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crimeandpunishment writes "The odds of Congress passing legislation to legalize and tax online gaming are probably no better than those of filling an inside straight, but some lawmakers are pushing for it anyway, hoping to lay the foundation for future passage. At a hearing Wednesday, one lawmaker cited numbers from industry analysts that Americans bet nearly $100 billion a year on the Internet, generating $5 billion for offshore operators. He said laws to prevent online gaming are no more effective than Prohibition was to alcohol."

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MojoKid writes "Google's own I/O conference in California is wrapping up today, but not before the company goes out with a serious bang. Google just announced something that has been rumored for a while now: Google TV. Basically, Google is taking the Apple TV concept, but going way overboard by introducing apps, screen customization and channel searching. Following Google's own announcement, Intel stepped in to provide some backbone to the story. Google is obviously using the big players to move Google TV forward, with Intel, DISH Network, Best Buy and Adobe firmly on board. Google TV itself is based on Android, runs the Google Chrome browser, and will allow users to access all of their usual TV channels as well as a world of Internet and cloud-based information and applications, including Adobe Flash based content."

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ZipK writes "After a few days of bad publicity, Apple's reversed its No-Cash Purchase policy, explaining that the policy was originally implemented to limit the number of iPad's an individual could buy during the introductory period of short supply. Now that supply has caught up with demand — and the story has hit front pages and gained national attention — Apple's reversed their policy. And they've taken the opportunity to put a bow on the story by giving the formerly scorned Diane Campbell a free iPad."

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Dr. Eggman writes "Physorg.com brings us news of a synthetic genome, produced by the J. Craig Venter Institute, being used in an existing bacterial cell for the first time. Using a combination of biological hosts, the technique produces short strings of DNA by machine which inserting them into yeast to be stitched together via DNA-repair enzymes. The medium sequences are passed into E. Coli and back into yeast. After three rounds, a genome of three million base pairs was produced." (More below.)

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