Even one racist attack is unacceptable: Aus PM

A day after news broke on the attack on two more Indians in Australia, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has told NDTV that no attack was acceptable to the government.


On Tuesday, two more attacks were reported against Indians in Melbourne . While a student from Hyderabad was mugged, an Indian taxi driver was attacked by passengers.

And in the backdrop of the continuing attacks, a new survey has said that 85 per cent Australians feel that racial discrimination is rampant in the country with one in five of them being a victim of verbal abuse.

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25 Free Download Design Programs

25 free must download design programs, the article features a range of different design programs including alternative programs for some of the most popular design programs such as Photoshop, flash and illustrator.

Image Editing

1) Paint.net

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

2) GIMP 2.6.6

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages

3) Xara Xtreme

Xara Xtreme is quite simply the best value and fastest all-in-one graphics package you’ll find. For drawings or photo work, for print or the web, it’s the perfect choice.

4) Active Pixels

Great free app which is very similar to Photoshop.

5) PaintStar

PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu.

6) Smooth Draw

The best free program which I’ve come across if your looking to test out your skills using a tablet. SmoothDraw NX is an easy yet powerful freehand drawing tool. It’s a limited yet free version of SmoothDraw. It produces the most smooth and expressive stroke through your tablet. It also smoothes mouse input for who don’t have a tablet.

7) Pencil 0.4.4b

Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

3D Modelling

Blender

This is the best 3D modelling program that I’ve come across Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

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Google Is Developing Artificial Intelligence

Co-founder Larry Page announced that Google is in the development stages of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and he claims the realization may not be far off.

Sci-Fi movies immediately come to mind and initial reactions may be curiosity-piqued-with-incredulity. However, some are very alarmed by this announcement calling into question the wisdom of such a move, in light of the moral and ethical questions and implications this advancement raises.

Yep, you read that right, Google is trying to build real AI. The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to Page it isn’t that far away either. ... true artificial intelligence not only has serious ethical and moral implications, self aware intelligence may also not be controllable, after all it thinks for itself and makes decisions based on that reasoning, as we all do.

PHP Frameworks To Consider

Using a framework is a great way to save time and effort on your next project—you’ll have a firm foundation to build upon, there will be pre-built modules to perform tedious coding tasks, and if you’re a learner, it’s a great way to learn about good coding practice. PHP’s massive popularity means that developers have a wide variety of frameworks to choose from.

Agavi: This PHP 5-based framework started off as a fork of the popular Mojavi project. While it can be used as a web site construction kit, its primary focus is on building fully-fledged applications.

CakePHP: The very well-known CakePHP is easy for coders of all skill levels to use. It’s based on the same principles that guide Ruby on Rails, and its heavy focus on rapid deployment methods make it a great choice for developers who are squeezed for time (see SitePoint’s beginner’s CakePHP tutorial to get started).

CodeIgniter: EllisLab’s CodeIgniter has won wide praise for its small footprint and speed, and has become a favorite amongst many developers. There’s extensive documentation and a large community of users to help you out.

eZ Components: OK, so we’re stretching the definition of framework here. eZ Components, as the name suggests, is a library of individual components for common tasks. If you’re familiar with the ezPublish CMS, you might have seen some of these components before!

Fuse: Fuse is based on Ruby on Rails and CakePHP, but has had many features added by the development team to make the most stable platform they could. There are frequent updates—development on version 2.0 is underway!

Horde: This mainstay of the PHP framework world grew from the Horde webmail and groupware suite. If you’re a developer who speaks a language other than English, you may be interested in the fact that the framework is designed specifically to be localization-friendly.

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UK reports its first swine flu death

It is the first swine flu

death in the United Kingdom; the victim is a 38-year-old woman who gave birth prematurely at a hospital. It is the first death reported outside the US.

As many as 1,261 cases of swine flu has been confirmed in the UK and an increasing number of sporadic cases are being reported from across the country.

AP adds:

This was also the first death from the H1N1 strain of influenza reported outside the Americas by the World Health Organisation in Geneva or the European Centers for Disease Control in Stockholm, which both keep tabs on confirmed cases of swine flu and deaths from the illness in countries around the world.

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Twin suicide blasts in Pakistan, 4 killed

LAHORE: A prominent anti-Taliban Pakistani Muslim cleric was killed on Friday in a suicide bomb attack in the city of Lahore, police said. In another blast at around the same time, a suicide car-bomber set off explosives near a mosque in the northwestern town of Nowshera, killing at least three people, police said.

The blasts came as Pakistani forces stepped up attacks on militants across the northwest after the US House of Representatives approved tripling aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years.

Security forces have made progress in more than a month of fighting against Taliban militants in the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, and in recent days have begun operations in several other parts of the region. The militants have responded with a series of bomb attacks. Moderate cleric Sarfraz Naeemi was attacked at his mosque complex just after leading Friday prayers.

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Gunman opens fire, kills guard at Holocaust museum

The Holocaust museum in Washington DC is a place where one goes to learn more about one of the most horrific chapters in human history. It is a museum built to commemorate the millions killed by the Nazis in World War II in Washington DC.


On Wednesday, its somber sanctity was shattered by the sounds of gunfire.

An 89-year-old man, now identified as James von Brunn, of Maryland entered the museum, armed with a rifle and opened fire, killing a security guard.

He was then shot and disarmed by other guards.

Brunn is believed to be an anti-Semitic World War II veteran with links to white supremacist groups.

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