6:42 PM
http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/free/sum/index.html
General says that 80% of US soldiers who died in Iraq (122 out of 155) would have been saved if the US had the right robots in Iraq. This General has commanded troops in combat and has a master's degree in robotics from MIT:
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2009/October/Pages/FailureToFieldRightKindsofRobotsCostsLives,ArmyCommanderSays.aspx
Insatiable demand fuels the UAV market boom. It is great that the US has 60% of the UAV market, but there is a lot of competition from other countries:
http://www.asd-network.com/press_detail_B.asp?ID=23796&NID=284998
Commercial home surveillance robots may be hijacked by hackers, who take over the robots remotely:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24220/?a=f
New reports state that oil production will reach its peak soon and therefore oil will be increasingly expensive. They will need to find a new Suadi Arabia every three years to maintain today's global oil production level:
http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/single.php?id=8899
The US has no way to track foreign visitors in the US on temporary visas who remain after their Visas expire...last year, 2.9 million foreign visitors on temporary visas checked into the US but never officially checked out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/us/12visa.html?_r=2
Radioactive rabbit poop has been found in Washington state:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/410808_radioactivepoop5.html
New biosensor chip is up to 1,000 times more sensitive than today's technology and can detect cancer at its earliest stage:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/october12/cancer-detection-101209.html
The Patent Asset Index is the first tool created to track the global R&D power of companies. They track market size and worldwide citations throughout the world to compute the Competitive Impact of a company's IP:
http://www.rdmag.com/Blogs-Tracking-the-cupcakes-worldwide/
Researchers made progress on a type of solar cell that artificially mimics photosynthesis:
http://www.rdmag.com/Energy-Researchers-make-progress-on-photosynthesis-mimicking-solar-cells/?wnnvz=cIpb87iV1KLzkFCg
Cisco is using its cash to snap up companies at a discount rate due to the economy...Cisco bought Starent Networks for $2.9 billion today. Tandberg for $3 billion two weeks ago, and they bought Pure Digital for $590 million in March. Cisco is sitting on $35 BILLION in cash and their CEO says that they plan to keep on spending...wow!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/technology/companies/14cisco.html
It looks like Philadelphia citizens will get to choose between Clearwire's WiMAX and Verizon's LTE next year:
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/homepage/20091012_Wireless_options_heating_up_in_Philadelphia.html
Article about how Windows 7 follows the Great Moore's Law Compensator--each Windows release gobbles up the latest gains in PC hardware, so computers perform about the same as in the past despite how the hardware is at least twice as fast as the computer being upgraded from. For example, Office 2010 Beta runs 15% to 20% slower in Windows 7 as compared to Vista (and Vista really slowed things down from XP):
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-7-restores-balance-universe-498?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2009-10-13
Article about the problems that a T-Mobile Sidekick user went through this past week. I cannot imagine how T-Mobile would wait for *4* days after their network problems first occurred to tell people not to shut off their phones! Shutting off or doing a hard reset of the phone resulted in countless Sidekick users losing their data. The data loss problem is being blamed on a server upgrade...and Microsoft apparently forgot to back up the data before upgrading their servers! How can any tech company make that mistake?
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/microsoft-learns-hard-way-back-our-data-625?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-10-13
Beware of exploding exercise balls! The Sacramento Kings are quite upset that they lost a player due to this freak accident...and it turns out that exercise balls have also exploded in other gyms:
http://www.sacbee.com/kings/story/2249361.html