Internet News

Adobe Systems agreed to acquire rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion in a deal that sets the stage for a showdown with Microsoft in the graphics software space.

Whoa, what a shocker! What does this mean for SVG?

WRAL.com

Whil Piavis’ campaign as “The Pirate Captain” made quite a slash with students. On-campus voter turnout was up almost 10 percent. He said he wants to keep students interested in the politics of the university.

“We felt a giant squid had eaten part of our spirit, so we decided to find the squid and get our spirit back,” Piavis said.

Quick, UNC needs a Ninja King to combat this.

Slashdot

Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What’s amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk.

Generate your own CS paper!

Slashdot

naylor83 writes “Four weeks ago, Opera’s CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they’re no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people’s.

PC Pro

During his career as one of the world’s most prolific spammers, the prosecution claimed that James amassed a fortune of some $24 million. According to prosecutors, he was churning out up to a million emails a day. Despite a response rate of 0.3 per cent he was bringing in around $750,000 a month.

Amongst the ‘products’ offered via his mass emailing were pornography, fake products and work-at-home schemes which purported to allow people to earn up to $75 an hour working from home. The prosecution had told the jury that in a single month Jaynes had received 10,000 credit card orders – each for the scam.

Although a resident of Raleigh, North Carolina, Jaynes’s trial took place in Loudon County, Virginia – the home of AOL. He was tried under State Law, which makes it an offence to use false internet addresses and aliases to send mass emails. James was convicted under this law of using the AOL servers to send the spoof emails.

Jeese! That’s a ton of money. You would think the guy would have been intelligent enough to call it quits after the first few million.

PCWorld.com

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will later this year begin selling hard drives based on perpendicular recording, a yet-to-be commercialized recording method…Hitachi is due to announce Monday.

The company is already testing sample drives based on perpendicular recording and says the technology could allow for 1TB desktop drives or 20GB Microdrives in 2007.

Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard drive technology. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today’s drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In today’s drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests.

…

“Without [perpendicular recording], existing technology will stall at about 120- or 130 gigabits per square inch,” says John Best, chief technologist at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Longitudinal recording is running into significant problems with bit size.”

Wired News

Commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cut short an appearance after an opponent of his conservative views doused him with salad dressing.

“Stop the bigotry!” the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.

CNN

(CNN) — A Korean company has created a car engine that runs on air.

The engine, which powers a pneumatic-hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), works alongside an electric motor to create the power source.

The system eliminates the need for fuel, making the PHEV pollution-free.

Cheol-Seung Cho, of Energine Corporation, told CNN the system is controlled by a computer inside the car, which instructs the compressed-air engine and electric motor what to do.

Claus Wahlers Blog

The FormFaces project team announced their open source ECMAScript XForms solution today. The engine processes XForms entirely on the client side and runs on any ECMAScript and DOM Level 2 powered Webbrowser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Konquerer, Safari and others). All the author has to do is add one JavaScript include to her XHTML/XForms document: .

CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) – High-tech reached the nation’s high court Tuesday as Supreme Court justices questioned whether online file-sharing networks could be held accountable for copyright infringement.

At issue is whether the entertainment industry can continue aggressively pursuing not only those who illegally download copyrighted songs, movies and photos, but also those who sell file-sharing software and services.

A San Francisco-based federal appeals court in August ruled those file-sharing companies were not responsible, since their products do not directly tell users where they can download protected material.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios sued the two makers of file-sharing software, Grokster and StreamCast Networks, claiming it has lost billions of dollars in revenue from the illegal distribution of its property, and has had to spend millions more developing anti-theft technology and prosecuting offenders.

Just remember this, nobody sues the gun manufacturer when their loved one is murdered. Just because something can be used to break the law, does not mean it will.