uncleO writes "The New York Times tells the story of today's arrest of Edwin Andres Pena, 23, who 'hacked into computers run by an unsuspecting investment company in Rye Brook, N.Y., commandeered its unprotected servers, and re-routed his phone traffic through them,' then 'used more than $1 million he received from his customers to go on a spending spree, buying real estate in south Florida, a 40-foot Sea Ray Mercruiser motor boat, and luxury cars including a BMW and a Cadillac Escalade.'"

kukyfrope writes "Sony Computer Entertainment America President Kaz Hirai recently talked to San Jose Mercury News about their upcoming console. His argument is that, by waiting to deliver Blu-Ray and performance hardware, even at a high price, the PS3 will be in greater standing than the Xbox 360 in the long run. Hirai also takes a cop-out on the amount of hype surrounding the PS3 hardware performance saying, 'It's all about the games. We all know that [...] This is a console that is here for the long haul and is not on a five-year cycle. Microsoft is coming out with an HD-DVD accessory for HD movies as an add-on only a year after they launched: that is exactly the kind of thing we don't want to do.'"

writertype writes "You may already be familiar with ultrawideband; UWB technology has been specifically talked about and designed to replace wired USB connections for over a year. Due to its high bandwidth, it's also been considered as an A/V cable replacement. The problem is that UWB radio performance degrades precipitously, effectively confining it to a single room. Until now, that is. Startup TZero says its UWB implementation provides high throughput through walls. Will this be an effective competitor to 802.11n?"

BaldManTom writes "ZDNet is running a story about the ESA's suit against the state of Minnesota regarding a bill which would fine anyone under the age of 17 for buying a game rated 'M' or 'AO'." From the article: "Lowenstein said that the average game buyer last year was 40 and the average player was 33. He also questioned how lawmakers reasonably expected retailers to collect the $25 fine from children."

An anonymous reader writes "Trusted reviews has a look at the Acer Aspire 9800. This massive machine has a 20.1" screen, two 120GB hard drives in a RAID 0 array, super-multi DVD burner, analogue and digital TV tuners and an Intel Core Duo dual core CPU. And at over 17lb you can even use it for weight training!"

Graeme Williams writes "One difference between SQL and a conventional procedural programming language is that for SQL there's a bigger gap between what the code says and what the code does. The Art of SQL is the opposite of a cookbook – or rather it's about cooking rather than recipes. It's not a reference manual, although there's plenty to refer back to. It's an intermediate level book which assumes you know how to read and write SQL, and analyzes what SQL does and how it does it." Read on for Graeme's review.

SR_melb writes writes to tell us that Melbourn researchers have, for the first time, managed to grow three dimensional human cells. This bypasses previous achievements of only being able to create two-dimensional constructions like skin. From the article: "Professor Wayne Morrison, from Melbourne's Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery has led the breakthrough. He says it's a world first and predicts the discovery will ultimately lead to the creation of human organs, including parts of the heart, by using the patients' own stem cells. Such a scenario, says Professor Morrison, would reduce the problem of immune rejection which is often associated with organ transplants."

writertype writes "Today, Seagate announced about a dozen new products, including its first hybrid laptop hard drive that includes a 256-Mbyte flash chip to save power and speed up the time a notebook recovers from hibernation. Interestingly, the new Momentus 5400 PSD has also exceeded earlier estimates of hybrid hard-drive performance, which said that such drives would add an extra hour to the typical battery life of a notebook PC."

jar writes to tell us Bruce Perens has a short editorial on why DRM could have an impact on much more than just our record collections. From the article: "Within the last century, electronic communications have increasingly become the vehicle of democratic discourse. Because radio and television broadcasting are expensive with limited frequencies available, the wealthy have dominated broadcasting. The Internet and World Wide Web place into the common man's hands the capability of global electronic broadcasting. [...] In order to protect democratic discourse in the future, the Internet must remain a fair and level playing field for the distribution of political speech. The full capability of the Internet must remain available to all, without restriction by religious, business, or political interests."

RobbeR49 writes "Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux. Unix was the big winner, however, beating both Windows and Linux in annual uptime. From the article: 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.' Yankee Group is claiming no bias in the survey as they were not sponsored by any particular OS vendor."

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a new open source tool for writing up scientific experiments for computers, not humans. Called EXPO, it avoids the many problems computers have with natural language, and can be applied to any experiment, from physics to biology. It could at last let computers do real science - looking at published results and theories for new links and directions."

muellerr1 writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that it had adopted 'a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with' in their Chinese activities. Though it doesn't yet sound like they're admitting to actually doing evil, it does appear that they are thinking about pulling out of China rather than compromise their 'do no evil' motto."

BStrunk writes "I was reading the news this morning on Reuters, when I stumbled across this article: U.S. Service Personnel Personal Data Stolen In the article, an official violated policy by taking the detailed personal information of thousands of active and reserve troops to his personal home, storing it on a personal computer, that was later stolen. In an age where domestic phone calls are monitored, a government employee was allowed to walk out of a government installation with the data on thousands of American citizens to store on an insecure personal computer? Doesn't that seem strange to you? This is a real failure, in my opinion, in government protection of its citizens. Layers of encryption and protected access was successfully bypassed to make the theft of this information as simple as stealing a home pc. Now, not only do service personnel currently serving have to worry about IEDs and being fired upon, but they are now subject to possible identity theft. A real failure. After this, how could one have faith enough to serve an inept institution?"

SirClicksalot writes to tell us that EMI is launching the first ad-supported peer-to-peer music downloading service called Qtrax. With Qtrax users will have two tiers of membership available to them, which EMI hopes will draw in a large segment of users to try it out and graduate many of them to stay on with a monthly fee or purchase music permanently. From the article "In the ad-supported, free tier, users will be able to search the network for specific tracks, and those tracks registered with Qtrax will be made available for download in Qtrax's proprietary ".mpq" file format. Users will then be able to play the downloaded .mpq file in full-fidelity sound quality for a pre-defined number of times. Each time a consumer plays a track, the Qtrax player will also offer fans click-to-buy purchase options, as well as the opportunity to upgrade to a premium subscription service for a flat monthly fee."

An anonymous reader writes "Harvard University scientists claim they will soon start trying to clone human embryos to create stem cells. Even with the history of controversy and fraud researchers hope they can one day use the newly created stem cells to aid in battle against many diseases. From the article: 'The privately funded work is aimed at devising treatments for such ailments as diabetes, Lou Gehrig's disease, sickle-cell anemia and leukemia. Harvard is only the second American university to announce its venture into the challenging, politically charged research field.'"