British Airways announces that it is exploring a potential merger with the Australian flag-carrier Qantas Airways.

The most striking images from around the world

h4OLPC rival?/h4 pAsus is to take on the $199 OLPC XO laptop with a $200 Small, Cheap Computer for the developing world..../p

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/sh.png alt= pI know I know, how pathetic ;-)/p pBut it finally reached Ubuntu:/p pa href=http://framework.zend.com/ target=_blankZend Framework/a 1.7.1 reached Jaunty Jackalope./p p class=rteindent2From the debian/changelog:/p pre class=rteindent2 zend-framework (1.7.1-0ubuntu1) jaunty; urgency=low nbsp; * New Upstream version nbsp; * New features and components: nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Amf with support for AMF0 and AMF3 protocols nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Dojo Toolkit 1.2.1 (Not installed in Ubuntu Package) nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Support for dijit editor available in the Dojo Toolkit nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Service_Twitter nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + ZendX_JQuery in extras library nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Metadata API in Zend_Cache nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Google book search API in Zend_Gdata nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Preliminary support for GData Protocol v2 in Zend_Gdata nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Support for skip data processing in Zend_Search_Lucene nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Support for Open Office XML documents in Zend_Search_Lucene indexer nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Performance enhancements in Zend_Loader, Zend_Controller, and server components nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Mail_Storage_Writable_Maildir enhancements for mail delivery nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Tool in incubator nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Text_Table for formatting table using characters nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_ProgressBar nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Config_Writer nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + ZendX_Console_Unix_Process in the extras library nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Db_Table_Select support for Zend_Paginator nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Global parameters for routes nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Using Chain-Routes for Hostname-Routes via Zend_Config nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + I18N improvements nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Application wide locale for all classes nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Data retrieving methods are now static nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Additional cache handling methods in all I18N classes nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Zend_Translate API simplified nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + File transfer enhancements nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Support for file elements in subforms nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Support for multifile elements nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Support for MAX_FILES_SIZE in form nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Support for breaking validation chain nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Support for translation of failure ,messages nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - New IsCompressed, IsImage, ExcludeMimeType, ExcludeExtension validators nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Support for FileInfo extension in MimeType validator nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Zend_Db_Table_Select adapater for Zend_Paginator nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + Support for custom adapters in Zend_Paginator nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + More flexible handling of complex types in Zend_Soap nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; + All bugs which are fixed you can find here: nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - a href=http://framework.zend.com/issues/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10903 title=http://framework.zend.com/issues/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10903http://framework.zend.com/issues/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10903/a nbsp; * Do not install the dojo toolkit which is being shipped inside the original tarball of Zend nbsp; * Do not install the incubator which is being shipped inside the original tarball of Zend nbsp; * debian/control: remove quilt from build-depends, not needed anymore nbsp; * debian/rules: nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - remove all quilt relevant patch rules and includes nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - copy debian/zend-framework.ini to the right location (/etc/php5/conf.d/) nbsp; * added debian/zend-framework.ini (LP: #220719) nbsp; * debian/README.Debian: nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; - Updated to the new world order for enabling zend-framework /prep class=rteindent4nbsp;/p pnbsp;/p

Far from the geriatric, overdesigned and unwieldy electric bikes available to date, the Optibike OB1 is built for proper biking enthusiasts. That is, proper biking enthusiasts with 13,000 spare...

The UK carrier said in statement to the stock exchange that it was exploring a potential merger with its Australian rival via a dual-listed company structure

Drug companies made multiple patent applications for the same medicine and started litigation to prevent or block rivals from entering the market for generic drugs, according to evidence presented as part of a European Commission inquiry.

Media critic Michael Wolff had some pretty blunt things to say about News Corp.s social network in a BusinessWeek interview about his new Rupert Murdoch bio.

British Airways (BA), the UK flag carrier, announced today that it is in merger talks with Qantas Airways, Australia's national airline.

Animoto, the impressive startup that automatically generates high quality music videos from a set of photos, has unveiled a new feature for the holiday season that will allow users to append any of their videos with a holiday intro/outro movie and a snow-themed backdrop, making for a perfect holiday eGreeting. To activate the special holiday look, just click on the ‘Santa’ button beneath any video. Of course, you’ll have to come up with photos suitable for the holiday season yourself - Animoto will just make them look festive.

We’re big fans of Animoto - the site may not offer an expansive list of products or features, but it does a great job of automatically spicing up photo albums, with little effort needed on the users’ part. For other holiday eGreeting options, check out MyPunchbowl’s eCards, which we covered last week.

To see a sample Animoto holiday video, click on the photo below.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Attacks in Mumbai highlight Indian security failings

The Apple Store now shows the Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic as available. Before they were listed as "coming soon", but their ordering database now shows shipping in 7-10 days, even...

Thousands of mourners and emissaries from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Chabad movement poured into an Israeli village Tuesday for the funerals of a rabbi and his wife killed last week in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/edition_world/~4/s1Cx3UDNE1k" height="1" width="1"/

Thousands of mourners and emissaries from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Chabad movement poured into an Israeli village Tuesday for the funerals of a rabbi and his wife killed last week in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

a href="http://www.printablefillinpuzzles.net"Printable puzzles/a Thousand of printable activities and printable games for children. Browse educational printables for children and adults br /

The challenge of trying to buy everything that is only made in the USA...
i had been cursing up and down the aisles at the grocery store for half an hour when I finally found a can of black beans claiming to be "100% usa family farm organically grown." I was on a weeklong mission to buy only American-made goods, and my very first shopping trip had turned into a debacle. I'd been forced to put back the bananas, cherries, coconut, and chipotle peppers, and I was about to blow $15 on a tiny bottle of US-made olive oil. I was hoisting the beans triumphantly above my head when my roommate approached. "What about the packaging?" she asked. I scowled at her. More of the world's aluminum comes from China than from anywhere else; the only way to know the origins of this particular can was to call the company--and it was Saturday. "Buying American is such a pain in the a**!" I wailed.

I try my best to get made in USA goods and services, but my friends think it's silly and impossible. Post up your experiences and attempts in the comments...

a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/o_say_can_you_buy_trying.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/o_say_can_you_buy_trying.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" / Permalink/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/o_say_can_you_buy_trying.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890#comments" /Comments/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/culture_jamming/?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more articles in Culture jamming/a | a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=blog.makezine.com%2Farchive%2F2008%2F12%2Fo_say_can_you_buy_trying.htmltitle=O%20Say%20Can%20You%20Buy%3F%20-%20Trying%20to%20live%20on%20100%25%20made%bodytext=%20The%20challenge%20of%20trying%20to%20buy%20everything%20that%20is%20only%20made%20in%20the%20USA...%20i%20had%20been%20cursing%20up%20and%20down%20the%20aisles%20at%20the%20grocery%20store%20for%20half%20an%20hour%20when%20I%20finally%20found%20a%20can%20of%20black...topic=tech_news" /Digg this!/a

How-to site 5min is expanding beyond its roots as a video portal and has launched a syndication network for its videos called VideoSeed, which uses semantic matching to deliver relevant clips to participating sites. The platform matches keywords found on syndication partner pages and pairs them up with videos in the 5min database according to title and tag information (along with relevant ads to go with the video). Clips are all played in 5min’s speciailized video player, which it launched earlier this year.

The company says that it can successfully distribute videos to syndication partners because its videos are all screened for quality and decency purposes and appropriately tagged with metadata, as opposed to the vast quantities of untagged footage that litter some more popular user-generated video sites.

And unlike some other how-to sites, 5min’s videos aren’t exclusively user-generated. Instead, the site has formed content partnerships with a number of other sites and media publications, including Ford Models, Elle, Car & Driver, Encylopedia Britannica, and Woman’s Day. Sydication partners (which will be displaying both videos from these content providers as well as 5min’s users) include Answers.com, wikiHow, and Ultimate Guitar. Through these sites 5min says that it will be reaching a whopping 110 million unique users a month, though this assumes that users will be reaching pages that feature the 5min videos (many entries in the aforementioned sites don’t have matching clips).

This is a crowded space, with competition from Howcast, Instructables, and a host of others. Provided 5min’s matching technology can live up to its promises (in my testing I could only find a few matches that displayed videos, so it was hard to gauge how accurate they were), these new syndication deals could help elevate 5min above the rest of the pack.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The new browser extension helps identify OpenID participants and manage them across the Web. Good timing, considering Facebook Connect is about to make its big debut.

The new browser extension helps identify OpenID participants and manage them across the Web. Good timing, considering Facebook Connect is about to make its big debut.

The new browser extension helps identify OpenID participants and manage them across the Web. Good timing, considering Facebook Connect is about to make its big debut.

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/plants-manufacturing/" rel="tag"Plants/Manufacturing/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/audi/" rel="tag"Audi/a/pa href="http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081127/ANE02/811279974/1177"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/au002943_l_450op.jpg" alt="" //abr /br /Over the past year, Volkswagen and Audi have set some remarkably aggressive goals for the US market, including the pronouncement that Audi would double its sales in the States to 200,000 units by 2015. Audi has fared well in 2008, even managing a slight sales increase in October while virtually every other automaker saw double-digit declines. However, holding your own in such a market is not a good way to double sales. Part of the the plan for multiplying its volume included building Audi's in the US, either in cooperation with parent Volkswagen or all by its lonesome. But without financial recovery in sight, CEO Rupert Stadler is justifiably hedging on whether the four-ring brand will make a production decision in early '09. The 200,000 annual sales target is also looking far less likely for 2015. Stadler has said the company will know in a year or two if its sales target is still feasible. br /br /[Source: a href="http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081127/ANE02/811279974/1177"Automotive News/a - Sub. Req.]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/audi-likely-to-delay-early-2009-decision-on-us-production/"Audi likely to delay early 2009 decision on US production/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:00:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081127/ANE02/811279974/1177Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/audi-likely-to-delay-early-2009-decision-on-us-production/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1385113/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/audi-likely-to-delay-early-2009-decision-on-us-production/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/DMwU8Yyobo_OA9gYwkwzT-svoaI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/DMwU8Yyobo_OA9gYwkwzT-svoaI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=rVym60Do"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=rVym60Do" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=tMHd41R0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=tMHd41R0" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/Gkbunh7EBs8" height="1" width="1"/

"Sticks" by Doug Back consists of a number of geared down stepper motors with fiberglass sticks mounted on shafts. If a stick touches another, it reverses directions as if they are shy to the touch, ultimately resulting in a common pattern that allows them to rotate freely. Pretty cool idea for a simple autonomous interactive bot.

Sticks at Electrohype Festival

a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/sticks_find_their_own_ali.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/sticks_find_their_own_ali.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" / Permalink/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/sticks_find_their_own_ali.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890#comments" /Comments/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arts/?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more articles in Arts/a | a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=blog.makezine.com%2Farchive%2F2008%2F12%2Fsticks_find_their_own_ali.htmltitle=Sticks%20find%20their%20own%20alignment%20over%20timebodytext=%20%26quot%3BSticks%26quot%3B%20by%20Doug%20Back%20consists%20of%20a%20number%20of%20geared%20down%20stepper%20motors%20with%20fiberglass%20sticks%20mounted%20on%20shafts.%20If%20a%20stick%20touches%20another%2C%20it%20reverses%20directions%20as%20if%20they%20are%20shy%20to%20the%20touch%2C%20ultimately%20resulting%20in%20a...topic=tech_news" /Digg this!/a

Great news! Looks like the pioneering electronic performance arts center is safe for now, due in no small part to all the support sent from around the world - The Dutch Council for Culture has reversed their initially negative decision. They were without a doubt impressed by the well over 1000 insightful, eloquent, personal letters of support from all over the world, which we received in just under two weeks. This, as well as some other factors, played a large role in opening their perception of STEIM's importance and contribution to our community and field.

We cannot thank you enough. You helped us realize again how extensive and faithful the network around us is. We are excited and thrilled that we can keep working with you and continue to build collaborations, connections and exchanges. - STEIM.org

More:

STEIM music research center needs your help!

History of The CrackleBox

a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/steim_is_safe.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/steim_is_safe.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" / Permalink/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/steim_is_safe.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890#comments" /Comments/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arts/?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more articles in Arts/a | a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=blog.makezine.com%2Farchive%2F2008%2F12%2Fsteim_is_safe.htmltitle=STEIM%20is%20safebodytext=%20Great%20news%21%20Looks%20like%20the%20pioneering%20electronic%20performance%20arts%20center%20is%20safe%20for%20now%2C%20due%20in%20no%20small%20part%20to%20all%20the%20support%20sent%20from%20around%20the%20world%20-%20The%20Dutch%20Council%20for%20Culture%20has%20reversed%20their%20initially%20negative...topic=tech_news" /Digg this!/a

The former Iraqi general known as Chemical Ali has been sentenced to death a second time, the country's official state television reported Tuesday.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/edition_world/~4/90BWqxxxiuE" height="1" width="1"/