A series of Envisat images captured the birth of a giant iceberg that occurred over a period of time from May-Oct 2007. The new berg was calved from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and measures 34km x 20km.

Check the image above and you’ll see the crack forming back in May 2007 on the left, the image on the right shows a spanking new baby berg.

Watch a cool animation of the birthing process at the European Space Agency site.

China’s battle against intellectual-property rights piracy will take “generations,” the PRC’s commissioner of IP rights said Thursday.

He added “is intellectual property protection a problem? Yes, it is. But is it as serious as some say? Not necessarily. To a greater degree, it’s hyped-up, politicized. We cannot accept that. In fact, if China does not do well, the biggest victim will be China itself.”

What the commissioner is trying to tell us is 2 things:

1) That if change occurs it will be lucky if it happens in our lifetime.

2) The PRC gov’t is more concerned with their appearance as a Second World country and that piracy is impacting his country more than it’s impacting the US or the European Union.

Therefore we essentially need to learn to live with this problem for now.

Link to the C|Net story

Predictions from a neural network could reduce characters’ jerky movements in online games. One way of reducing these problems is a technique called dead reckoning, a term more commonly known to sailors and pilots to plot their future positions based on present speed, current/winds, time.

In this case though dead reckoning calls for each player’s computer to run a low-fidelity simulation of what’s going on in the game. At the same time, the computer runs a high-fidelity version that keeps precise track of the player’s actions and position. The computer constantly compares the two versions. If they don’t match, the computer sends an update to all the other participating computers.

Technology Review (MIT) has more of the details on how your future games like Quake and Unreal will be improved somewhat in their online play.

Umm, I don’t think so. Getting warm though.

In the press release for their ‘Ultimate’ line of smartphone/PDAs i-mate says the gadgets will appeal to geeky power users and business folk alike due to:

• video out that can drive video onto a plasma screen
• the fastest radio connection of any Windows Mobile device
• XGA Direct Video Out
• GPS Built In
• PDA form factor with a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen
• Windows Mobile 6
• 256MB ROM, 128MB RAM
• Quad-Band GSM/EDGE

Microsoft beat GOOG at something for once, they won the high-stakes bidding war for a slice of Facebook. To top it off, they did it in the midst of GOOG’s Analyst Day which was supposed to be a big news day for them while pumping their enterprise Apps business.

In response to numerous questions from analysis and reporters, CEO Eric Schmidt became exasperated and repeatedly declined to comment.

Now back to MSFT - the terms of the agreement have them as the exclusive third party advert partner for Facebook, all for a $240M stake in the social networking site. Also, these ads will expand outside the US presence into the international market.

CNET has the lengthy analysis.