A New York child can be sued for crashing a bicycle into an elderly pedestrian and causing injuries that led to her death, a judge has ruled.

Juliet Breitman and another child were four years old when they raced their small bicycles on a Manhattan street and ran into Claire Menagh, 87.

Juliet's lawyer had argued Juliet was too young to be held negligent.

The judge disagreed, ruling Juliet's lawyer had presented no evidence she lacked intelligence or maturity.

According to court filings, in April 2009, Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn were accompanied by their mothers, Dana Breitman and Rachel Kohn, as they raced their bicycles along the pavement near the East River in New York's Manhattan borough.

'No bright line'
The children struck Ms Menagh, knocking her to the ground. She underwent surgery for a fractured hip and died three months later.

Ms Menagh - and later her son, acting as executor of her estate - sued the children, arguing they were "negligent in their operation and control of their bicycles". The estate also sued Dana Breitman and Rachel Kohn, saying they had consented to the race.

Juliet's lawyer sought to have the case dismissed, filing with the court a copy of Juliet's birth certificate showing she was four years and nine months old at the time of the accident.

Citing several cases involving young children who had been in accidents, New York Supreme Court Judge Paul Wooten ruled that Juliet, now six years old, could be sued.

While he noted that the law presumes children under age four are incapable of negligence, "for infants above the age of four, there is no bright line rule", he wrote in the decision.

He also wrote that the Juliet's lawyer had presented no evidence as to the child's lack of intelligence or maturity, nor that "a child of similar age and capacity" would not have understood the danger of riding a bicycle into an old woman.

A chimpanzee famous for smoking cigarettes has died at a South African zoo, aged 52.

Charlie the chimp started smoking when some visitors to Mangaung zoo, in Bloemfontein, threw him lit cigarettes.

Zoo spokesman Qondile Khedama said Charlie had become an institution, entertaining thousands of visitors every year with his antics.

An autopsy is being conducted to determine the cause of death.

For years, zookeepers had been trying to get the chimp to kick the habit, and they discouraged visitors from giving him cigarettes.

But Mr Khedama said he did not believe the addiction had ended Charlie's life prematurely, as he had lived around 10 years longer than the average chimp.

"He was on serious medications and in and out of the vet," he said.

"Even though he has been receiving special care, and a special diet including protein shakes, vitamin and mineral supplements, he succumbed to old age."

Charlie is not the only chimp to have picked up human bad habits.

In February, it was reported a Russian chimpanzee was being sent to rehab after he started pestering visitors for alcohol and cigarettes.

Mr Khedama said the zoo hopes to find a new companion for its female chimp, Judy.

But he said: "We realise it will be almost impossible to replace a character like Charlie."

Research in Motion — maker of the BlackBerry — has unveiled an Apple-battling tablet version of its email-friendly handheld.

They call it the BlackPad BlackBerry PlayBook. And as rumors indicated, it's based on a new operating system from QNX, a RIM-owned outfit whose embedded OSes are used in everything from Cisco routers to automobiles. The OS is known, appropriately enough, as BlackBerry Tablet OS.


The BlackPad PlayBook

RIM president and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis lifted the curtain on the "multi-touch" PlayBook this afternoon at RIM's annual developer conference in downtown San Francisco. Measuring 5.1 by 7.6 by 0.4 inches and weighing about 0.9 pounds, it includes a 7-inch display, a 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, HDMI and USB connectors, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and front- and rear-facing HD cameras. And in a clear answer to Steve Jobs, it offers Adobe Flash 10.1.

Yes, the PlayBook connects to existing BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, which, according to Lazaridis, now number 250 million worldwide. And RIM will offer a full native SDK when the device arrives to market. QNX founder Dan Dodge also said that the company is working on a Java VM. The SDK will handle OpenGL. And it will include Adobe AIR.


The iPad email app The PlayBook email app

Dodge indicated that QNX has been developing the PlayBook for over a year — i.e., since before it was acquired by RIM.

Before revealing the PlayBook, Lazaridis unveiled a web-based development platform for the BlackBerry and the BlackBerry PlayBook known as WebWorks, a means of building apps in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It allows for in-app payments, and it provides in-app advertising via RIM's new BlackBerry Advertising Services. It has been open sourced on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

Lazaridis did not say how much the PlayBook will cost, when it will be available, or how it will connect to the interwebs. But a press release on RIM's website says that the device won't arrive until "early" 2011 in the US, with international markets to follow in the second quarter. The release also indicates that, at least initially, the device will not include cellular wireless connectivity. "RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future," the release says.

The device will connect to existing BlackBerries via Bluetooth, letting you display BlackBerry data through the tablet. Content from the BlackBerry will be cached on the tablet, but not stored there.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK will be available "in the coming weeks." Developers can register here. ®

Apple is now the world's second-largest company, in terms of market value.

In after-hours trading on the US's tech-heavy NASDAQ market, Apple's share value hovered around $293 per share. At that level, Cupertino's market value comes in at over $267bn, surpassing the former number two, PetroChina, which is valued at a paltry $265.5bn.

As Bloomberg pointed out on Thursday when Apple briefly became number two before falling back to bronze-medal level later in the day, Exxon Mobil is still el numero uno, shuffling along at $314.4bn.

One analyst recently raised his target price for Apple stock to $390 per share. If he's correct, Apple will outshine its oily better by a cool $40bn or so.

Almost exactly 13 years ago, when asked what he would do to fix the then-ailing Apple Computer, Michael Dell famously told a crowd of IT execs: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Dell's market capitalization is currently $24.6bn.

Oh, and before you ask: Microsoft, $214.4bn; IBM, $169.2bn; Intel, $108.1bn. ®

Here's yet another fine preview of the inevitable robot apocalypse -- car-assembling arms in the city center overlooking us feeble humans. For now, though, these machines are merely part of an Kram/Weisshaar art installation dubbed Outrace.

Throughout the week-long London Design Festival, you can go to Outrace.org to submit a short text message that you wish to be displayed in Trafalgar Square, and with a bit of luck, the monitoring staff will pick up your greeting. What happens next is that the eight LED-equipped Audi robot arms will start scribing your message in the air, which is then captured by the 36 long-exposure cameras surrounding the stage (even during the day, courtesy of welding glass filter), and it'll end up on the LED board as pictured.

Stuck outside London? Fret not, as you can see the beasts in action via the website's live video stream, or you can watch bullet-time videos of each message on Outrace's YouTube channel -- we've got one for you guys in both clips after the break. Enjoy!

First Facebook didn't want anyone else to have the word "book" in the name of his or her online community and now it doesn't want anyone to have the word "face" either.

Facebook has apparently taken over the trademark application for "Face" from a company who operated a site called Faceparty.com and is trying to pursue the trademark. It won't be an easy task though, because Aaron Greenspan—the fellow who took Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to court over the creation of Facebook—is opposing the application according to TechCrunch:

As promised in our post last Friday and in our official news release, owners of the new Mid 2010 27″ iMac can begin “hot rodding” their machine with performance upgrades like the first eSATA port ever to be offered on an iMac.

We already have our first orders arriving for our certified technicians to turnaround in less than 48 weekday business hours.

Here’s a suggestion if you’re contemplating ordering this service…don’t just limit yourself to the eSATA port upgrade. Have us replace the factory hard drive with one of our award-winning SSDs, and then “retask” that existing drive by having us install it into our highly acclaimed Mercury Elite-AL Pro “Quad Interface” enclosure.

You get an internal drive that offers the fastest boot and app load times not to mention the highest degree of consistent speed and reliability…and can experience the difference other Mac model owners are enjoying. Then, to handle all your big data storage/transfer needs, just offload them to your new eSATA equippped external solution!

Of course, having us add more lifetime guaranteed OWC brand memory is a must as well.

So internally and externally, we can help you obtain the highest performance setup available for an iMac.

But as you’ve likely heard me say before in other posts, high performance doesn’t mean a thing unless it’s backed by service and warranty programs that deliver the highest level of confidence and convenience. That’s why we’re taking the responsible path and covering the labor, upgrade program components, AND even factory components for up to one year.

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While a warranty program like that allows us to arguably claim we offer the best warranty coverages in the industry, we create these kinds of comprehensive programs with one goal: to ensure you continue to have the utmost trust and peace of mind you’ve come to expect from OWC for the past 22 years.

To order your upgrade or for additional program details, including warranty information, just check out our easy explanation page.

Then, get ready to act like a kid with the fastest (insert favorite memory here) around and enjoy all your bragging rights!