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clang_jangle writes with this excerpt from The Inquirer outlining Comcast's new traffic-throttling scheme, based on information from Comcast's latest FCC filing. "Its network throttling implements a two-tier packet queueing system at the routers, driven by two trigger conditions. Comcast's first traffic throttling trigger is tripped by using more than 70 per cent of your maximum downstream or upstream bandwidth for more than 15 minutes. Its second traffic throttling trigger is tripped when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to – along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers – gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible. Tripping either of Comcast's high bandwidth usage rate triggers results in throttling for at least 15 minutes, or until your average bandwidth utilisation rate drops below 50 per cent for 15 minutes."

CWmike writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against microprocessor maker Intel, alleging that the company engaged in a 'systematic campaign' of illegal conduct to protect a monopoly. Cuomo's lawsuit alleges that Intel extracted exclusive agreements from large computer makers and threatened to punish those perceived to be working too closely with Intel competitors. Intel gave computer makers payments totaling billions of dollars in exchange for the exclusive agreements, and the company threatened to cut off payments to computer makers or fund their competitors when they worked with other microprocessor makers, the lawsuit alleged. Cuomo's lawsuit comes less than two weeks after news reports that the FTC is considering filing a formal complaint against Intel. 'Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,' Cuomo said in a statement. 'Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace.'"

Noiser writes "New Scientist reports: 'In 2007, Abdelmalek Bayout admitted to stabbing and killing a man and received a sentence of 9 years and 2 months. An appeal court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout's sentence by a year after finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression.'"

MahlonS writes "AP is reporting on a suit filed in Northern Georgia in which AT&T claims that Verizon's 'There's a Map for That' ads are misleading and amount to deceptive trade practices. Verizon had already agreed to modify their original ad to include a tag line that voice and data services are available outside 3G coverage areas." What's interesting is that on some level, this is actually a lawsuit over data visualization.

jbrodkin writes "SiCortex had an idea that it thought would take the supercomputing world by storm — build the most energy-efficient HPC clusters on the planet. But the recession, and the difficulties of penetrating a market dominated by Intel-based machines, proved to be too much for the company to handle. SiCortex ended up folding earlier this year, and its story may be a cautionary tale for startups trying to bring innovation to the supercomputing industry."

bth writes to let us know that Barnes & Noble has been sued by a company called Spring Design, which alleges that the recently announced Nook e-book reader infringes its intellectual property. This isn't a patent troll kind of situation; rather, the claim is misappropriation of trade secrets. Spring Design claims that they have been developing a dual-screen, Android-based e-book reader since 2006, filing patents all the while; and that they showed pretty much everything to Barnes & Noble in the expectation of working together with them to bring their reader to market.

Velcroman1 writes 'Taking a cue from the Terminator films, the US Navy is developing unmanned drones that network together and operate in 'swarms.' Predator drones have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the military arsenal. And now, these unmanned aircraft are talking to each other. Until now, each drone was controlled remotely by a single person over a satellite link. A new tech, demoed last week by NAVAIR, adds brains to those drones and allows one person to control a small squadron of them in an intelligent, semiautonomous network.'

waderoush writes "In May 2008, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, unveiled an e-book like design for the second-generation XO Laptop, consisting of a pair of facing touchscreens. In a new e-mail interview, Negroponte says that design has been thrown out, and that instead the foundation is working on version '1.75' of the existing green-and-white laptop with a more powerful processor, as well as a '3.0' version that would look 'more like a sheet of paper.' Negroponte also addressed a range of other questions about the OLPC project, including the significance of the project to make 1.6 million e-books readable on the XO laptop and the organization's push to reach more children in Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at the University of Rochester believe that a 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean in a million years or so, connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden. Using newly gathered seismic data, researchers have reconstructed how the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began 'unzipping' the rift in both directions. 'We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this,' says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester. The results show that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory had previously held. The sudden large-scale events pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events."

CWmike writes "Microsoft said today that computers in countries with high rates of software piracy are more likely to be infected because users are leery of applying security patches. 'There is a direct correlation between piracy and the malware infection rate,' said Jeff Williams, head manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. Highlighting research that showed worms to be the most prevalent computer security problem today, Williams said the link between PC infection rates and piracy is due to the hesitancy of users of pirated software to use Windows Update. China's piracy rate is more than four times that of the US, but the use of Windows Update in China is significantly below that in this country. Same for Brazil and France. But Microsoft's own data doesn't always support William's contention that piracy, and the hesitancy to use Windows Update, leads to more infected PCs. China, for example, boasted a malware infection rate — as defined by the number of computers cleaned for each 1,000 executions of the MSRT — of just 6.7 per thousand, significantly below the global average of 8.7 or the US's rate of 8.2. France's infection rate of 7.9 in the first half of 2009 was also below the worldwide average."