Advanced Micro Devices has fired off a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel, claiming that its rival has a monopolistic grip on the PC industry. The suit, filed Monday in the US District Court in Delaware, details alleged scare tactics and coercion that AMD claims Intel imposed on 38 companies, including large-scale computer makers, small system builders, wholesale distributors and retailers
Brazil’s Ministry of Health has demanded that Abbott Laboratories cut the price of its AIDS drug Kaletra by 42%, threatening to break the company’s patent and produce generic versions of the drug if it does not comply. The Abbott Park, Illinois-based company has 10 days from the time it received Friday’s ruling to agree to reduce Kaletra’s price to $0.68 per pill from $1.17. If Brazil follows through on its threat, the move would mark the first time the country has adopted compulsory licensing — via BoingBoing
A young mother found at the scene of a car crash near Tokyo in which her husband and infant son were killed had been dead for at least a day before the accident happened, police were quoted as saying on Sunday. The bizarre discovery was made after emergency crews who rushed to the scene found the body of Rie Ishikawa, 28, in a state of rigor mortis — via Warren Ellis
US scientists have managed to revive dead dogs to life, by using a technique similar to cryogenation, in which the dogs’ blood was drained and replaced by a cold, saline liquid. A couple of hours, their blood was replaced, and an electric shock brought them back to life with no brain damage. The technology will be tested on humans within the next year. Bear in mind this comes via one of Murdoch’s tabloids and they’re never known for fact checking or truthful reporting
The first voice-operated computer assistant is installed in space — its operators hope it is more reliable than the treacherous HAL from the movie 2001
Internet song-swapping web sites like Grokster can be held liable for copyright infringement, the US Supreme Court has ruled, siding with the entertainment industry in its effort to curb online piracy
Google has hugely expanded the areas of the world that it covers with satellite imagery. Egypt, Iraq, mainland Europe and the UK have all now got satellite coverage to a lesser or greater degree. You can now go see sights like Buckingham Palace or the Arc de Triomphe. Sydney is also available and you can zoom in quite nicely, provided you don’t want to go further North than Central Station, as the entire North Shore is missing
A hippo separated from his family has adopted a 120-year-old male tortoise as his mother. Owen the hippo sought refuge behind the tortoise just after Christmas, and weeks later they are inseparable. The details of Owen’s adventure are not entirely clear, but it seems to have begun when a group of hippos was swept into the open sea from the river where they lived — via Rogue Sun
Last year the Kurtztown Area High School approved a program which gave every student an iBook. Now thirteen students face felony charges for violating the district’s usage policy. The secret password, 50Trexler
, was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops. The more computer-savvy students began to disable the administrations’ ability to spy on the students’ computer use. For others, it became a game, trying to outsmart the administration and compete with fellow students who held the secret
An Italian judge has ordered the arrest of 13 CIA personnel on charges that they seized an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, on a Milan street two years ago and flew him to Egypt for questioning
I have seen Global Frequency and it is good.
Despite being a raw cut to sell to the monkeys at Warner Bros — who apparently wouldn’t know a good show if it bit them on the arse — the pilot still looks awesome. Some of the external sounds, like car doors and engines, were yet to be editted in and sounded a little tinny. The GF ringtone was a placeholder that would have a proper composition later; Warren Ellis was hoping for Aphex Twin, which would have been both amazing and disturbing.
The cast rocked. My only complaint there was the horrible American, cloned cuteness that US network execs seem to demand. I’d have preferred something more gritty. Aleph was so watered-down, I didn’t recognise her at first. That said, Michelle Forbes portrayal of Miranda Zero was perfection. She looked and sounded spot on, plus, she got to go all Emma Peel on the boys, which is always a good thing. You can never have too many women in leather throwing men about.
I was wondering why it looked like they’d opted to run with two leads instead of the constant rotation of guests that the original comic used and screenwriter John Rogers explained:
In order to have some semblance of continuity for network audiences, I needed some viewpoint characters — but it couldn’t be Miranda, because you never knew what was going on in her head. As a matter of fact, part of the entire five-season arc was that you were never sure what Miranda was up to … So we were going to use Josh and Jenni as the focal characters, but toss in a rotating cast of guest characters to be the expert of the week. Neatly, of somebody hit, I could then have built them up into recurring. Then, if the audience really started to like them … I’d kill them.
I guess now the weird thing is that a show that never was has developed a fanbase. You’ve got to love the internets.
A Nepali radio station that has been banned under the new, post-coup regime has gone back on the air. Every night, a commentator stands on the roof of his now-useless radio-station and reads the news over a megaphone to an audience of hundreds — via BoingBoing
An ethnic Ogoni group from Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta accused Shell on Thursday of undermining a new government initiative to reconcile Ogoni communities with the oil multinational
It’s a technology that could one day aid buildings to survive earthquakes or hurricanes. It could be used to remotely control the viscosity of liquid shock absorbers in cars, or the lubricants in robotic joints. Japanese researchers have devised a way to turn a range of oily liquid solutions to jelly using a burst of sound waves. The jelly can then be shocked back into becoming a liquid. Until now, there had been no method to achieve instant, remote and reversible control between stable liquid and gel phases at ambient temperatures
According to security company Secunia, a new browser flaw could allow attackers to trick users into relinquishing sensitive information such as passwords. The flaw is unusual in that it affects every mainstream browser and can be exploited on the Mac OS X operating system as easily as on Windows
Microsoft is throwing the full weight of Hotmail behind its Sender ID e-mail authentication technology by sidelining incoming mail when it fails to pass a Sender ID check. The software maker has begun warning Hotmail users with an on-screen alert when the sender of an incoming e-mail cannot be verified using its Sender ID Framework. Mail that fails to pass the test will be placed in a junk mail folder or could even be deleted
Google has confirmed that it is developing an online payment system, although it says it has no plans to take on eBay’s PayPal service
An Indian researcher has cracked the much-touted impenetrable
Windows Genuine Advantage of Microsoft. According to Microsoft this service would soon require all Windows users to verify their licence before downloading updates
Three lions reportedly rescued a 12-year-old girl from her kidnappers in Bita Genet, Ethiopia. The girl had been held captive for seven days by men who intended to force her into a marriage. Police say the lions scared off the kidnappers and stayed to protect her — via BoingBoing
Phishers and malware writers have started sending e-mails that refer to the high profile data security breach at MasterCard — when information on more than 40 million credit cards was stolen — with an offer to help worried card holders into recovering
their stolen information
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