Toto Neorest 600 – $5,000

What more do you need, when doing your business, than your standard lavatory offers? Toto’s most expensive toilet, the Neorest 600, has a wide range of features to answer that question. For starters, the lid automatically opens whenever you approach the toilet. As soon as you rise from your state of the art porcelain throne, it automatically engages its Power Catalytic Air Purifier function. Six seconds after you’re out of range of the toilet’s sensor zone, it will automatically flush and close both the lid and the seat.

“[This is] really a most imaginative way not just to map, but also to empower,” writes Thomas Theis Nielsen of the HarassMap, which plots the incidence of various types of sexual harassment in Cairo.

Sexually inappropriate behaviour is widespread in Cairo - in a recent survey, 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women reported being insulted or groped in the Egyptian capital [1]. On International Women’s Day earlier this year, a march for women’s rights in the city’s Tahrir Square descended into violence when a mob of angry men surrounded the female protesters, insulting and even sexually assaulting them [2].

Iain Wood spent up to 18 hours per day online, working out passwords from personal information posted on social networking sites by his acquiantances.


He targeted people living in his block of flats in a complex fraud and used his friends' personal details to get past security checks and hack into their bank accounts - stealing more than £35,000 over two years which he blew on gambling.


His scam only came to an end when he became over-confident and changed his system and the authorities were alerted.


Jailing him for 15 months, Judge Guy Whitburn said at Newcastle Crown Court:

HP has stepped forward to lay the smack down on its webOS operating system, saying that they will not license it – at all, making it stone dead, and for good. This comes after news of HPrefunding early adopters of the HP TouchPad, not to mention introducing a massive price cut to clear off whatever remaining inventory of the TouchPad that is left lying around. Perhaps ifTouchDroid takes off successfully, you might just see a reversal in the price policy of the TouchPad, no?

You don't find many designers working in the funeral business thinking about more creative ways for you to leave this world (and maybe they should be). However, Spanish designer Martin Azua has combined the romantic notion of life after death with an eco solution to the dirty business of the actual, you know, transition.

He made more money as a handyman than as an artist, but Vincenzo Peruggia’s personally responsible for making the Mona Lisa what it is today. Leonardo da Vinci painted Lisa del Giocondo in the early 16th century, but Peruggia made her famous worldwide by walking out of the Louvre with the painting wrapped in his smock on August 21, 1911, one hundred years ago today. With that daring daylight robbery, the Mona Lisa began her ascent into the stratosphere of cultural fame, while Peruggia (shown above, in his police photo) sank further and further into the hazy mists of vague infamy. How and why did Peruggia do it? More importantly, what would have happened if he hadn’t?

Peruggia came to Paris in search of a life in art, even if it was only as a part-time worker in the Louvre. Like many other Italians, Peruggia sought greater opportunities in the City of Lights only to find himself disparaged by the locals as “sale macaroni,” French for “dirty macaroni.” Wounded by prejudice and longing for home, Peruggia, as he later claimed, stole back what he mistakenly thought Napoleon had stolen from Italy a century before. In reality, Leonardo sold the painting to Francis I after moving to France to become court painter. But why did Vincenzo really do it?

There was a time when big was considered better. The more powerful the computing power, the more powerful processing, etc the better the computer was considered. In the last couple of years all that has changed.
Two companies that can be termed responsible for this change areSalesforce and Apple.Salesforce because way back in 2000 they launched server driven apps so the client didn't need any software, their application did all the work.That time it wasn't called cloud computing, yet application driven computing and now cloud computing changed the way software was used.