The biggest film of 2008 arrives on Blu-ray and DVD this December 9th, and Cinematical is here to share our initial impressions, likes and dislikes, as well as let you know whether this monster piece of home entertainment is worth the purchase. Perhaps time will tell if The Dark Knight is the best comic book movie ever made, but in the meantime it's fairly easy to declare it the best comic book movie of 2008. Director Christopher Nolan and his team of Bat-freaks brought out the bigger guns for this sequel, adding more explosions, more depth, more darkness and more Gotham. The result is an action-packed psychological salad full of delicious performances and fantastic visuals.

In fact, that's exactly why you'll want to own this thing -- it just looks ... so ... good. On the Blu-ray disc, for example, the film alternates between aspect ratios, showing the IMAX-filmed scenes in 1.78:1, and the rest in 2.40:1. Sure, it's a bit different than watching it on a seven-story screen, but the IMAX sequences (in particular the opening bank heist) will no doubt take your television hostage and seduce every inch of your geek-obsessed body. Is it somewhat annoying to dance between two aspect ratios during the film? Not really, except that you'll wish the entire saga was shot with IMAX cameras. If you haven't yet watched a flick on Blu-ray, do yourself a favor and pop your HD cherry on The Dark Knight.

Now follow us after the jump for more ...

Gallery: The Dark Knight DVD

Filed under: Action, DVD Reviews, Fandom, Home Entertainment, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels

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div style="FLOAT: right"img title="iPod Shortage Spreads" alt="iPod Shortage Spreads" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/ipod-shortage.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pLike a plague, the iPod is experiencing shortages at certain reseller channels, with Amazon.com recently extending the lead times of the 8GB iPod touch 2G to three to five weeks instead of the initial 11 days, while the 16GB variant stays at three to five weeks. Heck, even the screen-less iPod Shuffle is experiencing shortage on certain colors and capacities this week among retailers such as Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and Crutchfield.com. This is pretty surprising considering the current economic climate that we're in at the moment, and it goes to prove that music has turned into an essential part of our everyday life for many of us. /p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/ipod_shortage_spreads.html"iPod Shortage Spreads/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081203180244" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081203180244?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081203180244" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081203180244amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Fipod_shortage_spreads.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/k4MYykic64k_01k0X1kE2L35KsU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/k4MYykic64k_01k0X1kE2L35KsU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=pZbfyyZQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=Y4GrdSN1"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=Y4GrdSN1" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=G9VHEhvd"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=NpZWL3to"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=NpZWL3to" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=mfOaiQYL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=mfOaiQYL" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/E7XTwUr_Ekk" height="1" width="1"/

parameters version 0.1.0 has been released! Parameters allows you to add annoted variables to your classes which may have configurable default values. Changes: ### 0.1.0 / 2008-12-03 * Initial release. * Added Parameters.params= and Parameters#params= methods. * Allow Parameters#initialize to accept a Hash of parameter values. * Added more specs.

When a company called EMG Technology filed a patent lawsuit against Apple last week over “the way the iPhone navigates the Internet,” it had the stench of a patent troll. The suit was filed a month after the patent was issued in the Eastern District of Texas, known as troll country among patent attorneys because the courts there tend to rule favorably for patent owners.

EMG Technology is based in Los Angeles, and appears to have been formed solely for the purpose of filing this lawsuit. One of the inventors named on the patent and EMG “managing member” Elliot Gottfurcht is a Los Angeles real estate developer. Apple, of course, is also based in California.

Then there are the actual claims of patent No. 7,441,196. With the help of M-CAM, an underwriter of patent insurance, I uncovered some patents (listed below) that pre-date EMG’s and that might be considered prior art. Apple’s lawyers should take a look at them. Some of them are even owned by Apple. Others are owned by IBM, Microsoft, Sony, and Sun Microsystems.

Before we get to those, what about EMG’s patent? The claims in that patent describe the ability to manipulate, zoom, scroll, and view Web content on devices other than a laptop. But the central and primary claim has to do with a way to convert HTML Web pages into XML data that can then be displayed partially on different devices, including mobile phones.

I’m no lawyer or patent expert, but my initial reaction was that these seem like overly broad claims (they cover everything from TVs to Web appliances to cell phones) with lots of precedents. It is very difficult to display an entire Webpage on a small screen, so engineers have figured out various ways to display parts of those pages.

EMG does not specify in its suit which of the patent’s 76 claims it thinks Apple is infringing on. But in the press release announcing the lawsuit, EMG’s lawyer highlights the claims covering “the display of Internet content reformatted from HTML to XML on mobile devices” and “technology for manipulating a region of the screen for zooming and scrolling.”

I asked M-CAM to run EMG’s patent through its Patently Obvious database, which compares claims across millions of patents. And they came up with 250 instances of possible prior art not mentioned in the EMG patent. When an inventor files a patent, he is required to list all other patents you are aware of that could have an impact on your claims. One way to get a patent application past an overworked patent examiner is to list a ton of related prior art, but omit the critical ones that could invalidate the patent.

One key patent omitted by EMG is No 6,535,896: “Systems, methods and computer program products for tailoring web page content in hypertext markup language format for display within pervasive computing devices using extensible markup language tools.” It is owned by IBM and was filed on January 29, 1999, which is prior to the November 15, 1999 date that is applicable for the EMG patent. The abstract for the IBM patent describes what it does this way:

Content portions of a requested Web page are converted to an XML format and then modified using an XML content-tailoring tool. Other content portions of the Web page are masked so as to be “hidden” and are, thus, not converted to XML format. The masked portions of the Web page are then unmasked, combined with the modified content portions, and transmitted to a client device for display therewithin.

That sounds very similar to parts of the first claim of the EMG patent:

1. A method of navigating the Internet, comprising: displaying on-line content accessed via the Internet, the on-line content reformatted from a webpage in a hypertext markup language (HTML) format into an extensible markup language (XML) format to generate a sister site, . . . navigation options to change between layers of the simplified navigation interface from general to more specific in each deeper layer; receiving a user selection of one of the navigation options; forwarding the selected navigation option across the internet to a server providing the simplified navigation interface; receiving a next deeper navigation layer of the simplified navigation interface corresponding to the selected navigation option

How did EMG’s patent get approved by the U.S. Patent Office? This just illustrates a bigger problem with the patent system. Since the budget of the Patent Office, which is derived from filing and maintenance fees, is tied directly to how many patents it approves, it has an economic incentive to approve as many as possible. This system needs to be changed. (Anyone in on Obama’s team reading this?).

Below are some other prior art that Apple’s lawyers might want to take a look at (and some quaint patent art that accompanied EMG’s filing).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

div class="center"div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/42/fa/0009fa42.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/42/fa/0009fa42_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_653890"//a/divbr/ bNonlinear Differential Equations in Ordered Spaces (Chapman and Hall /Crc Monographs and Surveys in Pure and Applied Mathematics)/bbr/ 336 pages | Chapman Hall/CRC; 1 edition (June 14, 2000) | ISBN: 1584880686 | RARed DJVU | 7,6 Mb/divbr/ Extremality results proved in this Monograph for an abstract operator equation provide the theoretical framework for developing new methods that allow the treatment of a variety of discontinuous initial and boundary value problems for both ordinary and partial differential equations, in explicit and implicit forms. By means of these extremality results, the authors prove the existence of extremal solutions between appropriate upper and lower solutions of first and second order discontinuous implicit and explicit ordinary and functional differential equations. They then study the dependence of these extremal solutions on the data.

Wendy Boswell stays on top of Web search and social media trends at About.com. You can catch up with her via Twitter.

If you’ve been looking for a simple way to track your spending, make a budget, or follow your investments – without splashing out any dough – then online finance managers might be just up your alley. Let’s take a look at Mint and Rudder, two very similar money management sites that give you the tools to manage your hard-earned cash.

Getting Started with Mint

Getting started with Mint couldn’t be easier: you’ll just need to hand over the username and password to your financial institution (you can reassure yourself with Mint’s privacy policy, along with a detailed FAQ of security issues).

It’s easy to add accounts to your Mint dashboard, and thousands of financial institutions are available from which to choose from. In less than five minutes total, I was looking at an extremely detailed (yet manageable) analysis of three of my accounts, along with transaction information, spending trends, saving suggestions, and more.

Mint Your Money

Those of us who are financial software-phobic will love Mint’s simple yet comprehensive financial habits breakdown. There’s nothing you have to dig through a manual to understand here – it’s all pretty basic. For instance:

Overview: This is your main dashboard where you can see a quick snapshot of what your money’s been doing: recent account activity, budget trends, any alerts, etc.

Spending Trends: This gives you a pie chart o’spending; you can dig down within each category to see what your spending looks like. This is Quicken without the hassle.

Transactions: You can get a quick overview of all your accounts at once here, filter them by individual account, search via transaction type or just type in a search term (i.e., “Costco”).

Ways to Save: Mint pays the bills with sponsored offers on the “Ways to Save” page; this is also where you’ll be offered potential moneysaving deals, such as a higher interest rate for your savings account.

Mint Alerts: The most convenient tool that Mint offers is email or SMS alerts that can warn you if you’re going over your credit limit, about to incur some fees, getting a bit low in your account, and a lot more. This is an amazingly simple yet super awesome way to stay on top of your finances.

Mobile Access: You can access your entire Mint profile from the convenience of a Web-enabled phone or mobile device. For instance, if you text “Bal” (balance) to “MyMint” (696468), you’ll get instant balance reports for any account you’ve added to your Mint dashboard – and as we’re heading into the holiday season, this comes in especially handy.

Credit Management: Mint also offers a credit management program that scans for better interest rates and fees in addition to information on how to lower your current credit card debt – again, all for free.

Investment Management: You can manage all your investments – 401K, brokerage accounts, etc. – in one easy portal with Mint (rather than logging into one out of the way site after another). Also, since Mint automatically updates your investment information, you can stay on top of exactly what’s going on, rather than relying on an annual update.

Pros & Cons

Pros:

· You don’t have to balance anything; it’s all done for you.
· Read-only connection to bank accounts according to privacy policy.
· Excellent credit card management program; scans for better interest rates and fees and gives you information on how to lower your current debt.
· Easy to set up alerts
· Free!

Cons:

· You can’t import from any other financial software (such as Quicken), and you can’t take Mint data anywhere else.
· Mint also trusts your bank or other financial institution to be completely right, there are no inherent checks and balances.
· Good for keeping track, but shouldn’t be the only thing you use - always go to the source.
· Can’t be used offline.

Getting Started with Rudder

Rudder initially is not as easy to set up as Mint. The process is similar: pick your financial institution, hand over your username and password (read the privacy policy), and wait for your information to be extrapolated. However, this initial step alone took nearly five minutes – compared to about thirty seconds for Mint, and everything at Rudder must be entered manually. Yes, that’s right – manually.

Once you’ve added in your data, Rudder will identify your recurring bills and expenses. You also have to add in your income, which unless you work a straight paycheck to paycheck kind of job is not the most intuitive way to track your revenue.

However, Rudder’s not necessarily about the nitty-gritty details (and this is where a lot of people might say “thanks, but no thanks”). Rudder likes to focus on your big fiscal picture via broad stroke financial widgets that track this activity, such as:

Spend Meter: a simple way to tell if you’re spending beyond your means, but it won’t give you exact dollar amounts.

Savings Widget: A simple way to track your savings.

Bill Tracker: See if there’s anything upcoming that needs to be paid.

Rudder also offers emails (daily, weekly, monthly) to give you your account overview without actually having to log in to your account – you can get these via your Web-enabled phone or mobile device.

Pros:

· Easy to use
· Good for overall tracking
· Email-based; manage your finances via your inbox

Cons:

· Requires a manual setup
· Not good for specific money management

Rudder is definitely a simple, no-clutter tool for tracking your finances...emphasis on simple. If you’re looking for a big picture sort of tool that gives you an overall view of your money, then Rudder might be a good pick.

Mint vs. Rudder: The Bottom Line

Many of us have a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that we’re just not doing enough to manage our money, so we purchase expensive financial management software packages that end up sitting unused on the shelf. Both Mint and Rudder aim to solve this problem, providing free, simple, yet powerful money management tools that anyone can use, no matter what their level of financial expertise.

However, Rudder, while somewhat useful, only provides a core overview of your finances and is tedious to initially get going. In addition, there’s not much in the way of actually teaching you to manage your money more efficiently; it’s a tool aimed at showing you what you have left in your account, and that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, Mint is simple to set up and gives you a detailed yet completely understandable money analysis, with tools that can quickly help you become more financially savvy. Credit, investments, budgets – all of these are concepts that many of us tend to avoid, but Mint makes them accessible using our own accounts as a springboard to a healthier financial outlook. While Rudder is a good tool to get you going in the quest for fiscal improvement, Mint is a better long-term choice.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, bns124

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Mint SMS: Monitor Your Finances On the Go
Rudder Helps You Manage Your Money From Your Inbox (The Startup Review)
Mint.com Launches Redesign with New Financial Resources and Educational Tools
Mint.com Offers Web-based Financial Tracking Tools
Personal Finance Site Mint Opens to The Public With New Features
Thrive Wants to Help 20 and 30-Somethings Manage Their Money
BillShrink Wants to Help You Manage Your Credit Cards

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/hybrids/" rel="tag"Hybrids/Alternative/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/green/" rel="tag"Green/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/chrysler/" rel="tag"Chrysler, LLC./a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/ford/" rel="tag"Ford/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/gm/" rel="tag"GM/a/pa href="http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081203/AUTO01/812030347/1148/AUTO01"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/holliday_bubble.jpg" //abr /br /It's debatable whether or not now is the right time to make changes in the way our cars are made, with some believing that Detroit should follow the path it's already on and others claiming there couldn't be a better time to make major sweeping changes. Count DuPont head a href="http://www2.dupont.com/Our_Company/en_US/directors/holliday.html"Chad Holliday /aamong the latter. Holliday's so-called "Detroit Project" would challenge American automakers to introduce a new "Car of the Future" that would achieve 75 miles per gallon and run on butanol - an alcohol fuel that DuPont a href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/12/30/biobutanol-the-other-white-meat/"just so happens to market itself/a. br /br /Regardless of whether DuPont stands to benefit from this project, there are a few major hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is an initial $5 billion investment at a time when the Detroit 3 are asking for many times that from the government just to stay in business. We also see problems getting proposed collaborators such as Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Boeing and Google all working on the same page. Schools such as MIT, the Georgia Tech, and the University of Michigan could also be involved, according to Holliday. No problem, right?br /br /Getting an automobile to run on butanol emisn't/em a problem, it's been done over and over again. Yes, it is a cleaner fuel that may be a better choice overall than ethanol, but coming from the head of a company with a vested interest comes off as a bit disingenuous. It also reminds us of a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/02/opinion-stop-arm-chair-quarterbacking-the-auto-industry/"something we heard/a the other day... br /br /[Source: a href="http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081203/AUTO01/812030347/1148/AUTO01"Detroit News/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/dupont-chief-calls-on-detroit-to-make-car-of-the-future-tha/"DuPont chief calls on Detroit to make 'Car of the Future'... that uses his fuel/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:29:00 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://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081203/AUTO01/812030347/1148/AUTO01Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/dupont-chief-calls-on-detroit-to-make-car-of-the-future-tha/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1390012/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/dupont-chief-calls-on-detroit-to-make-car-of-the-future-tha/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/i0wOR0L-pxvSx5TQfLsI5XwgI6k/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/i0wOR0L-pxvSx5TQfLsI5XwgI6k/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=emNYnWCs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=emNYnWCs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=NgV6U6yU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=NgV6U6yU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/4AtLIaG4uu4" height="1" width="1"/

Website King-Mag.com is currently playing host to loads of images of hot girls getting their groove on with Guitar Hero. Below is just one of them, and if you want to see at least 10 more, then head over to the initial link.

!-- [DocumentBodyStart:7aa9b7e4-538e-4352-bccd-87c16da5059b] --div class='jive-rendered-content'pEugene,/pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/ppYes I do see the message (12 classes reloaded some nested classes there)/ppThere are two cases which 100% do not get reloaded (not sure what JVM DI /ppspecs say about it) static fields and instance field initial value change /ppdoes not get reflected in reloaded classes. These do not cause new code /pprejection but test shows old values printed./pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/ppAdding a line in constructor to re-set value of the test field failed to /ppwork as well. Test still printed value with which the app has been started/pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/ppChange of method content worked. I can not say at the moment if my prior /ppissues were due to the field initial values not being handled./pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/ppAlex/pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/ppspan"Eugene Zhuravlev (JetBrains)" lt;/spana class="jive-link-email-small" href="mailto:jeka@intellij.com"jeka@intellij.com/aspangt; wrote in message /span/ppspannews:/spana class="jive-link-email-small" href="mailto:gh6ogp$r68$1@is.intellij.net"gh6ogp$r68$1@is.intellij.net/aspan.../span/pblockquote class="jive-quote" level="1"pAlex,/p/blockquotepgt;/pblockquote class="jive-quote" level="1"pIn Settings | Debugger | HotSwap set "Reload classes after compilation" /ppoption to "Ask". Change some class and compile./ppIf reload was successful, IDEA writes in the status bar "N classes /ppreloaded"./ppCan you see this message in the status bar after you confirmed reload?/p/blockquotepgt;/pblockquote class="jive-quote" level="1"p-- /ppBest regards,/ppEugene Zhuravlev/ppSoftware Developer/ppJetBrains Inc./ppa class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://www.jetbrains.com"http://www.jetbrains.com/a/pp"Develop with pleasure!"/p/blockquotepgt;/pblockquote class="jive-quote" level="1"/blockquotep style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/pp style="min-height: 8pt; height: 8pt; padding: 0px;"nbsp;/p/div!-- [DocumentBodyEnd:7aa9b7e4-538e-4352-bccd-87c16da5059b] --

via MacNN:

NVIDIA is taking a cautious approach on netbooks and is unlikely to involve itself in that field anytime soon, company officials have said at the Credit Suisse technology conference. Company CFO Marv Burkett acknowledges that it could ultimately produce graphics chips and other hardware for the mini notebooks but is waiting for netbooks to "evolve" before taking any initial steps into the field, ...


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Feral House, one of my favorite publishers of outré history, recently released two excellent books. Dope Menace has hundreds of color photos of sleazy drug paperback books, and The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People is a re-issue of the Wallace Family's (The Book of Lists, The People's Alamanac) fascinating history of the bedroom proclivities of famous folks, past and present. While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality. Dope Menace collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything. For its initial edition of The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People in 1981, the legendary Wallace family read 1,500 biographies, pored over rare correspondence, legal transcripts and medical reports, and interviewed lovers, confidants and associates of many distinguished men and women in world history. This 600-page illicit encyclopedia of the private lives of writers, politicians, athletes, popes, rabble-rousers, composers, rock stars and sex symbols has been revised and enlarged, with a dozen new entries, including ones on Kurt Cobain, Malcolm X, Wilt Chamberlain, Ayn Rand, Jim Morrison, Nico, Aleister Crowley, and more. Previously: Stack of intriguing books from Feral House and Process Media ... Feral House and Process books - Boing Boing The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George ... Book on the current Secession movement (and Sarah Palin) - Boing Boing BBC: W's grandpappy planned fascist coup of USA - Boing Boing...br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=230750d7dcbda81c02bf845b3a32370ep=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=230750d7dcbda81c02bf845b3a32370ep=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=230750d7dcbda81c02bf845b3a32370e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

h4Christmas confusion clarified/h4 pMicrosoft has dashed hopes of a December release for Windows 7's first beta, having created initial confusion on this important code drop..../p

NVIDIA is taking a cautious approach on netbooks and is unlikely to involve itself in that field anytime soon, company officials have said at the Credit Suisse technology conference. Company CFO Marv Burkett acknowledges that it could ultimately produce graphics chips and other hardware for the mini notebooks but is waiting for netbooks to "evolve" before taking any initial steps into the field, ...

pFiled under: a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/internet/" rel="tag"Internet/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/utilities/" rel="tag"Utilities/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/windows/" rel="tag"Windows/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/macintosh/" rel="tag"Macintosh/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/web-services/" rel="tag"Web services/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/commercial/" rel="tag"Commercial/a/pdiv align="center"a href="https://www.backblaze.com/"img width="550" vspace="4" hspace="4" height="319" border="0" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.downloadsquad.com/media/2008/12/bb.jpg" alt="" //a/div Many users have the same problem when it comes to configuring a backup application: they forget to add one important file or folder to the job. a href="http://www.backblaze.com"Backblaze/a - a new online backup service - thinks they have a solution to the problem.br /br /Unlike most applications where items to be backed up must be manually added by the user, a href="https://www.backblaze.com/"Backblaze/a works by automatically emexcluding/em the junk it knows you don't really want to back up anyway. Gleb from the Backblaze team explained it like this: br /br /span style="display: block; padding-left: 6em;"span"The reason we took this approach was that most users would get stuck at the "pick what files and folders to backup" step. They either didn't know how to navigate the file system (try finding your PST file), or their files were not organized, or they just didn't have time."/span/spanbr /By default it won't back up operating system, application, or temp files, and you can add any other exclusions you like via the settings screen.br /br /Now, if you're like me and confined to 30kbps upload your initial backup is going to take a while - four days in my case. Once it's done, Backblaze keeps things efficiently in synch by performing differential backups. Your data is encrypted prior to uploading, transmitted securely via HTTPS, and users that demand added security can add their own private key.pa href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/03/backblaze-offers-truly-no-hassle-online-backups/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emBackblaze offers truly no-hassle online backups/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/03/backblaze-offers-truly-no-hassle-online-backups/"Backblaze offers truly no-hassle online backups/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com"Download Squad/a on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:00:00 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=https://www.backblaze.com/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/03/backblaze-offers-truly-no-hassle-online-backups/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/forward/1389870/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/03/backblaze-offers-truly-no-hassle-online-backups/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/buQzxl5tKwYNdJc7wzCC74S3obI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/buQzxl5tKwYNdJc7wzCC74S3obI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?a=QXw8Te5W"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?i=QXw8Te5W" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?a=X4hQGBmt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?i=X4hQGBmt" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/downloadsquad/~4/jIYSnqnEPTU" height="1" width="1"/

centerimg border=0 title="Lower Monthly Tariff For T-Mobile G1" alt="Lower Monthly Tariff For T-Mobile G1" src="http://www.uberphones.com/photos/2008/12/g1-uk-price.jpg" style="margin: 0 0 0 0;" //center br/pT-Mobile G1 users might be happy with the phone and all, but the initial monthly tariff pricing of £40 ($59) was a little steep, and it looks like T-Mobile is indirectly acknowledging it by dropping the monthly tariff to £30 ($44) instead. T-Mobile claims that it isn’t a reaction to poor sales figures, but the fact that a company spokesperson can state that it has chosen to "offer the device free with a £30 contract to make the pricing more competitive in light of recent device launches," is just another fancy way of saying that they’re dropping the price of it so that you don’t buy something else. Whatever the reason behind it, we’ve really got no complaints against them offering the phone for cheaper./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.uberphones.com/2008/12/lower_monthly_tariff_for_tmobile_g1/"Lower Monthly Tariff For T-Mobile G1/a from a href="http://www.uberphones.com"Uberphones/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"BlackBerry Storm/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/xGpJZQT5-dVOARSfGQ_rgsBrlQc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/xGpJZQT5-dVOARSfGQ_rgsBrlQc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

centerimg border=0 title="Lower Monthly Tariff For T-Mobile G1" alt="Lower Monthly Tariff For T-Mobile G1" src="http://www.uberphones.com/photos/2008/12/g1-uk-price.jpg" style="margin: 0 0 0 0;" //center br/pT-Mobile G1 users might be happy with the phone and all, but the initial monthly tariff pricing of £40 ($59) was a little steep, and it looks like T-Mobile is indirectly acknowledging it by dropping the monthly tariff to £30 ($44) instead. T-Mobile claims that it isn’t a reaction to poor sales figures, but the fact that a company spokesperson can state that it has chosen to "offer the device free with a £30 contract to make the pricing more competitive in light of recent device launches," is just another fancy way of saying that they’re dropping the price of it so that you don’t buy something else. Whatever the reason behind it, we’ve really got no complaints against them offering the phone for cheaper./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.uberphones.com/2008/12/google/lower_monthly_tariff_for_tmobile_g1/"Lower Monthly Tariff For T-Mobile G1/a from a href="http://www.uberphones.com"Uberphones/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"BlackBerry Storm/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/X2eNPVTp66wv50IP0neCeWbuc-4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/X2eNPVTp66wv50IP0neCeWbuc-4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

Derbyshire Arts Development Group was established in 1999 to pool the expertise of all the arts development organisations working within Derbyshire. The visual arts group of DADG started to look at ways to raise the low visibility of contemporary visual arts in the county – which is primarily due to a lack of venues – back in 2003, and commissioned London based Proboscis to research the potential for touring and showing visual arts across Derbyshire. The initial research included the commissioning of two site-specific works, Out of Curiosity by Lothar Goetz in Ashbourne, and Memories of the Little Things by Hannah Carvell at Erewash Museum Gardens in Ilkeston, in order to explore the potential for site-specific commissioning as an alternative to gallery exhibitions.br / br / Curator David Gilbert began a wider research and development process in 2006, which resulted in securing funding from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Arts Council England for a two-year programme of site-specific commissioning. Over the two years there will be at least four major site-specific commissions of national significance, and a programme of up to eight curatorial interventions across Derbyshire. br / br / Proposals are now being sought from artists, curators and arts organisations who would like to develop innovative proposals, with further information available at www.re-place.co.uk.img src="http://rhizome.org/syndicate/nothing.gif?f=announce" border="0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rhizome-announce/~4/473837984" height="1" width="1"/

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/74407?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Cluster+bomb+treaty%3A+Signing+begins+to+bring+ban+on+productionch=World+newsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Israel+and+the+Palestinian+territories+%28News%29%2CMiddle+East+%28News%29%2CDefence+policy%2CPolitics%2CWorld+newsc5=Policy+Society%2CNot+commercially+usefulc6=Richard+Norton-Taylor%2CPeter+Walkerc7=2008_12_03c8=1128081c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Israel+and+the+Palestinian+territoriesc13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FIsrael+and+the+Palestinian+territories" width="1" height="1" //divpGovernments from around the world today began signing an international convention banning the production of cluster bombs – unexploded canisters that have killed and maimed thousands of civilians and remain scattered dozen of countries./ppAt the Oslo signing ceremony, Norway, which has led the efforts to ban cluster munitions, was the first country to sign. It was followed by Laos – where cluster bombs dropped by US planes more than 30 years ago a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/03/laos-cluster-bombs-uxo-deaths"are still killing civilians/a, and Lebanon, another country affected by the weapons./ppBy the end of tomorrow, around 100 of the United Nations' 192 members will have signed up. Once 30 countries have ratified the convention, it will become part of international humanitarian law./ppThere will, however, be a number of notable absentees, including the US, China, Russia, India and Pakistan as well as Israel, which fired many cluster bombs during the 2006 Lebanon war. /ppCampaigners hope the treaty might help change global attitudes towards the munitions, as a 1997 treaty did on land mines, prompting some nations to sign up later./ppIntended primarily as anti-personnel weapons, cluster bombs open up in mid air to release dozens of individual devices, known as bomblets, which scatter across a wide area./ppWhile the bomblets are intended to explode when they hit the ground, many do not and can lie dormant for years. Victims often include farmers tilling land and children, attracted by the bomblets' bright colouring./ppThe US and other nations insist cluster bombs have a legitimate military use. One group that deals with the issue, Handicap International, says 98% of cluster-bomb victims are civilians and 27% are children./ppThe convention has been enthusiastically welcomed by the Red Cross, and a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/02/weaponstechnology-armstrade"on the guardian.co.uk/a by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, his German counterpart./ppThe weapons had "rendered huge trac