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SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A prominent fashion designer has sparked outrage in Chile by dressing up models like the Virgin Mary — in some cases with ample, near-naked breasts.
The Roman Catholic Church condemned Ricardo Oyarzun’s plans for a show featuring the models, and a conservative group tried unsuccessfully to block it in court.
Oyarzun said he had received telephone threats and had excrement smeared on his doorstep.
“There is no pornography here, there’s no sex, there are no virgins menstruating or feeling each other up,” Oyarzun said ahead of the catwalk show set to be held at a Santiago nightclub later on Thursday. “This is artistic expression.”
He said his designs — which include halos, look as though they come from a nativity scene and include religious icons — were inspired by the Virgin Mary but not intended to represent her.
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WASHINGTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Osama bin Laden’s son Sa’ad, a prominent figure in the murky relationship between Iran and al Qaeda, has left that country and is believed to be in Pakistan, U.S. intelligence said.
“The person you are talking about (Sa’ad bin Laden) has left Iran. He’s not there. He’s probably in Pakistan,” Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told reporters on Friday.
Sa’ad bin Laden, who is believed to have played a role in several al Qaeda attacks, was reported to have been living in Iran since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 that ousted the Taliban government shielding al Qaeda.
He is believed to have been under house arrest in recent years, but some reports say he also may have acted as an intermediary with Iran. The U.S. government lists him as having been born in 1982.
The United States and Saudi Arabia have sought the repatriation of al Qaeda members in Iran.
A U.S. counterterrorism official described the younger bin Laden as “a very well-connected apprentice terrorist.”
McConnell declined to say whether there was any deal that led to Sa’ad bin Laden’s relocation, and the counterterrorism official said the circumstances of his departure from Iran were unclear.
But McConnell suggested bin Laden’s relocation to Pakistan was promising for U.S. counterterrorism efforts. “It’s better for my world if any of these players are in places that we have access,” he said.
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Courtesy of Fox
“American Idol” hopeful Casey Carlson is a real-life bikini model.
Becker/AP
Katrina Darrell caused a stir when she showed up for her audition in a teeny orange bikini.
Meet the real “American Idol” bikini girl: Casey Carlson.
Contestant Katrina Darrell made headlines and became a YouTube star after she showed up for “Idol’s” Phoenix, Ariz. auditions wearing an itsy-bitsy bikini and planted a big kiss on host Ryan Seacrest.
But Kansas City contender Carlson is the real deal.
The singer models in swimsuit calendars for Campus Girls USA [see here]. The company’s Web site features a gallery of Carlson – who is identified as a representative of the University of Minnesota.
Fans can purchase a calendar that features Carlson in a different sexy bikini for every month of the year. Carlson is also featured in a special edition “Girls of the Big 10” calendar, from which all proceeds are donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. It sells for $14.95
And she doesn’t just look good – she sounds pretty good too.
Carlson sang Vanessa Carlton‘s “A Thousand Miles” in her audition and earned unanimous praise from four “Idol” judges.
After the singing-songwriting judge belted out a few bars to demonstrate how it should be done, Darrell shot back that her version “wasn’t any better.”
Judge Paula Abdul intervened and defused a potential faceoff.
And speaking of faceoffs – we’re wondering what will happen when the two bikini girls meet and compete.
They both made it to the next round: Hollywood.
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We can tell you without a doubt that at least one human being currently has a Samsung Instinct to play around with. Thanks to a tipster — and some loose lips over at Sprint — we present the first unboxing of this would-be iPhone contender. Well, what are you waiting for? Hit the read link and see how it all goes down.
Update: Apparently the source site is down. We’re throwing a couple of pics after the break until they get back on their feet.
[Thanks, DssTrainer]
Continue reading Samsung Instinct gets unboxed in someone’s office
Dell Studio line details leak out
Posted on: June 3, 2008
It looks like that mysterious listing on Dell’s support site for a “Studio 1535” laptop is evidence of a larger branding push soon to come — we just got a tip that says Dell’s planning on creating an entire Studio line as “a midpoint between performance XPS systems and entry-level Inspiron systems.” The first machines out of the gate will apparently be those rumored 1535 and 1735 laptops we caught a glimpse of last month (the 1435 appears to have been canned), but we’re being told that eventually there’ll be Studio desktops as well, and that the 1535 will get an AMD-based 1536 twin. All still rumors for now, but they dovetail nicely with the recent merger of the XPS and Alienware teams and Dell’s hints at “new directions” for XPS — and based on the obviously-related design language of the XPS m1530 and Studio 1535, we’d even go so far as to guess that the Studio line is destined to replace the XPS line, not simply supplement it. We’ll see when we see — any other theories out there?
Yahoo C.E.O. Jerry Yang mapped out a scorched-earth defense against Microsoft, essentially arranging to encourage all 14,000 Yahoo employees to quit if Microsoft succeeded in buying the company earlier this year, newly released court documents suggest.
Yahoo executives also declined to tell its employees that Microsoft was prepared to offer them $1.5 billion in retention bonuses if they would stay with the company after a merger was completed, documents say.
A Delaware state court judge today unsealed a class-action complaint by two pension funds that sued Yahoo’s board, claiming it failed to protect shareholders’ interests after Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo for $44.5 billion in January.
The 42-page complaint, filed by the New York class-action specialist law firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman, gives a window into internal discussions at Yahoo, and includes copies of internal e-mails among Yahoo executives.
The complaint asserts that the Yahoo board “handed to Yang responsibility for direct negotiations with Microsoft,” and that “none of Yahoo’s independent directors attended critical meetings with the company.”
As early as January 31, the day Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer e-mailed his offer to Yang, Microsoft made clear it wanted Yahoo “employees to be okay” and had earmarked “$1.5 billion for the retention of employees” in addition to the “$5 billion for [the] deal,” according to notes made that day by an unidentified Yahoo employee. But that fact was never conveyed to Yahoo’s employees.
Meanwhile, Yang was engineering a plan for a “massive employee walkout” in the aftermath of a Microsoft takeover by offering all of Yahoo’s 14,000 employees the right to quit his or her job and pocket 100 percent acceleration of their equity rights, if there was “substantial adverse alteration” of their jobs.
Yahoo’s compensation consultant calculated that the proposal would cost $1.5 billion, or 3.2 percent of the transaction price. “That’s nuts,” he concluded in an e-mail.
A Yahoo vice president wrote that it is “a bizarre outcome if people who stick around make off worse financially than people who [are] laid off.”
But another Yahoo executive, using Microsoft’s four-letter stock-ticker symbol, noted that the plan “will make things increasingly more expensive for MSFT though.”
The “double trigger” plan Yang supported would have first required Microsoft to pay benefits to everyone who lost their jobs as a result of the merger; a second trigger would also require severance for people who were still on the payroll if their jobs changed.
A February 14 e-mail exchange between two Yahoo executives—Gred Mrva, vice president of mergers and acquisitions, and John Dillon, senior director of integration and corporate development—shows them candidly observing they would be better off getting fired under the Yahoo.
“You and I will be f***ed as they will find a way to make us work for two more years,” Mrva wrote.
I sent a couple of people the following question: “What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?” Here are some of their answers (with formatting partly adjusted, omissions within quotes indicated with dots). Please add your own tips and approaches in the comments.
Niniane Wang, Google: «I like the time-honored tradition of responding to emails or archiving them as soon as I read them. (Like this one.) I’ve also found it helpful to maintain a to-do list that I reference every hour. Everything goes on the list or in my calendar, so that I don’t have to remember it.»
Paul Buchheit, FriendFeed (formerly Google): «Drop packets. Systems that work have some kind of flow-control. . . . It’s basically one of the big flaws in email – people expect reply. One of the nice things about FriendFeed is that you are free to ignore it when you get too busy or fall behind.»
Kevin Fox, FriendFeed (formerly Google, Yahoo): «Honestly my method isn’t highly structured. I have several streams of data of varying signal:noise and rates (twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader, email, voicemail, etc.). My strategy is to make sure I see at least the title of everything, and then pluck the important stuff out of the stream, either replying to it immediately or marking it in some way so I can ’get back to it’.
In reality “get back to it” usually means “recognize that it was important when it comes around again a second time”. This is usually most relevant with stars in Gmail. When something is both starred and unread it means that I indicated that it was important, and it’s come back for more. That’s usually my highest priority.
Beyond that, it’s mostly about realizing that communication is falut-tolerant, and recognizing the rare cases where it’s not: where it’s important and you’ll only get one notice, and where if you don’t act on it immediately you never will. This is pretty rare.»
Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo: «I try to prioritize . . . and watch Inbox Zero every couple of months to get re-inspired.»
Andy Baio, Waxy.org: «In Google Reader, I separate feeds into “mustread,” “maybe,” and “everything else” piles with tags, so that I make sure I don’t miss my essential reads. For everything else, I just liberally ignore and/or delete. More a defense mechanism than “dealing with information overflow.”»
Noam Chomsky, MIT: «I wish I could answer sensibly. I just can’t. You should see the room in which I’m working. Piles of books, clippings, manuscripts, notes,… All sorts of lost treasures buried in them.»
Louis Gray, LouisGray.com: «The big tip is to be selective in what you consume. I don’t write about everything, so if, for example, I do get e-mail pitches that aren’t in my areas of interest, it can be clear right away. Similarly, while it can be popular to sign up to every RSS feed under the sun, it makes sense to only select the very best ones that repeatedly have good content.
Also, reading fast, clicking fast, and having a quick yea/nay trigger can make things much more manageable. I do read upwards of 500-800 articles a day on Google Reader. Criteria that impacts just what I’ll read more thoroughly or respond to includes the headlines, the source, and whether it’s new data or more rehashing that’s already been covered somewhere else.
Taking on the information overflow means doing so in approachable chunks. I read e-mail, feeds, Twitter and FriendFeed first thing in the morning, just after feeding the dog. 🙂 Hitting each spot every few hours throughout the day means that work doesn’t pile up. It’s also just as important to get all the items to zero before going to bed, so there are no loose ends.»
Matt Cutts, Google: «At the beginning of the day, write down the 1-2 things you really want to accomplish that day. That will help keep you on track.
I’ve started exercising in the morning and I do email while I exercise. That lets me clean out my inbox early in the morning.
In Gmail I write a reply to some emails, but then save them as drafts and let them sit for a few hours or more. That prevents me from getting into a vicious loop of email back-and-forth.
Empty out your inbox by selecting all your email and (say) making those emails starred – then archive that email. Once your inbox is empty, it’s much more motivating to keep it empty.
Sort your RSS feeds by priority into folders, and hit the most important folder first.
Use a tool like FeedRinse to subtract recurring RSS items that you know you aren’t interested in for a given feed.»
Steven Hodson, WinExtra.com: «When it comes to RSS I tend to do two things. When I start my morning read I will skim over the posts. If they are only partial posts they usually get passed over as I don’t want to waste time by having to go the site to read the item. Same thing to those sites like CNN and Wired who only publish headlines they get ignored as well. As well I am a lot more selective in what I will finally end up reading during that first run through in the morning – if I get the sense by looking at the first few lines that this isn’t something that I would normally write something about two things can happen. I’ll either totally skip it or I’ll save it to one of my predefined Clippins folders in FeedDemon.
For the rest of the day I do something similar when the feeds get refreshed. That being short posts are generally read in full and longer posts recieve the same treatment as above. In both cases once I have gone through the feeds that have arrived I will go through the ones that were saved to the clippings folder.
Email is a little different in that I really don’t get that much right now (but I am seeing that change slowly) but notification from FriendFeed and the such get left most of the time until I have a bunch to do all at once. Personal emails are usually held until I have a quiet moment so that I can concentrate on them. Pitches are fairly easy – I give them a quick glance and any that are of the stupid type or boilerplate crap get tossed. Other ones that catch my interest are tagged to deal with at a later point in the day.»
«Triage (pronounced /ˈtriːɑːʒ/) is a process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition so as to treat as many as possible when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately. The term comes from the French verb trier, meaning “to sort, sift or select.”»
– Wikipedia
Elinor Mills, CNet: «Triage. I scan email and see what needs immediate attention, set aside things that can wait and then go back to them in order of importance, hoping that none of them expires in the meantime. 😉 I scan the RSS and iGoogle headlines several times a day. It is overwhelming the amount of information that gets thrust at you every day all day, especially in the daily news business. I also make a lot of lists of ideas to pursue and stories I’m working on to try to stay on top of it.»
Shelley Powers, Burningbird.net: «Frankly, the people who are having problems with information overflow are people who want the information overflow. We’re all big boys and girls here. We don’t need specialized technology or social gurus to tell us when we’ve subscribed to too many feeds, or are on too many social networks. We don’t need calendaring software to tell us when we’ve taken on more work than we can handle. What we need to do is prioritize the demands on our attention, and when we find ourselves overwhelmed, lop off the bottom distractions.
In all honesty, people who talk about how “noisy” their lives are one moment, while extolling the virtues of Twitter for FriendFeed the next would be the first distractions to go, and easily. Other distractions may be more difficult to drop, but if we want to be known for something other than “she gave great Twitter”, we have to make the decision, and live with the loss.»
Seth Finkelstein, Infothought blog: «Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m very good at dealing with information overload. If I were better, I think I’d get much more done. This cartoon has already become a classic . . .
I think mail-sorting is important. I like text-based command-line tools, since they are FAST – the waiting time to try to move rapidly through web-based GUI interfaces irritates me.»
Tony Ruscoe, Google Blogoscoped: «[B]y reducing the amount of information. So, for FriendFeed, I originally subscribed to quite a lot of people. Once they introduced the “friend of friend” type of sharing, I couldn’t handle the amount of information so I started pruning my subscriptions (since FriendFeed doesn’t have the option to just block “friends of friends”).
My lifesaver with regards to feeds is Google Reader. I add a tag/label/folder for every single feed to which I subscribe. That way, I can prioritise my reading effectively. When I’m using Google Reader for Mobile, I’m a lot more ruthless as to which posts I mark as read without even reading them. When I’m in the standard browser version, I use the “expanded view” rather than the “list view” but very quickly skim read posts, continuously pressing j or k to move back and forth between them. Quite often, if I’m pushed for time, I’ll simply star an item after skim-reading it and read it properly later when I have more time – particularly if I’m using Google Reader for Mobile.»
Dave Winer, Scripting.com: «I don’t know – I don’t have information overload. I keep wanting more. More! I want more! :-)»
[Thanks all! Xkcd cartoon Creative Commons-licensed by Randall Munroe. More on Triage at the Wikipedia source. Image with workout machine compiled via HealthPhenoms.com and Loaz.com.]
Tips For Dealing With Inf … by Philipp Lenssen
The Internet FAQ from 2085
Posted on: May 31, 2008
What was the internet?
The internet and the world web was a computing system to transfer human information. Scientists have based its beginning to the years 1920 to 1940.
What was electromail?
Electromail was another transport protocol to transfer human information, but it was quickly discontinued as it caused misunderstandings due to lack of correctly representing emotions.
What were world web sites?
A so-called world web site consisted of an address of its owner to locate their physical business location, as well as other miscellaneous transmitting of human information that was considered important at the time. The protocol used to decode the information was called hypertext, and as its standards changed quickly over the years, it is impossible to decode most of the information contained within.
I noticed the word “NSFW” in a world web sites museum displaying hypertext reproductions. What does it mean?
Scientific research at the late Mars Research Laboratory came to the conclusion that NSFW announced the display of a widely popular human called Britneyspears in the 1970s. Why warnings were issued before the viewing of this human is unclear.
Did the world web have version numbers?
Yes. In the beginning, the world web was numbered from 1 to 10, with most people considering world web 8 to be the first stable release. Afterwards, the world web received code names for each new version, like “Omega Sun” or the popular “Happy Happy Rabbit” release.
A picture showing the internet. It is unclear what it depicts.
Who controlled the internet?
The internet was controlled by the governments, then for a brief period by personal humans all over the world, and then again by the governments. The intermittent period of personal human control was subsequently named the internet dark age as it incited to unlawful behavior.
What alternative information transfer technologies accompanied the internet?
The internet was only one of many transfer technologies. Equally popular at the time were the Ipod, also called Phone, a device to record and emit copies of the human voice, as well as the so-called Pongmachine which showed an animated bright shape on a dark background.
What was the Googlecom?
The Googlecom was a government-supervised computerized mechanism for human information storage and retrieval. It subsequently became integrated into the Universal Intelligence in around 2035.
Did the internet help the birth of the Universal Intelligence?
It is believed that the internet was an important mechanism to copy, spread and advance the ancestor of the Universal Intelligence. While the human civilization host system was unstable, progress was quickly reached after the invention of self-developing computerized intelligence machinery.
What was the Worldthought, the Netlink, and the Civilitron?
This FAQ only deals with planet number 5010; for the early computing systems of other planets, please refer to FAQs number 1 – 10000.
How long did humans take to invent the internet?
Scientific research believes that humans took around 150,000 years to build the internet and the world web as well as electromail. To explain the delay, it is believed that a human brain needed around 20 seconds to calculate an expression like 12 * 390, whereas it was incapable of calculating expressions like 12 * 3903829. Other inhabitants of the planet such as Bonobo Apes or the Arrowtooth Eel are believed to have had higher brain capacities, but no intent to build the internet.
Which entities were most popular on the internet?
While early hypertext storage can only be vaguely decoded, scientific research believes that from 1970 to 1999, the most popular entity on the internet was Britneyspears; from 2000 to 2020, it was Pleaseclickhere; from 2021 to 2030, it was the Mechabot100 release.
When did the internet end?
The internet ended with the end of planet number 5010, which is widely attributed to the fact that humans were using transportation facilities called autocars which only used around 1/5th of their transportation storage capacity, causing the planet to overheat. Copies of the internet are available in other systems though so you can read the archive at anytime.
I am interested to find out more about humans, where can I see them?
You can find representative entities of the human species in most local zoos. Visitors of model version 4.55 and lower receive special discounts; while the brain of humans is likely incapable of experiencing pain, please do not feed or break them.
The Internet FAQ from 208 … by Philipp Lenssen
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