The New Yorker last week carried an astonishing article about the market for luxury rehab facilities in California. Here’s the bit that caught my eye:

According to the Treatment Research Institute, nearly half of all residential treatment centers in this country have closed since the early eighties. In the late nineties, luxury rehab centers, catering to self-paying patients, began to proliferate. Today, with a twenty-one-mile coastline and a population of roughly thirteen thousand, Malibu alone has twenty-nine licensed rehab establishments. Many are operated out of palatial estates; most are for-profit, do not take insurance, and expect their fee, sometimes as high as sixty-eight thousand dollars a month, to be paid up front.

Link.

I use Gmail when I’m on the move. I also have a 3G dongle from Three which is supposed to give me connectivity on the move. But for some reason, Gmail is unreachable via this connection. Twitter works (though slowly). In fact, everything is slow — see this ping testing the connection to Google.com.

Pinging Google via supposedly '3G' from Three.co.uk

Quentin uses a T-mobile USB modem and seems pleased with it. Maybe it’s time I tried another network. Or got a proper 3G phone that I could use as a modem.

First there was the Palm Pilot. Now comes the next development in PDAs — the Palm Pistol.

A small arms manufacturer in the US is taking deposits for a gun specially designed for elderly and disabled people, who may be able to get it on prescription.

The Palm Pistol is the world's first ergonomic firearm, according to Constitution Arms.

The single-shot 9mm weapon is grasped in the palm of the hand, with the barrel pointing out between the fingers.

Instead of pulling a trigger to fire the gun, users press their thumb on a button at the top.

"Point and shoot couldn't be easier," the New Jersey-based company claims on its website.

And it goes on to say: "It is ideal for seniors, disabled or others who may have dexterity limitations or difficulty sighting and controlling a traditional revolver or semi-automatic pistol."

The Palm Pistol has been certified as a Class I Medical Device by the US Food and Drug Administration, Constitution Arms said.

Source: Yahoo! News UK.

Thanks to Glenna for spotting it!

AMONG international outrages, depriving citizens of personalized maps seems far down on the list.

Still, that was the condition put on the introduction of Apple’s 3G iPhone in Egypt. The government demanded that Apple disable the phone’s global-positioning system, arguing that GPS is a military prerogative.

The company apparently complied, most likely taking a cue from the telecom companies that sell the phone there, said Ahmed Gabr, who runs a blog in Egypt, gadgetsarabia.com, and wrote about the iPhone’s release there. “The point is that using a GPS unit you can get accurate coordinates of any place and thus military bases and so on could be easily tagged,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

NYTimes.com.

… in 1941, Japanese warplanes attacked the home base of the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II. More than 2,300 Americans were killed.

It was also the day in 1995 when Bill Gates issued his famous email to Microsoft saying that the company had to put the Internet at the heart of everything it did — and that he wanted a browser to compete with Netscape. (And that he wanted it by yesterday.)

Memex is about to begin its journey through the DNS universe, so normal service will be interrupted for a while.