This was first brought to my attention by a friend of mine a few days ago. Apparently due to a large number of complaints to the PTA (Pakistan Telecommunication Authority) regarding rude or mean nature sms's, the PTA has decided to ban some 1600 words from SMS's. This means that if you send an sms that contains one of these words, your sms will not be delivered.
I must say that this list makes you feel how inadequate my cussing vocabulary is. Also, it makes me wonder if they just banned any word that they didn't know the meaning off. Among a few notable words on the list are:
I have upload the letter from the PTA regarding content filtering as well as the full list of English and Urdu (transliteration) words that have been banned.
Bare in mind that some how, instead of preventing spam sms's that are sent out by the tons or instead of making this a opt-in service they though a blanket ban was a better idea.
Almost makes you grateful that BBM is still pretty popular here. As a matter of fact I almost exclusively use it to forward dirty jokes.
Update: Apparently this has been deferred as mobile operators are awaiting clarification from PTA.
I have for the longest time maintained that this tablet craze makes no sense to me, it's a market segment that I simply am not a part of and see no sense in these devices personally.
However, a couple of years ago I lost my Samsung Galaxy (the original) after only having owned it for a couple of months and having recently purchased the Galaxy Tablet, I decided that I was not going to waste money on an other expensive phone (I was paying full price for these phones since I don't live anywhere carriers would subsidize these phones). So I went ahead and purchased a dumb phone with good email and web browsing capability.
Fast forward over a year and I've never felt the need for a smart phone. The dumb phone of choice for me was the blackberry curve which was a fraction of the cost of any decent high-end smart phone, it's great at email and average at web browsing especially after you install Opera web browser. This has lead me to conclude that most people really don't need smart phones (as defined today by the iPhone and high end Android phones). Instead most people would be happy with a simple phone and a small tablet for all the gaming, web browsing etc that they need to do! I understand the argument that with a smart phone you do not need to carry the tablet, but lets face it, most people have both and if you have a tablet and aren't carrying it around... you don't need a tablet.
I'll grant that I've tried very hard to resist the "instant gratification" culture or the "constant gratification" culture where people must be entertained all the time with games, music and videos. I'm not like that, I try very hard not to be like that. I'm actually okay simply sitting doing nothing on a long drive or just reading a *real* book on a short flight. This perhaps makes it easier for me to say that all you need is a dumb phone and a small tablet. Everywhere I go when I need video, games or other things the smart phones offer, I am mostly carrying a bag, meaning I can take my tablet along! Not having a smart phone is great! Mostly because I don't fiddle with the phone which really helps the battery life and I use it for what I need it for... to make calls! (sms and bbm as well but lets no get exact here). Fact is, most people will use their phones for 4 things max: Calls, SMS, MP3s, calendar and most low end android phones and symbian phones now do all this just fine. You can even throw in emails and most low end phones these days are good enough.
Yes, you can argue that if you had an expensive iPhone or Android phone you would not need the tablet, and you would be right, then why do you own one? Fact is, people own tablets and they make statements such as "I don't use my laptop any more", "I use it all the time"; yet they won't travel with their tablet and will own desktops and laptops. If your tablet stays at home, you wasted money on it, if you travel with your tablet, you don't need a phone that does all the same things on a smaller screen.
My suggestion, get a dumb phone, and a small tablet (7 - 8 inches).
I really like the Blackberry as a dumb phone because the BB Curve are cheap phones that do emails very well and you have the added benefit of a full keyboard and BBM. The 7 to 8 inch tablet is small enough that you can shove it in a tightly packed bag without worrying about breaking it and it's not too cumbersome even if you want to put it in a purse.
Finally, this is just an opinion, feel free to disagree, it's no reason to break into a blind rage! I'm also not saying that you shouldn't buy bigger tablets, get a bigger tablet if it suits your lifestyle.
Some times it’s surprising how life and Hollywood come together to give you deep insights into life. For instance, I have known that dinosaurs evolved into birds since 1993. This is significant because Archaeopteryx the first feathered dinosaur, was discovered in 1996 in the western Liaoning Province of China. Now for those amateur or professional paleontologists, in 1993 I did not know that this theory already existed since the time of Darwin and I most certainly did not have access to dinosaur fossils making this realization about something I had only seen in books even more impressive. To make matter yet more impressive, in 1993, the internet was basically non-existent by modern day standards and I was only thirteen. Getting back to the point, how does a 13 year old know that dinosaurs evolved into birds without exposure to any material that could have hinted on this issue? Simple, in 1993 the blockbuster movie Jurassic Park was released and in 1992 my younger sister adopted a pet chick which by the time Jurassic Park came had become a Rooster.
So I had a rooster, the mild mannered chick we once bought had evolved into a mean spirited rooster that was a widower and fiercely territorial. So much so that it would stalk anyone who stood in our yard. Needless to say that my sister had long abandoned this rooster as it was too vicious for most of us to handle. Later on in life, I noticed that the behavior of this rooster when it staked people was surprisingly similar to that of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. However, this story goes further back in time. When I was eight, we lived in an apartment building on the outskirts of the city. Our neighbors had a son who shared the same name as I did and he happened to have a pet chick. We mostly fed these chicks dough and uncooked rice. Thinking back, this is probably the reason most of them didn’t survive very long. One fine day, we saw the chick dash across the floor, peck at an ant and swallow it. Needless to say that for an eight year old who thought chicks were vegetarians, this was quite a shock. Perhaps the chick was sick of processed foods. Roughly 3 years later, I would see the same battle between insect and fowl played out one fine day as I was going downstairs with my family to the dinner table. Except, this time we had a full grown chicken at home and the insect in question was a cockroach. Needless to say, that day at dinner, no one touched the chicken.
All this came together in one moment of zen for me in 1993 when I was being stalked by my rooster. It was abundantly clear to me that this chicken for all the taboos that society had placed on it had the heart of something far more vicious that we had previously realized. The rooster went on to live very happily for 10 years and was a widower of three.
My case for the dinosaurs evolving into birds only grew stronger in time when I saw the footprints on an ostridge on television. I watch a lot of television; it’s almost a miracle I got time to write this book. To be fair, this particular documentary I was watching related to the discovery of some dinosaur foot prints and the paleontologist in this documentary was talking about how the footprints left behind were similar to those of an ostridge. At this point I still did not know about the theory which suggested that dinosaurs evolved into birds, as a matter of fact, this theory has only come into light for me in the last few years. However, this is a good example of how our imagination can provide us with insight to the truth even before the evidence is present to support it.
The world of animals has always been interesting to me, for one thing, why aren’t there any mammals with six legs? Six legs have worked great of insects and they have become perhaps the most successful of any species on this planet considering the great consistency with which six legs appear in the animal kingdom, surely there must be some ecological advantage to having six legs so why aren’t there any mammals with six legs? Where there ever any mammals that existed on this planet with six legs that failed so miserably that the rest of the mammals swore off the six leg strategy for survival? Also, why weren’t there any dinosaurs with six legs? This brings us to another important point, what do scientists have to say about how humans evolved? I'll discuss this when Chapter 1 continues!
