Megaboffins at the HP Labs in Palo Alto have conjured up something that was theorised back in 1971 (by Leon Chua at UC Berkeley), a fourth basic element of electronics: the memristor.

A memristor works by altering its resistance between two states (read like a 0 or a 1), and retains the state when powered down. However, they do this very fast, DRAM-fast.

This technology has the potential to provide the speed of DRAM with the storage ability of non-volatile memory, gradually replacing both.

Since RAM would effectively become non-volatile, the risk of data loss through power failure would become almost negligible.

This could also spell doom for HDD, DRAM and Optical disk tecnologies – one at a time - although there is no set timeframe for this technology to reach our computers.

Radiohead made it official: the band won't be giving away music like it did with the album In Rainbows.

Many music fans had hoped that the band's now famous pay-what-you-want promotion was an attempt by the group to discover a new way to sell music. Now it appears Radiohead at best was after publicity.

Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, followed Radiohead by offering the digital version of the album Ghosts I-IV for free as well as charging for premium versions. Reznor said last month that to that point the album had generated 781,917 transactions and $1.6 million.

"I think the way (Radiohead) parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," Reznor said.

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.

The DoJ did not respond to our requests for comment. But odds are, the edits were made by a single individual acting independently. Wikipedia's ban on the department's IP is due to be lifted today.

It warmed my heart to see Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the NY Times state that they still write HTML code by hand.

It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

US entertainment industry interests have been pushing for quite some time to get stronger copyright laws in Canada, despite plenty of questions about why they're needed.

Knopf was going to do a presentation explaining why Canadian copyright law is already stronger and better than US copyright law, and why the US ought to be copying Canada's law, rather than the other way around. However, Knopf believes that PPF was pressured to remove him from the schedule, including removing him from a panel where he planned to debate these issues with a registered lobbyist of the entertainment industry.

Witness the OpenMicroServer, which this week went on sale to North American folk. It's 9 inches by 4 inches by 1.3 inches. The system has built-in Power over Ethernet and can run fanless at up to 122°F over long periods of time. CRAC units need not apply. It also sports a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, a 100Mb port, a pair of USB ports and a pair of serial ports.

Earlier this month, Buffalo dished out the dual drive LinkStation Mini. This baby weighs just 1.1 pounds and measures 1.6 inches by 3.2 inches by 5.3 inches. It will ship in volume next month with a capacity of 1TB.

A question that, remarkably, is still being debated after a few thousand years: is mathematics discovered, or is it invented? Those who answer "discovered" are the intellectual descendants of Plato.

The European Mathematical Society recently devoted space to the debate.

China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest Internet-using population, reaching 221 million by the end of February, state media said on Thursday.

Internet censorship is common in China, where the government employs an elaborate system of filters and tens of thousands of human monitors to survey surfing habits, surgically clipping sensitive content.

But while Fusion Centers centralize law enforcement efforts, they do not centralize the criminal activity. There are places, however, where such activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these "choke points," and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data.

What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data that is already being siphoned off by the NSA in order to look for illegal activity.

I want to point out that this centralization of legal and illegal activity at network hubs will be a persistent part of all of our lives as we live more and more of them online. Thus the government's desire to tap those hubs and filter them for criminal and hostile activity will never go away.

People in the US are reportedly changing their holiday plans - after petrol reached the "ridiculous" price of up to 50p a litre.

Troy Green, of the American Automobile Association, told CNN that Americans should expect the price to go up another 25 cents over the next month and continue to climb over the summer.

The most expensive city is San Francisco where commuter Debbie Jasmin has stopped driving her gas-guzzling 4WD and started taking the subway to work. She's also curbed summer travel plans.