PowerLines

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Princess Mako of Japan to lose royal status by marrying commoner

Expected marriage to Kei Komuro would cost Mako her title under law that only applies to female members of monarchy

Princess Mako of Japan, the eldest grandchild of Emperor Akihito, will lose her royal status if she goes ahead with marrying a commoner because of a law that only applies to female members of the monarchy.

Her expected engagement to Kei Komuro, 25, has dominated television chatshows and newspaper coverage ahead of an expected official announcement in the coming weeks.

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for instructors to include notes regarding laptop and internet use in their course syllabi. Many instructors ban the use of electronics, including laptops, due to the assumption that these machines may be more distracting than helpful during class time. However, students often argue that they can take better notes on their laptops rather than on paper. Oftentimes, out-of-class assignments are done electronically, further encouraging students to rely on their computers to complete all of their coursework. So today’s educators must now question whether or not taking notes on a laptop has a detrimental effect on student performance.

You've probably never heard of this platform, but it's already surpassed Twitter in terms of users.

According to Weibo's first quarter results, it has a whopping 340 million active monthly users, a 30% increase from its previous year.

Twitter has around 328 million active monthly users in comparison.

Of course, it doesn't help that Twitter is blocked in China, along with other social media giants like Facebook.

Some 154 million people each day use Weibo, which has been deemed China's equivalent to Twitter — 91% of which access the website from their phones. Read more...

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Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Microsoft is trying to make passwords obsolete, and it might succeed - BGR News

Passwords are annoying, clumsy, easily beaten (for the most part), and an absolutely antiquated form of security. They also happen to be the primary way we secure our most precious information today. Microsoft wants to change that with a new app feature that basically removes passwords from the equation entirely. It’s part of the Microsoft Authenticator app, and it just might work.

The app’s new ability essentially enables the second layer of a two-factor authentication system, but instead of signing in with a password and then confirming your identity via an app prompt on your smartphone, the password isn’t used at all.

Once you have Microsoft Authenticator installed, you can opt to use it as the primary sign-in option for any of the supported logins. Then, when you need to sign in, an app alert will pop up on your phone asking you to approve the action. Tap to approve and that’s it, you’re in, password free.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Abu Dhabi firm wants to tow iceberg to the UAE

Is it feasible to tow an iceberg from Antarctica ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 Liam Quinn

An impending water shortage in the United Arab Emirates has called for a rather extraordinary solution.

It might sound like a ludicrous proposition, but the fact remains that an iceberg holding 20 billion gallons of fresh water would be enough to sustain more than a million people for up to five years.

Currently, water is a major problem for the country, not least because the typical Emirati uses 80% more water on a daily basis than the global average.

A large number of desalinization plants have been deployed to try and meet this demand however this is a particularly costly solution and, according to the UN, within 20 years there are likely to be 600 million children living worldwide without sufficient access to clean drinking water.

But is towing an iceberg from the Antarctic really a viable solution ?

Man Pays 200 Strangers to Act as Guests at His Wedding, Ends Up in Jail

What was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives turned into a complete nightmare for a young couple in China, after it was revealed that the groom had hired 200 random people to act as his friends and relatives at the wedding.

The groom, known only by his surname, Wang, and his fiancee, Xiaoli, were supposed to tie the knot on Sunday, April 30th, during a big wedding banquet at a hotel in Xian, China’s Shaanxi Province. Everything was going according to plan up to the point when the family of the bride noticed that half of the tables reserved for the groom’s guests laid empty. Wang kept telling them that they were on their way, but the bride and her parents really became suspicious of him after talking to the few guests that were seated at his tables and noticing that while they all said that they were Wang’s friends, they couldn’t really say how they knew him.

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Dressed for death: the women Boko Haram sent to blow themselves up - The Guardian

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Two of the women who survived Boko Haram’s attempts to have them carry out ‘suicide missions’. Photograph: Ruth Maclean for the Guardian

When Boko Haram fighters kidnapped 17-year-old Nadia and took her to their camp, their commander noticed her straight away. She was squatting with dozens of other abducted women in front of him, listening to his lecture.

When, a few minutes later, the commander ordered his men to take Nadia to his house, she asked: “Why only me?” But she went with the men and waited.

The commander, whose name she never learned, “was dirty, ugly, dark-skinned and had a beard. He had a lot of hair on his head like a madman,” Nadia remembered. He looked mean. And he wanted her as a second wife.

Three months later, Nadia woke up one morning to find her body strapped with explosives. She had been drugged the night before. The commander’s men pushed her on to a motorbike, and dropped her and two others near Gamboro, a town in Borno, the Nigerian state hit worst by the Boko Haram insurgency.

The mission they had been given: to blow themselves up in as big a crowd as they could find.