Former FBI agent John Connolly, whose fall from celebrated mob-buster to paid gangland flunky played out this year in a South Florida courtroom, will learn Thursday whether he will spend the rest of his life in prison for his role in a mob hit. Connolly, 68, was convicted last month in Miami of second-degree murder in the 1982 slaying of World Jai-Alai executive John Callahan, whose bullet-pocked body was found in the trunk of a Cadillac parked at Miami International Airport.div class="feedflare" a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=BDhPeye4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=TAnVJS3h"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=sNoEmIOh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=sNoEmIOh" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=vx4YMMPj"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com:80/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=8NqY1vaK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=8NqY1vaK" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/fELuiMucyus" height="1" width="1"/

We’ve made a bullet-hell shoot em up.

Fat Cat

Enjoy.

The world will see the second Android phone in late January 2009 and Australians will enjoy its use on their carriers as Kogan today started pre-orders for the Kogan Agora Pro. For $399 Australian Bucks (US$256) you’ll get the unlocked phone for use on any Australian Carrier and a toned down (not even a camera) Kogan Agora is going for $299 Australian dollars (US$192).

That’s a heck of a price for an unlocked piece of Android, but considering the Kogan brand is relatively unknown it’s a price point that will better lure in more curious mobilists. Those that make the leap of faith can expect some of the following specs:

• 3G Network
• 2.5-inch LCD Touch Screen
• 2MP Camera
• QWERTY Keypad with back lighting
• WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS
• 624MHz processor
• 256MB memory, 128MB Flash, MicroSD expansion

For $100 cheaper you give up the camera, WiFI and GPS. If you’re going to be an Android early adopter, chances are these are things you’ll want these things so dump out your piggy bank and ante up the extra hundy.
The company promised a $199 Android Phone by the end of 2008 - the phone is technically for sale in this calendar year but the price bump was needed due to the “the impact of the global financial crisis on currencies”. We forgive them… and we thank them for coming as close to making good on their promise as possible. The question is… will the phone deliver?
I’m sure half the people reading this are thinking, “Who the heck is Kogan?” Good question… I was thinking the same thing. The company is of an interesting breed - listen to how they define themselves:Kogan is a new business philosophy that places customers at the top of the food chain. We eliminate all the “middle men” and pass the savings directly to you. We are a manufacturer, importer, wholesaler, and retailer all in one. By cutting out all the “middle men”, we provide the best possible products at the best possible price.
This is the kind of ingenuity that Android can encourage and to be honest, I’m wondering why companies all over the globe aren’t flocking to follow suit. Android is the ultimate equalizer. So how come Kogan was able to put out this Android Handset while companies like Motorola have 500 people working on it and will be empty handed until late next year?
It could be a number of reason starting with the possibility that the phone absolutely sucks. We’ll know the scoop on that in a couple months time, but seriously… it makes you wonder why there aren’t a flurry of Android handsets out by now, doesn’t it?
Kogan could use Android to capitalize in a big, big way and the door is wide open for other (relatively) small companies to do the same and compete with the “big dogs” on a global scale. Android is knocking down the barriers of entry for manufacturers which encourages a market where good ideas can out above the battle of the big budgets.
It should be pointed out that this will be the first mobile phone Kogan has ever released with the manufacturing being outsourced to China. For whatever that’s worth.

A few questions worthy of discussion:

• Hey Australians, what is your experience with Kogan and what do you expect from the Kogan Agora Pro?
• Hey Australians, will you pre-order the Agora, wait for reviews and then decide or simply not consider it?
• Hey Ruslan Kogan, founder of Kogan, hook us up with a review copy that we can either rock on WiFi in the states or give a trusted Australian phandroid an early peek, will ya?
• Hey everyone else, I didn’t want to leave you out so I made a 4th bullet, feel better?

INTERESTING FACT: We dug this up and didn’t find it elsewhere but the name Agora not only sounds cool but was chose for an obvious reason - it is defined as, “The public open space that formed the heart of ancient Greek cities and it’s the origin of most western conceptions of public, or civic, space as center of for social interaction for ceremony and democratic life on a pedestrian scale.”
Discuss
[Via Kogan, ITWire, Engadget]


More...

We check out the bullet-bending action in this Grin-developed game based on the Hollywood blockbuster.

These ads caused a bit of a stink this past week. Variants -- with titles generously supplied by me -- include The Bullet or the Noose? and Puddles of Inferno!.

Whoa, talk about dodging a bullet! It looks like the U.S. Department of Justice was only three hours away from smacking Google with an antitrust suit over its search deal with Yahoo before the company abandon the agreement.

"We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day," Litvack said in the interview. "We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement."

Comments

I'm about to bite the bullet and purchase a new Macbook Pro from Amazon. Do you guys think it's a good idea to buy one now so that I can enjoy it for the holidays instead of waiting until after Macworld in January? I wouldn't think there would be any updates to Apple notebooks anyway.

I'm trying to build a bullet-proof backup system for my Macbook Pro on a modest budget and need some technical advice for choosing which hard drive to put in an external firewire enclosure. (OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad-interface [Firewire 800/400, USB, eSata])

This is not the oft-repeated question of "Which HDD brand is the most reliable?" We should all know by now that all hard drives will fail sooner or later and it's the backup strategy that should keep you up at night.

I've got the backup strategy nailed down (redundant copies of my laptop HDD and external HDD, plus off-site backup), and I've figured out I need a 750 GB or 1 TB SATA drive. The question is, which HDDs have performance and power-usage specs that make the best sense for an external backup drive that will only get written to for a nightly backup with SuperDuper plus occasional Time Machine writes in the background when I'm at my desk?

Tom's Hardware Winter 2008 Hard Drive Guide gives a great technical look at today's top drives from WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Samsung. I don't know how to read these numbers (like average sequential read throughput or access time) to know what's relevant to my backup situation. Tom's Hardware also gives metrics on performance per watt, and another article highlights low-power-consumption as an important consideration for always-on externals.

What metrics matter for backup-only drives? Should I go for so-called RAID class drives that are certified for 24/7 grinding? Should I go for one of these "green" drives that are low-performance but low power consumers? What's good for the long haul?

Swedish heavy rockers BULLET will have their sophomore album, Bite The Bullet, released on vinyl on January 30, 2009.

p style="text-align: center;"a href="http://img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module/126948/DC 20Universe 20Online 20resize_qjgenth.png?122821" rel="lightbox[article126948]" title="DC 20Universe 20Online 20- 20Image 201 20 26nbsp 3B 20 20 26nbsp 3B 20 3Ca 20href 3D 22http 3A//img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module/126948/DC 20Universe 20Online 20resize.png 3F122821 22 20target 3D 22_blank 22 3E 3Cimg 20src 3D 22/img/newwindow.png 22 20title 3D 22Open 20in 20new 20window 22 20border 3D 220 22 3E 3C/a 3E"img style="margin: 3px;" alt="DC Universe Online - Image 1" title="DC Universe Online - Image 1" src="http://img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module/126948/DC 20Universe 20Online 20resize_qjgenth.png?122821" align="" border="0"/a br/pbrMTV Multiplayer got a chance to interview span style="font-style: italic;"DC Universe/span span style="font-style: italic;"Online/span writer, Geoff Johns, about a href="http://ps3.qj.net/tags/soe/1772" id="tag" title="Sony Online Entertainment"SOE/a's upcoming MMORPG. The most important bullet point? He estimated we will be ready to don our official DC issued leotards by late 2009 or early 2010. Joy!brbrHe mentioned that he was done writing the overall story as well as the general path that players follow to get into the game. On the game itself, John elaborated on the basics of how he approached span style="font-style: italic;"DCUO/span, saying:brbrp style="padding-left: 40px; padding-right: 40px;"Lots of gamers create their own characters. Everyone knows Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, but this game gets you more entrenched in the universe. You meet the Metal Men, or Doom Patrol, and everyone gets a chance to embody something different. I like the idea that your secret identity is really outside the computer. You re a normal guy, and then when you log on to the game, you become the superhero./pbrDC Universe Online is being developed by Sony Online Austin and published by Sony Online Entertainment. The game will be available on both thespan id="iTxt"span id="iTxt" a title="Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online MMORPG" href="http://ps3.qj.net/category/DC-Universe-Online/cid/5211"PlayStation 3/a/span/span and the PC.brbrhr style="width: 100 ; height: 2px;"brspan style="font-weight: bold;"Related DC Universe Online Articles:br/spanullia style="font-style: italic;" title="DC Universe Online can have PS3-PC cross platform play, but... probably won't" href="http://mmorpg.qj.net/DC-Universe-Online-can-have-PS3-PC-cross-platform-play-but-probably-won-t/pg/49/aid/124475"DC Universe Online can have PS3-PC cross platform play, but... probably won't/a/lilia style="font-style: italic;" title="DC's Geoff Johns to write back story for DC Universe Online" href="http://mmorpg.qj.net/DC-s-Geoff-Johns-to-write-back-story-for-DC-Universe-Online/pg/49/aid/124025"DC's Geoff Johns to write back story for DC Universe Online/abr/li/ulbrbrimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/qj/ps3/~4/Lcp5wVxsg4Y" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/43908?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Forty+years+on%2C+Laos+reaps+bitter+harvest+of+the+secret+warch=World+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=World+newsc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Ian+MacKinnonc7=2008_12_03c8=1127780c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=c13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2F" width="1" height="1" //divpThe entrance to Craters restaurant is guarded by a phalanx of bombshells, each as big as a man. Opposite, the Dokkhoune hotel boasts an even finer warhead collection. For tourists who have not cottoned on, the Lao town of Phonsavanh lies at the heart of the most cluster-bombed province of the most bombed country on earth./ppThe haul of unexploded ordnance (UXO) is just a taster of that littering the countryside, or sitting in vast piles around homes and scrapyards. The deadly harvest from the US bombing of this landlocked country 30 years ago in the so-called "secret war" as the real battle raged in next-door Vietnam has become big business. Steel prices that surged on the back of soaring demand from China's go-go economy drove up scrap prices five-fold in eight years in impoverished Laos. It sent subsistence rice farmers, struggling make to ends meet amid spiralling food and fuel prices, scurrying into their fields in search of the new "cash crop"./ppBut it comes at a high price. At least 13,000 people have been killed or maimed, either digging in fields contaminated with live bombs or, increasingly, in their quest for lucrative scrap metal. Half the casualties are young boys, most killed by exploding tennis-ball-sized cluster bomblets - christened "bombies" locally - that are everywhere./ppThe scale of the contamination is mind-boggling. Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bomb-load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973. US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period than was dropped during the whole of the second world war. Of the 260m "bombies" that rained down, particularly on Xieng Khouang province, 80m failed to explode, leaving a deadly legacy./ppOverwhelmed by the immensity of the clear-up, Laos - which has dealt with just 400,000 unexploded munitions - had resisted the signing today in Oslo of a treaty banning cluster bombs and demanding that remnants be cleared within 10 years. But the country has had a rethink and will now be a key player in the ceremony./ppFor Laos it could be a godsend, focusing world attention on its plight and bringing international resources to tackle the problem. With 37% of agricultural ground made unsafe by unexploded munitions in a nation where four-fifths of people farm the land, the scourge has stifled development./ppYet farmers eking out a living below the dollar-a-day poverty line have no choice. Bombs unearthed as they gingerly peck at the soil are planted around, or moved to the side of the field./pp"In the end the Lao people regard lack of food as much greater threat than unexploded bombs," said David Hayter, the Lao country director of British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG). "It's just that each UXO death is marked by a big bang, but deaths from lack of food or poor water are less noticeable."/ppFatalistic acceptance of the danger is fostered by familiarity. Bomb remains are fashioned into everyday items: cluster-bomb casings become fencing; houses perch on stilts crafted from 500lb bombs; mortars with fins are used as table lamps. "People's familiarity is the most striking thing for me," said Jo Pereira, an occupational therapist with the Lao charity Cope, which fits UXO victims with prosthetic limbs. "They've lived with it for so long. Much of it is in their houses. Children think 'we've got those at home' and don't see the risks."/ppSo when scrap metal prices rocketed many saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity to boost meagre incomes. For those unable to grow enough rice to feed their families throughout the year, there is little choice but to collect UXO scrap despite the dangers./pp"People have lived with this for two generations," said Gregory Cathcart, an MAG programme officer. "They don't view it as risky. It's simply a cash crop. The problem is the main scrap on the surface is gone, so they've to dig it up which is extremely dangerous."/ppCheap Vietnamese metal detectors costing as little as pound;7.36 boost the business. Landless families have turned full-time scrap collectors, earning up to pound;2.70 a day if they unearth six or seven kilos. Stumble on half a cluster bomb casing of "best Detroit steel" and they hit pay-dirt, worth pound;20 to pound;27./ppNo such luck for Sher Ya, 25. He plonks a plastic bag of bullet casings on the scrap dealer's scales and anxiously eyes the needle. His teenage brother dredged the shells from their village rice field. It earns a welcome 40p. "My family grows only enough rice for six months," he said. "So when we're not planting or harvesting we collect bomb scraps. It's scary, but we've no choice."/ppThe trade is so lucrative that scrap dealers ferry collectors by truck to virgin forests every day. Sypha Phommachan, 45, need not to go to such lengths. Farmers around Thajok village beat a path to the scrap dealer's door. A pile of fragments, casings, and mortars is all she had left after the foundry took away nearly eight tonnes a few days before./pp"That took me about three weeks to collect," she said. "That's quite slow because it's the rice harvest season and people are busy farming. In a couple of months they'll be out furiously collecting to raise cash for the Hmong festival." Yet she carefully inspects the bomb harvest, rejecting live munitions. She knows the risks. In the six years she has lived in the village, 10 people have been killed collecting scrap. One 50-year-old man died three months ago when he tossed half a "bombie" he believed safe into the wicker basket on his back. It exploded and the ball-bearings it threw out went clean through his chest, killing him instantly./ppToday's treaty banning the stockpile and use of cluster munitions is due to be signed by 107 countries - including the UK, which has been the third biggest user. Those holding out include the US, China, Russia and Israel. /ppBut Richard Moyes, co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, is confident that the convention will change the climate. "We sense we'll see a dramatic decline in cluster munitions use even among states that don't sign."/pa href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/0isZpde_2gKB0VQVLsihe6OOssY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/0isZpde_2gKB0VQVLsihe6OOssY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

20h45 Riding the bullet (film) 22h20 Salem (téléfilm) 20h45 Eureka (série) 23h05 Stargate SG-1 (série) 23h50 Stargate Atlantis (série) Premier : 20h45 Le labyrinthe de Pan (film) Frisson : 22h50 Furtif (film) - a href="http://www.unificationfrance.com/spip.php?rubrique123" rel="directory"Nouveaux Programmes TV/a

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/opinion-editorial/" rel="tag"Opinion/Editorial/a/pimg width="210" vspace="4" hspace="4" height="220" border="0" align="right" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/eagle-tara-armchair_opt.jpg" /We'll be hearing more about the Detroit 3 in the mainstream media this week as their homework entitled "What I Would Do With My Share of $25 Billion in Government Loans" gets turned in to Congress. While Detroit deserves much of the ribbing that's on the way, it irks our ears every time we read an op-ed piece from folks who flat-out do not know what the Hell they're talking about. Take Karen Wagner, whose opinion letter was published by the a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-081118wagner_briefs,0,6629816.story"Chicago Tribune/a in which she claims that Ford should cancel launching the 2010 Mustang in order to receive federal loans. There are not enough appendages on the human body to count the reasons why that is a stupid idea, let alone an entirely unrealistic one. In her reasoning, she seems to believe that selling fuel efficient vehicles would equal a healthy, profitable automaker and therefore save millions of jobs, while not realizing that the Mustang has done infinitely more to help Ford's bottom line than the Escape Hybrid.br /br /Then there's entrepreneur extraordinaire Michael Arrington, co-editor of Tech Crunch, who claims in a recent a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/a-modest-proposal-for-the-auto-industry-stop-building-cars/"op-ed piece/a that what works for the tech industry will work for autos, too. His idea is that auto companies should outsource all production of their vehicles to third-party companies just like Apple does with the iPod. He also criticizes the auto industry for its business model of vertical integration, questioning why there isn't an Intel of engine manufacturers that sells to all the automakers. Well, guess what Mike, the Apple model doesn't work for everybody (it didn't work for Apple in the early '90s) and there are a tens of thousands more parts in a car than an iPod that might make outsourcing their production to the lowest bidder a logistical nightmare. br /br /While it's easy to dog on the domestics for the sorry shape in which they find themselves, don't listen to every Karen and Michael out there who voice their ill-informed opinions on how things ought to be. There are such a myriad of factors that have contributed to the current state of the Detroit 3, some of which is their fault and some (like bad mortgages ruining the credit market) which aren't, that there just is no silver bullet fix beyond continuing to lower costs and building better products. br /br /[Source: a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-081118wagner_briefs,0,6629816.story"Chicago Tribune/a, a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/29/a-modest-proposal-for-the-auto-industry-stop-building-cars/"Tech Crunch/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/opinion-stop-arm-chair-quarterbacking-the-auto-industry/"OPINION: Stop arm-chair quarterbacking the auto industry/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:30:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/opinion-stop-arm-chair-quarterbacking-the-auto-industry/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1387830/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/opinion-stop-arm-chair-quarterbacking-the-auto-industry/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/PrqPnUSmm8-fgRaXSXpKeFkaqEU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/PrqPnUSmm8-fgRaXSXpKeFkaqEU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=LjkY9Bnx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=LjkY9Bnx" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=r65rRRZB"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=r65rRRZB" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/mDgGBmo8uIQ" height="1" width="1"/