Tag: BRITAIN

For a little over $8,000, you could be the proud owner of a 75-year-old Marconi television set -- the oldest working TV in Britain. The family of the set's late owner, G.B. Davis, is putting it up for auction later this month in London, where the set will likely sell for more than the $8K experts have projected. When Davis bought it, there was only one channel and one hour of programming every ...

Got to hand it to those British Royals. In their own way, they're pretty cutting edge. In 1960, for instance, they were the first to televise a royal wedding service. (Blame them for the countless horrific wedding-related reality shows.) The royals are again acting oh-so-cutting-edge (not to mention classy) by planning a digital release of Kate and William's entire ceremony, mere hours after ...

Earlier today, a British hacker was sentenced to two years in prison for five counts of hacking and theft. Ashley Mitchell, 29, hacked into Zynga (the game giant behind 'FarmVille' and 'Texas HoldEm Poker'), stole more than $11 million in credits, and laundered a third of them through Facebook. There are some potentially interesting ramifications to this case. The court ignored the defense's ...

The Conservative Party in the U.K. is pushing for ISPs to start filtering content at the source, blocking pornography by default. The plan is being promoted by Conservative MP Claire Perry and Communications Minister Ed Vaizey. Unsurprisingly, children are being cited as the reason for all the hubbub, as the party wants to protect British youngsters from being exposed to sexually explicit content ...

Governments have been auctioning off surplus materials and goods for some time to help pad their coffers, or to keep them from sliding further into debt. But Britain is selling off a rather spectacular piece of military equipment to help close part of its budget deficit. The Ministry of Defense's disposal services site is currently home to an auction of the HMS Invincible, an aircraft carrier ...

On Wednesday, British writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown appeared on a morning television show to discuss human rights in China. For whatever reason, the liberal columnist's words raised the ire of a local politician named Gareth Compton, who promptly called for her death on Twitter. Now, he's been arrested. Shortly after the broadcast, Compton tweeted: "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown ...

Walking the entire 1,200 mile length of Britain is no easy feat, but using Google Street View to "travel" the same stretch of land is just plain boring. Matthew Partridge, however, has embarked on this adventure, going pixel by pixel from Land's End to John O'Groats in ten days. Honestly, we'd rather go the actual distance than stare at a screen for 240 hours, but, hey, at least the bright line in ...

Now that the dust from the recent U.K. parliamentary elections appears to have settled, the new Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government has wasted no time in publicizing its new agenda. And, as ArsTechnica reports, major changes may be on the horizon. Today, the new government issued its official unified policy statement (.PDF), which aims to reverse many of the controversial policies of the ...

Surgery, by definition, has always been a hands-on endeavor. It gets messy, it gets fleshy, and it definitely gets a doc's hands dirty. But all that may soon change, thanks to a new, robotic procedure that doesn't even require a surgeon be in the same room as the patient. Dr. Andre Ng, a consultant cardiologist and electrophysiologist at Glenfield Hospital in the U.K., recently became the ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... U.S. politicians have increasingly turned to social networking to rally support and spread information. For the British government, though, Facebook isn't just a medium for political communication and discussion anymore, as it's being actively used to raise voter awareness. The social networking site has paired with England's ...

The British government is proposing a drastic overhaul of how its various agencies interact and do business with its citizens. The plan, put forth by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, would move to make the government almost entirely paper-free. The government hopes that, by moving most interactions online, and by reducing the need to staff call centers and send traditional paper mail, it can save ...

Share In September, we briefly mentioned a new device that could return sight, in limited fashion, to blind patients through the use of an electrode covered "lollipop." The inch-long device is placed on the tongue and is fed electrical signals from a small camera hidden in a pair of sun glasses. These small electrical impulses allow patients who have lost their sight to recognize simple ...

They might not have as high a profile as the Oscars, but Britain's first annual Google Street View Awards ceremony was held Monday. The Telegraph reports a panel of U.K. experts, selected by Google, and about 11,000 online participants voted a cobblestone road in York, called The Shambles, "Britain's Most Picturesque Street." "It has been the backdrop for many a jigsaw, chocolate box and railway ...

The Brits are great, some of our favorite people. Well-dressed, polite, fabulous musicians, but perhaps a bit too hard on the average individual. In a recent investigation on the nature of humanity, CNET.co.uk decided to see what popular searches Google offered when prompted by simple questions, and the findings were bleak. Using 'Google Suggest,' the auto-fill feature that predicts text as it's ...

If Vision Express was looking for some attention, it just got it. A recent study by the optician chain found that 60-percent of Britons had avoided an eye test over the past year, with that number rising to 79-percent in Scotland. Phillip Hyde, dispensing optician and head of professional services at the firm, was quoted as saying that "even a marginally short-sighted person sitting on a sofa ...