Since YouTube caught on a few years ago, people have uploaded clips of their favorite TV shows and movies as well as videos they made themselves, which has of course raised the ire of media producers. Yesterday, during a court case on the legality of this issue, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google Inc. to turn over personal data pertaining to YouTube users' viewing habits to Viacom, in order to prove users watched illegitimately copied content more than user-generated ... Read this and 1 comment.

When your enemy is hiding deep within a cave or reinforced building, oftentimes bombing the target simply shakes things up rather than causing actual harm. One weapon to mitigate this weakness currently in use by British forces in Afghanistan is the Hellfire AGM-114N missile. The AGM-114N is known as a thermobaric munition designed to expel a fine cloud of volatile mixture, in this case fluorinated aluminium powder, that penetrates deep into the structure, whereupon a secondary charge ignites ... Read this and 9 comments.

What do you get when you cross seventeen miles of super cooled magnets, a handful of laboratory mice and some mad scientists? If the doomsayers are right, the Earth will be destroyed when the Large Hadron Collider creates miniature black holes and theoretical strangelets in August. According to the physicists, the types of collisions the LHC will produce happen everyday in the upper atmosphere and the Earth has yet to be destroyed by this natural process. "Obviously, the world will not ... Read this and 7 comments.

As oil topped a record $143.67 a barrel, another segment of the economy revealed its misfortune. Nevada's brothels report business is down by as much as 25% because trucker's disposable income has diminished with the rising price of diesel. The prostitutes have to offer discount rates and even gas cards to attract their customers. Brothel owner Bobbi Davis states, "Instead of spending $500 out here, they might only spend $300. I see it every time they raise gas prices." Not only ... Read more.

Several months ago, the election between the incumbent Mugabe and rival Tsvangirai resulted in a requirement for a subsequent run-off because the challenger did not win enough of the votes by Zimbabwen election rules. Since that time, supporters of Tsvangirai have been threatened and killed. Tsvangirai himself has sought sanctuary in the Dutch embassy. As expected, Mugabe's shut out of Tsvangirai's political campaign, execution of his supporters and forced votes by gunpoint resulted in an ... Read this and 2 comments.

Three years ago, the video game industry was shaken up by the discovery of what became known as the "Hot Coffee" modification to the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas game. With some software hacking, disabled code in the game was re-enabled allowing players to engage in a sexual mini-game. The incident spawned a renewed interest in the whether video games and their content were having detrimental effects on youths playing them and spawned a class action lawsuit against the company for ... Read this and 4 comments.

Three out of four Americans have no confidence in President Bush, but his approval ratings have been dragging well below 50% for such a long time nobody bats an eye at those figures. A Gallup poll indicates that Americans have finally had it with the houses of congress as well. Amazingly, the President's rating is twice that of Congress, which scores an abysmal 12% confidence rating. Confidence ratings are different from approval ratings (where Congress scores a similarly poor 19%). Likely ... Read this and 10 comments.

The technically advanced video, software and internet capabilities acclaimed by Apple's iPhone 3G are quickly acquiring a growing interest from the adult entertainment industry. In addition to the "usual" download of movies and pictures, the potential for somewhat interactive porn is possible because of the touch screen and the recently available programming SDK kit. Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple spokesperson, informs her company does not condone iPhone porn distribution and will ban the ... Read this and 1 comment.

For veteran OmniNerds, the new side menu addition may seem very reminiscent of the old version 2 "pulse" that was at the top of the front page. It's a new feature that we're calling the "showcase" and we intend to do just that, i.e., showcase content on the site that might otherwise get lost in the ... Read this and 12 comments.

DARPA has awarded the iRobot Corporation a 3.3 million dollar contract to develop and build a robot that is soft and flexible enough to ooze through small openings or cracks and still be functional enough to perform DoD tasks. Some of the initial specs for the chem-bot design include "Morphability in all three dimensions"; "Architectures that can sense and morph responsively to openings, e.g., using local tactile sensing and flexible backbone structures; or architectures that ... Read this and 1 comment.