Now.Imperfect writes "In its last day of session, the Supreme Court has definitively clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment. The confusion is whether the Second Amendment allows merely for the existence of a state militia, or the private ownership of guns. This ruling is in response to a case regarding the 32-year-old Washington DC ban on guns." This is one of the most-watched Supreme Court cases in a long time, and Wikipedia's page on the case gives a good overview; the actual text of the decision (PDF) runs to 157 pages, but the holding is summarized in the first three. There are certainly other aspects of the Second Amendment left unaddressed, however, so you can't go straight to the store for a recently made automatic rifle.

Many readers have written in to let us know Metallica may be the star of the next major installment to the Guitar Hero franchise. "Edward Woo, a Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst, was going through some SEC filings from Activision, and found the following plan. 'In fiscal 2009, we plan to publish Guitar Hero: On Tour for the NDS; Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Metallica, and Guitar Hero IV across multiple platforms,' the report read. Since the fiscal year ends March 31, 2009, it doesn't sound like we have long to wait for this title. That's four Guitar Hero games coming in the next year. How many can the market take?"

fireheadca writes "Metallica, once strongly opposed to file-sharing, has hinted at going 'free' in the style of NIN and Radiohead. Having heard success stories about releasing music online, Metallica has decided it wants a piece of the action. Radiohead, as a pioneer of online 'pay what you want' music, has shown the world it is possible to profit by releasing music online, but would not post those profits. NIN, on the other hand, has reported at least $1.6 million in revenue. In hindsight, many people remember Metallica as the band that helped shutdown Napster. I purchased the NIN album, after many years of free downloads of the NIN collection, to help support the band. Would you buy a Metallica online album despite their former views?"

tuxeater123 writes "According to a blog posting at BusinessWeek.com, the iPhone SDK could be pushed back by another 1-3 weeks. Unfortunately, the evidence provided, such as the media announcements that are usually made before most Apple releases, suggests that this may indeed be true. Apple usually sticks to their announced deadlines, however they have been known to break them occasionally."

TechDirt has an interesting article about a UK-based company that is trying to work with ISPs to make use of user surfing data to serve targeted ads. "Late last year, we heard about a company that was trying to work with ISPs to make use of that data themselves to insert their own ads based on your surfing history -- and now we've got the first report of some big ISPs moving into this realm. Over in the UK three big ISPs, BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media have announced plans to use your clickstream data to insert relevant ads as you surf through a new startup called Phorm."

Riding with Robots writes "The never-say-die robotic geologist Opportunity continues its extended explorations in Victoria Crater on Mars. The latest findings from the mission suggest that while plenty of water did exist in this location, it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold. 'Not all water is fit to drink,' said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team. 'At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic. Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.'"

Matt Barton writes "Gamasutra is running a feature on the venerable Apple II platform, which practically defined the early home computer industry and was home to many of the greatest games and developers of all time. The authors discuss the platform's lifespan and many iterations, struggles with illegal distribution, and legendary Apple II games such as Prince of Persia, John Madden Football, and Ultima. 'How big of a problem was piracy? Although several software authors claim that they stopped developing games because of rampant piracy and the subsequent loss of revenue, piracy did expose more computer owners to more games than they otherwise would have been -- this was at a time before ubiquitous demos made it easier to "try before you buy." Another benefit of this piracy is that much of the software archived today at online repositories are the cracked versions.'"

An anonymous reader writes "This week a sub-$100,000 rocket belt was unveiled and will be on sale this summer, but that's the sad thing: it's still not a real jet pack. Here's a fascinating inside look at the human-flight industry, full of law-suit scandals, technical difficulties, fuel-economy woes and endless delays. The good news? It all points to the next generation of rocketeer research, with real applications for medical rescue and military technology actually coming on the horizon. From the article: 'With a little patience, and a little funding, we could actually have the pleasure of grumbling over regulatory issues we never dreamed possible. Like being limited to specific kinds of air strips, because the jet strapped to your back is classified by the FAA as an ultralight. Or being required to wear a ballistic parachute, because Amarena's Thunderjet design could reach altitudes as high as 10,000 feet (and, for the record, speeds of up to 160 mph, provided someone can solve wind-resistance issues).'"

rambilly brings us a story from Wired about the origin and development of the iPhone. From the article: "Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, 'We don't have a product yet.' The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. 'It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,' says someone who was in the meeting."

Popular in Victorian and Steampunk fantasies, airships and zeppelins evoke a certain elegance that most modern travelers don't associate with the airplane. Some companies are capitalizing on that idea, and a need to move cargo by air in an era of ever-increasing fuel costs, to re-re-introduce commercial zeppelins. Popular Mechanics notes four notable airship designs, all with specific design purposes. One craft in particular, the Aeroscraft ML866, is being funded by the US government's DARPA group. It looks to combine the best elements of the helicopter and the zeppelin. "The Aeroscraft ML866's potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht's buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says. It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. "

A reader writes "Aviv Raff, an Israeli researcher known for his work in hunting browser bugs, has revealed a Firefox spoofing vulnerability which could allow identity thieves to dupe users into giving up their password. According to Mr. Raff Firefox fails to sanitize single quotes and spaces in the 'Realm' value of an authentication header. Raff was quoted as saying 'This makes it possible for an attacker to create a specially crafted Realm value which will look as if the authentication dialog came from a trusted site.' This vulnerability was shown to be in the latest Firefox, version 2.0.0.11 and until Mozilla fixes this vulnerability Mr. Raff recommends in his blog 'not to provide username and password to Web sites which show this dialog.'"

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system — when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock — to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of these intermediary stages are well established. The article abstract is available from Astrophysical Journal Letters."

notamicrosoftlover writes to tell us Channel9 is reporting that Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode". "With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle." There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9."

Brikus writes "And you thought your car had gadgets. In this story from Wired magazine, we hear about Alex Roy and his quest to break the record time for a cross-USA road trip. One of the biggest roadblocks to breaking the record: highway patrol officers, about 31,000 along the way. So Roy decked out his E39 BMW M5 with a thermal camera, radar/laser detectors, GPS devices, police scanners, and other high-tech gadgets and toys."

Bowling for cents writes "There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers. The latest variants of Storm are now using a 40-byte key to encrypt their Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer traffic, meaning that each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key. This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks. This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities."