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Drug hysteria hits a new high. (pun accidental)
Damn, we’re becoming a stupid people.
Pop quiz: Who was emperor when the United States declared independence from China?
Give up?
Perhaps you should ask one of the Americans who, when asked what country the U.S. separated from, named France, Japan, Mexico, Spain or, yes, China.
A new Marist poll shows that 26% of people in this country don’t know that the U.S. declared its independence from Great Britain. That includes 20% who aren’t sure — and another 6% who think it was another country.
Looking at the numbers more deeply, it appears the closer to 1776 you were born, the more likely you are to know the correct answer.
Really?? I’m putting the BS meter on this one until it can be verified or whatever.
Thousands of consumers have complained that when gripping the phone around the lower left-hand corner of the device, the signal degrades or calls are dropped.
[…]
Now the company says its engineers have made a “stunning” discovery. People may be finding that their reception is poor and that calls are being dropped not only because they’re holding the phone wrong, but also because they think they have a better signal than they actually do. In the statement, Apple says that it had made a mistake in the formula that calculates the number of bars that display the signal strength on all of its iPhones.“We were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” it said in a statement. “Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”
[…]
“If the only thing that Apple is changing in this software fix is how the bars are calculated, then this is simply a pacifier for people who like to watch bars,” said Spencer Webb, president of AntennaSys, an antenna design firm. “And signal ‘bar watching’ is a dangerous way to draw technical conclusions about a phone’s reception.”
This is the cockpit of the SR-71. Click the pic to embiggen and see more assorted cockpits.
For non-Flash version, Click here.
Today’s Guests:
- Andrew Eisner, Content/Community Manager, Retrevo
- Vanessa Fox, Founder, NineByBlue.com
- Chris DiBona, Open Source Manager, Google
The Topics:
- Google vs. Facebook
- Can Apple Doing Any Wrong?
- YouTube Weighs in on HTML5 and Flash
- Is the Kin a Loser?
- Hulu vs. Netflix
Download this Episode:
- iPod/iPhone/PSP: 111MB
- Quicktime H.264: 137MB
- Windows Media Player: 133MB
- Mobile 3GP: 38MB
- MP3 (Audio Only): 14MB
Right click and choose “save target as” or “save as” to download videos.
Here is a video of the infamous Russian spy Anna Chapman, or whatever her name is. Who cares. Listen to the message she is telling Russians about America on Russian TV. How dangerous, how threatening! And – she talks about what a great place Silicon Valley is and just last month Obama took Russian president Medvedev to Silicon Valley where he Tweeted back to the Russians back home. Coincidence? I don’t think so! This Anna Chapman has influence. I feel influenced every time I see her. Makes me want to join the KGB!
UPDATE: Netherlands beat Brazil by 2-1… I guess most readers were wrong.
FiveThirtyEight has Brazil with a 61.4% chance of winning, but the question is: what do the intelligent readers of this blog think it’ll be? Vote below:
Oh, and by the way, the game is starting at 10 a.m. EST.
The picture above is from an Eastern US chain I’ve never heard of called Friendly’s and is called the Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt. That’s right, it’s a burger between two grilled cheese sandwiches. Not long ago, KFC came out with their Double Down where they skip the bread and put bacon and cheese between two fried chicken slabs.
At least the Heart Attack Grill (where people over 350 lbs eat for free and the waitresses are dressed like nurses) is honest about what their food will do to you.
With the economy down, more restaurants seem to be experimenting with odd sandwiches and other foods to ensnare customers, often without regard to calorie or fat content. What new and unusual sandwich have you encountered that isn’t quite like your mom’s plain, old tuna on Wonder bread?
Cripes, there must something in that Arizona water. :)
Senator Gorman has previously graced our pages in a story about a legislation that was seen as a first step towards banning legal abortions, brought to you by Uncle Dave.
How many rapists in US prisons, after hearing of this, will be man enough to try to prove they are virgins and couldn’t have raped their victims?
An acupuncturist who claims she can detect a man’s virginity based on a small dot on the ear has become a minor celebrity in Vietnam, where she is credited with helping to free three convicted rapists from prison.
Traditional medicine practitioner Pham Thi Hong started lobbying for the men’s release, pleading their case all the way to the president, because she believes all three men are virgins and therefore could not be guilty of rape.
“They all had small red spots on the back of their ears,” said Hong, 54. “The spots should have disappeared if they had had sex. My many years of experience told me that these men did not have sex before.”
[…]
The George W. Bush’s speech writer’s latest theory:
Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.)
Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.
Soccer is collectivist. At this year’s World Cup, the French national team actually went on strike in the middle of the tournament on the eve of an elimination match. (Yes, capitalist sports have experienced labor disputes, but can you imagine a Major League Baseball team going on strike in the middle of the World Series?)
I love how these neocon Republicans pretend they’re for free-market capitalism when most of them voted for TARP and the expansion of literally state-run healthcare (Medicare).
A new study by Harvard University:
The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times “called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles.” That’s 1.4 percent of the time.
I’m sure that now, in the Obama years, the mainstream media has now gone back to describing an action for what it really is… not!
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