It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills -- morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it -- thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The United States has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

In the case of Warner et al v. Scantlebury, yet another individual was targeted by seven record labels looking for restitution of the horrible damages inflicted by the alleged downloading of music files.

Larry Scantlebury had the temerity to die before the case was resolved, though. Again, the cause of death is unknown, but the RIAA did get a hold of a death certificate. It was filed as support for a motion to "stay the case for 60 days and extend all deadlines 60 days," filed by the record labels' lawyers.

"Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury's passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve."

Because the litigants believed that the case was nearing a resolution before Larry's passing, it wants to move on with the proceedings rather than drop the case, and will request depositions from his heirs after the 60-day grieving period. Considering that deceased Enron executive Ken Lay's assets may be safe from legal action after his death, the recording industry's tenacity in this case is astounding.

In one of the many RIAA lawsuits over unauthorized distribution of music online, the defendant's lawyers are trying to depose RIAA representatives -- but the RIAA is refusing, unless they have a blanket gag order that would ensure that none of the information in the depositions is made public. Kind of makes you wonder what they're hiding. Speaking of hiding, with the RIAA dropping plenty of cases where they realize they may actually lose the case (usually, because they sued the wrong person), a whole bunch of legal groups joined together to file a statement supporting the idea that the RIAA should be responsible for paying the legal fees of the person they falsely brought to court. It seems only fair.

While Fox was gobbling up all the hot properties, MTV was pretty much caught napping. Earlier this year, they tried to talk a good game about how they were uniquely poised to be the "MTV of the online world," but their vision of the world was uniquely old media. Rather than understanding that the internet is about communication and interaction, they claimed it was all about "video," which they had more of than anyone else. Then, rather than realizing that everyone at the company needed to "think digitally" they assigned that task to one guy -- who quickly discovered that without any real power, no one else was thinking digitally and the whole strategy failed.

Today, though, they took another step by buying Atom Entertainment, another video site that's been around for years, but never could figure out how to become YouTube. Again, it's the same "old media" thinking at MTV. Atom is much more about distribution of video than about sharing and interacting with video. Until MTV recognizes that the internet isn't just television with a mouse, they're going to have difficulty being "the MTV of the internet."

On July 18, Microsoft's WGA team promised to send me a disk with a product key from their blocked list. It was supposed to arrive via overnight service, but it was never sent. After several follow-up messages, I was assured on July 26 I would have something by the end of that week. The package finally arrived the next week, on August 1. It contained a CD-R with a handwritten label that read "Windows XP SP2 – VLK," and a 25-character product key on a small slip of paper.

Over the weekend, I hoisted the Jolly Roger, cleared a partition on a test machine, slid the CD into the drive, and prepared to join the ranks of Windows pirates. Unfortunately, the product key that Microsoft had sent me didn’t work.

No problem, I thought. I'll just do what any red-blooded pirate would do and Google for a working product key. It took me about 15 minutes to find a web page containing five volume license keys that had reportedly been posted on September 9 2004.

My bootleg key worked perfectly. I went back to Windows Update and downloaded a series of Optional Updates and drivers that are only available to Genuine Windows users. I went over to the Internet Explorer homepage and downloaded the latest beta of IE7, passing a validation test twice – once on the download and again on the installation. And five minutes ago I went over to the Windows Defender page – this is another free utility that's only available to Genuine Windows users – and the validation check waved me right through.

They haven't managed to identify a stolen product key that's been floating around the Internet for nearly two years. I'm reluctantly running a pirated version of Windows and can't get caught no matter how hard I try.

Time and time again, the company's digital products have failed because Sony's made it a bigger priority to close systems and lock down products than to create open ones that are actually useful to customers. Despite the admission in early 2005 from a top Sony exec that DRM was holding the company back, the company doesn't seem to be listening: a marketing manager for the PSP says Sony hasn't yet opened an audio and video download store for the device because it hasn't yet figured out how to implement the DRM. Awesome -- instead of giving customers legitimate avenues with which to purchase digital content in a reasonable and attractive manner, they're spending time figuring out how to make the services and their devices less attractive, less valuable and less useful.

CacheLogic and BitTorrent introduce an open-source Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP) that allows ISP's to cache and seed Bittorrent traffic. Currently, Bittorrent traffic is suffering from bandwidth throttling ISP's that claim that Bittorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This motivated the developers of the most popular Bittorrent clients implement protocol encryption to protect bittorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP's. However, Bram Cohen, the founder of Bittorrent doubted that encryption was the solution, and found (together with CacheLogic) a more ISP friendly alternative.

AOL on Aug. 7 blamed an internal "screw-up" for the embarrassing release of detailed keyword search data for roughly 658,000 anonymized users.

"This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it," AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein said in a statement sent to eWEEK.

Weinstein said the release of the data was an innocent attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools.

Weinstein acknowledged that vanity searches, where users enter their own names into search engines, can sometimes lead to a privacy risk.

In some cases, Arrington said the data included personal names, addresses and Social Security numbers.

The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.

At worst, it could force a virtual shutdown of the agency, paralyzing the intelligence operation, erasing crucial intelligence data and causing irreparable damage to computer systems -- all detrimental to the fight against terrorism.

"If there's a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility," said Michael Jacobs, who headed the NSA's information assurance division until 2002.

The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric's largest customer, using as much electricity as the city of Annapolis, according to James Bamford, an intelligence expert and author of two comprehensive books on the agency.

The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble Jan. 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA's first-ever network crash. It took the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations, but with a power outage it could take considerably longer to get the NSA humming again.

A higher German court has ruled to uphold a decision by a lower court to ban the sale of used software licenses, in a case involving a subsidiary of Oracle.

The Appellate Court of Munich ruled on Thursday that the sale of used software licenses is illegal, upholding a decision reached by the District Court of Munich on Jan. 19, which ruled that the sale of software licenses by Soft infringed upon copyrights held by Oracle International.

At the time, the court ruled that the first sale of a license for software on tangible media, such as a CD-ROM, limits the manufacturer's right to restrict the resale of the media under certain conditions.