News For Idiots May 7th
Friday, May 7th, 2010I wanted to try a series that simplifies the news - cuts through big articles with boring facts and interviews and shit and just tells you what the story is about. Simple.
Supreme court of Canada says journalists shouldn't be able to fully protect anonymous sources. Saying it's not in the constitution.
The United Kingdom (ie: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern ireland) had a general election. It resulted in a minority government. Now they're fiff-faffing.
iPad available in Canada starting May 28. During Google's IO event May 19-20 Adobe will demonstrate a Google phone running Flash 10.1 and Adobe AIR. This will spur the completion of the bevy of competing tablets and mobile devices. Notion Ink's Adam tablet, and Hp's speculated WebOS tablet will be fierce competitors. Notion Ink plans to start shipping by the end of July.
They dug up some neanderthal bones from 30,000 - 40,000 years ago, and sequenced their DNA. It was difficult. They're saying based on similarities between their DNA and ours'(humans) there was a lot of interspecies fucking going on. Which technically means neanderthals and humans were not separate species - if they were able to produce offspring together.
Beyond Petroleum(BP) - the petroleum company - lowered a heavy metal box over their pressurized leaking oil hole in the Gulf of Mexico today. They hope it will work to stop the torrential leakage and not destroy the entire eastern coastline of North America. They're saying that if they knew oil - the thing gasoline and propane comes from - could catch on fire, they would have had a backup plan to prevent such a catastrophic disaster.
Germany decided to help the Greeks with their economy melt down with 110 billion euros. Other larger members of the European Union(EU) have helped, and other Countries are thinking about it too.
The United States and United Nations trying to coax peace in the Middle East asked Israel - the only known country there to have them - to disarm and disable some of their nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't want to do that until there's peace in the area.
One of the volcanoes in Iceland responsible for the huge ash cloud over Europe emitted more ash yesterday.
6 days ago Maoists in Nepal went on strike because they're unhappy with the government, this made everyone else angry so thousands of protesters gathered to demand an end to the strike and compromise between the Maoists and the government. After the protesters became violent, the government injured some people firing bullets in the air and tear gas at the crowd.
Political parties in Burma are having differences and splitting up. This is all much more difficult under their strict election laws. Some say participating in the election at all is undemocratic in the military run country.
Turkey may revise their constitution from being secular to Islamic based. The bill to do so has been approved but may still be blocked before coming into affect.
Microsoft's security patches secretly attempt to fix more than they tell people, which can cause problems and complete system failures.
Google Goggles - an app that let's you photograph something with your phone and find out more about that thing - has added translation. So aside from taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower and getting Wikipedia or whatever, you can photograph a chalk menu outside a bistro in Milan and have it translated into the language of your choice.
There's a new update for Google's web browser Chrome which makes it the fastest browser for looking at web sites. It's half a second faster than the latest Firefox, four hundreds of a second faster than the latest Opera and Safari. Internet Explorer is still painfully slow, so much that it's not even benchmarked anymore.
The first non-latin domain names are live now. You can now register website names using Arabic, Japanese, and other non-latin characters.
Yahoo tries ad campaign to compete with Google as a search/home page, speculatively wastes $85 million proving how incompetent they are.
