The Opti-Mystic

India will vote electronically...

The Election Commission (EC) of India has announced that it plans to conduct the general elections, due next year, wholly using Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

About one million EVMs will be required to accomplish this mammoth task. Also, the voter's identity card will be a mandatory requirement for voting during the general elections.

I found this link via slashdot.org where I spent a long time going through the comments on this piece of news.

I don't believe this!!

An adviser to Malayisan Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has declared that Malaysian Muslim men can divorce their wives via SMS.

"SMS is just another form of writing," the daily quoted Hamid as saying, following an Islamic court decision Thursday that ruled in favor of a man who served divorce on his wife using SMS.

The Intelligent Pill is here!

Hark! Tiny machines are here to crawl into your bodies to treat you!

Well actually, its the iPill, the latest in drug-delivery systems, which combines the diagnosis and the medicine in a single pill

Engineers at the University of Calgary have developed a pill that, once swallowed, will determine how healthy or ill the patient is, and will release just the right amount of medicine accordingly.

Dubbed the Intelligent Pill or iPill, the new drug-delivery system packs a micropump and sensors that monitor the body's temperature and pH balance into one pill. If the body's temperature and pH reach certain levels, the iPill responds by pumping out more or less of its drug payload. It could be used to treat many ailments like AIDS or diabetes.

The future's here!!

Cat 'Photoshop' Schwartz

Cat Schwartz of TechTV put up some of her photos on her weblog. Pretty normal, you would say!

But what she did not realize was that there exists a teeny weeny obscure bug in Photoshop. What is this bug all about?! ... Photoshop generates a small preview image for images it produces and hides it in the original image. If you then just do a minor change to the original image like cropping it down and if you then save the image with the same name, the preview image hidden in the original picture gets saved as it was before the original image was cropped. Then when you click on the image in the File Open menu, Photoshop picks up the preview image hidden in the picture and displays it in the preview window of the File Open menu.

What happens then is for all to see. But before you click on the following link, I must warn you that there is a little bit of nudity involved here. So, if you are easily offended, please refrain from clicking.

Click here to check out the Photoshop bug that lets you keep "abreast" of whats happening in Cat Schwartz's life! ;-)

After what would have undoubtedly been a passage of time where one would've seen a red-faced Cat Schwartz, she recovers well and handles this embarassing episode pretty well.

[link via Metafilter]

Fun with Google

How do you like your daily Google?... It's available in more flavours than you can eat!! ...

• The Bork, Bork, Bork! flavour


• The Laloo Yadav philavour!


• Wheee!! Elmer Fudd fwavouw


• The Hacker lingo


• The Klingon flavour for the Trekkies


• The Pig Latin Lavourfay

This is in addition to an assortment of Indian languages that the Google interface is available in!

Cool!!

Ad watch

I wonder why Rediff's main page still shows an ad that asks the readers to preorder a copy of The Order of the Phoenix?!!

Someone's not doing their job, obviously!!

Las 'Raigad' Vegas

The Maharashtra Government is seriously considering a proposal for the first ever casino in Maharashtra.

Commenting on the project, a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) minister said, “It will bring in some good revenue and also be a tourist attraction. But since elections are round the corner, we have to be a little careful.”

Good Cop, Bad Cop

While RIAA bares it fangs at music 'pirates', MPAA tries to politely ask people who download pirated copies of films over the Internet, to stop doing so.

A classic case of the good ol' Good Cop, Bad Cop routine!!

SC directs govt to introduce Uniform Civil Code

Yet again, SC directs govt to introduce Uniform Civil Code.

In a major development, the Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the government to implement a Uniform Civil Code.

The directive was given by a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice V N Khare while hearing a petition filed by a Christian priest challenging the Accession Act.

Even though the BJP is a proponent of the UCC, I do not see it being able to introduce it given the feeble excuses it is fond of offering, in the form of "compulsions of coalition politics".

Few days back, there was an interesting discussion on this topic on Shanti's blog. It's available here if you want to go through some insightful comments.

Cannon fodder for Anti-Outsourcing lobby

IBM says that it sees the need to shift jobs overseas to India and elsewhere to keep up with the competitors who are doing so and saving money.

I'm now waiting for the anti-outsourcing irrationalists to up their ante.