At a busy Madison Common Council meeting on Tuesday night, council members voted to make the plastic pink flamingo the official city bird. At Tuesday night’s meeting, the mayor introduced his proposed capital budget and council members discussed funding for the plastic bag recycling program. The new mascot was debated for five minutes, and then the Common Council voted 15-4 to make the plastic pink flamingo the official city bird. The idea was by a 1979 prank on Bascom Hill when the Pail and Shovel Party on campus put out 1,008 of the birds
eBay has agreed to sell the majority of internet phone company Skype for about $2bn. Skype is to be majority-owned by a group of private investors, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and private equity firms. eBay will keep a 35% stake in the firm, which it has been trying to sell for some time. It has said that Skype had limited synergies
with it. The deal values Skype at $2.75bn. EBay bought Skype for $2.6bn in 2005
Google’s Gmail service failed again on Tuesday. Users trying to access their e-mail accounts were greeted with a server error, and Google acknowledged the problem on its Gmail forum. Google have a good round up of what fell over
An accountant in NZ has been awarded NZ$17,000 for unfair dismissal after her boss fired her without warning for using uppercase letters in a single email to co-workers. The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist
. Her boss deemed the capital letters too confrontational for her co-workers to read after they woke up from naptime — via Slashdot
Optus has been forced to halt the planned shut down of its optushome.com.au email domain after users complained of insufficient warning. Thousands of long-time Optus customers awoke this morning to find empty email inboxes after the telco last night flicked the off switch to its optushome.com.au email domain server. Optus says it warned subscribers of the impending change — a migration to a new domain, optusnet.com.au — in an April newsletter but admitted it failed to issue any follow-up warnings
Lesbian couples who have children through fertility treatment can now register both their names on the birth certificate, following a change in the law. The change, which applies to couples in England and Wales beginning fertility treatment on or after 6 April 2009, confers legal parenthood on a biological mother’s female partner for the first time
The Walt Disney empire is to buy the superheroes stable Marvel Entertainment for $4bn (£2.5bn) in a star-studded Hollywood deal that unites family names such as Mickey Mouse with lucrative characters including Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men. Disney hopes to put Marvel’s 5,000 characters to work on its television channels and in video games, theme parks and movies. The agreed takeover is for a mixture of cash and stock, with Disney shares accounting for roughly 40% of the buyout price
Vodafone has gone live today with its expanded 3G coverage to rural areas, now reaching 94 per cent of the population. Coverage has been extended out to Kununurra in Western Australia, Port Douglas in Queensland and Devonport in Tasmania, according to the company. Vodafone’s 3G coverage previously reached 80 per cent of the Australian population. The upgrade has also included adapting the 2G network to support EDGE technology
Telstra has expanded its Twitter customer support footprint with the takeover of the @Telstra account. The account will handle customer support for the telco’s mobile, fixed line and Foxtel services. The account was previously in the hands of a cybersquatter
Google has already scanned 10 million books in its bid to digitise the contents of the world’s major libraries, but a copyright battle now threatens the project, with Amazon and Microsoft joining authors and publishers opposed to the scheme
News Corporation’s James Murdoch has said that a dominant
BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK. The chairman of the media giant in Europe, which owns the Times and Sun, also blamed the UK government for regulating the media with relish
It’s one of the bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean. Most of the trash has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether it’s sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it. During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected
It’s quite common for regulators around the world to insist that no company can call itself a bank
unless it’s an official, regulated bank. In fact, that’s often why you see companies (including holding companies of real banks) that use the word banc
instead of bank
. It’s to get around such regulations. However, it looks like regulators in Sweden have gone a step further, telling the Swedish domain registrar, that it can’t even allow any domain name to be sold with bank
in it, unless it’s sold to an official bank
The ISP that supplied much of The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth before cutting them off yesterday, is reporting that it has been sabotaged. Calling in experts and the police, Black Internet says the attack on them is intentional and has caused substantial damage
In a record reminiscent of a 100-meter dash, scientists at the University of South Wales in Sydney, Australia, have created the world’s most efficient solar power cell ever… by a hair. Professor Martin Green and his colleague Anita Ho-Baillie led a team of US researchers to victory with a multi-cell combination that is able to convert 43 percent of sunlight into electricity. The previous record was 42.7 percent
Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn’t exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago. The planet is known as a hot Jupiter
, a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its year
) in less than an Earth day. Of the more than 370 exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than our sun — discovered so far, this is just the second with such a close orbit
Lord Mandelson’s plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download copyrighted music and films were attacked by privacy campaigners, internet service providers and Labour MPs yesterday as unworkable, unnecessary and potentially illegal. TalkTalk, Britain’s largest consumer broadband provider, warned that innocent web users could be disconnected after having their connections hijacked by pirates looking to circumvent the new rules. It added that the move will likely breach fundamental human rights
Tartu, Estonia is the hometown of an Internet company that, from the outside, looks just like any other legitimate ISP. On its web site, the company lists services such as hosting and advertising. According to publicly available information, it posted more than US$5 million in revenue and had more than 50 employees in 2007. In reality, however, this company has been serving as the operational headquarters of a large cybercrime network since 2005. From its office in Tartu, employees administer sites that host codec Trojans and command and control servers that steer armies of infected computers. The criminal outfit uses a lot of daughter companies that operate in Europe and in the United States. These daughter companies’ names quickly get the heat when they become involved in Internet abuse and other cybercrimes. They disappear after getting bad publicity or when upstream providers terminate their contracts
Amazon Web Services has launched its virtual private cloud, which it said provides a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud
A federal appeals court has reversed a judge’s decision that granted the copyright of the Unix computer operating system to Novell, and has ordered a trial to determine ownership
RSS – Posts