World News.... 06-12-2013 ScienceTechnology

It also costs thousands of dollars and is way more machine than most people will ever need.

The Mac Pro is aimed at a narrow market of professionals such as photographers, videographers, designers and animators. Since the line was first announced in 2006, the Pro has received relatively few upgrades compared to the rest of Apple's product line. The company has been busy focusing on its hit consumer and mobile devices, leaving many professionals wondering if they were being left behind.

For people using the desktop computers in their businesses, the external look of a Mac is often secondary. So periodic internal improvements to the old tower design were enough to keep them satiated. Others had already abandoned the Pro line as the iMac and MacBook Pro became powerful enough to meet their photo- and video-production needs.

For the remaining power users, reaction to the new Mac Pro is mixed. And the future of the computer, which is 2.5 times faster than the current model, is still unclear.

First things first: The new Pro is a design marvel compared to its clunky predecessor -- a sleek, black cylinder that bears little resemblance to computers as we've traditionally imagined them.

It's smaller and cannot be expanded and customized as much as the previous system. Apple has built a machine so unique that people who want to add to it will end up building out, adding components like hard drives and PCI cards externally.

To make that expansion possible, the industry must first embrace the Thunderbolt input-output standard.

For example, it's no longer possible to pop in standard video cards. Mac Pro users will have to either get cards that fit the custom shape of the new computer or plug them into the computer using a Thunderbolt 2 connection.

"It's either going to change the way computers are built, or it will fall by the wayside," said Tony Welch, the creative services director at the Beyond Pix production studio.

Welch is excited about the new product and hopes to upgrade his studio's systems, but he hopes Apple's "risky" bet to depend heavily on Thunderbolt for expansion pushes the companies that make hard drives, PCI cards and other peripherals to support the connection technology.

Rumors have persisted for months that Waze was going to be bought by a major tech company. Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and Facebook (FB). were also said to be interested.

Neither Google nor Waze disclosed a purchase price. But according to several reports, Google was offering $1.3 billion for Waze.

Waze is one of only two major players in the world that has fully designed its own real-time, user-generated mapping service -- the other is Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). The search giant says it will run the company at arm's length, at least initially, with Waze's team remaining in Israel and operating as a separate entity. The Waze brand will remain for the time being.

"We're excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google's search capabilities," said Brian McClendon, Google's head of geolocation services, in a blog post.

Still, the deal is still likely to be scrutinized by lawmakers and antitrust officials.

Waze also partners with Apple and Facebook. So regulatory approval isn't a given. Facebook users can share their Waze mapping routes with one another, and Waze provides some mapping information for Apple's year-old mapping service.

The company's appeal to Google is likely due more to its technology than the size of its user base. Waze has just 50 million users, but it offers unique features, including social capabilities that other mapping services lack. For example, Waze users can wave their hands over their mobile device while driving to vocally report traffic or hazardous conditions.

The service then warns other users of the hazard or reroutes them around the traffic jam. Users can play social driving games, report gas prices and fully customize the app to their liking.

Most crowd-sourced services, including Google's maps, will detect fast and slow traffic, but that's where the user-generated data stops. Waze users get more detailed information, such as a warning that a police car is ahead or a tractor-trailer is broken down.

The Shenzhou 10 spacecraft was launched from a remote site in the Gobi desert in China's far west at 5:38 p.m. (0938 GMT) under warm, clear blue skies, in images carried live on state television.

Once in orbit, the craft will dock with the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1, a trial space laboratory module, and the two male and one female astronauts will carry out various experiments and test the module's systems.

They will also give a lecture to students back on Earth.

China successfully carried out its first manned docking exercise with Tiangong 1 last June, a milestone in an effort to acquire the technological and logistical skills to run a full space station that can house people for long periods.

President Xi Jinping oversaw Tuesday's launch personally, addressing the astronauts before they blasted off to wish them success, saying he was "enormously happy" to be there.

"You are the pride of the Chinese people, and this mission is both glorious and sacred," Xi said, according to state media.

This mission will be the longest time Chinese astronauts have spent in space, and marks the second mission for lead astronaut Nie Haisheng.

It is China's fifth manned space mission since 2003, and was accompanied by the usual outpouring of national pride and Communist Party propaganda, including children dressed as happy ethnic minorities waving off the three at the space centre.

However, some wondered why China was spending so much money exploring space when it was still a developing country with a plethora of more pressing issues, from food safety and pollution to the prevalence of workplace fire disasters.

"Why don't they spend this money solving China's real problems instead of wasting it like this?" wrote one user on China's popular Twitter-like service, Sina Weibo.

China's space program has come a long way since late leader Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China in 1949, lamented that the country could not even launch a potato into space.

But China is still far from catching up with the established space superpowers, the United States and Russia.

Rendezvous and docking techniques such as those which China is only testing now were mastered by the United States and the former Soviet Union decades ago, and the 10.5 meter-long Tiangong 1 is a trial module, not a fully fledged space station.

Restructuring specialist Hilco, which rescued Britain's most high-profile entertainment retailer HMV earlier this year, said it hoped it would be able to keep Xtra-vision's remaining 132 stores open following negotiations with landlords.

Hilco did not say how much it paid Xtra-Vision's court-appointed receivers Ernst & Young, who closed 20 of the firm's stores last month but found the majority of its outlets to be profitable.

Retailers in Ireland saw costs soar during a property boom that burst spectacularly in 2008, sparking a financial crisis that pushed Ireland into an EU/IMF bailout and left well-known names like Xtra-Vision saddled with high rents and collapsed demand.

While Ireland has avoided returning to recession like much of the euro zone, its mild economic growth is driven by exports, with consumer spending likely to contract again this year and unemployment still among the highest in Europe at 13.7 percent.

Hilco, which will also re-open four of HMV's 16 Irish stores which closed their doors in January, appointed Gerry Butler, a former executive of British DVD and game rental chain Blockbuster, as chief executive of the new business.

Hilco has been involved in many high-profile UK retail restructurings, including at Habitat, Woolworths and Borders. Last year it was also brought in to clear stock and close stores at Clinton Cards and JJB Sports.

It shows just how much the company is counting on Infinity - whose players can for the first time mix together characters from Disney's different franchises - to help turn around one part of the media giant that stubbornly refuses to turn a profit.

Since it was created in 2008, Disney's interactive division, which houses its video game and online properties, has chalked up losses in 13 of its 14 quarters, compiling $1.1 billion in total operating losses in that time.

The division will likely not turn a profit this fiscal year ending September 30 as a result of the company delaying Infinity by two months, Disney CEO Bob Iger told analysts on an earnings call in May.

"We believe in Infinity," Iger said during the call. "We think it will be a great product and it's going to drive profitability."

It took more than three years and around 200 people to create Infinity, according to John Blackburn, who heads Avalanche Software, the Disney-owned studio that created the game. Disney would not say how much it spent to create the game, which is scheduled for release on August 18.

In the game, players can pit characters from Disney or Pixar movies against each other, such as a race between the super-charged racecar Lighting McQueen from "Cars" and quick-footed 10-year old superhero Dash from "The Incredibles."

It is Disney's answer to Activision Blizzard's Skylanders games, which lets players collect action figures that they can send on virtual action-adventure quests in a magical world called Skylands. The game was one of 2012's top-selling games with more than $1 billion worldwide in retail sales.

The launch will test Disney's vaunted marketing troops, who can crank out hit movies and flashy theme park rides but have yet to work their magic to create many gaming hits. One reason is that most of its characters are more popular with girls than boys, who make up the majority of game players. Disney also invested heavily in console games, only to see sales of traditional boxed games decline and consumers flock instead to games played on cell phones or social networks like Facebook.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said the review will be separate from a criminal investigation by the Justice Department into Edward Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data from big companies such as Google and Facebook.

Packs of reporters staked out hotels in Hong Kong in hopes of finding Snowden, who had worked at an NSA facility as an employee of contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He went public in a video released on Sunday by Britain's Guardian newspaper but then dropped from sight and has yet to resurface.

Snowden's disclosures launched a sharp debate about the tradeoffs between privacy rights and national security in the United States in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and whether the resulting measures have been given sufficient scrutiny and oversight.

Members of Congress will be briefed by intelligence and security officials on the programs this week, including a Tuesday session with the House of Representatives. Lawmakers promised public debate and legislative efforts to tighten the laws on U.S. government surveillance.

"We'll have a lot of hearings on this," said Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat. She said there were questions about how Snowden, a high-school dropout, gained a top-secret clearance and access to high-level government secrets.

Booz Allen said it had terminated Snowden's employment on Monday for violations of its code of ethics and policies. It said he had been an employee for less than three months at an annual salary rate of $122,000.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill designed to end the secret supervision of the programs by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by requiring declassification of significant court rulings.

"Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it's allowed to take under the law," said Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat and chief co-sponsor with Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican.

Obama, who won re-election last year thanks in part to strong support from Latino voters, has made immigration reform a top priority of his second term.

He had not given a major public address on the issue for some time, reflecting a White House strategy of not wanting to get in the way of the bipartisan bill's progress in the Senate.

Obama's speech on Tuesday was the first major departure from that strategy.

The Senate bill would authorize billions of dollars in new spending for enhanced border security and create new visa programs for high- and low-skilled workers in addition to providing a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country.

"If you genuinely believe we need to fix our broken immigration system, there's no good reason to stand in the way of this bill," Obama said at the White House, adding that the bill could be wrapped up by the end of the summer.

"If you're serious about actually fixing the system, then this is the vehicle to do it," he said.

The bill, which has broad support from Obama's Democrats, will need backing from some Republicans in order to give it momentum in the more conservative, Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where the pathway to citizenship provisions face more skepticism.

In a sign of the hurdles to come, House Speaker John Boehner, of Ohio, said he expected immigration reform to be law by the end of the year, but said the Senate measures to enforce the changes and secure the U.S. border with Mexico were insufficient.

And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, warned in a speech in the Senate: "In days ahead there will be major changes in this bill if it is to become law."

Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, told ABC television in an interview that aired on Tuesday: "I've got real concerns about the Senate bill, especially in the area of border security and internal enforcement of the system. I'm concerned that it doesn't go far enough."

Boehner added that reforming the nation's immigration system was his top legislative priority this year.

The sweeping plan includes 250 recommendations, ranging from installing floodwalls and storm barriers to upgrades of power and telecommunications infrastructures.

Cook, who has seen Apple's stock fall 37 percent after it touched a high of $705 in September as competition in the key smartphone market escalated, began by describing the growth of Apple's app store.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan said the activists were entitled to serve their lawsuit on Baidu's lawyer in New York, without infringing China's sovereign protections.

Saying the issue had never been analyzed in detail, Furman on Friday night rejected Baidu's contention that allowing service would turn the part of the Hague Convention that China invoked into a "dead letter" by letting a court circumvent it.

The convention is a multilateral treaty that makes it easier to serve court papers internationally.

In their May 2011 lawsuit, eight New York writers and video producers had accused Baidu and China of conspiring to suppress their political speech from Baidu's search engine, the country's most widely used.

The plaintiffs said the content could be found via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, and Google's YouTube. They sought millions of dollars in damages for alleged violations of their First Amendment rights and human rights law.

Furman had dismissed the lawsuit on March 25 but put the dismissal on hold to let the plaintiffs propose another means to serve Baidu.

In giving the plaintiffs another chance to pursue their case, Furman said the Hague Convention was designed to ensure "sufficient" notice to recipients abroad of court documents.

Allowing service in the United States "in a manner that does not call upon China to effect service (in that country) does not override its invocation of its own sovereignty and security; to the contrary, it honors that invocation," the judge wrote.

Carey Ramos, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan representing Baidu, declined to comment.

Furman gave the plaintiffs 30 days to serve the complaint to Baidu's U.S. lawyer, and 120 days to serve China through diplomatic channels.

Stephen Preziosi, a lawyer for the activists, said he intends to meet those deadlines. "In terms of fairness and procedurally, the court got it right," Preziosi said.

The lawsuit was filed one year after Google Inc pulled its search engine out of China after hitting censorship issues. China has also blocked YouTube and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The deal is expected to be announced this week, though it was unlikely to occur on Monday, another source told Reuters.

"Negotiations are nearly final. There are a couple of details being worked out," the second source said. The source described the remaining details as "logistics" rather than significant sticking points.

Google and Waze declined to comment.

The deal with Google comes after discussions between Waze and social networking company Facebook Inc fell apart last month, according to a report in the technology blog AllThingsDigital. Waze was unwilling to relocate its Israeli-based engineering team to Facebook's U.S. headquarters, according to the report.

Maps and navigation services have become a key asset for technology companies as consumers increasingly adopt smartphones and other mobile devices. Waze uses satellite signals from members' smartphones to generate maps and traffic data, which it then shares with other users, offering real-time traffic info.

Google's existing maps service is among the most popular, which could raise antitrust issues for the deal.

The 4-year-old Waze, which has 47 million users, has raised $67 million in funding to date from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Blue Run Ventures and semiconductor company Qualcomm Inc.

Waze began looking to raise additional funding toward the end of last year, according to a third source close to the company. As the fund raising process got underway, Waze received interest from several companies about an acquisition, and it switched gears to focus its efforts on an acquisition, the source said.

There had been media reports earlier this year that Apple Inc was in talks to acquire Waze. News of the deal with Google was first reported by Israeli financial newspaper Globes on Sunday.