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In California politics, Silicon Valley executives used to be considered newbies, nerds or simply multimillionaires with too much time and money on their hands. No longer. Emboldened over the past decade by some success passing ballot propositions, a handful of the valley's most influential power brokers are once again aiming to use the initiative process to put their stamp on public policy in California. Two of the boldest electoral initiatives yet to emerge from valley interests will be on November's ballot: NetFlix founder Reed Hastings and Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr are backing Proposition 88, an unprecedented statewide real...

New thin-film semiconductor techniques invented by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers promise to add sensing, computing and imaging capability to an amazing array of materials. Historically, the semiconductor industry has relied on flat, two-dimensional chips upon which to grow and etch the thin films of material that become electronic circuits for computers and other electronic devices. But as thin as those chips might seem, they are quite beefy in comparison to the result of a new UW-Madison semiconductor fabrication process detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Physics. A team led by electrical and computer engineer Zhenqiang (Jack)...

Physicists of the University of Bonn have taken one more important hurdle on the path to what is known as a quantum computer: by using 'laser tweezers' they have succeeded in sorting up to seven atoms and lining them up. The researchers filmed this process and report on their breakthrough in the next issue of the prestigious journal Nature (13th July 2006). In the experiment the research team headed by Dr. Arno Rauschenbeutel and Professor Dieter Meschede decelerated several caesium atoms for a period of several seconds so that they were hardly moving, then loaded them onto a 'conveyor belt'...

A new type of computer that mimics the complex interactions in the human brain is being built by UK scientists. The £1m machine, nicknamed the "brain box", will be constructed at the University of Manchester. The first of its kind in the world, it will be used to help researchers engineer fail-safe electronics.Professor Steve Furber, of the university school of computer science, said computer science had much to learn from biological systems. "Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this 'fault-tolerant' characteristic is of great interest to engineers who wish to make computers more reliable,"...

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.