The China Post (in Taiwan) is reporting that the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) has announced that they will cease its $40 million-a-flight space tourism plans. This is because of a planned expansion of the crew on the International Space Station (ISS).

The permanent crew at the ISS would see it being expanded from three to six, meaning that Russia would have fewer seats to give out to tourists.

This was announced when Russia was celebrating Cosmonauts’ Day, where it celebrates the first manned flight into space.

One of Microsoft’s important advocates has confirmed that Audible will be compatible with the Zune very soon.

Paul Thurrott received an email from Jerry D that told him that service will be compatible with the Zune very soon, though no date has been set but has said that they would like it done before the end of this year.

Thurrott has also confirmed it with other sources as well.

Audible is a audiobook store that has compatibility with many MP3 players, notably the iPod. With this new compatibility, this would make the Zune and iPod nearly being similar.

FROM TECHGEEK.com.au > An anti-CNN group promoting to hack the site has hacked into two sites relating to sports, one under the CNN.com’s Sports Illustrated name.

Sportsnetwork.com and sports.si.cnn.com were both hacked Early Sunday, with the former still showing the message written by the group.

"Tibet WAS,IS,and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China!" it says.

"We are not against the western media, but against the lies and fabricated stories in the media."

These anti-western stance was caused by the media’s reporting in the Tibetan region, where rioting and violence have occurred in the lead up in the Beijing Olympic Games. Protests are actively campaigning for the former state of Tibet to be free from China’s Communist rule.

As well, TechCrunch is reporting that many Chinese MSN users are adding "Love China" to combat against the anti-Western stance.

On the forums of "Hack CNN", via a translation from Google Translator; there is a special forum dedicated to the hacking, dubbed the "Core Area", is password protected.

As well, they offer people a download of a piece of software which, what TECHGEEK understands, is that the software would crash the servers of CNN if it was used by many people. They also suggest that you go put it up in your Startup folder so it would run automatically.

However, hackers thought taking down the SI site was CNN’s sports site. They are both owned by the same company, yet they are two different properties that share the cnn.com domain.

The Register is reporting that the US telco giant, AT&T, has sacked 4,650 workers; about 1.5 percent of its 310,000 workforce. Those who are getting the sack are mostly coming from the managers in the "Home Landline Business" who don’t talk to the customers.

The telecom thinks it has too many on its payroll, after a merger (and reunification) of the three "baby" bells: SBC, AT&T and BellSouth.

The "streamlining", as what the company dubs in its purge in today’s SEC filing, will take a $374 million chunk out of the Q1 earnings, which will be published next week.

The darling of the Open Source world is facing an uprising against its customers after plans to reserve some key features and their source code to paying users for the next version.

Officials at Sun Microsystems, the new owner of MySQL after buying it in February, has confirmed that a new online backup capabilities will be given to MySQL Enterprise customers, not to the larger and free Community edition. The backup capabilities are still under development.

This is the second time that customers have been angry with MySQL. Last August saw it taking criticism from its customer base after an decision to stop making the Enterprise source code available to those who don’t have paid subscriptions.

GigaOM, and The Financial Times, are saying that the online auction firm will test Skype for so-called “synergies”, and if they aren’t that strong; it will reassess the division.

Skype was purchased by eBay for a potential payout of $4.1 billion; but eBay wrote down the value by $1.4 billion, admitting that they had overpaid for it.

Who do you think will buy Skype?

French politicians have called for stiff penalties, including three years in jail, for fines against “pro-anorexia” sites and publications that encourage girls and young women to stave themselves.

“Giving young girls advice about how to lie to their doctors, telling them what kinds of food are easiest to vomit, encouraging them to torture themselves whenever they take any kind of food is not part of liberty of expression,” Roselyne Bachelot, France’s Health Minister, said to the French parliament.

These proposed laws are mainly aimed at sites dubbed “pro-ana” blogs and sites where anorexics share and even provide tips on how to suppress their appetite. It will include penalties of two years in jail with a 30,000 euros fine for “incitement to excessive thinness by publicizing of any kind.”

It would then rise to three years in jail and a fine of 45,000 euros where cases involved death caused by anorexia.

The bill, like many other countries, needs to go before the Senate before it becomes law.

The Australian Federal Police have arrested two men in Victoria, after a six-month investigation into an alleged piracy syndicate.

Executing 10 search warrants in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland; they managed to find hundreds of fake Pay TV encryption cards and set-top boxed. These fake smart cards, or “gamma” cards, are used with these set-top boxes to receive and decrypt the signals from Foxtel and Austar service.

The two men, a 43 year old man from Mount Waverley and a 27 year old man from Sebastopol, have been charged with making, distributing and selling the pirated cards and now could face up to five years in jail if convicted.

Police also seized several computers and $169,000 from a Sydney house and 18 boxes filled with illegal fireworks in a raid on a Victorian home.

Police also say that there may be up to 50,000 fake Pay TV cards in use in Australia.

Now this proves that you should always do your chores! A 13 year-old kid in Virginia has suffered the wrath of his mother after he was told to do his chores, but never did.

The kid wanted to play his Xbox 360 and broke the vacuum cleaner on purpose to get out of it. Well, his punishment was that she was selling his Xbox and all the games on eBay.

It gets even worse…

She also found out that he was surfing porn sites, after checking his browser’s cookies. Talking to Gizmodo; Beth, his mother, said that she locked his son out and on his MySpace profile “has a picture of Snoopy.”

“Apparently I’m the meanest mom in the world, were his words.”

The Xbox 360 is selling for $250 and his games for $15 each on eBay. It is currently up to $455. Unfortunately, it’s only for US customers.

Welcome to our very first Comment Uncensored. You can say whatever you want about the topic below. We give you the information, the links, etc; and you can discuss any objections, facts or anything else.

The only things that will be deleted will be comments deemed to defamatory or just pure spam.

What do Friends, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Law and Order and Degrassi have in common?

Well apparently they could be in the same universe. It’s called the Tommy Westphall universe and may contain a lot of your favourite shows in it.

The fictional universe is based around the final episode of the Classic NBC show St. Elsewhere, where in the final episode showed that an autistic boy with a snow globe representing St. Elsewhere. I got this from Wikipedia, so this may be wrong.

There is a group that has done some ‘research’ and have made up a graph connecting shows to shows from St. Elsewhere or Homicide: Life on the Streets. Homicide leads to Law and Order, and Law and Order created SVU, CI, TBJ and Conviction.

As well, the graph also details that Homicide is linked with the show ‘The Wire’ (HBO), but that is because on of the Homicide characters, which is also a L&O character, appeared on the show. He also appeared on ‘The X Files’, where that has links to Buffy the ampire Slayers, which links to Angel, which then links with Battlestar Galactica (2003), Red Dwarf and The John Larroquette Show.

Now this gets a bit weird. Red Dwarf is connected to Doctor Who and the Original Star Trek, both are rivals in the science-fiction arena. It also links Doctor Who with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galexy and Chelmsford 123. It pairs Star Trek with Night Rider.

Even the show Heroes is part of it, linking it to Las Vegas, which in turn links to Crossing Jordan and The Office.

Now you think that is crazy, but the site has an entire image for you to see. It would be better if we know when does this occur so we could actually prove it.

But this theory is disputed, with some saying that the snow globe scene may be a dream.

So, comment away at the comments section; we do want to hear from you about this theory.