Roland Piquepaille writes "The St. Petersburg Times, Florida, reports that a well-known robot designer, Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), 'plans to add a heart to robot rescuers.' As says USF, the goal is to develop 'a robot that will be a companion to a person who may be trapped after a car crash or in building ruins following an earthquake, or someone pinned down by sniper fire.' As said Murphy, 'robots can provide not only a sense of being a 'buddy' by playing soothing music or providing other entertainment, the robot also can be the audio and video link between survivor and family.' Murphy will develop this robot with some money coming from Microsoft. But read more for additional references and a picture of Murphy with her robot rescuers."

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Sepiraph writes "In a letter sent to the Canadian Association of Internet Providers and Bell Canada on May 15, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) have ordered Bell Canada to provide tangible evidence that its broadband networks are congested to justify the company's Internet traffic-shaping policies. This is a response after Bell planned to tackle the issue of traffic shaping, also called throttling, on the company's broadband networks. It would be interesting to see Bell's response, as well as to see some real-world actual numbers and compare them to a previous study."

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bughunter writes "Internet consultant firm Gartner claims that only 1 in 10 commercial virtual worlds succeeds, and most fail within 18 months: 'Businesses have learned some hard lessons," Gartner analyst Steve Prentice said in a statement released Thursday. "They need to realize that virtual worlds mark the transition from Web pages to Web places and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics. Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience."'" Hard to believe it's even as high as one in ten -- most "virtual worlds" with obvious commercial trappings certainly don't inspire much besides mockery.

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Stating the obvious: "Two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass -- and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat. 'Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,' write the authors, Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the evocatively named London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine."

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New game releases for week of 5/18 @ ShackNews

Resistance 2 for PS3 preview @ GameSpy

PS3 “trophies” (similar to XBL achievements) in June rumors @ CVG

Top 5 things I learned from video games @ 1up

C&C: Red Alert 3 Hell March HD Trailer @ GameTrailers

New Left 4 Dead in-game movies @ Rock Paper Shotgun

Race Driver: GRID has gone gold on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC @ GamersHell

theodp writes "You probably saw media coverage of Bill Gates showing off touch-screen technology to his CEO play group last week. With the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch, touch (and multi-touch) technology — which folks like Ray Ozzie enjoyed as undergrads way back in the early '70s — has finally gone mainstream. The only question is: Why did it take four decades for its overnight success? Some suggest the expiration of significant patents filed during '70s and '80s may have had something to do with it — anything else?"

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We love finding fun things on Google Street View. This time we have a shot from New York City’s Central Park where Google’s privacy algorithm blurs out the face of the horse and leaves the (presumably) human driver’s face alone. If the link above changes, you can see an archived version here. I have a feeling that the comments won’t be kind to certain actresses.

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AOL has been busy launching specialized web sites that target specific demographics, such as parents or country music fans. Execs believe that the consumer market is fragmenting and want to put themselves in front of as many pieces as they can. According to the article, traffic is up but ad revenue is flat so the jury is still out on the success of this venture.

Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research, warned that all of AOL's niche offerings may not attract the total numbers they're seeking. "There's no way they can possibly anticipate all the ways consumers will want to bend and shape their own content," Epps said. But she credited AOL for trying. "They need to do something different. They need to keep innovating and experimenting and sometimes fail (in order to) find things that do work."

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Users anxiously awaiting the Open XML converters for Office 2008 for Mac should be good to go next month, if Microsoft stays true to their word. Without these converters, Office users that are on a version prior to the 2008 release are unable to open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents or save existing files as Open XML. The converters have been available for Windows since October 2007.

In February, Microsoft delayed the release of Open XML converters that would let Office 2004 for Mac users work with documents produced by Office 2007 on Windows and Office 2008 on the Mac. At the time, Microsoft said it would release the converters in late June.

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andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."

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HP announced Friday that they will introduce a new line of devices this fall that will be “designed by teens, for teens.” There’s no word on what those devices may be so stay tuned. Should be interesting to see what the next generation of geeks can come up with.

…the company is hoping to define a new generation of products with the help of its teen council. And some of those products might include gaming. (HP) referenced the company's acquisition of computer game company Voodoo two years ago during his talk.

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Not even a month after the Wii Fit hit European shelves, it is already under fire by obesity experts. Experts are concerned that the game can damage children’s body image by labeling them “fat” or “underweight,” based on their Body Mass Index (BMI).

Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum called for children to be banned from playing the game, claiming the BMI measurement was misleading… "BMI is far from perfect but with children it simply should not be used. A child's BMI can change every month and it is perfectly possible for a child to be stocky, yet still very fit.”

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schliz writes "Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a device that lets a standard digital camera take pictures with a resolution of 1-gigapixel (1,000-megapixels). The Gigapan is a robotic arm that takes multiple pictures of the same scene and blends them into a single image. The resulting picture can be expanded to show incredible detail."

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Cooling
CoolIt Dual Drive Bay VGA cooler NV Reference Series @ Bjorn3D

ThermoLab Nano Silencer CPU cooler @ TweakTown

Thermaltake V1 CPU cooler @ SPCR

Motherboards
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 @ Xbit

ASUS Rampage Formula X48 @ HardwareCanucks

Cases & Enclosures
Lian Li PC-A77 @ 3DGameMan

Mountain Mods U2-UFO CYO @ TechPowerUp

Memory
G.Skill vs Crucial: DD3 showdown @ Hexus

OCZ Reaper HPC PC2-8500 4GB kit @ Virtual-Hideout

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has revealed that the Wikimedia Foundation Board (which controls Wikipedia and Wikinews) has killed off a Wikinews report into the Barbara Bauer vs. Wikimedia Foundation lawsuit. Wikinews is a collaborative news site and is meant to be editorially independent from the WMF. The WMF office also suppressed a Wikinews investigation into child and other pornography on Wikipedia, which was independently covered by ValleyWag and other outlets this week. The US Communications Deceny Act section 230 grants providers of internet services (such as the Wikipedia and Wikinews) immunity from legal action related to their user-generated content provided they do not exercise pre-publication control. In deleting articles critical of the WMF prior to publication, Wikileaks says the Wikimedia Foundation may have set a dangerous precedent that could remove all of its CDA section 230 immunity (at least for Wikinews, where the control was exercised)."

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Researchers discovered that 20 million US households lack internet access. Age and education are factors in this “digital divide,” according to the research. This shouldn't be much of a surprise since the forums are full of support stories about people that shouldn’t have a computer or internet access.

"Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates, in a statement. "These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer."

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The National Science Foundation, along with Google and others, paid for research to see how email chain letters spread. What they found was that these letters take a much more circuitous route than what they expected. Maybe that’s why we still get forwarded email from mom suggesting a gas boycott that was scheduled eight years ago.

One surprising finding was that messages often took meandering routes between people who knew each other, often through as many as 100 intermediaries.

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We talk a lot about Windows and Apple vulnerabilities simply because they tend to be in the forefront of the news and the vast majority of readers are using those platforms. Now Debian and Ubuntu users can join in on the hand-wringing fun with this recent announcement about a “serious and scary” vulnerability in Debian and Ubuntu systems that can be exploited.

HD Moore, best known as the exploit researcher who created the Metasploit penetration testing framework, called the vulnerability in Debian and Ubuntu systems "ugly" and said it will be a big job for administrators to find every flawed key, then reissue them.

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Looks like QA is all done because Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Go forth and get it from this link if you're ready to check it out.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is available in more than 45 languages as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.

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Corrado writes "There is a big discussion going on over removing a bit of non-preemptable code from the Linux kernel. 'As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptable BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptable code again. "This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL.'"

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