| In Age of High-Tech, Are Americans Losing Touch with DIY Skills?
Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." That's a tall order. Although I can only do some of those things, I approve of the principle. Nowadays, though, we're specializing more. A popular Internet essay is titled: “I Can't Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can." Are hands-on skills—building things, fixing things, operating machines and so on—really in decline? I think so. SAT scores provide a record of academic performance, but there's no equivalent archive for tracking handiness.
Detroit Council to Vote on Mayor
A prosecutor is investigating whether Kilpatrick and former Chief of Staff Christine Beatty lied under oath about having an affair during a trial in a whistle blower lawsuit. The mayor has been dogged by recent media reports about steamy text messages the two exchanged that suggest an affair. .
Mother Earth Mother Board
The financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are much closer to each other than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan. Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people's hair stand up on end in more than just the purely electrical sense - it must have seemed supernatural. Perhaps this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with his code was "What hath God wrought!" - almost as if he needed to reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil, was behind it. During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented.
Notebook Review : BenQ Joybook S41
You can link external devices to the generous four USB 2.0 ports, mini-FireWire or ExpressCard/54 slot. A five-in-one memory card reader is compatible with SD/MMC, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro and xD-Picture cards. There is a 1.3-megapixel Webcam sitting above the display for video conferencing but, unlike HP Pavilion's dual-array mics straddling the lens, there is only a single microphone on the palm rest. This may reduce the audio pickup for those who like to multitask talking and typing.
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Microsoft prepares to take Office online
In addition to Google's effort, which, as of earlier this month, also includes presentation software, IBM has announced its free Lotus Symphony productivity software, which prompted 100,000 downloads in its first week of availability. Adobe, meanwhile, on Monday is expected to announce it has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, a start-up that has built a web-based word processor, called "Buzzword", using Adobe's Flash and AIR technologies. Adobe is also introducing a service, code-named "Share", that allows people to share and store documents via the web. A blend of online services and traditional software
For Microsoft, Office Live Workspace is also the next step in what the company touts as its "software plus services" strategy, essentially the notion that online services can serve as a complement to locally run software, but not necessarily fully replace software running on a consumer's own desktop machine or on a businesses server.
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