The Associated Press, among other news agencies, ran a story Thursday on the Food and Drug Administration's impending decision to approve meat and dairy products from animal clones for sale on American supermarket shelves.

Let's clarify: the products of concern include meat and milk from the offspring of a cloned mammal (for example, a clone of a cow yielding a lot of milk or a pig that fattens quickly).

Bloggers' early responses can be summed up by what professional ethicists call the "yuck factor." The consensus seems to be that eating the meat of animal clones would be viscerally revolting, for a variety of reasons.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the World. An Arab proverb says that: "Man fears time, yet time fears the Pyramids", a reference to the fact that the pyramid has survived for about 4,500 years and, in that time, has lost a mere 10 metres off its incredible 145 metre height.

Composed of two million blocks of stone, each weighing more than two tonnes, this was not erected by George Wimpey and Co in a fortnight. For approximately 43 centuries it was the world's tallest man-made structure.

Or so we thought. Reports are emerging from Bosnia-Herzegovina of structures that make the pyramid of Giza look like a scale model.

At 267 metres tall, the Pyramid of the Sun blows the Egyptian opposition into the weeds. If that wasn't enough, it is simply one of a number of pyramids located in the same region - there are also the Pyramids of the Sun, the Dragon and, most recently discovered, Love.

Throughout the (longer than expected) development of Vista, Microsoft has worked hard to push the idea that it wouldn't be burdened by the same sort of security problems as older versions of Windows. The company has beefed up the built-in security features and services of the software, much to the chagrin of some third-party security developers and the European Union, and one of its execs gave people the idea that Vista wouldn't need anti-virus software. Given all that, it's still not surprising to hear that researchers and hackers have found plenty of flaws in Vista, even before it's been released to consumers. It's the same type of stuff that's plagued Windows XP, like a browser flaw and a user-privileges hack, and just the sort of thing most people were expecting despite the company's incessant talk about Vista being more secure. The bad news for Microsoft is that things are probably only going to get worse: a new version of Windows was bound to be a massive target for hackers, and the company's security hype has likely only made it an even bigger one.

While we're waiting for Google to launch its own Google OS (if the rumours are true, of course), I've checked out 10 web operating systems and what they can do. Not many of them feel like finished and fully usable products, but there are some true gems among them.

There are over 10 fully functional WebOS applications out there, and a couple more that are announced or in closed betas.

I'd say that YouOS, Goowy and DesktopTwo are the names you should watch now and in the near future, while the others *might* turn into promising products, but we'll have to wait a month or two for that to happen. Also, keep in mind that while it's relatively easy to judge who has the best functionality, it's much harder to see who has the best code, or the most solid framework to build upon, so it's safe to say that we can expect a few surprises to happen here.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has taken the step of blocking HTML-based email. They are also banning the use of Outlook Web Access email clients. The DoD is making this move because HTML messages can easily be infected with spyware and executable lines of code that enable hackers to access DoD networks, according to an article in Federal Computer Week by Bob Brewin .

On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies.

If you've ever heard Larry Lessig's stump speech on creativity and copyright, you know that it has a chunk in the middle dedicated to the fact that Disney, one of the biggest proponents of copyright extension to keep Mickey Mouse protected, has a long history of taking the ideas of others and reusing them in their own stories. In fact, the biggest irony is the fact that Disney "stole" (using their language) the very idea behind Mickey Mouse's Steamboat Willie debut from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill -- which came out the same year.

William Patry goes through the court battle from about a decade ago where questions were raised about Disney's rights to the story of Bambi. Turns out they might not really have owned the rights to it. Patry focuses on the case and why the ruling is exceptionally bad, but even more interesting to me is the lengths Disney went to try to win the case. As Patry notes, they basically threw out every possible argument to see what stuck, including claiming that Bambi was really in the public domain and then that it wasn't in the public domain, but that Disney owned the rights to it, rather than the heirs of the author of the story. So whenever Disney claims some moral right to keep extending copyright, it seems like the Bambi fight is worth pointing out as a counter example alongside the Steamboat Willie story.

Microsoft has filed for two patents covering technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds, such as those delivered via the widely used Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, family of formats.

Redmond actually filed for the patents on June 21, 2005. That date, incidentally, is just three days prior to the company's formal announcement that it planned to build support for RSS into the next version of its Internet Explorer browser and into its planned Windows Vista operating system--then referred to as Longhorn.

The invention, for example, could allow a user to "subscribe to a particular Web feed, be provided with a user interface that contains distinct indicia to identify new feeds, and...efficiently consume or read RSS feeds using both an RSS reader and a Web browser."

A related application, titled "content syndication platform," appears to describe a system that can break down feeds into a format that can be accessed and managed by many different types of applications and users.

Chasin's background is in computer security; he was also founder, in 1995, of usa.net, the first Web-based email provider. He has spent 11 years watching the spam battles. This last round, the spammers have clearly won. Spam volume always takes a leap upward in late autumn, but this year seems particularly bad.

This year's big innovation: "pump-and-dump image stock spam". You've seen them: inline GIFs above a lot of useless text. The real spam message is the words in the GIF, which advise you to buy some stock or other.

Some 80 percent of spam originates from botnets – megagangs of virus-infected PCs controlled remotely. "This is probably the biggest threat to the Internet since it was created and commercialised. I say this because the botnets have multipurpose payloads. They're polymorphic. We're seeing queen bots, where they can essentially infect a PC and then monitor the anti-virus signature engines and time their propagation."

A Japanese woman trying on a pair of jeans in a shop got a shock when she was stung by a scorpion hidden inside.

The woman, on the southern island of Okinawa, ended up in hospital for five days as a result of the sting, which was not life-threatening.

Officials told the Mainichi Daily News that the woman, who was not named, felt a sudden pain in her right knee as she tried the trousers on.

When she rubbed the area with her hand, the scorpion then stung her right index finger.