June 27th 2008 marks the day that Bill Gates steps out of his role as nerd-baron and into the shoes of full-blown immortal philanthropist. Thank You!

Honda’s ASIMO robot conducts the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to raise awareness for music education.

ISPs and authorities increasingly use Deep Packet Inspection hardware to block access to BitTorrent sites, or spy on users’ browsing habits. To offer its users more privacy, isoHunt has now added SSL encryption, making it impossible for your ISP or the authorities to monitor your activities on the BitTorrent site.

SourceForge, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to blocked in Mainland China on the eve of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which began on 8 August in Beijing.

Speaking at a conference in New York, Microsoft’s chief architect, Ray Ozzie, said open source is a bigger threat to the software juggernaut than Google is. He says open source developers are not restricted by the best interests of shareholders and potentially are, therefore, a stronger market force.

With the help of an Australian partner, Google is close to landing a contract to support 1.3 million students with Gmail. The deal for student e-mail accounts at public schools and colleges in New South Wales is not quite finalized. But it is expected to be worth roughly AU$9.5 million (US$9.05 million) over a three-year period with an optional

One of the most interesting questions considered by astrophysicists deals with the start of our universe. Indeed, there is a great deal of speculation on the subject, with different theories about how the universe began, and what may have existed before the universe came into being.

What more do we know about Mars’ atmosphere? It’s hundreds of times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere and is made of 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and contains traces of oxygen, water, and methane.There are an amazing number of six current live probes exploring Mars. However, only a few show atmospheric phenomena. Here are some of them

According to an ever increasing wave of emails to TorrentFreak, it appears that residents of at least two countries can no longer access Demonoid. Not only are users from the Netherlands complaining they cannot access the site but now it’s the turn of Brazilian BitTorrent fans to wonder why they’ve been cut off.

Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year’s NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecom industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches.

It’s no secret to most readers that Comcast’s outsourced techs are often late, rude and incompetent, and that calling customer service is more akin to improving dialogue in a Beckett play, but as this exclusively obtained internal Comcast powerpoint shows, it’s no secret to the cable company either.

Behold the biggest Lego airplane in the world, made after the largest passenger airplane in the world, the Airbus A380. Made at a 1:25 scale-9.5-foot long, 10.5-foot wingspan, 3.2-foot tall—the Lego A380 uses 220 pounds (100kg) of bricks.

Britain’s most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, has accused the government of making “disastrous” cuts to research funding that threaten the country’s international standing. The leading physicist also reveals he turned down knighthood several times

Below are the top 25 highest scoring entries submitted in may 2008 on PST… taken from all photoshop contests that were active during that month.

During the last couple of years, hundreds of people have received letters from lawyers demanding compensation for the alleged uploading of copyright works. Their demands state that if you don’t pay up, you will be taken to court and dealt with severely. However, when people refuse to pay - nothing happens.

Here’s everything you wanted to know about the iPhone 3G.

The 51st entry in Charles Messier’s famous catalog is perhaps the original spiral nebula - a large galaxy with a well defined spiral structure also cataloged as NGC 5194.

Forget cryopreservation – hot and dry conditions might be all you need to awake far into the future. A date palm seed some 2000 years old – preserved by nothing more than storage in hot and dry conditions – has germinated, making it the oldest seed in the world to do so.

The Yahoo! chief ended talks with Microsoft and did a deal with Google. Here’s how we’ll know he made the best choice.

Here is an interesting map of the world’s religions.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is not quite feelin’ eBay’s plans to go PayPal-only in Australia, and has issued a draft notice rejecting the proposal. The ACCC said that eBay’s proposed conduct might allow the company to abuse its power and ultimately eliminate competition in the market where PayPal operates.

cheaper, global, and better.

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.The US (surprise, surprise) has circulated a draft (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting. Any border guard, in any treaty country, can check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion.

In spring 2007, Estonia’s banks and newspapers were shut down by an organized wide-scale cyber-attack using ‘botnets and other “Cyber-warefare” methods, in this Wired Science video they take an in depth look at how this happened and how Cyber-warfare similar to this will be fought and what governments/organizations can do to deter it.

Don’t bother clicking the links. These idyllic headlines only exist in fantasy. But it’s nice to dream of a better world….