Catching up on some noteworthy headlines and items from the past week …

Photo by Jim, via Flickr.

Microsoft received lots of press this past week for offering free bacon from a food cart near Amazon’s headquarters, as an offbeat tactic to find candidates for its Kinect for Windows engineering team.

But it turns out that the owner of the hot dog cart being used for the promotion, Dante Rivera, wasn’t aware that the purpose was to poach employees from Amazon, a company he also does business with. Once Rivera found out, he bowed out of the Microsoft stunt, reports Janet Tu of the Seattle Times.

Our Space Shuttle consolation prize, a wingless plywood mockup of a Shuttle orbiter that was used to train astronauts, is being taken apart at Johnson Space Center in Houston in preparation for transportation to Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

CollectSpace has pictures of the process.

The Fuel Fuselage Trainer, as it’s known, was what we were awarded instead of a real orbiter. It will be displayed in a new Museum of Flight gallery scheduled to open next year. (Thanks to Isaac Alexander for the link.)

Speaking of NASA, the space agency is launching its latest Mars Rover on Saturday. Here’s a great NASA animation showing how it will land on the planet once it gets there next year.

Amazon’s product page for the pepper spray used against protesters at UC Davis has become a platform for protests against the tactic, with tongue-in-cheek customer reviews such as this one: “Whenever I need to breezily inflict discipline on unruly citizens, I know I can trust Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray to get the job done!” (Thanks to Dan for the link.)

Microsoft will be putting more emphasis on online downloads and installation with Windows 8, as opposed to DVDs. And here’s some welcome news from the company’s blog post on the topic: “With our web setup experience, we actually ‘pre-key’ the setup image that is downloaded to a unique user, which means that you don’t have to type in the 25-digit product key when you install!”

A $125 Windows 7 tablet? Yep, it’s possible. With rhinestones, even.

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