Fausta's Blog

Cell phone de Fausta

Instapundit links to The ever-expanding smartphone screen: how supersized became everyday.

I recently had to replace my old cell phone, and bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 at a really good price at my neighborhood Radio Shack. I also own an iPod Touch, and you can find most of the apps, send email and text with the iPod as long as you have an internet connection.

I had looked at the Samsung Galaxy S3 last summer while visiting the Samsung booth at BlogHer. Once you get over the shock of the size (my old cell phone was tiny), you love the large display. Why so big?

… the primary purposes of smartphones have clearly changed. Early on, they were phones first, and data devices second. The various advents of modern apps, browsing and media shifted the focus enough that voice is almost incidental today. Our smartphones are now pocket computers, and they’re often our cameras and GPS units, too. Until and unless wearable computing replaces the smartphone, a bigger screen helps us process the glut of information we face in a day, and frequently provides a source of entertainment when it’s time to relax. There’s undeniably a threshold at which smartphone builders will have to relent: no one’s about to stuff a Galaxy Tab into their pocket. Likewise, there’s a good chance we’ll still see smaller devices for those who can’t (or won’t) switch to a phone that’s too big for their hands or pockets. Still, the past few years have taught us not to make too many assumptions — through technology and shifting tastes, what’s an extraordinary screen one year often becomes run-of-the-mill fare the next.

The size itself, even with the Otter protective case, is no problem for me since I have long fingers, it fits in coat pockets, and when I go out I carry it in a handbag. I prefer the iPod’s camera, but the Samsung’s cell phone reception indoors is superior to my son’s iPhone’s. The large screen’s great for videos and GPS, too.

Oh, yes, I got the heavy-duty Otter. While I got the Samsung S3 at a really good price, it’s best to not have to replace it.

Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Dia has an article (in Spanish) about Diaspora’s Yosem Companys, one of the creators of Diaspora.

Diaspora’s website says,

Choice
Diaspora lets you sort your connections into groups called aspects. Unique to Diaspora, aspects ensure that your photos, stories and jokes are shared only with the people you intend.

Ownership
You own your pictures, and you shouldn’t have to give that up just to share them. You maintain ownership of everything you share on Diaspora, giving you full control over how it’s distributed.

Simplicity
Diaspora makes sharing clean and easy – and this goes for privacy too. Inherently private, Diaspora doesn’t make you wade through pages of settings and options just to keep your profile secure.

Companys attended Yale and Harvard and is finishing his PhD at Stanford. He’s not getting paid yet. Will Diaspora gather significant participation to become an alternative to Facebook for people who want to network on line, while maintaining some control over their privacy?

There’s certainly enough of a demand.

In today’s news:

Mack: “Obama Administration Has All the Proof They Need to Make Venezuela a ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’”

Chairman Mack Renews Call for Freedom Loving Americans to Boycott CITGO
WASHINGTON, June 24, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — At today’s hearing of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, Chairman Connie Mack (FL-14) again called on the Obama Administration to cease their delaying of placing Venezuela on the “State Sponsor of Terrorism List.” The hearing, “Venezuela’s Sanction able Activity,” was held to provide oversight of sanctions available for the State Department and Treasury Department to dissuade illicit activity in our Hemisphere. To date, the Obama Administration has underutilized these tools allowing ruthless dictator Hugo Chavez to profit from the drug trade, sell fuel to the Iranians, and transport terrorists around the world.
Mack stated, “The State Department said they would name Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism as well as enforce consequential sanctions on their state run oil company if they received proof that Venezuela is demonstrably sanctionable. That proof was again presented to officials of the State and Treasury Department and further delay by the Obama Administration is unacceptable and will only continue to coddle Hugo Chavez.”
Chairman Mack reiterated Venezuela’s repeated support for acts of international terrorism; including the sale of refined fuel to Iran and the actions of Ghazi Nasr al Din, a Venezuelan Diplomat, who was sanctioned by the Treasury Department for facilitating the transfer of funds to Hezbollah and escorted Hezbollah officials to and from Venezuela. Additionally, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) drew sanctions on several Venezuelan senior government officials, Hugo Carvajal Barrios, the Director of Military Intelligence, and Henry de Jesus Rangel Silva, General-in-Chief of the Venezuelan Armed Services, for materially assisting and supporting drug trafficking and terrorism activities by the revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Chavez, still in Cuba, twittered yesterday. Daniel ponders Chavez’s condition.

Key Brazilian government websites have suffered a series of cyberattacks, with the worst occurring early Friday, but there is no evidence of any data loss, the government said.

Presidential spokesman Murilo Gabrielli said the denial-of-service attacks—in which access to a website is disrupted—are being investigated by the government’s Federal Data Processing Service, or Serpro. A Serpro spokesman said the service has established an internal task force to stop the attacks, guarantee security of the sites and restore website access.

The worst attack occurred early Friday, taking down the website of Brazil’s main government statistical institution, the IBGE. The site includes a vast archive of demographic and economic data.

Hackers were able to briefly post their own message on the IBGE’s site early Friday: “This month, the Brazilian government will suffer the highest number of virtual attacks in its history. These attacks are a protest by a nationalist group that desires to transform Brazil into a better country.” The group called itself Fail Shell.

A government cybersecurity expert said the hackers apparently took down the government sites through use of robotic computers. Under this technique, the computers bombard a site with billions of access requests until the site shuts down.

More blogging later.

Further proof that life isn’t fair:

For this she gets paid $100 million.

The April Fool’s joke is on AOL’s stockholders.

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post (emphasis added)

The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

AOL is not the most solid company around; it’s laid off thousands of employees, shows no profit and pays no dividends. It has 106 million shares outstanding, currently trading at $21.39 (down since the announcement of the purchase) in the NASDAQ, and this deal will cost $3 per share outstanding.

HuffPo is not publicly traded.

So, my question is, Where did AOL come up with $315 million?

Ann Marlowe thinks that the US should abandon its “stability” fetish since,

We’ve forgotten that extremist ideology mainly emerges from forced “stability,” not from free societies. As Elliott Abrams wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Sunday, “regimes that make moderate politics impossible make extremism far more likely. Rule by emergency decree long enough, and you end up creating a genuine emergency.”

That is not untrue, but that’s not the reason “stability” has become a thing of the past.

The reason is that technology has caught up with repressive regimes. Daniel Henninger, in his article Stability’s End, encapsulates in a sentence this fact,

Technologies with goofy names like Twitter and Facebook are replacing political stability with a state of permanent instability.

Mubarak unleashed the camels after trying to shut down the internet, the Iranian mullahs carry out executions by the thousands. The Medieval measures won’t work, any more than the Jimmy Carter 1979 approach to foreign policy would.

Indeed,

This new, exponentially expanding world of information technologies is now creating permanent instability inside formerly stable political arrangements.

This stuff disrupts everything it touches. It overturned the entire music industry, and now it is doing the same to established political systems.

Adding to the instability is the increasing food inflation. Larry Kudlow points out that

In addition to Egypt, the people have taken to the streets to varying degrees in Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, and Yemen. Local food riots have even broken out in rural China and other Asian locales.
…
The CRB food index is up an incredible 36 percent over the past year, including 8 percent year-to-date. Raw materials are up 23 percent in the past year. Inflation breakouts have occurred in China, among various Asian Tigers, and in India, Brazil, and other Latin American countries. Even Britain and Germany are registering higher inflation readings.

In dollar terms, the price of wheat has soared 114 percent over the past year. Corn has surged 88 percent. These are incredible numbers.

And let’s not forget that the world’s poor are the hardest hit by food-price inflation. They literally can’t afford to buy bread. It brings to mind the French Revolution in the 18th century. When you see this kind of mass protest in the streets, spreading from country to country, you see a pattern that cannot be explained by local conditions alone.

In our hemisphere, Venezuela has the highest inflation – 28%, as the economy contracts while the government takes over private property and food production and distribution. Chavez is ruling by emergency decree: if “Rule by emergency decree long enough, and you end up creating a genuine emergency” is the case, for how long will Hugo Chavez’s regime stand, considering these numbers?

“Instability is the new status quo”, states Henninger, and I agree.

The question remains, how will political systems and societies adapt to it? How will the US, when its own administration is passing thousands of pages-long laws that haven’t even been read?

Chinese woman jailed over Twitter post
A woman in China has been sentenced to a year in a labour camp after posting a message on the social networking website Twitter.

The fiance of human rights activist Cheng Jianping told the BBC she had been accused of disrupting social order, but her message had been a joke.

She had repeated a Twitter comment urging nationalist protesters to smash Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, adding the words “Charge, angry youth”.

Twitter is banned in China.

However, many people use it by circumventing internet controls.

So, Tom, what if we could just be China for a day?

Tina Brown giddily announces that Daily Beast, Newsweek to Wed! The offspring will be called The Newsweek Daily Beast Company.

Stacy wonders about The Weekly Newsbeast’s money flow:

The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.

Two things:
1. The Daily Beast’s code is such that, every time I have been to the site, it takes a couple of seconds for the text to ungnarl itself into readable form.
2. I can’t recall when was the last time I read Newsweek.
Perhaps it is a match made in heaven, after all.

Andrew Breitbart’s got how:
Reward: $100,000 for Full ‘JournoList’ Archive; Source Fully Protected

I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse.
…
I therefore offer the sum of $100,000 to the person who provides the full “JournoList” archive. We will protect that person’s privacy and identity forever. No one will ever know who became $100,000 richer – and did the right thing, morally and ethically — by shining the light of truth on this seamy underworld of the media.

Cash, undeclared, and ready.

Someone’s got to take that offer.

UPDATE
Offer: $20 and a Case of PBR for JournoList Emails About The Weekly Standard.
Heck, I must join in the offers:
$2.25 or 1-way subway fare for JournoList emails about Fausta’s blog.

UPDATE, Wednesday 30 June,
GM Roper:

I think if Fausta threw in a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich she’d have a taker.

It’s a deal, GM! Subway fare and a PBJ!

3 Reasons The FCC Shouldn’t “Touch” The Internets!

H/t Instapundit.