From Gizmodo: Google-Approved Motorola Lawsuit Trying to Block iPhone 4S and iCloud [Motorola]

In the words of Jack Nicholson acting as the president from “Mars Attacks”…

  • “Why can’t we all just… get along?”

Oh well… now the war is heating up even more!

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The days of Apple and Google sitting down for a nice cup of tea are long gone. Now they’re staring across the battlements, just waiting to lawyer bomb each other into the Stone Age. Motorola’s new lawsuit against Apple—which Google had to approve—is the latest stop on the road to the inevitable clash of titans. More »

 

from Gizmodo

From Business and financial news – CNNMoney.com: Federal student loan rate set to double

Uh oh… now we are REALLY in for trouble if this becomes a reality… it’s bad enough that the tuition rates have been climbing incredibly in recent years but to have the student loan rate DOUBLE?!  Are we really crazy and that stupid?!!

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Attention college students: The interest rate on federal student loans is scheduled to double this summer unless Congress acts soon.

from Business and financial news – CNNMoney.com

From Gizmodo: How the Government Used a Con Artist to Catch Google’s Criminal Activities [Google]

Oy?! One of my favorite shows, “White Collar”, is now a reality… o.O That’s … weird…
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Last summer, Google had to pay $500 million to avoid criminal prosecution by the US government. Using a convicted con artist, the feds caught Google aiding illegal online pharmaceutical drug sales. The operation—as described by the Wall Street Journal—is movie material. More »


from Gizmodo

From Droid Life: Lytro Camera Technology in Smartphones? Yes, Please.

 

If there was one new tech invention of the last year that will actually change the game and can blow the minds of even non-techies, it is easily the Lytro camera. Not familiar with Lytro? I’ll do my best to sum it up.

The Lytro camera takes “living photos” that can be manipulated well after they have been taken. And when I say “manipulated,” I’m not talking about some Photoshop trickery or a hipster filter. I’m talking about refocusing it on a different area over and over again. This camera captures the entire light field “which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space” or dimension. The camera itself takes instant photos with no shutter lag and no need to deal with an autofocus. Since the focusing happens on objects of your choice after the photo has been taken, you don’t have to worry about it during the shot. So, you get insanely fast photos and the perfect shot that you decide on afterwards. Make sense?

In an interview with PCWorld, the Lytro executive chairman Charles Chi talked about the future of their product and where they could see it headed. Smartphones are obviously on everyone’s minds these days when it comes to new technology, so Chi provided some thoughts saying:

If we were to apply the technology in smartphones, that ecosystem is, of course, very complex, with some very large players there. It’s an industry that’s very different and driven based on operational excellence. For us to compete in there, we’d have to be a very different kind of company. So if we were to enter that space, it would definitely be through a partnership and a codevelopment of the technology, and ultimately some kind of licensing with the appropriate partner.

So no definitive confirmations on Lytro coming to a cell phone near you any time soon, but can we start a campaign to help make it happen? Some of the top complaints we see time and time again when it comes to smartphones, have to do with cameras. And when it comes to cameras, we see a lot of issues with shutter lag and focusing, something the Lytro bypasses.

Overview of Lytro:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via:  PCWorld | More on Lytro

from Droid Life

From NPR News: 4 Conn. Officers Arrested Over Treatment Of Latinos

That is terrible!  Hope they get what they deserve!  Supposed to PROTECT the people!  Sheesh…

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The officers were arrested Tuesday by the FBI on charges that they assaulted Latino immigrants and created false reports to cover up abuses in a New Haven, Conn., suburb where a federal investigation found life was made miserable for Hispanics.

from News

From Engadget: Researchers use lasers to supercool semiconductor membranes, blow your mind

Whoa!! Hot laser was used to cool semiconductors?!  o.O

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Ah, lasers. Those wonderful, super intense beams of light that we’ve seen used in headlights, projectors, and naturally, death rays. Like us, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen figure there’s nothing lasers can’t do, and have figured out a way to use them to cool a bit of semiconducting material. This bit of black magic works using a membrane made of gallium arsenide and is based upon principles of quantum physics and optomechanics (the interaction between light and mechanical motion).

Turns out, when a one millimeter square membrane of gallium arsenide is placed parallel to a mirror in a vacuum chamber and bombarded with a laser beam, an optical resonator is created between them that oscillates the membrane. As the distance between the gallium arsenide and the mirror changes, so do the membrane’s oscillations. And, at a certain frequency, the membrane is cooled to minus 269 degrees Celsius — despite the fact that the membrane itself is being heated by the laser. So, lasers can both heat things up andcool them down simultaneously, and if that confuses you as much as it does us, feel free to dig into the science behind this paradoxical bit of research at the source below. In other news, left is right, up is down, and Eli Manning is a beloved folk hero to all Bostonians.

 

from Engadget