Neowin.net

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the government wrongly seized more than 200 lucrative wireless licenses from a bankrupt telecommunications company.

The ruling was a victory for NextWave Telecom Inc., a young company that won the licenses at a 1996 auction but filed for bankruptcy protection before paying for them.

The airwaves slices have been unused during the protracted fight between NextWave and the Federal Communications Commission, which confiscated the licenses and resold them at a huge profit to larger telecommunications companies.

Now NextWave can finish building a network or sell the licenses to other companies. It will free up wireless spectrum in dozens of crowded markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

"Everyone will benefit from achieving finality, putting the litigation behind us, and getting the licenses into use as quickly as possible to provide service to the public and help fuel economic recovery," NextWave Chairman Allen Salmasi said.

The court, on an 8-1 vote, rejected arguments that the FCC had a regulatory interest in taking licenses from a company that is reorganizing its finances.

News source: TechNews.com

Osmani said he has developed an algorithm that speeds up the way information is handled inside the browser. The technique takes advantage of the features of a particular type of server used widely on the Internet.

The browser handles multiple requests for information, he said. So, instead of a single stream of information, several streams are processed simultaneously. In essence, the task of bringing over a Web page is divided into a set of smaller tasks, cutting the time it takes to reassemble a Web page on the computer screen.

But the judges evaluated Osmani's browser without even considering its speed, as they could not independently benchmark it and lacked complete access to the browser's source code, Taylor said.

Osmani won't reveal more of the code because he is exploring the possibility of patenting or copyrighting aspects of his browser. Some judges said they were unsure whether the process would work in the real world, but others believe it could.

One judge, Intel Ireland's head of process engineering, Leonard Hobbs, said: "Certainly the capability is there. The technique he invented seems unique."

But Hobbs de-emphasized the speed claims. "What impressed us most of all is he absolutely knew what he was doing. It was a complete work, a whole." Osmani's project demonstrated "the science of the Web," he said.

MIT principal researcher with Media Lab Europe, Gary McDarby, said he was astonished by the teen's "years ahead" programming skills. Even if the speed claims prove false, McDarby said, "What he's certainly doing conceptually is raising the bar for the commercial companies."

The browser is based on the version of Microsoft Internet Explorer that third-party developers use. But rather than using Visual Basic, Osmani used an older language called Borland C++, which meant he also had to use some Microsoft tools to translate from one language to another.

These processes generate thousands of extra lines of code -- a point raised by critics on sites like Slashdot and Fark, who couldn't see how any single developer could write the one-million-plus lines first claimed for the browser.

Osmani, an entirely self-taught programmer who got his first PC at 10, said his computing heroes are Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ("because they were hackers and hands-on"), as well as hacker Kevin Mitnick.

The teenager, who says he'd like to attend Harvard University, was inspired to start work on his browser after a previous winner, Sarah Flannery, received worldwide attention for a new cryptographic algorithm. The algorithm eventually proved to be breakable, but only after top international scientists spent months trying to crack it.