In the course of building a large framed mirror last month—a process which cemented my belief that doing pro-quality wood staining is a black art best left to necromancers—I visited the website for hardware giant Lowe's. While exploring the site, I came across something peculiar: a short Lowe's "customer care" statement on how other website operators can link to Lowe's.

I know what you're thinking: “there are instructions for this?” Indeed there are; Lowe's has actually drafted three separate legal agreements to cover the practice. Two cover situations in which the linking site might use Lowe's images and marks, and for which some kind of license deal makes more sense. The third says only, "If you're linking to Lowes.com, but not using our mark(s)/logo(s) on your site, download the Version A link agreement."

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Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they "deleted" from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.

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Microsoft has published the specification for C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), its new system for heterogeneous parallel processing in C++. When Microsoft first announced C++ AMP in June last year, it said that it wanted to make the AMP specification open to all.

AMP has been developed by Microsoft with input from AMD and NVIDIA. Microsoft's implementation allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards (via the company's DirectCompute API), though the specification should also permit OpenGL/OpenCL-based implementations.

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Digital forms of Solitaire have been included with Windows since it reached version 3.0, and they may well represent the most widely played video game series this side of Angry Birds, enjoyed by bored cubicle workers and bored, procrastinating students alike. While most serious gamers probably wouldn't put these games top ten picks of all time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single PC owner that hasn't put in at least a few hours on a machine that has nothing else available.

Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle maker Popcap is targeting this familiar genre with its latest Facebook time-waster, Solitaire Blitz, a supremely addictive and well-crafted offering that adds just the right amount of tension to the zen autonomy of mindlessly clicking cards.

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Every year in late January or early February, two teams take to the field to play a football game that's watched by tens of millions of Americans. And every year, businesses launch ad campaigns to sell a variety of products—televisions, pizzas, soda—in conjunction with the game. And the overwhelming majority of these businesses avoid calling it the "Super Bowl."

Why? They're afraid of getting sued by the National Football League, which holds the trademark for the term and polices it aggressively. The NFL takes the position that no one is allowed to use the phrase "Super Bowl" in an advertisement without writing the NFL a big check first. Every year, the league sends cease-and-desist letters to businesses that stray too close to the line.

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This week, we wrapped up our coverage of the 2012 Macworld|iWorld conference in San Francisco just as Apple issued an update to Final Cut Pro X and gave the AirPort Utility an iOS makeover. Additionally, Tim Cook offered some strong words in response to doubts about Apple's attitude toward worker conditions in China, Neil Young recounted stories about Steve Jobs working towards higher-quality music downloads, and more. Need a recap? You're in the right place.

Rethinking iPhone UI and getting things done with Clear to-do app: Realmac is set to launch an iPhone to-do list app in a few weeks that breaks list making and maintaining down to the barest essentials, eschewing some common iPhone UI elements to make the app as simple as humanly possible.

LandingZone to ease docking for MacBook Air: A new Cupertino startup is launching a clever, well-designed docking solution for Apple's MacBook Air. The first version is set to begin shipping by March, but a planned Thunderbolt-equipped version is on hold pending licensing approval from Intel.

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This week, an animated trailer for an imaginary Zelda game got us wondering why exactly games often can't live up to the thrilling scenes we're shown in pre-release videos. We also looked at the slow redefinition of what an Online Pass can be used for, examined the legality of blocking used games sales, and spent a massively-multiplayer hour as a cat.

Madden NFL and Tecmo Bowl both agree that the Giants are going to win the Super Bowl this weekend. Personally, I'm rooting for stadium collapse.

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Kindle Fire dwarfs other Android tablets in market share after just three months: After three months, the Kindle Fire has an equal share of the Android tablet market with the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and has already outstripped the Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, and Acer Iconia Tab.

Firefox 10 arrives with new dev tools and full-screen API: Mozilla has released version 10 of the Firefox Web browser. The update includes improved development tools and a new API for displaying page elements in fullscreen mode.

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It was a crazy week for science. Normally, when we say that, we mean there was a lot of important news going on; this week, some of the actual stories involved a fair degree of nuttiness. These included an overt attempt to inject religion into science classes and a theory that attempts to explain everything without even bothering to deal with most of the fundamental particles identified by physics. Still, there was some good science, including a very selective graphene membrane and some bacteria engineered to turn seaweed into biofuels.

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A spam botnet brought down four months ago, which was once capable of pumping out almost four billion spam messages a day, remains very much dead, two of the companies behind the takedown said.

That determination, announced late Friday by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab representatives, contradicted published reports, including one from Ars, that claimed the network of infected computers had been resurrected. There's no evidence that control of Kelihos, which also went by the name Hlux, has returned to the control of its creators, the companies said.

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The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The project started after Oracle's acquisition of Sun with the aim of offering a better governance model and a more inclusive environment than OOo. LibreOffice quickly attracted the support of the major Linux distributors and a large number of independent developers.

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Earlier this week, we reported on efforts by an Indiana state legislator who was interested in getting creationism inserted into the state's science classrooms. He managed to get a modified bill, one that was less sectarian but still overtly promoted religion, passed by the state's Senate. Yesterday, however, the leader of the Indiana House voiced unease about having the state wade into an area that the Supreme Court has declared an unconstitutional promotion of religion. 

Many similar bills are introduced in state legislatures each year and, in cases where their sponsors speak to the press, they tend to reveal a great deal of ignorance regarding both science and the law. In terms of science, they tend to misunderstand the meaning of the term "theory," think that there are multiple scientific explanations for life's diversity, or suggest evolution is a theory for life's origin. The Indiana bill's sponsor, Dennis Kruse, appears to get all of these wrong.

When it comes to the legal issues, many of the sponsors of these bills seem to be blissfully unaware of precedents, including Supreme Court decisions, that have determined that teaching creationism is an unconstitutional promotion of religion. Here, Kruse is an exception: he is aware of the precedents, but is hoping his bill will prompt a lawsuit that will get the Supreme Court to turn its back on its own precedents. The House Speaker, however, has now said challenging Supreme Court decisions is "someplace we don't need to go," suggesting he will not bring the bill up for a vote.

ScienceInsider, in covering this decision, suggested national media attention to the bill had made it politically toxic. That, in turn, suggests that continued coverage of similar bills can play a vital role in promoting accurate science education.

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A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes.

Back in January 2009, nine scientists known as the "FDA Nine" anonymously wrote to the leader of then President-elect Barack Obama's transition team "pleading with him to restructure the agency," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Among other things, the Food and Drug Administration scientists complained that the agency approved devices in a flawed process that ignored science, and was driven by political lobbying.

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Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.

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The 2009 flu pandemic, although not especially deadly, revealed just how quickly a new influenza virus could elude surveillance and spread internationally. It also left health experts eying the disease that many fear could cause the next pandemic: H5N1, the avian flu. According to World Health Organization standards, that virus is phenomenally deadly, killing about half the people that contract it. So far, however, almost all the known cases came from people who were in direct contact with poultry; the flu doesn't seem to spread among mammals.  

The great unanswered question was whether we could continue to rely on H5N1's limited transmission. Recently, some researchers set out to answer that question, and came up with a disturbing answer: it was relatively easy to evolve a form of H5N1 that spread in ferrets, another mammalian species, without it losing any of its virulence. Two labs identified the exact mutations that enabled this new host range, and were preparing to publish their results in Science and/or Nature. At that point, the US government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) responded by requesting that the journals delay publication and limit the content released. That, in turn, prompted the viral research community to put a two-month hold on further research.

That's where things stood on February 2, when the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion on H5N1 and other dual-use research (research that has both public benefit and weapons applications). The panel included two members of the NSABB, representatives from both Science and Nature, a number of virus researchers, a public health expert, and a member of the Defense Department, and they spent two hours in a lively and sometimes contentious discussion of how to handle our current situation.

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Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile) was denied bail on Thursday by a New Zealand court. Dotcom insisted that he had no desire to flee the country and merely wanted to be with his pregnant wife and their three young children. But US attorneys argued the Dotcom posed a severe flight risk, and the court rejected Dotcom's bail request.

In court testimony, Dotcom described the dramatic raid on his home by law enforcement. Dotcom told the court that he didn't know the people invading his home were police officers, so he fled to a secure "panic room." Once he realized they were police officers, he decided to stay where he was rather than risk surprising officers and getting shot.

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Motorola facilitated the sale of a bunch of refurbished Xoom tablets with former owners' data still on them, the company announced in a press release Friday. The Xooms were part of a deal on flash sale site woot.com last fall, and of the thousands sold, 100 were shipped out to new owners with information the previous owners had left on them, including passwords, account information, photos, and documents.

The Motorola Xoom captured a narrow share of the market following its launch in February 2011, ending with about 9 percent as of November 2011. A number of the tablets appear to have been returned, as Woot.com held sales of refurbished Xoom units.

Of the 6,200 tablets sold, Motorola announced, 100 were not fully scrubbed of data left on them by previous owners. By way of apology, Motorola is offering any customers who bought and returned the tablet from a number of retailers (Amazon.com, Best Buy, BJ’s Wholesale, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack, Sam’s Club, or Staples) between March and October 2011 two years of membership to Experian's Protect My ID credit monitoring service.

Though the company is trying to make good, it can't be blamed entirely—we shudder at the thought of sending a device into the depths of customer service returns without wiping it via the easily accessible "factory reset" option in Android settings. Might any of our dear readers have been affected by this event, either by returning a Xoom or buying one from Woot?

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Anger at last month's decision by the European Union and 22 of its member states to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has led to widespread protests, hacked Web sites, and legislators backing away from the treaty.

The anti-ACTA protests that saw Polish politicians don Guy Fawkes masks in parliament have borne fruit. After experiencing a considerable backlash in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has suspended ratification of the controversial agreement, acknowledging that the consultation surrounding it was inadequate and that he approached it from a "20th century perspective."

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Back in the long-ago days of the 2010 holiday season, it looked like THQ had a hit on its hands with its out-of-left-field uDraw Game Tablet, a slate-like controller that used a stylus to let players draw on the TV. The company sold 1.7 million of them to Wii owners by early 2011, beating expectations and leading some to speculate that the uDraw might be the biggest game control revolution this side of the Kinect.

Buoyed by the initial success, THQ quickly cranked out uDraw tablets for the Xbox 360 and PS3, and got to work licensing new compatible software from big, family-friendly brands like Kung Fu Panda, Spongebob Squarepants, and Disney Princesses. But that expansion now looks like a colossal mistake, as excess uDraw inventory was a major factor in the huge financial loss reported for the company's recent 2011 holiday quarter.

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Apple will be able to sell its iPad 2 with 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 via its online store in Germany after all, thanks to a temporary extension courtesy of a German court. As noted by the BBC, an appeals court lifted the ban on certain iOS devices just after Apple was forced to remove them from its German online store earlier on Friday. Still, not all is going Apple's way, as a Mannheim Regional Court also ruled on Friday that Apple had infringed upon a patent owned by Motorola that allows devices to sync e-mail across devices wirelessly, which may spell out changes for iCloud users in Germany.

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