Villa Leopolda: World Most Expensive Villa Sold For €496 Million
Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov with his new villa
Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov has bought the world's most expensive villa, a former royal palace, on the French Riviera for nearly half a billion euros. Villa Leopolda, built in 1902 for Belgian king Leopold II near Cap Ferrat, not far from Nice and Monaco, was sold to the former head of Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel for 496 million euros (730 million dollars), Nice Matin newspaper reported Saturday.
Earlier owners include the late Italian industrialist and principal shareholder of Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, and Lebanese-born Swiss banker Edmond Safra, whose widow Lily Safra was now selling the property. Safra died at his Monaco home in 1999 in a fire that was deemed arson.
Forbes magazine has ranked Prokhorov's 19.5-billion-dollar fortunes sixth in Russia and 24th worldwide.
Flint & Silver: Treasure Island Prequal Tells The Story of The Two Most Famous Pirates
Who does not know Long John Silver? Who haven't read the book "Treasure Island", written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1883, or at least watched the movie or the animated series whether in Arabic, English, or Japanese? By the way, you can download the full book in PDF format by clicking here (8.42 MB).
When you read "Treasure Island", you feel like you are reading a sequel! The book is full of un-answered questions. How did Long John lose his leg? Where did he get the parrot? Who was the black girl he married? Who was the monster, demon, Captain Flint? And above all, why did they bury the treasure?
In my summer vacation to Gold Coast, Australia, early this month, I came across this book displayed in (New Releases) section of a bookshop. It was just published last month. The book is "Flint & Silver" by John Drake. It was like a dream came true to me! I bought the book and I'm currently half way through it.
John Drake, the author of "Flint & Silver", explained about the idea of pirates burying their treasure, "Think about that because buried treasure is so deeply entrenched in our culture that we never ask why pirates did it. And the truth is that they didn't. I know of no proven instance of pirates burying their treasure. This isn't surprising. Pirates lived short lives. They didn't set aside for the future. When they got money it went on girls, booze and food. You didn't stick in a hole in the ground to get 5.75% interest minus tax at standard rate. You didn't set it aside for the future because you didn't have a future. Blackbeard the most famous of all pirates lasted about fifteen months till the Navy caught him and killed him and cut his head off.".
Drake continues, "Since Robert Louis Stevenson was dead, and I was fascinated by this period of history. I decided to answer all these prequel/sequel questions, but to do it for adults. Stephenson wrote the book for his stepson Lloyd Osborne who was thirteen and wanted no women in the book. But I can't have that. I'm older than thirteen. So I brought Long John to life again, who has for years been in the shadow of Robert Newton's character: a short, dark, boozy, dirty, squinting A-harrr Jim-Lad, which is nothing like the character Stevenson created: who should be tall - that's why he's called Long John - and big and clean and blond! Flint was the other great opportunity. In Treasure Island he was long dead, but a monster who terrified everyone but Silver. So I've brought him to life, as a monster, but a beautiful one. A charismatic psychopath. Charming and clever and mad. "
I can tell you from what I've read so far is that I'm hooked to this book. I totally recommend it for all "Treasure Island" fans to read. The book is full of action and will answer so many questions left unanswered from Stevenson's greatest masterpiece.
There are some rumors that "Flint & Silver" will be made a movie to hit the big screen in 2010.
"Flint and Silver is the beginning of a series. There are plenty more to come. And I'll keep writing them if you keep buying them. ", said Drake.
Sometimes such simple ideas amaze me. This keyboard napkin is a concept design, but I think it should be passed to napkin companies at once! This is the best idea to protect your laptop keyboard from greasy fingers , soft drink spills, and cookies leftovers making its way through your keyboard buttons.
You simply stick the napkin on the surface of your laptop keyboard by pulling off the 2 plastic strips from the sides. Then after you get done typing, you wipe your hands and mouth with it and trash it .... and get another one!
This is so amazing. I wonder how much time and effort has been put into this beautiful piece of art. The picture above is for what is considered the largest city scale model in the world (click here to see more). How come Dubai didn't think of this first?
The model is located in the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, a history museum and a shrine to all things urban, located in People's Square in the heart of downtown. It is a 1:500 scale representation of the city, sprawling over 6,400 square feet -- and even then it all won't fit onto a full floor of the exhibition hall. It is surrounded by walkways, and it can be viewed from a balcony above. With the flick of a switch, artificial night falls, and its thousands of lovingly rendered buildings begin to twinkle. It is surreal, and beautiful, a bit absurd, and it seems to offer, in one comprehensive glance, a sense of the city in its massive, skyscraping, outward-spreading totality. Here, perhaps, one can absorb what it means to build some 10,000 high-rise buildings in a quarter-century. Watch the following short video to get a feel of how big the model is:
Huang Qi Min is a modelmaker, and it is his company that makes and maintains this mini-colossus. Modelmaking is a competitive sport in China, and that's how Huang got his start. But in the early 1990s, when Shanghai was released from the economic and social strictures that kept its potential in check for more than four decades of communist rule, city leaders decided they needed some way to get a handle on it. The model was an early effort to take the measure of the city. And it just keeps growing. Every few months, Huang says, he must swap out the "white" buildings, which represent projects in the planning or drawing-board stage, for finished models, rendered in color. When necessary, he will walk on the Huangpu River to get to the center of the city.
Darbb: Delivery Service From The People & By The People
Darrb is an online community where people can ship items and get better rates and faster services than conventional ways. In an auction based marketplace, members work together to offer their competitive charges for shipping items to locations they choose.
Darrb, which means "way" in Arabic, is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. it is a platform that connects people willing to send items from one location to another, with people willing to deliver these items and earn an income as a return.
The following is a brief introduction by Murshid Aljanahi, co-founder of Darrb.com:
In order to ensure quality, competitive rates and speediness, senders are able to rank the service of the deliverers (Darrbers) once the deal is done. This ranking system allows public to see how other people, that have used the service of a specific Darrber, found the quality, price and speed of the delivery.
Who might be interested?
Individuals that have free time can earn money by offering their delivery service within an area they desire.
Individuals that drive on a daily basis to another city and/or remote location and would want to earn money by picking up a delivery from his place and drop it to an agreed destination.
Delivery and logistics companies that want to increase their operational marketshare would find people willing to send items from any country in the world.
People willing to send items with a lower cost than average delivery charges.
People looking for instant and fast deliveries to a local destination.
Through Darrb, people can compare the delivery services of a huge number of service providers to select the suitable, cost effective, quality provider.
A 20-layer optical disc is now viable, following research by team of engineers at Pioneer HQ, Tokyo. Each layer of the disc can store 25GB of information to provide a mammoth 500GB of storage.
The news follows the International Symposium on Optical Memory (ISOM) and Optical Data Storage, held during July in Hawaii, where Pioneer Corporation presented its research, defining draft specifications for the 500 GB disc. The ISOM had previously outlined the industry objective of creating a 20-layer disc to be available between 2010-2012.
While Blu-ray discs (BD), offering both 25GB and 50BG, are sufficient for current demands, the need for a technology that can support far greater capacities as HD streaming in particular becomes commonplace and users build larger files of digital content.
The multi-layered method is compatible with Blu-ray devices providing a long term future for the technology and is more easily produced when compared to competing technologies such as holographic storage.
One of the technical issues addressed was the problem of ‘crosstalk’ between the separate layers of optical media. Due to the close proximity of the layers, data from one layer could interfere with that from another layer. By applying proprietary technology developed for its BD products and by stacking two different thickness of layers alternatively, interlayer crosstalk was reduced, thus further confirming the feasibility of 20-layer optical discs.
This is not my opinions, but the opinion of 207,426 voters in the well known website of The Internet Movie Database. According to IMDB's top 250 movies as voted by users, the latest Batman movie (The Dark Knight) has achieved a rating of 9.3 out of 10. This is truly phenomenal !
I've always known that the ranking system of IMDB is very popular and most of the time reflects my own opinion of different movies. Actually, a lot of people believe that IMDb's Top 250 is one of the most accurate lists ranking the greatest films in history. I usually visit the site before watching any movie to see the ranking and read the users' comments and votes. The current top 10 movies as I'm writing this blog are:
Rank
Rating
Title
Votes
1.
9.3
The Dark Knight (2008)
207,426
2.
9.2
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
357,104
3.
9.1
The Godfather (1972)
306,312
4.
9.0
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
173,872
5.
9.0
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (1966)
101,774
6.
8.9
Pulp Fiction (1994)
302,561
7.
8.8
Schindler's List (1993)
200,744
8.
8.8
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
152,234
9.
8.8
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
211,804
10.
8.8
Casablanca (1942)
129,198
I haven't watched the movie yet, but I'm planning to watch it today just to see for myself ... does the movie (The Dark Knight) really deserve to be the best movie in history?
