Samsung has built an ice skating rink next to a USA court house.
It’s outdoors.
It’s in Texas.
All of 25,000 people live in that town.
Why is it there? It might have something to do with patents, as John Oliver explains.
Update 19:33: funny story on Al Jazeera English just now. Following the resignation of Mubarak, an overjoyed taxi driver reportedly left his vehicle, leaving a camera man from the network to drive it. 😎
Just one day after he signaled he would not do so, Mubarak has resigned, according to USA Today and others. Excerpt from the article: (note: some (unimportant) errors here, not introduced by me)
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has resigne.d Vice President Omar Suleiman said in a brief televised statement. His statement in full: “Hosni Mubarak has waived the office of presidency and told the army to run the affairs of the country. ”
Tahrir Square is full of joy and possibly noisier than ever.
It remains to be seen what really happened behind the scenes and how things will progress in terms of elections etc.
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Update 22:12: listened to Mubarak’s speech on Al Jazeera English. He is not leaving, and it doesn’t seem like he’s offering anything new that is significant. The crowd in Tahrir Square definitely did not appreciate it, very angry response from there. It remains to be seen what the army and other parties will do going forward; quite a confusing situation in Egypt right now with several conflicting signals.
Following many rapid events in Egypt, CNN reports on their home page:
Strong likelihood Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will resign Thursday night, CIA Director Leon Panetta tells Congress.
This by itself may not satisfy protesters’ increasing demands, such as ones reported by Al Jazeera as follows:
They want a one-year transitional period before full parliamentary elections – during which a three-person presidential council should run the country while a panel of experts write a new, permanent constitution – taking advice from opposition groups and senior, high-profile Egyptians, including the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some reports by Al Jazeera suggest a resignation might be accompanied by some set of actions, but in any case, if Mubarak steps down now it would certainly be of great symbolic value for the protesters’ interests. I would say it would no longer be a matter of if, but when, the protesters would see their efforts pay off. That is hardly to say that the journey is over, though.
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On Al Jazeera (“Inside Story – Changing the US vision of the Middle East“, February 4, 2011), in the context of the political developments in Egypt, Khairi Abaza is asked about the desire for stability in the region. He points out several times that what matters would be how stability is achieved, and if it lasts. My transcript of the video from ca. 14:17 to ca. 14:26:
[REPORTER] Yea, that’s what I’m asking, how can you reject stability?
[KHAIRI ABAZA] Stability, I mean, er, graveyards are very stable.
(It sounds like the reporter was quite amused by this.)
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Update 10 December: it’s still possible I may have jumped to some conclusions (which can still be seen below). I need to dig a little deeper.
Update 27 November: some facts may have been wrong. They should be corrected now.
As of the 17th of this month, among some other changes in the network, I have IPv6 addresses1 from Tele2. This means I can now allocate vastly more IP addresses for myself than are in use on the whole IPv4 Internet. Yay! 😉
Specifically, it’s 6to4 tunneling (2002::/16). A number of mechanisms have been available from the ISP for some time already, but the new situation means that modern operating systems are able to configure IPv6 addresses automatically, without any prior tinkering from the user. That said, a default configuration may imply some privacy issues (the MAC address may be used when building the IPv6 address).
I’m not sure how wide the deployment is, but at least 8,000 fellow students in Stockholm are getting their connection upgraded at least in some other sense; anyway, that should be completed in a few weeks.
Nice to see this development on the IPv6 front.
1 For this computer, I have one IPv4 address and three IPv6 addresses right now.
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Photograph of Karlbergs slott, taken from S:t Eriksbron in Stockholm.
Click for 12Mp version. EOS 450D 18-55 mm (kit) 1/100 s f/7.1 55 mm ISO 200. CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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With the current political discourse in the United States in mind, Jon Stewart launches Rally to Restore Sanity. Kudos! 8)
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Update 31 Aug, 17:30: my first attempt with Google translate yielded a horrible result for some reason. A later attempt performed better than Bing Translator. Try for yourself to see what works better since I will not investigate further right now.
Update 31 Aug, 17:44: it seems I had attempted to try a Swahili-English translation by mistake. 🙂 I didn’t suspect I was that much off since it almost translated whole sentences like one would expect.
The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter has a good article (in Swedish) on opinion polling. For an online translation, try Bing Translator or Google Translate. 1
1 Note that Bing is a bit slow (at least in this case) and requires JavaScript support in order to provide the translation step by step in your browser. Note that Bing Translator has a side-by-side view that may be useful to match Swedish original sentences with their respective English translations in a more practical manner. Other than that, it outputs reasonably comprehensible text, although there are some particular oddities (e.g. DN.se is replaced with F1racing.NET (eh…?). I vaguely recall a third alternative to use instead of Google’s or Bing’s, but I can’t find it right now.
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Just for fun (if you can call it that):
If you click on the image: yes, it’s still a relatively “small” amount of complaints1, and no I haven’t read them, and maybe it’s just me, but I find this picture just a little ironic for some reason or other. Also, if you must know, I was just trying to determine the searchability of one of my own pages. 😎
1 For the purposes of this post, let’s ignore the merits of the law to begin with.
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Now that is an interesting design.
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IT and politics 