Reuters report that Microsoft’s upcoming Sidekick replacements should be arriving on market either in late Spring or Early Summer.
The Verizon-bound handsets will target the same teen demographic as the SideKick, and will feature heavy social network integration.
According to Gizmodo, one handset will feature a QVGA version, while the other will have a HVGA screen.
Read more at Yahoo News here.
Just as the rich get richer, studies show that often the happy get happier and the sad get sadder–because of simmering brain temperatures–also known as “resonance.”
Happy thoughts all share the same resonance in the brain–and are shown to naturally attract the memory of other happy thoughts–also simmering at the same happy “resonance.”
Chances are you’ve witnessed this theory of resonance with guitars. You know if you pluck the G string on one guitar, the G string on any nearby guitar will have “sympathetic resonance” and start to vibrate as well! If you haven’t experienced this, check it out! It’s very cool.
Well, memories are “tuned in” at specific frequencies, based on the information they’re encoded with–like “This is high-level happy stuff” or “this is low-level miserable stuff.”
Whatever resonance your present thoughts are simmering at (“high-level happy” or “low-level miserable”), they’ll attract memories of similar information. The result: When you’re happy, a stream of positive thoughts ensues. Ditto on simmering negative thoughts.
The good news: Over time, negative brain resonances eventually simmer back up to their normal, daily, even-keeled midlevel set zones. When they do, that’s when the feeling of “rebounding” kicks in.
So if lately you’ve been worried that you’re never going to feel like your normal self again, don’t. You’re biologically wired to return to your normal midlevel mood.
Happiness Assignment: Create a Gratitude Journal. Record: Who do you love? What do you love? What do you love to do? Psychologists find that people who keep weekly gratitude journals end up feeling happier, more energetic, and more optimistic than those who don’t. So write down those people, things, and experiences that bring you joy, and keep your brain resonating at a happy temperature.
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Most of the discussion around the conviction of three Google execs on criminal charges over a video uploaded to Google video (which none of those execs had anything to do with), rightly focused on the assault on basic common sense that the result created. Convicting three executives as criminals for actions they had absolutely nothing to do with, and which concern events where the company acted expeditiously once it was officially informed of the issue, just violates every concept of fairness. It’s hard to see how anyone can justify this sort of outcome (though, we’ve see a few people try).
However, a separate question is whether or not the ruling has a real legal basis. Given some of the reports we’d received from some lawyers in Italy, the feeling was that this was perfectly within the bounds of Italian law (and some were upset that we’d even question that). There is some uncertainty, however, as to how this fits within wider EU law, which Italy must also abide by. The Citizen Media Law Project has a post that details why they think that the conviction won’t hold on appeal, suggesting that the judge misclassifed Google in determining whether or not the company qualified for EU-wide safe harbors for service providers.
However, there are some other possibilities as well. Struan Robertson has a detailed post, looking at EU safe harbors, which notes two reasons why Google may have lost the case. The first is that, despite EU safe harbors, there’s actually a carve out for data privacy issues. Since the execs were acquitted on defamation issues, but still convicted on privacy violations, this might be correct. However, if that’s the case, it highlights exactly why this loophole is both silly and dangerous. Yes, privacy is very important, but it’s never going to make sense to put the liability for privacy violations on a third party directly. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on potential lawbreaking by those who created or uploaded the video — but blaming the platform used for hosting the video makes no sense at all.
The second area that Robertson highlights is the one that prosecutors had definitely brought up in the case: that Google did have “notice” of the offending nature of the video prior to the official alert from the police. The prosecutors argued that the comments on the video should have served to alert Google. Again, this seems a bit ridiculous — given how many videos are uploaded every day, and how many comments are found on those videos.
However, these issues all point to problems with EU law that really should be fixed. First, the safe harbors need to be clearer, so that it’s understood who or what is covered. Second, the “privacy” loophole needs to be closed. Yes, privacy is important, but nothing is so important that it should lead to jailing totally unrelated parties. Finally, the law needs to be much clearer on what constitutes official notice. As Robertson notes, there was a proposal made in the UK a little while back to clarify that very issue, and the politicians chose not to do so. When you leave the process open wide to interpretation like that, you get cases with nonsensical results, such as what happened in this case. Hopefully, Google wins on appeal, but in the meantime, Europe really should fix these problems with its current safe harbor laws.
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Published March 2, 2010
By KNDU TV
Richland, WA- When your kids ask you why they need to know math, tell them this.
Today engineering students at Columbia Basin College took the freshmen at Delta High School outside and let them get hands-on experience with equipment works.
The math students have been working with angles, and their teachers wanted to let them see and touch a real-life application.
“It’s not just a couple of lines on a piece of paper,” says CBC Associate Professor Paige Wyatt. ” It has real meaning, a real use. The other nice thing is surveying is an excellent field to go into, so it could lead to some careers if the kids dive in an really enjoy it.”
In case your kids ask, surveying helps engineers determine land boundaries and build straight and level roads.
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Report: BMW will offer up to 700 urbanites an electric 1 series lease Who’s ready? |
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CARB approves of Roush’s propane-powered Ford F-250 and F-350 The wait is over, for those of you who’ve been waiting. |
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Transonic gets Supercritical with fuel injection, claims 50-75% improvement Well, it “prevents droplet diffusion burn.” A good thing, apparently. |
Other news: | |
AutoblogGreen for 03.05.10 originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you have a thing for diamonds, forget rings or necklaces and go & get Resco Diamonds. A sparkling & addictive puzzle game for Windows Mobile. If you search the web for “diamond games” you end up with a whole bunch of games similar to Resco Diamonds, but none come anywhere near to Resco’s contribution in terms of class. …
Read more at BestWindowsMobileApps here.
Things seem to roll, flow and run uphill on this short patch of road near Ariccia, Italy
Just outside of Rome, one can find respite from the smog, and traffic of the big city among them fresh air, beautiful surroundings, wonderful food and a road that seems to run in reverse.
Known as an anti-gravity hill, this curious spot is popular in Rome and Italian national TV reported about it. As with other ‘anti-gravity hills’ It looks like a normal street in the woods with a gentle slope, but if you pour water or put a ball on the pavement it seems to go uphill! When one walks on the hill one “can clearly feel that going uphill is much easier than going downhill.” This of course should be a dead giveaway that something is amiss. If a blind man walked on this hill he would find it no stranger than any other hill, which in regards to gravity, it isn’t.
Like other gravity hills throughout the world, the same explanations are generally given: a deviation in gravity, magnetic effects caused by huge underground metal deposits, and in this case volcanic activity in ancient times. There is however only one true cause, one which only effects those with sight. The effect is caused by the peculiar series of uphill and downhill stretches in which there is scarce or no view of the horizon. If one lays a level on the hill is shows that things are going downhill indeed…
However it seems that even computers can get it wrong. Recently it has been pointed out that according to Google Maps the height of a succession of points on the road shows that according to Google things are indeed going uphill in defiance of gravity.
Read more about The uphill-downhill road of Ariccia on Atlas Obscura…
Category: Optical Oddities, Mystery Spots and Gravity Hills
Location: Ariccia, Italy
Edited by: Wanderful, Dylan
For a while the complaints used to be about Apple’s totally arbitrary process for choosing which apps get into the iPhone app store, but lately the complaints have been about Apple (again totally arbitrarily) removing apps that were already there. There were all those complaints about the sudden removal of “adult” apps (unless you were someone famous like Playboy, in which case Apple was fine with it), and now there are complaints that Apple suddenly and inexplicably has removed WiFi finders from the app store. While developers feel they need to keep developing for the iPhone given its footprint in the market, moves like this are going to keep pissing off developers quite a bit too. You can do that when you dominate the market, but it can come back to bite you later on.
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Before the United States was ever born, one principle was clear to John Adams, when as a lawyer, he defended British soldiers in the wake of the Boston Massacre (and I’m reminded in comments — ironically, it’s the 240th Anniversary of that event):
“The part I took in defense of captain Preston and the soldiers, procured me anxiety, and obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
And from Adams, to Clarence Darrow, to the Scottsboro Boys to Stephen Jones defense of Timothy McVeigh right through to the latter’s execution this has been a time-honored principle of an idyllic America, whether conservative like Adams and Jones, or liberal like Darrow.
But admiration for an Atticus Finch is no match for the visceral stupidity of Wolf Blitzer and the thuggish politics of a Liz Cheney. No, for them, lawyers following the highest principles of the calling are just another bunch of terrorist enablers.
The daily right-wing slant of FoxNews and it’s hourly diatribes are, of course, bad enough, and the determination of every news medium to allow right-wing bullshit to be taken seriously rather than laughed at is depressing. But CNN’s Situation Room had all the intellectual acumen of ‘The Situation’ himself yesterday. It’s one thing for Blitzer to be bland and dumb — because he is — it’s another thing to add kerosene to the fires of undermining the best things about our system of government.
According to SME.sk (SLO), a draft bill by the Slovak National Party (SNS) will introduce “obligatory patriotism” in Slovakia beginning April 1:
[…] It is Monday morning. In every state-run […] school or university in Slovakia directors must have the national anthem performed in a way that every student is able to hear it. In the classrooms, in addition to the portrait of the president, there are also the state emblem, the national flag, the text of the anthem and the preamble to the constitution.
This is how it is going to be like in every state school from April 1 [btw, traditional ‘fool's day'], as parliament members from the government coalition have approved the controversial patriotic law designed by SNS.
[…]
Obligatory patriotism is not limited to schools. Coalition parliament members will bring it also to adults. At every sports event organized by national sports organizations the anthem will be performed. ‘Lightning over the Tatras‘ will also sound before parliament meetings, and at the beginning of local government and parliament meetings. Every officer entering civil service will have to take an obligatory oath of loyalty to the republic.
[…]
“We will be bigger patriots,” promised Rafael Rafaj from SNS.
[…]
Rafaj also said that the state media would have to broadcast the anthem at midnight.
Other Slovak newspapers also point out that the new law is controversial. Pravda, for example, recalls (SLO) that the Soviet anthem was obligatory during the 1950s and publishes the question asked by school principals: who will pay the bills (the expected cost of the implementation of the law is about 1 million euro) when the ministry of education refuses to do it?
Bloggers are against the new law, too, and there have been organized protests in front of the presidential palace and the parliament (two sample reports (SLO) are at Robert Mihaly's blog – here and here).
Here is a short selection from thousands of netizens' comments (SLO):
Trautiq:
Strange but a very effective support of private schools.
foobar2k:
All it takes it to bring your child to school 10-15 minutes after lessons begin.
pokaini:
:-)) this is exactly what I will do every Monday too 🙂
niau:
Promises of loyalty are well known to SNS chief – in 2004 he promised loyalty to his third wife already… 😉
Slovän:
Not afraid, because there are no sanctions for breaking this law, but anyway I think it is not good. Especially the anthem at the beginning of every week. As a student of pedagogy, I perceive it quite negatively and directly because I have a positive attitude towards the anthem. The anthem has to be respected, but how can someone have respect for an anthem that will bother him this way?
1qwerty1:
It will end the same way as with the Russian language. It used to be obligatory, too, and let's be honest: who remembers even their [Cyrillic] letters now?
mibosa:
So what? I had experience with the Labor song, the Internationale and “Soyuz nerushimyj” [the Soviet anthem] – and I survived it. And the children will sing it and, believe me, they will have fun doing it.
livik:
I just wanna mention that I have no doubt that this president will submissively sign this pearl.
ficobijec_no.1:
During next year's census, it is necessary to write this in the ‘nationality' box: “Apache.”
zlyzlyzlykapitalista:
Good idea, the opposite to Comanches 🙂 [Comanche is in Slovakia a shortcut for ‘communist.' Comments that follow in this forum name various other nationalities that people have already chosen in the past census to make clear they were not members of the same nation as SNS members. In another discussion of this issue, an unverified news item was mentioned that claimed that in the Czech Republic such a big Eskimo minority had been created for the similar reasons that they already qualified for financial support from the government.]
wladelny:
Maybe a nephew of some parliament member owns a plant for printing of state symbols, the text of the anthem and the preambles? 😀
hollywood:
My God, don't we have other problems? I wonder how they are going to play the anthem: our education system even without this has no money – and now they have to buy new CDs.
haskii86:
Do not be afraid, SNS has suppliers who are waiting already.
charl1:
And is this the punishment that we have this government, my Lord? I promise I will be good, just don't let them govern more times! Amen.
arway:
At my command: “To love our dear Slovak homeland!” – “Always ready!”
Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.
The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it’s chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.
But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics– even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but the point is, what they spent on scepticswas even less.
For direct PR comparisons though, just look at “Think Climate Think Change“: the Australian Government put $13.9 million into just one quick advertising campaign. There is no question that there are vastly more financial rewards for people who promote a carbon-made catastrophe than for those who point out the flaws in the theory.
Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect. There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are devoted to UnNatural Forces.
It’s a monopsony, and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status (though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws. The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or
The stealthy mass entry of the bankers and traders poses a major force. Surely if money has any effect on carbon emissions, it must also have an effect on careers, shareholders, advertising, and lobbying? There were over 2,000 lobbyists in
Unpaid sceptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon, IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change. There’s no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or power grabs.
Tony Abbot’s new policy removes the benefits for bankers. Labor and the Greens don’t appear to notice that they fight tooth and nail for a market in a “commodity” which isn’t a commodity and that guarantees profits for big bankers. The public though are figuring it out.
It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat, copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than oil.
Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, agrees and predicts trades eventually will total $10 trillion a year.” That’s 10 thousand billion dollars.
And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the planet. But few realise that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2 effect and that this amplification simply isn’t there.
Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding “uncertainties” nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified.[Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008]
Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous “3.5 degrees of warming” collapses to just a half a degree — most of which has happened.
Those resorting to this vacuous, easily refutable point should be shamed into lifting their game. The ad hominem argument is Stone Age reasoning, and the “money” insult they throw, bounces right back at them — a thousand-fold.
In a twitter Q&A session Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Phone 7 development will take place in XNA and Silverlight. XNA is already in use on the X-box platform for mini-games and is also the foundation of application development on the ZuneHD.
Microsoft also confirmed Windows Mobile software will not run on the Windows Phone 7 platform, with Microsoft promising they "will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come" .
With this move Microsoft has sadly basically condemned Windows Phone 7 series to feature phone status for at least its first 6 months to a year, due to the very likely severe dearth of applications, especially productivity ones that take quite a long time to develop. At the same time, despite Microsoft’s promises, we can also expect development on Windows Mobile to more or less cease also.
It seems the time in the desert has just started.
Do our readers think Microsoft is acting wisely? Let us know below.
For years and years we’ve been hearing about the supposed threats of “cyberwar” and “cyberterrosism.” For nearly a decade we’ve questioned whether this was all hype, and the story hasn’t changed. Sure, there are hackers and those who look to break into systems, but the real risks and overall threats still seem fairly minimal. But that’s not enough for some people. Wired’s Ryan Singel has a long, but excellent look at how former director of national intelligence (now consultant) Michael McConnell appears to be trying to build up a giant moral panic about this ill-defined threat, with the goal of basically ripping out the guts of today’s internet to recreate it with almost no privacy at all. He recently claimed:
We need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable
In other words, we need to be able to spy on everyone. To build up this moral panic, McConnell isn’t even just getting the press to write articles for him — he’s doing it himself. The Washington Post recently gave him op-ed space to ridiculously claim that the recent hack on Google showed we’re “losing the cyberwar.” Yet, as Singel points out, that was entirely different. It wasn’t warfare, it was espionage. McConnell also played up some bogus threats, such as some old viruses and botnets that are hardly part of some dangerous “cyberwar.”
Singel then goes on to connect McConnell’s efforts with various other political proposals lately — suggesting that the government is moving towards more control of the internet and more monitoring. At times, unfortunately, the piece feels like it slips a bit into conspiracy theory territory — but McConnell’s efforts certainly appear questionable. He’s pushing a bogus “threat” and he works for a company that could profit tremendously from any “response” to such a threat. That seems like a massive conflict of interest that a lot of people are ignoring.
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Clavilux 2000 [jonasheuer.de] is a subtle music visualization installation that represents the playing of sounds by way of a simultaneous animation that can be interpreted.
For every note played on the keyboard, a stripe appears of which the dimensions, position and color correspond to the way the particular key was stroke. The length and vertical position of stripe is mapped unto the velocity, while the stripe’s width reflects the length of each note. By mapping the color wheel on the circle of 5ths, the colors give the viewer (and listener) an impression of the harmonic relations. Notes belonging to one specific tonality correspond to colors from one specific area of the color wheel. Therefore each key has its own color scheme and “wrong” notes stand out in contrasting colors. The more different tonalities a music piece has, the more colorful the resulting visualization will be.
As all the stripes do not disappear, the resulting representation is able to convey insights about the composition as well as the specific performance: Which notes were played the most? Which were the loudest notes? Which range of the keys was played mostly? How harmonically constant was the music?
Watch the visualization in action below.
“Viewing information and data in this way, is a lot like swimming in a living information infographic.” During his very impressive TED talk, Gary Flake, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, demos the novel and still experimental Pivot [getpivot.com] technology. Pivot is a completely new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on the Seadragon zooming technology, it enables spectacular zooming in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
“Right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse, we talk about the curse of information overload, drowning in data. What if we can turn that upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden.”
Watch the video of the talk below.
What will it enable in the world of data visualization that was not possible before?
Our newly developed Rotating Magnetron Guns (Z-Guns™) have been specifically engineered for the demanding requirements of data storage media producers. Integration with a new system or retrofitting an existing system is facilitated by Dexter’s new design and control interface.
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In most applications, customers are trying to maximize target utilization and achieve optimum uniformity. Our gun is capable of achieving both, along with radial magnetic anisotropy and zero re-deposition.
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Electrically Heated Catenary Type Furnace for annealing stainless steel mesh screen using a hydrogen/nitrogen atmosphere at temperatures up to 2000¢ªF.
The furnace included a static water cooler and a high volume recirculated atmosphere convection cooling system to cool the screen to less than 200¢ªF before leaving the protective atmosphere.
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