Apple has found children were hired to help build some of its products, with one employer in its Mac, iPod and iPhone supply chain falsifying records. Three facilities were found to have hired 11 workers aged 15 in countries where the minimum work age is 16, as part of the annual audit of companies adhering [...]

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Backed by Yahoo!, HP, and Intel, the computer science mavens at Carnegie Mellon University have added a new compute cluster to the worldwide Open Cirrus test bed, a collection of clusters designed to explorer the frontiers of interwebs-scale distributed computing. The test bed now spans ten clusters at locations across the globe. Open Cirrus was [...]

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Fedora Project developers said they will push back the first alpha release for Fedora 13 by one week. In a Thursday mailing list post by Jesse Keating, Red Hat release engineer for Fedora Core, said the first alpha will be delayed to “verify blocker bug fixes and validate new builds of software necessary to fix [...]

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A man serving three life terms conned his way out of a Baltimore prison with help from his cellmate, an extraordinary escape that raised questions about Maryland’s procedures for releasing inmates. Raymond T. Taylor, 26, of New York, successfully posed as a cellmate he never should have been paired with in the first place — [...]

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Twitter’s got a new plan to make money from its ultrapopular micropublishing system — copy Google’s lucrative search ads — according to All Things D. The idea is that Twitter will let advertisers sign up to have their ads show up as tiny 140-word posts when users search through Twitter or through other search engines [...]

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Annoyed by a French competitor’s bragging, U.S. Olympic swimmer Don Schollander stalked him into the men’s bathroom, then planted himself inches behind his rival — at the urinal. Within earshot of his competitors, seven-time gold medalist Mark Spitz reportedly once complained to his coach that he felt tight when he wasn’t hurting at all. Famously [...]

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The OpenSolaris Annual Meeting is under way on IRC. (The meeting itself is one of those odd side-effects of the old constitution, it’s never really been used as a proper meeting.) We were fortunate enough today to have Dan Roberts along to answer questions. A log of the session is available – for the conversation [...]

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A micro-ear could soon help scientists eavesdrop on tiny events just like microscopes make them visible. Initially, researchers will use it to snoop on cells as they go about their daily business. It may allow researchers to listen to how a drug disrupts micro-organisms, in the same way as a mechanic might listen to a [...]

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Movie-goers should have more information about how many calories are in cinema snacks, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said. The nutrition watchdog is concerned about the portion sizes of cinema snacks which are often high in fat, sugar or salt. The FSA said that cinemas sell “pretty large portions” and do not offer a smaller [...]

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The head of Russia’s federal drug control agency has accused Nato of not doing enough to curb the production of heroin in Afghanistan. Victor Ivanov said at least 30,000 people died in Russia every year from heroin, 90% of it from Afghanistan. He blamed the Obama administration for ending a military drive to destroy opium [...]

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