Thursday, 13 March 2014
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
BREAKING NEWS:
Obama: Russia Could Face 'Costs' Over Ukraine Actions
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says
that if Russia continues an aggressive path in Ukraine, the United
States and other countries will, in his words, be "forced to apply
costs" to Moscow.Obama made his remarks after meeting with Ukraine's new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, at the White House in a display of support for the fledgling government.
Obama referred to the Russian military presence in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and said the greatest threat facing Ukraine is to its territorial integrity.
Yatsenyuk said Ukraine will, quote, "never surrender" in a fight over its territory.
The Crimean regional government has scheduled a referendum Sunday on whether to separate from Ukraine and join the Russian federation.
Obama said he will stand with Ukraine in ensuring that its territorial integrity is maintained.
IS IT PROBLEM IN "IOS7"?Apple Keeps Turning Bluetooth On
When
you update your iOS, your Bluetooth will be turned on regardless of
your existing settings. Siri did not have an answer as to why it's
happening, and Apple did not respond to a press inquiry.
The last few times iPhone users updated their operating systems per Apple's prompting, they may have noticed something weird. Those of us who keep Bluetooth turned off for battery and privacy/security reasons suddenly had Bluetooth turned on by default after the update. There are scattered complaints about it in the Apple support forum. “It’s new to iOS7,” is the standard response from other users. Apple did not respond to emailed inquiries about the change to users’ settings. (Siri wasn’t very helpful either.)
Greg Sterling, a senior analyst for Opus Research who organizes a conference about location marketing, had no knowledge of Apple turning Bluetooth on by default, but was impressed if it’s true. “It’s a critical piece here,” he says. “Without Bluetooth, iBeacons won’t work.”
A plausible reason why Apple may be turning on Bluetooth is to bolster the use of iBeacon, a new technology from the smartphone giant that turns your phone into a homing beacon, helping retailers sense and communicate with phone-toting consumers in their vicinity. A person working in the geo-marketing space grew very excited when I called to ask about the implications of Apple turning Bluetooth on by default. “That’s a huge deal,” he said. “The 7.1 iOS makes a big push in what iBeacon can do, but Bluetooth has to be turned on.”
iBeacons communicate via low-energy Bluetooth to awaken apps so that they can send messages or coupons to a person’s phone, or send information about the person via the app. There’s a nice explainer via beacon-maker Estimote on the uses here, which notes at the end that business owners get better quantitative location data about customers.
“It’s interesting to see how iBeacons are becoming a much more significant part of the Apple experience. The most recent iOS update extends the ability of an app to get location even if the app is not open,” says Jules Polonetsky of the Future of Privacy Forum. Polonetsky notes that Apple has emphasized that the new Bluetooth is lower-powered so that it’s less of a drain on the battery.
“iBeacon now works when the app is closed,” said a celebratory headline from one trade blog. A person in the industry said it just works better with Apple’s recent updates, so that an iBeacon communicates with a person’s smartphone instantly rather than with a delay of several minutes — minutes that are crucial in real-time marketing, as the target could then be blocks past the American Eagle store that wanted to send her a deal.
What would be Apple’s motivation in forcing iBeacon on users by turning their Bluetooth on?
iBeacon is one of many technologies that retailers can use to track consumers in stores, or airports, or fill-in-location-of-your-choice, says Opus Research’s Sterling. There’s also acoustic or sonic tracking technologies, LED lighting, magnetic energy, Wi-Fi, cameras… “Public wi-fi is the most widely deployed technology but it’s less accurate in tracking exactly where the person is,” says Sterling. “iBeacon has emerged as a supplemental or alternate technology to provide better accuracy. It’s got the buzz and early lead among these other technologies.”
He says one of the advantages is how cheap iBeacons are and how easy they are to stick up on the walls. “It doesn’t require much IT knowledge,” he says. The technical part is configuring the beacons to work with your particular app.
“There’s a lot of excitement and a lot of momentum around building location sensing technologies out,” says Sterling. “The superficial angle is that retailers want lots of data about consumers, as if retailers are the NSA. The deeper reasoning is that retailers want to provide better experiences to customers, new tools for finding things in stores and helping them get more information about products.The challenge is to not screw it up by being too aggressive or too ham-handed in your implementation. You have to be respectful of privacy and permissions.”
What Sterling finds interesting is who is going to profit from this. It’s the real-world equivalent of Google selling ads based on what people are searching for online. If you’re in a Best Buy's appliance area with your smartphone, GE, LE and Samsung might all want to compete to target you with ads, says Sterling. “Who’s going to get to charge for that access to the consumers?” he asks.
As to why Apple might want to get iPhone users to keep their Bluetooth turned on, Sterling says it could help Apple become dominant in the real-time location marketing space.
“This extends their whole ecosystem. If iBeacon becomes dominant or standard, it expands their reach and reinforces Apple and iOS usage,” says Sterling. “There’s also the idea that they may get into payments, which we’re seeing with Passbook. With their hundreds of millions of users, and iTunes having credit cards, they could turn all that on, and iBeacon could be used for payment in stores rather than swiping credit cards. I don’t think there’s necessarily a massive plan or conspiracy, but I do think they have a number of ideas about how the technology could be used and they see advantages in getting the technology out there and people using it.”
In the meanwhile, if you don’t like all this, make sure to turn off Bluetooth after you update your phone. And you should update your iPhone’s software if you haven’t recently, as there was a major security problem that recently got fixed.
CHINA ON SPOTLIGHT
Satellite images of
possible debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have
been released on a Chinese government website.
The three images show what appear to be large, floating objects in the South China Sea. Previous sightings of possible debris have proved fruitless.
The China-bound plane went missing on Friday with 239 people on board.
It vanished about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur as it flew south of Vietnam's Ca Mau peninsula.
No distress signal or message were sent.
The three images are:
The images were taken on Sunday, a day after the plane disappeared, but were only released on Wednesday on the website of China's State Administration for Science.
Map co-ordinates place the objects in the South China Sea east of Malaysia and off the southern tip of Vietnam.
China's official Xinhua news agency says the largest of the objects measures about 24m x 22m (78ft x 72ft).
'All right, roger that'
China has deployed several high-resolution satellites - controlled from the Xian Satellite Control Centre in northern China - to help search for the jet, the People's Liberation Army said on Tuesday.
Earlier, Malaysian authorities revealed that the last communication from the jet suggested everything was normal on board.
Flight MH370 replied "All right, roger that" to a radio message from Malaysian air control, authorities said. Minutes later all contact with the plane was lost.
China's foreign ministry has complained that there is "too much confusion" regarding information released about the plane's flight path.
There were 153 Chinese nationals on the flight.
"It is very hard for us to decide whether a given piece of information is accurate," spokesman Qin Gang told reporters in Beijing.
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein dismissed the allegations and said that Malaysia would "never give up hope" of finding the plane's passengers and crew.
"It's only confusion if you want it to be seen as confusion," he told a press conference.
"I think it's not a matter of chaos. There are a lot of speculations that we have answered in the last few days," he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, Malaysia's air force chief Rodzali Daud denied remarks attributed to him in local media that the flight had been tracked by military radar to the Malacca Strait, far west of its planned route.
Gen Rodzali Daud said he "did not make any such statements", but added that the air force had "not ruled out the possibility of an air turn-back".
Early search efforts focused on waters between Malaysia and Vietnam but the search area has since been widened.
NEPAL: 3 design options given for 600 MW Budhi Gandaki
 |
| MW Budhi Gandaki River Photographer: Post File Photo |
In a report submitted to the Budhi Gandaki Hydropower Project Development Committee on March 1, the consultant to the 600 MW project has suggested design options consisting of damsite powerhouse, short tunnel and long tunnel.
The committee said that it would select one of the designs within the third
week of March and proceed to conduct a detailed project report (DPR).
Under the first option (damsite powerhouse), the powerhouse will be constructed alongside the dam. The report has stated that the powerhouse should be around 2 km downstream from the damsite and above a place where the Budhi Gandaki joins the Trishuli.
Under this option, a regulating dam will be constructed to control the flow of water during power generation during peak hours. As per the report, if the project is constructed under the first option, it will take at least 77 months to be completed.
The two dams will be linked by a tunnel where one more sub-project can be constructed. However, a study on the cost of the sub-project and its capacity has not been conducted.
Under the second option (short tunnel), the powerhouse will be constructed at Benighat which is 1.5 km downstream from the dam. Under this option, the project will take at least 71 months to be completed. As per the third option (long tunnel), the powerhouse will be built 8 km from the dam at Fisling.
“We will select one of the three options after which the DPR process will
start,” said Laxmi Prasad Devkota, executive chairman of the committee.
The consultant company has suggested constructing a sub-project while implementing any one of the three options. “So far, the first option seems to be the best one. The consultant company is also of the same view,” Devkota said.
The report has mentioned that if the height of the dam is increased from 520 m to 540 m, the plant’s capacity can be increased from 600 MW to 630 MW. The project capacity can be increased to 945 MW by upgrading the dam, the report said.
“The inundation area will not increase much if we increase the height of the dam,” said Devkota. “The cost, however, will increase.”
The report said that if the project is developed with a capacity of 630 MW, the cost of the project would be around Rs 209 billion. On this basis, the project will be able to generate 2,430 GW per hour on average per year, and the electricity generation will cost Rs 6.33 per unit.
If the project is constructed with a capacity of 945 MW, the cost will increase by Rs 14 billion to Rs 223 billion.
The plant will generate 2,524 GW per hour on average per year. However, the cost of the electricity generation is not stated.
Devkota said that even if the capacity is increased, there won’t be much increment in energy generation. “However, if we need more electricity during peak hours, it would be better to go for a capacity of 945 MW.”
According to him, if the project is built with a capacity of 630 MW, it will be easier to upgrade it to 945 MW in the future.
Devkota said that a decision would be taken on which model to follow after going through wide consultations with the Ministry of Energy, experts and other concerned stakeholders.
The committee has been given eight months to conduct the DPR after finalizing the design options. Devkota said that the tendering process will be completed within nine months after the completion of the DPR.
The End Of The Jailbreak Era Is Upon
Even though jailbreaking iPhones and iPads has become far less easy to do and gone are the days that jailbreaks followed new IOS releases in matter of hours, a familiar cycle still exists. This revolves around the jailbreaking community releasing their latest tools and Apple AAPL +0.98% subsequently patching it soon after.The trouble these days is that, jailbreak tools are released so infrequently, that many users, especially those with newer iPhone models, have often had to wait months for a tool that works. I bought my iPhone 5 over a year ago and had to wait several months for jailbreak to be released and even then, I was stuck on an older version of IOS 6 for most of 2013 and couldn’t upgrade to IOS 7 till the next jailbreak was released just before Christmas 2013.
Since that release, Apple has been remarkably lapse in patching the jailbreak. In fact, all the jailbreaking team at evasi0n have had to do is update their original jailbreak tool to be compatible with the subsequent updates of IOS 7 that have been released. Even now, the tool works fine, but that is about to change.
Apple is set to release IOS 7.1 any day now and as many jailbreakers now know thanks to access to the IOS 7.1 beta, this new IOS update will include patches that break the evasi0n jailbreak tool for good. This means that we’re likely to see a lengthy period, maybe even as long as a year, before another jailbreak is released.
Jailbreaking works with all versions of the
iPhone and iPad and allows you to customise the operating system and
install apps that haven’t been varified by Apple
Step 1. Firstly, it’s always best to make a backup of your device and restore it. You can do both of these in iTunes. This has been known to fix many issues during jailbreaking as has performing all restores and updates via a USB connection rather than WiFi.
Step 2. Go to http://evasi0n.com/ and download either the Windows or OSX depending on whether you own a Mac or PC.
Step 3. A pop-up box should appear that asks you to open or save the file. Click save download.
Step 4. You should be able to see two files in the folder you’ve downloaded. If not, download WinRAR, which will let you open up the zip file. Drag both of these onto your desktop. The Readme file includes detailed instructions – read these too to make sure you’re good to go.
Step 5. Having restored your device from the backup you’ve created, connect your device via USB to your computer and click on the evasi0n icon.
Step 6. The program will eventually require you to find and click on the new evasi0n icon amongst your other apps.
Step 7. The device may restart but eventually the program will announce it’s complete and your device will be jailbroken. That’s all you need to do.
The first thing to check is that an app called Cydia has found its way onto your device. Click on it, allow it to update, click on ‘user’ when it asks you what kind of person you are and you’re done. All that’s left to do now is pick the tweaks and programs you want to use or apply.
There are plenty of guides on the Internet about this and I’ll be covering some of my favorites soon so remember to follow me, especially if you’re unfamiliar with jailbreaking – a whole new IOS experience awaits you. Don’t forget, though, don’t upgrade to IOS 7.1 when it’s released else you’ll break your jeailbreak and you won’t be able to roll back.
10 Reasons To Take A Break From Sex
Sex can be incredible, but it can also be the giant, panting, red elephant sitting at the dinner table. Eliminating sex from the equation for a few months after a breakdown (whether it be of a marriage or otherwise) might be a good way to ease a bit of pressure and spend a little more time getting to know someone -- which is especially great if that someone is you.Here are 10 sexy reasons to take a break:
1. You're worth far too much to sneak home in last night's clothes, wondering what that acrobatic person's last name was.
2. Imagine taking a little longer to get to know someone before you drop your knickers and avoiding that, "Gee, if I knew this last week, I would not have slept with you," feeling.
3. Contrary to popular belief, sex with someone new does not cure past heartaches. Better to give that heart time to heal before you let someone else in your bed.
4. Yes, sex is yummy but flirtations and sexual tension can be utterly delicious. Enjoy them a while!
5. You can wear your comfy cotton undies on dates and your date will be none the wiser.
6. There is something to be said about totally selfish self love. Take yourself on dates, wear sexy unmentionables (for your eyes only) and, at the end of the evening, if you're so inclined, get to know yourself a little better.
7. STDs just love casual sex.
8. You know that pile of clothes in your bedroom that you keep meaning to pick up and wash? Yeah, you don't have to do that just yet.
9. Finding new ways to get excited and be intimate with yourself or someone new can be incredible. Cooking, dancing, painting, talking, exercising -- the possibilities are endless. Get to know your body, your likes and dislikes, things that turn you on and off and heighten your senses in other ways for a while.
10. When it does happen, it will be because you really, really want it to. Now, that's sexy.
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