After Internet commoners and companies alike pushed back in a determined way last month against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, many were content to pat themselves on the back for defeating the bill. The bills, though, while delayed, were not convincingly defeated.

Harry Reid appears unwilling to let SOPA go quietly into the night. An article published last night on RT reports that Reid may be trying to resurrect SOPA by couching it within a new cyber-security bill. Worse, the new bill would also reawaken the proposed Kill Switch bill from last year. Kill Switch, another Internet-regulating bill that was lobbied by Sen. Joel Lieberman, would instill the White House with the executive power to shut down the Internet in response to a cyber threat. Awesome, right?

Last month, it was hard to imagine that any legislature could be worse for the Internet than SOPA. Now that Reid may be attempting to include Kill Switch with his renewed efforts to pass the bill, he may officially become the Dr. Frankenstein of monstrous bills that seek to muzzle the Internet.

Watch this space for updates on what new horrors the Democrats in the Senate attempt to unleash on the Internet.

The bill bans members of Congress from using knowledge gained in the performance of their duties to gain an advantage in the stock market. While the practice is already illegal for most of the population, members of the legislature were not specifically included.

The House version of the bill is slightly different than the version passed by the Senate – a fact which leads some to call it “watered down.” Since the bills are different, the two houses will have to work toward a version of the bill they can both agree on before it can go to the President for passage.

The House’s passage of the STOCK Act generated a significant amount of buzz on Twitter. Check out a sample of what people are saying below:

The results are based on responses from adults (18 and over) and the sample includes responses from 2,260 adults via telephone interviews conducted in Spanish and English between july 25th and August 26th of 2011. The survey will also serve as a basis for comparing adults perceptions to teenage perceptions (another study Pew carried out).

Surprisingly, most users report that their experiences are overwhelmingly positive (85%) and only a small percentage (5%) said that they witnessed mostly unkind behavior. Almost 70 % said that their social networking experiences made them feel good about themselves. Doesn’t sound too bad so far.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, almost 50% agreed that they had witnessed cruel or outright mean behavior while using sites. In fact, 5% said that they never encountered generous behavior or comments while using sites. 18% report they only see helpful behavior once in a while.

Also of interest, is that almost three fourths of those sampled claim that they encountered offense content only once in a while or never while on social networking sites. When witnessing social attacks on sites, 26% of women will tell the attacker to stop, while only 19% of men will do the same. Interesting! Almost the same percentages report that they actually defend the attacked party.

Well there you have it, most adults are having positive experiences while networking on social sites. I am curious to see the comparisons once Pew releases the teenage versus adult study.

I’d wager that there have been bigger steps in terms of getting people to actually use Wolfram Alpha – it’s integration with Siri. According to The New York Times, Siri accounts for about a quarter of its queries.

Wolfram Alpha Pro costs $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students).

“Over the two and a half years since we first launched, Wolfram|Alpha has been growing rapidly in content and capabilities,” says Wolfram. “But today’s introduction of Wolfram|Alpha Pro in effect adds a whole new model for interacting with Wolfram|Alpha—and brings all sorts of fundamentally new and remarkable capabilities.”

The pro version includes:

data in put
file upload
image input
data download
CDF interactivity
extra computation time
customizable graphs and tables
PDF/CDF report download
extended symbol keyboard
output zoom

Wolfram provides an extensive walkthrough of the new features on his blog.

“We’re certainly not finished with everything that’s possible, but already in the version of Wolfram|Alpha Pro that we’re releasing today, I think what we can do with data is pretty impressive,” he says. “Of course, it helps that we can build on all the sophisticated data and statistics-related capabilities that are now built in to Mathematica. And it also helps that we can make use of all the other parts of Wolfram|Alpha.”

The standard version of Wolfram Alpha will remain free.

The file contains a lot of stuff that we already knew, such as Jobs experimenting with drugs during college and the lawsuits he was involved with while he was at Apple.

It does contain some interesting information such as high school GPA. It was a 2.65 if you were wondering. The FBI interviewed a lot of people with a common consensus being that Jobs could be trusted, but questioned his moral character. Some people, however, said that he couldn’t be trusted whatsoever.

Some of the more juicy comments on Jobs’ character are as follows:

[Redacted] advised that he has been acquainted with Mr. Jobs since [redacted]. He characterized Mr. Jobs as a deceptive individual who who is not completely forthright and honest.

[Redacted] advised that he is no longer friends with Mr. Jobs. He feels bitter toward and alienated by Mr. Jobs based on his association with Mr. Jobs at ACI. He characterized Mr. Jobs as an honest and trustworthy individual; however, his moral character is questionable.

They further stated that Mr. Jobs has integrity as long as he gets his way.

She stated she was somewhat reluctant to discuss the Appointee since she has questions concerning his ethics and his morality.

To read the rest of the almost 200 page file, it can be perused for your enjoyment here. There’s a lot of information that may be interesting for the Steve Jobs fan.

With that, the Obama campaign has made his 2012 playlist public on Spotify so that you can save it and share it with your Spotify pals.

The playlist features “picks by the campaign staff – including a few of President Obama’s favorites.” And it seems to stretch across a few musical genres – country, soul, indie rock, folk. Some of the songs’ titles seem to be on-message, such as Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of our Own” and REO Speedwagon’s “Roll With The Changes.”

Indie rockers Arcade Fire make an appearance on the playlist with their track “We Used To Wait” from last year’s album The Suburbs. Country is well represented with tracks from Sugarland, Montgomery Gentry, and Dierks Bentley.

As you might expect, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” is one of the 28 songs on the list. I’m sure you remember the significance of that one:

This writer is particularly happy to see some E.L.O. love on the mix, as the campaign included the timeless classic “Mr. Blue Sky.”

Of course, none of the tracks were specifically written for a political campaign – but the lyrics of many are strategic to the Obama campaign. Although originally written with a lover in mind, U2′s “Even Better Than The Real Thing” starts out by saying “Give me one more chance, and you’ll be satisfied.”

In other campaign music news, Newt Gingrich was recently sued by the band Survivor for his use of their famous song “Eye of the Tiger” at his rallies.

Anastasios ‘Takis’ Kyriakides, President and CEO of netTALK, says:

“Keeping your own number is a pivotal development for netTALK. We consistently find that the number porting feature is a non-negotiable feature that businesses and consumers want, as they are ready to fire their phone company and save money, but didn’t want to lose long-established phone numbers that they’ve invested in advertising among their friends, customers and colleagues. We trademarked ‘Fire Your Phone Company’ for a reason, and we remain committed to making it easier, more affordable and rewarding for consumers to make the switch.”

Copper phone lines are increasingly being replaced by new technology offerings like those from netTALK and other VOIP providers, creating increased competition for the heavily monopolized wireline telecommunications industry. netTALK has undercut Vonage pricing by nearly 50%.

The Pew Research Center reports that online phone calling has taken off as a quarter of American adult Internet users (24%) have placed phone calls online. That amounts to 19% of all American adults. On any given day 5% of Internet users are going online to place VOIP calls.

The netTALK DUO enables free nationwide calls to any phone in Canada and the U.S. from anywhere in the world, as well as low-cost, flat-rate international call plans and a variety of other features, detailed at www.netTALK.com. No computer is necessary to make calls using the netTALK DUO, as it simply plugs directly into a router or modem (or computer).

While FRAND rules are currently in place in Europe and elsewhere requiring companies to license essential patents to others – even major rivals – the rules are somewhat unclear. Microsoft’s statement lays out the company’s plans for working fairly within the current rules. In the statement, Microsoft pledges to adhere to all prior agreements regarding FRAND licensing, and to refrain from taking legal action against other firms on the basis of essential patents. Microsoft also promises to make all their essential patents available to other companies, and promises not to transfer any of their essential patents without securing agreements from the transferees to abide by similar conditions.

Meanwhile, news came to light yesterday of a letter Apple had sent to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute on November 11, 2011. In the letter, Apple asks the ETSI to enforce “a more consistent and transparent application of FRAND, especially related to the licensing of cellular standards essential patents.” The letter calls on the ETSI to implement basic rules for FRAND licensing, including standard appropriate royalty rates, a common royalty base, and prohibiting companies from seeking injunctions against one another over essential industry patents. A copy of Apple’s letter may be seen here. Late last month Cisco, which also owns a significant number of essential patents, posted their own letter to the ETSI expressing their support for Apple’s position.

While the kinds of rules that Microsoft has set for itself and Apple is calling on the ETSI to set would not eliminate patent litigation, they would certainly reduce it. That would be good news for a lot of tech companies, including Apple. Apple is currently embroiled in a number of legal battles over patent infringement. Motorola, HTC, and Samsung have all sued – and been sued by – Apple for infringement on a variety of patents. Some of these suits deal with the kind of industry essential patents that these new rules would deal with. The European Union already has FRAND licensing rules in place, but companies are inconsistent in adhering to them. In fact, the European Commission recently announced that it was conducting an investigation of Samsung concerning its violation of FRAND agreements. Though the EC’s announcement did not specifically mention Samsung’s patent war with Apple, that is almost certainly the subject of the investigation.

Meanwhile, Motorola recently won injunctions against Apple’s iCloud service, and against the online sale of several of Apple’s 3G-capable iOS devices, including the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4, and the 3G-enabled version of the iPad 2. The injunctions required Apple to remove the infringing devices from their online store in Germany and make changes to the way iCloud handles the delivery of email to users’ devices. While the iCloud injunction remains in place, the one requiring the removal of the 3G iOS devices was quickly overturned, prompting Apple to put the devices back up in the online Apple Store quickly.

Growing mobile use, and the lack of monetization of mobile users were highlighted in the Risk Factors section of Facebook’s IPO filing. Essentially, it could harm Facebook’s business if too many of its users spend too much time accessing Facebook from mobile devices without being properly monetized.

That’s why you’ll likely start seeing sponsored stories in your mobile news feed, and will probably eventually see more mobile ads. That is likely also why this deal with Bango has been made.

The press release is short and sweet so here it is in its entirety:

Bango has signed an agreement to provide payment services to Facebook.

Bango’s board believes it is too early in the relationship to accurately forecast the level of business which it may generate.

It’s hard to say just what all uses for Bango Facebook will find, given Facebook’s increasing integration with the web at large, but app payment is an obvious use.

DARPA is testing a robotic mule that that will be able to carry 400 pounds of gear on a rough 20 mile trip without being refueled. The robot is called “LS3” and is a four-legged, headless beast of a robot.

DARPA is hoping that the robot will someday be able to follow voice commands and follow troops into the thick of combat.

The YouTube video description details the robot:

To help alleviate the impact of excess weight on troops, DARPA is developing a highly mobile, semi-autonomous four-legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3). LS3 includes onboard sensors to perceive obstacles in its environment and path-planning capabilities to avoid them. The LS3 platform is designed with the squad in mind and is therefore significantly quieter, faster and has a much higher carrying capacity for longer mission durations than DARPA’s earlier mobility technology demonstrator BigDog.

“If successful, this could provide real value to a squad while addressing the military’s concern for unburdening troops,” said Army Lt. Col. Joe Hitt, program manager DARPA. “LS3 seeks to have the responsiveness of a trained animal and the carrying capacity of a mule.”

The LS3 also acts as a mobile recharging station for troops needing to recharge batteries for radios, tablets or laptops.

An 18-month test period will kick off this summer. If successful, it will deployed with Marines stationed around the world.

Have a video of the new robot in action: