" Riddle me this: What would you get if you crossed a BlackBerry with an iPod? The answer: The future of the music business. Let me explain. Imagine, if you will, an iPod as a wireless digital ladle. It would dip into a nearly bottomless stream of continual music, scooping up any song you wanted, when you wanted, where you wanted. There would be no need for CDs, hard drives, or any other storage device. And trying to capture such music would be about as easy as trapping mist in a jar. Every song would contain a digital expiration date, so, over time, they would evaporate."

A Wireless iPod Can Torpedo the Pirates

" A computer program designed to talk like a human is preparing for its biggest test in its bid to be truly "intelligent".

Loebner Prize finalist Rollo Carpenter with his bot Jabberwacky
Rollo Carpenter has high hopes for Jabberwacky

Jabberwacky lives on a computer hard drive, tells jokes, uses slang, sometimes swears and can be quite a confrontational conversationalist. "

Chat rooms in the future will just be filled with these things selling porn to one another.

Chatbot bids to fool humans

"If two companies get their way, pretty soon you'll walk through virtual advertisements in the mall or view television programs the same way Luke Skywalker watched R2D2's playback of Princess Leia's distress message in the first Star Wars movie.

The images would float off your TV screen and into thin air, allowing you to interact with virtual characters right in the middle of your living room. "

Look Ma, No Projection Screen

] RATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3
] player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database
] of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings
] and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks
] are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal
] downloads of their music.

Hmm..

iRATE radio home

" He built a prototype for what he thinks could be the future of voting: an agent that mines your online and other computer habits to extract a political ideology, and then makes voting recommendations — or more omniously, even casts the ballots for you."

Voting by Net Proxy?

"Machines accurately infer user intent, remember experiences and allow users to call upon simulated experts
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A new type of "smart" machine that could fundamentally change how people interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.

Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions."

Sandia team develops cognitive machines

"Open Source Victoria has expressed concern that the use of "insecure and vulnerable Microsoft platforms" have cost Australian industry and government a great deal in lost productivity and money and urged these sectors to upgrade to open source platforms such as Linux and FreeBSD."

Open source group urges switch to avoid 'costly' Windows worms

"Scientists at Cornell University in New York have now managed to build the ultimate in tiny transistors, in which electrons flow through a single atom. "

Scientists develop transistor the size of an atom

"Scientists running a pioneering experiment with "living robots" which think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it "lives"."

I am Not a Number!!! Well, maybe Number 5...

Robot on the run

“The lab is the world’s biggest playground for technology,” said Northrup, who joined Lawrence Livermore in 1993 and left about three years later to start the biotech company Cepheid. He is now president and chief executive of the startup MicroFluidic Systems Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif. “I had access to incredible technology, multimillion-dollar equipment … all the things I would need to figure out the problem.”

Resource-rich federal labs foster ingenuity, struggle with fledgling inventions