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POPSAustralia told it has to repair relations with Pacific states Beijing now has relations with eight forum island states, trade with the island states is increasing rapidly, and Beijing is now the third-largest aid donor behind Australia and the US. Russia, Georgia and Iran have used their links with the islands to secure votes in the United Nations, the United Arab Emirates have offered a US$50 million ($64 million) climate change aid package, and the Arab League wants to open a regional office in Suva. And while Australia has welcomed America's new emphasis on the Pacific, the paper warns the move reflects Washington's concerns about Canberra's influence.
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POPSOld grave stones for sea wall repair shocks Maori As a result, Mr Pohe said the best option would be for the council to dig the headstones up and re-bury them somewhere appropriate. Local Maori may take it upon themselves to remove the headstones if the council did not, he said. However, it seems that the council already has plans to remove the headstones. WDC infrastructure and services group manager Simon Weston said the council would like to relocate the stones to a special memorial at Kioreroa Cemetery. Mr Weston said the council first became aware of the headstones about three years ago.
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POPSMen busted 'for touting Facebook and Twitter shares' “By conjuring up a seemingly prestigious hedge fund and touting the safety of an escrow agent, these men exploited investors’ desire to get an inside track on a wave of hyped future IPOs,” George Canellos, director of the SEC’s New York office, said in a canned statement. “Even as investors believed their funds were sitting safely in escrow accounts, Mattera plundered those accounts to bankroll a lifestyle of private jets, luxury cars, and fine art.” The US attorney's office for the southern district of New York, which was carrying on a parallel investigation, has now filed criminal charges against Mattera and arrested him. The SEC is now looking for the courts to freeze the assets of all five men and eight different corporate entities listed in the complaint (PDF).
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POPSHideMyAss defends role in LulzSec hack arrest have accused HideMyAss of double standards over its handling of the Kretsinger case. "The Hide My Ass VPN service is run by a bunch of hypocrites," said Jacob Appelbaum, a core member of the Tor project, in a Twitter update. "They support revolution and circumvention when it suits their business image." In updates to its original blog posts, HideMyAss defended its stance on this point, arguing that it simply complies with UK law. It denied acting as a pawn at the behest of the Feds. "We are not intimidated by the US government as some are claiming, we are simply complying with our countries legal system to avoid being potentially shut down and prosecuted ourselves.
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POPSThe Copyright Industry – A Century Of Deceit It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn’t make a living off of middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on the player piano. A famous letter in 1906 claims that both the gramophone and the self-playing piano will be the end of artistry, and indeed, the end of a vivid, songful humanity. In the 1920s, as broadcast radio started appearing, another copyright industry was demanding its ban because it cut into profits. Record sales fell from $75 million in 1929 to $5 million four years later — a recession many times greater than the record industry’s current troubles. (Speaking of recession, the drop in profits happened to coincide with the Great Depression.) The 1970s saw the advent of the cassette tape, which is when the copyright industry really went all-out 1970s DJs and loudspeakers.
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POPSNvidia outs five-core ARM chip And you might well ask why Nvidia hasn't simply used one of the four main cores for the kind of tasks the fifth core will run. Presumably that's because it hasn't been able to implement core gating, allowing Tegra 3 to switch off three cores without hindering the fourth. The fifth core can run at up to 1.4GHz, the four-core cluster at up to 1.3GHz. The chip supports up to 2GB of 1066MHz DDR 3 memory. Still, Tegra 3 should impress gamers, and it's telling that Nvidia trotted out dozens of mobile gaming companies to praise its product. Nvidia promised 15 Tegra 3 games are currently in development.
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POPSWi-Fi hotspots to skyrocket over next five years The UK's mobile operators have a voluntary agreement to block access to adult content over the mobile internet (at 2.1GHz), so you have to call up the operator and present a valid credit card before it will let you browse porn sites. But jump 300MHz up into the Wi-Fi band (2.4GHz) and you can get all the porn you want, from the same operator on the same device – which is clearly nonsense. The Wireless Broadband Alliance is pushing its single-sign-on standard to make it easier for devices to authenticate themselves, so users can roam onto Wi-Fi connections without having to ask, though if they're switching regulatory environments that might come as a shock.
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POPSCompact Disc death foretold for 2012 t's a move that makes completely sense. CD's cost money, even when they don't sell because there is stock storage to be paid; a label also pays money to distributors when CDs get returned to the labels when not sold and so on. In short, abandoning the CD-format will make it possible to just focus on the release and the marketing of it and no longer focus on the distribution (since aggregators will do the work as far as dispatching the releases to services worldwide) and - expensive - stock maintenance. In the long run it will most surely mean the end for many music shops worldwide that only stock and sell CD releases. In the UK for instance HMV has problems paying the labels already and more will follow. It makes the distribution of CDs no longer worth it. Also Amazon will benefit from this The next monument to fall? That will be printed magazines as people will want to consume their information online where they also read most of the news.
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POPSCorby 'was drug mule for father' Schapelle's half-brother, James Kisina, who accompanied her on the trip to Bali, was jailed for four years in 2006 for his part in a burglary in Brisbane during which money and drugs were stolen and a couple were attacked with an iron bar. Two old friends of Michael Corby told Duff he began growing and selling marijuana in his mid-20s. Duff said yesterday it was not clear whether Schapelle knew the drugs were in her bag. However, he added: "I think it's fair to say that she was well aware that her father was entrenched in the marijuana game for three decades." Duff believes Schapelle's affection for her father - who always denied knowledge of the drugs - prevented her from revealing the true story. "This is a very, very close family and they're a very close father-daughter relationship," he said. McCauley, who served 15 months in jail for running drugs, visited Schapelle in prison soon after she was arrested.
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POPSOccupy Dunedin: police fear being sued they had ended up paying out up to $100,000 It would be "irresponsible'' of the police to risk doing that again. "The protesters have the right under the Bill of Rights Act to protest peacefully.'' Case law indicated the Act superseded lesser legislation such as council bylaws on illegal camping. He said police had met council staff more than once and the position had been explained to them. If the council wanted to move the protesters, the most effective method was for it to apply to the court for an injunction. However, that was not straight forward either, he said. An injunction could be sought without notifying the protesters - if police lodged an affidavit with the court supporting the council application. "This would have been the ideal course as if the protesters failed to act on the court order to leave, the DCC could return to the court and seek a warrant which the police could execute to remove the protesters - end of story.''
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POPSApril Fools' change to give-way rule a no-go A spokesperson for Mr Joyce told the Dominion Post the minister did not want to risk people not taking the change seriously. The rule change, which will come into force at 5am, will see New Zealand finally align with the rest of the world's give-way rules. Those turning left at intersections will no longer have to give way to right-turning vehicles heading their way. A $1.2 million campaign will be launched to inform drivers of the details of the change.
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POPSGun found in hospital patient's fake leg The gun drama comes on the same day new figures were released showing a 60 per cent rise in gun theft in NSW in the past five years. The latest figures show that 592 guns were stolen in the state in 2008-09 - almost 40 per cent of the national total. This compares with 371 guns stolen in 2004-05.
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POPSSmart PC gets `piracy' settlement offer from Microsoft Suspecting it was useless, at point of sale Matt Schmitt immediately asked for a refund and was refused. It turned out the sticker was for a copy of Windows XP already installed on an old IBM computer and would not work with any other machine. Pirated copies of Microsoft Windows do not receive updates from Microsoft's Windows Update service so are vulnerable to malicious software (malware) attacks. Cindy Xia, who manages the store, told the Waikato Times she did not think the sale, which breached copyright and licensing laws, was illegal. Clayton Noble, anti-piracy lawyer for Microsoft New Zealand, told the Waikato TImes Microsoft had made Smart PC a settlement offer and was awaiting a reply. Mr Schmitt was sent a $999 copy of Microsoft Office Pro 2010 as a reward for going public on the case. "We rely on people like you coming forward to help prevent others from being ripped off," Microsoft told him in an email.
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POPSRetail failures ignite debate "I think we've just got to remind ourselves the creation of the telephone certainly caused a change for the messenger boy industry," Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was recently quoted as saying on the issue. However, no-one can accuse the Aussies of being glib. In August its Productivity Commission released a 419-page draft report into its retail industry, which essentially concludes that retailers should stop whingeing and adapt as best they can. The commission's own analysis of "bricks vs clicks" retail prices shows significant differences for identical items - in some cases by more than 50 per cent. It concludes, however, that retailers will have to find their own solutions or risk being snubbed by consumers.
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POPSMaui gas leak: Farmer close to tears over spilt milk The disruption caused by the Maui pipeline leak looks set to cost businesses millions and throw affected companies headlong into time-consuming insurance negotiations. And some firms are already saying they may seek compensation for their losses from whoever is responsible for the situation.
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POPSStand up for your freedom to install free software This could be a feature deserving of the name, as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use, so she can run free software written and modified by herself or people she trusts. However, we are concerned that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will implement these boot restrictions in a way that will prevent users from booting anything other than Windows. In this case, we are better off calling the technology Restricted Boot, since such a requirement would be a disastrous restriction on computer users and not a security feature at all. Please add your name to the following statement, to show computer manufacturers, governments, and Microsoft that you care about this freedom and will work to protect it. We, the undersigned, urge all computer makers implementing UEFI's so-called "Secure Boot" to do it in a way that allows free software operating systems to be installed.
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POPSBay of Plenty boaties warned of Rena container risk MNZ National On Scene Commander Alex van Wijngaarden urged boaters to take care when they head out on the water. Cargo ship Rena lost 88 containers when it ran aground the Astrolabe reef on October 5, and spilled hundreds of tonnes of oil into the ocean. Captain van Wijngaarden said boaties need to heed navigation hazard warnings, because there are still about 40 containers unaccounted for. "We know some or many of them will have sunk, but some may be floating or partially submerged and these obviously represent a significant hazard to all vessels, but particularly relatively small pleasure craft." He said people needed to heed public health warnings, even if they couldn't see oil, and fishing and shellfish remained banned.
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POPSCigarette-Smoking, Alcoholic Jesus Pisses Off Indian Church
Babu Joseph, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI), agreed, saying, “The government should take strict action against the publisher so that it becomes a deterrent for others doing similar things.” You may be wondering—especially if you’re either agnostic or atheist—why everyone is throwing a fit over what may just be a cursory mistake, or the result of an obnoxious and soon-to-be-terminated employee. First of all, consider that the controversial image was uncovered in a Christian school. Second, keep in mind that young impressionable children were exposed to it. Last and perhaps most importantly, note that most Indian Christians (if not all) share the sentiment of church leader T. Jrwa, who told ASSIST News Service said that the image was “nothing but blasphemous.” The question remains, though: How would you personally react if you discovered an objectionable picture of your religious idol in your child’s school textbook?
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