Kazaa pays $100m to record industry

Peer-to-peer file-sharing site Kazaa will become a legal music download service following a series of high profile legal battles, according to BBC News.

"The peer-to-peer network has also agreed to pay $100 million in damages to the record industry," notes the article.

Kazaa`s settlement follows moves by other sites like Napster which now offers legal downloads, and comes after the recent release of a music industry report that says more than 20 billion music tracks have been downloaded illegally in the last year.

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday, a Microsoft representative has said.

"Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than three million times ... that`s 500% more than what was expected," adds the representative. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers."

Although Microsoft`s Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the "technical refresh", or update, for users of the software will remain free, the representative said.

Read the full article at News.Com.

The key to the crash-free future is vehicle-to-vehicle communication, or V2V. Some advances that would make V2V possible are already on the way, claims LiveScience.com.

The site reasons increasingly sophisticated GPS will soon allow drivers to pinpoint their vehicles` precise location at any given moment, and stability-control systems that track the car`s speed and direction are even now feeding such information to onboard computers.

"The primary remaining challenge is finding the means to communicate that data to cars in your projected path," adds the report. The US Federal Communications Commission has cleared the 5.9GHz band for dedicated short-range communication among cars and roadside transceivers.

Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed an executive order outlining the state`s plan for the advancement of health IT.

"[Better hospital IT] can lead to dramatic savings and to much safer, efficient medical treatment," says Schwarzenegger.

Two examples of advanced hospital IT systems are telemedicine centres, which permit doctors to diagnose patients through video conferencing, and networked databases between healthcare entities like hospitals, nursing homes and pharmacies, writes GovTech.Net.