This is upsetting. A South Korean couple was arrested for starving their baby to death, reportedly only feeding her once a day after marathon sessions at an internet cafe. What was keeping them so busy? Their virtual baby.

Yeah. The couple, who met on the internet (warning sign?), dutifully raised a young girl named Anima in the virtual world of Prius Online, a sort of South Korean Second Life. Not so dutifully raised was their real daughter, a prematurely born infant who only received powdered milk feedings as an afterthought following her parents' 12 hour days at the local internet cafe.

Twelve hours of virtual escapism a day is probably unhealthy in and of itself, but when its taking the place of your real responsibilities, well, it's probably time to log off. [CNN via BoingBoing]

This man is tightening a mold in a Samsung factory in Kaluga, Russia. Inside that mold is a portion of what will soon be a television. Let's take a tour of the rest of the factory.

Samsung opened this particular factory in 2008 and its been putting out products ever since. Aside from quality inspections, it appears that from the moment components arrive in gigantic sacks from Korea nearly everything is automated in this factory—from hot plastic being piped into molds to microcircuits being produced to the little logos being stamped onto panels. Humans mostly oversee the production and yes, occasionally tighten molds. Guess we're still needed for something. [English Russia]

Mindflex, the brandwave-detecting game, will probably give you a headache no matter what. But Harcos Labs decided to take it further, with a hacked Mindflex that shocks you when you concentrate too hard. The result: science, and hilarious shock videos.

The original Mindflex headset indicates how hard you're concentrating with a series LEDs. But with a little ingenuity and an electroshock kit, the devilish geniuses at Harcos turned it into something of a torture device:

Harcos hooked up the leads of the LEDs to a transistor/resistor relay network so they'd instead activate an electric-shock kit made by QKit. The end result? Concentrate a little, and you'll get zapped a little. Concentrate hard, and you'll get an electrical pulse that will make you think you've wandered onto the set of Green Mile.

Of course, the more worried you are about getting shocked, the higher the voltage. Which is cruel. And unusual. And so much fun to watch. [Wired]

While he was talking about cloud computing yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a casual remark about the future of the Xbox. Apparently there might be new form factors, options, and price points coming:

In the case of the TV we've got both strategies. We actually have a TV implementation in some senses built into Windows," Ballmer said. "It works really well for small screen TVs that you might call a PC, but for that big screen device here's a piece of hardware that we build, there's no diversity. You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it's going to [be] important.

This doesn't give us a timeline or even any actual details, but at least it fuels speculation about all the things we desire and may get at some point. [GearLog via CrunchGear]

The Maldives, a small nation consisting of 1,200 islands is gradually disappearing as sea levels rise. In an attempt to save the place, their government has signed off on the development of several "floating facilities" like this one.

Dutch Docklands/Dutch Watervalley, makers of many floating homes, are the starry-eyed folks working with the Maldives government on this project and they intend on creating tiered—and yes, star-shaped—mini-cities which won't be bothered by rising sea levels.

There doesn't appear to be a timeline for the project yet, but I'm assuming they'll get around to completing it before the entire nation disappears. [Inhabitat]

The funeral for Internet Explorer 6, one of the older members of the Microsoft family, was a pleasant affair with only a few protestors. Unfortunately representatives of the family were unable to attend and sent flowers and a note instead:

Thanks for the good times, IE6. See you all @ MIX, where we'll show a little piece of IE heaven.
-The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft

IE6's funeral arrangements—right down to the photographer— were made by design company Aten Design Group. They actually made it into a rather decent looking event:

Rest in peace, IE6. Even if we were enemies half the time. [Flickr via TechCrunch]

Google's shopping spree continues. This time they've picked up a company called DocVerse, whose software will eventually allow seamless interoperability between Google Docs and Microsoft Office. That's right, Microsoft... the call is coming from inside the house.

You can already store and share Office files through Google Docs, but DocVerse adds the functionality of letting users collaborate directly on Office documents. As the crowing Google Blog puts it:

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they've enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

Current DocVerse users won't be affected, but you won't be able to sign up for a new account until Google figures out exactly how they're going to incorporate the company. Of course, Microsoft was moving Office to the cloud on their own anyway; it's just that it'll be a bit more crowded there than they'd thought. It's official, though: even productivity software is a battleground now. [Google Blog via TechCrunch]

There are lamps that excite me and there are lamps that I couldn't care less about. Then there's this chandelier designed by Robert Kaindl, glass artisan extraordinary, which looks like it would stab me if given the opportunity.

For once, I'm scared to turn on the lights. [Design Milk]

Every year, Hanover, Germany hosts hordes of tech journalists, analysts, and PR people for CeBIT. It's like CES, sort of, except further away, and more boring. We decided not to go this year; it ends tomorrow. Here's what we missed!

To be clear, these were some of the bigger stories of the conference, at least for American audiences. We've written a few other CeBIT stories up as well, which you can find here, but by and large, the event just sort of came and went. So, this is what was happening over in Hanover this week, while the rest of the tech world was going about their business.

Pierre Cardin Tablet: Wikipedia tells me that Pierre Cardin is a "Italian-born French fashion designer" who is famous for his "space age" clothing designs. He's paired up with a small Taiwanese OEM to make a tablet—the old foldy kind, not the slate-like new kind. It's pink, and it will cost $450, if it ever hits stores in the US.

ASUS EeeTop ET2010PNT and ET2010AGT On the exterior, ASUS EeeTops are basically a budget take on the AIO concept you're familiar with from the likes of the iMac and HP's Touchsmarts. On the interior, as with most ASUS products, they're incomprehensible parts soup.

Shuttle I-Power External GPU: Breaking news, for people who would like to buy a box that's nearly the size of a netbook and which can help boost their notebook's graphics capabilities! (But only certain notebooks, because you need a special adapter!) The Shuttle I-Power External GPU is ready to accommodate your fantasies.

1Cross B'ook ereader: Entourage eDGe on a budget: The first step here is to try to remember what the Entourage eDGe is. Now that you've done that, the second step is to figure out why you care about this cheaper, gaudier, and somehow less practical take on the same concept.

Intel Atom for Storage Devices: Intel's Atom processors, traditionally meant for netbooks and cheap laptops, are about as unglamorous as tech products get. I'd even hold that this was true five minutes ago, which was before I'd even heard about the Intel Atom for storage devices, which is a special version of the platform for household and small business network storage devices.

New Intel Classmate: Intel's ultra-budget Classmate convertible tablet PCs are evolving! (Slightly!) Here is the reference design for the newest one, which is quite similar to earlier reference designs on the outside, but adjusted slightly for cost and performance reason on the inside.

LG 12x Blu-ray drives: Did LG not have 12x Blu-ray writers before? Are these just new versions of their old Blu-ray devices? Such are the mysteries of CeBIT, which could easily be solved, if anyone cared enough to Google for backlinks.

ASUS O!Play USB 3.0: We're big fans of the ASUS O!Play set-top boxes around here and we're not very slightly more enamored with the concept, now that it supports USB 3.0.

At the Hanover zoo, an orangutan must pull a succession of strings before being rewarded with a nut. Sometimes, the experience gets a bit frustrating:

We've all been there, buddy. We've all been there. [Telegraph via Animals don' think...][Image by Rex Features]