“Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in ”weight.“ Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found. It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK ”digitally fat“. ”Virtual weight“ measurements are based on research by California Institute of Technology professor Roy Williams. He calculated physical comparisons for digital data in the mid-1990s. He worked out that one gigabyte (1,000,000,000 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper. The amount of data people are squirreling away on their gadgets is clearly a sign that people are finding more things to do with their shiny things. 'Digitally obese' If digital hoarding habits continue on this scale, people could be carrying around a ”digitally obese“ 20 gigabytes by next year.” [BBC]
::::::
“Men who regularly balance their laptop computers on their laps when working may be jeopardizing their ability to have children, according to a new study from fertility researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The potential risk comes from the heat generated by the laptop computer and the close position of one's thighs when balancing the computer on one's lap, the researchers found. This heat is transferred to the scrotum, where the temperature can rise several degrees, putting users within the danger zone for testicular dysfunction.The findings suggest that young men should place laptop computers on a desk, a table or anywhere else but their own laps.” Wired
::::::
“TV over Internet protocol - IPTV - will transform couch-cruising into an on-demand experience. For the Internet, it will mean broadband at speeds 10, 100, or even 1,000 times faster than today's DSL or cable. Online games would be startlingly realistic; the idea of channels would seem hopelessly archaic. [...] For years, DirecTV and EchoStar have been adding subscribers far faster than cable, so cable companies want something satellite can't match. At the same time, voice over IP is enabling cable operators to poach phone customers from telcos. Combine VoIP, truly high-speed broadband, and totally on-demand TV - and you've got such a compelling proposition that the Bell companies figure the only way to survive is to do likewise.
IPTV is not to be confused with television over the Internet. On the public Net, packets get delayed or lost entirely - that's why Web video is so jerky and lo-res. But private networks like Comcast's are engineered, obviously, for reliable video delivery - which means IPTV will look at least as good as TV coming from digital cable or satellite. It will be accompanied by another, equally critical change. Instead of broadcasting every channel continuously, service providers plan to transmit them only to subscribers who request them. In effect, every channel will be streamed on demand. This will free up huge amounts of bandwidth for hi-def TV and high-speed broadband. [...]
But that scenario is a good five years out. First there's a lot of upgrading to do. The Bells have the worst of it: Their copper lines max out on current-generation DSL, never mind TV. SBC is testing an advanced form of DSL that promises 7 times the bandwidth it delivers now. Verizon plans to spend billions to provide its 30 million customers with direct fiber connections offering nearly limitless bandwidth. Cable companies have already upgraded their networks, at a cost of some $85 billion, but it will be 2007 before they complete the transition from analog to digital and some time after that before all their customers get IP-addressable set-top boxes.” [Wired]
::::::
“It is now possible to eavesdrop on a typist's keystrokes and, by exploiting minute variations in the sounds made by different keys, distinguish and decipher what is being typed. Credit for this discovery goes to Dmitri Asonov, a computer-security researcher for I.B.M. at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., who (with Rakesh Agrawal) published his results this year. The principle is a simple one. Keyboards are a bit like drums: the keys rest atop a plastic plate; different areas of the plate yield different sounds when struck. The human ear can't tell the difference, but if the sounds are recorded and processed by a highly sophisticated computer program, the computer can, with a little bit of practice, learn to translate the sounds of keystrokes into the appropriate letters and symbols. This means that firewalls and passwords will amount to nothing if someone manages to bug a room and record the cacophony of keystrokes.” [New York Times Magazine]
eedsterTV 
...the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows.
