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boogi78 writes "Remember ASCII art? This is the Web 2.0 CSS version of ASCII art featuring Homer Simpson. Here is a CSS G.W. Bush. There's also an program that automatically converts jpegs into 'CSS images,' but it's a Windows executable. I found no sources for it, but I got it to work with WINE."

DigitAl56K writes "The Washington Post reports that 'The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon' and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said that 'Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement.' Initially, it appears that the administration plans to leverage conventional satellites for domestic surveillance purposes. Congress last October delayed launch of the DHS office that would coordinate law-enforcement requests for satellite and other technical data, and demanded answers to legal questions about the program. The administration supplied answers that some Congress members characterized as inadequate and appears determined to go ahead anyway."

An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily is running an interesting interview with EPIC founder and Unreal creator Tim Sweeney. Sweeney is anyway very clear about his views on the gaming industry, but it is surprising how sharply he criticizes the PC industry for transforming the PC into a useless gaming machine. He's especially unhappy with Intel, which he says has integrated graphics chipsets that 'just don't work'."

Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge this week ruled in favor of a Washington-based watchdog group, allowing them to question White House officials about missing emails involving controversial issues. The subjects include the release of the identity of a former CIA operative, the reasons for launching the war in Iraq and actions by the US Department of Justice. The group had filed suit [PDF] last May against the White House Office of Administration, seeking access to White House email under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The discovery ruling is bringing to light issues of email retention in businesses and other private organizations. We've previously discussed the White House's difficulties with email."

jellybeans writes "MadPenguin.org takes a peek into the world of Linux as it looks going forward. "I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible, through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine. The vision, based on my own interpretation of Linux was always about choice."

jetpack writes to make sure we're aware that Apple's OS X 10.5.2 update is available and that it contains plenty of improvements and fixes that users have been asking for. Macworld enumerates some of the big ones, saying that the update "shows Apple listens to users" (sometimes). A couple of the new features simply restore Tiger (10.4) capabilities that Leopard (10.5) had inexplicably withdrawn. You can now shut off the much-maligned transparency of the menu bar, and organize your Dock stacks hierarchically and display them as folders. And Apple has provided welcome access to common Time Machine functions in the menu bar.

JoeBorn writes "The Sunday New York Times has an article on Neuros video recorder and describes the benefits of open source hardware to its mainstream readership. Can a mainstream audience appreciate that hackability can translate into new features or will it all just seem too geeky? In this case, the Neuros OSD got a YouTube browser. While the details might be lost on the average reader, are they getting the sense that some companies allow users to benefit from other users modifications while others are actively bricking products for applying 3rd party apps? In other words, is openness starting to add value to the brands that support it?"

SkinnyGuy writes "Mixed into all of PCMag's CES preview coverage is an interesting story about a projector that's no bigger than an iPod. An early version showed up at last year's CES, but some of the guts weren't inside the small body. Now they are. It uses lasers to project the image. Really fascinating, futuristic stuff."

The companies say the settlement involves a “limited cross license” to three Nortel and three Vonage patents, and will not call for any monetary payments by either company.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Nortel-Vonage.html?ex=1356843600&en=2f2a453f12587f02&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?

The Escapist this week is themed around stories and storytelling. The article that resonates the most with me is a Tom Rhodes piece called Slouching Toward Black Mesa. It explores the connection between the journey of Gordon Freeman and literary explorations of similar end-of-the-world themes. "Freeman isn't slouching toward Black Mesa, he's converging on the great citadel in the middle of City 17, the Bethlehem of our story. Bethlehem is a holy place in Christian theology, which makes it the perfect location for the beast of Yeats' poem to encroach upon. In City 17, that ideal is flipped on its head, replaced with a center of darkness and powe ... In an even more direct rejection of Yeats, however, the forces in Half-Life 2 are non-supernatural. It continues the series' theme, man as a force in this world; whether for good or ill is his choice. It is this choice, this need to carve out our own destiny and define ourselves based on our own hopes, dreams and fears that makes us human. So what is slouching toward Bethlehem? We are." The issue also features an article entitled The Ending Has Not Yet Been Written, about the never-ending story of Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

An anonymous reader writes "Seagate has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company mislead customers by selling them hard disk drives with less capacity than the company advertised. The suit states that Seagate's use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte" was misleading and inaccurate: whereby 1GB = 1 billion bytes. In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes — a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."

Ian Lamont writes "An Arizona State University researcher named Michael Kozicki claims that nanotechnology will replace disk drives in ten years. The article mentions three approaches: Nanowires (which replace electrons/capacitors), multiple memory layers on silicon (instead of a single layer), and a method that stores multiple pieces of information in the same space: 'Traditionally, each cell holds one bit of information. However, instead of storing simply a 0 or a 1, that cell could hold a 00 or a 01. Kozicki said the ability to double capacity that way — without increasing the number of cells — has already been proven. Now researchers are working to see how many pieces of data can be held by a single cell.'"