Group items tagged

The Supreme Court had a common-sense message Thursday for workers with cell phones and other gadgets provided by their employers: Use your own cell phone if you've got something to text that you don't want your boss to read. The justices unanimously upheld a police department's search of an officer's personal, sometimes sexually explicit, messages on a government-owned pager, saying the search did not violate his constitutional rights.

The scanner works by sweeping a red laser beam across any object that you can put in front of a webcam. When an object is close to the camera, the beam seems to have shifted to the side. That provides a key bit of information about the depth of the point being scanned. With a bit of number crunching, a computer can use the position of the beam to calculate the thickness of that object.