Between 23-37% of US wireless subscribers will use a wireless phone as their primary telephone by 2009, up from 9.4% at present, according to a recent report by In-Stat. Mobile wireless services have quickly become a viable alternative to traditional landline service for a large number of consumers in the US, said In-Stat. With wireline-to-wireless number portability introduced as part of the Wireless Local Number Portability (WLNP) mandate in November 2003, consumers now have an unprecedented degree of flexibility and convenience in cutting the cord on their landlines, the research firm stated.

The only time I've had a problem with the lifestyle was activating my Tivo.

BlackBerry Cool � Landlines Losing Users

The full email transcripts between Marty Bahamonde and FEMA’s director Michael Brown have been released. This is an update on our story yesterday, which we stated could be the first time that the Blackberry handheld has been used in a federal investigation. The full email is even more damning and shows how critical the situation was in The Dome, “situation is past critical … many will die within hours … out of food and running out of water … phone connectivity impossible”.

BlackBerry Cool » Full Blackberry Email Transcript From Bahamonde Released

GREENPEACE is to be fined after its flagship Rainbow Warrior II damaged a coral reef in the central Philippines during a climate change awareness campaign.

Dow!

Mr Constantino said that Greenpeace divers on the Tubbataha expedition had found that healthy coral and no evidence of bleaching, believed to be caused by warming sea temperatures.

He said the healthy state of the Tubbataha Reefs did not disprove the theory of global warming, which he described as an "extremely complicated science".

And just a lovely conclusion -- reefs were healthy, and while that may have shown their hypothesis to be false, the conclusion reamins the same. This should be the scary part of Global Warming "research" for scientists -- a willingness by vocal supporters to discard the evidence for the theory. I'm not saying Yea or Nay to Global Warming -- but they obviously did their research to have yet another data point to yell about. When the research did not provide their result... yell to shout it out. Yes, global warming science is very complicated... so stop doing research for the purpose of "proving it" and do it instead for the local effects AND to enable better macro experiments as that becomes feasible.

Greenpeace damages reef - Rainbow Worrier - Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au

A days-old human embryo preserved outside the womb isn't a person under the Arizona law that allows lawsuits for wrongful deaths, the Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled.

The decision is groundbreaking in an area of law that the court acknowledged is fraught with controversy.

A Phoenix-area couple sued the Mayo Clinic, accusing the clinic of losing or destroying some of their fertilized eggs. They had asked the Court of Appeals to expand the definition of "person" under the wrongful-death statute to include embryos with the potential to be viable, but the court declined, saying it's a matter for the Legislature to decide.

As Salon.com's Broadsheet (Lynn Harris) writes:

Any ruling, even a relatively minor one, that does not define embryos as "microscopic Americans" is another wedge against attacks on abortion, stem cell research and the like. As I wrote in a Salon article about insidious efforts to define embryo donation as embryo "adoption," "Though the 1970 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion turns largely on the right to privacy, it also notes -- in an aside that has become anything but -- if fetuses were 'people,' they would be entitled to protection under the 14th Amendment, and abortion would still be illegal. The Center for Women Policy Studies has stated that 'legislative efforts to establish fetal patienthood, victimhood and, therefore, personhood represent the primary threat to Roe v. Wade.'"

Appeals Court: Embryo outside womb not a 'person' under lawsuit statute

Goodbye, classic rock. Hello, Bob.

WRRK-FM (96.9) has flipped to Bob FM, a varied format aimed at a wider audience that includes its former classic-rock listeners. The station made the switch at midnight yesterday.

The hybrid music format, better known as Jack in most markets, is a mixed stew of a playlist, stretching from the '60s to current hits.

Programmers see it as a way to engage radio audiences who've grown tired of formulaic, corporate formats that are heavy on commercials and light on variety. The target audience is 25- to 54-year olds, and listeners are about a 50-50 balance of male and female.

Second time in very recent memory that a major Pittsburgh commercial radio station "flipped" its format. Last time, it worked nicely for a couple of weeks -- no DJs, any music, cooperative work with the listeners to design the playlists around who listens when.

By now, it is filled again with annoying DJs who are not quite good enough to be demagogues but have the ego and ambition to keep trying out.

It must be sad to work in a dying media without much chance of reprieve. With newspapers -- another dying media -- the basic principle (content creation, editing, presentation) will last. Small radio stations, college radio stations, will also last for similar reasons. But as the competition and the market scales up to everyone (internet broadcast), the ClearChannel and Infinity Broadcasting model (cookie cutter format) won't work. And the losers will not necessarily be CC or IB (their formats work, apparently), but definately the smaller market DJs.

WRRK shifts to varied format

SGI announced today that it has been advised by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that its common stock -- ticker symbol SGI -- and its 6.5% Senior Secured Convertible Notes due June 1, 2009 -- ticker symbol SGI 09 -- will no longer be traded on the NYSE beginning with the opening of business on Monday, November 7, 2005. The Company expects its common stock will be quoted on the OTC Bulletin Board.

DOW!

I made some non-insignificant money on this stock three years ago tracking it from 0.95$ to around 3.00$ as they started to sell assets. But I'm glad I left it then, because it has continued to slump downward. The bonds have been at pennies on the dollar for years because there is little hope they will be repaid.

It is a pity. Hopefully, Google will survive the Silicon Vally Campus-building Curse by just using SGI's.

SGI Securities to Cease NYSE Trading: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

[Chris Barron] is getting pretty unnerved by the UK moving to charging for road use based on GPS coordinates. He built this device to prove that GPS data can be spoofed and shouldn’t be relied upon. He promises future firmware updates that will provide two knob etch-a-sketch style path control.

GPS NMEA spoofing - hack a day - www.hackaday.com _

Several famous people applied catnapping to a large extent. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison and Buckminster Fuller. Other figures said to be associated with polyphasic sleep experimentation include Nikola Tesla, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill.

Polyphasic sleep - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

grng generates "random" numbers with the Google search engine. Taking a word from a .lst file, grng googles it and then takes a word count of the results displayed on the first result page. Additionally, grng feeds a word from each of the result pages into the .lst file, thereby insuring that the list will not run out.

Why?
While discussing random numbers on #linuxfriends on irc.oftc.net I stumbled accross the idea that became grng. grng makes an honest effort to generate random numbers, not pseudo ones. I hoped that by using randomized human input from a constantly changing database (Google) that I would be able to extract random numbers. However, this is not possible as Google uses its patented page ranking system, which results in the same pages being listed first every time

Google Random Number Generator (grng)

It would seem that del.icio.us has joined Technorati, Feedster, BlogPulse, etc. in the Web 2.0 applications that don't scale very well. Posting new links to del.icio.us seems to fail for me more times than it succeeds.

del.icio.us didn't scale either :-( - The RSS Blog