.:Ruthless Bastards:.

Today InBev offered $46.3 billion to buy Anheuser-Busch, overvaluing the company by $46.2 billion.  Why would a company that brews Stella, a pretty decent beer, want to sully it’s reputation with shit like Budweiser?

In other news, acting Surgeon General Steven K. Galson is a moron. Sorry, hate to just leave you with that link to do you own homework, but I think you’ll agree. Really, what’s it take to get anointed to a post in the government?  A secret decoder ring?

Do you own Monster Cables?  Well then, you’re a dumbass.

I’ve had my Nokia N75 for about a year now. I got it through AT&T (Cingular) as a replacement for my dead Motorola. I was looking for a phone that I could replace my PDA with, but one that was too big, which is why I ruled out the Blackberry’s or the bigger Nokia smartphones. The reason I’m writing this review is because, after this weekend, I have to say that I’m so disappointed in this phone that I couldn’t go another day without warning other prospective buyers. Not to say this weekend presented some drawback that I didn’t already know about; instead it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In short, when using this phone on a day-to-day basis, I wonder how Nokia, a phone company known for it’s quality products, could release a piece of shit like this into the hands of the public.First, fair notice: I had AT&T unlock this phone so that I could use SIM cards from other countries in it. As part of the process I updated the crippled firmware that AT&T loaded with the newest firmware from Nokia. So, in theory, the phone should actually be “better” than the product that you carry out of the AT&T store. Here are some reasons to update the phone.

Here are the good things about the N75:

• It does a really good job of managing contacts and calendar. This was a key element for my new phone and the N75 does it. It synchronizes with Outlook with no problems.
• The screen is beautiful. It produces very sharp images.
• It’s fast when it’s using the 3G network. Browsing the web works just fine, as does streaming audio from internet radio stations (which you can’t do unless you unlock the phone IIRC).
• The overall build is solid.
• It runs Gmail and Google Maps pretty fast and, with Maps, you can use cell tower triangulation to find yourself on the map.
• The phone comes with built-in speakers for speakerphone functionality. I once used this for a work conference call that lasted about 45 minutes, with several people huddled around a table, and it worked great.

And now the bad:

• The phone plays MP3’s and even has a built-in FM tuner. Too bad these features are utterly useless because the N75 doesn’t come with a 2.5mm headphone jack. If you want to plug in headphones you have to buy a Nokia Pop-port adapter which is bulky and that you’ll never carry with you.
• The camera sucks. Nokia claims it’s a 2MP camera which I guess it might be. But the pictures suck. It does come with a flash too, which is really bright. But pictures in low-light (and by low light I mean anything that’s not sunlight) come out grainy to the point that they look like they were purposely scrambled using Photoshop for some kind of artistic effect; flash or no flash. Plus the picture sound that the camera makes is not synced with the actual picture so the subjects will think the picture has been taken when in fact it hasn’t, inevitably leading to blurry pictures as everyone moves as soon as they hear the sound.
• The built-in web-browser is pretty bad, but you can get around this by installing Opera Mini, which works great.
• The phone’s CPU is slow. Too slow. I often find myself waiting 20 - 30 seconds (not an exaggeration) for the phone to figure out what exactly I wanted it to do before it does anything. Granted, this usually just happens when you’re performing a task immediately after another task, but think of it this way:
  • If you have several text messages and you read one, reply to it, then want to read the next one, expect a 20 second wait. Apparently moving straight to reading a text message after sending one is just too much for this phone to handle.
  • If you send a multi-media text message (something that can take 15 - 30 seconds) don’t expect any response from the phone while that’s happening.
  • Just took a picture and want to see it in the phone’s gallery? You’re in for a 30 - 45 second wait.
  • Just received a text message? Gotta wait a bit before the phone fully comprehends that it received something and lets you interact with it again.
  • Just exited Gmail and you want to send a text message? Go get a cup of coffee first.
  • Accidentally pressed the “play” button and now you have music blaring out of the speakers in the middle of the meeting? Better go for the battery first because waiting for the phone to respond to your desperate key presses is going to make you look like a jackass.

It’s really the processor speed that kills me. This weekend was Bay to Breakers which generally necessitates a large amount of texting so that you can find people in the throng of the masses. At one point I actually removed the battery of the phone to force a hard-reset because it was too busy doing… whatever the hell it does when you ask it to send a text message. The slowness of the processor alone is reason not to buy this phone. But then you have the lack of decent camera and music player on top of that and it’s infuriating. For may part I’ll deal with it a couple more months until the 3G iPhone comes out and then I dump Nokia. Too bad, too, because this phone *could* have been pretty decent had it been executed properly.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. I also wanted to be a doctor at some point too. But being an astronaut sounded much cooler because you could meet space aliens and travel to nearby star systems. As it turns out most astronauts are in fact doctors, if not medical then otherwise. And I’m neither, though very happy in my profession regardless of not achieving my age nine childhood dream. The fascination with space never ended though, being fed by many a sci-fi book or, more recently, Battlestar Galactica.

Part of my daily routine has also included, for the last couple years, a peak at the Astronomy Picture of The Day (APOD). I’ve setup the RSS feed to display the link in My Yahoo. I highly recommend it to anyone who ever wanted to be an astronaut. The pictures are varied but my favorites are generally the panoramas of nebulae, star systems and galaxies. Many are in false color, where they convert light that’s invisible to humans into some more obvious, but that little bit of trickery doesn’t detract in the slightest from some amazing pictures. I could spend an entire day just leafing through the archives. APOD does quite an effective job of showing you just how small you are, and just how big the universe is. Every morning I boot my computer and I get to remember what it was like wanting to be an astronaut when I was a kid. If you get a chance check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Every once in a while, a long while, I meet someone with a name that, for lack of a better explanation, is just fricken sweet. The last time, before today, was about seven years ago when I worked at Malcolm Pirnie. I worked with a guy named Ram Reddy. Really great guy, family man, industrial automation expert. But he had a porn star name. Ram Reddy.

Today I was just told about a new consultant on one of our projects. The guy is based in Paris. His name? Maxime Hacker. Fricken sweet.

Last week Fox News “exaggerated” the facts in one of their “segments” to take advantage of whatever hysteria existed in the media space at the time. Yeah, well, what else is new? It would be par for the course if Fox News reported that China just landed the Loch Ness Monster on the moon or that Barack Obama was the love child of Michael Moore and Osama Bin Laden. Yawning would ensue and I would move on to more relevant sources of information, like the NewsHour with Jim Lerher or the homeless guy that sleeps in the alley by my apartment. But, since I’m all wrapped up in the gaming industry right now it was interesting to watch this particular story unfold.

In summary:
1. Fox News lies about the level of sexual content in a (highly rated) video game called Mass Effect. Says things like “New videogame shows full digital nudity and sex.” This is not an exaggeration, this is not true. As in “lie” or “anti-fact.”

2. Fox News rolls out psychologist Cooper Lawrence to talk about how bad this game is for kids. Gamers take aim at her book on Amazon and tank it, giving it an effective one star rating. Reviews say things like “I know all about this book but have never fully read it. Why? Due to the overwhelming backlash, I have no choice but to agree with the 1 star ratings. The rumors are rampant that this book was poorly written and poorly researched. So without verifying the contents myself - I give it a 1 star. Good thing video games aren’t judged in this manner - whew!!!”

3. Poor Cooper Lawrence apologizes for commenting on a game she’s never actually played or seen played. Says things like “I recognize that I misspoke. I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke. Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography. But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit.”

The links above are worth the read to get a sense of the absolute shit that passes for reporting/news. It’s not just Fox News, though they are a major offender, but every 24 hour news network. If something interesting doesn’t happen during the day, make something up to fill in the time.

Don’t worry about ‘ole Stephen Johnson, the commander and chief over at the EPA. His meager government salary is compensated by the bonuses he gets from Detroit. Or is it Halliburton? It’s really hard to keep track of nowadays. As more details emerge about the EPA’s rejection of California’s proposed vehicle emissions standards it’s becoming more clear that there’s an ethical gray zone in the top ranks of the EPA. Not like I’m surprised. This is just par for the course.

“EPA officials told the agency’s administrator that California had “compelling and extraordinary conditions” to justify a federal waiver allowing the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, according to excerpts of documents released Wednesday.

Yet when Administrator Stephen Johnson denied the state’s request for a waiver in December, he said the California standards were not needed to meet “compelling and extraordinary conditions,” one of the criteria in federal law.” - Wired

Thanks to Ravination for passing this on