riflemann writes "NASA is reporting that two years into its 90-day mission, Spirit has lost one wheel and is now running on five wheels, dragging the broken wheel. With this reduced mobiity, the rover still needs to make its way to a slope where it can catch enough sun over the Martian winter to keep it operating. 'Even though the rovers are well past their original design life, they still have plenty of capability to conduct outstanding science on Mars.', says project leader Dr. John Callas."

Gosalia wrote to let us know about an article which opens with: "In a legal win for Google, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results." Thankfully, we can all still read Usenet articles on Google as well as other archive services.

An anonymous reader writes "CNET went to Intel's Viiv launch in Australia and scored some interesting info about Viiv's DRM scheme. From the article: '[Don] MacDonald also told CNET.com.au that Viiv won't be testing to see if the content being played is pirated from networks such as BitTorrent. He believes that it's not Intel's job to be policing downloads and that it's wrong to assume that all consumers are criminals. As such, Viiv won't test for watermarks or other red flags that reveal pirated content, allowing any type of media to be played.' Another choice quote from the article: 'MacDonald is confident that piracy won't be a significant issue for Viiv, as Intel promises to make content easier to buy than it is to pirate.'"

Paul Slocum writes "According to Ars Technica, Sony is now saying they will not use the Image Constraint Token and so movies will play on analog HDTV sets at full resolution. If HD-DVD does implement the analog downsampling, it's going to give Blu-ray a nice market advantage." From the article: "Sony's decision to not use the Image Constraint Token for the time being is meant to encourage the adoption of Blu-ray players. Launching a new product that would leave the thousands of analog HDTV owners out in the standard-definition cold could have proven to be a nightmare for Sony and the Blu-ray spec in general. Reports that 'Blu-ray discs don't look right on my HDTV' could result in consumers' switching allegiances to the competing HD DVD standard or postponing purchases of next-generation optical players altogether."