A move to suspend the rules of the House in order that the DTV Delay Act would be brought to the floor immediately, was defeated minutes ago. Although a majority voted in favor -- 258-168 -- a two-thirds majority of aye voters is necessary in order to pass a suspension of house rules.

As a result, the bill will not be fast-tracked, though it has yet to face total defeat. Rather, it must now be processed in the usual manner by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Its ranking member, Rep. Joe Barton (R - Texas), led the fight against the rules suspension and is currently against the bill.

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While throttling is still being treated by some Internet users as an implicit form of discrimination, the nation's ISPs must find both a technologically and politically correct method of managing their traffic congestion problems.

The US' second largest ISP, by many estimates, remains the nation's second greatest blocker of Internet traffic believed to be related to BitTorrent protocol. This according to the most recent test data released yesterday by the Max Planck Institute.

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Download Audacity for Mac OS X from Fileforum now.

Audacity X, the Mac version of the free open source audio editing and recording tool created by Google Dev Dominic Mazzoni, quietly received a beta upgrade this morning, fixing a handful of bugs and including some new features. The new features include Full Screen mode, a pitch shift/time scale slider effect, a WCAG2 accessibility testing function, improved latency correction and effect grouping.

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While AT&T added 1.9 million Apple iPhone 3G subscribers during the fourth quarter of 2008, and the giant's overall revenues also rose, the company has reported an earnings dip of 23.6%.

AT&T also experienced strong growth across its wireless business, with revenues of $12.9 billion for the quarter, an increase of 13.2 percent over the final quarter of 2007.

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"Osama bin Laden isn't fictional, and he isn't waiting," stated Rep. Joe Barton (R - Texas), in a vehement defense of the February 17 hard date.

The postponement of the US' digital TV transition to June 12 hit its first serious legislative obstacle yesterday, when Republicans led by the former Energy and Commerce Committee chairman and current ranking member, Joe Barton, debated the DTV Delay bill for the first time on Capitol Hill. Yesterday, Barton and colleague Rep. Cliff Stearns (R - Fla.) began their counter-assault with a letter (PDF available here) to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D - Calif.), urging her to reconsider even bringing the delay bill to the floor for a vote.

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Although its intent seems to be in the right place, a newly proposed US law imposing an audible alert on cell phone cameras raises thorny issues about actual implementation in the real world.

Along the same lines as existing laws in Japan and Korea, the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act now introduced into US Congress is aimed at thwarting sexual predators.

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The Sony Bravia XEL is tiny. The Organic LED screen measures only 11" across, and has a profile of only 3 millimeters, roughly the thickness of two stacked pennies. But this size carries with it a heavy pricetag, and in the US, units cost between $2,400 and $2,600 each. Today, the OLED screen is available in the UK at a price point twice that of North American retailers, £3,489 ($4,944).

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An invitation to Acer's press conference at GSMA in Barcelona on February 16 confirms that the third largest PC manufacturer will be entering the smartphone market.

Acer's Gianfranco Lanci talked about the company's plans for launching a Windows Mobile smartphone last year, after the company announced that it was acquiring Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer E-TEN.

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"Fast flux" is a technique used by highly respectable service providers and content networks to handle serious traffic loads. It has also become a favored tool of scammers and spammers.

ICANN this week released a report detailing its initial efforts to save this technique from being commandeered by the bad guys.

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Unfurl the festive banners and prepare the parades: Wednesday is the second annual Data Privacy Day, celebrated by the U.S., Canada, and 27 European countries. Intel co-sponsors the project, which includes a variety of events held on and around the special day.

In the US, six states (Arizona, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington) have declared Wednesday Data Privacy Day; in the US House of Representatives, 50 Congresspersons so far have signed on to co-sponsor a national version H.R. 31, a proclamation declaring Data Privacy Day, passed 402-0. In Canada, they're focusing efforts on educating The Kids about privacy on Facebook and similar sites. And in Europe, where this is in fact the third Data Protection Day, various efforts are also underway to educate the youth.

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If you use Google's Gmail service for your correspondence, check underneath the Labs tabs in the upper right corner. You may be one of the lucky ones in the first wave of those with access to the service's new option for reading and composing mail offline.

Using Gmail while offline has, of course, long been possible for anyone with an email reader compatible with POP and IMAP. But the option to do it via Gears-based functionality is new, and can handle work offline, work online (of course), and work over what the service calls "flaky" connections. (Gmail engineer Andy Palay assures readers of the Gmail Blog that live wire-chewing squirrels were used in the testing of the system.) Offline Gmail will include mailbox search and threaded conversations.

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In the second phase of its effort to put the disappointment of Barcelona behind it, AMD yesterday launched its low-power and high-performance versions of its 45 nm server processors.

For a market that had already once declared "the death of frequency" in determining a processor's relative value, AMD suffered a huge psychological hit by not having 65 nm "Barcelona" architecture CPUs that performed to expectations. The embarrassment of the December 2007 erratum aside, the company ended up never having a model that it trusted to be clocked at 3.0 GHz.

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On its Q4 earnings call Tuesday, Yahoo reported a loss of $303 million, due in part to various restructuring underway. But if the impression given by freshly minted CEO Carol Bartz is correct, the company's wise to look forward, not back.

The company managed to deliver above the midpoint of the guidance it previously gave for fourth quarter. Non-GAAP net income for Q4 was $238 million, or 17 cents/share, compared to $184 million or 13 cents/share for the same period last year; alas, with GAAP figured in, it works out to a loss of 22 cents/share.

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Commentary is swirling in the blogsphere this week over the prospect of eBay selling its VoIP property Skype to an acquirer. But does the online auctioneer really have some sort of "plan" in that direction?

Much of the media appears not at all convinced that this is so, despite all the attention paid to the rumors.

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