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They’re cute, white, and fluffy – and they glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet light. The cats are actually clones. They’re also the first cats to be cloned with a manipulated fluorescence protein gene.

The researchers hope that the procedure could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases.

The scientists, from Gyeongsang National University in South Korea, explained that they used the skin cells of the mother cat for cloning. To modify its genes, they inserted a virus in the skin cells, which were then transplanted into the mother’s womb. Four Turkish Angora kittens were born in January, but two died during a caesarean section. The two living cats, now nearly a year old, weigh about 6-7pounds.

By demonstrating that it’s possible to clone an animal with a manipulated gene, the research could help scientists better understand human genetic diseases. For example, scientists may be able to reproduce cloned animals suffering from the same diseases as humans. Cats have about 250 of the same kinds of genetic diseases that affect humans.

The ability to clone genetically altered cats may also help to develop new stem cell treatments for humans. And, using the same technology, researchers may be able to clone endangered animals like tigers, leopards and wildcats.

[via: inventorspot.com]

Honestly, I can’t believe the degrees to which people will go in order to get recognition.   I’m sorry, but “The ability to clone genetically altered cats may also help to develop new stem cell treatments for humans” just doesn’t justify this for me. After reading the article, I felt a worry inside, not just because these poor cats are being completely used, but a general worried feeling towards cloning. Cloning of mammals is something I am very much against, I don’t feel it’s a technology which the world needs to exercise – we were put here to do what ever we do and when our time comes, it comes. If we need more humans, have sex for petes sake! If we need more of a specific species of animals, take the time and care to mate then correctly. I know I am slightly biased on this matter due to my religious beliefs, but my thoughts cannot just be side lined.

• Would you support cloning of mammals?
• Do you feel that “The ability to clone genetically altered cats may also help to develop new stem cell treatments for humans” justifies the cloning and altering of cats?

Those questions both get a big NO from my side.

Affiliate marketing and such is a tricky business and once again it’s got the better of another company, this time – AGLOCO. I remember reading about AGLOCO many moons ago and thinking to myself that it would never work, and I was right on this one. Their slogan states ‘AGLOCO own the Internet’, haha, the Internet owned AGLOCO

John Chow (www.johnchow.com) wrote an article about it today. He noticed that AGLOCO never renewed their SSL certificate, which is a dead sign for something going horribly long. He decided to email the company and find out what was happening. The response he got was as follows:

Dear John,

We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO’s operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com.

We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.

AGLOCO Development Team

And as Mr Chow says, “those MBA grads should have got some street smarts to go with their book smarts” ~ I couldn’t agree more. The online world is about experience and practise, applying educated material to the online world just won’t cut it anymore, things have moved forwards, we’re living web 2.0 after all!

Interestingly enough, the AGLOCO website (www.agloco.com) is still up and running from what I can tell, I wonder when the domain will become suspended, perhaps I should make them an offer for the domain?

As a web developer and blogger, I’ve been involved with Adsense generation for a long time and watch the system closely for anything new. We’ve seen the adverts expand in colours, shapes and sizes. Not too long ago, Google implemented the option to ‘view more’ adverts from an adsense unit. But today, I noticed something very much cooler and in my opinion far more effective – Ajax Adsense Units.

As you can see from the image above, there are two little arrows facing left and right. Once clicked upon, the adverts slide either left or right and are replaced with fresh adverts. Pretty nifty and unobtrusive if you ask me.

I found myself sitting here and wondering whether this favoured the publisher, advertiser or consumer? Honestly, I think Google has hit it spot on – it favours no more more, nor does it detract income from publishers. In my opinion, I feel it favours advertisers more as well as consumers, as consumers have a wider range of choices and advertisers get more exposure.

All in all I think Google has done a great job with their Ajax Adsense Units!

The petrol price is set to increase this coming Wednesday, 5th December, by 41-45 cents per litre. This figure is based on current price regulation guidelines as stipulated by the Department of Minerals and Energy. This is mainly based on international crude and finished product price movements coupled with prevailing Rand – US Dollar exchange rates.

It’s fairly scary to realise how much our petrol price has increased over the years. Petrol was 8c a litre in 1970, 47c a litre in 1980 and 94c a litre in 1990. The petrol price started out in 2000 at around R3,30. Thinking about this makes me realise the benefit of buying a car with a smaller engine and using the excess money to put towards extras for the car. The price of a stock Polo Trendline 1.4 is R113,000 and the price of a stock Polo Trendline 1.6 is R130,000. That’s a R17,000 price difference. For that R17,000 could can buy the 1.4 and add the following: motor plan, mags, front loader, metallic paint, sunroof and perhaps even one or two more things. After driving the car for a year, you will probably make back most of the money by saving on petrol usage. Well, that’s my thought anyway – use it, don’t use it :)

We’ve all run into an advert which claims to make you thousands every month by working from home, using their strategies/products, but how many people actually make money, other than those who are actually doing to scamming? I stumble across websites with guys lounging on beach chairs on islands claiming to have made millions, what a load of nonsense! I don’t believe it for a single second!

I performed a Google search for ‘work from home’ and was presented with over a hundred pages of results, which at an average of 10 results per page brings us close on 1000 results all about making money online. Multiply this by say 4 or 5 different search engines and you can see how many scamming websites there are on the Internet, and these are the ones which are actually indexed! How many people click into these things, read the persuasive content and end up pay for more information, only to find themselves getting no where? My guess is thousands of people!

“Earn thousands every month from home” ~ krap

“Drive your dream car” ~ krap

“Live the life you always wanted” ~ krap

Each of these websites manages to have a fantastic list of people who have made thousands through them, with pictures and references ~ how much have these people been paid to do this? Isn’t this a sort of fraud?

The part which bugs me most is that there is no way of stopping these things. Making money online with Adsense, for example, or PayPerPost is the real deal – Proper reputable companies with a basis which is worth trusting, anything else is pure scam and too many people don’t realise this.

I often feel that I would like to make a website, where each time I come across one of these scams, I would make a post about it ~ and hopefully many people would reach it and realise that it’s all nonsense. It would be a great source for those looking to make money the easy realiase that you can’t make money the easy way!

I would actually love to talk to someone who has signed up for one of these programs and actually made anything off them and more specifically made money after the first month of signing up, because if I was to do a scam like this, I would make sure those people who sign up make a killing in the first month and then from the second month onwards I would make sure that I cover all costs ten fold, and I’m sure this is exactly what happens! Imagine you sign up for a service and in the first month you make several grand, the chances are that you will tell all your friends about it, so they will sign up and then do the same, each person realising in month 2 that they have been scammed.

This is something I read on the Mail & Guardian website a few months ago about work from home scams being illegal..

Advertisements offering certain work-from-home opportunities are now illegal, said the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) on Wednesday.

The ASA welcomed the regulation, which was issued by the Department of Trade and Industry.

“The regulation makes various work-from-home ‘opportunities’ illegal. These include opportunities to ‘fill envelopes’ and ‘type labels’ — two scams against which the ASA has issued various rulings,” said the ASA in a statement.

“Consumers are reminded that if they see ads of this type, they can lodge complaints with the ASA on complaint@asasa.org.za or fax 011 781 1616.”

Take action people, when you come across one of these websites, report the people, get these silly scams offline, so people who are actually trying to do things correctly can rank better on search engines and receive more traffic!

PROGRAMS WHICH WORK: With many years of experience, there are some programs which actually do work. I’ve used these two programs to earn money online successfully:

Google Adsense
Google Adsense is a form of advertising, where you place adverts on your website, which change according to the content you write. For example, if you write about sharks, your visitors will see shark related adverts. Google Adsense pay by cheque, which means you can be anywhere in the world!
More Proof Here
TrafficSynergy – Click here to sign up
TrafficSynergy is similar to Google Adsense, except that you can choose banners to place as well as their sizes and topics. I’ve successfully made a great deal of money using TrafficSynergy!
OfferForge – Click here to sign up
OfferForge is identical to TrafficSynergy, but has a number of different revenue streams. I’ve been successful in the past using OfferForge!

As you can see from the pictures above, I’ve successfully made money with these programs!

After a sneak preview of the Afrigator Beta website at the Geek Dinner last night, we see another impressive transission into a more user friendly, web 2.0 styled website. Afrigator Alpha has been very popular and we even featured on CNN. The new website looks fantastic and I cannot wait to see how things go once it finds its home on afrigator.com

Amatomu is another feed casting website, which has literally the same concept as Afrigator, just a few different things here and there, and obviously a different design to the page. We’ve seen a couple changes on the Amatomu website, which is also currently sitting in Alpha stage.

Now, Afrigator has moved to Beta, what is Amatomu going to do to keep up the pace? I think the race is on, who’s going to dominate the users interest? As a blogger, time is limited and rather used writing decent posts than surfing these feed casting websites, so when it does come down to viewing one of these sites, which site will you visit? Afrigator or Amatomu?

Firefox 3 Beta 1 launches for testers to poke and prod at the code, which boasts 2 million lines of changes.

Web developers can now download Firefox 3 Beta 1 to test more than 30 new features in the popular open-source browser released from Mozilla Nov. 19.

With Internet browsers, security, ease of use and performance typically top users’ wish lists.

To wit, Firefox 3 employs a button in the location bar that lets users see who owns the site. This is crucial at a time when bogus sites serve as pitfalls for unsuspecting Web users.

New malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites that are known to install viruses, spyware, Trojans or other bad code. Moreover, Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.

The browser beta boasts clearer and stricter error pages when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. Extended validation SSL certificate information will be displayed in later versions.

Firefox also now automatically checks and disables older, unsecure software versions, and add-ons that are unsecure will be disabled. Also, Firefox now respects the Vista systemwide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Firefox 3 Beta 1, based on the Gecko 1.9 platform, has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes to remedy more than 11,000 issues.

The software, which rivals Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Opera’s browsers, comes at a time when users are demanding secure, reliable browsers to access blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and other user-generated Web 2.0 technologies.

Continue reading →

Duncan McLeod from the financial mail has predicted some interesting events for 2008, here they are:

• Telkom will sell its stake in Vodacom to Vodafone, freeing the mobile operator to expand aggressively in fixed-line communications. Vodacom will list in the JSE’s biggest-ever initial public offering and the share price will soar on the back of the company’s aggressive expansion plans. But group CEO Alan Knott-Craig will step down by the end of the year.
• MTN will buy Telkom’s fixed-line assets, but only after intense discussions about the extent of government’s involvement in the merged business and the impact the deal will have on consumers. Government will retain a large stake, both directly and through the Public Investment Corp, but it will not enjoy the board-level control it had over Telkom.
• After years of waiting, Sentech will finally get the funding it needs to build a wireless broadband network. But it will squander this money by yet again failing to make a meaningful impact on the market. It will return to government, a year or two later, cap in hand, begging its political masters for more.
• Bandwidth caps will be doubled as Telkom slashes international bandwidth prices in anticipation of competition from Seacom, the consortium behind a new undersea cable project. Consumers who get 3GB/month on their broadband contracts can expect that to rise to at least 6GB/month by the end of next year, with no increase in price. If anything, prices will fall at the same time that the bandwidth caps are raised.
• New entrants in pay-TV will trigger a content war with incumbent MultiChoice, operator of DStv. MultiChoice will introduce its first high-definition channels as it fights hard to defend its turf. To the delight of thousands of geeks, one of the new operators will reintroduce the Sci-Fi Channel in SA. A price war is unlikely in 2008 but looks like a distinct possibility in 2009 as the new operators fight tooth and nail for market share.
• Linux will make further modest market share gains on the desktop, but Microsoft will continue to dominate with Windows and Office through 2008. One of the highlights of the year will be an exciting redesign of Ubuntu, the Linux distribution spearheaded by Mark Shuttleworth, which will cement its place as the most popular Linux desktop.
• Sony’s Blu-ray will consign HD-DVD to the trash heap by triumphing in the battle of the next-generation high-definition disc formats. Expect a Blu-ray player for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in time for Christmas 2008.
• Apple will introduce a new version of the iPhone, sending the company’s market value soaring through $200bn. The new version will have 16GB of memory and come with a 3G HSDPA antenna and built-in satellite navigation. Apple will ink deals to sell the iPhone in more countries in Europe and will also introduce the phone in China. The Apple fans who bought the first iPhone will rush out and buy the new one the day it’s released, even if it means reassigning the old one to doorstop duty. Apple will save local fans the money by not introducing the device in SA until sometime after the soccer World Cup.

Very very interesting!