./emilychang eBot

"But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful. “

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously agreed to open up unused broadcast TV spectrum for unlicensed use.

Despite protests from TV broadcasters, entertainers, professional sports leagues, church pastors, and some congressional leaders, the FCC approved rules for devices using spectrum that sits between broadcast TV channels. This 300MHz to 400MHz of unused spectrum known as “white spaces” is considered prime spectrum for offering wireless broadband services because it can travel long distances and penetrate through walls.

“As an engineer, I was really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics,” Larry Page, co-founder of Google, said on his blog. “For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC’s engineers to simply do their work.”

Technology companies such as Google, Motorola, Microsoft, and Dell have been lobbying the FCC for years to open this spectrum for unlicensed use. The hope is that the spectrum could be used to augment existing wireless services or eventually be used to create new wireless broadband services. 

While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, the Mac maker now has more cash than Microsoft and earns more than half of its profits and over three fourths its revenues.

For the quarter ending in September, Microsoft released revenues of $15.06 billion, net profits of $4.37 billion, and a reserve of cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments that added up to $20.7 billion.

Apple reported $7.9 billion in revenues and $1.14 billion in net profit, but those numbers don’t include most of its iPhone business, which is hidden away in subscription accounting under GAAP rules. For that reason, Apple also released its real earnings: $11.68 billion in revenue and $2.44 billion in net profits. The company also reported a cash position of $24.5 billion.

Microsoft’s quarterly revenues grew by 9%, compared to Apple’s non-GAAP revenue increase of 75.1% year over year.

Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up.

Amazon.com will start selling One Laptop Per Child’s low-cost XO notebook computer as part of the Give One, Get One program OLPC developed last year, according to an official from OLPC.

Google has introduced a new Web browser, called Chrome, aimed at wresting dominance of the browser market from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The move takes the Google-Microsoft rivalry to a whole new level. If Google succeeds, it will be a big deal, with major ramifications for the future of the Web.

A few new habits can make the difference between staying on task, finding what you need and getting things done - or having a tech meltdown.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world’s first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn’t require a corporate intermediary.

BREAKTHROUGHS often beget other breakthroughs, and Apple’s slick use of touch technology on its iPhone has set touch-screen makers to salivating. An industry once relegated to niches now sees the potential for riches.

"Faced with the discovery of a serious flaw in the Internet’s workings, computer network administrators around the world have been rushing to fix their systems with a cobbled-together patch. Now it appears that the patch has some gaping holes.”