The moon is about to become crowded.

In the next few years a slew of countries, including China, India, and Japan, are looking to put unmanned probes on the lunar surface. But more unprecedented are the 26 teams currently racing to win the Google Lunar X Prize—a contest that will award $20 million to the first private company to land a robot on the lunar surface, travel a third of a mile, and send back a high-definition image before 2015.

With all this activity, NASA is somewhat nervous about its own lunar history. The agency recently released a set of guidelines that aim to preserve important heritage locations such as the Apollo landing and Ranger impact sites. The report, available since 2011 to members of the private spaceflight community, was publicly posted at NASA’s website and officially accepted by the X Prize foundation on May 24.

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When Unity was first unveiled in 2010, it was introduced as a new graphical frontend for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Canonical later brought Unity to the desktop, making it the cornerstone of the company's Linux usability enhancement efforts. Ubuntu 11.04 (released last year) was the first version that shipped with Unity as the standard environment on the desktop.

Unity has come a long way since Canonical and the Ubuntu community began working to iron out its rough edges on the desktop. The performance and stability issues that afflicted earlier versions have largely been remedied. It was already in great shape back in October when version 11.10 was released, but it has benefited from further refinement.

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Big box retailers have been somewhat less adaptive to these customers’ tastes. It has been a long road for Eurogames publishers to get their titles stocked in the Walmarts of the world; in fact it was only just this last year that I first saw Settlers of Catan on sale at my local Target. I can remember an instance, during my holiday shopping, where a little boy in such a store picked Catan up and walked it over to his parents. They all looked a bit puzzled by the description on the box and eventually put it back.

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Planetary science is a fast-moving field, especially in this era of Mars rovers, orbiting mappers, and long-lived exploratory probes. Even ground-based telescopes have made astounding discoveries, thanks to relatively new optical techniques. Our Solar System—and exoplanetary systems—have been opened to remote exploration, and intriguing discoveries are happening at an astonishing rate.

Knowing all this, I was excited to pick up the new paperback edition of Lives of the Planets, Richard Corfield's 2007 book on planetary science and the exploration of the Solar System. As I expected, a lot of the latest and greatest findings simply could not be included, making the book seem a trifle outdated. While a few new bits of data (including the loss of the Spirit rover) did make it into the paperback, these updates were spotty at best. I don't wish to criticize the book on these grounds, however, since a lot of new science has emerged since 2007.

That doesn't mean there aren't grounds to criticize it, though. Lives of the Planets has far more serious problems that make me hesitant to recommend the book.

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You'll see this message if you visit the BBC website for the first time since the regulations went into place.

The law is the UK's version of a larger "e-privacy directive" ordered by the European Union. While the date for this law to go into effect has been on the books for a year, the BBC says that most websites will not be in compliance by this weekend, and even the British government isn't quite up to speed yet. "Last week the government admitted that most of its sites would not comply with the new rules in time," the BBC reported. "It said it was 'working to achieve compliance at the earliest possible date.'"

Most Ars readers will know that cookies are commonplace on the Internet. Websites that want to tailor ad-space to their users, or want to save a user's viewing preferences for the next session, or want to keep items in a user's shopping cart as they navigate away from checkout to find more items, will all require the use of cookies saved on that user's computer. But a backlash against tracking cookies, especially from third-party clients that can store a user's browsing history for long periods of time, spurred the British government to require consent when tracking methods are used on websites based in Britain.

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"We can turn any surface into a 3D touchscreen," explained Anup Chathoth, one third of Munich-based startup Ubi Interactive. Such claims typically conjure up images of floating Minority Report-style touchscreens made from curved glass, but that's exactly what this three-person team has developed.

Ubi's system uses a  Microsoft Kinect sensor to turn a regular projector into a multi-touch PC projection system, where regular PowerPoints, web pages, even games no longer require clickers or wireless mice to be navigated. By using the motion-tracking and depth-perception cameras in the Kinect, Ubi is able to detect where a user is pointing, swiping and tapping on a surface and interpret these gestures as if they were being performed on a giant touchscreen or interactive whiteboard.

All well and good in principle, but does it actually work? Wired.co.uk visited Ubi Interactive at Microsoft's Westlake offices in Seattle this week for a hands-on demonstration. And the answer was a resounding yes.

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Earlier this week, our own Gaming Editor Kyle Orland reported on Diablo III’s recent problems with servers, programming, and notably, post-launch fixes to the game’s character skill building. Keeping all technical problems in mind, how good is the Diablo III experience?

Over at the Ars OpenForum's “Perpetual Diablo 3 Thread! GAME IS LIVE!”, readers have been discussing the title since early May, just before the game launched, and have evaluated the game from all sorts of angles in more than 3,900 posts.

The thread begins with a useful set of Diablo III resources that Jebus H Cripes posted for all players, which includes the Ars battle tag list, server status page, known issues list and more. But if you still haven’t decided if you want to invest in the game, the discussions inside the forum add some insight in addition to our review of the game, including updated thoughts on how the game has evolved since that review first ran.

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Robert Harvey asks:

Occasionally I see questions about edge cases on Stack Overflow that are easily answered by the likes of Jon Skeet or Eric Lippert—experts who demonstrate a deep knowledge of a particular language and its many intricacies. Here's an example of this from Lippert's MSDN blog:

You might think that in order to use a foreach loop, the collection you are iterating over must implement IEnumerable or IEnumerable. But as it turns out, that is not actually a requirement. What is required is that the type of the collection must have a public method called GetEnumerator, and that must return some type that has a public property getter called Current and a public method MoveNext that returns a bool. If the compiler can determine that all of those requirements are met then the code is generated to use those methods. Only if those requirements are not met do we check to see if the object implements IEnumerable or IEnumerable.

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Not many octogenarians remain active enough to host a talkshow, but not many octogenarians have Stan Lee's resume.

Lee's a name that needs no identifiers. Along with Jack Kirby, he co-created an unreal number of iconic superheroes for Marvel Comics: X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Thor, the Hulk, superspy Nick Fury, and currently in-vogue villain Loki. (Editor's note: by no means is that list complete). Lee served as a head editor at Marvel and became the brand's primary ambassador over the years. He was one of the first individuals pushing comics to movie studios. Without Lee, it's safe to say The Avengers wouldn't be smashing box office records. It wouldn't even exist.

His legacy is what makes this most recent project interesting—going on 90-years-old, Stan Lee still does regular work. His latest project, Cocktails with Stan, is a weekly Web series in which Mr. Marvel (along with cohost Jenna Busch) interviews notable names from the world of pop culture. The series premiered two weeks ago with Jane Espenson (writer for Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, and more) and Colin Ferguson (star of Eureka) joined Lee last week. New episodes appear each Friday.

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I love buying gadgets, and I'm not one to deprive myself. My house has just about every piece of equipment I've ever lusted after, from a Mac Mini hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display to a Sony Bravia 3D TV connected to my PS3. I have a MacBook Air, PS Vita, iPad, Nintendo 3DS, Kindle touch—the list goes on.

I wouldn't want to do without any of them. But out of all my gadgets and computers, there's one I respect above all others, and it's an old piece of junk.

The Dell Latitude D620 pictured above has been a part of my life since mid-2007 when IDG, my previous employer, provisioned it to me to replace an older PC that died during a business trip. Running Windows XP, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 100GB of storage, and 2GB of RAM, the exceptionally sturdy laptop was a damn good computer—for a while. It eventually slowed down, becoming an unusable mess and a malware magnet that had to be repaired and cleaned more times than I like to remember. And with a battery that lasted 30 minutes to an hour if I was lucky, it was not ideal for my schedule involving frequent work travel.

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woodleywonderworks

A New Lease on 800MHz

For Sprint, the FCC changed the rules that govern how the 800MHz band of the spectrum is used. Sprint holds rights to broadcast in those wavelengths, but hasn't been able to efficiently build out more advanced networks due to rules that require certain spacing in between each channel Sprint uses in the 800MHz range.

Sprint obtained the rights to these wavelengths when it purchased Nextel in 2004, and the company originally used the spectrum to continue Nextel's iDen network, which allowed for "push-to-talk", walkie-talkie like service. But that same year, the FCC started restricting how the telco could use each individual channel on its band, meaning Sprint could keep the iDEN system in place, but was severely restricted in adapting the band for new network technologies. The FCC meant for these restrictions to prevent interference with licensees like firefighters and police stations that used the 700MHz spectrum for public safety purposes. The regulator even tried to push Sprint out of the spectrum entirely, but eventually granted the company a temporary stay on that decision.

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• Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s
  Celebs, comics, and—at times—computing itself helped sell the young technology.
• No-cost desktop software development is dead on Windows 8
  You won't be able to use the free Visual Studio Express to develop desktop apps.
• Windows 8 will integrate, include Adobe Flash
  When is a plugin not a plugin? Why, when it's integrated, of course.
• Kazaa code rises from ashes to help ISPs block pirated material for profit
  ISPs will also be able to inject their own contextual ads into search results.
• Puny humans too slow for Windows 8's high-speed booting
  Now you'll choose to enter the Windows boot menu before you reboot, not after.
• Anatomy of a hack: 6 separate bugs needed to bring down Google browser (Updated)
  A teenaged hacker named Pinkie Pie breaks out of Chrome's security sandbox.
• New Jersey mayor, son, arrested on charges they nuked recall website
  The father and son used a low tech hack—password recovery—to take down the site.
• Smartphone hijacking vulnerability affects AT&T, 47 other carriers
  Malicious data is injected by tricking firewalls into leaking sensitive data.
• Hands-on: GitHub for Windows takes the pain out of using git
  Get up and running with git without once having to use the command line.
• Business world gets a new way to monitor employee text messages
  Service will let consumers—and employers—store text messages in the cloud.

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My rant about the continuing gameplay tweaks to Diablo III generated the most reader interest by far this week, with many people coming down on both sides of the post-release "hotfix" debate. We also looked into the political implications of drone warfare through the lens of Black Ops 2, studied some of Activision's internal e-mails during the Infinity Ward debacle, and wrote a couple of stories regarding the impact of video game delays for both consumers and publishers.

• Why is Diablo III still a work in progress?
  How post-release patching leads to you playing a broken game.
• The politics of Black Ops 2's rogue drones
  Studio head says game examines "consequences" of rapid tech change.
• ITC judge recommends import ban on Microsoft's Xbox
  In a crazy tangle of patent disputes, an ITC judge rules in favor of Motorola.
• Rising costs, tensions in Activision-Infinity Ward e-mails
  Documents show Activision execs discussing how to cut Modern Warfare devs loose.
• Why Take Two is OK with game release delays
  Producing fewer, higher quality releases means no schedule. "Slippage" is OK.
• Early 2013 becoming new "holiday season" for some game developers
  Waiting for the new year will give titles added visibility to gamers.
• Leap Motion promises Kinect-beating 3D tracking
  $70 device tracks fingers, objects with sub-millimeter accuracy.
• Blizzard delays Diablo III real-money auctions indefinitely
  The company also responds to concerns over account hacking.
• Kingdoms of Amalur developer lays off entire staff
  Rhode Island officials step down amid funding calamity.
• Building a sci-fi TV show through an MMO (and vice versa)
  Syfy and Trion's Defiance tries for real-time "transmedia" integration

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• Where did dogs come from? It turns out we don't really know. 
  Most of those ancient-looking breeds aren't that old.

• SpaceX Dragon takes flight.
  The spacecraft soared into the pre-dawn sky this morning, on its way to the ISS.

• Coolest jobs in tech: decoding life, touring solar systems.
  When you run IT for cutting-edge scientists, no job is ordinary.

• Dragon orbiter climbs to the International Space Station.
  It will approach the ISS shortly after midnight Pacific Time.

• 2012's solar eclipse in pictures. 
  Views from across the globe, including a couple we shot ourselves.

• Disentangling the wave-particle duality in the double-slit experiment.
  Photons act like they go through two paths, even when we know which they took.

• The state of particle physics—a report from Pheno 2012. 
  The Standard Model isn't perfect, but the alternatives now look worse.

• Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done. 
  Some bogus arguments take on a life of their own.

• Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome. 
  Dunning-Kruger study today: The uninformed aren't as doomed as the Web suggests.

• Drugs give the immune system a mistaken sense of self. 
  Researchers identify how some small molecules can set off an immune response.

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Our top Apple news from the last week included a pretty diverse group of topics. They ranged from the state of IPv6 in Apple products to an interview with Apple designer Jonathan Ive, why IBM bans Siri in the workplace (and why others are likely to follow), and Apple's reaction to the Department of Justice's lawsuit over e-book prices. We even discussed Apple's planned "UFO" campus. If you need to catch up, you've come to the right place:

• The future is forever: the state of IPv6 in the Apple world
  The new Internet is upon us. Apple has work to do but there's no reason to fear.
• Apple designer Jonathan Ive "winced" over some Apple design choices
  And he wasn't inspired by a samurai sword, either.
• Next-gen iPhone expected to sport 16:9 display aspect ratio
  Would changing the iPhone from 3:2 to 16:9 throw developers for a loop?
• Report details Tim Cook's changes at Apple, for better or worse
  Apple is still Apple, but apparently more open, and more corporate.
• IBM's Siri ban highlights companies' privacy, trade secret challenges
  Apple's Siri is persona non grata at IBM, and it's just the beginning.
• Room for improvement? Apple's options for the next iPhone's camera
  The iPhone's camera is already pretty capable, so where can it go from here?
• Hands on with Glassboard 2.0 for iOS: simple, private group sharing
  Introducing sharing and collaboration for the boardroom, or some friends.
• Apple says DoJ "sides with monopoly, rather than competition"
  Apple takes credit for breaking Amazon's "nearly absolute" control over e-books.
• Hands-on: Yahoo offers sync and search features in new Axis Web browser
  Axis is available for iOS and through browser add-ons on the desktop.
• Apple looking for neighborly feedback on its UFO-like "Campus 2"
  Apple plans to occupy the new campus by 2015, but no outsiders will be allowed.

Have a great weekend everyone! If you're in the US and get Memorial Day off, enjoy the extra time off and try not to cook any of your iDevices on the grill while you're out reveling in the weather.

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• Senator admits: SOPA "really did pose some risk to the Internet"
  A SOPA/PIPA backer recognizes some bits of the bills went too far.
• Oracle v. Google: no patent infringement found
  Google's damages payout looks to be minimal.
• Oracle v. Google jury foreman reveals: Oracle wasn't even close
  Some jurors felt Oracle's IP claims might not be in the public's best interest.
• Key "rickrolling" video taken down due to copyright claim (Updated)
  You can still roll, but you'll be Rick-less—thanks to AVG Technologies.
• Supreme Court declines to hear $675,000 file-swapping case
  Boston student Joel Tenenbaum may be in for a second federal trial.
• New York legislation would ban anonymous online speech
  Sites would have to remove such comments unless posters agree to attach names.
• Oklahoma State University tries to patent a steak
  OSU wants to get meat packers to license the right to produce, sell steaks.
• Supreme Court orders do-over on key software patent ruling
  Justices wonder if online ad schemes are patentable inventions.
• Google names names on copyright takedowns; Microsoft is #1
  Google reveals the 250,000 takedown requests it gets each week.
• European regulators offer Google chance to settle antitrust violations
  Google disagrees with EC's findings, says online competition is way up.

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For many first-time game developers, selling 1.3 million copies of their first game in 90 days would be a major accomplishment. For Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios, though, that sales performance wasn't enough to pay back sizable loan guarantees from the state of Rhode Island, or to prevent the company from having to lay off all 379 staffers in the state and at Maryland-based subsidiary Big Huge Games late yesterday.

The layoffs effectively end one of the most prominent experiments in direct state support for game development in the country. Rhode Island had to issue $75 million in bonds to help attract the studio, founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, from its original home in Maynard, Mass., on the promise that the move would create hundreds of jobs in the state.

Signs that the financial arrangement was in trouble first appeared earlier this month, when 38 Studios failed to make a scheduled $1.125 million payment on that loan, prior to asking the state for even more financial assistance. Though the studio was eventually able to scrape together that loan payment, it was reportedly unable to make its payroll last week. Despite these problems, the company was still acting publicly as if it was business as usual, even releasing a trailer for planned MMO Project Copernicus last week.

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For researchers at the UK's Rothamsted research center, the past few weeks must have felt like a train wreck in slow motion. The team engineered a strain of wheat to carry an enzyme, found in many other plant species, that will produce an aphid-repelling chemical. After what was undoubtedly a lot of time in the lab spent preparing the wheat, the Rothamsted staff was finally ready to test whether their modified wheat actually did what it was supposed to in the field.

But starting in early April, they had reason to wonder whether they'd be able to learn anything from their test. In mid-April, a group calling itself 'Take the Flour Back' issued a blunt threat: "Pull up the GM wheat, or we will." Now, their deadline for action is fast approaching, and efforts to defuse the situation have gone nowhere, leaving researchers facing a potential confrontation this Sunday.

In Europe, genetically modified crops have met a very high level of public resistance. Derided as "frankenfoods," the crops have attracted a broad spectrum of fears, from technical concerns like the possible spread of the engineered genetic material, to vague worries about what is "natural" and the role of modern agribusiness. As a result, a number of countries have attempted to ban them outright, and many have strict labeling requirements. In general, consumer demand has kept food derived from genetically modified crops from making it to market.

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The US government is trying to "run out the clock" by denying Kim Dotcom's legal team access to the materials it needs to prepare for key court appearances. So says Ira Rothken, a lawyer for the Megaupload founder.

Ars Technica talked to Rothken on Thursday afternoon, shortly after he returned from a trip to New Zealand, where courts are considering whether to extradite Dotcom to the United States to face criminal copyright infringement charges. The latest example of the government's obstructionist tactics, Rothken said, is the handling of data seized from the Dotcom mansion.

Seized data

When law enforcement agents raided Dotcom's mansion in January, they seized dozens of computing devices and hard drives. Rothken says the seized materials include data from surveillance cameras that could shed light on whether excessive force was used in the raid. The hard drives also contain personal files belonging to Dotcom and his family.

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Today, May 25, as anyone with any decency, self-respect, and common sense knows, is Towel Day. Towel Day celebrates the beloved British author Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, its attendant volumes, and the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency books.

In the Hitchhiker's books, the towel has a place of pride as a tool both practical and psychological, a baby blanket for the Universe. On the news of Adams' death, in May of 2001, Clyde Williamson left a message on the Binary Freedom forum:

"Douglas Adams will be missed by his fans worldwide. So that all his fans everywhere can pay tribute to this genius, I propose that two weeks after his passing (25 May 2001) be marked as 'Towel Day.' All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day."

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Trying to ride the wave of tablet popularity, Cisco released the Cius a year ago with a heavily customized version of Android, focusing on the security, collaboration, and videoconferencing needs of businesses. A business-focused app store, AppHQ, was unveiled along with the option for businesses to host their own private app stores. But it's all pretty much over now, as Cisco said yesterday that it will "no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor," continuing to offer the device only "in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases."

Cius wasn't killed by the market-leading iPad and Kindle Fire; it was killed by consumers. While work laptops and desktops are still primarily provisioned to employees by corporate IT shops, mobile devices follow the opposite path, being brought into work environments by employees. Smartphones shifted from a business-driven model dependent on the BlackBerry to a consumer-driven one focused on the iPhone and Android devices, but tablets have never been a business-first device (with the exception of some Windows tablets deployed for industry-specific use cases).

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Flying high above the Pacific, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft scored one giant step for commercial space cargo at 12:02pm ET today as it berthed with the International Space Station (ISS). Over 1800 SpaceX employees will spend the day celebrating the end at the top of a very long climb—that is, before they get back to a very busy schedule.

Dragon made its flight tests look almost too easy, as the spacecraft, controlled from below by the SpaceX team in Hawthorne, California, zipped through its COTS Demo Flight 2 and 3 yesterday. Early today, astronauts aboard the ISS made contact with Dragon and turned on a strobe to begin the transition of control of the spacecraft from ground to orbit if necessary.

This morning at about 8:56am ET, Dragon shut down its thrusters and drifted to about 8 meters from the ISS. NASA astronaut Don Pettit extended the Canadarm2 robotic manipulator and captured Dragon by its grapple fixture. Slowly and carefully moving the spacecraft in, he took about two hours to hang it on the station's Earth-facing Harmony node. Harmony, otherwise known as Node 2, is the core of the ISS and hosts laboratories from both Europe and Japan. Australia passed underneath the two spacecraft as Pettit made the final attachment and allowed the arm to go limp.

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Snapping a quick picture on your iPhone is easy, but getting the image on your desktop can sometimes be a chore. Bump, an early iPhone app that made it easy to swap contact info by "bumping" two iPhones together, now lets you bump your iPhone on your computer to send a selection of images straight to your computer's hard drive, or even to Bump's photo-sharing cloud service.

I'll give you a scenario to illustrate how Bump can make the process of using pictures from your iPhone or Android phone a little easier (it's one I've run into personally on numerous occasions). Say you want to list an item on Craigslist: you snap a picture or two of the item using your iPhone, and you need to get the pictures to your computer so you can upload them to Craigslist.

You could connect your iPhone via USB, and use Image Capture or iPhoto syncing to get the images to your Mac. If you use Photo Stream on your iPhone, the photos will eventually sync to iPhoto and you can copy them from there. Because my sync cable is generally at the other end of the house on the nightstand, I usually e-mail the photos to myself.

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In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)." David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University's Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already.

Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. Fast forward to 2012, and the EU is looking at hard times. Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.

In all of this, uninformed idiots blame the Greeks for being lazy, the Germans for being too strict, and everyone but themselves. Newspapers, blogs, and television are filled with wise commentary hailing the return of the gold standard, the breakup of the Euro, or any number of sensible and not-so-sensible ideas. How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions. That is kind of scary.

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The real-money auction service was originally planned to launch a week after the game's May 15 release, but the rollout was briefly pushed back to a planned May 29 before this latest delay. Blizzard now says that it "need[s] a bit more time to iron out the existing general stability and gameplay issues" in order to "ensure everyone has the smoothest experience possible" with the service. While the company didn't suggest a new date for the launch, it did promise to have "more information soon."

Meanwhile, many Diablo III forum users have been complaining loudly about hackers breaking into their accounts and stealing accumulated items and gold, a problem that would seem crucial to fix before those items start having a real-world value through the auction house. Blizzard officially responded to these reports today, stressing that its servers have not been compromised. The "extremely small" number of complaints that Blizzard has received about compromised accounts have all boiled down to traditional password-stealing methods, the company said, despite rumors of "session spoofing" and other esoteric attacks.

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