More ringy-dingies

In an effort to reduce the cost of cell phones and get more of them into the hands of third-world residents, Philips Electronics has developed the Nexperia Cellular System, a way to put all the electronics of a mobile phone into a handset costing only $20.

The Nexperia sets can make calls and text message and come with monochrome screens. No flashy cameras, no note taking or extensive personal digital assistant hoohaw, just a phone that anyone can use and afford.

It’s a win-win for everyone, since 77% of the world’s population lives within range of a mobile network, but only 25% subscribe to the services. Now there are affordable phone to allow almost anyone to more easily communicate with everyone else, and the cellular companies get to jerk them around just like the rest of us with lousy service and ridiculous fees. Welcome to the modern world!

Hard core

Scientists have discovered a planet that they can’t quite explain, because although it’s 75% as big as Jupiter, its core is as big as 70 Earths. The planet was detected because it was tugging on its own star, rather than vice versa.

“This is a very weird object,” said one astronomer with what we will assume was a kind of small smirk and wiggling of eyebrows. For one thing, its mere presence kind of throws what we thought we knew about planetary development out the window. So it’s back to the drawing board and another stupid mystery to be solved by those dumb scientists who don’t realize that God did it, and that’s that!

Propagandamentalist

One you probably won’t see at Smoking Gun: Jeffrey Vernon Merkey lives in Utah. Mr. Merkey says that he’s been involved in Open Source development for 10 years, specifically relating to Linux. Mr. Merkey just filed suit against SlashDot, Groklaw and 230 other online sites and even some real people because, according to Mr. Merkey, they’re all violating his constitutional and statutory rights to free speech and religion.

And what’s more, Slashdot is “a far right wing Internet news website that posts libelous (sic) and defamatory content and is used by Open Source Community members to anonymously post hate speech, death threats, threats to murder and promotes and advocates acts of domestic terrorism within the United States.” Which is wacky!

I’m thinking of suing Kottke. Sometimes, but only sometimes, he links to dumb things which irritate me. Hate that!

Fat-fingering a $12 million loss

A stock trader for Fubon Securities in Taiwan accidentally bought $251 million in shares, resulting in a paper loss of $12 million for her employer — or, that should be, ex-employer.

She was supposed to be keying in a small order from Merrill Lynch but, you know, didn’t. She was, it has been explained, unfamiliar with new computer systems.

She is now employed by the Bush administration figuring out how to make Social Security work.

It's not the word, it's the idea

Same-sex marriage foes in the U.S. often say that they’re trying to protect “marriage,” because if “marriage” isn’t a union between one man and one woman, it could mean anything! Those that think the gays are raising a stink over a little thing — the word “marriage” — sometimes say “it doesn’t matter all that much, really. It’s just a word. You can have the same rights without calling it marriage.”

In California, we basically have those same rights under the domestic partner law. It states that registered couples within California have the right to every state spousal law except joint tax returns. And today, the state Supreme Court validated the law by declining to to review court rulings that have said it doesn’t conflict with California’s Prop. 22, passed in 2000, even though the people who put Prop. 22 on the ballot in the first place are the ones challenging this law. Because that law states that, quite clearly, “marriage” is a union blah blah blah.

Marriage. That’s what “marriage” is.

So you may think that those opposed to same-sex marriage would sit back and relax because they got what they asked for 5 years ago. And of course, you’d be dead wrong.

After the high court’s ruling, lawyers for the Alliance Defence Fund said they’re going to put another proposition on the ballot, because although they said “marriage” in 2000, they meant, “anything and everything having to do with gay couples getting together and trying to share their lives, which is completely wrong and everyone agrees with us and we’re going to prove it by stripping away this law, too, and any other attempts that come along in the future. Because, well, Jesus said so!”

Or words to that effect.

How cheap is cheap?

There was a time when “Made in Japan” did not equate with high-quality goods. Before everyone started watching Sony Trinitrons and driving Toyota Camrys, Japan was the center of cheap goods sold in bulk that lasted a few weeks and broke down. Who’s the next country to jump from also-ran to pack-leader? How about India.

c|net reports on the Indian computer companies producing inexpensive, portable, simple computers for around $250, and a plan by one company to introduce a full-featured desktop for under $100 (sans monitor) by year-end.

India’s computer technology is thriving, in part because they no longer need to outsource their talent to Western companies, and also because PC penetration within India is so low that innovation to produce better, cheaper products is a necessity in order to get those products into their customers’ hands.

All roads lead to terror

The White House’s current resident said “terror” or “terrorism” 34 times last night during his speech to pump up his poll numbers, and invoked September 11 six different times in an effort to make a connection between his Iraq War and terrorist attacks on American soil.

This redirect back to a previously successful propaganda tact linking two actions that are otherwise unrelated supercedes his previous proclamations that the Iraqi war was all about the spread of democracy. That worked for a while, but with the war dragging on and over 1,700 dead soldiers to account for, Bush is returning to what has always worked for him in the past.

Predictably, Republicans echoed the terrorist rhetoric to stay the course and not “allow the terrorists to shake our resolve,” while Democrats called the policy “adrift, disconnected from the reality on the ground and in need of major mid-course corrections.”

The latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that 61% of Americans say that Bush lacks an efective strategy, 53% said that going into Iraq was a mistake, and 56% disapprove of the President’s handling of the war. And for the first time, a majority of those surveyed felt that Bush deliberately misled them on the WMD excuses for going to war in the first place.

Intelling on you!

After being found guilty of violating Japan’s antitrust rules and being investigated by the European Union for also violating their antitrust laws, Intel is again under fire in the courts by rival AMD. The company claims that the chip maker freezes out competition by using price cuts and rebates to get exclusive deals with computer makers (Dell, HP and Sony, to be specific). Then, Intel threatens to withhold payment of the kick-backs in retaliation if those manufacturers consider using AMD’s chips instead.

Intel denies the charges, unsurprisingly, and pretty much calls AMD a jealous, petty little whiner. AMD points its finger right back stating that it has “nothing to be jealous of, you big fat hack, because our chips kick your chips ass!”

In Japan, Toshiba admitted that it was receiving $25-$30 million per quarter from Intel to use their chips exclusively, labeling such financial inducements ‘cocaine.’ Gateway’s Ted Waitt reportedly told an AMD executive that in order to return to profitability in 2001, he’d be willing to drop AMD’s chips in favor of Intel. And when HP started using AMD chips in 2002, the company wanted AMD to choke up $25 million in compensation for Intel’s expected financial retaliation.

AMD has sent letters to 40 PC-makers, retailers and distributors asking them to save all internal communications regarding the choice of chip maker for a possible future court date.

Fusion finalist

A 35-year, €10 billion nuclear fusion reactor project has been won by France after an 18-month delay while the parties involved tried to broker a solution. Japan was second in line for the honor.

Essentially, the plan is to build a small star on Earth and use that to produce power, replacing fossil fuels and nuclear (or “nucular”) fission, both of which contribute vast amounts of icky crap to our planet as waste material. The European Union, The U.S., Russia, Japan, South Korea and China are partners in the ambitious project.

One kilogram of fusion fuel produces the same energy as 10 million kilograms of fossil fuel, but the technology required to produce fusion — including heating gas to temperatures exceeding 100 million Celsius — are somewhat elusive, to put it mildly.

Goin' to the chapel and we're...

Canada’s Parliament voted to legalize same-sex marriages throughout the nation Tuesday, and the bill now passes to the Senate for final approval, which is expected to pass easily. Canada then becomes the third nation to allow homosexuals to legally wed one another.

The 158 to 133 vote wasn’t without controversy, of course, and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said he’s going to “revisit this in a future Parliament.” Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler threw some cold water on the heated words by explaining that “they’re going to have to acknowledge that they want to override the (Charter of Rights), override constitutional-law decisions in nine jurisdictions in this country, override a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, override the rule of law in this country.”

So there.

Meanwhile in the U.S., nothing is any better, most people polled still think the gays aren’t worthy of the institution of marriage and the Bush League mouths its platitudes to the far, far, far right about changing the nation’s constitution to include legalized inequality. Yay, us.

GTV

On what Janice Crouse from Concerned Women for America is calling “a sad day for America,” Viacom is launching their gay-themed network, Logo, on Thursday. And in what can only be labeled the best reason to have the channel, Crouse went on to say that, like MTV, she sees it “as indoctrination of children to present the gay lifestyle as something that’s normal, as something they don’t have any choice over.”

Speaking as an “official gay” to any impressionable straight children out there who may be considering or are curious about becoming homosexuals, let me explain that actually, you can’t. Only gay people are gay. Ms. Crouse and her co-horts have what we adults call “a bug up their butts,” and, no, anal sex won’t dislodge it.

Logo isn’t the first gay channel, but it will be the most widespread, available to around 10 million homes via cable when it launches. So we can finally join all the other demographic groups and be advertised down to like the lowly, misunderstood minority we so long to be.

Like golfers and Donald Rumsfeld.

Commandment Fever!

Missing the point entirely — which is hardly unusual — Christian groups such as Washington-based Christian Defense Coalition are planning to install 100 Ten Commandments monuments, bringing the total to 1,000 commandments within a year following the Supreme Court’s ruling that non-religion-promoting religious displays do not violate the constitution.

Without actually reading anything or listening to anyone or, like, paying attention, the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney said, “We see this as an historic opening, and we’re going to pursue it aggressively,” misunderstanding entirely that the single fact that they’re trying to promote Christianity with Christian monuments violates the very ruling they think allows them to do so, but whatever.

There are more than a few church-and-state issues left on the Sup’s docket, but they’ve called it quits until October. So we won’t find out whether, as one young Floridian wondered on her school mural before she was ordered to remove it, resulting in her suit against her school — “Jesus has time for you; do you have time for Him?”

Uh, no, actually, I don’t. But thanks for asking!

World wires short-circuit Bush

The San Francisco Chronicle goes out on the web to round up some of the more pithy comments that the world press has to say about the White House adminstration’s “weasel words on Iraq.”

And what they smell on the wind from Washington is more than a whiff of desperation. What they would like to hear more of is truth, and much less rhetoric. The news of death and destruction emerging daily from Iraq isn’t mirroring the more rosy and hopeful pictures that Bush & Co. keep spouting just as quickly, calling such comments “indefensible,” “desperate,” and “counterproductive.”

iTunes, uPhones

Apple released a minor update to iTunes today, coinciding with a decision to outfit all iPods with color screens. iTunes 4.9 adds support for podcasting as well and including some new directories aimed at Cingular’s reportedly upcoming Motorola iPod phone.

With yesterday’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that file sharing services could be liable for their customer’s violation of copyright law, iTunes moves up in class as one of the only viable, 100% legal digital audio (and video?) portals, and certainly the most successful. With color iPods the norm and iTunes-ready cell phones pending, Apple continues to be the pocket gadget leader to beat.

Confusing the matter

As the president’s war on terror Saddam Iraqi insurgents high oil prices continues unabated — and things look like they will get worse — Mr. Bush plans a prime time national address where, according to his White House spokesman, he will present a clear strategy for success in a manner that leaves him free of annoying questions from the liberal press and unbothered by radical judges or other talking points.

It’s a sure bet that he will once again site a connection between 9-11 and Iraq’s deposed regime that never existed, and label anyone opposing U.S. intervention into other countries we don’t agree with “terrorists,” whether or not they’ve ever actually attacked us.

By the way, please remember that the only way out is in, the only way forward is backward, and remember the words of Secretary Rumsfeld; that these “final throes” of the conflict should only last “for a number of years.”