Unsurprisingly, PayPal saw nothing wrong with the charge and demanded that Juan prove that he didn't actually buy $81.4 billion worth of gas.

"Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes," Zamora said. "'Did you get the gas?' he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn't pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!"

Eventually, Zamora said, he was finally able to convince the representative that he didn't deserve to be in the same position as General Motors, who has lost roughly 80 billion dollars since 2005.

A Chinese lunar probe has crashed into the moon in what Beijing has called a controlled collision.

China's ever-more ambitious space programme includes plans for a space station and landing a man on the moon.

Chang'e 1 was under the remote control of two stations in Qingda, eastern China, and Kashgar in the north-west of the country, the Xinhua news agency said.

We called Seanodes a "disruptive" factor in the data storage business -- not because it has a new concept, but because it has taken an older idea and refined it for the virtualized world of IT. Its shared internal storage concept clashes completely with conventional enterprise storage operations because it requires no external storage hardware.

It puts to work virtually all of a system's wasted spinning disk capacity for a hugely less power draw than a typical one that spins up numerous NAS, SAN and SATA disks and cools them in racks.

The latest development in the Seanodes package is that the product now has a business continuity feature. Whenever a disk anywhere in the system goes down or is replaced, whatever may be running on the system is not affected.

What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.

The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos - and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner, according to Kuittinen.

Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis appeared as an expert witness at the Pirate Bay trial yesterday. He was questioned on the link between the decline of album sales and filesharing. Wallis told the court that his research has shown that there is no relation between the two.

He was heavily attacked by industry lawyers Danowsky, Pontén and Wadsted who did everything they could to discredit and slander his reputation. When Wallis was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for travel expenses etc, he light-heartedly suggested sending some flowers to his wife.

The Wallis' soon ran out of vases for the flowers but Görel knows that sharing is caring and will distribute the flowers to all residents in their apartment building.

Some toolkits aim to create entirely new ways of envisioning and creating projects that appeal to younger minds, such as games and animations, while others aim to recreate the "basic"-ness of BASIC in a modern language and environment.

A multitude of other programming languages and environments exist to teach children, such as Greenfoot, Phogram, and Microsoft's Small Basic, though many of them exist as proprietary implementations. Scratch, Alice, and Shoes are all open source, include support channels such as forums or chatrooms, and have large, thriving communities.

First up is that the country's Prime Minister appears to be flat-out lying when he claims that New Zealand has to implement such a plan to remain in compliance with international obligations. That's simply not true. He claims that other countries, like Australia and the UK have already implemented similar plans, but that's also not true.

Then, apparently with a straight face, the RIANZ claims that the evidence it presents to ISPs is "highly reliable, well-tested and accepted worldwide."

So, the recording industry doesn't want to pay the costs, doesn't want to give users much time to respond and is lying about what other countries are doing and the quality of its evidence. And New Zealand politicians are buying it.

Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night.

"Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So - what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?"

Irish internet users are to be blocked from accessing music swapping websites, as internet service providers bow to pressure from the music industry.

The country's other internet providers have been told by the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) to follow suit or face legal action.

Under the terms of an agreement between Eircom and Irma, Eircom will not oppose any court application, meaning that the orders will be automatically granted.

Bill Gates' charitable foundation has pledged $12.5m to help the world's poor access banking services.

The foundation, set up by the founder of Microsoft, has earmarked money for 20 projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Vodafone is in the process of rolling out its M-Pesa system in other countries, including Tanzania and Afghanistan.