Some more aviation news for your edification. The British-built Zephyr is a solar-powered, unmanned aircraft that just flew for two weeks over the Arizona desert. That’s two straight weeks, mind you. It’s a triumph of engineering! → Read More
No, this aircraft most certainly isn’t as green as the Solar Impulse, but that doesn’t mean it’s not pretty amazing. It’s called, quite modestly, Taranis. It costs around $214 million, and it’s pretty much the pinnacle of stealth flight. → Read More
That Nike World Cup ad I mentioned the other day has aired, I think, 800 million times over the past few days on TV. I know I saw it at least once during the Champions League final at the weekend (which Inter thoroughly deserved to win). But get this: the very first time the ad aired in the UK the final six seconds of the ad never made it on the air! Someone’s getting fired… → Read More
The Cousins were mulling over a broadband tax, but the new Government has put a stop to that. (Now they’re considering using some of the BBC license fee to fund broadband development.) The idea was to charge people 50p (around $0.70) per month to fund the expansion of broadband into rural areas. Would such a move work here in the U.S.? Would you be willing to pay, say, $1 per month, paying toward… → Read More
Mayor of London and Top Gear slowpoke Boris Johnson is trying to make London one of the most wired cities, just in time for the Olympics. During a recent conference, Johnson announced a plan to install wifi hotspots in “every lampost and bus stop.” → Read More
OnLive, the streaming video game service that threatens to change the way people perceive gaming, has signed a deal with with British Telecommunications. The deal means that Britons will be able to play games like Mass Effect 2 and Assassin’s Creed II over their broadband connection (and it also means that BT will buy a small stake in the company). No UK launch date has been announced. The U.S. → Read More
The Digital Economy Act passed in the UK, as you know, and it’s pretty terrible. One of the more spicy sections of the law involved peer-to-peer use, and how it basically makes ISPs responsible for what their customers download. So if HBO finds that you’ve been download “The Pacific,” (really good show, by the way, much to my surprise) it can contact your ISP, who’s then responsible for… → Read More
Oh. My. God. Over in the UK, they’re in the process of passing the Digital Economy Bill, which three seconds of research suggests is analogous to the DMCA here in the U.S. Better people than I have already written extensively about why it’s Truly Evil, but this is pretty funny. “Copyright owners are currently able to go on-line, look for material to which they hold the copyright and identify… → Read More
There was another “are violent video games evil?” debate yesterday, this time on BBC Radio in the UK. (We sure do cover a lot of UK-centric news here, don’t we?) A group called Mothers Against Violence, whose goal is the complete eradication of violence (OK…), debated games journalists, the radio show hosts, and the video game industry in general. The debate wasn’t as silly as you may… → Read More
Thus begins the countdown to the Death of Usenet. It’s capitalized because it’s important. The High Court in the UK has ruled against famous Usenet index site Newzbin, saying that the site can be held liable for the copyright infringement of its users. Hear that? That’s the sound of the world’s Usenet users screaming “OH DEAR GOD NO!” You knew this day was coming. → Read More
Best Buy‘s move to the UK has been known for a little while now, but, to quote Jim Ross, business has just picked up. Other stores in the UK are planning how to best confront the store when it makes its debut this spring. (The first one opens in May.) Luckily for the local guys, Best Buy doesn’t exactly have the best reputation out there. Fair or not, that’s the way things are. → Read More
Watch out, Nicholas writing about cars, there’s bound to be errors! (No different from anything else, really.) It’s the McLaren MP4-12C, a £150,000 ($225,000) supercar that McLaren is actually positioning as “affordable.” I mean, an Xbox 360 Arcade SKU is “affordable,” maybe even a fancy gaming mouse when you consider what they do… Oh, I know who would consider this supercar affordable: people… → Read More
Who saw The Hurt Locker? Oh, right: none of you. Even if you didn’t you probably are already familiar with the basic concept: a U.S. Army guy whose job it is to disable I.E.D.s sorta goes crazy. That’s the gist of it. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense in the UK has unveiled something called the Dragon Runner, a remote-controlled robot that disables bombs. → Read More
I’m not an electrician, nor do I play one on TV, but this I like. It’s a re-designed UK electrical plug, one that’s much thinner and far more friendly to today’s portable, hi-tech toys than the standard plug. Apparently the actual UK plug is a cumbersome jerk, and tends to be a drag on people’s laptops, phones, and other gadgetry. Who wants that? → Read More
It finally happened. A Muslim woman in Manchester refused to submit to a full-body airport body scanner and was thus barred from boarding her flight. She cited her Muslim faith, which might have been expected, as to why she refused to submit to the scan. I don’t trust the Internet to react to this news with any aplomb whatsoever. → Read More
You’re certainly familiar with those full body scanners, installed at airports to prevent bad guys from bringing bad things aboard airplanes. They scan your body, producing a fairly clear 3D image of your naked body. It’s controversial because, really, who wants their naked body on display so some goon in a uniform can try to see if you have a knife taped against your leg? Oh, that’s your… → Read More
Trouble at HP. The Public and Commercial Services Union in the UK called for a one-day strike at HP’s Enterprise Service division. The union didn’t like that, despite record profits, the division has seen some pretty significant job cuts, as well as a pay freeze. So, strike. More than 1,000 people participated in the strike action, as strikes are commonly called in the UK. Knowledge! → Read More
Absolutely brilliant. The British Army has produced a series of podcasts (hence the story’s appearance here) designed to get you, the average loaf-about, into tip-top shape. Let’s give ‘em a listen, shall we? → Read More
Would you buy a video game out of a vending machine? I certainly would, if only to avoid the phony human contact thrust upon me at GameStop. So these POP247 whiz-bangs are great. Too bad I’ve never seen one here. → Read More
This is definitely a case of preaching to the choir, but perhaps you have friends and/or family members in need of support. A survey just came out in the UK that says that while 56 percent of households have an HDTV, 91 percent of them still use standard-definition sources. That is, even though Mum and Dad have shelled out £900 for a 40-inch 1080 LCD, said TV is still connected to standard-def… → Read More
They’re trying to balance the books over in the UK, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has proposed a tax that may interest you. The proposed budget for the next year includes a broadband tax! The name is a bit misleading in that it’s not a tax on broadband, but a tax on telephone landlines (POTS), the money of which will go to making sure people in rural areas have sufficient access to… → Read More
What a coup for Sony’s marketing men. The Royal Navy will be handing out PSPs to its sailors so that they can brush up on their maths and whatnot. The PSP was selected because it’ll work wonders in the closed, confined spaces of Navy quarters. → Read More
Well, well, well, look what we have here. A new study shows that people who download music illegally are more likely to buy music than their non-pirating counterparts. Why’s that? It turns out that people who are into downloading music are actually into music, whereas people who don’t download music aren’t necessarily fans of music in general. → Read More
There’s two new Xbox 360 bundles coming your way, UK. To mark the arrival of Transformers 2 and Star Trek to DVD (and Blu-ray), Gem and Paramount pictures have put together these blurry bundles. → Read More
The ban hammer is about to smash UK file-sharers. Legislation there is set to take effect in April that would, as a last resort, kick illegal file-sharers off the Internet. Very exciting~! → Read More
So the PS3 Slim was an absolute monster at retail (look at us, using superlative adjectives on a Monday!), selling one million systems since its release. (Keep in mind that’s an old number by now.) How’s the PSP Go doing? It’s doing well, yes, but I don’t think we can call it a monster yet. Sales in the UK were up 120 percent in the week following its launch. We don’t have U.S. numbers yet. Sorry. → Read More
Once again, the Internet has saved the day. As some of you may know, Setanta, a sports broadcaster, recently went out of business in the UK. The unfortunate thing is that Setanta held the rights to England (football/soccer) away games. England play the Ukraine, in Kiev, next week, in a World Cup qualifier, so that leaves English fans without a way to watch the game. (England have already… → Read More
Seems our compatriots across the sea will have the Amazon Kindle as soon as next week. “Reliable sources” have confirmed that the publishers involved signed non-disclosure agreements, adding weight to our previous suspicions that the e-book reader would be available in Britain this fall. It’s all quite a cloak-and-dagger event.
Amazon’s current wireless provider, Qualcomm, seems to be the one… → Read More
Some pretty big iPhone news to share with y’all this morning: the iPhone will no longer be exclusive to O2 over in the UK, becoming available on Orange “later this year.” So for all of you in the U.S. who one day hope to see the iPhone on a different wireless provider (like, say, Verizon Wireless, differences between CDMA and GSM notwithstanding), well, you now have a precedent. → Read More
It’s time for story Eight Million and Six-teen about how the record labels and the musicians they ostensibly represent no longer get on with each other. This time, we have a bit of a row developing over in the UK, where that proposed knock-people-off-the-Internet-for-file-sharing law is currently stirring division amongst the ranks. One on side, of course, you have the record labels who, in the… → Read More
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