Slashdot

Many of us think that all the humanoid robots are Japanese or Korean. Actually, there is a quite interesting human size robot that comes from UAE, REEM-A. It has some interesting skills as dynamic walking (of course), object recognition, voice recognition, self localization and mapping, long battery life and face recognition ("where have I seen you before?"). Recently, the development team announced that the second prototype, REEM-B, will be presented in February 2008. The second prototype got many improvements: a fingered hand with 12 motors, the ability to go up and down stairs, additional force sensors on the arms, ultrasonic range finders to avoid obstacles and a completely new look (but we must wait 2 more months to find out how REEM-B looks like).
http://www.pal-robotics.com/

Dave Touretzky writes "Quixtar (formerly known as Amway) has filed suit against 21 anonymous bloggers and YouTubers in an effort to unmask their identities. The suit alleges that the anonymous critics are acting on behalf of TEAM, a group of Quixtar distributors that recently broke with the company. Quixtar and TEAM are presently suing each other, and TEAM has called Quixtar a "pyramid scheme" whose prices are too high. One of the videos mentioned in the subpeona is a hilarious spoof of a Quixtar sales presentation that does seem to repeat TEAM's criticisms of Quixtar — but they're the same criticisms people have been making for decades. Another one of the targeted videos is an innocuous piece of criticism whose inclusion clearly demonstrates that Quixtar's real interested is intimidating its critics. Google is giving YouTubers until Nov. 5th to file motions to quash the subpoenas for their identities. Once unmasked, Quixtar will likely subpoena the defendants' hard drives, as they have done previously."
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Amway/quixtar-subpoena-2007-10-08.pdf