Cody Taylor

A recent e-mail from Eastman Kodak Co. didn’t lead to a Kodak moment for Vanessa Daniele. It got her angry.

Web users in the U.S. surf the Internet at an average broadband speed of 3.9 Mbps, according to an upcoming Akamai report obtained by GigaOm’s Om Malik.That’s higher than the worldwide figure of 1.5 Mpbs, but lower than average speeds in 16 other countries. Malik (and others) expect connections in the U.S. to continue to get faster…

Virginia Tech University engineers Dennis Hong and Gabriel Goldman say their robots, called Hydras, which can quickly roll up and down poles and columns, are designed to inspect bridges, construction sites and high-rise buildings, tasks that injure more than 1,000 people a year.

smooth wombat writes “If everything goes according to plan, an experiment designed to test whether plants can grow in the limited lunar gravity will hitch a ride with a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize. ‘The current prototype for the greenhouse is a 15-inch-high (37.5-centimeter-high) reinforced glass cylinder that’s about 7 inches (18 centimeters) wide on the bottom. Seeds for a rapid-cycle type of Brassica plant — basically, mustard seeds — would be planted in Earth soil within the container.’ The press release from Paragon Space Development Corporation outlines its partnership with Odyssey Moon to be the first to grow a plant on another world. In addition to the experiment, Paragon will be helping Odyssey with the thermal control system and lander design. To win the prize, Odyssey must land its craft on the lunar surface by the end of 2014.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

head_dunce writes “It seems that this economy has inspired a lot of businesses to move to Linux, with Red Hat posting profits that beat everyone’s expectations. There’s a dark side to being a highly profitable company in a down economy, though — now there are talks of Citigroup and Oracle wanting to buy Red Hat. For a while now, we’ve been watching Yahoo fend off Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer so that they could stay independent, but the fight seems to be a huge distraction for Yahoo, with lots of energy (and money) invested. Will Red Hat stay independent? What potential buyer would make for a good parent company?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A police IT forensics specialist has had some of his personal details leak via The Pirate Bay. Jim Keyzer, who led the investigation into the popular tracker, has just discovered that his girlfriend’s email account was compromised by hackers, who obtained several passwords and other personal documents.

The CIA claims that a year ago hackers invaded the networks of power utilities outside the U.S., causing power outages in several cities, and issuing extortion demands.

You might not intuitively associate wildflowers with mathematics, but as Ian Simpson Architects proves, the relationship between the two can inspire beautiful architecture. The architecture firm was part of the winning team in an open, international design competition to design the addition to an existing building at the British National Wildflower

Why limit your on-the-go Web surfing to Wi-Fi hot spots when you can get online anywhere you can find a cell signal? Here’s how to pick the right service and device to bring mobile broadband to your laptop.

In the four years since the Mac Mini was introduced, and Apple has added some solid firepower under the hood, while leaving the Mini’s basic nature intact.