Angelina Jolie

After nearly three months in Namibia, where she gave birth to daughter Shiloh Nouvel, Angelina Jolie is headed into the jungle — an animated one at least.

The actress has signed on to voice a character in ‘Kung Fu Panda’, a new animated film from DreamWorks Animation that sees the 31-year-old reunite with the company behind ‘Shark Tale’.

But that’s not the only reunion: she joins Jack Black, who played a timid shark opposite her seductress fish in the 2004 animated film.

This time around, Jolie is set to play Tigress, a master of the martial arts who trains Po the Panda (voiced by Black) how to become a kung fu fighter.

Although he’s a kung fu nut, Po is just a waiter in a noodle restaurant — and an incredibly lazy one at that. So he’s not exactly in fighting shape, which is a problem when a prophecy names him as the “Chosen One”, set to protect his community from powerful enemies, according to a press release from DreamWorks, the company behind the ‘Shrek’ films, ‘Madagascar’ and ‘Over The Hedge’.

Jolie’s character is one of the “furious five” martial artists given the task of training Po, according to Empire magazine. She is joined by martial arts legend Jackie Chan, ‘Charlie’s Angel’ Lucy Lui and multiple Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman as Master Monkey, Master Viper and Shifu respectively.

Ian McShane is to voice the evil nemesis Tai Lung, a snow leopard, in the CG animated film directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osbourne.

The screenplay for ‘Kung Fu Panda’, which is due in cinemas in May 2008, is by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon.

Jolie will next be seen opposite Matt Damon in ‘The Good Shepherd’, a CIA thriller directed by and starring Robert De Niro. It opens in the US on December 22. Almost a year later will see the release of ‘Beowulf’ directed by Robert ‘Forrest Gump’ Zemeckis and featuring similar motion-capture technology to that used in his ‘Polar Express’.

Bird Flu arrives in the UK

Breaking news from the BBC - H5 avian flu confirmed in UK

Oh noes!

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Porn site loses 17 million names, emails and IPs of its users

Seventeen million customers of the online payment service iBill have had their personal information released onto the internet, where it's been bought and sold in a black market.



Seventeen million customer list for sale, CHEAP! :)



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Cheney's Got A Gun!

Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday accepted full responsibility for shooting a fellow hunter and defended his decision not to publicly disclose the accident until the following day.

“I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,” Cheney told Fox News Channel in his first public comments since the accident Saturday in south Texas.

“You can talk about all of the other conditions that exist at the time but that's the bottom line and – it was not Harry's fault,” he said in an interview with Brit Hume. “You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”

He was referring to Harry Whittington, 78, who was hit in a bird hunting expedition Saturday. Whittington was reported doing well at a Texas hospital Wednesday after doctors a pellet entered his heart and had what doctors called caused “a mild heart attack.”

Cheney has been roundly criticized for failing to tell the public about the accident until the next day. He said he thought it made sense to let the owner of the ranch where it happened reveal the accident on the local newspaper's Web site Sunday morning.

“I thought that was the right call,” Cheney said. “I still do.”

One pellet from Cheney's shotgun – just under one-tenth of an inch in diameter – traveled to Whittington's heart. Hospital officials said the Texan had a normal heart rhythm again Wednesday afternoon and was sitting up in a chair, eating regular food and planning to do some legal work in his room.



Un-fcukin-believable!

Get your very own free (and legal) copy of Enemy Nations

Windward Studios have decided to release the most brilliant strategy game ever. A word of warning: you can get hooked on the thing (I played it for 3 years when it came out and now I'm back on it).

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First 360 Games Extracted

Release group Pi has successfully dumped several of the Xbox360 launch titles to standard ISOs. While they admit that these are of no use yet, any hacker or programmer with experience in file systems will be interested to see what is at the core of the 360.

Nice 360 Hack

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Sony hoping for merry Christmas

Sony is hoping for a Merry Christmas in the UK despite predictions of poor retail sales and the launch of the Xbox 360.

The consumer electronics giant faces a tough climate in the UK, with consumers widely expected to spend less on presents than last year. This means high-end gifts like its PSP could suffer.

At the same time, Microsoft will have the Xbox 360, its new games console, ready for the festive period long before the PlayStation 3 is ready.

Sony's PlayStation brand has traditionally dominated the console market but the Xbox 360 is expected to mount a serious challenge and will have a clear run at potential customers.

Uncertainty about the future of the economy has encouraged many consumers to take a more cautious approach to their present buying, with one survey suggesting Brits will spend £400 million less than last year.

However, Sony will be lifted by the early performance of the PSP. Sales of the portable entertainment device have been encouraging so far with up to ten million units sold worldwide.

TiVo on Video Ipod and Sony PSP

With new set-top box capability TiVo is expected to announce today, consumers won't have to spend $1.99 to view "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives" on their Apple iPods. They can instead synch up their TiVos to their iPods to have recorded shows transferred there overnight.

TiVo has built a feature into its TiVoToGo service to transfer TiVo-recorded shows onto both the iPod and the Sony PlayStation Portable, the two most popular of the new portable media devices.

TiVo insists the new functionality is not intended to wreck the economic potential of Apple's deal with Disney. A spokesperson for Disney declined to comment, and Apple could not be reached for comment by press time.

"This is a good deal for the consumer, whereas the [Disney-Apple pact] was a deal to find new revenue streams for the broadcasters," said Raj Amin, president of Amin Media, a strategic consultancy focused on new media. "It will be competitive to the recent deals by major broadcasters to offer downloads for a fee. Good for TiVo users and mobile device users, not so good for the broadcasters."

While TiVo's new capability will only be initially available in only a relatively small number of TV homes-about 300,000-the point is that the day of consumer-driven and -controlled media is upon us.

"The technology sometimes trumps the business model," said Ian Olgeirson, an analyst with Kagan Research, reflecting on the new TiVo feature versus the Disney-Apple structure. However, Mr. Olgeirson pointed out that the market for fee-based downloads still exists because consumers often forget to record a show they want to see and would then purchase that show for a fee.

TiVo is likely to strike more deals to deliver content to other devices. The company last week hired Tara Maitra as VP and general manager for content services, with a role of developing content for broadband delivery and fostering relationships with content companies. She previously worked for Comcast.

"Mobile television is going to be an increasingly demanded service by consumers," TiVo spokesman Scott Sutherland added.

The new capability will be delivered to TiVo's current 1.3 million stand-alone customers, but not its 2.3 million DirecTV customers, in the first quarter of 2006 after beta testing later this year.

The new extension of the service rides on top of TiVo's TiVoToGo capability, which is included in all standard TiVo boxes. Not all customers use the functionality because it requires a home network in the consumer's house. TiVo estimates that about 300,000 TiVo customers are connected to a home network and 80 percent have a broadband connection in their home, making them candidates for a home network.

TiVoToGo has been a feature of TiVo boxes since last year and allows consumers to transfer shows from the TiVo device to a computer.

To protect content rights, TiVo said it will watermark programs transferred to portable devices to track the shows and ensure the consumption falls under fair usage rules for transfer of personal content, Mr. Sutherland said.

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Bush Stem Cell Policy Allowed Koreans to Lead, Scientist Says

President George W. Bush's stem cell research policy allowed South Korean scientists to pull ahead of a U.S. biotech firm working in the same area, a company executive wrote in a letter today in the journal Nature.

Robert Lanza, medical director of Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., based in Worcester, Massachusetts, wrote that the U.S. policy impeded his company's efforts to create embryonic stem cells that are a genetic match to tissue from an adult. In May, a laboratory at Seoul National University in South Korean run by Hwang Woo-Suk announced it was the first to create embryonic stem cells cloned from human tissue.

The Bush policy prohibits the use of federal money to study embryonic stem cell created after August, 2001. Lanza said the funding restrictions allowed the Koreans to take the lead in the field and to propose the creation of a World Stem Cell Hub in Seoul. The hub is to provide cloned stem cells for researchers around the world.

``Why did the South Koreans win this race despite our early lead?'' Lanza asked in the letter. ``President Bush's restrictive policy on funding stem cell research was a major factor.''

Lanza's company put DNA from patients' cells into egg cells months before Hwang accomplished the same feat, Lanza wrote. In 2001, Bush cut off federal funding for research on any new lines of embryonic stem cells as a way of discouraging destruction of embryos. As a result, Advanced Cell had difficulty getting funding, Lanza said.

More Stem Cell

Avian Bird Flu Perspective

Avian Bird Flu Perspective

An article in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reviews significant achievements in molecular biology that hold great importance as the world faces the potential for an avian bird flu pandemic.

Robert Belshe, M.D., from Saint Louis University School of Medicine, says these achievements may enable us to track viruses years before they develop the capacity to replicate with high efficiency in humans.

One of the achievements noted is the recent genetic sequencing and recreation of the virus from the 1918 flu pandemic. The 1918 pandemic killed 675,000 Americans at a time when there were only 100 million people in the United States. Worldwide, the 1918 flu killed between 50 million and 100 million people. Dr. Belshe says this new sequencing and recreation of the 1918 epidemic will be extremely helpful in determining the events that may lead to the adaptation of avian viruses to humans before the occurrence of pandemic influenza.

Dr. Belshe says scientists should conduct worldwide surveillance to monitor this adaptation process. He says: "It gives us some reassurance that by continuing to monitor the current virus in birds, we can get a sense as to when it'll be an efficient virus. We may have some time to develop new vaccines and better therapies."

In his review, Dr. Belshe says the prospect of a new worldwide pandemic during the 21st century could involve either of two possibilities: A direct spread of an entirely avian virus from birds to humans, which is what happened during the 1918 Spanish flu, (the deadliest of last century's three pandemics) or a re-assortment virus that mixes bird flu with human influenza strains that are already circulating -- in effect creating a new strain.

Dr. Belshe says, "We don't know what will happen or when it will happen, but we know it will happen."

SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine, 2005;353:21

Zero Hour Xbox 360 Launch Construction Images

A few images snapped from the airplane hangar Microsoft will use for the Xbox 360 launch party. Construction is underway.

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Xbox 360 motherboard up close

A great overview of the 360's motherboard. Also gives a good explanation of the use of serial and parallel links on the 360.

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MIT to launch $100 laptop in 2 days

The MIT Media Laboratory expects to launch a prototype of its US$100 laptop in November.

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Marines Get Brutal New Weapon

The Marines have begun using a weapon that is easily capable of turning buildingsâ??and humansâ??into bits of rubble. This is called the SHAW-NE (shoulder mounted assault weapon â?? novel explosion) and it uses a thermobaric mixture that produces a shockwave in the air easily crushing walls and sending entire buildings collapsing to the ground.

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Open Source Mac - Free Open-Source software for OS X

Open Source Mac is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X. We aren't trying to be a comprehensive listing of every open-source mac app, instead we want to showcase the best, most important, and easiest to use.

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Google Base OFFICIALLY Launched [via GoogleBlog]

Google just OFFICIALLY launched a new service that crawls services such as Google SiteMaps, Google Print, and Google Video.

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iPod nano now does video too !!!!

iPod hack allows you to watch video on the Nano and iPod photo.

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Hi-Res Zelda Ocarina Of Time

The long awaited mod that takes The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time and updates the graphics with hi-res textures is finally out. Of course, you will need a ROM of the game and a compatible emulator to run itâ?¦but itâ??s worth it!

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FOX says you can get shows from friends

go to this page and click on number 8, it says Our recommendation is to ask co-workers, friends, family and neighbors for anyone who may have taped off-the-air the show you are looking for. This could mean that bit torrent is all right!

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