Cody Taylor

eldavojohn writes “GamePolitics is writing about a proposal to tax on things that make your kids fat. The logic from its author: ‘Almost all experts agree that the primary reasons [for the obesity epidemic] are increased consumption of larger quantities of high calorie foods, snacks and sugar sweetened beverages… and lack of physical activity as vigorous play is replaced by sedentary activities such as watching more television, movies and videos and playing video games. This bill would raise revenues from modest surcharges on the very food products and sedentary activities that are linked to the lifestyle changes involved in the explosion of childhood obesity in the last 20-30 years.’ Not as explicit as Japan’s fat tax but we’re getting there.”

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Craig writes “Gamepark have officially released the follow up to its successful Linux handheld the GP2X, the GP2X Wiz is a 533Mhz Linux-based handheld that’s a similar size to the GBA Micro with a touchscreen and 12 games preloaded into memory, many of which are demos of commercial games. The system comes with 1GB of flash memory which can be expanded with SD cards. The Homebrew Community have already released ports of games such as Quake, Wolfenstein3d, Warcraft and emulators for SNES, Genesis, Commodore 64 and the arcade emulator Mame.”

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IN THE GREAT TRADITION OF KANYE WEST

Craigslist, the online classifieds publication much loved by users for declining to charge a fee for most of its services, issued a statement Wednesday about the closing of its “erotic sevices” section and the opening of a new “adult services” section.

The dream of owning a keyboard embedded with a full-blown PC running XP on an Atom N270 processor and 5-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen display/trackpad is nearly upon us.

Aug. 1935—Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores railroad stations or other public place where individuals may leave messages for friends. The machine is similar in appearance to a candy-vending device.

rgarbacz writes “Today at 13:12 GMT ESA launched successfully new and long awaiting spacecrafts: Herschel — the 3.5m mirror infrared telescope, and Planck — the CMB mapper. The spacecrafts were carried by the Arian 5, which lifted off from Kourou in French Guiana. They will stay in L2 to perform the research. Herschel and Planck are one of the most expensive and important missions of the European Space Agency. They were built to perform measurements with an outstanding quality. Planck will measure CMB with accuracy below 1%, over 10 times better than the previous mission WMAP. Because of this high sensitivity both spacecrafts are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero by on board liquid helium, and staying in L2 is very helpful to maintain this state. Both spacecrafts are designed to observe the Universe at its infancy, the Herschel — the first stars (those real ones), and galaxies (whichever came first), the Planck the first photons which were set free, the so called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).”

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