TOKYO (AFP) - A research group will be set up in Japan to develop optical technology that will replace the Internet Protocol as the global standard in communications, a report said Sunday. ADVERTISEMENT

While the Blog Tang A+ seems to fall short in the blogging department, there’s plenty to make up for that. Like a 4.3-inch LCD, 30fps “high-def” video and up to 160GB of storage. Codec support is plentiful, including fan-faves like OGG in addition to the usual video and audio suspects, and there’s line-in recording as well as TV out. The 40GB version starts the bidding at 1,299 yuan ($173 US), with prices up to 2,199 yuan ($293) for 160GB.

[Via ]

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Explosive charges leveled two giant cooling towers at the world’s first commercial nuclear power station Saturday, as engineers began the planned decommissioning of Calder Hall, a 62-building site on Britain’s west coast.

The first two of four 289-foot towers crumbled to the ground just after 9 a.m., spewing plumes of dust over the Irish Sea to “oohs” and “ahs” from onlookers.

Calder Hall, officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956, produced weapons-grade plutonium while also feeding energy into Britain’s national grid.

The opening was hailed as an “epoch-making” event and praised as an example of Britain’s engineering prowess, reports the BBC News.

“This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community,” said the Queen in during the plant’s inauguration, according to the BBC.

Although smaller research reactors had been used previously to generate electricity, Calder Hall was the first plant to generate commercial quantities of electricity. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, in Pennsylvania, was the first such facility built in the United States. It went into operation in 1957.

The inauguration of the plant was a big enough event that some children were given the day off of school, reports the BBC.

Marjorie Taylor told the BBC that she was at Calder Hall with thousands of onlookers awaiting the Queen’s arrival and still has the invitation.

Interviewed in 2006, she said: “We stood for hours. One woman near us collapsed because she had been so excited to see the Queen that she had left home very early without eating anything. We found a camp chair and a sandwich for her.”

Power generation at Calder Hall stopped in March 2003, when the final reactor there was shut down.

By that time the stations’ 50-year-old towers, which cooled water used by the plant, had started to degrade and needed to be demolished, site manager Paul Brennan said.

Brennan said the demolition took three years of planning, and Sellafield Ltd., which manages the site, said it would take 12 weeks to clear the rubble.

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The iPhone 1.1.1 update has a hidden little surprise for y’all: Bluetooth audio streaming is now available off of your iPhone for whatever you darn please, meaning you can finally listen to music from the phone wirelessly. Oddly enough, this “function” has been unleashed by a Visual Voicemail bug that leaves Bluetooth audio on even after you’ve left the Voicemail interface. Of course, it’s only mono audio, and the audio keeps playing out of your built-in speaker — if you plug in headphones to cut off the speaker you’ll lose Bluetooth streaming as well — but it’s nice to see Apple forking over some “should have been there in the first place” functionality accidentally to go along with all that stuff of the same ilk 1.

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This article was written by Peter Ford.

That novelty brings challenges: Electricity supplies are not always reliable in the Chinese countryside, phone lines reach only 47 per cent of rural homes according to government statistics, and even $199 is beyond the means of millions of peasants.

Lenovo’s new product will also be competing with another low priced PC just launched by another Chinese producer, Haier. “These are very much early days,” cautions Wang Jiping, an analyst with the U.S. research company IDC. “They are still at the investment and ground-laying stage.”

Still, the trend is there. While only 0.3 per cent of China’s 162 million Internet users live in the countryside, their numbers are doubling every six months, according to the official China Internet Network Information Center.

Lenovo’s ambitions to tap this trend take the shape of a chocolate-box-sized computer that plugs into a TV screen, controlled by a touchpad keyboard and buttons laid out like a remote control.

Using the machine is more like watching television - a familiar experience for most Chinese peasants - than sitting in front of a computer.

Simple controls take the user around a range of functions from online education and entertainment services to agricultural information portals, and also allows him to choose specific sites or send e-mails and instant messages.

The computer uses flash memory instead of a hard disk. Indeed there are no moving rotating parts, such as a fan or a DVD player, that might break down in rugged conditions.

But company executives are pinning their hopes on the software - specifically tailored to peasant farmers’ needs - to attract customers.

“In cities, people consume at home and produce at the office, so you have two different IT markets,” says Wang Nan, Lenovo’s head of new business development. “Farmers are not just consumers … and if you treat them like urban consumers you miss something. They are willing to spend money to increase their production.”

So the “Road to Riches” suite offers easy one-button access to Web sites that provide information on crop raising, animal disease control, market prices, distribution networks, and other topics of interest to farmers.

Much of that information comes from government sources, and Lenovo has worked closely with the Chinese authorities in developing and launching its new product.

“The ability of Lenovo’s countryside strategy to open up and enter deep into new markets also depends heavily upon support from local governments at all levels,” explains a company publicity document.

“We hope local governments will improve the IT infrastructure and help find the right providers of agricultural information,” says Chen. “If they can do that we can bring PCs to the villages and people will see the benefits.”

Lenovo is especially dependent on the state-owned telecom companies to extend phone coverage, without which ADSL Internet access is impossible. “They are expanding into the countryside very fast and we will work with the telecom operators,” says Chen. “Wherever they reach, we will reach there together.”

The company also sees local governments as prime sales targets, and is currently negotiating the sale of 600,000 units to be distributed through the Chinese government’s poverty alleviation program, according to Wang Nan.

Close cooperation between Lenovo and the government serves the interests of both sides, analysts say. The company reaches customers and can boast of fulfilling its corporate social responsibility by narrowing the digital divide between town and country, while “the government achieves its goal of disseminating high technology” more broadly, says Wang Jiping.

Just how much demand there is for this technology, however, remains to be seen. Lenovo is busy creating a market, through road shows and educational advertising. How far they have to go was evident at the agricultural fair, where many peasants stopped by Lenovo’s stand, but few actually took the keyboard into their own hands.

“It looks easy enough to use, but I’m afraid I’d break it,” said Tang Shisheng, a dairy farmer, as he watched salesmen take the “Heavenly Prosperity” through its paces. “I’ve never really used a computer.”

Yao Zhenghai, who grows corn and fruit, was more adventurous. Even though he had trouble figuring out how the keyboard worked, he thought he could master it eventually, and signed up to buy one of the first of the new computers when they start rolling off the assembly line next month.

“Even if I’m a peasant, I need to know what’s going on in the world, and this will keep me in touch,” he said, as he jabbed at the keyboard with a stylus. “Maybe this will help me find out what kind of crops I could grow to earn more money.”

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By William Harwood
CBS News Space Consultant

Hickam, who went on to a distinguished career that included a long stint as an engineer in the space shuttle program, was not alone.
Sputnik inspired an entire generation and changed American society in ways that were unimaginable just a few short years before.

One man it had an enormous impact on was John Glenn, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts who became the first American in orbit and followed a distinguished Senate career with a space shuttle flight in 1997.

“I think most Americans just assumed that the U.S. was superior in every way to the Soviet Union,” he told CBS, recalling the Sputnik announcement. But the Russians “were bringing thousands of students in from Third World countries, giving them an education, sending them back home, most of the time as doctrinaire communists. And so the jury was still out at that time as to what the wave of the future was going to be.”

Citing “McCarthy’s antics in the Senate,” Glenn said Americans “were not without our own fears of the communist future and here all at once they were doing things that we were not able to do. And so it was sort of a jolt.”

A Race, Then A Leap

Spurred by Sputnik and smarting from early Soviet space successes, the United States set about creating what would become the world’s most successful space program, developing the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft that ultimately carried a dozen Americans to the surface of the moon.

To support the growing space program, America invested in loans and scholarships to attract more interest in science and engineering and financed wide-ranging research that led to a steady stream of technology “spinoffs” that worked their way into all aspects of American society.

Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969, ended the space race that Sputnik began just 12 years earlier. But by that point, the space programs of Russia and the United States were part of each nation’s cultural identity and sources of deep national pride.

The Russians focused on building and operating a series of space stations in low-Earth orbit and sending unmanned probes to Venus and Mars. NASA built Skylab and the space shuttle, and ultimately won approval to construct a large “international” space station. Along the way, NASA and the Russians staged the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, a harbinger of cooperation to come.

To The Edge Of Interstellar Space - And Of Human Knowledge

But manned space operations were just part of Sputnik’s legacy.

Robotic emissaries have now visited every major planet in the solar system and spacecraft currently are in route to Mercury, the dwarf planet Pluto and the two largest members of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Two rovers are exploring the surface of Mars, NASA and European satellites orbit the red planet and the U.S. space agency plans to launch a nuclear-powered Mars rover before the end of the decade.

The Cassini probe is beaming back a steady stream of pictures and priceless data from ringed Saturn and its enigmatic moon, Titan, and the twin Voyage spacecraft, after flying by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1970s and 80s, are currently looking for the boundary that marks the transition between the sun’s influence and interstellar space.

Looking further afield, the hugely successful Hubble Space Telescope and other major space observatories have revolutionized astronomers’
knowledge about the birth, evolution and fate of the universe.

Fifty years ago, the fate of the universe was little more than a question mark. But in a single generation, largely as a direct result of the space program, we now have strong evidence the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, that it began with a big bang and that its expansion is accelerating, not slowing down as previously believed.

We now know that 75 percent of everything in the universe is a mysterious repulsive “dark energy” driving the acceleration of the universal expansion and that 20 percent is made up of equally mysterious “dark matter,” not a single particle of which has ever been seen. Only about 5 percent of the entire universe is made up of the normal matter we see around us.

One could argue that humanity’s knowledge of itself and its place in the universe has moved further in the past 50 years than it did in the previous 500.

Falling Far Short Of “2001: A Space Odyssey”

But many would also argue humanity has failed to capitalize on the early promise of the space program. When Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” came out in 1968 - the year before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon - it was not considered unreasonable to assume that moon bases, huge space stations and commercial flights to and from low-earth orbit and the moon would be commonplace by the turn of the century.

The reality, of course, is vastly different: We have a hugely expensive, much more modest space station, and a manned space shuttle that cost more than expected and never lived up to the promise of affordable, routine access to space. While visionaries hope to stage commercial sub-orbital flights in the next few years, commercial access to orbit and beyond remains a distant dream.

The high cost of space exploration and shifting national priorities forced NASA and its Russian counterparts to merge their manned space programs in the early 1990s.

Now, 50 years after Sputnik, American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts are living in space full-time aboard the growing lab complex, a level of cooperation that would have been difficult to envision at the dawn of the space age. Indeed, some see U.S.-Russian cooperation on the high frontier as the major accomplishment of the two space programs, not any individual triumphs.

The Future Of Space

America is changing its focus once again. Largely as a result of the 2003 Columbia disaster, the agency has been directed by the Bush administration to finish the space station and retire the shuttle by the end of 2010. At the same time, NASA has been ordered to build new rockets and more modest manned spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit and, eventually, back to the moon.

But the administration did not give NASA significant new money to pay for the moon program - the funds will come primarily from money that currently goes to shuttle/station operations - and as things now stand, there will be at least a five-year gap between the end of shuttle flights in 2010 and the maiden flight of the shuttle’s replacement, a wingless capsule known as Orion.

During that five years - for the first time in the history of the U.S. space program - American astronauts will be forced to buy seats on Russian Soyuz capsules to reach the very space station American taxpayers financed. The irony of America’s dependence on its former Cold War rival is not lost on NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.

“I think that’s a concern,” he told CBS in a recent interview. “I think it’s an unseemly position for the United States to be in, quite honestly, and I think we will come to regret it.”

But Griffin also believes space exploration will endure. So does Arthur C. Clarke, the British science fiction writer and visionary who came up with the idea for communications satellites in 1945 and who wrote the short story that inspired “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Writing in 1999, Clarke predicted the 100th anniversary of Sputnik in
2057 will be “celebrated by humans on Earth, the Moon, Mars, Europa, Ganymede and Titan, and in orbit around Venus, Neptune and Pluto.”

If that prediction seems overly optimistic, remember that Americans landed on the moon just eight years after NASA’s first sub-orbital 15-minute Mercury flight. Regardless of how the history of space exploration plays out in the 21st century, one thing is certain: It will always begin with Sputnik.

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Engadget Mobile’s got the word on four new Verizon phones headed for a simultaneous launch in the next couple of weeks, so head on over and get the dirt on the new Juke, Pearl, Venus and Voyager before somebody beats you to it.

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YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar's main Internet link remained shut down Saturday as the country's military regime tried to curb the flow of information on the junta's bloody crackdown on protesters. ADVERTISEMENT

We’ve yet to find an average joe (or jane) who just adores that two-year agreement they signed to receive a single subsidized device on day one, and while Sprint to let folks off the hook , it is trying a slightly different approach with . Reportedly, the carrier will be relying on “subscriptions,” which will enable customers to save more when paying for larger chunks of time, while not forcing them into anything long-term. On the same token, this also means that you’ll likely be paying full price for any hardware. Notably, the outfit’s CTO also made clear that Xohm “would not be backed by what the industry calls service-level agreements,” so don’t count on any kind of minimum bandwidth guarantee. As for pricing, the numbers are apparently still being worked, but it was suggested that the service would “probably be based on tiers.”

[Via , image courtesy of ]

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Google Inc. has acquired a mobile social networking start-up called Zingku Inc., the search company's latest move to provide more services through mobile phones. ADVERTISEMENT