An Australian teenage girl has become the world’s first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said, calling her a “one-in-six-billion miracle.”

Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed.

Brennan’s body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her body’s immune system.

Her new liver’s blood stem cells then invaded her body’s bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.

Now, the research begins to determine how and why this happened.

A Spanish driver who collided with a cyclist is suing the dead youth’s family $29,300 for the damage the impact of his body did to his luxury car, a Spanish newspaper reported on Friday. Businessman Tomas Delgado says 17-year-old Enaitz Iriondo caused $20,500 of damage to his Audi A8 in the fatal 2004 crash in La Rioja region…

His family won 33,000 euros compensation from Delgado’s insurance company after the firm acknowledged he had been driving at excessive speed and this could have contributed to the incident, El Pais reported.

“I’m also a victim in all of this, you can’t fix the lad’s problems, but you can fix mine,” Delgado told the newspaper…

The family said they had previously pitied Delgado for the guilt he must feel at killing their son but were now disgusted that his greatest concern appeared to be money.

In the whole world, no one is responsible for anything. Right?

Simon Owens is a blogger who finally got so pissed off at how crappy MySpace is put together + spam = he put together an appeal for January 30th to be International Delete Your Myspace Account Day.

Here are a few of the 10 reasons why:

1. You rarely log in to Myspace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.

3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.

4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

The hope is that some NewsCorp executive will notice that hundreds or thousands of accounts all disappeared the same day. Perhaps wonder why?

I’d say this qualifies as breaking news.

We have been attempting to install a Microsoft-provided Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) product key on a Windows XP Pro machine for the last week. We purchased the key directly from the Microsoft WGA department, and attempted to install it, without success so far.

Now, the machine in question started out as Windows XP Home, and was later updated to XP Pro. (That combination is troublesome to WGA, and we recommend NEVER trying it.) When we came on the scene (much later), it had never seen the Internet, so we of course immediately ran updates, which meant the machine ran afoul of the WGA validation.

After a week of attempting to get the WGA validation to pass, and repeated calls to Microsoft, we were told the “Server is down” and “being worked on”. As you probably remember, they had similar problems last year, which prevented a lot of people from validating their Vista installations. At the time they swore a mighty oath It Would Never Happen Again. I’m extremely disappointed.

I have the Microsoft Product Support Services staffer’s badge number, should anyone wish to follow up with Microsoft. I’m planning to check again on Monday and will advise.

Sincerely,
Alex Pournelle

Cripes, this should actually be covered by mainstream media, but you will hear or read nothing.

related link:
Jeff Atwood blog

Kansas City infoZine News – First Virus Writer Arrested in Japan; Breaching Copyright – USA This is rich. Kind of like getting Al Capone for income tax evasion rather than murder.

SophosLabs, Sophos’s global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, has reminded businesses to defend their networks from malware attack, following the first ever arrest by Japanese authorities of a virus writer.

Police in Kyoto have arrested three men, who are said to have been involved in a plot to infect users of the P2P file-sharing network Winny with a Trojan horse that displayed images of a popular anime characters while wiping music and movie files. The malware, which has been dubbed Harada in media reports, is believed to be related to the Pirlames Trojan horse which Sophos reported intercepting in Japan last year.

According to Japanese media reports, the three men have admitted their involvement in the crime. One of the men is said to have written the malware, while the other two are believed to have distributed the malicious code via Winny.

“It isn’t illegal to write viruses in Japan, so the author of the Trojan horse has been arrested for breaching copyright because he used cartoon graphics without permission in his malware…

Australia and China are phasing them out, Germany and Ireland tax them, but in the United States, the plastic shopping bag is still king…

Americans use 100 billion plastic shopping bags a year, according to Washington-based think tank Worldwatch Institute, or more than 330 a year for every person in the country. Most of them are thrown away.

A handful of U.S. cities and states have made moves to cut that number and Whole Foods Market, a supermarket pitched at the organic and natural food shopper, said it would phase out plastic bags out by Earth Day on April 22. But critics say the United States is years behind countries in Europe, Asia and Africa…

Made from crude oil, natural gas and other petrochemical derivatives, an estimated 12 million barrels of oil are used to make the bags the U.S. consumes each year…

“The mentality in America is plastic bags come from plastic bag land,” said Mastny, of the Worldwatch Institute. “We don’t think about where they come from and where they are going.”

The plastic bag lobby is as big as the Oil Patch Boys lobby. Oh…

CNN.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge said Thursday that CIA interrogation videotapes may have been relevant to his court case, and he gave the Bush administration three weeks to explain why they were destroyed in 2005 and say whether other evidence was destroyed.

Several judges are considering wading into the dispute over the videos. But U.S. District Judge Richard W. Roberts was the first to order the administration to provide a written report on the matter. The decision is a legal setback for the Bush administration, which has urged courts not to get involved. The tapes showed harsh interrogation tactics used by CIA officers questioning al Qaeda suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002.

When they were destroyed, the government was under various court orders to retain evidence relevant to terrorism suspects at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After it became public in December that the tapes had been destroyed, lawyers for several detainees went to court demanding to know more. “There’s enough there that it’s worth asking” whether other videos or documents were also destroyed, said attorney Charles H. Carpenter. “I don’t know the answer to that question, but the government does know the answer and now they have to tell Judge Roberts.”

While I applaud Judge Roberts, I’m betting this will never happen.

New Orleans has yet to rebuild a single fire station more than two years after Katrina destroyed or damaged 22 of the city’s 33 firehouses.

Appalled by the city’s lack of action, an actor is leading the way in reconstruction of the fire stations.

Without city help, firefighters have resorted to repairing their stations along with volunteer carpenters.”I gave up on ever hoping that politicians in this country — local, state or federal — would step in to help these guys,” actor Denis Leary told CNN.

Leary, who stars as a firefighter on a TV show called “Rescue Me,” is using his charitable foundation to bring together volunteers from a New York carpenter’s union and the New Orleans Fire Department to rebuild the stations. So far, they’ve rebuilt five, with two more slated to be finished in a couple months.

Leary says it’s a sad commentary on society when actors and musicians become the key players in helping a city rebound.

How many politicians have to be tossed out of office to get the allocated funds to where they’re needed?

This isn’t a cops vs. firemen issue. Every part of the infrastructure, every part of the New Orleans community seems to be stuck in a corner this country forgot about.

Gmail, Google’s ‘spy email’, illegal in Europe – europasur.es (original link in Spanish): The controversy with Gmail’s advertising system started almost from its inception.

The email system was and continues to be criticized since it uses Google’s AdSense to include contextual advertisement together with email messages, which means that it’s a ‘bot’, a type of software, which ‘reads’ email contents, violating user privacy.
Despite the fact that Google’s representatives indicate that no human has access to such communications, ‘Consumers in Action’ has won the first battle against Google for email privacy invasion. After their complain before the Spanish Agency of Data Protection, this entity has declared illegal the business model used for this email service.

It would be funny and counter-productive if Gmail was somehow shutdown in Europe. Frankly, I don’t see it happening. However, if it were to happen, I would be forced to transfer thousands of emails off from my Gmail account; with Gmail’s large storage capacity, I almost never delete an email.

This is rich. Criminal gangs are using dwarves in a ruse to steal from the luggage holds of long-distance coaches, by hiding them inside suitcases, according to police.

The bizarre crime is on the rise in Sweden and officers say thieves have got away with thousands of pounds in cash, jewelery and other valuables in recent months.

Dwarves zipped in suitcases steal from Swedes
The dwarves hide themselves and their loot in bags

Gangs are said to sneak the dwarves into the luggage hold, hidden inside baggage.

Then, once the journey has begun, the stowaways are free to rifle through the bags of other passengers without fear of being apprehended.

Before the coach arrives at its destination the dwarves take their loot back into their suitcase, zip themselves inside and wait to be collected by their partners in crime.

found by Frank Kmiec

Yesterday the news broke, and it broke big: Genome pioneer Craig Venter and his team of scientists at his eponymous institute had created a microbe’s genome from scratch. Massive stories ran in newspapers and magazines, tingling with the sense that we were on the edge of a revolution.

Time’s piece was accompanied by a foreboding picture of Venter in a forest, wearing a dark coat and scarf, his beard giving his scowl a particularly dire look. The picture matched the story’s ominous mood: “He has gone beyond merely sequencing a genome and has designed and built one. In other words, he may have created life,” the article intoned. The Economist promised that when Venter is done, he will “have erased one of the last mythic distinctions in science — that between living and non-living matter.”

I get the impression that I am supposed to be tingling, my heart racing with exaltation or terror or … something. And yet I feel like I have a lesion in my amygdala, unable to respond to the threat of an electric shock. In some ways, this is actually old news. And in other ways, it’s news that hasn’t yet been written, and won’t be for decades…

But what does doing this really signify? What does it teach us about life that we didn’t know before? There was indeed a time when scientists believed there was something fundamentally different about living matter and nonliving matter.

It’s called the Middle Ages.

Pretty much all the headlines ran with the God story. Fear and excitement – and controversy.

The controversy only lives in the minds of those who fear science.