It’s been a mixed picture recently for leading tech services in courtrooms. British courts have been told they should allow reporters to post messages to Twitter during a case in most circumstances. But an American case was declared a mistrial after a juror used Wikipedia to look up a phrase mentioned in evidence. The Lord […]
Geekery was popular in the early 19th century, but its heyday began in the 1980s. That’s just one conclusion to be drawn from a fascinating new tool from Google. The Google Book Ngram Viewer allows users to search for the popularity of words in 5.2 million books that the company has scanned and digitized: that’s […]
A research company claims that Americans now spend as much time using the Internet as they do watching TV. But rival figures vary so wildly that it’s not possible to be certain of much more than a general trend. The headline claim comes from Forrester Research, which says the average US citizen spends 13 hours […]
According to the Federal Communications Commission, the majority of American “broadband” users are not actually receiving broadband speed. That’s because the FCC currently defines broadband as requiring a download speed of at least 4Mbps and an upload speed of 1Mbps. In total, 68 percent of broadband connections in the US fall short of this speed. […]
Researchers in Switzerland have produced what some are touting as a true 3D camera. In reality, though, it’s “only” a camera that can simulate a 3D effect in a 360 degree panorama. Traditional 3D imaging, known as stereoscopy, usually consists of taking two images of the same scene and then presenting them in a way […]
Today Youtube announced that it was lifting the restriction it’s placed on the length of video content being uploaded to their platform. This is great news, because we don’t have to chop our videos into 15-minute chunks to get them uploaded and playable. The Catch “Starting today, we’ll begin allowing selected users with a history […]
The days of unexpectedly loud TV commercials are numbered thanks to a bill that has just passed the US congress. The tenuously-named Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (that is, CALM) tackles a problem that dates back to the beginnings of commercial television and has attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic: that the commercials […]
A Japanese bid to bring the football World Cup to stadiums around the world via holograms has been rejected. Soccer’s governing body FIFA today announced that the 2022 finals will take place in Qatar. Japan was one of the bids for that tournament that reached the final vote. As part of a presentation to voters, […]