This has got to be one of the most amazing pictures I’ve ever come across. It was taken by the Columbia shuttle crew during their last space mission and shows a sunset cutting through Africa and Europe. Notice the bright lights in certain countries where the sun has already set — Paris, Berlin, etc.

A big thanks to the Columbia crew and the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources for this picture:

I would have never thought I’d see the day but alas it has happened, the Canadian dollar carries the same value as the U.S. dollar. According to Yahoo Finance — at the time of this writing — the USD is at 1.00 and the CAD at 1.00.

What does this mean for Americans and Canadians? Basically, the short of it is that it’s going to be a lot cheaper for Canadians visiting America, and a lot more expensive for Americans visiting Canada.

This is such a bizarre concept for me and I’m sure many others, having long been under the notion that the Canadian dollar was much weaker and therefore we as Americans had a much stronger purchasing power. It just goes to show how badly the Bush administration has and continues to destroy the U.S. economy.

Countries around the world have been slowly abandoning the USD standard and more are adopting the Euro. Additionally, many economists have been forecasting a U.S. recession for some time. This US-Canada currency equality provides further evidence to support the recession predictions.

Consider this 5-year graph of USD vs. CAD:

The economic downturn is staggering. I wonder how far off we are from Americans putting their savings in other currencies like the Euro. Lord knows the wealthiest U.S. elite are already doing it.

Another day, another European country to get the iPhone. Although Apple has not issued any formal announcement yet, the rumors circulating that Orange would be the iPhone carrier in France have seemed to come to fruition. Today, CEO Didier Lombard of France Telecom — parent company of Orange — announced that Orange has exclusive rights to be the French iPhone distributor.

Lombard didn’t offer any details as far as price is concerned, but he did mention that the iPhone would not be subsidized by Orange. What he did say, though, is that the iPhone will be in France “before Christmas, probably November.” I wouldn’t be too surprised if that date turned out to be November 9th, in order to coincide with the UK and German iPhone launches.

That’s all the details out at this time, whenever Apple issues a formal statement I will update this post with any relevant new information.

This is turning out to be a good week for European Apple fans. Yesterday Apple announced that the iPhone will be available in the United Kingdom on O2 beginning November 9th, and today Apple has announced that the iPhone will be available in Germany on T-Mobile beginning November 9th as well.

It makes sense that Apple went with T-Mobile as its German iPhone carrier. For one, by the end of this year T-Mobile will be the only carrier in Germany to offer EDGE throughout its entire GSM network (recall that there is still no 3G version). Additionally, T-Mobile is the biggest Wi-Fi provider in the world with 20,000 hotspots — 8,600 in Germany alone.

The German iPhone will require a 2-year T-Mobile tariff and will be an 8GB model going for €399 including V.A.T.

I wonder if German T-Mobile iPhones will be easily configurable to T-Mobile USA, hmmm…

We’re still waiting for an official word on who will be the French carrier for the iPhone, but speculation continues to be that Orange will get the nod.

Pope Benedict XVI refused a meeting request from Condoleezza Rice to meet this past August and discuss issues pertaining to Iraq and the Middle East in general. While the Vatican has said the Pope typically doesn’t receive visitors during the August holidays, one major Italian newspaper declared the meeting denial a snub against the Bush administration for two reasons.

The first reason is that back in March 2003 — just before the Iraq war began — Rice met with a special papal envoy from Rome and told them that the Bush administration didn’t care about the views of the late Pope John Paul II on the immorality of its planned military actions in Iraq.

The second reason is that the US has responded to a Vatican matter regarding the protection of Iraqi Christians under the new Iraqi constitution in an “unacceptable” fashion.

I for one think this is just awesome. Whether intentional or not, Pope Benedict has illustrated that the Bush administration cannot get whatever it wants and that there are individuals out there with the ability to keep the Bush administration in check, since the current lackluster U.S. Congress is unable to do so. I hope the Pope keeps a firm stand on this, and makes the Bush administration show some accountability for its actions for giving it the privilege of his presence.

A Turkish court ruled yesterday that telecom authorities must block access to video-sharing site YouTube, due to videos that allegedly insulted Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President Abdullah Gul, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This same incident happened in March, when Turk Telecom blocked access to YouTube for two days until a petition to the court ultimately removed the ban.

It seems the world of Internet censorship in Turkey hasn’t evolved much in the past few months. Let’s hope another issue like this will get them to consider the topic and draft some legislation to keep it uncensored.

At a press event in the Regent St. Apple Store (largest in the UK), Steve Jobs announced that the UK iPhone would be available to O2 customers beginning November 9th of this year.

The iPhone, which will be available solely to O2 customers (similar to the multi-year contract with AT&T here in the U.S.), will cost £269; which is more than the $399 (£200) that it currently costs stateside. O2 subscribers must sign an 18-month contract at £35, £45, or £55 depending on the voice plan of their choosing. Included in this price is unlimited data usage.

Some upsetting news is that this first European iPhone will not be 3G, as many including myself had hoped for, but rather it’s pretty much the exact same device as is currently available in the U.S. as far as we consumers are concerned. However, in an interesting twist, O2 has partnered with European-wide Wi-Fi network The Cloud, which will provide 7,500 Wi-Fi hotspots for iPhone users.

It will be interesting to see the level of demand for iPhones in the UK come November 9th. In the U.S. people were manic, but the number of AT&T subscribers is much higher than that of O2. However, although O2 only has 5.5 million customers, 80% of their high-value customers said they want an iPhone, and 40% of other networks’ subscribers said they would switch for an iPhone. So while the UK isn’t likely to sell a million in 74 days, it could still move quite a few.

As for the iPhone in France and Germany, no official word yet but rumor has it that French company Orange and the German T-Mobile are still the front runners in their respective countries.

Marek W., a 23-year-old Polish man from Cieszyn, is facing up to three years in prison for writing a piece of search engine optimization (SEO) software that committed the atrocious and horrifying act of insulting his president.

The software, an amateur “black hat” program used for SERP manipulation, would return a specified site in the #1 position for a given keyword on Google. The problem for Marek, according to the Polish government, wasn’t that the test site he used was www.prezydent.pl, but that the keyword which returned it in the #1 position on Google was kutas, or “penis” in English.

The Polish police found Marek fairly easily, as they traced his IP address to his home, where he had been testing the software. At the preliminary hearing, his explanation for using the presidential Web site and the derogatory keyword was “I just wanted to verify my skills and check if the software works.” Apparently it does, a little too well.

Am I the only one that thinks this whole situation is absurd? The Polish government potentially imprisoning a 23-year-old for writing some software that inferences the Polish president as a penis. Heck, if citizens could get arrested for insulting their government officials then I think it’s a safe bet to assume that half the global population would be in jail.

It’s news like this that makes you think negatively about where the world is heading, with all the war and disease and environmental problems happening around the globe, you have a government imprisoning citizens for referring to an official as a penis on the Internet.

A big thanks to Bart for pointing this out on his blog. Let me know if there is anything us fellow bloggers can do to support him.

Looking for the perfect beach getaway? A place where you can sit and relax, free from the daily stresses of life such as work, commuting, managing your finances and, mobile phones?

Palm Islands, a popular holiday destination in the Grenadines, has become the first place in the Caribbean to ban the use of mobile devices. Under the ban, the use of mobile phones, PDAs and laptop computers is prohibited within half a mile of Casarina Beach.

Rob Barrett, CEO of Elite Resort Islands — which owns Palm Islands — says “there is nothing worse than lying back in your double hammock, sipping on your strawberry daiquiri and hearing the Motorola jingle in the background.” He adds that guests should be on Caribbean time when vacationing at Palm Islands, which essentially boils down to switching off your mobile phone and listening to waves crashing on the beach.

My feeling is that if you have to worry about sitting on a beach surrounded by cell phones, you’re probably not far enough away from home and need a better vacation location. The best beach vacations I’ve ever taken have been to a place where my cell phone doesn’t have a chance of making a phone call. That’s how a real beach vacation should be, out in the middle of nowhere, unreachable to the outside world.

President Bush said yesterday to a national convention of the American Legion in Reno, Nevada that if Israel’s arch-foe Iran were to get nuclear weapons, the entire Middle East would be “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”

Bush also repeated accusations that Iran was materializing instability in Iraq by supplying weapons and training fighters. It seems someone is really trying to build a case with the American public for a war with Iran.

My issue with President Bush’s remarks is that they are misleading and incredibly short-sighted.

First off, even if Iran were to get nuclear weapons, possessing does not equal usage. Of all the countries around the world with nuclear weapons, only one has actually used them (outside of a testing capacity): the United States. That means that Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel and South Africa (before voluntarily disarming) have never used them on another country. So where does Bush’s inherent rationale that Iran would use them if they had them come from?

Secondly, and this ties in with my previous point, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” as reported in U.S. media. Contrary to propaganda popular belief, that remark was never made. It should be noted that the Bush Administration has repeatedly used this remark — falsely — as a basis for many of their threats against Iran.

Finally, Bush’s remarks about an impending nuclear holocaust in the Middle East should Iran get nuclear weapons are far less from what a real-life scenario would entail. Granted, Bush is probably correct that if one nuclear weapon were to go off the region would be set ablaze with hellfire and radiation. However, it’s not likely to remain contained to that region. Bush and his cronies need to read up a little on the IR concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which is the best nuclear weapon deterrent. Under this MAD premise, one nation setting off nukes means retaliation from other nuke states leading to the destruction of everyone. Thus, were Iran to nuke Israel, Israel and the United States would surely nuke back. As a result of the United States nuking Iran, Russia or China would likely get involved, and the downward spiral goes ever deeper. The lesson from all this: Iran knows that nuking another country will only get itself destroyed, so it’s not going to do it.

It’s unfortunate that the government uses such deliberate manipulation of information to pursue its own secretive agendas (read: attacking Iran). It is extraordinarily unlikely that Iran would ever launch a first-strike nuclear weapon against Israel. Rather, the more plausible explanation is that Iran is seeking to acquire a nuclear weapon so that it can use MAD as a deterrent against countries seeking to nuke it.