In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite.

Most of the major companies that have historically been involved in OOo development have moved to stand behind TDF and LibreOffice, including Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Canonical.

Oracle now has little choice but to abandon its commercial ambitions for OOo because the growing momentum of the more inclusive LibreOffice fork is making OOo irrelevant.

Last year a succession of volunteers sat down in a research lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico to play DARWARS Ambush!, a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq.

The volunteers received a few milliamps of current at most, and the simple gadget used to deliver it was powered by a 9-volt battery.

"They learn more quickly but they don't have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why," says Clark.

The next IE won't run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista.

If users try to install IE10 Platform Preview on a Vista machine, they'll receive an error message and the installer software will shut down.

This is how IE can attain impressive performance on graphics-intensive demos like those on Microsoft's IETestdrive site.

The Eco-marathon is a race, of sorts. The only goal is doing 10 laps around a Houston park at an average speed of 15 mph while consuming the teeniest, tiniest amount of energy possible.

Last year's winners, from Laval University in Quebec, achieved a phenomenal 2,487.5 mpg with a futuristic streamlined three-wheeler that weighed less than the engine in your hoopty.

For four days now, those of us who made the mistake of shelling out for Dragon Age:Origins (especially the Ultimate Edition) have been unable to play the single-player game that we paid for.

Game publishers of all stripes are getting greedy, and putting out games that are rushed, buggy, deliberately incomplete, and addled by bone-headed DRM schemes that serve mainly to frustrate legit players. EA and Bioware are a recent case in point.

For three days, users were locked out of a game that they paid for due to these server problems, and there was no notice posted.

"Unfortunately, there are no reporting requirements for the modern surveillance methods that make up the majority of law enforcement requests to service providers and telephone companies," Soghoian wrote.

Citing a New York Times story from 2006, Soghoian wrote that AOL was receiving 1,000 requests per month.

In 2009, Facebook told the news magazine Newsweek that it received 10 to 20 requests from police per day. Sprint received so many requests from law enforcement for mobile-phone location information that it overwhelmed its 110-person electronic surveillance team.

The fiery Trinidad Scorpion Butch T registers 1,463,700 Scoville heat units, placing it ahead of the current leader recognised by Guinness World Records, the Naga Viper, which comes in at 1,382,118. Jalapenos measure about 2500-5000 and the hottest Tabasco is 30,000.

"They're just severe, absolutely severe," says Marcel de Wit, The Chilli Factory co-owner. "No wonder they start making crowd-control grenades now with chillies. It's just wicked."

Sony dropped its jailbreaking lawsuit against PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz on Monday in exchange for promises the New Jersey hacker would never again tinker with the game console or any Sony product, records show.

Riley Russell, Sony's general counsel, said in a statement that the console maker brought the litigation "to protect our intellectual property and our consumers."

Videogame consoles are still covered by the DMCA. Modding them can be either a civil or criminal offense.

In buying up a stash of Novell patents, Apple and Oracle could choke rivals in the virtualization, middleware, mobile, and media markets, according to the Open Source Initiative.

The OSI is "very concerned" that Apple could make it "difficult or impossible to create competitive mobile platforms or mobile applications developed as open source."

Steve Jobs has threatened to "go after" Ogg Theora and other open source video codecs. "It seems plausible that Apple's most credible competitor in the mobile market, Android, would be vulnerable to challenge by the patents involved in the CPTN-transaction," Tiemann said.

Google has enhanced the enterprise management capabilities for its Android smartphone platform, making it possible for administrators to secure and reset lost or stolen devices.

One of the key updates is a new version of the Google Apps Device Policy app, which now makes it possible to locate a lost or stolen Android device on a map, call it, and reset the device PIN or password remotely through a new site called My Devices.