Guitar Hero instruments can take quite the pounding if you’re a regular player, and the plastic peripherals have a bad habit of dying a few days outside of warranty. What’s a dedicated rhythm game player to do?

One such man, Josh Straub, took it upon himself to write a disturbingly thorough repair guide for all things Guitar Hero World Tour, and he has shared it with the world. If you ever wanted to know what model screwdriver you need to open your instruments, along with a direct link to buy the tool, are you ever in the right place.

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Steven Colbert is the Rorschach test of modern politics: Apparently, if Ohio State students are any indication, everyone finds Colbert funny. But is he making fun of conservatives, or simply being goofy while presenting opinions he honestly shares? Apparently, how you answer that question depends on your own political leanings. As the authors put it, “conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.”

Ants do consensus building when picking a nest: An impressive use of RFID miniaturization in this work. Researchers fitted ants with tags, and then forced the colony to look for a new nest. It seems that the ants have a sense of the absolute quality of potential nest sites. If they spot a mediocre nest site, they’ll continue to wander; if they spot a good one, they’ll stay put. This behavior will eventually move the entire colony to the better site, even if it’s nine times further than the mediocre one.

Lizards adjust their sunbathing according to their vitamin D levels: The experiment was pretty simple—take two populations of chameleons, supplement the diet of some of them with vitamin D, and track how long they spent sunbathing. Apparently, the animals precisely regulate the amount of time they spend in the sun based on their dietary state.

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Senator John D. Rockefeller has proposed legislation to encourage development of interoperable systems for universal medical records. The bill, known as the Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009, calls for the government to implement a grant program to facilitate the development of open source software and open standards that will help meet this goal.

This isn’t the first time that open source software has been considered for use with medical records. Last year, a report attached to the National Defense Reauthorization Act encouraged the Department of Defense to refine procurement policies to maximize use of open source in the area of veterans health systems, especially in relation to electronic record storage.

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One of the major players in last decade’s arguments over anthropogenic climate change and its policy implications was the Global Climate Coalition, which received funding from both individual companies and industry groups. Now, documents from that era have come to light thanks to the involvement of one of the GCC members, the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, in a suit that has attempted to block California’s efforts to regulate automotive greenhouse gas emissions. During discovery for the suit, a memo came to light in which the GCC’s scientific advisors suggested that certain aspects of climate science simply weren’t controversial; that memo was leaked to The New York Times, which has placed it online.

The documents include a few introductory memos, followed by a primer on climate science prepared by the GCC’s in-house scientific advisory committee. The goal of the primer appears to be to bring everyone who would be speaking on the issue up to speed on the state of climate science; it apparently dates from late 1995, about the time when the IPCC published its second assessment of climate science. It appears to have been prepared by members of the industries represented by the GCC; the accompanying article in The Times indicates that the advisory committee was chaired by someone at Mobile, while two of the people listed as commenting on it appear to have worked for an oil company and an electric utility group.

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This week in gaming we had a game hit early at retail, and then get hit even harder by piracy. Chinatown Wars on the DS didn’t have the best start when it comes to sales numbers, and JAKKS Pacific shows us a great way to bring classic arcade games home. Let’s take a look at what stories people were talking about in the world of gaming.

Demigod hit by massive piracy; review scores take beating: Demigod publisher Stardock ran into a very unexpected problem when the game launched: around 100,000 more online players than expected. The number of legit connections? 18,000. Piracy can hurt review scores, as well as consumer confidence, especially when the stolen copies of the game flood servers, and there’s no easy solution to the problem. Being anti-DRM, pro-gamer may have given Stardock CEO Brad Wardell much press, but it could have lead to a disastrous launch for his company’s newest game.

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The month of April is almost over, bringing us even closer to WWDC ’09 and its corresponding keynote. It’s about time for buzz to start ramping up about iPhone 3.0, but there was other news this week that got some attention, too. Read on to find out what it was:

Apple rebuts Microsoft criticisms that Macs are overpriced: An Apple spokesperson has an answer to Microsoft’s recent ads and “white paper” that claim Macs are too expensive: “A PC is no bargain when it doesn’t do what you want.”

iPhone OS 3.0 to feature voice control and feedback: Various voice-related features, under the codename “Jibbler,” have been discovered in the version of SpringBoard set to ship with the next update to Apple’s mobile operating system.

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The Pirate Bay verdict may have been rendered a week ago, but the aftershocks are still being felt several days later.

Some people were surprised by the verdict, but it really wasn’t much of a surprise. When looked at in the context of MGM v. Grokster, Napster 1.0, and TorrentSpy, a pattern emerges: sites that appear to exist solely for the purpose of linking to copyrighted content don’t stay up forever. Big Content wants an injunction taking The Pirate Bay offline immediately.

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$62,000 to download a movie? That’s what happened to a caller named Alberto, who told his data roaming tale of woe on the air to HLN “money expert” Clark Howard on CNN. Alberto made the grave mistake of downloading Wall-E for his nephew while vacationing in Mexico over his data card and was slapped with a $62,000 bill from his wireless carrier when he returned home. Alberto tried to contest the charge and the carrier reduced the bill to $17,000, arguing that the five-figure charge was what it cost them to deliver the movie.

Needless to say, both Alberto and Howard were completely incredulous that a simple movie download would generate such an impressive data bill. Indeed, $62,000—or $17,000—is pretty daunting for a 98 minute animated movie about an robot. However, it’s pretty clear that Alberto made a rookie mistake after he purchased the data card for his laptop that could have been easily avoided. Instead, he inadvertently joined the legions of other mobile users who failed to pay attention to the fine print before traveling.

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File this in the “exporting democracy” category, or not: a recent report from Europe serves as a reminder that serious problems with e-voting aren’t just an American malady, although it’s much easier to move back to paper ballots if your country is fairly small. Just ask the Irish, who have announced their decision to scrap their e-voting system and return to paper. Ireland has already put about $67 million into building out its e-voting infrastructure, but the country has apparently decided that it would be even more expensive to keep going with the system than it would be to just scrap it altogether.

In a statement, Ireland’s Environment Minister John Gormely blamed the decision partly on the economic crisis, which has had an impact of nearly Icelandic proportions on the country’s real estate market and banking system.

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Time Warner Cable’s plan to impose tiered data caps on Internet users imploded last week, but that doesn’t mean TWC users can download to their heart’s content. No, like many other ISPs without explicit data caps, TWC retains an “acceptable use policy” that lets it curtail any “abuse” of its network, as one user found out the hard way.

StoptheCap.com has been covering the TWC case in obsessive detail (seriously, we’re a little worried), and it yesterday published the story of a TWC user from Austin, Texas who ran afoul of the acceptable use policy.

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It takes a certain chutzpah for the cable industry to tell Congress that deep packet inspection (DPI) gear is “pro-consumer” because it can block viruses and spam on the network, help ISPs plan their capacity upgrades, and help law enforcement wiretaps—all while avoiding mention of Comcast’s “TCP reset packet” blocking of BitTorrent connections or Cox’s plan to decide what priority its users’ traffic should have.

But that’s just what National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) head Kyle McSlarrow told Congress at a hearing yesterday, despite the hearing’s focus on consumer issues arising from DPI technology.

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Believe it or not, the webpage service Geocities is still alive—but not for long. Fifteen years after its original creation, Yahoo has announced that it will shut down the service later this year. An exact date is not specified, but Yahoo is warning current users to consider moving to other options, such as Yahoo’s own Web Hosting service.

Started in 1994, Geocities was like the Facebook to Angelfire’s MySpace—competing webpage services that allowed over-enthused HTML newbies to create artfully horrific webpages to represent themselves in the early days of the Internet. (I was a diehard Angelfire fan, myself.) Geocities was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 with the intent of extending Yahoo’s reach with its Internet advertising and services.

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Gamefly is a popular way for gamers to play titles without having to buy $50 or $60 games. It works just like any mail-based rental service: you subscribe, choose the number of games you’d like to rent each month, keep them from however long you’d like, and then send them back once you’re done. When Gamefly receives the games, it mails out the next one on the list. According to a recent complaint filed by Gamefly against the Postal Regulatory Commission however, mailing games remains dangerous, and expensive. That is, unless you’re Netflix or Blockbuster.

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Two artists attempted to create a performance art piece by establishing a Wikipedia entry entitled “Wikipedia Art,” which could then be freely edited and “transformed” by anyone choosing to do so. The page lasted for a mere 15 hours before being summarily deleted by Wikipedia editors and admins. Now, the pair’s archive and continuing discussion of the project is being threatened by the Wikimedia Foundation’s legal counsel, which has effectively threatened to pursue legal action against the artists for trademark infringement.

“Wikipedia Art is an art intervention which explicitly invites performative utterances in order to change the work itself,” reads the archive of the original Wikipedia post made by artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern. “The ongoing composition and performance of Wikipedia Art is intended to point to the “invisible authors and authorities” of Wikipedia, and by extension the Internet, as well as the site’s extant criticisms: bias, consensus over credentials, reliability and accuracy, vandalism, etc.”

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Sugar Labs has launched the first beta release of Sugar on a Stick, a new version of the open source Sugar Learning Platform that is designed to boot on conventional desktop computers and run directly from USB flash memory devices.

The Sugar software environment was originally created for the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO laptop. It offers a unique child-friendly user interface and includes an assortment of applications that are geared towards education and collaboration.

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A new report by the Ponemon Institute in conjunction with Intel claims that the average cost to the enterprise of a stolen or lost laptop is $49,246, once you factor in not just replacement but intellectual property loss, lost productivity, forensics, and other downsides.

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The developers behind Ubuntu project announced Thursday the availability of version 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope. The new release ships with the latest desktop software and several new features.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution is developed around a six-month release cycle, which means that two new versions come out every year. The version numbers are based on the year and month of the release.

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In a number of cases, our finest manufacturing techniques haven’t touched the materials that a few billion years of evolution have produced. Carefully tuned biochemistry can take a collection of otherwise abundant and mundane substances and fashion them into materials with some amazing properties, like the surface of gecko feet or the shells of mollusks. But that doesn’t mean that nature’s achievements can’t be tweaked. Scientists have now found that they can make spider silk even tougher by infiltrating some metal atoms into the spider’s handiwork.

The authors were inspired by a different animal entirely, the marine polychaete worm, which has jaws that can crush through the shells of various ocean denizens (one of these worms was recently discovered chewing through the coral in an aquarium). Previous research has suggested that the incredible strength of these jaws comes from a typical biological material spiked with a small amount of an inorganic metal—zinc, in this case. Although the zinc seems to be put in place as the jaws are formed by the worms, the researchers wondered if it might be possible to add metals back into some existing biological materials.

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As the last round of quarterly reports rolled in, Apple’s didn’t look so hot—until they were followed by mediocre results from Microsoft and an absolute disaster for Sony. This time around, with everyone’s expectations lowered by months of economic turmoil, Apple’s results looked pretty good, but Microsoft put a quick stop to any speculation that the good news for Cupertino was a general sign. The economy hit Microsoft hard, knocking profits down by nearly a third from where they were a year ago, with nearly every division of the company seeing a drop in revenue. After these results, I fear for Sony.

Microsoft typically sees a small but substantial drop from the holiday quarter, and the trend held this time around. Revenue overall wasn’t in terrible shape, as the $13.7 billion pulled in was only six percent off last year’s figure. But the money didn’t translate to nearly as much profit, with earnings-per-share coming in at 33¢, down 33 percent from a year ago (or the holidays; take your pick). Six cents of that drop were caused by one-time charges, some related to the layoffs announced at the end of last quarter, and the majority coming from investments gone sour with the economy.

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The European Commission is reportedly about to inflict some major pain on Intel. Sources tell Reuters that the chipmaker is facing a finding that it abused its dominant position in the European CPU market. Member states will first receive an initial draft of the EC’s decision, which would then be finalized within a matter of weeks and then handed down to Intel.

Intel’s European legal woes date all the way back to 2000, when AMD first accused Intel of squeezing it out of the market by means of unfair royalty rebates and exclusive purchase agreements. Initially shelved, the investigation was restarted in 2004 after AMD filed an additional complaint.

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The Obama administration’s stance on copyright enforcement has already attracted an open letter in which a variety of public advocacy groups voiced concerns that there seemed to be a bias towards content owners in the initial round of appointments. Those worries are unlikely to go away any time soon, if this week’s events are any indication. The Motion Picture Association of America came to town, armed with lobbyists and figures that suggest it functions as a one-industry, nationwide job stimulus, and it heard exactly what it was looking for from Vice President Biden.

The MPAA hosted a series of events in Washington on Tuesday, during which it pressed both Congress and the administration for action on piracy. Its justification: a new report which presents the entertainment industry as one of the US’ big success stories in recent years, one that’s creating jobs nationwide. The report focuses on how the industry is one of the few portions of the economy that is running a trade surplus, and that it’s able to create jobs in nearly every state.

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The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK has once again given the thumbs-up to Google’s Street View after reviewing complaints from a UK privacy group. The office stated that Street View does not violate the country’s Data Protection Act, and that the small risk of privacy burps are not worth the removal of an entire service.

Privacy International originally filed a complaint with the ICO about Street View in March, alleging that Google had not yet taken the appropriate steps to ensure citizens’ privacy and that the service has created “numerous instances of embarrassment and distress.” PI argued that Google should remove all of its images until it’s clear that the service operates within the UK’s Data Protection Act, and asked the ICO to take a hard look at its own reasoning for approving the service in the first place.

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They came from pretty much every sector—nonprofits, government, wireless executives, and think tanks—to a day-long conference in Washington D.C. on how to respond to the panic du jour over kids, mobile phones, and sex. “Sexting,” declared one panel moderator, “we might as well just get that big, giant elephant in the room. Parents are absolutely freaking every five minutes, because there’s some new technology worry to have to deal with.”

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Less than a week after the conclusion of The Pirate Bay trial, a new controversy has surfaced over the judge’s possible conflict of interests. It turns out that Judge Tomas Norström—the judge who found The Pirate Bay defendants guilty and slapped them with jail time—is currently a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, an organization that works against piracy along with a number of entertainment industry members. As a result, lawyers for the defendants have made it clear that they will push for a retrial.

The Swedish media dug up information this week revealing that Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association along with Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted—individuals who represented the recording industry in The Pirate Bay trial. Additionally, Norström also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws.

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Some people love the idea of digital distribution, others love their packaging and enjoy the social aspect of going to their favorite gaming store to make their purchases. There is much talk about the industry going digital-only, and Sony is taking a clear step in that direction by releasing Patapon 2 for the PSP without any physical media, even if you buy the game in the store. Today the company released more details about the “test case,” and recent comments by Sony explain why this move may have been necessary.

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Embedded Alley, a company that specializes in mobile and embedded Linux technology, is porting Google’s Android platform to the MIPS architecture. The port could make Android a viable choice for hardware makers in a wide range of product categories beyond the mobile phone market.

The scope of Android’s adoption potential is a topic of considerable speculation. The platform is touted by Linux enthusiasts as a choice for every kind of mobile device, from netbooks to set-top boxes. Although we think it’s not really a strong contender yet in the netbook space, we have pointed out that it is gaining some real traction on touchscreen tablet devices and media players, including some that are scheduled for launch this year.

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Richard Bookstaber, one of the original MIT math geeks gone bad (a.k.a. “quants”) and the guy who literally wrote the book on how to destroy Wall St. with computers, has been tracking what he calls the “arms race” in high-frequency, computer-automated trading. If he’s correct with his recently floated hypothesis that “the days for high frequency trading are numbered,” then this would be pretty bad news for Intel, AMD/ATI, and NVIDIA.

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Nearly every issue of major science journals contains new developments in nanotechnology which may eventually help us develop nanoscale medical implants, sensors, pollution scavengers, and other devices. In designing nanomachines, one has to think about how to power them. Batteries or other external power sources would add to the cost and size of the devices, so it would be preferable if they could be self-powered, having their own power cell or some power-harvesting mechanism.

Several years ago, scientists found that they could create an electric current by pushing water through a single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)—the direction of the electric potential along the tube could even be flipped by changing the course of the water flow. Last year, Chinese scientists led by Lianfeng Sun managed to make hydroelectric power converters based on this phenomenon, which led them to suggest that “SWNTs can be exploited as unique, tunable molecular channels for water and might find potential application in nanoscale energy conversion.” 

However, before it’s sensible to look into further applications, it’s necessary to figure out how water and SWCNTs generate hydroelectric voltage. Without a basic understanding of the mechanisms involved, it would be difficult to design an efficient power-harvesting technique.

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When college students are stumped on their classwork, where do they turn? Most of the time, not to their textbooks, according to a survey performed at the behest of Nature Publishing Group. According to Vikram Savkar, who heads the group’s Nature Education effort, 80 percent of the time, the students do what the rest of us do: look to Google, and often on from there to Wikipedia. Nature Education is an effort to change that and, in the process, provide a better science education experience.

Since January, Nature Education’s first product, Scitable, has been available to the public. The goal, according to Savkar, is to provide the sort of dynamic social content that college students now expect—as he noted, biology study groups had already formed spontaneously on Facebook. “The old content models are out of date,” he said, “we all know that textbooks aren’t what students find interesting.”

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Nintendo’s Excitetruck was one of the early games for the Wii, and featured some fun arcade-style racing… even if the overall package wore thin after a while. In a game so obviously over the top, why settle for simple trucks? Why not race robots with wings (who have the ability to run on their legs) that have built-in pies for throwing at giant clown faces? I mean, it’s only natural. That’s where Excitebots: Trick Racing comes in. Why settle for fun when you can be insane?

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Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has extended her oversight of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement by another 18 months, setting the new expiration date for May 12, 2011. Kollar-Kotelly acknowledged during a hearing today that this would be the second extension in under two years, but said that the company is “in a different and much better place” than before.

The judge’s order comes only days after the US Department of Justice filed a request for the oversight to be extended. The DOJ apparently felt that Microsoft still had a ways to go before meeting the requirements originally set in 2002, and that 18 months would be plenty of time to finish up without having to grant further extensions. At the same time, a joint status report from Microsoft and the plaintiffs states that all parties felt that the required documentation is almost ready. “While the entire project has taken longer than any of the parties anticipated, the project is nearly complete,” read the report.

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Apple provided its latest status report in the form of its financial numbers for the second quarter of its fiscal 2009. The quarter usually sees a big drop-off from holiday sales, but the challenge for the folks in Cupertino was ensuring that the economic crisis didn’t drag sales off a cliff. It seems to have met that challenge nicely. Everything did drop significantly off the holiday quarter, but revenue, earnings, and unit sales for everything but Macs were up year-over-year.

As far as the financials are concerned, revenue came in at $8.16 billion, which netted the company a profit of $1.33 per share. The holiday quarter had only seen revenue of $2 billion more, driving profits of $1.78 a share, while the quarter one year earlier had seen $7.51 billion in revenue and a profit of $1.16 a share. So the quarterly drop wasn’t especially large, and the company maintained its yearly growth. Part of the reason that Apple was able to hold up that well is that it managed to increase its gross margins by three percent (to 36.4 percent) despite the cutbacks happening in nearly every aspect of the economy.

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According to Time Warner Cable’s most recent annual report, the company has largely rolled out DOCSIS 2.0 across its hybrid fiber-coax network and “plans to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 selectively in its systems during 2009, which will enable TWC to deliver speeds significantly faster than currently achievable.” But will it?

Alex Dudley, the company’s vice president of public relations, has been tweeting like a madman recently, most of his tweets naturally concerning the data cap issue. When Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm asked Dudley if the DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts were going ahead apart from the data cap trials, the response was surprisingly pointed—”it was scheduled as part of cbb [consumption-based billing] trial, but we all know how you feel about that.” Ooh, snarktastic!

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Yesterday, things seemed relatively simple when it came to the passage of the EU’s telecom reforms, a set of laws that would go a long way towards creating a unified Internet and cellular market within the member states. As we reported, the main stumbling block appeared to be a matter of emphasis. The European Parliament and European Council both agreed to include some language supportive of a three-strikes policy for disconnecting copyright infringers, but were haggling over where to place the language. That near agreement was apparently short-lived, as a committee within the Parliament thumbed its collective nose at the EU Council and significantly changed the language of the rule.

The situation is made even more absurd by the fact that the whole issue of three-strikes rules is quite peripheral to the telecoms package as a whole, the majority of which is focused on unifying telecommunications services within the common market. There are a variety of measures that ensure network interoperability across national boundaries and provide for the allocation of unlicensed wireless spectrum blocks within the EU. Earlier in the day, the Parliament approved a series of measures that would significantly drop the cost of roaming within the EU, covering text message, calling, and wireless plans.

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Database-driven websites increasingly depend on distributed caching to deliver adequate performance. This is particularly true in the social networking space where scalability is everything. One solution that has emerged as a de facto standard is memcached, a versatile distributed memory caching system that is developed under the open source BSD license.

Gear6 announced on Monday the launch of its new Web Cache product, a hardware appliance that is built around memcached. The product leverages a combination of DRAM and Flash memory to deliver significantly higher density than conventional memcached solutions. It can accommodate up to 320GB in a 1U form factor. Gear6 says that its appliance can facilitate significant memcached consolidation, reducing the expense of large-scale memcached setups by as much as 80 percent.

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Red Hat and Georgia Tech have published the results of a collaborative research project which attempted to measure relative open source software adoption by region. The study illuminates open source hot spots and provides some insight into where the development model is most prevalent.

The report quantifies open source activity and also provides some statistical insight into the potential for growth in open source adoption for each region. The factors used to evaluate the level of open source mojo in each region include government procurement and research policies, the number of Red Hat Certified Engineers and registered Linux users, the volume of discussion about open source topics in regional media, and Linux localization support for the region’s dominant language.

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Congress is back on the war path about file sharing systems that critics say make it a little too easy for consumers, businesses, and even government agencies to accidentally disclose confidential records.

“Nearly two years after your commitment to make significant changes in the software, LimeWire and other P2P providers have not taken adequate steps to address this critical problem,” Representatives Adolphus Towns (D-NY) and

Darrell E. Issa (R-CA) wrote to the Lime Group, makers of LimeWire, on Monday. Towns and Issa run the House Committee on Government reform.

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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which builds low-cost mobile computing devices for students in developing countries, has announced plans to update its XO laptop. The new model, which has been dubbed XO generation 1.5, will include a VIA processor instead of the aging AMD Geode processor that is included in the current XO model.

OLPC has faced many challenges since its inception and was recently forced to make massive cuts due to a decline in sponsorship and the failure of its second G1G1 fundraising effort. The organization largely refocused its efforts on creating a reference design for the XO 2, which will have dual touchscreens, possibly an ARM processor, and a target price of $75 per unit. The XO 1.5 is a less ambitious undertaking and will bring a much-needed incremental improvement to OLPC’s hardware while the XO 2 is under development.

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Today Amazon announced that its Video On Demand service now has HD movies and TV shows, which had started appearing in late March, available for purchase or rent. The move catches Amazon up with Apple’s iTunes Store, which has offered HD content for rent via AppleTV since January 2008, though it only recently allowed watching HD content on a Mac or PC this March. Likewise, Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature has also offered a selection of HD content for some time.

Currently, Amazon VOD has a selection of over 500 movies and TV shows available in HD. That pales in comparison to its library of over 40,000 titles, but it does include a lot of popular content. Amazon highlighted the HD availability of movies like Frost/Nixon, Twilight, and Yes Man and hit TV series like Californication, The Tudors, Smallville, and Gossip Girl. We also spied Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and The Office in there as well.

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The proliferation of widespread Internet access has enabled everyone and their dog to start a website, but not every one is filled with what some of us would describe as “credible” information. That’s why some researchers are attempting to create software that can analyze Web content and automatically rank it to help out those who can’t quite decide for themselves.

Researchers at the Austria-based Know-Center are working on a program that analyzes the language used on blogs in order to rank them as highly credible, having average credibility, or “little credible.” The code looks at the distribution of words over time, and compares blog topics against articles from mainstream news, which are apparently weighted as being more credible.

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According to press reports, the EU’s attempt to overhaul the Internet market within its member states has now set the EU’s Parliament and said states on a “collision course.” We’ve been reporting on the proposed telecom reforms package for several years now (most recently here), in part because its a massive overhaul and modernization of network policy, and in part because the unwieldy structure of the European political system has frequently allowed various interest groups and member states to insert their own take on issues into the package. The latest hold up arose over the handling of copyright infringers, but it has given various advocates of other issues the opportunity to mobilize against other features of the reform package.

If it’s hard to follow what’s going on, that’s hardly surprising. The reforms package has been making its way through the European Parliament, a legislative body, under the direction of members of the European Commission, which is the executive branch. Commissioner Viviane Reding of Luxembourg, the Telecoms Commissioner, has had primary responsibility for the text. But, to actually be implemented, the reforms also need to be approved by the European Council, which is comprised of the individual union members’ heads of state. Getting everyone on board for a single document has proven challenging.

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AMD announced its first quarter earnings today, and, as expected, the company’s losses continue to widen. AMD posted a net loss of $0.66 per share, or $416 million, which is worse than the $0.60 per share net loss from the same quarter a year ago.

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The Bluetooth SIG today officially announced its new Bluetooth 3.0+HS specification, otherwise known as Bluetooth High Speed Technology. The spec has been in development for some time, and astute readers know that today’s announcement was expected.

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Add top-secret plans for the expensive, much-delayed Joint Strike Fighter to the list of victims of alleged Chinese and Russian hack attacks, or so the Wall Street Journal reports. The paper cites “current and former government officials familiar with the attacks,” and claims that the Air Force’s air traffic control system has also been compromised. These reports follow allegations from earlier in the month that hackers have also been probing our electrical grid.

We’ve been reporting on the alleged Chinese hack attacks for at least two years now, but nobody is certain that China is actually behind them. Indeed, as is typical with these incidents, the Chinese government has denied any involvement in the latest intrusions. Still, China has been blamed for breaching everything from Pentagon e-mail to congressional PCs. And there are relatively frequent reports of “widespread” and “systematic” waves of China-based attacks on both the private and public sectors.

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Google has released an experimental browser plugin that will make it possible to display rich 3D graphics in Web content. Google hopes that the plugin will stimulate discussion within the Web development community and contribute to a nascent effort headed by the Khronos group to bring 3D graphics to the Web.

The plugin provides an implementation of O3D, a new API conceived by Google that facilitates the development of interactive 3D Web applications. It can be used to programmatically create and manipulate 3D graphics with the JavaScript programming language. It’s far more sophisticated and ambitious than some of Google’s previous experiments with 3D Web content, such as the ill-fated Lively service. The source code of the plugin is distributed under the open source BSD license, which broadly permits third-party developers to study, modify, and redistribute the plugin software.

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Users should make sure to keep their third-party software patched, lest they expose themselves to malware and other security risks. Vulnerability research firm Secunia has gathered data from a number of organizations showing that the large majority of vulnerabilities are found in third-party applications, many of which are in older versions of the software. As a result, users should stay on top of updates as much as they can, and software makers should do a better job of informing their customers of available patches.

Secunia cited data from Microsoft showing that third-party software vulnerabilities are the ones that are most frequently exploited, and said that its own data showed that users simply don’t update as frequently as they should. Instead, they’re usually running software that isn’t current. In fact, according to a Secunia blog post from December of 2008, the firm says that less than two percent of all PCs are fully patched.

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The Pirate Bay verdict is in, but the site operators aren’t in jail, haven’t paid any fines, and continue to run the site. They have also filed their promised appeal in the case, ensuring that the whole episode will drag on for quite some time. That’s just fine with The Pirate Bay’s administrators, though, who today speculated that the case will take another two to three years to wrap up. In the meantime, “The site will live on!”

The fact that the site lives on is a little weird, given the guilty verdict, the 30 million kronor fine, and the year of jail time for all defendants. What’s missing from the collection of penalties? An injunction shutting down The Pirate Bay.

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After playing Demigod for the past few days, it’s clear that you almost have to play another game before giving any thoughts. That game is, of course, Defense of the Ancients, a custom scenario for WarCraft 3. You can’t talk about Demigod without talking about DotA, at least as far as I can tell from reading the threads on various gaming fora. There is an entire section of the review guide for Demigod that deals with the differences between itself and Defense of the Ancients.

I haven’t played Defense of the Ancients. You can filter all my thoughts through that sentence, or howl with rage if that makes you feel better.

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Last month, I covered the launch of real-time ray tracing startup Caustic Graphics, and I noted the skeptical chatter that I’d heard about the company’s prospects in the graphics community. In brief, anyone who’s pitching a custom coprocessor on an add-in board has a difficult road ahead of them in the current, price-sensitive market. When you factor in the challenges of doing real-time ray tracing, plus the fact that most of the visuals produced by the technique can be serviceably approximated in games by traditional rasterization, it was tough to see where Caustic could have a chance at success.

But after a visit to Caustic’s San Francisco headquarters this past Friday, I came away with a much better understanding of what the startup is trying to achieve.

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Twenty years ago this week, Nintendo released the Game Boy, its first handheld video game console. Excited Japanese customers snatched up the innovative monochrome handheld by the thousands, which retailed for 12,500 yen (about $94 at 1989 rates) at launch—a small price to pay for what seemed to be a NES in your pocket. Nintendo offered four games for the new Game Boy: Super Mario Land, Baseball, Alleyway, and Yakuman (a mahjong game), but the number of available titles quickly grew into the hundreds.

Later that year, the Game Boy hit the US at $89.99 with a secret weapon, Tetris, as its pack-in game. Selling over a million units during the first Christmas season, the Game Boy proved equally successful in the US, and that success was by no means short-lived: to date, Nintendo has sold 118.69 million units of the original Game Boy line (not including Game Boy Advance) worldwide, making it the longest running dynasty in the video game business. So in honor of the Game Boy’s twentieth anniversary, we give you six reasons why the Game Boy dominated the handheld video game market during most of its astounding two-decade run.

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