Gadget & Tech

Does Apple have the right to tell people who buy iPhones to use them only in the way it wants them to. Why shouldn’t we be able to run buggy software if we choose to?

But it’s not quite so simple. Jennifer S. Granick, a lawyer for the E.F.F., said that Apple can force buyers of the phone to agree to any conditions it wants to write into a user agreement. But those agreements would be governed by contract law, which would force Apple to sue users and prove actual damages.

Under copyright law, Apple would have the right to claim statutory damages of up to $2,500 “per act of circumvention.” People who jailbreak phones, might even be subject to criminal penalties of as long as five years, if they circumvented copyright for a financial gain.

“Apple is bringing the hammer down in a way that Congress never intended and is really severe for something that is just not wrong,” Ms. Granick said. An Apple spokesman declined to comment beyond its legal filing.

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Linux is free operating system, but there are still many users afraid to use it, if you give linux a chance, you will become a fun. They are many apps available in linux for free, from animation to audio and video, from image authoring/editing program to office to internet browser and more, click here to see the top 50 linux alternatives to popular apps provided by Blair Mathis from laptoplogic.com.

The new iPhone firmware 3.0 is rumored at Macword Expo 2009 to have four-core iPhone CPU support, this would make it even more a gaming device beating the PSP in terms of performance.
Imagination Technologies will announce the PowerVR SGX543 at CES , it’s the firm’s first multi-core capable GPU technology and Apple could have access to it.

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Three major electronics manufacturers have agreed to plead guilty to a price-fixing conspiracy and pay $585 million in criminal fines for their roles in the pricing of LCD display panels, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The Justice Department said LG Display Company, previously LG Philips, will pay by far the largest fine – $400 million, the second highest criminal fine ever imposed for price-fixing. The firm agreed to plead guilty to participating in a conspiracy from 2001 to 2006 to set the price of LCD panels worldwide.

Chunghwa will pay a $65 million fine for participating with LG and other unnamed co-conspirators during the five-year period.

Sharp agreed to pay a $120 million fine for three separate conspiracies with unnamed partners who sold LCD panels with artificially inflated prices to Dell for computer monitors and laptops, Motorola for panels in Razr mobile phones and Apple for panels used in iPod portable music players.

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Federal District Judge Kenneth Karas has ordered that Mark Papermaster “immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc until further order of this court.” IBM had sought the injunction citing an agreement with Papermaster in which he would not work with any competitor for a year after leaving the Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant. IBM, filed a lawsuit against him last week, claiming that he broke the terms of a noncompete contract with IBM in accepting a high-profile job with Apple. InformationWeek spotted Papermaster’s formal response Friday morning, in which he declares that the two companies are not competitors and that his experience at IBM is not the primary reason why Apple sought his services.

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Lala is a site for online music since 2005. Lala users can swap used CDs using prepaid envelops for only $1 per trade and later it allowed users to browse for music. Now Lala has announced that will let its users stream music for 10 cents per song.
If the user wants to listen again to a particular song he or she will have to pay 10 cents, allowing the user to listen to that song online whenever he or she wants.

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Temperatures in the Arctic last fall hit an all-time high – more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Centigrade) above normal – and remain almost as high this year, an international team of scientists reported Thursday.

“The year 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic,” said Jackie Richter-Menge, a climate expert at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H, and editor of the latest annual Arctic Report Card.

“These are dynamic and dramatic times in the Arctic,” she said. “The outlook isn’t good.”

Arctic temperatures naturally peak in October and November, after sea ice shrinks during the summer. The shrinkage lets more of the sun’s rays heat the ocean rather than be reflected back into space.

As a result, the ocean is warming and causing global sea levels to rise even faster than predicted, according to the Arctic Report Card, the product of 46 scientists from 10 countries.

Summer 2007 set a record low for sea ice in the Arctic, threatening reindeer, walruses and polar bears and opening shipping lanes above the Arctic Circle, the report said. This summer’s ice melt was only slightly smaller.

“There has been a massive loss of sea ice starting in the 1990s,” said one of the authors, James Overland, an Arctic expert at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “In 2008, we’ve lost so much multi-year old ice, it’s very difficult for the ice cover to go back to where it was 20 years ago.”

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Mozilla has just pushed out Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 to their servers, marking the first major step toward the official 3.1 release. They haven’t yet officially announced the beta release yet. Firefox 3.1 will introduce geolocation to the mix, streamlining the process required to get information from web sites based on your location. In the current release of Firefox, you needed to install the previously mentioned Geode extension to get this functionality, but it comes baked into 3.1.

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Richard Garriott, famed video game developer, is following in his father’s footsteps and has launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Richard’s father Owen Garriott is a former NASA astronaut who completed two space missions during his career. Richard is the the first second generation American in space, and also the sixth private astronaut client of Space Adventures.

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