A Swedish farmer sentenced to gaol for shooting a wolf preying on his sheep petitioned the government on Thursday for a pardon as a dispute grew between the wildlife lobby and farmers alarmed at growing wolf numbers. Depleted by centuries of hunting, Sweden’s wolf population has benefited from preservation programmes and legislation to now number about 150. Wolves have even been seen near Stockholm. Animal rights groups say the population is still critically low, making it vulnerable to inbreeding and disease, but the farming and hunting lobby says wildlife laws introduced in 2001 leave their livestock and dogs unprotected from attack
Idaho Department of Fish and Game intends to kill up to 75% of the wolves in the Lolo elk zone to bolster struggling elk herds there, pending approval from the Idaho Fish and Game commission and the US Fish and Wildlife Service — via TidePool
Several researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, led by principal investigator Susan Rempe, are part of a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team developing a nano-size battery that one day could be implanted in the eye to power an artificial retina — via Warren Ellis
The future of humanity could lie within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. The facility is designed to hold around 2 million types of seed, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. The Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels and earthquakes
Symantec has fessed up to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers. The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk — via digg
The BBC and the estate of Terry Nation are a wee bit angry at makers of a recent Dalek porn movie, entitled Abducted by The Daleks. Said movie apparently features, uh, hot plunger action, and unlicenced action at that. The Beeb has prevented the movie being distributed, but naturally a torrent is out there for those of you interested in such a thing.
Stan Howard faces prosecution for felling endangered trees as his brother, brother of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, prepared to host a major six-nation conference on climate change
This hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There’s just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics — via Warren Ellis
If you are scuba diving, be sure not to swim anywhere near any ship or installation that has been protected by the Raytheon Corporation’s new swimmer denial
system. Otherwise you will very quickly feel extremely sick and probably drown. Raytheon’s underwater sensors detect any unwelcome presence and trigger an underwater sound system that emits extremely powerful pulses of low frequency audio. The pulse rate and audio frequency are chosen to make human organs resonate like organ pipes, causing swimmers to vomit into their masks or suffer internal ruptures — via Warren Ellis
Bad punning aside, Apple have announced the first intel core duo macs: the MacBook Pro and iMac.
I’m currently in the market for a beefy-ish laptop of the Apple variety, and was only deciding whether to buy it out right with student discount, a 17 inch powerBook, or lease it for 2 years and upgrade to a new intel mac after a revision or 2.
When I started going through the Apple site, (and yes, the home page, iMac and MacBook Pro pages are significantly wider than the rest of the site. Bye-bye to the must fit in 800 x 600 mentality), I thought “yeah, screen’s not quite as big as I want it, but hey I still want one.”, especially after noticing that it’s pricing is almost identical to the powerBook, “well hey, it’s newer and 4X as fast or so they are touting, and the same price. Fuck it, go pro!”
Then I started reading about Rosetta and Universal stuff, and my head started hurting as I’m a designer/illustrator not a computer geek, and thought shit I’d better find out if my Adobe products, ie the main apps I’ll be using will be fine. At the time of writing this, I haven’t been able to find anything about it on the Adobe site, they seem too preoccupied with the whole Macromedia merger, which is fair enough. I’ve read snippets on various Apple rumour sites and what have you that if you’re an occasional Photoshop user, you won’t really notice any sluggish performance, but those who use it frequently will. I’m not finding this very encouraging.
Theres’s a comparison of guts so to speak between the powerBook and MacBook Pro here: Comparing the MacBook Pro to the PowerBook G4
Hmmm.
Me thinks powerBook will win for me, but hey Apple have to start some where with the new beasts. I hope those who buy the new breed are happy customers.
Mozilla has released the first major update to Thunderbird. Version 1.5 includes an automated update system, in-line spell checking, an a bunch of other additions and improvements
A press release from Nikon UK has announced plans by Nikon in Japan to reduce its production of film cameras and related products to just a handful of items — via digg
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is getting out of the domestic mobile phone market after selling its stake in Virgin Mobile Australia to joint venture partner Optus for AU$30 million. But the Virgin brand will go on after the company granted Optus, Australia’s second biggest telco behind Telstra, a 15-year licence to use the name
Steve Jobs has introduced a new notebook and an iMac computer that use Intel’s latest Core Duo processor. The iMac announcement is six months ahead of the schedule outlined by Apple last year
Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites News Corp relented and restored the links
The 8000-tonne japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru broke away from a supply ship it had loaded with whale meat and steered a deliberate collision course towards the 949-tonne Arctic Sunrise, the smaller of two Greenpeace ships chasing the whaling fleet. The Japanese are claiming they were rammed, but this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve lied about ramming Greenpeace vessels
ApNano has tested armour said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear. Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material. Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail. They said the nano-based armour, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact — via Warren Ellis
Unhappy when his Canadian bank, Vancouver-based Citizens Bank, began out-sourcing some of its credit card processing to the United States, Don Rogers lodged his protest via the bank’s online payment system, jamming its computers by making dozens of tiny payments a day — via Feòrag
Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, discovered the meaning of karma when he threw a mouse he had found in his home onto a pile of burning leaves — only to see it run away and burn his house down — via Feòrag
A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80% of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armour. Such armour has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection
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