Valve announced yesterday that their extension of Steam, called Steam Cloud, will launch later this week with the Left 4 Dead demo. Steam Cloud is "a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC." We discussed an early announcement for it back in May. Valve adds that "Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets."

vsync64 writes "Last night, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) spent 4 hours reading into the Congressional Record 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Interestingly, those articles (63-page PDF via Coral CDN) include not just complaints about signing statements and the war in Iraq, but also charges that the President "Sp[ied] on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment,' 'Direct[ed] Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens,' and 'Tamper[ed] with Free and Fair Elections.' These are issues near and dear to the hearts of many here, so it's worth discussing. What little mainstream media coverage there is tends to be brief (USA Today, CBS News, UPI, AP, Reuters)." The (Democratic) House leadership has said that the idea of impeachment is "off the table." The Judiciary Committee has not acted on articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney introduced by Kucinich a year ago.

An anonymous reader writes "A Singapore firm, VueStar has threatened to sue websites that use pictures or graphics to link to another page, claiming it owns the patent for a technology used by millions around the world. The company is also planning to take on giants like Microsoft and Google. It is a battle that could, at least in theory, upend the Internet. The firm has been sending out invoices to Singapore companies since last week asking them to pay up."

jcasman writes "Wired's got a piece on building a better robotic hand at Stanford. The new robot is called Stair 1.0, and scientists are hoping to take a cue from human children for how to teach a robot to learn. 'When a computer fails at a task, it spouts an error message. Babies, on the other hand, just try again a different way, exploring the world by grabbing new objects -- shoving them into their mouths if possible -- to acquire additional data. This built-in drive to explore teaches us how to use our brains and bodies. Now a number of hand-focused roboticists are building machines with the same childlike motivation to explore, fail, and learn through their hands.'"

LowSNR writes "Amazon this morning moved their DRM-free music store into open beta. According to the release, 'Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(tm), iPods(tm), Zunes(tm), Zens(tm), iPhones(tm), RAZRs(tm), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(tm) and Windows Media Player(tm), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free.' Not to mention Linux." Of course, without DRM few of the major labels play with them.

r7 writes "Internetnews is reporting on Sun's introduction of JavaFX at JavaOne today. Looks like a combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX with a friendly programming interface. Does this really spell the end of AJAX? I sincerely hope so. Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs. Proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in are also dead ends. JavaFX has the potential to satisfy this opportunity even better than did Java over a decade ago. Along with AJAX, let's hope JavaFX also puts paid to Microsoft's viral Active-X and JScript, and, more importantly, that it really is a web scripting language that developers can grok."

Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an article about the first successful tests of an Ebola vaccine on human subjects." From the article: "Nabel and colleagues at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encode three Ebola proteins. They boosted that vaccine with a weakened cold-related virus, and the combination protected monkeys exposed to Ebola. The first human testing looked just at the vaccine's DNA portion; the full combination will be tested later. At a microbiology meeting in Washington on Friday, Nabel and colleagues reported seeing no worrisome side effects when comparing six people given dummy shots with 21 volunteers given increasing doses of the DNA vaccine."