junctionvin writes "The company Sustainable Power Corp. claims to have created a form of bio-crude oil from agricultural refuse. They use agro-waste from cracked soy beans, rice and cotton seed hulls, grain sorghum, milo, and jatropha and turn it into bio-crude oil. This crude can then be further refined into everything from gasoline to jet fuel and just about every petrochemical in between. The CEO is quoted: 'Our biggest problem is that we are too good to be true. We can literally replace every gallon of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel in the United States using just 12 percent of the waste byproducts in the country.' They also claim that their fuel burns to near 100 percent efficiency." The article doesn't mention what price the "vetrolium" would command in today's market or going forward, except to report the CEO's promise "to one day sell his gasoline for $1 less than the pump price for regular fuel, no matter what the cost. 'Even if it's $2 per gallon, I'll sell mine for $1,"' he said."

ulash writes "Ars Technica reports that a court in Germany ruled in favor of an open WiFi network owner stating that if other users use your open WiFi network without your consent and download copyrighted material, you cannot be automatically held responsible for their actions. This does not carry much (if any) weight in the US but here is to hoping that it will at least have a positive impact in the EU as starters."

RCTrucker7 writes with a link to a Maximum PC story, which begins: "Details of Dell's surreptitious collusion with RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) have emerged. Apparently, the computer manufacturer disabled the Stereo Mix/Mono Mix/Wave Out sound recording function on certain notebooks to assuage RIAA. The hardware functionality is being disabled without any prior notice and one blogger has even alleged that he was asked by Dell's customer support staff to [shell] out $99 if he desired the stereo mix option. Gateway and Pac Bell are the other two manufacturers to have bowed to RIAA at the expense of their customers' satisfaction and disabled stereo mix without warning." (There are some workarounds posted in the comments of the linked article.)

MojoKid writes "Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the 'industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives.' The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that is capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed."

L. Miriam writes "Apple launched the iTunes App store for the iPhone and iPod Touch today, following the earlier launch of iTunes 7.7. There are over 500 applications available for download, with prices ranging from free to around $35. Both MySpace and Facebook apps are there, as well as a mix of games, utilities and ebooks. You can download applications now, but you can't do anything with them until the iPhone/iPod 2.0 firmware is released. The App Store can't be accessed directly through iTunes, but Mobile Computer explains how to get to it, and has a few screenshots, too."

Hugh Pickens writes "T. Boone Pickens (no relation) has launched an energy plan and social-networking campaign that calls for replacing Middle Eastern oil with Midwestern wind. The Pickens Plan would exploit the country's 'wind corridor' from the Canadian border to West Texas to produce 20 percent of the country's electricity and provide an economic revival for rural America. Transmission lines would be built to transport the power where the demand is and natural gas, now used to fuel power plants, would instead be used as a transportation fuel, which burns cleaner than gasoline and is domestic. Pickens proposed that the private sector finance the investment, which would result in a one-third reduction, equal to $230 billion, in the U.S.' yearly payments to foreign countries. Pickens has already invested heavily in wind, notably a planned 4,000-megawatt wind farm in his native Texas. 'We've got to get renewable into the mix. The problem for this country is that we're paying $700 billion — you heard that — $700 billion a year,' Pickens says. 'We can't afford that. In 10 years we'll be broke if we continue that.'"

Sportsqs writes "One of the main barriers to the widespread adoption of fuel cell vehicles has been the lack of an adequate hydrogen-refueling infrastructure. Beyond a handful of hydrogen stations, such as the one near Los Angeles International Airport, there just isn't anywhere to fill up. Step forward ITM Power, a UK company that has developed a hydrogen refueling station that could be installed at home, providing a ready-made solution for fuel-cell car owners."

An anonymous reader writes "You probably knew that the Deep Blue supercomputer beats chess masters, and that last weekend a software robot defeated four poker champions. But you may have missed this one: a GE Fanuc robot is taking on humans at air hockey. The robot is powered by a special PC-board that can instantly switch between 8-bit and its 32-bit modes. The 8-bit version lost to most human players, but the 32-bit microcontroller has defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one."

Lucas123 writes "Samsung Electronics said today it is now mass-producing solid-state drives with a 128GB capacity, and it will begin production of a 256GB product later this year, ahead of its scheduled 2009 release. Samsung's 128GB and 64GB SSDs are available in 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. Currently, solid state disk costs about $3.45 per gigabyte and spinning disk costs about $0.38 per gig."

arbitraryaardvark sends in a story a couple of weeks back in Yahoo's Ecogeek blog, reporting that Mercedes will phase out petroleum-powered cars by 2015 (mirror), and notes: "Story is unconfirmed but well sourced." "In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency."

schliz writes "Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs."

mattnyc99 writes A month ago we discussed the accomplishment when researchers got monkeys to feed themselves with a robotic arm controlled by their brains. But after all the recent successful experiments with brain-computer interfaces, will the technology ever make it out of the lab and into hospitals — or even into our hands, for the closest thing imaginable to The Force? Popular Mechanics takes a look at the future of mind-machine control, speculating on several theoretical applications once brains can adapt to devices via direct communication between, say, synapse and prosthetic. Quoting the field's leading neuroscientist: 'For the foreseeable future, the main benefit is for rehabilitation. But the research is showing that the brain can act independently of the body. One day, you could be sitting in an office and controlling a device from across the room — or in another building. And it's not just flicking a switch. It could be a nanotool that's moving through a tiny environment, and you can control it and see what it's seeing.'"

arcticstoat writes "Intel's Pat Gelsinger recently revealed that Larrabee's 32 IA cores will in fact be based on Intel's ancient P54C architecture, which was last seen in the original Pentium chips, such as the Pentium 75, in the early 1990s. The chip will feature 32 of these cores, which will each feature a 512-bit wide SIMD (single input, multiple data) vector processing unit."

robert2cane writes "The Compenion concept notebook, designed by Felix Schmidberger, eschews the familiar clamshell design in favor of two superbright organic LED panels that slide into place next to each other, making the notebook just three-quarters of an inch thick." Really this page is just some renderings of some concept computers that are pretty far out of practical production reach. Some interesting ideas, but mostly a whole lot of 'Yeah, right.'

mister_woods writes "It's not just governments that lose private data. Germany's Chaos Computer Club (CCC) reports that market research firm TNS Infratest/Emnid has lost 41,000 private data records of their survey participants. By simply changing the customer ID number in the browser's address bar access could be gained to comprehensive survey results, including names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers and much more sensitive data. A CCC spokesman described this as 'unprofessional, grossly negligent and above all deeply worrying' and sees this loss as a vindication for its calls for strict regulations for public and private sector data collectors."

Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have developed a prototype of a future giant rubber tube which could catch energy from sea waves. The device, dubbed Anaconda, uses 'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.' So far, the experiments have been done with tubes with diameters of 0.25 and 0.5 meters. But if the experiments are successful, future full-scale Anaconda devices would be 200 meters long and 7 meters in diameter, and deployed in water depths of between 40 and 100 meters. An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."

Leif_Bloomquist writes "The world's first Commodore 64 LAN party was held at the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club 2008 Expo last weekend, where the new multiplayer C64 game NetRacer was unveiled. The setup consists of up to eight Commodore 64s with Ethernet cartridges and a central server written in Java running on a PC. The game is also playable over the Internet."

Bandman writes "My business just purchased a couple dozen blades, and with our existing servers, this brings us to around 60 machines. We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters). We used to use theme-based naming schemes, but we've been migrating to a more utilitarian system. I think it's clearer and more concise, but I've had some feedback from users who didn't find it understandable. What do you use for your internal DNS schemes? How big is your network, and what do you recommend for future expansion? Does it matter to your users at all?"

An anonymous reader writes "A site called LegalTorrents has just launched that hosts trackers and seeds for digital media licensed under the Creative Commons license. ('We distribute content with the full permission of the rights holders and use the peer-2-peer file-sharing technology called Bittorrent.') The site even provides a way to donate money to artists you like. (LegalTorrents takes 15% off the top unless you are a member, which costs $50 one-time during the beta period.)" It's always good to see "legitimate" content distributed in ways that make it hard to demonize the distribution system itself — something Lawrence Lessig in particular has been doing for years, and his book "Free Culture" is one of the audiobooks available through LegalTorrents. Note that LegalTorrents has been around for a while now, rather than "just launched," but the current beta period won't last forever.

Orion Blastar tips us to an AP report that 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" uranium has successfully been removed from Iraq. The operation lasted three months, and it required 37 separate flights and an 8,500-mile trip by boat to reach a port in Montreal. Quoting: "While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth 'tens of millions of dollars.' A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors."