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(Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.

Located at the site www.broadband.gov, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers.
The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where [...]

Embracing chaos just might help physicists build a quantum brain. A new study shows that disorder can enhance the coupling between light and matter in quantum systems, a find that could eventually lead to fast, easy-to-build quantum computers.

Quantum computers promise superfast calculations that precisely simulate the natural world, but physicists have struggled to design the [...]

About a third of all Americans still lack broadband access to the Internet. At its Digital Inclusion Summit, held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provided a preview of its upcoming National Broadband Plan (NBP) to provide high-speed Internet access to the estimated 93 million people in the U.S. without it. The [...]

A screengrab courtesy of OnLive, a new videogame company aiming to challenge the big three console makers by providing a "cloud-based" gaming system promising on-demand access to games and no lag time.
Credit: REUTERS/Handout

(Reuters) – OnLive is set to launch its "cloud-based" video game service in June, as the closely watched start-up looks to challenge [...]

Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest format shifts in 30 years.

By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.
The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives [...]

A Web browser's speed isn't something one often thinks about apart from the speed of the computer it's installed on. But if you use multiple browsers on the same system—whether for professional or merely personal-preference reasons—you'll probably notice certain variations between them, even if the they usually don't amount to much more than a few [...]

A new Blue Ribbon Task Force reports that addressing one of the most urgent societal challenges of the Information Age — ensuring that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future — requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical. (Credit: Image courtesy of University [...]

(Reuters) – A Web application that alerts wine grape farmers when their vines are thirsty has won first place in a competition to spur entrepreneurs in the investment-starved water sector, organizers said on Monday.

Fruition Sciences, which operates in both California and France, came first among 50 teams in Imagine H2O's global competition aimed at building [...]

Internet users around the world are attracted by
the availability of information.

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both [...]

Owners of Nvidia-based video cards may be putting those cards, as well as the rest of their PCs, at risk if they're using the latest version of Nvidia's graphics drivers. First reported by beta testers playing Starcraft II, the problem with the recently released driver update 196.75 may affect you, even if you're not a [...]