felipe13 writes "We are working on a new piece of code that will be protected under a GPL license, this is fine for the code itself, but what about our 'innovations'? Are there any 'Open Patent License' models similar to the GPL or Creative Commons? We have Google patenting the highlight of search occurrences, Facebook protecting the word 'Book,' and Apple registering body movements. This is becoming ridiculous to a point. Now the patent trolls are making a killing as well. Does the open source community has a good way to protect its innovations and inventions? There are some initiatives to buy patents and release them to the public or at least place them is a protected area, but where would my very small company register a new way to include titles in a private message? Where could Drupal patent the use of 'hooks' to let developers interact with the core of the application? (If they invented this, I am not really sure.) I don't want to wake up in 10 years and discover that X huge company patented my innovation and that now I actually have to pay them for it." There's OpenPatents.org, there's the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, there's CERN's newly-updated Open Hardware license, and there are domain-specific patent sharing organizations like the Open Patent Alliance; what else is out there?

An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Atlantis shuttle is set to launch this Friday, and its crew will be testing an innovative device that can recycle human urine into a sugary sports drink. The bag uses forward osmosis technology and features a semi-permeable membrane capable of isolating water from virtually any liquid. Recycling urine in this way has a significant effect on a ship's payload, and considering that a single pound adds $10,000 of cost, that slight weight difference can translate to serious savings." CT: I'm at Kennedy Space Center now, tweeting as @cmdrtaco. And I think I'll stay away from the sports drink.

jones_supa writes "The Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC has bought the graphics department of VIA Technologies, S3 Graphics. This $300 million dollar deal brings HTC the ownership of new patents and graphics visualization technologies. 'In addition to its traditional markets in PCs and game consoles, S3 Graphics Texture Compression technology is increasingly being applied to smartphones and tablets, HTC said.'" It appears that HTC will be turning the tables on at least Microsoft and extracting royalties from them for a change.

An anonymous reader writes "Veteran of microcomputing Steve Furber, in his role as ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, has called upon some old friends for his latest project: a brain-simulating supercomputer based on more than a million ARM processors." More detailed information can be found in the research paper.

Sam the Nemesis submitted an interview in Wired with Bill Gates on the future of energy. Gates sees nuclear as the only feasible option for base load generation. His views on the current direction of energy funding are particularly distressing: "But the economics are so, so far from making sense. And yet that's where subsidies are going now. We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in deployment — this is true in Europe and the United States — not in R&D. And so unfortunately you get technologies that, no matter how much of them you buy, there's no path to being economical. You need fundamental breakthroughs, which come more out of basic research."

mache writes "It's scary when you find two completely unrelated areas that you are passionate about merged. It happened to me with BBQ and hacking home network infrastructure. People have taken old Linksys WRT54G (and their derivatives) routers and made them into automatic temperature controllers for BBQ smokers. They support Wi-Fi and even have a web browser to monitor progress."

An anonymous reader writes "Phillip Elmer-Dewitt draws on several sources to argue that 'Apple has become not a monopoly (a single seller), but a monopsony — the one buyer that can control an entire market.' According to Dewitt, Apple uses its $70 billion cash hoard to 'pay for the construction cost (or a significant fraction of it) of [tech factories] in exchange for exclusive rights to the output production of the factory for a set period of time...' This gives Apple 'access to new component technology months or years before its rivals and allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate.'"

BoxRec writes "Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer that prints layers of chocolate instead of ink or plastic. 'Now we have an opportunity to combine chocolate with digital technology, including the design, digital manufacturing and social networking. Chocolate has a lot of social purpose, so our intention is to develop a community and share the designs, ideas and experience about it,' says lead scientist Dr Liang Hao."

angry tapir writes "Lots of people are familiar with open source software. Open source hardware, however, is still more of niche category. The Uzebox is an open source, 'retro minimalist' 8-bit games console, licensed under version 3.0 of the GNU GPL. 'The console uses an overclocked ATmega644 microcontroller and classic Super Nintendo controllers, supports 256 colors and 4 sound channels and has an SD card interface from which games can be loaded from.'"

mdsolar writes "Renewable energy production has surpassed nuclear energy production in the U.S. according to the latest issue of Monthly Energy Review (PDF) published by the Energy Information Administration. ... During the first three months of 2011, energy produced from renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro, wind) generated 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy equating to 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. During this same time period, renewable energy production surpassed nuclear energy power by 5.65 percent. In total, energy produced from renewables is 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production."

An anonymous reader writes "According to two former US Army intelligence officers, the multi-billion-dollar DCGS-A military computer system that was designed to help the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan simply doesn't work. DCGS-A is meant to accrue intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and provide real-time battlefield analysis and the current location of high-value targets — but instead, it has hindered the war effort rather than helped. Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, says that DCGS-A's faults have even resulted in a loss of lives (PDF)."

Zothecula writes "Tokyo's Showa University has unveiled its latest robotic dental patient. The University engaged robotics company Tmsuk to manufacture the realistic bot which is designed to simulate a number of typical patient gestures and responses, allowing dental students to experience what it's like to work with a real patient."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports on new research revealing that the huge increase in coal-fired power stations in China, up from just over 10 gigawatts (GW) in 2002 to over 80GW in 2006, has masked the impact of global warming in the last decade because of the cooling effect of their sulphur emissions. But scientists warn that rapid warming is likely to resume when the short-lived sulphur pollution – which also causes acid rain – is cleaned up and the full heating effect of long-lived carbon dioxide is felt. 'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,' says Dr. Robert Kaufman. 'This, and solar insolation increasing as part of the normal solar cycle, [will mean] temperature is likely to increase faster.' The effect also explains the lack of global temperature rise seen between 1940 and 1970 as the effect of the sulphur emissions from increased coal burning outpaced that of carbon emissions, until acid rain controls were introduced, after which temperature rose quickly. 'Warming due to the CO2 released by Chinese industrialization has been partially masked by cooling due to reflection of solar radiation by sulphur emissions,' says Prof Joanna Haigh. 'On longer timescales, with cleaner emissions, the warming effect will be more marked.'"

mikejuk writes "Researchers from Cornell have used AI to create a system based on the Kinect that can recognize what you are doing — cleaning your teeth, cooking, writing on a whiteboard etc. In a smart home it could be used to offer help: 'Would you like some help with that recipe, Dave?' Or it could monitor patients or workers to make sure they are doing what they are told. The study also reveals that there is probably enough information in how activities are performed to recognize an individual — so providing yet more biometrics. There are clearly a lot more things that we can teach the Kinect to do with machine learning than just gesture recognition."

Mightee writes "Toyota officially announced at an annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas that the all-electric Scion iQ will be launched next year in the United States. According to Toyota, Scion iQ can only go 50 miles on a single charge. Because of this, it will be facing tough competition from 73-mile Nissan Leaf and 85-mile Mitsubishi i."

MojoKid writes "Dangerous Prototypes is a two-year old organization with the stated mission of producing 'one new open source project every month.' In its nearly two years of existence, DP has created about 30 projects, such as the Flash Destroyer, which tests the limits of solid state storage by writing and verifying a common EEPROM chip, rated for 1 million writes, until it burns out. The projects themselves are being sold by another interesting company, Seeed Studio. Seeed is a contract manufacturing/sales channel for hire. It helps hardware designers get their ideas manufactured in China and sold worldwide with a service called Propagate for manufacturing small quantities (100+) of open source hardware."

garymortimer writes "Researchers at The Flying Machine Arena in the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control ETH Zurich control a multicopter drone with gesture based commands. The designers say they are 'looking for ways to make interaction with our vehicles natural and intuitive.'"

mrtwice99 writes "Dropbox recently updated their TOS, Privacy Policy, and Security Overview. Included in the TOS is the following statement: 'By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.' I think Dropbox is a great service, but what is the significance of granting them such broad usage rights?" Elsewhere in the same Terms of Service, which are a few notches above the norm in both brevity and readability, Dropbox says both "Dropbox respects others’ intellectual property and asks that you do too," and "You retain ownership to your stuff."

An anonymous reader writes "For a long time what x86 users took for granted was just 'the future' for ARM devices. Now that time is over. Linaro — a non-profit engineering organization funded by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments — released a first port of Ubuntu Unity 3D experience and Compiz. If you have a pandaboard, go ahead, download, install the Linaro 11.06 LEB/Ubuntu images and try it out! It's just a few minutes away."

alphadogg writes "A Duke University grad student has come up with a way to double (or more) battery life in Wi-Fi devices, without any changes needed on the device itself. Essentially, the technique regulates how long and when client radios sleep (PDF), so that data transfers can be scheduled more efficiently. In a test using eight laptops and nine Nexus One Android-based smartphones on an 802.11n network, the researchers found that the scheduling technique, dubbed SleepWell, resulted in energy reductions of 38% to 51% across a variety of online applications, including YouTube, Pandora and Last.fm Internet radio, and TCP bulk data transfers. What's more, they found that as the quality of radio links degrades, the relative energy gains are even higher."