The BBC’s Will Ross says the party has begun in the capital Juba
South Sudan has become the world’s newest nation, the climax of a process made possible by the 2005 peace deal that ended a long and bloody civil war.
Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are among international dignitaries attending celebrations in the capital, Juba.
Sudan earlier became the first state to officially recognise its new neighbour.
Zach Galifianakis interview on the success of the first big film and being recognized in public as ‘the fat guy from The Hangover’.
At some point when we weren’t looking, Zach Galifianakis became one of the hottest comedians in Hollywood.
A University of Michigan study of 6.5 million car crashes will undoubtedly be the source of many tense discussions around the kitchen table if not Vegas comedy riffs, finding that an inordinate number ofaccidents happen when both drivers are women.
Insert your own tired women-are-bad-drivers comment here. And if you post this story on your Facebookpage, get ready for a commenta-palooza.
1. There is a wealth of information about blogging
What entrepreneurs of big businesses do is search for an unfulfilled need in the market, and fill it, often with a fancy new product. This is a great money making strategy,
If your laptop is ever lost or stolen, this security software will work hard to protect your precious data and help you recover the device.
Think quick; where’s your laptop right now? I bet you felt just a little twinge of worry until you remembered its location, right? Imagine how you’d feel if it was lost, misplaced, or stolen. How would you get it (and your data) back? How could you keep a thief from making evil use of private or corporate data stored on the laptop? We’ve rounded up a half-dozen products that aim to put your mind at ease.
A laptop antitheft product should keep your data safe, and keep strangers from using the computer. It should protect your private data and resist a thief’s attempts to disable its protection. On a laptop that’s merely lost, it should create a communication avenue for an honest finder to arrange the laptop’s return. And of course, if the laptop has truly been stolen it should help you recover it. Different products emphasize different goals. Here’s how they stack up.
Location, Location, Location
When you can’t find your laptop, the first thing you want to know is its current location. Most antitheft productsuse WiFi lookup to determine the laptop’s geolocation. They check nearby WiFi hotspots against a database, typically Google’s or Skyhook’s, to find out where the laptop is.
It’s also possible to roughly determine the device’s location based on the IP address of the network to which it’s connected. IP-based geolocation doesn’t have nearly the accuracy of the WiFi-based technology, though. Where WiFi can locate the device within a city block or better, simple IP geolocation can be off by miles.
Snuko Anti-Theft & Data Recovery Premium ($29.95/year direct, 2.5 stars) uses IP as a fallback if it can’t obtain a location using WiFi. That fallback proved important in testing, because at present Snuko’s WiFi geolocation isn’t fully functional on some XP-based systems. LoJack for Laptops by Absolute Software($39.99/year direct, 4.5 stars) uses only IP-based geolocation, meaning you can probably determine what city the laptop is in, but not much more. WiFi geolocation comes as part of LoJack’s premium package, which costs $20 more.
If you’re at all concerned about privacy, you’ll probably decide you don’t want the laptop maintaining a history of everywhere you go. You can protect your privacy by turning off the geolocation history until and unless the laptop goes missing. GadgetTrak Laptop Security ($34.95/year direct, 3 stars) offers a nice compromise. You can set it to display just the latest known location, without keeping a history. That way you’ll know a thief’s current location even before you remotely enable location history.
Stealth or Scare Tactics
Laptop Cop ($65 direct, 4 stars) and LoJack install in stealth mode, deliberately hiding their processes and leaving no visible evidence of their presence. Their aim is to covertly gather information about the thief without letting him know he’s under observation.
LaptopSentry 3.1 ($9.99 direct, 2.5 stars) and Laptop Superhero ($29.99/year direct, 2.5 stars) take quite the opposite approach. LaptopSentry sounds a loud alarm if a locked-but-running laptop is disconnected from its power cord. Laptop Superhero sounds a loud, whooping alarm when the owner remotely sends it a lockdown command.
When NASA’s space shuttle program was announced back in 1972, it was billed as a major advance — a key step in humanity’s quest to exploit and explore space.
The shuttle would enable safe, frequent and affordable access to space, the argument went, with flights occurring as often as once per week and costing as little as $20 million each. But much of that original vision didn’t come to pass.
Two of the program’s 134 flights have ended in tragedy, killing 14 astronauts in all. Recent NASA estimates peg the shuttle program’s cost through the end of last year at $209 billion (in 2010 dollars), yielding a per-flight cost of nearly $1.6 billion. And the orbiter fleet never flew more than nine missions in a single year.
The shuttle program is drawing to a close, with its last-ever mission — the STS-135 flight of Atlantis— slated to launch Friday (July 8). So now is as good a time as any to ask: Was it worth it? Or, put another way: Could NASA have found a better use for that $209 billion?
Unsurprisingly, Khan Academy followers can’t get enough of the product: online education tutorials that are easy to use and, best of all, free.
The site has thousands of math and science tutorials, and a decent library of finance and history lectures too. The video lessons are delivered in digestible 10-20 minute chunks, with corresponding online exercises. Students earn badges at each level, including Khan Academy’s version of a Masters. According to the site, they’re great incentive to young Khan Academy users, who collect the badges like Silly Bands.
Founder Salman Khan’s story is a cool cubicle-breakout tale. The 33-year-old American quit his job as a hedge fund analyst to work, unpaid, on his educational videos. Khan’s YouTube project developed into the not-for-profit Academy. His site is especially popular with high school and university students, with a million students accessing materials each month.
Many time-honored patriotic tales turn out to be more fiction than fact. On the Fourth of July—today marked by a continent-spanning Google doodle—here’s a look at some memorable myths from the birth of the United States.
(Also see “Fourth of July Facts: First Fests, Number of Fireworks, More.”)
1. The Declaration of Independence Was Signed on July 4
Independence Day is celebrated two days too late. The Second Continental Congress voted for a Declaration of Independence on July 2, prompting John Adams to write his wife, “I am apt to believe that [July 2, 1776], will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.”
Adams correctly foresaw shows, games, sports, buns, bells, and bonfires—but he got the date wrong. The written document wasn’t edited and approved until the Fourth of July, and that was the date printers affixed to “broadside” announcements sent out across the land. July 2 was soon forgotten.
Notorious hacker collective “Anonymous Operations” on Sunday published data it claims to have obtained by breaching a server belonging to Apple. The data, which consisted of 27 usernames and passwords, was allegedly taken during from surveys stored on an Apple server. Though the group said on one of its Twitter accounts that it is “busy elsewhere,” and therefore will seemingly not be targeting Apple again in the near future, it claims to have exploited a security flaw common to several companies when it gained access to Apple’s server. Anonymous said the breach was part of its AntiSec movement, short for anti-security, which is aimed at “exposing corporate and government data and humiliating security firms.”
In honor of Independence Day, The New York Times visualized America’s would-be Facebook profile in its Op-Art section, translating the history of the U.S. into Facebook’s iconic narrative structure.
The piece (below), “Like It or Unfriend It?” was created by novelist Teddy Wayne, Vanity Fair staffer Mike Sacks and designer Thomas Ng.
The graphic recalls a similar piece published by Slate‘s Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson in May, which chronicles recent U.S. events in an imaginary Barack Obama Facebook feed.
Last year the Washington Post published pieces of a real Facebook feed in “A Facebook Story: A mother’s joy and a family’s sorrow” to tell the tragic story of a young mother’s illness and subsequent death.
Online search giant Google has launched a new social networking website in its latest attempt to take on Facebook, which now claims more than 500m users.
Google+ allows individuals to share photos, messages and comments but also integrates the company’s maps and images into the service.
It also aims to help users easily organise contacts within groups.
