theodp writes “If you’re the giver or recipient of presents gift-wrapped by Amazon, you may want to take a gander at U.S. Patent No. 8,060,463, granted to Amazon last month for Mining of User Event Data to Identify Users with Common Interests. Among other things, Amazon explains the invention can be used to identify recipients of gifts as Christian or Jewish based on wrapping paper. From the patent: ‘The gift wrap used by such other users (more…)

Coffee has some health benefits. When it comes to coffee, the bulk of research supports that regular coffee intake among healthy people–even up to the 2-5 cup per day range– is associated with a variety of positive health outcomes compared to lower (or no) intake of coffee.

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Whoever said that videogames didn’t teach us anything important? Aside from the movie Zombieland, we’ve never had a better guide of what to do and what NOT to do in case of the zombie apocalypse than the Resident Evil videogame franchise. I’ve tossed together ten of the better little snippets of wisdom that we all should carry with us at all times. These are in no real particular order.

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As part of a James Lipton-esque new YouTube series called Conversations with Bert, the felt icon will be picking the brains of your favorite actors and comedians, starting with “pancake visionary” Andy Samberg

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The Syrian government says troops have begun withdrawing from a western border town following a six-day military operation that activists say killed at least 36 people.

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CWmike writes “Federal authorities will remotely uninstall the Coreflood botnet Trojan from some infected Windows PCs over the next four weeks. Coreflood will be removed from infected computers only when the owners have been identified by the DOJ and they have submitted an authorization form to the FBI. The DOJ’s plan to uninstall Coreflood is the latest step in a coordinated campaign to cripple the botnet, which controls more than 2 million compromised (more…)

An anonymous reader writes “Google has an interesting idea on how to take the edge off denial of service attacks. The latest developer builds of Chrome 12 have an option called ‘http throttling,’ which will simply deny a user access to a website once the browser has received error messages from the URL. Chrome will react with a ‘back-off interval’ that will increase the time between requests to the website. If there are enough Chrome requests flooding (more…)

Today marks the 35th birthday of Apple, and though the company has undergone many changes, in terms of its fortunes and its business focus, it’s still a leader when it comes to innovation. Can we expect that to continue for another 35 years?

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Rescuers had to cut a hole in a wall of his Ohio house to lift the massive man through after they were unable to pry him from the chair.

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A miracle survivor story out of the tsunami in Japan. A 12-year-old shih tzu named Babu insisted that her owner take her for a walk the morning of the tsunami, and it’s a good thing she did. The pair was saved when the 30-foot wall of water consumed their home and the entire district surrounding it.

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