Category: Sign of the Apocalypse

If it was anywhere near the first of April, we’d think this is a joke, but it’s not. A materials company, Pvaxx Research & Development, and the University of Warwick in the UK have developed a biodegradable polymer and used it in a prototype cellphone case. The cover of the case has an actual sunflower seed embedded in it. Theoretically, when you’re trading up to a new phone, you plant the cover of the case and it provides nutrients to the seed as the gigantic sunflower grows up in the center of your neighbors’ front lawn (their fussy Lawn Doctored expanse o’ pristine green REALLY needed a whole lot o’ somethin’). Of course, the rest of your phone goes to a landfill on the southside of town where it leaches out heavy metals into the municipal water supply while the “green” cover is grabbing all the media attention on CNN.

It’s really hard for most of us, sitting in our cozy homes, in our ergonomic task chairs, bloated from the holidays, to wrap our craniums around what just happened in southeast Asia. Tens upon tens of thousands of people dead in an instant and an equal number likely to die from the taint of death left in their wake. I saw a guy on the news last night who lives here in Maryland but is from Sumatra. He lost *30* members of his immediate and extended family! Siblings, parents, grandparents, nieces, nephews, cousins — all gone.

One thing we have no trouble doing is clicking buttons and spending money. I just found myself (through a typical morning serendipity search) on the Red Cross’s donation page on Amazon. If you have an account on Amazon, you can send mullah at the click of a button.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of excellent and well-meaning blog activity. One thing I found is a quick summary/ratings of some relief charities (which led me to the pushing buttons and transfering of invisible cash via Amazon.

Also, check out the Google Tsunami Relief page and The Tsunami Blog.

Wired has a story about Chatting AIM Bot, described as “a free service that lets anyone play a devious practical joke on a friend, in which an artificially intelligent AOL instant message, or AIM, bot carries on an innocuous, 10-minute conversation before finally lowering the boom and informing the unwitting human at the other end they’ve been had.”

The bot, which apparently IMs the victim using the capitalization-challenged, abbreviation-loving style common to 13-year-olds, then emails a transcript of the conversation back to the victimizer.

Does anyone else feel for Imation every time the news media shows the latest Al-Qaeda   
computer discs seized in Pakistan, and they’re always Imation-brand CD-Rs? I mean, do they know that they were on Imation media, and what difference does that make if they were? I would think a company would really sweat such evil association, sorta like Kool-Aid and the Jonestown massacre.

According to Screensavers.com, there may be a hint of the results of elections to come on the basis of who is downloading what screensaver or wallpaper for their PC:

Date	Bush	Kerry
May 11-17	55%	45%
May 5-10	47%	53%
April 28-May 4	63%	37%
April 21-27	59%	41%
April 14-20	57%	43%
April 7-13	60%	40%
April 1-6	51%	49%

…or it could be that those who want to see the face of their preferred candidate on their desktop every day are more absorbed in appearences than focused on the issues, and won’t bother to show up at the polls. You choose.

“OK, I admit it. I was just a front man for the real fathers of Linux: the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. They (for obvious reasons) couldn’t step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the computer bug and had been developing a series of operating systems on their own during the off-season.”

So says Linus Torvalds, previously credited with writing a key componant of the GNU/Linux operating system. He was responding to claims that he plagiarized it all by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, funded by Microsoft.

I read stories about BlueSnarfing and Bluejacking with a high degree of skepticism — it just seemed like a trend that was harmless and not likely to really take off. Well, it turns out that the dangers of someone hijacking your Bluetooth phone are actually pretty high. Owners of the T610 or Nokia 6310 could actually get jacked and the perp could use their phone for sending faxes and SMS, calling numbers from the target phone, disrupting calls and other potentially high-charge nastiness. Until there’s some kind of fix for this, it appears the only solution is to only turn your BT on in secure areas, which means in the middle of a wheat field at least 400 feet from the nearest other BT enabled human.

via Gizmodo

You’d swear this was an Onion story, but it’s true — Long John Silver’s is giving away free giant shrimp because of the recent discovery of evidence of an ancient flowing body of salt water on Mars:

“We can’t wait to celebrate NASA’s out-of-this-world success, and there’s no better way to recognize their giant accomplishments than with free Giant Shrimp for America.”

The only connections I can think of between the discovery and giant shrimp are that perhaps LJS’s is admitting that these giant mutant shrimp are actually not from earth, or perhaps that the discovery of salt water on Mars opens the possibility of shrimp farming on the red planet, which would certainly be much better for our environment considering that shrimp is one of the worst species to eat because of the environmental impacts of their harvest…but then again, they are so tasty, especially wrapped in bacon….

via boingboing

CNN is reporting that Microsoft has come up with a scheme to have users pay money to send email as a way to discourage spammers. That should come as no surprise, since the “killer app” of the Internet has gone so long without Microsoft getting any money out of it. But Microsoft is also claiming that their idea wouldn’t actually generate revenue for them because you could earn “email credits” by, for instance, solving a simple math problem, thus verifying your earnest interest in sending an email.

Not only is this idea one of the dumbest I’ve ever heard, but it’s one of the dumbest I’ve ever heard (oops, wrote myself into a hyperbolic corner there). The idea that somehow Microsoft is proposing this and not going to make money on it in one way or another is ridiculous. Surely there will be ads on the web pages with the credit-generating math problems or something of the sort. Or there will be a “float” that Microsoft can take advantage of in some way, or a micro-fee that you’ll have to pay just to get the credits. Something. The invisible hand just doesn’t work the way that Microsoft claims it does.

I have a better idea: let’s implement a system whereby every time you send an email it costs you a penny, but each time you receive an email you earn a penny. Not only would that discourage spammers, but it would discourage all sorts of those jokes and pron-lite that people send around on Fridays. And it would actually encourage people to engage in dialog! People who routinely didn’t respond to emails would run up a debt, and their credit rating would be ruined! Or I suppose we might could just use whuffie and everyone could have a whuffie filter on their email so that non-responders would automatically go to the spam folder…

It seems Nokia just can’t win with its mobile gaming/cell phone hybrid the N-Gage. According to MobileMag, the Advertising Standards Authority has banned the Nokia ads that show various locations with subtext that described what happened there, i.e. a bathroom with the text “this is where I missed the rim” or a bus stop with “this is where I got further with Lara than anyone else.”

Apparently some folks had complained that the ads are sexually suggestive, or evoke situations in which crimes may have occurred, reminding victims of their suffering.

Don’t worry — in case you’ve never heard of the Advertising Standards Authority, that’s because it’s a UK agency. We here in the US are still able to see these ads – bad as they may be (in quality, not taste).