whiskey

Perhaps no Google product has spawned a better blend of quirkiness and scandal than Google Street View--cameras pranked with staged sword battles, naked men emerging from car trunks, unsavory snapshots of dead bodies, and the ire of multiple governments, primarily in Europe, who believe that it's an invasion of privacy.

But in one of those countries, Germany, Google Street View has had a victory of sorts. A Berlin court has ruled, according to Deutsche Welle, that it's legal for Google to take the street-level pictures, striking down a lawsuit brought on by a German woman who sued Google … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Mike Tyson has been a lot of things--heavyweight boxing champion, "The Hangover" character, reality show star, controversial ex-con, possessor of one of the world's most recognizable tattoos, and now the start of an iPhone game called "Mike Tyson's Main Event."

At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) this week, game developer RockLive set up a massive boxing ring at the Austin Convention Center for a meet-and-greet with the notoriously eccentric Tyson, and CNET managed to pull him aside (along with RockLive co-founders and brothers John and Sam Shahidi) for a few minutes … Read more

QUEENS, N.Y.--They did it, mostly: The artists and engineers who dreamed up, built, and now operate a large-scale version of the classic board game Mousetrap took center stage at this weekend's World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science, with the aim of flattening a New York taxi with a two-ton safe through a series of deployments of their massive Rube Goldberg machine. Standing guard were the Lifesize Mousetrap operators--a half dozen clowns, a few women in tasteful burlesque costumes with mouse ears and tails, and a man in a gorilla suit.

If this all … Read more

Social-gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest game, "Mafia Wars: Las Vegas" earlier this month, and it promised eager players that when the game hit 10 million users, it would celebrate by detonating an armored truck in the Vegas-area desert and live-stream the whole thing on the Web. Yes, really.

Well, the milestone has been hit, according to a release on Thursday, and Zynga has made good on its promise to blow up the truck. Oh, except there's an addition: the truck will be blown up with the help of rapper Snoop Dogg, whose name I will never … Read more

Would you eat a burger created by The 404 Podcast? CNET social-media expert Caroline McCarthy joins us on today's episode and tell us about the burger joint of the future.

Rex Sorgatz, one of the founders of Fimoculous and former guest of The 404, consulted on 4Food, a new restaurant that adds a social-media twist to the burger by letting customers save their unique burger creations in the 4food system; a profit-sharing system even gives the creator 25 cents of in-store credit for every custom burger sold! Since Caroline knows practically everyone in Web 2.0, expect to see … Read more

Alcohol has no place behind the wheel of a car, but a team of Scottish scientists believe it might be perfect for the fuel tank: Researchers at Edinburgh Napier University's Biofuel Research Center, according to a report in Sky News, say they have successfully used whiskey by-products to form a butanol biofuel.

Lovers of fine scotch and bourbon may rest assured that this fuel is made from by-products, not the whiskey itself, so that no potable spirits are being put to waste.

The researchers' formula combines pot ale, which is a fluid coming from distillery equipment, with the grains … Read more

I spent four months in Ireland a few years ago. I got some work done, but my main accomplishment was a thorough review of all the Irish whiskeys. I learned a few tricks for cooling down my drinks without resorting to ice cubes and certain dilution, but there was never a perfect solution. The On the Rocks Whiskey Stones seem to offer one, however. These nine stones can set in your freezer, getting cold enough that when you add them to a glass of whiskey, your drink will be chilled, without worrying about watering down good alcohol.

The On the … Read more

Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.

Of course, there's now an app for that.

An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would … Read more

There's a "Wizard of Oz" joke to be made here: The city of Topeka, Kansas has unofficially changed its name to "Google" in an attempt to get on the Mountain View tech giant's radar as a test bed for new fiber-optic technology that would bring it Internet connections at top speed.

The Topeka Capital-Journal wrote that Mayor Bill Bunten signed a proclamation Monday that designates the town as "Google" for the duration of March, in an attempt to make it a more palatable choice for a test market than some of the … Read more