minnesota

Comcast customers in Illinois and three other nearby states lost their Internet access last night, apparently due to the same problem that took down service for East Coast customers just a week ago.

Reports first began showing up on Twitter, with Comcast customers in several Midwest states tweeting that their connections were down. Comcast's own Twitter account, Comcastcares, later confirmed that the outage was affecting people in Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan and seemed to be Domain Name System (DNS) related. The company also said at the time that it was working on a fix.

More specifically, the outage hit … Read more

The Minnesota Twins' new stadium will include a rain-water recycling system, the baseball team said Tuesday.

The system was custom designed for Target Field by Minnesota-based Pentair, a tech company that specializes in part on water treatment and storage. Pentair's system will capture, filter, and purify rainwater for reuse at the stadium.

Specifically, the system will collect and purify rainwater from throughout the ballpark's seven acres, including the stands, and store it in a cistern buried deep in the ground under the outfield. That so-called gray water will then be used to wash down the stands and irrigate … Read more

The campaign of Republican Norm Coleman, who is engaged in a fierce legal battle to keep his Senate seat from Democrat Al Franken, has warned supporters that their credit card numbers may have been exposed on the Internet.

His campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, said the office became aware of a possible security breach of the donor database in January, however an investigation found the data had not been accessed by an unauthorized party, according to a report on Wednesday in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

Supporters received an e-mail from the nonprofit Wikileaks site on Tuesday night saying the Coleman … Read more

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have reputations as time-sucking procrastination tools, but a new study from the University of Minnesota says au contraire.

Social networks build beneficial technological, creative, and communication skills, the study says, leading the researchers to actually describe social networks with the adjective "educational." Who knew?

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher from the school's College of Education and Human Development, said in … Read more

Minnesota authorities have missed a court-imposed deadline for turning over the source code for a breath-testing machine at the heart of a a high-profile dispute that recently made it to the state's Supreme Court.

That means now there's a greater chance that charges could be dropped against third-degree DUI defendant Dale Lee Underdahl.

The next step is a court hearing scheduled for September 19, Underdahl's attorney, Jeffrey Sheridan, told CNET News.com in a phone interview on Tuesday. At the hearing, Sheridan is expected to ask the judge to throw out any evidence the state had obtained … Read more

American Indians gave the U.S. military an advantage in World War II by using their native language to confound enemy code-breakers, and now a piece of defense equipment may be returning the favor.

The Prairie Island tribe in Minnesota is using a Voxtec International Phraselator P2 to pass along its Dakota language to the next generation, children K-12. Speak into the P2 handheld translator and it will instantly and accurately "translate spoken English words and phrases into any Native language," according to defense contractor Voxtec.

"The Phraselator technology is allowing us to preserve an integral piece … Read more