Stories about: Hatch

A NASA employee recently learned the hard way that federal workers can get into legal hot water if they blog or send e-mails about political issues while on the job. And others on the government's payroll may soon learn similar lessons.

Any employee can get in trouble for personal blogging on company time, but US government workers, as one NASA employee has discovered, can get into a special kind of legal trouble if they also write about politics. They risk violating a 1939 US law called the Hatch Act, which requires federal employees to keep their jobs and political activity separate.

As we enter the simmering heart of summer (it says here), most camcorder enthusiasts would rather be swimming in the water than shooting on land. On the one hand, beach and poolside frolics offer a perfect opportunity for memorable home movies, but on the other, you naturally want to be part of the fun yourself. In an attempt to address this shoreline dilemma, Panasonic is set to release the company's first waterproof video camera; unimaginatively dubbed the SDR-SW20. (Personally, we would have gone for 'Shark H2O cam', or something.)

MacBook Air users might need to move their new ultra-thin laptops to keep bits moving to and fro, Apple said in a note on its support site, just one of several problems posted now that the new portable has started shipping.

In the compact camera space, Olympus is well established as one of the brands to beat; however, as a relatively new entrant to the SLR market, it is here the company has been struggling to get a foothold. Olympus's latest model, the E-3, is targeted at 'professionals and experienced amateurs' but it sits at a price point that has it competing firmly with Canon's 40D and Nikon's D300. Fortunately Olympus has made some major improvements with this model, and the E-3 is without a doubt the best D-SLR they have released.

Solid-state drives may replace hard drives as future storage devices on computers, but not until their price plummets.

Google's proposed merger with online advertising server DoubleClick would create a giant that would control a huge portion of online advertising and hurt the Internet, opponents of the deal have told US lawmakers.

Don't expect much from mobile TV.

Not so long ago, the only way to see whether Linux would run on a particular PC was to install the OS on its hard drive. Times change. Nowadays, many so-called live CD versions of Linux boot and run solely from a CD-ROM. Ubuntu Linux, our 2005 World Class winner for Best Linux Distribution, has a live CD version available for download. You may be asking yourself, "How do I download a CD-ROM?"

A group of technology trade groups, consumer advocates and lawyers filed more than 20 briefs Tuesday in support of peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software vendors facing a U.S. Supreme Court showdown with the movie industry later this month.

A US federal appeals court ruled in favor of peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software makers Thursday, stating that the companies behind the Grokster and Morpheus services are not liable for copyright infringement due to the actions of their users.