The humble Motorola RAZR does come in for a bit of stick around these parts, what with its limited functionality and dated design. There is one thing it can do much better than the current crop of so-called ’smart’ phones, though - STOP BULLETS.
68 year old Ronald “R.J.” Richard was mowing the lawn on his property in St. Tammany, Louisiana when he felt a sharp impact o his chest. His first thought was that sopme debris had been kicked up by the mower, but on removing his RAZR phone from his overalls a .45 caliber bullet dropped into his lap.
“R.J.” (he is considering changing his nickname to “Lucky”) had been struck by a bullet fired about a quarter of a mile away - police assume someone just fired blinndly in the nearby woods - but his trusty phone had absorbed the impact. Looking at it, the thing seems barely damaged. Nice build quality there, Motorola.
See, now, if the plans to jam mobile phone signals on trains go through people will start trying to get creative and we could end up seeing a lot more of this sort of thing.
A passenger on a French TGV train somehow managed to drop his mobile phone down the toilet. Crouching down to fish it out he - and again it is not entirely clear how this happened - accidentally stuck his hand really far down. It was at this point that the automated suction mechanism kicked in, dragging his hand even further in and trapping him.
The normally high-speed train was delayed for two hours between La Rochelle and Paris while firefighters cut through the pipes. The shame-faced passenger was then carried into a waiting ambulance with the toilet still attached to his arm.
No word on the whereabouts of his phone, although he probably stopped wanting it back after the first hour or so.
Yikes. A man in Norwich got the shock of his life yesterday when he open his Vodafone bill and discovered that he apparently owed a whopping £588,198.15.
Helpfully, the Vodafone customer services line informed him that the management had gone home for the evening and he was forced to stew in his own juices overnight until Vodafone were able to sort out the mess.
Clearly, nobody could have run up over half a million in call/data charges without involving peak time calls to the moon or 24/7 streaming of IMAX movies throughout the preceeding month so it was not much of a surprise that Vodafone admitted an ‘administration error’ and cancelled the guy’s bill.
Vodafone have promised to investigate and to ensure that this kind f thing “never happens again”. I should coacoa.
In today’s sociopolitical climate, this is probably not the best idea - particularly if you live in London and travel by tube - but if you have ever wanted to own a bluetooth headset that looks like a pistol then, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can.
At craft blog Instructables, a fan of ironic suicide imagery has put together a step by step video guide to making your own bluetooth gun with the minimum of mess or fuss.
The mod requires an Airsoft pistol (basically, like paintballing, but with plastic pellets that sting a bit) an old bluetooth earpiece and some craft-type materials (glue, paint, sharp knife, etc).
Oh, and a willingness to risk being shot in the face the next time someone calls you during your commute.
There’s definitely a joke in here somewhere about standing in the iPhone queue and what it might make you want to do. It’s probably in poor taste.
I’m sure many of you have received a mobile bill and thought “Blimey, my SMS charges are astronomical!”
Little did you realise just how right you were..
A scientist at the University of Leicester has calculated that the cost of sending a text message is four times more expensive that that of transmitting the same data from the Hubble Space telescope.
As part of research conducted for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”, Dr Nigel Bannister contacted NASA who told him that it costs approximately £8.85 per megabyte (MB) to transmit data from Hubble to a receiving ground station on Earth. From there, there are further transmissions required to get the data to the right people in observatories and universities, etc. which can push the cost up to nearly £85 per MB.
A single SMS text message has a maximum size of 140 bytes (160 characters encoded at 7 bits per character) . There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte so it will take 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte.
Assuming an average cost of 5p per text, that works out at a whopping £374.49 per MB - about 4.4 times more expensive than sending the same data from space.
Which rather begs the question - how much would it cost to text your mate on the International Space Station?
