• Deconstructing Steve Jobs. Flash and the iPhone.
  • Oprah Winfrey in the Tech News.
  • HP drops the Slate after MSFT drops Courier.
  • Is Google getting dull? Some major thinkers think so. I tell why.
  • Adobe CS5 now out!
  • HP is bringing help from Sears.

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Not just theater of the air, but theater of the absurd. And we pay for the ticket whether we want to experience the show or not.

A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install “useless” imaging machines at airports across the country.

“I don’t know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.

“That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport,” Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.
[…]
Sela testified it makes more sense to create a “trusted traveller” system so pre-approved low-risk passengers can move through an expedited screening process. That would leave more resources in the screening areas, where automatic sniffing technology would detect any explosive residue on a person or their baggage.

Behavioural profiling also must be used instead of random checks, he said.


An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history…

The process is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor. Cement, pumped down the well from the drilling rig, is also used to plug wells after they have been abandoned or when drilling has finished but production hasn’t begun.

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, workers had finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the well with cement; it isn’t known whether they had completed the plugging process before the blast.

Regulators have previously identified problems in the cementing process as a leading cause of well blowouts, in which oil and natural gas surge out of a well with explosive force…

The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week…

Halliburton also was the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea, off Australia. The rig there caught fire and a well leaked tens of thousands of barrels of oil over 10 weeks before it was shut down. The investigation is continuing…

Federal officials declined to comment on their investigation, and Halliburton didn’t respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal.

Golly gee, that’s a surprise.


http://www.productwiki.com/upload/images/linksys_rv082.jpg

Linksys used to be a great company before Cisco bought it. I have a Linksys RV082. A couple of months ago Cisco released a firmware “upgrade” that has made the router barely usable. Version 2.0.0.19tm is poison. If you are running an earlier version – DON’T UPGRADE. Once you upgrade you can’t go back to an earlier version.

After upgrading, web access is very slow. If a page has multiple images on it many of the images don’t load. However if the RV082 is removed and I connect directly to the cable modem it works normally. I have been hoping that Cisco would fix the problem but so far nothing.

This I think is an example of what happens sometimes when a big company buys up a good smaller company and then manages to destroy it through stupidity. Linksys has really gone downhill and I’m just not going to buy any more of their products. I’m now looking to replace my broken dual wan router with something that actually works. Cisco sucks.


Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn’t have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.

The lack of the device, called an acoustic switch, could amplify concerns over the environmental impact of offshore drilling after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last week.

The accident has led to one of the largest ever oil spills in U.S. water and the loss of 11 lives…

U.S. regulators don’t mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn’t have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated…

Nevertheless, regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, in effect require them. Norway has had acoustic triggers on almost every offshore rig since 1993.

The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn’t needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.

Golly. Does that infer the Oil Patch Boys bought enough politicians and bureaucrats to stop regulation.

An acoustic trigger costs about $500,000, industry officials said. The Deepwater Horizon had a replacement cost of about $560 million, and BP says it is spending $6 million a day to battle the oil spill…

RTFA. Lots of history, lots of detail. You do the math!


Artist’s interpretation

UPDATE:
Wow! Who could have predicted this?

To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake. The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on location on Mt. Ararat. In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site. In the winter of 2008 a Chinese climber taken by Parasut’s men to the site saw the wood, but couldn’t get inside because of the severe weather conditions. During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site.

ORIGINAL STORY:

THE remains of Noah’s Ark have been discovered 13,000ft up a Turkish mountain, it has been claimed. A group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers say they have found wooden remains on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. They claim carbon dating proves the relics are 4,800 years old — around the same time the ark was said to be afloat. Yeung Wing-Cheung, from the Noah’s Ark Ministries International research team, said: “It’s not 100 per cent that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it.”

He said the structure contained several compartments, some with wooden beams, that they believe were used to house animals.

The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds none have ever been found above 11,000ft in the vicinity, Yeung said. Local Turkish officials will ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site can be protected while a major archaeological dig is conducted.

The biblical story says that God decided to flood the Earth after seeing how corrupt it was.

Huh, I thought they found that boat long ago.


  • iPhone story getting on my nerves. I explain why.
  • Steve Jobs says why he does not like Flash in a long memo that I doubt he wrote.
  • Microsoft kills iPad killer.
  • Telescope smashes car.
  • Sony sued by Linux users.
  • Apple gets into voice tech.
  • New Ubuntu upgrades.
  • MSFT hopes to embed media center into HDTV set directly. May do a deal with HTC.

Show sponsored by e-Harmony. Get a date.
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This Episode’s Executive Producers: Liam Duffield, Bill Hertha
Artwork by: Peekasso
Knighthood: Liam Duffield

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For those who haven’t seen it, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was caught on microphone describing a voter as bigoted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14f3aOC929w&feature=player_embedded


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Today’s Guests:
Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank
Sam Levin, Brand Evangelist
David Spark, Host, The Spark Minute

The Topics:
Does Chrome OS Bet Too Much On the Cloud?
Is Apple Moving to AMD?
Library of Congress to Archive All Tweets
3D On Your iPad?
Too Much Fragmentation for Mobile Apps?

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Metro Detroit motorists who exceed posted speed limits may not be breaking the law, because in many cases the limits themselves are unlawful, according to one of the state’s top traffic cops.

Four years after the passage of Public Act 85, which requires municipalities in Michigan to conduct studies to set proper speed limits, most cities, villages and townships have not complied, according to Lt. Gary Megge, head of the Michigan State Police Traffic Services Section. One likely reason, said Megge, whose section advises communities on how to set proper speed limits, is that communities want speeding ticket revenue, and failing to conduct the required speed studies allows them to keep enforcing their speed limits that Megge calls “artificially low.


Legendary White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, talks about her latest book and Obama’s stance on business.


Not a surprise, but interesting none the less.

In an ideal world, elections should be two things: free and fair. Every adult, with a few sensible exceptions, should be able to vote for a candidate of their choice, and each single vote should be worth the same.

Ensuring a free vote is a matter for the law. Making elections fair is more a matter for mathematicians. They have been studying voting systems for hundreds of years, looking for sources of bias that distort the value of individual votes, and ways to avoid them. Along the way, they have turned up many paradoxes and surprises. What they have not done is come up with the answer. With good reason: it probably doesn’t exist.

The many democratic electoral systems in use around the world attempt to strike a balance between mathematical fairness and political considerations such as accountability and the need for strong, stable government. Take first-past-the-post or “plurality” voting, which used for national elections in the US, Canada, India – and the UK, which goes to the polls next week. Its principle is simple: each electoral division elects one representative, the candidate who gained the most votes.

This system scores well on stability and accountability, but in terms of mathematical fairness it is a dud.


Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. This week we talk about the gloom in Europe and other market curiosities.

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  • HP to buy Palm. Why? For patents maybe?
  • MSFT demands patent royalties from Android vendors.
  • Are the earth’s oceans from outer space?
  • Facebook hates privacy it seems.
  • SF government worker found guilty.
  • Activision getting sued.
  • What is Windows Home Server?
  • Win 7 embedded coming.
  • Oregon Schools to use Google apps.
  • Google says it is neutral to net neutrality. 
  • Phone stats indicate Android has an edge.

Show sponsored by e-Harmony. Get a date.
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