Heads up: Using phone-based GPS illegal in Australia

Gizmodo reports that, looking at the laws governing use of hand held device in a car, using a phone based GPS system is illegal in Australia: According to Traffic Services Commander of the NSW Police, Assistant Commissioner John Hartley: Under Rule 300 of the Australian Road Rules, which prohibits the use of a hand held device while driving, if the unit is a mobile phone then any function connected to the phone would be classified as use and this includes GPS. ...

August 25, 2009 · 2 min · karan

The Decoupling of Reality on the Right

Between the birthers, deathers and the general right-wing lunacy on show in the US, I think David M. Green picks up a few important threads that we’ve seen: Can we really live in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction? Can the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world’s stage possibly be so incredibly backward at its core? ...

August 24, 2009 · 2 min · karan

Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds

It’s perhaps worth noting here that, as far as I can tell, this is the second Tarantino-directed movie where Quentin himself doesn’t get in front of the camera at some point, as he’s wont to do in most of his other movies, Kill Bill being the other notable one. But where Kill Bill was brilliant for its action sequences, its all too overt nods to kung fu and samurai movies, Inglourious Basterds ignores World War II movie convention as brazenly as the spelling in the title, making it recognisable and yet giving you reason for a double-take. ...

August 23, 2009 · 6 min · karan

Beer Conference

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August 2, 2009 · 1 min · karan

The iPhone Post (Part the Second)

The day iPhone 3GS was announced, I realised that on pure technical stats, it was higher spec than the second computer my family owned, bought in 1999 for a tidy sum - a Pentium III 550MHz with 128MB of RAM and 16GB of disk space. Here Apple was selling a device that could comfortably fit in your hand which rocked a 600MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and up to 32GB of disk space. ...

July 28, 2009 · 5 min · karan