US Visas to attract entrepreneurs

A proposal that will allow innovative entrepreneurs from the UK and elsewhere to set up a business in the US will be debated in Congress this week, writes Computing.co.uk.

The proposal was made by congressman and IT entrepreneur Jared Polis, with the aim of clawing back ground in technology innovation currently being lost to India and China. It is part of a wider proposed overhaul to the immigration system.

The issue would potentially swell the ranks of Silicon Valley, where even now, half the tech company founders are immigrants.

Nokia has beefed up its legal challenge to Apple, filing a second patent-infringement lawsuit against Cupertino in US District Court, in Delaware, says The Register. This time around, the Finnish outfit says that Apple stole patents that make Nokia unique, including patents for a camera phone and a touch-screen display.

The suit comes on the heels of the Finnish phone maker's filing last week of an infringement claim against Apple with the US International Trade Commission. At that time, Nokia issued a press release that said "virtually all of [Apple's] mobile phones, portable music players, and computers" infringed on Nokia patents.

The USITC complaint was a ramp-up of Nokia's original suit against Apple, filed back in October - which Apple responded to in kind in the middle of December.

A simple method to distinguish artistic fakes and imitations has been demonstrated by researchers, reports The BBC.

The approach, known as "sparse coding", builds a virtual library of an artist's works and breaks them down into the simplest possible visual elements.

Verifiable works by that artist can be rebuilt using varying proportions of those simple elements, while imitators' works cannot.

Since explosive materials were sneaked onto a US domestic flight on Christmas Day, full-body scanning machines are far more likely to make their way to security lines at airports, posing the question, are they safe? says CNet.

While the Transportation Security Administration already has 40 such devices in place, it just bought 150 to be placed in US airports and says it plans to buy 300 more (they go for $170 000 apiece). On Wednesday, the Netherlands announced that these scanners would be used on passengers for all flights out of Amsterdam to the US, and there is talk of scanners in Nigeria as well.

These full-body scanners fall into two main categories: millimetre wave and backscatter. The first directs radio waves over a body and measures the energy reflected back to render a 3D image. The latter is a low-level X-ray machine that creates 2D images.