RSSShould We Believe This Story
After the false “finger in the chili” story and the GA kidnapped bride hoax please excuse me if I am holding off on my decision as to whether this is a true story.
10-year-old boy in Sherman Oaks, Calif., suffered first-degree burns on his leg and groin area when a cell phone exploded in his pocket, according to a Local 6 News report.
Leobarda Villalobos recently purchased a Motorola phone for her son, Yovani. At some point, the phone exploded in Yovani’s pants.
He was treated at the Grossman Burn Center.
The family is trying to determine what could have gone wrong since the cell phone has not been recalled, according to the report.
Motorola officials are not commenting.
I am hoping it’s true but all I can think of is the many stories of my youth and my friends of what we made up to our parents to get us out of some pretty stupid things we did. Then the movie “A Christmas Story” comes to mind when Ralphie blames his broken eyeglasses on a fallen ice cycle rather than the BB gun.
Of course if it turns out to be true remind me to scream at the woman who always seems to be at the place where I get my gas that always is pumping her gas with her cell phone attached to her ear.
Intermix Sued Over ‘Spyware’
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued a major Internet marketer, claming they secretly installed software that delivered nuisance pop-up advertisements and can slow and crash personal computers.
A six-month investigation found that the company installed a wide range of advertising software on countless personal computers nationwide, with more than 3.7 million downloads directed at New Yorkers alone, Spitzer said.
“Spyware and adware are more than an annoyance,” Spitzer said. “These fraudulent programs foul machines, undermine productivity and in many cases frustrate consumers’ efforts to remove them from their computers. These issues can serve to be a hindrance to the growth of e-commerce.”
Christopher Lipp, senior vice president and general counsel for Intermix, denied promoting or condoning spyware, saying its toolbars and redirect applications do not collect personal information on computer users.
I am relieved I have nevered visited these sites.
According to Spitzer, Intermix owns and operates such Web sites as mycoolscreen.com, cursorzone.com and flowgo.com, which advertised screensavers, games and other software available for download. Though those programs are free, they often carry other software for delivering ads and can interfere with normal computer use, he said.
One of the company’s ad-delivery programs, “KeenValue,” delivered pop-up ads while another program, “IncrediFind,” redirected Web addresses to Intermix’s own search engine, Spitzer said.
The ad software sometimes comes without notice, or if a user was asked permission, it was often through a vague reference in a lengthy licensing agreement that could be misleading or inaccurate, investigators said.
The programs sometimes omitted “un-install” applications and couldn’t be removed by most computers’ add/remove function, Spitzer said.
Spitzer’s civil suit accuses Intermix of violating state General Business Law provisions against false advertising and deceptive business practices. He also accuses them of trespass under New York common law.
Internet Continues To Grow As A News Source
Techdirt is a great resource for Technology News. Here is a post from today:
Internet Continues To Grow As A News Source
Upwards of 26 percent of adults now prefer the Internet as their primary news source, which is up 35 percent since 2001. These gains are at the expense of newspapers and magazines. Forming a viable online strategy is clearly becoming more critical for the newspapers and magazines. As we’ve discussed before, while it’s still unclear if newsprint will go away completely, the ones putting their content in walled gardens are accelerating their demise. Prohibit users from finding their content will serve only to turn them off of your content and look elsewhere. True, they might cannibalize offline sales, but it sounds like users are leaving anyway; might as well give them a place to go.
The Environmentalist War on the Price of Gasoline,
Could it be that the high price of gasoline is not the fault of the Middle East, but of the Environmentalists?
The lack of capacity in REFINING the oil to gasoline seems to be the problem. Since 1976, 29 years by my reckoning, we have not built a refinery in the United States. It is my guess that we are using more gasoline since 1976. Heck, we need the Iranians and the Saudis to point this out to us. And if a major refinery becomes a target of terrorism, we are going to see significantly higher prices at the pump. heck, just a normal fire effects the price of gasoline.
Then we have the wonderful practice, lobbied for by the Environmentalists, of having special blends of gasoline for different regions of the country. When the already stretched refineries have to make that many blends, and then pump them to different spots all around the country, we are not being very efficient with a scarce resource.
So, what can we do? Ask President Bush to address this issue immediately. I bet if we went to one standard blend on refined gasoline for the whole of the United States, we would increase efficiency exponentially. It would be a fix that would resonate with;
- the refiners in lower costs,
- the companies who operate the pipelines, they will not have to manage the flow of all the different blends
- the population who will see lower prices immediately at the pump
Then, we can properly address the refinery production issue at a solid baseline and determine how much capacity we need as a nation.
The Environmental Lobby has to be stopped on this issue. Gasoline is still cheaper than milk by the gallon. What concerns me is that we have such a discombobulated system that any hitch in the refining process can cause an impact on our economy. This needs to be corrected soon.
Music was meant to be Free. Real Networks is taking another step in that direction.
First thing, I can not stand real media player. The ethics of the company, hiding shareware in the install process has always made me furious. I refuse to install it on my computers.
However, watching the controversy over the RIAA and the downloading of music has been something I have watched. It has been my assumption that music is fighting to be free, and once it is so, the artists stand to make much more money than they are now. As long as the record companies control the distribution of music, the artists will never achieve their earning potential. The biggest stars make their millions, but every other artist subsidizes the stars and typically barely breaks even selling their music through the record companies.
So today RealNetworks announced that if you download and install the Rhapsody software, they will give you 25 songs. That is not bad. My only fear is that in doing so, they will install spyware on the computer to make up some of the money that they are losing giving away the music. For the consumer, it is a windfall, and there is no commitment to buy any more music.
Soon most artists not under a contract will put their music out for free, and the exposure they will recieve will be much greater than any record label would ever give them.
The article is below the fold.
