Tomorrow is the Superbowl, the Colts vs the Saints... and the cost to show a 30 second advertisement on tv during the superbowl is what? About $2.6-million... AdFreak gives us an example of what the $2.6 millions really is.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Superbowl Advertisement Prices
Tomorrow is the Superbowl, the Colts vs the Saints... and the cost to show a 30 second advertisement on tv during the superbowl is what? About $2.6-million... AdFreak gives us an example of what the $2.6 millions really is.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
No Plate
A man whose car bore personalized license plates reading "NO PLATE" received notices for thousands of unpaid tickets.
Allowing motorists to obtain personalized plates provides them with an opportunity to obtain something distinctively unique, something that commands far more attention than the usual humdrum string of letters and digits. Sometimes, though, one's choice of license plate can command an unexpected and undesirable form of attention.
In 1979 a Los Angeles man named Robert Barbour found this out the hard way when he sent an application to the California Department of Motor
Vehicles (DMV) requesting personalized license plates for his car. The DMV form asked applicants to list three choices in case one or two of their desired selections had already been assigned. Barbour, a sailing enthusiast, wrote down "SAILING" and "BOATING" as his first two choices; when he couldn't think of a third option, he wrote "NO PLATE," meaning that if neither of his two choices was available, he did not want personalized plates. Plates reading "BOATING" and "SAILING" had indeed already been assigned, so the DMV, following Barbour's instructions literally, sent him license plates reading "NO PLATE." Barbour was not thrilled that the DMV had misunderstood his intent, but he opted to keep the plates because of their uniqueness.
Four weeks later he received his first notice for an overdue parking fine, from faraway San Francisco, and
within days he began receiving dozens of overdue notices from all over the state on a daily basis. Why? Because when law enforcement officers ticketed illegally parked cars that bore no license plates, they had been writing "NO PLATE" in the license plate field. Now that Barbour had plates bearing that phrase, the DMV computers were matching every unpaid citation issued to a car with missing plates to him.
Barbour received about 2,500 notices over the next several months. He alerted the DMV to the problem, and they responded in a typically bureaucratic way by instructing him to change his license plates. But Barbour had grown too fond of his plates by then to want to change them, so he instead began mailing out a form letter in response to each citation. That method usually worked, although occasionally he had to appear before a judge and demonstrate that the car described on the citation was not his.
A couple of years later, the DMV finally caught on and sent a notice to law enforcement agencies requesting that they use the word NONE rather than NO PLATE to indicate a cited vehicle was missing its plates. This change slowed the flow of overdue notices Barbour received to a trickle, about five or six a month, but it also had an unintended side effect: Officers sometimes wrote MISSING instead of NONE to indicate cars with missing license plates, and suddenly a man named Andrew Burg in Marina del Rey started receiving parking tickets from places he hadn't visited either. Burg, of course, was the owner of a car with personalized plates reading "MISSING."
Nonetheless, some motorists still choose personalized plates destined to land them in similar trouble. Jim Cara of Elsmere, Delaware, found that out the hard way when he selected the phrase "NOTAG" for the license of his Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle in 2004:
Jim Cara wanted a vanity license tag that would make people laugh.
But when he chose "NOTAG" for the plate on his Suzuki Hayabusa, a sleek blue and silver motorcycle with a speedometer that reaches 220 mph, the joke backfired.
The new tag arrived Saturday under an avalanche of Wilmington parking violations.
"All the traffic tickets say, 'Notice of violation. License number: no tag,'" Cara said.
City computers, talking to state Division of Motor Vehicles computers, had finally found an address for ticketed vehicles that lacked license tags: Cara's home in Elsmere.
"I messed up the system so bad," Cara said. "I wonder if they can put me in jail or something?"
He has received more than 200 violation notices. The mail carrier came twice on Saturday. Cara opened a few. They ranged from $55 to $125 for violations such as meter expirations.
Cara, 43, who works for the American Motorcycle Association, said he's been a lifelong prankster. This time, though, "the cleanup is going to be worse than the joke," he said.
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Harvey collected a few more similar tales from readers in August 2004:
"A few days ago, you printed a bit about people getting notices of unpaid parking tickets on vehicles with license plates NOTAG and NO PLATE," wrote Richard Turner of Beverly Hills.
He recalled thinking, "It would be cute to have VOID as my license plate. It was cute for a few years, until I started getting the unpaid parking ticket notices. Apparently, 'void' tickets got keyed into computers as valid tickets, but with my plate. Although I got all the tickets dismissed, I ditched the plates."
And Ralph August of Westchester says a friend encountered the same barrage of strangers' parking tickets after he put an UNKNOWN plate on his car. The DMV took UNKNOWN away from him.
In October 2009, the Birmingham News reported on Hunstville, Alabama, resident Scottie Roberson, who in homage to his nickname ("Racer X") and his favorite number (seven)-- had obtained personalized plates bearing a string of seven X's: 'XXXXXXX.' Suddenly, within a year's time, Roberson received multiple mailed notices of parking violations, totaling more than $19,000 in fines, from the city of Birmingham-- even though he had taken his car to that city on only a single occasion in the previous five years. The culprit was his license plate:
About a year ago, Roberson began receiving letters stating he had outstanding parking tickets, sometimes as many as 10 in one day in 10 places, he said.
Roberson said he has been to Birmingham only once in the past five years and left without a ticket. He said city officials told him the tickets were issued by mistake because of his vanity plate XXXXXXX.
When Birmingham parking patrols find cars without license plates parked illegally or at expired meters, they enter seven X's in place of the plate number, city officials said. The parking citation form calls for a plate number, and the practice is to use X's when no number is available.
SOURCE: Snopes
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Bear Wakes Up After Being Shot Chases Shooter
A man who shot a marauding bear with a tranquillizer gun had an almighty scare when the beast awoke as he approached, and proceeded to attack him.
The female bear had been injected with a sleep-inducing drug after it appeared near the village of Chorzow in Poland.
Unfortunately for the rangers tasked with capturing the animal, it woke up from its apparent slumber as they came near and gave chase to the man who had shot it.
Thanks to the efforts of both men, the bear was eventually brought under control. Reports said authorities plan to take it to a local zoo.
The same bear had reportedly been released in some nearby woods three weeks ago, after it was captured near a school in Przemysl.
It is believed that the bear had broken free from a Ukranian wildlife park 25 miles away.
SOURCE: Telegraph
iPhone Update 3.1.3 Released, Fixes Battery Bug [WARNING: Jailbroken Phones]
Apple on Tuesday afternoon released version 3.1.3 of its iPhone OS software for the iPhone and iPod touch, bringing with it improved accuracy of reported battery level on the iPhone 3GS.
If you care about your jailbreak and unlock, don’t update your device - 3G and 3G(S) owners should pay particular attention to this warning.
iPhone Dev Team have issued the following warning to users who have jailbroken and/or unlocked their iPhone:
WARNING! At 10.30AM PST on February 2nd 2010 Apple released the 3.1.3 version (7E18) of the iPhoneOS.
* PwnageTool/Redsn0w/Blackra1n are not yet compatible with 3.1.3
* There is no estimated release time for compatible tools (please don’t bug us about this).
It also looks like iPhone OS 3.1.3 also updates the baseband firmware (05.11.07 to 05.12.01) so it means that if you’ve accidentally updated your jailbroken and unlocked iPhone with it, then you will not only lose the jailbreak but your iPhone will also get locked. You’ll have to either wait for someone to unlock the baseband included in iPhone OS 3.1.3 or wait for someone to figure out a way to downgrade the baseband.
This update for the iPhone and iPod touch contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
- Improves accuracy of reported battery level on iPhone 3GS
- Resolves issue where third-party apps would not launch in some instances
Full details are available in the support document on Apple's Web site.
SOURCE: AppleInsider
Qrobe.it
Nisha Boban, an Analyst at Striquen the company that created Qrobe.it explains what Qrobe.it is. "What we did is focus on the user experience and meshed together the best of the Web, search results from Google, Bing and Ask, with ability to instantly share a URL with the leading social sites, save it, shorten it, verify it, etc." This reminds me a lot like Dogpile.com though better.
http://www.qrobe.it/
Qrobe takes the results from both (by default it doesn't include Ask results for the sake of performance, but you can choose to include them). Striquent wanted to include the top three search engines, but skipped out on Yahoo due to the 10-year Microhoo deal which may have Bing powering Yahoo and would result in "redundant results" for Qrobe. It also implements features exclusive to Bing, like instant answers for recipes and infinite scrolling (Bing only does this for the Images section, but Qrobe does it for Web as well).
SOURCE: Arstechnica
Monday, February 1, 2010
BMW Vision EfficientDynamics
Welcome to a new vision of BMW's automotive future. The newly unveiled Vision EfficientDynamics car from BMW is mainly here to show us BMW’s new diesel-based plug-in hybrid drive system.
Road & Track Explains
BMW Explains Parts 1 & 2
Falcon From Utorrent
In all the years it’s been available, uTorrent hasn’t changed as much as it will with the upcoming release. Codenamed Falcon, the client will have an easier, more secure and more complete web UI as well as support for streaming and remote downloading.
Developed by BitTorrent Inc., uTorrent Falcon will bring plenty of change to the BitTorrent client currently in use by more than 50 million people a month.
Most of the upcoming features of the Falcon project are still being developed, but those who download the latest Alpha release have the option to take a peak at what to expect from the future.
Access Anywhere
Allowing users to access their BitTorrent downloads from anywhere through a simple web-interface is one of the main goals of the Falcon project. Without having to configure uTorrent and home networks so that they can be accessed remotely, users can simply head over to the Falcon page and connect to their client instantly.
The easy to use web interface is as secure as it gets, a major improvement over the Web UI currently available. When logged in, it gives users all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.
Those who want to try the remote access features require an invite for now. Invites are sent out regularly and those who leave their email address behind should receive one within a few days.
Download Anywhere
Aside from the added security and easy setup, accessing your torrents via the Falcon web-interface offers another advantage – remote downloading. Once a file has finished downloading you can transfer a copy of the file to a remote computer via the web-interface.
This feature is not enabled in the current version of the Falcon web-interface. However, it has been publicly announced in the uTorrent forums so we expect that it will return soon.
Streaming
Another new feature of the Falcon project is the added option to stream video files while downloading. Instead of having to wait until a file has finished downloading, users can already start watching video provided that the download speed is sufficient.
“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak, commenting on the new feature.
Easy Sharing
Also new in the Falcon release is the “Send Torrent” feature. This feature is particularly useful when you want to share torrents with people who do not have a BitTorrent client installed yet.
Right clicking a torrent in uTorrent shows a “Send Torrent” option which then brings up a URL similar to this one. This is a direct link to a download of the uTorrent client with the torrent file included.
Finding Torrents
The Falcon release is expected to make it easier for users to find torrents. The uTorrent team didn’t want to comment on how this will be integrated, but Simon Morris has stated that they are working on “better ability for torrent sites to promote content or search within the client.”
When we asked if this means that uTorrent will come with a built in torrent search engine, Morris said that they are more interested in “APIs rather than bloating the uTorrent user experience.” We’ll see what this means in the months to come.
Further Improvements
The features listed above are just a few of many that will be added to the new uTorrent clients. The latest Alpha release also had a ‘minify interface’ option, for example, and the development team is also working on speed improvements, UI improvements and optional file security features.
Exciting times ahead for uTorrent users.
http://falcon.utorrent.com/
SOURCE: Torrentfreak
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Caught On Tape Dump Truck Slams Into Bridge
A dump truck driver in Turkey caused quite a mess earlier this week when he forgot to check the bed on his vehicle. Traffic cameras show the truck colliding with a pedestrian bridge in Istanbul.`The impact brought the bridge down. One person on the bridge was hurt and traffic had to be stopped for several hours while crews cleaned up the mess. I think he would have some explaining to do to his boss.
