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News Briefs 16-10-2006

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  • Sardinia is Atlantis, according to Italian journalist Sergio Frau, and UNESCO supports him. Support Robert Bauval, I say!
  • A UK team has proposed a new location for the mythical Ithaca.
  • A joint American-Iranian archaeological team will begin excavating the Susan Plain in southwestern Iran for the first time since 1973.
  • Obelisks belonging to the Neolithic period have been found in southeastern Turkey, and are decorated with human and animal figures.
  • Bronze idols of Lord Siva and Goddess Parvati dating to the 12th century AD were unearthed at a temple in Tamil Nadu.
  • Nine Neolithic-era buildings have been excavated near Stonehenge, the first house-like structures discovered there.
  • A self-described hobby physicist challenges the skeptics.
  • A non-profit US group has reached an agreement with Libya to provide each of its 1.2 million schoolchildren with an inexpensive laptop by 2008.
  • It was exactly ten years ago when 176 world leaders at the World Food Summit pledged to halve the number of undernourished people by 2015. Things have gotten worse.
  • Bono enlists Oprah to preach charity where people will listen — in the shopping mall.
  • New software will give computer-generated characters more soul. Does anyone remember Max Headroom?
  • This old house is haunted.
  • A prophetess says Russia will face a series of large-scale catastrophes in 2014 because the mummy of princess Ochy-Bala was recently unearthed. Egypt’s in a wee bit of trouble then …
  • A new biography (Amazon UK) of crime-writer Agatha Christie claim’s her two-week disappearance was a case of out-of-body amnesia.
  • A new book investigates sightings of deceased pets and tells you how to contact your own departed furry friends. Pet Ghosts: Animal Encounters From Beyond The Grave by Joseph P. Warren (Amazon US or UK).
  • Is this a photo of a UFO over Tel Aviv, or just a plane’s exhaust painted orange by the sunset?
  • Here’s video of UFOs filmed on a flight somewhere over Europe en route to England.
  • More than 700 UFO sightings have been reported to the UK’s Ministry of Defence, but only 12 of them are worth investigating according to MOD officials.
  • An article discussing the problems of UFO hoaxes.
  • A shadowy sack-like being was encountered by a Polish resident. I see plastic-bag-like beings on windy nights all the time.
  • A teenage boy in eastern India married a hill to appease its goddess who had put a curse on his mother.
  • No explanation needed — Crying, while eating.

Thanks Kat.

Quote of the Day:

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.

Pablo Picasso.

  1. Laptops
    Jeez it sure would be nice if every American schoolchild had a laptop. Over crowded classrooms, old text books, underfunded public libaries. But kids in anouther country are given free laptops. Great just great. I really do believe more and more that what the powers that be want are uneducated idiots that will work for a dollar a day.

    1. laptops – with a Linux OS
      >>But kids in another country are given free laptops. Great just great. I really do believe more and more that what the powers that be want are uneducated idiots that will work for a dollar a day.

      A couple of points from the article about laptops for all Libyan schoolchildren:

      ‘The two men also discussed the possibility of Libya’s financing the purchase of laptops for a group of poorer African nations like Chad, Niger and Rwanda.

      ‘It is possible, Mr. Negroponte said, that Libya will become the first nation in the world where all school-age children are connected to the Internet through educational computers. “The U.S. and Singapore are not even close,” he said.

      ‘Mr. Negroponte said Microsoft refused to sell its Windows software to the project at a price that would make it possible to include in his system. As a result, his laptops will come with the freely available Linux operating system, which is becoming increasingly popular in the developing world.’

      Hmmm… So, these laptops will use Linux, an open source operating system. As this ITbusiness article says,

      “…while he acknowledged that the quality of open source products varies, van Meggelen took issue with the perception that open-source software is the work of hobbyists programming in their spare time. “Something like 90 per cent of the Linux kernel developers are full-time paid employees of large companies,” he said, arguing that corporations are using the open-source model to do “shared-risk, shared-cost development.”

      Maybe I’m just one those conspiracy-theorist nuts, but if you connect a few dots, it seems ‘the powers that be’ may not have wanted children in any country to have access to these cheap laptops — although I suppose there could be a few other reasons why open source has recently been under attack, even though, according to the ITbusiness article above, open source is very good for large companies:

      Open Source Foes In Bed With Abramoff
      Posted by kdawson on Thursday October 12, @06:03PM, from the perpetrating-a-fraud dept. (at Slashdot)

      Will Rodger writes, “Citizens Against Government Waste has said some highly critical things about open source software in the past. They’ve also pounced on supporters of the OpenDocument Format along the way. Alas, it seems their close ties to Jack Abramoff have drawn the (unfavorable) attention of Senate staff.”
      (many interesting comments follow)

      Click here for more info about ‘Citizens Against Government Waste’.

      Kat

      1. linux and stuff
        Most people here are a bunch of cavemen when it comes to understanding of the computer industry. Even the women. What is the female version of “troglodite”?

        This is a little ironic, because everyone here relies on a technology they don’t know. Ok i’m wrong, that is the normal state of affairs, how many of us know how a refrigerator works?

        Linux is a high quality operating system. The fastest supercomputers run linux.
        On the other hand, Unix (the daddy of linux), had technology in 1972 that Microsoft caught up (and caughed up) with in 1995, maybe.

        Open source is the way of people who really know what they are doing and hence the future of technology.

        Open source does not mean you dont have to pay. And it is not communism. It is just free trade.

      2. my non-political version
        Here is the simple way to have a laptop with with Linux:

        1 – get a laptop. Buy, borrow, steal, or make it yourself

        2 – get a CD from Knoppix or Ubuntu or some other outfit like that, or download same CD

        3 – boot and install

        Enjoy

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