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The future is here, nearly. After Google's try at an autonomous car driving the streets of Las Vegas, Volvo have done something even more impressive. Volvo were impressive in the way that they platooned three cars behind a lorry for 200 kilometers on a busy Spanish motorway.

Don't know what platoon means outside of a first-person shooter like Battlefield 3? The term "platooning" means, in effect, queueing cars behind e ach other with a lead car as a pace setter. The technique is also known as road-training.

It involved several research partners alongside Volvo, with the latest version of the project codenamed SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment). The first public road test for the SARTRE took to the roads outside of Barcelona, Spain at the end of last week. The cars travelled at 85 kilometers per hour (roughly 52 miles per hour) at varying distances from each other.

The Megaupload case continues, with Kyle Goodwin, an EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) asking the court to return the files, that were legal, back to Goodwin.

Goodwin lost his files when Megaupload was seized in January, since then they've been to court, both for a hearing and a mediation, but nothing has changed according to the EFF. The problem between Goodwin's files and the court, is that the government isn't helping third parties like Goodwin to get access back to their data. This leaves no choice but court.

On May 24, EFF filed a brief asking the court to order Goodwin's rightfully owned data returned. But the problem is, is that's not just Goodwin'd files, it's the thousands upon thousands of other Megaupload users who had data on their servers, where they thought it was safe.

Would you decline $75 million? Heck, $75 for free wouldn't be too bad these days. On the flip side, Apple CEO Tim "Good Guy" Cook has declined a $75 million payout in restricted stock dividends owed to him. Yes, declined.

Apple announced plans last week where they would pay a $2.65 per share dividend on restricted stocks held by Apple employees. This is rare for a company to reward its employee stockholders like this, and even more strange for a high level executive to decline the money they are entitled to.

But, it's not all bad. AllThingsD reports that this could actually benefit both the company, and Cook in the long run. This move gets positive press for not just Apple, but Cook, which could, and most likely will, translate into more stocks sold. It also shows the kind of person Cook is, in this world of increasingly greedy CEOs and executives.

Just when you thought you wouldn't upgrade your phone beyond the already-announced and nearly here GALAXY S III from Samsung, or alternatively, HTC's One X, or if you're an Apple fan, the not-out-yet iPhone 5.

LG have just unveiled a new display for smartphones that shoves 1920x1080 pixels into a 5-inch screen. It's the world's first Full HD smartphone display and has an amazing pixel density of 440ppi, way out and beyond what we have in today's phones.

The panel LG have used is an Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching or AH-IPS LCD. It's the same technology that LG used in one of their panels last year and when compared to a standard IPS panel, AH-IPS panels sport greater color accuracy, wider viewing angles and greater light transmission which all leads to lower power consumption.

Often times job postings give us a view into the future plans of a company. The latest example of this is one of Microsoft's job postings which is pointing towards Skype integration into the upcoming Xbox 720. According to the posting, Microsoft is looking for a London-based Lead Program Manager to bring voice and video services to the Xbox 720.

The posting says: "Skype is working on powering real-time voice and video communications on the Xbox. Xbox is a fundamental lynchpin of Skype's living-room strategy, and we are focused on enabling amazing new in-game and in-console voice and video experiences for the next generation of Xbox. This is a crucial initiative for Xbox, and it is time-critical given the hardware lead times involved."

It's not exactly clear what the Skype integration would entail, but it seems like Microsoft feels this is a pretty big deal for the upcoming Xbox 720. The rumored release date is sometime in 2013, so they have some time to get it right. It could allow others to see user's Kinect motions or to share a celebration after a rough Call of Duty match.

It would seem that PowerColor is the first GPU manufacturer to spill the beans on the upcoming 7970 X2. The new GPU will be based upon two 7970 Tahiti cores, which is the top chip made by AMD. This card is being designed to compete with the NVIDIA GTX 690, which is the current king of the video cards.

The new GPU will be cooled by PowerColor's new monster Vortex III. This new cooler was designed specifically for the new Devil 13 7970 X2 and is huge as you can see by the picture above. It features three fans blowing onto a massive heatsink and takes up 3 slots, as seen by the picture of the backplate.

The new GPU is adorned in red and black and looks beautiful. But it's not all about beauty as the card appears to have some monster stats to go along with the beauty. It will feature a total of 4096 stream processors across the two chips and have a total of 6GB of memory available. The cores will be clocked at 1GHz and require a ton of power. The card is outfitted with three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and has a TDP of 525 watts. The card should make an appearance at Computex early next month. More should be known then.

It's looking like we will soon need to change this category to "Laptops & Ultrabooks" as more and more manufacturers are dropping Netbooks from the US market. Toshiba has confirmed that they will soon be joining the ranks of Dell and Lenovo who have also pulled out of the US Netbook market. It looks like tablets and Ultrabooks have killed the Netbook star.

Part of the reason for the change is that Netbooks have very little profit margin. So not only were sales slipping, but Toshiba wasn't making very much on the few sales that remained. Instead, Toshiba has decided to focus more on their Portege Ultrabook line and Excite tablet line. Looking at the money reasoning, you can see why. An Ultrabook sells for $800 or more which allows quite a bit more profit margin.

Another reason to focus on tablets is the upcoming Windows 8 which is designed with tablets in mind. Additionally, users like the higher performance capabilities of an Ultrabook as more and more users need to do more with their computers. It's pretty hard to play any sort of game or type any long message on a Netbook. If you still want one, HP, Acer, and ASUS are still offering them in the US. They will range from $200-$500.

The AMD FX series of processors is known for overclocking pretty well. It currently holds the world record for fastest clock speed ever achieved and looks to be breaking that once again. A new CPU-z validation screen shot has shown up online. It details the feat even though HWBot rejected the the posting.

The rejection was most likely due to the fact that the overclocker didn't provide much in the way of detail about the cooling system used. When I say much, I mean any. What we do know is that the chip was clocked at a massive 8805.6MHz and was achieved by overclocker Ksin. Speed like that comes only when an overclocker uses extreme cooling such as liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

To achieve the feat, Ksin used a base clock of 303.29 MHz and a multiplier of 29.0. To reach these clock speeds, an incredible 1.86 volts were pumped through the core. As such, it is recommended that you don't try this at home as that will kill your chip very quickly. Other components of the system include an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard and 4 GB (2x 2 GB) of ADATA memory. The memory was clocked at 1417 MHz.

It's always a difficult task to choose the next profile picture that you're going to use. You put a lot of thought into the process and probably look at several photos for a while before deciding. You may even ask a friend or two what they think. It turns out that there is also some cultural influence into the decision as well.

Your profile picture has different qualities depending on your culture. According to a new study, Americans tend to focus on the face and usually have a close-up shot where the face takes up most of the frame. This is contrary to Taiwanese users who tend to have some background visible and a much smaller portion of the frame taken up by the face.

The study was done twice after the first one found the correlation. The second time around they increased the sample size and locations in which they were drawing participants from and the findings still held true. The study also showed that Americans preferred a more intense facial expression such as a huge smile while Taiwanese tended to have a less intense expression.

Details surrounding Huawei's new Emotion UI aren't plentiful or clear, but we do know somethings. Samsung, HTC, and now ZTE all have custom user interfaces for their Android phones so it seems as though Huawei doesn't want to be left behind. As such, Huawei is now working on a UI called Emotion UI, likely for ICS.

Considering the other manufacturers' UIs works on Ice Cream Sandwich, it makes sense that that is what Huawei will be targeting. The new UI will be unveiled June 9 and will become available sometime in July. Updates will be pushed to currently shipping Huawei Android phones so that they will get the new user interface.

Functionality of the new UI is not clear. Huawei is using words such as "emotional," "simple," and "smart" when describing it, but that doesn't exactly tell us that much. This UI also may not make it out of China, although it could as Huawei is trying to become a global manufacturer. The only downside to this custom UI is that updates will now take longer when new Android versions come out.

We talked about NVIDIA prepping two more GPUs, but at the time we thought they'd be GK104-based. New reports have surfaced, where it might seem like the GEFORCE GTX 660 would be a GK106-based part.

The GTX660 based on the GK106 architecture would sport 768 CUDA cores, 4 SMXs, 64 texture units, 2GB of memory with an interface of 256-bit. Pricing isn't too bad, where we should expect the GTX 660 to hit $349 or so. But, in this market, with this much competition, is that too muhc to pay?

Would you grab one of these GPUs at $349? Or would you be looking at something from Team Red if you were getting into the $350-ish territory? Thoughts?

A Microsoft-sponsored IDC report claims that the annual support costs for a Windows XP systems are five times higher than a Windows 7-based system, as part of Microsoft's latest efforts in pushing more people toward Windows 7.

Microsoft have also issued a statement that has told organizations if they have not started "the migration to a modern PC, you are late". Windows XP gets orphaned by the software company with no further support or patches in April 2014, close to 13 years since it launched.

The report states that 42-percent of Windows' non-home installed base remains on the ageing Windows XP OS. If this continues, 11-percent of all Windows users will continue to be powered by Windows XP when the security patches end in 2014. As for support costs: IT workers' time and worker productivity costs jump by 25- and 23-percent respectively in year four.

We've heard the rumors before, and with the power that social networking giant Facebook has, it would not surprise me to see them release a smartphone. But, can a smartphone really succeed in this world of super-powered smartphones, built around Facebook?

Well, according to employees of Facebook, some engineers have been sought out by engineers there, as well as others who have been briefed on Facebook's plans, reckon that the company wants to release its own smartphone by 2013. These people spoke out in anonymity, fearing their jobs or relationship with Facebook.

Facebook have reportedly hired ex-Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, these same employees said. One thing that would boost the 'is Facebook building a phone' argument, is CEO and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has said he's worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms.

Google is sure throwing quite a bit of money and support at the Project Glass augmented reality glasses. They are trying to cram so much technology into a tiny, and hopefully fashionable, package that they should become every geek's dream gadget. We still don't know much about the project other than it's being publicly tested by Google executives.

We've seen some pictures released that have been taken using the glasses and, to be honest, they aren't that great. Most modern smartphones could easily outpace the resolution and quality, but the glasses do have one advantage: Point-of-view. Pictures can be taken hands-free and are from the perspective of the wearer.

Google has now released a 15-second video that was taken while the user was jumping on a trampoline. This really is where these glasses start to shine. It would have been near impossible to take a video like this without these glasses. The quality of the video isn't stunning by any means, but for users who video blog their lives, these glasses are an invaluable piece of technology.

With the SOPA and PIPA protests becoming distant memories, the attacks on internet freedoms have been renewed by Congress in the form of CISPA. There have been no protests like there were against PIPA and SOPA and that has Reddit's Alexis Ohanian concerned. An entrepreneurial group now wants to create the internet equivalent of the Bat-Signal.

The idea is that SOPA-like mass protests could be started at the push of a button when internet freedoms were deemed in danger. Website owners can sign up on the group's website and add a piece of code to their website that can be activated when a political crisis like SOPA rears its ugly head. Owners can also receive the code by e-mail when the signal is turned on.

"People who wish to be tapped can see, oh look, the Bat-Signal is up. Time to do something," says Ohanian. "Whatever website you own, this is a way for you to be notified if something comes up and take some basic actions...If we aggregate everyone that's doing it, the numbers start exploding."

Ever see a game on Facebook that looks interesting but you don't want to play it because of all the hassle of installing and uninstalling if it's bad? Facebook is looking to change that with a new feature which will allow game developers to demo their wares in the news feed. Developers won't be given any information about the users.

If players like the game then they are able to click through onto the full version. This new feature is great, although I'm not sure that the news feed is a proper location for it. Personally, my news feed is already overflowing with the posts of my friend and the posts of quality content here on TweakTown, so I don't think I want more posts, especially ones that take up a lot of room.

Facebook has provided some examples of games already using the new feature. These games include: Idle Worship, Angry Birds, and Bubble Witch Saga. Developers of these games receive statistics about impressions of the story and how many people use the game contained within. Facebook has provided examples of how current games are using the new feature:

The Computex news train continues to roll as bits and pieces of exciting new hardware comes in.

KingSpec, a SandForce partner is getting a new PCIe product ready for the show. Coming from the new Multicore Series, this PCIe solution has four SandForce SF-2281 controllers and four mSATA slots that may be used to expand the capacity size and controller count.

The details are thin now, but we do know that the maximum capacity is 2TB and the PCIe configuration is 8 lanes. The high number of PCIe lanes will let this product really stretch its legs.

Sony wants to show you ads while you're playing on the PlayStation. Or at least that's what a new patent indicates. A sharp-eyed person who goes by the handle onQ13 on NeoGAF spotted the patent on Thursday. The patent is titled "Advertisement Scheme for use with interactive content" and appears to stop the game in order to show an advertisement.

In-game advertising isn't a new idea. Many games feature ads in the environment where one would expect them to be. Common locations for these in-game ads are on vending machines or billboards. Never before, however, has a game actually been stopped in order to show an ad. Nintendo does nag users about taking a break every now and again.

Now, advertising is fine when it is paying for things like broadcast TV, but if a user shells out $60 for a game like Call of Duty, I imagine that user is going to be a bit upset. Additionally, if this is used during multiplayer settings, every user would need to be shown the ad at the same time or the game will be broken beyond repair.

Microsoft and Sony aren't saying much about the release dates for their next-gen consoles. Microsoft has let us know not to expect it at E3 this year, but that is about all they are saying. But thanks to the Activision lawsuit, some confidential agreements have been unsealed and given some possible launch time frames.

A little history behind this lawsuit: former Activision developers sued Activision saying they were owed royalties and bonus checks due to the massive success of the Call of Duty series. Activision countered the claims saying that the developers had breached the contract and thus not due any funds from Call of Duty.

The documents unsealed show a high-profile deal between Activision and Bungie, the developers behind Halo. The deal calls for four games to be developed and released starting in fall of 2013. Dudley, of the Seattle Times, has interpreted this information in an interesting way. The theory is somewhat likely. Here is what he said:

Amazon has had a feature like this for sometime and it looks as though Apple is finally following suit. It's no surprise that iOS users like to save money just as much as Android users who get this feature from the Amazon app store. The only announcement regarding this is a tweet by Apple, so this could be a one time thing, but I doubt it is.

The tweet by Apple says "Cut the Rope: Experiments is our #FreeAppoftheWeek. Go to the App Store for your free download. tw.appstore.com/uUj" so I'm going to guess it will be a continuous thing going forward. To go along with this, the description of the app says "***FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME***".

The app itself is actually a pretty fun game. I've played it before on a Windows 7 tablet that was running Windows 8. The object of the game is to cut various strings and manipulate objects to get the piece of candy over to the monster. While I'm not sure I would pay for the app, I'd definitely take it if it was free as it is now.