We've downloaded Live Writer a few months ago but today is the first day I've actually used it on My Digital life.

As any proud mother, I had mixed emotions yesterday, my babies first day at school. I want to protect you, keep you close where I know that you will always be safe and yet, I still want you to have the freedom to be able to blossim into the person that you are destened to become.             These are some of the pictures I took of her first day. Cheyenne, mommy loves you very much and may you gain the wisdom to know what is right and the strenth to always do the right thing :)

No more taking your new partners word on sexual issues. Now there will be a way of confirming your new lover’s status.

People over the age of 18 can get a Safe Sex Passport online. It is a credit-card-size article that you have to take to an affiliated laboratory along with your ID document, so that you can get tester for HIV, genital herpes, Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, the five major STDs.

Your results are connected to the card and not put on it. When meeting someone new, they can phone in your card number to get results on your test. Owners of Safe Sex Passports will also be provided with virtual health certificate which they can post on dating sites so that you can know with some certainty the status of the person that you are devoting yourself to.

This is a really good idea, it is not tagging any STD sufferers, but in a small way, securing the safety of non-STD suffers.

I am not sure, how these cards are going to be kept up to date, or how frequently the updates on individual statuses will be done. Still a noble idea, hats off to the US Company who launched this idea.

It seems that Microsoft is feeling the pressure after the negative reaction they received from there last release Windows Vista. So much so that they are giving away there newest addition, Windows 7 away as a Free download. Windows 7 is said to be the best Windows operating system ever and has faster startup and shutdown times, less security alerts, and will provide better power management. It is also more user friendly than its predecessor.             With new features like; updated Taskbar, animated desktop effects, context sensitive menus and a smarter desktop search tool. Microsoft claims that it will be svelte enough to run on a netbook with as little as 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz processor. (Pretty amazing, if true). Windows 7 Beta will be available on Friday 7 January as a Free download to the public on Microsoft’s website. So I would recomend downloading it as soos as possible, if you are interested in trying it out for yourself.         We will have to see if it is as good as they claim, at least now we don’t have to ruin our financial status to do so. .

 

The American Department of Defense wants to develop virtual parents to comfort children when their REAL parents are away from home on active duty.
The plan is to develop a highly interactive PC- or Web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with 'virtual' aviators of their loved ones.

This challenging application should be able to simulate conversation with a parent about everyday topics. It will not be able to put a child to bed, but will tell a child to have sweet dreams. Not really a comparison if you ask me.

I have to wonder if this will in any way be a substitute to parental love and guardianship to a lonely child or will it be the first step in creating the next generation of messed up individuals.  A child needs a lot more than an animated voice over a computer to be able to feel safe and loved. Why not rather use this money to employ more actual people, to help the child cope with the ordeal, when a parent is absent for some time.

What happens when the animated "parent" gets attacked by a virus and starts talking gibberish or a hacker reprograms the software to give the wrong advice or responses?

I would have been shocked if it was not the U.S. Who knows, this idea might still work, but in my opinion, there is no replacement for the human touch and the soothing voice of a parent comforting a child.

The Competition commission has opened a criminal case against Wikileaks, a website dedicated to exposing "unethical behaviour in governments or institutions".

This comes after Wikileaks revealed information on their website on 12 December 2008 about blacked-out information form the commission regarding South African banks.  

The report of the Banking Enquiry, was concluded in June 2008 and was the result of a 22-month inquiry into South African banking, esspecially the big four: Absa, Standard Bank, Nedbank and FNB.

WikiLeaks has been asked by the commission to take the uncensored Competition Commission report on banking off their site, wich has not been done up to date. You can download the pdf for yourself on their site here

WikiLeaks hacked and published the report to make consumers aware of why banking fees are so high and why it does not cater for low income people aswell. The commission stated that the decision to black out certain information in the report was at the behest of the banking institutions. Who would have guessed, always on the side of the big companies, never on the side of the every day person. 

A inter-governmental task team is expected to be formed soon to look at recommendations by the Competition Commission to reform South African banks. The question is wether this would have happened if WikiLeaks dit not post the unedited document on their site. Hopefully the task team will have true results, we each have some horror storie regarding a banks, it is time for it to end!

Liskula Cohen (top picture) a thirty six year old Canadian formar Vogue model, is sueing Google to give out the name or any information regarding a anonymous blogger who wrote very harsh things about her on Blogger.com According to her court papers, the blogger posted items solely about Liskula including photographs, captions to the photographs and commentary that describe her as a 'skank' and a 'ho'". It also stated that she is a "psychotic, lying, whoring...skank" and a "promiscuous woman who is filthy, disgusting, foul and a whore" Cohen feels that this hurtful entry damaged her reputation and desirability for endorsing products. The picture above is a screen shot that I have just taken of Skanks in NYC, the blog that slashed the model. If you follow the link that I have provided, you will find that the anonymous blogger, posted variouse blogs and images of Cohen. It is actually sad to the point that this person seems to have a obsession with Liskula. Liskula was alerted to the blog by modeling clients and did not hesitate on doing something about it. On 31 December 2007 she filed a lawsuit against giants Google. Strangely enough the blog has not been taken off the site and is still open to everyone. In a statement, Google has said that its policy was to provide subscriber information only under subpoena or other legal requirement. I hope that Liskula gets her information. Freedom of speech is one thing, but this is clearly jumping over the line.

 

Microsoft has applied for a patent on a pay-as-you-go like computing model. What this means is that customer’s will only by charged for computer software and hardware based on what they use.

It will not be a easy task to integrate this new addition to the Microsoft family, rented hardware could include processors, memory, and graphics controllers and software and services could include word processing, e-mail, Web browsing, database access, and more. For this to become a reality computers would have to be modified and they would need a metering agent to track usage and a security module to prevent tampering.

I must admit, Microsoft has a very noble idea, this might be very useful to people who can not afford to buy a computer, software and pay full price for internet access, but seriously did they have to take out a patent on it.

It is not strange that companies patent every possible thing, we have seen some real head scratches in the past, it is only that I always thought that you have to have a real product (something you can see, use, touch), not on a pay-as-you-go system. If Vodacom did that when they first started in South Africa, we would not have been able to choose between different networks. As a customer it is always great to have a lot of viable options.

I feel that they are seriously hijacking the computer market,  but that’s just me.

Opera has exceeded all expectation in the mobile market. They have risen above all the rest. Even though it is not the most popular desktop browsing system, users seem to love it`s mobile application.          In the last year, overall data trafic has increased by 463%, wich is what all companies strive for. There are a couple of options when downloading a Opera browser to your mobile, the two most popular options are: Opera Mobile (for Smartphones) and Opera Mini (for more low-end phones).             We have been using Opera as a browser for the last two years and I have never had any problem with using it. It is very user friendly and has lots of useful extras and add-ons. Even on my cellphone it is a breeze to operate. I do not have a smart phone and therefor I use opera mini. What makes this option great for me, is that it compresses Web pages through the company's servers before sending them it to my phone, making the transfer time very fast and with out frustration.

Protesters gathered outside the company's headquarters in California  to protest against the breastfeeding-photo banning. Photo`s of mothers feeding their infants fall under a policy banning obscenity, even though it is not sexual in any nature. People have been warned that they will be kicked off the site if they do load these kind of pictures. Facebook even went as far as to crop and even delete any picture of a mother breastfeeding her baby.   The picture above is of a mother descreetly feeding an infant. How can this be seen as obscene or sexual in any way. There is so much porn floating on facebook from one user to another, there are expliced porn groups and expliced pictures and yet this is what they delete. There is nothing more natural or more human than the bond between a mother and her baby, why make it out to be more than it is, why does facebook slap a sick label on it and ban innocent photo`s. Seriously, if they need more things to keep themselves busy with, they should look more into privacy and security for the safety of there users.