Jack Thompson has made a plea to Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, demanding that Penny Arcade's $10K donation (in Jack’s name) be considered criminal harassment.

When will it end? If we stop posting about Thompson, will he go away? Or, would making a collective agreement to shut him out of the gaming press leave his banter unchecked?

A US company has set up operations in China to sell land on the moon for 289 yuan (37 dollars) an acre, cashing in on renewed interest in space travel after the successful five-day voyage of Shenzhou VI.

The so-called Lunar Embassy, touted as the first extraterrestrial estate agency, started operations Wednesday in Beijing, the China Daily reported.

Lunar Embassy was set up by US entrepreneur Dennis Hope in 1980, 11 years after the Apollo II mission first landed people on the moon.

Hope believes a loophole in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty makes his property sales legitimate. The agreement forbids governments from owning extraterrestrial property but fails to mention corporations or individuals.

Sweden's high profile battle between illegal file sharers and representatives of the film and games industries rumbles on. But now the country's music industry, which has so far kept quiet on the subject, is planning to get involved.

Last week the IFPI, along with the games and film industry body, Antipiratbyran (APB), was given the right to register the IP addresses of individuals found to be sharing copyright-protected material.

This gave the organisations an exemption from the Personal Data Act and was seen as a significant victory for APB and an indication that the hunt for illegal file sharers could proceed.

The order comes from the Swedish Board of Data Inspection, but APB says it is impossible without the cooperation of the country's internet service providers. And the ISPs are not playing ball.

Only the file sharer's ISP can link the IP address to the person. If the ISP receives a request for such information from the police, they cannot refuse it, but a few calls from TT revealed that requests from APB would be ignored.

The public face of APB, lawyer Henrik Pontén, thinks that the ISPs are taking a short-term view of the problem.

"It is also in their interests that there is a functioning games and film industry for legal distribution," he said.

Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that's scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month.

"The Internet is likely to face a grave threat" at the summit, Coleman said in a statement on Monday. "If we fail to respond appropriately, we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on."

At the heart of this international political spat is the unique influence that the U.S. federal government enjoys over Internet addresses and the master database of top-level domain names--a legacy of the Internet's origins years ago. The Bush administration recently raised objections to the proposed addition of .xxx as a red-light district for pornographers, for instance, a veto power that no other government is able to wield.

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

"Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?"

Helicopters and warplanes bombed two villages near Ramadi in western Iraq on Sunday, killing about 70 people, the US military says.

It said all the dead were militants, although eyewitnesses are quoted saying that many were civilians.

An F-15 warplane fired a precision guided bomb at the group, killing about 20 militants, the US statement said.

Several witnesses quoted by Associated Press said they were civilians who had gathered near the wrecked US vehicle and 25 had died.

Thousands of aging turbines stud the brown rolling hills of the Altamont Pass on I-580 east of San Francisco Bay, a testament to one of the nation's oldest and best-known experiments in green energy.

Next month, hundreds of those blades will spin to a stop, in what appears to be a wind-energy first: Facing legal threats from environmentalists, the operators of the Altamont wind farm have agreed to shut down half of their windmills for two months starting Nov. 1; in January, they will be restarted and the other half will be shut down for two months.

Though the Altamont Pass is known for its strong winds, it also lies on an important bird-migration route, and its grass-covered hills provide food for several types of raptors. "It's the worst possible place to put a wind farm," said Jeff Miller, a wildlife advocate at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "It's responsible for an astronomical level of bird kills."

A Microsoft patch meant to fix critical security flaws in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is causing trouble for some users, the company said Friday.

The patch was released Tuesday to fix four Windows flaws, including one that experts predict will be exploited by a worm in the coming days. The flaw, tagged "critical" by Microsoft, lies in a Windows component for transaction processing called the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator, or MSDTC.

Installing the patch can cause serious problems, Microsoft said in an advisory posted to its Web site Friday. The patch could lock users out of their PC, prevent the Windows Firewall from starting, block certain applications from running or installing, and empty the network connections folder, among other things, the software maker said.

Even if users experience PC trouble after installing the patch, they will still be protected against any attack exploiting the Windows flaw, a Microsoft representative said. The patch was delivered with Microsoft security bulletin MS05-051.

A synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain.

In mammals, new nerve cells are constantly being produced in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is associated with learning, memory, anxiety and depression. Other recreational drugs, such as alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, have been shown to suppress this new growth. Xia Zhang of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues decided to see what effects a synthetic cannabinoid called HU210 had on rats' brains.

They found that giving rats high doses of HU210 twice a day for 10 days increased the rate of nerve cell formation, or neurogenesis, in the hippocampus by about 40%.

A battle has erupted over who governs the internet, with America demanding to maintain a key role in the network it helped create and other countries demanding more control.

The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.

Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the internet and the ubiquity that has made it such a success will disappear.

Just before the meeting in Tunis, there will be a three-day gathering of bureaucrats to try to thrash out a deal on internet governance. Getting the parties - especially the US - to agree to anything looks like a near impossible task but Mrs Reding believes it is crucial to find common ground or see the global communication network disintegrate.