InkPlusToner.com and CompTree Ink did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the settlement.

HP has gone after inkjet vendors many times in the past for violating patents. Earlier this month, the company filed a lawsuit against MicroJet, Mipo Technology, Mipo America,

HP said the companies, including seven others, violated patents related to cartridge design, ink level and delivery methods, according to a complaint on the ITC’s Web site. The patents in question are 6,959,985, 7,104,630, 6,089,687 and 6,264,301.

The original complaint with the ITC also included complaints filed against other companies that HP accused of violating patents, but those disputes haven’t been fully resolved yet. The ITC has passed a default judgment against those companies and HP hopes for a “satisfactory remedy” to resolve the disputes. The companies include BCInk, EZ Label and CDR DVDR Media in California; Mipo International of Hong Kong; and Mextec Group of Florida. Also listed are Shanghai Angel Printer Supplies, Shenzhen Print Media, Zhuhai National Resources, Jingjie Imaging Products, Tatrix International and Ourway Image, which are all in China.

The company said that the firms in question had been importing and selling counterfeit HP O2 inkjet printer cartridges. Formal complaints were filed in September of last year arguing that the companies had violated US trade laws.

“HP is pleased with the outcome on these matters, and remains committed to vigorously pursuing legal enforcement against practices that do not respect HPs IP rights,” said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president for Inkjet and web services business in HP’s imaging and printing group.

HP filed a complaint with the ITC in September 2009, alleging that companies including InkPlusToner.com and CompTree Ink were importing and selling inkjet supplies in the U.S. that infringed HP’s patents. HP reached settlement agreements with those two companies, which will pay damages and stop selling cartridges.

HP also made the same allegations with the ITC against SmartOne Services and expects to reach an agreement soon. An administrative law judge at the ITC also approved a motion from Chinese company Zhuhai Gree Magneto-Electric that it would not import or sell products that allegedly violate HP patents.

“HP is pleased with the outcome on these matters and remains committed to vigorously pursuing legal enforcement against practices that do not respect HP’s IP rights,” said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president at HP’s Imaging and Printing group.

Mipo Science & Technology, Mextec Group, Sinotime Technologies and PTC Holdings for infringing on patents.

While the settlements have different specifics, all centre on the defendants agreeing to stop importing and selling infringing cartridges. Three of the firms have also agreed to pay an undisclosed monetary settlement to HP.

The settlement comes as HP is pursuing three other companies it has accused of infringing on HP patents over cartridges and reselling stolen printer head components from an HP plant in Singapore.

HP’s is one of many counterfeit cases to make headlines as of late. Earlier this month Intel revealed that counterfeit i7 processors had apparently hit the market, while Cisco had a California retailer jailed for selling counterfeited versions of its routers.

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“Bret, I get 40,000 letters or e-mails a day,” Obama said.

The White House has been strident in its criticism of Fox News. In October its then-communications director, Anita Dunn, called Fox News “either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party” and added, “Let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.”

Other White House officials, including press secretary Robert Gibbs, have been fervent in their opposition to the news channel.

“I have watched many stories on that network that I’ve found not to be true,” Gibbs said from the White House podium in October.

Fox has faced withering criticism for its treatment of the Democratic White House. On Sunday, former New York Times editor Howell Raines decried the network and questioned why other news organizations lend it legitimacy.

Obama sat down with “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier in the executive mansion’s Blue Room to talk about a health care plan that is inching toward final passage. Several times Obama chided Baier for breaking into his lengthy answers with follow-up questions.

Baier acknowledged that he had spoken over the president many times.

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” he said, trying to get one last question into the interview and drawing a smile from Obama.

Baier wrapped up the interview by noting the tension.

“I apologize for interrupting you, sir,” he said. “I tried to get the most for our buck here.”

The tone was set early. Baier first asked about the latest efforts in the House to pass the bill, which elicited Obama’s standard talking points about the benefits of the overhaul effort. Baier tried to bring Obama back to the question.

“Bret, let me finish,” Obama said.

An unhappy Obama completed his answer, repeating his familiar reasons why lawmakers should pass legislation that would deliver the White House a victory on its top domestic priority during an election year when Democrats face tough prospects.

“Let me insert this,” Baier said, trying to regain control of the conversation by citing some of the 18,000 questions Fox News viewers had sent to him ahead of the interview. The two he mentioned were critical of what they called bribery and trickery to pass a bill supposedly good for the country.

“Bret, you’ve got to let me finish my answers,” Obama told Baier, the news channel’s White House correspondent during the Bush administration.

“Sir,” Baier responded, “I know you don’t like to filibuster, but …”

“Well,” Obama said in cutting him off again, “I’m trying to answer your question and you keep on interrupting.”

“Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?” Raines wrote in a column for The Washington Post. Ailes was a prominent GOP media consultant before becoming a national TV news executive.

It seemed during the interview with Baier that Obama was familiar with the criticism. The president sought to avoid questions about the legislative process Democrats are weighing to pass the proposal.

“I’ve got to say to you, there are a lot more people who are concerned about the fact that they may be losing their house or going bankrupt because of health care,” he said.

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Nearby, a teenage girl squatted behind a pile of garbage, trying to avoid the stench and clouds of flies around tarp-covered latrines that provide the only privacy, but also are places where women are attacked.

In this camp, some 47,000 people live crowded into what used to be a sports ground in a neighborhood that always has been dangerous. Residents include a dozen escaped prisoners, among them a man accused of a notorious murder, according to Fritznel Pierre, a human rights advocate who lives at the camp.

“But nobody says anything because they’re scared, scared of the criminals and scared of the police,” he said.

Pierre has documented three other gang rapes in the camp, including of a 17-year-old who says she was a virgin before six men attacked her and raped her repeatedly.

“I really worry about the teenager because she has no one to look out for her. She says she sees her attackers but is afraid to report them because she would then have to leave the camp and she has nowhere to go,” Pierre said.

The teen is among dozens of rape victims who have sought help from KOFAVIV, a group of Haitian women who survived political rapes in 2004. Their offices were destroyed in the quake and they now operate from a tent.

They brought the victims to American volunteer lawyers who came to Port-au-Prince a week ago to identify Haitians who may qualify for humanitarian parole to live in the United States.

“I’ve been here five days and have spoken to 30 (rape) survivors including a dozen under 18. Their stories are horrific. I would be catatonic,” said San Francisco lawyer Jayne Fleming.

Few rapes are reported because women often face humiliating scrutiny from police officers who suggest they invited the attacks and even nurses who contend young girls were “too hot” in their dress style, according to Delva Marie Eramithe, a KOFAVIV leader.

Her own 18-year-old daughter was saved from an attacker who dragged the girl into a dark alley between tents at the downtown camp sprawling across Champs de Mars plaza. The assailant did not see the teen’s three sisters, who had been walking behind her, and all four of them managed to beat him and run him off.

“They grabbed me, put their hands over my mouth and then the three of them took turns,” the slender 21-year-old said, wriggling with discomfort as she nursed her baby girl, born three days before Haiti’s devastating quake.

With no lighting and no security, they are menacing places after sunset. Sexual assaults are daily occurrences in the biggest camps, aid workers say — and most attacks go unreported because of the shame, social stigma and fear of reprisals from attackers.

Rape was a big problem in Haiti even before the earthquake and frequently was used as a political weapon in times of upheaval. Both times the first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted, his enemies assassinated his male supporters and raped their wives and daughters.

But the quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people has made women and girls ever more vulnerable. They have lost their homes and are forced to sleep in flimsy tents or tarp-covered lean-tos. They’ve lost male protection with the deaths of husbands, brothers and sons. And they are living in close quarters with strangers.

“I am so ashamed. We’re scared people will find out and shun us,” said the woman, who suffers from abdominal pain and itching, likely from an infection contracted during the attack.

Women and children as young as 2, already traumatized by the loss of homes and loved ones in the Jan. 12 catastrophe, are now falling victim to rapists in the sprawling tent cities that have become home to hundreds of thousands of people.

Investigators for Human Rights Watch reported the first three gang rapes to U.N. officials. Then, two weeks later, on Feb. 27, the 21-year-old mother was gang-raped.

Only a week later did U.N. police officers begin patrolling.

“For me it seems completely bizarre that for this one camp that everyone knows is unsafe, it’s taken them three weeks to get a patrol going,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of the agency’s women’s rights division. “It’s unrealistic to expect patrols in camps all the time, but I think they can identify hotspots and provide security to those spots.”

Pierre complained that the U.N. patrols are ineffective. “They only drive their cars down the one road that covers only a small portion of the camp. They never get out of their cars,” he said.

In the hilltop suburb of Petionville, where plush mansions look out over slums on hillsides and in ravines, a 7-year-old rape victim was being treated Monday in the hospital of a tent camp set up on a golf course. Another child, a 2-year-old, had been raped in the same camp two weeks earlier.

The toddler is taking antibiotics for a gonorrhea infection of the mouth, according to Alison Thompson, who is the volunteer medical coordinator for a Haitian relief group created by Sean Penn. She helped treat both children.

He praised the security offered by Haitian and U.N. police and told the women officers: “We must protect these women and girls. … If they are sexually abused and attacked and raped, that is totally unacceptable and intolerable, and we must stop it.”

On Monday, a man with a bullhorn was at the camp during a food distribution, saying “We don’t want men raping women, do we?”

No, the women waiting in line yelled back.

Still, the fear was palpable among the most vulnerable. The 18-year-old orphaned rape victim was nervous about the time, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

“I have to find somewhere to sleep, near some people who might help me if there’s trouble,” she said.

“It scares me, the way the men look at me, and they know I’m all alone.”

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Gateway T-6311 Battery(Voltage: 11.1V Capacity: 5200MAh )

“That is the puzzling aspect of this,” Michels said.

Earlier in the day, federal regulators said they were reviewing data from the gas-electric hybrid but so far had not found anything to explain the out-of-control acceleration reported by Sikes.

“We would caution people that our work continues and that we may never know exactly what happened with this car,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement.

On Sunday, Gomez said it was neither surprising nor significant that inspectors had been unable to recreate the conditions reported by Sikes.

“They have never been able to replicate an incident of sudden acceleration. Mr. Sikes never had a problem in the three years he owned this vehicle,” he said.

But Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., suggested it raised questions about Sikes’ story.

“It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but let’s understand, it doesn’t mean it did happen,” Issa said on CBS’ “The Early Show.”

Sikes has said his car raced to 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego. He called 911, but did not respond to instructions from the dispatcher to shut off the engine or throw the car into neutral.

The CHP officer ultimately helped bring the car safely to a stop by telling him over a loudspeaker to hit the emergency brake and foot brake simultaneously. Sikes spoke to reporters shortly after the incident but has since kept a low profile.

Toyota said it had conducted two days of tests on the car last week. It found severe wear and damage on the front brakes from overheating, but the rear brakes and parking brake were in good condition.

And the rest of the car was fine, the automaker said — the gas pedal was not slowed by friction, the floor mat was not even touching the pedal, and a system that cuts the engine power when the gas and brakes are pressed at the same time was working.

The automaker stopped short of saying James Sikes had staged a hoax last week but said his account did not square with a series of tests it conducted on the gas-electric hybrid.

In Sikes’ case, Toyota said it found he rapidly pressed the gas and brakes back and forth 250 times, the maximum amount of data that the car’s self-diagnostic system can collect. That account appears to contradict Sikes’ statement — backed by the California Highway Patrol — that he was frantically slamming the brakes, at one point lifting his buttocks off the seat.

Toyota spokesman John Hanson said the event data recorder — a car’s version of the “black box” inspected after plane crashes — would be of no use to investigators because it only stores information when the airbags are deployed. The box only stores four to six seconds of information before the airbags go off, he said.

But investigators were able to download valuable information from the hybrid’s control computer system, which showed the car was functioning normally, Toyota said.

Toyota will give the car back to Sikes soon, Michels said, indicating that no further testing will be done for electronic causes.

Two outside experts, however, said it would be a mistake not to test for unknown electronic gremlins, such as electromagnetic interference, static electricity or software glitches. Those problems, they said, can gum up electronics and then disappear.

It’s possible the Prius’ backup system could have been compromised by an electronic glitch, said Keith Armstrong, a British electronic engineer and consultant who advises companies on electromagnetic interference.

Toyota officials said they believed Sikes was hitting the pedals lightly, which would have prevented the brake-override system from kicking in.

The company had no explanation for discrepancies with Sikes’ account but confirmed the brakes were overheated and the pads worn. Bob Waltz, vice president of product, quality and service support at Toyota Motor Sales USA., said the front brakes were “metal to metal.”

Toyota said it believes a CHP officer’s account that he smelled burning brakes while guiding Sikes on the freeway.

“We have no opinion on his account, what he’s been saying, other than that the scenario is not consistent with the technical findings,” spokesman Mike Michels told a press conference.

The episode March 8 was among the highest-profile headaches Toyota has suffered in recent months. It recalled more than 8 million cars and trucks worldwide because gas pedals can become stuck in the down position or be snagged by floor mats. Dozens of Toyota drivers have reported problems even after their cars were supposedly fixed.

Toyota said its tests showed the car’s electronics were working fine.

“If there were some kind of electronic problem, you would think it might actually stay permanent,” Michels said. “When your TV goes on the fritz, when electronic stuff goes on the fritz, it doesn’t just do it once and never do it again.”

A statement from Sikes’ attorney, John H. Gomez, said the firm would not comment further on the episode until a government investigation was complete. Sikes did not respond to phone messages.

The company also said the push-button power switch worked normally and shut the car off when pressed for three seconds, and that the shift lever worked normally, so the car could be shifted into neutral.

The power management computer contained no diagnostic trouble codes, and the dashboard malfunction lights were not activated, Toyota said.

Toyota challenged Sikes’ account that a dealer turned him away when he brought the car in a few weeks ago after he got a recall notice. It said Toyota of El Cajon, east of San Diego, checked his floor mats and told him he would get a notice when they would be replaced.

The 2008 Prius is subject to a recall for floor mats but not sticky accelerators.

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Dell Inspiron 500M Keyboard(Color:Black;Without track point )
Acer AS5102WLMi keyboard(Color: Black
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Toshiba M35X-S329 keyboard(Status: Genuine and new! ;Remark: Ribbon cable included)
Compaq Presario CQ60-216DX keyboard(Status: Genuine and new!;Remark: Ribbon cable included)

Beyond that issue, the screen wouldn’t be my first choice for doing color-sensitive work like video or graphics editing. It has no perfect viewing angle, blacks come across as muddy pools, and the screen is too glossy. The audio is about as mediocre as the display, producing hollow-sounding tunes and issuing a lot of crackling. The speakers can kick out plenty of volume, but Dell clearly opted for quantity, not quality, of sound.

Our test model had a Core i5 520M processor clocked at 2.4GHz, 4GB of DDR3-1066 RAM, a 350GB hard drive, and the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 discrete graphics chip. All that power was reflected in an impressive WorldBench 6 score of 105, well above the average range for the all-purpose category. As for video game performance, the 1564 is no gaming rig, but it has more than enough power for a user who’s willing to stay within some reasonable resolution and effects limits. The native resolution of the screen is 1366 by 768, and modern games are playable at that level. You pay for performance in battery life, however: Though I expect most models in the category to reach about 4.5 hours of battery life, the 1564 usually manages about 3.5 hours.

Open the laptop, and you’ll find a keyboard that runs the whole length of the machine, a power button, a few status lights, and a touchpad with two buttons. The touchpad is bog standard, responsive and spacious but not quite up to the level of Lenovo’s ThinkPad line. The keyboard is shoved to the left to accommodate an undersize numeric keypad on the right, leaving the whole arrangement cramped and off-center. It’s ghastly to type on, and it gets worse the longer you use it. If you love Dell’s human-interface style, you’re in luck. If you love interfaces designed for human comfort, you’re…less in luck.

The review model I received had the “Ice Blue” finish with the familiar Dell icon in the center. The glossy sections of this machine are fingerprint magnets (no way around that), but they look good. The whole thing measures 15 by 9.8 by 0.8 inches and weighs just under 5.5 pounds. The 15.6-inch widescreen display stretches it out–this is not a laptop you can casually toss into a small bag, but it isn’t a monster either. The left side has USB, VGA, and HDMI ports, plus the ethernet plug. The right edge has the DVD drive, two more USB ports, microphone and headphone ports, and a memory card reader. 

A more serious concern than the amount of power is what you can–or, rather, can’t–do with it. The system’s three USB outs aren’t bad, but with this impressive CPU and discrete GPU, where’s my FireWire, my eSATA, or even my Express Card slot? The 1564 certainly has more than enough power to chew through regular laptop work without flinching. It has just enough oomph to be a capable portable video-editing machine, too. But Dell has provided no good way to get all that content in and out.

Dell’s built-in software is strongest in the Dell Support Center and Webcam Central apps. The former is a hub for information about your machine, while the latter makes it easy for even the most technophobic computer user to take embarrassing images and videos of themselves. On the other hand, the Dell Dock is still just a semifunctional combination of the Start button’s features and a Mac dock, and Dell DataSafe is merely a constantly running pitch for online storage.

I really wanted to like the Dell Inspiron 15 (1564), but mostly I find myself apologizing for it. Users who love the ergonomically unpleasant keyboard configuration can get a lot of power out of the rig for a reasonable price. But I’d lean toward a more powerful piece of laptop hardware for full commitment to the desktop replacement route, or a slightly less capable machine with better battery life for anyone who is committed to using their system on the go. Maybe the next Dell laptop will be the one I love.

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TOSHIBA Satellite P205-S6307 Keyboard(Color: White Remark: Ribbon cable included. )
GATEWAY M-6318 keyboard(Color: Silver
Status: Genuine and new! )
Dell NSK-D9301 keyboard(Color: Black;Status: Genuine and new! )

The company has since continued to filter results on Google.cn and posted ads for dozens of positions in China, which has 384 million web users.

Google has said it was currently in talks with the Chinese government on its future in the nation.

“Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China,” Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee this week.

“If the option is that we’ll shutter our .cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that,” she said at a hearing on the relationship between Internet technology and aiding democratic activists around the world.

“But if (it)… violates Chinese laws, it would be unfriendly and irresponsible and (the company) will definitely be responsible for the consequences,” he said.

Beijing tightly controls online content in a vast system of censorship often called the “Great Firewall of China”, removing information it deems harmful — including pornography and violence, but also politically sensitive material.

Google threatened in January to abandon its Chinese-language search engine and perhaps leave China altogether over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The comments from the minister of industry and information technology, Li Yizhong, came after the US Internet giant said it was prepared to leave the world’s largest online market if Beijing continues to insist on its censoring its web searches.

“We support (Google) to expand its business and market share in China,” Li told reporters at a briefing on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People’s Congress, the country’s parliament.

The company has not given a time frame for ending its filtering.

Li, the Chinese industry minister, said Google’s withdrawal would not generate much of an impact on the country’s Internet market.

“If it decides not to withdraw and stay in China, we will welcome it and it will benefit China’s Internet development,” he said.

“If it decides to leave… China’s Internet market will continue to develop fast and will not be impacted too much.”

Gateway NV-54 Keyboard(Each keyboard is tested before shipping and are 100% working Replace your faulty, cracked or broken keyboard)
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Acer AS5102WLMi keyboard(Color: Black
Status: Genuine and new! )
HP 441427-001 Keyboard(Status: Genuine and new!
Remark: Ribbon cable included)
Toshiba M35X-S329 keyboard(Status: Genuine and new! ;Remark: Ribbon cable included)
Dell NSK-D9001 keyboard(Product Type : Li-ion ;Rating : 11.10V; 4400 mAh)
Toshiba Satellite L25-S1194 keyboard(Status: Genuine and new;Remark: Ribbon cable included)

Though we have no trouble recommending a Pentium T4400-based budget laptop for general use, we would also point out that laptops with the Core i3 processor, one of the successors to the Core 2 Duo, cost only $100 more. For example, the Gateway NV7915u costs $599 and uses the Core i3 330M CPU. The Gateway finished our multitasking benchmark with a 32-percent-faster score than the Inspiron Satellite L505. That’s a significant number when you consider the laptops are only $100 apart in price. The performance difference on single applications is less drastic: the Gateway finished the Photoshop and iTunes benchmarks 12 percent and 2 percent faster than the Inspiron Satellite L505, respectively.

The Satellite L505 features the Intel Pentium T4400 processor, a dual-core chip clocked at 2.2GHz. It’s found in many laptops because it is an entry-level dual-core processor that’s a rung below Intel’s venerable Core 2 Duo line that delivers excellent bang for the buck (it’s basically a Core 2 Duo with half the L2 cache). Budget buyers will find that it provides more than enough muscle for general use, including heavy multitasking scenarios. It finished with a percentage point or two off the Asus K60I and the Dell Inspiron i1545 on CNET Labs’ application benchmarks, not a surprising result given that all three feature the same Pentium T4400 processor. The Asus has 4GB of memory to the Toshiba’s 3GB, but the Toshiba’s memory is a faster 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM compared with 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM on the Asus. The difference in memory speed and type offset the difference in memory amount, according to our test results.

Though we have no trouble recommending a Pentium T4400-based budget laptop for general use, we would also point out that laptops with the Core i3 processor, one of the successors to the Core 2 Duo, cost only $100 more. For example, the Gateway NV7915u costs $599 and uses the Core i3 330M CPU. The Gateway finished our multitasking benchmark with a 32-percent-faster score than the Inspiron Satellite L505. That’s a significant number when you consider the laptops are only $100 apart in price. The performance difference on single applications is less drastic: the Gateway finished the Photoshop and iTunes benchmarks 12 percent and 2 percent faster than the Inspiron Satellite L505, respectively.

Above the display is a 0.3-megapixel Webcam. It’s the same low resolution as the Asus K60I’s Webcam. The low resolution means photos and videos top out at 640×480 pixels. The Dell Inspiron i1545 features a 1.3-megapixel Webcam that can capture higher-quality 1,280×1,024-pixel photos and videos.

Two oval speaker grills sit in each corner above the keyboard and give the impression of offering some audio oomph. Unfortunately, their sound is average at best. We’re never blown away by integrated laptop speakers, but the Dell Inspiron i1545 offers louder, clearer audio than the Satellite L505 does.

The touch pad features a matte finish and a responsive feel, but it sits flush with the wrist rest. As a result, your palm is more likely to accidentally graze it and move the cursor. Most touch pads are slightly recessed to prevent your cursor jumping to and fro. We like the large mouse buttons, however, which offer good travel and none of the loud clack you get from many low-end laptops.

The 15.6-inch display features a 1,366×768-pixel native resolution, which is standard for the size. Movies and 720p HD video look good, and the glossy screen coating helps smooth edges and movement. The screen finish strikes a fine balance; it’s not so glossy and keeps reflections and glare to a minimum. The LED-backlit display on the Asus K60I was a touch brighter, by way of comparison.

Toshiba manages to squeeze in a dedicated number pad to the right of the keyboard, but we’re not sure how useful that is unless you spend the majority of your day entering numbers into Excel. In order to accommodate the number pad (and keep the four arrow keys at full width), the spacebar is shortened. It’ll take some getting used to and some accidental Alt-key hits before typing feels natural.

SONY VGN-C250NB keyboard(Status: Genuine and new! Remark: Ribbon cable included.)
Dell 0NK831 Keyboard(Status: Genuine and new! Remark: Ribbon cable included.)
Gateway NV-53 Keyboard(Each keyboard is tested before shipping and are 100% working Replace your faulty, cracked or broken keyboard)
Gateway MX6400 Keyboard(325.0 x 160.0 x 16.0(mm) Color: Black )
Acer AS5102WLMi keyboard(Color: Black Status: Genuine and new! )
Toshiba 1905-S301 keyboard(Status: Genuine and new! ;Remark: Ribbon cable included)
HP Pavilion ZE2000 Keyboard(Color: Black;Status: Genuine and new)

Disaster managers in Oregon and Washington are aware of the risks, and work is ongoing to shore up schools, hospitals and other buildings to withstand a seismic jolt.

“We’re definitely being proactive in trying to get those fixed, but we have a long way to go,” said Yumei Wang, geohazards team leader with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries.

Oregon has 1,300 schools and public safety buildings that are at high risk of collapse during a major quake. The state recently doled out $15 million to two dozen schools and emergency facilities to start the retrofit process. State law requires that all poorly built public safety buildings be upgraded by 2022 and public schools by 2032.

The state is also helping its coastal communities — home to 100,000 residents — plan for vertical evacuation buildings that could withstand giant tsunami waves.

The fault has been dormant for more than 300 years, but when it awakens — tomorrow or decades from now — the consequences could be devastating.

The Pacific Northwest “has a long geological history of doing exactly what happened in Chile,” said Brian Atwater, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and University of Washington. “It’s not a matter of if but when the next one will happen.”

The last one hit in 1700, a magnitude-9 that sent 30- to 40-foot-tall tsunami waves crashing onto the coast and racing across the Pacific, damaging Japanese coastal villages.

There’s an 80 percent chance the southern end of the fault off southern Oregon and Northern California would break in the next 50 years and produce a megaquake, according to Chris Goldfinger, who heads the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Laboratory at Oregon State University.

Research presented last year at a seismology conference found that Seattle high-rises built before 1994, when stricter building codes took effect, were at high risk of collapse during a superquake.

Recent computer simulations of a hypothetical magnitude-9 quake found that shaking could last 2 to 5 minutes — strong enough to potentially cause poorly constructed buildings from British Columbia to Northern California to collapse and severely damage highways and bridges.

Similar tectonic forces are at play off the Pacific Northwest, where the Juan de Fuca plate is diving beneath North America. At some point, centuries of pent-up stress in the Cascadia subduction zone will cause the plates to slip. Scientists cannot predict when a quake will occur, only that one will happen.

The region is all too familiar with violent earthquakes. In 2001, a 6.8-magnitude quake centered near Olympia, Wash., rattled a swath of the Pacific Northwest, but remarkably caused no deaths. While it was not the type of quake that hit Chile, it was a reminder of how a big disaster could strike at any time.

To better understand megaquakes, a group of scientists planned to travel to Chile in May for a conference on giant earthquakes and their tsunamis. There are field trips planned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1960 Chile quake.

Such a quake would also send powerful tsunami waves rushing to shore in minutes. While big cities such as Portland and Seattle would be protected from severe flooding, low-lying seaside communities may not be as lucky.

Seattle plans to retrofit its 34 fire stations. The city is also working on a plan to upgrade 600 buildings considered most at risk.

“We have been preparing aggressively,” said Barb Graff, who heads the city’s Office of Emergency Management.

Chile and the Pacific Northwest are part of several seismic hotspots around the globe where plates of the Earth’s crust grind and dive. These so-called subduction zones give rise to mountain ranges, ocean trenches and volcanic arcs, but also spawn the largest quakes on the planet.

The magnitude-8.8 Chile quake occurred in an offshore region that was under increased stress caused by a 1960 magnitude-9.5 quake — the largest recorded in history, according to geologist Jian Lin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The temblor destroyed or badly damaged 500,000 homes and killed more than 700 people.

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These houses lack plumbing, but the group plans to install community bathrooms and kitchens.

“The damage it caused (to Chile’s international image) is lamentable. Now they’ll throw all of us in the same bag,” said Juan Lagos Rosales, a construction worker forced to sleep in a tent with his wife and infant daughter outside their fallen house.

Some excused the looting as a natural result of the yawning wealth gap in Chile, where the poor are exposed to expensive consumer goods without any ability to buy them. The top 20 percent of wage earners make an average of $3,200 a month, compared to $340 a month for the bottom 20 percent, according to the national statistics institute.

When the earthquake shattered store windows, the temptation was too great, said the Rev. Luis Figueroa Vinet of the Our Lady of the Snows cathedral in Concepcion. “The pig isn’t guilty for what poverty brings,” he said, invoking a colorful Chilean adage about inequality.

But a poll Sunday suggests 85 percent of Chileans want the looters prosecuted — a view shared by city worker Aran Fuentes, who said the looting let all Chileans down: “After all that we’ve done for other countries, to present ourselves to the rest of the world as looters really hurts.”

Many Chileans squarely blame Bachelet for failing to stop the looting before it spread throughout the disaster area.

“As a society we have to stay on an emergency footing until everyone is able to have their house again,” said Prudencio, who hopes the raw material will arrive in time to begin construction in the next two days.

It could take a year to recover 50 percent of the housing lost in the region of Bio Bio, and 10 years to bring the local economy back to what it was before the disaster, said Osvaldo Arenas, the regional housing secretary.

Security, not housing, was on the minds of local officials Sunday as President Michelle Bachelet arrived in Concepcion to support police and send a strong message against looting.

One group of six women and seven children camped in a park in Concepcion after leaving their nearby community of San Pedro to avoid vandals and violence.

The children were staying in two flimsy tents, while the women huddled under plastic and blankets strung beneath a large tree, which despite its foliage still allowed rain to fall on their heads.

“This is the last thing we need, for it to rain,” said Magdalena Cuevas, 48. “There are children here who have become ill from diarrhea.”

The poll sponsored by the daily newspaper El Mercurio found 72 percent believe the government responded late and inefficiently to re-establish order after the earthquake, and 48 percent believe it was because Bachelet did not want to end her term sending soldiers into the streets.

Sixty percent also believe aid delivery has been too slow and inefficient according to the survey of 600 adults in Santiago, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Bachelet did wait 33 hours after declaring a “state of catastrophe” before putting the military in charge of the disaster response, and significant aid didn’t reach some hard-hit communities for two or three days after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake and tsunami killed more than 450 people.

But the government has since rolled out a massive effort, deploying planes, ships, helicopters, trucks, heavy equipment and thousands of troops to deliver tons of aid from government storehouses, Chilean businesses and foreign governments and aid groups.

Some help is coming from A Roof for Chile — a volunteer organization that plans to use part of the money raised in a national telethon this weekend to put up 30,000 tiny prefabricated houses in the next four months. With wooden walls and aluminum roofs, each one is just 9 feet by 6 feet (about 3 meters by 2 meters). But they will provide an emergency solution while stronger and bigger new housing is built, said Gabriel Prudencio, the group’s representative in Concepcion.

At least 30 cities and towns were badly damaged, leaving more than 500,000 homes uninhabitable. Authorities are analyzing the damage in buildings across the region to see if people can safely return.

Meanwhile, the best shelter many could hope for as the first rains since the disaster fell was a donated tent or plastic sheeting hung between trees in the pine-covered hills.

Using bullhorns as they drove through poor neighborhoods in the Concepcion area, police threatened to raid homes if looters didn’t return what they took from stores in initial hours and days after the quake. And so they did, depositing everything from mattresses to refrigerators and flat-screen TVs. It took 35 truckloads to recover it all, nearly $2 million worth of merchandise, officers said.

Bachelet vowed that those responsible would feel the full weight of the law: prison terms of two to five years.

“These are items that have nothing to do with survival — they reflect the moral damage of the people, some of whom came just to find things they could make money from,” she said, adding that the government also will prosecute anyone responsible for price speculation in the disaster area.

Thousands of quake survivors participated in the looting, which began only hours after the devastating earthquake and grew to include grandmothers and small children. Outnumbered police could only stand and watch, urging people to take only the food they needed, until soldiers arrived and restored order.

The looting hampered rescue and recovery efforts by distracting firefighters and police and deeply wounded the national pride of Chileans who yearn to be considered part of the first world.

Some disaster veterans say Chile’s response has been remarkable, largely avoiding bureaucratic infighting and quickly patching up the international airport and main north-south highway to keep aid flowing.

“Could FEMA have done that?” said Chris Weeks, director of humanitarian affairs for the DHL delivery company, referring to the U.S. government’s disaster agency. “There are some things going wrong, but a lot has gone right.”

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The keyboard is the same wide flat affair that graces almost all Toshiba Satellites. While we’ve largely hated its glossy finish, it might not bother other people as much as it bothers us. There’s plenty of room to rest your palms, and on Toshiba’s larger media-oriented laptops, these flat keys somehow bother us less. Of greater concern is the laptop’s tiny matte touch pad that has a width that is considerably less than the two massive chromed buttons set beneath it. Our fingers tended to slide around the pad without getting the cursor to react how we wanted it to, and the lack of space on the pad got on our nerves, especially when everything else on the P505D is glacial–it felt like driving a toy car on a real-life racetrack.

The 18.4-inch glossy LED-backlit display is arguably the star of the show on the P505D-S8007, and the most likely reason why anyone would be attracted to this Satellite. It is a fine display, with good colors and only decent brightness, but its maximum resolution–1,680×945 pixels–is a puzzler. That’s better than the standard 1,366×768-pixel screen resolution found on smaller laptops, but it’s less than the typical full-HD resolution (1,900×1,080 pixels) we’d expect from such a large screen. Budget desktop replacement systems can get away with a 1,600×900-pixel resolution (or 1,680×945 pixels in this case), but why not offer full-HD resolution here? Unfortunately, the displays low resolution showed, as full-screen HD video tended to demonstrate a bit of pixilation when viewed up-close. The Harman/Kardon speakers were, as always, very good, and had a nice combination of bass and volume.

Not for the weak of arm or those short in desk space, the Toshiba Satellite P505D-S8007 is one seriously big laptop. Weighing in with its adapter at 10 pounds and measuring 17 inches long, the P505D won’t fit in many laptop backpacks–but at least its battery doesn’t bulge in the back. Its glossy “sonic black” plastic chassis with “fusion finish”–understated gray lines etched through–is a fingerprint magnet, although the base’s bottom is dull matte black. The body of the P505D is virtually the same as the one that graces Toshiba’s high-end Qosmio line of multimedia laptops, but here, looks are deceiving. Toshiba’s Qosmios have a lot more under the hood, while the P505D is barely breaking ordinary.

Under the LCD, the laptop certainly looks attractive. It has a wide, flat keyboard, a full number pad, a set of touch-enabled media controls to the left of the keyboard, and Harman/Kardon speaker set above the keys–rimmed with chrome accents to catch the eye. The tremendous screen fills up most of the upper lid, with a little room at the top to fit the Webcam.

There is some graphics capability in the P505D, courtesy of an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200. While this should provide more gaming power than with Intel integrated graphics, we found the results middling. Unreal Tournament III benchmarked at 19.5 frames per second when running at a below-standard-resolution 1,280×768 pixels. Anything less than 30fps isn’t an acceptable frame rate for comfortable gameplay. Our anecdotal test of Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, a 2009 game, set to medium graphics settings and a similar resolution, played with choppiness that threatened to dissolve into frame stuttering at the sight of any more action.

If you want dedicated graphics in a mainstream retail laptop that looks a lot like this, check out the Satellite A505-6025. It ran Unreal Tournament III at the same resolution at 40fps–twice the frame rate of the P505D-S8007–and it only costs $50 more.

The Toshiba Satellite P505D-S8007 is a perfect example of this. We found its retail predecessor, the P505-S8980, to be a relatively good value. That was 2009 and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. In 2010, the P505D-S8007 has an AMD Turion II running the show along with middling ATI graphics chip, a combination that results in a decidedly last-generation performance at a price that’s hardly cheap: $749. For only $50 more, Toshiba has another laptop, the Satellite A505-6025, that’s a relative bargain with a far faster Core i3 processor and actually good Nvidia graphics chip. For only $649, you could get a 16-inch Asus U50F-RBBAG05 with a Core i3 processor would also provide a better, lighter experience . Is there any good reason to get the P505D-S8007? Let’s see. Graphics? No. Performance? No. Price? No. Battery life? No. This system was at the bottom of every chart. If we could stamp a “no buy” label on one product, this would be it.

 To its credit, the P505D-S8007 manages to earn a few ports many laptops don’t, such as having am eSATA port, ExpressCard. and mini-FireWire. Unfortunately, and baffling, the P505D is one of the few large laptops we’ve seen in the last six months that doesn’t have an HDMI-out port. On a big-screen desktop replacement laptop, having a video-out to an HDTV is one of the top features we’d look for. To add insult to the omission, the P505D has two blocked-off holes where HDMI and DisplayPort connections could have been. We don’t care about its lack of DisplayPort, but not having HDMI is silly.

Then again, maybe Toshiba is onto something. While the AMD Turion II processor was certainly able to play HD video files quiet well, our attempts to stream full-screen Hulu in 480p (we tried “Caprica” as a reference video) resulted in unsuitable choppiness. Being able to stream sub-HD, full-screen video is a minimum expectation in any laptop that deems itself to be a big-screen mainstream machine in the modern era. This isn’t a Netbook, after all. The P505D is aiming itself as a media machine and likely TV replacement, and it can’t even do that well.

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