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Initially, Wagner and his collaborators envisioned armor that could be spread on a person, almost like peanut butter on bread, says Eric Wetzel, a researcher at the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md. But in tests co-sponsored by the Army Lab, they found that the materials worked best when painted on Kevlar in ultrathin coats. By holding the fibers tight like a flexible glue, the compound spreads out the impact of a blow better than fibers alone. "The search in the past has been for stronger and stronger filaments," says Wetzel. "We've tried to change how the fabric interacts with the projectile." The liquid has other pluses. It's lighter than Kevlar and other widely used fabrics. That means Armor Holdings' new vests, in which the substance would be sandwiched between layers of ballistic fibers, might be lighter than current versions, which weigh four pounds or more. It also should be cheaper to manufacture, says Schiller. The Jacksonville (Fla.) company wants to continue to sell entry-level garments for $500 to $600.

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Taking the customer viewpoint, he said: "If the National Australia Bank wants to implement virtualization and it's not stable, you can imagine what they will tell us." Instead of trying to play catch-up with rival Novell and simply shipping Xen as included software with its operating system, Red Hat will attempt to build a full virtualization platform around the product in the next version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server software, due to be released in December.

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ReadyDrive has spawned a new category of flash-assisted hard drives. Both Samsung Semiconductor Inc. and Seagate Technology have announced hybrid drives that integrate a 1.5-in. magnetic hard disk with up to 256MB of onboard flash. Both are expected to be available early next year. A competing technology from Intel Corp., code-named Robson, places the cache on the motherboard, along with a controller chip. Robson will launch with Intel’s Santa Rosa notebook platforms in the first quarter of 2007.

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Approaches to the do-it-yourself idea vary widely. Start-ups, including SocialText and JotSpot are seeking to make it easier to create jointly authored Web pages, or wikis. Companies like Ning and Coghead promise more general hosted application development services. Meanwhile, several companies offer hosted versions of desktop applications, such as DabbleDB and Zoho Creator, which promote collaboration among small groups. And there a huge number of publishing tools, such as SiteKreator, and consumer-oriented services to create blogs or personalized home pages.

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GPLv3 "basically says, 'We don't want access just to your software modifications. We want access to your hardware, too,'" Torvalds said. "I don't think it's my place as a software developer to judge how hardware works around it." But the Free Software Foundation argues that it's modernizing the license, not changing its spirit. It's seeking to prevent hardware makers from using DRM as a technological end-run around the license's legal requirements for programmer freedoms. "If you're keeping the right to modify and not conveying that right to modify, you're violating the license," said Eben Moglen, the foundation's top lawyer, in an earlier interview.

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Most California consumer claims total under $100, but many could exceed that amount depending on how much software was purchased, Grossman said. The claims for businesses typically range from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars, he said. Microsoft has settled similar lawsuits with about 16 states plus the District of Columbia which charged the company with using its Windows monopoly to thwart competition and overcharge customers for its software products. The California agreement, which marked the biggest between the software maker and U.S. states, covers anyone in the state who bought certain Microsoft software between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001.

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But some analysts, such as NPD Techworld's Stephen Baker, fret that without a compelling reason to upgrade a PC this holiday season, holiday shoppers will spend their money on goodies like digital televisions and gaming consoles. In that sense, "the Core 2 Duo probably couldn't have come at a better time," Titera said. On top of the buzz that comes with a new chip, the performance delivered by the Core 2 Duo could also generate interest in high-end desktops that also deliver better margins for PC companies, he said.

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IE 7 will be delivered in the fourth quarter as a "high priority" update via Automatic Updates in Windows XP, Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of IE product management, said in an interview Tuesday. Automatic Updates is a Windows feature typically used for security updates, but Microsoft has also used it to push its antipiracy tool WGA Notifications. "The justification, of course, is the significant security enhancements in IE 7," Schare said. Microsoft recommends that all Windows users install the new browser when it ships, he added.

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"America's children will be better protected from every parent's worst nightmare--sexual predators--thanks to passage" of the legislation, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement on Tuesday. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, in a statement issued after the House approved the bill by voice vote, said: "We've all seen the disturbing headlines about sex offenders and crimes against children. These crimes cannot persist. Protecting our children from Internet predators and child exploitation enterprises are just as high a priority as securing our border from terrorists."

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So what we did learn here? That integrated video is slower compared to even the least expensive cards on the market including an add-in board with the same name. The X300 was much faster while the 6200TC was easily capable of doubling the performance of the integrated video in all but one situation. It's really important to point out that the integrated video and the ATI card in this test are using the same GPU, but they are clocked at different speeds and have much different ways of accessing the memory, which is why there is such a difference in our tests. This should illustrate just how much more efficient an add-in board is.

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One of Intel's big pushes for the motherboard market at the moment is the VIIV standard. VIIV is the combination of Dual Core CPUs, an Intel motherboard, High Definition Audio and more to present a unified digital home entertainment platform. The ECS board is a decent example of a VIIV board, with everything needed with the exception of a CPU, memory, hard disk drive to have a new system. The integrated GMA950 graphics is barely adequate for playing todays modern game titles, but beyond that it is a great start for a Windows Media Center PC.

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The highly anticipated return of Voltage Extreme memory from OCZ is finally here. The latest revision rolls in with DDR2-1000 speeds and a very tight 4-4-4-15 timing set. They are not called Voltage Extreme for nothing though. Let't see how far these can be pushed.

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Feature-wise, the ECS KA3-MVP motherboard includes the ability to Crossfire two ATI cards, 7 SATA devices, a Gigabit Ethernet controller, and two Firewire ports. The minimal expansion on the board is a bit disappointing, but the multiple SATA devices on a single port make for an excellent new feature as more and more devices move to SATA.

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Today in the BFR labs we have a pair of HIS' X1600 Pro Turbo Dual-DVI graphic cards.Yes, I said 'pair' as in two and yes we will be running them in CrossFire mode which should be interesting since there currently aren't many X1600 CrossFire benchmarks out there on the web.

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his is the best way to look at the TOXIC X1900XTX. We know that the water cooling solution is going to be nowhere near as effective as a custom made job and the effectiveness of the Liquid Cooling Solution in use here isn’t amazing from a performance point of a view, but when you stand back, close your eyes and then think... I have an X1900XTX and I cannot hear it!

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nVidia's releases of the nForce 590 SLI chipset and reference designs have been implemented one way or the other by a number of manufacturers - each of which has added a little bit of his or her own secret sauce to make things more comfoming to the rest of the product line-up, shave off a few pennies here and there or simply "because". There is, however, Foxconn, who manufactured the original , nVidia-internal reference boards. Reference boards have in the past always stomped the final production versions - in terms of performance and reliability and, often enough, also in terms of overall compatibility. Reason enough to greet reference boards with a bit of skepticism. However, in this case, we have a one-to-one conversion of a reference design into a GTO production - with an unspeakable name, produced by Foxconn and sold at a perfectly acceptable price.

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Enter the Sapphire Technology X1600 Pro HDMI 256MiB. The penultimate word, HDMI, is what makes it special. With an integrated HDCP-certified HDMI connection as standard, and half-height form-factor, could this be the card for those of you who have invested in HDMI-enabled LCD and plasma TVs of late?

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After reviewing ten enthusiast brand lines from eight companies I feel confident to call Corsair's PC2-6400C3 memory line the ultimate enthusiast memory on the market today. Thanks to ability to run super tight CL3 timings up over 880MHz and CL4 timings well over 1.1GHz these modules will give gamers and overclockers ample room to best optimize their system performance. Corsair made the smart move to use Micron D9 IC's on their PC2-6400C3 modules and thanks to super tight screening they are able to produce these kits in volume...

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Like the X1800GTO we looked at a few weeks ago, the HIS X1900XTX is using the third revision generation of the IceQ cooling solution funnily enough known as IceQ 3. It has a few improvements over the previous one and is of course a lot more peaceful than the screamingly loud fans that we find on most other X1900XT(X) graphics cards.

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Asus has embraced the nVIDIA GeForce 7600GT GPU and released a videocard which is not only ideally suited towards the occasional gamer and even hardcore gamer on a budget, but also doubles up the value by offering 100% silent operation which makes it ideal for home theatre PC's or just anyone who wants a quiet computer. The TV output and HDTV output capabilities of the Asus EN7600GT Silent/2DHT/256M/A work hand in hand with its 256MB GDDR3 memory and its 560 MHz GPU to provide a strong feature set for anyone walking down the multimedia path.

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One of our readers wanted to know what would happen if you put a top of the line video card into a system that was running an average processor. We were a bit curious ourselves so we thought we would just show him. Using a Pentium 4 - 3.4 GHz we ran it though a number of benchmarks to see just how well it would perform. Perhaps our experiment will help him decide if he buys a new video card before he buys a new processor.

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The first performance chipset to provide native support for Core 2, is Intel's 965-Express series. With that in mind, we've taken a look at a high-end offering from Gigabyte. The GA-965P-DQ6 looks impressive on paper. Let's see how it pans out in our comprehensive review.

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The new card, which resembles a debit card, is inserted into a small plastic reader/writer that can display and update the balance on the card. Traditional money is gone altogether, though purists can still purchase the original version. Visa's partnership with Parker Bros. seems designed to bolster the belief that using paper money is baffling and insecure.

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Why are employers fighting back so hard against their own employees? The AMA and the ePolicy Institute believe that this backlash follows a wave of lawsuits caused by employee e-mails. The survey points out that 24 percent of companies have been served with subpoenas for their employees' e-mails. About 15 percent of companies have gone to court to battle lawsuits triggered by e-mails from their employees. The failure by employees to retain certain e-mails, as required, has led to significant financial sanctions in some cases.

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"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said. A number of such lawsuits have been filed around the country in the wake of news media reports that AT&T and other phone companies had turned records over to the National Security Administration, which specializes in communications intercepts.

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Microsoft could get a competitive advantage if it can be the first big-name company to offer a wireless device. An open question, though, is whether Apple is planning any sort of wireless iPod this year. While adding wireless abilities could give the Zune a leg up on Apple, it also presents technological challenges. Rivals already struggle to compete with the simplicity of the iPod, analysts say.

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"Retailers are being forced to rethink their merchandising at the front end as they deploy self-checkout systems," says IHL President Greg Buzek in a press release. "The impulse displays have not caught up to this new technology. By definition these are impulse items – thus they must engage the senses. Retailers such as Meijer and Kroger have adjusted by offering items such as rotisserie chickens and fresh baked breads to rely more on the sense of smell to drive sales rather than simply visuals when trapped in a staffed lane."

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Tourists to the International Space Station (ISS) now have the option of adding a 90-minute spacewalk to their trips for an extra $15 million. They already pay $20 million to launch and land aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket and stay aboard the ISS. The trips and spacewalks are being organised by Space Adventures of Vienna, Virginia, US, in conjunction with the Russian Federal Space Agency and the Rocket Space Corporation Energia.

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Under the terms of the transaction, AMD will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of ATI for a combination of $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million shares of AMD common stock, based on the number of shares of ATI common stock outstanding on July 21, 2006. All outstanding options and RSUs of ATI will be assumed. Based upon the closing price of AMD common stock on July 21, 2006 of $18.26 a share, the consideration for each outstanding share of ATI common stock would be $20.47, comprised of $16.40 of cash and 0.2229 shares of AMD common stock.

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Bush's decision represents an unusually direct and unprecedented White House intervention into an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal affairs office at Justice, according to administration officials and legal experts. It forced OPR to abandon its investigation of the role played by Justice Department officials in authorizing and monitoring the controversial NSA eavesdropping effort. "Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels," chief lawyer H. Marshall Jarrett wrote in a memorandum released Tuesday. "In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation."

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"We've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now," writes Yahoo Music blogger Ian Rogers. "DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway."

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Internet Explorer users who visited a Web page containing this ad and whose IE was not equipped with the WMF patch would not get that warning. Rather, their machines would silently download a Trojan horse program that installs junk software in the PurityScan/ClickSpring family of adware. This stuff bombards the user with pop-up ads and tracks their Web usage. Only a little more than half of the anti-virus programs used at anti-virus testing service AV-Test.org flagged the various programs that the Trojan tried to download as malicious or suspicious.

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The Senate bill's principal sponsor, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, who recently survived a brush with cancer, was joined by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, a physician who argued that Bush's policy is too restrictive. "I am pro-life, but I disagree with the president's decision to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act," Frist said in a statement. "Given the potential of this research and the limitations of the existing lines eligible for federally funded research, I think additional lines should be made available."

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Red Spot Junior has made its closest approach to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, but the pass has not visibly diminished the strength of the smaller storm. Nonetheless, astronomers are maintaining their close watching on the two storms. Red Spot Jr, also called Oval BA, made its closest approach to the Great Red Spot on about 15 July when the edges of the storms were about 3500 kilometres apart. They will probably completely pass one another by the end of July.

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No doubt leery of all the problems with MySpace.com, Wal-Mart's site disqualifies any video with "materials that are profane, disruptive, unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially or ethnically-motivated, or otherwise objectionable." That's why "pending approval" notes dominate pages already created and content is limited to a headline, a fashion quiz and a favorite song. Wal-Mart also plans to e-mail the parents of every registered teen, giving them the discretion to pull a submission.

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Information transfer requires actual physical connection to the Memory Spot and Taub says they designed it that way. "We don't want to increase the range of contact," he said. "We think it's just right." Memory Spot technology works independently of Internet connection. It is meant for physical data transmission, much like RFID, although another fundamental difference is that the data on Memory Spot is rewriteable whereas the majority of RFID chips are read-only.

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Nintendo of America's "New Super Mario Bros" grabbed the No. 1 spot on the U.S. video game sales chart in June for the second month in a row with 453,000 units sold, according to market research firm NPD Group. The title, for the Nintendo DS portable player, is the latest version of the iconic game starring Italian plumber Mario and his brother Luigi.

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Throughout the commission's opaque process, it has never been able to identify quantifiable consumer harm. On the contrary, evidence provided to regulators and the court, as well as anecdotal market data, strongly suggests that both the markets for Media Player and server technologies actually thrive. Much to the commission's chagrin, consumers and competitors have reaped tremendous benefits wholly independent of the commission's policing authority. That complex, technological markets can flourish without European Commission intervention causes the regulatory body immense consternation. Thankfully, it has had little or no role to play in the design of IT products to meet consumer demand.

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"BetOnSports.com and other gambling Web sites operated by Gary Kaplan and his co-defendants offered gamblers in the United States illegal wagering on professional and college football and basketball," said a copy of the indictment seen by Reuters. The FBI has instructed four telephone companies to stop providing services to BetOnSports, the company said, citing the U.S. Department of Justice.