Pricless Information about Environment, Family And Relationships And More

A Chinese factory worker has become an Internet sensation after a picture of her smiling and flashing a peace sign to a co-worker testing an Apple iPhone stayed on the phone that was sold to a man in Britain.

Photos of the unidentified, smiling woman were posted on the Apple discussion website MacRumours.com by a customer identified as “markm49uk” from Kingston-upon-Hull and quickly posted around other sites.

“Not sure if this is or is not the ‘norm’ but I just received my brand new iPhone here in the UK and once it had been activated on iTunes I found that the home screen (the screen you can personalize with a photo) already had a photo set against it!!!!” he wrote.

“It would appear that someone on the production line was having a bit of fun - has anyone else found this?”

Some people voiced concern that the woman could now lose her job while others joked on the website that they were considering returning their phones because they did not come loaded with a photo.

“I think its a kind of personal touch. It’s nice. Maybe every phone that gets a full quality test should have its tester’s picture taken and left on there. And the working conditions look pretty good,” wrote one.

Taiwanese company Foxconn assembles the iPhones for Apple in Shenzhen in southern China but calls to the company by Reuters went unanswered.

However Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun told the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong that the woman had been identified but her details would not be released. She had also been assured by her bosses that her job was safe.

Liu said the photos were taken in the testing department as part of a normal procedure and only one phone was known to be affected so far.

Netflix has traced the causes of a lengthy system outage this month that prevented the online movie rental service from shipping for several days to a hardware glitch.

The good news for the company is that it received lots of help from vendors to determine that the cause of the outage, which hobbled the company’s ability to ship DVDs from August 11 to August 15, was a “key faulty hardware component.” Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said the company’s “strongest aspiration is to safeguard this from ever happening again.”

The bad news for the company is that Netflix can’t yet prevent these system outages. While a piece of hardware, about which Netflix declined to provide details, was the cause of the latest glitch, it was not responsible for the system crash back in March, Swasey confirmed.

In that earlier case, a malfunction knocked out the company’s Web site, as well as its logistics and delivery systems, for 12 hours, the company then said. In both cases, Netflix was unable to ship movies “to a large number of Netflix customers.”

Two major meltdowns in 2008 raises serious questions about the soundness of Netflix’s system. Tony Wible, an analyst at Citigroup, estimated that Netflix lost $1.8 million to $3.6 million for each of the days it was down. The 15 percent credit Netflix is providing to affected customers will reduce the company’s third-quarter revenue by $6 million, according to Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities.

As more and more competitors jump into Web video rental, annoying system blackouts could become more of a liability for Netflix.

In both outages, Swasey said many customers hardly noticed the delays. Many users who were expecting packages weren’t put out very much by waiting a day or two extra for their films. Customers never lost money or personal information, and by most anecdotal accounts, the service remains extremely popular with users.

At the root of the problem is the fact that Netflix is quite different from most e-commerce companies. It relies on the Internet, the U.S. Postal Service, and a groundbreaking fulfillment operation that combines software, hardware, and plain old elbow grease to ship those little red packages.

Netflix has won accolades for using technology to wrest market share away from big brick-and-mortar video renters, such as Blockbuster. The company has amassed 8.4 million customers and ships more than 2 million movies per day.

But perhaps now is the time that Netflix would do well to invest in a major system upgrade. If Netflix customers continue to see delays, it could undermine the company’s credibility. Does Netflix really want users to consider Blockbuster’s in-store kiosks? I don’t think so.

Exposure to burning incense over long periods of time raises the risk of developing cancers of the upper respiratory tract, a new study shows.

Interestingly, the practice did not increase the overall risk of lung cancer.

“Given that our results are backed by numerous experimental studies showing that incense is a powerful producer of particulate matter and that incense smoke contains carcinogenic substances, I believe incense should be used with caution,” said study author Dr. Jeppe Friborg, of the department of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. “That is, frequent use in rooms where people live should be minimized, or at least sufficient ventilation should be secured. In our study, we find the increased risk of cancer to be present in individuals reporting frequent use of incense for many years, thus, repeated exposure for years should probably be avoided.”

Others echoed the thought.

“The American Lung Association is going to add it as a risk factor,” said Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer of the association. “It’s not nearly the danger of smoking a pack a day for 20 years, but it’s a danger.”

Not only is incense burned regularly as part of daily life in large swaths of Asia, the practice is also popular among certain segments in the West.

Incense burning produces particulate matter and is known to contain possible carcinogens such as polyaromatic hyodrcarbons (PAHs), carbonyls and benzene.

There have also been reports linking the burning of incense with cancer but the results have been inconsistent.

For this study, researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with more than 61,000 Singapore Chinese aged 45 to 74 who were cancer-free at the beginning of the study.

Incense burning almost doubled the risk of developing squamous cell upper respiratory tract carcinomas including nasal/sinus, tongue, mouth and laryngeal. There was an increased risk both in smokers and in nonsmokers, pointing to an independent effect of incense smoke.

There was no overall increased risk of lung cancer, but it did heighten the risk of squamous cell carcinoma of the lung.

Will incense go the way of tobacco? Not necessarily, said some experts.

“Certainly I think bathing yourself in particles is probably not the smartest thing in the world . . . but I think very few people fill up their room with incense,” said Dr. Arthur Frankel, a professor of medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and director of the Cancer Center, Cancer Research Institute and Division of Hematology/Oncology at Scott & White in Temple.

The findings, which are in the Oct. 1 issue of Cancer, might also point researchers toward other household practices that should be investigated.

“It’s a population-based study, which means that you can make an association but not necessarily a conclusion,” said Dr. Erin Fleener, a clinical assistant professor in internal medicine at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and an oncologist at the Bryan-College Station Cancer Clinic. “It probably promotes more work in the area of routine household items and things we need to be looking at more prospectively to make a clear cause-and-effect relationship.”

In general, though, it’s not a bad idea to avoid environmental pollutants of various types.

“Anything that affects air quality negatively is not a good thing,” said Dr. Len Horvitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “Burning in general and the release of smoke, these things are certainly to be avoided. At the very least, chemical irritants will set off asthma, and that’s reversible. Cancer is not reversible.”

“This is not unlike the type of risk that one experiences from secondhand tobacco smoke,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “At the end of the day, people who use incense casually, I don’t think that’s a cause for major concern, but those cultures which embrace incense as part of their daily lifestyles have to consider this has a real potential risk for cancer.”

Viacom Inc’s mtvU college cable network will launch an online network of campus guides, aiming to be the “Citysearch” of university life.

Working with college newspapers and Zvents, a local Internet search and advertising network, mtvU has created sites that offer listings for everything from local night life to bus and dining room schedules, an executive said.

“We’re simplifying students’ experience and providing national, regional and local advertisers a powerful connection to this hard to reach audience,” said Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU.

The notoriously fickle young adults and college crowd seen as the next generation of big media consumers is big business for programmers and a core target for MTV.

The news follows on the heels of the decision by News Corp’s Fox to air the premieres of its television series “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” and “Fringe” on television and over the Internet at the same time for students viewing on college campuses only.

MTV Networks, which has dominated youth programming for decades was seen losing some ground to Internet start-ups in recent years.

mtvU, a division of MTV Networks that broadcasts on 750 college campuses in the United States, is now moving more aggressively to make its programming and services more integral to its audience’s everyday life.

The online campus guides aim to be a “one-stop shop” destination for college students, Friedman said in a phone interview.

mtvU will launch 25 guides on Tuesday at colleges including Northwestern University, University of Texas at Austin and University of Pennsylvania.

Working closely with local college papers, the company is also in discussions with some to potentially launch print versions of the guides, Friedman said.

By the end of 2008, mtvU will launch a total of 50 daily guides.

A death row inmate who says he’s too fat to be executed received poor legal help during his trial and later when he appealed the death sentence, his lawyers said Monday during a clemency hearing.

It’s the second time that Richard Cooey, convicted of killing two University of Akron students in 1986, has asked the state for mercy. The Ohio Parole Board denied a similar request five years ago, and Cooey came within a day of being executed in 2003 before a federal judge issued a reprieve.

In a lawsuit filed this month, his lawyers said that executioners would have trouble finding Cooey’s veins and that his weight could diminish the effectiveness of one of the lethal injection drugs.

Cooey stands 5 feet 7 and weighs 267 pounds. His execution is scheduled for Oct. 14. It would be the first execution in the state since the end of a moratorium while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky’s lethal injection procedure.

Cooey didn’t attend Monday’s clemency hearing, and neither side argued the merits of the obesity lawsuit.

His lawyers said that Cooey’s original defense team didn’t properly present evidence about the effect of beatings he received as a child, as well as the impact of Cooey’s alcohol abuse.

Cooey, 41, isn’t the same person who committed the murders and is remorseful to the point of self-loathing, said Dana Cole, a University of Akron law professor who represented Cooey at the parole board hearing.

“If he’s killed on Oct. 14, we will kill a changed man,” Cole said. “He’s not the same man who committed these crimes.”

Larry Whitney, one of Cooey’s lawyers from the 1986 trial, said he and fellow defense attorney Roger Davidson did everything they could to present Cooey’s psychological makeup and background to the three-judge panel trying the case.

The judges “obviously felt that the mitigation we presented did not outweigh the aggravating factors in the case,” Whitney said.

Parole Board member Sandra Mack questioned whether Cooey has ever acknowledged his role in the crimes.

“This just does not sound like someone taking responsibility for the major part he played in killing these young women,” Mack said.

Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh reviewed graphic details of the rape and murder of the two students. Cooey and his co-defendant met the victims after throwing chunks of concrete off an overpass and striking their car.

Walsh also reviewed Cooey’s unsuccessful attempt to escape from death row in 2005, when he used a homemade ladder constructed of rolled-up magazines and sheets to scale an outdoor recreation area wall.

“In the 22 years since the defendant committed these brutal acts, he has never demonstrated one second of genuine remorse for murdering these two young women,” Walsh said.

Cooey’s accomplice, Clinton Dickens, was not eligible for the death penalty because he was 17 at the time of the murders. He is serving a life sentence.

The parole board will make a recommendation to Gov. Ted Strickland on Tuesday. Strickland can follow the board’s ruling or make his own decision.

Mexicans will soon be able to pay for small purchases such as restaurant meals and taxi rides using their mobile telephones, the country’s banks said on Monday.

Telephone operators Telefonica SA (TEF.MC) and Iusacell (CEL.MX) are teaming up with big banks such as Citigroup Inc (C.N) and BBVA (BBVA.MC) to launch the service, marketed at first toward technology savvy teenagers and expected to debut over the next few months.

Cell phone users will be able to have their bank link their savings account to their telephone so they can make payments to participating stores, restaurants and taxis by sending a text message, Roberto Rodriguez, in charge of the service, said at a news conference.

Most big banks are participating in the service, but Latin American mobile giant America Movil’s (AMXL.MX) (AMX.N) Telcel, which accounts for more than two-thirds of Mexico’s mobile telephones, has yet to sign up.

Using phones to buy items such as train tickets or products in vending machines is commonplace in Japan, but the trend has yet to catch on in the United States.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he is withdrawing his party from Pakistan’s ruling coalition.

The move will likely concentrate power in the hands of the main ruling Pakistan People’s Party, which wants to maintain the country’s close ties with the United States.

Sharif said Monday that he is pulling out of the five-month-old alliance because it has failed to restore judges ousted by ex-President Pervez Musharraf.

Lawmakers are expected to choose People’s Party leader Asif Ali Zardari as Musharraf’s successor on Sept. 6.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistan banned the Taliban on Monday, toughening its stance after the Islamic militant group claimed responsibility for deadly suicide bombings against one of Pakistan’s most sensitive military installations.

The ban imposed by the fragile governing coalition comes just a week after the ouster of Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally whose departure has prompted concern that the nuclear-armed country is too unstable to beat back extremists.

Anyone caught aiding the Taliban in Pakistan — which will have its bank accounts and assets frozen — faces up to 10 years in prison.

The Interior Ministry announced the ban 24 hours after rejecting a Taliban cease-fire offer in Bajur tribal region, a rumored hiding place for Osama bin Laden, where an army offensive has reportedly killed hundreds in recent weeks.

Another 200,000 people are said to have fled their homes.

“This organization is a terrorist organization and created mayhem against public life,” said ministry chief Rehman Malik.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella group of militants along the rugged Afghan border set up last year, has claimed responsibility for a wave of suicide bombings that have killed hundreds since the fragile civilian government took power some five months ago.

The deadliest attack, a spectacular twin suicide bombing at one of Pakistan’s largest and most sensitive military installations, just 20 miles from the capital, left 67 dead on Thursday, almost all of them civilians.

“I think at the moment they definitely have the upper hand, and we need to do something better,” Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, which has the largest bloc in Parliament, told the British Broadcasting Corp. shortly before the ban was announced.

Whatever the world, Pakistan included, has done in the last 10 years to fight terrorism, the presidential hopeful said, “it’s not working.”

Malik said the Taliban group was not banned more quickly because the provincial government had been trying to negotiate with it to secure peace. The restrictions would include offering financial aid, handing out propaganda or providing any other type of support.

The militants, meanwhile, called the ban “meaningless.”

“We are neither registered nor do we have any bank accounts,” said Muslim Khan, spokesman for the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which has threatened to step up its campaign of violence nationwide unless the military ends its operations in Bajur. “We are slaves to no one.”

Malik noted that, despite a peace deal struck with some insurgents in Swat, a former tourist destination-turned-battlefield, al-Qaida and Taliban-linked militants kept attacking security forces, burning schools and damaging public buildings.

Eight were killed in the latest violence Monday, a pre-dawn rocket-and-bomb strike on the home of provincial lawmaker Waqar Ahmed Khan in Swat, police and the politician said. His brother, two nephews and five guards were killed.

Separately, an armored vehicle believed to be going to NATO forces in Afghanistan was set ablaze by “miscreants” as it was being transported in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, said Iqbal Mahmood, a police official.

Despite its hardening stance toward militants, Pakistan’s government appears increasingly fragile. The People’s Party was building alliances with smaller parties in Parliament in case its main junior partner, headed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, pulled out.

The two sides have been drifting apart over several key issues, including whether to slash the powers of the next president.

It’s touch and go whether Jason Taylor will play in the Washington Redskins’ season opener against the New York Giants.

Taylor sprained his right knee in the second quarter of Saturday night’s 47-3 loss. An MRI performed Sunday morning allayed Redskins’ fears of a more serious injury.

“It looks like there’s no ligament damage,” coach Jim Zorn said. “He could be out for 10 days or as much as two weeks. We are just waiting to see what type of a heeler he’s going to be.”

The timetable puts in doubt Taylor’s availability for the Sept. 4 Redskins-Giants game, which is the NFL’s Thursday night league opener. Taylor has a streak of 130 consecutive regular season starts — seventh among active players — but that was put in jeopardy when the six-time Pro Bowl defensive end had his leg bent awkwardly in a pile during DeAngelo Williams‘ 5-yard run.

Taylor was acquired from the Miami Dolphins on the first of training camp after Phillip Daniels was lost to a season-ending knee injury. The Redskins are relying on the former NFL defensive player of the year to improve a pass rush that has been inconsistent in recent seasons.

Longtime Redskins backup Demetric Evans and recently acquired Erasmus James would be among the contenders to start if Taylor can’t play. Zorn said Taylor won’t suit up if there’s a substantial risk of a re-injury.

“We’ll be cautious,” Zorn said. “If we have the choice of having him for one game or 15, we’ll take the 15.”

Taylor’s injury was a low moment in the game, but, then again, the Redskins sideline spent virtually the entire evening down in the dumps, watching a one-sided show that erased the good feeling from the 3-0 start to the preseason.

In what was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for the regular season — the only time the starters will play an entire half — the Redskins suffered their worst exhibition lost in 34 years. The first-time unit was outscored 34-0.

“I didn’t sleep much on it,” Zorn said. “I lay awake thinking on it.”

The starting offense did a better job going backward than forward. They played eight series and had five three-and-outs, two turnovers and the end of the half. Jason Campbell was sacked four times and completed 6 of 10 passes for 39 yards.

While grading the film, Zorn said Campbell wasn’t much at fault. On three of the four sacks, the coach said he wrote down: “No chance.”

“There are a lot of words we can use,” Zorn said. “I think we were very soft in our pass protection. In our run game, we had a lack of sustaining one-on-one blocks. … On the first four passes that Jason threw, he had somebody walked back into him or he had somebody in his face. It is very difficult to play QB from that position. … They played very aggressive football and we didn’t match that intensity.”

The defense allowed four touchdowns in the first half, including touchdown runs of 50 and 60 yards. The Redskins again played without free safety LaRon Landry, who has missed the entire preseason with a hamstring injury, and he was sorely missed as safeties Reed Doughty and rookie Kareem Moore struggled.

“This was no joke of a game,” Zorn said, “for both teams — because it was a chance to see what (the starters) could do for a longer period of time, and we didn’t do anything.”

Notes:@ The Redskins got an early start on this week’s cut by releasing S Vernon Fox, DT Babatunde Oshinowo and DE Dorian Smith. Fox played in 30 games, with six starts, for Washington over the last two seasons. … The previous worst preseason loss for the Redskins was 48-3 to the Houston Oilers on Aug. 9, 1974.

Nvidia on Friday announced the release of CUDA 2.0, a new version of its C language development environment for its graphics processing units (GPUs).

CUDA enables Macs or PCs equipped with certain Nvidia graphics processors to offload the computation of some information to the graphics processor instead of using the CPU. Nvidia’s graphics processors are parallel processing engines, which makes them suited to handling tasks such as medical volume reconstruction and oil and gas seismic computing, for example.

CUDA is Nvidia’s implementation of technology called General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units, or GPGPU. It’s something Apple hopes to leverage on an operating system level with Snow Leopard, which will support an emerging standard called OpenCL. CUDA, however, lets developers leverage Nvidia’s hardware today to perform the same function.

The latest production release of the CUDA toolset includes Mac OS X support, as well as Windows 32-bit and 64-bit support, and also includes an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example, as well as its source code.

Nvidia hopes the example will spawn further efforts from third-party developers to create filtering and image manipulation software that leverages Nvidia GPUs to speed processing.

The road to advanced video, Internet and phone services is bumpy — and the bumps can be almost as big as refrigerators.

As cable and phone companies race to upgrade services or offer video for the first time, they’re doing it by installing equipment in boxes on lawns, easements and curbs all over American neighborhoods. Telecommunications rollouts have always been messy, but several towns and residents are fighting back with cries of “Not in my front yard!”

AT&T Inc.’s nearly fridge-sized units, which route its new U-verse video product to customers, are drawing particular ire. A few caught fire or even exploded. AT&T said it has fixed that by replacing the units’ backup batteries.

That’s not much comfort to David Crommie, who thinks the boxes are an eyesore. Crommie, who is president of a San Francisco neighborhood group called the Cole Valley Improvement Association, complained after seeing some boxes sprout in town and managed to delay AT&T’s plans to install up to 850. AT&T now is expected to reapply for an exemption to the city’s environmental-review procedures.

“We have nothing against the technology. We just don’t want that delivery system,” Crommie said. “It’s 19th century packaging for 21st century technology.”

AT&T’s rival Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, apparently thought so too. It ran ads in Illinois calling the cabinets “giant utility boxes.” In most locations, U-verse cabinets are 4 feet tall, 4 feet wide and 2 feet deep.

AT&T didn’t think it was funny and sued Comcast in March for running a “false, deceptive and disparaging advertising campaign.” The companies signed a standstill agreement in May.

But Comcast has utility box problems of its own.

Several residents in Lower Makefield Township, about 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia, got upset when new green boxes from Comcast popped up around town, sometimes between driveways.

“All of a sudden we have cable boxes appear,” said 64-year-old resident Bernie Goldberg. “They seem to think our community is their open job site.”

He wants to know why Comcast can’t bury the new boxes, which are about a foot tall and wide, and 2 feet long. Comcast said aboveground boxes can be accessed more easily and are more reliable.

But Goldberg noted that Verizon Communications Inc. was able to bury its fiber-optic boxes underground in town — a fact the phone company was more than eager to confirm. (Of course, Verizon also has had installation mishaps with its new FiOS service, such as fires at homes in Pennsylvania and Virginia.)

For Goldberg and other residents of Lower Makefield Township, arguing with Comcast over cable boxes is a familiar fight. They battled the installation of aboveground boxes in the 1990s with Comcast’s predecessor and won.

This time, Township Supervisor Matt Maloney said residents felt Comcast’s boxes were an “intrusion.”

“They’re putting it in without permits,” he said. “It is their contention they are not required to do so. It’s our contention that they are.”

Comcast, which has installed 50 boxes and doesn’t plan to add more, said it is working with the township to resolve these issues.

A resolution has yet to come to Geneva, Ill., where Mayor Kevin Burns is furious with AT&T.

A few years ago Geneva passed a 180-day moratorium that effectively stopped installations of AT&T’s U-verse cabinets. The phone company sued Geneva and six other Illinois municipalities for restricting its plans. AT&T claimed it had the right to use public rights of way for its telecom network.

Burns said his city merely wanted some say.

“If we were going to have our landscape dotted with refrigerator-size boxes, we should have some control over them,” Burns said.

Illinois passed a law last year fast-tracking approval for cable rivals to enter the pay-TV market, stripping away much of the clout wielded by municipalities. Geneva dropped a countersuit against AT&T in 2007 and gave it permits for installing U-verse boxes in early August.

But all this time, AT&T has maintained its suit against the city. Burns said that “is beyond my comprehension.”

An AT&T spokesman would not comment on the lawsuit.

There are signs AT&T is learning from its earlier missteps.

In Springfield, Ill., AT&T has agreed to pay the city $1,500 for each of the 75 to 100 U-verse cabinets it plans to install. The money will be used for landscaping that can make the boxes blend with the environment, said city spokesman Ernie Slottag.

AT&T also recently installed about 120 U-verse boxes in Santa Rosa, Calif., after that city worked with the phone company and Comcast to find locations for their equipment. Eric McHenry, the city’s chief technology officer, said AT&T’s units were trickier to place since they were much larger than Comcast’s boxes.

But while Santa Rosa had limited say on the cabinets — units go into public utility easements and, like Illinois, California had passed a fast-track video franchise law — McHenry said AT&T relocated boxes when requested.

“We didn’t theoretically have the ability to say no,” he said. “We asked them to move certain locations and they voluntarily did.”