Computers

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

The first mission by a private company to the International Space Station was aborted before dawn Saturday at Cape Canaveral, Fla., when computers detected an anomaly in one of the rocket's engines and automatically shut down the launch sequence. The countdown forSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, was flawless until about 4:55 a.m. EDT when, at the last second, the rocket engines briefly lit up and then went dark. "Three, two, one, zero and liftoff," announced NASA commentator George Diller before he realized what had happened.

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

Yahoo Chief Executive Scott Thompson is expected to step down Sunday after dissident shareholders called attention to his apparent misrepresentation of his college credentials. News of the impending departure was credited to multiple unnamed sources by the Wall Street Journal's technology blog AllThingsD. In an email sent to Yahoo employees last week, Thompson, 54, apologized to workers at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet company. "The board is reviewing the issue and I will provide whatever they need from me," Thompson wrote.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

UCLA's neuropsychiatric hospital has banned all cellphones and laptop computers after a patient posted group photos of other patients on a social networking website, officials confirmed Monday. Dr. Thomas Strouse, medical director of the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, said in a statement that the decision was part of "UCLA Health System's ongoing efforts to enhance patient privacy and confidentiality in compliance with California's patient rights law."

California no longer allows dumping of discarded televisions and computer monitors in landfills because most contain lead and other toxic materials, making them hazardous. There is no state or national program for disposing of electronic waste, so residents looking to get rid of a monitor or television should notify their city governments or local waste haulers. Most cities have periodic hazardous-waste collection events in which they take large trash bins to neighborhoods.

In 1973, at age 58, John Henry Martin suffered a severe heart attack, the result of a viral infection he developed after cutting himself while clearing his property in Cold Springs Harbor, N.Y. He was dead on arrival at the hospital but physicians revived him. Then, as he recalls it, after 30 days in intensive care, he was sent home to die.

For 11 years, Nathan McGuinness ran a successful visual effects house in California. His Santa Monica  company, Asylum Visual Effects, created the World War II submarine battle scene in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the flying dragon straddled by Nicolas Cage in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and the bionic anatomy of Sam Worthington's character in "Terminator Salvation. " But the impressive credits, along with an Academy Award nomination, couldn't keep his business afloat.

Old computers never die--they just pile up in the garage. ROBERT BUTLER Buena Park

JetBlue Airways blamed a computer glitch for an 18-month-old girl being removed from a plane in Fort Lauderdale , Fla., because the carrier's employees thought she was on the no-fly list. The girl and her parents were removed after the flight bound for Newark, N.J., had boarded, media reports say. In a statement made Thursday, JetBlue said it was looking into the incident that happened Tuesday. It also said its employees "followed appropriate protocols" and included an apology to the family.

A few years ago, my local school district invested in software designed to teach students better writing skills. The computer program - without the help of a teacher - would rate their work on a scale of 1 to 6 and give them feedback on the needed improvements, such as fixing grammatical errors or expanding sentence fragments into full sentences. The students could watch their scores rise as they made corrections, actively engaged in the process of learning new English usage skills, while their teachers were freed from the chore of reading every draft.

David Coppedge's co-workers at one of the nation's most prominent scientific institutions didn't have to guess his theory as to how the universe was created. He offered to lend them DVDs advocating intelligent design. An evangelical Christian, he also asked that the holiday potluck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory be renamed the Christmas potluck and sparred with at least one colleague over their divergent views on Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. Coppedge's zest for hot-button topics rankled some co-workers at the facility in La Cañada Flintridge, who complained about him to management.

With all of the chatter around Google Drive and the like, you may be wondering whether you should have a cloud drive somewhere. Some people live blissful digitally disconnected lives -- free of smartphones, free of Facebook, devoid of a digital photo album with snapshots of everything from their baby to their breakfast, no tangle of charging cables, no bytes of data to transfer or tap. But if you're sending yourself emails just to get a...

With the advent of Google Drive, we talk about cloud computing as if the bits and bytes of our lives are stored somewhere up in the air, but, really, the "clouds" are very terrestrial. What's more up in the air are the laws that govern who can access your stuff and how. Originally a way for geeks to explain to the rest of us the notion of remote servers storing and serving up content, cloud computing can be defined several different ways, depending on whom you ask. In some ways, even email is a form of cloud computing.

Personal computers at home and in the office will soon be displaced by the tablet as the primary computing device, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Tablet sales are expected to grow sharply from 56 million in 2011 to 375 million in 2016, according to the report. Given that most users keep their tablets for three years, there will probably be 760 million tablets in use globally by 2016, said Frank Gillette, principal analyst on Forrester's business technology futures team.

A paradigm shift may be coming to the digital lifestyle. Instead of the PC being the center of the personal computing universe, consumers will be opting for tablets as their primary computing device and relying on cloud storage to access their content across their devices, according to a new report. "This burgeoning market is set to disrupt the personal computing device and OS markets," says the  report from Forrester Research on the future of computing. Instead of serving as a supplement to a desktop or laptop computer, the report said, these burgeoning cloud services will play such an integral role in the connected future that consumers will first choose a service, then the compatible device as the focus shifts from device to personal content storage services.

The much hyped and eagerly awaited Raspberry Pi -- a $35 computer the size of a credit card -- is finally moving out of the testing room and into consumers' hands. If you were one of the lucky 10,000 people who were able to pre-order the first run of the Raspberry Pi back in March, you should be receiving your mini-computer by April 20. And by mini, we mean miniature and stripped down. The Raspberry Pi computer is built around the ARM chip that is used in most mobile phones.