The attorney looked into the matter and explained that the music industry has been filing these lawsuits in an effort to frighten people away from downloading music. A woman in Minnesota went to court and lost $120,000. That frightened me. I decided to accept the settlement offer. We had to pay the music industry $4,000.

I do not even know what downloading is.

The spherical coma of Comet Holmes has swollen to a diameter of over 1.4 million kilometers, making the tenuous, dusty cloud even bigger than the Sun. Scattering sunlight, all that dust and gas came from the comet's remarkably active nucleus, whose diameter before the late October outburst was estimated to be a mere 3.4 kilometers. In this sharp image, recorded on November 14 with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, stars are easily visible right through the outer coma, while the nucleus is buried inside the condensed, bright region. The bright region of the coma seems offset from the center, consistent with the idea that a large fragment drifted away from the nucleus and disintegrated, producing the comet's spectacular outburst.

The suit accuses the Cardinals of negligence in allowing a defamatory statement to be published. The girl is seeking damages "in excess of $25,000," plus legal fees.

The Cardinals introduced the scoreboard service when the new stadium opened last year. For $2.99, fans can send a text message from their phone to digital boards along the first- and third-base lines, as well as a display in right-center field.

Vulgar comments are supposed to be caught before they are displayed, but that has not always been the case.

The finding, from a telescope array 10 times the size of Paris, solves a long-standing mystery about the origins of the most energetic cosmic rays that strike the Earth's atmosphere....

[T]he origins of the highest-energy particles, which travel within a whisker of the speed of light, have been puzzling. A single proton can have as much energy as a tennis ball served at 100 kilometres per hour.

Astronomers found it difficult to explain how particles are accelerated to such enormous speeds.

User will be able to boot in a few seconds straight into the DVD player, skipping the longer Windows startup, or switch to the DVD player from Windows. If Windows is running at the same time, it can be put in sleep mode, prolonging battery life.

Laptops with a media player separate from Windows already exist, but the players don't run parallel to Windows (you have to boot into the player, then shut it down and boot into Windows to switch tasks).

Laptops with HyperSpace would likely have a separate button that instantly switches away from Windows.

When matter gets swallowed by a black hole, it could fall into another universe contained inside the black hole, or get trapped inside a wormhole-like connection to a second black hole, a new study suggests.

"We were very surprised about the results," Böhmer says. Instead of a boundary around the singularity, they got two other kinds of solutions — both bizarre — that replaced the singularity

The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values — regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral.

For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one. The results suggest that individual cells in human brains might also have a fine-tuned preference for specific numerical values.

"We are able to grab things out of the flow and propel them along a new path," says Erickson. He adds that microfluidic work is inherently fiddly, because drag, friction and viscosity are much stronger at such smaller scales. "Optics is the opposite — as you confine things to smaller spaces they get faster and more useful," Erickson adds.

The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer's central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU — less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card — Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days.