UltraOne writes "With the US Senate voting to table the Boehner debt limit bill, the US is only a few days away from running out of cash to pay for all its obligations. Slate is reporting on a fascinating legal hack that could come in handy, described by blogger 'beowulf' back in January 2011. Seigniorage is the extra value added when a government mints a coin with a face value greater than the value of the precious metal contained in the coin. The statute governing the minting of coins contains a section (31 USC 5112(k) ) that authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to mint and issue platinum coins in any denomination or quantity. To keep the government from running out of money, Timothy Geithner could order a $5 trillion platinum coin struck and deposited at the Federal Reserve. The money could then be used to fund Federal Government operations (blog post contains legal details)."

mikemuch writes "Use that graphics card for something besides games. ExtremeTech has a group review of three browsers that use some aspect of 3D to display the Web. While none of them are going to put Firefox or IE out of business any time soon, they're fun to play with and give a new slant to the Web." From the article: "Whatever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the Web? Back in the late '90s, all the hype was about VRML -- Virtual Reality Markup Language -- which would turn the web into an immersive environment that you'd maneuver around to get to the information you wanted. We're here to tell you that the reports of the 3D Web's death are greatly exaggerated."

SnakeOil Steve writes to tell us that Gary McKinnon, the alleged hacker who broke into Army, Air Force, Navy, and NASA systems, has just lost his extradition case. From the article: "'My intention was never to disrupt security. The fact that I logged on and there were no passwords means that there was no security,' McKinnon said, outside the hearing at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court. 'I was looking for UFOs.'"

houseofmore writes "After many years of development, Bram Moolenaar, creator of Vim, today announced version 7 of the widely used editor. New features included spell checking in up to 50 languages, intelligent completion, tab pages, extended undo branches and much more. Downloads available here for Unix, Windows, Mac and more."

Seagull76 writes "Check out this 1 minute video with Greenpeace's underwater photo/videographer and deep sea toy specialist, Gavin Newman, aboard the Esperanza. After months of confronting whalers and pirates, some might envy the crew aboard the next leg of Defending Our Oceans who are heading to the beautiful Azores in the mid-Atlantic. For this leg of the expedition, the Esperanza has been equipped with state of the art monitoring equipment, including a remote operating vehicle (ROV) which can shoot video down to a depth of 300m, and a drop camera capable of reaching depths of 1,000 metres - giant squid territory! The ship will become part of the ongoing University of the Azores research program intended to establish greater scientific knowledge of the importance of deep-sea habitats and marine life. "

An anonymous reader writes "Representative Lamar Smith is sponsoring the Intellectual Property Protection Act. The new bill is designed to give the Justice Department 'tools to combat IP crime' which which are used to 'quite frankly, fund terrorism activities,' according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Among the provisions is lowering the standards for 'willful copyright violation' and increasing the corresponding prison term to 10 years." More information is also available at publicknowledge.org.

An anonymous reader writes "NetworkWorld reports that security vendor McAfee places the blame for increased numbers of rootkits squarely on the shoulders of the open source community. Others, however, do not agree. From the article: 'Rootkit.com's 41,533 members do post rootkit source code anonymously, then discuss and share the open source code. But it's naïve to say the Web site exists for malicious purposes, contends Greg Hoglund, CEO of security firm HBGary and operator of Rootkit. "It's there to educate people," says Hoglund [...] It's a great resource for anti-virus companies and others. Without it, they'd be far behind in their understanding of rootkits."'"

Sabah Arif writes "Michael Spindler was supposed to be the savior of Apple. After four years at Apple, he was an executive vice president and had built Apple Europe to the point where it was providing 25% of Apple's revenues. Just the same, at the end of the day Spindler couldn't handle the stress or control the Apple organization. Low End Mac has an extensive biography of this figure in Apple's History." From the article: "Apple Europe ran out of a cramped 100 ft. office in Brussels and had only a few employees. Spindler had never worked at the startup before, but he liked it a lot. He had freedom to try almost anything he wanted. There were problems with working for such a young company, though. Spindler went without payment for almost six months because Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium."

Gosalia writes "In order to increase its presence in the business intelligence market, Microsoft announced its plan to acquire business analytics software developer ProClarity. 'This acquisition advances our (business intelligence) strategy and our ability to deliver performance management applications to customers,' Jeff Raikes, Microsoft business division president, said in a statement."

An anonymous reader writes "TrekStor, a German manufacturer of MP3 players has developed the world's most expensive MP3 player. This unique custom-made portable player is based on TrekStor's i.Beat organix mp3 player, and has one GB of memory, 25 hour battery life, supports MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF, OGG audio files, and is cast in 18 carat gold with 63 diamonds (one carat)."

Stuart Gibson writes "As predicted, the Gnarls Barkely single 'Crazy' has reached the number one spot on the official UK charts, based solely on legal downloads. The CD version of the single will not be released until tomorrow. This is the first single to be eligible for the honour as, until last month, download sales would only be counted if the track was also available to be bought as a physical copy."

An anonymous reader writes "Spam king Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, is facing up to life in prison for conspiracy to tamper with a witness and up to 20 years for endeavoring to obstruct justice. The charges are based on an alleged phone call in which he threatened to have a witness or the witness' family killed to prevent them from testifying against him in an upcoming trial on drug and related charges.