@egoldstein, I'm willing to go back to the basics to play along. What does clicking on Like do here at Amplify? I see that if the people I follow like a post, it shows up in RSS (I don't use Amplify RSS daily as it is always crowded) So what happens when I like someone's post? Thanks.
Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk
A helicopter was among the gifts for the groom in what is being described as one of India's most expensive weddings.
The week-long nuptials of Lalit Tanwar to his bride Yogita Jaunapuria are lavish and attended by thousands.
Thursday's Indian newspapers say that the wedding was celebrated with 100 dishes and 12 giant TV screens to broadcast proceedings.
The Hindustan Times reported that 2,000 guests were invited to the pre-wedding ceremony last week and each was given a silver biscuit, a safari suit and $500 (£307) in cash, while at a different ritual the bride's family welcomed the groom with gifts worth $5m (£3m).
There was even a reported gift of $5,500 (£3,381) for the groom's barber.
So I had an old laptop laying around which I was thinking about recycling for some time. But then I thought of installing Ubuntu, or something else. My previous experience with Ubuntu has not been that great so I thought I give Jolicloud a try (which is apparently in tech news lately). Long story short, I went from Lubuntu (light-weight version of Ubantu) to Jolicloud to Peppermint OS. My verdict? Don't recycle your old PC. Give it a Peppermint OS. Well, Jolicloud didn't work out at all. It took very long to install, multiple reboots, errors and what not and it finally hanged. After a quick internet search, I went to Lubuntu as it is apparently a lightweight version of Ubuntu (the basic minimum). Apparently it took way longer to install Lubuntu than I was expecting. But it worked better than Jolicloud for sure. During my internet search, I stumbled upon PeppermintOS and I thought it looks interesting. I got the ISO image, popped the CD, turned the computer ON and it took me directly into the Operating System. I thought that was neat. Basically, PeppermintOS is for average computer user. You pop the CD in, turn your computer on and you are there already in the operating system. There is an icon on the desktop for you to install the operating system after you play around with it. The base of PepermintOS I realized is Lubuntu but they have made it more simple and easy. The biggest surprise was the time it took to install this operating system: the fastest of all. The Software Manager is one of the most amazing thing I have seen from the Linux side of the world. I think it is even easier than installing software on Windows (which has been one of my gripe with Linux previously that it is not easy to install software unlike Windows, but things have changed lately). PepermintOS has Firefox browser with Mozilla Prism at its base (unlike Jolicloud and Lubuntu with Chromium at its base). It is also a hybrid of local and cloud application)
The astonishing story of the last few decades is a massive redistribution of wealth, as the rich have shifted the tax burden
Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk
Over the last half century, the richest Americans have shifted the burden of the federal individual income tax off themselves and onto everybody else. The three convenient and accurate Wikipedia graphs below show the details. The first graph compares the official tax rates paid by the top and bottom income earners. Note especially that from the end of the second world war into the early 1960s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years. Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%. Note also how the gap between the rates paid by the richest and the poorest has narrowed. If we take into account the many loopholes the rich can and do use far more than the poor, the gap narrows even more.
One conclusion is clear and obvious: the richest Americans have dramatically lowered their income tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the tax burdens of the middle income groups and the poor.
Amplify’d from blogs.forbes.com
The company best poised to capitalize on Sheen’s move to social media would be TwitPic.com, a Twitter-based image sharing website founded in 2008 by Noah Everett. TwitPic.com – one of many photo sharing sites utilized by Twitter users – is clearly Sheen’s service of choice; it has been the medium for six of Sheen’s eleven tweets at press time. Sheen’s first photograph – which features the actor posing with chocolate milk, a Naked juice bottle, and a porn star – has racked up 1.2 million views in less than 24 hours. By contrast, one of TwitPic.com’s most recognizable photos, of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River, has received only 656,000+ views in its considerably longer lifespan.
Groups and Chat seem to have sneaked back in through the back door of mobile user adaptability. Is this is a real deal or a fad? Well, get on the bandwagon while it is hot! Here are four recent stories. Blogging Startup Posterous Throws In The Towel, Reinvents Itself As Mobile App
Facebook set to unveil new group chat feature
Forget Facebook and use The Fridge to plan your spring break
New Chat Thing Convore Is Google Wave Minus the Suck
Not sure how effective this is.
Amplify’d from www.businessinsider.com via Google Reader
Maybe you've seen this before: You're shopping around for a DVD, book, or gadget on Google and later that same item shows up in an ad on another website.
It's annoying. And it means companies are tracking your browsing history to show you targeted ads.
How can you stop it? Lifehacker has an extensive column on the subject, but we'll tell you one way to help get rid of it.
Several major online advertising companies have joined together to give users the option to avoid targeted ads while browsing.
If you want them to stop tracking your browsing history, head over to aboutads.info, a site that will let you opt out of ads from 60 different companies.
The site adds a cookie to your browser that will keep your history a secret. Just check the box next to each company you want to block and click "submit."
Amplify’d from www.eurekalert.org
Radio traffic can flow in only one direction at a time on a specific frequency, hence the frequent use of "over" by pilots and air traffic controllers, walkie-talkie users and emergency personnel as they take turns speaking.
But now, Stanford researchers have developed the first wireless radios that can send and receive signals at the same time.
This immediately makes them twice as fast as existing technology, and with further tweaking will likely lead to even faster and more efficient networks in the future.
"Textbooks say you can't do it," said Philip Levis, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering. "The new system completely reworks our assumptions about how wireless networks can be designed," he said.
Cell phone networks allow users to talk and listen simultaneously, but they use a work-around that is expensive and requires careful planning, making the technique less feasible for other wireless networks, including Wi-Fi.
Damn, I'm really surprised, the quality of this software has shot up tremendously. There's so much fun and learning, all for free. It's the real too good to be true but it is true
Watch the video at the source.
Amplify’d from singularityhub.com
Amplify’d from www.ox.ac.uk
Online stargazers have reported 90 potential new planets to Oxford University's planet seekers' website.
Planethunters.org was set up by Oxford’s Department of Physics to test NASA's Kepler project which is searching for planets in the 'Goldilocks zone', the region around a star in which planets can have liquid water and are neither too hot nor too cold for life to exist.
