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The W3C recently released a working draft specification for HTML 5. In its current iteration, this is the worst specification I have ever read.

In comparison to HTML 5, I take back everything that I said about SMTP -- at least SMTP knows its role and sticks to it. HTML 5 is a 15-year leap backwards;
it's also a transparent attempt to pander to the current tool vendors,
in a format that is so incredibly "right here and now" that it is not a
durable standard to carry us through to the future.

A computer has been trained to "read" people's minds by

specific words, researchers said today.

They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information.

This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who

helped lead the study.

"The question we are trying to get at is one people have been
thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organise
knowledge?" Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

"It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we have this way that we can study this question."

Mitchell's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a type of brain scan that can see real-time brain activity.

They calibrated the computer by having nine student volunteers think of 58 different words, while imaging their brain activity.

"We gave instructions to people where we would tell them, 'We are
going to show you words and we would like you, when you see this word,
to think about its properties,'" Mitchell said.

They imaged each of the nine people thinking about the 58 different words, to create a kind of "average" image of a word.

A gaggle of Google I/O predictions

CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi and Stephen Shankland discuss the upcoming Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Could a second mobile SDK be released? Or maybe the winner of the Android developer contest?

Google demonstrated its Android mobile phone software Wednesday at the
Google I/O conference in San Francisco. The project, under development
by Google and a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance, is due
to ship as open-source software when the first Android phones go on
sale later this year. This is a view of the home screen, demonstrated
by Steve Horowitz, Android's engineering director.

Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com

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The Novell-led Mono project this week made the first, though incomplete, public release of Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, a browser plug-in that competes with products such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, JavaFX, and Apple QuickTime.