Action urged on broadband future
 High-speed broadband could boost moves to use telemedicine |
Moving to the next generation of broadband technology could deliver huge economic rewards, says a report.
The Broadband Stakeholder Group report said the benefit could be in excess of £16bn - the estimated cost of upgrading the UK's net infrastructure.
But those benefits should not tempt a rush to invest too quickly and boost speeds, it said.
It warned that some of the benefits will only materialise when high-speed networks have reached most UK homes.
High costs
The report looks at the likely impact of upgrading the UK's broadband infrastructure so it can handle speeds up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).
Although some parts of the existing infrastructure can already deliver domestic net speeds of up to 24 Mbps it is widely accepted that a huge programme of work will be needed to get the whole country upgraded.
The report puts a price tag of £16bn on work to upgrade the networks to reach 80% of UK homes but said: "the long-term benefits to the UK associated with the wide-scale deployment could outweigh the cost of deployment".
Putting an exact figure on the benefits was difficult, said the report, but there were likely to be widespread economic and social advantages to having faster networks.
 |  it matters more to do this right than to do it now 
Antony Walker, Broadband Stakeholder Group |
Economic benefits would accrue as faster networks would allow more people to work from home and allow businesses to be more distributed.
A nation wired for high-speed broadband would also benefit socially. Lifelong learning programmes would be easier to support, flexible working would be more viable and social exclusion could be diminished.
Despite these benefits the report did not condone a rush to start the upgrading programme.
"It is tempting to jump in feet-first, but it matters more to do this right than to do it now," said Antony Walker, head of the Broadband Stakeholder Group.
Far better, he said, would be to wait and prepare the UK so companies and investors are in a better position to start the upgrade.
But, he cautioned, the UK could not wait too long.
If the upgrade programme did not start within three to five years there was a danger that the UK could lose out, he said.
The report was prepared for a joint conference organised by the Broadband Stakeholder Group and Ofcom's Consumer Panel that will debate ways to get the UK started on its next generation broadband programme.
"It is imperative that we face the challenges of delivering a social dividend by looking at ways of delivering next generation access to all corners of the UK, alongside making the economic case for commercial roll out," said Anna Bradley, chair of the Ofcom Consumer Panel.
"We have a choice," said Ms Bradley. "Let's make the right one for all consumers and citizens."(bbc)Final spacewalk for Discovery astronauts
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- Shuttle Discovery's astronauts breezed through their third and final spacewalk Sunday, replacing an empty gas tank at the international space station and collecting a sample of dusty debris.
This NASA image shows the Japanese lab, bottom, and the forward section of Discovery, top left.
Spacewalkers Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. wrapped up their work so quickly that Mission Control threw in some extra chores.
The highlight of the 6½-hour spacewalk, for Garan, was a long ride on the space station's robot arm that swung him 80 feet out from the orbiting complex. He carried an empty nitrogen gas tank from one side of the station to the other, then returned with a full tank and plugged it in for use in the coolant system.
With the Earth 210 miles below and the space station the equivalent of eight stories away, it was a ride like no other. NASA called it the windshield wiper maneuver. It took Garan over Australia and the South Pacific, over Peru and beyond.
"How's your ride, Ronnie?" Fossum asked.
"Great!" Garan replied.
Don't Miss
The two squeezed in some stargazing as Garan rode on the robot arm. Fossum recalled how a schoolboy once asked him once whether he could see the stars during a spacewalk. "Indeed, you can," Fossum said. 
Afterward, Fossum returned to a big joint that he inspected during Thursday's spacewalk and gathered some dusty debris on two pieces of tape for analysis back on Earth. The joint turns the solar wings on the left side of the space station toward the sun, like the paddle wheels of a boat.
Flight director Annette Hasbrook said engineers don't know what the powdery residue might be.
That left joint is working fine, but the one controlling the solar wings on the right side is clogged with metal shavings and has been used sparingly since last fall. Energy production has been hampered as a result.
NASA wants to learn as much as they can about the joints, in hopes of figuring out why one ended up in such bad shape.
The spacewalkers performed a few more outdoor chores on Japan's Kibo lab, which was installed last week, and hooked up a newly repaired camera elsewhere on the space station.
"Well, fellas, you did an awful lot of good work today. You ought to be very proud of yourselves," shuttle pilot Kenneth Ham called out from inside.
Gaming gains celebrity status
| Margaret Robertson
Video game consultant and writer |
Margaret Robertson on how games and gamers are attracting more and more recognition.
 Games developer Hideo Kojima is gaining a high profile |
Like many commuters, one of my milder vices is leafing through a free copy of Metro on the morning train. It rarely disappoints - cute animals rescued from improbable peril, TV stars revealed to be dieting hoaxers, lovelorn fugitives betrayed by sausage addiction - but it's rarely worth slowing down from a rapid flick.
Today, though, I was brought to a standstill, not by the enduringly inexplicable photo of Mike Tyson cab-sharing with Aisleyne from Big Brother, but by a mean and moody quarter-page shot of a middle aged Japanese man.
Suddenly, alongside Amy and Blake and Peaches and Lily, here was Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid, and one of the best known game developers in the world.
But while Kojima had made it into the paper he hadn't made it into the fashion column or the interview slot.
He was smouldering out from an HMV promo advertising a signing session for the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
What else would you expect? Game designers just aren't great gossip fodder.
Rich rewards
It's hard to imagine David Braben on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, for all sorts of reasons.
Gillette, to my certain knowledge, has never approached Charles Cecil to be its new face, despite his formidable stubble, and I'm pretty sure Mike Tyson has never shared a cab with Matthew Smith.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that most Metro readers will never have heard of Braben, Cecil or Smith, nor be able to name off-hand the games for which they're revered (Elite, Broken Sword and Manic Miner, respectively).
 Guitar hero has changed relationship between games and music |
But Kojima's presence in the paper - albeit in a paid-for slot - is evidence of a trend that's been building for some time.
Game makers are gaining more and more recognition. In Britain they get OBEs, in France admittance to the Ordre des Artes et de Lettres. Game fans queue along Oxford Street to bag an autograph, and it's not unheard of for game studios to receive requests for candid developer calendars.
Nor are these emerging stars rubbing shoulders with an army of geeky nobodies.
Gaming is drawing celebrity to it like never before.
Throwing knickers
The arrival of Rock Band and Guitar Hero have changed the relationship of gaming and music forever.
At the moment the repertoire - Motley Crue and Def Leppard - may leave you cold, but the news stories show that games can be a better place to sell a single than iTunes, and a better place to launch an album than a TV show or a festival stage.
And if The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has left you wanting more Spielberg, then you'll need to head to your Wii, not the cinema, for his latest release, Boom Blox. And speaking of cinemas, the rash of game-inspired movies in the works is going to produce an epidemic of heart-throbs racing each other to come out as life-long gamers.
Expect hours of interviews with Prince of Persia Jake Gyllenhaal earnestly explaining how much he loved the original game on the Apple II, and whatever hunk bags the Gears of War lead to lay claim to 16-hour co-op marathons to get him into character.
 The World Cyber Games attracts big prize money |
Of course, the great thing about games is that there's scope for their consumers as well as their creators to become stars.
It's hard to imagine anyone throwing their knickers at a really prolific reader, or eBaying the kidney stones of someone who's seen a lot of films, but around the world top-class gamers are already celebrities.
Virtua Fighter experts get mobbed by girls in Japanese arcades. Korean Starcraft champs are on TV every night.
In Brazil the top Gunbound player was famous enough to get himself briefly kidnapped. Think it can't happen here? Sky already screens the Championship Gaming Series, and live e-sports events in the west attract audiences of tens of thousands.
Major events - such as the Electronic Sports World Cup and the World Cyber Games - have prize purses of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
New models
And money is a key issue. There's long been a theory that we don't get gaming celebrities because developers just don't have the charisma, or the looks, to be superstars.
The truth is colder: overwhelmingly they just don't have the money.
Being famous is an expensive business, and game makers were for many years most likely to be salaried employees, paid the same regardless of how much money their games made.
But that's changing: thanks to new distribution methods and new financial models, there are more and more ways for developers to work independently if they choose to, which lets them reach their market direct, speak their minds instead of towing publisher PR guidelines and retain more of the credit - and more of the profit.
All of a sudden, the indie kid who made Desktop Tower Defence is making more each year out of his ad revenue than lead designers on games that gross hundreds of millions. And wherever youth and money meet, fame follows.
So a year, or two, or three from now, there could be enough celebrity game developers that Mike Tyson would need to share a bus with them, not a cab.
Make no mistake, gaming is going to get celebrities, and celebrities are going to get gaming. But I'm still not betting you'll see them in the gossip section of the Metro. Not because they're too boring, or too ugly, or too poor. But because they're too smart.
Invasion of the Body Scanners
Ten of the busiest airports in the U.S. will begin using scanning machines at security checkpoints. The machines can see beneath clothing to detect weapons, and very little is left to the imagination of the TSA agent viewing the images. The viewers cannot see the person's face, and all images are instantly deleted, but not everyone likes the idea.
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Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security 
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport.
Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington started using a body scanner Friday. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.
"It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.
'Just Scratching the Surface'
Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. "We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging," Schear said.
The TSA effort could encourage scanners' use in rail stations, arenas and office
Scanners are used in a few courthouses, jails and U.S. embassies, as well as overseas border crossings, military checkpoints and some foreign airports such as Amsterdam's Schiphol.
A Scanner Nakedly
The scanners bounce harmless "millimeter waves" off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A TSA screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger.
The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers' faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender. "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back," Schear said.
The scanners aim to strengthen airport security by spotting plastic and ceramic weapons and explosives that evade metal detectors and are the biggest threat to aviation. Government audits have found that screeners miss a large number of weapons, bombs and bomb parts such as wires and timers that agents sneak through checkpoints.
"I'm delighted by this development," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former Homeland Security inspector general whose reports urged the use of body scanners. "This really is the ultimate answer to increasing screeners' ability to spot concealed weapons."
The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology.
"You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things," Siegel said.
'You Have to Go Along With It'
Passengers who went through a scanner at the Baltimore airport last week were intrigued, reassured and occasionally wary. The process took about 30 seconds on average.
Stepping into the 9-foot-tall glass booth, Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. "Some of this stuff seems a little crazy," Reardon said, "but in this day and age, you have to go along with it."
Scott Shafer of Phoenix didn't mind a screener looking at him underneath his shorts and polo shirt from a nearby room. The door is kept shut and blocked with floor screens. "I don't know that person back there. I'll never seem them," Shafer said. "Everything personal is taken out of the equation."
Steinhardt of the ACLU said passengers would be alarmed if they saw the image of their body. "It all seems very clinical and non-threatening -- you go through this portal and don't have any idea what's at the other end," he said.
Passengers scanned in Baltimore said they did not know what the scanner did and were not told why they were directed into the booth.
Magazine-size signs are posted around the checkpoint explaining the scanners, but passengers said they did not notice them.
Darin Scott of Miami was annoyed by the process.
"If you don't ask questions, they don't tell you anything," Scott said. When he asked a screener technical questions about the scanner, "he could not answer," Scott said.
Would You Rather Have a Pat-Down?
TSA spokesperson Sterling Payne said the agency is studying passenger reaction and could "get more creative" about informing passengers. "If passengers have questions," she said, "they need to ask the questions."
Passengers can decline to go through a scanner, but they will face a pat-down.
Schear, the Baltimore security director, said only 4 percent of passengers decline.
In Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where scanners have been tested since last year as an alternative to pat-downs, 90 percent of passengers choose to be scanned, the TSA says.
"Most passengers don't think it's any big deal," Schear said. "They think it's a piece of security they're willing to do." 
SPACE
Virtual Space Travel, Part 1: One Small Step
With the help of virtual worlds such as Second Life -- which can release them from the burdens of physics -- everyday people are starting to explore space without actually going there. So far, NASA has begun to host avatars on two islands in Second Life: one for experimenting and another for exploring.
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For those of us old enough to remember life before the Internet
Fast forward to today, and things are just a little different. In today's Internet-enabled world, ordinary citizens can explore the universe from the comfort of their own homes through the likes of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) 
Never before has the universe been so close within reach of everyday people.
Now, thanks to the virtual world of Second Life, the possibilities have been extended even further.
World Without Limitations
Today on Linden Lab's Second Life, ordinary people can make real contributions to mankind's understanding of the universe. They can collaborate with real-life space experts on spacecraft
"Everything science fiction has shown us on TV and in the movies is at our doorstep," Charles White, subject matter expert for virtual world technologies with NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL), told LinuxInsider. "Once you're in this virtualized environment, you're not limited by reality, and that's a real benefit."
Virtual Conferences
Freedom from the constraints of reality benefits myriad facets of NASA's work.
On a practical scale, for example, JPL held a conference at CalTech last summer, and 100 people attended physically while 40 people attended virtually via Second Life. The conference proceedings in the virtual world were broadcast for those in real-life attendance, including the miniature version of the auditorium that had been specially constructed in Second Life.
"What was really strange was that the real people could see the avatars," recounts White, who is also known as "Jet Burns" in Second Life. "One attendee in Canada got out of his avatar chair and showed his PowerPoint presentation in the virtual world, which was being broadcast to the real world. I found myself looking at the real-life podium and expecting to see him there."
Besides fostering communication in a way never before possible, the ability to attend virtually also brought with it the not-insignificant benefit of saving the cost of "40 international flights, 40 hotel rooms, 40 rental cars -- talk about being green," White explains.
Government Agencies Join In
NASA is one of a handful of government agencies that have begun to establish a presence on Second Life in the last year or so; others include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Of course, NASA has been using virtual technologies for years, including the flight simulators astronauts are trained on, White pointed out.
The beauty of Second Life for research and exploration, however, is that it provides an environment that's scientifically accurate but also allows researchers to break the laws of physics in size and other constraints, White explained.
That combination allows researchers to develop a microscopic avatar that can walk through and inspect a spacecraft's substructures, for example, or huge avatars that can look at the Earth, Moon and Mars and perform orbit calculations among them, he explained.
"The real key is that we can now do this not just person to person, but with 100 people in a collaborative, immersive and sustaining environment," he explained.
CoLab Island
NASA has actually established two different islands in Second Life, both a part of the virtual world's SciLands islands devoted to science and technology on the adult main grid.
More than 20 such organizations have facilities in the SciLands, including also the International Spaceflight Museum, which operates spaceports with rockets on display.
The first NASA island, CoLab, focuses on outreach and collaboration with the public and NASA partners. CoLab started at the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in the San Francisco Bay Area and has since grown to include members from other NASA centers as well.
Information Sharing
"NASA CoLab in Second Life was intended to be a community of people immersed in collaboration, very peer-to-peer and flat," Andrew Hoppin, communities liaison for CoLab at NASA Ames, told LinuxInsider. Hoppin is also known as "Drew Frobozz" in Second Life.
"Now we have people from all 10 NASA centers participating and learning from non-NASA folks," Hoppin said. "Having this virtual environment has been very beneficial for informal sharing."
NASA CoLab features a number of educational and interactive 3-D displays, and visitors can also join communities focused on hands-on projects such as building a mockup of the International Space Station or testing a mockup of a lava-tube habitat on another planet.
"Some of the best research is being done by independent groups," Hoppin noted. "Much of the work is being done by volunteers, who often serve as internal consultants to NASA."
Indeed, the virtual CoLab project was recently contacted by the Johnson Space Center, which is interested in assessing the viability of using the virtual world as a training environment, Hoppin added.
CosmosCode
On the software side, NASA CoLab has also launched an initiative, CosmosCode aimed at building a core offering of free and open source
To do that, it has begun to develop and manage a free-software community focused on space that will provide a common access point for individuals, academics, companies and space agencies around the world that are using, contributing to, or supporting re-usable, modular, extensible or standards-driven space exploration software.
In addition to a source-code repository and project tools, the CosmosCode site will offer guides and how-tos focused on developing open source for the space sector; blogs; and discussion forums.
Competing With Google
Before the launch of CoLab, "most people in the Bay area didn't even know NASA was there, because we were competing with the likes of Google," Hoppin noted. "We always need public support, and to be relevant and interesting to the public -- if we're not, something's wrong."
From that respect, the effort could well prove to be a success.
"All I could think was how great it would be to get my 28 kids to explore the area," Jackie Blumer, a 4th grade teacher of science and social studies at Greenville Elementary, a NASA Explorer Schools participant in Greenville, Ill., told LinuxInsider.
Field Trip to Mars
Blumer is a lifelong space enthusiast and has participated in two zero-gravity flights -- one through Zero Gravity Corp. and one through NASA's Explorer Schools program.
The possibility of attending virtual meetings with NASA officials is a compelling one, Blumer added, as is the ability to take her class to Mars, virtually speaking.
"If I could take my students and say 'OK, we're going to travel to Mars today,'" she said, "that would be a really cool thing."
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