China says about 44,000 ancient ruins, temples and other cultural sites have disappeared.

Explaining the results, an official quoted by Chinese state media said many such sites were unprotected and had been demolished to make way for construction projects.

In the worst-affected region, Shaanxi province, which is the home of the terracotta warriors, the statistics indicate that more than 3,500 cultural sites have vanished.

HTC previously took pains to lock down the bootloaders on its Android devices, preventing users from rooting them to install custom operating system builds. After some backlash, HTC recanted, and Peter Chou, HTC's CEO, said in May that the company would no longer be locking the bootloaders.

Of course, "allowing" is different than "supporting." HTC warns customers that unlocking their devices may mean they're no longer covered under warranty. The company also notes that unlocking the devices may cause unintended side effects, including overheating.

At launch the diminutive machine will be offered in two configurations, one at $25 and the other at $35. The extra $10 gets you double the RAM at 256MB, as well as the addition of an Ethernet port for getting online. Its creators have also announced the "Gertboard," a small expansion board that can be added to the Rasberry Pi. Its purpose is to "flash LEDs on and off, drive motors, run sensors and all that other fun stuff."

Researchers at Japan’s Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology have developed a seat that can identify the user by the shape and heft of their buttocks.

One of the advantages of the technology, according to the team, is that it’s less awkward than other forms of biometric technology.

The sentence comes just days after China sentenced another Tiananmen activist, Chen Wei, to 9 years in prison. Wei was one of hundreds of dissidents who were held by Chinese police earlier this year in order to to prevent the "Jasmine Revolution," a series of planned protests inspired by the Arab Spring.

Human rights groups have accused Beijing of cracking down on activists under the cover of the Christmas holidays so that they would not receive as much attention from diplomats or media, BBC News reported.

If you're the giver or recipient of presents gift-wrapped by Amazon, you may want to take a gander at U.S. Patent No. 8,060,463, granted to Amazon last month for Mining of User Event Data to Identify Users with Common Interests. Among other things, Amazon explains the invention can be used to identify recipients of gifts as Christian or Jewish based on wrapping paper. From the patent: 'The gift wrap used by such other users when purchasing gifts for this user, such as when the gift wrap evidences the user's religion (in the case of Christmas or Hanukkah gift wrap, for example.)'

Following criticism from customers for its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, domain registrar Go Daddy today said that it's no longer backing the legislation.

In addition, the company has also taken down blog posts where it outlined its support for portions of the bill.

Just yesterday, the creator of icanhascheezburger.com, among other sites, vowed to move 1,000 domains held by parent company Cheezburger, Inc. to another registrar if Go Daddy did not change its stance on the matter.

And today, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales tweeted that the company was moving away from using Go Daddy given the company's support for the bill.

In an op-ed published in Politico shortly after SOPA was introduced in the House, GoDaddy applauded the bill and called opponents “myopic.”

Now furious Internet users at reddit (owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast) have organized a boycott of the registrar.

GoDaddy appears to be the only domain registrar, or Internet company for that matter, on the list. Indeed, even traditionally strong copyright supporters like the Business Software Alliance have been having second thoughts about the legislation.

Facebook has kicked off a new Web page explaining how and why the social network depends on advertising.

"Selling your information would actually be bad for Facebook. Here's why: Facebook was created to help you share and connect with the people in your life. If you don't feel like you're in control of who sees what you share, you probably won't use Facebook as much, and you'll share less with your friends."

The source code for Oracle's Solaris 11 operating system is now out in the open for anyone to peruse and compile, thanks to a furtive posting of a compressed archive that has been mirrored across scores of bitstreams and filesharing sites. But so far, Oracle hasn't moved to do anything about it, and the question remains whether the code was leaked by a disgruntled Oracle employee, or if this is the strangest open-source code-drop in history.

Rather than it being a stealth code drop by Oracle or an attempt to trap open source developers, many in the community believe the leak is just that—a leak by a disgruntled Oracle employee. And Cantrill said there are no doubt plenty of those, as Oracle has disenfranchised many engineers and the company's culture has driven away a large portion of Sun's engineering talent—including Cantrill himself, who left Oracle in July of 2010.