Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."

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theodp writes "Late on Monday, Oracle announced that ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has joined the company as a co-president and a director. Hurd resigned from HP a month ago, after an investigation by the board into a personal relationship with a contractor turned up questionable expenses. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a personal friend of Hurd, criticized HP's board at the time, saying it was 'the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs.' 'Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle,' Ellison said in a statement Monday. 'There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.' Stepping down to make room for Hurd was Charles E. Phillips Jr., who had some personal relationship issues of his own."

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telomerewhythere writes "Michael Strano and his team at MIT have made a self-assembling and indefinitely repairable photovoltaic cell based on the principle found in chloroplasts inside plant cells. 'The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.'"

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Thanks to travel website Oyster.com, where their tagline is " See the Hotel Truth. Book with confidence.", travelers are able to preview actual, undoctored amateur photos of the hotel destinations and see what they are they are really booking.

The origin of this meme (which recently spawned it's own Meme of "Leo Strutting") started with aGIF animation of a kid strutting and thinking the phrase was created by the artist Omar Noory. He drew the image in November 2008. It was originally uploaded to his portfolio page sometime in 2009, labeled “baller.gif” for something called “Top Secret Project.” The first public place he posted it was in an art thread on Yay Hooray.com

An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on."

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Click HERE to see young vs. old childhood celeb pics on theBERRY!

Kilrah_il writes "In recent years the number of people killed on roads in New South Wales, Australia has dropped, but strangely enough, the number of pedestrians killed has risen. Some think it's because of the use of iPods and other music players making people not attentive to road dangers (the so-called 'iPod Zombie Trance'). Based on this (unproven) assumption, the Pedestrian Council has started a campaign in an effort to educate the people, but apparently it isn't enough. Now, some are pushing for the government to enact laws to help eradicate the problem. 'The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars, but is apparently unconcerned that listening devices now appear to have become lethal pieces of entertainment,' [Harold Scruby of the Pedestrian Council of Australia] said. 'They should legislate appropriate penalties for people acting so carelessly towards their own welfare and that of others. ... Manufacturers should be made to [warn] consumers of the risks they run.'"

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GovTechGuy writes "On Friday we discussed news that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott opened a probe into whether Google ranks its search listings with an eye toward nicking the competition. Google suggested the concerns have a major sponsor: Microsoft. In question is whether the world's biggest search engine could be unfairly disadvantaging some companies by giving them a low ranking in free search listings and in paid ads that appear at the top of the page. That could make it tough for users to find those sites and might violate antitrust laws. Abbott's office asked for information about three companies who have publicly complained about Google, according to blog post by Don Harrison, the company's deputy general counsel. Harrison linked each of the companies to Microsoft."

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jamie tips a post at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog about an extremely unusual astronomical phenomenon originating from a binary system about 3000 light years away. Quoting: "The name of this thing is AFGL 3068. It's been known as a bright infrared source for some time, but images just showed it as a dot. This Hubble image using the Advanced Camera for Surveys reveals an intricate, delicate and exceedingly faint spiral pattern. ... Red giants tend to blow a lot of their outer layers into space in an expanding spherical wind; think of it as a super-solar wind. The star surrounds itself with a cloud of this material, essentially enclosing it in a cocoon. In general the material isn't all that thick, but in some of these stars there is an overabundance of carbon in the outer layers which gets carried along in these winds. ... AFGL 3068 is a carbon star and most likely evolved just like this, but with a difference: it's a binary. As the two stars swing around each other, the wind from the carbon star doesn't expand in a sphere. Instead, we see a spiral pattern as the material expands."

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