| Intel peddles pie in the sky
INTEL'S PAUL OTELLINI gave a CES keynote that had one new codeword, some tech that is much farther off than he hopes and a lot of older process technology news. We will skip the older stuff. The technology is based on the idea of a Star Trekish communicator, a little PDA that will translate voice on the fly. This may not surprise you, the tech is close to real, and probably will be available in the not hugely distant future. It may even be in PDA form before we all die of old age and ennuis. The part less likely to happen before the sun dies a heat death is the camera on the back translating everything that you take a picture of. The Chinese writing on the store menu might be possible, but tossing in contextual info based on pictures? Overlay it intelligently on video in realtime? Ummm, call me a skeptic......
China enacts new labour law amid rising discontent
Chinas new Labour Contract Law came into effect at the beginning of the year. The government and state-run media has hailed the legislation as a milestone in the protection of the rights of Chinese workers. In reality, it formally guarantees only the most minimal working conditions, which in many sweatshops will simply be ignored. The key provision is that all workers in China must be employed on the basis of a written contract that stipulates their wage rates and under what conditions they can be fired. Previously, at least 40 percent of employees of private companies had no contract at all. Employers must also contribute to a social insurance or unemployment fund for each worker. Employees who have worked for over 10 years for the same firm or had a fixed-term contract renewed twice are entitled to an open-ended contract.
Delirious? to release Kingdom of Comfort
The RIAA Certified Gold-selling, globally impacting Christian rock band Delirious? return with their eleventh studio album, Kingdom of Comfort, set to release April 1, 2008 on Sparrow Records. It is the first new studio album since the acclaimed 2005 release, Mission Bell, Delirious?'s Kingdom of Comfort questions everything, from cancer to consumerism, “five star" dreams to slums and poverty. It is an album that calls for sacrifice, social justice and love. Recent tours have taken Delirious? to some of the poorest countries on earth where they've faced encounters with life that made poverty personal and forced hard questions to be asked by each member of the band. The visits have sparked a newfound commitment to social justice and compassionate ministry as an outworking of their being drawn ever closer to the Kingdom of God, as opposed to the kingdom of comfort.
CBR surpasses tax collection target by 11.5%
ISLAMABAD: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has surpassed the revised revenue target of Rs 264.1 billion assigned for July-October period of the current fiscal year, indicating a cumulative growth of 11.5 percent.
According to an official announcement made...
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Tim Masters, wrongly convicted of murder, ready to get on with life
FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) Tim Masters no longer has a burning desire to put Fort Collins squarely in his rear-view mirror.
Masters, who on Jan. 22 was released from a life prison sentence after serving almost nine years for murder, had initially planned to leave the city as soon as he could.
Too many bad memories, he said the day before his release.
Fort Collins police pursued Masters as a suspect in the 1987 stabbing death of Peggy Hettrick he was 15 when she was killed through high school and the Navy and eventually arrested him in 1998. He was convicted by a jury in 1999 but saw his conviction overturned earlier this month by a judge who agreed DNA evidence pointed to another suspect.
Now, Masters is a free man, although a cloud of suspicion follows him around.
Mother Earth Mother Board
The financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are much closer to each other than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan. Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand up on end in more than just the purely electrical sense - it must have seemed supernatural. Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with his code was "What hath God wrought!" - almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil, was behind it. During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented.
Review: Treo 700p (with Sprint or Verizon Wireless service)
On the business side, the device comes with VersaMail to connect to common Internet mail providers but will support POP and IMAP mail. For corporate mail, the device supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (Exchange 2003). Other third-party e-mail providers (including Good Technology) have announced support for the 700p. Once you get your e-mail, the Documents To Go application continues to support the viewing of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file attachments, and users can edit Word and Excel documents on the device. As a personal entertainment device, the 700p includes a 1.3-megapixel camera/camcorder and the Pocket Tunes digital audio player, which can play music from a Secure Digital card. The Sprint TV application was OK; watching live TV or other video clips was hit or miss (sometimes the system timed out trying to connect, or I got jittery video).
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