Plustech, a subsidiary of tractor maker John Deere, has built a six-legged walking logging machine that looks suspiciously like a prototype for an AT-AT walker
Crime statistics are political dynamite, and the media is trying constantly to light the fuse of public alarm. As law and order becomes a permanent political campaign issue, each new statistic is a bullet in a war of words
Bloggers are busting chops, big time, and their weblogs are what’s keeping the media honest. The latest evidence: some big media organisations are now quoting their criticism of other big media organisations
Robert Young, an animal behaviour expert at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, and his colleague Rebecca West of De Montfort University in Lincoln, UK are convinced that dogs can count and researchers at the University of California Davis say they try to convey different messages through the pitch and pace of their barks
The R2-D2 Interactive Astromech Droid is coming soon to a store near you. Equipped with innovative speech recognition technology, infrared scanning technology and working sonar navigation, this R2-D2 recognises 40 spoken phrases, plays six exciting games, and sings three tunes. It even has a retractable arm that lets it hold a beer can
When web operator Jon Messner gained control of one of al-Qaeda’s prime Internet communication sites, he offered it to the FBI to use it for disinformation and collecting data about sympathisers. But by the time FBI agents found someone with enough technical know-how to set up the sting, the opportunity was lost as militant Islamic web users figured out the site was a decoy
Philip Kaplan, the creator of FuckedCompany.com, is rolling out a new site called InternalMemos.com. On it, readers can sample some of the more than 800 examples of internal business correspondence sent to Mr Kaplan over the last three years by aggrieved employees of various companies
The Recording Industry Association of America’s web site was unreachable over the weekend due to a denial-of-service attack. The apparently deliberate overload rendered the RIAA.org site unavailable for portions of four days and came after the group endorsed legislation to allow copyright holders to disrupt peer-to-peer networks
Australian businesses are well placed for attacking the Asia-Pacific broadband market if they play to their strengths, but are being hindered by the low penetration of Australian broadband. Perhaps it has something to do with Telstra’s continual problems involving broadband applications going missing and substantial delays in connection times
In South Australia’s outback, history has been made with a team from the University of Queensland successfully launching their supersonic air-breathing scramjet engine atop a rocket. Until yesterday morning no organisation, including NASA in the United States, has been able to successfully launch a scramjet — an air-breathing supersonic engine
Like other researchers who’ve backed down for fears of Hollywood reprisals, open-source guru Bruce Perens said he would not include details about how to circumvent DVD player controls in an open-source presentation
Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly — via Slashdot
In a misguided fit of patriotism mere weeks after the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, a corporate employee handed over the records — almost literally, the grocery lists — to federal investigators from three agencies that had never even requested them. In a flash, the most basic of exchanges became fodder for the Patriot Act
For more than 20 years, FBI headquarters in Washington knew that its Boston agents were using hit men and mob leaders as informants and shielding them from prosecution for serious crimes including murder. Until now, the still-unravelling Boston FBI scandal has been portrayed largely as the work of a handful of local agents — mavericks willing to deal with the devil to bring down a Mafia family. But documents have been obtained that directly connect FBI headquarters to a pattern of collusion with notorious killers
Afraid that Peru may adopt a bill decreeing the use of open-source software in all government systems, Microsoft apparently enlisted the American ambassador in Lima to help try and convince the Peruvians to kill the legislation
Makers of Australian digital-TV set-top boxes have rejected calls for dual-tuner boxes, which give free-to-air and pay-TV networks separate gateways to viewers’ homes
As part of a series of new storage policies aimed at driving more people toward its paid services, Microsoft has instituted a plan to delete sent Hotmail messages that are more than 30 days old. Early last week, it began erasing all messages in subscribers’ Sent file transmitted before 16 June
A web site invites visitors to donate selflessly to Karyn, a struggling 26-year-old resident of Brooklyn Heights. And they do. I can’t believe so many morons are willing to part with money for a brainless bimbo with a credit card addiction
Owners of PlayStation consoles who modify their machines to play games bought overseas have had a win in the Federal Court. Sony Computer Entertainment has failed in its claim that chipping
breaks copyright laws
IBM and Linux combined represent a threat and inspiration as Microsoft drives into enterprise computing. Computing giant IBM wages war against Microsoft in lucrative corporate accounts while Linux, the low-coast threat to Windows, wins supporters in fertile developer communities
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