paulelaguna writes “The dream of owning a household robot is starting to become reality, particularly for people in Japan. There are robots to help you do the dishes, move furniture, and even robotic wheelchairs to help you get around. Really, the only question that remains for us is when do we move?”

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crimeandpunishment writes “Does the battle over the Blackberry ban in the United Arab Emirates have its roots in a spy story? Dubai’s police chief says concern over espionage (specifically, by the US and Israel) led to the decision to limit BlackBerry services. The UAE says it will block BlackBerry email, messaging, and web services on October 11th unless it gets access to encrypted data. Comments by Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim are often seen as reflecting (more…)

pickens writes “Erik Hayden writes in the Atlantic that children will see endearing portraits of Chewbacca rendered in the style of “Winnie-the-Pooh” in the book of drawings “Wookie the Chew,” a tribute to the combined genius of George Lucas, A.A.Milne and E.H.Sheppard, by artist James Hance released on September 1st. Samples from the book are available at Hance’s web site. Hance bases his right to parody Winnie-the-Pooh on Fair Use as parody under (more…)

wiedzmin writes “Public broadcaster ARD’s show ‘Plusminus’ teamed up with the known hacker organization ‘Chaos Computer Club’ (CCC) to find out how secure the controversial new radio-frequency (RFID) chips were. The report shows how they used the basic new home scanners that will go along with the cards (for use with home computers to process the personal data for official government business) to demonstrate that scammers would have few problems extracting (more…)

beschra writes “BBC writes of ‘terra-forming’ Ascension Island, one of the islands Charles Darwin visited. He and a friend encouraged the Royal Navy to import boat loads of trees and plants in an attempt to capture the little bit of water that fell on the island. They were quite successful. The island even has a cloud forest now. From the article: ‘[British ecologist] Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used (more…)

An anonymous reader writes “Engadget has photos of ‘Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.’ It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman’s lair.”

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coondoggie passes along this excerpt from Network World: “Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. … The technology starts with the ‘they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done’ (more…)

KwahAG writes “Colin Watson, one of the Ubuntu developers, published in his blog information about Windows applications making GRUB 2 unbootable. Users of dual-boot Windows/Linux installations may face the problem, which boils down to particular Windows applications (Colin does not name them, but users point at least to HP ProtectTools, PC Angel, Adobe Flexnet) blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying (more…)

An anonymous reader writes “Google is already experimenting with GPU acceleration in its latest Chrome developer builds. Chrome 7 can separate different layers of a webpage into CPU and GPU processes and combine those layers using the GPU as long as the browser is now launched with certain switches. Chromium 7 has also a new Labs feature that reveals that Google is thinking about moving tabs from the top of the browser to the left side. It seems that (more…)

theodp writes “Out of necessity, reports Slate, tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired. Take database technology startup RethinkDB, whose old-school recruiting effort — job boards, external recruiters — yielded hundreds of resumes, dozens of phone screens, and numerous four-hour meetings with viable candidates, but no one who fit their criteria. ‘They [recruiters] can’t tell the difference between the competent (more…)