The FTC is considering imposing a bounty on spammers. They are guessing it would take between $100,000 to $250,000 to get people to rat out their friends and coworkers. Interestingly enough is that it is higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases. For example, the FBI pays $50,000 for tips leading to the arrests of most of its top 10 fugitives
University of Washington scientists plan to infect monkeys with a killer flu virus grown from tissue exhumed from victims of the 1918 epidemic. They hope the insight they gain will unravel the mystery of why tens of millions of people worldwide died from the virulent flu strain and lead to development of better vaccines and drugs that may save lives in the future
What was once a Monty Python joke has become reality with a renegade sheep eluding live export now set to live happily ever after. The Monty Python team once joked about the most dangerous of creatures — a clever sheep called Harold who escaped after realising his life was about standing around and then being eaten. Now there is the story of the sheep who 10 weeks ago escaped while boarding a ship at Port Adelaide and hid out the aptly named Mutton Cove, eating rare plants and scaring birds
Johnny Ramone, guitarist and co-founder of the seminal punk band The Ramones that influenced a generation of rockers, has died. He was 55. Ramone, who had been fighting a five-year battle with prostate cancer, died in his sleep Wednesday afternoon at his Los Angeles home surrounded by friends and family, said the band’s longtime artistic director Arturo Vega
Big detailed map of Springfield, including the whereabouts of the Matlock expressway (not completed), The Gilded Truffle, 99c Porno Store and other gems — via Lucie
ginmar takes us on an enlightening look at the nanny mindset in charge of filtering content that US GIs can look at:
I can’t get to Victoria’s Secret any more. That means that Pat Robertson is, in fact, in charge of what we can see and read. And you know, I’m a girl, which means they’re censoring me from looking at halfway decent underwear! Jesus Fucking Christ, if I can be trusted with a fucking weapon, can’t I be trusted with a fucking thong? Because I’m really trying to see what kind of danger this could pose to anybody. I suppose I could make a slingshot out of the damned thing. That’ll terrify the insurgents!
Run, Ahmad! They’re using Rocket-Propelled Undies!
A new plan would make Oregon the first Western state to independently accept the return of wolves. The plan, created by a panel of experts which included Amaroq Weiss, western director of species conservation for Defenders, could provide protections for several breeding pairs of wolves in the state. Many biologists feel that it is only a matter of time until wolves migrate from Idaho and elsewhere to reclaim their historical range in Oregon
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan says the United States decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was illegal [BugMeNot]. Mr Annan’s comments are likely to reignite debate over whether the retarded monkey boy, John Howard and British Prime Minister Tony Blair acted within the bounds of international law by failing to get a final UN Security Council resolution on Iraq
Mozilla.org has unleashed a triple threat; Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8, and Mozilla Suite 1.7.3
Nokia has signed a licensing agreement to support the use of Secure Digital (SD) flash memory cards in its mobiles. The company also will continue to support MultiMediaCards
The National Australia Bank is about to pilot a new service delivering internet banking passwords via SMS
Transitive Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup, claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit. They claims their QuickTransit software allows applications to run transparently
on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes
Linux backers have agreed on a standard version of the operating system so that programs written for one Linux distribution will work with others
Estate agents the world over are often alleged to be guilty of sharp practice but a Siberian real estate firm has been accused of much worse; namely of poisoning its clients before burning them alive and then stealing their homes. Russian prosecutors allege that the firm, ironically named Comfort, murdered nine of its clients during 2002 and 2003 and managed to get its unfortunate victims to sign over their property beforehand
Warren Ellis lets Spider Jerusalem out his box again with short story that shines the harsh glare of a cathode ray tube on the horror of politics.
It was true. B-roll from SPKF coverage spilled across the television screen, and there they were, just under his shirt collar, accidentally revealed by a make-up artist as she tried to relieve his unearthly grey pallor. A steel bolt in either side of his neck, marked with the unmistakeable sooty scars of electrical contact.
Go now and read the rest.
Grameen Bank, famous for pioneering micro-credit programs in Bangladesh, has launched a new idea to empower the poor: arming beggars with mobile phones so they can sell a roving service for cash
Having sex with corpses is now officially illegal in California after Schwarzenegger signed a bill barring necrophilia. The new legislation marks the culmination of a two-year drive to outlaw necrophilia in the state and will help prosecutors who have been stymied by the lack of an official ban on the practice, according to experts. I’m a little bemused to hear that there are necrophilia experts
Zambian police have arrested a man who exhumed, cooked and ate part of his grandson’s corpse. Police spokeswoman Brenda Muntemba said police had no idea why the man, who had no history of madness, had started eating his grandson, who died in July. The man was charged with interfering with a dead body and also for trespass in the graveyard
A US federal judge has thrown out a state law requiring internet service providers to block web sites containing child pornography, saying the method used also caused massive suppression
of free speech
Scientists in the United States have found that the right ear is better at picking up speech-like sounds and the left is more attuned to music, after studying the hearing of babies. It has long been known that the right and left halves of the brain process sound differently. However, those differences have been thought to stem from cellular properties unique to each brain hemisphere. The new research suggests that the differences start at the ear
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