Students at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus are complaining about a bill passed July 11 by the U.S. House of Representatives that would ban online gambling.

In particular, the students object to the fact that the bill, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, HR 4411, would  ban  playing poker on the Internet. The Senate has not yet scheduled action on the measure.

"I think the Internet is nice—the only place where you can find millions of players at all hours of the day," one student told the Daily Collegian.

Card Player Magazine recently noted the...

The Internet2 high-speed networking consortium has formally awarded a contract to Level 3 Communications to build a national fiber-optic network for higher education, the consortium announced today.

Internet2 previously had announced its intention of working with Level 3 on the project, which has the working name Newnet. The network is scheduled to start operating by late next year, when Internet2’s leases on high-speed lines used in its current network, Abilene, expire. Terms of the contract were not disclosed. —Vincent Kiernan

Officials from academe, industry, and the Bush administration told senators Wednesday that Congress should spend more than $1-billion in the next fiscal year on supercomputing projects in various federal agencies.

“High-performance computing has been – and will continue to be – a cornerstone in the government’s networking and information technology R&D portfolio,” Simon Szykman, director of the National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development, said in prepared testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation, and Competitiveness.

“National interest, academia, and the high-performance-computing community are joined at the hip,” testified Joseph Lombardo, director of the National Supercomputing Center for Energy...

The Japanese government plans to use one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to produce forecasts of the weather 30 years from now. The project, scheduled to start next year, will rely on the Earth Simulator, a computer in Japan that can process more than 35 trillion calculations every second.

The Associated Press reported that the project’s annual budget could be about $26-million.

Japanese officials hope that the forecasts could be useful in disaster preparedness, such as by indicating the areas most prone to weather disasters like hurricanes. —Vincent Kiernan

Later this month, computer scientists from around the world will gather in Boston to pit poker-playing computer programs against one another, in a quest to advance the frontiers of artificial-intelligence research.

Some of the programs try to incorporate the poker-playing rules of experts. But two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have taken a different route: Their program, called GS2, tries to compute all the possible sets of cards that could be held by opponents and then develops strategies accordingly.

Although there are as many as a billion billion different combinations of hands in a poker game, GS2 lumps together hands that are similar and that are “strategically equivalent,” resulting in 2,465 different groups of hands that the program has to track.

GS2 was developed by Tuomas Sandholm, director of Carnegie Mellon’s...

Academic and industry leaders from Ohio pushed a high-performance computing bill called the Blue Collar Computing and Business Assistance Act of 2006, S. 3527, at a forum today on Capitol Hill.

The legislation, which was introduced last week, would provide up to $25-million a year for five years to establish five supercomputing centers across the country.

The centers would help small businesses and manufacturers use high-performance computing to expedite the design and testing of new products.

University computer scientists and researchers would help operate the centers, said David Barber, director of information technology program for the Ohio Board of Regents.

In Maryland, candidates for governor are showing up on Facebook, according to The Washington Post. The two Democratic candidates, Martin O'Malley and Douglas M. Duncan, list their favorite movies and music -- but to what end? It's a bit of a mystery. The 43-year-old Mr. O'Malley, the mayor of Baltimore, who plays in a Celtic-rock band, seems most at home on Facebook, with his still-youthful tastes: He cites U2 and his own band as his favorite music. Mr. Duncan apparently prefers politics in both work and play: His favorite movies include Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the Kevin Kline comedy Dave.

Would any...

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has created a Web site on fair use.

Called The Fair Use Network, the site says it attempts to alleviate the "mass of confusion for artists, scholars, journalists, bloggers, and everyone else who contributes to culture and political debate."

The site guides people on what to do if they get a letter from a copyright owner demanding that they cease and desist from making use of the owner's work. And the site also explains how much people can borrow, quote or copy from another's work. 

The University of Abertay, in Scotland, is offering Britain's first degree in computer hacking.

Of course, the university isn't seeking to foster cybercrime. Just the contrary: University officials hope that graduates will be able to find and fix vulnerabilities in corporate computer systems. (The Sunday Times)