send me videos!

TV sets a turnoff for South Korea's youth | CNET News.com

User-generated content sites such as "ipop" have clubs where users can pay by the download or pony up monthly subscription fees of about 10,000 won to 20,000 won ($11 to $22) that will let them tap into a huge library of U.S., Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV programming and movies.

One of the most popular peer-to-peer clubs, Mansal, has had nearly 50 million visitors. While many are repeats, the total is still almost equal to the country's population.

"I like to download stuff because I don't have to wait to watch something" Seong-sun said.

The clubs make money from subscription fees and advertising. Young professionals with little time to spare and students with an abundance of time to search for material are the main clients for these services--making cable TV and TV sets obsolete.

don't eat me

Polar Bears on Yahoo! News Photos

Dolphins rescue surfer from shark - People: Tales of survival - MSNBC.com

That attack shredded his back, literally peeling the skin back, he said, “like a banana peel.” But because Endris’ stomach was pressed to the surfboard, his intestines and internal organs were protected.

The third time, the shark tried to swallow Endris’ right leg, and he said that was actually a good thing, because the shark’s grip anchored him while he kicked the beast in the head and snout with his left leg until it let go.

The dolphins, which had been cavorting in the surf all along, showed up then. They circled him, keeping the shark at bay, and enabled Endris to get back on his board and catch a wave to the shore.

Our finned friends
No one knows why dolphins protect humans, but stories of the marine mammals rescuing humans go back to ancient Greece, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

A year ago in New Zealand, the group reports, four lifeguards were saved from sharks in the same way Endris was — by dolphins forming a protective ring.

diamonds

Wis. man finds 3.92-ct white diamond - Yahoo! News

His fiancee Susan Gabrielson — who has "only one carat on her finger" — her daughter Sayde and Susan's sister Sarah accompanied Blake to the park this week. Susan found a 1.47-carat stone and some smaller gems Monday.

"We're going back out today. We'll take a lunch and then go back into the field," Blake said.

More than 700 diamonds have been found at the park this year.

The Crater of Diamonds park is the world's only diamond-producing site open to the public and visitors can keep the stones they dig up. The largest diamond ever found in the United States, the 40-carat white diamond named Uncle Sam, was unearthed in 1924 at the Murfreesboro park.

I need more bling for my ring!

Chore Wars

'Chore Wars,' where 'World of Warcraft' meets toilet cleaner | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

'Chore Wars,' where 'World of Warcraft' meets toilet cleaner
Posted by Michael Kanellos

SAN FRANCISCO--Housework is a lot more fun with a battle axe and a couple of dwarves.

Chore Wars, a game shown off by noted game developer Jane McGonigal at the Web 2.0 Summit recently, gives users "experience" points for various household chores. Collecting those points then lets you advance your profile in the online game.

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal speaks at the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco this past May.
(Credit: James Martin, CNET News.com)

Swiffer the floor twice a week and get 20 points for charm, that sort of thing. You can also play for virtual gold doubloons. These can be exchanged for rewards, inside your own circle of friends. Earn 200 doubloons and you can receive a get-out of-cleaning-the garage card. Or if you are the low scorer for a month, you can be dubbed a scapegoat and put up for adoption.

Naturally, most players concentrate on people you know. Who cares if some guy in Texas slew 200 yards of PVC pipe in putting together his new sprinkler system and got 1,000 doubloons. The bean bags in your guest room still need to be stacked. Still, you can get a sense of the value that other people put on certain tasks to get a sense of the value of your own.

There are different roles you can play--apprentice, dungeon master (DMs have full administrative power and get to wield the unstoppable cleansing power of Comet) and adventurer.

I hate it.

mags would be he dungeon master, and I would have to clean the toilets for 20 gold.

Bubble Blogger...

Real estate blogger taps into bursting market bubble

Every once in a while his two worlds - programming and blogging - collide. Time was, Killelea was best known as the author of "Web Performance Tuning," a geeky manual that helped him get jobs. Now his fame as a bubble blogger has spread - not always to his advantage. "Once a guy called me in for a job interview just to berate me," he said. "I don't do this language called Ruby that he wanted, so I said, 'Why did you bring me here?' He said, 'I want to talk to you about your Web site.' He complained about how he had overpaid for a house in Palo Alto and couldn't get out of it. It was not a civil conversation."

Sometimes I ping dennis and yell at him too stupid php and housing in mountain view!

I go buckwild

Man in China dies after three-day Internet session - Yahoo! News

A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.
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The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.

when my wife goes out of town, I go on a gaming binge. She usually gets back in 2 days, to prevent my death... the third day would kill me.

old doods younger chicks

May/December Couples Boost Human Lifespan - Yahoo! News

How it works

Women often lose their reproductive capacity around age 50, but if men can still reproduce into their 70s, Darwin would say it's advantageous for males to live longer lives providing they can hook up with a woman capable of reproducing. Natural selection should favor longevity-boosting genes, which would get passed down from fathers to both sons and daughters. So women would benefit as well in future generations, the scientists say.

Result: Over time, the older-guy-with-younger-gal lifestyle would lift the lifespan ceiling for both men and women in the next generations and so on.

"By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes," said study team member Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.

vacu seal my meat!

Tumble your way to tasty meat | Kitchen Gadgets - CNET Blogs

Tumble your way to tasty meat
Posted by Jennifer Guevin

Now even procrastinators can serve up tender, tasty meat as if they hadn't forgotten to start marinating until 10 minutes before their guests arrived.
Meat in barrel

The Reveo requires a surprisingly small amount of marinade. Mmmm...meat juice...
(Credit: Jennifer Guevin/CNET Networks)

I recently got to test out the Reveo MariVac from Eastman Outdoors, a funky kitchen appliance that looks suspiciously like a rock tumbler and that the company claims can cut down the time it takes to marinate meat to a fraction of the norm.

To use it, you just put raw meat and marinade into a compartment that tumbles it all together for up to 20 minutes. The idea behind the machine is that it vacuums out the air in the main barrel, stretching the fibers of the meat to allow the marinade to soak deeper into the meat in a shorter amount of time. All the while, the barrel turns, tumbling the meat and the marinade together in a messy bucket of flavor and goodness.

i want to order a hamburgler!

dont eat my doggie

Councilor: Ship stray dogs to Korea - Yahoo! News

A soup with dog meat called boshintang is popular in Korea, especially on the three hot "dog days" of summer on the lunar calendar. The traditional belief is that dog meat helps boost stamina and virility, but activists regularly criticize the practice and call for bans on eating dog meat.

Please don't eat my doggie... bow wow

watch out for da bomb!

hello kitty punishment

Bad Thai cops to endure Kitty shame - Yahoo! News

Police officers caught littering, parking in a prohibited area, or arriving late — among other misdemeanors — will be forced to stay in the division office and wear the armband all day, said Police Col. Pongpat Chayaphan. The officers won't wear the armband in public.

The striking armband features Hello Kitty sitting atop two hearts.

jumbo squid

Voracious jumbo squid invade California - Yahoo! News

An aggressive predator, the Humboldt squid — or Dosidicus gigas — can change its eating habits to consume the food supply favored by tuna and sharks, its closest competitors, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

yummy

j2me 904 errors?

Are you getting j2me errors? This usually means that your cell phone decided to cache the jar file, while updating your jad file. Two possible solutions:

1. clear the history on your phone browser or power cycle the bastard.
2. update the jad/jar name. Stuff a random number param at the end of the jad/jar so that the phone doesnt update it
3. add this to your apache config file

LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
.....
AddModule mod_expires.c
.....


ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor "access plus 1 second"
ExpiresByType application/java-archive "access plus 1 second"

so sad

j2me woes

Java ME Mobile Phone Applications - Conclusions - www.shinetech.com

Conclusions

In this article I’ve explained the good, bad, and just plain ugly features of Java ME.

First, we saw that "the good” included:

* Core features for interacting with devices
* Easy to develop, and existing Java skills can be leveraged
* Wide ranging availability
* Package portability across different devices
* Deployment is trivial
* Tools are abundant and of an excellent caliber

Next, I explained how "the bad” concerned problems of API versioning and fragmentation, and the associated difficulties of configuring mobile phones for internet access. Finally, we saw how "the ugly” usually concerned the runtime environment (devices and carriers) and centered on security certificates, locked-out functionality and Java verification.

In my opinion the “good” of Java ME far outweighs both the bad and the ugly. There are alternatives to Java ME, but if you want to deliver robust applications to the widest possible mobile phone audience, it’s the best technology to go with. The Java ME community is active and exciting. Furthermore, it’s a technology that is both a de-facto standard and rewarding to work with.

Java ME – a little bit of bad, a touch of ugly, but mostly good.

Decent article summarizing the challenges of using j2me. I'll have to say that porting is a nightmare, especially when you are working on cutting edge work.

Opera 4 mini is good web browser for mobile phones. I’ve used it on a new prototype MOT q9 phone and 8830 black berry. It displays a website, exactly how you would see it on a computer. And it auto-zooms to the readable portions of the website, and the text is sized to fit on the screen perfectly. The text and images in the zoomed in portion are very readable on my blackberry 8830. However in the zoomed-out view, the view is too fuzzy to be useful. You can navigate if you know what you are looking for. Most phones are about 72 dpi, which contributes to the fuzzy screen. The iphone is much more useful in the zoomed out view because of the 140 DPI, and 480x640 screen.

You have be a bit careful though, the websites you visit are processed and read by a server hosted by the opera folks. I would not do any secure type of banking or ebay things with opera mini.

Watch this annoying video about iphone browser against opera mini.

http://www.operamini.com/beta/video/

Annoying blackberry j2me development notes

1. No left or right soft keys.
2. You cannot mix midlets and blackberry APIs.
3. Garbage collection causes hourglass to appear on the screen.
4. Track wheel on older blackberries go only up and down. Trackballs act normally.
5. Video implementation for MMAPI is crippled for video running from http URL.

2 billion Chinese mice overrun lake area - Yahoo! News

Now, an estimated 2 billion mice are ravaging crops in 22 counties around the lake, and authorities were rushing to construct walls and ditches to keep the rodents out. Residents have killed more than 2.3 million field mice — or 90 tons of the rodents, Xinhua said.

In Hunan province's Yiyang County, a ditch along the lakeshore was filled with mice. Residents were using clubs and shovels to beat them to death, while others scooped the furry animals out using fishing nets.

Ratatuillie goes crazy!

i hope there aren't any lines here!

China public restroom has 1,000 stalls - Yahoo! News

BEIJING - They're flush with pride in a southwestern Chinese city where a recently-opened porcelain palace features an Egyptian facade, soothing music and more than 1,000 toilets spread out over 32,290 square feet.
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Officials in Chongqing are preparing to submit an application to Guinness World Records to have the free four-story public bathroom listed as the world's largest, the state-run China Central Television reported Friday.

My wife would love this, then she wouldn't have to wait in line!