Trevor Floyd

Like the Internet? If so, please take a moment to thank today's three Nobel prizewinners for their discoveries. Own a digital camera? The three American scientists, honored today with the 2009 Physics prize, helped give us modern telecommunications-including the Internet-and digital photography.

Sad it took 40 years to honor these great men-their work was done during the 1960's-but good health has smiled upon all three, now in their 70's and 80's. (Nobels are not awarded posthumously). Charles Kao, who also holds British citizenship, is being honored for his work helping to develop fiber optics, the oh-so-slender glass pipelines than carry digital data-converted into pulses of colored light-around the world. Fiber optic cable makes the high-speed communications possible, while charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are the cornerstone of digital photography. Born in 1933, Kao was in England when he invented a method to dramatically improve the purity of the glass used to construct the fibers. Dr. Boyle also holds Canadian citizenship. The other half of the $1.4 million prize was won by Willard Boyle, 85, and George Smith, 79, for their invention of the CCD, made at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969. CCDs are based on the photoelectric effect, which itself won a Nobel for Albert Einstein. Read about the science being honored in this New York Times story.

In honoring these three today, perhaps we can also honor all those who make our technology-based lives possible. Many other people played a part in making these Nobel-winning discoveries a part of daily life. Better, we can recommit ourselves to supporting basic science and research-hard thinking-that is so out-of-fashion in much of society today. You and I are direct beneficiaries of the work the Nobel committee has chosen to honor today. (The ceremony will be held Dec. 10 in Stockholm). Let's honor these scientists by supporting math and science education and, perhaps, in another 40 years we'll be honoring a new generation of American scientists for their life-changing achievements. At a time when we need more answers than ever before, we should be concerned about how many people are capable of asking the questions and putting what they discover to use for the good of everyone. David Coursey tweets as @techinciter and can be contacted via his Web page.

Just hours after Yahoo announced a planned implementation of Facebook Connect on its network of sites, Google announced that you can now use your Twitter credentials to register on Google Friend Connect sites. This could end up being a hard fought battle, because there's one major reason one-stop online identity is becoming important as we enter 2010, and that reason is paywalls. 2010: Year of the micropayment 2009 may have been the height of Google's power as the champion of the open and free Web, but the mantra "information wants to be free" may start to change in 2010 to "information wants a small fee." The signs are everywhere. Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are both a means to quickly register for a site or service that requires a login, and it's likely no coincidence they announced competing deals on the same day. Forget Rupert Murdoch's ludicrous comments about pulling News Corp's news sites from Google's Index.

Murdoch isn't the only one either. What's more likely, and what the News Corp Chairman has stated on several occasions, is that all of his company's news sites-including The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Times in London-will erect paywalls by next summer. The New York Times Company CEO Janet Robinson has said there is a "high probability" the Times will put up a paywall again. There are even rumors that Hulu may be considering some kind of pay service. Magazine publishers like Conde Nast and Time Inc. are also busy creating online formats for touchscreen devices that will entice people to pay for digital versions of their magazines. So in all likelihood, paywalls are coming back.

During the Web's early days in the 1990's numerous sites wanted you to sign up for an account with a unique login and password. Nickel-and-dimed to death But this idea of having you pay for every single site and service they use online has been tried before. Many of these sites were also asking you to pay small amounts for access to their content-typically anywhere from two to ten dollars a month. It was such a pain to have to constantly remember logins and fork over your credit card information all the time, so most people didn't. Over time paywalls fell, the Web became more open and business models started crumbling. But all those little payments could add up if you bought too many of them, and very few were offering one-time payment schemes. But things may change with resurrected paywall schemes, and that's where these unified logins like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect could come in handy.

In May, TechCrunch's MG Siegler came across an option to pay with his Facebook account on a Facebook application from GroupCard. Your Digital Wallet is already here Paying with Facebook is already underway according to several reports. Then in June, Inside Facebook reported that Facebook had lured a Google Checkout executive to help Facebook develop the social network's growing payment platform. If paywalls, micropayments, and subscriptions are coming back to the Web in force, then a digital wallet that you can take with you to any site and pay for items using one-click access will be a critical component for success. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect could easily be linked to Google Checkout and Facebook's payment platform making it easier to pay for things online.

These identities would become even more useful if they could be used across most online retailers as well. Google and Facebook aren't alone; other major contenders looking to be your wallet include PayPal and Amazon. That's why a war over how you choose your online identity could become increasingly important moving into next year. None of these services are universal methods of payment yet (although PayPal is probably the closest), which means the market is wide open for some of these companies to dominate the digital wallet. Connect with Ian on Twitter (@ianpaul). So the question is: who will you trust with your money?

In the days leading up to NASA's crashing of two halves of a space probe into the moon, doubters turned to the Internet to express fears that the lunar bombing would have negative effects on the Earth. In a quest to find out if there's water on the moon , NASA sent two separated halves of a spacecraft crashing into a permanently dark crater on the south pole of the moon this morning. Scientists and astronomers were quick to step forward to refute any rumors and quell concerns, but rumors are still circulating online. The crashes were meant to send up a huge debris plume that could be measured and analyzed for evidence of water ice hiding in the cold, dark crater.

But detractors were quick to post online warnings about possible negative effects of the experiment. With NASA still hopeful to one day create a viable human outpost on the moon , it would be helpful for anyone there to find water rather than haul it up from Earth. Amy Ephron, an author and screenwriter, wrote an article for the Huffington Post earlier this week, questioning NASA for taking the risks associated with sending two spacecraft crashing into the surface of the moon. "Who did the risk assessment? Ephron was far from alone in her concerns. I mean, what if something goes wrong?" asked Ephron. "I could say something scientifically lame and ask, 'What if it gets thrown off its axis?' or something funny and suggest something (that I actually sort of believe), like, 'What if it somehow throws off the astrology?' Or that we're not risking - as we have the earth with continued experiments of this kind - sending the solar system out of balance. The Chicago Surrealist Movement posted an online petition , which was signed by 560 people, calling for NASA to halt the bombing of the moon.

Faith Vilas, director of the MMT Observatory , said she's been amazed by such negative reactions to the mission. And people against the LCROSS mission started their own Twitter presence with @helpsavethemoon . While some people said they felt NASA's plan was simply too aggressive an attack on the Earth's orbiter, some claimed that the impacts would change the Earth's tides, throw the moon off its axis or even affect women's menstrual cycles. There's simply no danger, she added. "The moon is impacted by nature and meteors all the time," said Vilas. "Nature has done much more damage to the moon than we just did. What we did was nothing. We were not likely to have any effect on the moon at all.

We didn't have much of an impact at all." Bruce Betts, director of projects at The Planetary Society , said in an email to Computerworld that this morning's crashes will have no negative impact on the moon or the Earth. "The spacecraft are far too tiny compared to the moon, in fact, to have any significant effect on the moon's orbit or dynamics," he added. "The impact might be likened to a gnat hitting the windshield of a truck."

Microsoft Corp.marketed i4i Inc.'s XML software to potential customers at the same time it planned to drive the small company out of business by infringing on its patent for the technology, according to court documents filed last week. Federal Judge Leonard Davis issued the injunction in August, barring Microsoft from selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 after Oct. 10. The decision came about three months after a Texas jury found that Microsoft had illegally used patented i4i technology to build XML features into its word processing software. In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District in Washington, Toronto-based i4i argued that an injunction blocking Microsoft from selling current versions of Word should stand. The jury had awarded i4i $200 million, but Davis increased the amount to just under $300 million when he issued the injunction.

Earlier this month, the three-judge appeals panel decided to stay the injunction while it weighs Microsoft's appeal . I4i filed the patent infringement lawsuit in 2007. The new i4i brief charges that in 1991, "at the same time Microsoft was praising the improved functionality that i4i's product brought to Word, and touting i4i as a 'Microsoft Partner,' Microsoft was working behind i4i's back to make i4i's product obsolete." According to the brief, just days after a 1991 meeting in which Microsoft had sought to find ways to work with i4i, Microsoft executives discussed XML plans for Word that would eventually "make obsolete any competitive attempts by third parties to conquer that market." Microsoft must file its rebuttal to i4i's brief by Sept. 14; the appeals court is slated to hear oral arguments from the two sides on Sept. 23. Asked to comment on i4i's briefs, a Microsoft spokesman said, "We're looking forward to the hearing on the merits of our appeal." This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld 's print edition.

The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope. "The goal of the program is national networking of all scientists," said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics for the University of Florida, in a statement. "Scientists have problems finding each other.

But they don't always know people even at their own institutions." 12 cool ways to donate your PC's spare processing power Technologies used to support the effort will include VIVO, an open source discovery tool out of Cornell used to search for research information. We often find that researchers have pretty good networks with students or with scientists at institutions where they received their degree or worked before. It will also exploit concepts of the Semantic Web, Tim-Berners Lee's vision for an even more useful Web that enables better sharing of data. Of course this effort is by far not the only one looking to make it easier for scientists to find one another. In addition to the University of Florida and Cornell, also involved in the project are Indiana University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.

One commercial venture, Epernicus, recently took the stage at the Web Innovators Group in Boston to talk about its effort to link life sciences researchers within companies with one another, and eventually across organizations. For more on network research news, follow our Alpha Doggs blog  Track Bob Brown on Twitter