Eh-Wire writes “Roborior, a house-sitting robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors and a videophone is on sale in select Japanese department stores. The house-sitting robot can detect break-ins with it’s infrared sensors and then call the owners cell phone and stream video to the tiny screen. At $2600 each the Roborior is not cheap. For those that require something a little more substantial, Tmusk, the manufacturer of Roborior, has produced a four legged version called Banryu. This one is the size of a large dog and sells for around $18,000. It’s not supposed to shed hair or sleep on the furniture which could make it quite popular.”

Slashdot | House-Sitting Robot Hits Store Shelves in Japan

“An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes,” – Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Osaka University, Japan.

jolyon writes “The BBC is reporting that Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised – a “female” android called Repliee Q1. ‘She’ has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we’re a long way from Blade Runner yet.”

* Slashdot | Japanese Develop ‘Female’ Android

/. deepexplorer writes “Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back. Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the Blue Gene. Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teaflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops.”

* Slashdot | Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer

* CNN | Japan to build world’s fastest supercomputer

darkonc writes “The CBC has notes and an interview with Dane Rasmus Nielsen who decided to reduce the confusion between ‘free as in speech’ and ‘free as in beer’ by making a beer free — in speech. The result is Vores Øl, an open source beer. The CBC site includes the recipe for the beer which is made with Guarana beans, and gives it a bit of a caffeine-like hit. The danish site downloads include the label for the beer (which is also Open Source).”

* Slashdot | Free Beer That’s Free as in Speech

Internet phenomena. Memes. Grist for the e-mail forwarding mill. Whatever you call them, Web fads are entertaining, unintended consequences of life on the World Wide Web. Once the masses could put anything online easily, they turned up weird fetishes, hilarious parody, jaw-dropping narcissism, and moments of brilliance. And over the past 10 years, some of these ideas broke through to the mainstream. Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs.

* Top 10 Web fads – CNET.com

A slashdot reader writes: “KDE continues to grow. Early screenshots, mockups, and developer blogs show that the new Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch) will bring innovative approaches to desktop computing. On the other hand, the very first screenshots of SimpleKDE, an unofficial fork of KDE, were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated.”

* Slashdot | KDE’s future: Plasma & SimpleKDE

The product is called “Клавиатура Optimus” on it’s russian website, but you will want to check out those neat images, I do suspect the quality is worse than depicted in real life, but I am looking forward to seeing this being standardized, or bought by logitech! Whichever comes first..

UPDATE: Added link to english product page, please note that this product is not yet in mass-production, if even in prototype stage.

* Optimus Keyboard
* Клавиатура Optimus (Russian)

* Real Life Tron

Also see
* Human Pacman
* Mixed Reality Pacman

* Slashdot | Star Destroyer Built Before Your Eyes