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If education and awareness don’t work, the Department of Transportation Secretary has some other interesting ideas on how to lower the number of distracted drivers careening down the pavement. It seems people still haven’t gotten the voicemail about the dangers of cell phone use in cars and if the trend continues, the Department of Transportation may have to do something about it — like forcibly disabling your Blackberry. While Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood stressed personal responsibility in a recent TV appearance, the Secretary said the department was “looking into” other technological possibilities.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world's powers have generally agreed on the wisdom of letting market competition—more than government planning—shape economic outcomes. China's national economic strategy is disrupting that consensus, and a look at the ascent of solar-energy magnate Zhu Gongshan explains why. A shortage of polycrystalline silicon—the main raw material for solar panels—was threatening China's burgeoning solar-energy industry in 2007. Polysilicon prices soared, hitting $450 a kilogram in 2008, up tenfold in a year. Foreign companies dominated production and were passing those high costs onto China. Beijing's response was swift: development of domestic polysilicon supplies was...

Virtual idol Miku Hatsune has gone from a character marketing voice synthesizing software to a full blown pop star -- pretty clever for a hologram Home › Sound Check › Tokyo › Play Japan's holographic rock star -- Miku Hatsune Virtual idol Miku Hatsune has gone from a character marketing voice synthesizing software to a full blown pop star -- pretty clever for a hologram By Robert Michael Poole 11 November, 2010 Select ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome PoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome. .EmailTwitterFacebookShare. Forget the tantrums, entourage and ridiculous riders. Here's one rock star that only needs electricity to keep her happy. Following on from Japan's cybernetic...

Aviation China to showcase world's aircraft Xinhua, November 9, 2010 The 8th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, to be launched on Nov. 16 in Zhuhai, China's mainland, will showcase about 70 aircraft of different models from all over the world, the event organizer announced here Tuesday. The exhibition organizer Zhuhai Airshow Co. Ltd. held a press briefing in Hong Kong on Tuesday and introduced the details of the show, which has attracted about 600 exhibitors to join. The show, with a floor space totaling 23,000 square meters, will feature about 70 aircraft, including both commercial and military ones, from...

Mobile Cell Phone Radiation The Health Hazards Politics / Social Issues Nov 07, 2010 - 01:03 PM By: Joel S Hirschhorn It is now inconceivable that our world could function without the 5 billion cell phones used globally. The new book by Devra Davis “Disconnect” deserves your attention. Indeed, if you use a cell phone a lot it should be mandatory reading. It also seems inconceivable that the trillion dollar cell phone industry and governments worldwide could have pushed this technology without ever having solid research results proving the safety of cell phones. If true that would be deadly frightening....

This is sample footage of the earliest surviving colour videotape recording which is the Dwight Eisenhower inaugural address to WRC-TV on 22nd May 1958. The first 15 minutes of this event was shot in B&W which you see the president arriving to the building and the news reporter giving details of the event, then about nearly 15 minutes in Robert Sarnoff hits the colour switch and on comes the colour. For the remaining 15 minutes Robert Sarnoff, Dwight Eisenhower and David Sarnoff speak about the station and the colour television technology while being recorded in living colour!!! The whole program...

A Stockholm hotel has launched a new pilot security system enabling guests to open their rooms, and even check in and out, with the help of their mobile phones, the participating companies said Tuesday. Starting this week the Clarion Hotel Stockholm provide a number of guests with telephones equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The chosen clients will not only be able to reserve their rooms and receive confirmation on the devices, they will have the option of checking in even before arriving at the hotel and have their electronic room key ready in the phone when they get...

Recently Comm Daily (subscription required) reported that an FCC decision on net neutrality was unlikely before its January meeting. While uninteresting in itself the one remarkable line in the story had to be this quote from a senior FCC official: “While they are busy handing out waffles and making posters, we are focused on creating jobs and protecting consumers.” The FCC official was referring to Free Press, the group that has been relentlessly attacking the FCC and many Democrats for not jumping off the cliff for net neutrality. As far as can be determined, this is the first time the...

Oh, Net Neutrality sure sounds like a great idea. Why, Net Neutrality supporters only want what's best for "the people," right? They only want the Internet to be a playground for all, free of the influence of evil corporations, and they want fees to be reasonable for the lowly masses, right? Turns out, not so much. Fair pricing and open access is the least of what Net Neutrality supporters really care about. The latest wrinkle in the saga of Net Neutrality pretty much proves that Net Neutrality supporters really don't care much about a free and open Internet as formulated...

Microsoft has been at the top of the heap for almost as long as people have used PCs. They’ve managed to sustain an overwhelming competitive advantage, even after a decade’s worth of antitrust action and the astonishing transformation of Apple into a profit-making machine that has built one billion-dollar business after another while the entire rest of the tech industry is stuck in neutral. Indeed, the presence of Apple and Google as direct competitors suggests that maybe Microsoft is overdue to take a tumble. There is never a shortage of Apple-versus-Microsoft yammering in the blogosphere, but I haven’t seen much...

After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player. The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. Once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer. The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony...

Due to the fierce competition among the music players, Sony will retire its once-popular Walkman tape player in Japan, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Monday. "Those of us who grew up in the Reagan Decade know: By six years after its 1979 debut, the Walkman had become the iPod of its day," Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post wrote in a blog post on Monday. "Much like Apple's music player, Sony's gadget was near-ubiquitous, got a little smaller over subsequent revisions, and had cheaper competitors that Weren't Quite The Same Thing."

The iconic Walkman has come to the end of its run. Sony has pulled the plug on the original portable cassette-tape player, Japanese media report. The company made its last shipment of the cassette Walkmans to the Japanese market earlier this year -- and when they're gone from stores, they'll be finished. Sony is outsourcing some manufacturing to a Chinese company for sales to people who still use obsolete cassette tapes.

The ITU has given its stamp of approval only to the next versions of those technologies If someone is trying to sell you 4G wireless these days, don't believe them.The truth is, neither WiMax nor LTE (Long-Term Evolution) qualify as 4G (fourth-generation) technologies, according to the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R). On Thursday, the group announced it had finished its assessment of submissions for the 4G standard, also called IMT-Advanced. Based on that group's decision, to really be selling 4G, carriers will have to get going with one of two future technologies, called LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced. The latter, also...

The IDF has announced it will block soldiers from having access to social media on the Internet as well as email accounts while they are in offices on military bases across the country. Among those to be barred are the popular Facebook and Twitter social networking sites, as well as Google’s Gmail and the Yahoo! network’s Yahoo! Mail. It is possible that cellular service could be disrupted as well at least within offices, according to unconfirmed reports. Reportedly, soldiers might still be able to access the Internet on their private cell phones, and in their break rooms. Military intelligence officials...

MERCK SUED: HomeAgain® PET CHIP IMPLICATED IN CANCER New website, ChipMeNot.com, features details on cancer case and other adverse reactions Nashua, NH (CASPIAN) October 13, 2010 Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has been served with a lawsuit over claims its HomeAgain® pet microchip induced cancer in a cat. Animal rights attorney Steven Wise seeks "reasonable compensatory damages" for a malignant tumor "likely" induced by a HomeAgain® ID chip implanted in his client's cat, Bulkin. The complaint, "Andrea Rutherford v. Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. and Digital Angel, Inc.,"(case # 1052CV1147) was filed last week in Cambridge (MA) District Court. The...

A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company's search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past. The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google and the CIA. Now the company has offered a glimpse of how its technology works. Conventional search engines like Google use links to rank and connect different Web pages. Recorded Future's software goes a level...

Kerfye Pierre's thanks for helping out victims of Haiti's earthquake? A $35,000 bill from T-Mobile. Pierre tells CNN that she racked up about $35,000 while texting family and friends from Haiti with the news that she had just survived the devastating earthquake. T-Mobile offered to waive voice plans for Americans who were volunteering there after the crippling disaster, but Pierre said she didn't realize that the waiver didn't include text messages. The company has now reduced her bill to approximately $5,000, but Pierre says she still can't pay that. "I would be OK to pay for it if everything was...

The Two Faces of Feisal RaufWhat's wrong with What's Right With Islam. This is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.The problems with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam begin with the title. As Andrew McCarthy noted on National Review Online, the book, whose full title is now What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, was previously called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America; before that, it was published in Malaysia as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of...

U.S. Embassy sponsors Irish Muslim business conference: Imam calls for Sharia Law in all business dealings" SNIPPET: "There would seem to be a Constitutional issue involved here -- isn't the U.S. Government involving itself in promoting a religion via such a seminar? And what a surprise that that religion would turn out to be Islam. "U.S. Embassy sponsors Irish Muslim business conference: Imam calls for Sharia Law in all business dealings," by Patrick Cooper for IrishCentral.com, October 7 (thanks to Sr. Soph): The U.S. Embassy in Dublin has sponsored a seminar on Muslim entrepreneurs and business in Ireland. A main...