A number of hooded youths appear in the video
A group of teenagers sparked a police inquiry in Merseyside after posting footage of themselves posing with weapons on the internet.
The montage of clips, entitled Seacombe Ladz, shows hooded youths brandishing a kitchen knife, baton and pellet gun.

Merseyside Police - dismissed as "scum" in the two-minute video - investigated after one shot helpfully lingered on a street sign in Seacombe, Wirral.

Four males were arrested on suspicion of firearms offences.

The two 15-year-olds, 16-year-old and 20-year-old were later released on bail, Merseyside Police said.

As well as the weapons, the video features two "guard dogs" - a pair of tail-wagging collies.

Seriously! tht is so embarrisin!! get a grip! think ur hard with a pellet gun! PLEASE!

YouTube viewer

One of the participants also appears to be wearing an electronic tag that looks like one issued to released prisoners.

In addition to the featured street signs, a Merseyside Police logo doctored to read "Merseyside Police R Scum" appears.

Insp Paul Farrar, of Merseyside police, said: "Any information that suggests unlawful use or possession of firearms, or other offensive weapons, will be vigorously followed up and investigated.

"This includes videos posted on the internet," he added.

The YouTube clip has been viewed more than 530 times but has failed to impress those who sat through its running time.

One reads: "Seriously! tht is so embarrisin!! get a grip! think ur hard with a pellet gun! PLEASE!"

Another comment said those responsible "should be ashamed of themselves".

BBC

This gives you an idea of just how small Haier's Elegance phone reall is.
 

The small package addage is doubly true with two new, diminutive handsets.

The Haier Elegance (otherwise known as the Black Pearl) is a lipstick case-sized GSM mobile phone that measures only 3.5 inches long, 1.4 inches wide and a mere 0.6 inches deep.  The mini battery pack inside is said to last up to 3 hours of talk time and 200 hours of standby.

There are actually two Elegance models: One is a tri-band (800, 1800, 1900 MHz) world phone and the other a dual-band (850, 1900 MHz) handset for the U.S. market. 

There’s no digital camera in this phone but you‘ll probably never miss it.  That’s because there’s a terrific OLED color screen with animated, 3D graphics, stereo Bluetooth capabilities, a FM radio, a voice recorder, a MP3 player along with a micro-SD card slot to store your music, some games, an alarm clock, calculator, calendar, text messaging and a mini-USB 2.0 port on the bottom for connectivity and charging. 

It’s hard to believe there’s room for a great phone in there.

I’m happy to report that my in extensive tests -- here and overseas -- the Elegance was an excellent performer.  And everyone who saw it wanted to use it.

Because of its size and good looks (it has a black gun metal finish), the Elegance could become the next “ultimate fashion accessory.”  On the other hand, it’s easy to lose the phone in your pocket.  It’s that small.

Elegance doesn’t come cheap.  Both tri-band and dual-band models are both sold as unlocked phones, which means you need to activate with the GSM provider of your choice.  Price is $229.95. Highly recommended.

Pantech 

This little beauty is a flip open world phone with changeable front color panels.
 

The other phone I want to tell you about is much, much larger than the Elegance – maybe by a few millimeters. Pantech’s C3b is a little powerhouse of a flip phone that does everything really well.

The handset is 2.7 by 1.7 by 0.76 inches and weighs all of 2.5 ounces.  Amazingly, the tiny battery inside is good for up to 3 hours of talk time and 10 days of standby.

The C3b (b is for Bluetooth) is a tri-band (850/1800/1900 MHz) world phone with two TFT color screens.  Because the outer screen shows the time, someone might mistake your phone for a pocket watch.  Well, it could happen!

Inside, there’s a VGA camera with flash, hands-free speakerphone, email and a calendar with reminders, an address book that holds 800 contacts, MP3 and music tone ringtones, picture/ringtone caller ID, AOL/Yahoo/ICQ instant messaging, plus customizable wallpaper and graphics.  That’s a lot stuffed into this small package.

You can customize the outside too.  There are optional interchangeable color faceplates (red, silver, blue) to make the C3b your own.  I used the blue cover during testing.

The Pantech turned heads wherever I took it.  And I’ve taken it everywhere.  The C3b worked and sounded great everywhere I tried in the U.S. and Europe.  The phone was able to find and hold a cellular signal as well as – or better than – any other handset I’ve ever tried.  That’s big news for such a diminutive product.

The Pantech C3b is currently available at AT&T, and it’s free with a two-year contract.  It would be a bargain at $50 -$100 or more.  The C3b is also highly recommended.

msnbc.com

Sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in the US rose by 21% in June, analyst figures show, but the machine still trails the Wii and Xbox 360.

Tracking firm NPD Group reported that 98,500 PS3s were sold, compared to 198,400 Xbox 360s (up 28%) and 381,800 Wiis (up 13%).

Sony said that the $100 (£50) price cut to the 60GB PS3 led to a 135% sales rise over the last two weeks.

Independent figures for sales of the cheaper PS3 are not yet available.

"This jump in sales bodes very well for us heading into the fall as we launch an impressive arsenal of hardware and software," Jack Tretton, head of Sony Computer Entertainment America, said in a statement.

Leading firms

Nintendo's DS handheld sold 561,900 units , while Sony's PSP, which has been boosted by an April price cut, sold 230,100 units, NPD reported.

Software sales in the US are 31% higher than the same time last year, the market research showed, buoyed by new consoles from all three firms.

Last month's sales topped $1.1bn (£550m), the data revealed.

"The industry continues to realise substantial gains, month after month, and on all fronts it's great growth," NPD analyst Anita Frazier told Reuters news agency.

Nintendo said the sales showed that the firm was reaching a new gaming audience.

"We are delivering on our message of reaching out to new gamers," said Nintendo spokeswoman Beth Llewellyn.
 
BBC

For anyone stuck on a casino stool, playing hours of video poker, rest assured: humans can still beat a computer.

Phil Laak pitting his poker skills against a software program. Mr. Laak, working with a partner, Ali Eslami, won two rounds out of three.

But computers may soon dominate on the felt-top table, as they have on the chessboard.

In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional human poker players.

The contest, which was billed as the “First Man-Machine Poker Championship” and which offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted two professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, against a program written by a team of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta. They gave it a name that probably no gambler would ever choose as a nickname, Polaris.

Poker is thought to be a more difficult challenge for software designers than games like chess and checkers. Computer scientists have to develop different strategies and algorithms to deal with the uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player as well as difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing.

In the past, research has focused on chess and checkers. In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer-based chess playing software system developed by I.B.M. researchers, beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion. The University of Alberta researchers won the world checkers championship in 1994, and earlier this month they reported that they had developed a program that cannot lose, and at best can be tied at checkers.

However, Jonathan Schaeffer, chairman of the University of Alberta computer science department and the researcher who initiated the poker playing research effort 16 years ago, said that the advances that are being made in the development of poker-playing software are likely to be more applicable in the real world than chess research.

“I contend that poker is harder than chess for computers, and the research results that come out of the work on poker will be much more generally applicable than what came out of the chess research,” he said.

Research interest has shifted to games like poker in recent years, in part because chess is no longer of keen interest and in part because rapid progress is being made in developing new algorithms with broad practical applications in areas such as negotiation and commerce, said Tuomas Sandholm, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist.

The version of poker used in the match Monday and Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement Artificial Intelligence was a popular game called Texas Hold ’Em heads-up limit poker, a two-player game in which some cards are hidden and others are playable by both sides. Each hand is played in four rounds during which each side can bet or fold. After four rounds of 500 hands each, lasting about four hours, the player with the most money is declared the winner.

Unlike chess competitions, which are marked by extreme concentration and long moments of silence, the tournament in a hotel here was festive, with each human competitor offering a running commentary on Polaris’s style of play to an audience of several hundred people.

Mr. Laak, who is nicknamed the Unabomber because of his trademark hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, would frequently gesticulate wildly at the laptop computer screen and repeatedly referred to the computer’s play as “sick” — his way of describing an unexpected or extraordinary action on the part of the machine. His supporters included Jennifer Tilly, an actress who is also a well-known professional poker player.

The contest had to be formatted to accommodate the computer. To counter the luck of the draw, a dominating factor in poker, the human players were put in separate rooms. The hand dealt to the human in one room was identical to the hand dealt to the computer in the other room.

The format also eliminated one of the crucial aspects of traditional poker called the tell, subtle clues such as facial ticks that may permit other players to make accurate guesses about the hidden cards held by their opponent.

Mr. Eslami and Mr. Laak are both well-known figures in the world of poker and are mathematically skilled and familiar with the techniques used by their opponents. Although Mr. Eslami and Mr. Laak are not the best human players in the world, the scientists argued that their knowledge of computing made them more effective opponents than other top-ranked poker players.

The human team reached a draw in the first round even though their total winnings were slightly less than that of the computer. The match rules specified that small differences were not considered significant because of statistical variation. On Monday night, the second round went heavily to Polaris, leaving the human players visibly demoralized.

“Polaris was beating me like a drum,” Mr. Eslami said after the round.

However, during the third round on Tuesday afternoon, the human team rebounded, when the Polaris team’s shift in strategy backfired. They used a version of the program that was supposed to add a level of adaptability and “learning.”

Unlike computer chess programs, which require immense amounts of computing power to determine every possible future move, the Polaris poker software is largely precomputed, running for weeks before the match to build a series of agents called “bots” that have differing personalities or styles of play, ranging from aggressive to passive.

The Alberta team modeled 10 different bots before the competition and then chose to run a single program in the first two rounds. In the third round, the researchers used a more sophisticated ensemble of programs in which a “coach” program monitored the performance of three bots and then moved them in and out of the lineup like football players.

Mr. Laak and Mr. Eslami won the final round handily, but not before Polaris won a $240 pot with a royal flush than beat Mr. Eslami’s three-of-a-kind. The two men said that Polaris had challenged them far more than their human opponents.

The New York Times

Hewlett-Packard said Monday that it had agreed to pay $1.6 billion for Opsware, which makes software to update corporate servers automatically, a deal that promises a hefty payoff to an Opsware founder, Marc Andreessen.

Mr. Andreessen, the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who helped start the browser maker Netscape Communications, owns about 10 percent of Opsware, offering him a payday of around $160 million from the cash transaction.

The acquisition, for $14.25 a share, is at a premium of nearly 40 percent to the company’s closing price on Friday of $10.28.

Shares of Opsware, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., closed on Monday at $14.

Hewlett-Packard, of Palo Alto, Calif., also announced that it was buying Neoware, a thin-client computing company, for $16.25 a share, in a deal valued at $334 million. A thin client computer is managed and controlled remotely by centrally managed servers, instead of by software on the machine’s hard drive, as a PC is operated. Neoware is based in King of Prussia, Pa.

The two acquisitions are intended to bolster Hewlett-Packard’s aggressive efforts to sell big corporate customers energy-efficient data centers that can operate with fewer people. Last year, it bought Mercury Interactive, which manages hardware in data centers, for $4.5 million.

Ann M. Livermore, Hewlett-Packard’s executive vice president in charge of selling hardware, software and services to large corporations, predicted that companies would spend $130 billion this year setting up, running and tending to their technology infrastructure. “Every company in the world wants to automate and take the complexity out,” Ms. Livermore said.

Mr. Andreessen said corporate data centers were entering an era analogous to the shift by manufacturers to highly automated factories that needed fewer workers.

“If you’re running a few servers, you can do it by hand,” he said. “If you’re running tens of thousands, you can’t.”

George Hamilton, an enterprise software industry analyst for the Yankee Group, a market research firm, said corporations were becoming more interested in automating large data centers known as server farms because the centers are growing in size and they are being asked to do increasingly complex tasks.

“There’s much too much going on to do manually anymore,” he said.

Benjamin Horowitz, another Opsware founder, will move to Hewlett-Packard to run the division overseeing the new acquisition and other server automation technology, Ms. Livermore said.

The deal is the culmination of a considerable turnaround for Opsware and Mr. Andreessen. In 1999, Mr. Andreessen and several Netscape colleagues founded Loudcloud, the precursor to Opsware. Loudcloud initially took off, but its fortunes followed the dot-com boom and bust.

By 2002, the company was forced to refocus on software automation and it renamed itself Opsware. Mr. Andreessen said Opsware now has more than 350 customers, including Hewlett-Packard, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, General Electric and Microsoft.

In a celebratory posting on his blog Monday morning, Mr. Andreessen said Opsware’s stock price had risen exponentially since October 2002. “Everyone who bought and held stock in Loudcloud or Opsware in the public market at any time made money.”

Mr. Andreessen made several hundred million dollars when Netscape was sold to America Online in 1998.

His latest project is Ning, a Silicon Valley start-up that allows people who are not knowledgeable about computers to develop their own social networking sites. He serves as chairman and is a financial backer of the company. Last week, Ning raised $44 million in additional funds from a group led by Legg Mason.

Mr. Andreessen said that Ning was “ramping up pretty fast” and that after the Opsware deal with Hewlett-Packard closed, he planned to “jump directly into that.”

Texas Instruments, the largest supplier of chips used in mobile phones, said on Monday that its second-quarter profit plunged almost 75 percent from a year ago, when its results in the quarter were bolstered by the $1.65 billion sale of a sensor business.

Net income met analysts’ expectations, however, at $610 million, or 42 cents a share, down from $2.39 billion, or $1.50 a share, in the second quarter of 2006.

On an operating basis, the company, based in Dallas, earned $739 million, or 47 cents a share, after excluding parts of the business it sold last year.

Revenue for the quarter was $3.42 billion, down from $3.7 billion in the year-ago period, because of weaker demand for a broad range of products. Analysts had expected $3.45 billion in revenue, according to a Thomson Financial survey.

Ron Slaymaker, the company’s vice president of investor relations, said it had emerged from an inventory glut, and that sales of high-performance analog products were helping to offset declines in other products.

The president and chief executive, Richard K. Templeton, repeated his prediction, made in May, that gross profit margins, which were 52.1 percent in the second quarter of 2007, would reach 55 percent in the next few years.

Texas Instruments said it expected to earn 46 cents to 52 cents a share in the third quarter — in line with Wall Street forecasts — on revenue of $3.49 billion to $3.79 billion. Analysts were expecting third-quarter sales of $3.7 billion.

In May, the company unveiled plans to invest about $1 billion over 10 years in a new test and assembly facility in the Philippines, and also announced the sale of its digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., customer equipment business to the German chip maker Infineon Technologies for an undisclosed amount. That sale is expected to close at the end of this month.

In a separate announcement that coincided with Monday’s earnings report, Texas Instruments said it was working with Ericsson, the world’s largest maker of wireless networks, to build a cellphone platform that could run on any operating system that manufacturers and carriers choose.

Hoping to persuade skeptical regulators to approve their proposed merger, the nation’s two satellite radio companies announced detailed plans Monday to give consumers the ability to choose the programs that make up their subscription package.

The companies, Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, said they would offer two “à la carte” pricing plans. One would enable consumers to purchase the best of the premium services now offered by each company — like professional football, baseball and basketball — for a monthly fee of $14.99. For $6.99 a month, the other would enable listeners to choose 50 of the nonpremium channels, with each additional channel costing 25 cents. To subscribe to the “à la carte” plans, consumers would have to buy new radios.

The companies said they would also let listeners select “family friendly” and other rate plans and would give subscribers a $1 a month credit if they asked to have stations with adult content blocked. Consumers who do not want to change their existing service would not see any changes in their current monthly bill of $12.95.

The announcement, coming the day before the period for receiving comments on the proposal closes at the Federal Communications Commission, was an effort to persuade the agency that the merger was in the public interest. Several of the five commissioners, including the agency’s chairman, Kevin J. Martin, have raised significant concerns about the deal because it would result in the creation of only one satellite radio service.

When the deal was announced this year, Mr. Martin said the companies would have a high hurdle to overcome in persuading the commission that it was in the public interest.

The proposal is tailored to reflect two major policy campaigns that Mr. Martin has led. He has urged cable television and satellite radio services to give consumers greater choices by offering à la carte price plans. And he has repeatedly denounced violent and vulgar programs, while suggesting that à la carte plans could solve that problem.

The way the announcement deals with these issues increases the chances that the merger could ultimately be approved, although analysts said they believed it remained a close call.

Through an aide, Mr. Martin declined to comment about the pricing plans. The aide said Mr. Martin “looks forward to reviewing the entire record.” The agency is expected to complete its review by the end of the year. The deal is also being examined for antitrust issues by the Justice Department, where it faces fewer obstacles.

Consumer groups, which have denounced the deal as anticompetitive, applauded the announcement and said that it demonstrated that subscription services for television and radio could be sold on an à la carte basis.

“It clearly shows that the companies are enormously fearful that the merger would otherwise be denied,” said Gene Kimmelman, vice president for federal affairs at the Consumers Union, which has urged the commission to reject the deal. “It doesn’t resolve long-term competition issues, but it is a wonderful step in the right direction. Kevin Martin will read it positively, but whether it is enough for him, I don’t know.”

The merger has come under assault by the National Association of Broadcasters, which has considerable clout in Congress.

“The history of antitrust law demonstrates that two hotly competitive companies will promise anything to become a monopoly,” said Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters. “Policy makers should not be hoodwinked by today’s announcement, since nothing is stopping either XM or Sirius from individually offering consumers a more affordable choice in limited program packages.”

The merger’s architect, Mel Karmazin, has responded that the relevant market for the services offered by the two satellite radio companies includes all terrestrial broadcasters, Internet radio and other popular listening devices, including iPods and portable music players.

“It’s hard to imagine how two companies with a combined audience of 3.4 percent of the nationwide audience could harm competition,” said Mr. Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius, at an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington on Monday where he announced the pricing plans. “The market is brimming with competition and would remain robust after a merger.”

Mr. Karmazin said that the companies, which have never made a profit, were unable to offer à la carte plans if they did not merge because it would be too expensive. But he said that the merger would result in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings, much of which could be passed on to consumers. And he said that the plans were aimed at significantly increasing the number of subscribers. The companies have 14 million subscribers.

In an interview, Mr. Karmazin said he did not know how long the rates would stay in effect and that he did not have “an end date or a predetermined time” in mind.

“My hope is we would be able to offer it forever,” he said.

He said that the merged company would consider offering some kind of rebate to customers who have to replace their radios to get the à la carte service. The new radios are expected to be in the same price range as those now being sold, he said.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Netflix, the online DVD rental leader, expects its profit to sag the rest of the year as it absorbs the cost of lowering its prices and upgrading its customer service to ward off an intensifying threat from a rival, Blockbuster.

The sobering forecast overshadowed the company’s second-quarter results, which were released on Monday after the stock market closed.

The dimmer outlook — foreshadowed on Sunday when management announced the lower prices — weighed on Netflix’s already drooping stock.

After plunging $2.36, or 12 percent, to end Monday’s regular session at $17.27, Netflix shares shed another 62 cents in extended trading.

“We are in a very competitive, large battle,” Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said in an interview on Monday. “But we feel like we are still in a great position.”

Hoping to retain more of its current customers while enticing new subscribers, Netflix, based in Los Gatos, Calif., is lowering monthly fees by $1 on its two most popular plans to match Blockbuster’s prices for comparable Internet-only services. The new rates take effect on Tuesday.

The discounts were driven by Netflix’s trouble in signing new subscribers since late last year, when Blockbuster began giving its online subscribers the option of swapping DVDs to one of its stores instead of relying on the mail and waiting at least two days for another movie.

Netflix fared well financially in the second quarter, earning $26.6 million, or 37 cents a share. That represented a 50 percent increase from net income of $17 million, or 25 cents a share, at the same time last year.

Revenue totaled $303.7 million, a 27 percent improvement from $239.4 million last year.

If not for a $4.1 million payment from Blockbuster to settle a patent infringement lawsuit, Netflix said it would have earned 31 cents a share.

Taser International, the maker of stun guns, posted second-quarter profit of $3.7 million on sales to the military and law enforcement agencies.

Earnings and revenue beat analysts’ estimates. Net income was 6 cents a share, compared with a loss of 15 cents a share, or $9.6 million, a year earlier, when it had a $17.7 million expense to settle shareholder litigation. Sales climbed 59 percent to a record $25.9 million, Taser said yesterday.

Shares of Taser fell 58 cents, or 3.4 percent, to $16.56. Taser was downgraded to neutral from buy by an analyst, Eric Wold at Merriman Curhan Ford.

Taser sales to the military and domestic and foreign law-enforcement agencies increased after orders were delayed in the first quarter. The company is poised to expand beyond its current markets with a hand-sized model available in four colors to consumers.

Taser, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., depends on police and military customers for about 99 percent of sales.

Taser has successfully defended itself from product liability lawsuits and has “52 consecutive wins,” the chairman, Thomas P. Smith, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Eight of the lawsuits were dismissed during the quarter.

This record has helped produce a “significant decline in new litigation,” he said. Taser has about 50 lawsuits pending, according to Mr. Smith.