Former NHL great Theoren Fleury is set to release a book next week that reveals he was sexually abused by junior hockey coach Graham James in the 1980s.

The NHL fined Edmonton Oilers head coach Pat Quinn $10,000 US on Friday for comments made after his team’s heated 4-3 shootout loss to Calgary a day earlier.

Being a fan of the classic NES Duck Hunt, I have been anxious to test out this new live action mechanical version from Hammacher Schlemmer. I’ll say this: It’s fun while it lasts.

The Price

Available later this month for $30.

What’s Good

I've never hunted actual ducks, but I would imagine that the real experience offers up a similar (albeit more intense) mixture of fleeting thrills, unpredictability and satisfying violence as the game—except this way you don't actually have to kill anything. Plus the action sounds the gun makes when pumping the forearm and pulling the trigger are a nice touch.

What’s Bad

As I mentioned earlier, this game is fun in short increments. The typical flight lasted anywhere between 5 and 15 seconds depending on how I set the directional control pad near the tail. As you can see in the videos above, setting the tab for a straighter flight tends to keep the duck up in the air longer while setting it more to the left or right results in shorter, more compact flights. Either way, the flights were inconsistent and it was difficult to get hits before the duck glided naturally to the ground. They say you can play this game indoors, and that’s probably true if “indoors” happens to be a gymnasium.

You will break Duck Hunter. Seriously, even if you didn’t get tired of the game after a few hours of flying, you will probably break it well before that. The infrared gun feels cheap and the bird is nothing more than a piece of styrofoam with a few bits of plastic and wings that have about the same tensile strength as masking tape. Every time I pushed the duck down on the charging post located on the barrel of the gun I thought I would snap something. And that happens a lot because you need to charge it for 10 seconds after each flight.

The Verdict

The $30 price tag isn't a fortune, but that's probably more than you want to spend on something that will end up forgotten or broken in a few weeks. Early on, there was talk of a premium, $40 version that could be remotely controlled by a second person—I'm not sure what happened with that, but it might have been a worthwhile upgrade.

Definitely feels like a live action version of the Duck Hunt NES game.

Gun sounds and the mid-air “stumbles” when the duck is hit are a nice touch.

Flights are inconsistent. Patterns are hard to contain, so it is best used in a large open space.

The equipment feels cheap and fragile.

General Motors has agreed to sell its Hummer brand to a Chinese company, the automaker announced Friday.

Marge Simpson, the matriarch of Springfield’s first family, will appear on the cover of Playboy.

Remember Microsoft Works, the lighter, entry-level Microsoft Office-type software that often shipped with new computers? According to tech news site Betanews, Microsoft is ditching the Works model, replacing it with a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office with limited functionality that will ship from participating manufacturers.

The full Office suite will actually be installed on these computers, but it’ll remained crippled until whatever time the user decides to purchase an upgrade from their PC seller, who will simply hand them a card with a license on it. It probably sounds like good news to people who don’t really need Microsoft Office to do any sort of heavy lifting, but with so many good Office alternatives for those folks, it’s probably not going to be the best option out there, either. [Betanews]

NASA crashed a rocket and a lunar probe into the moon Friday morning in the hopes of finding water hidden beneath the rocky surface.

Rene Bourque tipped home Jay Bouwmeester’s point shot with less than two seconds left to tie the game, and Miikka Kiprusoff stopped two of three shootout attempts to help the Calgary Flames remain unbeaten with a 4-3 win Thursday night in Edmonton.

The popular term “whatever” tops a list of five most annoying phrases, easily beating “you know,” according to a poll by New York-based Marist College.

Jonathan Roy, the son of former Montreal Canadiens goalie Patrick Roy, has received an absolute discharge after pleading guilty to assaulting an opponent in a junior hockey match.

Google Street View, a feature of Google Maps that shows high-resolution street-level images on the internet, has gone live in several Canadian cities.

We’ve seen it teased, but now we’ve seen it in real life. No real details, but it is really effin thin, like it could slice a MacBook Air in half. And a belly shot, even closer:

Mozilla's popular web browser, Firefox, is quite a big name in the realm of the Internet. It's multi-platform, easy to use, and packs a extremely vast amount of add-ons to improve the user experience. In addition to this, it's about to get a new version. The newest version of the browser, currently in development, is 3.6; it's not a huge upgrade, as Mozilla plans to save the bigger changes for version 4.0, but it's still packing some nice improvements. According to The Register, the new version will come with tweaks which improve the TraceMonkey javascript engine, an "optimized session restore", plus additions to the CSS technology in the browser and improved page rendering speed.

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Update – there are now 20,000 accounts affected and non-Hotmail addresses. Neowin has received information regarding a possible Windows Live Hotmail “hack” or phishing scheme where password details of thousands of Hotmail accounts have been posted online. An anonymous user posted details of the accounts on October 1 at pastebin.com, a site commonly used by developers to share code snippets. The details have since been removed but Neowin has seen part of the list posted and can confirm the accounts are genuine and most appear to be based in Europe. The list details over 10,000 accounts starting from A through to B, suggesting there could be additional lists.

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Winnipeg is back in the NHL rumour mill after a Hockey Night in Canada commentator speculated on the weekend that a group of investors in Toronto is interested in moving the Atlanta Thrashers.

NPD’s Household Penetration Study found a 3% uptick in Mac households for 2009. This makes sense! What’s surprising (or not) is that of the 12% of homes with a Mac, less than 2% are Mac-exclusive.

The 2% figure is extrapolated from NPD’s less direct assessment:

[A]pproximately 12 percent of all U.S. computer owning households own an Apple computer, up from 9 percent in 2008. While Apple ownership is growing, those households are decidedly in favor of mixed system environments. Of those 12 percent, nearly 85 percent also own a Windows-based PC.

At first glance, these stats almost seem wrong, but when you start think about it, they make sense: The survey polled "households," which, on account of grandma's Compaq or your roommate's gaming PC, clobbers the exclusivity figure. (I live in what any reasonable person would call a "Mac household"—three people who use Macs almost exclusively—but that little Acer netbook sitting on the table means we're not.)

Plus, PCs are cheap and they linger, and Macs, being pricier, tend to find their way into richer households, where more than one computer is almost a given. That, combined the fact that most Macs sold are laptops, and therefore a little more likely to be a supplemental computer, makes the 2% figure look a little less crazy, but still, 2%? Fanboys, you’re slacking. [NPD via Macrumors]

Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be…