6:26 PM
http://www3.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/brown-fat-cells-make-spare-tyres-shrink
One sign that the economy may be picking up is that H-1B visa demand has increased significantly. Throughout the summer and into September there were virtually no visa petitions, but over the past few weeks the total number of Visa petitions for the year has jumped from 45,000 to 58,900, close to the 65,000 cap. Another positive sign for the job market is that the number of large companies (7,000 or more employees) who plan to increase college hiring was 17% in August and had increased to 28% in November:
http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/growing-demand-h-1b-visas-signals-improving-outlook-skilled-pros
Sprint apparently provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' GPS location information over 8 mission times between 9/08 and 10/09, made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a special web portal for law enforcement officers:
http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html
The Ford Focus Econetic hybrid will soon be on sale in Europe and will get 62 MPG:
http://green.autoblog.com/2009/12/02/ford-focus-econetic-gets-eco-overhaul-to-reach-62-mpg-u-s/
Interesting article discusses six myths of plug-in hybrid electric cars:
http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2009/news091119.html
Verizon showed up at the WiMAX Forum Americas 2009 conference to defend its choice of LTE over WiMAX in front of an audience full of WiMAX advocates:
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/verizon-defends-lte-wimax-confab/2009-12-02?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
AT&T dropped its lawsuit over Verizon's commercials in return for Verizon dropping its lawsuit...on the surface this looks like an equal trade, but Verizon wasn't even suing AT&T--its lawsuit was just to ask a judge to verify that Verizon's advertising slogan was correct:
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/dismissed-t-verizon-end-legal-wrangling-ad-wars/2009-12-02?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
Article about how smartphone development has matured like the PC market and become a stable platform where there is not much more to come in terms of innovation:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/has-mobile-innovation-come-end-439?source=IFWNLE_nlt_mobilehdwr_2009-12-02
Oklahoma City is a great example of a successful municipal WiFi installation--Tropos APs cover 95% of the city's 620 square miles, handling over 4 terabytes of data per month (for public safety and some city departments) and saving the city $10 million:
http://urgentcomm.com/networks_and_systems/news/oklahoma-city-wifi-mesh-20091202/
New Zealand consortium was fined $16 million for their spamming operation. They ran the biggest spamming operation in the world, sending 10 billion spam e-mails a day!
http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=45797&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10#
University of Montreal researchers were conducting a study that compared men in their 20s who never watched porn with men who watched it regularly...trouble is, they couldn't find a single man who didn't watch porn!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6709646/All-men-watch-porn-scientists-find.html
Obese air passenger sitting in economy class has his photo taken:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6671018/Obese-air-passenger-in-economy-seat-has-picture-taken.html