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‘Sexting’ has become a very popular trend among high school students but it has also become a problem. No longer are a boyfriend and a girlfriend keeping it between themselves, instead one gets mad and

IMG: Sxc.hu

blasts the nude photo all over the net. Video tapes are no longer private either, these are easily taken off a cell phone and uploaded to youtube or another equal site. So what can be done about this? Nothing, at least not yet.

Here’s a question for all parents out there:  Does Sexting equal child porn? I’m being serious and want many to think about this. I’ve heard through parents that they picked up their child’s phone before when it rang and found a naked boy/girl on it. Imagine the horror/shock of these parents.  Now some are sickened by it and want their child to cut off all ties, some just don’t care. It’s what kids do. Now here’s another question: 

If say you had a daughter that was 16 or 17 and she had a boyfriend that was 18 and sent a text of his nude body to her what would you think? I’ve heard of parents pressing the “statutory rape” when they are the same age and have sex. Could sexting be considered child porn then? If the boyfriend and girlfriend break up and he posts nude pictures of your daughter online isn’t that considered child porn?

For those of you that have kids with cell phones, (it doesn’t matter what age) you may want to discuss these issues with them. Remember it isn’t just that they send it to one person, but that one person could send it to more and end up in the wrong hands of some sick person that would only want to do harm to your precious child or someone else’s precious child.  What are your thoughts on these questions?

Post from: Blisstree

Does ‘Sexting’ Equal Child Porn?

As the tragedy from last week’s earthquake in Haiti continues to unfold, the Red Cross and other relief organizations have now raised more than $20 million via text message donations, which is about 10 percent of the $210 million total raised so far. The text donations have been doubling at a rapid pace, from $5 million last week to $10 million to more than $20 million today. As more and more people pick up their phones and text “HAITI” to the number 90999, not only is a $10 donation to the Red Cross be added to their phone bill, but many of them are also experiencing mobile SMS payments for the first time.

James Eberhard is the CEO of Mobile Accord, the company behind the mGive Foundation which is coordinating the text fundraising efforts for the Red Cross. Mobile Accord has been running cause marketing campaigns for non-profits since the 2008 SuperBowl. He’s never seen mobile giving at this scale. “It is the biggest,” he says “Previously the largest was during American Idol when Alicia keys made a call to action that raised $450,000 through two calls to action over the course of three minutes.”

There are many advantages to mobile giving. It’s probably the fastest way to make a donation. You don’t have to write a check. You don’t even have to turn on your computer. It lowers the barrier to giving and opens the door to w whole new class of donors. When someone decides they want to give, they can do it immediately and get billed later. (The carriers, for their part, are trying to release the money as quickly as possible to the relief organizations). Eberhard notes that there are 270 million cell phones in the U.S., and they all can send text messages. For the non-profits, they end up getting funds faster and can begin to establish a direct relationship with the people who give.

As text donations become more common, they may also pave the way for regular mobile commerce payments. It’s like Paypal: sending money via text message might seem unnatural at first, but once you do it, the next time the option comes up it won’t seem so strange. The people texting money to the Red Cross this week will be more likely to text money to a business down the road. But for now, keep texting “HAITI.”

Here’s a list of different ways to text to help Haiti:

• Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
• Text QUAKE to 20222 to donate $10 to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund
• Text HABITAT to 25383 to donate $10 to Habitat For Humanity
• Text OXFAM to 25383 to donate $10 to Oxfam A
• Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
• Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
• Text YELE to 501501 to donation $5 to Yele
• Text RELIEF to 30644 to get automatically connected to Catholic Relief Services and donate money with your credit card
• Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
• Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
• Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International

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Social shopping site Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Interactive Group in 2007 for $30 million or so, is re-launching its site to upgrade its product-discovery engine that allows online shoppers to discover, search for, browse, and interact with the more than six million products.

Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service and search product that allows you to discover and share e-commerce content. With the re-launch and re-design of the site, Kaboodle is becoming less content centric and more realtime and product and people centric.

The new version of the product-discovery engine allows online shoppers to search and discover products according to normal search terms, but also according to popularity amongst other shoppers in the Kaboodle community and consumers. The platform has upgraded search to be realtime and lets users see products that are most popular right now based on specific filters, such as items from a specific store, within a specific category, related items, and more. For example, a user can see what are the most popular items being searched on Nordstrom.com.

Kaboodle’s bookmarklet functionality which allows users to add products from anywhere on the Web is staying the same, but the site has made it easier for retailers to incorporate the bookmarklet on their own sites. Manish Chandra, co-founder of Kaboodle, says that the site will continue to make realtime improvements in the coming year, hoping to become the go-to destination for product discovery and sharing. Chandra says the site has over 1 million registered users and is seeing 8 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore. Launched in 2005, Kaboodle faces competition from ThisNext, Like.com and Sugar’s ShopStyle.

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For most people the name Lockheed Martin relates to missiles, rockets, simulators, robotics, satellites, aircraft and advanced military systems but look up the company’s “about us” page on the global web site, and you’ll see that the 140,000 LM employees who bring in around US$43 billion in revenues each year, see themselves as working for a security company. Which might serve as some degree of confidence that the company’s new IronClad “PC on a stick” USB drive offers military-strength security for their out-of-office computing. The IronClad shrinks a laptop’s hard drive, including the entire operating system, software applications, and files, onto a fully encrypted flash drive – a “PC on a stick” that delivers hardware-level protection against today’s most insidious malware threats, and it costs way less than a Longbow helicopter, a Cassini satellite, Titan rocket or SR-71 Blackbird. ..

Tags: Encryption,
Ironclad,
Lockheed Martin,
Operating system

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With all the excitement of the end-of-the-year bonanza, I let a trivia friday go by without a whiff of a question. The last question (from Dec. 25) was, what holiday classic was made into a musical by Mel Marvin and Timothy Mason. The answer is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Mason has also written a great science fiction book for kids called The Last Synapsid. Check it out.

Filed under: Aftermarket, Coupe, Performance, Auctions, Ford

Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the original 1965 Shelby GT350, Shelby American unveiled an all new GT350 Mustang at the opening night gala of the Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, AZ. Presented in concept form, the new GT350 features a supercharged version of the brand new 5.0-liter V8 engine in the 2011 Mustang as well as performance upgrades from Ford Racing, Borla, Cragar, Baer and more.

Unlike the GT500, the GT350 will be a post-title upgrade available from Shelby. Customers can have their 2011 Mustangs shipped directly to Shelby’s Las Vegas facility to be converted or they can deliver the car themselves. Once in the hands of Shelby, each Mustang is fitted with a Ford Racing supercharger good for approximately 500 horsepower, a Ford Racing suspension system, Baer brakes front and rear, Borla exhaust system, Cragar wheels, and more. For the exterior, Shelby fits a new front fascia, front splitter, functional hood scoop tail light trim, rear deck lid filler panel and a rear fascia with center exhaust exit. White with Guardsman Blue racing stripes will be the only available color combination, which isn’t such a bad thing.

Of course, all of that comes at a price. Shelby lists the GT350’s MSRP at $33,995, which doesn’t sound that bad until you realize it doesn’t include the base car. With the 2011 Mustang GT coming in at just over $30,000, the total price of the GT350 will actually exceed that of the GT500. Does something similar to the Shelby GT built the last few years make more sense? Perhaps, but we’re sure Shelby will find quite a few buyers anyway. You can read all of the details in Shelby’s press release after the jump, and check out the new GT350 for yourself in the high-res gallery below.

[Source: Shelby American]

Continue reading Shelby unveils 2011 GT350 Mustang at Barrett-Jackson

Shelby unveils 2011 GT350 Mustang at Barrett-Jackson originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Images of the Nokia Morph, a flexible concept phone with a transparent screen, cropped up nearly two years ago. The company’s recently-filed patent for a device with a bendy screen suggests that the Gumbyphone may still have legs.

Nokia recently filed a patent for a device with a flexible screen that takes on different applications when the hardware is bent into different shapes.

While that diagram might make it seem like Nokia is trading in camping gear, the patent illuminates some of the phone’s possible uses:

In one embodiment the pre-specified shape is also associated with a movement. As a pre-specified shape is detected and followed by the detection of a pre-specified movement an associated function is executed.”

“FIG. 10a shows a device having been bent to resemble a can, possibly used to hold beer or soda. A search will thus be performed for a bar or a pub either a specific franchise or any bar or pub in the neighborhood.

FIG. 10b shows a device having been bent to resemble a bowl. A search will thus be performed for a restaurant either a specific franchise or any restaurant in the neighborhood.

FIG. 10c shows a device having been bent to resemble a roof or a tent. A search will thus be performed for a hotel, motel or guest house either a specific franchise or any hotel, motel or guesthouse in the neighborhood.

There’s no telling if this patent will amount to anything, but for now just be happy that Nokia’s bendy phone may eventually see the light of day. [Go Rumors via Slash Gear]

After seeing Faith’s delectable post about making maple syrup taffy à la Little House in the Big Woods, I was compelled to pull down my battered copy of The Little House Cookbook and pore over the recipes inside. If, like me, you regularly re-read the Little House series as much for the mouthwatering food writing as for the stories, this cookbook is a must-read.

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The latest report from market research firm Gartner suggests that mobile apps are big business, and that business should only grow in the next few years. According to Gartner’s numbers, Apple completely owns this market, grabbing almost every one of the 4.2 billion dollars spent on mobile apps in 2009. Based on Gartner’s estimates and our own analysis, Apple could hold on to at least two-thirds of the market if current sales trends hold for 2010.

Apple first opened the App Store in July 2008, along with the launch of the iPhone 3G and the release of iPhone OS 2.0. Sales were brisk, with 300 million apps sold by December. After the holidays, that number had jumped to 500 million. Earlier this month, Apple announced that sales had topped 3 billion; that means iPhone users downloaded 2.5 billion apps in 2009 alone. Gartner’s figures show another 16 million apps that could come from other platform’s recently opened app stores, giving Apple at least 99.4 percent of all mobile apps sold for the year.

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MWC is a few weeks away – it starts on February 15 – and we’re expecting to see a new version of Windows Mobile, version 7, to be launched with hardware soon to follow. We’ve heard some rumors about potential improvements over the current 6.x codebase, but a developer has told us that this new version is so distant from the old WinMo that it is almost unrecognizable. The worst part? It is completely non-backwards compatible, meaning all WinMo apps are about go extinct.

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Filed under: Hardware, Odds and ends, iPhone, iPod classic

I’ve lived in big cities for almost ten years now, first in Chicago and now in Los Angeles, and I could have told you exactly what this New York Times piece does: that you’ve got to be careful while using your iPhone while walking the city streets. We’ve heard about this before with the iPod, but an iPhone offers up even more distraction while walking around — in between checking email, jumping on Twitter, and/or playing any number of games, it’s practically impossible to spend enough attention on where you’re walking and what you’re doing even on a relatively clear street.

Think it’s a joke? Over 1000 people found themselves in emergency rooms in 2008 because they were distracted while walking, says the article, which is twice the number from 2007 and almost double the number from 2006 (and it’s probably gotten higher last year). That’s not to say that we need actual legislation to deal with this (although legislation has been discussed in New York, and there is already legislation on the books in many places against using your phone while driving), but it’s something to keep in mind: I put my iPhone away whenever I cross a street, and just plain stop whenever I need to do anything more attention-deserving than switch a song or up the volume.

And it only took me one close call with a moving truck to figure that one out. If you’re walking around with your iPhone or iPod in a busy urban environment, be careful out there.

TUAWUsing your iPhone in the city? Be careful! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DuPont increases capacity of its Tedlar film for solar photovoltaic backsheets. The expanded capacity leverages manufacturing assets at its Circleville, Ohio manufacturing site. …

… “The film line expansion will be located at the DuPont Circleville, Ohio, facility using existing and retrofitted assets. This expansion provides Tedlar oriented film capacity to support global demand of over 10 gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic module production. The investment will deliver DuPont technology to help meet increasing needs for energy and environmental sustainability. This reflects the company’s recently announced commitment to focus on meeting four emerging global trends, one of which is decreasing dependence on fossil fuels. Film production is scheduled to start up in September 2011. ” …

Via DuPont: PVF Film Expansion for Durable Photovoltaic Modules

Dupont expands solar film capacity based on its market position and growth forecasts. …

Backsheet Materials for Photovoltaic: “DuPont Tedlar PVF film has been viewed as the industry leader for providing durable, weather-resistant backsheets for photovoltaic modules. ”

Sometimes, instead of asking “why,” it’s better just to say “woah.” This piece by New York artist Naoko Ito is one of those times.

The project, entitled Ubiquitous, dissects a single six-foot wide tree branch into about two dozen pieces, the meticulously places them in jars to create this optical illusion. A comment on the commoditization of nature, or preservation’s collateral fragmentary and isolating effects? Nah. Just one wicked cool visual idea. Woah. [Neatorama via Make]

Here’s a tasty treat for kitty to sink her teeth into. It’s a scrumptious catnip cheesburger from Etsy seller Yes Please Burger! Each one is made to order from cotton and felt fabrics with 100% organic catnip inside. Yum!