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SAN FRANCISCO--CORRECTION: Right now, if you buy an energy-efficient dishwasher, utilities like PG&E will give you a cash rebate.

They may do the same for energy-efficient PCs.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium of tech companies that is trying to get the industry and consumers to adopt energy-efficient components, has started to explore the idea of direct rebates with utilities, said Erik Teetzel, a program manager at Google during a meeting at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in San Francisco. Google and Intel are the driving forces behind Climate Savers. (correction: we spelled his name wrong. … Read more

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of these battles here and vote on the Final Four matchups here.

Get it now! Your updated, printer-friendly tournament bracket.

This is why they call it Late September Lack-of-Sanity. Upsets, upsets, upsets were the theme of last week's nonviolent robot vote-battles, and only two No. 1 seeds are still in the mix.

Which nonviolent robots will win their division finals and go on to the Final Four? Vote for the winners right now; you have until Sept. 23 to vote on these Elite 1000 matchups.

The battle for net neutrality might be in its infancy, and already we're seeing casualties. There have been murmurs that Comcast has been capping bandwidth usage on its all-you-can eat high-speed subscribers that have simply used more of their connection than Comcast is comfortable with, along with evidence the ISP has been monkeying with people's BitTorrent usage. Last week GameDaily BIZ got in touch with Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation who confirmed that the company was indeed capping monthly downloads of its "excessive" users.

The actual ballpark figure Douglas gave GameDaily BIZ was "… Read more

Jason Matusow (Microsoft's interoperability guru) has a swipe at me in his blog today. He emailed me to tell me he had done it. I appreciate the courtesy, and I also appreciate the post. Jason has a way of dismantling someone's arguments in a very polite, but complete way.

Unfortunately, in this case, he didn't dismantle my argument. He supported it.… Read more

Solid-state drives are beginning to pop in more and more and more systems, but that doesn't mean the traditional hard drive with its quaint spinning platters doesn't have a few tricks up its sleeve. Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in England think they've come up with a new read-head sensor design that can read more densely packed data on a disk thanks to something called the magneto-electric effect. (Today's drives rely on the magneto-resistance effect, if you're scoring at home.) While the sensor on your hard drive would have trouble reading anything more than … Read more

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of these battles here and vote on the Elite Eight matchups here.

Get it now! Your full-size, printer-friendly tournament bracket.

And then there were 16.

These robots don't want to fight. That's why you have to pick the winners. After two weeks of "battling" it out, our field of nonviolent robots is down to 16 competitors.

Voting is open from now until Sept. 17. Check back then for the results of this round and vote on the Elite Eight matchups.

Some large corporations now have a million square feet worth of floor space dedicated to data centers.

It's a factoid that Peter Van Deventer, CEO of SynapSense and a former Intel exec, likes to fling out. The company, which evolved from research at UC Davis, makes software and sensors for mapping out the weather in data centers. The sensors measure temperature, pressure and other environmental factors on a continuous basis.

Data center owners can then take this data and tweak their air conditioning and cooling systems. Soon, the SynapSense's technology will also be able to automatically control the … Read more

Reports of users being temporarily cut off from BlackBerry service have been popping up on the Web.

BlackBerry users who are also customers of Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon complained of slow e-mail or completely interrupted mobile data service. Corporate customers of Research In Motion did not seem to be affected.

Silicon Alley Insider got this statement from RIM: "Some customers using BlackBerry Internet Service experienced a delay this afternoon in sending or receiving e-mail. The issue has since been resolved and no messages were lost. RIM continues to investigate the matter. Service for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers was not … Read more

Facing criticism over its privacy practices, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has opted to abandon a massive new data-mining project intended to flag patterns and pinpoint relationships that indicate terrorist threats.

According to an Associated Press report, the department "quietly" suspended a program known as ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement) after federal government auditors issued a report this spring dogging the agency for failing to assess the privacy risks associated with the scheme. ADVISE was one of a dozen data-mining projects under way at Homeland Security, according to the AP report.

Homeland Security'… Read more