Budget 2011: Impact on my weekends. (... in weekdays my employer pays for my coffee. )

Excise levy on food mixes
An excise levy of 1% will be imposed on items such as coffee and tea pre-mixes, sauces, ketchup, soups and broths, fruit pulp, fruit juice-based drinks, food mixes, ready-to-eat packaged foods and toothpowders. Since the levy is small, it will not trigger price increases.

Hospital, medical bills to rise
Medical bills, including diagnostic tests, will be 5% higher at private hospitals as the government brings these under the service tax net.

Now pay more for air travel
Passengers to pay Rs 50 more on domestic air travel and Rs 250 on foreign travel because of a 2% increase in service tax.

Branded garments to cost more
Branded garments to cost a tenth more as retailers plan to pass on the 10% excise levy on such clothes to consumers.

Food bills, hotel tariffs slither up
Eating out in restaurants serving liquor will become 3% costlier. Staying in hotels with room rents higher than Rs 1,000 will become 5% more expensive.

Excise on sanitary napkins slashed
Excise on sanitary napkins and diapers cut to 1% from 10%. Prices unlikely to come down.

PCs likely to cost more
The levy of 5% excise duty on microprocessors as well as DVD writers is likely to make PCs costlier. AMD said that instability in policy is not good for the industry. Intel says it’s still reading the fine print, but a marginal price rise may be imminent.

Sops on mobile phone parts to continue
No hike in customs duty of 5% on mobile phone parts, as was widely expected, will give local manufacturers some relief. Full exemption from special additional customs duty on handset components and accessories will help lower costs marginally.

Nokia to increase prices marginally
Phone maker Nokia is expected to pass on the 1% increase in central excise to customers, but other phone makers say it is too small a number and are not expected to do anything. Nokia phones may cost Rs 100-200 more.

Push for rural broadband, but will it work?
Rural broadband has got a big push, but earlier efforts have not clicked. The government planned to set up 2,50,000 citizen service centres in villages to drive e-governance. Many of the one lakh CSCs that were set up have shut down, raising questions about the model.

Not something the doctor ordered
All private air-conditioned hospitals with more than 25 beds will face 5% tax on their services. This will increase cost of health care in most corporate hospital chains. Health-care providers such as Apollo Hospitals, Fortis Healthcare, Manipal Healthcare, Super Religare Laboratories may have to bear the brunt of service tax or pass it on to consumers. Bottomline of these providers is likely to be impacted.

Happy weekends 2011. :D

Source: ET

Inception: peering into the science of dreams

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a dream snatcher. He's an industrial spy, who steals secrets when his victims are at their most defenceless: when they are asleep, and dreaming. But he has an even rarer ability, that of inception. He can plant an idea in someone's sleeping mind, and watch it grow and take root in reality. "The most resilient parasite is an idea," he says.
Inception is a complex sci-fi thriller that lies somewhere between a James Bond film and The Matrix. Many of the film's themes are often covered in New Scientist, so we have assembled a spoiler-free guide to the science of the movie, and all you need to know about dreams and the unconscious mind.

Is it possible to directly access someone's dreaming mind?
In the movie, the dream-snatchers use a drug called somnacin and a dream machine to upload a scenario into someone's sleeping mind. One or more of them then go to sleep themselves, hooked up to the machine, and enter the target's dream.
This fictional dream machine is called a Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous (PASIV) Device.
A device does already exist that can effectively read someone's mind. A functional MRI scanner takes snapshots of brain activity, and then the software recreates images of what the subject was looking at.
The researchers say it has the potential one day be able to record someone's dream - without the mess and danger (or the fun) of actually sharing that dream.
Using drugs like somnacin to access a sleeping mind is not possible, but there are drugs that can drastically modulate our sleep. These include modafinal, which can promote continuous wakefulness, and new classes of sleeping pills that can deliver "super sleep".


How can I control my dreams?
The easiest way to experience a lucid dream is to train yourself to ask, "Am I dreaming?" while you are asleep. Keen video gamers, probably because they focus on a single task for hours per day, are particularly good at lucid dreaming.
The dream team of Inception is highly trained at this, which may be why they are able to perform complex tasks - such as reading - which most normal lucid dreamers find difficult. Some of the characters in the movie have also militarised their dreamscapes, to protect themselves against the invasive dream snatchers.

Do dreams have to obey the laws of physics?
This is a fondly debated topic, and Inception has it both ways. Sometimes impossible things happen - in one dream Paris gets folded like a huge sheet of paper - and optical illusions become "real". The endless staircases created by M. C. Escher, for example, exist in Inception dreams thanks to a manipulation something like that occurring in 3D virtual environments.
However, the dreams follow some "real life" rules. As writer and producer Jeff Warren wrote about his own dream investigations:

Without sensory input, consciousness appears to behave in predictable ways. Informal laws can be deduced, for example, the "law of self-fulfilling expectations" (what you expect to happen will happen) the "law of narrative momentum" (linger too long in one place and the dream world begins to fray).

In Inception, the dream world "frays" when external influences from the real world intrude.

What is the function of dreams?
Freud thought that dreams expressed our repressed desires. And so they do, sometimes, but much modern research suggests that dreams help in information processing and memory storage.
Dreams occur in both rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, and non-REM sleep. REM dreams are more story-like, with emotion and aggression, and non-REM dreams often involve friendly social interactions. People with depression often experience more REM sleep than non-depressed people.


How does subjective time pass in a dream?
In Inception, dream time runs much slower than real time, and there is a scaling effect, such that if you dream within a dream, time passes even more slowly. So 5 minutes of real time equals 1 hour of dream time, a 5-minute dream inside a dream equals one week of second-level dream time, and so on.
This is perhaps the cleverest part of the movie, but though intuitively pleasing, there is little evidence for it. In fact there is some evidence that in lucid dreams, at least, the perception of time in similar to that when the dreamer is awake.
A more pressing question for researchers is what happens when our brain's time perception goes faulty. In fact, the illusion of time may be created by the brain itself, which is at least as much of a head-scratcher as the plot of Inception.

Source :-  http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/07/inception-peering-into-the-science-of-dreams.html

Love letter by a programmer...

(By a Programmer...  )
 
Sweetheart ,

I`ve seen you yesterday while surfing on the local train platform and realized that you are the only site I was browsing for. For a long time I`ve been lonely; this has been the bug in my life and you can be a real debugger for me now.
My life is an uncompiled program without you, which never produces an executable code and hence is useless.
You are not only beautiful by face but all your ActiveX controls are attractive as well.
Your smile is so delightful; it encourages me and gives me power equal to thousands of mainframes processing power.
When you looked at me last evening, I felt like all my program modules are running smoothly and giving expected results. /*which I never experienced before.*/
With this letter, I just want to convey to you that if we are linked together, I¡¯ll provide you all objects & libraries necessary for a human being to live an error free life.
Also don`t bother about the firewall which may be created by our parents as I¡¯ve strong hacking capabilities by which I`ll ultimately break their security passwords and make them agree for our marriage .
I anticipate that nobody has already logged in to your database so that my connect script will fail.
And its all but certain that if
this happened to me, my system will crash beyond recovery.
Kindly interpret this letter properly and grant me all privileges of your inbox. Error free...

Regards,
Software Pogrammer
Today This company
Tommorrow That Company
But always want ur   company!



courtesy:- Hiral N

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Who will be next Big Bull?

IN 1990, a young stock trader bet big on what the then finance minister, Madhu Dandavate, would do in the budget. His bets paid off and suddenly, Dalal Street had a new star, now referred to as the Big Bull.

Come February, every year, thousands of investors begin building up positions in the hope that one of them may end up as the next big bull. They scour papers to see what sources close to the finance ministry are saying — which sector could get a tax break, will fertiliser companies be given even more subsidies, and if a certain core sector is likely to get a sudden boost in allocation. They carefully listen to ‘market experts’ who have been sharing their wisdom with the world on television. Then, there is the ‘knowledgeable’ neighbourhood broker or a ‘smart’ friend, who made a killing on a momentum counter and is now furtively sharing ‘tips’.

The budget punters looking to make a quick killing are a motley lot. It could be Harish bhai, who has spent his life in the market. It could be Shankar, who, given the phenomenal returns he has made in the recent bull run, believes he ‘understands’ the market and the finance ministry. Or it could just be Mrs Sharma, a housewife who is just following the herd.

Unfortunately, it is rather likely, market intelligence notwithstanding, that Harish bhai, Shankar and Mrs Sharma (as also most other budget punters) will lose some of their hard-earned money. Not because they are not smart people (perhaps they are), but because a detailed analysis of the market (Sensex) reveals that betting on the budget is a bad idea.

However, die-hard punters are likely to counter by saying that this has nothing to do with betting on the budget, but merely an anomaly of the month. They may also argue that if one were to look only at the last week of February — the week before the budget — the picture will be very different.

Anticipating this argument, assuming that investors are investing on every given day of February.

So, Harish bhai could have invested on February 1, Shankar on February 2, Mrs Sharma on February 3 and likewise. These are the people who have been afflicted by the February fever. For the sake of simplicity, assume that each of these investors computes a one-month return starting from the date of his/her investment in February. This means that some investors would know how well their bet paid off in the month of March.

Analysis reveals that even if one were to consider shorter time horizons, there is no difference in this trend — the average rolling returns during the budget period are always less than the returns generated by investing in a similar manner at any other point of the year. Once again, ’06 is an exception to this trend.

Hence, it is clear that betting on the budget is a game where the die is loaded against the gamblers. Whether it is Harish bhai, Shankar, Mrs Sharma or thousands of others, all investors would do well to stick to the basics of investing, rather than trying to buy on rumour and sell on news.

source ET.