Hopes — and worries — that U.S. regulators will soon end the ban on using wireless phones during U.S. commercial flights are likely at least a year or two early, government officials and analysts say. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday plans to seek public comment on whether to ease or lift its prohibition on the use of wireless phones and two-way communications devices like Blackberries while in the air. FCC officials stressed that it could take at least a year to lift the agency’s ban. And there’s still a prohibition by the Federal Aviation Administration, which could take another year to ease.

The newest books in the New York Public Library don’t take up any shelf space. They’re electronic books — 3,000 titles’ worth — and the library’s 1.8 million cardholders can point and click through the collection, choosing from among best-sellers, nonfiction, romance novels and self-help guides. Patrons borrow them for set periods, downloading them for reading on a computer, a hand-held organizer or other device using free reader software. When they’re due, the files are automatically locked out–no matter what hardware they’re on–and returned to circulation, eliminating late fees.

A study by State University of New York researchers says heat generated from laptops can significantly elevate the temperature of the scrotum, potentially putting sperm count at risk. The study, which included more than two dozen men ages 21 to 35, found that the sitting position required to balance a laptop can raise scrotum temperature by as much as 2.1 degrees Celsius, Sheynkin said. Heat from the laptop itself can raise the temperature by another 0.7 C, bringing the potential total increase to 2.8 C.

sfr GmbH in Cologne have released their newest product, visPassword for PalmOS. visPassword is a password generator, where you can create a new password with letters, digits or special characters. Best of all, visPassword is FREE.

Pylon Anywhere accelerates communication, decision making and customer responsiveness by giving workforces anytime, anywhere access to email, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks. Pylon Anywhere 6.0 features extensive globalization enhancements including Unicode support and non-English clients, clustering improvements, expanded groupware integration, the extension of push capabilities and broader mobile device support.

Camera phones may make great Christmas gifts, but people better not use them for peeping-Tom photos on federal property. In one of its last moves of the year, Congress passed a bill that would levy heavy fines and prison time for anyone who sneaks photos or videos of people in various stages of undress, a problem lawmakers and activists called the new frontier of stalking.

Creative Algorithms is having a Huge Holiday Sale, offering 30% off ALL software titles for 10 days only. Popular titles include: Trip Boss, Date Wheel, Serving Sizer, and Fraction Fit. This offer is good through December 20, 2004.

Mobile phone subscribers around the globe totaled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union. The figure reflected a sharp surge in the mobile telephony business, especially in developing countries, over the first half of the decade, with subscribers doubling since 2000, according to the United Nations agency’s annual report.

nSgnia Handcrafted Leather Cases is running an online survey asking questions to find out what mobile computing users are looking for in a leather PDA case. Answer all the questions in the survey and your name will be placed in a draw for an Exotic Leather PDA case of your choice from all models, leathers and colors available on the nSignia Web site at the time of the draw. Survey and competition closes February 28, 2005 and the winner will be drawn on March 1, 2005.

The Vosonic DiGi VIEWER DV-320 is a home media distribution set-top box to bring you the fun of audio & video in high quality. The DiGi VIEWER has Audio/Video inputs and outputs that enable to show directly from TV MultiMedia files stored from your memory cards.