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Judge Rudi Brewster ruled that Microsoft had not breached patent laws because Microsoft had already paid German firm Fraunhofer $16m to use one of the patents in question. Given that Fraunhofer had not sued, Microsoft was not deemed to have broken any laws, the judge decided. In reversing the decision, the judge also rejected the argument given to justify the fine - that it amounted to 0.5% of Microsoft's global personal computer sales since 2003.

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The 227-183 vote, which followed the Senate's approval Friday, sends the bill to Bush for his signature. Late Saturday, Bush said, "The Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, has assured me that this bill gives him what he needs to continue to protect the country, and therefore I will sign this legislation as soon as it gets to my desk." The administration said the measure is needed to speed the National Security Agency's ability to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other communications involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States." Civil liberties groups and many Democrats said it goes too far, possibly enabling the government to wiretap U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties without adequate oversight from courts or Congress.

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The alleged sale and distribution of illegal modification chips and copyright circumvention devices for the popular consoles and others included 32 search warrants in 16 states, said the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE declined to release the names of those targeted but said they are allegedly responsible for importing, installing, selling and distributing foreign-made devices smuggled into the U.S. Illegal chips and other devices used on gaming consoles violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Sales of counterfeit or illegally obtained games costs the industry about $3 billion a year globally, not including Internet piracy, estimates the Entertainment Software Association trade group.

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"Logitech today took the veil off two major releases in its G-Series line of PC gaming peripherals. A new G9 wired gaming mouse will supplant the G5 and G7 as Logitech's flagship gaming pointer, and a full revamp of the G15 keyboard maintains the integrated LCD but shrinks the overall footprint and adds more modern styling."

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Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware (UD) has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent. The current record of 40.7 percent was attained in December 2006 by Boeing's Spectrolab, Inc. Honsberg said the previous best of 40.7 percent efficiency was achieved with a high concentration device that requires sophisticated tracking optics and features a concentrating lens the size of a table and more than 30 centimeters, or about 1 foot, thick. The UD consortium's devices are potentially far thinner at less than 1 centimeter.

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Safari's security model prevents JavaScript in remote web pages from modifying pages outside of their domain. A race condition in page updating combined with HTTP redirection may allow JavaScript from one page to modify a redirected page. This could allow cookies and pages to be read or arbitrarily modified. This update addresses the issue by correcting access control to window properties. Credit to Lawrence Lai, Stan Switzer, and Ed Rowe of Adobe Systems, Inc. for reporting this issue.

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Neighbors said agents showed up between 11 a.m. and noon, and a commercial locksmith was called to open the front door. The agents were still there at 8:30 p.m. Stevens, 83, has long been the most powerful political figure in Alaska, and a major force in Congress. A swarm of federal agents serving a search warrant at his home is unprecedented in Alaska politics, and represents the latest chapter in the corruption investigation that burst into view last August when agents raided the offices of state legislators, the oil field services company Veco and others. Federal investigators and grand juries in Anchorage and Washington, D.C., have been seeking information about a remodeling project at Stevens’ Girdwood home in 2000. The project, which more than doubled the size of the dwelling, was overseen by Veco CEO Bill Allen, who two months ago pleaded guilty to bribing state lawmakers and agreed to cooperate with authorities. Veco vice president Richard Smith pleaded guilty to similar charges.

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Of the 9,000 built in 1981 and 1982, about 6,500 are still on the road, according to James Espey, vice president of DeLorean Motor. Enthusiasts gather at clubs from Cleveland to Norway. An event next week at Universal Studios Hollywood theme park is expected to attract more than a hundred DeLoreans. "People of all ages are interested in this car," says Espey, a San Diego native. "Kids who can't tell you what a Camaro is come through here on tours because they've seen 'Back to the Future.' "From the start, the DeLorean seemed destined for cult status. Its gull-wing doors and rakish lines stood out in an auto market that was still living down the AMC Pacer. And the stainless steel exterior looked like it belonged on a jet fighter.

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A larger conference means not one but two keynote addresses. One is from Richard Clarke, President Bush's former special adviser on cyberspace security. Clarke, whose 2002 Black Hat keynote speech stated that software vendors and Internet providers must share the blame for malicious software, is now with Good Harbor Security. This year, he will talk about those "who seek truth through science, even when the powerful try to suppress it." The other keynote speaker will be Tony Sager, vulnerability chief of the National Security Agency, who will talk about creating government security standards while working with commercial vendors. Unlike last year, when Microsoft hosted an entire series of sessions focusing on the yet-to-be released Windows Vista platform, there will be no similar tracks offered this year. Returning tracks include sessions on voice services security, forensics, hardware, zero-day attacks and zero-day defenses. New tracks include operating system kernels, application security, reverse engineering, fuzzing and the testing of application security. But it's the individual sessions that could get heated.

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"Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether," Sen. Stevens said. "The headlines continue to tell us of children who are victimized online. While the issues are difficult, I believe Congress has an important role to play to ensure that the protections available in other parts of our society find their way to the Internet." The measures they are calling for include directing the Federal Communications Commission to identify industry practices "that can limit the transmission of child pornography" and requiring the Federal Trade Commission to form a working group to identify blocking and filtering technologies in use and "identify, what, if anything could be done to improve the process and better enable parents to proactively protect their children online."

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AT&T's second explanation was that Apple's 270,000 iPhones included sales of iPhones through Apple's online store, which obviously couldn't have been activated the first weekend since Apple is quoting two- to four-week lead times for iPhones ordered online. But Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer specifically said on the conference call that the 270,000 units reflected only iPhones that were sold to AT&T for distribution through its network of retail stores and iPhones sold through Apple's retail stores. No iPhones sold through Apple's online store were included as part of that 270,000 unit figure, the company later confirmed.

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Now, KHTML won't be deleted right away since there are features in it that need to be ported into Webkit. For example, KHTML (in KDE 4) implements portions of the definition of the CSS3 standard, which will need to be adopted into Webkit and so forth. But the big deal is that the coders that invented the underlying layers that power Konqueror, some Nokia browsers, Abrowse, Safari, Adobe's Air, and now Epiphany and a few other projects that are in the works, are now back in the fold. Additionally, Trolltech has announced that they are including Webkit in their upcoming Qt 4.4 release which means that a major, cross-platform toolkit now permits anyone to use the Webkit rendering engine where ever they need to render some HTML. In open source terms, this may be as big of a deal as the gcc and egcs merger of yonder days. KHTML and Webkit are definitely coming of age. The KDE developers, responsible for the original creation of KHTML, are dedicated to seeing this unforking happen and are taking a leading role in that effort.

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"Ask.com became the first major search engine to promise users it won't store data on their queries, giving the privacy conscious the option of conducting research on the Internet in relative anonymity. The move comes amid increasing concerns about the release of search information through leaks or subpoenas. In some cases, the search terms a person uses can reveal plenty about medical conditions, marital troubles or kinky interests."

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For its part, Google says it's confident that the threat to its business can be contained. "We're finding that the more we meet with policymakers, the more they are realizing that Google and DoubleClick are different types of companies, that we take significant steps to protect users' privacy, and that this acquisition will benefit both consumers and advertisers," said spokesman Adam Kovacevich. In addition to its full-time staff lobbyists, also involved in Google's efforts to fend off antitrust bureaucrats are four newly hired lobbyists in the Washington office of the law firm Brownstein Hyatt & Farber (including Makan Delrahim, a former top Justice Department antitrust official). Google's earlier hires include the now-renamed PodestaMattoon, which draws its name from longtime Democratic dealmaker Tony Podesta, and King and Spalding, home to former Republican Sens. Connie Mack and Dan Coats.

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Scientists are working on a new type of nanogenerator that could draw the necessary energy from flowing blood in the human body, by using the beating heart and pulsating blood vessels. Once completed, this new cellular engine could find various applications, even beyond medicine. Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology hope to be able to incorporate the new nanogenerator into biosensors, environmental monitoring devices and even personal electronics that will require no fuel source, internal or external. It will produce its own electricity while immersed in biological fluids or other liquids, using ultrasonic waves as the energy source. So far, they achieved the nanogenerator effect in an array of nanowires that could produce as much as 4 watts/cubic centimeter.

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Copyright groups may not be able to demand that telecom companies hand over the names and addresses of people suspected of swapping music illegally online, a senior legal adviser to the EU's highest court said. Advocate General Juliane Kokott, advising the European Court of Justice, said Wednesday that EU law directs governments to resist the disclosure of personal data on Internet traffic in civil cases - unlike criminal cases, where compliance would be required.

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The US-run Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most widely used satellite-navigation system in the world. But the EU wants to have alternative that is not under US control, and is developing its own system called Galileo, which has yet to be launched. The benefits of a US-EU agreement will depend on makers of receivers making use of both systems, but one senior US official involved in the talks says this is inevitable. "The market probably will drive dual-use receivers," said Raymond Clore, a GPS-Galileo senior adviser from the US State Department. "It just doesn't make sense to limit yourself to just one system."

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As expected, Yahoo posted disappointing second-quarter financial results on Tuesday and lowered its guidance for the remainder of the year. The company cited continuing slowed growth in display advertising and bigger-than-expected declines in search affiliate sales. As Google pulls further and further ahead in the ad market war, Yahoo executives keep promising big things. But so far, it appears, they're just promises, and vague ones at that.

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The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

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We know that many of you are waiting on the edge of your seats to find out what's going on behind the scenes here, and we're just as excited to tell you, but we can't give you many details while we are still involved in negotiations. We can, however, let you know that we are actively working on a solution that will provide what we hope will be a smooth transition away from Zap2it Labs by the September 1 deadline. We will release more details as soon as we are able to do so, so please keep an eye on http://easytvdata.org/ for updates.

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This is release 0.9.41 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

What's new in this release:
- A number of gdiplus functions.
- More complete pdh.dll implementation.
- Support for MSI remote calls.
- Messaging support in crypt32.dll.
- Lots of bug fixes.

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Under a pledge issued by the company Wednesday, IBM is granting universal and perpetual access to intellectual property that might be necessary to implement standards designed to make software interoperable. IBM will not assert any patent rights to its technologies featured in these standards. The company believes its move in this space is the largest of its kind. "These are what I could call the core infrastructure standards that people now use around such things as SOA," said Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards. Web 2.0 applications also could be developed, for example. The company seeks to spur development of software that leverages these standards.

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"CFS's task picking logic is based on this p->wait_runtime value and it is thus very simple: it always tries to run the task with the largest p->wait_runtime value. In other words, CFS tries to run the task with the 'gravest need' for more CPU time. So CFS always tries to split up CPU time between runnable tasks as close to 'ideal multitasking hardware' as possible. "Most of the rest of CFS's design just falls out of this really simple 32 concept, with a few add-on embellishments like nice levels, 33 multiprocessing and various algorithm variants to recognize sleepers."

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The event kicks off Tuesday night with Microsoft's press conference, followed by fellow console manufacturers Nintendo and Sony on Wednesday morning. It's not yet clear what the console manufacturers will be announcing, but rumors have spread (many of them highly unsubstantiated) of upgrades ranging from hard drives in Nintendo's Wii to an HD DVD player in Microsoft's Xbox 360 to a "revamped" PlayStation Portable handheld console from Sony. The company has already announced, as widely rumored due to a leaked Circuit City flier, that it's cutting the price of the PlayStation 3 by $100.

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For Boeing, the 787 is a huge play. It is its first plane made largely with composite materials instead of aluminum, and it is promising its carrier customers that the plane will be far more fuel efficient than today's planes. The commitment seems to be paying off, as the company has already taken 677 orders for 787s, making it the first plane to ever rack up more than 500 pre-orders. And this despite the fact that the first passengers won't get on a 787 until next May.

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The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago on April 25'th. An overview of all the changes merged into the latest version of the kernel is maintained in the Kernel Newbies wiki. Included in the list of changes are the SLUB allocator which replaced the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree.

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"Those who purchased the phone via the Web, like Amy, were given a place in a virtual waiting line two to four weeks long, with a lengthy "homework assignment" to pass the time. Those who braved the crowds to purchase the phone at retail stores were rewarded with a form of instant gratification--the opportunity to activate their iPhone using an online activation mechanism that requires subscribers to enter a Social Security number (SSN).

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Massachusetts today released draft specifications that would allow state workers to continue using Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format. The latest proposal comes about two years after state IT officials kicked off a raging political battle by unveiling specifications that would have required state workers to use applications that support only "open" technologies like the OpenDocument format (ODF). "Open XML does meet our established criteria for an open standard," said Bethann Pepoli, the state's acting CIO, in an e-mail to Computerworld. "There is industry support for Open XML and we believe that by adopting the standard we will be able to accelerate the pace of migration to XML document formats."