Here is the latest image snapped from ThePete's MacBook's iSight.
Isn't it neat how he's always doing something interesting? ^_^
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![]() TheKey Chronicle |
![]() $6 back issues! |
![]() Ballpoint Adventures mega-T |
![]() ADVENTURES |
And the email does one worse--it gives me a window of when to expect my XO to be delivered. It's a TEN DAY WINDOW! I'm going to be driving my wife crazy between the 13th and the 24th as I bounce off the walls waiting for my XO to show up. Anyway, that's the update for now!
OH wait-- Laptopmag.org did do a comparison between the XO and the eee--which to me is way too much like comparing Windows machines to Macs. Ultimately, it's up to user preference. They both have strengths and weaknesses depending on what you're looking for in a low-power-consuming, portable PCish device. Feel free to have a read if it'll help you decide which you'd rather buy though for $400 you might as well go with the XO so a 3rd World kid can get one, too.
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Soaring mortgage default rates this year already have shaken major financial institutions and the fallout from more of them, some experts say, could spread from those already battered banks into the general economy.
The worst-case scenario is anyone's guess, but some believe it could become very bad.
"We haven't faced a downturn like this since the Depression," said Bill Gross, chief investment officer of PIMCO, the world's biggest bond fund. He's not suggesting anything like those terrible times -- but, as an expert on the global credit crisis, he speaks with authority.
"Its effect on consumption, its effect on future lending attitudes, could bring us close to the zero line in terms of economic growth," he said. "It does keep me up at night."
A recent FCC report promoted by Kevin Martin, the agency's chairman, found that cable TV reaches a wide enough U.S. audience to trigger a rule within a 1984 law that would give the government significant new powers to ensure program diversity.
But a majority of the agency's five-member commission said the report endorsed flawed data and should have used other sources. Some said they weren't even aware of the agency's own numbers until Monday night.
"Our job of ascertaining the facts is made more difficult because the draft cherry picked the only data that justified the outcome apparently desired while suppressing other data," Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said.
Found this military exo-suit video at Engadget which led me to a post on the same robotic exo-suit video at Wired.
Funny how when the Japanese designed an exo-suit back in 2005, it was designed to help people who needed medical attention. An American company does it and it's all about the killing military applications. Let's hear it for innovation!
According to a press release, the G1G1 program has been extended to December 31!
For those of you not in XOniverse, you may recall the XO laptop and the program being run by OLPC (the non-profit behind the XO) where if you pay $400, they'll send you an XO laptop and they'll also send a 3rd World kid an XO, as well--it's called Give 1, Get 1. The period in which North Americans could Give an XO and Get an XO was originally only supposed to be fifteen days--from November 12 to 27, 2007. However, thanks to $2 million a day in sales, OLPC is extending the program to December 31, 2007.
So, if you're thinking about it, you've got a bit larger of a window--but don't expect Amazon.com service--it could take as long as four months to receive your XO and it runs $25 for shipping.
Read http://thepete.com/tag/olpc for more of my blogging on the XO and the G1G1 program.
You can also check out laptop.org or wiki.laptop.org to learn more about the XO from the source.
Follow XO-related news at OLPCnews.com.
Or if you're ready to make the jump, head to XOgiving.org and place your order.
I'll be blogging on the XO as I come across news or when I have new experiences to report with the XO. I still have yet to spend any more time with SugarOS, but I hope to do that once the first draft of my novel is done. So be sure to stop back and see what's new. Feel free to drop me a line if you've got XO news.
King George of America pats an American on the head. Photo:Reuters, nicked from smh.com.au. |
They were torturing me. They all passed a knife around that was -- and stabbing me. I was trying to get away as they were stabbing me, and they were holding me down and stuff. And they smothered me with a bag. That morning, I had a bag wrapped around my neck and everything. They choked me. They made me eat dog poop, rat poop and human. They made me drink their urine. And each time, they braided some switches together, and they were beating me across the back. They tore my clothes off me and everything.
And then they took me up to a lake. They said that was the place they were going to cut my throat and throw me in, and I was never going to come back and see my family again. They were just telling me that they were going to kill me.
And, you know, I was -- they made me take a bath in a trash can. They wouldn̢۪t let me use the bathroom. I had to use the bathroom outside. I had to sleep outside. And they told me if they even remotely heard me once, that they would go out there and kill me. They poured candle wax in my hair. They pulled my hair out when they were cutting it with scissors. And, you know, they were just scary.
They had me tied up. I couldn̢۪t go anywhere. Like the time when they left, they were going to go get some beer and stuff, and when they came back they said they were going to finish me off. And before they even got back, I had already got loose. I found a knife and cut myself loose.
I heard the police coming up to the driveway. When I̢۪d seen the police, I just -- you know, I knew it was, you know, my chance to get out. And if I didn̢۪t, I was going to die anyway. And then, that̢۪s when they see me coming out there, and they thought -- they said I was going to lose my leg, when they see about the stabs. And I was scared. I didn̢۪t know what to do. All I kept saying -- I was thinking about my momma, also wanting to come home. And every time I close my eyes, all I see is that knife, the one they kept stabbing me and stabbing me. It̢۪s just -- you know, it̢۪s a nightmare.
The price of gasoline has jumped another 13 cents in the last two weeks, close to the all-time high set earlier this year, according to a survey published Sunday.
The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular is $3.09, the Lundberg Survey found. That's just 9 cents below the record set in May.
The latest price is also 9 cents below the inflation-adjusted all-time high, said survey publisher Trilby Lundberg. In 1981, the price peaked at $1.35 -- which, in today's dollars, comes out to $3.10 using the latest Consumer Price Index data, she said.
Don't be surprised if the records are shattered in the coming weeks, Lundberg said. Even if crude oil doesn't climb further, "we can easily see another dime at the pump," she said, "because refiners are severely squeezed between their oil buying price and their gasoline selling price."
6 inch diagonal B&W (grayscale) screen
Uses Sprint's EV-DO network (connects to 'net via cell phone network) to hook you to the Amazon Kindle Store (think iTunes Music Store for digital books)
QWERTY keyboard for entering in book titles (and such) to said AKS, you can also annotate and bookmark
Compatible with Audible.com tracks as well as standard mp3s
Has an SD (low capacity) slot for "expansion"
Supports something called "Kindle format" for text docs, along with PDF, Mobi, HTML, plaintext, and image files like JPEG, GIF, and PNG (source) but I have yet to read conclusively that it surfs the web
Comes with a built-in dictionary and allows you to wirelessly connect to Wikipedia.org
All that for just $400.
I haven't even told you how expensive books and newspapers are.
Books: $9.99 (for most titles)
Newspapers: $9.99 to $14.99/mo
Magazines (the only reasonably priced thing here): $1.99/mo
Will it flop? Well, I haven't heard of Bezos making any flights into orbit and I only see Segways zooming down the street when there's a blue moon out, so, based on those two facts and the cost of the Kindle, I'm going to go out on a limb and say:
Baring an extreme price drop, the Amazon Kindle will bomb.
I mean, think about it: you're saying the future of a passtime that hardly anyone does is in an electronic device that costs $400???
For that price you can get a laptop--hell, the eee PC is the same price and it runs XP! I just dropped $400 on an XO laptop and it has basic PC features (like web surfing) and it has an e-Book mode. So, why should I be expected to drop another $400 on the Kindle? Just because it has free Sprint EV-DO service?? Well, it only has free EV-DO to the Kindle store and to Wikipedia--that's hardly a robust Internet experience. I can do more on my Sidekick 3--which also cost me $400. But my SK3 is a phone and I can surf and check my email and IM and, a short stack of other things.
So, remind me again why I should drop $400 on the Kindle?
I'd say this thing is worth $100 for what it does. Ditch the free EV-DO service and just let us load our own stuff in it and I'm good. Oh and the books that cost nothing to copy over and over and over? Those should be about $3--not $10. Who the hell do you think you're kidding, Bezos? $9.99 for a digital book? Where do the costs go? Not to cover design or printing--just to marketing and download service support (I'm assuming that most of the mark-up on the Kindle, itself, goes to pay for the EV-DO).
Frakkin' greedy bastards. All these guys think about is how much they can charge instead of how little. Do they want their device in everyone's hands? Newsflash, guys! The cheaper your tech is, the more people will buy it! This is especially true if your device is as useless as the Kindle.
sources: Amazon Kindle product page Engadget: here, here, and here.
Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity - a process called deindividuation - we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called "suicide baiting" - when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.
Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are "distant" from the person we're talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.
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AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about how President Bush and Vice President Cheney made the case for war in Iraq, I want to turn to comments made by Dick Cheney in September of 1992. At the time, he was President George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. During an address at the Economic Club of Detroit, Cheney was asked why the United States didn̢۪t bury Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. This is how he responded close to fifteen years ago.DICK CHENEY: At the end of the war in the Gulf, when we made the decision to stop, we did so because we had achieved our military objectives -- that is, when we decided to halt military operations. Those objectives were twofold: to liberate Kuwait and, secondly, to strip Saddam Hussein of his offensive military capability, of his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And we had done that.
There is no doubt in my mind, but what we could have gone on to Baghdad and taken Baghdad, occupied the whole country. We had the 101st Airborne up on the Euphrates River Valley about halfway between Kuwait and Baghdad. And I don̢۪t think, from a military perspective, that it would have been an impossible task. Clearly, it wouldn̢۪t, given the forces that we had there.
But we made a very conscious decision not to proceed for several reasons, in part because as soon as you go to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein, you have to recognize that you’re undertaking a fairly complex operation. It’s not the kind of situation where we could have pulled up in front of the presidential palace in Baghdad and said, â€Å“Come on, Saddam. You’re going to the slammer.†We would have had to run him to ground. A lot of places he could have gone to hide out or to resist. It would have required extensive military forces to achieve that.
But let's assume for the moment that we would have been able to do it, we got Saddam now and maybe we put him down there in Miami with Noriega. Then the question comes, putting a government in place of the one you̢۪ve just gotten rid of. You can̢۪t just sort of turn around and away; you̢۪ve now accepted the responsibility for what happens in Iraq. What kind of government do you want us to create in place of the old Saddam Hussein government? You want a Sunni government or a Shia government, or maybe it ought to be a Kurdish government, or maybe one based on the Baath Party, or maybe some combination of all of those.
How long is that government likely to survive without US military forces there to keep it propped up? If you get into the business of committing US forces on the ground in Iraq to occupy the place, my guess is I̢۪d probably still have people there today, instead of having been able to bring them home.
We would have been in a situation, once we went into Baghdad, where we would have engaged in the kind of street-by-street, house-to-house fighting in an urban setting that would have been dramatically different from what we were able to do in the Gulf, in Kuwait in the desert, where our precision-guided munitions and our long-range artillery and tanks were so devastating against those Iraqi forces. You would have been fighting in a built-up urban area, large civilian population, and much heavier prospects for casualties.
You would have found, as well, I think, probably the disintegration of the Arab coalition that signed on to support us in our efforts to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait, but never signed on for the proposition that the United States would become some kind of quasi-permanent occupier of a major Middle Eastern nation.
And the final point, with respect to casualties, everybody, of course, was tremendously impressed with the fact that we were able to prevail at such a low cost, given the predictions with respect to casualties in major modern warfare. But for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it was not a cheap or a low-cost conflict. The bottom-line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: Not very damn many. I think the President got it right both times, both when he decided to use military force to defeat Saddam Hussein̢۪s aggression, but also when he made what I think was a very wise decision to stop military operations when we did.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dick Cheney, speaking in September of 1992 at the Economic Club of Detroit.