Hasta La Gadget!

Financial scammers are infecting ads on Google’s ad network, and people who visit Examiner.com are at risk. These infected ads look legit, but they use Flash-based redirection to install malware and steal financial information. And you don’t even have to click on them to get infected with Zbot, the banking trojan that takes financial data. You just have to visit the page and have Flash enabled.

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Motorola’s highly anticipated smartwatch was released recently though every time it has been stocked it tends to sell out. Now obviously no one knows exactly how many units Motorola has in each stock run but today is the third time that Moto 360 happens to be back in stock. The company just announced this via Twitter and urged interested customers to hurry up before it gets out of stock once again. Those wishing to purchase one can now head to Motorola’s website to throw their money at the company.

Motorola tweeted just now that its new smartwatch is back in stock on Motorola.com. The company also mentioned that quantities are limited so hurry up if you want to purchase one.

Customers can pick up a Moto 360 in silver/stone leather or in all black color. It costs $249.99 plus tax but the company will ship it for free so there’s no additional charges for that.

The original silver version is no longer available through the website since it was a limited edition but Best Buy does have that particular version in stock right now, but black is not to be found at the rerailer.

There’s a possibility that in the future a gold Moto 360 might be made available as well but for now today is your best bet to pick one up before it goes out of stock and then you have to wait for another couple of weeks.

Moto 360 Back In Stock For A Limited Time

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

You might have heard about the Samsung Galaxy Alpha by now, its a new device that the company has launched recently and its main selling point is the fact that its partially made out of metal, a material that’s not commonly found in Samsung smartphones. It was reported soon after the launch that Samsung had three more metal based devices up its sleeve and the Galaxy A5 is said to be one of them. There have already been many leaks related to these devices and now the Galaxy A5 has been seen making the customary stop at the FCC.

The FCC listing reveals that Samsung Galaxy A5 is going to have support for 4G LTE. It particularly shows support for LTE-FDD Band 5 on which US Cellular’s LTE network operates.

Rumor has it that all three devices, namely Galaxy A3, A5 and A7, will have LTE support although their specifications may differ since they’ll be meant for the low-end, mid-range and high-end segment of the market respectively.

As far as the Galaxy A5 is concerned it is rumored to have a 5-inch Super AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, 16GB internal storage, 5 megapixel front and 13 megapixel rear camera, Android 4.4.4 KitKat as well as a 2,330mAh battery.

The official announcement is expected to take place in the coming weeks. At launch the Galaxy A5 will reportedly cost between $400-$450 off contract.

Samsung Galaxy A5 Makes The FCC Stop

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — An Oklahoma man apparently uttered Arabic words during an attack in which he allegedly severed a co-worker’s head, and had “some sort of infatuation with beheadings,” but the killing appeared to have more to do with the man’s suspension from his job than his recent conversion to Islam, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Alton Nolen, 30, could face the death penalty after being charged with first-degree murder in the attack Thursday that authorities say appears to have been an act of revenge for a co-worker’s complaint that got him suspended. The FBI also is investigating the attack, given Nolen’s interest in beheadings and a recent surge in Middle East violence.

“There was some sort of infatuation with beheadings. It seemed to be related to his interest in killing someone that way,” Cleveland County Prosecutor Greg Mashburn said. “Other than that, it seemed to be related to his being suspended earlier in the day.”

Mashburn said the human resources department at the Vaughan Foods plant in Moore had suspended Nolen earlier Thursday after another co-worker, Traci Johnson, had complained she had had an altercation with Nolen “about him not liking white people.”

“It had more to do with race rather than trying to convert people,” Mashburn said. He said there was a “back and forth with Ms. Johnson and that led her to make a complaint to the HR department.”

Mashburn said that after being suspended, Nolen retrieved a knife at home and “returned to get revenge.” He had the knife in his shoe when he returned to the plant, according to a police affidavit.

Nolen walked into the plant’s administrative office in suburban Oklahoma City and came across Colleen Hufford, 54. According to the prosecutor, Nolen attacked Hufford from behind, severing her head, before turning his attention to Johnson, 43. Nolen “cut her across the throat and left side of her face,” and later told police he was attempting to behead her as well, the affidavit said. Johnson survived.

The company’s chief operating officer, Mark Vaughan, a reserve sheriff’s deputy in Oklahoma City, leveled a rifle at Nolen and fired, striking him once and stopping the attack.

Mashburn said he would “vigorously prosecute” the murder charge but that it was more appropriate to leave any questions about a possible terrorism component to federal investigators.

“It is my understanding he was using some Arabic terms during the attacks and that is one of the many reasons the FBI is involved at this point in time,” Mashburn said.

The prosecutor also said it was “highly likely” that he would seek the death penalty against Nolen, but would confer first with Hufford’s family.

Nolen’s mother and sister posted a video message on Facebook over the weekend saying they were shocked and saddened by the allegations against him.

“My son was raised up in a loving home. My son was raised up believing in God,” his mother, Joyce Nolen, said in the video. “Our hearts bleed right now because of what they’re saying Alton has done.”

A cousin, 29-year-old James Fulsom, told The Associated Press that as recently as February, Nolen did not mention his conversion in conversations.

Oklahoma prison records show Nolen was released from prison in March 2013 after serving two years of a six-year sentence on charges that included assaulting a police officer and possession of cocaine with intent to distribute.

Nolen received no misconduct reports during his incarceration at five separate facilities, Department of Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said. Nolen completed his probation in March of this year.

The archbishop of Canterbury recently admitted that he sometimes has doubts about God. Thank God! We could only wish that more religious leaders had some doubts and expressed them honestly. The archbishop’s confession caused a bit of a stir among some of the ignorant and uninformed. Some atheists hailed it as the beginning of the end. A person of faith who doubts is a contradiction? Even though the news was a bit of damp squib, the issue did point out, yet one more time, the appalling ignorance in our culture about the very nature of faith. Faith isn’t necessarily believing fifty impossible things before breakfast. It is not believing in something in spite of the evidence. Faith has to do with risk and trust in the face of deep uncertainties and amazing mysteries. It comes in many forms — admittedly, some irrational and unreasonable — a sort faith in faith; but others, are humble and tentative, inviting and deepening questions.

If you’re a faithful unbeliever and approach the claims of religion as if they were scientific facts, you will naturally point to and even rejoice in their whacky falsehoods. In this view, science and religion cannot be reconciled. So claims David Barash (an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington). He’s right, but only if religion is thought of as a bunch of “facts” to be swallowed. He writes, “But just a smidgen of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelous, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death — and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things.” (see the New York Times, Sunday, September 28, 2014). It’s an amoral process. So far so good (or bad). But in the light of this how should we vote? Where does our social and political vision come from? Or should we seek to be more efficient predators, parasites, and murderers? Religion could be helpful here but it needs to give up its claim to “scientific” knowledge and share its deep wisdom in myth, story and metaphor, as to how we are to live together. Religion has a lot to give but it also has a lot to give up — not least its greedy claim to explain things.

Novelist Grahame Greene was a great critic of religion’s greedy claims. In his novella Monsignor Quixote the priest has a dream: Christ had been saved from the Cross. There was no final agony, no stone to be rolled away. He just stepped down from the Cross to the cheering crowd. A happy ending. “There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew for certainty that Christ was the Son of God. It was only a dream, of course, only a dream but nonetheless Father Quixote has felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man… who must continue to live in a kind of Saharan desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true. He had found himself whispering, ‘God save me from such a belief.'” It’s hard for believers and unbelievers alike to understand what Greene (and what the archbishop) is getting at. We’re all — believers and atheists — in the business of trying to control reality. Certainties give us power over both data and others. Our need to domesticate the awesome mystery in which we find ourselves is manifested in the arrogant certainties, which are at war in our culture.

Science, too, has a lot to give and a lot to give up — not least its claim to be the privileged language. Alex Rosenberg recently defended “naturalism” as “the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge”. But it’s a pretty thin view of “knowledge” — knowledge as information, data, the plumbing of the universe; but no help in reasons for getting up in the morning. All we are left with is the affirmation that life is meaningless and we’d better grow up and muddle along with our own meaning. But there are languages other than science. As professor William Egginton of Johns Hopkins University points out: “Literature has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.” I would add that a lot of that literature is “religious” in impulse and science needs to leave the safety of it’s supposed objectivity to enter a conversation where come up with a view of the world that doesn’t destroy us.

When I saw Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra for the first time, I was momentarily paralyzed by the music in the context of a stage filled with blood. I was shocked that there was no stunned silence from the audience but the relief of rapturous applause. It’s understandable. The pressure to domesticate art is as intense as the desire the exile mystery and metaphor from religion and kill it with literalism — making it manageable. Religion and art degenerate into that which can be easily controlled. We see to it that the genuinely new cannot break in and upset the world. Art is precisely the subversion we need to enable us and the world to come alive in a new way. Both religion’s and art’s radiance depends on a dialectical double path manifested in three ways:

• There are two journeys: the journey of images and metaphors and the journey of their rejection;
• The way of irony in being able to discern that something can be true on one level and not on another.
• The way of reliance and yet distrust of narrative in recognizing that we need a story and the story must always be capable of revision. We cannot avoid the movie going on in our heads but woe betide us if we think it is somehow unambiguously true.

That evolutionary biology class at the University of Washington sounds terrific but it could do with a little bit of poetry, narrative and metaphor not only to spice things up but also to ground the course in human experience. What do you do after you’ve grasped Darwin’s momentous truth? Many of the students will be obliged to see their Bibles (those who still have them) in a new light by letting go of the burden of literalism and fundamentalism. That “letting go” will open the door to mystery and metaphor. Any one who reads a novel knows that it’s not “true” — not literally — but that it can be true on another level. We have no difficulty in grasping “levels of truth” — that something can be true on one level and not true on another. We all have a movie going on in our heads. As Dr. Egginton points out, “we are all active participants in the creation and support of a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality.” That’s why we need to talk to each other and, like the good archbishop, always leave plenty of room for doubt.

Alan Jones, dean emeritus of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.