lisah writes "Though Linus Torvalds isn't exactly tripping over himself to endorse the GPLv3 draft, he continues to warm up to it little by little and says the newest version is 'a hell of a lot better than the disaster that were the earlier drafts.'"

An anonymous reader writes "According to a memo being reported on by Information week, the US Department of Transportation has issued a moratorium on upgrading Microsoft products. Concerns over costs and compatability issues has lead the federal agency to prevent upgrades from XP to Vista, as well as to stop users from moving to IE 7 and Office 2007. As the article says, 'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."'"

eldavojohn writes "Scottish engineers are taking advantage of the huge ocean coast that Scotland enjoys by building a 'wave farm' to harvest electricity from the ocean's powerful waves. These big red tubes have been named the Pelamis System after a sea snake. Max Carcas, the business developer for the firm, says it is 'a bit like a ship at anchor or a flag on a flagpole, it self orientates into the waves ... Waves then travel down the length of the machine and in doing so each of the sections, each of these train carriages, moves up and down and side to side.' These snake-like movements push hydraulic fluid through generators to produce electricity."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The start-up Lightfleet has developed an unusual way to use lasers to speed the flow of data inside a computer, hoping to break a bottleneck that can hamper machines using many microprocessors, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company plans to sell servers it predicts will be much more efficient than existing systems in tackling tough computing problems. Tasks could include automatically recognizing a face in a video image or sifting through billions of financial transactions for signs of illegal activity. These machines will attempt to sidestep some of the problems associated with parallel computation by ensuring all processors are connected, all the time."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "A Hong Kong health club is hoping that a car battery, some StairMasters and dozens of gym rats can help ease the world's energy problems. It is just one of a wave of projects that are trying to tap the power of the human body, the Wall Street Journal reports. The article explains the impetus behind the project: 'The human power project at California Fitness was set in motion by Doug Woodring, a 41-year-old extreme-sports fanatic and renewable-energy entrepreneur, who pitched the experiment to the gym's management last May. "I've trained my whole life, and many megawatts have been wasted," says Mr. Woodring, who has worked out at the Hong Kong gym for years. "I wanted to do something with all that sweat."'"

ukhackster writes "Those overheating laptop batteries are back. Lenovo is recalling 205,000 'extended' batteries which shipped with its ThinkPad machines, or were bought as replacements. Slashdot readers will doubtless remember the flak which Sony attracted last year, after it was blamed for exploding Dell notebooks and several massive recalls. This time, the batteries were made by Sanyo. Their engineers determined that the failure was repeatable by dropping machines using the batteries from a certain height and at a certain angle. As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued."

There have been several updates to game releases and showings this week. Probably most interesting is the news that the much-anticipated Bioshock will release in August, as opposed to the 'June-ish' timeframe we had previously. GTA and Civilization fans have much to look forward to next year; GTA IV's downloadable content, as well as new Civilization content are both due out in 2008. GTA IV itself is due out later this year. If anyone but me was wondering when the MMOG 'Bigworld: Citizen Zero' would be coming out, you can stop wondering: it's been canceled. The sci-fi title was to feature a world where players re-discovered their past on a penal colony where everyone's memory had been erased. Developer Micro Forte has been working on the game for some seven years now, and they've now publicly announced it just won't happen. Instead, they're now working on a spy-themed title. Finally, RPG fans will be getting their fix next week. Tabula Rasa and Mass Effect will be on display at GDC. More details will finally be available for both of these intriguing but mostly-enigmatic titles.

Terror Alert Brown writes "Reuters is reporting that a UK woman has been charged as a terrorist because of computer files on her hard drive. According to the article, these files included 'the Al Qaeda Manual, The Terrorists Handbook, The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, a manual for a Dragunov sniper rifle, and The Firearms and RPG Handbook.' She was picked up in connection with the plot stopped in August to detonate explosives in airplanes flying out of Heathrow airport. Now might be a good time to delete any copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook you once read for amusement and still have floating around on your hard drive."

merryprankster writes "New Scientist reports that Scripps Research Institute scientists have found that lowering the body temperature of mice by just 0.5C extends their lifespan by around 15%. Until now the only proven way of increasing longevity has been calorie restriction — but as this also causes a lowering of body temperature the researchers speculate that this cooling may be the underlying mechanism retarding aging. In this study mice with a defect in their lateral hypothalamus, which has the side effect of cooling body temperature, not only lived longer but also ate normal amounts."