After surviving a car crash an 11 year old boy named Lachlan performed CPR on his critically injured father, then ran 3km (nearly 2 miles) barefoot through total darkness to get help.

Lachlan “Lochie” Nally, 11, and his father Matthew, 36, of Koolunga, were in a crash on the Red Hill to Koolunga Rd in South Australia just after 12am today.

Mr Nally was critically injured.

Lochie suffered minor injuries, including seat belt burns to his neck, two lumps on his head and a graze to his lower back but ran 3km without shoes to the Koolunga Hotel to get help.

Police Chief Inspector Graham Goodwin praised the boy, saying he could be nominated for a bravery award.

“As you can imagine he’s been in a very serious collision so that’s distressing in itself.

“He’s performed CPR on his father and he got the courage to walk 3km down the track to raise the alarm. That to me is one of the most heroic acts I’ve seen.” (Source)

That’s one brave and resourceful kid.

LectureFox is a cool resource if you have an interest in academic subjects and want to kill some time. The LectureFox site contains a growing catalogue of links to lecture materials (video, audio, and notes) from distinguished universities such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

The lectures are skewed towards the sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Math, and Computer Science) but they also have a section with all sorts of subjects from copyright law to modern poetry.

When I was studying at university I couldn’t stand listening to lectures. Now I can’t get enough of them. Go figure.

WOW Insider has an interview with Noor, a World of Warcraft player who is progressing through the game without resorting to killing. It can’t be much fun playing this way and his chances of reaching level 80 are slim but kudos for trying.

Back in November 2007, columnist John Himes took a look at a special breed of player who levels from 1 to 70 in a decidedly unconventional manner: hunters who only melee, a naked (well, except for his loincloth) warrior – and Noor the pacifist, who levels without intentionally killing anything. Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of players who’ve given this idea a whirl, but Noor, a gnome rogue on Maiev, and his Horde counterpart, Reinisch the undead priest, seem to have the gumption and persistence to make it to the top of the XP tree.

[Link]

From TorrentFreak:

A DVD-player that has been designed to prevent DVD-screeners from leaking to the public will be phased out because industry insiders say the DRM hurts their viewing pleasure. It seems that DRM is fine when it’s annoying the public but unacceptable when it’s affecting them.

The hypocrisy of people within the film industry is amazing.

Apparently so. Welcome to bizarro world.

According to an article over at the New York Times, Ahmadinejad has been blogging for over a year and has promised to spend 15 minutes a week to update his website.

The irony is palpable and the NYT doesn’t fail to point it out.

There is a political irony to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s blogging, since other Iranian bloggers, including reporters who worked for news Web sites, came under more pressure after his election. Hundreds of Web sites and blogs that were critical of the government have been blocked. Censorship has been so wide that the president’s blog was once blocked mistakenly along with Google for a day. (source)

For those of you who are curious you can find his blog at this address: http://ahmadinejad.ir/

If you’re having trouble explaining to Grandma what a blog is, this video by the guys at Common Craft should help.

(source)

The TV-Links website has been shut down and it’s 26-year-old operator arrested after a raid by Gloucestershire Police in cooperation with an anti-piracy group called Fact (Federation Against Copyright Theft).

What’s disturbing about this is TV-Links didn’t host any of the movies or shows themselves. All they did was link to videos on YouTube, Google Video, Stage6, and a whole bunch of Asian and Eastern European servers - none of which were owned or controlled by them. Arresting someone for linking to something shows a complete lack of understanding for how the Internet works. By their logic I should be arrested for linking to TV-Links and other sites like it.

The chances of a successful prosecution are negligible but this guy will probably be bankrupted in the process and that’s probably what they want to do to make an example of him. If they really wanted to crack down on web piracy they would go after the sites hosting the videos, but they aren’t such easy targets.

The arrest and the closure of the site - www.tv-links.co.uk - came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.

“Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organising, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites,” said a spokesman for Fact.

The group’s director general Kieron Sharp said TV Links was the first major target in a campaign to crackdown on web piracy. (source)

I found this pretty amusing. Kim Jong-Il has told delegates at the recent inter-Korean summit that he is an Internet expert. Apparently he doesn’t like what he sees on the net because he’s reluctant to allow people further access. Sounds to me like he just wants to keep all the porn to himself.

Kim told delegates at this week’s historic inter-Korean summit his Internet expertise made him reluctant to allow further access to the Web in the communist state, the South’s Yonhap news agency reported. Kim’s comment came as he turned down South Korea’s proposal that a joint industrial park in the communist state be connected to the Internet. “I am an Internet expert. Many problems would arise if the Internet is connected to other parts of the North,” Yonhap quoted Kim as saying. On his way home to Seoul from the summit in Pyongyang, Roh said Kim seemed to be “very familiar with the technical aspects of the Internet.” (source)

Everyone has used the smiley face at one point or another, but do you know how its use started?

Twenty-five years ago a Carnegie Mellon University professor named Scott E. Fahlman sent a message proposing the use of a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis as a joke marker. It is the earliest recorded use of the smiley face, which has since become ubiquitous with online communication.

Love them or hate them, emoticons do provide a quick and easy way to show emotion in an otherwise detached medium.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

“I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways.”

The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile — or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.

Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman’s smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity. (source)

In news that will no doubt get NASA folk sweating a little, Google has announced they are offering a $20 million prize to the first private group to land an unmanned rover on the moon.

For a company that posted a first quarter profit of $3.66 billion, $20 million is a drop in the water, but it’s still nice to see that there is corporate interest in space exploration.

Nearly 40 years after the USA beat the Soviets to the moon Internet giant Google said Thursday it will give $20 million to the first private group to land a roving robot on the lunar surface — a prize likely to start a 21st-century space race.

The giant purse is being offered by the X-Prize Foundation, which awarded $10 million in 2005 to the first privately funded group to launch a human into space. (source)

With any luck we’ll see another person step foot on the moon in our lifetime.

Link: Google Lunar X-Prize