Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads

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“Consider any file-hosting service that allows people to store their own material, such as Dropbox. What if it can be shown they are storing copyrighted work. Do they need a license?” he asked in a telephone interview.

Mitch Stoltz, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said in a telephone interview that, “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the broadcasters, their opinion might create liability for various types of cloud computing, especially cloud storage.”

via Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads | Ars Technica.

‘Easter Dragon’ makes delivery to International Space Station

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Reuters – A cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, with a delivery of supplies and science experiments for the crew and a pair of legs for the experimental humanoid robot aboard that one day may be used in a spacewalk.

via ‘Easter Dragon’ makes delivery to International Space Station | Reuters.

Dragon will be reloaded with science samples and equipment no longer needed on the station and returned to Earth in about a month.

Preventing Heat From Going to Waste

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 Thermoelectrics are slabs of semiconductor with a strange and useful property: heating them on one side generates an electric voltage that can be used to drive a current and power devices. To obtain that voltage, thermoelectrics must be good electrical conductors but poor conductors of heat, which saps the effect. Unfortunately, because a material’s electrical and heat conductivity tend to go hand in hand, it has proven difficult to create materials that have high thermoelectric efficiency—a property scientists represent with the symbol ZT.

via Preventing Heat From Going to Waste | Science/AAAS | News.

The key to the ultralow thermal conductivity, Kanatzidis says, appears to be the pleated arrangement of tin and selenium atoms in the material, which looks like an accordion. The pattern seems to help the atoms flex when hit by heat-transmitting vibrations called phonons, thus dampening SbSe’s ability to conduct heat. The researchers report the results today in Nature.

The IRS uses computers?! The horror!

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It’s impossible to imagine the Internal Revenue Service or most other number-crunching agencies or companies working without computers. But when the IRS went to computers — the Automatic Data Processing system –there was an uproar. The agency went so far as to produce a short film on the topic called Right On The Button, to convince the public computers were a good thing.

via The IRS uses computers?! The horror!.

$99 ARM-based Utilite gives the Raspberry Pi some competition

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The Utilite can have the processor configured up to 1.2GHz, up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, up to a 512GB mSATA SSD, up to a 128GB Micro-SD SDXC, and two display ports — HDMI 1.4 and DVI-D — up to 1920×1200 resolution at 60Hz. The specs of the GPU aren’t listed, but rather what is listed is what it supports: OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG 1.1 and OpenCL EP, multi-stream 1080p H.264, VC1, RV10, and DivX HW decoding. What seems static on the Utilite, at least, is Bluetooth 3.0, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, stereo line-out and in, four USB 2.0 ports, a micro-USB OTG connector, and two RS232 serial ports.

via $99 ARM-based Utilite gives the Raspberry Pi some competition | ExtremeTech.

44 Percent of Twitter Accounts Have Never Tweeted

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According to the site, approximately 44 percent of Twitter’s 947 million accounts or so have never sent a single tweet. Of the number that have — approximately 550 million — just under half of these accounts are reported to have sent their last tweet more than one year ago (43 percent). Only 126 million have sent any kind of tweet at any point in the past 30 days.

via 44 Percent of Twitter Accounts Have Never Tweeted | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

What Twitter has said, however, is that the service had a count of 241 million average monthly active users as of December 31 last year – a 30 percent increase over the same time period one year prior.

The Comcast Merger Isn’t About Lines On A Map; It’s About Controlling The Delivery Of Information

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The joy of being a vertically integrated company is being able to exercise something called vertical leverage. Basically, the bigger Comcast gets, the more extraordinary financial power they wield. The terms they can negotiate upstream and downstream are more likely to be favorable to them, and not to anyone else.

A report [PDF] from the Consumer Federation of America calls these “bottleneck points.” And the bigger Comcast gets, the more of them they have — as in their recent peering dispute with Netflix.

via The Comcast Merger Isn’t About Lines On A Map; It’s About Controlling The Delivery Of Information – Consumerist.

In the end, making Comcast bigger only gives it more leverage — a company that would control the lion’s share of to-the-home information for this country. Until such a time when (and if) wireless and fiber providers begin offering a service that competes with cable Internet on speed, availability and cost, consumers are only going to see the walls around Comcast’s sandbox grow taller, while bottlenecked Internet businesses face higher and higher tolls for access to a huge portion of American homes and offices.

BASIC at 50

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At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born.

via BASIC at 50.