Taiwanese airline EVA has repainted one of its jets with giant Hello Kittys. The plane’s interior features Hello Kitty-related items as well, ranging from boarding passes, baggage tags, dining utensils, and loo paper to attendant uniforms — via PopGadget
Google is testing a database service that would put it into competition with one of its big advertisers: eBay. Blogs had buzzed with word of Google’s motives after some internet users a day earlier found a test service called Google Base that handled online classified advertising. The site was later taken down. Google Base would allow people to list items wanted or offered for sale in an online-classified forum similar to those provided by eBay and Craigslist, according to feedback in blogs
A 93-year-old driver in St Petersburg, Florida hit and killed a pedestrian last week. Then, he drove three miles with the body hanging out of his windshield. After he was stopped by police, the driver apparently said that the body fell from the sky. Obviously, he was confused,
police officer Mike Jockers said. Incredibly confused
— via Boing Boing
A Hong Kong computer user was Monday convicted of copyright infringement in what is believed to be the world’s first piracy case involving the use of BitTorrent software
A new generation of spam has emerged lately in the form of automatically-created spam blogs, or splogs
. One wily programmer manipulated Blogger’s API to create a spamalanche
of thousands of blogs whose sole purpose was to increase their real sites’ pagerank. This clogged search engine results while filling RSS feed services with useless listings. Though Google, Blogger’s owner, is doing its best to fix the problem, in the meantime several services have stopped listing any site they host. So far nobody has found a solution
Britain’s Deputy PM has proposed a law that would allow local councils to move families into any building that had sat empty for a year or more, and to keep the buildings in use as council housing for seven years. Some depressed UK cities have tens of thousands of buildings sitting empty, used as shooting galleries or flophouses. The objective is to persuade owners in these circumstances to pass the responsibility for bringing the property back into housing use to the local authority. Of course, we want this to be with their consent, but where that consent is not forthcoming we do not apologise for granting local authorities powers to secure occupation without the need to obtain consent
— via Boing Boing
A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was recently developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. And it’s completely emission free
The computer industry is fast-tracking a system called e-mail authentication, which will attempt to do for e-mail what caller ID does for telephone calls
DeLaval, a 122-year-old dairy equipment company, has used embedded Linux in a robotic cow-milking system (the system is robotic, not the cows). The Voluntary Milking System allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings
Berkeley Lab researchers in the US have developed ultra-thin solar cells made entirely of inorganic nano-crystals. The team says it is the first time something like this has been accomplished, and hints that it is the first step towards cheap and efficient solar paneling
After a number of false starts Apple has finally made its iTunes music download service available in Australia
The Taiwanese government has announced that it will violate patent laws to manufacture a drug that can help fight bird flu virus. In doing so, they have spelled out their reasoning very clearly: We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche, it means we have shown our goodwill to Roche and we appreciate their patent. But to protect our people is the utmost important thing
The likely eventual replacement of common light bulbs by LEDs may come quicker thanks to an accidental discovery announced this week. Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big… When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant colour. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened. I was surprised when a white glow covered the table,
Bowers said. The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow
The Federal Opposition says it is concerned that a parent could be jailed for five years if they tell their partner their child is being held under the Government’s proposed anti-terrorism legislation. While John Howard denies that his dodgy terrorism laws are unconstitutional and just like those in use in the UK, Australian-born human rights barrister Dr Angela Ward points out that the key difference in the laws lies in the fact that the UK terrorism legislation is subject to review against its Human Rights Act
A working reconstruction of an ancient Greek computer, the Antikythera mechanism, which was found at the bottom of the ocean in 1900 has been unveiled and is on display at the Technopolis museum, in Athens. The device is believed to have been used to calculate the positions of various celestial bodies including the sun and the moon on any given date. While some guesswork was required in the reconstruction, the bulk of the design is based on updated X-ray photographs of the device
The US Navy is flouting federal law by conducting sonar training exercises like the 2003 incident in the San Juan Islands that spooked orcas and may have killed porpoises, environmentalists charged in a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups said they have been trying for years to get the Navy to talk about ways to decrease harm to marine mammals and other sea life, but the service has refused to deal with the issue head-on
A recently foiled botnet operation, controlled by a crime ring, has turned out to have put about 1.5 million computers and servers under its control, the largest botnet ever detected, 15 times larger that police initially thought
Ryuji Sakamoto was so enraged by Takayuki Niimi’s failure to address him with an honorific that he stabbed the man to death with an umbrella. It was the second killing with an umbrella in Japan in less than a month — via Laridian
E Ink has just announced a breakthrough in flexible electronic paper displays. The new display which has a 100dpi resolution and is only 300 microns thick has the potential of truely changing the way we read our information
A new species of marine worm that lives off whale bones on the sea floor has been described by scientists. The creature was found on a minke carcass in relatively shallow water close to Tjarno Marine Laboratory on the Swedish coast. Such zombie worms, as they are often called, are known from the deep waters of the Pacific but their presence in the North Sea is a major surprise. The new species has been named Osedax mucofloris, which literally means bone-eating snot-flower
— via The Register
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