A 42-year-old Freedom High School chemistry teacher was arrested Monday after students told authorities he taught his class how to make explosives, the Orange County Sheriff's Office said.

David Pieski, a teacher at Freedom for two years, used an overhead projector in class to give students detailed instructions in bomb-making, including advising them to use an electric detonator to stay clear from the blast, according to an arrest report.

On Feb. 8, sheriff's investigators interviewed Pieski at the school. He told investigators he detonated chemicals in a coffee can by a ball field four times for his students. He said he did this as a chemistry project to show a reaction rate, the arrest report said.

He was arrested at Cunningham's office Tuesday morning on a charge of possession or discharging of a destructive device and culpable negligence.

The Nosoftware patents site is reporting that Bill Gates told the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen that 800 jobs would go if the country opposed the European Union's proposed directive on software patents.

It quotes a report in Danish newspaper Borsen, which alleges that Gates told Ramissen and two other Danish ministers last November that 800 jobs at Navision would go unless the EU passed the directive.

The ginger group also alleges today that the CEO of Philips put pressure on the Dutch government to support the proposed directive.

A survey of taxi drivers showed that people are losing their mobile phones, their PDAs, their notebooks, and even their lives in the back of cabs, worldwide.

According to Pointsec, which surveyed 900 licensed cabbies in London, Sydney, Paris, Munich, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Chicago, one driver turned round to find his passenger dead.

Other cabbies have found passengers' false teeth and their artificial limbs in the back of their vehicles.

The survey claimed to show that in the last six months, drivers of London's black cab unearthed 63,135 mobile phones, 5,838 Pocket PCs, and 4,973 notebooks.

The London survey was conducted by the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, Taxi. But Pointsec claimed that an average of 80% of passengers were re-united with their mobiles after the cabbies tracked down their owners.

Numerous eBay Store sellers lit up the Web auctioneer's message boards Thursday, railing against upcoming fee increases and looking for alternative ways to sell their wares online.

Among other things, the cost of a monthly subscription for a basic eBay Store will go up 60 percent to $15.95. The cost of 10-day listings will double to 40 cents, and final value fees that are assessed when a sale closes also will rise.

Sellers complained that the fee increases will take a bigger chunk of their sales take. Some said it may force them to raise their own prices amid a weak economy, and others asked for feedback on other companies, such as Overstock.com (Research), that may be alternatives to eBay.

Eight year old computer whiz-kid Ajay Puri has told his local paper that when he grows up he wants to be Bill Gates, "only better". The precocious kid, who lives in Bangkok, is well on the way to at least working for the Vole.

At five, he passed the Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) core level examination, scoring 98 per cent and becoming the youngest person to pass the examination. He went on to achieve the Expert Level, scoring 93 per cent.

Certainly if he did take over there would be a massive change in policy from the Vole.

"Apparently Microsoft's resolved to leave no stone unpatented, starting out the New Year with patents for Paying Bills ('the consumer is in direct control of the amount to be paid and the payment date') and IM Invisibility ('users may not ever even know that they are viewing inaccurate presence information'). Coincidentally, IM invisibility was the subject of a quip made by MS blogger Robert Scoble a day before the patent was issued." The paying bills patent is a little more involved -- as it's more about " managing" how you pay your bills to avoid overdraft problems. Not sure that's really patentable, but it's not just for paying bills. The IM one is amusing, and you can bet Yahoo will have something to say about that, considering they already have selective IM invisibility enabled on their client (which is also the answer to Scoble's question).

Before the end of the year, the first U.S. biometric passport will be issued with a tiny computer chip and antenna embedded inside it. The chip will contain a digital image of the person's face, along with other information such as name, birth date and birthplace. The data on the chip can be picked up wirelessly using a radio signal.

The problem, security and privacy experts say, is that the technical standard chosen for the system leaves passport data unprotected.

'The U.S.-backed standard means that all the information on American passports can be read by anyone with an RFID reader, whether they are an identity thief, a terrorist trying to spot the Americans in a room or a government agent looking to vacuum up the identities of everyone at a political rally, gun show or mosque,' said Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington, D.C., legislative office.

Hasbrouck believes the new passports will enable 'undetectable tracking and the identification of travelers, as well as secret, remote collection of all the data needed to create perfect passport forgeries.'

British police said on Sunday they had arrested a man after a hoaxer posing as a government official e-mailed relatives of people missing since the Asian tsunami, saying their loved ones had been confirmed dead.

The hoaxer, claiming to be from the "Foreign Office Bureau" in Thailand, targeted people who had placed appeals for information about relatives and friends on the Web site of TV station Sky News.

"The British government would not use e-mail to convey news of the death of a loved one," police said. "Anyone receiving such an e-mail should treat it with utmost caution."

Sky News said it was "disgusted" at the abuse of the message board on its Web site and had contacted police as soon as it was alerted to the hoaxes.

Aid agencies are struggling to cope with the scale of the Asian tsunami disaster and are hoping for a boost in online donations to help finance relief efforts.

The death toll had reached 40,000 people in 11 countries by Tuesday morning, according to the Associated Press.

"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.

Relief teams in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, two of the worst affected nations, sought to prevent the spread of disease from rotting corpses and putrefied water by burying corpses in mass graves and flying in shelter and water sanitation kits.

"This is a massive humanitarian disaster and with communications so bad in many areas, we still don't know the full scale of it," Oxfam Community Aid Abroad executive director Andrew Hewett told reporters in Australia.

The SCO Group Inc. on Tuesday reported a loss of $6.5 million, or 37 cents per share, in its latest quarter, which ended Oct. 31.

Darl McBride, SCO's president and CEO, blamed the revenue drop on the competitive market for its Unix server products and the company's declining Unix IP (intellectual property) license revenues. In last year's fourth quarter, its SCOsource revenues amounted to $10.3 million. In this most recent quarter, SCO's IP revenue came to only $120,000.

Nevertheless, McBride insisted that licensing revenues would bounce back. "There is continued interest in the licensing of our Unix technology, and we believe that when our legal claims are substantiated in a court of law, we will see an increase in the demand for this licensing business," he said.