One day after the Senate voted 63-37 for lifting the restrictions imposed in 2001 on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, President Bush killed a bill that he claimed would sanction "the taking of innocent human life." The vetoed bill, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, would have scrapped limits on federal funding, but it failed to reach the two-thirds majority in its Senate vote which would have overturned the presidential veto.

John Dvorak writes on CSS after working on redesigning his weblog, the article ended up being extremely funny. From the write-up:

As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia's domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that none of this stuff works at all?!

After the first announcement last October, Yahoo and Microsoft said they have begun a limited public test to allow users of Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger with Voice to connect to each other through either service, exchange messages, check their friends' online presence, view status messages and share emoticons. Users can register to a limited public beta at Yahoo or Microsoft. According to a survey done by the U.S. Internet traffic measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings in June, the estimated unduplicated audience of Microsoft and Yahoo was 43.5 million U.S. users, compared to AOL's 47.2 million users. As for questions on a similar deal with AOL, Microsoft denied to comment, but said that the company "anticipates more of these relationships in the future."

HD Moore, the creator of the Metasploit toolkit, announced publishing details on one browser vulnerability per day for the month of July. Moore says on the Month of Browser Bugs blog that published information will be carefully chosen to demonstrate the concept without disclosing enough details that may lead to remote code execution. The blog currently contains vulnerabilities for the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari.

The Washington Post reports that Merriam-Webster has added "google" as an official English verb in its latest update on Thursday. The dictionary defines the new verb as: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web". CNET has also mentioned that several other technical words were added to Merriam-Webster, such as spyware and ringtone.