Category: News

Brazil’s laws concerning liability for online posting continue to haunt Google for no good reason. For years now, we’ve been hearing about lawsuits against Google in Brazil because of comments made on Orkut, Google’s social networking site that (for whatever reason) is mostly popular in Brazil. Brazil doesn’t seem to have a concept of safe harbors or of actually applying liability to those who actually did the actions. Instead, every time that someone does something mean on Orkut, Google gets blamed and fined.

Slashdot points us to the latest such case, an appeal of an earlier ruling against Google, where, once again, the judge found that Google should have magically stopped a supposedly defamatory message from being posted:

“By making space available on virtual networking sites, in which users can post any type of message without any checks beforehand, with offensive and injurious content, and, in many cases, of unknown origin, [Google] assumes the risk of causing damage [to other people],” judge Alvimar de Avila said.

Of course, that makes no sense. Does that mean webhosts are automatically responsible for any content that people put online? Claiming that just creating a place where people can post messages means liability for the provider creates huge chilling effects. It doesn’t make sense for any internet company to operate in Brazil if it has any user-generated component at all. The liability is way too high.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Garmin-Asus’ latest Android smartphone has been outed, the 3.2-inch HVGA nuvifone A10.  Targeted at pedestrian navigation users, the A10 obviously comes with GPS but Garmin-Asus also preload mapping data onto the handset rather than leaving it to the whims of the cellular network while you’re on the move.

There’s also a 5-megapixel camera with geotagging support, an accelerometer and a 1,500mAh battery; Garmin-ASUS don’t actually suggest how long that will last you while navigating.  In the box there’s an in-car windscreen mount that both recharges the smartphone and has a speaker for amplified voice guidance prompts.

The usual Android apps together with Microsoft Exchange support are loaded, and there’s the Android Market too; no word on whether the screen is capacitive or resistive, but it does support multitouch.  The Garmin-Asus A10 will go on sale in Europe and Asia-Pacific midway through this year; no word on pricing at this stage.

Press Release:

Garmin-Asus announces newest Android smartphone with Garmin navigation

A10 focuses on pedestrian-friendly features and navigation for Europe and Asia-Pacific

Cayman Islands/April 28, 2010/Business Wire — Garmin-Asus, a co-branded alliance between Garmin® Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), and ASUSTeK® Computer Inc. (TAIEX: 2357), today announced the Garmin-Asus A10, a touchscreen smartphone running on the Android™ platform that is optimized for pedestrian navigation. The A10 is expected to be available in mid-2010 in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

For those times when walking is the best way to go, the A10 is ideal for city navigation because of its bright, 3.2-inch HVGA touch screen, electronic compass and long-lasting 1500mAh battery. As with other Garmin-Asus Android-powered devices, the A10’s GPS capabilities are optimized to ensure that customers have the best location and navigation experience a smartphone can offer. Detailed maps are preloaded on the A10 so that users do not have to pay and wait for third party maps to download from a server, nor will they lose their turn-by-turn, voice-prompted navigation if they are out of cell phone coverage. In addition to pedestrian navigation, the A10 is ready for use in an automobile out-of-the-box, and it comes with a powered audio mount that magnifies the volume of the device’s voice commands.

The A10 is a full-featured smartphone on the Android platform that integrates Google™ Mobile Services with one-click access to Google Maps™, Gmail™, YouTube™, calendar, contacts and Android Market™, where users can find more than 30,000 applications to expand and personalize their phone to fit their lifestyle. Android applications that include location-centric content are also able to utilize the A10’s enhanced GPS capability.

To optimize a user’s ability to stay in touch with family, friends and business contacts, the A10 is compatible with Microsoft Exchange server and will wirelessly synchronize contacts, calendar and enterprise email. Account setup is quick and easy, and in a few simple steps users will have their contacts, calendar and email ready to go.

Additional A10 smartphone features include a powerful WebKit browser with multi-touch,
five mega-pixel camera including auto-focus capability that automatically geotags images with an exact location reference. The built-in accelerometer will quickly change the display so that screens may be viewed in portrait or landscape mode.

The A10 also supports optional cityXplorer™ maps, which makes it possible to plan and use routes that include public transit options such as bus, tramway, metro and suburban rail systems.

The Garmin-Asus A10 is expected to be available in mid-2010 in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Additional information about Garmin-Asus products is available at www.GarminAsus.com.

About Garmin-Asus
Garmin-Asus is a co-branded strategic alliance that enables Garmin Ltd. and ASUSTeK Computer Inc. to combine their complementary resources to develop world class LBS-centric mobile phones.

About Garmin Ltd.
The global leader in satellite navigation, Garmin Ltd. and its subsidiaries have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold navigation, communication and information devices and applications since 1989 – most of which are enabled by GPS technology. Garmin’s products serve automotive, mobile, wireless, outdoor recreation, marine, aviation, and OEM applications. Garmin Ltd. is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and its principal subsidiaries are located in the United States, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit Garmin’s virtual pressroom at www.garmin.com/pressroomor contact the Media Relations department at 913-397-8200.

About ASUS
ASUS is a leading company in the new digital era, with a broad product portfolio that includes notebooks, netbooks, motherboards, graphics cards, displays, desktop PCs, servers, wireless solutions, mobile phones and networking devices. Driven by innovation and committed to quality, ASUS designs and manufactures products that perfectly meet the needs of today’s home and office users. ASUS won 3,268 awards in 2009, and is widely credited with revolutionizing the PC industry with the Eee PC™. With a global staff of more than 10,000 and a world-class R&D design team, the company’s revenue for 2009 was US$7.5 billion. ASUS ranks among BusinessWeek’s InfoTech 100, and has been on the listing for 12 consecutive years.

ASUS is a registered trademark of ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Garmin is a registered trademark, and cityXplorer is a trademark of Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries.
Google, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Android and Android Market are trademarks of Google, Inc.
All other brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

Every life form present on this blue planet needs water for survival. That’s the reason we see environmentalists over the world encouraging individuals to save every drop, as those precious drops might be what someone is desperately in need for. Since many potable water sources are contaminated, there are some designers who’re looking toward humid air to quench the thirst of millions. Here are some of the best devices that harvest fresh water from thin air:

(more…)

Despite a fan frenzy that left his mom picking herself up off of the floor, teen sensation Justin Bieber made the most of his short time in New Zealand by throwing himself off a bridge. Bieber bungee jumped while in Auckland and posted a video of it on his Twitter account saying: “BUNGY!!! I love New Zealand!!”

Veja o sensacional salto do piloto Sébastien Loeb com o seu Ford Focus no Campeonato Mundial de Rally 2010, etapa da Turquia, a galera foi ao delírio.

Francesca Woodward wants you to join the Oxjam team and lead volunteer campaigners throughout 2010.

Credit: Toby Adamson/Oxfam

Love music? Love going to gigs? Love changing the world? Hate injustice? Me too.

In the past, Oxfam has campaigned at a number of band tours, some big, some small. We go along and hope to raise awareness about poverty and suffering through our campaigns, and try to inspire people to take action.

With the summer fast approaching music gigs start to pick up audiences, so it’s an excellent time to campaign. Oxfam is looking to recruit motivated, happy-go-lucky people willing to donate a few hours of their time (sometimes at evenings and weekends) to help coordinate our campaigning presence in their local towns.

We call them ‘Local Events Campaign Coordinators’! We need you in over 30 major cities across the UK, to lead and manage teams of volunteer campaigners at numerous exciting events throughout 2010, and to help campaigning during our legendary Oxjam festival in the autumn.

It’s an excellent opportunity to gain some really useful experience of inspiring a team of volunteers, organising campaigning tactics at events, as well as a fantastic opportunity to see first hand how an organisation like Oxfam is run – all invaluable stuff you can put on your CV .  Aside from the more practical benefits of getting work experience and learning new skills along the way (oh yes, we will train you too!), you will be supporting Oxfam in fighting the good fight against poverty and injustice (right on! Right?). Our motto is “do what you love doing, just change the world while you do it”, and this is just the chance for those of you that want to make a difference, and have loads of fun whilst you’re doing it.

Oh, mentioning fun… I almost forgot the really good bit. Band tours. Some really rather lovely musicians have let us have a ‘campaigning presence’ at their gigs… Ever heard of a band called Coldplay? They’re our mates. We’ve been on tours with them, as well as Editors, Just Jack, Feeder and Embrace to name but a few, and in a couple of weeks we will be joining the lovely Florence and the Machine on tour!!!

Sooooo exciting! Oh yes. But we want more. We believe that music makes the world go round, it is a fantastic unifier of people and music events are a fantastic campaigning opportunity.

As a Local Events Campaign Coordinator, your role would be to make sure that our campaign presence at events in your area is effective, well managed, and a good representative of what Oxfam stands for. If you think that you’re up for the challenge, if you stand for what we stand for, and if you love music and music events, this could be the start of a fantastic summer. Give us your time. We’ll give you our love.

So if you’re interested email me on [email protected] and we will send you an application form.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Frankie

Google is finally comfortable enough with its Google Earth web browser plugin to include in Google Maps. The new Earth View in Maps enables users to view a full 3D version of any location on Earth. Google has been making an effort to have as many 3D buildings as possible and plenty of cities around the world are now modeled in three dimensions.
read more)

Cargraphic has provided several sketches as a sample of what to expect in the optics tuning that it plans to do on the upcoming Aston Martin Rapide.

The German tuning firm didn’t give an image of the front but it mentioned a spoiler on the front apron, side mirror caps and a rear diffuser. Cargraphic also intends for the Rapide to have its own set of GT-R 21-inch light alloy rims covered in 255/35R21 tires for the front and 295/30R21 at the back. Cargraphic will also offer the GT, I-10 and Sport rims, which will be offered in 20 to 22-inch dimensions. The Rapide will also be getting the high-grade steel flap on the exhaust that will be remote controlled and will come with a polished shield. Cargraphic calls this exhaust system as the “Stradvarius of mufflers,” which the tuner claims will result to delivering some extra horsepower out of the 6.0 liter V12 engine. Photo gallery after the jump!

Source: Car news, Car reviews, Spy shots

El nuevo Dartz Prombron Red Diamond Edition es por derecho propio el SUV más polémico y extravagante del mercado mundial. Este artefacto con diseño de tanque alcanza la friolera del millón de euros, algo que a lo mejor no es demasiado si lo que buscas es protección, ya que su carrocería es antibalas.

El Dartz Prombron quiere que se hable de el y así será. Un diseño transgresor como poco y unos detalles de exclusividad que muchos calificarían de horteras harán las delicias de ricos ostentosos que podrán pasearse sin peligro alguno por cualquier barrio con este bunker sobre ruedas.

El SUV más caro del mundo trae incorporados detalles de gemas, rubíes y oro en la tapicería, además de la mejor piel que se pueda encargar. Por si esto fuera poco, el equipamiento incluye un teléfono con botón del pánico y tres botellas de RussoBaltique Vodka, el más caro del mundo.

La propulsión elegida para esta bestia es un motor V8 de 8,1 litros que le da una potencia de 450 CV, pero aunque esto suene potente debemos tener en cuenta que la seguridad pesa y el Dartz llega a las 4 toneladas, por lo que solamente alcanza los 160km/h.

Vía | Coches-es

Wade Roush wrote:

For a while now I’ve been curious about Gather, a privately funded news and social networking site based in downtown Boston. I knew that Gather was founded by marketing pro Tom Gerace, that it is owned in part by the public radio operator American Public Media, that it has an unusual way of paying users for contributing content, and that its traffic has been rising through the roof—the company claims that the number of unique visitors it attracts each month is 7.2 million, a 400 percent increase just in the last five months.

But I didn’t really get Gather. I didn’t understand who reads its articles, who writes them, or how the company makes money. And I was a bit skeptical, to be honest, about whether there’s much value in Gather’s content, which is largely a blend of news, reviews, recipes, celebrity gossip, and how-to articles, much of it seemingly cribbed by users from more traditional journalistic publications. But it’s hard to argue with 7 million unique visitors. Gather claims that its “reach,” meaning the number of households exposed to the site every day, exceeds that of CBS.com, CNBC.com, iVillage.com, PBS.com and even USAToday.com.

I recently sat down with Gerace for a long conversation about the company, which is his second startup, and also his second venture in what he calls “pay-for-performance” marketing. The first was BeFree.com, an affiliate marketing network that he founded in 1996 with his brother Sam. That company’s business was to sign up online merchants to send business to e-retailers like Barnesandnoble.com, LendingTree, and Dell in return for sales commissions. Gerace (pronounced je-RACE) says he learned from BeFree—which was purchased by rival ValueClick in 2002 for $128 million in stock—that paying commissions creates an “ecology” with “directly aligned incentives” where the affiliates themselves figure out how to win more customers over time. “We got to realize the power of that as billions of dollars in commerce flowed over our platform without us doing any business development,” Gerace says.

So the first thing I came to understand about Gather is that it represents Gerace’s attempt to recreate an Internet business driven by a pay-for-performance marketing model, but in the realm of user-generated news and discussion rather than e-retailing. In fact, Gerace, who graduated from Harvard in 1993 and spent three years writing case studies at Harvard Business School before plunging into entrepreneurship, seems to have deliberately gone searching, after the BeFree experience, for an Internet niche where he could apply the same core concept—call it the Tom Sawyer maneuver—of getting your users to do a lot of the work for you.

He chose the online media business, where traditional notions of authority have been blown to smithereens and anyone who can achieve high search-engine rankings can draw in traffic—which can then be monetized through advertising and other forms of marketing. In Gerace’s eyes, it’s all a matter of casting a sufficiently wide net.

“If you go back to 1990, everything we knew we got from one newspaper, a couple of magazines, and likely a nightly news or morning radio show,” Gerace says. “In effect, we were handing off our information sourcing to three or four editorial groups who told us what we needed to know. Today it’s completely different. More than half of all traffic, even to the largest news sites, comes from search. There are 15.5 billion searches run a month, which means 15.5 billion opportunities to …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:  

 
 
 

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

A delightful study on the function of sighing has just been published in the journal Physiology and Behavior which suggests that our wistful deep breaths reboot our respiration and work as an unconscious stress management strategy.

Researchers, led by psychologist Elke Vlemincx, asked participants to wear devices that kept track of their breathing and monitored chest muscles while they were asked to complete stressful pressured mental arithmetic tasks or an attention task that required similar bodily movements but without the mental stress.

The participants thought they were completing an experiment on the body’s responses to maths problems but, in reality, the researchers were looking at the effect of sighing. Researchers kept track of spontaneous sighs, but in the second high pressure maths task, the volunteers were asked to deliberately sigh.

In biological systems, adding a little randomness or noise can sometimes make a signal clearer as long as it doesn’t drown everything out – a phenomenon technically known as stochastic resonance.

Imagine you’re in a dark nightclub trying to make out people’s faces. Too little light doesn’t help, completely crazy lighting is just too dazzling to allow you to recognise anyone, but moderate disco lighting, even with the colours and movement, does allow you to identify individual faces among the crowd.

The same principle applies when the body is signalling to itself, of course, and the researchers suspected that sighs might work like a bit of added noise into the breathing system, allowing the internal breathing regulator to get back into its groove.

As it turns out, sighs do seem to work like the brain’s reboot button for regular breathing. During mental stress, the volunteers’ breathing became more and more irregular as participants increasingly relied on deliberate breath control, at which point, a sigh occurred, causing automatic regular respiration to kick in again.

Furthermore, muscle tension steadily built up before a spontaneous sigh and decreased afterwards, supporting the idea that sighing helps release tension.

Interestingly, when the participants were prompted to sigh by the researchers, muscle tension decreased by a much smaller amount and breathing become more irregular. Being instructed to deliberately sigh seemed to actual impair recovery from mental stress.

It’s a wonderfully elegant study because it helps us understand both the mental and physiological function of a behaviour usually associated with wistful distraction.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

2010 AUDI Q7 with facelift

Audi present the new bombastic model of Q7!

When it was first rolled out three years ago, the Audi Q7 performance SUV immediately achieved a leadership position – as a sporty, comfortable as well as high-performance recreational and business vehicle on a grand scale.

Now Audi is making it even better – more elegant and more efficient, with lower emissions: the Audi Q7 3.0 TDI consumes only 9.1 liters per 100 kilometers (25.85 US mpg).

And now it’s also available in a new version as a TDI clean diesel, with the world’s cleanest diesel technology and even lower fuel consumption of only 8.9 liters/100 km (26.43 US mpg).

The Q7 is the large Audi for sporty individualists, for people who are seeking a vehicle that will take them anywhere they want to go for sports, recreation, and business.

Photo Gallery: 2010 Audi Q7 Facelift

Its dynamic proportions and distinctive lines express this character, and subtle modifications endow its styling with even more elegance.

Details have yet to be confirmed about the Google TV service being planned, but Samsung’s jumped the gun and is already talking about full-blown Google TVs which run Android. More »

Trevor Hoffman(notes) has a sterling reputation, a winning smile and 594 career saves. But these days he’s just another scuffling closer looking for answers.

The 42-year-old Hoffman has been a mess to open the year, collecting three blown saves in his last six appearances. The latest collapse came Tuesday against the Pirates and there was nothing cheap about it – Ronny Cedeno(notes) tied the game with this frozen rope out of the park, and Ryan Doumit(notes) sealed the deal with this moonshot to right field. Hoffman has already allowed five homers in just eight innings; he’s not getting beaten on bloops and bleeders, it’s been no-doubters. He’s been getting behind in the count regularly, which presents two problems: he has to throw his 80s fastball more than he wants to, and it prevents him from going to his money pitch, an out-of-the-zone change-up while ahead in the count.

But when you’ve got the resume of Hoffman, ninth-inning changes don’t happen overnight. "He’s the all-time saves leader," Milwaukee manager Ken Macha said after Tuesday’s loss, essentially offering Hoffman a vote of confidence. "I mean, I think he’s got a pretty good feel for what he’s doing out there."

Sounds like Hoffman will get a chance to right the ship, but it’s important for us to look around the Milwaukee bullpen to find a possible successor, just in case. Get out the notebook and let’s see what’s what.

LaTroy Hawkins(notes) has been the bridge to Hoffman most of the year but he’s been struggling as well, getting hit hard in three of his last five outings (eight hits, eight runs). Todd Coffey(notes) has been passable as a set-up man (3.72 ERA, 1.34 WHIP) and was a mediocre closer for the Reds in 2006, if that matters to you. And then there’s Carlos Villanueva(notes), who’s been far and away the most dominant man in this bullpen (11 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 4 BB, 14 K). If you have to own a non-Hoffman reliever on this team, I’d suggest betting on the skills and going with Villanueva.

If the Brewers eventually look towards Triple-A for some relief help, there are some options. Closer Chris Smith has already collected eight saves with Nashville (8 IP, 5 H, 1 R, 2 BB, 9 K), though he’s also 29 and can’t really be called a prospect. The real tantalizing arm belongs to left-handed set-up man Zach Braddock; he’s been out of this world (9.2 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 17 K). But those are just names to tuck away for now; when Milwaukee has a lead to protect later this week, Hoffman figures to have the ball.

(Feel free to discuss Milwaukee’s bullpen in the comments. I’ll be back shortly with another 1,000 words of baseball talk in this space.)

Remember the days of yesteryear when Russell Crowe was throwing telephones at hotel clerks and ranting at awards show directors for cutting his speech short? Turns out the angry Aussie was also making death threats against moviemakers.

Crowe allegedly threatened to kill a film producer while shoot his Best Actor Oscar-winning role in the 2000 box office hit Gladiator.

Branko Lustig (center)

A new tell-all book, which offers a behind the scenes look at Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Production Studio, claims that Russell was a terror to work with on the set and never let underlings forget who was boss. Russell thought that his assistants weren’t being paid well enough so he called 77-year-old producer Branko Lustig at three in the morning and told him, “You mother******. I will kill you with my bare hands.”

Charming….

Lustig was so frightened of Russell that Spielberg had to talk him out of quitting the project.

Set spies also claim that Russ stormed off the set countless times and threw tantrums about the script.

Trailer: Audi A1 and Justin Timberlake

We proudly present you the trailer of the stunning movie “the next big thing” starring Justin Timberlake and Dania Ramirez. Over the next weeks we’ll present you six episodes on the A1 Webspecial. Be prepared

More Audi A1 on YouTube

Article Tags: Lewis Page

Greenhouse experiments show reduced greenhouse effect

The world may not be doomed after all, according to top American dirt scientists. Soil-dwelling microbes, expected in climate models to go into CO2-spewing “overdrive” as the world warms, refused to do so in experiments.

According to a statement released this week by the US National Science Foundation, which funded the research:

Conventional scientific wisdom holds that even a few degrees of human-caused climate warming will shift fungi and bacteria that consume soil-based carbon into overdrive, and that their growth will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This conventional wisdom now appears to be wrong, as research conducted by University of California ecologist Steve Allison have shown that in fact the carbon-eating microbes’ planet-busting activities are reduced, not increased, by warmth.

Allison developed a new climate model based on experimental results showing what happened in soils which had been warmed up artificially in greenhouses over a period of several years. There is an initial increase in microbial emissions, which has been the basis for existing models, but after a while the microbes “overheat” and their numbers – and CO2 output – plunge.

Click source to read FULL report from Lewis Page

Source: theregister.co.uk

Read in full with comments »   

Article Tags: Tony Hake

One of the key scientists at the center of the Climategate email scandal has threatened suit against the creators of a video parodying the event. Lawyers for Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University say the video “irreparably harms Dr. Mann’s personal and professional reputation.”

The video, launched last November in the wake of the scandal that saw some of the top climate scientists’ emails exposed, uses an image of Mann taken from Penn State’s website. Singing the refrain “Hide the Decline” which refers to one of the more controversial emails, the video is set to the tune of “Draggin the Line” by Tommy James and the Shondells.

Originally created by the operators of the website Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW), the video became a YouTube sensation and garnered over half a million views in five months.

In a letter from the lawfirm Cozen – O’Connor Attorneys, Peter Fontaine demands that all versions of the video be pulled from YouTube and other sites. Fontaine writes that, “The referenced video clearly defames Professor Mann by leaving viewers with the incorrect impression that he falsified data to generate desired results in connection with his research activities.”

Source: examiner.com

Read in full with comments »   

Spyshots: New Audi A7

Audi is making a free way to launch the new Audi A7 luxury sedan with a sporty design sometime during 2010 and the interesting news that the new sedan will make its way to India in 2011.

Audi A7 will directly fight against Mercedes-Benz CLS, upcoming BMW 8-series, Volkswagen under-development Passat based coupe and Jaguar XJ. The vehicle will get a “four-door coupe” body style that will make an attempt to dominate in that segment.

Photo Gallery

(via Autowereld)

The Audi Present A7 in 2010 , the new design , fast car and also beautiful , just Audi can make you happy . Audi driving experience – progress is beautiful by dukagjini design!