An anonymous reader writes "Picture a 3D inkjet printer that deposits droplets of plastic, layer by layer, gradually building up an object of any shape. Fabbers have been around for two decades, but they've always been the pricey playthings of high-tech labs — and could only use a single material. A Fab at Home kit costs around $2400 and allows users to print anything from Hors d'Oeuvres to flashlights."

Mr. Fahrenheit writes in with a Wired story on research out of Arizona State, where researchers have "developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years... The new memory technology — programmable metallization cell (PMC) — comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits." PMC involves the on-demand creation of copper nano-wire bridges. It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory. Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.

An anonymous reader writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows. "We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal, in an October 21 e-mail posted to one of the group's discussion lists. Sarwal and others are now finalizing the design of the cow-powered generator."

The Insultant writes "Dr. Larry Roberts, co-founder of the ARPANET and inventor of packet switching, predicts the Internet is headed for a major crisis in an article published on the Internet Evolution web site today. Internet traffic is now growing much more quickly than the rate at which router cost is decreasing, Roberts says. At current growth levels, the cost of deploying Internet capacity to handle new services like social networking, gaming, video, VOIP, and digital entertainment will double every three years, he predicts, creating an economic crisis. Of course, Roberts has an agenda. He's now CEO of Anagran Inc., which makes a technology called flow-based routing that, Roberts claims, will solve all of the world's routing problems in one go."

Rik702 writes "Wolframscience.com have announced that an undergraduate from Birmingham, UK has proved Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine is universal." You can read a pdf of the proof as well as some related coverage.

An anonymous reader writes "The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that US-made censorware is being used to oppress the people in many countries, including Burma. That in itself may not be surprising, but a more interesting point is that according to lawyers interviewed by the CS Monitor it appears to be legal — in spite of all the economic sanctions against the country, and even though people know it will be used to hush up any mention of things like attacks on peaceful protesters."

christian.einfeldt writes "The State of California sued Microsoft for anti-trust violations, and now the proceeds of the settlement of that case are being used to fund the acquisition of computers for any school district in California. The terms of the settlement allow every school district in California to be reimbursed a set dollar amount for the purchase of computers with the software of their choice. Microsoft probably anticipated that school districts would mainly use the settlement to buy more Microsoft products, with a few Apple purchases sprinkled in here and there. But now that Free Open Source Software is being commercialized by hardware vendors such as Dell, System76, EmperorLinux, Zareason.com, and TechCollective.com, acquiring computers powered by FOSS is straightforward. I'm a volunteer sysadmin at a northern California public charter school and in my Slashdot journal I detail the step-by-step process for using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice." And then there's the Ubuntu team in Belgium that is raising funds by auctioning off a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate that a Microsoft rep gave them at a trade show. So far the bidding is up to 101.76 Euros, about $144.

kurmudgeon writes "The Register is fielding reader tips that Hotmail has placed Draconian limits on the number of Hotmail recipients who can receive an email. The first 10 Hotmail addresses included in a mass email go through just fine, according to these reports. But any additional addresses are returned to sender with a message that reads: "552 Too many recipients." (Microsoft denies it has placed any such restriction on the number of senders.) This would appear to be a violation of RFC 2821, which states: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification."

Damon Tog notes a Wired blog posting featuring quotes from a juror who took part in the recent RIAA trial. Some excerpts: "She should have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars... Spoofing? We're thinking, "Oh my God, you got to be kidding."... She lied. There was no defense. Her defense sucked... I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naive. We're not that stupid up here. I don't know what the f**k she was thinking, to tell you the truth."

netbuzz writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute says it's the first full census of the 'visible Internet' since David Smallberg canvassed a piddling 315 allocated addresses in 1982. They're talking about 3 billion pings directed toward 2.8 million addresses over the course of 62 days. Oh, and they credit the comic strip xkcd for sparking the idea of presenting the data using a Hilbert curve." The main page for the census project has links to versions of the census at various scales.

jemtallon writes "The jury in the previously mentioned Captiol v Thomas story has reached a verdict. They have found in favor of the plaintiffs, Capitol, and ordered that she pay a $222,000 fine for 24 cases of copyright infringement."

Bayscribe writes "A Silicon Valley company co-founded by a 12-year-old has just raised $6.5 million in venture capital. PlaySpan, based in Santa Clara, Calif. says it offers game publishers a technology that lets users make payments and shop for other items. It calls itself the first "publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network." Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader, says on his Web site that he is passionate about software that can make the game experience more "rewarding," and that he started the company last year in his garage. He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won."

THX-1138 writes "A few months ago, Trent Reznor (frontman of the band Nine Inch Nails), was in Australia doing an interview when he commented on the outrageous prices of CDs there. Apparently now his label, Universal Media Group is angry at him for having said that. During a concert last night, he told fans, '...Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means — STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that's not right.'"

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a data center, over 500km away. In the last year, Germany has passed a draconian new anti-security research law and raided seven different data centers to seize Tor servers. While back in 2003, A German court ordered the developers of a different anonymity network to build a back-door into their system."

Will Fisher writes "New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help."