Jacob Kinglisten, your site isn't going to code itself

One of the most striking images from The Terminator was the weapon he carried and used in his first attempt on Sarah Connor's life: the .45 Longslide, with laser sighting. Who can forget the scene in the gun shop? The gun was likewise such a striking presence on screen it was used on the film's poster. There are T-shirts dedicated to the gun.

Terminator was released in 1984, and while laser sights on weapons are common now, when the film was first shown the red laser was able to communicate something subtle and powerful to the audience: this is a machine, deadly accurate and futuristic. It made the Terminator seem other-worldly and terrifying. At a party during CES, Deputy Editor Jon Stokes and I bumped into some representatives from SureFire, a company that specializes in tactical flashlights. We talked about some of our favorite moments with technology in cinema, and The Terminator came up.

"We created that laser!" I was told. They told me the gentleman who built the prop was named Ed Reynolds, and he was still with the company. More than a little jazzed about bumping into a fun part of film history, we knew we had to get the full story behind the Terminator's gun.

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Apple COO Tim Cook's warning from early 2009 wasn't the only one that handset makers received before Apple sicced the lawyers on HTC last week. According to a research note from Oppenheimer analyst Yal Reiner, Apple began warning top executives at companies such as HTC and Motorola in January that it wasn't too happy about seeing allegedly iPhone-related IP showing up in proposed new products.

According to "industry checks," Cook's comments last January during the quarterly analyst call—that Apple "will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we'll use whatever weapons that we have at our disposal"—were taken seriously by the likes of LG, Samsung, and even Nokia. Though the Palm Pre openly flaunted multitouch capabilities (what most handset makers believed were at the heart of Cook's warning), its sales numbers haven't proven to be much of a concern for Apple so far.

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A typical neuroscience paper (or a typical report on one) is a laundry list of structure:function relationships between brain regions and the mental tasks they perform. The amygdala deals with registering rewards, the hippocampus handles memory, and so on. These relationships have been the result of over a century of work, starting with rare cases of brain injury and building through modern medical imaging, which can detect ever-smaller lesions and associate neural activity with specific cognitive processes. Doctors routinely rely on the combination of brain imaging and structure:function relationships for diagnostic purposes, but is wider society willing to trust it in the courtroom, where it might make the difference between guilt and innocence?

That question was handled in a rather unusual manner at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: a mock trial. Most other panels consisted of a set of scientists who each gave a fairly standard presentation. This one was presided over by Louis Rodriguez, an Orange County Superior Court Judge, and featured a law school professor and a practicing attorney, each with a neuroscientist as an expert witness. Although the proceedings were heavily scripted, anyone who's sat through a jury trial would recognize that they were a reasonable attempt to approximate a normal courtroom experience.

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Facebook is allegedly planning to roll out location sharing capabilities next month, once again playing catch-up to other services that have gained popularity thanks to location data. The rumor comes courtesy of anonymous sources who have been "briefed on the project" speaking to the New York Times, who said that Facebook will announce the feature at Facebook's annual f8 conference in late April.

The company's plans for such a feature have not been entirely secret—Facebook hinted at location features when it updated its privacy policy in November. Like other postings made to Facebook, location information will only be made available to the people you decide to broadcast it to.

"When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post," reads the policy. "If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate."

The location features will come in the form of an API for third-party developers and from Facebook, according to the Times' sources.

The feature will undoubtedly be popular among many of Facebook's 400 million users, as it has already proven itself with other services. For example, Twitter added geolocation to its API last year, not to mention that Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Latitude, and Loopt have all built their success solely upon the use of user location data. Needless to say, it's not something that will be new to the Web, though it probably will be new to a sizable chunk of Facebook's audience. Let's just hope the company rolls it out the right way, as implied by its privacy policy, and doesn't end up broadcasting everyone's locations to the world by default.

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The Microsoft browser ballot released this month to Windows users in the EU is already doing Microsoft's rivals a favor. Two of the major competitors to Internet Explorer have seen an increase in downloads, while the other two are not willing to share data. We contacted the makers of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera; here's what they had to say.

Opera, the Norwegian browser maker that first filed a complaint with the European Union in December 2007, accusing Microsoft of violating EU antitrust law by bundling IE with Windows, is pleased with the progress its browser is making. "Since the browser choice screen rollout, Opera downloads have more than tripled in major European countries, such as Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, and the UK," an Opera spokesperson told Ars. The company said it currently did not have more detailed numbers but plans on sharing more as they become available.

Mozilla, which has a particularly solid foothold in Europe, was slightly more specific in the progress it was seeing with its browser downloads. "Early data suggests 50,000 to 100,000 new users chose Firefox as a direct result of seeing the Ballot Choice screen," a Mozilla spokesperson told Ars. "We expect these numbers will increase as the Ballot Choice rolls out in additional countries and will share updated metrics as they become available."

Apple did not respond at all, and while Google was happy to respond, the company wouldn't get specific: "We generally don't share download stats on that granular of a level," a Google spokesperson told Ars. The company did not respond to a follow-up question if Chrome saw an increase in number of downloads period. While Apple and Google haven't said much, we think it's likely that both have also seen a bump in the number of downloads of their browsers. Hundreds of thousands of users who may not have known of a world outside of Internet Explorer are being confronted with the alternatives.

The browser ballot will be presented on Windows computers across the EU for at least the next five years. Microsoft's rivals are, however, already pushing to have it appear outside of Europe as well.

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Google's recent announcement of a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home testbed has communities across the US salivating—but imagine what the Internet might be like if that connection to your home were even faster. Say... 100Gbps. In less than 20 years, such speeds will be possible, but only for companies who installed the right sort of fiber architecture.

The UK telecoms regulator Ofcom commissioned a lengthy report on the future of fiber (PDF) (or "fibre," in this case) from the firm Analysys Mason. In it, the company sketched out the future of fiber capacity with a pair of handy charts. Both are clear: between 2025 and 2030, shared fiber tech will be able to offer 10Gpbs to each user; individual fiber can offer a full 100Gbps. Whether ISPs will support it or not is a separate question.

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Apple subsidiary FileMaker has released version 11 of its flagship FileMaker Pro database. The updated software purports to make building and maintaining databases even easier, while acknowledging that many users are accustomed to using spreadsheets for database purposes by including pivot table-like reporting and Excel-like charting features. FileMaker Pro Server has also been updated, dropping the simultaneous client access limit for the Advanced version.

FileMaker Pro already laid claim to being one of the easiest cross-platform database tools available, but the company added additional features designed to enhance that ease of use. The Quick Start screen has been improved, offering clear ways to begin a new database. You can start from scratch; import existing data in tab or comma-separated files, Excel spreadsheets, or Bento databases; or choose from a number of Starter Solution templates. A new invoicing template has been added in version 11 to make that common business task practically a plug-and-chug operation; customer data can later be linked for other purposes.

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The European Parliament is fed up with the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today, representatives from all the major parliamentary coalitions introduced a resolution demanding that the European Commission release all negotiating texts, inform Parliament about the negotiating process, and absolutely refuse to countenance any sort of "three strikes" Internet disconnection penalty for online copyright infringement.

The measure comes up for a vote tomorrow and looks set to pass—it has the support of all the important groups in Parliament, including the EPP, S&D, ALDE, and the Greens/EFA. One notable supporter: Christian Engström, the Pirate Party's lone MEP in Parliament, who aligns with the Greens/EFA group.

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Microsoft today began rolling out its new MSN homepage, but not everyone will be getting it at once: the update will trickle out over the next few weeks to the site's 100 million US customers. The software giant is touting the new version as "its most significant homepage redesign in over a decade." It comes with a new MSN butterfly logo (which complements the Bing logo), a larger Bing search box and tighter integration with the search engine, local information from a new feature dubbed MSN Local Edition, as well as the addition of three social network streams: the Windows Live "What's New" feed of course, Facebook, and Twitter.

The above was previewed in November, but Microsoft says the redesign includes more than 30 updates that are based on 70,000 pieces of customer feedback. These new features include TrendWatch, which highlights the day's top trends and movers on Twitter, Hyper-local Tweets, which uses Bing to highlight tweets from your location (available on the new Local Edition), and My Cities, which allows you save up to three cities to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country in your MSN Local Edition.

Microsoft says it has seen double-digit increases in Bing search queries coming from the new homepage thanks to changes that make the decision engine more prominent. As for the MSN Local module on the homepage, the software giant says it is driving over 50 percent more traffic to the MSN Local Edition and that the main module on the new homepage also received over 50 percent more clicks than the original homepage. Microsoft made improvements to these sections based on the data it was seeing. For example, the company says the social networking additions were welcomed with open arms, so it has made sure the default social network tab is the one that the user frequents the most.

The real test, not only for the servers but for the designers, will come in the next few weeks as the majority of users start to see the new version. As we've said before, we think the new look is much cleaner than the old version, but—as Facebook knows all too well—users aren't always happy with huge revamps of major websites.

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The .xxx domain is back on the table. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will reconsider the top-level domain during a meeting in Kenya this week, nearly three years after it was shot down and nine years after it was first introduced as a way to identify pornography sites and hopefully confine them to their own Internet red-light district.

The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2001 and approved in 2005 for exclusive (but voluntary) use by the adult entertainment industry. The idea was to provide a place for porn sites online that would be explicitly obvious from the domain, which would not only help consenting adults find the sites, it would also help parents and corporations better block access to them.

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Government and industry bureaucrats addicted to spewing out mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, be very afraid; Edward Tufte is coming to Washington, DC. The Obama administration has appointed Tufte to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will suggest ways that the $787 billion stimulus program's watchdog accountability board can do its job.

"I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service," Tufte explained on his website on Sunday. "And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do."

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Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla's new JavaScript engine engine into the fast lane is some code borrowed from Apple's WebKit project. Mozilla intends to bring together the powerful optimization techniques of TraceMonkey and the extremely efficient native code generator of Apple's JSCore engine. The mashup will likely deliver a significant boost in Firefox's JavaScript execution speed, making Mozilla's browser a formidable contender in the ongoing JavaScript speed race.

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Many of the parasites that plague humans have life cycles that are positively baroque, hopping between species and hiding out in tissues for years before setting off a damaging infection. These habits can make them extremely difficult to study, since it can be hard to tell what tissues and cells the parasites pass through on their way to causing disease. But a clever bit of genetic engineering has now forced one parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, to leave telltale signs of its progress.

The work took advantage of some basic understanding of Toxoplasma biology. Upon infecting a cell and taking up residence, proteins in a specific organelle get exported into its hosts' cells. The researchers took the gene for one of the proteins that is known to be shipped into hosts, toxifilin, fused it to a site-specific DNA recombinase called cre, and injected the fusion gene into Toxoplasma cells. The resulting cells were called secreted Cre, epitope-tagged, presumably so that the authors could use the abbreviation SeCreEt to refer to them.

When a SeCreEt expressing parasite infects a mouse cell, the recombinase will catalyze DNA rearrangements at any sites that match a specific sequence. So, for example, the researchers used a DNA construct that normally expresses a red fluorescent protein, but switches to green following cre-based rearrangement. When mouse cells carrying this construct were infected with SeCreEt parasites, 95 percent of them switched from glowing red to glowing green. Mice that expressed a cre-dependent luciferase gene (the protein that helps fireflies glow) could be infected, and the progress of the infection tracked over the course of a week.

The authors suggest that SeCreEt cells will be useful for eliminating various host genes during infection, so that we can test whether different mouse proteins are essential for Toxoplasma to grow. But the general approach could potentially be used simply to follow the parasite during infection, since it could be used to create a trail of glowing green cells behind it. It might also be possible to engineer systems that don't actually require the parasite to enter cells.

In any case, the CDC calls Toxoplasma "the third leading cause of death attributed to foodborne illness in the United States," so knowing more about it can't be a bad thing.

Nature Methods, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/Nmeth.1438  (About DOIs).

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Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch claims that the company's ubiquitous Flash plug-in doesn't ship with any known crash bugs. One can only assume that he has never used the software. As Adobe representatives exhibit an increasingly dismissive attitude about Flash's technical deficiencies, the browser vendors have stepped up to address the problems and are finding ways to insulate their users from Flash's poor security and lack of stability.

Several mainstream browsers isolate Flash and other plug-ins in separate processes in order to prevent an unstable plug-in from crashing the entire browser. Mozilla is preparing to introduce a similar feature in the next version of Firefox. A developer preview that was recently made available to users offers an early look at the new plugin crash protection.

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Amazon has pulled the plug on its affiliate program in Colorado thanks to a new state regulation on sales tax collection. The company sent a notice to its Colorado-based affiliates Monday morning to let them know about the decision, urging residents who depend on the affiliate program to contact their lawmakers if they want the program back.

Most states only require retailers to collect sales tax if they have a sufficient enough brick-and-mortar presence thanks to a 1992 Supreme Court decision on Quill Corp. v. North Dakota. Despite this, a handful of states have tried to pass laws in recent years (often dubbed the "Amazon Tax") that would force Amazon to start collecting sales tax if their affiliates—that is, those who use Amazon's affiliate links on their own sites or blogs in order to earn a return on referrals—are based in those states.

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An unresolved question in astronomy is how the Milky Way reached its current state. One theory is that the Milky Way grew, at least in part, by cannibalizing smaller dwarf galaxies that happened to get too close. If this was the case, then it would follow that there should be stars in the Milky Way that are similar in chemical makeup to those in the dwarf galaxies that exist throughout our neighborhood of the Universe.

Since it is known that metal-poor stars—stars having up to 100,000 times less metal than our Sun—exist in the Milky Way's halo, similar stars should be found in dwarf galaxies. "The Milky Way seemed to have stars that were much more primitive than any of the stars in any of the dwarf galaxies," says co-author Josh Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution. "If dwarf galaxies were the original components of the Milky Way, then it's hard to understand why they wouldn't have similar stars."

As described in this week's edition of Nature, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution have found an extremely metal-poor star in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor. Located 290,000 light-years away, the star, S1020549, has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Using spectroscopic measurements of the faint light from S1020549, they observed metal levels about 6000 times lower than that seen in the Sun. The value is also five times lower than the levels seen in a star during any previous survey of dwarf galaxies.

While this is only a single data point, it bolsters the idea that the Milky Way has grown by absorbing old dwarf galaxies. The authors suggest that future optical telescopes that are currently under construction will expand our ability to find these faint stars that will shed further light on the origins of galaxies in general, the Milky Way included.

Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature08772  (About DOIs).

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Cisco today said that after the close of markets on Tuesday, the company will announce a significant news (we're guessing a major acquisition) which will "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments." We first learned of the news from MarketWatch.

Cisco has been rumored to be about to purchase almost every interesting company in the technology field over the last decade. The company's closest kept secret has been the degree of real interest it has in EMC. While such an acquisition would be huge in the financial markets, it is unclear why it would forever change the Internet. Also, the rumor mill around that partnership has more or less died.

One may feel tempted to think that Cisco wants to get in the bandwidth game, chasing after Google's recent announcement: a trial of open-access, fiber-to-the-home Internet service at speeds of 1Gbps in select locations. But Cisco claims that they have no interest in being a service provider. David McCulloch, Spokesperson at Cisco, told MarketWatch, "our strategy remains to partner very closely with service providers to enable advanced new telecommunications services versus building out public networks ourselves." We wonder if they protest too much, especially since the company just said it was also bailing on WiMAX. My bet is that it's someone in streaming video, or possibly someone in wireless. A streaming video play would make more sense for a company like Cisco. Either they've built something, or they've bought someone.

I know, I know! They are buying Chatroulette! I kid.

So we invite you, for the honor of having great bragging rights, to lay down your bets on just who is going to get a big check from Cisco tomorrow (or more likely, after the deal clears). Or, if you don't think an acquisition is in the works, what magical announcement might they make?

Update: It looks like the Internet won't be changing all that much after all.

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The US Treasury Department today relaxed export regulations against Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, allowing US companies to provide instant messaging, e-mail, and social networking services to those countries. The goal is to ensure that citizens can "exercise their most basic rights," said Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin.

The new policy provides a general license to tech companies. According to the official rule, they can now export "services incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, such as instant messaging, chat and e-mail, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, Web browsing, and blogging, provided that such services are publicly available at no cost to the user."

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Valve has stopped with the teasing and has officially announced that its online gaming service Steam is coming to the Mac. As a bonus, the company also plans to make the Mac a "tier-1" platform, promising simultaneous release of games on Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360.

Valve has developed a Mac-native version of its Source engine, using the cross-platform OpenGL. "We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," John Cook, Director of Steam Development, said in a statement. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward."

Beginning in April, Mac users will be able to access games via Steam, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series. The Mac Steam client is based on the latest version for Windows that is currently in beta, which is where the first hints of Mac OS X compatibility were discovered.

That version includes a new Steam Play API that will allow users to access and play games from either a Windows PC or a Mac. Progress on one platform is automatically updated and synced when using the other, meaning all the fragging you do on your work PC (on your lunch break, of course) will be reflected when you log in from your Mac at home. Playing games on either platform won't cost extra.

The Mac compatibility extends beyond Steam Play, however. All future games, beginning with Portal 2, will be available for the Mac the same day as the Windows version. "We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360," Cook said. Players on all platforms will be able to play each other in online multiplayer setups, as well. "We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients."

These announcements are surely music to Mac gamers' ears. Besides Steam and Valve's own titles, making Source cross-platform also means other developers using Valve's engine can easily create Mac-compatible versions of games without much additional effort.

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Two weeks ago, we reported that Internet search giant Google had acquired third-party iPhone mail application reMail. At the time, Google rehired reMail CEO and programmer Gabor Cselle to work as a product manager on the Gmail team. reMail was then pulled from the App Store and Google decided to discontinue the app, only offering support through the end of March. However, Google recently contacted Ars to say that it had decided to make the code available as open source on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License.

The Apache 2.0 License states that the code is free to use, alter, and redistribute as the user sees fit. Further, users can charge for any aspect of the software they choose, including the application itself or support. That means people can use portions of code to add functionality in their own applications or create totally new ones without having to release them under an open source license. Google usually favors the Apache license over alternatives and uses it for Android.

This may still mean the end of reMail, but it's good news for anyone looking to incorporate more advanced e-mail functionality into their own applications. As Cselle pointed out in his blog post, he has already dealt with many of the obstacles associated with developing an e-mail client, including communication with IMAP and parsing MIME messages. In other words, there's no need to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.

If you're interested in poking around, the code can be found on Google Code, where there has already been a fair amount of action since the announcement on Friday.

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