We're pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you'll have a lot more control over your phones.

We're really excited to welcome the GrandCentral team to Google. While we're moving their technology over to Google's network, a limited number of invitations will be available to register for a GrandCentral beta account. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.

If you know me just ask and I will send you an invite... We had done something like this with AsteriskPBX a few years ago for use at home...

Grand Central

More Australian voters would like to see Labor Opposition leader Kevin Rudd naked than their current prime minister, John Howard, a poll showed on Sunday just two weeks out from a hard-fought general election.

The question was posed in a Galaxy poll of 1,200 voters and published in Zoo magazine, the Australian Associated Press reported.

The survey found 34 percent of respondents wanted to see Rudd, 50, with his gear off, more than double the 16 percent who said the same thing about Howard, 68.

Even Howard's usually strong following among the over 50s slipped, with the poll showing just 16 percent wanted to see him naked compared with 27 percent for Rudd.

"No one wants a prime minister who doesn't look good naked," Zoo editor Paul Merrill was quoted as saying.

More conventional polls have consistently shown Howard's conservative government trailing well behind Labor, although the gap has narrowed slightly ahead of the November 24 general election.

Do you want to ask this question in the USA.....

Hillary vs Obama? ***shudders***

Which politician do voters want to see nude?

Sandra Day O'Connor's husband struck up a romance with a fellow Alzheimer's patient after moving into an assisted living center, and under the circumstances, the retired Supreme Court justice is just glad that he is comfortable, her son told a TV station.
art.oconnor.getty.jpg

Sandra Day O'Connor cited her husband's illness and her need to take care of him when she retired in 2005.

The retired justice isn't jealous about his relationship with the woman, Scott O'Connor told KPNX in Phoenix in a broadcast that aired Thursday. He said it has dramatically changed the outlook of his father, John, toward being in the Huger Mercy Living Center.

The focus of the broadcast report was Alzheimer's patients who forget their spouses and form new relationships. It quoted experts as saying that that situation is not unusual.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, cited her husband's illness and her need to take care of him when she retired in 2005. His neurological disease was diagnosed 17 years ago.

"Mom was thrilled that Dad was relaxed and happy and comfortable living here and wasn't complaining," their son said.

It was different when he first came to the center recently, the son said: "He knew this was sort of the beginning of the end ... It was basically suicide talk."

John O'Connor was shifted to another cottage at the center, Scott O'Connor said, and "48 hours after moving into that new cottage he was a teenager in love. He was happy."

The Associated Press sent an e-mail request for comment from the retired justice via Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg. There was no immediate response. A message left with the only Scott O'Connor found in a Phoenix phone listing was not returned.

An official with the assisted living center, Dr. Marianne McCarthy, told the station that there were several romances at the center, and people with dementia need intimacy as much as anyone else.

Sandra Day O'Connor, 77, was named to the high court by President Reagan in 1991. She married John O'Connor in 1952 and they have three sons

This is sad. How can a person forget so much?

O'Connor not jealous of husband's new relationship

Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, creators of Thirtysomething and executive producers of My So-Called Life, are making news again with a new series.

It's called Quarterlife, and it's airing not on TV, but in short, six-to-an-hour episodes on the Web. Some pundits are touting it as an alternative for audiences during the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike.

Revealing Slices of 'Quarterlife'

Sacha van Loo, 36, is not your typical cop. He wields a white cane instead of a gun. And from the purr of an engine on a wiretap, he can discern whether a suspect is driving a Peugeot, a Honda or a Mercedes.

Van Loo is one of Europe's newest weapons in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime: a blind Sherlock Holmes, whose disability allows him to spot clues sighted detectives don't see.

"Being blind has forced me to develop my other senses, and my power as a detective rests in my ears," he said from his office at the Belgian Federal Police, where a bullet-riddled piece of paper from a recent target-shooting session was proudly displayed on the wall. "Being blind also requires recognizing your limitations," he added with a smile, noting that a sighted trainer guided his hands during target practice "to make sure no one got wounded."

Van Loo, a slight man who has been blind since birth, is one of six blind police officers in a pioneering unit specializing in transcribing and analyzing wiretap recordings in criminal investigations. An accomplished linguist who taught himself Serb Croat for fun, he laments that he is not entitled to carry a gun on the job or make arrests. But such is his acute sense of hearing that Paul van Thielen, a director at the Belgian Federal Police, compares his powers of observation to those of a "superhero."

A blind Sherlock Holmes: Fighting crime with acute listening

President George W. Bush vetoed a major spending measure on Tuesday that would have funded education, health care and job training programs, saying it contained too many special projects, even as he signed a $459 billion bill to increase the Pentagon's non-war funding.

The veto, of a measure providing $150.7 billion in discretionary spending for the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services, was announced as Bush was en route to southern Indiana to deliver an economics speech at which, his spokeswoman said, he would criticize Congress for its "wasteful spending."

This is total bullshit! He is truly trying to take this country down... Really? What is his logic ... ?

Bush vetoes domestic spending bill on health, education and jobs

What is Android?

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. This early look at the Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.
Features

* Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
* Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
* Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
* Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
* SQLite for structured data storage
* Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
* GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
* Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
* Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
* Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

Android Architecture

The following diagram shows the major components of the Android operating system. Each section is described in more detail below.

Android System Architecture
Applications

Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.
Application Framework

Developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. The application architecture is designed to simplify the reuse of components; any application can publish its capabilities and any other application may then make use of those capabilities (subject to security constraints enforced by the framework). This same mechanism allows components to be replaced by the user.

Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems, including:

* A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, including lists, grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser
* Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data
* A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graphics, and layout files
* A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar
* An Activity Manager that manages the lifecycle of applications and provides a common navigation backstack

For more details and a walkthrough of an application, see Writing an Android Application.
Libraries

Android includes a set of C/C libraries used by various components of the Android ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

What is Android?

Google on Monday released programming tools for its Android mobile-phone alliance for download, giving developers the ability to start writing software for phones due to start shipping in 2008 and $10 million in prizes to lure them.

The software development kit (SDK), an open-source package available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X machines, shows that Java is indeed the programming language for software running on the Linux-based phones.

Accompanying the SDK is a raft of details that wasn't available when Google and its partners announced the Open Handset Alliance a week ago. The Android software includes the Google-created Dalvik virtual machine for running Java programs, a browser based on the WebKit engine, and support for many media and image file formats. (Note: I clarified that the browser is only based on the WebKit engine.)

And hardware abilities permitting, it also supports wireless communications using GSM mobile-phone technology, 3G, Edge, 802.11 Wi-Fi networks. Conspicuously missing from the list is the widely used CDMA mobile-phone technology developed by Qualcomm.

To jump-start the Android programming effort, Google is offering $10 million total in prizes, each ranging from $25,000 to $275,000, to programmers picked by a panel of judges.

Memestreams enabled phone for real world (live) social blogging?

Google releases Android programming tools

On Monday, Google released the software developer kit, or SDK, for Android and announced that it would set aside $10 million to give out as prizes to developers who create programs for the new platform.

Android is based on the work of Andy Rubin and several other founders of Danger. Google acquired their newer venture, Android, in 2005.

Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google, talked to CNET News.com about what Android phones will look like, whether they will compete with Apple's iPhone, and why the software took so long to build.

From Danger's realm come Android's makers ...

A cat is baffling his owner by wandering off at night before expecting to be collected by car every morning at exactly the same time and place.

Sgt Podge, a Norwegian Forest Cat, disappears from his owner's home in Talbot Woods, Bournemouth, every night.

The next morning, the 12-year-old cat can always be found in exactly the same place, on a pavement about one and a half miles (2.4km) away.

His owner, Liz Bullard, takes her son to school before collecting Sgt Podge.

She said the routine began earlier this year, when Sgt Podge disappeared one day.

Ms Bullard rang the RSPCA and began telephoning her neighbours to see if anyone had seen him.

An elderly woman who lived about one and a half miles away called back to say she had found a cat matching Sgt Podge's description.

Ms Bullard collected him but within days he vanished again. She rang the elderly woman to find Sgt Podge was back outside her home.

She said a routine has now become established, where each morning she takes her son to school before driving to collect Sgt Podge from the pavement between 0800 and 0815 GMT.

It is thought Sgt Podge walks across Meyrick Park Golf Course every night to reach his destination.

Ms Bullard said: "If it's raining he may be in the bush but he comes running if I clap my hands."

All she has to do is open the car passenger door from the inside for Sgt Podge to jump in.

Wandering the streets

Ms Bullard also makes the trip at weekends and during school holidays - when her son is having a lie in.

She does not know why, after 12 years, Sgt Podge has begun the routine but explained that another woman who lived nearby used to feed him sardines, and that he may be on the look-out for more treats.

"As long as you know where they are you don't mind as a cat owner," Ms Bullard said.

"I know where to collect him - as long as he's not wandering the streets."

Back at home, Sgt Podge has breakfast before going to sleep by a warm radiator.

Cat's daily routine baffles owner