AmiCOUR IP Group News and Opinions

Welcome to the AmiCOUR IP Blog.  We invite your comments.  Past Issues.

February 5, 2010 - Google News tracked progress of a controversy over this year’s National Prayer Breakfast. The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that it asked President Obama to boycott the event. The breakfast is held the first Thursday in February and is sponsored by a normally invisible organization known as the Fellowship Foundation. After the Huffington Post reported the controversy, web news articles snowballed, mostly outside mainstream media. Google News software tracked the "15 minutes of fame."  (Image left.)   Read Comments.

February 3, 2010 - Physicist Masahiro Hotta at Japan's Tohoku University has disclosed a novel idea to teleport energy. Hotta believes that strings of "entangled" particles may be stretched across space. When one particle is altered, the others must change. If the first particle is destroyed, conservation of energy requires its energy to be teleported to the remaining particles. Earlier IBM research suggests teleportation does not require traversing the intervening space between particles. Entanglement, where two particles share the same existence even though they can be light years apart, is a recently accepted principle of modern physics. If one entangled particle changes state, then its counterpart changes state simultaneously. This new teleportation has been suggested as a way to advance computing and facilitate instant teleportation of information for advanced, interplanetary communications systems. Readers of Hotta's idea, featured today in MIT's Technology Review, suggested using the idea to teleport energy to remote spacecraft and reduce fuel weight. Read comments

February 2, 2010 - Unveiled from a cold war like cloak of secrecy, last week Russia completed a test flight of its newly unveiled advanced fighter plane.  Also reminiscent of 1960's copying and one-upmanship, the new Russian fighter looked remarkably, if not laughably, similar to Lockheed's advanced tactical fighter, the F22 Raptor. Older James Bond films sometimes poked fun at the mysterious "technology transfer" of the era, but times haven't changed in the high technology sector. Mirroring cold war IP rivalries, this week tech writer MG Siegler released a mockup of Google's new lightweight touch computing tablet. It comes on the heels of Apple's iPad launch and clever product placement in the Grammy Awards. Apple's iPhone already faces competition from Google's touch controlled smart phone.  Read comments.