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A federal grand jury has subpoenaed Pandora to produce documents in what could be an industry-wide investigation of smartphone apps. In an SEC filing, Pandora said the subpoena was served early 2011, and it was told it wasn't a specific target of the probe. However, it believes similar subpoenas hav...
The downer in buying a new gadget is in ditching the old gizmo. The mental gymnastics set in almost immediately. Sell it? Donate it? Trash it? To make matters worse, the ditching dilemma appears to get harder to solve with every passing year. eBay, the old standby for profitable disposal of just abo...
Plastics make our lives convenient, but they're the gift that keeps on taking -- they pollute the environment, and they're often difficult to get rid of in an ecologically sound way. Plastics don't break down readily, which is why they're such a nuisance. Worse yet, some of them contain chemicals th...
Two books came out last week: Idea Man, about (and by) Paul Allen; and The Steve Jobs Way, about (but not by) Steve Jobs. These books reveal differences in the approaches the two men took to achieving their goals, showcasing why Apple is so successful and why other companies just can't make the gra...
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Tuesday and Wednesday captured and delivered to Earth the first photographs of Mercury ever taken from within the planet's orbit. Taken at 5:20 am EDT Tuesday, the historic first photo was soon joined by 364 more of the solar system's innermost planet, and several of t...
It's now official: Everything that the Federal Communications Commission has ever told us about the safety of cellphones is almost certainly wrong. When the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse recently reported that simply holding a turned-on cellphone next to the ear for 50 minutes ca...
A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed what it describes as the first practical artificial leaf. The device, made from silicon, electronics and catalysts, is the same size and shape as a playing card, but thinner. It splits water into its two components, hydr...
Last week, Oracle FUD-bombed the Itanium processor. Like Oracle's own SPARC chip and PowerPC at one time, Itanium was supposed to be the future for most everything -- but all of these chips ended up on the largest and most fault-tolerant systems each company supports. Announcing the death of any one...
A brown dwarf is A) a tepid spot of tea; B) a tiny cup of java; or C) a star with so little energy its temperature isn't much different from a cup of coffee or tea. The correct answer -- C -- describes a newly discovered, lukewarm star about 75 light years -- 709,539,630,000,000 kilometers or 440,88...
When so-called "minicomputers" first appeared in the 1970s, they supplanted mainframes on a scale of size and cost expressed by Bell's Law, which holds that a new class of smaller, cheaper computers comes along roughly every 10 years. Personal computers, notebooks, smartphones, and tablets followed,...
Lawyers for George Hotz, whom Sony is suing for publishing codes used to jailbreak PlayStation 3s, claim the Japanese electronics giant has misled the court. Sony Computer Entertainment America, based in California, is suing Hotz for publishing a secret encryption key and software tools that allow P...
Last week, I was at the HP analyst event where DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg got up on stage and gave an example of what every speaker should do -- tell a story. Behind him slides went by, and we even saw a preview of one of the coming movies. Looking back, it was one of the two best presentatio...
In a first-time ever maneuver, NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging space probe -- aka "Messenger" -- entered Mercury's orbit Thursday. The sun's closest planetary neighbor, Mercury is hot and harsh, presenting conditions no human astronaut could endure. Messenger, ho...
As a concept, the notion of online privacy seems to rank right up there with the Tooth Fairy. Facebook has declared that all posts by members on their walls are public property; Google keeps getting into trouble with various governments over the data its Street View cars collect; and you can forget ...
"Smart" computerized hospital beds may become a standard of care if negotiations between John LaCourse -- professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire -- and hospital bed manufacturers bear fruit. An algorithm LaCourse invented progr...
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