Click pic to learn all about it

With support for “18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands,” it’s for people who think the new Apple Magic Mouse has gone a tad too far the other way. Designed for use with the free Open Office suite, the three extra fingers needed to operate it are, well, extra.

I’m thinking about taking another shot at replacing my old Palm 700p cellphone and am looking for something that is at least as good as what I bought 5 years ago. As many of you know, I tried the HTC Touch Pro2 and ended up returning it because it was so dysfunctional. I went to a Verizon store and was somewhat impressed. The thing actually seems to work. I didn’t see any kind of stylus with it which may be a good thing. Perhaps you don’t need one.

So – should I buy this phone or is there yet a better one about to come out? Should I wait for the Droid 2?

I have a few questions.

1) Since it’s a Linux box – is there a Bash command line?

2) Need an SSH client.

3) Would like to be able to turn it into a hotspot like I could do with the Windows phone I took back. Can that be done?

4) Youtube video was pretty grainy. I’m wondering why?

5) Where are good sites to get apps for this platform.

What else should I know or consider before buying this phone? Is it mature? There are no honest reviews out there for any phone and unlike most reviewers I am interested in how well it makes phone calls. One thing I almost never see in a review is the phone app. I’m also interested in the email app. If an email has an attached WAV file, can I play it?

Thoughts?

Few people who watch Jon Stewart watch Glenn Beck, so few in the audience even knew he was doing a spot-on parody of Beck and his show. Outrageously great. This ran this past Thursday.

House Committee on Ways & Means – Republican — This kind of solves the problem if you think of it. Jails have health care.

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp R-MI released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation JCT confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill H.R. 3962, as amended could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax generally 2.5% of income, are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

Found by Matt Duvall.

GENEVA : THE $6.5 billion machine designed to recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time had to be switched off after a bird dropped a “bit of baguette” into it, causing it to overheat.

As a result, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had to postpone their plans last week to emulate the universe’s Big Bang.

The European particle physics laboratory near Geneva launched the LHC in September last year. Physicists hoped to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass.

But the LHC, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99.9 per cent of the speed of light, has been out of action since a helium leak caused it to be shut down nine days after its start-up.

The bird dropped bread on a compensating capacitor – where the mains electricity supply enters the collider – cutting power to the LHC during a test run.

This LHC project is getting seriously weird.

This app demeans us both

Phone Application Translates Babies’ Howls – Wired

The Cry Translator listens to a whining child and analyzes the pitch, volume, tone and inflection of his nerve-jangling noise. Ten seconds later, it provides you with one of five “translations”: hungry, sleepy, stressed, annoyed or bored.

The idea of this $30 iPhone application, apart from preying on the anxieties of new parents, is to help teach you the meanings of the distinctive sounds and to help out babysitters who might otherwise try to feed your three-month old (hunger) instead of just switching over to the Family Guy from American Idol (bored). The application even gives advice on what to do, depending on the translation.

According to the seller, Biloop Technologic, clinical tests have proven the app to be accurate 96% of the time, and it will “continue to translate crying regardless of the age of the child”.

Can’t be bothered trying to understand your baby? There’s an app for that. Seriously, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s tried it.

Obviously what happened Thursday at Ft. Hood was a tragedy. Just as obviously, Sgt. Kimberly Munley who got shot while taking Hasan out is a hero. So are others who helped the wounded as the firing continued. So, flying the flag at half staff seems a reasonable tribute to the fallen and the heroes. But…

Why isn’t the flag flown at half mast for the soldiers killed or wounded daily in combat? Don’t they deserve the same tribute for their sacrifice? Aren’t their injuries and deaths just as tragic under their heroic circumstances? Or has the flow of coffins from overseas been too steady from unpopular wars for us to even bother with… them?

I do feel we should be honoring those who died, were wounded and took action under fire at Ft. Hood. I just wonder what it says that we don’t accord the same to the others.

• Verizon iPhone release coming in 2010.
• Fortune mag has a bunch of odd articles about Microsoft. I comment on them.
• Mein Kampf approved by App store.
• SSD’s now bricking up. Blamed on firmware.
• The Sun is in trouble with the EU now.
• Intuit-online killed.
• Flash once again under attack.
• Cell phone inventor does not like the current direction of the business.
• Software patents under attack.

RIO DE JANEIRO – A Brazilian bricklayer reportedly killed in a car crash shocked his mourning family by showing up alive at his funeral. Relatives of Ademir Jorge Goncalves, 59, had identified him as the victim of a Sunday night car crash in Parana state in southern Brazil, police said.

As is customary in Brazil, the funeral was held the following day, which happened to be the holiday of Finados, when Brazilians visit cemeteries to honor the dead. What family members didn’t know was that Goncalves had spent the night at a truck stop talking with friends over drinks of a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca, his niece Rosa Sampaio told the O Globo newspaper. He did not get word about his own funeral until it was already happening Monday morning.

A police spokesman in the town of Santo Antonio da Platina said Goncalves rushed to the funeral to let family members know he was not dead.

“The corpse was badly disfigured, but dressed in similar clothing,” said the police spokesman, who talked on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to discuss the case. “People are afraid to look for very long when they identify bodies, and I think that is what happened in this case.” Sampaio told O Globo that some family members were not sure the body was Goncalves.

“My two uncles and I had doubts about the identification,” she told O Globo. “But an aunt and four of his friends identified the body, so what were we to do? We went ahead with the funeral.”

I’m gonna milk the Halloween thing for as long as possible.