How you ever stopped to wonder how a fruit fly is able to locate and blissfully drown in your wine glass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Are the spontaneous flight paths of fruit flies really random or do they serve some real purpose?

Wondering why Google's board of directors recommended to shareholders that they vote down a proposal that would require Google to adhere to a set of standards against censoring the internet? Perhaps you just need to look to the situation in Thailand, where Google's YouTube property was lamely banned earlier this week over a single video that mocked that country's king. Apparently, the country is now getting ready to ditch the ban, but only because Google has promised to help them censor the video, not by pulling it down, but by making it inaccessible to viewers from Thailand. I guess on Google's famous "evil scale", censoring one video to make the rest of YouTube available is less evil than having no YouTube at all in Thailand.

Anyone who has bought a new PC in recent years knows all about the rigmarole associated with getting them going once they've been taken out of the box. In addition to all of the preferences, the user is faced with an onslaught of what are basically software ads in the form of trial services. Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, who has certainly seen more than his fair share of computers over the years, was nevertheless struck by how ridiculous things have gotten, after experiencing the joys of setting up a new Sony Vaio laptop. In addition to two dozen pieces of teaser software for services from Napster and AOL, the computer came pre-loaded with four feature-length movies from Sony Pictures. Of course the movies, which were taking up valuable space on the hard drive, couldn't be viewed without first paying Sony. The problem, as Mossberg correctly identifies, is that computer manufacturers act as if the computer doesn't belong to the user, but is instead some platform for them to pitch services. It could be argued that all of these pitches help subsidize the cost of the computer, or at least help defray the growing Windows tax (the fact that as hardware prices continue to drop, the portion of a computer's price that goes to paying for Windows goes up). But it's not surprising, then, that consumers are increasingly interested in alternatives, like desktop Linux, as a way of avoiding the whole mess.

Filed under: Robots

We've got means to extract oxygen from water, a portable bar, and even ways to deprive entire server farms of the sustenance, but a new project being tackled by Lockheed Martin is hoping to create O2 on the moon. A critical part of NASA's PILOT (Precursor In-situ Lunar Oxygen Testbed) initiative, this digger bot will work hand-in-hand with a "processing plant that will add hydrogen to moon soil, heat it to 1,652-degrees Fahrenheit, condense the steam, and finally extract the oxygen." Additionally, the blue LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) box atop the three-foot-long machine can assist it in locating "oxygen-rich lunar soil and autonomously carry it to a processing plant." The overriding goal is to use the newly extracted O2 for air, or moreover, to combine it with hydrogen and produce water for the four astronauts that the lunar base could support. Unfortunately, there's no timetable as to when we'll actually see the PILOT roll into action, but we're most interested in porting this bad boy over to Mars along with half the traffic in LA.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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