| Say "No!" to bundled apps!
You've gotta be careful when you install software nowadays - you install one thing and you end up with a couple of applications that you didn't expect to get. Welcome to the world of application bundling, and it seems that everyone is doing it nowadays. Over the past few years I've noticed a disturbing increase in app bundling. Sure, you've always had to keep an eye on the install process just to make sure that you weren't getting something you didn't bargain for, especially if you were dealing with less well-known vendors, but now it seems that there's no telling who might be bundling apps - free software or commercial, it seems that companies are looking for additional revenue streams. Take, for example, security software. Alex Eckelberry, president of Sunbelt Software, security expert and all round good guy, has been keeping an eye on the competition and has noticed a disturbing trend where security vendors are bundling the Ask toolbar with their security offerings.
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The red planet Mars is becoming prominent in the night sky. It is already brighter than most of the stars, and is of course very red, which is why it was named in honour of the God of War. It is a small world, only just over 4000 miles in diameter, and further away from the Sun, so that it is a cold pIace – but it is less unlike the Earth than any other planet, and it has always been regarded as a possibIe abode of life. And at the moment a new space craft, Phoenix, is winging its way there.By now many probes have been to Mars. Some have passed by, others have entered orbit round the planet, and several have landed there, NASA's rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been crawling happily around, sending back amazing pictures as well as data. We know much more about Mars now than we did a few years ago, but one thing we do not know is there any life on Mars – and if not, have living things ever existed there? Perhaps Phoenix will tell us. We are quite sure that there is no intelligent life, and indeed intelligence does not exist anywhere in the Solar System except (possibly) on the Earth, Percival Lowell's brilliant, canal-building Martian engineers belong to fiction, not to fact.
European Commission Proposes Single European Telecoms Market/Regulator
The European Commission officially adopted proposals for a reform of the EU telecoms rules with the aim of creating a single European telecom market with a consistent set of regulations covering consumers in all 27 EU Member States. The plan calls for a new European Telecom Market Authority to govern national telecoms regulators in ensuring that market rules and consumer regulation are applied consistently, independently and without protectionism. To become law, the Commission proposals will now need to be approved by the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers. The European Commission believes the approval could be attained by the end of 2009.
Specific components of the reform proposal include: New consumer rights such as the right to switch telecoms operators within 1 day; the right to transparent and comparable price information; the possibility to call freephone numbers from abroad; and a more effective single European emergency number 112.
Woster: Whalen camp draws fire for farce
Rumor has it she's pregnant, engaged to her chief of staff and is now a pro-lifer opposed to abortion rights. Baloney, you say? Well, sure. It's also a sign of how wacky things get when you mix politics into that cascading avalanche of information - some of it true, much of it not - that lands in your personal computer every day. The Herseth story landed last week by way of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia that offers a little information about a lot of subjects. It's also a place that polices itself for accuracy, since readers can edit the data - and apparently do. Somebody did some creative editing in Herseth's biography page on Wikipedia. They inserted a wild bit of fiction, crediting the Democratic congresswoman with a sudden change of heart on abortion, a sudden engagement to her chief of staff (identified with a fictitious name) and a sudden pregnancy.
European Commission Proposes Single European Telecoms Market/Regulator
The European Commission officially adopted proposals for a reform of the EU telecoms rules with the aim of creating a single European telecom market with a consistent set of regulations covering consumers in all 27 EU Member States. The plan calls for a new European Telecom Market Authority to govern national telecoms regulators in ensuring that market rules and consumer regulation are applied consistently, independently and without protectionism. To become law, the Commission proposals will now need to be approved by the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers. The European Commission believes the approval could be attained by the end of 2009.
Specific components of the reform proposal include: New consumer rights such as the right to switch telecoms operators within 1 day; the right to transparent and comparable price information; the possibility to call freephone numbers from abroad; and a more effective single European emergency number 112.
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