Livermore Laboratory shows off world's biggest laser gun [PIC]

Today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dedicated the world's largest laser system. The National Ignition Facility, with its 192 giant laser beams, fills up an entire 10-story building in Livermore, Calif., about 45 miles east of San Francisco. 

No, all that laser power is not to shoot down UFOs or melt ice on Mars -- the goal is even more elusive: sustained nuclear fusion. 

When the system goes online in two to three years, the nearly 200 lasers will focus all their power inward at a tiny 2-millimeter ball of frozen hydrogen gas, zapping it with 60 times more energy than any laser system that's come before. How much juice is that? Try 2 million joules.

How much juice is that?

"It's never been done before under controlled conditions," wrote the lab's Bob Hirschfeld in an e-mail.  "Just in nuclear weapons and in stars."

If things go well, lighting a mini-sunfire inside that hydrogen ball would release far more energy than the already gigantic amount of energy the laser is putting in. The main goal of fusion science is, of course, to create a nearly endless supply of safe and carbon-free electricity without the need to create nuclear byproducts. But scientists hope it could also be beneficial for astrophysics, as well as inspection and explosion-free testing of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

Here's a picture of the laser; click to see at full resolution:

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory .

-- David Sarno

Justice Department sides with Cablevision against Hollywood

Just what, exactly, are all those Hollywood types getting in return for their investment in Barack Obama's presidential bid? The Justice Department, a steady ally for the entertainment industry on copyright issues during the Bush administration, today opposed the studios in a potentially precedent-setting dispute with Cablevision over TV recording services. U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan urged the Supreme Court not to review the 2nd Circuit's ruling, which held that Cablevision's "network DVR" service did not infringe copyrights (download the brief here.) In addition to some technical arguments about the suitability of the case, Kagan maintained that a network-based recording service controlled by a consumer was on the same legal footing as a VCR in the home -- a device the Supreme Court famously defended in the 1984 Betamax ruling. The critical issue is who makes a recording, not how or where it's made, she wrote, and the 2nd Circuit was correct in finding that individual consumers would be the ones recording TV shows, not Cablevision.

The brief drew praise in tech circles, but Kagan took pains to emphasize how narrow the 2nd Circuit's ruling was. "The court of appeals announced no 'categorical exemption from direct liability' (Pet. 24) for providers of automated services and it did not 'assume[]' (Pet. 19 n.4) that only one person can 'make' a particular copy," she wrote. In other words, the administration's position is that the 2nd Circuit's decision doesn't provide a broad shield for Web 2.0 companies that want to replace home recording and playback devices with online services. Besides, as the brief notes, the appeals court didn't consider the possibility of contributory infringement because the studios and Cablevision agreed not to litigate those issues. (The parties agreed to take fair-use defenses off the table, too.)

Nevertheless, her stance is a departure from the previous administration's expansive view of copyrights. It also shows a welcome degree of technological literacy. "Respondents’ proposed RS-DVR service is part of a broader transition from analog to digital recording and playback, and from business models where consumers purchase a tangible item to those where they pay for a service,” Kagan wrote. Or as Gigi Sohn, president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, put it more tartly, "Common sense would dictate that a recording is a recording, whether made on a set-top box or in a cable head-end."

Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Reddit updates its toolbar feature for the first time in 4 years [UPDATED]

Reddit toolbar, version 2.0, the first revision in years. Credit: Reddit

When Digg joined Facebook and StumbleUpon last month in the pantheon of social sites that followed users to outside Web pages, all of a sudden it seemed every other social destination was deploying a frame toolbar.

Tsk, those Johnny-come-latelys.  You might not have known, but Reddit, the underdog social news site from Conde Nast, has had a similar toolbar for four years.

But don't worry, even some avid users of the site had no idea it was there. That's because, unlike those from its social media brethren, the Reddit toolbar is an opt-in feature, buried away in the preferences menu. Plus, it was lacking the visual polish and channel-surfing features that Digg and StumbleUpon have.

But today Reddit is rolling out the first major update to its toolbar in years. It adds all the expected features -- the ability to ...

Obama exhumes Net neutrality from the Tomb of Forgotten Issues

The debate over Net neutrality has quieted considerably since the Federal Communications Commission rebuked Comcast in August for its discriminatory handling of BitTorrent traffic. Congress has been silent on the issue as one of the leading proponents of Net neutrality, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), has focused on cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The FCC is still awaiting confirmation of President Obama's pick for its chairman, Julius Genachowski, and has been preoccupied by the looming analog TV cutoff. The new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, has dropped hints about regulating broadband providers, but for the most part, whatever momentum that the Net neutrality drive had in 2007 and 2008 seems to have dissipated.

So when Obama brought up the issue today in a speech on cyber-security, it seemed like a bolt out of the blue. Here's the relevant excerpt:

"Let me also be clear about what we will not do. Our pursuit of cyber-security will not -- I repeat, will not include -- monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be -- open and free."

This isn't a change for Obama -- he strongly endorsed Net neutrality during the presidential campaign. And it's consistent with some elements of the cyber-security strategy he laid out today, which emphasized (in a striking contrast with the previous administration) protecting individual liberties and privacy along with critical digital infrastructure. On the other hand, such a regulatory impulse conflicted with another important tenet of Obama's cyber-security initiative: that private companies will be free to choose how to protect themselves. As Obama put it:

"The vast majority of our critical information infrastructure in the United States is owned and operated by the private sector.  So let me be very clear: My administration will not dictate security standards for private companies. On the contrary, we will collaborate with industry to find technology solutions that ensure our security and promote prosperity."

At any rate, it looks like the Net neutrality debate may be revving up again. Let the lobbying begin!

Photo credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Best times for a movie theater bathroom break

RunPee's listing for Star Trek provides a multitude of potential bathroom breaks.

How many times have you been sitting in a movie theater and felt that familiar pressure in your bladder, but didn't want to leave because you had a feeling that the awesome battle scene you'd heard so much about was coming up soon?

Probably not that often, right? It's a problem that was almost too ridiculous to be solved. But thanks to the wonders of the Internet, somebody solved it.

RunPee shows a list of the boring parts in many of the popular movies in theaters and tells you how far into the flick they appear. It even gives you a synopsis of the part you'd be missing.

So at the 50-minute mark in "Star Trek," when Capt. Pike leaves the bridge, you might want to leave for the john. If that large Coke hasn't ...

Google Wave is a hodgepodge of e-mail, photo sharing, chat

Google Wave combines e-mail, documents, photo sharing and chat in one Web app. Credit: Google

Ever feel like you have information overload?

You start Gmail to find a few dozen new messages, thousands of spams and a bunch of friends shouting at you via instant message the moment you sign-in.

Then, you hop over to Picasa, Google's photo-sharing software, to find your family and friends have just uploaded hundreds of snapshots of their trip to Aruba or of your baby cousin.

Finally, you make a pit stop in Google Docs to see that your co-worker has added a few new documents that need your approval.

Could Google Wave, the new product that the company announced today at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, help us cut through the noise?

Probably not. The app just dumps everything onto one page.

The interface should be familiar to Gmail users -- just with a lot more stuff. If you've checked out the iGoogle custom home page, that should give you a better idea of the hyper-integration that Google is going for.

Wave displays your e-mail in one column and your incoming photos in another. Folders sit on the left side-bar followed by contacts, which you can access to start new communications, called "waves." And with ...

Bada Bing ... Microsoft 'decision engine' aims to take search leaders down a peg

Microsoft's new Bing search engine, unveiled this morning by CEO Steve Ballmer, is being positioned as an alternative to the busy, confusing search engines of today.  This more elegant and intuitive "decision engine," Microsoft says, will help consumers distill useful information on commerce-friendly topics such as shopping, travel, health and local business.

The new engine, which will launch next Wednesday, will vary the way it displays results based on the type of info a consumer is looking for. It might be an Expedia-like list of airplane flights, an Amazonian array of customer reviews and price comparisons for digital cameras, or Yelp-esque view of local restaurants, sortable by factors such as price, parking or atmosphere.

"Bing helps you overcome search overload," says a promotional video on the product's website.  To do that, it presents search results in a more logical, user-friendly format, "instead of spitting them out in order of popularity."

The rather negative tone of words like "spitting" and "overload" seem to suggest that market-leading search engines like Google may be bludgeoning consumers with more data than they need.

Rather than introducing a revolutionary approach to presenting information, Bing appears to stitch together its own versions of the Web's most popular planning and decision tools, potentially saving consumers the trouble of navigating to specialized sites.

Microsoft’s redoubled focus on commerce-related search is likely a reflection of the online advertising market, in which sellers pay more to put their ads in front of consumers who are already shopping.

The company's search tools captured just 8.2% of the market, according to comScore's April 2009 report.  That put the company a distant third behind Google (64.2%) and Yahoo (20.4%).

-- David Sarno

Verizon Wireless will sell the Pre too

The Palm Pre isn't just for Sprint anymore. Credit: renaissancechambara via Flickr.

The Palm Pre, the device that was pegged to save both Palm and Sprint Nextel, will soon be available on Verizon Wireless, CEO Lowell McAdam said today. Verizon plans to market both the Pre, which will initially be available only on the Sprint Nextel network, and a new version of the BlackBerry Storm early next year. That's not great news for Sprint, which needs the Pre to keep it from losing more customers. 

"It's an incremental blow to Sprint," said Steve Clement, a senior research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. Verizon subscribers who were thinking of switching to Sprint to try the Pre might just wait until next year, rather than jumping ship, he said.

Sprint has been struggling to reduce churn, an industry term for the subset of customers who leave one carrier for another. It lost nearly 5 million customers last year to rival carriers. 

"Sprint will have this device exclusively through at least the end of 2009," said Kathleen Dunleavy, a Sprint spokeswoman. "Beginning on June 6, customers can purchase the Pre only through Sprint. Sprint was chosen as the exclusive provider due to the power of its network, the fantastic value our offerings provide and our commitment to a great customer experience."

Sprint's most important goal with the Pre is to keep existing customers from going to other carriers such as AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone, said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at research firm Collins Stewart. This announcement won't hurt that goal, he said.

But Palm has had trouble producing enough devices to meet demand. Best Buy has already said it will probably run out of stock when it goes on sale this summer.  

"Palm thus far has been misexecuting on the production side," he said. If the device is a flop, or gets lampooned by consumers, neither Sprint nor Palm will benefit.

Sprint's stock was up 1% at $5.13 at 12:12 PDT today. Palm was up 9% at $11.49.

--Alana Semuels

Watermarks, a friendlier DRM?

The Digital Watermarking Alliance, a group that encourages content owners to embed unique identifiers in media as a way to combat piracy and promote new distribution models online, released a study this morning on the prevalence of illegal downloading and the motives behind it. (Download the .pdf here.) Done by market research firm Interpret, it used an online survey to gauge how many U.S. residents were downloading media legally and illegally. Then it did what amounted to a push poll of 996 downloaders (again, both legal and illegal) ages 13 to 49, exploring their behavior in more detail and measuring their reaction to watermarking technology. Not surprisingly, given who was paying for it, the survey found that embedding watermarks (called "digital serial numbers" in the survey) could deter people from sharing content online. In particular, a third of the downloaders said they definitely or probably wouldn't use file-sharing services to obtain content if watermarks were deployed, and half said the same thing about uploading.

I take some of the  findings with a grain of salt, such as the assertion that using watermarks would lead illegal downloaders to buy more content from legitimate sources. Watermarks may very well drive some people away from file sharing, but they won't stop them from going to sites that stream free songs or bootlegged movies. As the survey points out, multiple factors influence how people choose to acquire content. Nevertheless, the study provided a number of intriguing insights, including the following:

Tinysong: injecting music into the conversation [UPDATED]

Grooveshark, a former song-swapping service that has evolved into an on-demand jukebox, unveiled a nifty new site (and API) today called Tinysong. It's yet another example of technology racing ahead while the content industry's lawyers try to sort out the legalities of it all.

Tinysong is like Seeqpod combined with Tinyurl or Bit.ly -- it marries an online music streaming engine with a link creator. You enter the name of a song or artist. It returns a list of possible matches. You pick one, and it generates a link to a stream of that tune on the Grooveshark site. An even better version is offered by Ping.fm, which has integrated Tinysong into its tool for broadcasting content to all your social networks. Let's say you want to tell all your Facebook friends and Twitter followers something snappy about the looming GM bankruptcy filing (and don't we all?), punctuated with a link to the ultimate song about doomed motorists. Ping.fm lets you do that in a single step. OK, so maybe I'm the only one who wants to do that. But you get my point -- Tinysong makes it that much easier to add a soundtrack to our microblogged lives.

Like Seeqpod, though, Grooveshark operates in an unlicensed gray area. Seeqpod, which filed for bankruptcy protection in March, let users stream music from various nooks and crannies online -- with or without the copyright owners' permission, and without paying royalties. The bankruptcy filing halted the lawsuits by Warner Music Group and EMI before they could be resolved, and there's some debate on whether Seeqpod would have been held liable; after all, Seeqpod says it didn't host any of the song files, it merely helped people find them. Grooveshark may be in a more precarious legal situation because it appears to host the song files that users stream. That, at least, was its approach when it launched in 2007 as a way to stream music for free from other users' collections, or buy them for 99 cents a track. Company executives have maintained throughout that the site was designed to be win-win, with copyright holders sharing in the revenue. They have yet to strike licensing deals with the major record companies, however, and they've dropped the paid downloads in favor of advertising-supported streams. (Company executives didn't respond to my requests for comment.)

Grooveshark is slick, has a vast library of music and incorporates an impressive recommendation engine and playlist generator. And Tinysong is a great application. These technologies deliver fully on the promise of the Internet as a "heavenly jukebox." If the past is any guide, the labels will tolerate Grooveshark and its Tinysong app until it builds some momentum online, and then their lawyers will descend on the company. It would be better for all concerned if the labels licensed the back end for such services, then let innovators do their thing. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen until someone finds a way to generate a meaningful amount of advertising revenue from on-demand music streams. Looking at Grooveshark's site, I don't find an effective advertising model -- you can listen to hours of music without bothering to look at the ads. I do, however, find a great online music experience, albeit one that may not be long for this world.

Update, 8:55 p.m.: Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino e-mailed to say, "We've secured a major deal and more are coming but I'm not allowed to say who yet." So my pessimism about Grooveshark's ability to avoid a lethal label lawsuit may be overstated. Stay tuned.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.