YokimaSun writes "Homebrew coders push the boundaries on the PSP again, StrmnNrmn has released a new version of his Nintendo 64 emulator for the PSP that has been confirmed to play Mario 64 at Full Speed on Sony's Handheld. A full Compatibility listing is available with games such as Starfox64 playble too."

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica is reporting that EMI may announce on Monday that it will be freeing much of its catalog from the shackles of DRM. The Wall Street Journal, in a subscription-only portion of its site, is saying that that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be present at the announcement in London and that the music will be sold through the iTunes Store and possibly other online outlets. In early February rumblings were heard that EMI was thinking about ditching DRM, but EMI was unable to entice the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and others. As it turned out, EMI wanted a considerable advance payment to offset what it perceived as a risk: selling DRM-free music online. EMI's position was simple: if they sell music without DRM, then users will find trading it that much easier." There's also rumours of an Apple/Beatles announcement sometime today, perhaps tied into this drm decision.

An anonymous reader submitted a link to an International Herald Tribune story about NASA's answer to the movie 'Armageddon'. Specifically, they've outlined a plan to deflect a planet-killer asteroid. "In 1998, Congress gave NASA's Spaceguard Survey program a mandate of 'discovering, tracking, cataloging and characterizing' 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer (3,200 feet) wide by 2008. An object that size would probably destroy civilization. The consensus at the conference was that the initial survey is doing fairly well although it will probably not quite meet the 2008 goal." With this tracking system in place, scientists are hopeful an intervention could be staged before any grim choices have to be made. Assuming they have the money and manpower needed for the effort, NASA has actually outlined a pair of procedures that dove-tail with each other: "First we would deflect the asteroid with kinetic impact from a missile (that is, running into it); then we would use the slight pull of a 'gravity tractor' -- a satellite that would hover near the asteroid -- to fine-tune its new trajectory to our liking. (In the case of an extremely large object, probably one in 100, the missile might have to contain a nuclear warhead.) To be effective, however, such missions would have to be launched 15 or even 30 years before a calculated impact."

a-charles writes "Just as power companies are considering the first expansion of nuclear power usage in the US since the 70s, Reuters reports on a disturbing anouncement from the nation of Japan. On Thursday the Japanese power company Hokuriku Electric Power admitted it had covered up a 1999 incident in which mishandling of nuclear fuel rods led to an unintended self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction. The mishap caused the plant, located in central Japan, to enter a 'critical state' for much of those 15 minutes. Apparently, this was in the same year that two workers were killed in a separate incident in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo. A pair of workers were killed after using buckets to mix nuclear fuel in a lab, a test that also created an uncontrolled chain reaction for a short time. The nuclear power industry already has a bad name for safety violations in Japan, and these revelations are unlikely to help with that public image."

warm sushi writes "An academic at the British Computing Society asks, Is computer science dead? Citing falling student enrollments and improved technology, British academic Neil McBride claims that off-the-shelf solutions are removing much of the demand for high-level development skills: 'As commercial software products have matured, it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop software from scratch. Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, customer relationship management systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.' Is that quote laughable? Or has the software development industry stabilized to an off-the-self commodity?"