Teenager's Desperation: sells kidney for iPad

 

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A teenager in China has sold one of his kidneys in order to buy an iPad 2, Chinese media report.

The 17-year-old, identified only as Little Zheng, told a local TV station he had arranged the sale of the kidney over the internet.
The story only came to light after the teenager's mother became suspicious.
The case highlights China's black market in organ trafficking. A scarcity of organ donors has led to a flourishing trade.
Deep red scar It all started when the high school student saw an online advert offering money to organ donors.
Illegal agents organised a trip to the hospital and paid him $3,392 (£2,077) after the operation.
With the cash the student bought an iPad 2, as well as a laptop.
When his mother noticed the computers and the deep red scar on his body, which was caused by the surgery, Little Zheng confessed.
In 2007, Chinese authorities banned organ trafficking and have introduced a voluntary donor scheme to try to combat the trade.

Bought Your Child An iPhone? Stalk Them With Footprints

When we think of smartphones and geo-location the two main use cases that come to mind are mapping and check-ins. These are fine and dandy, but what if you could use smartphones to keep tabs of where your child is? Footprints lets you do just that.
The new app (iTunes link), available for both iPhone & iPad, tracks the location of the device and shares it with family and friends. These can then know in real-time a person’s exact location. The app can have several use cases, but the parent/child one seems the most compelling.
What about privacy? With more and more parents shelling out the cash to equip their tweens and teenagers with iPhones, I don’t see why a basic requirement couldn’t be running Footprints in the background. As my father put it when I grew up, our household was run as a totalitarian democracy. Ergo, he buys my iPhone, he gets to run whatever app he likes in the background. Parenting rocks.
Using the app is fairly simple. A quick set-up process and then you just let it run in the background. The app was designed to run efficiently, without draining the battery. Once installed on the device to be tracked, permissions are then given to those individuals that should be able to view its location. A passcode can be put in place to make sure that the app isn’t removed.
Once setup and permissions are given, the location is provided in real time. Movement speed is also provided, so you can get a fairly accurate indication of how fast your kids is driving as well. That’s a nice bonus.
Theoretically, Footprints also has business-case potential. Companies who are subsidizing iPhones for their employees can surely enforce running Footprints in the background (certainly in business hours). Sure, there’s the big brother aspect to it, as in, boss-man making sure employees are where they’re supposed to be. However, I see it more as a potential utility between co-workers, as in, “Hey I see John is out on a customer call”.
Another use-case could be couples, well, ones with trust issues… “Hey sweetie, why were you at the Motel Six right off of Exit 123 for two hours today?” Riveting dinner conversation guaranteed.
Footprints provides users with 60 free days of usage upon registering. Then, an additional 3-month subscription will cost $0.99. A yearly subscription goes for $2.99, or $4.99 for a 2-year subscription.
The app is iOS only for now, but Android support is on the way.

Fring 4-way Video Chat, Out of Beta

We first mentioned Fring in July of last year. They have been working on an application that rocks videochat on a handheld to something of a new level. Then earlier this month they released the Beta. If this is all new to you like it is to me, they designed an application that will set up a video chat room for up to four people at once. It’s available for both Android and iOS.


Fring released this promo video showing you the way this will allow you to connect with groups of friends to create unique personal moments of joy and beauty. It’s a fun little advertising spot and really does showcase the possibilities with this kind of technology. I especially enjoyed the short scene that implies you should take your friends with you when you’re peeing in public. It reminds me of a friend who would tweet their toilet shenanigans with alarming regularity, pun intended.
One thing I noticed…

Fringing? Really? It always bothers me when marketers jump forward like that and try mutate their own memes. It always looks and feels hokey and artificial. Listen up, let the meme pools do their work, that’s what they’re for. Google never wanted “google” to be an English verb (publicly anyway), that just evolved naturally out of the language.
Linguistic foibles and tangents aside, this app seems to be a similar tool to Cloudtalk, except Cloudtalk is more focused on asynchronous messaging, where there can be a significant time delay in response. Fring is more about synchronous messaging, where all parties are streaming the video data up and downstream at the same time. This is a good sign for the app ecosystems. These are similar, but slightly different applications that might be competing to fill a similar, but distinctly different, niche. Which do you prefer?

Nexus S smartphone works after soaring to 32K meters on a weather balloon

Folks from Google and some other space enthusiasts got together recently and ran an experiment with the new Samsung Nexus S smartphone to see just how well the smartphone sensors and accelerometers worked when the temperatures decreased. The test involved several smartphones and a trip to the stratosphere.


Engineers from Google and students from the University of California put the Nexus S smartphones into special coolers with GPS antennas on them, tied them to weather balloons, and then let them go. The balloons were able to reach 32,000 meters above the ground before the balloons burst and the phones started the plummeting decent.
The phones and their special coolers were brought to the ground using parachutes and the decent from height took 20 to 30 minutes. After the smartphones were retrieved, they still worked despite the extreme temperatures at the heights the balloons reached.

Oracle: Making Extraordinary Profits

The company’s revenue is increased by 37% and net income increased by 78%. So to celebrate their success they are giving 20% dividend to their shareholders new software license sales jumped 29% to $2.2bn in the third quarter.

Oracle made net income for the quarter of $2.1bn up from $1.2bn a year earlier. The company is in a battle with rivals IBM, Cisco Systems and HP to provide infrastructure for companies to move to "cloud computing" the remote storage and handling of data.

Japan provides 5% of the company's revenues but Oracle executives told analysts they saw no material impact from the disruptions to production caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

To learn more about oracle  visit

http://www.oracle.com/index.html

Hackers Have Made Their Move

Hackers have made their move and stole security tokens of millions of people which they used in order to guard right to use of their bank accounts and corporate data. RSA Security told customers about the "extremely sophisticated cyber attack" in an open letter posted online.

The company is providing immediate advices to customers to limit the effect of the cyber attack. It is also advising their customers to increase the security measures for their accounts i.e. password strength and other security questions.

Destructions Caused By the 8.9 magnitude Earth Quack In Japan

On Friday the 8.9 magnitude earthquack has been confirmed as the fifth strongest earthquack on the earth in the past 100 years. More than 50 aftershocks and Officials say that more than 1,000 people are thought to have died with the 10,000 people are missing and these statistics could rise significantly.

One of the worst-hit areas was the port city of

Sendai.A huge rescue and recovery operation is going on as Japan tries to deal with the Friday's earthquake. Moreover,A large explosion has occurred at the Fukushima I - nuclear power plant in north-eastern Japan, close to the epicentre of Friday's earthquake. Officials fear a meltdown at one of the plant's reactors. Tens of thousands of people in the surrounding area have been evacuated. This 8.9 magnitude quake also caused tsunami at the pacific cost.

 
So at the time of this great sorrow and loss its the responsibility of all of us to help the Japanese people in whatever way u can.

donate online

http://redcrossla.org/news/donations-now-accepted-for-japan-earthquake-and-pacific-tsunami-relief

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