Hulleye Comes By!

Dell is guilty of fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices, according to a ruling by the New York State Supreme Court. Damages have yet to be determined, but Dell maintains that it is committed to offering the best possible service. I have always claimed that I’d never buy a Dell machine. This proves exactly why I will not. The list in this article is unbelievably long and it’s remarkable what all Dell was able to get away with. Their machines have never worked for me and this just gives me another reason never to support them.

Out of this list, Dark City, The Truman Show and Brazil remain three of my favourite films of all time. If you haven’t seen them, I highly recommend you do. I have to watch Waking Life, never seen it. The others are pretty fun as well. Donnie Darko, Matrix, and I Heart Huckabees are brilliant films. If you haven’t seen them, I’d put them up there on the list.

My English teacher once told me that good short stories were the ones that spoke to universal truths.

These were the stories that go beyond mere characters and their antics through an imaginary universe. They offer an insight into the human condition: what is life? what is truth? what is reality?

The same could be said for memorable films. Only films convey their meaning in a more sensory way - using both audio and visual elements to enter the mind of the viewer.

And perhaps even shift your perspective.

The following 10 films are chosen because they shed light on the forces at work within our lives, this very moment. They use satire and metaphor to approach the truths that would otherwise be too difficult to understand, or too terrifying to comprehend.

Most of all, these films challenge you to wake up.

okay so i’ve had some good and bad reviews about this new user interface. here’s a few issues that i wanted to address.

firstly, i found this via jason’s site. it’s essentially a command line interface emulator for wordpress and primarily bears resemblance to a classic vt terminal.

secondly, it’s not meant to render images. when it does, it does so in 8 bit. if you wish to see the images, please change the theme using the sidebar.

thirdly, i know the site breaks when using Opera and IE8. haven’t heard about any other browsers in which it breaks yet. do let me know if your browser does not work. in these browsers though, you should be able to switch the theme and get it to render with a GUI.

i’ve removed the ls command as it was going through the entire archive of posts.

i appreciate all the feedback. i really do. i know a lot of it pretty broken, but i’m working on it as i get time. credit goes to jason for getting me more involved into this. when you get a moment, go check out his Linux Log as well. jay, i’m taking partial credit for converting you over entirely from windows to linux. i know you were mostly there on your own anyway.

Update: Okay this is more headache than not so I’ve gone back to this GUI.

well, at least GWB did something right. aldous huxley had it all wrong, there won’t be a brave new world after all.

This past week, President Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which would protect people from being discriminated against by health insurers or employers on the basis of their genetic information. ‘the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). GINA is the first and only federal legislation that will provide protections against discrimination based on an individual’s genetic information in health insurance coverage and employment settings. 

the new trailer for will smith’s new movie, hancock is out at apple.com. it looks amazing.

just going through sadequain’s page on wikipedia. it’s a sad but briliant. he really was a genius.

In an interview he said, “People ask why I don’t paint flowers, butterflies and landscapes? I tell them that I seek the truth and I am after reality. I am not inspired by someone posing against the backdrop of roses in a vase or pink curtains. What inspires me is a person who has gone hungry for hours and is struggling for survival. The expression that lights his face at the end of the day when he has finally found some scraps, that is what touches me. I am a painter of the expression of reality.” Self proclaimed “Faqir,” Sadequain was outside society’s worldly greed or hypocrisy and called himself “speaker of truth.”

Best known for his calligraphies, Sadequain painted abstracts, drawings, and sketches on thousands of canvases, volumes of paper, and multitudes of other conventional and unconventional materials.

Deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, forgotten for the best part of a century, lies a tunnel linking London and New York.

It was built on the whim of a Victorian inventor with the aim of linking two great cities and developing the kind of friendship that still exists today.

But bad fortune befell the venture - and the tunnel lay idle ever after.

Until today, that is, when the project was rekindled with a modern twist.

Using a giant “electronic telescope” and state-of-the-art technology, England and America were joined once again when the tunnel entrances were reopened beside Tower Bridge in London and Brooklyn Bridge in New York.

It meant that New Yorkers and Londoners could wave to each other across the sea and begin the kind of mute dialogue that was only a dream all those years ago for eccentric engineering entrepreneur Alexander Stanhope St George (deceased).

Or at least, that’s the way the story goes.

the story of stuff is a fascinating little video clip about 20 minutes long. take some time out and watch it. you really need to. no, no, you really, really need to.

so one of my favourite blogs is da vinci automata, as listed in my links celebrating all that is steampunk and clockpunk. along similar lines comes a  new blog by a buddy, which looks rather promising and i hope to be reading up on it regularly. just wanted to give you guys a headsup about it.

“Till Malfunctions Do us Part” promises to be a rewarding read if you’re into science, technology and the way humans interact with their alternate counterparts in these genre’s, the robots. it’s about human relations and how we are influenced and the way we interact with machines ever more so in the world today.

While for many infants a thing out of sight is also out of mind, there is a developmental milestone, called object permanence, that children reach when he or she realizes that the object exists even when it can’t be seen. The term was coined by child development expert and psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget believed most children reached the object permanence stage when they were about eight or nine months old. However, all children develop slightly differently, and may reach this stage earlier or later than others.

Piaget studied the concept of object permanence by conducting relatively simple tests on infants. He would show an infant, or young baby a toy and then cover it with a blanket. A child who had a clear concept of object permanence might reach for the toy or try to grab the blanket off the toy. A child who had not yet developed object permanence might appear distressed that the toy had disappeared.

Parents, of course, have tested object permanence for years with young babies. Games of peek-a-boo with a three month old are quite delightful because the child will often be pleasantly surprised each time one covers one’s hands with one’s face and then reappears. According to Piaget’s theory, the delight results in the sudden reappearance of the parent, who magically disappeared and came back. Children over five or six months may also hide under blankets and expect that their parents can’t possibly find them, since the child cannot see the parent.

Lack of object permanence might also explain why children tend not to fuss as much when they are younger and the parent leaves. Yet this is not always the case, and calls into question some of Piaget’s theories. For instance, studies testing breastfed week-old infants suggest they can easily differentiate between their mother’s breast milk and other breastmilk. Basing the concept of object permanence on what can be only visually perceived discounts what can be heard, smelled or touched.

In complete dark for instance, a baby far too young to have developed object permanence may feel comforted by the touch and smell of a mom sleeping nearby or picking up the baby. The mother exists even before the sight of the mother can be determined. Thus vision cannot be the only factor guiding object permanence.

However, it is clear that as infants begin to expand their visual perception they may seem quite surprised by the sudden visual disappearance of a beloved toy or person. They may however be still able to smell, hear or sense the missing object. This suggests that the infant has more ways of perceiving than were summarized by Piaget in his development and testing of the theory of object permanence.

Researchers say they have found about half of the universe’s missing matter hidden in the spaces between billions of galaxies thanks to the Hubble telescope.

This normal matter, which is called baryons, was created during and after the Big Bang, and should not be confused with dark matter, researchers said.

“We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe,” said astronomer Mike Shull of the University of Colorado after an extensive search of the local universe.

“What we are confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter in the universe.”

Read the rest of the news here.

Leading logic puzzle supplier Conceptis announces a new website today dedicated to logic puzzle enthusiasts. Promised to be the most advanced puzzle website ever created, conceptispuzzles.com aims to change everything about how we play logic puzzles on the Internet.

The site was designed with the sole intention of providing exceptional puzzling experience. Both newcomers who have no idea what logic puzzles are about as well as experienced “beyond Sudoku” puzzlers who seek new challenges and varieties will enjoy the range of puzzles and features. The site includes Sudoku, Kakuro, Battleships, Hitori, Slitherlink, Hashi, Pic-a-Pix, Link-a-Pix, Fill-a-Pix, Maze-a-Pix and Dot-a-Pix puzzles in dozens of variants and hundreds of models. All puzzles are playable interactively and printable online, providing a content and gaming platform which is by far the most advanced of its kind in the world.

The internet has brought us many joys. It’s rewritten the rules of business and pleasure.

And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time (’let’s use it to make sure our customers have the latest software’, for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.

Here are just ten of the guilty parties who try to do the impossible: to make us hate the internet and wish it had never been invented — and who very nearly succeed.

We all know gas prices are crazy lately. But how much are you really paying. How about this…

Check out the highest gas prices across the globe courtesy of CNN Money and Air-Inc.

10 Most Expensive Places to Buy Gas

1. Eritrea $9.58
2. Norway $8.73
3. United Kingdom $8.38
4. Netherlands $8.37
5. Monaco $8.31
6. Iceland $8.28
7. Belgium $8.22
8. France $8.07
9. Germany $7.86
10. Portugal $7.84

And the U.S.??
108. United States $3.45

You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

A grandson of the last ruler of the Indian princely state of Hyderabad has joined the claim for a share of a fortune held in a London bank since 1948.

As Sir Osman Ali Khan, the absolute ruler of India’s largest princely state of Hyderabad deposited one million pounds in to the National Westminster Bank - he pondered whether his mostly Muslim subjects should join India or Pakistan. The amount which was deposited in August 1948 was frozen a month later when Indian forces annexed Hyderabad and the Nizam’s finance minister tried to transfer it, without his permission, to the new Pakistani High Commissioner in London.

The money, which has swelled to 30 million pounds, has been claimed ever since by India, Pakistan and the heirs of the Nizam, who reputedly sired 100 illegitimate sons by 86 mistresses. It is only now, after 60 years of family feuds and legal wrangling, that India has agreed to begin negotiations on an out-of-court settlement with Pakistan and the Nizam’s descendants.

According to the BBC, the best known claimant to the fortune is 66-year old Mukarram Jah, the Nizam’s first grandson and technically the heir to the throne. He currently lives in a small apartment in Istanbul after spending several years squandering much of his initial inheritance of land, jewels and a rusting collection of antique cars, on a sheep farm in Australia. An article in The Guardian states that Mukarram Jah is now so poor that he had been unable to hire a lawyer to handle his case.

Prince Jah could receive as much as 20 per cent of the money, with India and Pakistan dividing the remainder. However, since the state of Hyderabad no longer exists, his brother, sister and cousin are also expected to stake a claim - as are his former wives, one of whom is a former Miss Turkey. Then there are the estimated 470 sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters from the Nizam’s various mistresses.

In any event, it appears that in a case which has taken over 60 years to begin, it might just take an equal number of years to finally settle.

Send $10 to the Something Store, and they will send you something. You won’t know what it is until you open it, but hey, it’s only ten dollars!

It maybe something you need, something you want or something you desire.
Yours may be a cool gadget, rare book, table game, handmade necklace, reverse clock, box of gourmet chocolates, set of shiny shower curtains, popular video game, big-box retailer gift card, the latest version of a software, a set of kitchen knives, a pair of designer jeans, garden tool, kitchen appliance, unique home decor item, electronic equipment, magazine subscription, office supply item, or …
Your something will most likely be brand new, though it may also be refurbished or antique.

interesting comparison over at the mental floss between miyagi, santa claus, dumbledore, gandalf, merlin, obi-wan kenobi and others. i would have liked to have seen getafix on there.

so we just did books. let’s try movies to see before you die. i’m sure my brother would do a lot better on this than myself though. here’s the ones that i’ve seen. that’s 258 movies i’ve seen out of 1001 compared to only 69 books that i’ve read out of 1001.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror(1922)
The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Metropolis (1927)
Dracula (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
City Lights (1931)
Shanghai Express (1932)
King Kong (1933)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Modern Times (1936)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Stagecoach (1939)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Wuthering Heights (1939)
Rebecca (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Pinocchio (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Dumbo (1941)
High Sierra (1941)
Casablanca (1942)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Rashomon (1950)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
The African Queen (1951)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
The Big Heat (1953)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Animal Farm (1954)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Forbidden Planet (1956)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
North by Northwest (1959)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Ben-Hur (1959)
Psycho (1960)
Spartacus (1960)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
The Hustler (1961)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Lolita (1962)
8 1/2 (1963)
The Great Escape (1963)
Goldfinger (1964)
Marnie (1964)
My Fair Lady (1964)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The Shop on Main Street (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Battle of Algiers (1965)
The Sound of Music (1965)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
The Graduate (1967)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Point Blank (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Jungle Book (1967)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Easy Rider (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Patton (1970)
M*A*S*H (1970)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Klute (1971)
Harold and Maude (1971)
Get Carter (1971)
The French Connection (1971)
Shaft (1971)
Dirty Harry (1971)
Last Tango in Paris (1972)
The Godfather (1972)
The Sting (1973)
American Graffiti (1973)
Papillon (1973)
Enter the Dragon (1973)
Mean Streets (1973)
The Exorcist (1973)
Fantastic Planet (1973)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Chinatown (1974)
Blazing Saddles (1974)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Wall (1975)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Jaws (1975)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Rocky (1976)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Star Wars (1977)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Eraserhead (1977)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Grease (1978)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Alien (1979)
Life of Brian (1979)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Jerk (1979)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Mad Max (1979)
The Shining (1980)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Airplane! (1980)
Raging Bull (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1981)
E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (1982)
The Thing (1982)
Blade Runner (1982)
Poltergeist (1982)
Tootsie (1982)
Gandhi (1982)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Terms of Endearment (1983)
Once Upon a Time in America (1983)
Scarface (1983)
Amadeus (1984)
The Terminator (1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Ghostbusters (1984)
A Passage to India (1984)
The Natural (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Ran (1985)
Out of Africa (1985)
Back to the Future (1985)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
Stand By Me (1986)
The Fly (1986)
Aliens (1986)
Top Gun (1986)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Princess Bride (1987)
The Untouchables (1987)
Bull Durham (1988)
Akira (1988)
Cinema Paradiso (1988)
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
The Naked Gun (1988)
Big (1988)
Die Hard (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Rain Man (1988)
Batman (1989)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
Roger & Me (1989)
Glory (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
King of New York (1990)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Pretty Woman (1990)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Total Recall (1990)
Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991)
Naked Lunch (1991)
Thelma & Louise (1991)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
JFK (1991)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Unforgiven (1992)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
The Crying Game (1992)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Philadelphia (1993)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Three Colors: Blue (1993)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Clerks (1994)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
The Lion King (1994)
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Casino (1995)
Toy Story (1995)
Braveheart (1995)
Clueless (1995)
Heat (1995)
Seven (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Fargo (1996)
Independence Day (1996)
The English Patient (1996)
Trainspotting (1996)
Scream (1996)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Boogie Nights (1997)
Titanic (1997)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Run Lola Run (1998)
Pi (1998)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
There’s Something About Mary (1998)
Magnolia (1999)
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Three Kings (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
American Beauty (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Matrix (1999)
Gladiator (2000)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Traffic (2000)
Memento (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Amelie (2001)
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Gangs of New York (2002)
City of God (2002)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

for the people who grew up watching PTV.

bhool na jaana phir papa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyGfuHJvno8

beema policy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdGgXddaBDQ

binaca cream and brush

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0seU8n_9T9E

kiwi shoe polish

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruEgC6FSF_Q

meri muthi main band hay kia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_RRMqrDrJM

wasim bhai main cigarette nahin peeta

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1plUHwAk-Y

1001 (fictional) books every person should read before they die. i’m skimming through the list and these are the ones off the top of my head that i’ve read. the more i read though, the more i realize i’m becoming a fan of non-fiction and reading fiction is getting more and more distasteful. what are some of your favourites from the list?

Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace - seen the movie, not read the book
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Contact – Carl Sagan
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Life of Pi – Yann Martel

You know how the mobile carriers charge you a couple cents to SMS a few characters’ worth of text over their network? When you add it up, you’re paying about a zillion bucks a meg for that traffic — seriously! A space scientist from Leicester has calculated that SMS data is four times more expensive than receiving data from the Hubble space telescope.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

via BB

One of my favourite geek news sites has an extensive review of Hardy Heron. Check it out.

Before Mozilla open sourced their code, they had to go through a clean-up/sanitization process cause there were far too many swear words in the comments.

Good fun.

Thanks Ali.