AfterTek

Nintendo’s new video game console, the Wii, goes on sale Sunday, just two days after the launch of the rival PlayStation 3 from Sony turned violent at some stores. The release of the Wii is expected to be less dramatic, because Nintendo has made sure to have a lot more units available than Sony could muster.

The console itself is a daring design: it eschews the high-definition graphics that are the main selling points of the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360, which came out a year ago. Instead, Nintendo hopes to attract a new generation of fans by changing the way games are played.

Universal Music Group sued MySpace.com on Friday, saying that the social networking site that bills itself as a source of “user generated” content instead trades on “user stolen” songs and music videos.

The lawsuit, that was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, described MySpace as a “vast virtual warehouse” of pirated works from some of the company’s best-known artists, including Mariah Carey, Diana Krall and U2. Universal claims that “no intellectual property is safe” from the alleged copyright infringement, even unreleased albums such as Jay-Z’s “Kingdom Come.”

After years of much debate on how to dispose of rubbish from the international space station, NASA has come up with the answer open the back door and fling it out. The agency that has long drilled its astronauts and international partners in the merits of responsible waste management is to relax its rules and allow the station’s crew to jettison selected items of superfluous or broken equipment.

Earth is ringed by hundreds of thousands of pieces of rubbish, including old rockets, satellites, nuts, bolts and spent instruments. NASA’s decision to relax its rules comes as a Russian cosmonaut, Mikhail Tyurin, prepares to add a golf ball to orbiting debris.