Kodak today announced that an administrative law judge found the Apple iPhone 3G and several older Research In Motion BlackBerries infringe on a Kodak patent. However, the judge also recommended that Kodak's patent be declared invalid. The patent at issue relates to a technology invented by Kodak for previewing images on a digital camera-enabled device that is fundamental to how those devices take pictures. Kodak plans to appeal the judge's validity recommendation, but the iPhone 3G isn't available for sale any more. Further, the ITC cleared Apple and RIM's current device line-ups from infringing on the patents in question. The full International Trade Commission will need to sign off on the law judge's ruling. Kodak has been mostly unsuccessful at using its patent portfolio as a litigation tool.

Now it's easier than ever to nosh while you're posting a status update.

Today's theme is wild technology. We homo sapiens-type people are proud of our technology, but we'd better give credit where credit is due. Lots of other species can literally eat us without having to invent any weapons to help them.

Some can even outsmart us.

This rich infographic goes into depth about the amazing eyes of some of the world's hardiest species.

Here are six animals that are so smart, it's creepy.

Namit Arora contemplates the inner lives of animals in this intriguing essay.

Japanese scientists have invented a "dolphin speaker" that may enable us to communicate with our marine counterparts.

Maybe we should learn a thing or two from the animal kingdom. Rachel Armstrong has put a new spin on Arthur C. Clarke, arguing that "any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature."

But just to put us in our place, here's a two-minute supercut video of animals seriously messing with people.

Image via

Twitter was blocked in Pakistan for much of Sunday because it would not remove tweets that were considered "offensive to Islam."

In separate filings, both T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS have asked the Federal Communications Commission to force Dish Networks to give up 50% of its spectrum in order to gain approval for its proposed LTE broadband network. Dish has 40MHz of S-Band spectrum in the 2000-2020 MHz and 2180-2200 MHz bands. Dish wants to repurpose this spectrum for a terrestrial LTE-Advanced network. T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS contend that Dish should agree to give up 20MHz of the 40MHz block in order to avoid a "windfall" should the company eventually sell to AT&T or Verizon Wireless. They believe that the spectrum could be auctioned off to non-dominant players and still allow Dish to recoup the cost of purchasing the spectrum. The Rural Carrier Association added its own comments, suggesting that if the FCC grants the waiver for which Dish is requesting, it should be required to offer competitive roaming rates to smaller operators. The RCA also wants to prevent Dish from inking roaming agreements with AT&T and Verizon Wireless without FCC approval. Dish's proposal is similar to that of bankrupt LightSquared, but Dish's spectrum doesn't abut GPS signals.

With the lackluster first day issue of Facebook on Friday, we thought we would take a moment to look at the memorable tech IPOs of the past and see how they have fared over the years. While the first day "pop" of some companies can generate news, what is more important is the longer-term performance of the stock - say, after three years of trading. The chart above shows some of these percentage gains – and losses.

One of the more memorable first-day increases was the doubling of share price for Netscape Corp. when it went public back in 1995 to raise the then-unheard-of sum of $1.6 billion. That's less than 2% of what Facebook raised on Friday. Akamai raised twice what Netscape did in 1999 and had an increase of more than 450% in its first-day share price, only to fall to Earth three years later (thanks to the tech bust) and trade at 1% of its offering price. Ouch. Even Apple had "only" a 31% increase when it raised $3.4 billion in 1980 at its public offering. Three years after its IPO, it was down 25%. (Now is another story, of course.) And Paypal, which made billions for its owners and spawned an entire ecosystem of startups, was trading flat from its IPO three years later.

The biggest three-year percentage increases of popular tech stocks were Yahoo, with a 3,500% increase from its IPO, and Amazon, which rose more than 2,700%. Both benefitted from being on the right side of the tech bubble when they went public. Yet Yahoo has had its problems, as we have documented in the past. The last time its stock price broke 100 was at the end of 1999, and it hasn't been anywhere in that neighborhood since then (right now, it is trading in the teens). Certainly, tech stocks are hot right now, and many – apart from Cisco and Microsoft – are close to their all-time highs including IBM and Amazon, both trading around 200.

One interesting trend not shown in the numbers is that all of the recent tech IPOs have come into the public markets with dual classes of stock shares, meaning that the public shares carry less voting rights (or in some cases, absolutely none) when it comes time for that annual shareholder meeting. Google will have three classes of shares next month: one for the founders, one for the public and then one with absolutely no voting power whatsoever that it will issue for dividends, employee incentive plans and acquisitions. LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and Yelp all have dual-class shares. James Surowiecki, writing in the New Yorker, says that this may "make the stock market less central to American capitalism." A sobering thought indeed.

So what can we learn from this trip down memory lane? Just this: The first three years of a public tech company can be very chaotic times with regard to its stock. Some of the most successful companies didn't make much money for normal shareholders. So if you are going to invest in a startup, start early, in its pre-money stage. Of course, that is pretty risky, too.

Virgin Mobile USA's payLo pre-paid service today announced a new plan that offers unlimited voice minutes, unlimited messages, and 50MB of data for $40 per month. The new plan is compatible with a number of payLo's feature phones, which are available from the payLo web site. payLo also offers 1500 minutes/messages and 30MB of data for $30 per month; and 400 voice minutes for $20 per month (messages costs $0.15 each, data costs $1.50 per megabyte).

When your job is to be open to everyone's ideas, sometimes the hardest part for you is to just go with the right one. In Part 2 of ReadWriteWeb's interview with Internet Society (ISOC) senior public policy manager Sally Wentworth (Part 1 of which was published on Thursday), we discuss how difficult it can be to navigate the routes of change in Internet architecture, especially when everyone out there - ICANN, Comcast, Russia, etc. - seems to have a different idea.

While maybe hundreds of white papers are published every day leading off with the statement that the Internet is changing so very rapidly, with respect to its technical underpinnings, real change has been dreadfully slow. The exodus of Internet Protocol hosts to an IPv6 address system whose benefits are almost undisputed has yet to begin after nearly two decades of initiatives. And the top-level domain system that helped make Web addresses friendlier to the world than phone numbers is rapidly disintegrating into a bizarre carnival of conflicting interests and outrageous conduct. It's a state of affairs that gives justification to proposals like that of Russian President Vladimir Putin: that the Internet be brought under more direct governmental control.

Motorola today filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that it expects to conclude its sale to Google by Wednesday, May 23. "As the transaction has now received all required regulatory approvals, the companies are moving to close the transaction within two business days," said Motorola. Chinese anti-trust regulators approved the deal over the weekend, though Google had to agree to keep Android open for five years as a condition of winning approval. The deal already has the approval U.S. and European government bodies. Google agreed last August to acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. Along with Motorola's smartphone and cable box businesses, Google will also acquire some 17,000 patents.

The idea behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is pretty simple - break programming work down into bite-sized chunks, and put it in front of a large workforce that can do the work quickly and cheaply. Part of the challenge of that is making it easy for requesters to create the bites that workers are chewing on. The new categorization app from Amazon removes some of the hurdles of creating HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that ask workers to pick the best category for items. The result could make the crowdsource coding marketplace even more usable and popular.

Creating a request for Mechanical Turk isn't overly difficult, but it takes a bit of time editing HTML and answering a lot of questions for which first-time users don't have a lot of context - for example, deciding the qualifications for workers, or whether they need to be "masters" to take on a task.

Amazon is streamlining all that with the Categorization App by making assumptions about what its users would want, providing suggested pricing and helping to create the form that workers will see.

Right now, Amazon is providing an app only