Economist.com | Technology and development

Economist.com | Technology and development

Boy on cell phone

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points (see article).

And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world’s poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.

What the hell is that boy talking on? A cell phone? A cell phone shaped rice crispy treat? A cell phone shaped hyena turd?

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak

Microsoft Watch

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

Microsoft instead will be releasing their MS-CSS3 spec days after the release of IE 7.0 and will provide full support for that. 😉

Thirteen companies warned of GPL non-compliance at CeBIT

LWN

Some 13 vendors of commercial software and appliance products present at CeBIT receive an open warning letter against their alleged misuse of GPL licensed software. Those warning letters will be personally handed over to the respective companies at their CeBIT booth by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.

The list of companies includes high-profile names of the computing industry, such as Motorola, Acer, AOpen, and continues with Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware.

They're Made Out Of Meat

SETI Fiction

“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars.”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

Music piracy unit raids ISP in BitTorrent assault

ZDNet

Australia’s music industry piracy investigations unit has raided an Internet service provider in Perth in what it says is the first Australian assault on the use of BitTorrent technology for copyright infringement.

Outgoing Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) general manager, Michael Speck, said the raid was launched this afternoon at the offices of Swiftel Communications in the Western Australian capital’s central business district after federal magistrate Rolf Driver yesterday granted a civil search order.

Yup, that is correct. You read that right. The corporation raided the ISPs offices, not the government. No police were involved. Again, correct, corporations have the governments blessing to enforce the law themselves.

DumpChunks()

A buddy of mine I went to school with at UNC who works for a very well known gaming company shot me an email today, which stated:

My direct superior here at work informed me that he had to legitimately
write a C++ function called DumpChunks() this morning… Now, that made
my day :^)