After a brief respite after the March court trial on The Pirate Bay sentencing the founders to a year-long prison sentence, the site is back in the news. The next chapter began on Tuesday with the announcement that the owners were selling the most well-known torrent file tracker site to a corporation - Global Gaming Factory.

Though both companies are based in Sweden, the effects on Americans has begun already. With the business model that GGM will introduce, a suggested partnership between The Pirate Bay, site members and internet service providers will create a new file-sharing system, they hope.

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All Maine students in grades 7 through 12 will receive free MacBooks for the academic year.

The measure is intended to bridge the digital divide, allowing all students access to new technology no matter their socioeconomic position. It is part of the state’s expanding Maine Technology Learning Initiative (MTLI), established in 2002, which provides all middle school students with free computers.

Today’s announced expansion brings computers to high-school students.

“We have seen incredible success, with our middle schools showing increased student engagement and achievement with (MLTI) in place, and we want to bring this same opportunity to our high schools,” Maine Educational Commissioner Sue Gendron said.

“This is not just about technology–it’s about using the technology to support education,” Gendron said.

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The trend of the Free and Open Source Software movement had many supporters talking today. ZDNet ran multiple perspectives on the blossoming popularizing of Linux this morning, and OStatic published an in-depth article on Open Source Resources as well.

Various events have pointed to this moment in the evolution of Operating System software, a two-party system if there ever was one. Jason Perlow claims the economic slowdown has pushed consumers to consider the low- or no-cost options available in this category. Netbooks are a hot commodity, and many come installed with their personalized version of Linux favorite, Ubuntu.

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The quest for a “good deal” leads many on sidewalk-scouring wild goose chases, sacrificing a perfectly good Saturday to thrift store or garage sale sprees, with little tangible return. Online shopping, the supposed panacea to miserly inclination, can lead to packages filled with ill-fitting or otherwise disappointing results.

Re-thinking these shortcomings is reMatch Sports (”Revival of the Fittest”), a San Francisco company that combines the accessibility of a Web site with the verifiability of a physical storefront.

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Internet ubiquity is easy, but being in two physical places at once is still problematic. We’re getting closer, though: some of the innovation coming out of robotics will allow – at least virtual – bilocation.

Rovio, a wi-fi enabled “home exploration and mobile webcam” lets you be two places at once. You can control it via PC, phone or game console from anywhere in the world, keeping an eye on your home and office and communicating with people in those places.

You can set home points to create navigation routes for the Rovio so it can act like a watchdog in your absence, providing you with video and audio streams of its surroundings.

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Facebook seems to have taken the place of honor for most popular social networking site. But the Palo Alto company is looking to the functionality of MySpace in a move that will take effect this Saturday.

Usernames are coming to Facebook, and this might not affect thousands of casual Internet users that happen to utilize this social service. For the rest of us, we can finally have an easily promotable, bloggable, embeddable account URL, just like we used to have at MySpace.

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The major barrier to increased online and mobile spending – outside of this economy, of course – is the possibility of losing one’s information to cybercrime.

Miri Systems is one of the host of new companies which are trying to find an affordable way to protect consumers from online fraud.

“Fear is the number one reason cited by U.S. consumers for not making purchases over the Internet or on their mobile phone,” said Miri Systems CEO Ludwick Zon in an interview with StartUp Beat.

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Netbook sales are about sixteen percent of all laptop sales in the world, but that number is even higher in western Europe. According to European sales chief Christian Morales, the “cannibalization” of portable PC sales has been less than projected, but in Britain and Italy the levels are as much as a quarter of these sales.

The market for inexpensive netbooks is growing faster than conventional notebooks. The limited function laptops save the consumer cash by doing away with optical drives, heavy duty processors and other features, while promising maximum portability and absurdly long battery life - products similar to the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, a netbook with a ten inch screen and claimed 9.5 hours between charges, which retails for under four hundred dollars.

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Blogs are the most influential social media for U.S. female internet users while social networks are the most popular, according to the 2009 Women and Social Media Study (pdf) by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners.

“The scale of social media usage among U.S. women continues to grow, and blogs remain the go-to resource for those who want to gather information, share ideas and get reliable advice,” said Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer co-founder and COO.

42 million women in America use social media at least once a week, which is 53 percent of the U.S. female online population. (For the purposes of the study, social media is defined as social networks, blogging, reading blogs, posting to blogs, message boards and forums, and status updating.)

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In the next seven months, the number of people using personal computers will pass one billion (compared to the nearly two billion who own TVs). Over half the global population owns a mobile phone, and there are over 5.5 billion external power devices for electronic devices.

Electronic devices account for 15 percent of household electricity consumption. From 1990-2008, electricity consumption from electronics grew 7 percent every year.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that, if energy use continues as it is today, the energy consumed by electronic devices will double by 2022, tripling by 2030 to 1,700 Terawatt Hours (TWh).

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