Professor Lessig will be flown in at the 11th-hour
to testify on the intellectual property provisions of Australia’s pending Free Trade Agreement. The IP section of the FTA is modeled after the DMCA — via Lessig News
The first Australian patients to be cured from type one diabetes have spoken about their treatment. Doctors from Sydney’s Westmead Hospital transplanted cells from a donated pancreas into the patients and they are now producing their own insulin. Barbara Dunn and Julie Mudd are among the first Australian patients to undergo the ground-breaking transplant. After being diabetic for 37 years, Ms Dunne is now free of daily injections
A million hectares of land with the most significant areas wilderness outside of the national parks system will be sold off at only three percent of its market value to current leaseholders, after the Carr Government successfully passed legislation it had fought to prevent in 1993
Australia hosts more porn pages than any other country in the region despite strict laws designed to restrict adult content
The President’s handlers foolishly granted a Presidential interview (Indymedia have an MP3 available or you can read the transcript) to a non-White House Press Corps journalist, Carole Coleman, the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish national television network. When she asked him pointed, pertinent questions, he became upset when his stock answers failed to satisfy her. An aide to the President later complained that Coleman had overstepped the bounds of politeness
— via BoingBoing
John Howard, showing his usual love of money over environment, has offered a $5 million bribe to the notorious eco-vandal Gunns for a proposed $1 billion pulp mill. The Greens are far from impressed
mozilla.org today released upgrades to both Firefox 0.9 (0.9.1) and Thunderbird 0.7 (0.7.1) to fix some minor bugs present in both releases. Both releases correct some flaws in the extension system that some users may have been experiencing, as well as a new icon set for the navigation toolbar on Windows and Linux in Firefox 0.9.1
A US motorist found a slithery surprise not covered in his rental car agreement when a ball python stuck its head out from between his legs. He was completely in shock,
said Madison, Wisconsin, police officer Laura Walker. I mean, he said he was lucky he didn’t crash the car
Regular readers will recall that I have been in job limbo lately (and in the sense of doing meaningful work, ever since the dot com years). Over the past month or so I have even been reduced to the mind numbing horrors of helpdesk.
Today the clouds have parted to reveal glorious IT sunshine. As of the beginning of August I will be following in the footsteps of the great Ryan Heise and starting my new job as… drumroll… Oracle Hax0r.
w00t!
Apple have released some shiny new aluminium cinema displays in 20 (AUD$ 2,299), 23 (AUD$3,499) or a whopping 30-inch (AUD$5,999) options.
Yes you read right, the 30-inch cinema display is even more expensive than the top of the range G5 going for AUD$5,299.
It’s swively so you can adjust your viewing angle easily, has a gazillion ports and you can get a wall mounting kit so that you can behold it’s floating majesty and save desk space.
Folk cures abound for curing a hangover, yet only time — to let the body clear out the toxins — seems to really do the trick. But help may be on the way. Researchers from Tulane University and the University of California, San Francisco report that an extract from Opuntia ficus indica, a type of prickly pear extract, eases the symptoms of a hangover when taken before drinking begins — via Rogue Sun
The Iranian daily newspaper Etemaad has reported the controversial story of a woman who claims to have given birth to a frog. While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal. It has been speculated that the woman, who has not been named, unknowingly picked up the larva while she was swimming in a dirty pool — via Die Puny Humans
Paul Curtis, a Yorkshire graffiti writer, has come up with a really clever writing technique: he lays a template with his tag over a dirty wall, then sprays the template with solvent, leaving behind a clean patch bearing his message. It’s inverse graffiti — he’s selectively cleaning up dirty walls.
He decided to commercialise the process and tagged Smirnoff ads in Leeds, and that’s where he got into trouble: he’s been ordered to remove
the clean patch of wall and get rid of the ad — via boingboing
Ice cream tycoons Ben and Jerry gave Penn State US$600,000 to develop a refrigerator that uses sound waves instead of freon to keep food cool.
The mad-scientist design of the fridge is very impressive — via boingboing
It may soon be possible to carry around an AK-47 assault rifle and an iPod with you down the street — and be arrested for carrying the iPod. That’s according to critics of a Senate amendment to the copyright code proposed by Senator Orrin Hatch this week called the Induce Act
. He wants to make the intentional inducement of copyright infringement
an offence, and this will extend liability to any manufacturer of a device which plays infringed material, or a shop that sells such a device, they say — via BoingBoing
Sheddrick Deon Bentley, a less than intelligent member of society, walked into a Wal-Mart covered in blood and bought clothes, bandages and garbage bags with a bloodstained $100 note. The employees found this a bit suss and called the cops. The rocket scientist was charged with murder after authorities found a stabbed body in a bin — via Keith Lynch
Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it. The loophole is being exploited to open a backdoor on a PC that could let criminals take control of a machine. The threat of infection is so high because the code created to exploit the loophole has somehow been placed on many popular web sites. Experts say the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast
An interesting article about the absentee rate of PCs in various UK workplaces. While the average employee was out sick seven days a year, the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year. There’s also mention of junk e-mail’s impact on productivity, with one business reporting that 99.84% of all incoming mail is spam
Hewlett-Packard has discovered a memory flaw that could be in as many as 900,000 of its notebook computers and is offering customers free memory modules as a remedy
An Oklahoma state judge, Donald Thompson, frequently masturbated and used a device for enhancing erections while his court was in session, charges a petition by the state’s Attorney General Drew Edmondson seeking his removal
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