Day: January 3, 2005

Film Reviews, Music Reviews, Game Reviews, Book Reviews: “Metacritic compiles reviews from respected critics and publications for film, video/dvd, books, music and games. Our unique Metascores show the critical consensus at a glance by taking a weighted average of critic grades.”

“‘Perhaps the most saddening and most alarming is doctors who come in right after the birth of the child and say, ‘I’m sorry to tell you,’ and ‘I have bad news to tell you.’ And it is not bad news in retrospect,’ researcher Brian Skotko said.” (Yahoo! News)

Decoding Iraq War Lingo: “The history of warfare is written in acronyms that cleanse the blood from gory wounds and strip the horror from bombs. The Iraq war has spawned its very own alphabet soup of abbreviations and battlefield buzzwords intelligible only to the military and war correspondents trying to make sense of it all.” (Reuters)

TiVo Untethered and Ready to Go: “The long-awaited service feature called TiVoToGo, set to launch Monday, will give users their first taste of TiVo untethered.

No longer confined to TiVo digital video recorders in the living room or bedroom, subscribers will be able to transfer their recorded shows to PCs or laptops and take them on the road — as long as the shows are not specially tagged with copy restrictions. That’s also the case for pay-per-view or on-demand movies, and some premium paid programming.

Users also will be able to copy shows onto a DVD — soon after but not immediately at the service launch, company officials said.” (Wired News)

“A 10-year-old British girl saved 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami having warned them a giant mass of water was on its way after learning about the phenomenon weeks earlier at school.

‘I was on the beach and the water started to go funny,’ Tilly Smith told the Sun at the weekend from Phuket, Thailand.

‘There were bubbles and the tide went out all of a sudden. I recognised what was happening and had a feeling there was going to be a tsunami. I told mummy.'” (Yahoo! News)

“Agitated elephants felt the tsunami coming, and their sensitivity saved about a dozen foreign tourists from the fate of thousands killed by the giant waves.” (Reuters)

Plan to Keep Detainees in Jail for Life Criticized by Senators: “The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sunday dismissed as ‘a bad idea’ a reported U.S. government plan to keep some suspected terrorists in custody for their lifetime, even if there was not enough evidence to bring them before a judge.” (Yahoo! News)

“As the horror of the South Asian tsunami spread and people gathered online to discuss the disaster on sites known as Web logs, or blogs, those of a political bent naturally turned the discussion to their favorite topics. To some in the blogosphere, it simply had to be the government’s fault.” (New York Times )