CVS has began selling a disposable digital camcorder. The US$29.99 pocket-sized camcorder was developed by Pure Digital Technologies, a San Francisco-based start-up company. The camcorder weighs under 140 grams and holds 20 minutes of digital video and sound. It features a 35mm colour playback screen and an ability to delete video and it saves video on a memory chip instead of tapes. Within 18 hours of getting his hands on the camera, the king of the one-time digital camera hacks/analysis had slurped the flash memory and has the unencrypted, XVID codec, 320×240, 30fps movies stored in the camera on his computer
Taiwanese technology group BenQ has agreed to take over Siemens’ ailing mobile-phones unit, drawing a line under hundreds of millions of euros of losses for the German engineering giant
An Israeli inventor has developed a way for divers to breathe underwater without cumbersome oxygen tanks. His apparatus makes use of the air that is dissolved in water like the gills of a fish
The US Supreme Court has refused to sanction the use of marijuana for medical purposes, dashing the hopes of thousands of patients using the drug for pain relief. By a vote of six to three, the court refused to allow residents in 10 states to use the drug with a doctor’s permission and under highly regulated conditions. The ruling means federal authorities in 10 states may arrest terminally ill patients who use the drug as well as those who provide it to them. But some states remain defiant, saying medical certificates authorising marijuana will still be dispensed
A scuba diver was swallowed almost whole by a great white shark yesterday in a Jaws-style attack just offshore from Cape Town
Australia’s domain name regulator has seized more than 1,000 domains from Ansearch, saying the search engine company’s intended use did not comply with its policies. However, in a twist, more than 100 of those names — which only came back onto the market last week — have already been scooped up by a Perth-based web hosting and online search company, Empius Interactive
According to its creator, Dr Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath, RepRap is a revolutionary machine that can copy itself and manufacture everyday objects quickly and cheaply could transform industry in the developing world. To encourage that development, Bowyer plans to make the design of the RepRap available online and free to use, in the same way as open source software such as the Linux operating system or Mozilla’s Firefox browser
Japanese scientists are attempting to explore the centre of the Earth. Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below. The team wants to retrieve samples from the mantle, six miles down, to learn more about what triggers undersea earthquakes, such as the one off Sumatra that caused the Boxing Day tsunami
Penn Jillette‘s latest stunt did not involve his usual sidekick, Teller: He became the father of a baby girl. Jillette, 50, and his wife Emily, 39, welcomed Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette on Friday. We chose her middle name because when she’s pulled over for speeding she can say, ‘But officer, we’re on the same side’,
Jillette explained. ‘My middle name is CrimeFighter’
— va BoingBoing
Apple will announce its plans Monday, that it is scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel’s microprocessors, in a move that raises questions about the Mac maker’s future computer strategy
Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites’ content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap
Chris Claremont is returning Excalibur to its British roots and bringing back Pete Wisdom. To which Warren Ellis commented: He’s not my character, I don’t own him, and if Chris can wring some more mileage out of a character who is basically Jack Regan out of ‘The Sweeney’ stuck in a superhero comic and made to play James Bond (seriously. That was pretty much the entire thought process), then good luck to him.
I can just see that a Pete Wisdom not running about at the behest of Warren’s twisted imagination is going to suck horribly
Two men have been arrested after shots were fired during a meeting in which it is believed they were trying to sell stolen copies of the next instalment of the adventures of Harry Potter
Bob Geldof is aiming to galvanise the world to aid Africa with his Live 8 concerts next month and thousands of people will demonstrate in Scotland as leaders of the world’s richest nations gather for a summit there
New Jersey is using an anti-terrorism law for the first time to try six animal rights activists charged with harassing and vandalising Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that made use of animals to test its drugs
Developers of the Mozilla Thunderbird open source e-mail client have recently added a podcasting feature to its arsenal and improved its defence against phishing attacks
Microsoft announced that the next version of Office will use Internet-friendly XML technology as the default file format for documents created in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. While it may use XML, it will use it badly
An experimental supercomputer made from Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) that can reconfigure itself to tackle different software problems is being built by researchers in Scotland. The Edinburgh system will be up to 100 times more energy efficient than a conventional supercomputer of equivalent computing power. The 64-node FPGA machine will also need only as much space as four conventional PCs, while a normal 1 teraflop supercomputer would fill a room. At this point in time, the software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware
The Washington Post today confirmed that W Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was Deep Throat, the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard Nixon. The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C Bradlee
Major companies that sell open source software have been accused by a top EU official of treating open source developers as mere subcontractors
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