If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house. That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday. There was absolutely no way ...

Volunteering at church. Working part-time at a bookstore. Selling real estate. All are worthwhile pursuits, but not exactly what Peter Marshall thought he'd be doing after he graduated from Vanderbilt Law School this spring. Particularly since he received a coveted offer last September to join a white-shoe Chicago firm, Kirkland & Ellis. Then the economic crisis set in, and as legal work across the country has dried up, many large and mid-sized firms have turned to a surprising ...

Good news is relative. A Dow of 10,000 looks awfully sweet right now, for example, but it would've seemed like a disaster back when daily closes were closer to 14,000. That's the kind of pick-your-perspective choice offered by a new paper published in the journal Science about the catastrophic rise in sea levels we could expect if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet continues to melt away due to global warming. According to a study by a team of ...

The European Commission handed down its ruling in a landmark anti-trust case against Intel Wednesday, fining the computer chip giant a record $1.45 billion for abusing its dominant position in the computer processing unit (CPU) market. The ruling, which Intel plans to appeal, may have future implications for American companies accused of "jurisdiction shopping" to avoid anti-trust verdicts against them, says CNN's Jim Boulden, who explains the basics of the Intel case. The commission has hit Intel with the ...

The European Commission found leading computer chipmaker Intel guilty Wednesday of violating European anti-trust rules and ordered that it pay a fine of 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion). It is the largest fine the commission has ever imposed, said Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for competition. Intel has said it plans to appeal the decision. The commission found Intel abused its dominant market position in the market for computer chips known as the x86 computer processing unit (CPU), Kroes said. ...

You get a quick message from a friend on Facebook, click on the link and absentmindedly log in to a website pretending to be Facebook. This is what happened last week, when scammers unleashed a new attack on Facebook, collecting users' log-in information and passwords and pilfering victims' "friends" lists to target the next dopes. Listen up, people: Although Facebook has a reputation for Internet security — it identified the scam within hours, and the ripple effects only lasted for a couple days — at 200 million ...

Mac computers are known for their near-immunity to malicious computer programs that plague PCs. But that may be changing somewhat, according to computer security researchers. It seems that as sleek Mac computers become more popular, they're also more sought-after targets for the authors of harmful programs. "The bad guys generally go toward the biggest target, what will get them the biggest bang for their buck," said Kevin Haley, a director of security response at Symantec. Until recently, ...

The FBI for the first time has placed an animal rights activist on the bureau's "Most Wanted Terrorists" list. The FBI announced Tuesday the addition of Daniel Andreas San Diego to the list, hoping a burst of international publicity associated with the move will help investigators find him after six years on the run. San Diego, 31, may appear to be out of place on a terrorist list with familiar names like al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and ...

At 2 a.m., most workers are asleep in their beds, blissfully unaware that their alarm clocks will sound in a few short hours. But for 41 percent of Americans this is the time of day is when they are most productive, according to a 2005 poll by the National Sleep Foundation. You can probably pick these folks out of your own office -- they're your co-workers who slouch into work, never a minute early but often several late, bleary-eyed and ...

The Conficker worm is finally doing something--updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday. Researchers were analyzing the code of the software that is being dropped onto infected computers but suspect that it is a keystroke logger or some other program designed to steal sensitive data off the machine, said David Perry, global director of security education at Trend Micro. The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding ...