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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness.   REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Netflix says shipping back to normal

    LOS ANGELES
    Fri Aug 15, 2008 1:36pm EDT

    LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Online DVD rental pioneer Netflix Inc resumed normal shipping on Friday after the most severe outage in the company's decade of operations, a spokesman said.

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    "With possible rare exceptions we will get everything out today," said spokesman Steve Swasey.

    Netflix said all customers whose shipments were delayed will get a 15 percent credit to their next billing statement. New customers using the service on a free trial basis will have their trial extended by a week.

    "We don't have in our terms of agreement that if you miss a day you get a credit," Swasey said. "We just do that voluntarily because it's the right thing to do."

    Netflix did not disclose what caused the outage, which affected about a third of its 8.4 million customers.

    The disruption prevented Netflix from mailing out any DVDs on Tuesday, but the company did have partial deliveries on Wednesday and on Thursday.

    This week's disruption was only the second delivery outage for Netflix since the company started mailing out DVDs in 1999, Swasey said. The company had a one-day delivery meltdown in March, he said.

    Netflix shares edged down 35 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $31.49 on Nasdaq early Friday afternoon.

    (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Mary Milliken, John Wallace, Richard Chang)



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