Robotic fire-fighting team debuts

A team of fire-fighting robots has been unveiled by defence contractor QinetiQ at a demonstration in London, says the BBC.

The display showcased a quartet of robots aimed at tackling the particular risk of fires involving cylinders of the industrial gas acetylene.

The robots range from a nimble, stair-climbing reconnaissance unit, to a diesel-powered robot with a large claw. The two-year project is funded by Network Rail, the Highways Agency and Transport for London.

Xhead = UK govt seeks hardware worth £6bn

The UK government is seeking vendors for £6 billion-worth of contracts for supplying commodity hardware and software products to the public sector, says Computing.co.uk.

Buying Solutions, the procurement arm of Whitehall purchasing body the Office of Government Commerce, has issued a tender for framework agreements covering personal computing equipment and infrastructure hardware such as servers, storage and routers.

As many as 20 suppliers could be selected as part of the 3.5-year deals, which would provide a standardised set of contracts for public organisations to buy hardware and software at preferential prices thanks to the combined buying power of the sector.

Hollywood is asking a Swedish court to deliver the killing blow against The Pirate Bay now that its four co-founders have been found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement, reports The Register.

Although the owners of the notorious BitTorrent tracker face prison time and hefty fines, the sentence handed out in April did not include an injunction forcing the site to close down.

Now a coalition of studios, including Columbia Pictures, Disney, NBC, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios and Viacom, is demanding the Web site be shut down to protect the illegal distribution of roughly 100 films and television programmes.

Greenpeace has taken action after Hewlett-Packard failed to fulfil a promise to stop using hazardous materials, such as PVC plastic and brominated flame retardants, which have been linked to thyroid hormone disruption in animals, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Dressed in haz-mat suits and armed with motorised paint-sprayers, activists scaled the building with industrial-strength ladders and blasted the words "hazardous products" on the roof of HP's Palo Alto headquarters.

"Greenpeace will not stand idly by while companies that commit to environmentally responsible action backtrack on commitments," said Greenpeace International toxics campaigner Casey Harrell.