When pepper spray became a mainstream law enforcement tool in the 1990s, it was hailed as a relatively peaceful alternative to harsh physical violence.

But as demonstrated by the routine spraying of Occupy Wall Street activists, culminating in the horrific assault at the University of California, Davis, pepper spray can too easily become a tool of first and excessive resort.

“I can’t get into the head of people using it in New York and Davis and around the country, but it seems that rather than turning to other tactics, they turn to the simple tool,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of crimi...

HP says that its Integrity servers will ship with Xeon processors (Photo: HP)

HP has announced that its “mission critical” Integrity servers will eventually ship with ordinary x86 chips that run Linux and Windows — not just the ill-fated Itanium processor that runs the company’s old-school UNIX operating system, HP-UX.

On Tuesday, HP said it was going to start porting some of that HP-UX software to Windows and Linux, making them more Unix-like. It will also build new Xeon x86 rack-mounted servers and blade servers that will slide in next to the Itanium servers inside the server’s chassis. The c...