Google rival Wolfram Alpha works... But only if you ask a very specific question

An internet search engine which can answer specific questions without throwing up millions of optional pages has launched today. Wolfram Alpha first went live over the weekend for 'pre-launch testing' and answered 13.7million queries from people around the globe. Nearly 27,000 people sent feedback that the search engine designers will use to improve the site.

Devised by renowned British physicist Professor Stephen Wolfram, the ‘computational knowledge engine’ whittles down the facts and provides you with a single, precise answer.
For instance, entering ‘what is the capital of Venezuela' brings up the current answer (Caracas), but also a map of the area, and some facts about the population, and local time.

Entering the same search on Google gives you a mammoth 32,700,000 results.However, ask it for restaurants in your local area and it won’t be able to help – as the question is far too general. 'We can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out,' Professor Wolfram said.'There will be one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms,' he added.

Devised by renowned British physicist Professor Stephen Wolfram, the ‘computational knowledge engine’ whittles down the facts and provides you with a single, precise answer.
For instance, entering ‘what is the capital of Venezuela' brings up the current answer (Caracas), but also a map of the area, and some facts about the population, and local time.

Entering the same search on Google gives you a mammoth 32,700,000 results.However, ask it for restaurants in your local area and it won’t be able to help – as the question is far too general. 'We can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out,' Professor Wolfram said.'There will be one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms,' he added.

Professor Wolfram said people hoped computers would be able to answer questions accurately 50 years ago, but the task has proved too challenging until now.'I’d always thought,' he wrote on his blog 'that eventually it should be possible.'The professor has dedicated his life to theoretical particle physics, computer algebra and computability theory.Educated at Eton, he published an article on particle physics aged just 16, and went on to Oxford university, receiving a doctorate on particle physics from Caltech aged 20.In 1987, he founded Wolfram Research to develop his computer algebra system Mathematica. The company promotes itself as an 'intellectual pioneer' and now has more than 300 staff. Professor Wolfram remains the CEO and majority shareholder. Professor Wolfram said his online search engine was the most complex project that he had ever undertaken, and because human knowledge evolves, it will never be truly finished.'I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web,' he said.

In the Spirit of Spider-Man, the Border Patrol Casts Its Web

With drug-related violence on the rise in Mexico, there has been a lot of talk lately about putting more boots on the ground at the border.
Anh Duong has different advice: Try Squid.

Duong directs a small unit in the Department of Homeland Security charged with adding a little whiz-bang wonder to the drudgery of desert patrols and vehicle checkpoints.
Her engineers scour the nation to find crazy-yet-promising concepts — like the Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device, or Squid — then team up with private entrepreneurs to turn them into working prototypes. They're not ashamed to admit that they draw inspiration from comic-book superheroes and science-fiction novels as they dream up the gizmos and gadgets they hope will keep bad guys at bay.

The Squid, a lightweight disc about the size of a manhole cover, lies on the road and ejects rubbery tentacles on command to ensnare fleeing vehicles and drag them to a stop.
Martín Martínez came up with the idea one evening in late 2005, over beers. Several beers.
"Light up a nice El Rey del Mundo cigar, start pouring Guinness, and you can get pretty creative," he explains. He had been watching a car chase on TV, thinking, "I could find a way to stop that guy." He still has the napkin with his squid scrawls.

Microsoft to Unveil New Search Engine Next Week

Microsoft Corp is likely to show a new version of its Internet search engine publicly for the first time next week, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The software giant has been testing a new version of the service internally under the name of Kumo.com and it may become part of the firm's attempt to catch up with Internet search leaders Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.
Microsoft has hired JWT, a unit of WPP Plc, to develop an advertising campaign for the product, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The search engine is expected to be unveiled at the "D: All Things Digital" conference.

Man Uses Google Earth to Pick Suicide Location

A 40-year-old British man used Google Earth to pick his suicide location — 200 miles away from where he lived, London's Daily Telegraph reported.
David Grant, who was reportedly experiencing job-related stress, also used the Web to find and print information about carbon-monoxide poisoning, an investigation into his February death revealed.
"He had arranged it with almost too much precision, Everything was very neatly done," Detective Sgt. Michael Brewer said.
Grant posted notes on his car, which was parked in Dartmoor in Devon, telling people not to open the doors.

Google Glitch Disrupts Search Engine, E-Mail

An unknown number of people were cut off from Google Inc.'s search engine, e-mail and other online services Thursday, sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society's growing dependence on Google's technology.

Without providing specifics, Google said technical problems had prevented a "small subset of users" from getting into their e-mail accounts. The e-mail issues also had a ripple effect on other services, including the Google's search engine, according to the Mountain View-based company.
The intermittent trouble lasted for hours before the issues were fixed by early afternoon EDT
Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the Internet to express their dismay and despair.

Multiple messages posted on Twitter, a popular information-sharing forum, indicated that people all over the world had trouble with the Google search engine and e-mail. But other Twitter users said their Google services have been running smoothly.

Because Google is used by hundreds of millions of people, even a breakdown affecting a small percentage of its audience can have a major impact. Google's search engine, by far the most popular on the Internet, fields more than 9 billion monthly search requests in the United States alone.

As part of its effort to retain its current users and expand its market share so it can sell more Internet ads, Google has invested billions of dollars to create a vast network of computers to lessen the chances of breakdowns.

Although its search engine is renowned for its reliability, Google isn't fail-safe. Its 5-year-old e-mail service, in particular, has been susceptible to periodic outages.

The new generation DVD that can hold all of your movies on just one disc

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data.

One disc could back up the memory of a computer or record thousands of hours of film.
The breakthrough comes from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, where scientists created a prototype using 'nano rods' - tiny particles of gold too small to see - and polarised light, in which the light waves only flow in one direction.
Professor Min Gu, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, said: 'We were able to show how nano-structured material can be incorporated on to a disc to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the disc.'

A DVD can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of information, enough for a movie, several special features and an alternative soundtrack.
Blu-ray discs, which were designed to replace them, can store 50GB, enough for a film and extra features in high definition.

But ultra-DVDs will be able to store ten terabytes - or 10,000GB. A conventional DVD records music, pictures and computer files as digital code - a series of ones and zeroes.The code is written as a series of pits under the clear surface of the disc and is read by a DVD player's laser.
Most DVDs have two layers of information - one on top of the other. The laser reads the first layer before adjusting its focus and reading the second.

The new disc stores information using two extra 'dimensions' - the colour of light and the direction, or polarisation, of light waves.
'These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs,' said Prof Gu.To use colour, the researcher inserted rods of gold too small to see with the naked eye onto the surface of a disc.

The rods were designed to react to particular wavelengths - or colours - of light. That allowed researchers to record information in a range of different colours on the same physical area of the disc.

They were also able to add extra information by using polarised light, which is made up of light waves that vibrate in just one direction. Light that has been polarised can be blocked using a special filter.
'The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees,' said co- author Dr James Chon.
'So for example, we were able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that, we were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other.'The researchers, who have agreed a deal with Samsung, admit recording on to ultra-DVDs is complicated and time consuming. The discs would allow vast amount of information to be stored on a cheap, disposable disc.

Currently, people have to use portable hard disc drives to store the equivalent amount of data.
Consumers would need to buy new DVD players to use the discs - although they should be able to read the older Blu-ray and DVDs, the researcher said.

Bloggers, Beware: What You Write Can Get You Sued

Be careful what you post online. You could get sued.
In March 2008, Shellee Hale of Bellevue, Wash., posted in several online forums about a hacker attack on a company that makes software used to track sales for adult-entertainment Web sites. She claimed that the personal information of the sites' customers was compromised.

About three months later, the software company — which contends that no consumer data were compromised — sued Hale in state court in New Jersey, accusing her of embarking "on a campaign to defame and malign the plaintiffs" in chat-room posts.

In her legal response, Hale, 46, claims she is covered by so-called shield laws that protect reporters from suits, because she was acting as a journalist and was investigating the hacker attack while researching a story on adult-oriented spam.

Bloggers are increasingly getting sued or threatened with legal action for everything from defamation to invasion of privacy to copyright infringement. In 2007 — the most recent data available — 106 civil lawsuits against bloggers and others in social networks and online forums were tallied by the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, up from just 12 in 2003. There have been about $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers to date, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, a nonprofit clearinghouse that tracks free-speech cases.

Microsoft Ordered to Pay $200 Million in Patent Case

The world's largest software company, which is involved in a number of legal battles over patents, said the award was unsupported, and plans to appeal.

Toronto-based i4i, a privately held maker of software for manipulating documents, claimed in a 2007 suit that Microsoft knowingly infringed one of its patents in its Word processing application and its Vista operating system.

The patent concerned software for manipulating a document's content and architecture separately. Microsoft denied infringement throughout the case.
"The evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid," a Microsoft spokesman said. "We believe this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict."
i4i did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Last month, Microsoft was ordered to pay $388 million in damages for infringing a patent held by anti-piracy software maker Uniloc Inc. It also appealing that verdict.