday it will begin using chips from Advanced Micro Devices rather than its rival Intel Corp., as the computer maker posted a first quarter drop in net income. Round Rock, Texas-based Dell had an exclusive agreement with Santa Clara-based Intel, but said in its second-quarter earnings press release that it will switch to Sunnyvale-based Advanced Micro Devices chips in some of its products by the end of the year. Dell, which had lowered its forecast last week, posted net income of $762 million, or 33 cents a share, compared with $934 million, or 37 cents a...

BANGALORE, India — After graduating from Northwestern University last year, Nate Linkon contemplated job offers in Chicago and New York. But he chose a less conventional path and started his career here, in India's booming tech capital. The 22-year-old Milwaukee native works in marketing at Infosys Technologies Ltd., India's second-largest software exporter. He's part of a small but growing number of young Americans moving to Bangalore and other Indian cities to beef up their resumes, launch businesses or study globalization in one of the world's fastest-growing economies. Despite the traffic-choked streets, unsteady electrical supply, occasional digestive troubles and other daily...