Many outlets are echoing a subscribers-only report in the Wall Street Journal that Yahoo's board has decided to reject Microsoft's takeover offer. The NYTimes offers the only other independent reporting so far confirming this claim. The report says that Yahoo will formally reject the offer in a letter on Monday, since they believe it "massively undervalues" the company. Microsoft offered $31 per share, a 62% premium on the stock price at the time, for Yahoo; but the latter believes that no offer below $40 per share is tenable. The AP has some background on Yahoo's options in responding to the bid.

danlor writes "We were all taken aback 4 years ago when someone linked us the history of George Lawrence and his photos of the aftermath of the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake. I personally thought to myself: man, I would love to make one of those cameras. The idea of flying 2,000-pound cameras with kites... Well, someone has actually recreated the feat. They even provide links to get large prints of the original and recreated scenes."

Schneier points out an interesting (and long, 117-pages) paper on the ethical implications of robots in war [PDF]. "This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, representational requirements, architectural design criteria, recommendations, and test scenarios to design and construct an autonomous robotic system architecture capable of the ethical use of lethal force. These first steps toward that goal are very preliminary and subject to major revision, but at the very least they can be viewed as the beginnings of an ethical robotic warfighter. The primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity."

alphadogg writes "Next-generation 802.11n systems promise to considerably improve WLAN performance. But the processing required for the boost sucks up more power than the older 802.11a/b/g networks. Still, many enterprise-class Wi-Fi vendors claim to deliver full 802.11n capabilities without enterprise customers having to touch their power infrastructures. So what gives?"

An anonymous reader writes "VNUNet is reporting that a company called InPhase Technologies claims they have successfully recorded 515GB of data per square inch to capture the record for highest data density. From the article: 'InPhase promised to begin shipping the first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300GB on a single disk with a 20Mbps transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6TB capacity.'"