CNET.com has come up with a short, but helpful handbook on teaching about the telecommunication industry jargon you tend to hear. IF you ever wnated to know what “throttling” was you have come to the right place. The Beginner’s Guide to Telecom Jargon

Now The U.S. government has launched a major crackdown on online copyright infringement, seizing dozens of Web site domains linked to illegal file sharing and counterfeit goods.

The domains of torrent sites that link to illegal copies of music and movie files and sites that sell counterfeit goods were seized this week by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security. Visitors to such sites as Torrent-finder.com, 2009jerseys.com, and Dvdcollects.com found that their usual sites had been replaced by a message that said, “This domain name has been seized by ICE–Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court.”

Oh no…someone took down a domain. Let’s go use the other 10,000 sites that do the same thing now. Darn.

The seizures came after a Senate committee unanimously approved a controversial proposal earlier this month that would allow the government to pull the plug on Web sites accused of aiding piracy. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) allows a Web site’s domain to be seized if it “has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than” offering or providing access to unauthorized copies of copyrighted works like selling msm cream, or something.

So…what is going on here? Well Facebook has 500 million users and Twitter has 150 million. that’s what is going on. Facebook holds all the cards here. Sharing data with Twitter isn’t as important to them as it is to Twitter.

With Google they are playing Google-ball. They claim it is for user privacy, but really it’s just that users are worth too much to let them just have them. Google has their own fortress of secrecy so they know all about it. Giving away all your leverage for the hell of it makes absolutely no sense. Glad all I have to worry about are document management solutions.

Keep in mind this is YOU they are arguing about. YOUR information. The right to SPAM YOU. This is what this is all about. There is a financial gain for getting access to these 100s of millions of users. This isn’t exactly a huge help to the users at all. It’s just another way for them to spam the hell out of you with their ads.

In the long run is Facebook going to fall the way of Myspace? Doubtful at this point, but should it be a consideration in teaming up with these other heavyweights? I would completely ignore Twitter if I were Facebook. If there is any sense in this world Twitter will die off eventually. Facebook already does what they do and offer way more. Twitter is basically takes one tiny part of Facebook and makes it the total product. IT’s a complete waste of time IMO.

Hulu Plus officially announced as open is now being dropped to $7.99 per month instead of the $9.99 a month all the suckers paid last month. New users will get 1 week free trial, while the ones that got shafted will get 2 free weeks out of the deal.

Did I say deal? Hulu is dead to me more or less with this subscription fee, and I assume it will be to many others. Of course there are a lot of dumb people out there that will gladly pay $7.99 a month for something the rest of us get for free elsewhere. I’ll spend it on my one a day vitamins and my next 1 TB hard drive.

The only benefit to the less internet and consumer-savvy out there is that Hulu will offer full seasons of all the shows they have on the site. Of course these are all shows that are on normal TV and not the actual shows people actually do pay for outside their basic cable. We can assume that they will have a small leg up on Netflix in this regard, but with Netflix you get so much more anyways with movies and TV that it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to go the Hulu route. Especially since the site is awful.

“We asked the question whether or not there is a link between search volume data and financial market fluctuations on a weekly time scale”, says Preis.

Search engine query data can deliver insight into the behavior of individuals who are submitting several hundred million search engine queries around the day each day. Aggregated query data provided by Google cover the time period from 2004 to present and are available for scientific use.

“Both collective ‘swarm intelligence’ of internet users and financial market participants can be regarded as a complex system of many interacting subunits that react quickly to external changes”, explains Preis.

While the prices are not directly related, the study seems to indicate that at least the trade volume does. This means interest in stocks seems to be showing a connection directly to search results of the same companies.

While this is more or less common sense once you get the idea, it wasn’t really studied before. This study would be much more interesting say over a decade from now. More in depth research would definitely be something to look out for.

On the darker side, how would skewing the results of search volume change stock volume? Would it be possible to fake the information to indicate trends that aren’t there? Surely someone could come up with a plan that would do this right? Oh right Google is mistake free I forget…that’s why there are so many sites out there running apidexin scam and other spam sites.

Personally, I have gone from back in the AOL days with Netscape, to Internet Explorer, to Opera, to Firefox (Also, Pale Moon as a copycat browser that seems to be a bit more stable at times, although I find it only is right at first), and now I stick with a mix between Firefox and Google Chrome. The last 3 are all perfectly capable of doing what I want. Th only positive for Internet Explorer for me has always been that it looks a lot crisper than the other browsers, but all its other problems outweigh its benefits. Opera I went away from due to a lack of support for what I want to do and had some issues with my dedicated hosting account.

Firefox was rally the first that did everything I needed, and it still has some perks I like more than Chrome. It definitely has more support still than Chrome does, but Chrome feels a bit less cluttered for me now although it has some issues I miss from Firefox like some of the menus, the search box and the address box being the same that won’t allow me to search a web address unless I make it open Google first. Overall it works enough to be my regular option just for browsing. Firefox for some other jobs I need it for.

So, is RockMelt, created by the Netscape developer Marc Andreessen the next browser we should all be looking at? It won’t be for me for quite some time until I start hearing more about it and get it recommended to me. I don’t have time to look into it and play around with it. At least I’m not willing to spend a few days playing with it yet to figure out if it meets my needs. After all the Beta version has just been released today. If you want to test her out by all means let me know what you think. At first look it is a Chrome rebirth of some sort.

TechCrunch published a story saying “Facebook is building a mobile phone…or rather, they’re building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware.” Facebook quickly tried to discredit the story, with a spokesman telling CNET that “Facebook is not building a phone. Our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social, so integrating deeply into existing platforms and operating systems is a good way to enable this.”

One source familiar with the matter said the concept is in the very early stages and Facebook apparently has not determined whether to proceed. However, around Silicon Valley, Facebook is notorious for floating ideas that get leaked, but the company either walks away entirely or goes in a dramatically different direction.
For example, two years ago the company was said to be building a music service to challenge MySpace Music, but Facebook still has no similar offering. And while Facebook’s e-commerce product was originally rumored–and, it appears, sketched out so far as to be pitched to potential partners–as “Facebook Wallet,” a competitor to PayPal, the social-networking giant announced in February that it would partner with the eBay-owned PayPal for its transaction technology, a virtual currency called Facebook Credits. Next thing you know they will be selling the best diet pill.

Crazy ideas that probably aren’t all that worthwhile in the long run I’d say. Stick to what you know. Not every internet company that strikes it big needs to just into hardware. There are plenty of opportunities with their reach to just steal other people’s ideas and buy them out.

What were the “adult services” on Craigslist anyways? Selling a mattress? I have never used Craiglist. I don’t trust people that sell on it, so about the only time I hear anything about it is when some hookers get busted on there.

The website has come under increased scrutiny since the jailhouse suicide last month of 24-year-old Philip Markoff, a former Boston University student. Markoff was awaiting trial for the fatal shooting of Julissa Brisman of New York City and the armed robbery of a Las Vegas woman. Rhode Island prosecutors also accused him of attacking a stripper. Markoff had met the women through ads for erotic services posted on Craigslist.

According to researchers, this alternative to traditional microelectronics, so-called “spintronics” could store more data in less space, process data faster, and consume less power.

At this point, the device is little more than a thin strip of dark blue organic-based magnet layered with a metallic ferromagnet and connected to two electrical leads. (A ferromagnet is a magnet made of ferrous metal such as iron. Common household refrigerator magnets are ferromagnets.) Still, the researchers successfully recorded data on it and retrieved the data by controlling the spins of the electrons with a magnetic field.

Normal electronics encode computer data based on a binary code of ones and zeros, depending on whether an electron is present in a void within the material. But researchers have long known that electrons can be polarized to orient in particular directions, like a bar magnet. They refer to this orientation as spin — either “spin up” or “spin down” — and have been working on a way to store data using spin. The resulting electronics, dubbed spintronics, would effectively let computers store and transfer twice as much data per electron.

But higher data density is only part of the story.

“Spintronics is often just seen as a way to get more information out of an electron, but really it’s about moving to the next generation of electronics,” Epstein said. “We could solve many of the problems facing computers today by using spintronics.”

What he refers to mostly is the heat generated by the moving of electrons through circuit boards. Moving electrons through them creates heat, and it takes a lot of energy to cool them. Chip makers are limited in how closely they can pack circuits together to avoid overheating.

Flipping the spin of an electron requires less energy, and produces hardly any heat at all, he explained. That means that spintronic devices could run on smaller batteries. If they were made out of plastic, they would also be light and flexible.

This is beneficial for everyone from soldiers in the field to those that have to lug a laptop around at school, or work, or even just media freaks like Casablanca fans that carry around a ton of movies, or music such as a DJ. Instead of carrying a big case with your laptop, it could literally be rolled up if it were made in a flexible polymer display.

Judge Nancy Gertner on Friday cut the damage award to $67,500 — three times the statutory minimum — and said the new amount “not only adequately compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards.”

Everything about these cases are a failure. The damages are outrageous. Nobody is losing any money. The people that share these files never would have bought them in the first place. They may go to a concert though. Nobody that is stealing music is ever gonna be able to afford to pay these fines. It just doesn’t do anything except lead them towards a natural treatment for depression and bankruptcy.