RT @WSJ: Census data: median household income for 2nd-generation Hispanics is $48,400, vs. $34,600 for Hispanic immigrants. http://t.co/ouQ…>•<Think on this a little while.>•< 1 hour ago
RT @ColbertReport: "[Terrorists] hate us for our freedom. So the less freedom we have, the less likely they are to attack us." http://t.co/…>•<Think on this a little while.>•< 1 hour ago
@UberFacts That was Harry J. Anslinger, Director of the Treasury Department's then-newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics.>•<Think on this a little while.>•< 2 hours ago
"The Global Consciousness Project, also known as the EGG Project, is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others continuously collecting data from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites worldwide. The archive contains over 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second."
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, June 8, 2013
Much ado about nothing.
That’s how I describe the recent ruckus & hullabaloo made about the recent UK news story that “revealed” the U.S. National Security Agency is “spying” on American citizens at home.
The reality is, that the information the NSA is creating is called “metadata,” is a set of data that describes & gives information about other data. Phone numbers called, dates, times & length of calls is NOTHING by comparison to what BIG BUSINESS knows about us already.
When you bought your car, if you borrowed money to purchase it, the bank or credit union which loaned the money to you performed a background credit check on you before they loaned their money to you.
When you applied for a credit card, did you happen to list your age or birthdate on the application?
What about the life, health, auto, or house insurance policies you have? Did you mention your relationship status, number of children, their ages, specifics of your health including medicines, treatments, surgeries, income & source, length of residency, height, weight, or even the size, color & consistency of your last bowel movement?
I would imagine the answer to ALL those questions – at one time or another – has been “yes.”
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, June 7, 2013
IN AN EARLIER ENTRY I’d written that I had successfully resolved sparsebunlde errors on the Time Capule/Time Machine which I use to back up my computer.
At the time, I thought I had.
However, when I examined the disk, I found there was a duplicate sparsebundle.
Typically, unless the file name is changed by the user, on the OSX (Apple’s MacintoshOperating System) duplicate files are indicated by the presence of an Arabic numeral (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) following any file name. Because the sparsebundle, and any errors arising from it are created by the system, they are therefore not available to be changed by the user. Thus, the file names would be appended with a number as explained.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, January 20, 2013
Among the standard WordPress offerings are statistics on each blog, and corresponding search terms that were used to discover any particular entry. Those are very powerful tools, and in the proper hands, can be effectively utilized.
It’s interesting to read the search terms that often lead to this blog, and to this point, though I have considered opining on some of the more “fascinating” or “peculiar” entries, I shall share something a wee bit less salacious.
In fact, it’s not salacious at all.
One such entry was “what does unified info mean on iPhone“?
First, consider what the word “unified” means.
“Unified” means “to make, or become united, uniform or whole.”
The prefix “uni” means “one.”
By implication, unity, unification, or unified means that exactness is present. There is no variation, or difference.
Things are as one. They are made into one. To unify is to make into one.
New Contact on iPhone – Note the data fields.
New Contact in “Contacts” address book on OSX Note the data fields.
Sample Contact entry in “Contacts” address book on OSX.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, January 13, 2013
Behold but one of the effects of climate change… the mighty Mississippi River going dry.
And really, why argue about what’s causing it when we need to be responding to the problems it creates?
—
Initial Mississippi River Rock Removal Complete, Says Army
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said contractors have completed the first phase of emergency work to remove rocks that have held up barge traffic in the drought-stricken Mississippi River.
Contractors have excavated about 365 cubic yards (279 cubic meters) of limestone from the river near the town of Thebes in southern Illinois, deepening the channel by about two feet, the Corps said in a statement today.
Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices “have been failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate,” the agency wrote in a procurement request issued last week.
NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss, citing procurement rules, declined to name any specific problems the agency has had with its BlackBerry phones. RIM (RIMM) has suffered a few high-profile outages, including a global, three-day disruption last year.
“The NTSB requires effective, reliable and stable communication capabilities to carry-out its primary investigative mission and to ensure employee safety in remote locations,” the agency wrote. “Due to performance issues with the blackberry [sic] devices, the NTSB desires to transition to a different device.”
RIM declined to comment specifically on the NTSB’s criticisms.
Nicholas Carlson | Sep. 15, 2012, 11:32 PM
New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just sent an email to all of Yahoo’s full time and part time employees in the US, promising them a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia, or HTC smartphone.
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Meyer with Michael Arrington founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch at TechCrunch Disrupt September 14, 2011. Photo by Kevin Krejci
“People are happy,” says a source at the company.
A couple weeks ago, we reported that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was considering giving every Yahoo employee a new iPhone or Android smartphone.
Mayer has now put that plan into motion through a program Yahoo is calling “Yahoo!Smart Phones, Smart Fun!”
We learned about this plan from an internal memo, which we received from one source and confirmed with another.
Through the program, Yahoo employees will have a choice of phones: iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, or Nokia Lumia 920.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, September 14, 2012
Gonna’ get yours?
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The iPhone Stimulus
By PAUL KRUGMAN, September 13, 2012
Are you, or is someone you know, a gadget freak? If so, you doubtless know that Wednesday was iPhone 5 day, the day Apple unveiled its latest way for people to avoid actually speaking to or even looking at whoever they’re with.
So is the new phone as insanely great as Apple says? Hey, I’ll leave stuff like that to David Pogue. What I’m interested in, instead, are suggestions that the unveiling of the iPhone 5 might provide a significant boost to the U.S. economy, adding measurably to economic growth over the next quarter or two.
Do you find this plausible? If so, I have news for you: you are, whether you know it or not, a Keynesian — and you have implicitly accepted the case that the government should spend more, not less, in a depressed economy.
Before I get there, let’s talk about where the buzz is coming from.
Tourist and Apple devotes stop and pose to take pictures of the Apple logo adorned front facade of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, USA, 09 September 2012, three days before the anticipated iPhone 5 announcement will be made. EPA/PETER DaSILVA
The controversy targeting Apple’s manufacturing partner in China comes as Apple is expected to unveil the latest iPhone on Wednesday.
Foxconn, which in recent months has come under heavy scrutiny in connection with working conditions in its factories, has conceded that Read the rest of this entry »
SHANGHAI — As Apple prepares to unveil the latest iPhone this week, the company’s manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn Technology, is coming under renewed criticism over labor practices after reports that vocational students were being compelled to work at plants making iPhones and their components.
Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside its factories. Ym Yik/European Pressphoto Agency
Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.
Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.
“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had Read the rest of this entry »
Vice President Biden said, “Now people, when I say that, look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is ‘yes,’ that’s what I’m telling you.”
“And folks look, AARP knows – and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know – that the status quo is simply not acceptable. Its totally unacceptable. And its completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially, Were going to go bankrupt as a nation. Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is ‘yes,’ I’m telling you.”
Of course, Vice President Biden was speaking in context of the Affordable Care Act – also commonly known as “ObamaCare” – which the Government Accountability Office has shown has already demonstrated significant cost savings and proven to be business-stimulating legislation, and that to eliminate it’s protections would cost the federal government even more in the long-term.
Analogously, it’d be like having a fuel inefficient automobile – one that only got about 5 miles/gallon, or less. If you were to purchase even a used vehicle with twice the fuel economy – 10mpg – you could realize significant overall long-term savings. Simply ceasing driving will not solve any problem, but would rather create more problems.
Similarly, could you imagine having an inefficient Heating/Ventilation & Air Conditioning (HVAC) system? You gotta’ stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter – there’s no way around it. And to lower your average monthly utility bills by even 1/3 would be beneficial.
So, here’s a shocker for armchair philosophers, political pundits, amateur economists, Radical Republicans, TEA Party types and more: Government spending – in part – is a significant driver of our nation’s economy. And, spending on economic infrastructure is ALWAYS a most wise investment.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, June 3, 2012
It may be on life support, but it’s still hanging on.
The odd thing about it is, that anyone can take a crappy picture, and most do. Lens flares, inaccurate color balance and other “quirky” things about these inferior quality cameras for some reason, endear them to their users.
When is the last time you took a photo with an old-school camera — the kind that doesn’t have a wireless connection, needs to be loaded with finicky rolls of film and is too bulky to slide into a back pocket?
A panoramic image captured by one of Lomography’s cameras, the Spinner 360. (Lomography)
Unless you are a professional photographer or an artist, it has probably been a while. Most people have abandoned film cameras for digital models or, more recently, smartphones outfitted with lens accessories and apps like Instagram that make photo-sharing extremely simple.
FCC Is Expected to Vote to Open Up Spectrum, EasingPatientMonitoring and Making Product Development LessRisky
Hospitals are getting ready to cut the cord.
In place of knots of wires stuck to patients to monitor their blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen level and body temperature, doctors and the companies that supply them hope to use Band-Aid-like sensors to accomplish the same task wirelessly.
The Federal Communications Commission is expected to vote Thursday to open up spectrum for wireless medical devices, raising the possibility of easier hospital-patient monitoring, fewer tubes in emergency rooms, and more remote monitoring at home.
The shift will make it easier to track patients’ conditions, improving the odds that health problems will be caught before they become an emergency, analysts and clinicians say.
Wireless Hospitals
While wireless technology has boomed for phones and computing, it has been slower to take hold in the medical sphere. Hospitals have Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, April 23, 2012
What would it be like if you could to to your clinician’s office, and within a few minutes have a complete analysis of your blood done to detect whatever bug might be growing in there simply by the DNA of the organism?
It’s being doing now.
But why is there resistance to progress?
—
The Wireless Revolution Hits Medicine
• Updated April 16, 2012, 11:42 a.m. ET
Eric Topol talks about the upheaval that’s coming as the digitization of health care meets the smartphone
By RON WINSLOW
After 14 years as chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, Eric Topol moved to La Jolla, Calif., in 2006 to become director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, which was established to apply genetic discoveries to personalized medicine. Three years later, he helped launch the West Wireless Health Institute, for which he is vice chairman and which is investigating use of wireless technology in the delivery of health care.
The convergence of these two fields—genomics, marked by the rapidly plummeting cost of sequencing a person’s entire genetic code, and wireless, with its flurry of innovative health-care apps—led Dr. Topol to write “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,” a book that offers an illuminating perspective on the coming digitization of health care. It’s also a reminder that while medicine is one of the globe’s premier drivers of innovation, it is also a conservative culture that now finds itself buffeted by transformational change.
The Wall Street Journal’s Ron Winslow discussed the implications with Dr. Topol. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Unnecessary Boundaries
WSJ: Let’s start with the title. “Creative Destruction” is a provocative term. What needs to be destroyed?
DIGITAL DOCTOR Eric Topol advocates the transformative power of technology like the MinIon, a disposable device being developed to sequence parts of an individual’s DNA; a mobile patient monitor enabled by an iPhone app; the Zio patch, worn above the heart to check for irregular heartbeats; and a contact lens embedded with a chip to measure eye pressure for people with or at risk of glaucoma.
DR. TOPOL: There are two levels. One is that in medicine, everything we do essentially is Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, February 24, 2012
Great.
Mitt Romney, official portrait, Governor of Massachusetts
You’ve worked diligently to earn some of your money, while you live off the interest income, and pay a lower tax rate than most normal, regular, hard-working, struggling families.
No one begrudges your wealth.
You should pay a higher rate.
I mean, really.
How many houses do you need?
Even if you have three – while most folks have one (the Census Bureau says that private home ownership rate is 66%) – why do you need a break?
Why not give a break to the little man who’s working to make ends meet, while yours wrap around several times?
C’mon, guy.
What’s the price of a gallon of milk, or loaf of bread?
It’s just that… Mitt, you’re out of touch with reality, and you continually demonstrate how much you’re out of touch every time you open your mouth.
Romney’s Wealth Emerges as Subtext in ‘Cadillac’ Remark
Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) — Mitt Romney is a wealthy man, as he keeps reminding voters, even if it’s unintentional.
In remarks today to the Detroit Economic Club, Romney highlighted his love of American-made cars by saying he owns a Ford Mustang and a Chevrolet pickup, while his wife, Ann, drives “a couple of Cadillacs.”
Cadillacs retail for $36,000 to $74,000, according to Edmunds.com., an online auto market. One reason the Romneys may need multiple vehicles is that they own homes in Massachusetts and California, plus a vacation place in New Hampshire. Read the rest of this entry »
Via Flickr:
The 4our digit passkey is the one with which most may be familiar. Yet some iPhone owners may not be aware that there is another, more secure method of protecting their investment in that wonderfully powerful tool.
A more complex (and therefore secure) combination – one of the user’s own choosing – is able to be used. Not only is the creation of that passkey cAsE sEnSiTiVe, but numbers (0-9) and characters (such as # , $ ) @ + } ~ ? <, etc.) are able to be employed in the creation of the passkey.
Apple continues to improve the camera application on their iPhone, and in the 4S, the resolution of the camera has reached 8MP, and sports all-new optics. Not only does it shoot 1080p HD video, but it boasts a f/2.4 aperture, improved backside illumination sensor, excellent auto white balance, advanced color accuracy, face detection, and reduced motion blur.
As well, the 4S model iPhone has 60 percent more pixels than the camera on iPhone 4.
While the improved camera sensors in the iPhone 4S have increased its sensitivity, it is ultimately the glass that makes any camera’s pictures worthwhile. And the appearance of a five element lens in conjunction with a larger aperture allows better quality light, and more light to reach the camera’s sensors, which results in a clearer focus and significantly improved pictures, overall.
However, those hardware improvement don’t say much about other really cool integrated camera features in iOS 5. And just so you’ll know, iOS 5 will work on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3d & 4th generations.
