AMD CEO: Intel Is a Monopoly, Microsoft Isn’t

NASA funded robots to search for life under Arctic ice -

Filed under: Robots

In a mission that is apparently similar to searching for life under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa (sans the space travel part), three robots are set to start a mission to explore the underwater hot springs under the ice of the Arctic: because someone else did the Antarctic last year. On a 40 day expedition in July, researchers from Cape Cod hope to use three new robotic vehicles -- two that can operate without cables under ice -- to find life that resides in the hot streams along the techtonic boundary between Eurasia and North America. Although the robots can descend over 3 miles under the water working just meters from the bottom to photograph objects and collect samples, the task of the NASA-funded $450,000 Puma and Jaguar robots will be hindered by the rough terrain and their inability to surface through the ice. Sounds like NASA's got quite a while to go until it can submarine around Europa -- they probably won't be able to surface there at all. [EnGadget]

Insane Laptop: Alienware m9750 -

Looks like Alienware will never stop out-doing itself. This bad boy comes packed with up to two 512MB GeForce Go 7950’s using SLI and a slew of Core 2 Duos to pick from. Options include a pair of 200GB HDD’s in RAID 0 for a total of 400 gigs of media storing power. The 17″ 1920 x 1200 res LCD is also sure to impress. Integrated b/g/nwireless, Bluetooth 2.0, and 7.1 high def audio is definitely making a few mouths water at CrunchGear HQ.

Alienware Area 51 m9750

Click on for a few more pics (more…)

[CrunchGear]

NSA wire taps my Drupal?

The Privacy of Email - Anonymous Coward writes "A U.S. appeals court in Ohio has ruled that e-mail messages stored on Internet servers are protected by the Constitution as are telephone conversations and that a federal law permitting warrantless secret searches of e-mail violates the Fourth Amendment. 'The Stored Communications Act is very important,' former federal prosecutor and counter-terrorism specialist Andrew McCarthy told United Press International. But the future of the law now hangs in the balance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slasdot]

This really sucks. When I use Debin I have to install the flash player for FireFox from a different source you get all your other applications within Debian. This is done by modifying the apt-get configuration file. Other Distribution's you have to download the linux plugin from Adobe and install it manually.

Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated -

A free Flash viewer is one of the last major gaps in GNU/Linux desktop functionality, so last week's news that Gnash, the free Flash player, had reached the stage where it could play YouTube and Lulu.tv videos seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was.

[Linux.com]