Streaming digital video showing activities inside and outside the International Space Station and the view of Earth from up there will now be available for about twelve hours every day, according to NASA. The feed will also contain audio of communications between Mission Control and the astronauts, including (for instance) live video of maintenance activities outside the station during today's prep for the incoming space shuttle.

The ISS is 200 miles up and moving at 17,500mph, posing a unique assortment of problems not encountered in the average video stream. Satellite coverage can occasionally drop out as well. (On the upside, there's a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes, and many views of activity outside show the Earth below looking ridiculously lovely.) When no spacewalks are underway, video will originate from inside the station during on-duty hours. Don't expect The Real World: ISS from the video setup, though; off-camera time is expected to run about 12 hours each day, from 2pm to 2am EDT. During those hours, the familiar location-and-path map will be streamed from Mission Control in Houston.

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The appointment of William Morrow -- a former executive at Vodafone and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) -- as Clearwire's new CEO comes at a time when the company badly needs to gain industry traction to offset financial losses and retain an early market lead in the US over LTE, a rival 4G technology set for deployment in 2010 by both Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

Morrow said in a statement on Monday that Clearwire now intends to deploy WiMAX in over 80 markets -- to as many as 120 million people -- by 2010.

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In YouTube's
blog yesterday, Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), announced that premium music video content would be blocked from view in the UK.

Citing a failure in negotiations with the publishing, composing, and songwriting organization PRS for Music (Performing Rights Society), Walker said, "The costs are simply prohibitive for us -- under PRS's proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube -- that's like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it."

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In a statement this morning, graphics chip maker Nvidia said it is willing to join with others in investing in early-stage companies that seek to produce general computing software products that leverage graphics processor technology. It's the manufacturer's latest step in drumming up support for CUDA, the library that enables developers to offload heavy mathematical functionality away from the CPU and onto the GPU.

"These companies are the innovators that will fuel the continued growth of the GPU platform," reads a prepared statement this morning from Nvidia VP for Business Development Jeff Herbst. "Through this program we will provide financial, marketing and other support to help start-up companies realize their full potential and we strongly encourage interested entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others to reach out to us with their ideas."

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Elevation Partners' Managing Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee -- whose firm has a big stake in the restoration of Palm -- was interviewed by Bloomberg last week, both for television and print, discussing the upcoming launch of the Palm Pre. This morning, Palm issued everything short of a full retraction of McNamee's statements, in a statement filed with no less than the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

McNamee's casual and plain-spoken rapport with Bloomberg interviewers raised eyebrows in the tech community and has led Palm to print a disquisition of McNamee's statements.

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A memorandum published by the White House this morning made good on a campaign promise by President Obama to discontinue the Oval Office practice of disregarding or even suppressing certain scientific and technological information when crafting executive policy.

"Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security," reads the President's memorandum this morning. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public."

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Owners of the Android Developer Phone (ADP1) found themselves unable to obtain protected apps from the Android Market because of the device's innate ability to sidestep protection measures. Today, the Android development team announced an update to the Android development system image that addresses this problem, along with other compatibility issues the unlocked device had with its locked counterpart, the G1.

Android Developer Advocate Dan Morrill said, "Many developers are concerned about the unauthorized redistribution of their applications, so they make use of the copy-protection feature (known as 'forward locking') which prevents applications from being copied off devices.

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As three federal agencies prepared for an initial meeting on Tuesday in Washington, DC about implementing a sweeping new broadband program, public advocates gathered on Monday to give their ideas on how to use the funding to stimulate jobs and extend high-speed Internet communications throughout the US.

Signed into law last month by President Barack Obama, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act allocates $4.7 billion to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for broadband deployment to "unserved," "underserved," and low-income communities, plus another $2.5 billion to the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), while also directing the FCC to develop a "national broadband strategy."

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Over the weekend, Microsoft revealed that in its latest private beta build of Windows 7, it will allow users to uninstall the Internet Explorer 8 Web browser front end -- a choice it has never offered to consumers since version 3.0. The fact that since 1996, the presence of IE in Windows was elevated to such an extent that users could not completely uninstall it, nor could they ever entirely avoid it, has been credited by many as the real reason for Microsoft being perceived as having won the browser war against Netscape.

While Microsoft credits "user feedback" as having driven the need for this feature -- or actually, something like this feature but maybe more up-front -- the truth is, users have been supplying that feedback now for more than a decade. Most likely, it was the European Commission's latest objection which finally drove Microsoft to institute what some are seeing as the first crack in the dam. But is it enough to let any light break through for the other browser manufacturers desperate to gain more than a toehold on the Windows desktop?

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Windows Mobile Marketplace was announced at 3GSM in Barcelona in February, noting that it would be available when Windows Mobile 6.5 is released before Christmas this year.

A site related to the app store, http://client.marketplace.windowsmobile.com/ has gone up, causing speculation that the shop could actually be Web-based instead of a standalone application. The page and its code give very little away other than its obvious mobile phone screen formatting.

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At the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans today, Seagate and AMD are delivering the world's first public demo of 6 gigabit-per-second Serial ATA, an ultra-speedy interface between the host bus adapters used in PCs and storage drives such as hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and optical devices.

A replacement for older and slower ATA technology, Serial ATA supported throughput of 1.5 Gbps in its first generation and operates at 3 Gbps in much of the hardware sold today, said Mark Noblitt, Seagate's senior marketing manager for I/O (input/output) development, in an interview with Betanews.

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It takes a lot of discs to stock the more than 7,800 Blockbuster Video stores in North America, and the company is a prolific purchaser of disc-based media, both movies and games. So when the company's substantive value derives directly from the discs it buys, any big changes to its structure could impact the disc production industry, and all the other businesses that rely upon it.

Blockbuster's future has been uncertain since well before it attempted to purchase the now-defunct Circuit City, a move which CEO Jim Keyes said at the time was not in the best interest of Blockbuster's shareholders.

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Once again, comments made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during an analysts' briefing two weeks ago are being bandied about by the press as "confirmation" that the company plans to produce a slimmed-down, netbook-ready SKU of Windows 7. However, a complete read of Ballmer's comments, as transcribed by Microsoft (Word document available here), indicate that this isn't what Ballmer said at all. In fact, he seemed intentionally vague on the topic, making clear the company was certainly thinking about the prospect of a netbook Win7 SKU, but confirming nothing.

"I think we have an opportunity when we ship Windows 7, which will fit on a netbook, we have an opportunity to rethink the product lineup for netbooks, product lineup and price lineup, and we get a chance to engage in that dialogue, both with the OEM, and potentially with the OEM and the end user," stated Ballmer last Tuesday, in response to a question from a J.P. Morgan analyst. "Today when you buy a netbook with XP you don't really get a full XP version, you get some restrictions on XP. Some people might say, hey, look, I'm happy with the restrictions, some people might want Windows 7 instead of XP, some might be happy with the restrictions, some end users might not be happy with the same restrictions.

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Taiwanese electronics company Wintek reported to the Chinese Language financial newspaper Commercial Times that it is working with Apple to develop new products that utilize the company's touch panels.

The paper speculated that one such product will be a netbook made by Quanta Computer, which has already manufactured notebooks for Apple, although Wintek said the panels will begin shipping in the second half of the year. Wintek is the company which supplies touchscreens for the iPod Touch, and news of the product was revealed in a similar fashion, several months before the product's debut.

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Over the weekend, some -- though not all -- users of Google Docs received notifications in their Gmail inboxes stating that some of their cloud-based documents marked as private may have been sharable with other users anyway. The problem apparently concerns marking multiple documents as private with a single command, which ended up not fulfilling that task.

Here is the text of the letter Google Docs users received, which was published over the weekend independently by multiple bloggers who use the service:

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