Apple has s suffered another loss of sorts as one of the post-trial sales bans instituted by Judge Koh has been overturned by an appeals court. The federal appeals court ruled that Apple would not suffer significant harm by the infringement that was found during the trial, and as such removed the sales ban.

The Next Web put it beautifully when they described Samsung's arguments: "Samsung argued, somewhat humiliatingly, that the sales of the Galaxy Nexus were so poor that they didn't pose a threat to Apple's iPhone and that the unified search feature was not essential to the success of its device. The appeals court apparently agrees."

An excerpt of the official order:

Verizon will begin selling the DROID RAZR HD and DROID RAZR MAXX HD on October 18. The new devices continue the design of the popular DROID Android devices that Verizon has been selling for several years now. Of course, they feature updated specifications to keep up with the competitors offerings.

The devices sport a 4.7-inch 1280x720 resolution screen powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor. Wireless is complete with 4G LTE and NFC connectivity, still features saved for higher-end models. The RAZR HD sports 16GB of internal storage and will set you back $199.99 with a new two-year contract.

The RAZR MAXX HD is very similar, but will set you back $299.99 with a new two-year contract. Why the cost difference? Well, the MAXX comeds with a 30 percent larger battery and 32GB of internal storage. Verizon's full press statement is below:

In a continuing effort to make Google Chrome more secure, Google enters the browser into hacking competitions. One of the hacking competitions stopped requiring participants to fully disclose how an exploit was performed, so Google decided to start hosting their own. Known as Pwnium competition, Google hands out awards from $20,000 to $60,000 depending on the exploit.

In this case, a hacker managed to win $60,000, the highest award amount, for exploiting a security hole in Chrome on Tuesday. "We're happy to confirm that we received a valid exploit from returning pwner Pinkie Pie," Google announced in a Chromium blog. "This pwn relies on a WebKit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) compromise to exploit the renderer process and a second bug in the IPC layer to escape the Chrome sandbox. Since this exploit depends entirely on bugs within Chrome to achieve code execution, it qualifies for our highest award level as a 'full Chrome exploit,' a $60,000 prize and free Chromebook."

Of course, Google's team immediately started patching the exploit as soon as it was discovered and had a patch pushed out in just 10 hours. The hacker who performed this exploit also picked up $60,000 in the first competition that was held earlier this year. If Pinkie Pie can keep this up, he could support himself nicely with this income.

Couch vacationing just got even easier as Google has just released their biggest update ever to Street View. With more than 250,000 miles of roads around the world updated and double the number of special collections, Google is the definitive mapping application and couch vacationing service.

Google specifically calls out the use of couch vacationing (my term, not theirs) in their announcement: "Street View, as you know, is a useful resource when you're planning a route or looking for a destination, but it can also magically transport you to some of the world's picturesque and culturally significant landmarks."

Google even throws in what I take to be a jab at Apple: "We hope you enjoy taking a virtual stroll around some of the world's beautiful places, and stay tuned for more Street View updates as we look to make our maps more comprehensive and useful for you." Apple does insist that their maps are getting better, but they have a long way to go to catch up to Google.

The rumors proved correct in this instance. Today, Samsung has officially outed the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini, the little brother of their flagship Galaxy S3 device. I just want to take a moment to complain: why did they have to continue to extend the name of the device? The name was already long enough before they attached "Mini" to it.

Now that that is out of the way, let's move on to what you really want to hear about, the specifications. The device sports the rumored 4-inch screen, which should give it broader appeal among customers. It's powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which is in turn interpreted by a dual core 1GHz SoC.

The device's design is extremely similar to its larger older brother. It features the same NFC, S Bean feature, and curvy design elements. The rear-facing camera is a 5 megapixel sensor if auto-focus and flash. It sports 8GB of internal storage and up to a 32GB microSD card. Customers should be able to purchase the device in early November.

OCZ, a maker of popular solid state drives, lost their CEO recently, but not to fear as the Board of Directors has picked a new replacement from its Board of Directors. Enter Ralph Schmitt, the former CEO of PLX Technologies up until Monday. Tuesday morning, the new OCZ CEO held a conference call and laid out his plans.

"Our actions will be based on innovation, quality, and profitability. Our focus will be to further penetrate OEMs and the enterprise market," he said on the conference call. "OCZ is committed to supporting our customers. We have already made great strides in discontinuing value products and non-core products. Focusing strategy on enterprise. We have lost credibility but we will win it back. We will focus on predictable, sustainable, & profitable results, but this will not happen overnight."

OCZ is planning to trim away at its value offerings as a company of its size just can't have as many as they do. Along with this, OCZ had offered customer incentives that were also too big. The CEO is looking to make the company profitable and work on its image:

It looks like I'm not the only one not impressed with the iPhone 5, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wishing that the new sixth-generation iPhone 5 wasn't just a taller, thinner, faster iPhone 4S. Wozniak says Apple were arrogant in their decision of keeping just a single 4-inch sized iPhone 5.

He notes that the Cupertino-based company should've created two sizes, a smaller iPhone, and a larger as well as wider iPhone. His chat with TechCentral gave quite a lot of insight, and opinion into the company he helped form:

Part of me wishes that Apple had not been so kind of arrogant and feeling we're the only one with the right clue. I wish they had made a small and a large version of the iPhone; that would have been great for me. Keep the aspect ratio the same, horizontal and vertical the same, but just grow it in the other way.

Tesla have just received a huge grant from the California Energy Commission to the tune of $10 million, which will help the luxury electric car maker expand manufacturing capacity for their upcoming Model X SUV.

Tesla's terms of the agreement with Commission will match the $10 million grant, with $50 million if their own money and spend the entire lump sum to keep Model X production rates high when it reaches manufacturing in 2014. This plan involves the hiring of 700 more workers with the manufacturing starts.

If there are no problems between now and the production of the Model X SUV, Tesla will be much closer to their goal of producing a truly mainstream electric vehicle. The Model X SUV won't be that goal, but it is definitely getting closer. The new Model X SUV will hopefully fall into the same price range as the Model S, which ranges between $50,000 and $70,000. Tesla's VP of Finance, Mike Taylor, said:

In a world completely dominated by smart devices like smartphones and tablets, less and less people are buying traditional PCs. The "post-PC" era has been touted for quite sometime, but the market has been doing well, until now.

ISH iSuppli's numbers for annual PC sales have dropped for the first time in over ten years, since 2001. iSuppli's numbers aren't devastating, representing a drop of only 1.2% from this time last year, but it's the first decline since 2001. Last year saw a 2.2% growth, so a 1.2% drop is actually something to talk about.

Expectations of growth were pushed and relied on the economy recovering somewhat, Intel's huge push of Ultrabooks and more. Manufacturers shipped 348 million PCs so far, down from 352 million of 2011's numbers. iSuppli does ask some questions:

Well, this is interesting - the European Commission has approved the construction of three new huge research lasers, leaving the door open on a fourth that would, for a tiny instant, be several hundred times more powerful than the entirety of the power generated by the human race.

Yes, that is very, very powerful. The scientists hope to actually create virtual particules from absolutely nothing. The fourth laser when at peak power in Europe's Extreme Light Infrastructure project (ELI) would combine a total of ten beams into a single pulse at 200 petawatts. The entire Earth doesn't even generate that much power at any one moment, and if we're talking scale, it is more total power than the Earth receives from our star, the sun.

This is not the type of laser that stays on continuously, and will only use this mammoth amount of power for just 1.5 x 10^-14 second .This is the same time that "it takes for light to travel from one side of a human hair to the other, if you shave your hair down by 90%", reports Dvice.