"England and America are two countries separated by a common language." - George Bernard Shaw

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5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Apple - "In October of 2009, a new application from Apple landed in the U.S. Patent Office. Apple's idea was to program devices to periodically interrupt users with unskippable ads. The ads would temporarily halt performance of the device in order to "compel attention." That on its own is pretty nightmarish but, innovators that they are, Apple found a way to crank it up to that hard-to-reach "Lovecraftian" level."

YouTube - The Menstruating Ghost of Puncak Trailer

The State of Broadband in Singapore - "Singapore scored 3.15 Mbps, which isn’t that far off from the global average of 2.91 Mbps.
This is highly embarrassing, considering that:
* Singapore touts itself as a broadband “connected society”
* The global figure includes less developed markets like China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and many other emerging markets worldwide that are still using 56 kbps modems
* The Singapore figure includes business connections that are typically much better than residential ones
Referring to our chart above, StarHub is truly providing much lower YouTube performance compared to the Singapore average...
ISPs market their connections as supremely capable of downloading videos, music and other high-bandwidth activities, while working to limit such customer activities in the background by installing traffic shapers...
If Singapore laws were actually applied, the fact that some ISPs are throttling customers’ internet connection is a potential case of false advertising and breach of contract"

Please Rob Me - "Hey, do you have a Twitter account? Have you ever noticed those messages in which people tell you where they are? Pretty annoying, eh. Well, they're actually also potentially pretty dangerous... The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home... t gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face."

Would You Sacrifice Love For Greatness? - "I take a look at the history of women who have achieved what I deem as greatness: changing the world in significant ways. Many women throughout history, like Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale and Susan B. Anthony, were never married, and those who were, like Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Indira Ghandi and Katharine Hepburn, were very nontraditional in their approach to marriage. Amelia Earhart called her marriage a "dual control partnership," and married later on to equally powerful, impressive men... That dedication takes a great deal of time and energy--time and energy that most people don't have after a day of working to get by, then working the second shift at home. Believe me. I'm a single mom and if it weren't for the help of my family and my son spending many of his early years with other family members (including his father), I wouldn't have got the leg up on my education and early career I needed to get ahead... Greatness sounds awful and lonely and like a huge burden... Who in their right mind would choose a path of greatness over love?"

A Rant About Women « Clay Shirky - "There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less. They will also end up in jail less, but I don’t think we get the rewards without the risks... [women] aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world... 'You are the only woman who suggested her own work. Men do that all the time, but women wait for someone else to recommend them'"

Americans are 'most attractive' people in the world, poll finds - "In second place was Brazil while Spain, which boasts Hollywood actress Penelope Cruz as one of its natives, was third. Blonde, tanned surfers of Australia saw it voted into fourth place, while Italy came fifth. Sexy Swedes, such as model Victoria Silvstedt, helped it into sixth spot, but England only made it into seventh place in the poll. India was eighth, France ninth, and Canada finished off the top 10."

Traffic chaos as Russian hacker beams pornographic film onto billboard - "An elderly motorist suffered a heart attack at the wheel after seeing the scenes."

Digital Death - "The Straits Times' weekly Digital Life supplement is one of the most poorly-produced newspaper products to come from Singapore Press Holdings. It's often filled with factual inaccuracies, layout gaffes, and other editorial oversights. One day we had a thought: might there be enough wrong with Digital Life to start an entire blog about it? This is the answer."

Indonesian teenager convicted for Facebook insult - "Arahaf's posting in July last year called Fandini a pig and a dog, as well as saying she was promiscuous and overweight. Presiding judge Ekofa Rahayu sentenced her to 75 days in prison, but suspended the sentence because Arafah cooperated during her trial. She must serve the sentence if she breaks the law in the next five months... A mother of two young children, Prita Mulyasari, became a national symbol for the plight of the powerless in Indonesia when she was sued by a hospital and spent three weeks in jail last year because she complained on Facebook that her mumps had been misdiagnosed. She has countersued... Indonesia's criminal defamation laws were among the world's toughest. Since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, the penalty for defamation has been reduced from death to life in prison"

Medical assault on the three-foot Guinea worm of Sudan - "The white worms dig through the body towards the skin, releasing chemicals to burn the flesh and then spewing thousands of larvae as they exit... Worms mainly exit from the legs and arms but affected communities say they have been known to emerge from the head, sexual organs and even the eyes... Extracting an entire worm requires winding it around a small stick - like twisting spaghetti on a fork, but victims can be incapacitated for months. The traditional universal medical symbol, of a snake wrapped around a pole, is thought by many to have its roots in the treatment of Guinea worm."
Protect biodiversity!

Pompoms, Pyramids and Peril - "Of 104 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes from 1982 to 2005 — head and spinal trauma that occasionally led to death — more than half resulted from cheerleading... there were nearly six times as many emergency room visits for cheerleaders in 2004 than in 1980... The more athletic, more acrobatic era of cheerleading is widely linked to the 1980s, when hundreds of high school gymnastics teams were dropped, partly because school districts grew weary of paying off injury insurance claims for the sport... cheerleading accounts for a disproportionate number of major injuries in youth or college athletics... 'Most athletes throw balls around. We throw other cheerleaders around. What’s harder? What’s harder to catch?'"

Always Judged Guilty: Friedman Update - "To me that perfectly captured Friedman's problems- taking a small subset that you experience and extrapolating it to create a model of the whole. Hell, he wrote an entire book based on an off-hand remark he heard from a tech guy in India."
Actually this afflicts journalists to a certain extent

Obama elusive on about-face on same-sex marriage - "President Obama says he opposes same-sex marriage for religious reasons. Fourteen years ago, however, while a churchgoing Christian and a state legislative candidate, he endorsed the right of gays and lesbians to marry... At the federal court trial of a lawsuit challenging Prop. 8, lawyers for the measure's sponsors have cited Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage as evidence that people who favor a traditional view of marriage are not necessarily prejudiced against gays and lesbians... "When he was running for office in Chicago and wanted strong support from the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community, he made it clear he supported full equality," Kors said. "Since he has continued to seek higher office, he has changed his position for the worse. "It's especially appalling that he is citing his religious beliefs as grounds for his public government position on the civil marriage issue because he knows better""
Change we can believe in.