angry tapir writes "Panasonic has developed a hair-washing robot that uses 16 electronically controlled fingers to give a perfect wash and rinse. The robot, images of which were distributed by Panasonic, appears to be about the size of a washing machine. Users sit in a reclining chair and lean back to place their head in the machine's open top. Two robot arms guide the 16 fingers, which have the same dexterity as human fingers, the company claims."

Beetle B. writes "Do Google search results contradict your religious views? Tired of getting pornographic results and worried you'll burn in Hell for it? Are you Christian? Try SeekFind — 'a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible.' Muslim? Look no further: I'm Halal. Jewish? Jewogle is for you. NPR ran a story on the general trend of search engines cropping up to cater to certain religious communities. I wonder how many other 'filtered' search engines exist out there to cater to various groups (religious or otherwise) — not counting specialized searches (torrents, etc)."

nk497 writes "An MP in the UK has had his official email address removed from the parliamentary website, because he's tired of getting 'nuisance' emails via online campaign websites. MP Dominic Raab's parliamentary.uk email is currently not listed on the House of Commons' website following a spat with online campaigners 38 Degrees. 'Just processing the emails from your website absorbs a disproportionate amount of time and effort, which we may wish to spend on higher priorities, such as helping constituents in real need or other local or Parliamentary business,' he said, threatening to report the group to the government's data and privacy watchdog if they didn't remove the details from their own website. 38 Degrees says Raab gave them his personal email address during the election: 'it's only since he became a member of parliament with a taxpayer funded email address that he's now said he doesn't want to hear from people,' unless they're willing to shell out for a stamp to write him a letter. The lobby group said Raab likely averaged fewer than two emails from their site each day."

dango0 writes "SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization – Beginner's Guide is a detailed guide that will figuratively take you by the hand and teach you how to make stunning photorealistic and artistic visuals of your projects with free software and free resources that you can find all over the Internet." Read on for the rest of Dan's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on have released research detailing how molecules in chips can self-assemble, potentially reducing manufacturing costs. The researchers have developed a technique in which polymers automatically fall into place to create an integrated circuit."

CWmike writes "Microsoft withdrew on Thursday its demand that Cryptome.org yank the 'Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide' document from the site, and said it had never intended for the whistleblower's domain to be knocked off the Web. 'In this case, we did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed,' said a Microsoft spokeswoman. 'We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document's removal.' The document, a 17-page guide to law enforcement on how to obtain information about users of Microsoft's online services, including its Windows Live Hotmail, the Xbox Live gaming network and its Windows Live SkyDrive storage service, was published by John Young, who runs Cryptome.org, on Feb. 20. Earlier this week, Microsoft demanded that Young remove the document from his site, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. When Young refused, his Internet provider shut down the site, and Network Solutions, the registrar of Young's domain, put a 'legal lock' on the domain name. The last prevented him from transferring the URL to another ISP. Computerworld blogger Preston Gralla dug into the document today in his 'Leaked Microsoft intelligence document: Here's what Microsoft will reveal to police about you' post."

theodp writes "Microsoft says it has reached a wide-ranging IP agreement with Amazon in which each company has granted the other a license to its patent portfolio. Microsoft says the agreement covers technologies in products such as Amazon's Kindle — including open-source and proprietary technologies used in the e-reader — in addition to the use of Linux-based servers. Microsoft issued a news release celebrating the accord, while Amazon declined to comment. 'We are pleased to have entered into this patent license agreement with Amazon.com,' said Microsoft's deputy general counsel. 'Microsoft's patent portfolio is the largest and strongest in the software industry, and this agreement demonstrates our mutual respect for intellectual property as well as our ability to reach pragmatic solutions to IP issues regardless of whether proprietary or open source software is involved.' A Microsoft representative declined to say which of its products are covered by the deal."

hrimhari writes "The settlement between Amazon and Macmillian got the attention of a known dinosaur. Consistent to his views, Mr. Murdoch wants to defend his book editors by killing the cheaper solution. '"We don't like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99," Murdoch said. "They pay us the wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge," he said. "But I think it really devalues books, and it hurts all the retailers of the hardcover books.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"

bgweber writes "The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment. The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top-performing bots."

Many readers are sending in the news about Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in: "For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference. It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures. There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python's dictionary concept. ... One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system. It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance. You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them. You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java. In Go, however, you don't manually specify which interface a class implements. ... Parallelism is emphasized in Go's design. The language introduces the concept of 'goroutines' which are executed concurrently. ... The language provides a 'channel' mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines."