Unique Dogs that have ear Width

Dogs as trained animals, of course you already knew it. But you know if the dog also had some kind of super wide ears, so interesting to see. and perhaps from some of these images will make you smile hehehe

Source : uniknya.com, riz-news.blogspot.com, August 2011

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Unique pictures of Animals Sleep

As we know all living creatures need sleep, animals must also hehehe, well in this article I will share pictures of unique, when the animal fell asleep.

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Apple using 'bogus' patents to make Android more expensive, says Google

Google lawyer accuses rival companies including Apple, Oracle and Microsoft of running an anti-competitive strategy to stifle innovation and push up prices

Google has accused iPhone-maker Apple of using 'bogus patents' to make Android phones more expensive. Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters/Corbis

Google has accused Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and "other companies" of trying to make Android smartphones more expensive to consumers by running a "hostile, organised campaign" against it by using "bogus patents" acquired from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel and their existing patent holdings.

Its chief legal officer, David Drummond, alleges that the companies are effectively imposing a "tax" to push up the price of Android devices. "Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other's throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what's going on," Drummond wrote in a blog post.

But Microsoft has hit back, with its general counsel Brad Smith claiming on Twitter that Microsoft invited Google to bid jointly for the Nortel patents – and was turned down. Representatives from Apple and Oracle declined to comment.

Drummond alleges that the rival companies are using an "anti-competitive strategy [which] is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they're actually worth" and using them to stifle innovation.

Drummond writes that "in this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we're determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it".

He asserts that: "Microsoft and Apple's winning $4.5bn (£2.7bn) for Nortel's patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1bn. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means – which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop."

A consortium including Microsoft, Apple and RIM won the bid for the Nortel patents, which cover a number of communications technologies, against a consortium of Google and Intel. Google had made a preliminary bid of $900m before the auction, but was eventually outbid despite having large reserves of cash.

Drummond says: "A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a 'tax' for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation."

Microsoft has sued HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Barnes & Noble, claiming that their use of Android infringes patents that it holds, while Apple has filed a number of similar suits asserting patent claims against other companies.

HTC has admitted that it is paying Microsoft a set amount for each Android device it sells. The amount has not been disclosed but it believed to be between $5 and $15.

Apple recently won a ruling in the US that HTC infringes patents covering the iPhone. And Oracle is currently suing Google in a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit alleging that Android infringes copyright relating to its Java programming language, acquired through the purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Google launched its Android mobile operating system at the end of 2007, with the first phones appearing about a year later. It makes it available for free to handset makers, unlike companies like Microsoft which charges around $15 per handset using its Windows Phone software.

Android phones have exploded in popularity, making more than a third of all smartphones sold around the world. The platform has displaced the former leader Nokia, which is abandoning its Symbian operating system in favour of Windows Phone. Apple and RIM have their own mobile operating systems which they do not license.

Google has been hampered by a lack of intellectual property in wireless telephony, which has exposed it to patent-infringement lawsuits from rivals such as Oracle.

Drummond says Google is looking to strengthen its patent portfolio; it recently bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM. It is also in talks to buy InterDigital, a key holder of wireless patents valued at more than $3bn, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The most valuable patent that it uses covers its "PageRank" search algorithm used for organising its search results: it has an exclusive license on that from Stanford University, where Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed it. Though the PageRank patent is now available for licensing, Google has the rights to determine who can license it.

Patent acquisitions are expected to accelerate, with IBM and Kodak often mentioned as shopping intellectual property on the market.

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

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Second moon may have collided with our moon, say scientists

Artist's impression of a hypothetical collision between the moon and a companion moon. Photograph: Martin Jutzi/Erik Asphaug/Nature

The remnants of a second moon that orbited the Earth billions of years ago may be splattered across the far side of our moon, scientists claim.

The two moons are believed to have been created at the same time and followed a similar path to the moon we're familiar with today, but after tens of millions of years of peaceful co-existence, the two appear to have crunched together in a gentle collision that left the smaller, just a third of the size, spread across the larger like a cosmic pancake.

Researchers put forward the idea after computer simulations found that a collision with a second, sibling moon in Earth's early history might solve the longstanding puzzle of why the two faces of the moon differ so dramatically.

While the near side, which always faces the Earth, is low-lying and relatively flat, the far side is high and mountainous, with a crust tens of kilometres thicker.

The idea builds on what planetary scientists call the "big impact" model of the moon, in which a planet the size of Mars slammed into the Earth in the early days of the solar system and knocked out a vast shower of rocky debris, which later coalesced as the moon.

"The impact produced a disc of debris around the Earth and from this disc we got the moon, but there is no reason why only one moon would be formed," Martin Jutzi at the University of Bern in Switzerland told the Guardian.

Jutzi and his colleague, Erik Asphaug at the University of California in Santa Cruz, decided to simulate what might happen if a second moon was created from the rock and dust that fell into orbit around the Earth.

Computer models showed that a sister moon roughly 1,200km in diameter could have accompanied the larger moon around the Earth for tens of millions of years. But as the two moons' orbit moved further away from Earth, the balance of forces became unstable and they collided.

A high-speed impact would have punched a giant crater into the moon and kicked a shower of rock into space, but if the two bodies met at less than three kilometres a second, the smaller moon would have splatted onto the surface of the larger and stayed there. The study appears in the journal, Nature.

"A slower collision doesn't produce such intense shockwaves and causes much less damage than a high-velocity collision," Jutzi said. "It's kind of a gentle collision that doesn't form a big crater. The smaller moon gets more or less pancaked onto the larger moon."

If Jutzi is right, the impact thickened the moon's crust on the far side, creating the highlands and forcing subsurface magma to the opposite side. "It wouldn't matter where the impact happens, because after the collision, the moon would reorient itself so that the material left from the impact was on the far side," Jutzi said.

While speculative, scientists hope to find ways of testing the idea. The smaller moon would have formed before the moon we see today, so rock samples from the far side of our moon should be older than rocks collected from the near side.

Another approach under consideration is to compare Jutzi and Asphaug's simulations with details of the moon's internal structure, gleaned from lunar maps drawn up by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and high-resolution gravity maps of the moon, which will be obtained next year by Nasa's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission.

In an accompanying article, Maria Zuber, a geophysicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the study raised "the legitimate possibility that, after the giant impact, our Earth perhaps fleetingly possessed more than one moon. Furthermore, significant remnants of this long-departed member of the Earth-moon collisional family may be preserved today on the lunar far side."

The moon shows only one face to the Earth because its centre of mass is slightly off-centre – around 2km closer to our planet than the geometric centre. There is no dark side of the moon, though much of the surface spends 14 days in daylight and 14 days in darkness.

Last year, Ian Garrick-Bethell and Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published an alternative explanation for the different thicknesses in the moon's crust that suggested tidal forces rather than an impact were responsible.

"The fact that the near side of the moon looks so different to the far side has been a puzzle since the dawn of the space age, perhaps second only to the origin of the moon itself," said Nimmo. "One of the elegant aspects of [this] study is that it links these two puzzles together: perhaps the giant collision that formed the moon also spalled off some smaller bodies, one of which later fell back to the moon to cause the dichotomy that we see today."

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

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Bank of England to keep rates on hold

LONDON | Thu Aug 4, 2011
(Reuters) - A darkening economic backdrop and the threat of further market turmoil have raised the possibility that the Bank of England's next move might be to loosen monetary policy rather than tighten it.

The majority view is that the Bank will sit on its hands this month, but a surprise monetary easing from the Swiss National Bank on Wednesday suggests nothing can be ruled out.

All economists polled by Reuters expect the central bank to keep rates at 0.5 percent at 12 p.m., but around one in four believe a second wave of quantitative easing (QE) will be needed at some point.

August marks one of the four months when the Bank publishes updated growth and inflation forecasts in its quarterly inflation report, and these months have historically proven the trigger for changes in policy. Moreover, the run-up to the meeting has been dominated by a cluster of surprisingly weak data.

Britain's economy barely grew in the second quarter following six months of stagnation, and data from the United States and the euro zone suggest a global slowdown is becoming entrenched.

Former Bank rate-setter Sushil Wadhwani said on Tuesday that the main issue facing policymakers was whether to ease policy now or wait for another month.

"If I were on the committee, for the first time this year I would be voting for more QE," he told Fathom Consulting's Monetary Policy Forum.

WOULD MORE QE WORK?

Britain's coalition government, elected last year on a deficit-fighting mandate, has made clear that the ball is in the Bank of England's court should further economic stimulus be required.

But it is far from certain that another wave of gilt purchases -- which accounted for almost 99 percent of the Bank's first QE programme -- would have the desired effect.

Gilt yields have fallen to a series of record lows this week with 10-year bonds paying little more than 2.7 percent, a drop of more than 1 percentage point since mid-April.

"With gilt yields at such incredibly low levels, doing more QE in the form of gilt purchases just doesn't stack up," said David Owen, chief European financial economist at Jefferies.

"If they do decide to do more stimulus, they would probably do something more targeted, but I don't think it will be a decision taken this month," he added.

UK interest rates have stood at a record low 0.5 percent for more than two years -- already the longest period of inertia since World War Two. Money markets are not pricing in any realistic chance of a rate rise until the second half of 2012.

The Bank bought 200 billion pounds of assets, mainly government bonds, with newly created money between March 2009 and February 2010 in an attempt to reduce borrowing costs and boost the supply of credit.

For the past few months, the Bank's nine-member Monetary Policy Committee has been split three ways, with arch-dove Adam Posen voting for more stimulus and hawks Spencer Dale and Martin Weale voting for a 25 basis points rate rise.

There is a strong chance this month that Dale and Weale will join the pack voting for the status quo and at least one other member -- possibly Paul Fisher -- ally with Posen in voting for more quantitative easing.

Inflation, currently running at more than double the BoE's 2 percent target, appears to be close to a peak and forward-looking indicators suggest price pressures could ease sharply over the coming year.

How each member has voted will not be known until minutes to the policy meeting are published in two weeks' time.

($1 = 0.609 British Pounds)

Source : uk.reuters.com

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Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack

IT security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered one of the largest ever series of cyber attacks.

It lists 72 different organisations that were targeted over five years, including the International Olympic Committee, the UN and security firms.

McAfee will not say who it thinks is responsible, but there is speculation that China may be behind the attacks.

Beijing has always denied any state involvement in cyber-attacks, calling such accusations "groundless".

Speaking to BBC News, McAfee's chief European technology officer, Raj Samani, said the attacks were still going on.

"This is a whole different level to the Night Dragon attacks that occurred earlier this year. Those were attacks on a specific sector. This one is very, very broad."

Dubbed Operation Shady RAT - after the remote access tool that security experts and hackers use to remotely access computer networks - the five-year investigation examined information from a number of different organisations which thought they may have been hit.

"From the logs we were able to see where the traffic flow was coming from," said Mr Samani.

"In some cases, we were permitted to delve a bit deeper and see what, if anything, had been taken, and in many cases we found evidence that intellectual property (IP) had been stolen.

"The United Nations, the Indian government, the International Olympic Committee, the steel industry, defence firms, even computer security companies were hit," he added.

China speculation

McAfee said it did not know what was happening to the stolen data, but it could be used to improve existing products or help beat a competitor, representing a major economic threat.

"This was what we call a spear-phish attack, as opposed to a trawl, where they were targeting specific individuals within an organisation," said Mr Samani.

"An email would be sent to an individual with the right level of access within the system; attached to the message was a piece of malware which would then execute and open a channel to a remote website giving them access.

"Once they had access to an organisation, they either did what we would call a 'smash-and-grab' operation, where they would try and grab as much information before they got caught, or they sometimes embedded themselves in the network and [tried to] spread across different systems within an organisation."

Mr Samani said his firm would "not make any guesses on where this has come from", but China is seen by many in the industry as a prime suspect.

Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying it was "very likely China was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would be of particular interest to Beijing".

"Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia," Lewis said.

However, Graham Cluley - a computer-security expert with Sophos, is not so sure. He said: "Every time one of these reports come out, people always point the finger at China."

He told BBC News: "We cannot prove it's China. That doesn't mean we should be naive. Every country in the world is probably using the internet to spy.

"After all, it's easy and cost-effective - but there's many different countries and organisations it could be."

Mr Cluley said firms were often distracted by the very public actions of LulzSec and Anonymous, groups of online activists who have hacked a number of high-profile websites in recent months.

"Sometimes it's not about stealing your money or publicly leaking your data. It's about quietly stealing your information, which can have a very high political, military or financial value.

"In short, don't let your defences down," he added.

Source : www.bbc.co.uk

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Sir Alex Ferguson coy over Dimitar Berbatov's Manchester United future

Dimitar Berbatov's future at Manchester United was cast into doubt by cryptic comments from Sir Alex Ferguson. Photograph: Chris Trotman/Getty Images

Sir Alex Ferguson has cast doubt over the future of Dimitar Berbatov at Manchester United after appearing to suggest that the Bulgarian could leave the club.

Ferguson made the admission after his reserve side's 8-2 defeat in a charity match against Marseille in Monaco on Tuesday evening. A French television journalist asked the United manager if Berbatov could play with Paris St-Germain, who are interested in signing the striker. "Yes," a smiling Ferguson replied. "Absolutely, no problem."

The French club are reportedly willing to pay £18-£20m, which would help United to recoup some of the £50m they have spent so far this summer on Ashley Young, David de Gea and Phil Jones.

Berbatov was United's top scorer last season and, alongside Carlos Tevez, the joint winner of the Premier League's golden boot, but Ferguson appears to have lost trust in the Bulgarian's ability to influence the more important matches. The club-record £30.75m signing from Tottenham Hotspur was not even on the substitutes' bench for the Champions League final against Barcelona in May, a decision that devastated him to the point he did not even leave the Wembley dressing rooms.

Nonetheless, Ferguson's statement represents a considerable change of direction for the champions, who have maintained all summer that Berbatov is not for sale and can still play a significant part in their attempt to win a 20th league title next season.

David Gill, the United chief executive, said at the weekend that the club had never considered moving on the Bulgarian. "Everyone has been talking about Berbatov from the outside, saying he wants to leave or that we want him to leave, but we don't want him to go. We want him to stay. He scored 20 goals last season, so there is no desire on our behalf to see him go."

Gill also said nothing sinister was to be drawn from the fact Berbatov was the only player at the club in the final year of his contract not yet to be offered an extension. "People keep telling me he's in the final year of his contract but there is an option on the club's side to extend Dimitar's contract by another year. We can do it whenever we want, there are no conditions around it and that means, in effect, he has two years to go."

It also makes Berbatov more valuable in the market if PSG, who have a £37.7m deal in place for Palermo's Javier Pastore that would smash the French transfer record, are serious about adding him to their new-look side.

Ferguson also attempted to brush off the latest speculation about Wesley Sneijder, saying it was "just all the newspapers" when he was asked about the possibility of signing the Holland international from Internazionale.

United have been trying to play down the matter for weeks, repeatedly informing reporters they are not interested in the player, but a deal is actually in place providing Sneijder agrees to lower his financial requirements.

Ferguson was quoted in one Sunday newspaper saying: "If he [Sneijder] wants to come, he must accept our contract offer. If not, we have other options in mind. We're done talking." The United manager has since denied saying such a thing but this is, in fact, the accurate and latest position.

Source :www.guardian.co.uk

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Cesc Fábregas back in training but doubts over Arsenal future remain

Cesc Fábregas has had to sit out Arsenal's pre-season fixtures so far as he continues his recovery from a hamstring injury. Photograph: Ian Kington/AFP/Getty Images

Cesc Fábregas is back in training with Arsenal as he steps up his recovery from the hamstring injury that has kept him out of the club's pre-season fixtures but his future in north London remains in some doubt.

Arsenal's next friendly is against Benfica on Saturday, yet it is unclear whether Fábregas will fly out with Arsène Wenger's squad on Friday. The Catalan's lack of match action may mean that Wenger decides he should continue his rehabilitation at the club's London Colney training base.

Fábregas wants to move to Barcelona, with his boyhood team interested in the 24-year-old rejoining them after he departed for Arsenal in 2003, although Wenger repeatedly suggested during last weekend's Emirates Cup that Fábregas could recommit to Arsenal. Fábregas will take part in Thursday's official club photo-shoot.

Carl Jenkinson has vowed to challenge Bacary Sagna for the right-back's first-team starting berth. The 19-year-old, who signed this summer from Charlton Athletic, said: "I'd like to think I'm quite an ambitious person so I want to get into that starting XI and I want to stake my claim to be a first-team regular. It's up to me to work hard and impress whenever I can.

"Obviously there are going to be opportunities in pre-season, and in training every day so I'm looking forward to working hard and doing as well as I can in an Arsenal shirt. Bac's a really nice guy, very friendly and I'm sure it will be good for us both – him to be pushing me and me pushing him. It's always healthy in a team environment to have that competition, and hopefully we can bring the best out of each other."

Arsenal's young centre-back Kyle Bartyley has signed a two-year contract extension that will keep him at the club until 2014.

The 20-year-old FA Youth Cup-winner made a combined 32 senior appearances on loan at Rangers and Sheffield United last season but to date has played only once for Arsenal's first team, in a Champions League tie with Olympiakos in 2009.

"If I'm honest, I don't think I was anywhere near the level to play for Arsenal last season," he told the club's website. "But I've come back, I feel really strong and I feel that I am ready now. I am a little bit different to the other centre-backs.

"I like the physical side of the game and I see myself as a leader. If Arsène decides that he wants me in the first team then that will be fantastic."

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

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