Hewlett-Packard has signed an agreement to sell Sendmail’s e-mail software, the latest move by the longtime Microsoft ally to also woo open-source players
NTT DoCoMo says it has achieved a connection of 300Mbps with its experimental fourth-generation network
Approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online. The project will cost roughly £$2 million and include 100 years of news and images from publications that are no longer copyright protected, and currently only available at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. 52,000 newspapers and magazines will be included and the project should take 18 months to complete
An angry buzzard is terrorising a quiet English country road by dive-bombing passing cyclists. Paul Taylor, 71, says the bird of prey used its beak and claws to rip a three-inch gash in his head as he cycled along the stretch of road near Holsworthy in Devon, western England
The decomposed body of a man dressed in pyjamas was discovered in an abandoned Tokyo apartment building 20 years after he is believed to have died. A Tokyo Metropolitan Police official said construction workers were preparing to tear down the building earlier this month when they found the man’s skeletal remains laying face-up on a mattress on the tatami reed mat floor of a second-floor room — via Rogue Sun
A former night-shift cook at a Denny’s Restaurant in Illinois is in hot water after allegedly getting creative in the kitchen. Anthony Lindhorst, of Waterloo, is charged with five counts of aggravated battery for allegedly lacing brownies with marijuana and mixing his semen into the restaurant’s sauce. Lindhorst is accused of serving the brownies to co-workers and the tainted sauce to two customers
Headblade is a razor designed for shaving your head. Unlike a conventional razor, the HeadBlade makes your hand (and fingers) the handle. This gives you more control. Practical, well-designed and a really nice shade of yellow. I want one — via boingboing
It’s shaped like a basketball. It was inspired by Spock’s tricorder. And, if NASA researchers have their way, it could be helping out astronauts aboard the International Space Station in as little as three years. The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day’s tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right — via boingboing
Spore make affordable, squishy, light-up doorbells. And they’re pretty too — via boingboing
Michael Costa has always been a man with a reverse Midas touch, everything he touches turns to shit. Public transport in NSW is no exception. His ingenious method for solving the problem of trains running late is the use of creative accounting. The definition of a late train will change from more than four minutes to more than ten minutes. Usually this sort of dodgy scheme is done far from the public eye. But rocket scientist Costa, always keen to get his ugly mug on camera, announced his cunning plan to the press
Virtual, moving fences controlled from a laptop could one day herd cattle to fresh fields for grazing. A farmer would control multiple herds from a single server at home as if they were playing a video game. Although static virtual fences already keep dogs inside yards in affluent US neighbourhoods, no-one has attempted a moving virtual fence before, nor attempted to apply the idea to large herds of animals. Basically we download the fences to the cows,
says Zack Butler, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. We say: ‘Today stay here, tomorrow go somewhere else
Peter FitzSimons has a good write up on how Peter Garrett‘s independent views highlight Alexander Downer’s kow-towing — via GeneWeb.info
The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently reported that a record 55 red wolf pups [BugMeNot] have been born in 11 litters in North Carolina this spring. More than 100 red wolves now roam 1.5 million acres in the northeastern part of the state. This year’s promising wolf census comes on the heels of a judge’s decision that temporarily halted the building of a landing field by the US Navy that Defenders and others charged would be harmful to wolves and migratory birds in the area
Google is considering renewing support for RSS, the latest twist in a standards war that could change how people read the news
An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims’ computers that triggers pop-up ads
Armed police staking out a former nuclear bunker in Fife said they are now talking to a man hiding inside. Firearms officers and negotiators were called to Scotland’s Secret Bunker near Anstruther, which is now a Cold War museum. The man is understood to be Ronald MacDonald, a 39-year-old who had been living rough in the area — via Charlie Stross
The chief of the defence force General Cosgrove has been caught misleading the people [BugMeNot] yet again. He told Senate Estimates this week that Australia had an agreement with the Americans that they would detain POWs in Iraq on our behalf so we could avoid our responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions to ensure they were not tortured
Just when you thought Optus customer service couldn’t get any worse, the cheap bastards have joined the ranks of Australian telecommunications companies using cheap labour in India for some of their call centre operations
A British robber who stole £115,000 in cash from a bank broke back in a week later to give most of it back. The thief got into the Barclays Bank in east London, smashed a window and helped himself to the cash in the ATM machine. A week later baffled staff called detectives to say the robber had returned £104,000
Australia’s overseas aid spending is up, but not all the money goes to worthy projects to alleviate poverty. (Australia’s Official Development Assistance outlay for 2004-05 is an estimated $2133 million.) Increasingly, money is being allocated to beefing up regional security and promoting good governance. Much of what should be pure aid money has gone to managing refugees in Nauru and on the recent Solomons mission. Overseas aid is being redefined to include things such as counter-terrorism measures. The Parliamentary Library has a two-page Research Note that lays it all out — via journoz
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