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California Governor Jerry Brown announced today that he has signed into law the Spaceflight Liability and Immunity Act, AB 2243.  This law provides the necessary liability protections for compliant companies in the state, should any spaceflight participant who has acknowledged the risks sustain any bodily injury during spaceflight activities. Currently, Florida, Virginia, and Texas also provide spaceflight companies liability protection.

Free and Open Another reason there are so many audio codecs: silly licensing restrictions. Would you base a business on technology a competitor controls? That's why the Opus specification and complete source are Free, Open, and available for any use whatsoever without IP restrictions, explicit licensing or royalties. Opus was developed and tested in a public, fully transparent process within the IETF, proof that open collaboration can produce a better audio codec than proprietary, secretive, patent-encumbered systems. Open standards benefit-- and benefit from-- open source organizations and traditional commercial software companies alike. Opus itself is the result of a collaboration including Broadcom, Google, the IETF, Microsoft (through Skype), Mozilla, Octasic and Xiph.Org.

Portugese prosecutors have declined to press charges against individuals accused of file sharing

Using genetically modified E. coli to generate biofuel isn’t new. U.K. scientists said in April they have developed a process under which the bacterium turns biomass into an oil that is almost identical to conventional diesel–a development that followed similar research by U.S. biotechnology firm LS9 in 2010. But the breakthrough this time is important because the reprogrammed E. coli can produce gasoline, a high-premium oil product that’s more expensive than diesel if the biofuel becomes commercially viable, according to Prof. Lee Sang-yup at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His team’s study was published in the international science journal Nature on Monday.

The significance of this breakthrough is that you don’t have to go through another process to crack the oil created by E. coli to produce gasoline. We have succeeded in converting glucose or waste biomass directly into gasoline,

only a few drops of the fuel per hour—making just 580 milligrams of gasoline from one liter of glucose culture.

the next step in computing technology

But the technology took a hit earlier this year when tests on the world's first commercially available quantum computer — the D-Wave 2, priced at around $15 million — appeared to show that it was no faster than a standard computer.