Andy wanted me to put up a little advisory for you wacky bastards that he's doing a little work on the comments system and it things may get a little broken in a few hours.

So if something goes awry on the comments, please don't bother emailing or complaining until we think that it works, please. Thanks much.

Looks like we're getting one step closer to the Jetsons. This humanoid robot by Honda. The robot can walk around on two legs, navigate stairs and all kinds of other things. All for just $29.99! (ok, probably not). It's still really amazing to look at and makes you wonder what robots will be like just another 5-10 years from now. I just want one to clean up the mess around the house and fix me filet mignon every night, that so hard? (Thanks Rick for the link)

The robot is one metre sixty tall, has a shoulder width of 60 centimetres, a depth of 55 centimetres, and weighs 130 kilograms. The skeleton consists of magnesium, and the movements are powered by servomotors. P3 can work for up to 25 minutes on a battery charge, and carries weights of up to nine kilograms per hand effortlessly.

Also, here is the developer page that the /. guys dug up.

Oh my goodness! It's the end! It has come upon us! An international team of scientists has estimated the locations of many as 900 large asteroids, some of which could eventually threaten the Earth with disastrous collisions.. (Thank sCan-r3v)

Such space rocks could set off natural catastrophes that freeze or fry the planet. Smaller ones could wipe out millions of people and larger ones could wipe out most species, according to Bottke.

I knew this day would come. I'm gonna play Diablo2 though in the mean time.

Just when you thought getting web traffic was a good thing, this guy is wanting to file a lawsuit against Nike.com because they made it so easy for Nike to get hacked and traffic was sent to his website. Mr. Smith isnt going after the hackers though, but going after Nike for negligence. (Thanks rage)

"Some might say the hacker or hackers are/were responsible," Smith wrote in an angry note on a self-created website called Shame on Nike. "To a small degree that might be true. However, Nike must surely bear the responsibility, since it was their total lack of security that allowed it to happen in the first place.

Now this is something that should interest you guys more than that silly Half-Life patch. CNN is reporting that the newly updated Atlas of Human Sexual Behavior has some pretty interesting bits. Firstly the average person in Briton has sex 2,580 times in a lifetime with 5 different people. The most sexually active nationality in the world. Here's some more:

The Brazilians have the greatest endurance, with sex lasting an average of 30 minutes. Thailand produces sprinters who have sex the quickest -- 10 minutes on average.

If you just got too much money to spend but don't know what to do with it maybe you should read this article on the Seattle Times website. Basically a toy inventor with little flight experience is building a rocket himself, and will be using it to blast himself into space next year. It's costing him a sweet $250,000 (not that bad) but hey he'll be the first to do so. Whether he'll return in one piece remains to be seen according to critics, but he's pretty damn confident himself.

Robert Frisbee, senior engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said Walker's plan should work in theory.

Frisbee hehe. Yeah I'm lame :D

ESPN has news that an animal rights group would like the Green Bay Packers to change their name, because it promotes violence and bloodshed and refers to meat packers. They rather would like to see the Green Bay Pickers, as in "picking fruits, vegetables and other crops" or Green Bay Six-Packers. Euh wtf are we talking about here people? This is btw the first time in 81 years that someone has complained about the name. Some people...

Well, it looks like you dont even have to host MP3 files to break the law anymore. The RIAA is now going after websites that even link an MP3 file. Somehow the RIAA feels that this lawsuit isnt about linking, but something about "what they know and what they dont know" according to an RIAA Here:

"If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt," said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com. [snip] This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of." says Steve Fabrizio, for the RIAA.

This has some pretty serious implications. Basically this could be carried over to any kind of known linking of anything illegal if you want to get nice an vague. I wonder if someone who runs a MP3 messageboard could get sued because of users posting links...

Britney Spears hasnt been getting enough attention around here lately so I figured the middle of the night is a good time to share a couple of Britney articles. First of all it looks like Britney is pulling a Milli Vanilli act in one of her recent shows. (Thanks Conan Ford). With stuff like that, and the amount of attention and honor she brings to the world of breast implants one would think she deserves a museum right? Well your wish has come true! (Thanks jet14)

note: Yes those anti-drug ads are annoying, I've put in a request to have them pulled. Should be gone some time during the day Tuesday.

Ah, Monday morning and back to work eh? Well what is going back to work without marveling at what an amazingly screwed up world the majority of us here live on. Here are a few things that should make you go 'wtf is going on around here?' Check it:

- A bunch of college athletes got videotaped nude in their lockers and the footage is being sold on a website on the net, and the students cant get a lawsuit to stick!
- Some dude in NYC is taking pictures of groups of 120+ naked people in public against the Mayor's wishes and getting away with it. (Yeah!)
- Some dude in Florida got the idea in his head that the dog his wife had was gay. (It kept humping another male dog) He knocked the dog out with a vacuum tube and threw it against a tree. The dog died.
- There is a law in Nova Scotia preventing people from wearing perfume. They have even expelled a student (for 2 days) and arrested a kid.

Our super-nerdy article of the day comes from CNN. Scientists have developed an electronic circuit that mimics the wiring of the human brain in some ways. Its pretty freaky stuff going on here:

"This is a demonstration of what's possible when circuits compute in biological ways," [snip] "If you take a Pentium chip and cut a single wire, then it would probably stop functioning," said Richard Hahnloser, another MIT researcher. "If you took our circuit, you could cut a wire and it would still work the same."

If you thought things got slow on the net when those Half-Life patches were coming out, check out this story. A California company plans to Webcast a competition in which five women will attempt to earn $1 million by breaking the “world record” for consecutive sexual partners. How many is that?

The current record holder [snip] ...who was filmed having intercourse with 620 men over a 10-hour period in late 1998.

As a pretty firm believer that there is life outside of earth (or at least outside of my computer room), this news item with word that NASA is about to announce they have found water on Mars is pretty cool. (and another story here) We're not talking that whole traces of water once existed stuff either, you can ship this stuff home and make ice cubes with it! Well, maybe. (Thanks /. for the links)

By finding liquid water near the surface, or actually part of the surface environment, "you could really move the whole question of searching for life ahead significantly, I think,"

Ok, being as that it Sunday evening and Maarten managed to call it a slow day twice (heh) I figure we may as well goof off a little bit before all those so called 'serious' people start showing up again on Monday. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, it to link the most wacked out or obscure audio file (be it .wav or mp3 or whatever) in the comments. There is no prize except well that huge amount of respect gained by your peers or something.

What's a Saturday without some random reading eh? Here are a few interesting bits from around the web which I figured you guys might want to read. Dont rush! We're gonna go two at a time here guys, pick a buddy. Here you go:

- Showing off just how organized we are here in the US of A, those missing super-secret nuclear secrets? They were stuck behind a copy machine.
- It looks like commercialization of space is getting closer. RadioShack is sponsoring a lunar mission (another link) and we've even got our first space tourist forking out 20million.
- This professor has possibly one of the best jobs in the world.
- If you still havent gotten your fill of Napster, here is yet another study.
- I dont know what is going on here, but I figured it was worth a look on MSNBC.

Dont know if you guys have been following the ICQ/Instant messenger wars but today is the big day for submitting a 'standard' to the IETF in an attempt to unify the whole thing. Basically letting people on ICQ, AOL IM, Yahoo IM, etc. directly message each other through their own respective IM software of choice. It's a pretty interesting debate and most of the big companies arent happy about the whole thing. (They want to keep their userbase exclusive in most cases). They tried this earlier but AOL wouldnt play ball, this time around they seem to be though.

An earlier effort to establish an IMPP standard failed last year amid protracted discussions on technical minutiae and a lack of participation from AOL, which commands nearly 90 percent of the rapidly growing IM market.

On top of that, it looks like AOL is considering open sourcing the AIM messenger protocol. (Thanks /.) .. and the official link on AOL. (Thanks Dopeman)

Ah what the hell, here is a bunch of random stuff for you guys that might prove interesting. Everyone in single file though, no crowding! Keep your hands to yourself and try not to pick on Daggah. :)

- Check out the plasma rockets that NASA is working on, (linked on /.)a trip to Mars in 3 months time!
- Microsoft got turned down for the initial request to delay the company breakup.
- Some chick got ass-implants and then claimed emotional anguish, and won $30,000. WTF?

CNN.com is reporting that those massive DoS attacks that took down Yahoo etc. a while back havent completely ended. Some new hackers have developed a new system. They have distributed a hack disguised as a movie clip to over 2,000 machines across the internet and even ran a test on Wednesday. (Which is when security experts detected it). Check it:

The security firm suspects the hackers are adding to their numbers daily and could soon launch a major attack. "They're gathering up their armies, and as that number increases, so will their testosterone level,"

Oh I love this one. OJ Simpson has agreed to take a lie detector test, on one condition. Someone has to volunteer 3million dollars as a reward to catch the 'real killer'. (Thanks ArmieBrat)

IF SIMPSON passes the test, the reward money would be put in a trust fund and paid out for information about the crime. If he fails, the letter of credit pledging the money will be dissolved, Bailey said in an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live.

Well look at this one, it appears that viruses arent just a problem for Windows users anymore, cell phone users in Spain have been a victim of a new virus that attacks phones with text capabilities. The virus has a striking similarity to the ILOVEYOU virus that hit a little while back. There is another story on MSNBC. Also, Telefonica put out a PR denying the problems. (Thanks Haakon Larsen)

security experts say the Spanish virus -- which could be altered easily to attack the millions of pagers and cell phones being used worldwide -- foreshadows the beginning of attacks on other handheld devices like Palm Pilots and Microsoft Pocket PC computers.