Natsuko Sone is a petite 21-year-old who stands 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs just 95 pounds. But she can eat 183 pieces of sushi in half an hour and down 20 pounds of food in one sitting.

Presented with a gigantic bowl on a weekly variety show, Sone says, "I can eat this easily!" The human food vacuum takes a pair of chopsticks and digs into the 20-pound tub of curry, noodles and rice. For the next hour, the crowd looks on as her slender hand carries giant gobs of food from bowl to mouth. When asked how she's doing, she simply says: "This is delicious!"

According to an estimate from a company called Power-levels.com, it would take someone starting from scratch 768 hours to reach the highest level you can hit in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

These game consultants sell what are known as power-leveling services. Essentially, that means that for a fee, they will take over your account in any one of a large number of online games and put in the work required to get you where you want to be.

"Using a service to level a character is pretty universally regarded as a 'lamer' move," said Eric Haller, a San Francisco investor and long-time WoW player. "You will definitely not earn anyone's respect if they know you have paid for your levels."

From the class action 'Comes et al. v. Microsoft' suit, some very enlightening internal Microsoft emails are now made public. Emails to and from Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, etc all make for some mind blowing reading. One of my favorites is from Jim Allchin to Bill Gates, entitled 'losing our way,' in which Allchin states 'I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

Imagine if all it took to get inside widely-used Diebold electronic voting machines--perhaps with malicious intentions, such as installing tally-altering software on its memory card--was a photograph of the key to the system's physical lock.

Thanks to a little help from the e-voting outfit itself, it may actually be that simple, a security researcher from Princeton University suggested this week.

According to J. Alex Halderman, a computer science PhD student, a picture of the key published at Diebold's online store was a veritable blueprint for filing down ordinary hardware-store cabinet keys to an identical shape.

At the time, they said it would take only seconds to pick the lock guarding the machine's memory card--and beyond that, it could be opened with the same keys typically used with hotel minibars and jukeboxes. With less than one minute of physical access to a machine, a hacker could install corruptive software on the memory cards inside, the study reported.

It's official: record companies don't like you. After all that griping about signing up for the Zune music store -- and keep in mind that these record companies receive monies for selling songs here -- that resulted in Universal Music Group getting some sort of fat royalty check from Microsoft for Zune sales, not to mention whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors to come up with that ridiculously minimal "three days or three plays" sharing scheme, a couple of labels have once again gone out of their way to make life hard on you. It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as "prohibited" for sharing, meaning that just because you've paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet Earth, doesn't mean you'll necessarily get to beam that JoJo track to another Zune via WiFi magics. In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail. Oh well, maybe you can just hum a few bars or something -- just make sure the labels don't hear you!

Police working with the RIAA have arrested a famous DJ for making rap mixes, which according to the recording industry makes him a pirate.

According to the New York Times, DJ Drama, AKA Tyree Simmons, is highly influential and his 'Gangsta Grillz' compilations have define this decade's Southern rap explosion.

Recording companies have turned a blind eye to mix tapes because they are valuable promotional tools. Rapper 50 Cent built his entire career on the careful use of mixtapes.

However no one seems to have told the RIAA, which seems to be acting independently of the record labels. In fact it is working against its own PR spinning that its fight against pirates is helping to protect artists' rights.

Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products Co. and inventor of instant ramen, died of heart failure Friday evening at a hospital in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, his family said. He was 96.

Born on March 5, 1910, in Taiwan, Ando initially ran clothing companies in Taipei and Osaka while he was a student at Ritsumeikan University. In 1948, he founded the precursor to Nissin and in 1958 unveiled Chicken Ramen, the world's first instant noodle product.

Ando was inspired to develop the instant noodle after coming upon a long line of people on a cold night shortly after World War II. They were waiting to buy freshly made ramen at a black market food stall.

Kei Kizugawa, head of the journal Kamigata Geino, said Ando was a great food product inventor whose accomplishments equaled that of Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. "I believe generation after generation will talk about Chicken Ramen," Kizugawa said. "I don't think there will ever be an instant noodle product that beats the taste of Chicken Ramen."

A 17-year-old Chinese youth, disappointed his online girlfriend turned out not to be the woman of his dreams, has killed himself, state media reported Friday.

The youth from a town in northeast China "hung himself after a catastrophic meeting with his online sweetheart," the Xinhua News Agency said.

"To his intense disappointment, his dream girl turned out to be a plain lady who was more than 10 years older than him," Xinhua said.

The disappointed youth immediately returned home, and told his parents what had happened only after the woman telephoned him.

They tried to console him, but he was found four days later hanging from a tree.

Silicon Valley is packed with foreign spies eager to steal technology secrets, according to a report prepared by the Pentagon.

According to Reuters, the Pentagon fears that spies from the Asian-Pacific area are doing overtime to capture US defence secrets.

The Defence Security Service Counterintelligence Office recorded an annual rise of 43 percent in the number of suspicious incidents reported to US authorities. Since 2005 the total number of suspicious foreign contacts climbed to 971, the report said.

Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington.

By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account.

The extent of the demands were disclosed in "undertakings" given by the US Department of Homeland Security to the European Union and published by the Department for Transport after a Freedom of Information request.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, expressed horror at the extent of the information made available. "It is a complete handover of the rights of people travelling to the United States," she said.

In October, Brussels agreed to sweep away the "bureaucratic hurdles" preventing airlines handing over this material after European carriers were threatened with exclusion from the US. The newly-released document sets out the rules underpinning that deal.