In recent years the US has begun to lag in education for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and a number of efforts are underway to address this issue. We know that giving kids hands-on experience is one of the best ways to spark and keep their interest in STEM-related fields, and to this end, high schoolers all over the country are getting an opportunity to learn and apply STEM knowledge by participating in the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.

Rube Goldberg, who was himself an engineer, is most famous for his cartoons that depicted contrived, complex contraptions for executing the most mundane tasks. The cartoons were meant to serve as a criticism for the encroachment of technology in our lives during the early part of the 20th century, and the tendency to favor "exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results." Rube Goldberg machines, named in honor of these cartoons, typically involve complex arrangements of levers, pulleys, balloons, ball bearings, mouse traps, and other mechanical means that could accomplish something as simple as starting a phonograph.

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"Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing," opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan titled "Availability."

What would that mean in terms of performance? "An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access," the NBP says. The document calls this the "National Broadband Availability Target."

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VirnetX, a software corporation founded in 2005, has prevailed in a patent-infringement lawsuit accusing Microsoft of willfully infringing on two patents for automatic and secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. The Texas jury recommended an award of $105.75 million, which is less than half of the $242 million that VirtnetX asked for. Still, the verdict was a very positive one for VirtnetX. "Our clients are very happy with today's verdict," said VirnetX counsel Douglas Cawley in a statement. "We hope this decision sends a clear message to patent infringers everywhere that they will be held responsible for wrongly profiting off the hard work of others."

Microsoft is not happy with the decision and plans to fight on. "We are disappointed by the jury's verdict," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "We respect others' intellectual property, and we believe the evidence demonstrated that we do not infringe and the patents are invalid. We believe the award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict." 

The case was tried in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the favored venue for patent infringement cases.

In its original lawsuit filed in February 2007, VirnetX alleged that Microsoft Office Communicator included technology covered by its patent No. 6,502,135 and that Windows Meeting Space infringed its patent No. 7,188,180. The $105.75 million breaks down as $71.75 million for the former and $34 million for the latter, according to the Scotts Valley, California company. VirnetX acquired the rights to the patents from the government-contracting company Science Applications International in 2006. Microsoft accused VirnetX of being a patent troll during the trial, and it was revealed that the company's business model was based on winning the lawsuit, though it does have a licensing agreement with VeriSign.

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Mobile computing has taken over as the main driver of growth in PC sales for the past year, with notebooks overtaking desktops in late 2008 and sales of desktops declining for the last two years. However, Caris & Company analyst Robert Cihra is expecting desktops to show a small positive growth this year, due in large part to brisk sales of Apple's iMac.

Cihra still expects notebooks and netbooks to account for 90 percent of overall growth in the market for the current year. But the increased demand driven by emerging markets, a slight increase in corporate IT spending, and "power gamers" should result in a 3 percent uptick in desktop sales over last year.

"[B]elieve it or not," Cihra wrote in a note to investors, "we estimate Apple's iMac accounting for a full one quarter of ALL desktop market growth in calendar year 2010."

The number isn't so surprising when you consider that the iMac pushed an impressive 70 percent year-over-year growth in desktop Mac sales for 2009. Contrast that with a 12 percent drop in overall sales of desktops for the same time frame.

Apple's second fiscal quarter sales are already looking healthy, with sales up 36 and 43 percent year over year for January and February respectively. Those figures led Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster to peg Mac sales at about 2.9 million for the quarter. That's less than the recent record quarters of late, but would still mark a 31 percent year-over-year growth compared to the second quarter last year. Sales of iMacs resumed in earnest recently after manufacturing problems with the large 27" LCD panels caused some delays.

Cihra also praised Apple in his note for its ability to drive growth without sacrificing average selling prices or margins. ASPs for desktop and portable Macs have decreased slightly over the last year, while ASPs for HP and Dell have dropped more dramatically. Meanwhile, Apple's tight control on costs have driven increased operating margins that exceed even the gross margins of HP, Dell, and Acer. It's worth noting that while Acer has seen explosive sales growth over the last year—in particular due to low-cost netbooks—the company's operating margins hover around 3 percent while Apple's are just over 25 percent.

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The PlayStation Move was just announced, but Sony is wasting no time before going on the attack. The newest—not to mention first—advertisement for the peripheral makes fun of the Nintendo Wii, attacks Microsoft's Project Natal, and basically buries the entire message under a thick layer of smarm with a side order of smug.

Yeah, this commercial is pretty much awesome.

We were lucky enough to spend some serious time with the PlayStation Move at GDC this year, and you can read all our thoughts and impressions in our latest gaming feature.

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Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud.

According to Google's Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There's even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there's too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Google announced its acquisition of DocVerse, a company that allowed Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. Both companies said that they had a "shared vision" for enabling Office users to edit documents online, and Google is undoubtedly planning to integrate DocVerse's features into Google Docs. With its Exchange migration tool and the acquisition of DocVerse, Google is definitely treading on Microsoft's territory and trying to make it even harder for small businesses to resist "going Google."

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Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: "If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on."

The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice. Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post, Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not.

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Apple's iWork.com document sharing and collaboration service still carries the beta tag that it has worn since it was introduced with iWork '09 last January. (Perhaps it's just another hobby, like Apple TV?) Still, with the iPad ready to launch in a few weeks, Apple has added a few improvements to iWork.com.

One improvement is an update to the way documents can be shared publicly. A simple toggle turns public sharing on or off as needed, and a "Show URL" button rolls down a drop-down sheet with the URL selected for easy cutting and pasting. The new public URLs don't show comments or notes, according to Apple. The company also noted that it makes sharing documents via social networks easy, though adding buttons to "Tweet this!" or "Post to Facebook" would more likely get users to post documents to such sites.

The other improvement is that Apple has created interfaces that are optimized for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Functionality on Apple's mobile devices is quite limited, but you can access documents that you have shared via iWork.com and view them within Safai. On the iPad, documents can be edited using the new iPad versions of Pages, Numbers, or Keynote if they are installed. Both new views have interfaces optimized for touch input, but the iPad's screen makes viewing documents much more pleasurable.

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Critics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we're not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use.

The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We'll see if the FCC's network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to "encourage" ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow.

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Nearly half of Internet users check for or post updates to Twitter and Facebook after they have already gotten themselves tucked into bed, during the night, or first thing when they wake up, according to a new report from Retrevo. The study asked more than a thousand Internet users about their own behaviors when it came to social media and gadget usage, and discovered that many of us are just flat out addicted.

According to Retrevo, 55 percent of users over the age of 25 must check Facebook at least once a day. That's not that freakish—yet. Eleven percent said they can't even go more than a couple of hours before popping onto their favorite social network, and when users under 25 are taken into consideration, that number went up to 18 percent.

People are fine with being interrupted by electronic messages, too. Almost half of those under 25 said they're cool with being interrupted during a meal and 11 percent said they're fine with it during sex (those over 25 were less OK with these things, at 27 percent and six percent respectively).

Whether Internet (and subsequently social media) addiction actually exists is a topic that remains under debate. Still, for those of us who find ourselves tapping out messages in the middle of the night, there's no question that we could benefit from cutting back a bit.

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All sorts of counterintuitive behavior happens with regularity in the quantum realm, but very little of that bleeds over into the world of classical mechanics that the human senses occupy. We can register the effects of the quantum behavior of electrons and atoms, but the actual objects that undergo tunneling and entanglement are invisible to the naked eye. In the last couple of years, however, researchers have started working with mechanical oscillators that can display quantum behavior in some circumstances. A paper that will be released by Nature now provides pretty unambiguous evidence for quantum interactions between a standard qubit and a piezoelectric device that's roughly 50µm long—large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

This isn't the first paper to describe quantum behavior in a mechanical device, but it seems to be one of the cleanest. For the most part, the work has focused on microscopic levers, where the vibrational modes can be characterized in terms of a quantum mechanical unit called a phonon. The number of modes accessible increases rapidly as temperature goes up, which is why vibrations never appear to be quantum mechanical in our day-to-day experience.

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Last week was an important waypoint here at Ars. It has been just over six months since we launched version 2.0 of our Ars Premier Subscriptions. There's been a steady stream of new subscribers each day, and the program is outperforming our wildest expectations.

Two weeks ago the staff had an opportunity to talk with a wide spectrum of readers about a number of topics. One of the things we took away from those conversations was that many Ars readers wanted to join and support the site directly, but weren't able or willing to put down $50 all at once.

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Surprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don't know won't hurt them.

The research was done as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL) out of the University of Washington. Researchers included data from focus groups across seven university campuses in the US as well as survey responses from six campuses. What they found was that a full three-quarters of students use Wikipedia at least occasionally, with 30 percent of the group saying they always use it when performing their own research. Thirteen percent used it rarely and only nine percent said they never used Wikipedia (mysteriously, three percent said they didn't know whether they used it or not).

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In an interview with Xconomy.com, the new head of E Ink talks about the company's plans to launch color displays at the end of this year. T.H. Peng, executive vice president of E Ink's parent company, Prime View International, admitted to Xconomy that in terms of quality color E Ink won't be ready to go head-to-head with LCD anytime soon.

"Our color quality will not be as good as LCD, initially," Peng told Xconomy. "But we have already received very encouraging signs from a few customers that they want to launch our color e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011."

Peng went on to insist that E Ink's color capabilities compare favorably with that of newsprint—a bar that Peng himself admits is substantially lower than that of glossy magazines.

I actually got a glimpse of a color E Ink prototype at this past CES, and I will admit that I wasn't too impressed. Color saturation and contrast were very low, and it was fairly hard to tell the different colors apart. But the Skiff spokesperson who had the demo mentioned that it represented only one of a number of possible methods for bringing color to E Ink, and this fits with what Peng says in the interview.

Right now, E Ink is staffing up in R&D and is exploring a range of options for bringing color to E Ink screens. It's likely that the company will iterate through a number of approaches in the coming years as it pursues its goal of getting E Ink closer to full-color printing.

While E Ink explores its color options, competing approaches aren't standing still. I didn't care for the Mirasol demo that I saw at Qualcomm's CES booth, but the company claims that it has a newer, much improved version of the MEMs-based technology that looks significantly better. I was supposed to get a demo of the new Mirasol tech last week, but I wasn't able to go. We've rescheduled, though, so look for a report next month.

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There are many video games from our youth that we as gamers may introduce to our children. Few of them will be 3D titles from the Nintendo 64 era. While games like Mario 64 still stand up, trying to suffer through Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on the original hardware these days is a painful lesson in just how much nostalgia can distort our memories. The re-release of Perfect Dark on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade wants to fix that, and by updating some aspects of the game and leaving others alone the $10 title becomes a fun, if sometimes frustrating, look back at an earlier time in console first-person shooter history.

So what's better, and why is it hard to look back? Let's dig in.

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Image hosting is the kind of service many people use for sharing their images. There are several great options that cost money—like SmugMug, for instance—but unless you're a major shutterbug, a free service might fit your modest needs and usage pattern better. Here we round up three of the top options for free image hosting around the Web—Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket.

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I frequently download the latest Ubuntu daily build and set up a fresh install in a virtualized environment so that I can test software that I'm developing or evaluate the status of Ubuntu development.

Canonical's Jorge Castro recently introduced me to a nifty tool called TestDrive that simplifies the setup process by automatically downloading the ISO and configuring a VM. TestDrive provides a simple command-line tool that allows you to select which ISO image you want to test. It will download the image and then configure and launch a VM. The real win is that it caches the ISO images and uses rsync to update the parts that have changed so that you don't have to download the whole ISO again every time you want to test a new daily build.

It has saved me a bit of time over the past week. It's also fairly easy to use, which makes it a handy tool for casual Ubuntu users who want to see the latest updates to the new default theme or try out some of the new features that have been prominently discussed in recent reviews. It supports both KVM and VirtualBox. You can configure your preferred virtualization software, the default ISO caching path, and the default memory configuration by editing the /etc/testdriverc file.

To get TestDrive on Ubuntu 9.10, you can install it from the project's PPA. For more details, visit its project page on Launchpad.

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Bacteria have largely stayed out of the forensics game, but with some new research, scientists are seeking to put them into the evidence bag along with human DNA. Researchers have found that the bacteria left on keyboards and mice by users' hands are distinct to individual users, and  that it is possible to identify a piece of hardware's primary user simply by swabbing the keyboard or mouse for bacteria. The technique proved effective within the constraints of the experiments, but it's a long way from being ready for forensic use.

Our skin houses large bacterial ecosystems and, even after washing your hands, the bacterial community is restored within a matter of hours. Scientists have suspected for some time that we might leave "trails" of this skin bacteria on things we touch during the course of a day, and more importantly, that the bacteria might be traceable to individuals. It's not that each person has a unique bacterial species, but that their ecosystems contain different mixes of species, each present at different frequencies.

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Wikileaks, a website that aims to boost government transparency and accountability by publishing sensitive documents, has released a classified military counterintelligence analysis report that discusses the "threat posed to the US Army" by Wikileaks itself.

The report outlines this perceived threat and contends that military security could be put at risk if classified information is made available through Wikileaks, where it can be accessed by foreign intelligence agents and terrorists. The report also points out that foreign governments could leak falsified information to the Wikileaks site in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the United States.

One of the primary topics addressed in the report is potential strategies for deterring moles within the US government from disclosing information to Wikileaks. The author of the report suggests that identifying leakers and terminating their employment or pursuing legal action against them could undermine the relationship of trust between Wikileaks and its informants, thus diminishing the risk of future leaks.

"Recent unauthorized release of DoD sensitive and classified documents provide FISS, foreign terrorist groups, insurgents, and other foreign adversaries with potentially actionable information for targeting US forces," the report says. "The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out."

The report concludes that the disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks reflects the need for stronger counterintelligence programs and better information security training for military personnel.

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Canadian MP Charlie Angus, a former rocker, has formally introduced a bill meant to ease the legal uncertainty around format shifting. He proposes a trade: Canada's levy on items like blank CDs gets expanded to devices like iPods, and in return people can legally transfer their own music to devices like iPods.

Such a plan might sound bizarre to US ears, where format- and time-shifting are assumed to be legal so long as no DRM circumvention is involved, but it remains legally dubious in countries like Canada and the UK. Shifting a song from a CD to a computer to an iPod does, after all, create new copies of the work—and copyright holders have long claimed compensation for such uses.

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