Archive for February, 2009
Families that own mobile phones of different brands and models may be able to share a single charger within three years under a deal involving 17 mobile phone companies. Â Note the discluded names of Apple (iPhone), Palm and RIM from the list below.
The list includes
3 Group.
AT&T.
KTF.
LG.
mobilkom austria.
Motorola.
Nokia.
Orange.
Qualcomm.
Samsung.
Sony Ericsson.
Telecom Italia.
Telefónica.
Telenor.
Telstra.
T-Mobile.
Vodafone.
the slow and inevitable doom of the art of handwriting is sure to come about. the bbc describes it. i remember the days of three lined pages to teach hand writing and urdu calligraphy. i highly doubt that this will be the case in even ten or fifteen years from now, much less a century from now.
“When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they’ll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them,” says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.
She argues that children – if not this generation then one soon to come – may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare occasions in life they need to communicate by pen.
The way handwriting is taught has undoubtedly changed. At Ms Florey’s school in 1950s America, a nun beat time with a stick as the class copied letters from the blackboard. It was not a place for individuals. There was a right way to form letters and very many wrong ways.
just following up on the pirate bay trial as it continues. trust me when i say it’s well worth the read.
also…as a bonus, here’s a great rebuttal by the defendants and other interested and vested parties about why the music industry is wrong about why their sales are decreasing and why file sharing has nothing to do with it and how they are just swinging an axe in their own foot.
where do these people get this jibberish in their head? why don’t we all time travel to the stone age and live like the amish. damn fatwa’s. i’d love to know where all this profound knowledge comes from.
As if the debate around using ethanol to fuel cars weren’t already complicated enough, now an Islamic scholar has suggested that driving or even riding in a vehicle fueled by ethanol could be considered a sin for observant Muslims.
The opinion comes from Sheikh Mohamed al-Najimi, of the Islamic Jurisprudence Academy in Saudi Arabia. It is based on the part of Islamic law derived from a statement by the prophet in which dealing with alcohol in any form–including purchase, sale, transport, consumption, and manufacture–is strictly prohibited.
The sheikh urged that the issue of ethanol-powered vehicles should be studied by Islamic religious scholars, and stressed that the statement was not a fatwa but simply his own opinion.
we say things without realising the impact they could have if they ever came true – say like, wishing someone would get run over by a truck or drop dead or get nuked.
here’s the impact a 21k ‘fat-man‘ will have if dropped anywhere around the lahore airport.
Physical Effects
orange zone – 1st Degree Burns Sunburn-like discomfort, skin redness
peach zone – 2nd Degree Burns Blisters and pain, like burns by boiling water
pink zone- 3rd Degree Burns Skin charring and necrosis, requiring medical care
core – Conflagration Most people will die within 24 hours
if karachi got bombed with a B61 it would wipe out a good percentage of the 21million or so people living there.
nuke your own friends and family, or your favourite city here. fun!
p.s check out the asteroid impact for extra points.
The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life’s savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back.
Microsoft executives have been telling the tech industry that if hardware supports Windows Vista, it will support Windows 7, but it now looks like that may not entirely be the case. According to CRN: ‘But after a series of tests on older and newer hardware, a number of noteworthy issues emerged: Microsoft’s statement that if hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7 appears to be, at best, misleading; hardware that is older, but not near the end of most business life cycles, could be impossible to upgrade; and the addition of an extra step in the upgrade process does add complexity and more time not needed in previous upgrade cycles.’ And here is CRN’s overview of the difficulties Microsoft faces in asking enterprise users to walk this upgrade path: ‘Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, ‘known issues’ and unknown issues. Sound familiar? That’s what people used to say about Linux.’
via /.
i don’t see how or why cosmetic changes are called features. anyway here’s a low down of windows 7. and not needing a new PC is apparently a feature too.
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Clay Bennett
Chattanooga Times Free Press Feb 21, 2009 |
the pirate bay has been under a whole lot of legal scrutiny lately and has gone to trial against the big media in sweden and the court case has been on going for a few days now. torrent freak has been keeping a very close watch on the trial and been summarizing day to day activities. it’s definitely worth reading, especially since this court case may end up shutting down the largest bittorrent site on the web. the pirate bay have always said they have done nothing illegal and are rightly defending themselves in my opinion. they’re been accused of providing a service to find content, rather than physically providing the infringing data, something even a company like Google does. it’s like saying that if a guy goes to a bar, gets drunk, starts driving and gets into an accident, it’s the bar’s fault for providing the person with the alcohol. i’m keeping a close watch on this court case and i’ve provided the links below as a quick summary. i’m with TPB on this one.
low tech fixes for high tech gear.
Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.
Mr. Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.†Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths.
Tuba Sahaab is taking on the Taliban. But the 11-year-old Pakistani girl is no militant and her weapons are simply her words. She lives on the outskirts of Islamabad and writes poems about the pain and suffering of children in her country despite personal threats from hardline Islamic militants.
“If they kill me, do not worry,” she says. “I want everyone in Pakistan to be equal.”
The young poet has been interviewed by US network, CNN, and now regularly appears in the media. She is not afraid to express her views and is famous in Pakistan.
“I want to give peace to my nation,” she tells CNN (photo). “I will fight for it.”
A pretty good read, not for the article, but definitely for the comments. tom s. and admin go through some very articulate discussions about the pros and cons of living in and thoughts about what most people have in their head about Dubai but were afraid to say.
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
