The disruptive potential of 3D printing is considerable—it has implications across a wide range of fields and promises to be a game-changer for one-off manufacturing. A new startup called My Robot Nation has come up with a particularly whimsical use for 3D printing technology.

The company is offering custom robot figurines built to specification. The My Robot Nation website has a slick interactive tool that allows users to configure the design of their very own robot. For a price, the company will use its 3D printers to generate a matching model which will be shipped to the desired address....

(Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co is set to resume selling its Galaxy tablet computer in Australia as early as Friday, after the South Korean technology firm won a rare legal victory in a long-running global patent war with Apple Inc.

An Australian federal court unanimously decided to lift a preliminary injunction, imposed by a lower court, on sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- but granted Apple a stay on lifting the sales ban until Friday afternoon. "

It's hard to expect the ruling to have a major positive impact on Samsung's tablet business or legal cases in other countries as Apple could appeal ... and sales won't be restored anytime soon,"...

After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered "all Internet search engines" and "all social media websites"—explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google—to "de-index" the domain names and to remove them from any search results.

The case has been a remarkable one. Concerned about counterfeiting, Chanel has filed a joint suit in Nevada against nearly 700 domain names that appear to have nothing in common. When Chanel finds more names, it simply uses the same case and files new requests for more seizures....

(Reuters) - Toshiba Corp said on Wednesday it would close three of its six discrete chip-making facilities in Japan and also trim output of certain types of chips over the year-end as demand for PCs and TVs slides in Europe and the United States.

Discrete chips are relatively simple semiconductors used in a wide range of electronic products from audio-visual equipment to cars and mobile phones.

The three plants are scheduled to be closed in the first half of the fiscal year starting in April 2012, in a bid to slash costs, with Japanese makers at a disadvantage because of strength in the yen....

Waiting in the lobby of Blizzard’s Irvine headquarters, I was overcome by nostalgic reverence. Where most businesses have a mountain of months-old magazines, Blizzard has a museum. It was nothing too extravagant, mind you, but the frames lining the walls were like windows to my childhood. Each piece of classic Diablo art conjured up fond memories of the franchise that’s marking its 15th birthday this November.

It wasn’t always this way, however. Blizzard certainly didn’t begin its existence as a gaming giant responsible for both this generation’s Dungeons & Dragons and the game that has become South Korea’s national sport. Over the years, the company has seen both growth spurts and growing pains, both successes and, er, whatever Warcraft Adventures was. Many incredibly talented people have come and gone....

In a conference call to press this afternoon, the FCC announced that it will grant AT&T's request to formally withdraw its application to acquire T-Mobile US. In addition, the agency will also release a 109-page report today that discusses what it found over nine months of reviewing the merger. In short, the FCC found that the cons of the deal outweighed the pros, and AT&T is likely to build out its LTE network regardless of what happens with the carrier's buyout of T-Mobile. The report determined that the merger would create too many network inefficiencies and job losses, and whatever cost savings that would be generated by the deal wouldn't be passed on to the customer....

I

remember the first time I learned about hybrid hard drives--models that combine traditional spinning platters with a sizable chunk of solid-state flash memory.

The goal was to combine the best of both storage worlds into one drive: The low cost and high capacity of a hard disk, plus the speed of flash. It sounded like a great idea to me.

That was way back in 2006, though--and hybrid drives have never quite taken off. But the concept still makes sense, and hard-disk kingpin Seagate is releasing a new hybrid drive designed to deliver on the technology's promise....

(Reuters) - Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc said global cloud data traffic will grow at a compound annual rate of 66 percent between 2010 and 2015, as consumers and businesses seek untethered access to content and applications.

By mid-decade more than a third of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud, which allows data to be stored and accessed remotely, Cisco said in its first annual Global Cloud Index published on Tuesday.

Global data center traffic overall will increase four-fold, a 33 percent compound annual growth rate between 2010 and 2015,...

You may now shop two malls again without fear of individualized tracking—at least by your cell phone signal. Privacy concerns raised by US Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) have ended plans by malls in southern California and Virginia to "survey" customers' shopping habits by tracking their cell phone signals.

As Ars Technica reported last Friday, Forest City, the mall developer that owns and operates the Promenade Temecula in Temecula, California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia had announced it would test technology in those two malls from Path Intelligence. Called Footpath, the system uses a series of cellular signal detectors to triangulate the movement of customers' phones—and by extension, the customers themselves—through the mall's stores and other spaces. While the technology doesn't eavesdrop on cell phone users' calls or record information about their phone numbers, it does use their cellular device's digital signature to track individuals....

The Linux Mint team on Saturday announced the release of the latest release of their increasingly popular distro. The release of Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” comes at a time when the five-year-old distro is experiencing a strong surge in its popularity. Hit the jump to find out more about this biannual Mint release.

Here’s a list of all that is new in Mint:

GNOME 3 and MGSE: Lisa comes with a new desktop environment. Described as a “mix of old and new,” the Linux Mint 12 combines GNOME 3 with MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions). If you happen to be one of the critics of GNOME 3, you can temper it with MGSE for a slightly more “traditional” experience. But if it’s MGSE that you can not stand, you can disable all its components and savor some raw GNOME 3....

Global supply of hard disk drives (HDDs) in the fourth quarter of 2011 will decrease to 110-130 million units due to the impact of flooding in Thailand, about 35% short of demand for 180 million units, according to Taiwan-based makers in the PC supply chain.

Some PC makers are relatively optimistic that the global HDD shortage will ease in first-quarter 2012, while others estimate the easing to come in the second quarter, the sources indicated. However, they believe the HDD industry will take 9-24 months to completely restore normal production, meaning PC vendors will have to face increased HDD costs in 2012, the sources said.

Acer has decided to hike prices for its notebooks to be launched in December by 2-3% to partly reflect increased HDD costs, and Asustek Computer and Dell may follow suit.

Some of the Silicon Valley's most important companies, including Intel, Google, and Yahoo, were cofounded by immigrants. Yet America's creaky immigration system makes it difficult for talented young people born outside of the United States to come to the Bay Area. There have been various proposals to make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the United States, but they've made no progress in Congress.

So a new company called Blueseed is seeking to bypass the political process and solve the problem directly. Blueseed plans to buy a ship and turn it into a floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California....

Android hackers are working overtime to bring Ice Cream Sandwich into the real world, and early fruits of their labor are starting to emerge--if you have the right phone.

The CyanogenMod project to build unofficial versions of Android is working on CM9, the version based on the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich source code from Google. Early CM9 buildsare available in alpha for the Samsung Nexus S and beta for the Samsung Galaxy S.

"CyanogenMod 9 Alpha 11 for Nexus S is definitely worth checking out," programmer Koushik "Koush" Dutta said on Google-+ yesterday. And it's pretty mature, he added: "Usable as a daily driver."...