Archive for March 6th, 2008

Apple iPhone Event

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

From the description it sounds very, very smart. Unfortunately, the developer.apple.com site is getting hammered, so I can’t download it right now. The Enterprise bits from the iPhone 2.0 pre-release sounds very promising. It looks like they addressed just about every single “it’s not enterprise ready” complaint heard since the 1.0 release. And then some.

It just got a wee bit more difficult for all the other cell phone builders to catch up with Apple…

Teen Says TSA Screener Opened Sterile Equipment, Put Life In Danger

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

A sick teenager said an over-zealous security screener at Orlando International Airport put his life in danger. After Channel 9 started making calls, the TSA opened an investigation into the matter.

James Hoyne, 14, has a feeding tube in his stomach and carries a back-up in a sealed clear plastic bag. Hoyne said two weeks ago a TSA officer insisted on opening the sterile equipment, contaminating his back-up feeding up tube which he later needed.

“I said ‘Please don’t open it’ and she said ‘I have to open it whether you like it or not. If I can’t open it, I can’t let you on the plane,’” Hoyne said of his conversation with the TSA screener.

TSA officials apologized to James and said they’re looking into the incident to see what corrective steps need to be taken.

Feel safer yet?

Cartoons

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

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Danny Boy banned for St Patrick’s Day

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

The dirge-like Irish classic song Danny Boy has been banned for a month by an Irish pub in New York because it’s too depressing and was written by an Englishman.

“It’s overplayed, it’s been ranked among the 25 most depressing songs of all time, and it’s more appropriate for a funeral than for a St Patrick’s Day celebration,” said Shaun Clancy, who owns Foley’s Pub and Restaurant, just off Fifth Avenue opposite the Empire State Building.

He’s playing the wrong version. Try this:

Cemetery full, mayor tells locals not to die

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish.”

It added: “Offenders will be severely punished.”

Obama could top Clinton by 3

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

With all the back-and-forth over the delegates gained by Obama and Clinton in yesterday’s Texas primary, this word is just in from state Democratic officials.

Obama could pick up a net gain of three delegates, after all the dust settles.

Here’s how Dem officials say that’s possible:

Clinton won the popular vote, and could pick up as many as four delegates from that.

Obama appears to be winning the caucus voting on delegates, and could pick up as many as seven delegates there.

If that holds true, Obama would end up with three more Texas delegates than Clinton.

The caucus results aren’t in yet, updates here

Let Me In!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Comcast Injects 9/11 Into Broadband Debate. Really.

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

The Comcast tab so far: Comcast denied throttling and then admitted BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications and then got caught. Comcast denied, and then admitted, stuffing the room at the Federal Communications Commission’s Feb. 25 hearing on network management with paid seat-holders who stayed for the hearing while legitimately interested observers were kept out.

And now, there is a new episode in absurdity, albeit on a slightly lesser scale. In March 4 testimony to the Economic Matters Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates whether broadband companies should disclose to consumers where their services are deployed and where they aren’t, Comcast lobbyist Sean M. Looney invoked the Giuliani defense: consumers can’t be given information about broadband in their neighborhoods because of… 9/11.

A religion based on drugs…

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.

Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

“As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,” Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the “burning bush,” suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.

From the Obama web site

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

David Plouffe just sent out this email…

[Quote:]

Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday’s elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.

That’s a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted.

For comparison, that’s less than half our net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It’s also less than our net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it’s considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.

They failed.

9-Year Auto Loans

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

Here’s something that should make you realize what crazy times we are living in: 9-year auto loans are popping up around the country. That’s right, it wasn’t a typo. Nine years! 108 months! Almost a third of the time used to pay off a conventional mortgage!

I talked with a dealer on the East Coast the other day, who wrote his first 9-year loan. What’s the first word out of his mouth after telling me about the new loan? “Crazy.”

Yeah, that’s one word for it. I’ve got several others, but I’ll save them.

Did chimp and human ancestors interbreed?

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

The earliest known ancestors of modern humans might have reproduced with early chimpanzees to create a hybrid species, a new genetic analysis suggests.

Based on the study of human and chimp genomes, the scientists believe the split between the human and chimpanzee lines occurred much more recently than previously thought — no more than 6.3 million years ago and perhaps as recently as 5.4 million years ago.

Oh dear, the Christian Fundamentalists are going to really like that one….

How to Inoculate Your Children Against Advertising

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

We didn’t sit the boys down for long lectures; rather, every time we noticed that a commercial or a print ad caught their attention, we asked them if they thought the product really did what the commercial claimed. This introduced the idea that sometimes people say things that aren’t true and that it was okay for them to question what they saw and heard. It also taught the boys that what they think is important and valuable.

At the same time, we explained to them how companies need money to pay their workers and themselves, and how those companies try to convince others to buy their products in order to make money. Slowly, we began to see a change in their behavior.

How Idiots Pull Down Palm Trees

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

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Coolest science toy ever

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

You can download the program for free here:

www.acc.umu.se/~emilk/

The Golden Rule, followup

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

A followup to this post:

atheist.jpg

City may ban little baggies

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

And next year they’ll ban “self-sealing plastic bags just over two inches in either height or width”, etc….

On dealing with roadblocks

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

[Quote:]

In an exclusive interview, Apple’s CEO talked with Fortune senior editor Betsy Morris in February in Kona, Hawaii, where he was vacationing with his family, about the keys to the company’s success, the prospect of Apple without Jobs, and more. Here are excerpts.

“At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn’t great. It just wasn’t great. We stopped production for five months…. We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn’t had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.

“We called that the ’story crisis,’ and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There’s been one on every film. We don’t stop production for five months. We’ve gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it’s just not working, and it’s so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn’t.

“Well, you know what? It’s been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too…. Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’

“And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ And you know what everybody said? ‘Sign us up.’

“That happens more than you think, because this is not just engineering and science. There is art, too. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of one of these crises, you’re not sure you’re going to make it to the other end. But we’ve always made it, and so we have a certain degree of confidence, although sometimes you wonder. I think the key thing is that we’re not all terrified at the same time. I mean, we do put our heart and soul into these things.”


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