Samsung Electronics today announced that it has developed the first Solid State Disk (SSD) based on NAND Flash memory technology. The NAND-based SSD is a low power, lightweight storage media for notebook PCs, sub-notebook PCs and tablet PCs. Using the industry's highest density 8Gb NAND Flash, Samsung can build SSDs with a capacity of up to 16Gb.

The SSD has a power consumption rate less than five percent of today's hard disk drives (HDDs), enabling next generation mobile PCs to extend their battery life by more than 10 percent. The NAND-based SSD weighs less than half that of a comparably sized HDD.

Free of moving parts, the Samsung SSD memory has minimal noise and heat emission. Moreover, it is a highly reliable storage media that endures exceptionally well in environments with extreme temperatures and humidity, making it suited for industrial and military applications.

The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.

Ian Pearson, head of the futurology at BT told the Observer that such technology will be possible for the very rich in about 50 or so years. The rest of us will have to wait, but of course we will have more interesting lives to record.

He said that will mean that when you die it's not a major career problem, you just work from inside the computer rather than having to use a monitor. His rationale is that Sony's new PlayStation 3 is 35 times more powerful than the model it replaced, and in terms of processing is "one per cent as powerful as a human brain".

Pearson thinks that the next computing goal would be replicating consciousness. His crystal ball also forecasts that computer systems will be able to feel emotions so that aeroplanes will be programmed to be more terrified of crashing than their passengers, meaning they would do whatever possible to stay airborne.

Adding fuel to the debate over U.S.-international trade, a tech industry group is blasting "Buy American" legislation passed by the House of Representatives this week.

On Friday, the Information Technology Association of America called the measure bad security policy and bad economic policy. The legislation, an amendment to the Homeland Security Authorization Act, would force the Department of Homeland Security to buy products mostly made in America.

The legislation was authored by Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, and passed by the House on Wednesday. It would require more than 50 percent of the components in any end product procured by the department to be mined, produced or manufactured inside the United States.

"With this purchasing prohibition, I guess (the department) will have to learn to do without computers and cell phones," ITAA President Harris Miller said in a statement. "I cannot think of a single U.S. manufacturer that could meet this 50 percent threshold for these devices, and I doubt that those charged with protecting our safety here at home can either."

Lycos DSL in Germany says it will no longer store dynamic IP addresses of its customers, now that a specialist on data privacy laws from Frankfurt University has threatened to sue the company.

Jonas Breyer had asked Lycos what data was kept on him and whether that information was shared with backbone providers, but the ISP refused to co-operate. Probably to avoid further law suits, Lycos has now decided to ditch IP storage altogether.

According to the German Tele Services Data Protection and Telecommunications Act, ISPs are only allowed to store communications data for accounting purposes. Apparently, there is no requirement for German ISPs to keep a record of IP addresses.

A decision by German ISPs not to keep logs on IP addresses would be extremely controversial as the entertainment industry is increasingly demanding from ISPs to disclose the names of suspected file sharers. Courts in both Germany and Canada have recently denied the entertainment industry the right to subpoena the identities of file-sharers.

"Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" has been leaked onto a major file-sharing network just hours after opening in theaters, at a time when Hollywood is increasingly concerned about online piracy.

At least two copies of the film, which was first shown in theaters in the early hours of Thursday, have been posted to the BitTorrent file-sharing network -- a new and increasingly popular technology that allows users to download large video files much more quickly than in the past.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been aggressive in going after Web sites that provide "tracker" links that enable BitTorrent downloads of copyrighted material, including six lawsuits this week against sites with links to TV shows.

According to Web site Waxy.org (http://www.waxy.org/), one print was leaked on Wednesday before the film was even released in theaters. The movie was time-stamped, suggesting it may have come from within the industry rather than from someone who videotaped an advance screening.

I have been teaching "Intellectual Property" (although I dislike the term) among other subjects at a Masters Degree in the Polytechnic University of Valencia UPV (Spain) for over 5 years. Two weeks ago I was scheduled (invited by the ETSIA Student Union and Linux Users' Group for the celebration of "Culture Week") to give a conference in one of the university's buildings. During that conference I was to analyze the legal use and benefits of the P2P networks, even when dealing with copyrighted works.

The day before the conference, the Dean (pressured by the Spanish Recording Industry Association "Promusicae" as I found out later, and he recognized himself in a quote to the national newspaper El Pais, and even the Motion Picture Association of America, as another newspaper quotes) tried to stop it by denying permission to use the scheduled venue. So I scheduled a second one, and that was denied again. And a third time. Finally I gave the conference on the university cafeteria, for 5 hours, in front of 150 people.

It is not so important that I lost my job even though my ratings from the student satisfaction questionnaire were the highest of the whole Program, and I never violated any rule, contract, or regulation. I don't even mind so much that I never received a direct phone call from anyone objecting to my ideas or procedures. What I regret the most is to have suffered CENSORSHIP inside my own university (in a European Union member state, of all places on earth), and as a result of pressures and threats coming from Collecting Societies and Recording and Movie Industries (on my website you have proof of all that).

Card maker Sapphire Technology is demonstrating an ATI Radeon X850 XT PE card at the E3 show in Los Angeles, which is cooled with liquid metal.

The "Blizzard" card uses a liquid alloy pumped over the chip to cool it. The alloy, supplied by NanoCoolers, is 65 times more conductive than water, according to the manufacturer, and the card is 25 percent quieter than the standard ATI solution.

The PCI Express-based Blizzard will ship with 256 Mbytes of GDDR-3 memory. No prices have been revealed, but the card will reportedly ship this summer. More information is available at the Sapphire web site.

Not that i ever want to see anyone lose their jobs, but it will be nice for music label employees to have all the subsidies they are paying the RIAA go to their artists. (Yes you were supposed to laugh at that one )

As Barry Ritholz smartly pointed out in his blog, the introduction of Yahoo's Music Unlimited Service sets the new marketvalue for all the music you can download in a month... 5 bucks.

The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They cant claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.

Of course, RIAA staffers wont go quietly into the night. They will continue to scream loud and hard about evils of illegal downloading. The question is, will they move the money they are currently spending on court cases and filing suit, towards promoting the new subscription services that are available. Particularly Yahoo's dirt cheap service.

Ted Stevens wanted to know just how much the Internet has turned private lives into open books. So the U.S. senator, a Republican from Alaska and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, instructed his staff to steal his identity.

His staff, Stevens reported, came back not just with digital breadcrumbs on the senator, but also with insights on his daughter's rental property and some of the comings and goings of his son, a student in California. "My staff provided me with information they got from a series of places," he said. "For $65, they were told, they could get my Social Security number."

The Johns Hopkins students demonstrated - as has a growing chorus of privacy advocates around the United States - that there is plenty of information to be had on individuals without ever buying it (or stealing it) from big database companies like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.

In some instances, students visited local government offices and filed official requests for the data - or simply "asked nicely" - sometimes receiving whole databases burned onto a CD.

"If some citizen is concerned about dead people remaining registered to vote, he can simply obtain the database of deaths and the voter registration database and cross-correlate," said Joshua Mason, whose group discovered 1,500 dead people who were also listed as active registered voters. Fifty of those dead people somehow voted in the last election.

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory have learned to produce 10-carat, half-inch thick single-crystal diamonds at rapid growth rates (100 micrometers per hour) using a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. This size is approximately five times that of commercially available diamonds produced by the standard high-pressure/high-temperature (HPHT) method and other CVD techniques. In addition, the team has made colorless single-crystal diamonds, transparent from the ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths with their CVD process.

The standard growth rate is 100 micrometers per hour for the Carnegie process, but growth rates in excess of 300 micrometers per hour have been reached, and 1 millimeter per hour may be possible. With the colorless diamond produced at ever higher growth rate and low cost, large blocks of diamond should be available for a variety of applications. "The diamond age is upon us," concluded Hemley.