According to a company statement [PDF] just released, Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., will become Premier Election Solutions. The company president, David Byrd, who has overseen the disastrous election unit for some time, will stay on as president. After a string of disastrous reports on the quality and security of their voting systems, along with plummeting stock prices since last week, it seems clear that Diebold, the once-great, more-than-100-year old company, is doing whatever it can at this point to save the corporate parent.

When astronomers think about the Big Bang, in general they don't actually mean that one singular moment when the Universe burst into being. It's really the name given to the model used to describe what happened an infinitesimally thin slice of time after that moment. The basic trouble is that Einstein's relativity gives us a good description of some things (large scale gravity, for example), and quantum mechanics tells us about other things (how particles behave), but no one has ever successfully combined the two, and they must be combined to understand that First Nanonanonanonanonanosecond. Einstein himself tried, and failed. It's possible, now, that this has changed.

The FBI is contacting more than one million PC owners who have had their computers hijacked by cyber criminals. The initiative is part of an ongoing project to thwart the use of hijacked home computers, or zombies, as launch platforms for hi-tech crimes. The FBI has found networks of zombie computers being used to spread spam, steal IDs and attack websites. The agency said the zombies or bots were "a growing threat to national security". Yes, it is called Operation Bot Roast.

Engineering TV is an online video program by engineers for engineers. Twice a week, each 5-8 minute episode shows cutting-edge technology in action and looks behind the scenes as "today's engineers shape tomorrow's breakthroughs". Topics range from NASA flight control engineer training to robots, from virtual combat to artificial heart design.

The Drake equation has inspired debate and more than one scientific project over the years. The integers that are plugged into this equation are often subject to wide interpretation and can differ significantly from scientist to scientist. Even the slightest change can result in vastly different answers. Part of the problem is that our understanding of cosmology and astrobiology is rapidly changing and there is often very little consensus among specialists as to what the variables might be. And so the question is posed: Is the Drake Equation obsolete?

A large, wooden calculating machine was built in 1840 by Thomas Fowler in his workshop in Great Torrington, Devon, England. In what may have been one of the first uses of lower bases for computing machinery, Fowler chose balanced ternary (Base 3 with a twist!) to represent the numbers in his machine. Very little evidence of this machine has survived.

Since 1997 Pamela Vass and David Hogan have been researching Thomas Fowler and his inventions. They discovered a two-page description of Fowler's calculating machine, written in 1840 by a prominent mathematician of the day, Augustus DeMorgan. Working together with Vass and Hogan, Mark Glusker designed and built a working model, based primarily on the information in DeMorgan's description. It's a Base 3 Wooden Calculator

We all know the story, delivered in grade school textbooks across the country, of how the universe began. The Big Bang. Fourteen billion years ago. Space and time and everything, exploding into being in a flash, and still exploding as celestial bodies race apart across the cosmos. Well, maybe so. But the Big Bang theory has taken its lumps in recent years. Now, renegade physicists are making a new case. That it didn't all start in an instant. That there is no beginning, and no end. And those are fighting words in the halls of science. Presented in an interview on WBUR in Boston (48 Minutes).

In the Age of Computer Bloat someone has decided to do a performance comparison between a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core, each running appropriate software.

In order to keep the hoots and hollers of "unfair comparison" at a minimum, we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience. After all, most users don't know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do. And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications.

Computer Bloat does not fare so well.

The launch of Microsoft Surface marks the beginning of a new technology category and a user-interface revolution. Surface, Microsoft 's first surface computer, provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural hand gestures, touch and physical objects. Surface computing breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology. Something similar to this was presented at the Ted Talks last year

A while back someone asked several people what they thought was a simple typographic question. They were thinking about doing a quick eye tracking study with a colleague and wondered if there was any empirical research available that showed that a single space after a period was "better" than two spaces, or vice versa. While they were mostly interested in this as a web usability issue, many folks were very interested in this for all sorts of reasons. In any event, there was a flood of email about this classic question. Here are the results.

May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC's expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

Whil Wheaton on the gaming generation as Parents: Now don't get me wrong: I love gaming. I love technology. In fact, I almost wrote a column this week all about the majesty of handeld games in the 70s and 80s (Merlin and Mattel D&D FTW!) and when I was younger, I took my Mattel Football and then Gameboy just about everywhere with me, but my parents gave me limits, (I didn't miss Old Faithful erupting because I was playing Tetris, for example) and they certainly never brought our Atari 2600 with us on a vacation. I've been ruminating on this for some time, but I've recently concluded that there is, in fact, an entire generation of parents, about my age or just a little older, who are substituting technology for parenting. As a result, there's an entire generation of children who are overstimulated and undersocialized, and in some cases heavily medicated, because their damn parents would rather distract them with a DVD or video game than, you know, interact with them. Is this the new way we're supposed to raise emotionally healthy and well adjusted kids? I must have missed a memo, because these people are everywhere.

Microsoft has been ordered to actually pay the $1,500,000,000 fine it incurred for violating MP3 patents owned by Alcatel and Lucent Technologies. US federal judge Rudi Brewster told the software giant that it's time to pay damages, after a trial jury found Microsoft guilty in February. According to Brewster the court finds "no just reason for the delay and therefore enters final judgment on these patents".

Whenever faked food products are identified, people often assume these foods to be sub-quality secondary or tertiary processed food products such as canned food, sauces or snacks. Now it seems that even the primary food products can be artificially altered, faked and even human-made. Thus we come to the case of Fake Eggs

Dell has finally chosen a Linux distribution to offer on its desktop and laptop machines. Following news that Michael Dell was running Ubuntu on his personal laptop, the company has followed suit and from late May Dell machines will ship with Ubuntu 7.04 as an option.