Roundup: Obama’s environmental policy, Sun’s big loss, and more

Here’s the latest (mostly depressing) action:

President Obama reverses Bush policy on environment — Obama endorsed California’s strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and vowed that the federal government will follow suit. Auto manufacturers’ responses were “similar in their ambiguity and political correctness,” according to The New York Times.

Sun posts a $209M loss — At fault are falling demands for servers and storage, as well as a big restructuring charge.

AdMob offering Android-specific ads — The move mirrors AdMob’s similar iPhone announcement last summer.

University endowments plunge — The news might mean VCs will lose a major source of funding.

Wilson Sonsini, Silicon Valley’s best known law firm, makes major cuts — The firm laid off 45 lawyers and 78 staffers, totaling about 6.9 percent of its U.S. attorneys.

Texas Instruments laying off 12 percent of workforce — But the chip and semiconductor manufacturer also posted better-than-expected Q4 earnings.

Bill Gates’ foundation is hurting from market drop — But Gates says he still plans to give out a record amount of money this year.

IBM lays off 2,800 in the U.S., despite reporting a solid quarter — The cuts will come in the company’s sales and software units.

Senate approves delay in digital TV transition — The switch has been pushed back to June 12, as per President Obama’s request.

Video game sales beat out DVD sales for the first time — Games brought in $32 billion worldwide in 2008, while DVD sales (including Blu-ray) were $29 billion.

EU turns down Intel’s request to delay antitrust probe — An EU court is investigating allegations that Intel abused its position against competitor AMD.

Sellit and CafePress partner on shopping widgets — Sellit will allow CafePress merchants to create embeddable widgets that contain entire online stores.

New iPhone software improves Safari stability — Despite a relatively bare feature list for the 2.2.1 update, it weighs in at a whopping 246 megabytes.

Happy Data Privacy Day! — This article in CNET News.com has thoughts from Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others.