I have seen some stupid thing this one might just rank right up there!

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Research In Motion unveiled a new BlackBerry aimed at wooing consumers away from Apple’s iPhone and other rivals, but analysts said the handset won’t blow away the competition.

Even though the main features of the BlackBerry Torch, including a touchscreen and slideout keyboard, were well-known within the industry, investors registered their disappointment, driving RIM’s Toronto-listed shares down 4 percent.

The Torch will go on sale in the United States on August 12 for $199.99 with a two-year contract — about the same price as an iPhone. The new BlackBerry uses a revamped operating system and has a faster and easier-to-use Web browser.

Underscoring RIM’s intention to compete head to head with the iPhone, the Waterloo, Ontario-based company will launch the phone in the United States with AT&T Inc, the same carrier that has exclusive U.S. rights to the iPhone.

Analysts at Tuesday’s launch event in New York said the Torch does not represent a major advance but that its consumer-friendly features were enough to help RIM to catch up to rivals.

“RIM is playing catch-up. This is clearly the upgrade for BlackBerry users, but otherwise not a lot here is super exciting,” Altimeter analyst Michael Gartenberg said.

The Torch does not represent a “leap forward”, but will help RIM compete with rivals such as iPhone and Google Inc’s Android software, used in phones from several vendors including Motorola Inc, said NPD analyst Ross Rubin.

“This gets the experience competitive again — if they can do that with the efficiency and stability that RIM is known for, then it’s a positive,” Rubin said.

Some analysts have said the Torch’s success will depend how heavily it is promoted by AT&T, which said it collaborated with RIM on the device for thousands of hours.

AT&T described the device as the best BlackBerry ever but declined to say how much advertising the company will spend on the phone or how it would compare to the amount of money it spends on iPhone advertising.

“It will be as big a campaign as you’ve seen in some time,” Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher told Reuters.

BlackBerry’s nearly air-tight encryption has come under scrutiny in several overseas markets recently. The United Arab Emirates threatened on Sunday to ban some BlackBerry services unless RIM gives it access to encrypted messages. India’s Economic Times reported that RIM will allow Indian security authorities to monitor BlackBerry services.

RIM Chief Technology Officer David Yach declined to comment on discussions with specific governments.

“I believe they’ll have trouble pulling the trigger to shut down BlackBerry,” Yach said. “Most governments in the world rely on BlackBerry.”

NEW FEATURES

While the BlackBerry has long been the gold standard for corporate and government customers because of its speedy, secure email service, critics said it needs a big overhaul to expand its popularity beyond business customers.

One of the new features RIM touted is the ability to search any application, media content or contact by typing a word on in Torch’s “universal search” function.

BlackBerry Torch users can type messages on the screen or a slide-out keyboard. It comes with a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and a built-in GPS for location-based applications.

The new BlackBerry 6 operating system also offers an inbox where users can access updates from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in the same place as their emails.

“It’s a really special product because so much new goodness has been added to it.” said Mike Lazaridis, RIM’s president and co-chief executive.

The August launch was earlier than some analysts expected.

“I’m glad to see they got it out sooner rather than later,” said Nick Agostino at Mackie Research Capital. RIM’s success will depend on positive industry reviews and adoption by developers of applications, he said.

The Torch’s success could also hinge on RIM’s ability to convince software developers to create applications for the device. Analysts say a big part of the iPhone’s appeal is the huge choice of applications that it has to offer.

“Developers want to go where the consumers are and consumers want to go where the developers are. RIM is going to have to tell a very compelling story to attract the first batch of developers,” he said.

RIM fell 2.7 percent to $55.44 on the Nasdaq stock market. Its Toronto-listed shares fell 4 percent to C$56.75. AT&T shares rose 5 cents to $26.64.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew in New York and Frank McGurty in

US President Barack Obama uses his BlackBerry or similar device as he walks to the Oval Office in Washington, DC in 2009. Obama fought hard to keep his BlackBerry when he became president, but with only 10 people authorized to email the super-encrypted device, he admitted Thursday that it is ‘no fun. ‘

So Porsche has decided to go forward and produce the Spyder 918 hybrid, which, up until now, was strictly conceptual. Did I mention it’ll cost around $650,000? Because it will. Yeah, I just pre-ordered two. Didn’t I, Hot Wheels? High rolla, HIGH ROLLA!

A 3.4-liter V8 petrol burner is combined with electric motors to put out 500bhp, while featuring the mind-altering acceleration to go from a standing start to 62mph in just 3.2 seconds. Topping out at 198mph and offering a very respectable 78mpg fuel economy…
The cost? That hasn’t been officially announced yet, but estimates peg it around the $650,000 mark. Don’t worry, though — it’ll be eligible for the federal tax credit; but you will have to pay GST of $32,500!

Well thank God for the federal tax credit. I know that’s what I’m concerned about when I’m wiping my ass with diamond-studded toilet paper. Did I mention my commode is solid gold? Which — you know how they say you can’t polish a turd? They’ve never seen one sparkling at the bottom of my bowl.

Sat Jul 31
LAS VEGAS (AFP) – Hackers are weighing in on the Facebook privacy controversy with creations that help people strengthen privacy or empty profile pages at the world’s leading social networking service.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) technology fellow Chris Conley showed off an arsenal of such applications at the infamous DefCon gathering, which kicked off Friday in Las Vegas.

“They are needed because people don’t have control of their privacy and don’t really understand,” Conley said after the presentation.

“They give people options.”

A program written by Conley displays pictures, posts, or other profile data being accessed by applications at Facebook accounts. People can then see what personal information programs are gleaning from their pages.

News stories about privacy control issues at Facebook may slip people’s minds by the time they sit down at their computers, but Conley’s application grabs their attention with a winning subject — themselves.

“People love to hear about themselves, that is the thing that Facebook is great at,” said Ceren Ercen, who worked briefly for the California company and wore a T-shirt bearing the words “Disgruntled Facebook ex-employee.”

“People don’t have the attention spans to carry over concerns they have to actual Facebook usage.”

Ercen added that during her brief stint at Facebook she had “serious problems” regarding the privacy of users and that she wasn’t alone.

Applications shared by Conley included a software tool that helps people change Facebook privacy settings using simple color coding to demystify the process.

Other programs let people pack-up Facebook profile data in order to take it elsewhere or stop the social-networking service getting automated feedback about where members go elsewhere on the Internet.

“The long-term goal is they should become obsolete because Facebook has addressed this in some way,” Conley said. “We would like Facebook to be doing this.”

Conley’s application, available online, at dotrights.org has been used by 150,000 people.

“I think people don’t see the real potential damage of their information going out the door,” a DefCon veteran who asked not to be named said after attending Conley’s presentation.

Facebook this week launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” highlights news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the social-networking community.

The new page augments a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans.”

The number of people using Facebook recently topped the 500 million mark, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social network.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by the ACLU and other privacy activists and governments that Facebook give users more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

Sat Jul 31, 9:33 AMBILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) – BP said on Friday it could seal its ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well by next week as the House of Representatives voted to toughen regulation of offshore energy drilling.

Windows 7 Tip of the Week

Windows has had a Performance Monitor since the earliest days of NT, but with Windows Vista, Microsoft added a great new utility, the Reliability Monitor, which tracks the overall reliability of your PC over time, keeping up to a year of PC use history. In Vista, the Performance Monitor and Reliability Monitor were part of a combined tool. But now, in Windows 7, they live as separate tools. You can access the Reliability Monitor, shown here, by typing relia into Start Menu Search.

The Reliability Monitor assigns a reliability rating to your PC on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is horrible and 10 is perfect. Out of the box, Windows 7 gets a perfect 10 but from there on its all downhill: Any glitch or failure in any application, hardware, or Windows will cause the reliability rating to immediately plummet. Meanwhile, days with no problems are barely rewarded, with only a slight upward bump. If anything, Microsoft is being too hard on itself, as most of these problems aren’t even the fault of Windows. But then, the Reliability Monitor isn’t monitoring just Windows. It’s monitoring everything on your PC.

As part of its quarterly and annual financial results releases late last week, Microsoft announced that it had sold over 175 million copies of Windows 7 through the third week of July. According to Microsoft, Windows 7 is now selling at a rate of about 10 units every second or almost 1 million copies of Windows 7 every single day.

Shares of Research In Motion jumped on Wednesday on speculation that next week it would unveil a new touchscreen BlackBerry that could compete more effectively with Apple Inc’s iPhone and other smartphones.

RIM is expected to announce the launch of the BlackBerry 9800 at a joint event with AT&T Inc in New York next Tuesday. AT&T is expected to get exclusive U.S. rights to sell the new device.

NEW YORK, N.Y. – In case 10 minutes isn’t enough to show off your guitar solo skills or Lady Gaga impersonation, YouTube has raised the limit it places on video uploads to 15 minutes.