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As if incoming students didn’t have enough on their plate, Cal State - and several other colleges - are teaming up with the Educational Testing Service(ETS) to create a test that will evaluate Internet intelligence. The test aims to measure whether students can find reliable online information, and give proper credit to the material. The test is expected to be available next year to students, and will be voluntary. This quote says it all:
This test measures a skill as important as having mathematics and English skills when you come to the university,” says Roth. “If you don’t come to the university with it, you need to know that you are lacking some skills that educated people are expected to have.
Read More 
| USA Today
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As more and more people in China get connected to the Internet, the number of those addicted to the Internet rises. The country promotes use of Internet for business and education, but believes that places like Internet cafes are “eroding public morality”. These beliefs have led the country to open the first officially licensed Internet addiction clinic. The clinic is ran by Dr. Tao Ran, with most of the patients between the ages of 14 - 24 suffering from nervousness, fear, depression, agitation, and an unwillingness to interact with others. Dr. Ran estimates that about 2.5 million Chinese are currently suffering from Internet addiction, although not everyone agrees on the accuracy of that number. “As the number of the Netizens grows, the number of the addicted people will grow as well, but we should not worry about the issue too much,” says Kuang Wenbo, a professor at the Beijing Renmin University. “The young men at the age of growing up have their own problems. Even if there was no Internet they will get addicted to other things.”
Read More | USA Today
The Google Video Viewer program that launched less than a week ago is already running into problems. It seems that users are using the service to upload copyrighted full-length movies and television shows that violate Google’s TOS which states “anyone uploading content to the search tool must have the rights to distribute the video and that copyrighted material is barred without the express consent of the copyright holder.” A Google spokesman says the company is working to remove all videos in violation of copyright laws. Google’s TOS goes on to say, “anyone who has a copyright concern or complaint to send us a DMCA content removal notice.”
Read More | CNet
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Those of you using broadband may soon find yourself paying new universal service taxes similar to those you see on a standard phone bill. The decision of course would be made by Congress, who would have to change the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This is the bill which is responsible for the Universal Service Fund that we see on phone bills. The USF should continue to be “industry funded,” but the base of contributors should be expanded to “all providers of two-way communications, regardless of technology used, to ensure competitive neutrality,” a bipartisan coalition of rural legislators said in a June 28 letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, which will be drafting the rewrites. This would also mean that companies providing services over broadband lines, like Vonage for example, would also be liable to pay into the fund.
Read More | CNet
Piper Jaffray declares Apple the “Clear Winner” in Music Download Traffic
Posted by Kristin Wenzel Categories: Internet, Music,
Using data from Alexa, senior analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray announced that his findings where somewhat unsurprising when calculated out to a “web traffic report card” style examination of the top four legal music download sites. Apple’s iTunes got an “A” rating after a healthy 11% increase in web traffic and an 11% increase in reach. Napster came in second, also with an “A” rating.
“We believe that Apple.com is the clear winner in our second grade report on the audio download industry,” Munster concluded. “Apple has the highest web traffic rank (64) of the four and also has seen the most increase in web traffic rank and reach over the past 3 months.”
Do note that Alexa rankings do not include any Mac users - they are tabulated only from people using Internet Explorer with the Alexa Toolbar installed.
Read More | iPodLounge.com
Don’t Like Hasselhoff? How to Make Your Own Plane!
Posted by Kristin Wenzel Categories: Internet, Misc. Tech, Mods / Hacks,
A couple of days ago, Andru posted directions for making a David Hasselhoff paper plane. Well, I got curious and poked around in Photoshop a bit, and here’s a “how to” for building your own paper plane blueprint with whatever you want on the wings. For the sake of demonstration, I used a picture of Jenna Jameson (don’t worry, it’s not a nudie picture) pulled from Google – who wouldn’t want a plane with Jenna posing on the wings?
- First, I took the original into Photoshop. Then, using the polygon lasso and trial and error, found the degree to which both sides of Hasslehoff’s head were rotated to the left and right, respectively. It’s 17°, by the way. It took a lot of guesswork.
- Then, I took my picture of Jenna and divided it in half, cut half of it (ctrl+x or apple+x) and pasted it into my frame containing hasslehoff. I then rotated it 180° and positioned it, and then rotated it 17° and lined it up perfectly. The same was repeated for the other half, except rotating it -17° (the opposite direction).
- After lining up both halves of the body with the airplane fold lines, I took the polygon lasso again, went to the bottom layer and lassoed the exposed hasslehoff-head, and deleted it. The result? An airplane blueprint with Jenna Jameson, not David Hasslehoff, on the wings.
You can of course use this with whatever image you’d like. Experiment! Send them in! Make one with the GearLive logo! Show your friends! That’s right, I did all the work so you don’t have to.
Full Size Diagram 
| Print Out Kristin’s Jenna-plane
Read More | David Hasselhoff Plane
Click Defense Inc., a seller of online marketing tools, have said that they have filed a lawsuit against Google Inc. because they have failed to protect those who use their advertising program from “click fraud”, costing at least $5 million. The lawsuit, filed June 24th in San Jose, Ca, is also seeking a class action status. A spokesman for Google has said, “We believe the suit is without merit and we will defend ourselves against it vigorously.” The thing is, “click fraud” is not fraud at all, at least by the standards of the law. Rather, it is an industry term used to describe the deliberate clicking on Web search ads by users with no plans to do business with the advertiser. Rival companies might employ people or machines to do this because the advertiser has to pay the Web search provider for each click.
Read More | Slashdot
DVD Jon Cracks Google Video Viewer Software In Under 24 Hours
Posted by Devin Categories: Internet, Mods / Hacks,
DVD Jon, the Norwegian who created software to unlock copy-protection codes on DVD movies about 6 years ago, said he only needed one day to crack the Google video viewer that launched Monday. Keeping true to his word, Jon Lech Johansen posted the software on his “So Sue Me” website that he claims will modify the viewer, allowing it to play videos stored on any server. Google has not yet responded to any emails/messages left early Wednesday morning at its California headquaters, but I’m sure we’ll have their take on this by days’ end.
Read More | So Sue Me
This has got to be making the leeches on P2P networks salivating right now. Cablevision has teamed up with Narad Networks to launch a 100Mbps cable service in Metropolitan New York. Since the connection is symmetrical, this amounts to 50Mbps both upstream and downstream, and uses the existing cabling. Better yet, this is only the initial deployment; further architecture developments will allow up to a 10Gbps over the last mile. Cablevision services 4.4 million homes in New York. I’ve never wanted to live in Manhattan so bad.
Read More | PR Newswire
Monday was the day that Google officially launched their new in-browser video playback site, Google Video. The site features content from CNN, The Weather Channel, Fox News, Food Network, The Discovery Channel and many more, many of which charge a fee to view. If you’re more interested in free content, you can search for videos from Greenpeace, Gamespot, PS3, breakdancing and a few other topics and see what comes up. The site offers a general search function (ex. New York) or advanced search functions that allow you to look for a specific show (ex. Title:Nightline).
Our mission is to organize the world’s information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content - everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.
Read More | Google Video
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