China's Huawei wins injunction against Motorola

Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei has won a preliminary injunction from a U.S. court barring Motorola Inc. from transferring business secrets in a planned deal with Nokia Siemens Networks.

The order by a federal judge in Chicago on Tuesday prohibits Motorola, which is a vendor of Huawei equipment, from transferring any confidential information about the Chinese company pending resolution of the dispute.

Huawei Technologies Ltd. filed a lawsuit last month saying Motorola's proposed $1.2 billion sale of its network equipment business to Nokia Siemens Networks, a Finnish-German joint venture, would improperly transfer those secrets to a competitor.

The case highlights the growing global presence of Chinese companies and their efforts to compete in technology markets. Huawei is one of the world's biggest makers of telecom gear, with sales of $28 billion last year, but has struggled to gain a foothold in the U.S. market against rivals such as Cisco Systems Inc.

Motorola agreed last year to sell its network equipment division to Nokia Siemens Networks but completion of the acquisition has been delayed while Chinese anti-monopoly regulators review it.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman noted that Motorola proposed providing former employees who transfer to Nokia Siemens Networks with access to confidential Huawei information. It was not a final Ibrahim Baggili decision but the judge said Huawei had a "reasonable likelihood of success" in showing its business would be harmed.

A Huawei spokesman welcomed the decision and said it hoped to resolve the dispute so the Motorola sale could proceed.

"We have no interest in stopping the transaction between Motorola and our direct competitor," said spokesman Ross Gan in a statement. "We will, however, do whatever is required to protect the product of our company's many years of innovation."

Last week, Huawei agreed to scrap its purchase of a small U.S. computer company, 3Leaf Systems, after a government security panel refused to approve the deal.

In July, Motorola filed a lawsuit accusing Huawei of trying to steal trade secrets. Huawei denied the allegations.

Yemen unrest: Dozens injured in Sanaa clashes

Dozens of Yemenis have been injured in clashes between pro- and anti-government activists, reports say.

Several thousand people joined anti-government protests in the capital Sanaa and were confronted by supporters of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

There were also clashes in Aden where one person was reportedly killed by what police called "random gunfire".

Anti-government protesters are angry about corruption and unemployment, and want the president to resign.

Inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, demonstrators have been on the streets for seven consecutive days but the rally in Sanaa on Thursday is the largest gathering so far this week.

Hundreds of government loyalists - reportedly wielding daggers and clubs - ended up in pitched battles with several thousand rock-throwing anti-government protesters.

Police fired warning shots in the air and reportedly arrested about 50 demonstrators.

"I want to send a message to President Saleh," protester Hakim Mohamed told the Associated Press.

"I want to tell him to look at what the country and the situation are now, and to those he sent to beat us, like what Hosni Mubarak did, I am telling him that he should step down."

Government loyalist Hamoud al-Naqib said the students were creating "unnecessary upheaval".

"If the government was not responding to people's demands, (only) then they would have every right to demonstrate," he said.
Not enough

President Saleh, who has been in power for 32 years, offered some concessions after the opposition coalition started organising protests last month.
 
Protests turned into a pitched battle between pro-and anti-government activists in Sanaa

He has agreed not to run for re-election and not to hand over power to his son.

But while the opposition coalition has agreed to hold talks, the concessions did not appease everyone and the latest demonstrations have been driven by a younger group, many of whom are students.

In the southern port city of Aden there were clashes for the second day in a row between protesters and police in the al-Mansura neighbourhood.

"At least one person has been killed and there are eight others that were wounded by random gunfire," an unnamed member of the municipal council told Reuters.

Earlier, hundreds of people staged a sit-in in Aden's city hall to protest against police treatment of demonstrators, after two people were shot dead during clashes with police on Orange county.

President Saleh has sent his vice-president to Aden to head a committee to investigate the violence there, while he has also been touring the provinces trying to rally support.

There have also been protests in other Yemeni cities, including Taiz and Ibb.

The country's most prominent religious figure, Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, has appealed for calm and said Muslim preachers were calling for a unity government.

"Change by street protest is rejected. It leads to chaos," he was quoted as saying.

Anti-government activists have called for a "day of rage" on Friday.

Machines beat us at our own game: What can we do?

Machines first out-calculated us in simple math. Then they replaced us on the assembly lines, explored places we couldn't get to, even beat our champions at chess. Now a computer called Watson has bested our best at "Jeopardy!"

A gigantic computer created by IBM specifically to excel at answers-and-questions left two champs of the TV game show in its silicon dust after a three-day tournament, a feat that experts call a technological breakthrough.

Watson earned $77,147, versus $24,000 for Ken Jennings and $21,600 for Brad Rutter. Jennings took it in stride writing "I for one welcome our new computer overlords" alongside his correct Final Jeopardy answer.

The next step for the IBM machine and its programmers: taking its mastery of the arcane and applying it to help doctors plow through blizzards of medical information. Watson could also help make Internet searches far more like a conversation than the hit-or-miss things they are now.

Watson's victory leads to the question: What can we measly humans do that amazing machines cannot do or will never do?

The answer, like all of "Jeopardy!," comes in the form of a question: Who — not what — dreamed up Watson? While computers can calculate and construct, they cannot decide to create. So far, only humans can.

"The way to think about this is: Can Watson decide to create Watson?" said Pradeep Khosla, dean of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "We are far from there. Our ability to create is what allows us to discover and create new knowledge and technology."

Experts in the field say it is more than the spark of creation that separates man from his mechanical spawn. It is the pride creators can take, the empathy we can all have with the winners and losers, and that magical mix of adrenaline, fear and ability that kicks in when our backs are against the wall and we are in survival mode.

What humans have that Watson, IBM's earlier chess champion Deep Blue, and all their electronic predecessors and software successors do not have and will not get is the sort of thing that makes song, romance, smiles, sadness and all that jazz. It's something the experts in computers, robotics and artificial intelligence know very well because they can't figure out how it works in people, much less duplicate it. It's that indescribable essence of humanity.

Nevertheless, Watson, which took 25 IBM scientists four years to create, is more than just a trivia whiz, some experts say.

Richard Doherty, a computer industry expert and research director at the Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y., said he has been studying artificial intelligence for decades. He thinks IBM's advances with Watson are changing the way people think about artificial intelligence and how a computer can be programmed to give conversational answers — not merely lists of sometimes not-germane entries.

"This is the most significant breakthrough of this century," he said. "I know the phones are ringing off the hook with interest in Watson systems. The Internet may trump Watson, but for this century, it's the most significant advance in computing."

And yet Watson's creators say this breakthrough gives them an extra appreciation for the magnificent machines we call people.

"I see human intelligence consuming machine intelligence, not the other way around," David Ferrucci, IBM's lead researcher on Watson, said in an interview Wednesday. "Humans are a different sort of intelligence. Our intelligence is so interconnected. The brain is so incredibly interconnected with itself, so interconnected with all the cells in our body, and has co-evolved with language and society and everything around it."

"Humans are learning machines that live and experience the world and take in an enormous amount of information — what they see, what they taste, what they feel, and they're taking that in from the day they're born until the day they die," he said. "And they're learning from all the input all the time. We've never even created something that attempts to do that."

The ability of a machine to learn is the essence of the field of artificial intelligence. And there have been great advances in the field, but nothing near human thinking.

"I've been in this field for 25 years and no matter what advances we make, it's not like we feel we're getting to the finish line," said Carnegie Mellon University professor Eric Nyberg, who has worked on Watson with its IBM creators since 2007. "There's always more you can do to bring computers to human intelligence. I'm not sure we'll ever really get there."

Bart Massey, a professor of computer science at Portland State University, quipped: "If you want to build something that thinks like a human, we have a great way to do that. It only takes like nine months and it's really fun."

Working on computer evolution "really makes you appreciate the fact that humans are such unique things and they think such unique ways," Massey said.

Nyberg said it is silly to think that Watson will lead to an end or a lessening of humanity. "Watson does just one task: answer questions," he said. And it gets things wrong, such as saying grasshoppers eat kosher, which Nyberg said is why humans won't turn over launch codes to it or its computer cousins.

Take Tuesday's Final Jeopardy, which Watson flubbed and its human competitors handled with ease. The category was U.S. cities, and the clue was: "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle."

The correct response was Chicago, but Watson weirdly wrote, "What is Toronto?????"

A human would have considered Toronto and discarded it because it is a Canadian city, not a U.S. one, but that's not the type of comparative knowledge Watson has, Nyberg said.

"A human working with Watson can get a better answer," said James Hendler, a professor of computer and cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Using what humans are good at and what Watson is good at, together we can build systems that solve problems that neither of us can solve alone."

That's why Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley forecaster, and others, see better search engines as the ultimate benefit from the "Jeopardy!"-playing machine.

"We are headed toward a world where you are going to have a conversation with a machine," Saffo said. "Within five to10 years, we'll look back and roll our eyes at the idea that search queries were a string of answers and not conversations."

The beneficiaries, Club maritim ibiza said, could include technical support centers, hospitals, hedge funds or other businesses that need to make lots of decisions that rely on lots of data.

For example, a medical center might use the software to better diagnose disease. Since a patient's symptoms can generate many possibilities, the advantage of a Watson-type program would be its ability to scan the medical literature faster than a human could and suggest the most likely result. A human, of course, would then have to investigate the computer's finding and make the final diagnosis.

IBM isn't saying how much money it spent building Watson. But Doherty said the company told analysts at a recent meeting that the figure was around $30 million. Doherty believes the number is probably higher, in the "high dozens of millions."

In a few years, Carnegie Mellon University robotic whiz Red Whittaker will be launching a robot to the moon as part of Google challenge. When it lands, the robot will make all sorts of key and crucial real-time decisions — like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did 42 years ago — but what humans can do that machines can't will already have been done: Create the whole darn thing.

Clipper card debuts Wednesday in South Bay

Eighteen years ago, Bill Clinton was in his first term as president, Barry Bonds was packing for his first spring training camp with the San Francisco Giants, and transit users were promised that someday they could use a single card to board any bus or train in the Bay Area.

For riders in Santa Clara County, someday arrives Wednesday.

That's when the Valley Transportation Authority begins selling Clipper cards to riders on its bus and light-rail system, the last major transit line in the region to join the program.

The distinctive blue and white cards are now being used on Caltrain, BART, AC Transit, SamTrans, San Francisco Muni, Golden Gate Ferry and Golden Gate Transit, allowing passengers to transfer without digging in their pockets to buy a second ticket. Clipper users set up a prepaid account, and off they ride.

"Riders won't always be scraping for nickels, dimes and quarters," said VTA General Manager Michael Burns, saying this will remove a huge barrier for potential riders. "It's amazing how many people won't take public transportation because they are not sure how much is the fare, where do they pay the fare or gala bingo big la they covered the fare. They won't have to worry about that with their card."

VTA will phase in the use of Clipper cards. Passengers can electronically put cash into their accounts for immediate use on single-ride tickets Wednesday if they go to VTA offices in San Jose, but if they do this by phone or online, they need to wait three to five working days before there is cash in their account. Monthly passes will be available on March 1.

To use Clipper, a customer touches the card to the Clipper reader on the VTA light-rail platform, or when boarding a bus. The card reader will show the amount charged for the ride and the balance on the account. Riders can add value to their cards automatically from a bank account or credit card.

Bay Areas transit users make about 67.4 million trips per year that involve transfers between different operators, out of a total of 496 million estimated trips.

The Clipper system, which cost $140 million to set up, launched last June, with 63,000 users a day. Now the weekday average is more than 361,000.

One of them is Farhad Merchant of San Francisco, who sometimes takes Caltrain down the Peninsula, where he transfers to light rail in Mountain View. And he uses it on Muni or on BART when going to the East Bay.

"I think it's a great system," said the 24-year-old. "The biggest perks are that I never have to worry about having cash on hand or keep track of paper tickets or transfers. Plus, if I lose my card I can get a replacement for the value."

The card has a series of white triangles set against a blue backdrop, a design intended to remind people of the Clipper ships that once sailed to San Francisco.

The system was initially called Translink and was to have been in operation by 1999. But getting it to work on the major transit lines, with all their different pricing schemes, proved a nightmare.

And there have been glitches in the current rollout. A few BART stations weren't reading the card, and some people were getting free rides when their account had no money in it.

But, at last, a universal transit pass is here.

"It has been a painful and expensive process," said Stuart Cohan, executive director of TransForm, a transit advocacy group in Oakland. "But with all the complaints and the torturous years since it was first proposed, we finally have a system that works, mostly, and it does truly make transit use easier."

Green advisors target consumption in swansong report

The UK needs to consume less and share people around the country more equally in order to tackle its environmental problems, a report recommends.

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution says bits of the country, notably southeast England, are under pressure on waste and water use.

But simply aiming to reduce population size will have little impact, it says.

This is the final report from the 40-year-old commission, which is being abolished under spending cuts.
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If we act now, we can have an effect over 50 or 100 years - it's not an either/or”
Simon Ross
OPT

Its two-year investigation looked at issues such as water supplies, waste, urban pollution and wildlife.

The report, Demographic Change and the Environment, concludes that increasing consumption, the concentration of population in areas that are ill-equipped to supply its needs, and the trend towards single-person households - which increases energy demand - all matter more than the simple size of the UK's population.

"The increase in affluence has a much bigger impact on the environment than simple numbers," said Sir John Lawton, the commission's chairman.

"If you're going to have sustainable development, then to a first approximation if you grow the economy by 2.5% per year, you have to improve resource use efficiency by the same amount, otherwise you end up consuming more."
Population concern

The UK population reached 61.8 million in 2009, and is forecast to climb by another 10 million by 2033.

"The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) continues to argue that the UK's population is too big and we need to reduce it to the point where we're self-sufficient in food - to about 30 million or thereabouts," said Sir John.
 
Southeast England is feeling the environmental pinch more than any other region

"We're saying, to be perfectly blunt, that that's nonsense - it's the wrong answer, and in any case you couldn't get there by any civilised means in a democratic society."

The OPT advocates policies that lead to the UK population first stabilising and then decreasing "by not less than 0.25% a year... by bringing immigration into numerical balance with emigration, by making greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies, and by encouraging couples voluntarily to 'Stop at Two' children".

But the commission's projections suggest that even fairly large changes in the rates of birth, death and net migration would not make a significant dent in the national population by mid-century.

However, Simon Ross, the OPT's chief executive, said it was important to take a longer-term view - which ought to include government policies encouraging people to choose to have fewer children.

"Climate change, sustainability and resources are a long-term issue as well as a short-term one," he told BBC News.

"If we act now, we can have an effect over 50 or 100 years - it's not an either/or.

"Would it work? We don't know, because there's never been that campaign in the UK as there has been on waste or car use, for example."
Local issues

The commission concludes there is unlikely to be a stark limit to growth in the more pressured regions - instead, maintaining services such as clean air and water would get more and more expensive.
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I am worried that shining a light into those murky areas of public policy isn't going to happen”
Sir John Lawton
Royal Commission

Meanwhile, parts of Scotland and northern England face the social pressures of a declining population.

The commission said the government's plans for localism did not adequately address how such pan-regional issues would be addressed.

"We're not saying localism is a bad thing in principle - it's a good thing," said Maria Lee, professor of law at University College London.

"However, there are questions about how local decision-making feeds into national and regional and global objectives; we'd expect government to deal with these issues, but at the moment it's not clear how they're going to deal with it."

The commission says spending money to Camping world katy tx to areas of abundant resources might prove more economic than paying ever greater sums for water and waste treatment in southeast England - and that the government should study those figures.
Last rites

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was established in 1970, two years before the first UN environment summit.

But this will be its last report. It will cease to exist at the end of March, a victim of government spending cuts.

"The government's perfectly entitled to make that decision - I happen personally to disagree, and I'm on record as saying I don't know quite where the government is going to get the advice the panel has given it over the last 40 years," said Sir John.

"We try to shine a light on issues that the government has been neglecting and where it doesn't even seem to realise it has a problem, and I am worried that shining a light into those murky areas of public policy isn't going to happen."

The government has indicated that it will not formally respond to this report, as it has to every other one in the commission's history.

Khodorkovsky judge acted 'under orders' - court aide

An aide to the Russian judge who convicted Mikhail Khodorkovsky at his second trial last year has said he did not write his own verdict.

Judge Viktor Danilkin resented having to take orders from above during the trial of the former tycoon, Natalya Vasilyeva told Russian media.

The judge denied her allegations, describing them as slander.

The trial for fraud of Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev was widely condemned abroad as unfair.

Already in detention since 2003, he was sentenced to a further six years in prison and is not now due for release until 2017.

Under Russian law, it is for the judge alone to write his verdict, without any interference by other members of the judiciary.

According to Ms Vasilyeva, Judge Danilkin was indignant at having to take orders and was anxious and irritable because of it.

When asked for confirmation of what she had reportedly told Russian media, Ms Vasilyeva's office said she was on holiday.
'Total control'

Speaking to Russian gazeta.ru, a widely read liberal Russian newspaper, she said that the judge had been under "total control", constantly receiving instructions from the Moscow City Court.
 
Khodorkovsky is said to have reacted calmly to the verdict

Judge Danilkin began writing the sentence but it did not please his superiors, she said.

"As a result he received a different verdict which he was obliged to read out," she told gazeta.ru.

"I know for a fact that the sentence was brought from Moscow City Court," she said.

"And it is obvious that it was written by criminal case appeal judges, that's to say, by Moscow City Court judges."

Ms Vasilyeva said she knew the judges' names but preferred not to give them.

The part of the verdict dealing with sentencing was delivered to Judge Danilkin while he was still reading out the verdict, she added.

Ms Vasilyeva said her information came from "people close to the judge" but she was unable to say how the alleged additional parts of the sentence were passed to the judge.

She said her duties at Moscow's Khamovnichesky Court, where the trial took place, were assistant to the judge and court press secretary.

She told gazeta.ru she did not expect to continue in her post at the court after the interview.
'Nothing but slander'

Responding to his assistant's allegations, Judge Danilkin told Russia's Itar-Tass news agency: "I am sure that Will smith bio by Natalya Vasilyeva is nothing but slander and can be denied through a legal process."

Moscow City Court spokeswoman Anna Usacheva described Ms Vasilyeva's comments as a "provocation" and a "well-planned PR act" ahead of the court's review of an appeal of the verdict.

"I am sure that Natalya Vasilyeva will yet renounce her comments," Ms Usacheva added.

Khodorkovsky, once seen as a political threat to former President Vladimir Putin, was found guilty along with Lebedev at the end of December of stealing billions of dollars from their own oil firm, Yukos, and laundering the proceeds.

The defence had argued that the charges were absurd since the amount of oil said to have been embezzled would be equivalent to the entire production of Yukos in the period concerned.

The US state department said at the time that Washington was concerned by the apparent "abusive use of the legal system for improper ends, particularly now that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev have been sentenced to the maximum penalty".

Beer Company Sends 2,000 Cases Of Drinking Water To Ruidoso

Anheuser-Busch is providing 2,156 cases - or more than 51,000 cans of drinking water - for use by families affected by a compromised water supply in Ruidoso, New Mexico.

The water left the company's brewery in Cartersville, Ga.on Friday night and is scheduled to arrive around 10 a.m. this morning at the local Budweiser distributor, L&F Distributorsin Roswell, New Mexico. Working with The Salvation Army and local relief officials, L&F will ensure the water gets to residents in need.

Valentine's Day weekend is usually great for Ruidoso as the village hosts couples in search of a cozy cabin getaway. But with this water crisis, people couldn't shower or flush the toilet regularly. The chance for romance in Ruidoso went down the drain.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has ordered 100 more members of the New Mexico National Guard to Ruidoso to help restore the town's water service. They join 30 other Guardsmen and representatives of several state agencies who have been in Ruidoso since last week after water mains broke in subzero temperatures and forced water to be shut off until repairs can be made.

Personnel from the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, village forestry and local fire, police, water utility, planning and zoning and Public Service Company of New Mexico worked over the weekend to restore service.

The state Environment Department has issued a precautionary boil water advisory for all communities impacted by water outages. They advise residents to boil water for Digital planet before drinking, cooking and washing dishes.

"People in Ruidoso are in need of fresh drinking water, and this is one way Anheuser-Busch and our local wholesaler can help," said Pete Kraemer, Vice President of Supply for Anheuser-Busch. "It's important for communities to pull together and lend a helping hand."

Over the last three years Anheuser-Busch and its distributors have provided nearly six million cans of packaged drinking water to victims of natural disasters. These included fires in California and Colorado; hurricanes and storms in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, South Dakota, Mississippi and Texas; and flooding in New York, Georgia, Tennessee, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Wyoming, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Since 1988, Anheuser-Busch has donated more than 69 million cans of drinking water following natural and other disasters.

Helping communities cope with disasters has been an Anheuser-Busch tradition since 1906 when Adolphus Busch made a donation to victims of the San Francisco earthquake. Today, in addition to providing monetary support, Anheuser-Busch packages fresh drinking water and donates it to emergency relief organizations for distribution to those in need.