It was a long week off without my normal tech updates -- but here we are on the other side, ready for the tech stories I may have missed! Without further ado...

Water cooler talk today will center around the moral issue presented to Microsoft: According to a letter, recently laid-off employees from the Redmond wonderland were overpaid in their severence packages and are being asked to give the extra money back. I've alreay debated this and, though others disagree with me, I can tell you categorically I would give the money back. And, all you ex-employees out there: If you ever want to work for Microsoft again (and with the way they hire, you know it's a strong possibility once the economy turns around), *pay them back*... Aside from the fact that it's not nor was it ever your money. If a bank gave you too much, you'd have to pay them back...

OOH, I love a good conspiracy! Researchers are saying Google Earth's new program to map the oceans has found the lost city of Atlantis! I am so not kidding. According to this report, a British aeronautical engineer playing round with Google's map off the coast of Africa's Canary Islands found a strange street-like grid on the ocean floor about the size of Wales. Of course, Atlantis was supposed to be round with mulitple rings seperated by ring-like rivers (think, bullseye), but whatever. Google is denying the report, saying that it was an error in data-gathering, and the grid is actually the path of a boat. That's a weird error -- I want proof!

Users of XBox Live beware -- beat the wrong person in a particularly nasty round of online Halo and it may be your last. A new report says for-hire hackers are offering to boot users off XBox live with a denial of service attack.
OK, time to learn a little about hacker/computer security lingo: Your computer (and XBox) sends little messages out called pings when looking for a response from another computer. It does this all the time without you knowing and vice versa. The system, though, can only handle so many of these requests at a time before being overloaded, which is why web sites crash because of so many visitors. In a DoS attack, the attacker sends so many pings and requests to your computer (or XBox) that it also crashes.

In interesting-gadget news, Yamaha has created a digital grand piano it says has exactly the same sound quality and feel as it's analog parents. This new piano "a lot smaller (four feet long) and lighter (480 pounds) than the nine-foot, 1,500-pound, $100,000 grand piano it's meant to replace. And it's a lot cheaper to make, retailing for $19,000 when it hits the market this summer," says our friends at PopSci. Very cool :)

Check back here Wednesday for more geeky stories and awesome news bytes...