Anyone that’s spent time on the internet is fairly aware that piracy is a big deal to folks in places like, oh, Hollywood and anywhere else involved in the creation of media. In fact, anyone that’s watched a movie at home has almost certainly noticed the disclaimers about potential fines and legal maneuvers related to the piracy of that material. Never fear, however, as Pirate Pay, backed by Microsoft, is looking to scramble pirates before they can get their sticky fingers on the goods.

While there are many official LEGO tie-ins available, Back to the Future sadly isn’t one of them. That might be changing, however, now that user m.togami has received 10,000 votes on LEGO’s CUUSOO website. With the passing of that important milestone, the possibility of this becoming an official LEGO set moves tantalizingly close to reality. But it’s not there yet.

Ever since the takedown of MegaUpload, other cyberlockers have been a little antsy. If it can happen to the biggest player in the game, it can probably happen to whoever steps up to fill that pair of shoes. FileSonic, for instance, stopped allowing file-sharing at all, and BTJunkie — a torrent site — went whole-hog and completely shut down. RapidShare, another big player in the cyberlocker game, is trying to stay alive and has recently released an anti-piracy manifesto, detailing the extreme lengths to which they are going to completely avoid piracy. Besides taking anti-piracy far more seriously than any other cyberlocker to date, RapidShare’s manifesto explains these measures as “responsible practices” and encourages all other cyberlockers to do the same.

What with Google’s Project Glass being the talk of the proverbial internet town, it seems as good a time as any for those scuttling about in the shadows of the technology world to admit they’re working on similar projects of their own. So it’s interesting for Valve to shrug and acknowledge their own wearable computer research in a post that begins with a reference to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Scientists are spending a lot of time looking for worlds on which life may flourish — worlds like our own, or at least sufficiently like our own. How life would get there is a bit of an open question, but one possibility is a “panspermia” scenario where life is propagated between worlds by asteroids and comets. But a study on the subject of panspermia takes a look at a radical suggestion: That Earth has spread life to other, possibly life sustaining bodies.

For small businesses, it can be a real pain to have to deal in cash, and while taking credit cards might be an option, it can be a serious hassle. On top of that, it’s almost impossible to take credit card payments on the go. These are the problems PayPal Here aims to solve. The small card reader and accompanying app allow small business owners — or anyone really — to take credit, debit, and PayPal payments via smartphone, making it much, much easier for them to shut up and take their customers’ money in whatever form the customers can offer it.

Touchscreen phones revolutionized the mobile phone industry. Think about it. When was the last time you saw any remotely modern phone that didn’t have a touchscreen? Sure, we can make our touchscreens bigger, or look better, or even flexible but touchscreens all have one thing in common: You have to touch them. Not anymore. Sony’s new Xperia Sola has a touchscreen with what it calls “Floating touch” or in other words, the ability to interact with its touchscreen by hovering your finger over it. The Sola has a “hoverscreen” if you will.

This summer, pirates who torrent copyrighted material and have a major ISP are in for a rude awakening. Starting July 12th most major ISPs, including Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, will begin taking steps to first “educate” and ultimately “mitigate” pirates by adopting a system of graduated warnings after which repeat offenders may experience throttling of their broadband connection. While the plan was agreed on last year, a list of some of the ISPs involved only came to light yesterday at the Association of American Publishers’ annual meeting yesterday, where they were announced by RIAA CEO Cary Sherman.

Surely you’ve had annoying experiences with battery operated devices. You have to find the right batteries, put them in, and eventually replace them. Sure, it beats wires, but it’s still not optimal. So what about robots that could go around and find their own “batteries” and generate power by eating things like leaves and dirt, and even maybe urine and feces? That’s what the Ecobot-III –product of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory– can do, and it even has a fancy new feature it’s predecessors didn’t have; the Ecobot-III can poop.

Other than a few instances of playful trolling, Valve has been utterly — painfully — silent about the future of the Half-Life franchise for years now. The Half-Life 2 episodes, while not exactly you may have wanted, at least provided that I.V. drip fans so desperately needed until it cruelly ended at Episode 2, and on no less than the  largest ever cliffhangers in the series. Now, members of Steam Group “A Call for Communication,” who number around 28,000, are planning to play Half-Life 2 this Saturday as a way of half-demanding, half-begging Valve to talk about Half-Life again.