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Panettiere on Playing Convicted Killer Knox

‘Heroes’ actress Hayden Panettiere talks about the challenges of playing Amanda Knox in an upcoming film. Knox is currently serving a 26 year jail sentence in Italy after being convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher. (Oct. 15)

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MindScape’s Karotz continues the proud Nabaztag lineage

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything on the Nabaztag front. Violet, the company that built the original “ambient” bunnies, went bankrupt but was snapped up by MindScape a year ago. Now MindScape is ready to show off the latest addition to the Nabaztag family, dubbed “Karotz.” The WiFi rabbit runs on Linux, with a 400MHz ARM CPU, 64MB of RAM and 256MB of storage, so it should have plenty of headroom for that vibrant hacker community that sprung up around the first two Nabaztags. Karotz can also run off batteries or be plugged in via USB, and has the same RFID reader functionality of the Nabaztag/tag. The biggest new feature is a webcam, which will purportedly have face recognition (to be paired with Nabaztag’s existing voice recognition), along with allowing you to check up on your home from a smartphone app. Karotz will retail in France starting in November for €150 (about $210 US), followed by the UK in December and February in the US. Hopefully Karotz can find a bit more market success than its ill-fated predecessors. Gallery: Karotz press shots and a peek under the hood MindScape’s Karotz continues the proud Nabaztag lineage originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

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Face Your Food On UN World Food Day, October 16

Tomorrow is World Food Day , and FairFood International, which “encourages sustainability in the food industry, contributing to the fight against poverty and hunger around the world.” is trying a new form of very social media to promote it. They have set up a websit… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Dem Funds Failing

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With a Dem flop pending for November 2nd, Dem organizations are having problems raising money to defend themselves : A late effort by Democrats to match record fund raising by conservative organizations has come up short, leaving the party more reliant than usual on the campaign efforts of labor unions. A key pro-Democratic group, recently created by top party insiders to build a “firewall” around the Democrats’ majority in the House, said Thursday it hoped to raise $10 million. That’s a fraction of the $50 million that an alliance of GOP groups said Tuesday they would spend to help Republicans in dozens of House races. “We are David vs. Goliath,” said Ramona Oliver, a spokeswoman for the new Democratic group, called America’s Families First Action Fund. Founded this summer, it began raising money after Labor Day to help counter Republican fundraising efforts. It once hoped to help protect up to 30 Democratic House seats, but is now focusing on just 18 campaigns, Ms. Oliver said. In total, outside conservative groups—such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network and American Crossroads—could spend more than $300 million on TV advertisements, campaign mailings and other efforts to elect Republicans to Congress this year. Outside Democratic groups, by contrast, plan to spend about $100 million on those activities. The largest labor unions say they will spend $200 million combined, but most of their focus will be on rallying union voters. You can tell things are pretty bad if they have to spend that much money to rally union voters, and even that effort could backfire given that a great many rank-and-file union members no longer support the Dem agenda. They may be turning out GOP voters. Obama himself has turned out to be a great fundraiser…for conservatives.

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When mainstream media folks like Harry Smith dismiss the Tea Party movement as merely voters venting their anger, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell is reminded of the dismissive reaction of journalists back when Republicans won control of Congress 16 years ago. Here's what he told viewers of the October 15 “Fox & Friends”: read more

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Lesance GSN801GAW gaming laptop packs 18.4-inch LCD, oodles of ugly and serious muscle

Is it actually possible to construct an 18.4-inch gaming laptop that isn’t unsightly? Our bets are on no (unless HP’s Envy line creeps up a bit in size), but as your mum always proclaimed, it’s the beauty on the inside that truly counts. Following in the footsteps of Eurocom’s frighteningly similar X8100 Leopard , the Lesance GSN801GAW packs an 18.4-inch display (1920 x 1080 resolution), a potent quad-core 1.73GHz Core i7 940XM Extreme Edition CPU, 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory and your choice of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M (2GB) or two ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870′s in CrossFire. There’s also a Blu-ray burner, 160GB worth of SSD (in a RAID 0 configuration), USB 3.0 sockets, Windows 7 Home Premium, an ExpressCard slot, multicard reader, HDMI / DVI output, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and an inbuilt webcam. Naturally, an ideal runtime is but 1.5 hours, and it weighs just over a dozen pounds — if neither of those tidbits faze you, it’ll be topping out soon in Japan for

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For Many People, The Stars Don’t Come Out Any More

Credit: Stellarium Click image to enlarge Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium has complained that kids growing up where he did (in the Bronx) don’t even know that there are stars. This image, generated by Stellarium software, shows the dramatic difference…. Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Week in Animal Photos: New Carnivorous Mammal, Celebrity Goose and More (Slideshow)

Photo: Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust CuteOverload it’s not. This fellow is a newly identified cat-sized species called Durrell’s vontsira , found in the wetlands of Madagascar. This image is just one amazing shot in our roundup of the week in animal photos: We’ve also got news on a goose that, thanks to persistence, now has its own music video; a female humpback whale who travels 6,125 miles for a mate; and a human-led migration of whooping cranes.

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Machine Breaks Out Last Bit in Longest Tunnel

Swiss engineers have smashed through the last stretch of rock to create the longest tunnel in the world, the 35.4-mile (57-kilometre) Gotthard Base Tunnel. (Oct 15)

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Russia to build nuclear power plant in Venezuela

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia agreed on Friday to help build Venezuela's first nuclear power plant and buy $1.6 billion of oil assets, reinforcing ties with President Hugo Chavez, who shares Moscow's opposition to U.S. global dominance. Chavez presided over the deals at a Kremlin ceremony with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who said the countries shared a “strategic partnership” and a vision of a world free of overwhelming U.S. influence. “Both Russia and Venezuela favor the development of a modern and just world order — a world order in which our future does not depend on the will or desire of any one country, its well-being or its…

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