Geekly Update - 09 November 2011

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

Freedom of tweetch? Not in jolly old England. Twitter users in the UK are subject to up to 2 years in prison, if they violate the country's stringent libel and defamation laws.

"Really, boss, this is business related!" Microsoft plans to release a commercial version Kinect for Windows early next year. The company says that about 200 businesses, including car and healthcare companies, may be able to use the technology.

RIM has finally released BBM Music for Blackberry that includes 50 free tunes to start, more if you have friends who like to share. Download the app now and you get a 30 day free trial (60 if you do it immediately,) then $4.99 monthly with 25 swappable titles. In other news, a local farmer was seen closing the barn door after the horse had bolted.

The Nook Tablet has arrived from Barnes and Noble. With a price tag of $249, it comes in at $50 more than Amazon's competing Kindle Fire. But it does have VividView, a dual-core thingie, and Angry Birds. Oh wait, the Fire has Angry Birds too. Darn.

Kids, you can go play Zelda now. A Michigan State University study claims that kids playing video games tended to be more creative than those who don't. The study was mum on the effects of long-term residence in a parent's basement.

WhatsApp is celebrating because they now deliver more than a billion messages daily. Undoubtedly the fact that the SMS service is cross-platform surely contributes to its success of over 41 million messages per hour.

Samsung has begun taking pre-orders for their Galaxy Tab 7.0, due out November 13 for $399.99. With a 7" display, it runs on Android Honeycomb and has Peel Smart Remote TV, an application that lets you control almost any device to watch TV shows and find new ones based on preferences.

GameStop is releasing 4 certified gaming tablets for the holidays in select stores and online that run on Android. Included in the package are 6 free games that can be used for trading up in the future and wireless controllers will soon be available.

Captcha systems, words or phrases designed to identify humans online, may soon become even more annoying and frustrating. Stanford researchers used algorithms to break 70% of Blizzard's captchas, 66% of Visa's and 25% of Wikipedia's.

Can you imagine a PC that can handle up to 16 displays? It's out there in the form of Shuttle XPC H7 5820S that comes with quad or hexa Core i7 processors, up to two 1 TB hard drives, and a liquid cooling system at a starting price of $2000.