Sending a text message home to boast about a beach vacation should cost less than half of what it does now, EU regulators said Tuesday.

The European Commission wants to set a price cap for text messages of 11 euro cents (16 U.S. cents), far below the current EU average of 29 euro cents (43 cents).

The EU’s top telecom official, Viviane Reding, said she was putting the new rules forward because telecommunications companies had not responded to her call for them to lower the roaming charges for sending or receiving mobile phone text messages outside a user’s home nation.

“There is no reason or justification in a normal functioning market for so excessive prices,” she said.

The effort builds on an EU campaign last year to slash the cost of voice calls made and received outside a user’s home nation. And it comes as the cost of text messages also has come under scrutiny in the U.S., where a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the nation’s top four wireless carriers to justify why prices for individual text messages have doubled since 2005.

The European action was met with disapproval from companies that say the EU is interfering in the market without proving its claim that lowering prices would drive up text-message usage. The companies said their lost revenue could harm their plans to invest in future technology.

The EU regulators will also ask for a stricter cap on voice calls. The plan would bring prices from the current level of 46 euro cents (68 cents) per minute to 34 euro cents (50 cents) per minute for a cell phone call made abroad. Receiving a call on a mobile phone internationally would incur charges of 10 euro cents (15 cents) by July 2012, down from 22 euro cents (32 cents) now.

From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality.

Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.

Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (£5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.”

Sony Video Store on the Playstation Network is running some rather restrictive DRM. When purchasing movies, users are allowed just one download — even if they delete the movie to make space and want to download it again on the same machine.

A Sony representative told Ars that users could be issued an extra download as a “one-time courtesy” with help from customer support. Quoting: “When we’re discussing a system that seems to release new hardware configurations every few months and a company that actively encourages you to swap hard drives yourself, it appears users are going to run into problems if they ever decide they want to switch out their hard drive or even upgrade into a larger system; the information on the back-up utility makes it clear that video content can’t be moved over to new system, although new hard drives should be safe.

Sony claims that the PS3 is operating on a 10-year timeline: is one extra download, which you need to contact customer service to apply for, good enough for the next decade?”

Adobe released details Monday about Creative Suite 4, its first update to more than a dozen design and editing tools since Adobe CS3 some 17 months ago.

The costs of the applications, set to reach consumers in October, haven’t changed since CS3, but remain hefty. Should longtime users upgrade?

Of course that depends on the specific tools you need. However, we suspect that only the most well-heeled will jump at the chance, as CS4 shares the majority of tools with its predecessor. Perhaps more dramatic, life-changing alterations will come with the next Creative Suite. That said, time-saving tweaks to Illustrator and Flash in particular could lure professionals immersed in them to upgrade.

With CS4, Adobe aimed to unify the interfaces of more than a dozen applications, including Flash and other former properties of Macromedia. You’ll see similar pull down menus for toggling among workspaces that you can customize, as well as Flash-based panels that nicely snap open and shut. Corporate design departments will find plenty of enhancements for their teams to share work more quickly.

Adobe continues to improve integration among the applications. After Effects, as only one example, can import Photoshop 3D layers and export content directly into Flash.

Options for working with high-definition video and mobile content expand too, with support for the latest formats as well as for making Adobe AIR applications. Among other highlights:

Photoshop CS4 will use your computer’s graphics chip for the first time, while offering support for 64-bit Windows.

At long last, you can handle more than one project at a time in Illustrator, thanks to the new multiple Artboards feature.

Flash CS4 has a rebuilt animation model, so you can make objects move on the stage in two quick steps. And Flash introduces a new, XML-based file format.

Dreamweaver provides plenty of shortcuts to CSS coding, including within the Properties panel.

The FBI searched the residence of the son of a Democratic state lawmaker in Tennessee over the weekend looking for evidence linking the young man to the hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Monday.

“The Kernell family wants to do the right thing, and they want what is best for their son,” said attorney Wade V. Davies of Knoxville. “We are confident that the truth will emerge as we go through the process. David is a decent and intelligent young man, and I look forward to assisting him during this difficult period.”

Kernell is the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, a Memphis Democrat and chairman of Tennessee’s House Government Operations Committee. The father declined last week to discuss the possibility his son might be involved in the case.

“I had nothing to do with it, I had no knowledge or anything,” Mike Kernell told the AP last week.

“I was not a party to anything of this nature at all,” he added. “I wasn’t in on this - and I wouldn’t know how to do anything like that.”

No one answered the door at Mike Kernell’s home in Memphis on Monday, and he did not return repeated phone calls Monday from the AP.

The apartment the FBI searched is in a complex about five blocks from the University of Tennessee campus in a neighborhood popular with students. No one around the complex Monday knew David Kernell or saw the FBI agents over the weekend.