Google Maps satellite photos of US government's reserve fleet

The United States government’s three reserve ship sites can be seen via satellite photos taken by Google Maps.

The National Defense Reserve Fleet is a group of ships that are used for “national defence and national emergency” crises.

The 'Boneyard': £22bn 'military aircraft cemetery' on Google Maps.

More than 170 vessels, managed by the Department of Transportations Maritime Administration, are located at James River, Virginia, Beaumont, Texas and Suisun Bay, California.

Its ships are classified as either ready “reserve force ships” (RRF), which can be put back into service between 10 and 120 days or “non-retention vessels”, which are past their serviceable life and have been nominated for disposal.
It is another example of how the US government’s disposal of military machinery.
On Monday, a spectacular series of new high-resolution Google Earth satellite images were released of the world’s most expensive military cemetery, a £22.6 billion centre dubbed “The Boneyard”.
The 2,600 acre facility, officially known Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, is home to thousands of outdated aeroplanes and helicopters mothballed by the United States Air Force and other allied forces.
Established under Section 11 of the Merchant Ship Sales Act of 1946, NDRF vessels have supported emergency shipping requirements in seven wars and crises, according to is official website.
They were used by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support relief efforts during Hurricane Katrina.

Officials say that of the 93 non-retention vessels in the fleet, 70 are in the disposal process, or are ready for disposal while a further 23 are being prepared for disposal.
Last month the US government announced that a cleanup operation of Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet had been expanded.
A MARAD spokesman said that when a ship becomes obsolete, the department arranged for their disposal in an “environmentally sensitive manner”.
“When a ship is recycled, the recycler often salvages and sells metal and other materials, and disposes of other materials in accordance with state and federal law," he added.

By Telegraph.co.uk

Skype on Verizon: A Big Deal or Not?

Verizon Wireless and Skype say they’re teaming to bring Skype to nine BlackBerry and Android phones on the Verizon network.

I'm not sure if this is just an intriguing partnership or a major moment in phone history. But at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Verizon Wireless and Skype announced that they're working together to bring Skype to nine BlackBerry and Android phones on the Verizon network. A version of Skype Mobile will be available next month, permitting free Skype-to-Skype calls, chatting, and Skype Out calls to any phone number, including cheap international rates. And it'll all be done using flat-rate data plans rather than phone minutes.
There's nothing inherently historic about Skype being available on phones -- it's on the iPhone (albeit over Wi-Fi only right now) and I first used the service on a Windows Mobile handset years ago. (Only briefly, though -- it taxed the phone to the breaking point, and voice quality was pretty miserable.)

But a major carrier such as Verizon not only grudgingly permitting Skype but buddying up with it as a selling point for its phones is an interesting twist. I look forward to trying Skype Mobile on my Droid when it's available. And I have a few questions in the meantime...
Is there any integration with the phones' standard phone features? Say, access to the phone address book from within Skype? Or-dare I wish for it-the ability to route all calls through Skype, as Google's Google Voice app permits on BlackBerry and Android handsets? (Yes, I know that Google Voice isn't comparable to Skype-it uses phone minutes, and Skype doesn't)
How well does it work for incoming calls? Skype Mobile can run in the background, and I presume that you can use a Skypein phone number to permit people to dial a standard phone number and reach you in Skype. But does all this work smoothly enough that you could comfortably use Skype to take calls rather than the phone's standard phone features?
How's the quality? As good as a standard cell call? Better?
Are there any gotchas? On paper, this whole deal sounds...suspiciously enticing. The better Skype Mobile works, the more likely it is that lots of Verizon customers will do most (or all?) of their calling using it. Even if Skype cut Verizon in on any revenue it made, that couldn't be good for Verizon's bottom line.

More thoughts once the app's available.
For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com. Story copyright © 2010, Technologizer. All rights reserved.

Nexus One Multitouch Arrives Officially

The update also adds the Google Goggles app;

Ever since the Google Nexus One was announced (and then released) last month, talks were on about its forthcoming multitouch support. We all knew that the phone was more than capable to integrate multitouch gestures. Google, however, for some reason, chose not to include it in the initial firmware that the Nexus Ones came. There was a small fix that enabled multitouch in the browser. But that was from unofficial channels.
That was then. Yesterday, Google issued a small OTA (Over The Air) update for the Nexus One that brings in multitouch support to it - apart from numerous other improvements. Multitouch has been enabled in the gallery, browser and Google Maps where now you can pinch and zoom - just like on the iPhone. Google Maps has also been updated to version 3.4 and brings with it items synchronization, search suggestions from users' personal maps history, and a very interesting "night mode" in Maps Navigation. The update also adds the Google Goggles application that was first seen in December 2009.
Under the skin, there seems to be not much of a change. We can expect another update in the near future that will help Google fix the 3G connectivity issues that many users faced initially. As for the update to arrive for on your phone, you would have to be at the mercy of your operator to have it issued for you. Of course, there is another way out where you can update manually to get this same OTA version. More on that here.
As always, if you plan to update, do take a backup of all your data. Just in case, you know.

Techtree.com

Nokia Phones Offering Free GPS for 74 Countries

Nokia on Thursday introduced free driving and walking directions for 74 countries on a range of their mobile phones, in a direct challenge to Google and the entire GPS navigation industry.
The new version of Ovi Maps, available today on 10 phones with more existing models to be added in the next several weeks, will offer voice-guided driving and walking directions featuring text-to-speech, lane assistance, live traffic and road works information, and detailed content from partners including Lonely Planet and Time Out, all for free. Maps will cover 180 countries; navigation will be available in 74, including the U.S. and Canada. By March, all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the software.
"I expect that this will be globally available, including in the United States," said Nokia executive vice president for services Tero Ojanpera.
Not surprisingly, shares of GPS makers Tomtom and Garmin fell sharply on the news.
Google received plenty of press when it recently introduced free voice-guided navigation with the Motorola Droid. But the Droid and its GSM doppelganger, the Milestone, are available in relatively few countries, while Nokia's smartphones are best-sellers across a huge swathe of the world. The 5800, for instance, which is almost unknown in the U.S., sold more than 3 million units in its first six months on the market in Europe and Asia, according to Nokia.
Nokia has offered Ovi Maps navigation for a while, and bundled the service with a Nokia 5800 phone and a car kit to create a "navigation edition" which we reviewed recently. But for almost all of their phones up until now, voice-guided navigation carried a monthly fee and content such as Lonely Planet guides added an additional fee. All of those fees are now gone.
Ojanpera wouldn't explain how partners such as Lonely Planet, Michelin Guides, WCities and Time Out are making money now that Nokia is offering their formerly-for-pay products for free; he also wouldn't confirm or deny that including free navigation would cause smartphone prices to rise. Rather, improved location-based services will enable better mobile advertising and location-based applications, he said.
"It's not about increased prices; it's about having something consumers want," he said.
Nokia's new navigation move comes naturally from their 2008 acquisition of map provider NAVTEQ, which was part of a larger strategy to put location-based services at the forefront, Ojanpera said.
"This is a worldwide map database second to none, which actually enables us to do things that nobody else can do," he said.
Nokia's mapping technology offers several advantages over Google's, Ojanpera said. Ovi Maps can live on your phone's memory card rather than being continually downloaded to your phone, greatly reducing data traffic and letting navigation work even when the phone has no signal. (The maps for the U.S. and Canada take up about 1.6 gigabytes, he said.) The maps also use vector graphics rather than bitmaps, which means they use much less bandwidth when they're streaming to your phone over the network – one-tenth the data traffic of Google maps, Ojanpera said. The low data traffic will appeal to wireless operators, he said.

Nokia's product also has unusually good pedestrian directions, Ojanpera said, including footpaths, one-way streets and other pedestrian-only routes that don't appear on automotive maps. The software includes weather forecasts, 3D renderings of some landmarks, and the ability to post your location to Facebook updates.
Nokia's announcement could have a huge effect on the dedicated GPS navigation industry, especially in countries such as India where Nokia dominates the smartphone market. According to a Nokia press release, there are already about as many Nokia smartphone owners capable of using Ovi Maps as there are dedicated GPS owners in the world.
Ovi Maps is available today for the Nokia N97 Mini, 5800, E52, E55, E72, 5230, 6710, 6730 and X6 phones. Not a single one of those phones is currently available from a U.S. carrier, though some of them are sold unlocked here in the US. We're hoping the software will be available on U.S. carrier-supported phones such as the Nokia E71x soon.

• 

Microsoft to patch hole in Internet Explorer

Microsoft will patch a hole in its Internet Explorer browser that may have allowed Chinese hackers access to human rights activists' e-mail accounts.
The firm normally issues patches at a set time each month but said that the attention the problem had received forced it to move more quickly.
It follows the French and German governments decision to advise citizens to use other browsers.
The bad publicity has allowed rivals such as Firefox to gain market share.
According to web analytics company StatCounter Firefox is now a close second to Internet Explorer (IE) in Europe, with 40% of the market compared to Microsoft's 45% share.
In some markets, including Germany and Austria, Firefox has overtaken IE, the firm said.
Microsoft said it had now decided to act on the security hole.
"Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability," said Microsoft's general manager of Microsoft's trustworthy computing security group George Stathakopoulos.
"We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update is the right decision at this time," he said.
He said that the only successful attacks "to date" were against IE 6.
"We continue to recommend customers update to Internet Explorer 8 to benefit from the improved security protection it offers," he said in a security advisory.
Following the high profile attacks on Google, Microsoft admitted that IE was a "weak link" in the attacks.
It said that the vulnerability could allow hackers to remotely run programs on infected machines.
The recent spate of attacks were alleged to have hit more than 30 companies including Google and Adobe.
Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the attacks.

BBC News

10 cool new toys from CES

By John D. Sutter and Brandon Griggs, CNN
Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) -- Three-dimensional televisions, Internet-enabled TVs, touch-screen "tablet" computers, e-book readers and other fun new gadgets were scattered all over the enormous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
CES, which ended on Sunday, is regarded as one of the best trade shows for spotting new technologies before they take off. DVDs, CD players and Blu-ray all were introduced at previous shows. It is the largest event of its kind in the world.
As we hunted through thousands of tech displays at the show this year, these 10 products particularly grabbed our attention. It's hard to say which, if any, of the new technologies shown at CES this year will become a hit with consumers.
But these 10 new toys proved to be useful, unique or just plain strange.
So, here they are, in no particular order. Please let us know what you think.

Toshiba CELL TV with gesture technology

Toshiba unveiled a prototype of a television that doesn't require a remote control -- TV watchers simply wave their hands in the air to control the menu, fast-forward movies and turn the volume up or down. Many TV makers are working on "gesture" technology for TVs, and it hasn't been perfected, but Toshiba is among the first to show it off publicly.
In a demo at CES, a woman put her palm out in a "halt" position to select items from a 3-D, spherical menu on the TV screen. She looked like she was swimming the breaststroke when she commanded the TV to zoom in on an image. The TV uses infrared technology to sense a viewer's movements in a particular zone of the room, which a demonstrator referred to as the "couch-potato zone."
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2011 or 2012

What's cool: The idea of technology that reads human gestures has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers and TVs.

TCL 3-D TV, sans glasses
One of the big problems with 3-D TV is that most systems, when they debut later this year, will require viewers to wear 3-D glasses. They're goofy, expensive and, some testers complain, cause headaches and nausea.
But TCL Corporation, the Chinese company that's a parent of RCA, showed off 3-D TV technology that doesn't require glasses. A company representative said the technology, which adds a layer of rippled lenses to the front of the TV screen to produce the three-dimensional effect, could be used in the home as well as on billboards.
"Basically, we put the glasses that you'd be wearing on the TV," a TCL spokeswoman said.
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2011 for commercial clients
What's cool: No irritating glasses.
Blio e-reader

Amid a crowd of promising new electronic readers at CES, this one stood out. This software application, built in part by futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil, turns almost any laptop, netbook or smartphone into an image-rich, full-color electronic reader. Blio uses publishers' original PDF files to preserve the exact format of books and magazines while supporting interactive multimedia, including video and Web links. It will launch with an online store featuring more than 1.2 million titles. Best of all: It's free.
Price: Did we mention it's free?
Available: Late February

Why it's cool: Blio also has a read-aloud feature and will translate to or from English. It looked impressive in a demo at CES. Tivit mobile TV add-on for phones
The Tivit, a cute, credit-card-sized device, catches live television signals -- like local weather and news -- and brings them to smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Droid.
The gadget is an intermediary step for people waiting for mobile-TV-enabled phones, and for those who don't want to purchase a new phone just to get TV on it. Tivit, from a company called Valups, uses an antennae to pick up mobile free digital TV signals from local television stations, and transmits them to phones via Wi-Fi, which it also creates, meaning you don't have to find someone else's Internet hot-spot to get a connection.
Price: About $100
Available: Spring 2010
Why it's cool: Upgrade to mobile TV without getting a new phone. Plus it's sleek.
Samsung TV remote with a TV screen on it

How meta. Samsung unveiled at CES a television remote with its own television screen. The "All-in-One-Premium" remote, which also plays its own audio, can be tuned to different TV channels than the TV it controls. It will come with Samsung's upcoming C9000 high-definition TV, and will be sold separately, said spokesman Jermain Anderson.

So, why would a person want such a thing? A Samsung spokesman said the TV-playing remote has as few functions. Say you're watching a sitcom while your roommate wants to watch a basketball game. One of you can watch on the remote, he said. The remote-watcher can put headphones on so you can both hear the audio.
Chalk this one up to another big trend at CES: Digital screens are ending up everywhere.
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2010
Why it's cool: It's so over-the-top unnecessary that it's a little bit interesting.

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 tablet-laptop

Tablet computers created quite a stir at CES. These mid-sized devices fall somewhere between mobile phones and laptops in the computer continuum.
Among the standout tablets at CES was Lenovo's U1 hybrid. It looks like a laptop, but its touch-sensitive screen pops off to become its own tablet. Independent from the keyboard, the screen looks like a big iPhone, and is said to be ideal for reading digital books, sorting through and resizing photos and surfing the Web.
The tablet is not without issues, though. One short-circuited in a demo for CNN.
Price: Less than $1,000
Available: Summer 2010
Why it's cool: It's got the best of both worlds -- a take-with-you tablet for consuming media, and a keyboard for content creation.
Intel Infoscape

It's not a consumer product yet that we know of, but this multitouch-screen display at Intel's CES booth fascinated us and just about everyone else who saw it. Two seven-by-seven-foot HD screens showed an ever-shifting array of 576 cubes, each representing a photo, video or other piece of Internet content pulled from 20,000 sources and more than 20 live feeds. Touch a cube, and it expanded the content in real time.
Available: Now?
Price: Unknown
Why it's cool: Can you imagine your digital life arrayed like this in your home or office? Plus it just looked neat.
Palm Pre Plus

This newly announced smartphone, along with its thinner cousin the Pixi Plus, wouldn't be a huge upgrade over the current Pre except for one novel feature: The capability to create a 3G mobile hotspot for up to five laptops or other devices. The function comes in a downloadable app that lets Pre users create a personal Wi-Fi cloud on Verizon's 3G network.
Price: Unannounced
Available: January 25
Why it's cool: Wi-Fi everywhere you go, without paying Starbucks fees or buying a wireless card, sounds pretty sweet.
Intel Reader

OK, so it's an expensive niche product. And we've already given some love to Intel in this article. But this handheld device that scans printed text, converts it to voice and reads it aloud seems too groundbreaking to ignore. Hold the it over a page of a book, snap a high-res image of the text and the thing will read it aloud to you almost immediately. It also can play documents you transfer from a computer.
Price: About $1,500
Available: Now

Why it's cool: Yes, it's pricey, but this gadget could be a life-changing tool for the dyslexic or vision-impaired.

Parrot AR.Drone


It's a remote-controlled helicopter. And a gaming device. And yet another use for your iPhone. This flying toy is about the size of a pizza and can hover almost motionlessly, propelled by four rotors and an on-board computer. Users steer the Drones with iPhones, which act as remote controllers. A camera mounted on the AR.Drone sends a live video feed to the iPhone, meaning that you see what the Drone sees. Parrot is creating augmented-reality video games for the open-source device.
Price: less than $500
Available: Summer 2010
Why it's cool: It's fun, it's different and it can hang suspended in the air like the spaceship in "District 9."

CNN

Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension

It was more than half a century ago, in a 1955 episode of “The Honeymooners,” that Kramden, the parsimonious bus driver played by Jackie Gleason, told his wife, Alice, that he had not yet bought a new television because “I’m waiting for 3-D.”
The wait will soon be over. A full-fledged 3-D television turf war is brewing in the United States, as manufacturers unveil sets capable of 3-D and cable programmers rush to create new channels for them.
Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. Beginning at around $2,000, the 3-D sets will, at first, cost more than even the current crop of high-end flat-screens, and buyers will need special glasses — techie goggles, really — to watch in 3-D.
But programmers and technology companies are betting that consumers are almost ready to fall in love with television in the third dimension. In part, it could be the “Avatar” effect: with 3-D films gaining traction at the box office — James Cameron’s “Avatar” surpassed the staggering $1 billion mark last weekend — companies are now determined to bring an equivalent experience to the living room.
Anticipating this coming wave, ESPN said Tuesday that it would show World Cup soccer matches and N.B.A. games in 3-D on a new network starting in June, and Discovery, Imax and Sony said they would jointly create a 3-D entertainment channel next year. The satellite service DirecTV is expected to announce its own 3-D channels at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where every major television manufacturer is planning to announce 3-D televisions and compatible Blu-ray DVD players on Wednesday.
“The stars are aligning to make 2010 the launch year of 3-D,” said John Taylor, a vice president for LG Electronics USA. “It’s still just in its infancy, but when there is a sufficient amount of content available — and lots of people are working on this — there will be a true tipping point for consumers.”
At that point, the question becomes whether consumers — many of whom have only recently upgraded to costly new high-definition sets — will want to watch in three dimensions enough to pay for the privilege. “I think 90 percent of the males in this country would be dying to watch the Super Bowl and be immersed in it,” said Riddhi Patel, an analyst at the research firm iSuppli.
But will the experience translate to other entertainment? Ms. Patel said, “You don’t necessarily want the ladies of ‘The View’ sitting around you when you watch them.”
For most consumers, 3-D is still far in the distance. With the announcement this week, the media companies are trying to place themselves at the forefront of an emerging technology, much as they did for HDTV a decade ago.
 It took high-definition television about a decade to catch on — to the point where it has become part of the entertainment mainstream, with an adequate stock of HD programming and the sets now cheap enough to entice middle-class buyers. Analysts expect 3-D television to go through the same curve, initially attracting first adopters for whom price is little or no object and gradually moving out to other affluent and then middle-class homes as sets become cheaper and programmers create enough 3-D fare.
Or, of course, the technology could be a total flop.
For decades 3-D was a gimmick for B-movies and occasionally on television (in bad quality with flimsy paper glasses), but newer technology has largely erased those memories. Peter M. Fannon, a vice president at Panasonic, called the new sets “totally different than what one had seen over the last 20 to 30 years.”
In 3-D, television makers see an opportunity to persuade households that have already bought HDTVs to return to the electronics store. Though television sales jumped 17 percent in 2009, the industry needs new innovations to keep the cash register ringing.
“Three-D is an effort by the industry to come up with something that will motivate consumers to trade up,” said Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Research.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief of Dreamworks Animation, said producers were preparing “an enormous surge in 3-D content, with images that are truly beautiful on these new monitors.”
Leading the charge to television, the pioneering sports network ESPN said it would show at least 85 live events on a 3-D channel starting in June. “The sports genre is probably the best suited to exploit this technology,” said Sean Bratches, an executive vice president at ESPN. The company has held preliminary talks with Comcast and other operators about gaining distribution; the 3-D channel could come at an added cost to subscribers. It will go dark when not showing live events.
The joint venture among Discovery Communications, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Imax Corporation will be a full-time channel featuring natural history, movies, sports, music and other programming.
New 3-D televisions, like the 3-D screens in theaters, work by dividing picture images into two sets, one for each eye. A viewer must wear special glasses, so each eye captures a different image, creating the illusion of depth. Filming entails two connected cameras, one for the left-eye image and the other for the right.
Manufacturers have developed two technologies for 3-D glasses in the home. In so-called polarized glasses, which can cost under a dollar, each lens blocks a set of images transmitted in certain types of light. “Active” glasses, which are better suited for LCD screens in particular, have battery-powered shutters that open and close rapidly, so each eye sees different views of each frame. These glasses can cost up to $100, but television makers are expected to package at least two pairs with each monitor.
On the horizon is technology that allows people to watch 3-D without glasses, but that has severe limitations, like forcing viewers to sit at a certain distance.
Mike Vorhaus, the managing director of new media for Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm, said 3-D was many years away from widespread adoption. For now, he said, it is “one more appetizer” for consumers who “already have a lot to digest.”
Indeed, a number of hurdles remain, including a lack of production equipment and dueling 3-D transmission standards. But backers like David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, say 3-D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks “closest to real life.”

By BRIAN STELTER and BRAD STONE
The original article -->NYTimes