The Medical Benefits of Carbon Monoxide

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EyeTV app pulled from App Store for ability to stream over 3G

Source: Gizmodo | 17 Oct 2009 | 10:30 am

The Changing Face of the Console Wars

An article at Gamasutra explores the decisions by Microsoft and Sony to launch significant hardware additions — their respective, upcoming motion-control schemes — in the middle of a console cycle, rather than waiting until the next generations of their systems are ready. It's indicative of a change to the established pattern of console wars; nowadays, it's more about adding features and gadgets to improve existing products than developing entirely new ones. Quoting: "... for Sony and Microsoft, motion controllers are their next-gen consoles. And it's a damn sight easier than launching Xbox 720 or PS4. They can debut these peripherals without needing to engineer completely new boxes for consumers, potentially bundle them over time, and they have a much better chance at getting exclusive games, thanks to the specificity of the hardware (something that's happened a lot for the Wii). Thus, both hardware manufacturers and publishers like EA see these controllers sparking new interest in Xbox 360 and PS3, which will delay the next dreaded console transition for another few years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 17 Oct 2009 | 10:25 am

What “On-demand” Media Really Means And Why Your Cable Company Should Be Scared

I've been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I've finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I'll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it's stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks. I posit that the TV industry is about to face the same threat dealt the music and movie industries but they still have a chance to make things better for themselves when the world changes around them. First, let's rehash the old arguments. What I'm doing is downloading TV shows and sending them to a media player near my TV. I'm doing this because there exist two separate infrastructures that interface imperceptibly at one key point - the official cable and online distribution networks and the shady underworld of pirate distributors. Right now that interface is a trickle, but it will soon be, pardon the pun, a torrent. The first infrastructure is the studio system. While I'm talking specifically about TV here, we can also extrapolate to talk about movies and music. This infrastructure is based on the advertising or distribution model in that they make all their money placing advertisements around their content or by placing their content onto physical media. But what is important to note is that the TV industry is in a completely different business from the music and movie industry. They're not "selling" a product. They're selling the space around a product. They they commission artists to make that product better in hopes of raising the price of the space around that product. They sell DVDs, sure, but that's a sideline.

Source: TechCrunch | 17 Oct 2009 | 10:01 am

What “on-demand” media really means and why your cable company should be scared

I’ve been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I’ve finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I’ll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it’s stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks.

I posit that the TV industry is about to face the same threat dealt the music and movie industries but they still have a chance to make things better for themselves when the world changes around them. First, let’s rehash the old arguments.

What I’m doing is downloading TV shows and sending them to a media player near my TV. I’m doing this because there exist two separate infrastructures that interface imperceptibly at one key point – the official cable and online distribution networks and the shady underworld of pirate distributors. Right now that interface is a trickle, but it will soon be, pardon the pun, a torrent.

The first infrastructure is the studio system. While I’m talking specifically about TV here, we can also extrapolate to talk about movies and music. This infrastructure is based on the advertising or distribution model in that they make all their money placing advertisements around their content or by placing their content onto physical media. But what is important to note is that the TV industry is in a completely different business from the music and movie industry. They’re not “selling” a product. They’re selling the space around a product. They they commission artists to make that product better in hopes of raising the price of the space around that product. They sell DVDs, sure, but that’s a sideline.


But when I take that content out of its context, like meat out of an oyster shell, I strip out their value and shuck the rest. But technology has outstripped that analogy and television has evolved into a processable set of events – shows – whereas before it was an event, each show linked together into infinity.

TiVo, to continue the analogy, created a way to sell jarred oyster sauce. The device contained the content, sure, but it tried to keep some of the advertising intact. However, what I’m attempting to do buffets into an entirely new infrastructure, one none of us wholly understand.

It consists of two disparate parts. The first is a shady underground that can offer these shows, stripped of commercials, a few minutes after they’ve aired. How they do it is a topic for another story, but needless to say popular shows are available in less than ten minutes after they air on the Eastern Seaboard. It is a testament to the dedication of a few TV lovers that these shows are available, for free, as they happen.

Then we have the web arms of the major TV studios as well as the clips cable stations post on their sites. These are, to a lesser extent, a re-canning of those same oysters in the hopes that the shorter advertisements wrapped around them will maintain the revenue offered by TV broadcasts.

So what’s my point? First, I believe some media will survive the move to the web better than others. Book publishing, for example, may change formats but the inherent problems of pirating a physical book make them weak targets for piracy. I also believe that the medium of television is also not conducive to large scale piracy because there is so much of it. I can shuck all the oysters I want but there will still be 24-hour news channels, old movie networks, and sitcoms that someone out there will watch even if the pirates are uninterested in recording and distributing them.

Now, back to that interface between the two worlds. Because pirates can’t steal everything at once there is no impetus to stop up this hole. The highly regimented and very well organized system of content capture that is going on exists as a labor of love and not as a money making venture. It allows guys like me, guys who no longer want to be beholden to a wonky TiVo, for example, to get HD content quickly and easily. However, there are more guys like me every day. To say that television as we know it won’t exist in a decade is quite far fetched but it is a possibility. How, then, should a TV broadcaster react?

First, I think TV broadcasters need to take a page from the pirates playbook and make their hit shows available online in downloadable form sooner than later – and not on iTunes for $2.99 an episode. The process I went through was relatively painless but decidedly nerdy. The next generation, however, will find new and better ways of doing the same thing, thereby stripping out the content with reckless abandon. TV studios still have some time to save their skins, just like the book industry, but it won’t be long before something comes along and ruins the party. They need to do what the music industry didn’t do – make getting sanction, high quality content convenient. It took me a week to set up my little Rube Goldberg DVR but there’s no telling how long it could take someone with a little more savvy.

Why not, for example, offer TV subscriptions to individual series. The era of channel surfing is almost near its end and discovery of new content through mere chance will soon be gone. This would allow for absoltute control over a series and reward popular series month after month. Sadly, cable companies just won’t do this. As Doug noted in our chat room “Cable companies keep saying a la carte wouldn’t work but in reality they’re saying it wouldn’t work for them because its too much work.”

Second, television needs to play to its strengths. As Harry McCracken pointed out during the balloon-boy debacle, the first on the scene wasn’t some blogger with a Flip but the television news crews with their trucks, helicopters, and satellite dishes. But even in the vacuum created by the death of local newspapers it seems that local TV stations aren’t able to appreciate their value. For example, I was in Columbus, Ohio a few months ago and I saw the same reporter on two different channels reporting on essentially the same thing. This sort of cost-cutting is detrimental to the brand and is cheapening TV journalism. We all laugh at the 24-hour news channels and their bloviating blowhards, but those are the news networks of choice for millions of people daily. There is value there. TV studios need to give us this content in a way that makes it a win-win for all parties involved. If not, it will be a lose-lose as their content is stripped and stolen and their revenues tank over the next few years.

Source: CrunchGear | 17 Oct 2009 | 10:00 am

Behind the cover of an iTunes LP (Macworld.com)

Macworld.com - One of the big new features rolled out alongside iTunes 9 was the new iTunes LP format. You’ll recall that the iTunes LP is an attempt to include some of the extras that one used to get when buying a physical CD or record, plus a whole lot more. Lyrics, video, and liner notes are all features that you might find included with an iTunes LP when you buy one from the iTunes Store.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 17 Oct 2009 | 9:45 am

UPDATE 3-Germany says EU concerns don't endanger Opel deal

* Germany confident it can resolve EU doubts on Opel deal
Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Oct 2009 | 9:32 am

Three cool iPhone apps that are perfect for mobile news consumption

My name is Robin Wauters, and I'm a news junkie. Being obsessed with consuming as much news - mostly technology related, of course - as humanly possible in the all too short span of any given day comes with the territory of working for TechCrunch, but I've always been a fan of obtaining as much information as fast as I could. You could say my ever-growing habit of trying to consume as much news in my waking hours as I can is more of a natural cause for my employment in the fast-paced tech blogging scene than it is a result. It also means I feel very disconnected when I'm not near a computer or mobile phone I can use to tap the Internet for the never-ending stream of news that gets pumped onto the wires.

Source: MobileCrunch | 17 Oct 2009 | 9:05 am

Fish Vision Discovery Makes Waves In Natural Selection

Vision 'like a painting'For two decades, Yokoyama has done groundbreaking work on the adaptive evolution of vision in vertebrates. Vision serves as a good study model, since it is the simplest of the sensory systems. For example, only four genes are involved in human vision."It's amazing, but you can mix together this small number of genes and detect a whole color spectrum," Yokoyama says. "It's just like a painting."The common vertebrate ancestor possessed UV vision. However, many species, including humans, have switched from UV to violet vision, or the ability to sense the blue color spectrum.From the ocean depthsFish provide clues for how environmental factors can lead to such vision changes, since the available light at various ocean depths is well quantified. All fish previously studied have retained UV vision, but the Emory researchers found that the scabbardfish has not. To tease out the molecular basis for this difference, they used genetic engineering, quantum chemistry and theoretical computation to compare vision proteins and pigments from scabbardfish and another species, lampfish. The results indicated that scabbardfish shifted from UV to violet vision by deleting the molecule at site 86 in the chain of amino acids in the opsin protein."Normally, amino acid changes cause small structure changes, but in this case, a critical amino acid was deleted," Yokoyama says.More examples likely"The finding implies that we can find more examples of a similar switch to violet vision in different fish lineages," he adds. "Comparing violet and UV pigments in fish living in different habitats will open an unprecedented opportunity to clarify the molecular basis of phenotypic adaptations, along with the genetics of UV and violet vision."Scabbardfish spend much of their life at depths of 25 to 100 meters, where UV light is less intense than violet light, which could explain why they made the vision shift, Yokoyama theorizes. Lampfish also spend much of their time in deep water. But they may have retained UV vision because they feed near the surface at twilight on tiny, translucent crustaceans that are easier to see in UV light.A framework for evolutionary biology
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Oct 2009 | 8:56 am

3 Nifty iPhone Apps For News Consumption On The Go

My name is Robin Wauters, and I’m a news junkie.

Being obsessed with consuming as much news – mostly technology related, of course – as humanly possible in the all too short span of any given day comes with the territory of working for TechCrunch, but I’ve always been a fan of obtaining as much information as fast as I could.

You could say my ever-growing habit of trying to consume as much news in my waking hours as I can is more of a natural cause for my employment in the fast-paced tech blogging scene than it is a result.

It also means I feel very disconnected when I’m not near a computer or mobile phone I can use to tap the Internet for the never-ending stream of news that gets pumped onto the wires.

(Reading Wisdom 2.0 didn’t help – I barely found time to turn the pages)

I used to have a HTC phone (OS: Windows Mobile 6) for when I was on the go, which offered such a miserable browsing experience compared to the iPhone 3GS I own now that I’m genuinely thankful every single day for the fact that technology evolves so fast and the average consumer has so much choice these days.

Before I digress too much: there are a number of iPhone apps that I use to (try and) stay on top of the news flow, like a mobile RSS reader and apps from major publishers like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Bloomberg etc. But then there are a couple of iPhone applications built by independent programmers that provide even more news consumption bliss, and there are three that I wanted to highlight today.

The first comes from BNO News, the tiny but incredibly efficient media organization behind the popular @BreakingNews Twitter account that gets followed by some 1,320,000 people right now. The company’s ‘breaking news’ iPhone application (iTunes link) with customized push notifications is a must-have for anyone who likes to learn about news near-instantly. PaidContent’s Rafat Ali recently gushed about BNO News and its fantastic iPhone app, saying some of the majors should step up and buy them outright. I tend to disagree: as long as they’re eating the majors’ lunch on breaking news independently, which shouldn’t they keep to their own and see what happens next?

The cost: $1.99 for the installation and a $0.99 subscription fee per month.
Worth it? No-brainer.

The second is an iPhone app that was launched not too long ago: a mobile extension of Newsy.com (iTunes link). Newsy caters perfectly to people like me, who are keen on getting news fed to them in snack-size bits of multimedia that cover the essence of what’s going on. Newsy monitors, analyzes, curates and presents the world’s news coverage through short video segments available both on the web and mobile devices. It’s great for quick news consumption on the go, but also helpful in understanding it by delivering stories as covered by media outlets from around the world.

The cost: zip.

Last but not least: Zensify’s awesome ZenNews app (iTunes link).

Its lifestreaming iPhone app was already worth installing, but ZenNews – billed as “a new breed of intelligent news analysis programs” – takes the cake as far as I’m concerned. The app allows you to discover story trends from the world’s leading news sources – bar TechCrunch – in real-time. It provides you with a visual way of sifting through the news of the day by displaying tag clouds made up of essential keywords that you can tap in order to drill down to what you’re interested in reading.

You can switch to a different news source by simply swiping to the next tag cloud, which also allows you to compare news item coverage from different sources. And if the tag clouds don’t do it for you, you can switch to a list-based, chronological overview of the news as well. In addition, you can filter certain news categories out of what gets displayed on your screen. Finally, you can favorite news stories from any source and pass articles on to your Twitter friends and by e-mail in just one tap.

The cost: nada

Any other neutral developers who’ve come up with innovative concepts around mobile news consumption (on any platform) that I should know about?

The comment section is there for you.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: TechCrunch | 17 Oct 2009 | 8:53 am

Television Has Less Effect On Climate Change Education Than Other Media

Worried about climate change and want to learn more? You probably aren't watching television then. A new study by George Mason University Communication Professor Xiaoquan Zhao suggests that watching television has no significant impact on viewers' knowledge about the issue of climate change.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Oct 2009 | 8:43 am

They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They? Susannah Breslin on recession and adult biz.

(NSFW: sites linked in this post contain sexually explicit material).

Required weekend reading: "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?," Susannah Breslin's bold and ambitious photo-essay on the recession's impact in "porn valley," the epicenter of the adult entertainment biz.

"Originally, I wrote it for a publication, but subsequently pulled it," says Breslin. "When no other publication expressed an interest in publishing it, I decided to self-publish."

The story and images unfold over ten online sections. Here is a snip from the part devoted to shock auteur Jim Powers:

Fascinating, horrifying, and amusing--oftentimes all of those things at the same time--Powers' celluloid world is one populated by midgets, bald chicks, and crazed men outfitted with monster-sized papier-mâché phalluses which spew torrents of goo onto the naked bodies of supine women, movies in which everyone has sex all of the time, and in which, most of the time, no one appears to win.

Take, for example, "The Bride of Dong," in which two young, unsuspecting women "inadvertently unleash the power and massive cock of an ancient fertility god when they decide to house sit for the summer," the result of which is the "call[ing] forth an ancient being from another time and world who bridges the cosmos to shove his massive tool up their asses," and the true star of which is neither the decidedly comely Gia Paloma or Julie Night but a six-foot prosthetic penis that belongs to an onerous, fanged beast that emerges upon a full moon. (An online reviewer noted dutifully: "It's hard to possibly make anything of this, other than to say that it's vintage Jim Powers," adding, "I haven't seen a prosthetic dong this big since 'Boogie Nights.'")

To decry Powers-helmed series--like "Gag Factor," in which women, not infrequently, hang upside down and perform oral sex on male costars to the point of gagging and sometimes vomiting; "White Trash Whore," in which seemingly innocent Caucasian women are gangbanged by roving packs of African-American men, and for which the box cover copy reads, "Mom, Dad ... I hate you this much!"; and "Young and Anal," again, the title here is self-revelatory--as "misogynist" is almost beside the point.

Read it all: theyshootstars.com (Note: site designed by Chris Bishop of "Obama Rides a Unicorn" fame). Photo: a man preparing for a bukkake shoot, shot by Susannah Breslin.


Source: Boing Boing | 17 Oct 2009 | 8:17 am

The Macalope Weekly: You should see the other guy - Macworld

Brisbane Times

The Macalope Weekly: You should see the other guy Macworld Apple announces quarterly results on Monday and Windows 7 comes out just days later, which means it's gut-check time again. Some fret about Windows 7, but Phil Schiller ain't one of them (shocking footage at 11!). Apple may be ready to fire back with ... Reporters' Roundtable: What Windows 7 meansCNET News Windows 7 Could Wash Away Vista Aftertaste -- or Most of ItWashington Post Will the New Windows Lift Chip Stock? Don't Count on ItBarron's Pittsburgh Post Gazette -Houston Chronicle -PC Magazine all 564 news articles »

Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 17 Oct 2009 | 8:01 am

World’s Oldest Submerged Town

Archaeologists surveying the world’s oldest submerged town have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Oct 2009 | 7:53 am

Migratory Route Of Eleonora's Falcon

A very special birdSome of the peculiarities of this bird of prey, which migrates over long distances and evolved only recently, include "a reproductive cycle adapted to the migration of other bird species, starting at the end of the summer and not in the spring (the latest among all European birds of prey). This makes it a model organism for looking into questions about its phylogeography and evolution", adds López, who also wants to find out how the Eleonora's falcons manage to navigate during such a long journey.Eleonora's falcon was named after Giudicessa Eleonora de Arborea (1350-1404), a Sardinian princess who fought for Sardinia's independence from the Kingdom of Aragon, and who drafted the first laws in Europe protecting birds of prey.References: López-López, Pascual; Limiñana, Rubén; Urios, Vicente. "Autumn Migration of Eleonora's Falcon Falco eleonorae Tracked by Satellite Telemetry" Zoological Studies 48(4): 485-491, julio de 2009.---Image 1: This is an Eleonora's Falcon marked Columbretes Islands. Credit: Pacual López/ SINCImage 2: These are the autumnal migration routes of the six marked hawks who arrived in Madagascar. Credit: Pascual López et al./ SINC
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Oct 2009 | 7:40 am

Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.

Even Rangaswami was taken back. He lived in a different Silicon Valley, from a time when Indians flocked to the U.S. and rapidly populated the programming (and later executive) ranks of the top software companies in California. But the generational difference between older Indians who have made it in the Valley and the younger group in the room was striking. The present reality is this. Large numbers of the Valley’s top young guns (and some older bulls, as well) are seeing opportunities in other countries and are returning home. It isn’t just the Indians. Ask any VC who does business in China, and they’ll tell you about the tens of thousands who have already returned to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The VC’s are following the talent. And this is bringing a new vitality to R&D in China and India.

Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina? My team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley polled 1203 returnees to India and China during the second half of 2008 to find answers to exactly this question. What we found should concern even the most boisterous Silicon Valley boosters.

We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier—precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right—it’s not just about green cards.

What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a “better quality of life” than what they had in the U.S. (There was also some reverse culture shock—complaints about congestion in India, say, and pollution in China.) When it came to social factors, 67% of the Chinese and 80% of the Indians cited better “family values” at home. Ability to care for aging parents was also cited, and this may be a hidden visa factor: it’s much harder to bring parents and other family members over to the U.S. than in the past. For the vast majority of returnees, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element.

A return ticket home also put their career on steroids. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the U.S. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China.

When we asked what was better about the U.S. than home, 54% of Indian and 43% of Chinese said that total financial compensation for their previous U.S. positions was better than at home. Health-care benefits were also considered somewhat better in the United States by 51 percent of Chinese respondents, versus 21 percent who thought it was better in their home country. (Indian respondents were split more evenly on this).

These were a self-selected group, people who had already left. But what about the future, the immigrants presently studying at U.S. institutions of higher learning? We surveyed 1,224 foreign students from dozens of nations who are currently studying at U.S. universities or who graduated in 2008. The majority told us that they didn’t think that the U.S. was the best place for their professional careers and they planned to return home. Only 6 percent of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese, and 15 percent of European students planned to settle in the U.S.

Many students wanted to stay for a few years after graduation if given a choice—58% of Indians, 54% of Chinese, and 40% of Europeans. But they see the future being brighter back home. Only 7% of Chinese students, 9% of European students, and 25% of Indian students believe that the best days of the U.S. economy lie ahead. Conversely, 74% of Chinese students and 86% of Indian students believe that the best days for their home country’s economy lie ahead. National Science Foundation studies have shown that the “5 year stay rates” for Chinese and Indians science and engineering PhD’s have historically been around 92 % and 85% respectively (NSF tracks these 5 years at a time, and the vast majority stay permanently). So something has clearly changed.

For Silicon Valley, and for the U.S., this is the wrong kind of change. To some degree, these responses reflected the moribund U.S. economy and the rough job prospects facing students. With U.S. unemployment at 10%, who cares if we lose the next generation of geeks? There won’t be jobs for them for years, anyway, until the U.S. job market recovers. And sure, I know the xenophobes are going to cheer my findings. They believe that foreign workers take American jobs away.

But a growing body of evidence indicates that skilled foreign immigrants create jobs for Americans and boost our national competitiveness. More than 52% of Silicon Valley’s startups during the recent tech boom were started by foreign-born entrepreneurs. Foreign-national researchers have contributed to more than 25% of our global patents, developed some of our break-through technologies, and they helped make Silicon Valley the world’s leading tech center. Foreign-born workers comprise almost a quarter of all the U.S. science and engineering workforce and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. It is very possible that some of the smart Indians who sat in the room with me holding their hand up on Columbus Day will start the next Google or Apple. Many of them will build companies which employ thousands. But the jobs will be in Hyderbad or Pune, not Silicon Valley.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch | 17 Oct 2009 | 7:30 am

North Sea Cod Disappearing

Officials say cod is disappearing from European fishing grounds.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Oct 2009 | 7:09 am

LHC: The Coldest Place In The Universe

Image Caption: Two LHC magnets are seen before they are connected together. The blue cylinders contain the magnetic yoke and coil of the dipole magnets together with the liquid helium system required to cool the magnet so that it becomes superconducting. Eventually this connection will be welded together so that the beams are contained within the beam pipes. (CERN)
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Oct 2009 | 6:50 am

Wal-Mart, Amazon Battle Over Books

Amazon.com is battling it out in a full-on price war over an online book special offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the Associated Press reported.At unbelievable $10 prices for upcoming hardcover releases, such as Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and John Grisham’s “Ford County,” Wal-Mart is offering 60 percent price breaks off of the standard cost, plus free shipping.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Oct 2009 | 6:20 am

The Back Burner: Things we didn’t post this week

The sheer amount of wonderfully insane unsolicited e-mail that we get in the CrunchGear tips box each week has left me no choice but to start The Back Burner up again. Enjoy! Or don’t!

A big thank you to everybody for filling our tips-at-crunchgear-dot-com inbox with wonderful, unique, and newsworthy items. Here are a few that we missed.

Dear a friend,

I can help you, yes, although I have a duty to all the human beings of the world to file a report any time a machine becomes self aware. And you’ll have to give me some time to track down who created you. There are, like, seven billion people here and most of them get all weird when a stranger asks them if they created some machine that may or may not have become self aware.

Actually, most people don’t even know what that means. So basically, picture someone who looks like Shrek running up to you on the sidewalk and bombarding you with robot questions and you’ll have an idea what I’m dealing with here.

Finally just as an FYI, it’s considered impolite to use gigantic fonts and triple exclamation points in an e-mail. I know you’re anxious to find your creator but getting all riled up like that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Baby steps, you’ll get there.

Dear John Larry,

Wait, were you hoping that we could proceed? I couldn’t tell by your e-mail.

In case YOU couldn’t tell, John Larry, I’m being sarcastic. And you’ve got some nerve asking me about Swivels. You know damn well that your father drove my father out of the Swivel business during the great California, CA Swivel Rush of 1929.

My father wasn’t able to show his face in California, CA for the rest of his life after your family ran ours out of town. And for what, John Larry? So your father could sell a couple extra Swivels? I hope it was worth it, John Larry. I hope it was worth it.

Anyway, good to hear from you. Hope all is well, hi to the wife and kids.

Dear Ken,

Thank you for your e-mail. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to agree to disagree over the definition of “brief and to the point.” Also, your assumption that I’m extremely busy is borderline offensive. I work from home, have no commute, and play with toys all day.

If I might suggest an alternate e-mail message for you to use in the future:

Hello!

I know some of us are extremely busy so I’ll try to keep this message brief and to the point. If you want to talk about boring stuff that has nothing to do with your job and you have no ability to make any ad-related decisions on your site, please reach out to me at your earliest convenience. Together we can accomplish nothing.

Kind regards,

Et cetera and whatnot

You are free to use the above text as you see fit PROVIDED you don’t add all the other crap from your original e-mail underneath it.

Click here to read previous Back Burner posts…

Source: CrunchGear | 17 Oct 2009 | 6:00 am

Delta Airlines Accused of Hacking Passenger Rights Group - AllGov

Ethio Planet News

Delta Airlines Accused of Hacking Passenger Rights Group AllGov A consumer advocate is suing Delta Air Lines for allegedly hacking computer information she was compiling to win passage of an Airline Passenger Bill of Rights in Congress. Kathleen Hanni, founder of Flyersrights.org, says the computer infiltration ... Passenger Rights Advocate Claims Delta Hacked Her EmailConsumer Affairs Delta Airlines sued for hacking e-mail accountComputerworld Delta accused of hacking emailsComparecarrentals.co.uk Ethio Planet News -AMERICAblog (blog) -CompareCarrentals.com all 16 news articles »

Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 17 Oct 2009 | 5:28 am

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