What we expected:

What we got:

woa.

Over in SF, the room is packed, over 2000 people. Let’s look a the DELL CES keynote happening at the exact same time:

intel proc, 802.11 wifi, 40GB HD, 720p HD video, component rca, usb2, ethernet, HDMI. $299, order now, ship next month…

w00t! Now that’s a Keynote item!

(now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to a live text-stream at http://www.macrumorslive.com/, I’ll probably link some pictures when they’re available)

Good news for Saddam!

oh, wait…

[Quote:]

A Microsoft Corp. technical evangelist referred to independent software developers writing for Windows and the company’s other software platforms as “pawns” and compared wooing them to convincing someone to have a one-night stand, according to testimony presented Friday against Microsoft in an ongoing antitrust case in Iowa.

[..]

Alepin, a former chief technology officer at Fujitsu Software Corp. and currently a San Francisco-based adviser for high-tech law firm, Morrison Foerster LLP, testified that 1-2-3′s eventual demise was caused in part by Microsoft encouraging Lotus’ programmers to use Windows application programming interfaces (API). Microsoft Excel’s own developers had already decided those same APIs “were not worthwhile using because they were complicated,” he said. “They used large amounts of memory. They were slower than other ways of doing it.”

Of course, the whole point of a one-night-stand is to get fucked.

[Quote:]

“Fact-powered decisions”…. wow! Perhaps the White House can buy a couple?

[Quote:]

The Chinese postal service is releasing a special edition of sweet and sour pork flavoured stamps to celebrate the year of the pig, which begins February 18.

The stamps feature a cutesy cartoon of a sow an her suckling piglets. Scratching and sniffing reveals what said piglets would smell like slow roasted and then covered in sugar, rice vinegar and monosodium glutamate.

According to Metro, the Royal Mail launched its own set of scratch and sniff stamps in 2001 which smelt of eucalyptus.

But since that triumph the UK stamp innovation bunker has laid idle, and now been humiliated by the Chinese taking olfactory postage technology to the next level: the glue on the back of their New Year stamps has been primed with the taste of sweet and sour pork too.

Which leaves us with one question: when oh when will the UK catch up with the Far East and release stamps which taste of the Queen?

[Quote:]

What’s the most inspiring story of entrepreneurship that you’ve heard in 2006? My answer does not involve two guys in a garage who sell their company to Google for $1.6 billion. No way…my answer is a woman who runs a soccer-ball factory in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Her name is Aziza Mohmmand, and she told me what it takes to be a woman entrepreneur in Afghanistan. I met Aziza when I spoke to a group of Afghani women who were attending a class in entrepreneurship at Thunderbird in Glendale, Arizona.

[Quote:]

As we saw as recently as last Friday, the Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to prevent any access to information documenting a relationship with Jack Abramoff. But that relationship exists. CREW was provided a photo of President Bush and Jack Abramoff taken at a campaign fundraiser in December 2003. The White House did not want anyone to see this photo. So, that begs the question: What else are they hiding?

Read my Lips…I-did-NOT-have-financial-relations-with-that-lobbyist

[Quote:]

Millions of Britons who visit the United States are to have their fingerprints stored on the FBI database alongside those of criminals, in a move that has outraged civil rights groups.

The Observer has established that under new plans to combat terrorism, the US government will demand that visitors have all 10 fingers scanned when they enter the country. The information will be shared with intelligence agencies, including the FBI, with no restrictions on their international use.

US airport scanners now take only two fingerprints from travellers. The move to 10 allows the information to be compatible with the FBI database.

‘We are going to start testing at several airports,’ a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman confirmed. ‘It will begin some time this summer.’

Sources said 10 airports would initially be involved. The scheme will cover most of the major airports frequently used by British travellers, including New York, Washington and Miami. Countries subject to the new scheme include Britain, other European Union nations, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Last night the British civil rights group Liberty expressed astonishment at the plan, which will affect four million British travellers to the US. ‘This must be the Keystone Cops school of border control,’ said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. ‘Accumulating the fingerprints of millions of innocent passengers will not deter would-be suicide bombers.’

[..]

‘The technology at US airports will be far less reliable. That means anyone could be the victim of a false match, Davies said. ‘Be warned. A San Francisco Bay family holiday may easily become a nightmare.’

[..]

The spokeswoman said she was confident the new procedure would not deter people from visiting the US. ‘That is what people said when we introduced the two-digit system,’ she said. ‘But that is not what happened.’

That’s odd – they haven’t noticed that I stopped visiting the USA because of all the theater…and I know I’m not alone. Apparently they plan to make the process of traveling to the United States so horrible, that only a terrorist intent on nefarious deeds would even contemplate going through it. This makes it much easier to spot a terrorist…

And it’s not just fingerprints that you have to worry about. You better make sure you don’t have the wrong stamps in your passport..