"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.

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.

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).

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IBM today announced that it has resolved its suit against former PowerPC chip and blade server executive Mark Papermaster. In November of last year, the company filed for a preliminary injunction that would have denied Papermaster an advisory position at Apple because he knew too many of IBM's secrets.

Papermaster and IBM agreed on a resolution that would keep the executive from beginning work at Apple until April 24 of this year, whereupon he will remain subject to all of his former contractual obligations at IBM, including the obligation to not divulge any of IBM's confidential information. Papermaster will be under the watchful eyes of the court until October 24, 2009, a full year after he officially left IBM. In that time, he will have to legally certify in July and October that he has adhered to his legal obligations. There was no announcement regarding the monetary terms of this settlement.

The second quarter of fiscal year 2009 was a reworking period for Sun Microsystems, which on Tuesday reported a loss of $209 million, or 28 cents/share, in the wake of its restructuring effort announced back in November.

The loss exceeded analysts' estimates of 13 cents/share. But without those one-time restructuring losses, things look a little better -- as they do in comparison to last quarter, when Sun announced a net loss of $1.677 billion (or $2.24/share). Non-GAAP net income for Q2 was $114 million, or 15 cents/share. Last quarter non-GAAP results showed a net loss of $65 million, or 9 cents/share.

Apple has pushed out a minor software update to its iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch devices this afternoon. According to the update information from Apple, among 246MB worth of unnamed bug fixes and improvements, Safari's stability has been improved, and an "issue where some images saved from Mail do not display correctly in the Camera Roll" has been fixed.

Since last July, Intel's defense against a Statement of Objections filed by the European Commission has been that it isn't privy to all the evidence. Now, a court has concluded that time to find what that evidence is, has run out.

A last-chance petition by Intel before the European Court of First Instance in Brussels last month, pleading for enough time to gather information it believes may be exculpatory in charges against its anti-competitive conduct against AMD, was turned down this afternoon.

Yesterday evening, Apple released the Nvidia Graphics Update 2009 which deals with video smoothness issues on Macs equipped with GeForce 7300 GT or GeForce 9600M graphics cards.

The primary fix involves cursor movement and visibility when a Mac (MacBoook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) with one of these Nvidia cards is using a Dual-link DVI adaptor connected to the Mini DisplayPort. This particular piece of hardware was a requirement for anyone who bought an updated Mac in October and wanted to use it with a 30" external monitor. Unfortunately, the $99 product wasn't available until the end of December.