LTE-Advanced gets the go-ahead, but don't expect faster 4G as a result

The 4G network standards approved last week by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) stadards body may improve the mobile data experience soon, even if consumers don't actually see the 100Mbps mobile speed for which they were designed.
The ITU gave its seal of approval to the two new standards, LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced, at the ITU Radiocommunication Assembly in Geneva last Wednesday. WirelessMAN-Advanced, the second generation of WiMax, is not expected to be widely deployed. But LTE-Advanced, the next version of the Long-Term Evolution standard chosen by most carriers moving to 4G, could start improving mobile networks soon.

Will RIM survive? The issues the new CEO faces

As Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie step down as co-CEOs at Research in Motion, the company is at a crossroads. Thorsten Heins steps into the CEO chair with many daunting obstacles ahead of him and RIM.
Talk has been swirling in the past six months about the relevance of RIM's top device: the BlackBerry. Now that the iPhone has made its way into the enterprise, the BlackBerry has lost its "in," and the company is scrambling to keep its head above water.
In this PDF report, we review the issues facing RIM and Heins, such as: Who will truly be the company's leader, what is going to be its

What JavaScript's inventor really thinks about Google Dart

Google's Dart language, which attempts to address JavaScript's supposed weaknesses, is getting a mixed reaction from the inventor of JavaScript itself, Brendan Eich.
While admiring Google's efforts to make the Document Object Model more usable as part of Dart, Eich was skeptical about its chance for support in browsers. "Dart is one of the many languages that currently compiles to JavaScript, and that's a lot to say about that because like in Native Client from Google, I don't think Dart is going to be natively supported ever in other browsers. Not in Safari, not in IE (Internet Explorer)," said Eich, who is CTO at Mozilla, at the Node Summit conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. JavaScript has been supported in popular browsers, including Mozilla's own Firefox browser.

RANGO

In the film, Rango is a pet chameleon who lives in a terrarium. He has long thought himself a hero, but then finds himself removed from his contemporary American southwest surroundings and ending up in an Old West town called Dirt, which is populated by various desert critters garbed like characters out of a spaghetti western. As he’s always thought himself a hero, Rango establishes himself as the lawman, strolling the streets as a sheriff like character.Unknown to him, the ‘good guy’ role doesn’t do very well in Dirt — with a whole cemetery filled with good guy tombstones. But that doesn’t stop Rango from trying, constantly seeking to fit in, with his surroundings, no matter how challenging — just like a good chameleon! At a certain point in the narrative, Rango will come to question everything about himself.

REAL STEEL

A boxing drama set in the near-future where 2,000-pound robots that look like humans do battle.

Apart from silencing opponents and enriching personal friends, the one thing Vladimir Putin was really good at was fixing elections. In this, he had a perfect track record since March 2000—until last Sunday. The Russian parliamentary election on December 4th was neither free nor fair. Several opposition groups had been barred from the ballot; officials pressured voters to support the ruling party; the vote-count was marred by ballot-stuffing and the rigging of protocols. But even in these conditions—and even by the official figures—most Russians voted against Vladimir Putin. His party, United Russia,received 49.3 percent of the vote, losing its two-thirds supermajority in Parliament for the first time in eight years. Compared to the last poll in 2007, when it registered 64.3 percent, United Russia’s result represents a net loss of 13 million votes and 77 seats in the 450-seat Duma (down from 315 to 238).

Being, Consciousness, and the Future of Europe

The eurozone is going to the wire in its struggle to preserve the euro. Although some criticize it for taking too much time, it is encouraging to see that it seems to have finally found the will to defend itself against a looming economic disaster stemming from the potential collapse of its common currency.

That radical steps toward a fiscal union are needed if the euro is to be preserved few would deny. It is another question, though, whether such steps should be seen as strengthening the political unity of Europe. It seems obvious to some that the two march hand in hand, but what seems obvious is in itself no guarantee of truth. Some critical reasoning seems to be in order.

The Autumn of the US-Russia Reset

Acolleague and I have described the post-Soviet era in Russia as the “age of impunity,” whereby even the most howlingly obvious crimes of man or state are implausibly denied or whitewashed in a manner redolent of Stalinist propaganda. Two such examples have furnished themselves in quick succession in the last month, one relating to the conviction of a notorious Russian arms dealer and the other to a Russian nuclear scientist’s facilitation of Iran’s atom bomb project. Both acts would have spelt the end of the US-Russian “reset” without the added complications of renewed brinkmanship over the placement of a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and the drubbing delivered to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in a transparently fraudulent parliamentary election on December 4th.