luminescente

At the Atlantic online, there is a great article, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?“, explaining how the De Beers cartel inflated the prices for diamonds.

If you feel ofended by this, lighten up. And all this will be forgotten by the time the next scandal comes up on TV.

Seen in a comment by Jeremi on this story….

A big STFU to all the Hummer owners out there.

Since Hummer owners want to drive a military-style vehicle, I think we should give them the full experience: every hummer should come with an all-expenses paid 6-month stint as a chauffeur in Baghdad. Nothing shows one’s masculinity and patriotism more than Supporting the Troops, right?

According to this interview, a lot is going to change to the .PT domain. Anyone with half a brain should notice everything that is said as obvious, but this time it’s coming from someone at the top of the chain.

1. Everyone prefers a straight down .PT domain as opposed to the .COM.PT;
2. Some entities prefer a “foreign” .COM instead of a .PT
3. IDN not having much success;

Points 1 and 2 are somewhat related. Why go all the trouble (paperwork, registration fees, arbitrary rules) of registering a .PT when a .COM is much easier and cheaper? The .COM.PT appeared too late in the game not to seem a macguyver-style duct-tape hackjob. Other countries (.BR, .UK) had those from the beginning, but we didn’t.

And as a side note, the .CAT TLD was introduced to Catalunya. Having myself signed the petition for this, this is nice.

Fins ara!

Today at work I used Pandora to provide me with background music. I left the Powerbook with my extensive mp3 collection at home and decided to give Pandora a try after listening to Nuno Markl’s podcast.

I must say I’m impressed. For the playlists created the suggestions were ok. Some dubious, some spot-on. The sound quality is fairly good and the interface is nice, even if a little slow in my 1Ghz G4 eMac.

But then, this got me thinking and coming to the conclusion that this is a good example of how bad we are here in Portugal regarding internet connectivity. This is not something to use at home with my miserable Netcabo 300MB download limit, as this is obviously not national traffic. I don’t know what is the bitrate the songs are in, but assuming a 96 Kbps bitrate, a hour listening to this equates to 43,2 megabyes. Given 8 hours, the monthly limit is gone. So, my 640Kbps cable sits idle most of the time and relegated to light (and I mean light) browsing and email.

What’s the use of a faster connection? Despite having larger limits, they are still small and just mean I can get to the limit of the monthly usage in less time.