Each time the cursor meets the target, there is a low bleep. He repeats the movements as occupational therapist Natalie Smyk hovers.

"Jamaal has good strength. Now, we are working on his ability to control his movements," said Smyk, at the Sheltering Arms rehabilitation hospital in Mechanicsville.

The machine Williams is on is called a REO. Used in rehabilitation therapy, it can help patients like Williams, 32, regain function after neurological injury. In Williams' case, the injury was caused by a stroke in February 2007 that affected his right side.

Initially unable to walk or talk, Williams, a former Virginia Union football player, has regained much function. But there are some lingering problems. You have to grab his right hand to shake it. He walks slower than he did before the stroke. He sometimes struggles to get words out.

The Sunnyvale-based company expects to begin registering new addresses under the domains of "ymail" and "rocketmail" around noon PDT Thursday at http://mail.yahoo.com.

It will be the first time that Yahoo has offered e-mail accounts under umbrellas other than its own company name since it became a correspondence conduit in 1997.

Yahoo began offering free e-mail shortly after its $80 million acquisition of Four11 Corp., which included the rocketmail domain. Rocketmail users at the time of the acquisition were allowed to keep their existing accounts, but Yahoo hadn't accepted any new addresses under that name until now.

The diversification into new e-mail designations is being driven by the difficulty that people are having as they try to find an appealing e-mail handle under the Yahoo domain.

Most people prefer an e-mail address that's easy to remember like the first letter of their first name in front of their last name or reflective of a personal interest, like a hobby or favorite sports team.

The report found YouTube and other video Web sites having soared in popularity with 35 percent American adults having watched a political video online during the primary season. It found 10 percent of adults as having used social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace for political activities. It found video- and social- networking to have increased since the last presidential election.
An interesting revelation: Pew found online fund-raising to have gone up to six percent as compared to just two percent in 2004. Democrat Barack Obama was found to be particularly good at raising funds online; Obama supporters were found twice as likely as those of Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican John McCain to have made an online contribution to the campaign.

To top it all, the Pew report found that though so many Americans were obviously using the Internet to get a bird's eye view of the campaign, as many as 60 percent did not trust the Internet fearing widespread misinformation and propaganda.

Discovery has two opportunities to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Mission Control told the shuttle crew early Saturday morning the initial weather forecast for the first opportunity called for light winds and no rain, ideal conditions for Discovery to land.

The second chance did have a slight chance of rain showers.

"Right now it looks pretty good," Mission Control said.

Since Discovery has enough supplies to allow it to stay in orbit until Tuesday, NASA will only aim on Saturday to bring home the shuttle in Florida, the primary landing site.

Florida would remain the only choice on Sunday as well, if Saturday's opportunities don't pan out, said flight director Richard Jones.

Merrill Lynch analyst Guy Moszkowski says he clearly doesn't like removing his buy rating from Lehman Brothers (LEH) just a week after putting it in place, at a price 10% lower, but seems clear to him now that move to buy was premature.

Moszkowski says the magnitude of pre-announced second quarter loss and associated capital raising (both considerably greater than his expectations) indicate weaker ROE potential, and after careful reconsideration of Lehman's various exposures and hedging issues, he has less confidence than he would need for buy rating.

He expects Lehman to survive because its liquidity profile is strong and the Fed discount window is open. But he thinks its current business and asset mix are just not well positioned for the current environment.

JP MORGAN DOWNGRADES ALCOA TO NEUTRAL FROM OVERWEIGHT

JP Morgan analyst Michael Gambardella says he downgrades Alcoa (AA) as he believes the market will be disappointed with both the strategic direction from the new CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, and the company's near-term earnings due to higher-than-expected input costs.

Intellpedia's core is a wiki, built with the same software as Wikipedia. It resides on three different networks, designated unclassifed, secret and top-secret. Over the past couple of years, the initial project has grown to include an instant messaging client built with the Jabber platform, a tagging system similar to del.icio.us, RSS feeds, image galleries and even the CIA's version of YouTube.

The system is "agency-agnostic," noted Don Burke, "Intellipedia Doyen" at the CIA, who gave the update along with Sean Dennehy, the agency's Intellipedia evangelist.

The CIA wants the system reach a level where the entire U.S. intelligence community is contributing knowledge, the two said.

While there have been early successes, that goal is a long way off, they added.

Still, Intellipedia's registered user list has grown from 20,000 in July 2007 to 35,000 today. It now contains more than 200,000 pages of content, according to the CIA.

But selling the concept of sharing information in a milieu known for secrecy has been "a painful experience," marked by repeated confrontational briefings with skeptical CIA employees, Burke recalled: "This was far more of a cultural problem than a technical problem."

While Intellipedia serves a specialized need, the CIA representatives had general advice for enterprises that are thinking about implementing wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies.

"We all do things every day that are the equivalent of organizing and aggregating," and the idea is not to create additional processes, but migrate existing ones to these tools, Burke said.

"People say, 'I don't have time to edit Intellipedia with all the other things I'm doing.' ... We say, look at what you're doing now in e-mail and shared drives and start moving those practices to those tools," Dennehy added.

Companies should take small steps, Dennehy urged. One of the first Intellipedia projects revolved around creating a list of acronyms.

"It's simple, gets people who are uncomfortable with the tools past those first couple of edits. If you make those barriers small at the very beginning, they're more likely to adopt," he said. 

For years, the rivalry between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices helped define not only the x86 microprocessor market but also the PCs and server systems that used the chips from these two companies.

Now it seems that Intel is preparing to face off against a pair of very different companies.

In two weeks' time, Nvidia, which is best known for its line of graphics processors, announced it had a new platform called Tegra that will challenge Intel in the still-emerging market of mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, while Via plans to compete against Intel in the low-cost notebook market with a line of low-watt, x86 processors called Nano.

Intel had planned to come into both markets with its line of Atom processors Silverthorne for MIDs and Diamondville for low-cost PCs and define these markets through its technical innovations, marketing muscle and strong relationship with the hardware vendors.

In a way, Intel, Via and Nvidia are all looking for the next great opportunity to grow their businesses outside the traditional PC market and create processors that will define these new areas. What all three companies have found, and what they have developed products for, is that these markets involve low-cost, mobile devices that can connect a user to the Internet at any time.

What is open
I confirmed with three different Google employees at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco that the core Android platform will be 100% open source. Even multimedia codecs, which historically are held close to the vest will be open. Except where noted, everything will use the Apache software license (ASL v2). This is the same open source license used by projects like the Apache HTTP server, Tomcat, Harmony, and many other large projects in the open source community.

There are two exceptions to the Apache license rule:

Software that is already covered by by a free/open source license will continue to use that license. Most notably, this includes Google’s enhancements to the Linux kernel. Linux uses the GNU Public License (GPL v2) so enhancements to the kernel will use the same license.
Any software that touches Eclipse, for example the Eclipse Android Development Tools plug-in (ADT) will be licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), because that’s what Eclipse uses.

The new features will allow the creation of polygons, lines and marks in the 3D space. Also, it will allow the conversion of Maps API sites to 3D Earth.

Paul Rademacher, technical leader for the Google Earth plug-in and API, explained for ComputerWorld that the company wanted all Maps API sites to be 3D enabled with a single line of JavaScript code. "What's been missing [in Google Earth] is the ability for developers to use Google Earth inside their own Web pages. Now inside a Web page, you'll be able to fly through San Francisco or see a 3-D model of a cabin with exactly the view out the window of the mountains," he exemplified.

According to PCMagazine, Google officials are very confident in their product, already downloaded by over 400 million users, and also their new plug-in. They added that everyone inside the company is looking forward to seeing the development of the "wonderfully creative new web applications," facilitated by their release.

The new plug-in supports the following browsers: IE 6.0+, IE 7.0+, Firefox 2.x or 2.0x, Netscape 7.1+, Mozilla 1.4+, Flock 1.0+. The installation will not take much of the users’ time, with only a few clicks and a browser restart.

The spacecraft has redundant systems to survive the failure of some components, and mission controllers have drawn up contingency plans for possible problems.

“Up to this point, we haven’t needed any of it,” said Edward Sedivy, the Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, which built the spacecraft.

At a news conference on Monday, NASA released a photograph made possible by another engineering tour de force. On Sunday, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, passing by at an altitude of 192 miles and traveling 7,600 miles per hour, snapped a picture of the Phoenix and its billowing parachute as it descended through the Martian air to its landing site.