$10m for quasi-lethal cattleprod blasters

The US Navy will put nearly $10m into development of "man-made lightning" blaster weapons.

The Federal Communications Commission will unveil some of the rules it will use in the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction.

A spectacular fossilized forest has transformed our understanding of the ecology of the Earth's first rainforests. Nowhere elsewhere on the planet is it possible to (literally) walk through such an extensive swathe of Carboniferous rainforest.

Dan Berninger has been deeply involved in the VoIP world for many years. If you need to know anything about the early days of VoIP, Berninger is worth talking to. These days, he's an analyst for Tier1Research and has just published (and emailed to us) a note looking at the claims in Verizon's VoIP patents that a judge has ruled Vonage infringed on. There are just a few problems with that ruling -- with the key one being that the concepts in those patents were clearly discussed and published by others prior to the patent being filed. Berninger says that the ideas were discussed at the VoIP forum meeting in 1996 and published in January of 1997. The patents in question were filed after that. I've included Berninger's note after the jump. However, due to the fun way the patent system works, introducing that kind of prior art to the USPTO for it to review the validity of Verizon's VoIP patents will take quite a bit of time and effort -- much longer than Vonage has to fight Verizon in court.

A study from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine suggests that fish caught in Pittsburgh rivers show evidence of estrogen-like activity, indicating that chemicals that mimic the female hormone may be making their way into the region's waterways. The study also found that when the researchers treated breast cancer cells in culture with fish extracts, the cells grew at increased rates.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/movies/AACS_hacked_again_to_expos e_Volume_ID_WinDVD_patch_irrelevant'; The DRM "protecting" HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc films -- AACS -- continues to unravel at the seams. In parallel efforts, hackers in both the Xboxhacker and Doom9 forums have exposed the "Volume ID" for discs played on XBOX 360 HD DVD drives. Any inserted disc will play without first authenticating with AACS, even those with Volume IDs which have already been revoked by the AACS LA due to previous hacking efforts. Add the exposed processing keys and you can decrypt and backup your discs for playback on any device of your choosing. So yeah, it looks like last week's WinDVD update has been quickly and definitively made useless just as we expected it would be. Well, for XBOX 360 HD DVD drive owners anyway but you can see where this is heading, right? Now go ahead AACS LA, revoke the Toshiba-built XBOX 360 HD DVD player... we double-dog dare ya.

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