A typing mistake on an online booking form left a German tourist 13,000km off-course on a journey to meet his girlfriend. Tobi Gutt left Germany in high hopes on Saturday, dressed in T-shirt and shorts for the Australian summer, but instead of heading towards Sydney, Australia the 21 year-old ended up en-route to Sidney, Montana. Initially Gutt reasoned that it was possible to fly to Australia via the United States and it was only as he boarded a commuter flight to Sidney, an oil town that’s home to around 5,000 people, that the terrible truth dawned on him. Up to that point he’d flown to Portland, Oregon and on to Billings, Montana with mounting concern
Warner Brothers, which helped popularise the DVD more than a decade ago, plans to announce next week a single videodisc that can play films and television programs in both Blu-ray and HD-DVD
Google has quickly fixed a flaw that reportedly exposed the contact lists of Gmail users to spammers, giving them, at least in theory, a new source of e-mail addresses for hawking their wares
While some islands are sinking, last August another rose from the ocean, formed by volcanic activity and caught in the act by a passing yacht. What looked like a brown stain on the South Pacific turned out to be a spectacular drift of floating pumice stones stretching more than 16 km — and an indication an island was being born nearby
British travelers using a credit card to purchase their ticket may now have their credit card and email accounts inspected by US authorities. This has been true since October, when the US and the EU agreed about what information the US could demand from airlines and how this information would be handled. But details of the agreement only recently came to light following a Freedom of Information request. The US says it will encourage
US carriers to reciprocate to any requests by European governments
Wikipedia has inadvertently blocked Qatar from editing pages thanks to the technical workings of an automated censor imposed by the sole national high speed ISP. The temporary 12 hour autoban was due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, but the fact that this belongs to the country’s sole high-speed internet provider had the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. Wikipedia has since narrowed the ban down to anonymous users from the affected IP, meaning existing accounts from Qatar should now be back online. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries and any company allowed to run ISPs in a monopoly situation — via Slashdot
Ah, Pravda… it does bring the wacky: Russian scientists from the city of Novosibirsk, Siberia, made a sensational report at the international conference devoted to new methods of treatment and rehabilitation in narcology. The report was called Methods of painful impact to treat addictive behavior
. Siberian scientists believe that addiction to alcohol and narcotics, as well as depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. The absence of the will to live is caused with decreasing production of endorphins — the substance, which is known as the hormone of happiness. If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the production of happiness
and eventually remove depressive feelings — via Improbable Research
It has long been known that the Toxoplasma gondii parasite alters its host’s behaviour, but now it seems the way it alters it depends on the sex of the host. A common parasite can increase a women’s attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid. Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women. On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls
Over at The Frosty Mug Revolution, PJ Doland makes a compelling case for a new HTML attribute in the spirit of the highly-regarded nofollow
attribute promoted by Google — the NSFW attribute (rel=nsfw
). His original idea has been refined and expanded by positive comments from readers, resulting in a semantic solution to the issue he raises in the original post. Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element. This isn’t about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content — via Slashdot
The first deliveries of Clocky, which runs away from drowsy owners who don’t get up in time, were made just in time for Christmas, and one early user says the clock, which was an Internet sensation when it was first announced, is appropriately aggravating
This New Year’s Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of US government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they’ll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption
The AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player
Two-hour flights to the other side of the world may seem like a scene from a science fiction movie; but the technology is in place, and a plane that can do just that is currently in development. While it looks like a scene from a flight simulator, the Astrox space plane is the real deal, and the Astrox Corporation says it could revolutionise the transportation industry. Traveling as fast as Mach 25 with at least 30 minutes of space shuttle-like views while in orbit is the highlight of this plane, and the Astrox Corporation, along with their partners, are claiming to have finally overcome their largest problem, mixing fuel
Samsung, the world’s third-largest maker of mobile phones and a force in the notebook and display markets as well, has engineered a fuel cell that can power a notebook computer for up to a month
25 years ago, TV series Blake’s 7
— and most of its characters — were killed off. But now the cult programme is coming back from the dead in a series of newly penned hour-long audio episodes, which will initially be podcast in five-minute segments. It is hoped that they will be followed by a mini-series, Blake’s 7: Legacy, to be set 30 years after the bloodbath on the planet of Gauda Prime, which ended the original 52-episode run
Microsoft has managed to rankle its critics again, this time over a set of patent applications that cover one of blogging’s key technologies — a technology that Microsoft did not invent. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, lets bloggers, owners of news sites and other content providers notify their readers when new content is published
Former US President Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal and later pardoned Richard Nixon, died at age 93
The world’s top spy chiefs — including the heads of the CIA and British, Australian and Canadian agencies — have been meeting in secret in New Zealand — via Monsters and Critics
Ironically, web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are twice as likely to contain badware as web sites without a security certificate, alleges spyware researcher Ben Edelman in a new report
Microsoft sent some holiday cheer in the direction of security vendors this week by releasing new APIs for developers working to create software that can interact with Windows Vista
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