Why Pirate? Microsoft Offers $60 Office to Students
Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a $60 Web-based version of its new Microsoft Office Ultimate suite of applications that will be exclusively available to college students. Students with a valid e-mail address from their university will be able to download Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $60 via the Web. The offering includes Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Groove and InfoPath. Students outside the U.S. will be charged €18, £12.95 or C$22 for a one-year subscription license. The program will expand to Spain, Italy and France by Sept. 20. The promotion expires in all locations on April 30, 2008. The estimated retail price of Office Ultimate 2007 is $679, according to company Web site.

Fair use boosts US economy more than copyright
Fair Use is worth more than copyright to the US economy, concludes a report issued Wednesday by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA). It said that fair use exceptions to copyright produce over $4.5 trillion of US annual revenue. Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past ten years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner. To stay on the edge of innovation and productivity, we must keep fair use as one of the cornerstones for creativity, innovation and, as today's study indicates, an engine for growth for our country. The CCIA referred to recent estimates of the industry wide value added net revenue of fair use versus copyright based industries. Copyright based value amounts to $1.3 trillion, whereas fair use value amounts to $2.2 trillion, according to the CCIA report. Thus the fair use contribution to the US economy is 70 per cent greater than that of copyright.

Sprint Nextel starts mobile shopping service
Sprint Nextel unveiled a new service that allows mobile handset customers to buy and compare a wide range of products over their phone. Called Mobile Shopper, the free service essentially replicates the experience of shopping online but on a mobile handset. The service also allows shoppers to compare the prices they see in stores with those offered by more than 30 online partners. Customers who like what they see can order items on the spot with a credit card. The service, provided in partnership with online provider mShopper, offers around 7 million products from retailers ranging from Wal-Mart and Target to niche players such as Dreamtime Baby or GolfTravelBags.com. Sprint Nextel, which receives no money from purchases, views the service as another way to attract and retain its customers. Mobile users have been shopping with their phones for some time, adding ringtones and games to their devices. Making the leap to buying electronics or clothes with a phone has taken longer, although other carriers have developed shopping services on their phones tied to specific retailers, such as Amazon.com or eBay.

Court Puts Hold on Qualcomm Import Ban
A federal judge Wednesday halted an import ban on mobile phones by Qualcomm Inc., a rare legal victory in a long-standing patent dispute with rival Broadcom Corp. Judge Haldane Mayer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted a request by several mobile phone manufacturers and AT&T Inc.'s wireless division to stay the ban the federal government ordered in June. The U.S. International Trade Commission barred imports of new mobile phone models with Qualcomm chips after determining that the company had violated a patent held by chipmaker Broadcom on battery power-saving technology. The White House refused to overturn the ban in August. The ITC's ruling applied to chips that are used in high-end phones that can transmit video and data at high speeds. Mayer's decision Wednesday will allow carriers and manufacturers to introduce new phone models later this year. The order applies only to the seven companies that sought to halt the ban: carriers AT&T and T-Mobile USA Inc. and handset makers Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Corp., LG Electronics, Kyocera Wireless Corp. and Sanyo Fisher Co. Sprint Nextel Corp. was conspicuously missing from the order but a spokesman for the carrier and a Qualcomm attorney said the carrier could sell phones made by any of the manufacturers covered.

Sony Drops DVD for Blu-ray Disc
Sony is increasing its bet on Blu-ray Disc and plans to ditch DVD and use the high-definition video disc format in all future digital video recorders in Japan. The announcement was made at the same time as Sony, the biggest backer of the technology, unveiled four new Blu-ray Disc video recorders. They include support for dual-layer discs-- something that was missing from models announced this time last year-- and can transcode video into the more efficient MPEG4 AVC format to increase recording time per disc. A 50G-byte Blu-ray Disc typically holds just over 4 hours of HDTV when the over-the-air MPEG2 stream is recorded directly to the disc. By transcoding this stream to MPEG4 AVC it's possible to squeeze 16 hours of HDTV onto the same disc. The four models are aimed at three different applications. The BDZ-X90 is targeted at home cinema use and is capable of 1080p video output-- the highest quality of several video subsets that fall under the HDTV banner-- and "Deep Color" output. This latter feature should mean better colors when using a TV with support for the HDMI1.3 signal.

Cancelled TV show goes to MySpace
The award-winning producers of TV shows Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life are taking their latest project online, citing "frustration" at US TV networks. Quarterlife, a drama about a group of recent graduates in Chicago, started as a pilot for ABC in 2005, but the network declined to make a full series. But creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick stuck with the idea, and the show will now debut on MySpace in November. Social networking site MySpace will have exclusive rights to each of Quarterlife's 36 episodes for the first 24 hours, after which the video will appear on the show's own website. The producers and MySpace will share revenue from adverts contained in the video stream. So far, about one hour of material has been shot, which will be divided into six or seven episodes. Additional content, including character profiles, will also appear on MySpace, while scripts could be made available on the Quarterlife website for fans to make suggestions. Quarterlife is not the first online series to be backed by Hollywood heavyweights.

Online worlds to be AI incubators
Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences. Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds. Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners. Novamente said it eventually aimed to create more sophisticated avatars such as talking parrots and even babies. Many of the computer controlled characters in games are driven by basic AI programs that dictate how they behave when attacked, when they spot a player's character or how they interact. This desire to embody artificial intelligences led many to robots, he said, but that approach presented its own problems. Novamente is working on avatars for different virtual worlds with The Electric Sheep company that specialises in producing artificial entities for online environments.

Tesla Plugs In to PG&E Research
Tesla Motors is teaming up with Pacific Gas & Electric to research ways to remotely regulate when and how the startup’s electric sports cars charge up from the grid, the California utility said Wednesday. The two-seat Roadster, due out this year, has certainly raised the profile of all-electric cars to transform what was once the terrain of smug savers of the Earth to something now remotely sexy. Some mainstream environmental organizations have thrown their weight behind plug-in electric cars–of all shapes and sizes, not just hotrods–as an answer to America’s driving addiction rather than biofuels, which critics say are less environmentally desirable and require a lot of vegetation and energy to produce and transport. But plugging electric vehicles into the grid to charge up or feed back electricity is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Utilities such as PG&E know they must eventually figure out how to do it without frying the system, causing blackouts, or worse.

Google Founders’ Ultimate Perk: A NASA Runway
In the annals of perks enjoyed by America’s corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes’ drive from their offices. For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft. It is a perk that is likely to turn other Silicon Valley tycoons green with envy, as no other private jets have landing rights there. But it may not sit well with a community that generally considers itself proud to have Google in its midst. How did the two billionaires get such a coveted parking place for the jet, which is unusually large and rare by private jet standards? Officials at the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency signed a unique agreement last month that allows it to place scientific instruments and researchers on planes used by the Google founders.

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