73,000...holy hannah...
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73,000...holy hannah...
From a few posts back.Quote:
Originally Posted by RobinHood3000
"New relationship smell"???? What?
New relationship smell: the period common to the early stages of most relationships where it seems like every interaction is brimming with chemistry, stemming possibly from genuine compatibility but existing at least in part in the sheer novelty and excitement of a new relationship.
Oh, now I get it. The chemistry is letting off fumes, which have that new-relationship odor. Makes a lot of sense, and brought a smile to my face!
Thousands of people have subscribed to a self-destruct text message service which started on Sunday in the UK, says the firm behind the system.
The commercial service allows sensitive messages to be destroyed 40 seconds after being read.
Developed by a British firm, Staellium, it is designed to allay worries about incriminating messages.
The company said it has had interest from businesses, the Ministry of Defence, as well as celebrity agents.
Mission possible
Staellium likened its system to that of the self-destructing tape recorders featured in the 1970's TV show, Mission Impossible.
"The technology behind StealthText is derived from military technology, so the comparisons with Mission Impossible are justified," said Carole Barnum, chief executive of Staellium UK.
"The ability to send a self-destruct message has massive benefits for people from all walks of life, from everyday mobile users through to celebrities and business people," she said.
The most high-profile case of embarrassing text messages in recent years was the revelations of messages sent from England football captain David Beckham to his personal assistant Rebecca Loos.
Privacy comes at a price. Each text using the system costs 50 pence, though users have to sign up for a minimum of 10 messages.
People interested in using the service to send messages have to register and download a small program onto their mobile phone.
Once a message has been sent, the recipient receives a text notification showing the sender's name and a link to the message.
After they have opened it, the message disappears after 40 seconds.
Despite the fact the message will be removed from phones, users cannot entirely avoid a data trail.
For legal reasons, a log of the message will remain on a secure server to which they have no access.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4524770.stm
Municipal regulations normally ban anything from smoking in public places to parking in certain zones. But officials in the Brazilian town of Biritiba Mirim, 70km (45 miles) east of Sao Paulo, have gone far beyond that.
They plan to prohibit residents from dying because the local cemetery has reached full capacity.
Mayor Roberto Pereira says the bill is meant as a protest against federal regulations that bar new or expanded cemeteries in preservation areas.
"They have not taken local demands into consideration", he claims.
Mr Pereira wants to build a new cemetery, but the project has been stalled because 98% of Biritiba Mirim is considered a preservation area.
A 2003 decree by Brazil's National Environment Council forbids burial grounds in protected areas.
'Ridiculous'
Biritiba Mirim, a town of 28,000 inhabitants, not only wants to prohibit residents from passing away.
The bill also calls on people to take care of their health in order to avoid death.
"I haven't got a job, nor am I healthy. And now they say I can't die. That's ridiculous," Amarildo do Prado, a unemployed resident, told local media.
The city council is expected to vote on the regulation next week.
"Of course the bill is laughable, unconstitutional, and will never be approved," said Gilson Soares de Campos, an aide to the mayor.
"But can you think of a better marketing strategy to persuade the government to modify the environmental legislation that is barring us from building a new cemetery?"
The bill states that "offenders will be held responsible for their acts". However, it does not say what the punishment will be.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4527868.stm
This sounds like a Terry pratchhet book... cant you just see poor Deaths shocked face?
:D
Penguins at a zoo in northern Japan have been taken on their first walk of the season in an attempt to keep them trim during the winter. Asahiyama Zoo on the northern island of Hokkaido take its King Penguins on a 500-metre walk twice a day to stop them getting too fat during the cold months.
Spokesman Tetsuo Yamazaki said penguins gained weight in winter because they stood still to conserve energy.
The exercise programme takes place between December and the Spring.
"This stroll is done twice - 11 o'clock and 1430 - of every day until the snow disappears," Mr Yamazaki said, adding that each walk lasted about 30 minutes
"Just like in humans... the fat accumulates during the winter months, and the blood-sugar level rises," Mr Yamazaki said.
The penguins can only be taken on walks during the snowy months because their feet are unsuitable for walking on other surfaces, Mr Yamazaki said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/4530928.stm
Seee they are controlling them!!
:eek:
I need to start a panic button thread aka The Hills where we can all be safe!
:eek:
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!:eek2:
India's state-owned airline Air India has threatened to ground its overweight cabin crew unless they shed their excess pounds over the next two months.
Some 10% of its 1,600-strong cabin crew are estimated to be overweight or suffering from obesity.
S Venkat, Air India's general manager public relations, told the BBC that the airline would strictly implement the directive.
"We have a tolerance limit that cannot be exceeded," he said.
Airline officials say the move is to try and improve the airline's poor image in the face of increased competition.
Air India has an excellent safety record. However it is has a reputation for dowdy looking aircraft, lengthy delays and sloppy service.
But a recent boom in Indian aviation has meant that the airline faces stiff competition from a host of newly launched private airlines within India, and increased services by international airlines.
Glamour of flying
Indian air travel has undergone a revolution in recent years with the new airlines offering cheaper fares combined with top-level service from glamorous, young crew members.
It is estimated that the Indian aviation market will grow to some 45 million passengers by 2010 from an existing 14 million passengers.
To meet the increasing demand, Air India announced this year that it would buy 68 aircraft from US aircraft manufacturer Boeing over the next 10 years.
"We are expanding and we need more crew," said Mr Venkat.
But they would have to conform with the weight restrictions which have been drawn up by the airline's insurance company.
Crew happy
The move has been welcomed by the cabin crew.
"We welcome the decision, as it is for our own benefit," Raju Joshi of the Air India Cabin Crew Association is quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times newspaper.
Under Indian law, female crew members can fly up to the age of 50 while males are allowed to fly till they are 58.
Reports say many of the crew members found overweight tended to be older staff.
Airline officials now say the sight of portly flight attendants lumbering up and down the aisles will rapidly fade away.
"Imagine if crew members can't fasten their seat belts, how can they fly?" an Air India spokesman, G Prasad Rao, is quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4530914.stm
An Australian and a New Zealander have been rescued off the Vietnamese coast after 11 days adrift in a lifeboat. Mark Smith, 49, and Steven Freeman, 30, left Hong Kong on a 65-ft yacht early in December, but it developed problems and sank soon afterwards.
The men say they had no food, drank their own urine and rainwater and huddled "like two babies" to keep warm.
They were weak and dehydrated by the time they were found by Vietnamese fishermen off the country's coast.
The men said that when their ship sank in the East China Sea during a storm, they were left with just two sponges and an oar.
When it rained, they used the sponges to collect rainwater, according to the Associated Press news agency.
"It was sheer will power that kept us alive," said Mr Smith.
His fellow sailor said: "It's been unreal, incredible."
They were forced to resort to drinking their own urine, and said they were most afraid at night.
'Unable to walk'
They were taken to a clinic on Ly Son island, about 54km (34 miles) off the coast of central Quang Ngai province, said Nguyen Thanh Tung, deputy head of the island's People's Committee.
The centre's director, Le Van Phuong, said the two men were in poor condition when they arrived.
"When we received them on Saturday afternoon, they were cold, exhausted and could not walk on their own," he said. "We warmed them up and gave them food. They are in good condition now, ready to return home."
When that may be remains unclear.
A speed boat was sent to Ly Son island on Sunday to take the men to mainland Vietnam, but was forced to turn back because of rough waves, Mr Nguyen said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/4541186.stm
A simple typing error has triggered mayhem on the Tokyo stock exchange and cost one bank £190m. But in a world where almost everyone now is expected to type, how many of us really can?
Think back to those initial days when you made the leap from pen and exercise book to the infinitely more sophisticated keyboard, and how bewildering the jumble of keys seemed to be under your ill-guided fingers.
The "P", tucked away in the upper-right-hand reaches of the keyboard always seemed particularly aloof.
But in time the apparently random distribution of letters, numbers, punctuation and other function keys fell into place.
Diplomatic incident
The Qwerty layout was developed in the late 18th Century not to ease the flight of the touch typist's nimble digits, but the opposite.
It was designed to slow her - and in those days it was almost exclusively women who carried out secretarial duties - down and prevent a typewriter's clunky typebars from getting jammed.
It's ironic then that today, in an era when lightning-fast computers are de rigueur and typing is no longer the preserve of skilled secretaries, but expected of just about everyone, that the Qwerty layout has never been more widespread.
Its popularity, however, is less certain, particularly among those who've been at the sharp end of an embarrassing "fat fingers" incident - the term given to a simple typing error caused by hitting the wrong key.
It happens millions of times a day, but once in a while the result can be devastating. Earlier this month a trader on the Tokyo stock market accidentally blew £190m because of a simple typing error.
A computer which should have cancelled the transaction failed to click in, and this further embarrassment led to the resignation on Tuesday of the head of the Tokyo stock exchange.
'Hunt and peck'
In March this year the Sudanese government was irked to read on a US Congress website that America had carried out nuclear tests in Sudan in the 1960s.
Fears were allayed however when it turned out to be a typing error. The report should have said Sedan - a test site in Nevada.
Occasionally, such errors can even play into the hands of ordinary folk - such as when online traders accidentally under-price a product.
TYPING & TEMPERATURE
Prof Alan Hedge, Cornell University, found typing accuracy depends on room temperature
At 77ºF employees had a 10% error rate
At 68ºF speed slowed by almost half, and error rate rose to 25%
Hedge also estimated this caused a 10% increase in labour costs per worker hour
Mostly, though the clumsy two-fingered typist has little to smile about compared to his or her infinitely faster and more accurate touch-typing colleague.
Anecdotal evidence suggests not only are "hunt and peck" typists less efficient, they are also more likely to suffer an industrial injury.
"As more and more people are getting computers at their desks we are becoming a nation of two fingered typists," said the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber this year.
"While you can become quite proficient without typing properly, you are putting yourself at serious risk of developing RSI."
Phobia
Part of the problem rests with perceptions, says Sue Westwood, who is campaigning for touch-typing to be taught to children.
"In schools we still get comments about it being a secretarial skill and the 'less able' children will make use of it."
She compares two-fingered key bashing to "like trying to write with a quill and a pot of ink, because you've got to keep stopping to look up at the screen."
In the eyes of John Sutherland, an English professor at University College London, "tough guys don't touch type".
His words are meant as caricature. One of the initial problems in selling computers was getting men to touch the keyboard, he says. Having got over that phobia, many are reluctant to see typing as a skill, to be learned.
In fact, hunt and peck typists have always been around. The iconic American journalist HL Mencken suffered not a bit from "writing ceaselessly using a staccato two-fingered typing process that made him look like a bear cub imitating a drum majorette" - to quote his biographer Terry Teachout.
But times have moved on, and the question for many now is not whether to learn, but how best to learn.
French man Daniel Guermuer has a novel approach.
Blank keyboards
M Guermeur felt frustrated when, as a young student, he signed up for a computer science course in the US, only to find his classmates were adept touch typists. (Typing is commonly taught in US schools, says M Guermuer.)
He tried some traditional typing courses without any luck, before hitting on the idea of scrubbing all the letters from his keyboard; effectively typing blind.
"It's analogous to a piano - there are no marking on piano keys, you just have to learn them," he says.
It did the trick and earlier this year M Guermuer began selling blank keyboards for others who want to learn, under the brand Das Keyboard.
"You go through two weeks of pain. In the first week your typing slows greatly, but by the end of week two you are touch typing," says M Guermuer. Journalists who have tried the keyboard have reported some success with it.
But it's tempting to get things out of hand. Millions of people find the hunt and peck method adequate, some even reporting speeds of up to 60 words per minute. As Alan Knifton, of Pitman Training, acknowledges, "if you don't do a lot of typing, the two-fingered approach is probably sufficient".
Just so long as you can remember where that errant "P" went.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4545714.stm
Why does this article remind me of Nightshade?
:p and :p
and abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
I know where all the letters are I just cant spell the words I can type though somtimes at least.
:brow:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/image...ntapope203.jpg
Pope Benedict XVI appears to be getting into a different kind of Christmas spirit, donning a Santa-style hat for his weekly appearance at the Vatican. At a chilly St Peter's Square, the Pope draped a red cloak over his shoulders and covered his head with a red velvet hat lined with white fur.
Vatican officials said the hat, known as a camauro, has been part of the papal wardrobe since the 12th century.
But it has not been worn in public since the death of John XXIII in 1963.
Riding the popemobile and waving to crowds, the 78-year-old pontiff smiled as he was cheered into the square.
Follower of fashion
Although missing Father Christmas' trademark white furry bobble, the pope's timely discovery of the long-forgotten camauro seemed as much a nod to the season as to the chilly weather.
The traditional Santa Claus figure is based on Saint Nicholas - a bishop in fourth century Lycia, now part of modern Turkey.
Ordinarily, the pope covers his head with a more traditional white skullcap, which he donned instead of the camauro by the time he reached his podium in the square.
Benedict, who was elected pope in April after the death of John Paul II, has already made a sartorial mark in the Holy See.
He is reported to favour medieval-style red slippers over more practical shoes while padding around his Vatican apartments.
Fashion-watchers have also reported spotting the pope wearing Gucci sunglasses and Prada shoes in recent months.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4551348.stm