Sunday, February 25, 2007

Houston WiFi to benefit lower-income residents | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "City's WiFi plan: Access for all
Lower-income residents could be among top beneficiaries of mayor's proposal

By ALEXIS GRANT
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

The Internet remains inaccessible to many low-income people. Some Houston numbers:

• 270,000 : Households without Internet

• 40,000 : Low-income discounts available under city's planned wireless Internet system

• $10 : Discount monthly price for access to planned city wireless system

• $22 : Approximate regular monthly price

Source: City of Houston

Mireya Zenil isn't used to going to the library every time she wants to use the Internet.

Until a month ago, the 17-year-old used a cable connection in her eastside home to do online research for school projects or check her MySpace account. But her parents recently canceled their Internet service because it was too pricey, and they're now shopping for a cheaper connection."

Saturday, February 24, 2007

17" Powerbook LCD bug, literally!

An actual bug stuck i just behind a lovely Powerbook screen. This is a sad (for the owner & the bug), but very interesting article.



read more | digg story

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

How To: Build your own stuffed cat turn signal indicator (?!)

Winky the Cat was a stuffed animal turn-signal sold through catalogs. I wanted Winky for my car, to keep me safe with his soft fluffiness and his acrylon-like fur. Sadly, a victim of teenage peer pressure, I couldn't bring myself to buy Winky. Now, 25 years later, I realize that all is not lost. Yeah, I can't buy Winky, but I can make my own!



read more | digg story

Monday, February 19, 2007

Ancient Tree Frog Found Encased in Amber



National Geographic News

February 17, 2007—A miner from Mexico's Chiapas state has made the find of a lifetime—a tiny tree frog preserved in amber that could be 25 million years old, a scientist recently announced (map of Mexico).

The block of amber, or fossilized tree resin, encasing the 0.4-inch (1-centimeter) frog was unearthed in 2005 and sold to a private collector, according to the Associated Press (AP). The collector then lent the piece—seen in this photo released on February 14—to scientists.


Photograph from AP/Gerardo Carbot-Instituto de Historia Natural y Ecologa

XM And SIRIUS Radio Merging

By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Write

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., rivals in the fledgling satellite radio industry, have agreed to combine in a deal that investors hope will result in lower costs, assuming it overcomes significant regulatory hurdles.

The companies billed the deal announced Monday as a merger of equals, with shareholders of both companies owning approximately 50 percent of the combined entity. However, Sirius will be giving $4.57 billion of its stock to XM shareholders, a substantial premium to the value of their shares.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Mummified man found in front of his Long Island TV

Mummified man found in front of his Long Island TV

Associated Press

HAMPTON BAYS, N.Y. — The partially mummified body of a man dead for more than a year has been found in a chair in front of his television, which was still on, authorities said.

Vincenzo Ricardo, 70, apparently died of natural causes, said Dr. Stuart Dawson, Suffolk County's deputy chief medical examiner.

Police found Ricardo's body this week when they investigated a report of burst pipes.

The home's dry air had preserved his features, morgue assistant Jeff Bacchus said.

"You could see his face. He still had hair on his head," Bacchus said.

Ricardo's wife died years ago, and he lived alone, Dawson said.

"He hasn't been heard from in over a year. That's the part that baffles me," he said. "Nobody sounded the alarm."

Neighbors said they had thought Ricardo was in a hospital or nursing home.

"We never thought to check on him," said neighbor Diane Devon.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Skeleton "Valentines" Won't Be Parted





February 13, 2007—In what's been called a Valentine's Day gift to Italy, archaeologists today excavated two interlocked Stone Age skeletons—leaving their "eternal embrace" intact and making it easier to analyze the double burial.

Discovered last week during construction not far from Verona, the setting of Romeo and Juliet, the roughly 5,000-year-old couple has already become an icon of enduring love to many.

Like Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, the prehistoric twosome appear to be young, as evidenced by the condition of their teeth. But that's about all that is known about them so far. They could just as easily be two brothers.

But dig supervisor Elena Menotti takes the romantic view.

"It was a very emotional discovery," the archaeologist told the Associated Press last week. "From thousands of years ago we feel the strength of this love. Yes, we must call it love."

—Ted Chamberlain
National Geographic News

Chinese man to hang for ant scam

A Chinese company chairman has been sentenced to death for running a scam involving giant ants.
Wang Zhendong promised investors returns of up to 60% if they put money into the fictitious ant-breeding project, the court heard.

Wang, from Liaoning province, raised 3bn yuan ($390m; £200m) in three years, prosecutors said.

HP printing secrets from a former employee

From the Houston Chronicle's Tech Blog....


The Consumerist — rapidly becoming one of my fave stops on the Intarwebs — has a great post featuring stuff you didn't know about Hewlett-Packard printers and their tech support.

The source? Supposedly a former employee. The goods? If true . . . absolutely fascinating.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Cartoon Network CEO Resigns Over Aqua Teen Scare

Cartoon Network boss quits over bomb scare
Jim Samples is taking the fall for the marketing debacle at Turner Broadcasting.
February 9 2007: 3:17 PM EST

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The head of Cartoon Network resigned Friday after the network's guerilla marketing scheme for one of its shows went bad last week and led to a bomb scare in Boston - a fiasco that cost its parent company $2 million.

In a letter to employees, Jim Samples, the general manager and executive vice president of the network, wrote: "I deeply regret the negative publicity and expense caused to our company as a result of this campaign. As general manager of Cartoon Network, I feel compelled to step down, effective immediately, in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under my watch."

Turner Broadcasting System and Interference Inc. agreed to pay $2 million to make amends for last Wednesday's bomb scare in Boston, the Massachusetts attorney general said Monday. TBS is the parent of the Cartoon Network, which initiated the marketing scheme. CNN, CNNMoney.com and TBS are all owned by Time Warner Inc. (Charts), the world's largest media company.

Samples had been with Atlanta-based Cartoon Network for 13 years.

In the marketing scheme, battery-powered cartoon advertising signs were placed around Boston and other cities for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a show that's on the Cartoon Network's late-night Adult Swim programming. The signs led to a massive security alert around Boston.

-- from CNN's Katy Byron and CNNMoney.com's Rob Kelley

Thursday, February 08, 2007

As the president and Republicans continue to hype the surge -- and stifle debate about it -- Bush's own war planners are preparing for failure in Iraq

The Pentagon's not-so-little secret
As the president and Republicans continue to hype the surge -- and stifle debate about it -- Bush's own war planners are preparing for failure in Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Feb. 08, 2007 | Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. "He's tried this two times -- it's failed twice," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the "surge" tactic. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.'" She repeated his words: "'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."

On Feb. 2, the National Intelligence Council, representing all intelligence agencies, issued a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, as harsh an antidote to wishful thinking as could be imagined. "The Intelligence Community judges that the term 'civil war' does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al-Qaida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term 'civil war' accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements."

The report described an Iraqi government, army and police force that cannot meet these challenges in any foreseeable time frame and a reversal of "the negative trends driving Iraq's current trajectory" occurring only through a dream sequence in which all the warring sects and factions, in some unexplained way, suddenly make peace with one another. Nor does the NIE suggest that this imaginary scenario might ever come to pass. Instead, it proceeds to describe the potential for "an abrupt increase in communal and insurgent violence and a shift in Iraq's trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political, and security consequences."

Bush justified his invasion on the basis of false intelligence in the now notorious NIE of October 2002 that claimed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Now, as the latest NIE forecasts nightmares, he is escalating the war. But almost everything has changed in the nearly four years since the invasion.

A newly elected Congress has been galvanized to debate a bipartisan resolution disapproving of Bush's escalation. Yet in the Senate, where 60 votes are necessary to establish cloture on a filibuster, the Republican minority has blocked a vote. Though many Republicans are keenly aware that continued support for Bush's policy amounts to political suicide in 2008, all but two of them have joined a phalanx to shut down the vote. By mustering behind him, they tie their fate to his policy. Bush, however, will be gone, while they remain exposed to the political elements.

Even Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the Republican cosponsor of the resolution against the escalation along with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., cast his lot with the Republican martyr brigade, voting to suppress his own measure. In 2002, the Republican right mounted a primary campaign against Warner in retribution for his deviation from their ideological line, but failed feebly. Warner cannot fear a repetition of the right's vengeance. Can he be undermining himself out of deference to the authority of a commander in chief whose course he believes is reckless?

The Republican prevention of a vote on the Warner-Levin resolution reflects an effort to close debate on the war itself. It amounts in effect to a gag rule on Bush's Iraq policy. During the Vietnam War, under President Johnson, neither party attempted to shut down debate. After 1969, President Nixon's Vietnam policy consisted of misdirection, deception, covert action and fait accompli, such as the counterproductive and ultimately catastrophic invasion of Cambodia. The Bush administration's methods can be traced to the Nixon administration, with Dick Cheney as the connecting thread.

The reception of the latest NIE, even more than the NIE itself, indicates again Bush's and Republicans' denial of objective analysis from the professional intelligence community. The October 2002 NIE was produced under intense pressure from the White House, especially Vice President Cheney, to validate its preconceived views. "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East who oversaw the assembling of that NIE, wrote a year ago. In the shadow of this travesty, the new NIE was written with great care; its frightening descriptions, therefore, should be considered to be deliberately guarded and reserved in tone.

Just as Bush and the Republicans rejected the bipartisan wise men of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, they have now rejected the objective assessment of the professionals. By thwarting the bipartisan Warner-Levin resolution, they have declared that they will operate on their own fanciful criteria, even against their own political interests.

As the Senate curdles in frustration over Republican tactics, the trial of Scooter Libby continues to clarify the degree to which the administration covered up its disinformation campaign that led the country into war with another disinformation campaign to cover up the role of the vice president as the prime mover of the smear campaign against former ambassador Joseph Wilson for committing the unforgivable act of revealing the truth. For the Senate Republicans, Scooter Libby is not an object lesson. The lesson they take away, if any, is not the necessity of open government but once again the need to burn the tapes.

Libby's effort to prevent his grand jury tapes from being entered into evidence in his trial resembled nothing so much as Nixon trying to suppress his tapes. Both in the end revealed their respective coverups. Cheney learned from Nixon to burn the tapes at least figuratively; now, his chief of staff, Cheney's Cheney, has tried to protect Cheney by literally and futilely suppressing the tapes. Cheney finds himself back at the beginning. For him, life has come full circle. From the entire history of deception, from the Nixon to the Libby tapes, the Republicans have learned nothing.

The new NIE offers more than "key judgments" on "The Prospects for Iraq's Stability." It is also a template for the short-term future of American politics. The ruthlessly cruel events projected for Iraq will blow back to the United States. The more Bush fights there, the more the embattled Republicans must fight here.

The Senate Republicans' vote to suppress the resolution on the war was the moment when they irrevocably aligned themselves completely with a president who rejects objective analysis. Unable to shield him or themselves from the inevitable consequences, they have made a conscious decision to place the president's delusions above the welfare not only of the Republican Party but also of the troops sent into the deadly labyrinth of Baghdad. Quietly and calmly, as the Republicans hype the "surge," the war planners prepare for the worst.

-- By Sidney Blumenthal

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Google Apps, which lets companies offload their e-mail systems, is beefing up

Google Steps Into Microsoft's Office
Google Apps, which lets companies offload their e-mail systems, is beefing up

Greg Brandeau is itching to dump the decade-old, homegrown e-mail system he manages at Pixar Animation Studios Inc. (DIS ). And the senior vice-president for technology at the Walt Disney Co. (DIS ) unit is sure about one thing: The replacement won't be Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) Exchange and Outlook duo, whose e-mail, calendar, and other programs dominate corporate computing. Brandeau says it's difficult to manage the software because Pixar uses a variety of computers. His likely choice may surprise you: Google.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Apple - Thoughts on Music

Steve Jobs
February 6, 2007

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Craziest X-rays


A dentist found the source of the toothache Patrick Lawler was complaining about on the roof of his mouth: a four-inch (10-centimeter) nail the construction worker had unknowingly embedded in his skull six days earlier.

The strange tale of General Tso's chicken.

General Tso’s (or Zuo’s) chicken is the most famous Hunanese dish in the world. A delectable concoction of lightly battered chicken in a chili-laced sweet-sour sauce, it appears on restaurant menus across the globe, but especially in the Eastern United States, where it seems to have become the epitome of Hunanese cuisine. Despite its international reputation, however, the dish is virtually unknown in the Chinese province of Hunan itself.