Last year Burt Rutan and his team won the X-Prize by taking SpaceShipOne over 62 miles above the Earth. Twice in a fourteen day period. Virgin Galactic has licensed the technology and is preparing for the first commercial flights to space in 2008. At a cost of $200,000 dollars (requires a $20,000 down payment) only the most wealthy will be able to take the trip. As for everyone else, including me, we will have to wait until tickets come down to say, $2,000.

From the site:

The first flights are planned to begin in 2008. We are now starting to take reservations and deposit commitments for the first year of operations. The ticket price has been set at US$200,000 and the minimum, fully refundable deposit to secure your spaceship seat is US$20,000.

If you’re ready to talk to us about making a firm reservation and paying a deposit, or would just like to be kept up to date with the Virgin Galactic space tourism programme, fill in the form below.

This pre-dates YL by a month, but I thought it was worth a mention anyways. This one of a kind interactive stop motion video will give you the creeps. You have to wait for the entire quicktime file download first. Which could take a while since it’s over 13MB.

When one or more area is highlighted, click on it. The doll will respond by interacting with that object.

This video is not for younger viewers.

Kevin Rose and his cohorts have released the 3rd episode of Systm. While these aren’t coming out as fast as I would have thought, Kevin is busy building a vast online media empire. With The Broken, Twit, Systm, and now Diggnation, Kevin has jumped full force into IPTV and podcasting.

The strange and extremely demented Salad Fingers has returned for a sixth installment. These animated shorts, viewed in Flash, will leave you wondering, “Who the hell comes up with this sh*t?”.

It’s hard to describe exactly what this is, but one thing is for certain, this is not for younger viewers or the easily squeamish.

In this video David Bradley describes how he invented CTRL-ALT-DEL, then tries to packpedal after he inadvertently slams Bill Gates for making it famous..

Hilarious

While not what Alexander Graham Bell had in mind for his invention, it is certainly funny. Dial-A-Fart is a grad school project of a friend of mine. The system will let you enter a phone number, and after a .99 cent payment, will call the number and deliver one of five selected farts. For the time being, the area codes seem to be limited to the Greater Cincinnati Area.

Has to be seen to be believed.

From the site:

Send the gift of a fart to the number of your choice. You pick the number and the fart of your choice and we’ll make sure it gets to the recipient.

Hewlett-Packard has ceased its alliance with Apple and will stop selling the HP branded iPod. Hewlett-Packard has been in the news lately regarding the massive 14,500 layoffs. Company spokepersons state they will no longer sell the iPod due to what it calls an incompatibility with “[the] company’s current digital media strategy.” Apparently their strategy doesn’t involve making money. The iPod and iTunes are still the premier way of downloading and listening music and podcasts.

HP says they will still install iTunes on their PCs.

Let’s just say I can think of a few uses for this technology. The Japanese, the crafty inventors on the other side of the world, have created a female android. Created by one Professor Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University, a card carrying mad scientist if there ever was one, who believes one day androids could pass as human. He think they can fool us gullible bags of mostly water, for a full 10 minutes.

The android can respond to external stimuli, including touch. But Professor Ishiguru admits there is still a lot of work to do. Right now the android moves, and even appears to breath, by way of an external air compressor. Although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actuators that enable human-like movements.

All I can say is I for one welcome our new Asian female android overlords.

Yeah, I know 17 years to late. Producer Mark Gordon who brought us the dazzling “The Day After Tommorow” is in the works of developing a big budget feature movie based on the giant robot us kids used to refer to as VOLTRON.

The “Voltron” animated TV series debuted in 1984, about the same time as Hasbro’s Transformers toy line, igniting a morphing robot phenomenon. According to sources, Voltron has generated $750 million in worldwide licensing and nearly $200 million in toys and merchandising since 1984. The show, in its many incarnations, remains syndicated throughout the world.

Read about it over at Yahoo News

Yahoo! has purchased widget company Konfabulator for an undisclosed amount. Originally Konfabulator was a Mac only product and was much ballyhooed by Leo Laporte when he was on The Screen Savers. Yahoo’s purchase of Konfabulator means that it will shed it’s $20 license fee, plus refund the cost to anyone who has purchased the software since mid-May.

Konfabulator allows anyone to create widgets that run on the users desktop and is similar to the technology Apple included in the latest release of OS X, Tiger. You can find the software for Windows (2000/XP) and Mac on Yahoo’s widget site. There is even a tutorial on creating your own widget and the gallery boasts over a 1000 widgets.