Report: Apple to unveil next iPad in January > Defending Turf vs. Amazon Fire > 8 megapixels camera

I am so ready for this ! 

Another week, another fresh set of rumors about Apple's next rendition of the iPad.

The latest wave stems from Digitimes once again, which claims Apple is expected to unveil two versions of its next iPad in late January.

Perhaps the most important detail is Digitimes has backed off an earlier report that Apple was planning to launch a "mini" iPad with a 7.85-inch screen.

According to the latest Digitimes details, it appears Apple will release two new iPad models and price the iPad 2 to compete with Amazon's red-hot Kindle Fire tablet.

The new iPads will reportedly include 9.7-inch screens with retina displays, dual LED light bars to bolster brightness and quad-core A6 processors. What sets these tablets apart: their cameras. One has a 5-megapixel camera while the other is 8 megapixels.

Rumors of the next iPad arrive as sales of Amazon's Kindle Fire continue to flourish. The online retailer says the $199 tablet remains the top-selling item on its site after 13 weeks. Also, Dave Limp, the vice president for Amazon's Kindle division, said earlier this month the Fire "is the most successful product we've ever launched."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/12/report-apple-to-unveil-next-ipad-in-january/1

World's Most Talkative Woman - Computer Has Hard Time Keeping Up !

http://mrtube.netne.net/mr-tube-worlds-most-talkative-women-guinness-world-records.html

World's Thinnest Woman - no audio, just music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RCPeFD7pYuE#!

What is Depersonalization disorder?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization_disorder


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation

U.S.P.S. Pricing

if item is over 13 oz, goes to priority Mail status, $4.75 is starting point for Priority Mail.


http://postcalc.usps.gov/MailServices.aspx?m=1&p=2&o=6&dz=07458&oz=33912&pob=0&MailingDate=12/17/2011&MailingTime=8:00%20AM

Bending the Notes with E.C.

Eric Clapton demonstrates how he bends the notes:


http://www.great-guitar-players.com/Eric_Clapton.html


http://www.last.fm/group/Guitar+Blues/forum/50888/_/313381


http://guitarsecrets.com/hammer_on.htm


http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/a_young_eric_clapton_demonstrates_the_elements_of_his_sound.html

Back to the 60's

Here are all those groovy terms that hippies use and what they mean, starting with the letter A, and click on link for entire list !


http://www.hippy.com/glossary-c.htm


1-A: Status determined by draft board that you are currently fit  and available to serve in the military.
1-O: See Conscientious Objector.
4-F: Exemption from military service due to mental or physical disability.
 

2001 - A Space Odyssey:  Written by Arthur C Clarke.  The movie was directed by Stanley Kubrick.  It was touted as "the ultimate trip" in this poster.  And many people took those words to heart as this was indeed a great trip.  Man's evolution is directed to the stars by strange black obelisks. Hal, the irrepressible silicon concierge is up to his tricks in interplanetary hijinks. The special effects are now classics.

Acapulco Gold: Legendary Mexican marijuana from the 60s.  Today it wouldn't be considered so special, but back then it was great!
Acid: see LSD.
Acid Tests: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters did the first Acid Tests.  These were events were everyone dropped acid together for an extraordinary group experience.  Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about the experiences of Ken Kesey the Merry Pranksters.
Activist: A person who participates in protest actions.  Anyone involved in a cause, usually political.
Afterglow: A state of peace that can follow after a psychedelic experience when your mind is still detached from worldly concerns.  "He's bathing in the afterglow of his last LSD trip".
Agnew, Spiro T.: Vice President during Nixon's reign, he antagonized almost everyone but expecially liberals with his verbal rantings.  He claimed the antiwar movement was the work of "an effete corps of impudent snobs." He survived a bribery scandal but was convicted of income tax evasion he was forced to resign much to everyone's delight.  Recently declassifed FBI files show Agnew did receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks as Govenor and Vice President.
Allman Brothers: Southern rock Band popular in the early 70s, played the Fillmore.  Midnight Rider, Melissa, Ramblin' Man some of their hits.
Altamont: Controversial, ill fated rock concert headlined by the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane at Altamont Speedway on Dec.24,  1969.  Hells Angels, acting as security, had their hands full as people kept rushing the stage. One man pulled a gun, and the Angels killed him.  The film "Gimme Shelter" documenting the concert was used in evidence to clear the Angels.
Antiwar Movement: The organized resistance by students, veterans and other activists against the draft and Vietnam War in the 1960s and early '70s. Rallies, marches, speeches, teach-ins, sit-ins, slogans, banners, and songs were some of the non-violent tactics used to get the message out.
Asanas: Sanskrit word. A series of body postures that stretch and tone muscles, increase endurance, and improve flexibility. Along with breathing and meditation they make up the practice of Hatha Yoga.
Ashram: A monastery where monks practice yoga.
Astral Plane: A dimension of existence beyond the physical world. A place where disembodied spirits dwell. Many attempt to contact the astral plane through meditation or by using psychic energy.
Babe: Affecti

Best NYC Pizza

Colin Hagendorf, 28, of Brooklyn, reviewing his final slice at Davinci Pizza in Lower Manhattan.

 

 

Manhattan is home to some of the country's oldest and most celebrated pizzerias, but the great metropolis also holds many mediocre slices. Colin Hagendorf has tasted it all.
Mr. Hagendorf, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, may know New York-style pizza more exhaustively than any other living soul. During a 2½-year quest, he has sampled nearly every pie sold by the slice in Manhattan. The feat—involving 362 slice joints—is unmatched by any modern-day enthusiast, according to local pizza experts.

"It's become a chore," he admitted recently, over a lunchtime slice. Folding the pizza lengthwise, he watched glumly as the end sagged, unsupported by a doughy crust. A proper slice, Mr. Hagendorf avows, should crease when folded and droop only at the very tip, "just like Johnny Cash's nose."

"This pizza is cotton," he sighed. Still, he was pleasantly surprised at the taste and scribbled notes for a review to be posted on his blog, where he chronicles his pizza forays and rates slices on an eight-slice scale. 

With his girlfriend, Christina Sparhawk, Mr. Hagendorf ate his final slice last week in Lower Manhattan. 

Mr. Hagendorf began his project with the aim of trying every slice in New York City's five boroughs. But with more than 1,600 pizzerias in town, according to a health-inspection database, he soon realized he had bitten off more than he could chew. So he narrowed his focus to Manhattan and set simple rules: only order plain cheese pizza; only eat at places selling individual slices; and no going back after canvassing an area to catch newly opened establishments.

Mr. Hagendorf began in August 2009 at Grandpa's Place near 211th Street and Broadway—in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood—and worked his way down to the island's southern tip. He excluded from consideration national chains and cafeterias that don't make their own pizzas.
The results are chronicled on Mr. Hagendorf's website, Slice Harvester, as well as in printed 'zines he assembles at copy shops and sells for $3 apiece—only slightly more than the price of the average cheese slice. The reviews are deeply personal and occasionally blue, written in the confessional manner of a pizza-obsessed Lenny Bruce. Each pizzeria gets a grade, from zero to an exalted eight.

He bestowed the only perfect score on Pizza Suprema, a slice joint steps away from Penn Station. The place may be the only establishment to proudly hang one of Mr. Hagendorf's reviews, which can be profanity-laced, and he is treated like royalty when he visits.

Mr. Hagendorf says he hasn't gained weight as a result of the project and continues to eat pizza even when not conducting reviews.

"It comes out looking beautiful, grease shimmering above the cheese," he says of the slice at Suprema. "You need that grease!" 

For Mr. Hagendorf, the best slices display balance above all, cheese and sauce used in moderation upon a solid yet supple crust. He disdains many of the new wave of recession-friendly dollar-per-slice outlets. He also scorns purveyors of Texas-size slices.

"A good dollar slice is like finding the Ark of the Covenant," Mr. Hagendorf says. "The fixation on giant stuff is part of the current horrible state of American capitalism."
Mr. Hagendorf is a waiter at a Brooklyn diner and describes himself as "activist-y punk." He spent years working for tips as a puppeteer in Union Square. Before devoting himself to pizza, "my project was: I want to work as little as possible," he says. 

His slice-eating endeavor was born after a cross-country trip in 2009, when he grew outraged at a New York-style pizza served in Colorado Springs, Colo. After hearing him berate that, friends jokingly suggested Mr. Hagendorf market himself as a consultant for out-of-town pizzerias. He set out to survey the city's slice joints.

"I'm not sure what made me actually do this idea instead of just talk about it, which is what I've done with my ideas for years," he says.

He has learned that even in the home of the New York slice, inferior pizzas outnumber truly delectable pies. But mediocrity may be the price for having so many pizzerias.

There are 1,676 New York City restaurants classified as primarily selling pizza, as well an additional 425 categorized under "pizza/Italian," according to a food-inspection database maintained by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Manhattan is home to 494 pizzerias and 97 other restaurants listed under the joint category. A spokeswoman for the agency cautioned that classifications are assigned by inspectors and are therefore inexact. 

The 2010 Yellow Pages phone book lists 412 distinct Manhattan eateries under its "pizzeria" section, according to a hand count by Michael Berman, a Brooklyn-based photographer and pizza-focused food writer. Mr. Berman, 44, recently combed through past phone books stored on microfilm at the New York Public Library as a way to track the growth of the city's pizza industry.

In 1958, the phone book listing for pizzerias showed 117 in the five boroughs—and just 10 in Manhattan, Mr. Berman found. By 1970, the total number of pizzerias in New York had surged to 861. 

Scott Wiener, 30, who runs New York pizza tours, credits the commercial gas oven with giving birth to the modern slice as a unit of sale. The dial-controlled technology and lower temperature made the oven easier to manage and allowed slices to be reheated without risk of burning bits of cheese on the cooking surface, which fouls the taste.

"It's that oven that made pizza by the slice a big deal," Mr. Wiener says. "It makes more people into pizza makers. You didn't have to be an experienced baker."
With his final slice consumed last week in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Hagendorf has eaten slices at 362 pizzerias. Of those, he's ranked 75 as good or great. 

He hasn't gained weight as a result of the exercise, and continues to eat pizza even when not conducting reviews. He now plans to go through his archive and produce a best-of retrospective. "There's a huge body of work," he says.
New York pizza aficionados watched with interest as Mr. Hagendorf approached the finish line.

"A lot of the time I kick myself for not doing it first," says Adam Kuban, who started chronicling New York pizza in 2003 on his website, Slice. "But at the same time I'm glad I didn't have to endure it." 

American and British Toilet Slang

from


http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_toilet_slang

Defecation

• A sewer snake to release
• Abort a baby
• Anaconda action
• Arsefire
• Back one out
• Backing the big brown motorhome out of the garage
• Baiting the trap
• Becoming the porcelain assassin
• Blasting a dookie
• Blinking
• Blow one out - Also flatulence
• Blow the load
• BM
• Boo-Boo
• Boom Boom
• Bomb the porcelain sea
• Building a log cabin
• Burn a mule
• Caca
• Carpet Bombing Afghanistan
• Chocolate time!
• Create a custom extrusion
• Cripping a crapple
• Crowning
• Curling one off
• Cutting rope
• Deceiver of Farts
• De-corking the borking
• Deucing
• Dirty squirties
• Doing brown
• Doing some spring cleaning
• Dominating
• Doo-Doo
• Doodey
• Download a brownload
• Dr. Benjamin Fartlin
• Drop a double deuce
• Dropping a dook
• Dropping a bomb
• Dropping a deuce
• Dropping a hoopsnake
• Dropping a jolst
• Dropping a load
• Dropping a loaf
• Dropping a Purtle
• Dropping a Washburn
• Dropping The Dangle
• Dropping anchor
• Dropping bass ("base" as in the opposite of treble. Not the fish.)
• Dropping logs
• Dropping some friends off at the pool
• Dropping the Browns off at the Super Bowl
• Dropping the Cosbies
• Dropping the kids off at the pool
• Dropping the Mexican Boll Weevil
• Dropping the weights
• Dropping wax
• Faxing a shit to the toilet machine
• Feeding the seagulls (politer version of "Feeding the shitehawks")
• Feeding the toilet
• Fertilising the plants (refers to defecating outdoors and on the ground, such as while camping)
• Filing some papers
• Filling the bowl
• Fire away
• Freeing me chocolate hostages
• Giving birth
• Giving birth to a chocolate baby boy
• Giving birth to a healthy brown baby
• Giving birth to the black eel
• Giving birth to the Spineless Brownfish
• Giving birth to an African
• Going Boom Boom
• Going poop
• Going to meet Jim Davidson
• Going to number two
• Going to have a talk with Mr.Hanky (South Park [2] Refrence)
• Going to the restitorial
• Growing a tail
• Hanging a rat
• Hungry Hungry Hippos
• Inagurate Barack Obama to the White House
• Inserting a SEAL Team
• Kurt Bevacqua
• Launching torpedoes
• Laying a brick
• Laying a brownie
• Laying a cable
• Laying a Hank
• Laying a turd
• Laying some wolf bait
• Lengthening the spine
• Letting loose
• Letting the toilet know who's boss
• Letting the dogs out
• Lift tail (used commonly among members of the furry fandom)
• Logging
• Logging into the toilet and making a huge download
• Logging out
• Load your pants
• Loafin'
• Lose some weight (Also used in urination)
• Making a banoogie (referring to an unusually large defecation, often clogging the toilet)
• Making a tail
• Making an appointment with Dr. John
• Making gravy
• Making logs (or a log)
• Making waves
• Makin' bears
• Monopoly!
• Montezuma's Revenge (traveller’s diarrhoea)
• Number two (a portable toilet company advertises itself as "Number One in Number Two"; a Midwest plumbing company proclaims, "We're Number One in a Number Two Business.")
• Pebble-dashing the porcelain
• Pinching (off) a loaf
• Pinching a yam
• Pinch-hitting for Kurt Bevacqua (a reference to the old brown uniforms worn in the 1970's and 1980's by the San Diego Padres.)
• Poo-Poo
• Poopy Doo
• Poppin a gooky
• Producing some output
• Pump a clump of dump out of my rump
• Pull a few cones (Think Mr Whippy soft serve ice cream, and the cones)
• Punching a growler
• Punishing the porcelain
• Punishing the toilet
• Put food in the dog's water
• Releasing a depth charge
• Releasing a Dungbomb (from Harry Potter)
• Releasing the chocolate hostages
• Releasing the hostages
• Releasing the Kraken
• Releasing the hounds
• Ride a pony and trap
• Ring of fire
• Sacrificing to the Toilet/Porcelain god
• Saturday morning special
• Scatter bombing
• Shitting bricks (Houses or apartments as substitutes for higher quantity.)
• Showering the room with roses
• Shtounga
• Slopping gruel in Oliver's bowl
• Speaking with the arabs (When whoever is listening asks "what" the toiletee replies "Mustapha Crap!")
• Spray-painting the porcelain
• Squirt juice
• Stalling a brown sedan
• Streaming Nixie (naval expression referring to an anti-submarine device towed behind a ship by a long, thick, possibly brown cable)
• Studying one's Process Design notes (refers to Environmental Engineering Process Design, a course taught to civil and environmental engineering undergraduates and that deals with, among other topics, the design of wastewater treatment facilities)
• Taking a brew
• Taking a crap (see also Mr. Thomas Crapper)
• Taking a dump
• Taking a Nixon (used by Kinky Friedman in his detective novels)
• Taking a poo
• Taking a Shatner (as in Captain Kirk; would also accept "dropping" or "doing" a Shatner)
• Taking a shit (a coarse expression, not a euphemism)
• Taking a slam
• Taking a Tarzan (crapping in the woods/forest)
• Taking the Browns to the Superbowl
• Taking the Cosby kids to the pool
• Taking the mains offline and ejecting the warp coil
• Taking the morning curl
• Throwing up backwards
• Tuesday Afternoons
• Turtle time (see Turtle Action)
• Uni(I've got to take an uni)
• Unlikely Traveler (Defecation, usually on vacation, when you defacate in your pants away from a toilet)
• Unload
• Unloading a batch of cigars
• UH-OH! (Peter Griffin again; is incontinent at awkward moments)
• Visiting Boston
• vote for president.
• wrestling a leprecon
• Take a Critical Ambient to the Lab
• Upgrading my Thetan Level

Zooey -New Girl - Clip # 1

How to Deploy/Administer/Run Parallels on Multiple Mac Computers

http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v6/docs/en/Mass_Deployment_of_Parallels_Desktop.pdf

Superior Autobiographical Memory and Memory Bumps

Recently we noticed a lot of traffic to our informative page about autobiographical memory. We quickly realized this was a consequence a recent episode of 60 Minutes–a fascinating program called  “Endless Memory”. The episode profiles six people, including Taxi actress Marilu Henner, who can remember literally everything about their lives. Their talent has been labeled “superior autobiographical memory” and is now being studied in depth by neuroscientists. I highly recommend you watch the episode online.



Why does this happen? Why are there just a tiny number of people in the world who have the remarkable ability of remembering, in great detail, every day of their lives? The researchers aren’t exactly sure, but none of the six people appear to be impaired in any other way. MRI scans of the six people are currently being analyzed. While results are preliminary, they have found that some brain regions in these folks are huge compared to you or me. Both the temporal lobe (a key area for memory) and the caudate nucleus (an area implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder and habit formation) appear to be involved. The question is: are these brain regions large because these folks have trained their brain to do this? Or can they do this because they have abnormally large brain regions? More research will need to be done before we can unravel this mystery completely.

Even if you don’t have superior autobiographical memory, you may be interested to know that most of us have a “memory bump”–a certain era of our lives about which we can remember much more than other time periods. To find out what your memory bump is and learn more about this phenomenon, you can take this quick test. 

http://www.positscience.com/test-your-brain/memory/find-your-memory-bump
You can also read more in-depth about autobiographical memory, or learn about five different types of memory, including autobiographical memory.

By Karen Merzenich on December 21, 2010  
 

Spotify.com - Free Online Music - For Now

Monday, Aug. 08, 2011

Spotify, the Swedish-born cult hero of music-streaming services, wants to play you a love song. After years of legal wrangling, the popular European site finally made its U.S. debut on July 14, entering a massive market that is already saturated with music offerings — one of the many reasons most newcomers flop. (Anyone remember Lala.com?
But what makes Spotify more appealing than iTunes is that you can listen to its vast song collection for free. And what makes it more appealing than Pandora is that you can easily share playlists with your friends. Basically, Spotify is what would happen if Facebook had a baby with Napster, except that it's completely legal and comes in the form of a desktop application that can follow you anywhere, streaming music even when you're offline. If this all sounds too good to be true — free access to a library of 15 million tracks! — you guessed correctly that the world's largest music-subscription service comes with a catch.
 
(See five cool websites for new Spotify users.)

For now, users can get unlimited streaming at no charge, but Spotify is expected to drive people to paid subscriptions by eventually capping the hours of free listening per month as well as the number of free plays per song. The site made this shift in April in Europe, where a 10th of its 10 million users now have premium accounts, a sign that Spotify could be one of the first online music services to really understand the digital economy.

Premium versions offer users better sound quality on mobile devices as well as unlimited streaming. For $4.99 per month, customers can eliminate aggravating ads. For $9.99 per month, a price comparable to those of similar services like Rhapsody and MOG, the company's top-notch mobile app will stream playlists even when the listener is offline. (See how to get a Spotify invite.)

Spotify is arriving Stateside armed with deals with each of the four major music labels — Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner — a critical vote of confidence from an industry that has had a tortured history with online music sites. Spotify is also barreling into the U.S. market just as competition is intensifying between the likes of Pandora, MOG and Rdio (pronounced Ar-dee-o) and new cloud-based services from Amazon, Google and Apple. Meanwhile, AOL recently announced it will relaunch its radio player in partnership with streaming service Slacker, and Myspace is getting a makeover by entertainment utility player Justin Timberlake, who in June bought a stake in the once dominant social-networking site.

But J.T.'s considerable star power may not be enough to outshine Spotify's tie-in deal with Facebook, which is letting its 750 million members see which of their friends are using the music-streaming service. That arrangement — plus the hordes of A-listers, including Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and Trent Reznor, who have been gushing about Spotify on Twitter — might just provide the edge it needs to avoid becoming a one-hit wonder.

See TIME's special All-TIME 100 Albums.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2084577,00.html

Thanks Linda for this article!

A Letter from the IRS: Good News or Bad News?

http://www.jklasser.com/WileyCDA/Section/A-Letter-from-the-IRS-Good-News-or-Bad-News-.id-310448,articleId-285350.html

The IRS sends letters to taxpayers for a variety of reasons. Usually, the letter is a notice stating that you owe additional taxes because you failed to report income or for some other reason. However, the IRS also sends letters if it believes a taxpayer is owed an additional refund that could be paid if an amended return were filed. Before fear strikes, read the letter carefully to determine what you must do.

Check the Number of the Notice

The IRS has resigned its notices to make it clearer to a taxpayer why he or she is receiving the letter. There are dozens of different types of notices and other letters. Here is a rundown of some of the more common notices (additional information about notice numbers can be found here).

• CP01H: The IRS cannot process your return because the Social Security number of the taxpayer or spouse belongs to someone who died prior to the current year. The Social Security Administration provides this information to the IRS. If you received this notice, you may simply have made a typo on your Social Security number, which is easy to correct.
• CP04: The IRS believes you may be eligible for the additional child tax credit, which may entitle you to a tax refund.
• CP10: The IRS made corrections to your return because of miscalculations. This affected the amount of estimated tax you wanted to apply to next year's taxes.
• CP11: The IRS made changes resulting in an underpayment. You can accept the IRS corrections or write back that you disagree. The letter tells you what to do in this case.
• CP11A: The IRS made corrections because of miscalculations in the refundable earned income credit and you owe taxes to the government.
• CP21B: The IRS made corrections that you requested and they result in a tax refund. Expect to receive the refund within two to three weeks of the notice.

Take Action

Do not ignore any letter you receive. You may have to write back to the IRS or telephone the service to discuss your letter. You may need to send copies of certain statements, checks, or other receipts to prove a questionable item; keep the originals with the copy of your tax return and other receipts.
Important: When calling the IRS about a notice, be sure to write down the IRS employee's identification number, which is given automatically at the start of every call. This will help you if you need to call back or in case you follow IRS advice that turns out to be incorrect.

Work with an Expert

When in doubt, check it out. Contact a tax advisor who can explain the impact of the notice on you and what action, if any, to take. The advisor's fees may be less than the tax you would otherwise have to pay without the advisor's help.

How Many Nukes Does China Have? Just Look At The Immense Tunnels

Shortly after the end of the Cold War, an American defense official named Phillip Karber traveled to Russia as an advance man for a visit by former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. "We were meeting with Russian generals," Mr. Karber recalls, "and we met a three-star who told us they had 40,000 warheads, not the 20,000 we thought they had." It was a stunning disclosure. At a time when legions of CIA analysts, Pentagon war-gamers and arms-control specialists devoted entire careers to estimating the size of the Soviet arsenal, the U.S. had missed the real figure by a factor of two.

Mr. Karber, who has worked for administrations and senior congressional leaders of both parties and now heads the Asian Arms Control Project at Georgetown University, tells the story as a preface to describing his most recent work. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency—which deals with everything from arms-control verification to nuclear detection and forensics—to look into a mysterious Chinese project known as the "Underground Great Wall." The investigation would lead Mr. Karber to question long-held assumptions about the size—and the purpose—of China's ultra-secret nuclear arsenal.

The agency's interest in the subject had been piqued following the devastating May 12 earthquake that year in Sichuan province: Along with ordinary rescue teams, Beijing had deployed thousands of radiation specialists belonging to the Second Artillery Corps, the branch of the People's Liberation Army responsible for the country's strategic missile forces, including most of its nuclear weapons.

The involvement of the Second Artillery wasn't entirely surprising, since Sichuan is home to key nuclear installations, including the Chinese version of Los Alamos. More interesting were reports of hillsides collapsing to expose huge quantities of shattered concrete. Speculation arose that a significant portion of China's nuclear arsenal, held in underground tunnels and depots, may have been lost in the quake.

Mr. Karber set about trying to learn more with the aid of a team of students using satellite imagery, Chinese-language sources and other materials—all of them publicly available if rarely noticed in the West. History also helped. 

Tunneling has been a part of Chinese military culture for nearly 2,000 years. It was a particular obsession of Mao Zedong, who dug a vast underground city in Beijing and in the late 1960s ordered the building of the so-called Third-Line Defense in central China to withstand a feared Russian nuclear attack. The gargantuan project included an underground nuclear reactor, warhead storage facilities and bunkers for China's first generation of ballistic nuclear missiles.

China's tunnel-digging mania did not end with Mao's death. If anything, it intensified. In December 2009, as part of the celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic, the PLA announced to great fanfare that the Second Artillery Corps has built a cumulative total of 3,000 miles of tunnels—half of them during the last 15 years.
"If you started in New Hampshire," notes Mr. Karber by way of reference, "and went to Chicago, then Dallas, then Tijuana, that would be about 3,000 miles." 

Why would the Second Artillery be intent on so much tunneling? There are, after all, other ways of securing a nuclear arsenal. And even with a labor force as vast and as cheap as China's, the cost of these tunnels—well-built, well-lit, paved, high-ceilinged and averaging six miles in length—is immense.

The extent of the tunneling was also hard to square with the supposedly small size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, which is commonly believed to be in the range of 240-400 warheads. "So they've built 10 miles of tunnel for every warhead?" Mr. Karber recalls asking himself. "That doesn't make sense; it's kind of overkill." 

That thought prompted Mr. Karber to take a closer look at Western estimates of China's arsenal. In the late 1960s, the U.S. military projected that China would be able to field 435 warheads by 1973. A straight-line extrapolation based on that assumption would suggest that China would have somewhere in the order of 3,000 warheads today. In 1984 the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that China would have 818 warheads by 1994 and more than 1,000 today. More recent reports in the Chinese media put the figure somewhere between 2,350 and 3,500, with an average annual warhead production of 200 over the last decade. By contrast, estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council suggest that China's arsenal peaked by about 1980 and has been more-or-less flat ever since.
How accurate are any of these figures? Without on-site inspections, it's impossible to say for sure: As a report by the Council on Foreign Relations noted a decade ago, "China stands out as the least transparent by far of all the nuclear-weapon states."

Yet despite the opacity, the consensus view among China watchers is to go with the low estimates. Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists insists the Chinese are "not in the business of trying to reach [nuclear] parity with the U.S. or Russia. They're not hiding hundreds and hundreds of missiles in these tunnels." The tunnels, he adds, are China's "typical game of hiding what they have and protecting their relatively limited missile force."

Mr. Karber isn't persuaded. "One kilometer of tunneling is approximately equal to the cost of four or five nuclear weapons and certainly several delivery systems," he notes. Why would China devote such vast resources to building a protective network of tunnels, while devoting comparatively few to the weapons the tunnels are meant to protect?
Then too, there is the question of whether Beijing's declared nuclear policies are believable. Beijing insists that it has a "no first use" policy. Yet in 2005, PLA Maj. Gen. Zhu Chengdu told The Wall Street Journal that China would launch nuclear attacks on "hundreds of, or two hundreds" of American cities if the U.S. came to Taiwan's aid in the event of a war with the mainland. 

Beijing also claims to adhere to a policy of maintaining a small nuclear force, described by one Chinese general as a "minimum means of reprisal." Here too Mr. Karber has his doubts.
China is in the midst of a major nuclear modernization effort that includes building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles reportedly capable of delivering multiple warheads. It fields an estimated force of nearly 1,300 tactical and theater missile systems that can be tipped with either a nuclear or a conventional warhead—the ambiguity itself giving China immense strategic leverage in the event of war.
Mr. Karber also suspects China may have up to five missiles for every one of its mobile launcher vehicles. If so, those "reloads" would go far to explain the discrepancy between China's observed number of mobile launchers—one of the reasons for thinking China has a relatively small number of missiles—and Mr. Karber's suspicions about the true size of its arsenal.

What purpose would a large and presumably invulnerable Chinese arsenal serve? For decades, nuclear experts have understood that the key to "winning" a nuclear exchange is to have an effective second-strike capability, which in turn requires both a sizable and survivable force. The Second Artillery itself suggested some ideas when it announced the completion of the Underground Great Wall in 2009, claiming it gave China the ability to "withstand nuclear strikes"; that "Taiwan independence can despair"; and that China no longer had cause to be "afraid of a decisive battle with the United States." 

Mr. Kristensen writes this off as standard regime propaganda, noting that "the Chinese are known for putting out incorrect information as a form of information warfare." Yet it's unclear why the U.S. arms-control community seems happy to accept Beijing's claims about its nuclear doctrine at face value while dismissing the giant network of tunnels as the equivalent of a Chinese Potemkin village.
Mr. Karber has some thoughts on that score. The low estimate of China's arsenal, he believes, originally derived from an estimate of delivery vehicles—meaning missiles, mobile launchers, airplanes and submarines—that could be observed. After that, he suspects, "lack of new evidence and inertia seem to have kept the numbers flat."

He also fears an institutional bias in favor of the low numbers. Within the U.S. government, "the Pentagon and the intelligence community have been criticized over the years for 'worst case projections,' so now everyone avoids them like the plague." 

Outside of government, "arms-control experts have tried hard to downplay the PLA strategic effort in order to head off 'unnecessary' U.S. reaction." China, after all, is supposed to be the role model for the kind of arsenal a "responsible" nuclear power should have, and a China with an arsenal much larger than commonly believed would be the ultimate inconvenient truth for those pushing for steeper nuclear cuts.
Mr. Karber is a careful, deliberate man, who favors negotiated arms-control with China. In speaking to me, he repeatedly insists that his research is far from definitive and cannot substitute for a real intelligence-gathering effort. He also admits that it's possible—if only just—that the Chinese have led with the tunnels in order to stock them later with weapons, launchers and missiles.

Yet for all of the uncertainties, there is little doubt about the tunnels themselves, which the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time this year in its annual report on the Chinese military. And nobody who cares about the nuclear balance can look away from the mountain of evidence Mr. Karber has compiled, much less fail to consider what it might imply. That goes especially for the Obama administration, which has moved forward with an ambitious agenda of deep nuclear cuts with Russia as if China's arsenal barely existed.
That assumption needs urgent reconsideration. The alternative is for China, steeped in a 2,500 year military tradition of concealment, deception and surprise, to announce—at a time and in a manner of its choosing—its supremacy in a field that we have foolishly abandoned to our dreams.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204346104576639502894496030.html?KEYWORDS=Stephens

About Apple Lion OS

With Lion, Apple claims that it has added more than 250 new features since 10.6 Snow Leopard. Here's Apple's walk-through of features and benefits.

http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html?cid=CDM-US-DM-P0010787&cp=em-P0010787-177303&sr=em 
Touch is a big deal in the mobile world. You can't lug a keyboard and mouse around with you everywhere. That's why tablets, smartphones and other gadgets are touch-based.

Well, Apple is bringing that to Macs. Its laptops already have built-in multi-touch trackpads. Apple also sells a multi-touch trackpad for its desktops and iMacs.

That's why Lion will have full support for multi-touch gestures. You can zoom, pinch, scroll and swipe. It gives you an easy way to control your on-screen content. You'll find it popping up a lot as I go through Lion's features.

Next up are full-screen applications. OS X has always lacked a true full-screen mode for programs. You don't have the maximize button like you do in Windows.

Now, however, OS X allows programs to go full-screen. The program will even cover the dock and top Finder bar. You can use a swiping gesture to move between full-screen applications.

To start, it will mostly be Apple programs that have this feature. However, developers will be integrating this with future third-party programs. Soon, it should be available in all applications.  

Mission Control is the next new feature. It's actually a conglomeration of several existing features. It combines Expose, Spaces, Dashboard and better previewing.
You can enter Mission Control using an upward three-finger swipe. It lets you view all your open programs and documents. Plus, you can easily create and manage workspaces. You can even preview running programs using touch gestures.

Next up is the Mac App Store. This isn't actually a new feature. You can visit it right now. However, it is now fully integrated into Lion.

That makes finding and installing new applications much easier. It also allows in-app purchasing, push notifications and extra security. So it will be similar to the App Store in iOS.

Lion is going to feature a new option for launching programs. It's appropriately called Launchpad. You open it using a pinch gesture. (I told you gestures would keep popping up!)
Launchpad shows you a grid of installed applications. It looks somewhat like the home screen in iOS. You can quickly browse for the application you want to run.

OS X now supports a feature called Resume. When you open a program or system window, it will appear exactly as you last left it. That includes size, position, toolbars and highlighted text.

This is supposed to increase productivity. You don't have to spend time arranging things just as you like them. Once you set them, they'll always open that way.

Similar to that is the new Auto Save feature. Every document you create will be automatically saved. You don't even have to think about it.

Auto Save is controlled through the document's name on the top bar. For example, you can lock the document to prevent auto saving. You can duplicate the file or revert to the last-opened state.

There is also an option to Browse All Versions. A new document version is saved every time something changes. You can also create manual snapshots. This means, you can review all the versions at any point.

If you accidentally changed something, just go back and get it. Changes can be copied and pasted between versions. Multiple versions of a document are stored within a single file. It keeps you from creating clutter with multiple files.
Next up is AirDrop. This is a peer-to-peer sharing system. It makes it simple to share files with other AirDrop users.
Your computer will auto-detect any other users on your network. Just drag a file to that user. It will send them a notification; they can start downloading the file. The transfer is fully encrypted to prevent snooping.

Finally, Apple has upgraded its built-in Mail program. It has a new layout with two or three columns. You can more quickly browse through your mail and folders.
Searching through your mail is easier with intelligent searching rules. There is also a conversation view for following a thread of email. Neither of these is revolutionary, but it's nice to see Mail finally include them.

Those are the main features Apple covered in the keynote. However, there are still over 200 more. This includes things like better searching, system-wide spelling auto-correct and streamlined file dragging. A lot of the new features really tweak and polish existing features.


The good news is that Lion will only cost $30! Plus, you only need to buy one copy for all your authorized Macs. That means you can install it on any Macs linked to your iTunes and Mac App Store account.

Apple is also offering an Up-To-Date upgrade. Any Mac purchased on June 6 or after gets a free upgrade to Lion. However, you will need to request the upgrade within 30 days of purchase.

Now for the not-so-good news. Apple says you need to be running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to upgrade. There is no information yet on upgrades from other versions.
The reason you need Snow Leopard is that Lion won't be available on a disc. It can only be acquired from the Mac App Store. The App Store was added in Snow Leopard.

Apple says the Lion upgrade will be 4 gigabytes. That's a very large file. You'll need a fast Internet connection or a lot of patience to get it. A 1.3 megabit-per-second connection will take over 7 hours to download it.

There are also some hardware restrictions to consider. Unlike previous OS X versions, Lion only runs on Intel Core 2 Duo processors and newer. If you have a PowerPC or Intel Core Duo processor, forget it. However, any computer purchased after 2006 should be okay.

There are still some upgrade questions to be answered. What do you do if you don't have Internet? How do businesses and schools go about upgrading? Apple hasn't commented on this yet. I'm sure it will before Lion is launched, however.

Macs are great computers. You might be considering getting one. Learn more about what you should know before you buy:

• There are several types of Macs available. Find out which one is right for you.
• Macs are reputed to be immune to viruses. Unfortunately, this isn't true. Learn how to secure your Mac from threats.
• Mac has almost all the software you could want. However, you might need a Windows-only program. Get instructions for installing Windows on your Mac.

 http://www.komando.com/toolbox.aspx?mode=print&id=10915

About Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon's and Apple's recently announced cloud computing services have generated a lot of buzz. 

The "cloud" simply refers to the Internet. "Cloud computing" refers to software and services that run over the Internet. 

Webmail like Gmail and Hotmail are considered cloud computing. So are online backup services.


You can access cloud computing services and data from virtually any Web connection. Here are Amazon's and Apple's cloud services and the advantages they offer.

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon Cloud Drive provides 5 gigabytes of free storage. That holds about 1,000 songs, 2,000 photos or 20 minutes of high-definition video. There is a 2 GB size limit per file. You can upload documents, videos, music, photos and more.
You get unlimited access to your files from up to eight devices. Amazon will upgrade your account to 20 GB for a year at no charge. You just have to buy an MP3 album. 

If you need more storage, Amazon offers paid plans. They start at 20 GB and top out at 1,000 GB (1 terabyte). You'll pay $1 per gigabyte per year. Plans renew automatically.
There are different ways to upload and download files. You can store MP3s purchased from Amazon on Cloud Drive automatically. Purchased music won't count against your storage limit. You can upload or download single files via your Web browser. To download multiple MP3s, you'll need the Amazon MP3 downloader. It runs on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and OS X.

Clicking a music file from your account will open the Amazon Cloud Player. You can listen to your music directly from the Web. You can only play MP3 files or AAC (M4A) files that are DRM-free. There's also a Cloud Player app for Android phones and tablets.

Apple iCloud

iCloud is a free service that replaces MobileMe. It is integrated into apps and iTunes. Some iCloud features appear in iTunes 10.3 beta, but the full roll-out is this fall. iCloud provides 5 GB of free storage. You can also store up to 20,000 songs purchased from iTunes. Other purchased content and photos don't count against your limit.

When you purchase a song from iTunes, you can download it to any of your devices. Past purchases are available, and you can have music downloaded automatically. You can't play music directly from iCloud. You must download it.

You probably have music purchased from another store or ripped from CD. In that case, there's iTunes Match ($25 yearly). It scans your music collection. You can listen to music already in iTunes. If music isn't available, you can upload it from your collection.

iCloud isn't just about music, though. Photo Stream syncs photos taken on your iOS device with other devices. You can view and download photos to other iOS devices, PCs, Macs and Apple TVs. A Photo Stream album containing your last 1,000 photos is created. New photos are stored for 30 days.

iCloud also backs up a variety of other data, like apps, text messages and iWork documents. You get a free email address that works across all your devices. And it stores your calendar and contacts and syncs entries across all your devices. If you choose, you can create a calendar to share with your entire family.

To get all the features of iCloud, you'll need iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Mac users need OS X Lion. It is available in July for $30. Windows users need Vista or Windows 7. Outlook 2007 or 2010 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars.

As users, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. No longer is our data, music, media, photos, and documents tied to a particular computer at a specific location. When all this moves into the cloud, access to your files is literally at your fingertips.

http://www.komando.com/toolbox.aspx?mode=print&id=10910

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Halloween Music Playlists

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080729234225AAPilbU

Life Explained in Graphs

http://rammygram.com/index.php/2010/08/12/life-explained-by-graphs/


http://www.thethinkingblue.com/fun/yourlife.html

Thanks for Doreen for this one !

Steve Job's Biography

Some information from the book is already starting to leak out. Take a look at the links below
Read more


http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/preview-steve-jobs-biographer-on-60-minutes-on-sunday/9549?tag=nl.e101

• Official site: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• Jobs questioned authority all his life, book says (Associated Press)
• Steve Jobs: Android a ’stolen product’ (ZDNet)
• Biographer: Jobs refused early and potentially life-saving surgery (CBS News)
• Steve Jobs and biological father unknowingly met, biographer says (CBS News)
• Steve Jobs biography reveals he told Obama, ‘You’re headed for a one-term presidency’ (Huffington Post)
• Amazon: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

American Slang

http://www.slangsite.com/slang/G.html