With 300,000 iPhone apps and 200,000 Android apps available for download, consumers aren’t willing to tolerate apps that at first sight don’t meet their standards.
Twenty-six percent of apps are only opened once after download, according to a study by software company Localytics…
Continue reading… “26% of Mobile Apps Are Opened Only Once”
Inside a Masonic lodge.
Despite the impression given by books such as author Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol, and movies like National Treasure, the Masons are not a clandestine group.
“We’re not a secret society,” Bennett says. “We’re a society with a few secrets.”
South Africa is in the grip of a dangerous new drug craze that could threaten the country’s battle against AIDS. The street drug called “whoonga” is a cocktail that includes the anti retroviral (ARV) medication prescribed to people with HIV. Demand for the substance has prompted a wave of thefts of AIDS drugs across the country.
Continue reading… “HIV Street Drug ‘Whoonga’ is South Africa’s Latest High”
HealCam is a ChatRoulette variant that invites you to select a disease, medical condition, or health issue (Crohn’s, back pain, pregnancy, bipolar disorder, allergies, HIV, etc) and connects you with someone else who shares your problems, so you can share notes. Sounds like a helpful way to find tips and commiseration when you need it.
Continue reading… “HealCam: a ChatRoulette for Health”
A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzes more than 2,500 pages’ worth of FBI documents extracted using Freedom of Information Act litigation and finds disturbing, system-wide violations of civil liberties on a scale that is far beyond anything reported to date…
Continue reading… “EFF: FBI May Have Committed More Than 40K Intelligence Violations Since 9/11”
Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after she got lung cancer…
Continue reading… “Ayn Rand Slyly Took Government Assistance While Decrying Others Who Did The Same”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has officially approved the unregulated planting of Monsanto’s genetically engineered alfalfa. In a move that will undoubtedly set a precedent for what comes next (namely, the question of whether or not to deregulate GE sugarbeets) Vilsack did nothing more, and nothing less than obliterate our choice as organic consumers to be assured that we are avoiding genetically modified organisms in our food…
Continue reading… “Monsanto Wins Big and Consumers Again Get Screwed”
Should the government here have this kind of power?
On Thursday Jan 27th at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesys explains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US…
Continue reading… “Egypt Turns Off Internet, Lieberman Wants Same Option For US”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnw5BvxSDmM[/youtube]
As China gears up for the Year of the Rabbit, the nation’s Communist authorities have censored a bunny cartoon with political overtones. The Chinese New Year – which falls this year on February 3 – is the country’s biggest holiday. Families come together for several days of feasting and gift-giving. But, this year, a New Year-themed cartoon posted on a popular Chinese website seems to have rankled officials. Censors have deleted the video, in an apparent reaction to its biting political satire.
The three-minute animation begins with rabbit babies being poisoned, a blatant reference to a recent toxic milk scandal that left six children dead…
Continue reading… “China Bans Satirical Bunnies”
The dairy industry is butting heads with the FDA over the agency’s plan to increase testing for antibiotics in milk. Food safety advocates are concerned about overuse of drugs in dairy cows (and increased antibiotic resistance in humans), while the industry says the new testing procedures would cause a lot of milk to be wasted because the results can take a full week to come back.
Certain farms are already caught regularly with milk containing illegal levels of drugs—and farmers also use drugs that are not regularly tested for.
Continue reading… “Dairy Industry Fights FDA’s Proposed New Drug Testing for Milk”
Google, the company that fought censorship in China and vowed not to censor even anti-Semitism, has begun a subtle censorship campaign of its own.
As of today, if a Google search user begins typing in a term such as “BitTorrent,” Google’s Auto Suggest feature stops listing possible terms as soon as he types the second “T” in the word. Likewise, it won’t auto-complete the pirate-familiar words “megaupload,” “utorrent” or “rapidshare.”
Continue reading… “Google Engages in Subtle Form of Censorship”
UPS saved a lot of money by eliminating left turns from its delivery routes. Would this practice be effective on a larger scale? At Smithsonian, Sarah Zielinski writes:
UPS minimizes left turns for its delivery trucks to save on fuel. (And it works, as the Mythbusters demonstrated last year.) In the 1960s, the state of Michigan designed an intersection known as the “Michigan left” that prevents people driving on side streets from making left turns onto a multi-laned divided road; if they wish to go left, they’ll first have to go right and then make a U-turn…
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.