The FTC said last Monday that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will have to pay a US$800,000 fine to settle charges that he violated financial reporting laws in conjunction with his investment portfolio. And they think that amount of money will make him change his ways, try cranking the fine up into the billions and you might make a point
An amusing guide to wading through some of the jargon that litters fan fiction. Love the description of the evil plot bunny.
Plot bunny: How a story starts: you’re innocently watching tv/film, and then you feel a strange sensation of… pain. You look down. A creature resembling the bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail has attached itself to your leg with three inch fangs, and you suddenly have an odd idea along the lines of ‘what if Legolas & Aragorn had been Full Monty style strippers before they joined the Fellowship?’. And it will stay there ’til you buckle down and write the story.
Habitat: depends on the bunny; a Merry/Pippin fluff bunny gambols about in the sunshire, eating lettuce, while a Frodo/Gollum angst bunny lurks behind the radiator, making horrible heavy breathing noises.
How to rid yourself of them: write the story. Suffer a head injury involving loss of memory. Get bitten by a better bunny. Rentokil (though for bunny extermination their rates are extortionate).
Technology to grow replacement teeth could mean the end of dentures. Scientists at King’s College London have been awarded £500,000 to help them develop human teeth from stem cells. The company Odontis, set up by the college, hopes to develop its research for tests on humans within two years after successful research on mice. Stem cells, the so-called master cells, would be programmed to develop into teeth and then transplanted into the patient’s jaw where the gap is. It is thought it would then take two months for the tooth to fully develop — via Die Puny Humans
One of the weirdest computer mods, the Heavy Metal PC takes modding to maybe not a new but different dimension. Computing on wheels, and we’re not talking a car computer here. Have a look for yourself, 2×3.2 GHz on wheels, it’s sure worth seeing if you’re interested in mods
Gerald Newburger really doesn’t like losing. A year after getting outbid at an online auction for a collection of used band uniforms, the New Orleans native traveled to New York to confront his rival bidder with a gun
Will Apple own up to manufacturing problems with 15″ Powerbooks?
Apple Discussions — Uneven illumination
Hmm… some disturbing links indeed, especially as this is one of the contenders for my next/new mac. Looks like it’s 17″ PoweBook or G5 for me.
So, will this problem still occur in the new 15″, 1.5Ghz models? We shall see.
www.toondoctor.com has some interesting articles on flash animation and webisodes. It’s in my bookmarks, filed fiendishly under ‘toons’. Hopefully their articles will prove to be helpful in the not too distant future.
Fwak! Blog is a handy toon themed blog, populated with the rants of these guys over at www.fwakanimation.com.au
While you’re at it, check out www.woohoopictures.com, they have recently finished up a flick entitled ‘Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher’ and it looks very smashing indeed. Trailer can be seen here
P.S. This entry is the magical 500th entry in the Opinion section. Boy can we blog shit or what?
The US Government is taking legal action against an Australian company for sending 400,000 spam e-mails promoting eternal youth. The FTC filed a civil action against Global Web Promotions, whose spam, it said, promoted diet patches and the products called HGH and Natural HGH, which allegedly contained human growth hormone — all products were bogus — via GeneWeb.info
Study of the use of green tea extracts for polishing the magnetic heads in hard-disk drives has yielded a compound that works three to four times faster than conventional compounds. If the findings can be reproduced in an industrial setting, the compound could reduce the cost and environmental impact of hard-drive manufacturing
Telstra is to increase rental fees for household phones by as much as $3.45 a month and hike the cost of some calls by two cents
Authorities in two states are trying to determine why a woman may have driven with her mother’s decaying body as a passenger from their Oklahoma home to Florida — by way of North Carolina and Texas — and then left the body in the car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Flagler County sheriff’s deputies found Melba Doshier’s body Tuesday in the car parked at a Wal-Mart in Palm Coast after shoppers reported a bad smell coming from the vehicle. The St Johns County medical examiner on Wednesday said she died of natural causes at least five days before she was found — via Oftquoted
Google files documents with regulators that provide an insight into its business, as it prepares to sell shares to the public
Misbehaving dogs are soothed by a chemical scent that evokes their puppyhood, according to new research. The chemicals could help relax dogs living in stressful environments such as animal shelters or working for the military. Researchers in Scotland conducted the largest-ever study on the effects of dog-appeasing pheromone
(DAP) on dogs in an animal shelter. DAP is a synthetic chemical that appears to mimic those secreted by lactating bitches three days after birth to create a comforting setting for puppies
Public transport systems of the future will feature high-tech vehicles supported, behind the scenes, by revolutionary control and scheduling systems that will make timetables redundant say CSIRO scientists. CSIRO has developed software that simulates the movement of passengers and vehicles around track-based public transport networks that are designed to carry large numbers of people
A truly extraordinary cure for some forms of blindness is being proposed. The idea is to add light-absorbing pigments from spinach to nerve cells in the retina, to make the nerve cells fire when struck by light. Eli Greenbaum’s team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee has been exploring this possibility for several years. In their latest experiments, the researchers have shown that adding plant pigments to human cells makes the cells respond to light
A few political sketches took a 15-year-old Prosser boy from his art class to questioning by the Secret Service — and thrust him into a debate over free speech
The headteacher of a leading Scottish prep school has banned his teachers from setting homework because he thinks meddling parents are harming children’s education
Friends of a champion Irish clay pigeon shooter have fulfilled his dying wish by packing his ashes into shotgun cartridges and blasting his remains over firing ranges around the world
A long-awaited review into digital copyright laws has been released, but recommendations for ISPs who may be hosting copyright-breaching material have been clouded by the new Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US
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