Planet 無

Un pobrecito hablador nos cuenta: «Mandriva Linux, una de las distribuciones de GNU/Linux con más solera, cambia su rumbo. Jean-Manuel Croset, CEO de Mandriva SA, ha anunciado que la responsabilidad de Mandriva Linux pasará a manos de una nueva entidad, en la que la participación de la comunidad será mucho mayor que hasta ahora. ¿Mandriva ha muerto, viva Mageia?»

by nettizen at May 20, 2012 10:38 PM

Offensive tweets put officials in a spin

Tweets offensive to Islam have prompted Pakistan’s government to block Twitter – but a strong public reaction saw the ban lifted after eight hours.…

May 20, 2012 10:15 PM

May 20, 2012 10:11 PM

Una cámara en un quiosco situado frente al insituto de Brindisi le grabó. Se le puede ver en el momento de apretar el detonador que hizo explotar las tres bombonas de gas.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 10:06 PM

Don't bank on earning the same returns.

May 20, 2012 10:00 PM

Chart 'o the day: "shared" sacrifice

by digby

Contrary to Paul Ryan's exhortation to withdraw the "hammock" that's making the parasites all lazy and dependent, it turns out that the so-called entitlements are going to the working poor with kids or the old and sick. I'm sure all of them would be thrilled to work at Bain Capital if they could, but sadly Bain doesn't seem to be many hiring janitors, retirees, children or quadriplegics at the moment.

Some conservative critics of federal social programs, including leading presidential candidates, are sounding an alarm that the United States is rapidly becoming an “entitlement society” in which social programs are undermining the work ethic and creating a large class of Americans who prefer to depend on government benefits rather than work. A new CBPP analysis of budget and Census data, however, shows that more than 90 percent of the benefit dollars that entitlement and other mandatory programs spend go to assist people who are elderly, seriously disabled, or members of working households — not to able-bodied, working-age Americans who choose not to work. This figure has changed little in the past few years.[...]

Contrary to claims that entitlements take heavily from the middle class to give to people at the bottom or shower benefits on the very wealthy, the middle 60 percent of the population receives close to 60 percent of the entitlement benefits, while the top 5 percent of the population receives about 3 percent of the benefits.

Non-Hispanic whites receive slightly more than their proportionate share of entitlement benefits. They accounted for 64 percent of the population in 2010 and received 69 percent of the entitlement benefits.

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May 20, 2012 10:00 PM

Contributor Ken Shreve takes a look at economic data and earnings reports scheduled for the coming week.

May 20, 2012 10:00 PM

Andy Baio : Paul Lamere calculates the most musical American cities, per capita - using the Echonest API and the top 50,000 artists

May 20, 2012 09:58 PM

El ataque terrorista por el que se le condenó y que costó la vida a 270 personas en 1988 aún permanece rodeado de enigmas.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 09:56 PM

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The CEO of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. Sunday acknowledged technology problems related to Facebook's listing Friday, according to a published media report.

"This was not our finest hour," said Robert Greifeld, the exchange's CEO, in an interview with reporters, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Nasdaq came under fire after trading in Facebook shares was delayed by 30 minutes on Friday morning. ...

Click to view a price quote on NDAQ.

Click to research the Financial Services industry.

May 20, 2012 09:46 PM

El Partido Progresista Serbio ha proclamado la victoria de su líder, Tomislav Nikolic, y ha vaticinado que el candidato vencerá con un 1,5% de los votos de ventaja (cifra que podría aumentar con los votos de Kosovo).  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 09:14 PM

Su hijo mayor y su cuñada, con quienes la presidenta quiere perpetuar la saga en el poder, logran discretos resultados en dos encuestas.  Leer

May 20, 2012 09:10 PM

At the dawn of the Internet era, Congress set out to avert a digital divide between rich and poor students. In a landmark bill, lawmakers required the nation's phone companies to provide bargain voice and data rates to schools and to subsidize the cost of equipment and services, with the biggest subsidies going to the schools with the most disadvantaged children.

More than a decade later, as schools struggle for funding amid widespread budget cuts, there is growing evidence that the program's crucial low-price requirement has been widely neglected by federal regulators and at least one telecom giant.

A decade after the program started, AT&T was still not training its employees about the mandatory low rates, which are supposed to be set at the lowest price offered to comparable customers. Lawsuits and other legal actions in Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York have turned up evidence that AT&T and Verizon charged local school districts much higher rates than it gave to similar customers or more than what the program allowed.

Read more | Comments

by Ars Staff at May 20, 2012 09:00 PM

With all but one company's results in, things looked good in the first quarter.

May 20, 2012 09:00 PM

Andy Baio : Endless, Nameless - Adam Cadre's new interactive fiction inspired by BBSes and old-school text adventures

May 20, 2012 08:58 PM

Casi tres siglos después de ceder el territorio al Reino Unido, España sigue dividida y un tanto perdida sobre la forma de recuperarlo.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 08:46 PM

By Marcus Wohlsen

SAN FRANCISCO -- For Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was quite a week -- from birthday, to IPO, to I DO.

A day after the historic Facebook stock offering, Zuckerberg on Saturday wed 27-year-old Priscilla Chan, his girlfriend of nearly a decade, according to a guest authorized to speak for the couple. The person spoke only on the condition of anonymity. ...

Click to view a price quote on FB.

May 20, 2012 08:40 PM

Centenares de personas se preparan para pasar la noche fuera de sus hogares tras el movimiento sísmico, y posterior réplica, en el norte de Italia.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 08:39 PM

God's chosen country

by digby

This article about Mitt and his devotion to Mormonism should make him pretty happy. In fact, I think it could succeed in making some converts to the faith. This, in particular, has to appeal to a certain subgroup of unaffiliated (or maybe just not strongly affiliated) fervent Christian Patriots:

[T]ake Mr. Romney’s frequent tributes to American exceptionalism. “I refuse to believe that America is just another place on the map with a flag,” he said in announcing his bid for the presidency last June. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney’s is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.

“He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land,” said Douglas D. Anderson, dean of the business school at Utah State University and a friend, and that leading it is “an obligation and responsibility to God.”

In fact, Mormons believe that Jesus literally came to America:

Joseph Smith Jr. said that when he was seventeen years of age an angel of God, named Moroni, appeared to him,[10] and said that a collection of ancient writings, engraved on golden plates by ancient prophets, was buried in a nearby hill in Wayne County, New York. The writings described a people whom God had led from Jerusalem to the Western Hemisphere 600 years before Jesus’ birth. According to the narrative, Moroni was the last prophet among these people and had buried the record, which God had promised to bring forth in the latter days. Smith stated that he was instructed by Moroni to meet at the hill annually each September 22 to receive further instructions and that four years after the initial visit, in 1827, he was allowed to take the plates and was directed to translate them into English...

The books from 1 Nephi to Omni are described as being from "the small plates of Nephi". This account begins in ancient Jerusalem around 600 BC. It tells the story of a man named Lehi, his family, and several others as they are led by God from Jerusalem shortly before the fall of that city to the Babylonians in 586 BC. The book describes their journey across the Arabian peninsula, and then to the promised land, the Americas, by ship.[42] These books recount the group's dealings from approximately 600 BC to about 130 BC, during which time the community grew and split into two main groups, which are called the Nephites and the Lamanites, that frequently warred with each other.

Following this section is the Words of Mormon. This small book, said to be written in AD 385 by Mormon, is a short introduction to the books of Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, 3 Nephi, and 4 Nephi. These books are described as being abridged from a large quantity of existing records called "the large plates of Nephi" that detailed the people's history from the time of Omni to Mormon's own life. The book of 3 Nephi is of particular importance within the Book of Mormon because it contains an account of a visit by Jesus from heaven to the Americas sometime after his resurrection and ascension. The text says that during this American visit, he repeated much of the same doctrine and instruction given in the Gospels of the Bible and he established an enlightened, peaceful society which endured for several generations, but which eventually broke into warring factions again.

The book of Mormon is an account of the events during Mormon's life. Mormon is said to have received the charge of taking care of the records that had been hidden, once he was old enough. The book includes an account of the wars, Mormon's leading of portions of the Nephite army, and his retrieving and caring for the records. Mormon is eventually killed in battle after having handed down the records to his son Moroni.

According to the text, Moroni then made an abridgment (called the Book of Ether) of a record from a previous people called the Jaredites. The account describes a group of families led from the Tower of Babel to the Americas, headed by a man named Jared and his brother. The Jaredite civilization is presented as existing on the American continent beginning about 2500 BC, - long before Lehi's family arrived in 600 BC - and as being much larger and more developed. The dating in the text is only an approximation.

The Book of Moroni then details the final destruction of the Nephites and the idolatrous state of the remaining society. It mentions a few spiritual insights and some important doctrinal teachings, then closes with Moroni's testimony and an invitation to pray to God for a confirmation of the truthfulness of the account.

I you truly believe that America is the Promised Land, this is definitely the religion for you.

BTW: I'm not making fun of Mormonism. Most religions have these sorts of tales. I'm just pointing out that if you are one who believes that America was specifically chosen by God to lead the world then Mormonism literally believes that too.

For me, any time someone talks about American Exceptionalism in these terms I get a little bit queasy. It's bad enough that we fetishize the founders (whose revolution was far more steeped in Enlightenment rationalism than sacred texts.) But when people talk about America as the God's Chosen Country, suddenly you can excuse anything. That's not good.


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May 20, 2012 08:10 PM

Bristol-Myers' dark ages have arrived as Plavix comes off patent.

May 20, 2012 08:00 PM

Lessons from Big Brother power live streaming app, lead to cloud CMS at Vodafone Oz

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) “never elegantly and cost-effectively” solved the problem of delivering online content to phone-wielding hordes during its long association with the Australian incarnation of Big Brother. But the company has nailed a cricket-streaming app first time, thanks to cloud services from Amazon Web Services.…

May 20, 2012 08:00 PM

Yesterday we had BangPypers meeting at ZeOmega office.  There was 10 members came for the meeting.  There was no specific agenda for the meeting, we discussed some general topics related to Python.


I demonstrated the installation of Salt in Windows XP ( http://saltstack.org/ ). Salt is a remote execution and configuration management tool.  For those who missed, here is the screencast I created today for the installation of Salt in Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeJByb-alz8 BTW, community is working on a unified installer for Windows.


If you are interested to learn more about Salt, look at the excellent documentation here:
http://salt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html


You can replace remote execution systems like Fabric & Capistrano with Salt. Also you can replace configuration management systems like Puppet, Chef & CFEngine.


I have tried Salt with RHEL,CentOS,Debian,Ubuntu,Fedora,FreeBSD,Windows 2008 Server R2
and Windows XP.  For example, if you want to install Salt in a CentOS machine, just run
these two commands:


 rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-6.noarch.rpm
 yum install salt*


Similarly for Ubuntu:


add-apt-repository ppa:saltstack/salt
apt-get update
apt-get install salt-master salt-minion


While talking about Salt, I also happened to demonstrate Jenkins server I setup for the
same project ( http://jenkins.saltstack.org/ ).  Here is the screencast I created sometimes
back for the same project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IRzPFYtyD4
This screencast walk through various code metrics available for Python like:
clonedigger, pep8, pyflakes, pylint & sloccount.

May 20, 2012 07:43 PM

En la reunión se intentará definir la organización en Afganistán a partir de 2015 y se estudiará cómo afrontar los problemas de presupuesto.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 07:34 PM

On Friday, an association of e-book publishers—including major companies such as Harper Collins, Random House, and Barnes & Noble—issued a statement suggesting an outline for a new “Lightweight DRM.” This proposed Digital Rights Management standard could increase interoperability of books on hardware like e-readers.

Don’t get excited yet—the outline was only an invitation to a conversation that the association, called the International Digital Publishing Forum, wants to have. Still, it suggests the traditionally conservative publishing industry is learning how to do business in the Internet era. Hopefully, publishing is realizing something that the music industry has known for years: DRM is dead.

Of course, publishers aren't giving up entirely on DRM yet—they just want a different kind. But the IDPF suggested version of content management doesn’t require a lot of proprietary hardware or software to decrypt e-books (like the system we have today). In DRM’s current incarnation, books bought on a Kindle won’t work on a Nook, and books purchased on a Nook won’t work on a Kobo.

Read more | Comments

by Megan Geuss at May 20, 2012 07:30 PM

El controvertido rapero brasileño atiende a ELMUNDO.es al día siguiente de recuperar la libertad tras ser detenido por desacato.  Leer

May 20, 2012 07:16 PM

El presidente español garantiza a la canciller alemana que el Estado central y las comunidades seguirán recortando el gasto público.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 07:15 PM

La hora del seísmo evitó una tragedia en Ferrara. Miles de personas celebraron el Corteo del Palio hasta la medianoche.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 07:02 PM

This Fool sees three limbs to go out on, and he's the adventurous type.

May 20, 2012 07:00 PM

María Antonia Munar se ha sentado en el banquillo sin carrocería ni pistas exteriores de la fortuna que dilapidaba.  Leer

May 20, 2012 06:56 PM

La densidad de estas plantas esenciales para el buen estado del mar podría bajar un 90% a final de siglo por el calentamiento del agua.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 06:40 PM

El Gobierno español, no obstante, mantiene abiertas "todas las hipótesis" sobre el agente destinado en la embajada en Saná.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 06:39 PM

Tras recibir acuse de recibo por parte de Zarzuela, IU lamenta que "no se responde a ninguna de las cuestiones planteadas".  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 06:37 PM

Un pobrecito hablador nos cuenta: «La legendaria compañía AT&T dispone de una interesante colección de vídeos sobre el desarrollo tecnológico pasado, presente y futuro de dicha compañía bajo la denominación AT&T Tech Channel. Sin lugar a dudas, resulta muy interesante, entre otras muchas posiblidades, iniciar la exploración de dicha colección con los vídeos históricos filmados durante el desarrollo del sistema operativo UNIX en el que aparecen algunos de sus primeros creadores como Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson y Brian Kernighan.»

by nettizen at May 20, 2012 06:27 PM

Michael Haneke completa en 'Amour' una profunda y conmovedora obra maestra sobre la vejez, la decrepitud y la dignidad.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 06:02 PM

Things would be very different for both companies if the deal had closed.

May 20, 2012 06:00 PM

Following up on the post below, make sure you watch the discussion on Chris Hayes' show this morning on the very topic at hand.

May 20, 2012 05:48 PM

We just released LFS 0.7.4. This is a yet another bugfix release of the 0.7 branch.

 

May 20, 2012 05:44 PM

We just released LFS 0.6.17. This is a yet another bugfix release of the 0.6 branch.

May 20, 2012 05:44 PM

La Dirección General publicará este lunes una circular con las pautas que se deben seguir las actuaciones de identificación de extranjeros.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 05:40 PM

Agustín Díaz Yanes aparca el cine para presentar su primera novela, 'Simpatía por el diablo'. 'Soy cansino. Me aburriría hacer una película cada año'.  Leer

May 20, 2012 05:38 PM

Radio commies and totes adorbs marrieds Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein of Citizen Radio are in Chicago stone cold marchin’ on the mansion of Ol’ Mayor Nine-Fingers hisself, and also taunting pigs. They are also taking pictures of NATO protesters, for your ‘batin. Like this guy! HELLO THIS GUY! More protester hotness after the jump!

Hey, whassup, Chicago protesters? Do you have lots of good chants? YES! Here is one! “Get those animals off those horses!” chanted the people. Also:

“2, 4, 6, 8, Walmart fuck you!”

Here are some veterans of hotness.

Mr. Jackson if you’re nasty.

And here is an awesome picture of an arrest. Look at that chick! She is BEST! And here is where we get all concern troll and disagree with most of our Occupy NATO protester pals about dudes arrested for either bomb-making equipment or “brewing” equipment: we don’t care if the cops coaxed them into it. MAYBE DON’T BOMB RAHM EMANUEL, OR ANYONE ELSE. YOU ARE NOT EMMA GOLDMAN, the end.

by Rebecca Schoenkopf at May 20, 2012 05:26 PM

Dos trabajos indagan en los 'errores' más frecuentes en el segundo tumor habitual entre varones de todo el mundo.  Leer

May 20, 2012 05:16 PM

SAN FRANCISCO—As the Oakland A’s were set to take on the Giants in the adjacent baseball stadium, few in the Polo Grounds bar seemed aware that another event was taking place—the launch party of the controversial social geo-location app, SceneTap.

The Chicago-based startup debuted in the city by the Bay Friday evening after it caused a bit of a stir locally during the week. This is despite the fact that SceneTap has operated previously in several other cities around the country largely without a hitch. Several San Francisco bars that originally agreed to partner with SceneTap said that they have pulled out, largely due to negative media attention and potential privacy concerns.

The app, using facial detection and video cameras, plots bar activity on a Google Map, with pushpins revealing data like: “Crowd: >70% full | Women: 52% | Men: 48%.”

Read more | Comments

by Cyrus Farivar at May 20, 2012 05:05 PM

cobra libre : NYT: How the Taco Gained in Translation - Gustavo Arellano, historian of Mexican American food.

May 20, 2012 04:59 PM

Andy Baio : Community's 8-bit episode on Hulu - chock full of retro references, from Mega Man to Minecraft

May 20, 2012 04:58 PM

El fundador de Facebook organizó una ceremonia de boda sorpresa para un pequeño grupo de amigos en su casa.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 04:46 PM

The private equity firm co-founded by presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “fired a lot of people” to get “prosperity for the rich,” CNBC analyst Jim Cramer said during an appearance on Meet The Press this morning. During a panel discussion on the effectiveness of an ad from President Obama’s campaign highlighting Romney’s past at Bain Capital, which bankrupted nearly a quarter of the companies in which it invested while making billions of dollars, Cramer said the firm’s past earned Romney a reputation as a “job destroyer, not a creator.” Watch it:

by Travis Waldron at May 20, 2012 04:36 PM

El hallazgo de que la enzima 5-LOX se vuelve más activa en ingravidez podría ayudar a ralentizar el envejecimiento.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 04:28 PM

The CBS Evening News  had one of the best segments ever on manmade global warming.  The piece is headlined on their website, “Assessing the risk of climate change” with this description:

The past 12 months were the hottest on record, and forecasters are predicting high temperatures across the U.S. this summer. Science and environment contributor M. Sanjayan explains the risk of climate change.

Watch it:

Kudos to CBS News for running this segment with Sanjayan, who is “the lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy.” Let’s hope CBS makes it a regular feature.

Related Post:

• As floods and extreme weather devastate the world, CBS News explains the link to global warming

by Joe Romm at May 20, 2012 04:21 PM

In today’s New York Times, former cable news anchor Campbell Brown attacks President Obama for “condescending” to women with a “paternalistic,” “fake,” and “grating” attitude. In the 10th paragraph, she discloses that her husband Dan Senor is a top advisor to Mitt Romney.

Brown launches her assault based on Obama’s commencement address at Barnard College — the women’s college at Columbia University — and suggests that though “it’s a tough economy,” he shouldn’t have encouraged the young women there that they are “tougher” and that “things will get better” in the nation’s job market.

Brown’s primary contention is that Obama is ignoring economic issues related to women to focus on things like abortion rights and affordable access to contraception. To justify her attack, Brown cites a handful of stories from personal friends and relatives, then cites polling data:

The struggling women in my life all laughed when I asked them if contraception or abortion rights would be a major factor in their decision about this election. For them, and for most other women, the economy overwhelms everything else….

Another recent Pew Research Center survey found that voters, when thinking about whom to vote for in the fall, are most concerned about the economy (86 percent) and jobs (84 percent). Near the bottom of the list were some of the hot-button social issues.

She’s right: the economy and jobs are at the top of voters’ lists of issues. But it’s not at the expense of all other issues. Indeed, the same Pew poll Brown cites shows that more than a third of voters ranked “abortion” and “birth control” — 39 and 34 percent, respectively — as “very important” issues. And, according to the report, “Birth control is significantly more important to women (40% very important) than men (27%).”

Four pages past Brown’s essay in the Times’s Sunday Review, the Times editorial board takes Republicans to task and outlines their continuing assault on women’s issues. The problem with Romney — elided by Brown — is that he shares many of these extreme views. Brown writes:

Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

A career “independent journalist,” which Brown claims in her disclosure to be, would be prompted to ask why the Romney campaign dodged a question on whether he supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a landmark 2009 law (signed by Obama) that empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination. The campaign quickly covered itself with the hedge that Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.” Republicans in Congress opposed the law when it was debated. Only two GOP senators — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who side with the President against their party on women’s issues — voted for it.

by Ali Gharib at May 20, 2012 04:20 PM

Ante el paro, algunos optan por compartir el trabajo. En Londres, un centro de estudios cifra la jornada óptima en 21 horas semanales.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 04:08 PM

Correr y esquivar, como tantos otros juegos de móvil; Ski Safari ofrece más de lo mismo. Y por eso es tan bueno.  Leer

May 20, 2012 04:06 PM

Correr y esquivar, como tantos otros juegos de móvil; Ski Safari ofrece más de lo mismo. Y por eso es tan bueno.  Leer

May 20, 2012 04:06 PM

Et tu, Cory Booker?

by digby

False equivalence of the day:

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Newark Mayor and Obama bundler Cory Booker said he was “uncomfortable” with the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s career with Bain Capital.

“It’s a distraction from the real issues,” Booker said, of both attacks on Bain and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “It’s either gonna be a small campaign about this crap, or it’s gonna be a big campaign about the issues the American public cares about.”

“I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” Booker added. “If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses — to grow businesses. And this to me, I’m very uncomfortable.”

No, attacks on Bain are not the equivalent of attacks on Jeremiah Wright and no, it is not a distraction from the campaign, it is the campaign. Or it should be.

If Romney can't be criticized for his vulture capitalism and we can't "indict" private equity then what does he think this campaign should be about? The deficit? Some abstract notions of "jobs" and "the economy" without any reference to the fact that it was the financial sector and "private equity" that caused this situation in the first place? Sounds perfect. For Wall Street.

Sadly, this is exactly the kind of concern trolling that will make the Village declare that the Democrats are hitting below the belt by criticizing Bain Capital and the Dems will fall in line. Indeed, the fact that it's Cory Booker who's saying it today indicates that it's the Democrats themselves saying "stop us before we hurt the Masters of the Universe's feelings again."


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May 20, 2012 04:03 PM

. in your regular expression

I only vaguely remember my first encounter with a parser generator which must by dated back to the late 1990s. I guess it was Spark by John Aycock, an Early parser. What puzzled me back then was the need to be explicit down to the character level.  Regular expression engines, albeit cryptic, were a revelation because one could specify the structural information one needed and match the rest using a ‘.’ which is the wildcard pattern that matches any character.

I came back to Any in the Trail parser generator lately. I was motivated by writing a reversible C preprocessor. Unlike conventional C preprocessors which are used in the compilation chain of C code, a reversible C preprocessor can used to refactor C code, while retaining the preprocessor directives and the macro calls. This is basically done by storing the #define directive along with the code to be substituted and the substitution. The substituted code and the substitution are exchanged after the refactoring step, such that it looks like no substitution happened at all.

A comprehensive C preprocessor grammar can be found on the following MSDN site. What is most interesting to us are the following two EBNF productions:

# define identifier[( identifier_opt, ... , identifier_opt )] token-string_opt

token-string :

String of tokens 

The String of tokens phrase this is Any+.

Bon appétit

Suppose one defines two macros

#define min(a,b) ((a)<(b)?(a):(b))

#define max(a,b) ((a)<(b)?(b):(a))

Obviously the defining string of the min macro can be recognized using token-string but how can we prevent that token-string eats the max macro as well? Once in motion token-string has a sound appetite and will eat the rest. The solution to this problem in case of regular expressions is to make Any non-greedy. The non-greediness can easily be expressed using the following requirement:

If S | Any is a pattern with S!=Any. If S can match a character, S will be preferred over Any.

In the production rule

R: ... Any* S ...

we can be sure that if S matches in R then Any won’t be used to match – although it would match if we leave it greedy. Same goes with

R: ... (Any* | S) ...

Non greediness in grammars

Grammars are more complicated than regular expressions and we have to take more care about our greediness rules. To illustrate some of the problems we take a look on an example

R: A B | C
A: a Any*
B: b
C: c

Any causes a follow/first conflict between A and B. Making Any non-greedy alone won’t help because a grammar rule or its corresponding NFA is always greedy! It follows a longest match policy and an NFA will be traversed as long as possible. So once the NFA of A is entered it won’t be left because of the trailing Any*.

Detecting the trailing Any in A is easy though. We solve the follow/first conflict with a trailing Any by embedding A into R. Embedding strategies are the centerpiece of Trail and they shall not be recapitulated here. Just so much: embedding A in R doesn’t destroy any information relevant for parsing. If A has been embedded Any* will be delimited by B to the right and we can safely apply R without the danger of Any consuming a token ‘b’.

Eventually we have to re-apply our embedding strategy: if A is a rule with a trailing Any and A is embedded in B and B has a trailing Any after this embedding  then B will be embedded wherever possible.

A short experiment

Here is a mini-Python grammar is used to detect Python class definitions.

file_input: (NEWLINE | stmt)* ENDMARKER
classdef: 'class' NAME ['(' Any+ ')'] ':' suite
suite: simple_stmt | NEWLINE INDENT stmt+ DEDENT
simple_stmt: Any* NEWLINE
stmt: simple_stmt | compound_stmt
compound_stmt: classdef | Any* suite

Unlike a real Python grammar it is fairly easy to build. All rules are taken from the Python 2.7 grammar but only file_input, suite and stmt remained unchanged. In all other cases we have replaced terminal/non-terminal information that isn’t needed by Any.

 

 

May 20, 2012 04:01 PM

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley this morning, host Crowley asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus about a widely-denounced proposal for a pro-Mitt Romney outside group to run millions of dollars in race-baiting attack ads highlighting controversial statement’s by President Obama’s former pastor.

Rather than denounce the proposal or the dangers of having a small group of rich outside donors and corporations free to spend as much as they want to influence elections, Priebus blamed Obama.

After lamenting that Romney and his party had to spend a day and a half dealing with the fallout from the Super PAC proposal, Priebus told Crowley:

I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.

Watch the video:

It was, of course, actually a Republican strategist with a long history of race-baiting ads who proposed these attack ads for a Super PAC led by a billionaire determined to defeat President Obama’s re-election.

And it was Mitt Romney who, back in February, made similar attacks on President Obama saying: “I don’t know what is worse, him listening to Rev. Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.” When asked this week about the comments, Romney told reporters “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” This, of course, the same Romney who repudiated the Super PAC proposal as “character assassination.”

by Josh Israel at May 20, 2012 03:47 PM

In a new op-ed in the Chicago Tribune ahead of the NATO meetings today in the Second City, Mitt Romney attacked President Obama, claiming he hasn’t showed sufficient American leadership in the Atlantic Alliance because of the administration’s cuts in military spending:

Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. President Obama’s own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called cuts of this magnitude “devastating” to our national security. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has plainly said that such a reduction means “we would not any longer be a global power.” Despite these warnings, the Obama administration has pledged to veto an attempt to replace these cuts with savings in other areas. [...]

With the United States on a path to a hollow military, we are hardly in a position to exercise leadership in persuading our allies to spend more on security. And in fact the Obama administration has failed to exercise such leadership. Quite the contrary; a multiplier effect has set in: The administration’s irresponsible defense cuts are clearing the way for our partners to do even less.

There’s one major flaw in Romney’s argument: Obama alone is not responsible for the $1 trillion in military spending reductions over the next decade. The Obama administration did usher in nearly $500 billion in cuts over the next decade, but those cuts — contrary to Romney’s suggestion — have “real buy in” from the military’s top brass, as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said. Panetta supports the cuts too, saying the U.S. will still have “the capability to confront and defeat more than one adversary at a time.”

Congress, however, is responsible for the other $500 billion in military spending cuts as a result of the bipartisan debt deal that Obama signed into law. Those reductions are set to take place because of the sequester the deal put in place should lawmakers fail to agree on how to find savings elsewhere (House Republicans want to cut much needed programs for the nation’s poorest to offset the military spending cuts).

Indeed, as the Washington Post noted, “Romney’s statement fails to note that the sequester was part of a deal negotiated by the White House and leaders of both parties, a sweeping proposal that was approved by nearly three-quarters of the House Republican conference and six in 10 Senate Republicans.”

But on the substance, Romney is also wrong to claim that the U.S. military can’t withstand $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. As CAP defense budget expert Lawrence Korb noted, “[t]his would, in real terms, allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 levels.”

by Ben Armbruster at May 20, 2012 03:40 PM

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has turned to pop culture to promote clean energy. He put up this picture and Facebook post on the new box office smash The Avengers:

I can rarely find the time to make it to the movies, but my staff is buzzing about The Avengers, which focuses on a new, limitless clean energy source called “The Tesseract.” In the film, there is evidently an intergalactic struggle to claim this new resource – one we can only win by relying on heroes like Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow, and the Incredible Hulk. Naturally, the group includes a couple scientists!

While the “Tesseract” may be fictional, the real-life global competition over clean energy is growing increasingly intense, as countries around the world sense a huge economic opportunity AND the opportunity for cleaner air, water, and a healthier planet. This is now a $260 billion global market, a sum that would impress even Tony Stark. According to the International Energy Agency, last year — for the first time — more money was invested worldwide in clean, renewable power plants than in fossil fuel power plants.

Given how big the opportunity is, and how fast it is growing, it is no surprise that 80 countries have adopted policies or incentives to capture a share of the clean energy market. The good news is that we have an advantage every bit as powerful as the Incredible Hulk: Americans’ talent for entrepreneurship and innovation is unrivalled by any other country in the world. We have world-leading scientific facilities that would make Bruce Banner green with envy, and the investments we’re making today in groundbreaking new technologies can help American businesses stay ahead of the curve.

Ultimately, however, the clean energy prize is still up for grabs and countries like China are competing aggressively. It’s not enough for us to simply invent the technologies of the future, we need to actually build and deploy them here as well. As President Obama noted recently, one step Congress should take immediately is to renew the expiring tax credits for clean energy – a step that will create jobs and help American companies compete. When it comes to clean energy, our motto should be: “Invented in America, Made in America, Sold Around the World.”

Chu is kind of the Bruce Banner of clean energy. Now if the rest of team Obama would only suit up since the world is most certainly facing the gravest imaginable danger….

Related Posts:

• Steven Chu on climate change (2/09): “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”
• Video (11/10): Steven Chu on why China’s bid for clean energy leadership should be our “Sputnik Moment”
• Steven Chu (8/11): ‘It Saddens Me’ That Political Leaders Don’t Understand Climate Science

by Joe Romm at May 20, 2012 03:23 PM

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s budget would add $10.7 trillion to the debt and reduce federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, exploding the “prairie fire of debt” Romney warned the nation about in a speech last week in Iowa.

Romney isn’t the only one decrying the debt while ignoring that his budget would make it worse. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), in an appearance on Fox News this morning, made the laughable claim that a budget that explodes the debt will simultaneously prevent a debt crisis:

RYAN: More to the point, though, the kind of budget Mitt Romney is talking about is one that prevents a debt crisis.

Watch it:

Ryan praised Romney’s 20 percent, across-the-board tax cuts that are paid for, he claims, by closing loopholes that primarily benefit the wealthy. The only problem with that, of course, is that Romney hasn’t laid out such a plan, and even if he did, it wouldn’t make up enough revenue to avoid adding trillions to the national debt.

This isn’t anything new from Ryan. Though he paints himself as a very serious person who is trying to reduce the debt, he authored the House GOP’s radical budget plan, which manages to add to the debt despite cutting spending on programs that help the poor and middle classes because, like Romney, he gives away trillions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

by Travis Waldron at May 20, 2012 03:04 PM

New user account

by Getmivemon1989 at May 20, 2012 02:45 PM

Poverty at a glance

by David Atkins

Slate has become such a hub for conventional wisdom disguised as faux contrarianism that it often veers into self-parody. Hence, it has turned from a regular stop on my daily readings to an also-ran if I feel I've exhausted everything else worthwhile.

Still, the site does manage to produce some great content now and again, and this interactive map showing county-by-county poverty rates is one of them. As they say:

It’s hardly news that the Great Recession pushed millions of Americans into poverty. In 2010, “poverty” meant having an income of less than $22,113 for a family of four; 15.1 percent of Americans were below that line. As this map shows, some areas of the country fared worse than others between 2007 and 2010. While some counties saw their poverty rates increase only slightly, and some even saw them drop, the number of people under the poverty line in Oregon’s Malheur County doubled to nearly two-fifths of its population. And those “bright spots” that appear as dark blue? Look closer—a full 6-point improvement in South Dakota’s Ziebach County still left more than one-half its residents below the poverty line. And even the poverty rate itself understates the privation in the country.

Click through to the map to see the devastating toll the recession has taken on communities all across America.

Keep in mind that this recession was created by the greed of the Wall Street elites, and then contrast the poverty figures on the map with the income inequality figures here.

It's almost enough to make one wish for a 1789-style revolution, if it weren't for the indiscriminate blood in the streets and the minor problem of the autocracy that usually follows in the wake of such things. Still, there comes a point at which the inequality and injustice gets so bad that the instinct to right the scales becomes strong enough to overwhelm our reason. Perhaps the wealthy believe they'll be able to take a jet to Dubai when that time comes. But human history suggests that most will wait until it's too late, being far too cocky and comfortable at home.

If and when that time comes, they'll wish they hadn't tried to extract every last farthing for their own enrichment, or so thin-skinned at even muted criticism of their wanton greed. But it will have been too late.


.

May 20, 2012 02:30 PM

by Elisa Wood, via Renewable Energy World

Why do some states avoid creating policies that encourage consumers and businesses to save energy? What’s the psychology of the laggards?

A new report by the American Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy sheds some insight as it examines the states that consistently fall behind in the organization’s annual energy efficiency ranking.

The bottom states are: Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The good news is that even these laggards are beginning to adopt policies to save energy, according to the report, “Opportunity Knocks: Examining Low-Ranking States in the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard.”

But they still have a lot of catching up to do. And why did they fall behind in the first place?

The report authors, who interviewed 55 stakeholders, found one reason is a general lack of awareness about energy efficiency’s benefits. Another is an aversion to government mandates. But one of the most fascinating barriers is a misperception about energy costs.

Industry folklore says that consumers in states with low electric rates have no motivation to save energy. This folklore discourages policymakers from putting time and money into energy efficiency programs. In truth, these states have good economic reasons to  encourage consumers to insulate, install better lighting, and undertake other energy savings measures.  It turns out that even though electric rates are low in these states, consumers are paying high monthly bills.

This may sound counterintuitive. But consider these numbers. In Alabama electric utilities charge 10.67 cents/kWh and households pay an average $147.69/month for electricity. Similarly, in South Carolina rates are 10.5 cents/kWh and monthly bills are $137.59/month. Compare Alabama and South Carolina to Massachusetts and California, two states with aggressive energy efficiency efforts. Massachusetts’ electric rates are high, averaging $14.59 cents/kWh, but monthly bills are low, only $97.34. California, too, has high rates of 14.75 cents/kWh and low monthly bills of $82.85.

So electric rates are higher in Massachusetts and California, yet households in those two states pay less per month for power than households in Alabama and South Carolina. This is because they consume less power. Households in the efficient states have an edge; they need less electricity each month to secure the same level of comfort and service in their homes as those in Alabama and South Carolina. So there should be plenty of good motivation for households in the low-rate states to pursue efficiency measures.

Another point of confusion involves the cost to society of investing in energy efficiency.  Because it’s generally categorized with other ‘green’ initiatives, energy efficiency is perceived as boutique and expensive.  To the contrary, it is cheaper to avoid energy use than to make new electricity, according to ACEEE.  Energy efficiency measures cost an average 2.5 cents/kWh while building a new power plant cost 6 to 15 cents/kWh. Because of this cost differential several states now mandate that utilities institute cost-effective energy efficiency before building new generation.

These are arguments, unfortunately, that might get lost in the din of an election year, one in which energy is shaping up to be a major issue. However, as is often the case, the states are leading the way and not relying on federal policy. Even the laggard states are picking up their pace when it comes to energy efficiency, as the ACEEE report describes. More here.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work appears in many top industry publications. See her articles at RealEnergyWriters.com. This piece was originally published at Renewable Energy World and was reprinted with permission.

by Climate Guest Blogger at May 20, 2012 02:16 PM

La popular red social quiere reforzar con esta nueva adquisición su posición en el mundo del móvil y del comercio electrónico.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 01:44 PM

El ministro de Interior les pide que no se dejen engañar y reitera que los procesos de reinserción serán "individualizados".  Leer

May 20, 2012 12:52 PM

by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The housing price recovery has begun, says a new report from The Demand Institute, a think tank recently launched by Nielson and The Conference Board to track consumer demand.  Among the findings that are promising for more sustainable development patterns, the strongest segment of the market “comprises populous urban or semi-urban communities well served by local amenities.”

The authors of the report, The Shifting Nature of US Housing Demand, call this group of properties the “resilient walkables” and forecast a home price rise of three percent by 2013, and up to five percent per year between 2014 and 2017.

The analysis concludes that the weakest segment of the market, by contrast, are in outer and smaller suburbs or outlying areas that “are sparsely populated, and have low walkability.”  Though prices for this segment are “relatively cheap,” the authors contend that these “weighed down” properties will not rise in value enough to reach the national average even by 2017.

In other words, if you’re a real estate investor, put your money on smart growth and avoid sprawl.  To those in the field, this simply confirms trends that have been documented for years.  Alex Dodd summarized the report’s contrast between these two segments on Smart Growth America’s blog earlier this week.

A closer read of the new report, however, contains a lot of nuances, mostly but not entirely consistent with what other forecasters have been saying with regard to growing demand for smart growth.  From the new report:

• Nationally, the recovery will accelerate between 2012 and 2013, and again between 2015 and 2017.
• The recovery will be led by increasing demand for rental homes, especially from younger people and immigrants.  This, too, is consistent with my last analysis.  The national share of occupied rental homes as a portion of the total has risen from 31 percent in 2005 to 35 percent in 2012, and home ownership has declined sharply among persons under 35.  “The only segment of the home building sector now showing clear signs of recovery is multifamily housing,” driven by developers seeking to rent.
• But the dominance in rentals may be temporary.  Conversion of for-sale homes now in oversupply to rentals will clear the excess, the authors say, after which home ownership will rise and return to historical levels.
• The average size of the American home will continue to shrink.  By 2015, average new home size should be back to where it was in the mid-1990s.
• The extent to which walkability helps the market may depend on where you are.  In addition to the strong “resilient walkable” category and the weak “weighed down” category, the report identifies two other segments:  “slow but steady” homes in areas with average walkability and employment rates; and a “damaged but hopeful” segment, where neighborhoods are highly walkable but suffer from a weak regional economy.  Both will see price recovery, though not as quickly and strongly as the resilient walkables; the slow but steady group will see it sooner than the damaged but hopeful group.
• In a prediction I find particularly troubling, “neighborhoods will be increasingly segregated economically, resulting in polarization.”  The authors observe that the portion of Americans living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined considerably in recent decades, while the portions living in both affluent and poor neighborhoods has increased.  “Housing stock within neighborhoods will become more homogenous.”
• While the increased demand for urban and walkable, transit-served neighborhoods is clear – the authors note the positive correlation between Walk Scores and prices, “many Americans – particularly those planning to purchase – will move even farther from the city to suburbs where housing is more affordable.”
• There will be some ancillary effects of the increased demand for urban, smaller, and rental properties.  Industries that will do well include home remodeling, carsharing, and portable appliances.  Homes with less space for storage but more accessibility to shops may also lead consumers to more frequent purchases of smaller sizes of packaged goods.

So, particularly for those of us who prefer a future of more mixed-income neighborhoods with a variety of housing types, we may want to pay attention to policy shifts that can help us get there, since at least this forecast suggests that the market alone will not do it.  It also suggests that maintaining a supply of affordable units in high-demand walkable neighborhoods may be critical to dampening a potential rebound market for sprawl.

Still, the central finding is one that is heartening after decades of both policy and market forces wreaking damage on central cities while paving over cornfields and forests to build mediocre development:

“Although demand for new and existing homes will rise, consumer demographics as well as altered preferences will change the nature of that demand . . . demand will be high in areas well served with amenities that are within walking distance and that have a sense of community.  Sprawling, featureless suburbs will be less attractive.”

The more cities and inner suburbs strengthen, the more the environment will benefit.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment.  For more posts, see his blog’s home page. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

by Climate Guest Blogger at May 20, 2012 12:49 PM

May 20, 2012 12:43 PM

LuminanceHDR is an excellent free software project for creating high dynamic range photographs from a collection of exposure-bracketed shots of the same scene — first it aligns your photographs using tools from the Hugin project, and then lets you choose between HDR tone-mapping algorithms to create the final image with. Here are some of my photos from the last year processed with LuminanceHDR's implementation of the Mantiuk '06 algorithm, with parameters of contrast=1.0 and saturation=1.2, all available under CC-BY-SA 3.0. (Since the thumbnails below are small, you might prefer to use this Flickr slideshow to see them up close.)

May 20, 2012 12:40 PM

Vuelve el policía más atormentado de la historia de los videojuegos con su explosiva mezcla de violencia, alcohol y analgésicos.  Leer

May 20, 2012 12:29 PM

La Iglesia católica tiene unos 100.000 inmuebles en España. Si se le cobrase el IBI, tendría que abonar unos cinco millones de euros.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 11:39 AM

May 20, 2012 11:27 AM

La compañía estadounidense rechazó la petición del Gobierno de poner fin a una discusión sobre el profeta considerada insultante.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 11:07 AM

"Dramáticos", "difíciles", así califican los presupuestos para la I+D+i algunos investigadores. Pierden un 25% para 2012.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 10:21 AM

Birdhead 曰く、

東京商工リサーチが同社の企業データベースから抽出した全国261万社の商号データを分析・集計したところ、2012年4月時点で最も多い商号は「アシスト」で609社だったそうです(東京商工リサーチの記事、 Business Media 誠の記事)。

2位以下は「ライズ(515社)」「アドバンス(478社)」「トラスト(433社)」「サンライズ(427社)」「フロンティア(422社)」と続きます。前回2008年の集計では上位10位以内に漢字の商号が3社入っていましたが、今回は上位13位までカタカナ商号が占めています。漢字の商号は14位の「鈴木工務店(291社、前回7位)」、15位の「佐藤工務店(288社、前回4位)」、17位の「田中工務店(283社、前回6位)など。

特定の会社を連想してしまいそうな名前も並んでいますが、重複による弊害が出てくるのではないかと不安にも感じます。同じ社名が重複して混乱した経験のある方はいますか。個人的には「ネクスト」社がどんな商品／サービスを扱っているのかが気になります。

すべて読む | idleセクション | ビジネス | idle

関連ストーリー：
苦情の発覚を避けるための「検索しにくい社名」 2012年03月06日

by headless at May 20, 2012 09:58 AM

El fundador de Facebook organizó una ceremonia de boda sorpresa para un pequeño grupo de amigos en su casa.  Leer

May 20, 2012 09:24 AM

Proliferan las iniciativas 'online' que permiten aprender gratis y al ritmo de cada alumno. Proyectos que aspiran a revolucionar la enseñanza.  Leer. Escuchar

May 20, 2012 08:31 AM

In this post we'll explore some effective presentations techniques using Samsung Galaxy S2 accessories. Use the Droid@Screen (See this blog post) program to display the mobile phone screen on my computer during my presentations. This program works by taking a continues series of screenshots of the phone screen. There are some problems with this design, there is noticeable delay during application interaction and the video performance is not great on my Lenovo X120e Ubuntu computer.

You can not demonstrate audio and video capabilities of the mobile phone using such software. Planning to give a talk about using Firefox Mobile with Android 4 screen-reader and existing solutions doesn't work for me.

Samsung Galaxy S2 HDTV Adapter

This adapter allow you to plug in your phone directly into HDMI large displays and digital projectors. The mobile phone AC charger powers the adapter and no additional audio cable is needed. The Samsung HDMI adapters are available for Samsung Galaxy phones and tablet models.

This works really great if you are planning to setup large screen display in a exhibition booth. Connect the phone to large screen display with HDMI cable and play your video demo in a loop.

Samsung Galaxy S2 Power Pack

The Samsung Power Pack comes handy when phone runs out of battery in the middle of the presentation. It does extend the battery life of the phone during the presentation or an extending application testing session.

Few caveats using these accessories. The HDMI adapter will not work when the phone is attached to the power pack .

This power pack has some issue with power sensing, sometimes it starts and stops charging with annoying beeps every 10 seconds. And you need to press locking mechanism tight to get the phone to charge. Hope someone at Samsung fixes this problem.

May 20, 2012 08:30 AM

本家/.記事「Ask Slashdot: Wrist Watch For the Tech Minded」より

現在はスマートフォンがあればどんな情報もすぐに知ることができる。しかし、腕時計を見る習慣も懐かしく感じる。そこで腕時計を買おうと探しているのだが、なかなか気に入ったものが見つからない。さまざまな機能を搭載した腕時計も出回っているものの、小さな腕時計に複雑な情報が表示できるわけでもない。予算の問題もあるが、時計としての品質を重視したいところだ。ただし、高級品がほしいわけではなく、ガジェット感覚で腕時計を使いたいと思う。ハイテクマニアが持って楽しいシンプルで洒落た腕時計はないだろうか。また、皆さんがお使いの腕時計はどのようなものかもお教え願いたい。

すべて読む | Slashdotに聞けセクション | テクノロジー | idle | Slashdotに聞け！

関連ストーリー：
セイコー、GPS内蔵のソーラー腕時計を発表 2012年03月08日
米軍曰く「カシオのデジタル腕時計『F91W』を持っている人はテロリストだ」 2011年05月02日
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古代の墓から「スイス製腕時計(の模造品)」が出土？ 2008年12月17日
シチズンの電波腕時計で不具合 2008年02月21日
放射線を検出する腕時計 2007年12月12日
iPodのリモコンになる腕時計 2007年08月03日
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Palm OS搭載の腕時計、Fossilから発売 2005年01月07日
世界最初のクオーツ腕時計、IEEEマイルストーン賞受賞 2004年11月20日
FeliCa内蔵の腕時計 2004年06月10日
ダイアル式腕時計「ジホッチ」 2004年03月28日
SPOT腕時計はいかが？ 2003年11月21日
カギになる腕時計 2003年01月28日
腕時計使ってますか？ 2002年08月16日
あのLinux腕時計、とうとう発売？ 2001年10月11日

by headless at May 20, 2012 08:21 AM

クリエイターの求人数・転職支援実績NO.1クラス。求人情報毎日更新中

May 20, 2012 08:21 AM

Today I discovered one of my friends had returned to blogging. Seized with happiness, I went to leave a “welcome back” comment.

Unfortunately, in the two-plus years since I had last left a comment on her blog, WordPress.com had completely redone comment authorization. Even though the text reads

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

(emphasis added) and I filled in my details rather than clicking on a service icon, WordPress.com decided that, because said email address was also associated with my Gravatar or WordPress.com accounts (both, in this case¹), I would have to sign in to WordPress.com in order to leave a comment.

That’s not the end of the world (although way back when, I had carefully crafted my cookies exceptions list to ensure I was remembered on her blog but not anywhere else in the WordPress universe—there’s nothing more frightening than showing up on a site you’ve never visited before and finding that you’re logged-in in the comments field—and generally free from being tracked by WordPress.com in my travels across the web), if that were where it ended. I would have logged in, had my comment posted, logged out, and gone about the rest of my evening, and you’d never be reading this post.

However, what happened is, without any notification whatsoever, WordPress.com replaced the details I had entered (remember, I entered my name, URL and email address instead of clicking on a service icon) with a reference to my WordPress.com account. So instead of “Smokey” from http://www.ardisson.org/ leaving a comment, “sardisson” with no URL left a comment. Even after I visited my never-used WordPress.com profile and entered http://www.ardisson.org/ as my “Web Address” (“Shown publicly when you comment on blogs and in your Gravatar profile.”), my comment still has no URL. I guess because my blog isn’t actually at WordPress.com, I can’t have a Web Address associated with my comments on WordPress.com sites. As for my name, I can also change my “Public Display Name”, but, once again, doing so didn’t alter my comment. (I can also change my WordPress.com username, which might produce the desired effect—though based on the prior two changes it seems unlikely—but I don’t want to jump through the hoops required to do that, and, besides, I like my username just fine.)

On the one hand, I can understand WordPress.com’s desire to force all commenters to use an account from one of their blessed services (even if I don’t agree with the idea), but in that case, why even allow for the appearance of commenting with any name/URL/email? I can also see an argument for forcing anyone who is trying to comment using a known-to-the-WordPress.com-universe email address to log in, so all comments can be associated with the user profile and aggregated (though, in my opinion, that argument is not one that carries much weight).

But if you’re going to force this correlation on visitors/users,

1. Make it clear the association is going to happen, and don’t offer alternative identification UI that leads users to believe they can still comment using the traditional name/URL/email details, and
2. Realize that users—and here by users I mean people, human beings, flesh-and-blood, your mom, your brother, your best friend from college, real people you know and interact with in person on a daily basis, not some abstract construct called “users”—are going to want to identify themselves differently in different contexts,² so you need let them. Not just let them, but facilitate this choice.

After all, even Yahoo! allows you to have separate “identities” associated with the same account and has allowed you to subscribe to different Yahoo! Groups using different identities for so long I’ve forgotten when they introduced that feature. And, er, I believe Gravatar.com supports exactly that sort of thing, different gravatars for different email addresses (except, I guess, if you want to comment on WordPress.com?). Why can’t WordPress.com comments?

Please, just let me comment on my friend’s blog as “Smokey” from http://www.ardisson.org/ using the email address I customarily use on the internet, and let me choose to comment elsewhere on WordPress.com blogs as “Smokey Ardisson” or “sardisson” or whatever facet of my identity is most appropriate for the context in which I am commenting.

        

¹ Even if I hadn’t used the same email address on both services, once Auttomatic acquired Gravatar and linked it with WordPress.com, practically speaking for everyone the two accounts are one and the same. ↩

² :cough: Google Buzz :cough: Google Plus :cough: ↩

by Smokey at May 20, 2012 07:29 AM

masakun 曰く、

東海道新幹線のN700系車内で提供されているWi-Fiサービスで、各サービス事業者は5月31日の始発から一部の通信について帯域制限を実施する(ケータイWatchの記事、 ITmediaの記事、 インターネットコムの記事)。

N700系車内のWi-Fiサービスは下り2Mbps、上り1Mbps。この帯域を利用者全員でシェアするが、スマートフォンなどの急激な普及により利用者が増加したため、通信速度が低下して使いにくくなっていたという。帯域制限は動画視聴やファイルダウンロードなどが対象で、制限時には通信速度が低下するとのこと。Webブラウズや電子メールの送受信についてはこれまで通り使用できる。

すべて読む | ITセクション | モバイル | インターネット | 携帯通信 | 交通

関連ストーリー：
山手線車内にWi-Fi試験導入 2011年09月07日
日本通信、FOMA網＋公衆無線LANを時間単位課金で利用できるサービスを発表 2009年03月11日
東京〜大阪間の夜行バスにて、無線LANサービスを試験的に開始 2008年12月28日
リムジンバスで無線LAN接続サービス、トライアル開始 2008年12月15日
都営地下鉄全駅で公衆無線LANの設置を完了 2007年06月28日
東海道新幹線の無線LANサービスは2009年春より 2006年06月29日
東海道・山陽新幹線にモバイラにやさしい新型車両N700系導入へ 2006年04月03日
つくばエクスプレス開業，無線 LAN実験運用の参加者を募集 2005年08月24日
つくばエクスプレスは列車内で無線LANサービス 2005年07月14日
東京メトロ全駅に無線LANサービスを 2004年05月14日
JR各社の公衆無線LAN実験が終了 2004年03月15日
ネットレ・サービス、出発進行 2003年07月15日
特急成田エクスプレスで無線LAN 2002年05月24日
MISとJR東日本が無線LANでモメている 2002年04月12日
通勤電車で無線LAN 2002年02月12日

by masakun (posted by headless) at May 20, 2012 06:28 AM

I can't find it on Oracle's website any more, but thanks to Internet Archive, we can find Sun Microsystems writing about software patents in 2006 and explaining its position. This was back when the European Union was for a while considering adopting software patents. You will not believe what Sun's position was. It's definitely relevant to the Oracle v. Google litigation.

Sun's position paper was titled, "Software Patents: A European Union (EU) Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions must not Jeopardize Interoperability." The title says it all, but I'm going to show the entire statement to you in all its glory, so Oracle can't pretend, as it tried unsuccessfully to do with the Jonathan Schwartz corporate blog, that it wasn't an official company statement. Sun strongly urged that Europe, if it adopted the Directive, "allow for the creation of products which can interoperate with the protected products to safeguard competition in the sector and to provide greater choice and lower costs for consumers."

Imagine that. Sun said publicly that interoperability was more important than IP rights, even patents, because it led to competition and hence greater choice and lower costs for consumers.

May 20, 2012 06:20 AM

eggy 曰く、

米国立がん研究所などの研究によれば、コーヒーを飲む高齢者は飲まない高齢者に比べて死亡リスクが低下するとのこと。研究結果は5月17日付の医学誌 The New England Journal of Medicineに掲載された(The New England Journal of Medicineの論文プレビュー、 米国立衛生研究所のニュースリリース、 本家/.)。

調査は1995年～1996年のNIH-AARP Diet and Health Studyのアンケート結果に基づいて実施された。対象者は50歳から71歳の米国人男女約40万人。2008年12月31日まで追跡調査を行ったところ、コーヒーを1日3杯以上飲むと答えた人は飲まない人と比べて死亡リスクが約10%低かったという。死亡リスクの差は心疾患、呼吸器疾患、脳卒中、怪我、事故、糖尿病、感染症にみられた。女性の場合、がんによる死亡リスクとコーヒー飲用との関連はほとんどみられなかったが、男性では特に多くコーヒーを飲むと答えた人については死亡リスクがわずかに上昇する結果になったとのこと。

コーヒーには健康に影響する可能性のある成分が1,000種類以上含まれており、どの成分が死亡リスクを低下させるのかは明らかになっていない。最も研究の進んでいるのはカフェインだが、今回の研究ではカフェインの有無による違いはなかったという。なお、コーヒー飲用に関するアンケートは調査開始時点で1回のみ行われたもので、その後の変化は追跡されていない。また、研究者らはコーヒーの抽出方法による成分の変化も死亡リスクに影響を与える可能性があると考えているが、アンケート結果では抽出方法まではわからないとのことだ。

すべて読む | サイエンスセクション | 統計 | サイエンス | 医療 | アメリカ合衆国

関連ストーリー：
「退屈で死にそう」な人は実際に死亡率が高い？ 2010年02月10日
テレビを毎日長時間見ている人は心臓疾患のリスクが高いという調査結果 2010年01月18日
その症状、カフェインの離脱症状？ 2009年04月09日
コーヒー毎日1～2杯で子宮体がんの発症率4割減 2008年09月06日
肉や魚を食べることで、心臓疾患などのリスクは減少する 2008年07月22日
ビタミンD欠乏と死亡リスクの高さに関連性あり 2008年06月27日
コーヒーの飲みすぎは体に悪くない 2008年06月18日
猫を飼うと心臓発作のリスクが低減される？ 2008年03月11日
太っているほうが死亡率が低い? 2007年11月11日
コーヒーの飲み過ぎで病院に搬送 2007年08月20日
コーヒーは健康飲料? 2005年08月30日
カフェインを含まないコーヒーの木、見付かる 2004年06月26日

by headless at May 20, 2012 04:22 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

5月21日朝、日本全国で部分日食を見ることができる。食が最大となる前後には、九州地方南部や四国地方南部、近畿地方南部、中部地方南部、関東地方などの広い範囲で金環日食となる(国立天文台特設サイト、 アストロアーツ特設サイト、 毎日jpの記事、 ナショナルジオグラフィックニュースの記事)。

金環日食は九州南部で7時20分ごろに始まる。その後、高知で7時25分、静岡で7時29分、東京で7時31分に始まり、それぞれ金環日食が数分間続く。金環日食にならない地域でも、太陽が大きく欠けた様子を観測できる。日本で金環日食が観測されるのは1987年の沖縄以来。東京では173年ぶり、大阪では282年ぶり、名古屋では932年ぶりとのこと。今回のように日本の広い範囲で金環日食が見られるのは、平安時代末期の1080年以来だという。次回2030年の金環日食が観測できるのは北海道のみだ。

なお、太陽が大きく欠けているときや、薄曇りのときでも、太陽を直接見ることは非常に危険だ。サングラスや下敷きなどの使用も目を傷める可能性があるので、日食専用のグラスや遮光板を使用するようにしよう。ただし、日食専用グラスの中にも透過率が不適切な製品もあるので確認が必要だ(2012年金環日食日本委員会 )。

すべて読む | サイエンスセクション | サイエンス | 宇宙 | 月

関連ストーリー：
5月6日はスーパームーン 2012年05月06日
1 月 15 日、西日本で部分日食が観測可能 2010年01月15日
日食は「ひまわり」で 2009年07月15日
皆既日食の 4K 超ハイビジョン中継、大阪、京都、筑波にて。 2009年07月06日
7月22日に日食発生、奄美大島等で皆既日食の観察も可能に 2009年07月03日
7/22の皆既日蝕、どこで見る？ 2009年02月16日
「オデッセイア」の皆既日食は現実に起きた出来事だった？ 2008年06月30日
皆既日食で島がパンクする？ 2007年05月08日
「金環」「皆既日食」のハイブリッド日食をインターネット中継 2005年04月07日
11月24日、南極から日食中継 2003年11月20日

by headless at May 20, 2012 02:18 AM

Chinese authorities approved Google's multibillion dollar purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings. The $12.5 billion sale is thought to be the last step for Google to begin developing its own line of smart phones.

Google announced their plans to acquire Motorola last year and regulators in both the US and Europe approved the acquisition in February. According to a Reuters report, the main condition of the deal is that Android OS stays free and open for five years.

Android is currently the top operating system for Internet-enabled smart phones. Google will now add to that substantially; it gains access to Motorola's 17,000 patents and 7,500 patent applications.

Read more | Comments

by Nathan Mattise at May 20, 2012 02:05 AM

Verizon wants a world of sharers. That's a threat and an opportunity for Apple.

May 20, 2012 02:00 AM

In 1983, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy summarized his mission as follows: "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip'."

This Hellenic manifesto certainly gets to the point. Unfortunately, Ogilvy's battle cry offers little guidance for helping us view advertising spots from a half century ago—the kind that fans of the AMC series Mad Men see being worked out alongside the personal lives of Don Draper, Peggy Olson, and Pete Campbell. The dictum offers even less aid for considering ads that hawk items so outmoded that even Ogilvy's skills could not inspire us to march on our local electronics store.

Take, for example, sales literature for mainframe computers made and marketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Even after reading a classy three color foldout for a room filling UNIVAC or PDP-5, would you buy one today? No way unless you are a dedicated collector. But now, thanks to the Computer History Museum's wonderful exhibit titled Selling the Computer Revolution, we can appreciate the considerable creative effort that went into making these machines attractive to business owners and consumers.

Read more | Comments

by Matthew Lasar at May 20, 2012 01:30 AM

Can the social-networking top dog conquer the world?

May 20, 2012 01:00 AM

The tech giant's in a rut. Check out a few reasons that's not likely to last.

May 20, 2012 12:30 AM

Saturday Night at the Movies

By Dennis Hartley

The Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so over the next several weeks I will be bringing you highlights. Navigating such an event is no easy task, even for a dedicated film buff. SIFF is presenting 273 films over 25 days. That’s great for independently wealthy types, but for those of us who work for a living (*cough*), it’s tough to find the time and energy to catch 11 films a day (yes-I did the math). I do take consolation from my observation that the ratio of less-than-stellar (too many) to quality offerings (too few) at a film festival differs little from any Friday night crapshoot at the multiplex. The trick lies in developing a sixth sense for films most likely to be up your alley (in my case, embracing my OCD and channeling it like a cinematic dowser.) Hopefully, some of these will be coming soon to a theater near you. So-let’s go SIFFting!

Your Sister’s Sister, the new offering from Humpday writer-director Lynn Shelton was SIFF’s Opening Night Gala feature presentation (it opens wide in mid-June). In my experience, the film selections for the annual kickoff soiree are not always (how should I put this delicately)…well-advised, so I usually approach with trepidation. This year, however, I think they made a really good call. It was not only filmed in and around Seattle, by a Seattle filmmaker, but (most importantly) it’s vastly entertaining (locally produced and/or filmed doesn’t necessarily equate “perfect choice”, as 2008’s anemic Festival opener, Battle in Seattle demonstrated). Shelton’s romantic “love triangle” dramedy (reminiscent of Chasing Amy) is a talky but thoroughly engaging look at the complexities of modern relationships, centering on a slacker man-child (Mark Duplass) his deceased brother’s girlfriend (Emily Blunt) and her sister (Rosemarie Dewitt), who all bumble into a sort of unplanned “encounter weekend” together at a remote family cabin. Funny, insightful and well-directed, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year.

Paul Williams: Still Alive begs the question: “Do I care?” Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I “care” care, but I had enough morbid curiosity to pull me into this update on the oddball singer-songwriter-actor with the pageboy haircut who penned a slew of huge 70s hits (“We’ve Only Just Begun”, “Rainy Days and Mondays”, “An Old-Fashioned Love Song”, “Evergreen”), appeared in a number of cult movies (The Loved One, Phantom of the Paradise), became a fixture on the TV game show/talk show circuit, then disappeared. A wary Williams initially vacillates on whether he wants to be the subject of a “fly on the wall” study, but filmmaker (and professed super fan) Steven Kessler ingratiates himself after the men bond over a mutual love of squid (don’t ask). What results is an alternately hilarious and sobering look at the ups and downs of this business we call “show”. In a priceless sequence, real life imitates Ishtar (for which Williams wrote the score for, ironically) when the neurotic, Woody Allen-ish Kessler reluctantly joins Williams for a gig in the Philippines that includes a long bus ride through jungles (allegedly) chock-a-block with Islamic terrorists. Kessler is on the verge of a panic attack for the entire trip; Williams remains quietly bemused. That’s show biz…

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy meets Burn After Reading in a sardonic espionage thriller from the UK called Eliminate: Archie Cookson. Archie (Paul Rhys) is a British Intelligence analyst, specializing in Russian translation. His glory days are long over; his workday is divided between clockwatching and guzzling wine when he thinks no one is looking. His estranged wife and precociously droll young son are rarely happy to see him. Archie shrugs and drinks some more wine. Suffice it to say, he is not your suave, self-confident 007 type. When he unknowingly falls into possession of incriminating tapes that could sink the careers of two MI6 bigwigs, he becomes a “loose end” and soon finds himself playing cat and mouse with an old work acquaintance, a former CIA agent now turned freelance hit man. At first resigned to his fate, Archie’s survival instincts rekindle, and he begins to crawl out of his existential malaise, deciding to not only turn the tables on his corrupt superiors, but to win back the love and respect of his wife and son as well. Aside from a few pacing issues, filmmaker Robin Holder has made an impressive debut here, displaying a refreshingly dry wit as a screenwriter and an assured hand as a director.

Immersing yourself in the world of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is not unlike entering a fever dream you might have after dropping acid and trying to get back to sleep…after waking up inside someone else’s nightmare. If that sentence made sense to you, you might find Keyhole worth a peek. Any attempt to offer a cogent synopsis of a Guy Maddin film usually ends in tears, but I’ll try: A Roaring 20s gangster (Jason Patric) comes home after a long absence, schlepping a corpse and a hostage. His gun-toting crew is encamped in the living room, and his house is surrounded by coppers. Patric’s primary concern, however, is getting upstairs to reconnect with the wife (Isabella Rossellini). Unfortunately, it takes him 90 minutes to get up the goddamn stairs. Did I mention the protagonist’s name...Ulysses? It’s a Homeric journey, get it? Reminiscent of Ken Russell’s Gothic, another metaphorical long day’s journey into night via the labyrinth of an old dark house. And, like Russell’s film, Maddin’s is visually intoxicating, but ultimately undermined by an overdose of art house pretension and self-indulgent excess.

May 20, 2012 12:30 AM

Mirrored from jwz.org.

May 20, 2012 12:03 AM

Whenever I search in Aurora on my phone, I'm taken to a stripped-down version of the page with the header "this page adapted for your browser".

How do I fix this? I'd rather fix it with a Google preference, but barring that I expect that Firefox has a way for me to regain control of my online experience?

May 19, 2012 11:33 PM

The footwear maker is fined $40 million for false advertising of its toning shoes.

May 19, 2012 11:30 PM

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch was aborted this morning at the last moment—T-minus 0.5 seconds to be exact.

Liftoff was scheduled for 4:55 am EST, but one of the rocket's engines experienced unusually high amounts of pressure. Once the pressure hit a certain level, SpaceX software took over and halted the procedure. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell noted the issue appeared to be with the physical engine and was not a misread by any sensor or software. The iconic countdown actually reached zero, but SpaceX holds its rockets on the launch pad a few seconds after ignition to ensure everything is functioning (protocol that looks even smarter in light of this morning).

The next available launch window for SpaceX occurs this week: Tuesday at 3:44 am EST. Company founder Elon Musk indicated any tweaks would be made with that goal in mind so SpaceX would be prepared for "countdown in a few days."

Read more | Comments

by Nathan Mattise at May 19, 2012 11:30 PM

"Protecting" the national will

by digby

Michael Hastings at Buzzfeed notices something unusual:

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations — Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.”

The bill's supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home, and that new techniques are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, a borderless enemy whose own propaganda reaches Americans online.

Critics of the bill say there are ways to keep America safe without turning the massive information operations apparatus within the federal government against American citizens.

What could possibly go wrong?

The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

According to this official, “senior public affairs” officers within the Department of Defense want to “get rid” of Smith-Mundt and other restrictions because it prevents information activities designed to prop up unpopular policies—like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ok, but that's just standard PR, right? Not exactly:

The Pentagon spends some $4 billion a year to sway public opinion already, and it was recently revealed by USA Today the DoD spent $202 million on information operations in Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

In an apparent retaliation to the USA Today investigation, the two reporters working on the story appear to have been targeted by Pentagon contractors, who created fake Facebook pages and Twitter accounts in an attempt to discredit them.

Propaganda, has a whole lot meanings and applications, but with the new social media, it's likely to go into some very creepy directions:

In December, the Pentagon used software to monitor the Twitter debate over Bradley Manning’s pre-trial hearing; another program being developed by the Pentagon would design software to create “sock puppets” on social media outlets; and, last year, General William Caldwell, deployed an information operations team under his command that had been trained in psychological operations to influence visiting American politicians to Kabul.

The upshot, at times, is the Department of Defense using the same tools on U.S. citizens as on a hostile, foreign, population.

I'm fairly sure that's the direction they're most interested in pursuing. After all, they don't need traditional pro-war propaganda --- they have the mainstream news media for that.

A U.S. Army whistleblower, Lieutenant Col. Daniel Davis, noted recently in his scathing 84-page unclassified report on Afghanistan that there remains a strong desire within the defense establishment “to enable Public Affairs officers to influence American public opinion when they deem it necessary to "protect a key friendly center of gravity, to wit US national will," he wrote, quoting a well-regarded general.

Yeah, we need the Pentagon to decide what the "national will" is and then "protect" it.

Meanwhile, read Perlstein on the terrorist menace from whom they are trying to protect us. You won't sleep well tonight, and not because of the "terrorists."


.

May 19, 2012 11:10 PM

Rumor has it, iPhones are about to get bigger.

May 19, 2012 10:30 PM

The bubbly soda star can't shake the skepticism.

May 19, 2012 10:00 PM

NEW YORK -- Authorities in China have approved Google Inc.'s bid to buy phone maker Motorola Mobility, clearing the way for the $12.5 billion deal to close early next week.

But Chinese regulators attached a big condition: that Google's Android operating system for mobile devices remain available to all at no cost for the next five years.

The approval brings the Internet search giant closer to sealing its biggest acquisition ever. Buying Motorola allows Google to expand into manufacturing phones, tablet computers and other consumer devices for the first time. The deal also gives Google access to more than 17,000 Motorola patents. ...

Click to view a price quote on GOOG.

Click to research the Internet industry.

May 19, 2012 09:55 PM

The importance of global diversification cannot be overstated.

May 19, 2012 09:30 PM

All roads lead to Koch

by digby

This blockbuster investigation from Lee Fang at Republic Report should bust the myth once and for all that the right wing billionaire Koch Brothers are only interested in economics. In fact, it's clear that they are interested in electing Republicans by any means necessary:

Charles and David Koch, the billionaire owners of of Koch Industries, are known as big spenders when it comes to lobbying and influencing public policy. Now, a new document filed with the IRS reveals how the Koch political machine funneled over $54.5 million in previously undisclosed funds to a litany of front groups designed to smear Democrats.

The disclosure suggests that a very wide variety of Republican groups active in the last major election, from pro-life organizations that ran ads on abortion to shadowy fronts that aired partisan commercials with the infamous Ground Zero Mosque conspiracy, have been highly dependent on Koch money. The document also reveals that the Koch’s political network spent much more on electing the current Congress than previously known.

Sean Noble, a Republican consultant, was hired to help administer the Koch war chest. According to Politico, Noble was part of a group of GOP operatives who met regularly with Karl Rove’s Super PAC to target 120 House of Representatives races in 2010. The close coordination was pivotal in helping the Republican Party capture 63 seats in one of the biggest midterm election landslides in modern history.

Yesterday afternoon, OpenSecrets.org bloggers Viveca Novak and Robert Maguire were the first to flag a tax form filed by an obscure Arizona-based foundation called the Center to Protect Patients’ Rights, noting the foundation gave huge amounts almost exclusively to conservative groups that use undisclosed nonprofits to air partisan ads. The Center acted as a pass-through to distribute $44,599,946 in grants in 2010, and $10,783,500 the year before. Novak and Maguire also reported that the Center’s tax forms were prepared by at least one employee of the DCI Group, a lobbying business.

Though the document does not reveal where the Center receives its funds, the tax forms available online from 2009 and 2010 indicate that Sean Noble, Koch’s campaign commercial operative, managed the foundation. Heather Higgins, a presenter at the infamous Koch mega-fundraisers, served on the board for part of 2009. The Center paid Noble’s firm a total of $350,000 a year in lobbying and “management services.” In turn, it appears, Noble played a significant role in fueling the most aggressive advertising campaign in the history of midterm elections.

Noble’s grant list features sponsors of the most hard-hitting partisan ads, including Americans for Job Security and the Club for Growth. Many of the Center’s grants, however, went to social conservative groups that clash with traditional libertarian values, particularly in terms of women’s health and foreign policy. Although the Koch brothers are eager to present themselves as small government libertarians, the grants suggest a different set of priorities.

Interesting how they laundered it, isn't it? You can see why. It's obviously better for them that everyone believes that there are numerous groups with varied interests just exercising their rights to free speech as a grassroots uprising took the country by storm rather than a very small group of high level wealthy Republicans buying themselves elections.

Here's the scam:

In all, Koch operative Sean Noble channeled grants to two dozen 501(c)4 nonprofits. As Stephen Colbert has covered, 501(c)4 nonprofits, which he refers to as “Spooky PACs,” can act like Super PACs — raising and spending unlimited corporate, union and individual contributions — but do not have to disclose a dime in terms of where the money is coming from.

The disclosure of Noble’s outfit is the biggest window we’ve seen recently into who purchased the current composition of Congress two years ago. Before this disclosure, the Koch network could only be tied to a few disclosed donations during the 2010 election: about $30-45 million reportedly raised by Americans for Prosperity, the attack-ad sponsoring Tea Party front founded by David Koch, over $2 million in contributions to political action committees through Koch PAC, and $1,050,450 in donations to the Republican Governors Association. The Center’s $55 million grant budget, raised possibly in connection to the Koch fundraisers — one of which Sean Noble and some of the wealthiest Republican billionaires in the country attended only months before the midterm elections — certainly raises the stakes in terms of calculating how much the current Republican Congress owe their current political fortunes to the Koch machine. From cutting the EPA to passing bills to undermine the Clean Act, Congress has handsomely rewarded the business interests of Koch Industries.

Read the whole piece to see just how wide ranging their patronage was. It makes me queasy to tell you the truth. I haven't shed any tears for the loss of the Blue Dogs, but it also means that progressives simply won't be able to compete if these guys get into a race. The amounts are staggering and will have a huge impact on the congressional races, even if the president is able to collect enough to compete from the same small donor pool.


.

May 19, 2012 09:30 PM

Here they are.

May 19, 2012 09:00 PM

It was an awful week for these stocks.

May 19, 2012 08:30 PM

Whose conscience is it anyway?

by digby


My conscience is very offended by this (from Alternet and I feel believe it inhibits my religious freedom. And I would prefer that my tax dollars not even touch the tax dollars that fund it:

School vouchers have long been a pet cause of Christian school advocates who want to shore up profits and increase their ranks. In 2002, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public funds designated for private school tuition were not an infringement on church/state separation. That gave private Christian school advocates a green light to promote vouchers for themselves.

Though vouchers have become legal in some states, like Ohio, others, like North Carolina, are still holding out. Either way, Christian school advocates show no signs of slowing down their efforts. One reason vouchers remain so contested is that they sometimes fund activities in private Christian schools that many American taxpayers would not want to support. Here are 10 strange things that happen at Christian schools that may give you pause next time vouchers are debated in your state.

Click over for the full indictment. Hardcore anti-abortion lies and propaganda, fundamentalist sex-ed, racism, creationism, patriarchy etc. Here's just one example:

Punishment by gender. Teachers in Christian schools sometimes stereotype boys as more rambunctious and rebellious than girls. In practice, this means that boys are often the targets of harsher corporal punishment. In 2007, a Chicago school was sued for injury and surgical costs after a forcing a 14-year-old boy to kneel in place for nine days, causing a hip injury. A few years later, in 2011, a Christian school teacher in Orlando was arrested on charges of beating a boy at her home with a rusted broom handle.

Many Christian schools punish girls more harshly because of perceived sexual acting out. In 2009, a California appeals court upheld a Christian school’s decision to expel two female students simply because administrators suspected they were involved in a same-sex relationship. Just last year, a 15-year-old girl was expelled from another California school for writing on Facebook that she was bisexual. Luke Jones tells AlterNet of an incident he remembers from high school, when a boy and girl were caught having sex in a school bathroom. The boy “got suspended for a little while but then came back,” but the girl was expelled for the remainder of the school year.

I'm very serious when I say that it offends my conscience to spend tax dollars for torture, child abuse and homophobia.


.

May 19, 2012 08:00 PM

By Ben Feller

CAMP DAVID, Md. -- Confronting an economic crisis that threatens them all, President Barack Obama and leaders of other world powers on Saturday declared that their governments must both spark growth and cut the debt that has crippled the European continent and put investors worldwide on edge.

"So far so good," Obama proclaimed after economic talks at Camp David, his secluded and highly secure mountaintop retreat. He played international host in the midst of a re-election bid that will turn on the economy, underscoring his stakes in getting his allies abroad to rally around some answers. ...

May 19, 2012 07:49 PM

Why did the Navy can this dude, er, Gordon J. Klingenschmitt, just for praying in Jesus’s name? (Oh right, because it didn’t.) But that has not stopped Gordon J. Klingenschmitt from having some opinions on the persecution of Christians by the government because Barack Nobama “blame[d] Jesus Christ” for his endorsement of homosexual marriage by invoking the Golden Rule, and also that animals are homosexual because evil spirits escaped from gays and possessed them, like when Jesus cast an evil spirit into some pigs. Hello, it is called science, why don’t you look it up! RawStory has the raw story on dude just laying down the cold homo FACTS. Marketing, recruiting, homosexual agendas (don’t forget the free toaster!), for starters, turn people who were born straight into icky queers. This is when you perform gay and lesbian exorcisms, obviously. Except that then the gay goes into the animals, and that is why 4000 species do gay stuff to each other.

The David Pakman Show is a hero for bringing us this wonderful explanation that will answer all your questions, now and forever, we are sure!

[RawStory]

by Rebecca Schoenkopf at May 19, 2012 07:45 PM

The board of the NAACP, the “nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization,” endorsed marriage equality at a meeting this afternoon. The move comes 10 days after President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage.

The NAACP’s move comes as attitudes about gays and lesbians in the African American community are changing rapidly. A recent poll found that 54% of African Americans supported President Obama’s recent decision.

Maxim Thorne, formerly of the NAACP, broke the news over Twitter:

The NAACP Board of Directors has just endorsed marriage equality unequivocally. Only two opposed! An historic moment.

— Maxim Thorne (@Maximthorne) May 19, 2012

Since Obama’s announcement, numerous influential political figures — including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Assistant Minority Leader James Clyburn — have joined him in supporting marriage equality.

by Judd Legum at May 19, 2012 07:33 PM

JR: It’s remarkable how warm it was globally in April considering that we were only just coming out of a double dip La Niña. If we don’t triple dip, we’ll set more temperature records soon. Indeed, NOAA models predict a good chance of an El Niño forming in the late summer, which would make it quite likely next year would be the hottest on record. As for April, you’ll note it was hot in the ‘wrong’ places again — over much of the tundra, which is a carbon time bomb.

UPDATE: Tropical Storm Alberto, the first named storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, has arrived. Details here.

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for April 2012. The most notable extremes were the warmth observed across Russia, the United States, Alaska, and parts of the Middle East and eastern Europe. There were no land areas with large-scale cold conditions of note. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) .

– Jeff Masters via Wunderground

April 2012 was the globe’s 5th warmest April on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NASA rated April 2012 as the 4th warmest April on record. April 2012 global land temperatures were the 2nd warmest on record, and the Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature was 1.74°C (3.13°F) above the 20th century average, marking the warmest April since records began in 1880. Global ocean temperatures were the 11th warmest on record, and April 2012 was the 427th consecutive month with ocean temperatures warmer than the 20th century average.

The last time the ocean temperatures were below average was September 1976. The increase in global temperatures relative to average compared to March 2012 (16th warmest March on record) was due, in part, to warming waters in the Eastern Pacific, due to the La Niña event that ended in April. Global satellite-measured temperatures for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were 6th or 4th warmest in the 34-year record, according to Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH). April temperatures in the stratosphere were the 1st to 4th coldest on record. We expect cold temperatures there due to the greenhouse effect and to destruction of ozone due to CFC pollution. Northern Hemisphere snow cover during April was 4th smallest in the 46-year record.

Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, has a comprehensive post on the notable weather events of April in his April 2012 Global Weather Extremes Summary. Notably, national heat records (for warmest April temperature on record) occurred in the United States (a tie), Germany, Austria, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungry, Croatia, Ukraine, and Slovakia as well as the cities of Moscow and Munich.

La Niña officially ends
According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC), La Niña conditions are no longer present in the equatorial Pacific, where sea surface temperatures were approximately average as of May 13. The threshold for a La Niña is for these temperatures to be 0.5°C below average or cooler. CPC forecasts that neutral conditions will persist though the summer, with a 41% chance of an El Niño event developing in time for the August – September – October peak of hurricane season. El Niño conditions tend to decrease Atlantic hurricane activity, by increasing wind shear over the tropical Atlantic.

Figure 2. Arctic sea ice extent in 2012 (blue line) compared to the average (thick grey line.) The record low year of 2007 (dashed green line) is also shown. Arctic sea ice was near average during April, but has fallen well below average during the first half of May. Image credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

April Arctic sea ice extent near average
Arctic sea ice extent was near average in April 2012, the 17th lowest (18th greatest) extent in the 35-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This was the largest April Arctic sea ice extent since 2001. However, ice in the Arctic is increasingly young, thin ice, which will make it easy for this year’s ice to melt away to near-record low levels this summer, if warmer than average weather occurs in the Arctic.

– Jeff Masters co-founded the Weather Underground in 1995 while working on his Ph.D. He flew with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 1986-1990. This piece was originally published at the WunderBlog and is reprinted with permission.

by Climate Guest Blogger at May 19, 2012 07:09 PM

Concert taping is at least forty years old—the First Free Underground Grateful Dead Tape Exchange formed in the early 1970s after all. It was an informal network of Deadheads willing to share tapes with each other in person or via mail, some described it as the original Napster. Les Kippel remembered smuggling in extra batteries, tapes, and microphones so he could capture an entire evening. He started out with a Japanese portable tape machine but insisted the real quality recordings didn't come until '74, when Sony came out with the 152 and the ECM-99 stereo microphones.

Today, firsthand concert audio can be accessed much easier. It's among the first results on any YouTube song search, venue partnerships exist such as NPR's "Live In Concert" series, and you can always find modern incarnations of the tape exchange (like the popular NYCTaper.com).

"As long as we've been a band, we’ve had a good relationship with tapers," said Jason Cohen, keyboardist for blues outfit, The Ryan Montbleau Band. "We've always tried to get good, quality recordings out there. But what’s out there tended to be a pair of mics at the back of the room and it didn’t sound that great. So we wanted control."

Read more | Comments

by Nathan Mattise at May 19, 2012 07:00 PM

Like many FOSS fans, I always wanted to be an active part of the movement. My last big project was for the Amiga in the past millennium though. Nowadays I’m happy that after years of small-scale dabbling on various projects I’ve found my haven. I’d like to share my way to my recent gain of push privileges on the Python project and hope to inspire some of you to do the same.

The Problem

It isn’t easy to start contributing to FOSS. Some projects seem even not to be particularly interested in new contributors – because everyone wants to contribute for fame and glory. Others could use help but aren’t eager to get new patches because of ample amounts of code rotting in the bug tracker. But there are plenty of projects that want you to help.

And yes, even CPython — i.e. the most widespread Python implementation as of 2012, I’ll call it just “Python” henceforth — needs your help! That’s the reason it’s active in its outreach to new contributors. Please note I said “contributors”, you don’t have to be a programmer – or do programmer’s work – to help.

Python core development has always been a welcoming place. But Jesse tried to push things even farther. And he succeeded at that – it’s easily one of the best places to hang out with people way smarter than you (or at least me) without being patronized.

But it’s hard to get started with new code and often even harder to get started with a new community. So what’s the most important personal attribute to get into a high profile open source project like Python, Django or Twisted? Hint: it’s like with everything important in life you can’t buy.

The Solution

Perseverance.

People sense that but don’t believe it. It’s just like kids don’t believe they’ll ever become adults and their parents were where they are now at some point in prehistoric times. And just like that, the now famous CPython developers once started submitting patches to a tracker and prayed for someone to notice.

I’m in no way famous but I think that’s exactly what it makes easier for you to relate to me.

Please compare the dates between my first patch (2011-08-08) to the bug tracker and the day I got my push rights (2012-05-14): nine months. What’s even worse, my first real code patch rotted for four months in the tracker. I’ll be honest with you: I walked away from Python core development at this point.

“If they don’t want my help, I’ll look elsewhere.”

Fortunately, Antoine gave me my “christmas presents” and committed it at last out of nowhere. That made me come back and I’m really happy about that. But was it really necessary for me to leave my ambitions? Not really. I’ll try to draw a picture of the real situation.

The problem is: the delay didn’t indicate that Python isn’t interested in my help. It proved it needs my help very much.

Although there are lots of committers, only few of them are active (try running hg churn -c -d '2012 to 2013' if you don’t believe me). Committing code to a project like Python is different than dabbling on some small project. We have a high responsibility to not break stuff livelihoods depend on. Someone who commits your code has to fully understand what it’s doing and takes responsibility for your patch (although breaking stuff isn’t really a crime as long as it breaks loudly, that’s what we have buildbots for).

So, logically few active committers means few checkins means long delays on patches.

So in the beginning, you really need some patience. It also helps to hang out and socialize on Freenode’s #python-dev or the Python mailing lists (although I’m rather shy on posting on mailing lists myself; it doesn’t feel good to ask basic stuff that gets archived forever). Your also gain good karma but reviewing code of others and generally being active on the bug tracker. Once some of your patches have been committed, other developers will be much more open to look at your code. We’re all human in the end and you would also rather help out a friend, no?

And that would have been the better way for instead of retiring. While I was on IRC, I wasn’t really active on the tracker building up reputation. After my first patches were committed and I started triaging and reviewing, people even started asking me whether I need to have something reviewed.

When you arrive at this point, you’re over the hump. Contributing becomes much less of a insular patience game and much more of a social experience. You’re part of a community hacking on something cool – and while there’ll always be friction where people gather and you’ll still have to wait for reviews – it’s a lot of fun.

And one day – out of the blue – you’ll get extended privileges offered. At this point it’s important to keep your cool; too many people started doing way too much, burning out and stopping doing anything at all.

What Python Needs Most

We need triagers that weed through tickets – new and old – and help to close them. Be it by reviewing code, checking spelling, grammar and wording, trying to reproduce the problems – we’re especially in need of capable Windows users – or just pinging stale tickets and adding suitable developers to the watch lists. There’s a lot to do and the current team is glad to be able keep up with new stuff, but there are 1,500 and growing tickets with patches open – and I’d like very much to change that.

Let me stress at this point that it’s unlikely that you get commit rights if you just add own patches and wait for them to be committed. It’s expected from you to take part at the whole development process.

So my foremost priority for the next months is doing exactly that: cut back on own coding and weed through tickets and make people happy by getting simple stuff merged or at least noticed. I know from personal experience that ignored patches are worse than rejected ones.

But I could use the help of people like you, who speak Python or English and are willing to learn Python’s development process! Get an account on the tracker, familiarize yourself with our triaging process and start triaging! Meanwhile, feel free to ask your questions on Freenode’s #python-dev or our core-mentorship mailing list.

Your efforts will be noticed. And nothing’s as fun as breaking all buildbots with one commit. :)

May 19, 2012 06:35 PM

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by Unprompted at May 19, 2012 06:17 PM

Paradise Lost

by digby

The Financial Times details Jamie Dimon's troubles. He's quite a guy:

For Mr Dimon himself the losses have posed a question of his credibility – fuelled in part by his initial handling of the affair. On April 13 he bluntly dismissed news reports about the big trading positions held by the CIO as “a complete tempest in a teapot”. Less than four weeks later, he was forced to reveal that the unit’s “terrible, stupid, egregious” errors had caused $2bn losses.

This jars with his image as the self-assured, charming and, at times, disarmingly frank Wall Street veteran who had successfully steered JPMorgan through the crisis, avoiding the losses that had crippled his rivals.

For some in Washington, though, his star had already dimmed. “The Jamie I first met was not the arrogant Jamie that he has become,” says a senior congressional aide. Mr Dimon, he says, “morphed into some combination of Goldman Sachs and Ken Lewis” – the former chief executive of Bank of America – “gratuitously full of himself, unnecessarily angry”.

Oh, that sounds terrible. Perhaps we should hear from some of his nobles ... er, employees:

However, in a series of interviews of top executives, a handful of whom are likely successors when Mr Dimon does step down, there is unwavering hostility towards the idea that these losses could force his departure. “Ludicrous,” says one. “Crazy,” says another.

“People will throw rocks at the boat,” says Mike Cavanagh, head of treasury and securities services, who was appointed by Mr Dimon to lead an internal probe into the losses. “It doesn’t change the work we have to do.”[...]

Four executives are adamant Mr Dimon did not deliberately misrepresent the bank’s exposure on a first-quarter earnings call on April 13. “As the guy who signs the books and records of this place for the last six years I know how seriously he takes what we tell the market,” says Mr Cavanagh. “He had senior people saying we’ve got the all clear.”

The executives agree that it was only after the first-quarter earnings, with losses becoming larger and more sustained that it became obvious the CIO’s estimate of the size of the problems was not credible.

“Losses that had occurred had been explained in a variety of ways and those losses continued to mount and they picked up pace,” says one, who adds the company was then justified in waiting until its next big regulatory filing on May 10. “There was no obligation that when losses get to ‘x’ we say something. This wasn’t putting the company in harm’s way.”

Well, that's a relief. Unfortunately, some malcontents think that no man of such talent could possibly have not been in the know:

Still people close to the bank are surprised that a man with such a grasp of detail could miss the warning signs. A renowned cost-cutter, Mr Dimon recently expressed alarm that fancy potato chips in clear cellophane tied with a ribbon were available in the JPMorgan dining room. His colleague Frank Bisignano launched an investigation, triumphantly reporting back that the chips were cheaper than alternatives bought from local stores.

Mr Dimon still prowls the corridors with a sheet of paper in his pocket – an “owe me” list of people who need to provide a report. “I used to have nightmares that my name would be on the list,” says one former employee.

Others question whether as a charismatic, headstrong leader, he has enough people to stand up to him – particularly after removing rivals such as Bill Winters, co-head of the investment bank, two years ago.

“One of Dimon’s great weaknesses is that he has not created any succession plan – he has kicked out anyone who really might challenge him,” said one person who knows him.
His executives insist they do say “no” to him.

Well, one would have to be very, very sure of oneself, wouldn't one? After all:

Mr Lee argues that Mr Dimon may seem an outsized presence in a world of lower-key peers, but not compared with historical forebears or contemporaries in other sectors. “Look in our industry at different times: obviously Pierpont Morgan was a big, larger-than-life leader. If you look at other industries, you get your Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs.”

Also too, Jesus.

It's very hard to sort through all the brown-nosing and back-stabbing in that article, but I suppose that's the point. Dimon is in trouble. It doesn't appear that people really believe the person who cares about the cost of the potato chips in the cafeteria was inattentive to the fact that this London Whale was acting like a Casino Whale.

I think the most telling opinion is the one from the congressional staffer who calls him "Jamie." He says he's grown arrogant, full of himself and unnecessarily angry. That could describe just about everyone in the business at the moment. The word that's missing, I'm afraid, is hubris.


.

May 19, 2012 06:07 PM

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- On Friday, like most of you, I watched the nation's media help to perpetrate one of the great frauds in American history.

Consider. If I can barely sell 15% of something at $38 a share, if I have to lay out millions-upon-millions of dollars to prop up that price for a single day, what makes you think I can sell the rest of it at that price, or anything like that price?

Exactly. ...

Click to view a price quote on FB.

May 19, 2012 06:07 PM

I'm so excited to tell you that we have all the publicly available trial exhibits from the Oracle v. Google trial. We should thank this judge, the Hon. William Alsup, because he is the one insisting on keeping the trial as public as possible. I know you join me in saying thank you for this treasure.

Now, logistics: there are a lot of them, and I could use your help.

May 19, 2012 06:07 PM

Glassboard: is it a group messaging app? Sort of. Is it a collaboration app? Sure. Is it like a Facebook Group? Maybe. Version 2.0 of the app, released this week, can be as many or as few of those things as you'd like, depending on who you're sharing with and why. On the one hand, it's a way to share notes, photos, files, and other updates with a group of friends. On the other, it could be useful among a group of colleagues working together on a project.

Glassboard 2.0 is now available for iOS and Android, as well as a newly unveiled Web app. The apps are offered by Sepia Labs—the new home of former NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons—and we thought we'd take a look at the recently updated offerings. "The easiest way to describe Glassboard: as Pair is to the bedroom, as Path is to the rec room, Glassboard is to the boardroom," Simmons told Ars in an e-mail. "It's an app for communicating inside teams (formal or not). I think it's how people will work together in the future—it cuts way down on e-mail."

Indeed, if you are new to small group sharing apps, the idea is like taking Facebook and stripping down all parts of the social network except for the parts where you share privately among clearly defined groups. Or if Google+ allowed everyone in your circle to post to that same circle. The idea is to keep things insular and private. There's no way to blast updates to the whole world like Twitter, and there's no friending or unfriending. You can create or join various groups—close friends, family, coworkers, Ars Technica staffers, cousins, etc.—and post a variety of content to those "boards" as a way to keep each other up-to-date. According to Sepia Labs, Glassboard is supposed to be a digital boardroom.

Read more | Comments

by Jacqui Cheng at May 19, 2012 06:00 PM

New user account

by Ntrwtest7 at May 19, 2012 05:53 PM

New user account

by Ntrwtest at May 19, 2012 05:24 PM

I decided I had to write my own Document Object Model implementation because the models available to me just won’t meet my requirements.  That involves writing a lot of code, though, and ensuring that Element nodes, Text nodes, etc. all implement Node properties like firstChild, childNodes, etc., and methods like appendChild() correctly.

To lend a hand, I wrote a little InterfaceChecker library for ensuring that tests on a base class are run on derived classes.  (I know, JavaScript uses prototypes instead of proper classes; I’m using the concept’s meaning here.)  In principle, I need to only do three things:

• Write tests for the Node interface’s methods and properties
• Designate Element as inheriting from Node, and
• Provide some functions to build “typical” instances of Element,

My InterfaceChecker will run the Node tests against the “typical” instances of Element, for example.  It’s not DOM-specific, either:  I can do the same to arbitrary JavaScript constructors, like a theoretical Shape and Circle pairing.

This code is for debugging purposes only; in my opinion, it’s a little extreme to include these tests in a production environment.

Please, let me know what you think!

by ajvincent at May 19, 2012 05:07 PM

Sonic artist and programmer Daniel Jones and composer Peter Gregson have joined forces with Britten Sinfonia orchestra to create The Listening Machine, a tool that records the social networking activity of 500 people in the United Kingdom and uses algorithms to translate that into music.

The Listening Machine is software that monitors the tweets of 500 people (the team won’t reveal the tweeter's identities to ensure that the musical outcome is not affected by participants becoming aware that they are part of it) selected from eight different fields—arts, business, education, health, politics, science, sport, and technology. Whenever these people post an update, the properties of the tweet are analyzed in terms of the sound and meaning of the words, and the program generates music based on it. Many different elements of the music have been prerecorded as individual musical cells, which are then recombined by the generative software.

The aim of the project is to create a six-month musical installation that is a "live soundtrack to the thoughts, opinions, feelings and conversations of the U.K.’s population, as played out on Twitter."

Read more | Comments

by WIRED UK at May 19, 2012 05:05 PM

BuzzFeed reports that Rep. Mark Thornberry (R-TX) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) have inserted a provision into the latest defense authorization bill that would “‘strike the current ban on domestic dissemination’ of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon.” The proposal would “give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public.”

by Judd Legum at May 19, 2012 05:02 PM

It is true, from time to time I read things on the internet. What has been bothering me lately is the feeling that all of these ideas I'm consuming and all of my responses to them are just lost into a sea churning together everything into the unidentifiable paste that comes out of my head.


So, I've decided to start logging this. After all, the word "blog" is a shortening of "weblog", a web log, a log of the things you've read on the web. I want this for my own daily readings, both to keep a record for myself (and anyone with an interest) and to note my thoughts, comments, responses, and questions about the things I come across.


Ironfroggy Reads Things On The Internet is this new thing. It is a blog on Tumblr, which I find a useful tool for smaller posts and their bookmarklet is perfect for my needs here. I'll be directing the posts to twitter to, as an experiment. Let me know if that turns out annoying.


Follow it, if you care to. Mostly its for me, but I believe in transparency by default.

May 19, 2012 05:02 PM

Pretty often I point bug reporters at random git branches and sometimes they'll happily compile kernels from sources, but have no idea about git. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a quick how-to tailored to the needs of bug reporters, so let's fix that.

$ git clone --depth 1 --no-checkout --no-single-branch <git-repo-path>

This clones the git repository, but avoids downloading the entire history. It also avoids to check out the default branch because usually you need a specific branch for testing.

All the following commands only work if the working directory is within the newly cloned git repository.

$ git checkout origin/<branch-name>

will check out the git branch <branch-name> (from the remote git repository) into the local git repository so that you can use it. git will complain about 'detached HEAD' but that's only really important when committing new changes, so just ignore that. If you already have an older clone of the git same remote repository, you first need to update the local git database (in the .git directory in your local repository) with

$ git fetch origin

before checking out the branch again. Even if you need to test the same, but updated branch, you need to do both steps - git doesn't update anything automatically by default.

If you have patches or other local changes applied, git might complain that there's a conflict. You can simply remove all local changes with

$ git reset --hard

and then re-do the checkout command. Much more rarely some build artifacts could get in the way (or you just need a quick way to start a clean build),

$ git clean -dfx

will remove any files not in the currently checked-out git commit.

May 19, 2012 04:51 PM

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Jim Cramer fills his blog on RealMoney every day with his up-to-the-minute reactions to what's happening in the market and his legendary ahead-of-the-crowd ideas. This week he blogged on: The relationship between trading in Facebook and Apple; problems coming from Europe; and the unpredictability of retailers.

Click here for information on RealMoney, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.

...

Click to view a price quote on FB.

May 19, 2012 04:49 PM

Have you finished with your shame spiral over the P-E-N-I-S lady, and how much fun you made of her and how you howled with laughter until we all realized huh, chick who sounds crazy was actually crazy? What were the odds??? Well here is a new lady for you to gawk over, and her name is Mema, and it is her world and we are just living in it! Mema loves to sit on her porch and tell her stories! Stories about how black people can be racist too, because there is a Black Miss America pageant! Thing is, by the third video (they autoplay back at the Youtube page, for your convenience), you sort of begin to LOVE Mema, just as she loves everyone, even Indian people — both kinds, from India and the “whooo-whoo-whoo” kind — because she is not racist! And when she declines to say the “n-word,” referring to it as “the word we’re not allowed to say anymore even though we used it when I was growing up,” it seems like actually a MAJOR VICTORY FOR HUMANITY! Good job, you guys! Mema doesn’t say the n-word! Behold this giant step for mankind, after the jump!

Mema, dudes. Click click click.

[Youtube]

by Rebecca Schoenkopf at May 19, 2012 04:42 PM

Mitt's Promise

by digby

Uhm, this is why some of us aren't for it:

As president, Mitt will work to expand and enhance access and opportunities for Americans to hunt, shoot, and protect their families, homes and property, and he will fight the battle on all fronts to protect and promote the Second Amendment.

h/t to AS

May 19, 2012 04:09 PM

This week's top posts to our Apple section included the latest rumors about an updated MacBook Pro, Apple's curious (if only temporary) censorship of the word "jailbreak" in iTunes, a discussion about Apple's "green" initiatives, and more. And don't forget our guide to hardening your iPhone against stalkers, as well as a look at five Mac antivirus apps! Read on if you need to catch up:

• How to harden your smartphone against stalkers—iPhone edition
  Stalkers: sometimes they're coming from inside your phone.
• MacBook Pro rumor rollup: thinner, better, faster, stronger
  As the MacBook Pro update looms, "leaked" info is seeping out of the woodwork.
• Hands-on with five antivirus apps for the Mac
  Which antivirus software is the best for Mac users? It depends on your needs.
• Stars aligning for June Ivy Bridge Mac launch alongside Mountain Lion
  Yet another reason all eyes will be on WWDC.
• According to iTunes, "jailbreak" is a four-letter word
  Is the word "jailbreak" on the same level as "f**k"?
• Judge: Ample evidence that Apple "knowingly joined" e-book conspiracy
  Apple hasn't been found guilty yet, but the judge's comments don't bode well.
• "Swiss Army knife for QuickTime" Perian turning off the lights
  The source code will be made available on Github or Google Code.
• WSJ: production of 4-inch iPhone beginning in June
  There's hope for farsighted iPhone fans.
• What it takes to make a "green" Apple
  Nearly all of Apple's operations will run on renewable power by 2013.
• A Good AirPlay Speaker
  The best tool to listen to iTunes exclusively.

Have a wonderful weekend, folks!

Read more | Comments

by Jacqui Cheng at May 19, 2012 04:00 PM

New user account

by RecioGardea975 at May 19, 2012 03:52 PM

This week, the New York Times reported that Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, is soliciting multi-million dollar ad proposals to attack President Obama. One such proposal, leaked to the paper, was a $10 million, racially-charged campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End his Spending for Good.” The proposal, which center on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, suggests hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to break down Obama’s image as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

Ricketts moved quickly to publicly reject the plan after it leaked. His spokesman said it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion.” (The statement seems somewhat disingenuous as the Ricketts had already given “preliminary approval” for the $10 million concept after seeing a separate ad about Jeremiah Wright.) Nevertheless, Ricketts’ spokesman confirmed his intention spend money attacking Obama through an organization he controls called “Ending Spending Political Action Fund.”

There is one area, however, where Ricketts is much more open to government spending. He’s seeking a massive government subsidy for the Chicago Cubs, which he owns with his family, to renovate Wrigley Field. Here is the deal the Ricketts family is seeking, via Crain’s Chicago Business:

That means $300 million is needed for the ballpark proper.

Half would come from the team, presumably in increased revenue from more signage inside Wrigley and retail and other entertainment in what amounts to a game-day carnival on Waveland Avenue on Wrigley’s north side and Sheffield Avenue to the east.

And half would come from $150 million or so in bonds to be retired with increased revenue from the existing city and Cook County amusement taxes on ticket sales. Specifically, debt service would get the first 6 percent in growth above a base level of around $15 million a year now.

But it’s a little more complicated than that.

The team also wants a 50 percent cut of any increase in amusement tax revenue growth above 6 percent. And unlike the bonds, which would be retired in 30 or 35 years, that would be forever.

So Joe Ricketts and his family not only want a $150 million subsidy directly from taxpayers but also a large chunk of tax revenue from the city in perpetuity. In other words, taxes from the City of Chicago would no longer go to roads, schools and police officers but also into Joe Ricketts pocket. Without this taxpayer welfare, the family will presumably let Cubs, which they acquired in a highly competitive bidding process in 2009, play in a stadium that is falling into disrepair.

Ricketts negotiating position seems completely at odds with his public stated political views. In a video posted by another organization he controls, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Ricketts says “I think it’s a crime for our elected officials to borrow money today, to spend money today and push the repayment of that loan out into the future on people who are not even born yet.” Of course, that’s what he is attempting force the taxpayers of Chicago to do for the benefit of his team and his family.

At the same time, Joe Ricketts has plenty of disposable income available to attack Obama. A Ricketts spokesperson said future attacks on Obama would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy.” Joe Ricketts, however, may want to focus on the fiscal policy of his baseball team. In 2011, the Cubs were “one of nine franchises in violation of MLB’s debt service rules.”

by Judd Legum at May 19, 2012 03:47 PM

DETROIT -- Chrysler is recalling nearly 87,000 Jeep Wranglers in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere due to a risk of fires.

The recall affects only Wranglers from the 2010 model year that have automatic transmissions and were built before July 14, 2010, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted Saturday on its Web site.

Debris can get caught between a plate that protects the transmission and the catalytic converter, causing a fire. A catalytic converter is part of the exhaust system and uses heat and precious metals to control pollution. ...

May 19, 2012 03:47 PM

Kevan posted a photo:

May 19, 2012 03:20 PM

Kevan posted a photo:

May 19, 2012 03:20 PM

Kevan posted a photo:

May 19, 2012 03:20 PM

Kevan posted a photo:

May 19, 2012 03:20 PM

Kevan posted a photo:

May 19, 2012 03:20 PM

New user account

by ConnerHornback408 at May 19, 2012 03:12 PM

Empire Myopia

by digby

What do you suppose a country that is only willing to pay (top dollar) for a far flung military empire, domestic policing, prisons and border security look like? If the Republicans get their we're way, it looks like we're going to find out:

The House passed a defense budget Friday that exceeds the deal cut by Congress and President Barack Obama last summer, and that would have to be paid for with cash taken from poverty programs, health care and the federal workforce.

The National Defense Authorization Act permits $642 billion in defense spending next year. The White House has threatened to veto the bill, citing more than 30 changes to the budget it was seeking.

But the measure also adds $8 billion more than called for in the Budget Control Act that Congress agreed to last summer in exchange for raising the nation's debt limit.

"We increase the spending for defense due to the priorities that we feel are most important and the constitutional requirement we have to provide for the common defense," Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said. "But we will cut in other areas of the budget so that we comply fully with the deficit reduction act."

Those other areas were spelled out in the broader budget plan passed last week. Written by House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), it would cut more than $80 billion in federal retirement benefits, nearly $50 billion from Medicaid programs and more than $36 billion from programs to feed the poor.

I've always thought of the Military Industrial Complex as welfare for (middle-aged, educated white) guys. This would back up that claim:

Among other unasked for changes, the bill keeps aging aircraft and ships the military wants to phase out, keeps the Army and Marines at larger force levels and orders construction of missile defenses.

They don't want it, they don't need it, but the Republican donors want the profits and their conservative base voters want the very well paying, extremely high benefits jobs.

They like to say they hate Big Government, but that's a lie. They love it. It's just that they want to funnel the money to their own constituencies --- and they want to build a police state that will keep everyone else in line in case they decide to do something about it.

It is true that many Democrats back all those programs too. But I think they do have more pressure coming from constituents to spend money on domestic items as well, so they're forced to at least pay them lip service and offer token support. It's not much, but it's where we are these days in terms of choices.


.

May 19, 2012 03:09 PM

This week readers were really excited about a tiny new Linux box. They also wanted to know how to make their Android smartphones more secure. Also on the Android beat, folks were interested in learning how Android fragmentation is driving developers nuts. It's your top 10 stories from the IT and Security beats.

• New $74 Android mini computer is slightly larger than a thumb drive
  This little Linux box packs a 1.5GHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM.
• How to harden your smartphone against stalkers—Android edition
  With great power comes great responsibility, so lock up that smartphone.
• Android fragmentation: one developer encounters 3,997 devices
  Android devs miss out on market share by not casting a wide support net.
• How much bandwidth does your office really need?
  Quite a lot, if you watch Netflix. But even e-mail may surprise you.
• Dawn of a new wireless: first 802.11ac router available today
  Buffalo surprisingly beats its competitors to market.
• Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users
  DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google.
• Best Buy's surprisingly insecure approach to new PC setup
  Somewhere in the march toward "easy," security got blindsided.
• Build versus buy: one company's decision to go it alone
  Do you build your own technology in-house, or buy/license from someone else?
• Microsoft will remove the bloatware from your PC, for a price
  $99 and a trip to a Microsoft Store will get you a clean Windows install.
• Massive DDoS attack keeps The Pirate Bay offline for over a day
  Angry Anons may be behind the attack.

Read more | Comments

by Ars Staff at May 19, 2012 03:00 PM

By Jim Kuhnhenn

CAMP DAVID, Md. -- Leaders of the world's economic powers say Germany should balance its push for European fiscal austerity with doses of stimulus spending to avoid a financial calamity with global repercussions.

The Group of Eight leaders, meeting over the weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat, are trying to figure out how to tame Europe's debt crisis while also increasing the demand for goods and spurring job growth. ...

May 19, 2012 02:31 PM

by Adam James

Ever hear the one about the Icelandic geothermal systems engineer and the Kenyan project developer who walk into a bar? As interesting this meeting might be, it’s unlikely to happen anywhere but in a bad renewable energy joke. Or at a geothermal conference.

Enter the Clean Energy Solutions Center, a new website designed to make it easier for these kind of encounters to happen — helping spread valuable experience to emerging clean energy markets around the world.

Serving as a clearinghouse for clean energy information, the Solutions Center offers stakeholders a wide range of tools, including over 1,300 resources (reports, presentations, and models), webinars and online training, and sharing experiences.

The Solutions Center one of the eleven initiatives launched by the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) and the UN Energy Mechanism. Boasting 10,000 users in over 150 countries, the clearinghouse seems to have corrected the mistakes of many of its predecessors by maintaining regularly updated files and offering interactive experiences with experts. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. With the launch of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative and the 21^st Century Power Partnership, there is a serious need for a platform to connect interested parties and offer interdisciplinary solutions to problems with complex regional and geographic variables.

Playing Matchmaker to Reduce Emissions

A report, prepared by the Energy Information Agency for the most recent CEM meeting, shows that members represent 80 percent of global energy consumption, and two-thirds of the growth in demand in the next ten years. These countries could cut 29 Gt of CO2 by 2050 — equaling a 50 percent reduction from 2010 levels — by crafting national clean energy goals and engaging in international collaboration.

The Solutions Center addresses both of these objectives in a pragmatic way. By sharing information on various national policies and supporting data, policymakers can develop strategies for their countries or regions to reflect the newest developments and network with experts. This lays the foundation for increased collaboration at the international level as stakeholders have a forum to make connections and participate in larger efforts.

Three Ways the Solutions Center Can Make a Difference

The IEA report urges ministers to commit to “national actions that aim to appropriately reflect the true cost of energy production and consumption,” follow through on the 2009 G20 commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, step up energy efficiency, and invest much more in research and development. While the report concludes that we are not currently on track to achieve needed emissions reductions, there are some encouraging takeaways:

• Renewable power has had a 13 percent annual growth over the last ten years — with 2011 showing global investment in new renewable power plants ($240 billion) outpacing fossil fuel plants ($219 billion) for the first time.
• Over 80 countries have renewable energy policies in place; including feed-in-tariffs, tradeable green certificates, tenders, tax incentives, and grants.

If the Clean Energy Solutions Center works as planned, it could help spread that success further.

For example, solar PV has grown tremendously — 40 percent between 2000 and 2011 alone. However, this has been focused in Germany, Italy, the U.S., and Japan. Regions with high solar potential like Africa and Asia need to scale up their use of this technology as well. The Solutions Center can help bridge informational gaps by offering cost-free resources to policymakers in these regions to encourage technology transfer and best practices.

Additionally, those 80 countries with renewable energy policies need to be able to adapt to changing market conditions. As the IEA report notes: “These policies must… be designed to effectively keep pace with technology cost reductions, to keep policy costs to governments moderate and maintain investor confidence, all while helping renewables compete.” The Solutions Center can help policymakers keep a pulse on what other governments and regions are doing, while tracking changes in the economics of different technologies.

The Clean Energy Solutions Center is the right idea at the right time — and has the potential to be a very powerful tool for policymakers.

Adam James is a Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress.

by Climate Guest Blogger at May 19, 2012 02:20 PM

I needed to add a boolean field to a model. For many web apps, this typically involves:

1. modifying the model layer, so that the field becomes available as an attribute on retrieved objects, and can be queried against etc.
2. creating a database migration script that can be run immediately on the development box, and later for staging and production.
3. running the migration against the development DB.
4. updating any admin screens for editing the field.
5. checking the changes and scripts into source control.
6. deploying - including pushing source code and running migration scripts etc.

Using Django, from a cold start (no editor/IDE open), this just took me 1 minute 45 seconds of work for steps 1 - 4, and an additional 45 seconds waiting for step 5, total 2 minutes 30 seconds, and I wasn't rushing.

Step 1 is a one line code addition. Pretty much everything else can and should be generated automatically.

Step 2 is taken care of by a one line command using South, as is step 3 and the database part of step 6 (which is run de-rigueur from my deployment scripts).

Step 4 is taken care of by Django's admin, which introspects the model and generates the right form for you.

This is one of the reasons I love Django. It's not so much the time it saves, although that is pretty awesome, it's the tedium it saves.

This is also one of the reasons I'm not very tempted by schema-less or schema-light databases, because with Django a nice strict schema brings so little administrative overhead. I was going to have to add something about the change to the model anyway, even if it was only documentation, and having done that in one place, the other additional changes required by a relational DB with strong schema placed virtually no burden on me.

(Of course, things could be more complex on bigger apps, especially if the table is large or sharded. But then again, there's no reason why rolling out your DB change shouldn't be just as automated - it's only the 'waiting' stage that has to take longer for a simple change like adding a column. If the coding/work part is taking much longer than the above example, your tools probably need fixing or replacing.)

May 19, 2012 02:12 PM

As we wait for a verdict in the Oracle v. Google patent phase, ponder these top 10 stories from Law & Disorder.

• FBI comes looking for child porn, so man stabs his computer
  If you're going to thrust a samurai sword into your computer, aim well.
• Prosecutors: "pedodave69" was former top FBI agent
  Life as a digital cop: a little file-swapping, a little wardriving.
• Top judge: ditching software patents a "bad solution"
  Former Federal Circuit Judge Paul Michel sees no "magic bullets" for patent reform.
• Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help
  Says RIAA sought huge damages to create an "urban legend."
• Those $22,600 W. Virginia routers were "economical"
  Congress wants to know how enterprise routers end up in rural libraries.
• Oracle v. Google patent phase wraps up
  Oracle is handed another small win by the judge—along with a warning.
• FCC to Verizon: what's wrong with that spectrum you never built out?
  Verizon wants to sell spectrum it never bothered to use, and buy some more.
• Justice Dept. defends public’s constitutional ‘right to record’ cops
  The DoJ sent a letter to the attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department.
• Oracle v. Google: the road ahead
  Several variables could color the outcome of the giant IP case.
• Was Righthaven right to sue an Ars author?
  A new article sort-of makes the case; Nate Anderson raises a giant eyebrow of skepticism.

Read more | Comments

by Ars Staff at May 19, 2012 02:00 PM

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Facebook's IPO came and went on Friday, amid mixed reviews.

Many were hoping for a massive pop, but shares opened trading at $42.05, after pricing at $38 per share. The offering raised more than $16 billion in the largest tech offering in U.S. history. Facebook and its existing shareholders sold 421.2 million shares in the offering.

The stock jumped up to $45 right away, then ran down to its pricing level of $38 but never went negative. Shares closed their first day of trading up 0.6% at $38.23 on 573 million shares. ...

Click to view a price quote on FB.

May 19, 2012 01:30 PM

The top of this week's stories featured two developments that sounded more like science fiction than science news. Implanted electrodes created the world's first photovoltaic retinal implant, translating incoming light to nerve impulses. And a second implant translated nerve impulses from paralyzed patients into the control of a robotic arm, allowing one woman to use the arm to take a drink of coffee.

• Paralyzed woman controls robotic arm, sips coffee
  Electrodes implanted in the brain were used to control mechanical motion.

• Wireless, photovoltaic retinal implants could recharge sight
  Laser goggles would also be used to stimulate the implant.

• American consumers prepared to pay more for clean energy
  Republicans, unaffiliated voters are less inclined to pay extra for green power.

• East coast wind grid gets a go ahead
  The wind is always blowing somewhere.

• Sheets of virus generate electricity when squished
  The biomaterial could one day power electronics using our body movements.

• Cambrian shutter of doom becomes sucker of worms
  The mouth of this segmented invertebrate has been a puzzle for many researchers.

• It's (just barely, sort of) alive!
  Below the ocean floor, microbes are surviving on 100,000 oxygen molecules a day.

• The state of particle physics—a report from Pheno 2012
  The Standard Model isn't perfect, but the alternatives now look worse.

• Cosmic forensics: signs of a Tunguska meteorite?
  A group of researchers thinks a small Siberian lake may be an impact crater.

• Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe
  Most of the rest of the world has seen little change from 2011.

 

Read more | Comments

by John Timmer at May 19, 2012 01:00 PM

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Market anxiety is expected to stay at elevated levels in the coming week as the political turmoil in Greece goes unresolved.

The week is a very light on the economic and earnings fronts, and it comes right before the Memorial Day long weekend. That means major domestic drivers will be few, and investors likely will continue to focus on the overriding issues in Europe.

"The big question is 'what if'-type bad news like what if Greece leaves the eurozone soon?," said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer's. "But what is important to remember is that no one has ever left the eurozone." ...

Click to view a price quote on JPM.

Click to research the Banking industry.

May 19, 2012 01:00 PM

From the Dirty Tricks dept.:
The US International Trade Commission today ordered an import ban on Motorola Mobility Android products, agreeing with Microsoft that the devices infringe a Microsoft patent on “generating meeting requests” from a mobile device.

The import ban stems from a December ruling that the Motorola Atrix, Droid, and Xoom (among 18 total devices) infringed the patent, which Microsoft says is related to Exchange ActiveSync technology. Today, the ITC said in a “final determination of violation” that “the appropriate form of relief in this investigation is a limited exclusion order prohibiting the unlicensed entry for consumption of mobile devices, associated software and components thereof covered by claims 1, 2, 5, or 6 of the United States Patent No. 6,370,566 and that are manufactured abroad by or on behalf of, or imported by or on behalf of, Motorola.”

May 19, 2012 12:44 PM

A cyber-penny for your thoughts.

Related Post:

• Cartoonist Tom Toles slams GOP denial: “They have turned their faces away from climate change in a way that is simply and utterly unforgivable.”

by Joe Romm at May 19, 2012 12:39 PM

Basic competence

by David Atkins

America doesn't spend much time thinking about the Bush Administration any more. Not surprising, given how awful and traumatizing it was. The Administration was so defined by the impact of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath that we often forget the bumbling mess that it was in its first seven months. One of those bumbling episodes was the Hainan incident, which caused an unnecessarily severe diplomatic row with China.

Contrast with this:

Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal defender who made a dramatic escape from house arrest and whose decision to seek refuge in American Embassy jolted American-Sino relations, left China aboard a commercial flight bound for the United States, according to friends who have spoken to him.

Mr. Chen left Beijing on a United Airlines flight bound for Newark with his wife and two children at around 5:30 p.m. after facing earlier delays.

Earlier Saturday Mr. Chen told friends over a cellphone that he was excited to be leaving China but that he was also worried about the fate of relatives he leaves behind. “He’s happy to finally have a rest after seven years of suffering but he’s also worried they will suffer some retribution,” said Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, a Christian advocacy group based in Texas...

One of China’s best known dissidents, Mr. Chen, 40, made an improbable escape last month from home confinement, scaling walls and evading the dozens of guards who were charged with keeping him and his family locked up in their Shandong Province farmhouse.

With the help of Chinese activists, Mr. Chen made his way to Beijing, and days later, into the American diplomatic compound. During several days of tense negotiations between American and Chinese officials, Mr. Chen insisted he wanted to stay in China — as long as the safety of he and his family could be guaranteed. Exile, he said, would effectively silence his voice.

A deal was reached, but Mr. Chen grew fearful and changed his mind in the hours after leaving the embassy. A fresh crisis ensued — with the Obama administration accused of pressuring him to leave the embassy — and another agreement was forged. The Chinese government agreed to allow Mr. Chen to attend New York University on a fellowship.

Notice the lack of chest-thumping from the Obama Administration on this, and the quiet calm with which it was handled. The Obama Administration is far from perfect on many things to be sure, but at least it can be counted on for basic competence and lack of drama in affairs of state.

It's no exaggeration to suggest that under a Republican Administration, Mr. Chen might not be free or even alive today.


.

May 19, 2012 11:38 AM

Twisted is excited to be supporting 4 full-time summer interns from around the world through 2 internship programs this summer.

Google Summer of Code internships

Expanded Endpoints Support, by Ashwini Oruganti (IRC nick ashfall)

Ashwini joins us from the Manipal Institute of Technology in Manipal, India. She has already worked on and closed out a number of Twisted tickets and has previously contributed to Evolution and Sugar Labs.

Her project:

Recently, two new APIs, IStreamServerEndpoint and IStreamClientEndpoint were added to Twisted, for specifying what address the servers should listen for connections and what address a client should connect to, respectively. But not all of the addresses that Twisted supports have this endpoint support added to them; presently endpoint support has been implemented for TCP, SSL and UNIX domain sockets. My project deals with adding more endpoint implementation to Twisted, some involving wrappers around the existing APIs (e.g. serial ports, standard I/O), others involving making fresh APIs where setting up connections was difficult before the addition of the endpoints (e.g. SOCKS and HTTPS proxies).

Python 3 preparation, by Vladimir Perić (IRC nick vperic)

Vladimir joins us from Czech Technical University in Prague. Last year he was a Google Summer of Code student with SymPy.

His project:

Python 3 is the future of Python. If Twisted is to see continued usage in the future, it will have to be ported, and rather sooner than later. As Twisted is a large and complicated code-base, this process needs to be done with care, ensuring that any code written remains compatible with the currently supported versions. The test-driven development methodology Twisted uses will ensure no regressions happen and will ease the maintenance of the code-base.

Automatic Coding Standard Enforcement, by Raphael Shu (IRC nick zomux)

Raphael joins us from Tsukuba University in Japan, where he uses Python daily in his NLP research.

His project:

Twisted applies certain naming and style standards to all contributed code. Currently, a human reviewer needs to check all of these things. The purpose of this project is to develop a tool which can automatically make these simple, mechanical checks, freeing up human reviewer time to focus on more important aspects of proposed changes. Finally, it will speed up the review process.

Software Freedom Conservancy / GNOME Outreach Program internship

We are also excited to be working with the Software Freedom Conservancy and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women this summer. You can read more about the initiative and our work to encourage diverse participation in open source communities here. Through this initiative we have a 4th paid, full-time internship this summer:

Improving Twisted Mail and Twisted Core, by Fei Tan (IRC nick argonemyth)

Fei joins us from Grand Bay, Mauritius, where she works as a freelance web developer.

She will improve Twisted Mail on a number of fronts, including improving API documentation, adding more examples, adding more HOWTOs, and improved test coverage.

Please join me in welcoming Ashwini, Vladimir, Raphael, and Fei, whose internships start next week. Expect a torrent of code reviews and some record-breaking high scores list stats this summer!

Thank you Google for giving us this paid mentorship opportunity, and thank you to the Python Software Foundation for supporting us as our Google Summer of Code umbrella organization.

May 19, 2012 11:08 AM

Auto Hop has content industry hopping mad

In the latest episode of the US ad-skipping saga, Dish Networks is facing the wrath of broadcasters such as NBC and Fox, but winning praise from customers and no doubt causing a little churn among competitors. That at least is the intention of the Dish PVR ad skipping feature called Auto Hop, with the company gambling that the gain in subscription revenue will make the pain of having to defend a possibly protracted case against it from broadcasters worthwhile.…

May 19, 2012 11:00 AM

Estaremos ante un título de carácter continuista que refina la fórmula de éxito ya aplicada por EA en la edición de año pasado.  Leer

May 19, 2012 10:15 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

ホンダは15日、人の両足の間に収まるサイズで前後左右や斜めへの自在な動きが可能な1人乗り用電動車両「UNI-CUB(ユニカブ)」を発表した(ホンダのUNI-CUB紹介ページ、 日本経済新聞の記事、 MSN産経ニュースの記事、 WSJ日本版の記事)。

UNI-CUBは2009年に発表したU3-Xがベースになっており、ヒューマノイドロボット研究から生まれた独自のバランス制御技術と全方位駆動車輪機構により、体重移動で速度や方向の調整が可能。スマートフォンのタッチパネルを使用した操作にも対応する。前後左右に移動可能な「Honda Omni Traction Drive System」を前輪に、旋回用車輪を後輪に装備し、最高速度は時速6km。1回の充電で6kmの走行が可能とのこと。空港やショッピングモール、博物館などバリアフリー対応空間での使用を想定しており、6月から東京の日本科学未来館で実証実験を開始する。

すべて読む | idleセクション | 日本 | テクノロジー | 変なモノ | idle | ロボット | 交通

関連ストーリー：
米ニュージャージー州フォートリーで歩行中の携帯電話操作が禁止される 2012年05月16日
ホンダ、新型パーソナルモビリティ「U3-X」発表 2009年09月28日
ホンダ、「体重支持型歩行アシスト」の試作機を公開 2008年11月09日

by headless at May 19, 2012 09:45 AM

専用ボディカラーにナビと19インチアルミホイールを装備した特別なKuga登場

May 19, 2012 09:45 AM

Computer said no: New attempt expected on Tuesday

The Falcon 9 rocket from private space company SpaceX, intended to launch this morning and send a Dragon capsule loaded with supplies to the International Space Station, has failed to take off. The rocket's computer aborted the launch automatically at almost the final possible moment, when its engines had already ignited but the vehicle had not yet been released from the pad.…

May 19, 2012 09:31 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

政府は18日午前、電力需給に関する検討会合とエネルギー・環境会議の合同会議を開き、今夏の電力需給見通しと節電対策を正式に決定した(議事次第、 毎日jpの記事、 NHKニュースの記事、 日本経済新聞の記事)。

原子力発電所の再稼動を行わない場合、関西電力管内では昨夏の東京電力管内で想定されたピーク電力不足よりも厳しい状況になるとされており、一昨年比15%の節電を要請する。検討されていた電力使用制限令の発動は見送るとのこと。このほか、九州電力管内で10%、北海道、四国の各電力会社管内で7%、中部、北陸、中国の各電力会社管内で5%、東京、東北の各電力会社管内では数値目標を定めない節電を要請する。電力供給力に比較的余裕がある中部、北陸、中国の節電により、関西と九州への電力融通も見込む。

節電を求める期間は7月2日から9月7日(北海道のみ7月23日から9月14日)の平日9時から20時。8月13日から8月15日は除外される。北海道では9月10日以降、17時から20時までの節電要請となる。関西、九州、北海道、四国では発電設備のトラブルなど万が一に備えた計画停電の準備も進める。

すべて読む | ハードウェアセクション | 日本 | ハードウェア | 電力 | 政治 | 原子力 | 政府

関連ストーリー：
国内の原発がすべて停止、2012年夏の節電はどうする？ 2012年05月07日
クールビズ、今年も1ヶ月早く開始 2012年05月03日
東京電力、全原発が停止 2012年03月27日
でんこちゃん、リストラされる 2012年02月28日
本当は難しい、間引き点灯による節電 2011年08月25日
関電の堺港発電所でトラブル、40万キロワット分の発電が停止。 2011年08月15日
7月1日より大口需要者向けの電力制限実施 2011年05月26日
九州電力も節電を要請、理由はLNGが確保できないため 2011年05月23日
サーバーの節電どうしてますか？ 2011年04月30日
東京電力、夏季も計画停電しないで頑張ることに 2011年04月11日
夏の電力不足、どう対処する? 2011年03月21日
IT技術者ができる節電を考えよう 2011年03月18日
節電の為になにをやっていますか ? 2011年03月16日

by headless at May 19, 2012 07:50 AM

I recently forked the defunct eyefiserver project. The new project is called eyefiserver2. It is a server for eye-fi cards that runs on Linux using Python, however, it should be possible to run it on any OS, I just haven't tested it on anything other than Linux.

May 19, 2012 07:17 AM

Pushy types

Product round-up As the speedy texter generation grows longer in the Bluetooth and touchscreen technologies improve, the range of Qwerty phones on offer gets smaller by the day. But for many, they wouldn't use anything else. Indeed, for RIM, Qwerty keys have been the hallmark of it BlackBerry handsets.…

May 19, 2012 07:00 AM

利根川水系から取水する浄水場の処理後の水道水から国の基準を上回る濃度のホルムアルデヒドが検出された問題で、千葉県内の浄水場が相次いで取水を停止し、断水する地域も出ているようだ(千葉県のプレスリリース、 NHKニュースの記事、 日本経済新聞の記事)。

野田市では市内の浄水場が18日から取水を停止しており、19日午前中からほぼ全域で断水。柏市でも19日正午ごろから市内の南部を中心に断水し、全域で水の出が悪くなっているという。断水する地域は今後広がる見通し。また、鎌ヶ谷市の全域、松戸市および市川市、船橋市、白井市の一部などでも断水の恐れがあるとのことだ。

すべて読む | 日本 | ニュース

関連ストーリー：
中国の農地、1/10が重金属で汚染されている 2011年11月10日
水源地のダム湖での立ちションにより、水が全量廃棄処分に 2011年06月27日
東京・金町浄水場で乳児飲用基準を超える放射性ヨウ素を検出 2011年03月23日
野菜や水道水などから微量の放射性物質が検出される 2011年03月22日
讃岐うどんの茹で汁排水に規制を検討 2007年05月01日

by headless at May 19, 2012 06:18 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

Lenovoは15日、ラスベガスで開催されたAccelerate Channel Partner Conferenceで14インチのUltrabook、ThinkPad X1 Carbonを発表した。また、第3世代Intel Coreプロセッサー(Ivy Bridge)搭載のThinkPad X/T/W/Lシリーズ計8機種も同日発表されている( ニュースリリース、 LAPTOP Magazineの記事、 Gizmagの記事)。

8月発売予定のThinkPad X1 Carbonはカーボンファイバーボディーで重量1,360グラム以下。14インチUltrabookとして最薄・最軽量だという。3G通信機能を内蔵し、35分で80%までの充電が可能なRapidCharge機能を搭載している。現在のところ、詳細なスペックは公表されていないようだ。

ThinkPad X/T/W/Lシリーズ8機種は6月発売予定。全機種にUSB 3.0ポートと6列アイソレーションタイプのThinkPad Precision Keyboardを搭載。Lenovo Enhanced Experience 3.0 (EE 3.0) with RapidBoot technologyにより、一般的なWindows 7パソコンよりも40%速く起動するという。多くの機種にMini Display Portが搭載され、オプションで T430/ T430s/ L430/ L530 はHD+ディスプレイ(1600x900)、 T530/ W530 はFHDディスプレイ(1920x1080)の搭載が可能。バッテリー持続時間はT430が最大30時間、T530は最大24時間。 X230も外付けバッテリー追加により最大24時間となる。

タレコミ子はずーーーっとXシリーズだったが、今回はどれにしようか蝕手が蠢く。

すべて読む | モバイルセクション | ビジネス | ハードウェア | ニュース | ノートPC | Windows

関連ストーリー：
レノボの「ThinkPad X1 Hybrid」は x86 と ARM の「デュアル CPU」構成 2012年02月09日
NECとレノボ、PC事業の合弁会社設立を発表 2011年01月27日
ThinkPadを熱く語れ！レビュー・コンテスト開催 2010年01月18日
Lenovo、AMD製CPUを搭載する低価格ThinkPad「X100e」と「Edge 13”」を発表 2010年01月07日
ThinkPad 新モデル「T400s」では Esc キーと Delete キーのサイズを拡大 2009年07月01日
lenovoの「ThinkPad W700」はワコムのペンタブレット内蔵 2008年08月14日
ThinkPadにワイド液晶採用の「Zシリーズ」が追加 2005年10月05日
IBM PC事業売却決定！ 2004年12月08日
どんなThinkPadがお好き？ 2003年10月30日

by headless at May 19, 2012 04:26 AM

Este malagueño, diseñador gráfico, crea sus propios videojuegos que distribuye libremente en Internet.  Leer. Escuchar

May 19, 2012 03:19 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

Appleは「新しいiPad」のLTE対応モデルについて、モデル名表記をこれまでの「Wi-Fi+4G」から「Wi-Fi+Cellular」に変更した(Engadget 日本版の記事、 Engadget 日本版の記事(2)、 AV Watchの記事、 CNET Japanの記事)。

新しいiPadはLTE通信サービス(4G)に対応していることから「Wi-Fi+4G」と表記されてきたが、日本のように対応周波数の関係でLTEが利用できない国や地域もあり、混乱を招いていた。海外では先週からすでに名称が変更されていたようだが、日本でも現在はAppleやソフトバンクモバイルのWebサイトで表記が変更されている。

すべて読む | アップルセクション | モバイル | アップル | iOS | 携帯通信

関連ストーリー：
米国でiPadによる「パケ死」が続出 2012年04月03日
新型iPadはバッテリ残量が「100%」表示でも満充電状態ではない？ 2012年03月27日
新しいiPadは修理業者に優しくない？ 2012年03月23日
新しいiPadに過熱問題？ 2012年03月22日
Apple、新iPadとApple TVを発表 2012年03月08日
AXGPサービス「SoftBank 4G」、2月24日よりスタート。ただし帯域制限あり 2012年02月20日
米 Sprint、WiMAX に見切りを付けて LTE に移行? 2011年10月13日
ソフトバンク、2011年秋冬発売モデルや「4G」を発表 2011年09月29日
一定以上使うと128kbpsの速度制限、LTEサービス「Xi」の新料金プラン発表 2011年09月09日

by headless at May 19, 2012 02:30 AM

見て見ぬフリはもうやめませんか？あなたの個人情報はしっかり守ります。

May 19, 2012 02:30 AM

For those who labor long and hard to craft good and just standards, as well as those who have suffered from their absence. On the one hand, the fight against the tyranny of structurelessness. On the other, the fallacy of one size fits all  (Lampland & Starr, 2009).

This book dedication found in Standards and Their Stories captures the inherent paradox of badge system design. By seeking to standardize the process we risk the introduction of systemic rigidity. And yet by developing badges without a plan we risk the possibility of ideological entropy. In my writing about this topic I’m attempting to walk the middle path: somewhere in between fanatical dictums and a mad free-for-all. I wish I could say that it was easier than this, but then I’d be lying.

The status quo
Even while we’re in the midst of talking about a potentially reconstructive idea like Mozilla Open Badges, I still rather rotely refer to my own typically conventional educational route with “my undergrad degree this” or “my grad degree that.” Perhaps this is to be expected. It certainly hearkens to one of the issues that the open badges in the wild will have to confront: the seeming intractability of the status quo. In the Open Badges world this desire for stability echoes within the repeated request for a standard method of validation; it’s mated to a deep concern about badge quality. In unfamiliar situations such as these we tend to rely on current cultural understandings and touchstones. In this case, degrees and certificates, accreditation systems and educational rankings.

The status quo of our formal academic system has transmogrified into a sort of binary approval system. You pass or you fail. You go to a respected school or you go to a second-tier school. You graduate or you don’t. It all seems pretty inexorable. We gravitate toward that which is customary. The familiar often appears to be less threatening than the entirely unknown. Indeed, there is a robust academic research field that studies this tendency, especially with regards to our proclivities toward risk and reward: behavioral economics. (For a deep and delightful dive on this read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)

Resonance
I’m hoping that some day people will refer to not only their formal schooling but their non-traditional learned experiences as well (hopefully badged in the open way) without speaking of one of them as second-rate or less than the other. That noted, I’ll return to my rather classical undergraduate education to make a point. I double-majored in graphic design and writing. The classes I took in design inform a significant amount of the way that I think. This is not to say that every design class I took made sense or built on every preceding design class so that one day I had taken enough of them to—ta-dah!—be called a designer. On the contrary, I gleaned information from a variety of sources. My deep learning occurred in many different venues, a bit of it very much outside the realm of what typically would be called design. Nevertheless, some aspects of design that I learned in those college classes continue to reverberate within me.

One of the most resonant aspects of those years pertains to users and audiences and owners and consumers and interested parties and even uninterested parties. The idea of multiple audiences pulses within me at the root. Akin to that concept, another: juxtaposition. What is there versus what is not there; what has been asked versus what has not been asked; the solid versus the void. Good designers are problem solvers, not stylists or skinners. They interrogate situations and ask why? They poke around in seemingly unrelated categories. They consider the issue of temporality and end users while acknowledging that a problem owner need resolutions. They know that solutions can have many audiences and that things that seem straightforward can be damn complex. (Massimo Vignelli has spoken eloquently on this subject in “Massimo Vignelli on Rational Design.” Actually, read all the interviews on Steven Heller’s Design Dialogues site.)

Hard questions
Why do I mention all of this? Because as you begin the process of badge system design, you, too, will be delving into these areas. You, too, will be learning to be a designer. You’ll be gathering information from many sources—no doubt a few of them entirely unexpected. And most likely you’ll find yourself asking deep and sometimes existential questions. I encourage you to remain open to the idea that periodically, like the question, the answer will prove to be both complex and difficult and very much not binary. Sometimes you will have to try something to know if it works because there will be no answer until you do. Accept this. Your badge system will benefit from this sideways approach. That is, believe it or not, the middle path.

- – -

Much more soon.

references
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Lampland, M. & Starr, S. L. (2009). Standards and their stories. (p. dedication). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vignelli, M. (1998). Massimo Vignelli on Rational Design. In Heller, S. (Ed.), Design dialogues (pp. 3-8). New York, NY: Allworth Press.

Tagged: badge system design, creativity, design, drumbeat, inspiration, mozilla, openbadges, social networks, tools, trust

by carlacasilli at May 19, 2012 01:58 AM

New user account

by KinnaYarber579 at May 19, 2012 01:57 AM

I’ve had some requests to port Cleary over to Native Fennec (aka the hot new Beta for Android), and thought it would be a good chance to blog about addons in the native Fennec world. Cleary is a pretty simple addon (based on mfinkle’s BootstrapJones tutorials) that gave Fennec some more advanced clear history options, like the ability to only clear certain things:

1. History (cache,history,downloads,formdata)
2. Passwords (cookies,passwords,sessions,syncAccount)
3. Site Preferences (offlineApps,geolocation,siteSettings)

and only clear them for certain time frames (One hour, Two hours, Four hours, a Day, and Forever). Porting it gives a chance to show off some new things we can do. Turned out, porting it was really easy though. In fact, a lot of the code it was using in XUL Fennec isn’t even necessary anymore thanks to some additions to the platform! Quick overview:

Step One: Updating compatibility

This steps pretty easy. We just need to mark Cleary as compatible on our install.rdf

<em:targetApplication>
  <Description>
    <em:id>{aa3c5121-dab2-40e2-81ca-7ea25febc110}</em:id>
    <em:minVersion>14.0b1</em:minVersion>
    <em:maxVersion>15.0</em:maxVersion>
  </Description>
</em:targetApplication>

Updating our UI

Cleary (luckily), is a bootstrapped extension and doesn’t include any overlays. While you could potentially use an overlay in Native Fennec, I’d highly discourage addon authors from doing it.

So to update our UI here basically means altering some scripts so that they only run on XUL Fennec. I decided an easy way to do that here was just to check the app id:

if (Services.appInfo.ID == "{a23983c0-fd0e-11dc-95ff-0800200c9a66}") {
  // setup xul fennec
} else {
  // do nothing!
}

Inside here the XUL Fennec code creates some buttons and rows for the Preferences pane. Overlaying things into prefs isn’t possible in Native yet, so we can basically do nothing! In some cases you might opt to use our NativeWindow interface to add UI elements. Instead, I’m opting to include some inline options for the addon.

settings.xul also happened to already be in Cleary. I just used some trickery to display it in the normal settings list. It also included some things we didn’t want, like a <settings> element, which I’m pretty sure Native Fennec will not like, so I removed that and just created a new options.xul in the root of the addon.

We also need to re hook up our click listeners to the clear buttons in the dialog. This requires a fix for Fennec that hopefully we can push into the beta. In bootstrap.js we need to add a listener for “addon-options-displayed” notifications:

Services.obs.addObserver(observer, "addon-options-displayed", false)

and a little observer to see them trigger:

var observer = {
  observe: function(aSubject, aTopic, aData) {
    if (aTopic == "addon-options-displayed" && aData == "cleary@digdug.org") {
      var doc = aSubject;
      var control = doc.getElementsByClassName("clearButton");
      for (var i = 0; i < control.length; i++) {
        var c = doc.defaultView.gChromeWin.cleary;
        control[i].addEventListener("command", c.doClear.bind(c), false);
      }
    }
  }
};

The old settings.xul was also localized using some JS trickery, which won’t work now. BUT!!! bootstrapped addons now support a chrome.manifest file, so we can add it and save ourselves some work. At the same time, I can remove a bunch of junk I had to register a resource URL and load style sheets. Yay for simplifying! We just add a chrome.manifest file with:

content cleary content/
locale cleary en-US locales/
style chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://cleary/content/dialog.css

Functionality

Most of the functionality we previously had will just work in Native Fennec. Passwords, Form history, Cache, Cookies, Downloads, etc. All of its the same (and the same as desktop).

Except! browsing history is no longer handled in Gecko at all. Its all done in Java. Eventually Fennec should expose an interface for this, ideally that one that mirrors nsIBrowserHistory. I filed bug 731888 awhile ago for a slightly less hacky fix as well, but need to put up a correct patch there (volunteers welcome!).

For now, I had to hack into the database. This is NOT recommended. It will probably break eventually, and it will definitely make kittens cry but you can open the history database using the mozStorage service and tinker around in it. That may crash some phones where Android’s sqlite assuredly won’t match Gecko’s, so be warned! For history I added:

let file = FileUtils.getFile("ProfD", ["browser.db"]);
let dbConn = Services.storage.openDatabase(file);
if (this.range) {
  var statement = dbConn.createStatement("DELETE FROM history WHERE :from_date <= date AND date <= :to_date "
  statement.params.from_date = this.range[0];
  statement.params.to_date = this.range[1];
  statement.executeAsync();
} else {
  dbConn.executeSimpleSQL("DELETE FROM history");
}

And we’re done! There’s a build with this on Dropbox here, but it will not work until bug 756689 is fixed an checked in (and be warned its not on AMO because I’m still testing! Dataloss definitely possible!) There’s some bugs here I need to look into (clicks in the options dialog seem to fire multiple times and there’s some oddity with menulists), and I haven’t tested on XUL Fennec yet. For things that delete your data, there’s always lots and lots and LOTS of testing to do. But for the most part the port was pretty easy.

I’m pumped about Native Fennec. Its a great browser, and having extensions work in it is just icing on the cake. I’m excited to see what some good add-on developers can come up with to do with it in order to fix and enhance the mobile web.

by digdug2k at May 19, 2012 01:43 AM

New user account

by DorisaPalomares221 at May 19, 2012 01:24 AM

This just isn't right

May 19, 2012 01:00 AM

The weather was perfect today. My only gripe was that there were some mosquitoes, but they left me alone as long as I kept moving and stayed out of the shade.

I recorded a video of about an hour of the trip. I will post it as soon as YouTube digests it.

This is the best picture I took:

From Kayaking at Stewarts Bridge Reservoir May 18, 2012

by cory at May 19, 2012 12:36 AM

Running on pavement is the worst.

This is some data from my first and only time running outside so far this year.

I thought I had run 5k, but I didn't, and I hurt in new ways.

by cory at May 19, 2012 12:28 AM

I went to Harriman Reservoir, hoping to do the perimeter, but it was way too windy. I still had a good time, and I had the lake almost entirely to myself, which is always nice.

The embarrassing part is that when I crossed the lake before turning around, I thought I was just going past a little outlet. I was pretty confused when I started seeing familiar landmarks on the wrong side, but in the end it was best that I turned around, as the wind only got worse.

The most notable thing from this visit was the storm damage. Numerous wooden garbage boxes were strewn around the edge of the lake. There was a crew of people cleaning up trees in one area.

by cory at May 19, 2012 12:23 AM

Ad·ver·sary calls out Combichrist for being misogynistic, racist fuckheads -- while opening for them.

It was when I got booked to play Kinetik, and I found out that I was scheduled to open for Nachtmahr and Combichrist. Given how strongly I feel about the way they do what they do, I didn't think I could just get up there and play and pretend as though I wasn't going to be followed by these two acts that I've openly criticized. I actually considered just cancelling my performance, and being done with it. I don't want to be associated with what they do, and I don't want to be a support act for them, even in a festival setting. But I took some time to think about it, and at some point I was listening to Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death and thought, "What would Jello Biafra do?" He'd use the stage time to tell people why he's pissed off. And so here we are.

They played this PowerPoint behind their last song:

Later in the linked article, the Combichrist guy rebuts with, "Hey, I'm just kidding with all that misogyny and racism, can't you take a joke?"

In case you couldn't have predicted that.

Industrial music began circling the drain in earnest in around 1995 and has been fully dead as a genre since 1999, and this brodustrial jock-rock bullshit from bands like Combichrist certainly brought nothing to the party.

"Football season is over, Veronica. Kurt and Ram had nothing left to offer the school except for date rapes and AIDS jokes."

Mirrored from jwz.org.

May 19, 2012 12:22 AM

On Wednesday, the Alabama legislature passed a bill preserving most of the harshest provisions of that state’s anti-immigrant law, including the provision that unconstitutionally drove many Latino students from attending schools. Yesterday, Gov. Robert Bentley (R-AL) objected to this bill, noting in particular that the schools provision should be removed or substantially changed. Today, he caved, signing the bill into law.

by Ian Millhiser at May 19, 2012 12:20 AM

A few months ago, I "took over" maintenance of elasticutils. We use it in SUMO as the API for building search queries with elasticsearch.

One of the first things I did was spend some time figuring out whether we should keep working on elasticutils at all. django-haystack also provides a django-ish API for working with elasticsearch. Why have two libraries that at a high level do the same thing?

The thing is that they're not exactly the same. django-haystack is really great and supports a variety of backends for search, elasticsearch being one of them. Right now, it only has support for elasticsearch in 2.0 which is in either an alpha or beta state now (their web-site could use some updates). However, because it supports a bunch of backends, it only supports functionality that works across all of them.

elasticutils, on the other hand, is elasticsearch-specific. As elasticsearch adds functionality, we can, too. That's the compelling reason to keep working on this library. However, django-haystack has some awesome ideas that we'd like to implement in elasticutils, too. This will fix some sharp edges in elasticutils, but also make it much easier for projects to switch from one to the other.

Currently, elasticutils only handles the query side of things. django-haystack handles that, but also has an API for defining mappings, indexing, and all the other things you need with a search system.

Thus, Rob Hudson and I are going to embrace and extend elasticutils to:

1. fix the current situation where it seems every elasticutils user is actually using their own branch with additional functionality in it (ew!)
2. implement the rest of the things you need with a search system
3. document the things we've learned while working with elasticutils because at a minimum, it seems most of the Mozilla projects that use elasticutils bumped into, spent time on, and solved the same problems---that's a huge waste of time and a failure on my part

One of the things users of a library need is for the library to be a mature project with releases, tagged version, documentation, tests, stability, reliability, reproduceability, communication, community and all that. Thus, I'm also going to spend some time to turn this into a real project. Towards that end, I created #elasticutils on irc.mozilla.org where we'll talk dirty elasticutils stuff. If we end up with more people pitching in, we'll create a mailing list. But for now, IRC will do.

My next step is to spend a little time cleaning up what's in the master branch, then tag and release a baseline version.

After that, I'm going to spend time identifying, thinking about and merging in the divergent functionality in the various branches while Rob works on continuing his imperative mapping work.

I think in a couple of months, we'll be in a better place and that'll make it easier for Mozilla projects and anyone else who wants to use elasticutils to use and contribute to it.

If you're a user of elasticutils, please come hang out with us! Let us know how we can better help you.

[Comments]

May 19, 2012 12:01 AM

(Note: the following has been cross-posted to Mozilla UX)

Two Firefox features getting a redesign in Firefox 13 (currently in beta) are the Home Tab and New Tab. Home Tab can be viewed by clicking house icon in Firefox or by typing “about:home” into your URL bar. New Tab appears when you click the “+” at the end of your tab strip.

Firefox’s Home Tab and New Tab have, until now, had fairly basic pages. In Firefox 12, Home Tab had a large search bar, a “snippet” which Mozilla uses to display messages to users, and little else. The main reason the search bar is on Home Tab is because many users click the Home button to initiate a search, either unaware of the toolbar search box or preferring not to use it. The snippet allows Mozilla to give a message to users, such as last October when it asked users in the United States to contact their representatives when the anti-internet-freedom bill SOPA was being heard in the House of Representatives. Such messages can be important while not being urgent enough to disrupt users with a notification.

New Tab, for most of Firefox’s history, has been completely blank. This was done deliberately to offer users a clean, fresh “sheet” to begin a new browsing task. However, a blank tab may not be distracting, but it’s also not useful.

Surely, we thought, we can present a more helpful design than a blank page! Using Mozilla Test Pilot, we began to research how Firefox users use New Tabs. What we learned is that each day, the average Firefox user creates 11 New Tabs, loads 7 pages from a New Tab, and visits two unique domains from a New Tab. The average New Tab loads two pages before the user closes or leaves it.

What this tells us is that users create many New Tabs, but they’re very likely from those to return to a limited number of their most-visited websites. So, we began to experiment with giving users quick access on New Tab to the websites they visit most frequently.

What you’ll see on the New Tab page of Firefox 13 are your most-visited sites displayed with large thumbnails, reducing the time it takes to type or navigate to these pages. This data comes directly from your browsing history: it’s the same information that helps Firefox’s Awesome Bar give suggestions when you type. Or, if you want to go somewhere new, the URL bar is still targeted when you type on a New Tab page. If you want to hide your top sites – permanently or temporarily – a grid icon in the top right wipes the new tab screen to blank.

Mozilla Home is getting a redesign, too! While still keeping the prominent search bar and snippet, the graphic style is softer, the text is more readable, and launch targets at the bottom allow you to quickly access areas such as Bookmarks, Applications, and previous Firefox sessions.

Both Home and New Tab are being improved as part of our longterm vision of making Firefox more powerful, engaging, and beautiful. Over the next few releases, more design improvements will be made towards this goal. For now, please try out Firefox’s new Home and New Tab pages in Firefox 13 Beta and tell us that you think!

by Jennifer Morrow at May 18, 2012 11:43 PM