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POPSClip Title Deleted It's for "National Security." :) Screw our own rights and liberties and security and privacy, as long as the tyrannical, paranoid, fear-driven Empire is happy. Right? America's behaviour is alarming, annoying, paranoid and ridiculous, to say the least, and very unbecoming of a so-called "free and brave" nation. "It's one thing to say it's reasonable for government agents to open your luggage. It's another thing to say it's reasonable for them to read your mind and everything you have thought over the last year. What a laptop records is as personal as a diary, but much more extensive. It records every Web site you have searched. Every e-mail you have sent. It's as if you're crossing the border with your home in your suitcase." ----- One law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with "blank laptops" whose hard drives contain no data ----- Lawyers cannot fully advise people how they may exercise their rights during a border search.
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POPSSay Goodbye to power cords and battery packs This sounds really interesting. It's not in the practical stages yet, but how convenient would it be to charge your cellphone, mp3 player or laptop without having to plug it in? I know in my house, free outlets are hard to come by, so this is something I can really get behind.
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POPSHow to save a wet cell phone I could have used this bit of info last year. Hopefully this will save some of you from having busted cell phones. Gotta wonder who first did this to find out that it worked.
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POPSThe Wonders of Blood Blood is the one tissue that comes into contact with every other tissue of the body, and it is through blood that our disparate parts communicate, through blood that our organs cooperate. Without a circulatory system, there would be no internal civilization, no means of ensuring orderly devotion to the common cause that is us. “It’s an enormous communications network,” Dr. Schafer said — the original cellphone system, if you will, 100 trillion users strong. Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, “taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water,” Dr. Schafer said. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water. Keep reading.
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POPSBehind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains Other questions arose. How did you know for sure that Malachi was not a miscarriage? How did you know the damage to the fetus did not come from simple decomposition, or the month that it was outside the freezer? Mr. Benham said there was no doubt in his mind that the image captured the truth of abortion because Malachi was found at a clinic dedicated to abortions. He cited the mark by Malachi’s right ear. “You can see that, it’s forceps,” he said.
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POPSMichelle Obama serves soup, Nation misses the point
Conservatives are all over this photo. Not because the first lady is promoting volunteerism by actually doing rather than talking, but because someone in line has a cell phone. The assumptions are: 1-the homeless cannot possibly afford a cell phone, 2-this man is homeless yet owns an expensive cell phone with all the bells and whistles and is therefore cheating the ‘system’. This article answers these assumptions very well by debunking common misconceptions many of us have of the homeless and poor. Those conservatives we most often hear from (the ones yelling the loudest) have jobs (paying much more than minimum wage), a comfortable home to go to after their job, drive a well-maintained vehicle, enjoy all the trappings that money provides, and generally are out of touch with the majority of working class people. From the article: “you'd have to be a magician to stretch a minimum-wage job to cover housing, transportation, food, healthcare, childcare and other incidental expe
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POPSElectronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.
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POPSWhen Language Can Hold the Answer The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.
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POPSIn Africa- The cellphone is the single most transformative technology for development" "Democratic Republic of Congo, with a population of 60 million, there are just 10,000 fixed-line telephones, but more than one million mobile subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least-developed country in Africa, usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years. At the end of 2007 there were more than 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%." "now they can call around and know what the prices are. They can call their relatives in town, for example, and ask how much is a bunch of bananas, so they get an idea of what the price is for their produce"
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POPSBees vs Cell Phone: Creating Another False Panic? Another take on the whole cellphones are killing the bees story that is buzzing around the net, today (hey, even Dizzy posted about it). I am posting this in the interest of introducing another perspective on the issue. The author is a scientist who says "wait a minute...not so fast...weigh ALL the evidence first, all is not as it would seem..." Hey, I can buy that...and, at the same time (like on the whole global warming issue), I can research the issues and come to my own conclusion--not one fed to me by the MSM...
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POPSThe soap that knows what you want This is one of those things, though, that’s an easy trickle-down technology for things like the iPhone, which already is a touch sensitive gadget with an accelerometer and multiple modes of functionality.
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POPSIf Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone Some writers are just rejecting modernity. M. J. Rose, whose books about reincarnation are the basis for a planned pilot on the Fox Network, intends to set her next book in 1948 in part so she can let missed connections and miscommunications simmer. “You miss a train in 1888 or even 1988, and have no way to contact the person waiting at the station on the other end,” she said. “He thinks you’ve changed your mind, been captured, weren’t able to escape. You miss a train in 2009 and you pull out your cell and text that you’ll be two hours late.”