TEHRAN (AFP) - An Iranian court has ordered a man to buy his wife 124,000 roses after she filed a complaint against her "stingy" husband to claim her dowry, a press report said on Monday.

"After 10 years of marriage Hengameh had decided to claim her dowry of 124,000 red roses to punish her very stingy husband," the Etemad newspaper said.

"Shortly after marriage I realised that Shahin was very cheap. He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant," said the woman, identified only by her first name Hengameh.

But Shahin told the court he could only afford five roses a day and complained that it was "her billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head."

The court has seized his apartment worth 600 million rials (64,000 dollars) until he has bought her the entire 124,000 roses. A long stemmed red rose costs 20,000 rials (about two dollars) in Tehran.

Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry or mahr, which is a gift pledged by the man at the time of marriage, at any time during married life or when getting a divorce.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins, or property as mahr and the number of gold coins (worth about 260 dollars) could vary from 14 to even hundreds or thousands.

An Iranian man can end up in jail over dowry debts and there has been a judicial debate whether it should be adjusted according to the man's financial status.

Virginia's Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003.

Jeremy Jaynes is the man who will make history. A Raleigh, North Carolina, resident who made Spamhaus' top 10 list of spammers, Jaynes was arrested in 2003 even before the CAN SPAM act was passed by Congress. Jaynes was convicted in 2005, but his lawyers appealed the conviction. This past Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld that conviction, but the vote was a narrow 4-3.

The prosecution presented evidence of over 53,000 illegal e-mails that Jaynes sent over just three days during July, 2003, but it is believed that he sent 10 million messages per day between July and August of that year. Though he is a North Carolina resident, Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the AOL servers he used for sending spam were located in Loudoun County, Virginia.

While defending Jaynes, his lawyers attempted to argue that a provision of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act violates constitutional First Amendment rights to "anonymous speech," as well as the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution. The court rejected these claims due to Jaynes' use of fake e-mail addresses, which breaks the US CAN SPAM law's condition of giving recipients a means of contacting the sender. The court also stated that his peddling of scam products and services excludes him from First Amendment rights. In effect, the court said that you can't scam people and then cry "free speech!" when hooked by the law.

While one might think that Jaynes' case should have been open and shut, Justice Elizabeth Lacy highlighted some of the reasons behind the close 4-3 verdict, along with the potential dangers of vague anti-spam legislation. In her written dissent, Lacy argued that the "unsolicited bulk electronic mail" provision of Virginia's Computer Crimes Act is "unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mail including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."

Still, the court upheld Jaynes' original 2005 sentence of three years in prison for each of the three Virginia Computer Crimes Act code violations for which he was found guilty. For those playing along at home, that's nine years in the pokey.

The lesson? Spam doesn't pay, unless you live outside the US. But that's a story for another day.

Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in its going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions.

First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising - their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.

What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience.

That change foreshadows the upcoming shift - which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.

Advertising networks are popular right now - Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.

Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively.

Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product.

Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, but lost high profile partner Digg last year to Microsoft. Others, including us, have simply sold advertising directly while continuing to work with FM. With Technorati entering the market, publishers will have yet more choices. That’s good for everyone except the ad networks competing for their business.

German artist HA Schult makes people out of household waste and glue. By the thousands, he is a one-man recycling center. "Anything can be made into art. Mankind's confines have narrowed, the freedom of art is unlimited.We live in the trash time: we produce trash and we become trash. Therefore HA Schult's 'Trash People' are images of ourselves."

Since 1996 he has installed them everywhere from the Pyramids at Giza to the top of the Great Wall of China. Until March 29th you can see them in the Piazza Del Popolo in Rome. ::HA Schult via ::Splurch

As the weeks keep flying and nothing worthy of mentioning is happening after Yahoo! turned down Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, rumors are starting to get leaked and suppositions made.
The lawsuits filed against the Sunnyvale-based company are something of lesser importance, because they are in a unsolvable situation whichever way the coin flips. Out of the seven suits, there are two accusing Yahoo! of encouraging MS to bid, and others that demand the sales as being in the shareholders’ best interest. It doesn’t matter what Yahoo! does, it will still get sued.

Google responded very quickly when Microsoft made the big announcement. In an instant, a press release was put together, deeming the bid as dangerous, and the next day, investment banker George Boutros was hired for advice. "Boutros is known in M&A circles as a briefcase slammer. […] The kind of negotiator who will do whatever it takes to make the other guy blink," Valleywag quoted Adam Lashinsky.

Two weeks’ work later, the solution presented to Google’s directors was that the Mountain View-based company should bid for just under 20 percent if Yahoo!’s stock at an inflated price. There are two theories as to why that is. The first, presented by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, is that "Google clearly wants to see the status quo continue in the search space, and would rather fight a fragmented market than a single, stronger, Microsoft/Yahoo."

The second has a lot more to do with chaos and mayhem, that would destabilize the two companies currently involved in their very own cold war right now: Microsoft shareholders are unhappy and penalized the Redmond giant severely by lowering its stock value, while Yahoo! is hit with lawsuits and has talent departing due to the vesting packages that just expired. If crazy is what Google’s after, it did a very good job. I wonder if the bid is actually made what will be to come.

The liver, the second largest organ (only the skin is larger), is like a sharp-eyed bouncer guarding the red velvet rope in front of an exclusive nightclub called Your Body: It makes sure the right elements get in and the wrong eliminated. The liver enforces its stringent standards for good health using an intricate of highly sophisticated cells designed to synthesize, transform or detoxify nutrients and other chemicals in the blood.

Linked to the digestive tract through a complex system of blood vessels, the liver takes nutrition from food in the intestines and changes it into essential nutrients such as proteins, fats and vitamins.

The liver also stores vitamins and sugars (carbohydrates) so the body can have a ready supply in times of need; and it contains and converts iron and iron-related molecules into heme, the main oxygen-transporting molecule in red blood cells. No wonder the immune system, digestive tract, kidney, brain, cardiovascular system and the regulation of sex hormones are all dependent on a healthy liver.

Understanding how the healthy liver works is essential to understanding what happens to the body when hepatitis C prevents the liver from doing its job.


Blood Circulation and Filtration

The liver has the most complicated network of arteries, veins and capillaries of any organ. In fact, a gallon of blood passes through it every 2.6 minutes.

There are two main vessels that transport the blood:

The portal vein carries all the blood in the large and small intestines to the liver--and that brings 90 percent of all the nutrition extracted from food in the intestines through the liver's processing plant.

The hepatic artery, a branch of a main heart artery called the aorta, brings oxygenated blood from the heart to the liver. Sometimes up to a quarter of all the blood in the body is circulating through the liver.

The portal vein and the hepatic artery are fed by a system of smaller blood conduits that run throughout the liver. These smaller blood conduits in the liver are called sinusoids.

The liver cells, called hepatocytes, are assembled into cordlike structures that are separated by the sinusoids. These hepatocytes and the sinusoids are contained inside lobules, tiny six-sided structures about one-fifth of an inch wide. Each lobule is dense with blood vessels; a vein runs through its center and is connected to the sinusoids, and six or seven additional blood vessels cluster around each lobule. These vessels include branches of the portal vein (that connects the liver to the digestive tract) and the hepatic artery (that connects it to the heart).

The role of all these blood vessels is to bathe the liver cells with toxins, nutrients and other chemicals; the liver cells respond appropriately, excreting bile, synthesizing, breaking down, storing or transporting each element as needed to keep the body healthy and the blood circulating.

In liver disease, scarring of the liver tissue can interfere with the circulation of the blood; this in turn can produce high blood pressure in the portal vein and interfere with the cleansing and nutrition-building functions of the liver.


Bile Production and Fat Metabolism

One to two quarts of bile--the most important digestive chemical in the body--are synthesized in the liver every day. After you eat a meal, bile made in the liver travels to the major bile ducts and is temporarily stored in the gallbladder until it is needed. When summoned to help with digestion, it travels on through the pancreas and into the intestines, where it breaks down fat molecules so the body can digest them more effectively or excrete them if they are in oversupply. This process allows the body to absorb the oil-soluble vitamins A, D, K and E.


Bile helps the body balance cholesterol--90 percent of which is synthesized in the liver, not derived through the food you eat. Blood levels of this fatty substance, essential for healthy cell membranes and production of sex hormones, can surge in hepatitis C. This happens when bile production is impeded by cirrhosis or when scarring of the liver reduces the number of active cells available to process cholesterol or makes it difficult for the cells and the blood in the sinusoids to come into contact.


Bile also helps transport the toxins that the liver neutralizes to the kidneys and intestines for excretion.

When bile flow is impaired because of a blocked bile duct (a possible result of gallstones or scar tissue), the whole body is thrown out of kilter: Vitamin synthesis may be reduced, and toxins cleared though the bile may not be excreted from the body. As a result, a person becomes lethargic or depressed, or experiences fuzzy thinking. Jaundice may set in.

The connection between the liver, bile and feeling down in the dumps has been known for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks coined the word melancholy--it literally means black bile--to describe a state of overall sadness and world weariness. Chinese medicine doctors have long diagnosed Liver Qj Stagnation when a person has similar symptoms: depression and apathy.


Blood Sugar Regulation

The liver changes glucose (sugar) into glycogen, which it stores until the body needs to regulate blood sugar levels and provide energy to the muscles and the brain. In addition, it helps balance amino acids, the building blocks of proteins that are converted into fatty acids and glucose. In Chinese medicine this is associated with the functions of the Spleen Organ System, which encompasses all pancreatic functions.


Changes in blood glucose levels can indicate liver function problems. In fulminant liver failure (that is, sudden liver shutdown) blood sugar levels drop; with cirrhosis, blood sugar levels may skyrocket as a result of increasing insulin resistance and the development of diabetes.


Toxin Removal

Many toxins such as DDT are lipid soluble; that is, they dissolve in fatty substances, not in water. The liver, using enzymes produced in the liver cells, transforms these fatty toxins circulating in the blood into water-soluble toxins so that they can enter the gastrointestinal and kidney systems and be excreted through the bladder and intestines.

The liver also breaks down natural waste by-products of cell metabolism and other naturally occurring bodily toxins such as ammonia--the by-product of muscle and amino acid metabolism--into less toxic substances (in this case, urea) that can pass through the kidney and become waste.

Bilirubin, a waste product that comes from a breakdown of heme, the central oxygen-carrying molecule in red blood cells, can also act as a toxin. If not cleared out by the liver, this yellowish liquid can produce jaundice, the most vivid symptom of hepatitis and often the first one that alerts a person to the presence of the disease, especially in acute hepatitis or late-stage chronic hepatitis.

The liver also detoxifies drugs, such as clearing aspirin from the blood, breaking down alcohol so it can pass from the system and keeping acetaminophen from being converted to toxic molecules. Excess alcohol harms the liver because it overwhelms the detoxification process, allowing poisons to remain in the liver and damage the tissue.

The liver regulates hormones; hepatitis C disrupts the liver's ability to keep estrogen levels in check. As levels rise in both women and men, complications occur. In men they may include testicular atrophy and breast development.


Liver Enzyme Synthesis

The liver is awash in enzymes, molecular agitators that are essential for the organ's important work of transforming chemicals and synthesizing nutrients. AST (aspartate aminotransferase) and ALT (alanine aminotransferase) are liver enzymes used for amino acid metabolism, a process that balances the types of amino acids available for building proteins and then transforms them into proteins. (Tests for AST and ALT enzyme levels are frequently used in diagnosing hepatitis C, despite the fact that they are only crudely indicative of what is going on in the liver: The best use of these tests is to keep tabs on changes in liver inflammation. When ALT or AST levels increase by a factor of ten or more, it can indicate a worsening of the disease.) Note: AST used to be called SGOT, and ALT used to be called SGPT; some labs still use that terminology.


Other enzymes made in the liver that are vital to maintaining overall health include alkaline phosphatase and GGT (gamma-glutamyltransferase). Alkaline phosphatase is involved in phosphorus metabolism, which also delivers energy to the body's cells. GGT is used in metabolizing another amino acid, glutamate, which affects tissue oxidation. When fatty deposits cause damage to bile ducts or blockages, these enzyme levels increase. Although the elevated levels aren't necessarily associated with symptoms, blood tests that track these levels can be used to determine the presence and degree of liver inflammation.

Samsung F700
Samsung F700 Vs Apple iPhone

When it was launched, it was termed the iPhone Killer, and after a small comparison with the iPhone - the end results were as follows. The Samsung’s F700 had more megapixels, a little bit more format support, an actual keyboard, and 3G connectivity, the iPhone has it beat on screen size/resolution, HTML Email, storage, widgets, google maps, and push.

But some may argue that it is much better, especially those who are used to the older Samsung phone models. What you will not find on the older models that makes the F700 so special is the large full control touch screen. Whilst the Samsung G600 or G800 will need a navigation key or a joystick to scroll through your phone’s menu, the F700 will only require a light tap on the screen. email. Plus, of course, the whole built-in iPod thing.

Design and Usablity

Another unique and exciting feature of the F700 is the full-sized QWERTY keyboard that slides out on the side for easier text and email composition. There is also an on-screen QWERTY keyboard, but as the touch screen phone is a new technology, Samsung thought first-timers would like to be eased in to it and provided an alternative. Like all QWERTY keyboards, you should type in text messages and emails with both hands on the Samsung F700. This should be easy to master, as it is exactly like typing on your computer keyboard, and faster than texting on a regular mobile keypad. Fortunately, it doesn’t look plastic, as the finish is ultra sleek and polished, so much so that the phone may even seem slippery.

Performance

F700 excels with crystal clear audio and consistently good reception. Likewise the battery performance is good, lasting over two days with fairly heavy usage. This will vary depending on the use of 3G and HSDPA, but you shouldn’t find yourself cursing the fact you’ve left your charger at home too often. there’s also a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus- but, here’s also no flash, but the LED photo light does improve low-light shots.

What’s Cool

1. 3G HSDPA support
2. Slide-out Qwerty keyboard
3. Large touchscreen display

What Sucks

1. Fiddly user interface
2. No Wi-Fi
3. Limited music player