Based on the extent to which uranium-238 and uranium-235 isotopes had decayed into their daughter isotopes lead-207 and lead-206, they say the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old. That's between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates, which relied mainly on the Allende meteorite that fell in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1969.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said the chief prosecutor had come to the decision that Mr Assange was not suspected of rape but did not give any further explanation.

Wikileaks, which has been criticised for leaking Afghan war documents, had quoted Mr Assange as saying the charges were "without basis".

Earlier, Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden's prosecutors' office, said there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation.

Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user slurped up 2.7TB of data. He was followed by similarly impressive downloaders who transferred 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB.

Telenet doesn't want to call its plans "unlimited," but it does say that "'fair use' means that you can send and receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network.

The really important point is that they did this in three afternoons (and remember, these machines are often left totally unguarded, in the open at polling places for days before elections) without breaking any of the "tamper-resistant" seals that are supposed to alert anyone to any foul play.

So now my only question is whether or not they get a cease and desist from NAMCO.

The Federal Communications Commission reported this week that broadband users see about half the advertised "up to" speeds promised by Internet providers, and similar findings were made earlier this year in the UK.

Hungary faced the same issue and has tried to address it with a novel solution: ISPs must offer guaranteed minimum speeds.

When Apple's sultan of spin Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that the Iphone 4 would come with adverts that did not "suck", delivered through the company's Iad software, fanbois everywhere starting foaming at the mouth at the prospect of having yet more propaganda to happily swallow.

Jobs offered up the enticing prospect of advertisers taking over the whole device, with fanbois taken into a world of mesmerising glitz and marketing fluff, if they weren't there already.

The two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

"Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do."

The two sides hope to strike a grand bargain: radio would agree to pay around $100 million a year (less than it feared), but in return it would get access to a larger market through the mandated FM radio chips in portable devices.

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week alleges that a group of well-known Web sites, including those owned by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, and Demand Media, broke the law by secretly tracking the Web movements of their users, including children.

They allege the data was obtained by tracking users as they moved "across numerous Web sites, even spotting and tracking users when they accessed the Web from different computers, at home and at work.

Even though Oracle appears to have a solid basis for legal action, the lawsuit could permanently burn bridges between Oracle and the broader Java ecosystem. Such blatantly antagonistic litigation sends a clear message to the open source software community that Oracle is a hostile and abusive interloper rather than a contributor.

The move reflects Oracle's unwillingness to publicly account for the egregious inconsistency between its message of enthusiasm for open source software and its aggressive conduct towards other companies in the ecosystem.

Oracle issued a press release late Thursday saying it has filed suit against Google for infringing on copyrights and patents related to Java, which Oracle acquired along with Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

Oracle, on behalf of Sun, is arguing that Java is a mobile operating system competitor against Android, and that Google is using Java-derived technologies without a proper license.