Planet 無 Web Logs
July 04, 2009 08:50 PM
July 04, 2009
Man: (sneezes)
Woman: Swine flu!
--14th St
Overheard by: moxychique
July 04, 2009 09:00 PM
Courtesy of Wonkette commenter Atheist Nun, here’s your Fourth of July Blingee, featuring history’s lamest whining quitter. Whether Sarah Palin will be indicted and put in prison forever or not, we will always appreciate her, in our hearts, for ruining the teabaggers’ big plans to have all 500 teabaggers meet in a park somewhere to complain about having socialist parks where they can meet. Sorry, teabaggers! Happy Independence Day, everybody! Click the to watch Barack Obama’s happy July 4th video e-card!
Ahhh, takes the sleazy Palin flavor right out of your soul.
by Ken Layne at July 04, 2009 08:00 PM
Sun announced this week the availability of VirtualBox 3, the latest version of its open source virtualization solution. The new version introduces experimental 3D graphics support and the ability to expose multiple CPUs to guest operating systems.
VirtualBox was originally developed by InnoTek, which was acquired by Sun last year. InnoTek launched an open source edition of VirtualBox in 2007, releasing most of the program's code under the GPL. Alongside the open source version, the company has continued to sell a commercial version that has additional features, such as a built-in RDP server and full USB support. VirtualBox is cross-platform compatible and is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 04, 2009 07:30 PM
HAPPY 4TH OF JULY.... The president's weekly multimedia addresses aren't usually worth noting, but in light of the holiday, I kind of like today's edition. After addressing education, health care, and energy policy, the Obama said, "These are some of...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 07:15 PM
kaninka.net : hallakol:
Tattoo by Yannou at www.yourmeatismine.com
July 04, 2009 07:00 PM
deusx : That Cheesecake Sitting On The Table: What If It Accidentally Fell Into Your Mouth? | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Tags : cheesecake theonion accidents funny
July 04, 2009 07:00 PM
Kid #1: How old is she?
Kid #2: Six.
Kid #1: And she's goth?
--Myrtle Ave & Washington, Brooklyn
Overheard by: Dark Lord in Training
July 04, 2009 07:00 PM
Nutty Palin spokeslady Meg Stapleton was in New York when Nutty Palin suddenly resigned as governor of Alaska, the state that elected her as governor two-and-a-half years ago. Listen to Meg make NO SENSE as a baffled Anderson Cooper asks her again and again, “Lady why are you talking about basketball, and how does quitting equal leadership, and I don’t know who the hoop is, and who the ball is.” Cooper’s expressions around 4:40 are priceless. [CNN/YouTube]
by Ken Layne at July 04, 2009 06:55 PM
WIN OF THE AFTERNOON: In the middle of this monster Palin Chaos Theory post, commenter-person Alaska Girl reminds us why Sarah Palin’s latest “I’m gonna take my ball and go home” move is standard Wasilla Snowbilly behavior: “She didn’t finish her term as mayor, stepping down to run for Lt. Governor. She didn’t finish her term on the petroleum board ethics panel, she resigned in protest and then ran for Governor. She doesn’t want the office, she just likes running for office. She doesn’t want (can’t actually) accomplish anything, she just wants to talk about it.”
by Ken Layne at July 04, 2009 06:45 PM
kaninka.net : fuckyeahtattoos:
metro line (via sylvie LS)
July 04, 2009 06:00 PM
deusx : Zombies: Still Undead, And Suddenly Everywhere : NPR - "George A. Romero certainly didn't invent zombies, but with his 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead, he created a lasting cinematic mythology for them.
In Romero's taxonomy of horror, zombies are undead creatures that feed on human
Tags : zombies horror brains
July 04, 2009 06:00 PM
THE SEQUELS ARE RARELY AS GOOD AS THE ORIGINAL.... The lasting impact of the "Tea Parties" in April has been minimal. A few months later, it's still not clear what the point was, or what organizers hoped to accomplish. In...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 05:30 PM
President Obama devotes his address this week to remembering the “indomitable spirit of the first American citizens” who built this country and the lessons we can apply to the current challenges:
That is the spirit we are called to show once more. We are facing an array of challenges on a scale unseen in our time. We are waging two wars. We are battling a deep recession. And our economy – and our nation itself – are endangered by festering problems we have kicked down the road for far too long: spiraling health care costs; inadequate schools; and a dependence on foreign oil. [...]
These are some of the challenges that our generation has been called to meet. And yet, there are those who would have us try what has already failed; who would defend the status quo. They argue that our health care system is fine the way it is and that a clean energy economy can wait. They say we are trying to do too much, that we are moving too quickly, and that we all ought to just take a deep breath and scale back our goals.
These naysayers have short memories. They forget that we, as a people, did not get here by standing pat in a time of change. We did not get here by doing what was easy. That is not how a cluster of 13 colonies became the United States of America.
Watch it:
by Amanda Terkel at July 04, 2009 05:29 PM
THIS WEEK IN GOD.... First up from the God Machine this week is an angle to the debate over health care reform that shouldn't go overlooked: some religiously-motivated activists are weighing in heavily on the side of reform. Liberal-leaning religious...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 05:05 PM
nelson : Lost Coast Tangerine Wheat - I had this beer on tap at lunch yesterday, it was great. Not usually one for flavoured beers, but this worked.
Tags : beer lostcoast wheatbeer
July 04, 2009 05:00 PM
nelson : Obama's pronounciation - Pronouncing names right is a simple way of showing respect
Tags : obama diplomacy pronounciation
July 04, 2009 05:00 PM
nelson : Shockwave crash icon - Love the image: sad puzzle piece
Tags : shockwave flash badtech crash computers
July 04, 2009 05:00 PM
kaninka.net : "Ef fólk er ekki tilbúið til að gefa kapítalismanum langt nef, þá finnst mér að það ætti að velja..." - “Ef fólk er ekki tilbúið til að gefa kapítalismanum langt nef, þá finnst mér að það ætti að velja fyrri kostinn, borga og halda kjafti. En mig grunar að margir þeirra sem vilja sleppa því að greiða Icesave, vilji líka halda í gróð
July 04, 2009 05:00 PM
Hipster guy: Then, she sent me all these naked pictures of herself.
Hipster chick: So what did you do?
Hipster guy: Went to McDonald's. Big Macs clear my head.
--87th & Lexington
July 04, 2009 05:00 PM
Gaming news this week began with a bang—our famed Mole revealed that price drops on both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles are coming this fall, along with some tasty new bundles.
A huge rush of news about StarCraft 2 has hit the gaming blogs this week. We break down the news reports and bring you the surprises, the oddities, and the pleasant surprises. The takeaway? The game looks great.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 04, 2009 04:18 PM
nelson : RIP Compuserve - Old infosystem finally shut down
Tags : internet history compuserve cis
July 04, 2009 04:00 PM
YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE.... Towards the end of her strange speech yesterday, Sarah Palin said, "[I]t hurts to make this choice but I'm doing what's best for Alaska, and I have explained why..... I've given my reasons."...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 03:50 PM
Scientists are increasingly worried that the beautiful fireworks millions of Americans will be watching this Independence Day contain toxic chemicals that may pose a threat to the environment. A particular focus is perchlorate, which helps “create the combustion reaction needed for the explosion.” According to a 2009 article in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, “the amount of perchlorate in nearby bodies of water could increase by anywhere from 24 to 1,068 times the amount present before the fireworks, and that it takes 20 to 80 days for the chemical levels to subside.” When ingested, perchlorate can hinder the thyroid’s production of growth hormones. In response, some chemists are looking for other solutions, including cleaner-burning fireworks that use nitrate-based oxidants.
by Amanda Terkel at July 04, 2009 03:44 PM
RUNNING WITHOUT A DAY JOB.... Since Carter and Reagan were able to mount successful presidential campaigns after leaving their governorships behind, many have come to believe the best way to launch a national campaign is to run without a day...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 03:15 PM
It's now a holiday weekend here in the US, but that doesn't mean last week wasn't exciting. Here's a recap of the Week That Was.
The big news, of course, was the long-awaited release of Firefox 3.5. With support for HTML 5 tags like <video> and a high-performance JavaScript engine, 3.5 is lightning fast and ready for the future.
While Firefox was busy showing us the possibilities of the future, science was busy showing us just how petty we can be. Turns out that people will even reject free money if they think that they can screw over a rival by doing so.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 04, 2009 03:04 PM
July is finally here, proving that the world of Apple can in fact keep turning while Steve Jobs is away. This week's top Apple news examined the adoption rate of iPhone OS 3.0, a Newton bug, fraudulent iTunes gift cards, the disappearance of .Mac HomeSites, and more. Catch up here on the week that was with our news roundup—between throwing brats on the grill and checking out fireworks, of course.
What's the uptake on iPhone OS 3.0? How quickly are users of Apple's mobile devices jumping on the 3.0 bandwagon? Conflicting data points from multiple sources give us anything but a clear answer. If you want to participate in our own poll on the matter, though, let us know whether you have upgraded yet and why (or why not).
Impending Newton Y2K10 apocalypse narrowly averted: A dedicated Newton fan and hacker has developed a patch for Apple's long-since-discontinued PDAs that will keep them humming along just fine after this New Year's Eve. The patch isn't for the faint of heart, but then again, neither is using a 20-year-old PDA.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 04, 2009 03:04 PM
Portly man: So what are you trying to tell me?
Skinny blond teen: He choked to death on a live hampster!
--Times Square
Overheard by: Not how I wanna go
July 04, 2009 03:00 PM
THE WRONG METAPHOR FOR THE OCCASION.... One of the more memorable moments in Sarah Palin's ridiculous announcement yesterday came when she compared herself to a point guard. "Let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me -- sports,...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 02:30 PM
'ACCOMPLISHMENTS'.... Bill Kristol thinks Sarah Palin's bizarre resignation may be "shrewd," in part because she's "probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor." Now, perhaps it's unfair to expect Palin to have "accomplished" much. She's...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 01:55 PM
MAKING SANFORD LOOK SOUND AND REASONABLE BY COMPARISON.... Sarah Palin's decision to resign is difficult to understand, but nearly as interesting as the announcement was the way in which it was made. Or, put another way, have you seen the...
by Steve Benen at July 04, 2009 01:05 PM
Hipster #1: They thought it was the coolest thing they'd ever done.
Hipster #2: The firemen?
Hipster #1: The girls.
--Lafayette & E 4th
Overheard by: Jon A.
July 04, 2009 01:00 PM
kaninka.net : txtsfrmlstnght:
(858): in retrospect, sexting while high was a mistake - I meant to say “I’ll fuck... - txtsfrmlstnght:
(858): in retrospect, sexting while high was a mistake - I meant to say “I’ll fuck you stupid, baby” but of course I said “I’ll fuck your stupid baby”
July 04, 2009 12:00 PM
Crazy lady, pointing at Christmas tree: Is the tree real?
Doorman: Yes, ma'am.
Crazy lady: Can I go smell the tree?
Doorman: Yes, ma'am.
Crazy lady, going over to tree: Can ah smell yo, tree? (giggles)
--Upper West Side
Overheard by: Neck Twister
July 04, 2009 11:00 AM
あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、
毎日射精している男性のほうが、そうでない男性よりも DNA損傷が少ない「質の良い」精子になることが分かったそうだ（ロイター記事・本家記事・European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryologyのプレスリリース）。
オーストラリアの体外受精研究機関、シドニー IVFの David Greening博士は毎日の射精が精子の質に及ぼす影響を実験したとのこと。実験では精子の質があまり良くないとされる、118名の被験者を対象に実験前の精子の DNAダメージ指数（DFI：DNA Fragmentation Index）を検査し、その後１週間毎日射精してもらった。その結果、81%の男性では DFIが12%減少したが、残りの19%では10%増加するという入り混じった結果となったそうだ。しかし全体の DFI平均値は26%となり、多くの被験者の精子の質が「良い」と分類できるレベルに向上したとのこと。
この精子の質の向上が理論上は妊娠の確率を高めるとのことで、博士曰く、排卵日の1週間前から毎日性交渉を行うのが良いと考えられるとのことだ。
すべて読む
| サイエンスセクション
| 医療
| サイエンス
関連ストーリー：
コンピューターゲームで若年層の妊娠を防げ
2008年07月15日
人工甘味料は子作りの敵
2003年03月28日
by soara at July 04, 2009 10:10 AM
 | | 新型インフルエンザに備えるビジネスモバイル活用術をご紹介！詳細・申込はこちら！ |
July 04, 2009 10:10 AM
Jersey teen on class trip: I wonder if they've got Billy Joel here.
Friend: Dude, isn't he some preacher in Texas?
--Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame Annex, Mercer St
Overheard by: stillrockn'rolltome
July 04, 2009 09:00 AM
There's Something About This I Just Don't Understand ... Anderson Cooper interviewed Sarah Palin's spokesperson tonight. He asked what Sarah Palin would be doing next. Here's her answer: "STAPLETON: OH, everything under the sun that you can possibly think of....
by Hilzoy at July 04, 2009 07:29 AM
Old tourist woman to daughter, about gangsters shouting slang to each other: Is that French?
Daughter: No... That's Ebonics.
--Broadway & Waverly
Overheard by: Noah
July 04, 2009 07:00 AM
Long-hair hobo: All America is an insane asylum.
Hobo friends: (chuckle)
--18th St & 6th
Overheard by: Moose
July 04, 2009 05:00 AM
Gay, complaining about relationship: I'm so tired of this...do you think love lasts forever?
Girl, obviously frustrated about being single: Fuck it, Jaimie, the real question is whether it ever starts.
--H&M, NoHo
Overheard by: Yeah I'd like to know too
July 04, 2009 03:00 AM
live-gon 曰く、
各報道が伝えているが、今年のツール・ド・フランスに 2人の日本人が出場することが決定した（参考：新城幸也氏出場決定の記事、別府史之氏出場決定の記事）。日本人の出場は戦後では13年ぶり、2人目と3人目となる。出場を祝うと共に、ささやかでも存在感を示せることを願ってやまない。
#旧聞だけどタレコミがみつからなかったのでしてみた。自転車はスラド向きだと思うんだ。
すべて読む
| スポーツ
| 日本
by live-gon (posted by soara) at July 04, 2009 02:20 AM
TarZ 曰く、
アルゼンチンアリというアリがいる。このアリは南米原産だが、主に人間の経済活動で運ばれることによって、今では南極を除く世界各地に広がっている。日本でも繁殖が確認され、特定外来生物被害防止法では、ブルーギル、セアカゴケグモなどと並んで真っ先に特定外来生物指定されたほど問題になっている。
アルゼンチンアリはときに長さ数百kmを超える巨大なコロニー(super-colonies)を構成することがあるが、コロニーの一つはどうやら全世界規模のサイズに達しているらしい、いう研究結果が出た(本家記事、BBC News)。
すべて読む
| サイエンスセクション
| 地球
関連ストーリー：
めだかの学校が乗っ取られそうになる
2007年02月19日
アリの巣がヨーロッパを横断
2002年04月18日
by TarZ (posted by soara) at July 04, 2009 02:00 AM
During a townhall in Waukon, IA Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was asked by a constituent of his: “Why is your insurance so much cheaper than my insurance and so better than my insurance?” When Grassley struggled to explain the details of his own health care plan, the elderly man followed up, “Okay, so how come I can’t have the same thing you have?” Grassley said, “You can. Just go work for the federal government.” Watch it:
Grassley has been at the forefront of railing against Obama’s health care plan, declaring, “We need to make sure that there’s no public option.” As Igor Volsky notes, there is an irony in government workers like Grassley complaining about “government-sponsored health care.” If Grassley wants to stand on principle, he could abandon his government-sponsored insurance and try his luck in the individual health insurance market.
by Faiz Shakir at July 04, 2009 01:40 AM
Barracuda I just watched Sarah Palin's announcement that she will step down as governor, which was surreal even by her standards. It's hard to pick just one favorite moment, though this has to be on anyone's list: "Life is too...
by Hilzoy at July 04, 2009 01:26 AM
Guy: Of course I thought about it before I did it!
Girl: So you're a premeditated moron.
--55th & Broadway
Overheard by: Cornbread Jim
July 04, 2009 01:00 AM
Max Blumental reports on The Daily Beast that Sarah Palin may have quit her job today because she was trying to avert a major, yet-to-be-disclosed corruption scandal. The gist of the rumor is that an Alaska building company called Spenard Building Supplies (SBS) was awarded a contract by Palin to build a hockey arena in Wasilla, AK, and in return, SBS helped construct Palin’s home:
Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide open state.
SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004.
Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett’s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits—thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.
Just months before Palin left city hall to campaign for governor, she awarded a contract to SBS to help build the $13 million Wasilla Sports Complex. The most expensive building project in Wasilla history, the complex cost the city an addition $1.3 million in legal fees and threw it into severe long-term debt. For SBS, however, the bloated and bungled project was a cash cow.
Alaska bloggers have reported in recent weeks that “a long simmering embezzelment/IRS scandal is still being looked at by the feds.” In her press conference today, Palin asked the public to “trust me with this decision and know that it is no more politics as usual.” But she also bemoaned “political operatives” who have “descended on Alaska” to investigate “all sorts of frivolous ethics violations.” Palin said this “politics of personal destruction” was one of the key motivating factors behind her decision today.
by Faiz Shakir at July 04, 2009 12:47 AM
July 03, 2009
First of all, Sarah Palin, go to HELL for ruining your editor’s day of patriotic rest and BBQ. Second, why did you really quit, crazy lady? We admit to “jumping to conclusions” (trying to hurry up and get back outside to our cocktails and friends), but the story may be more complicated than “Sarah Palin is a sociopath who will just quit being governor of Alaska THREE-AND-A-HALF YEARS before the next presidential election, just to show her, uhm, Leadership Credentials, which means constantly yelling at David Letterman about a joke she couldn’t comprehend.” But there are so many more crazy theories about America’s craziest Alaskan Anger Bear, the snowbilly grifter and strip-mall Ice Queen of Wasilla. Let’s examine them, together!
- Andrea Mitchell’s sources say Sarah Palin is not running for anything, ever, and that she’s “out of politics for good.” But who will fill the other half of the Santelli 2012 ticket?
- Sarah Palin (or somebody!) is pregnant again! CNN’s Rick Sanchez suggested this “why not?” reason.
- Palin’s nutball spokeswoman, “Meg,” denies Andrea Mitchell’s account, and says that Palin will actually be going “outside government,” which, uhm, is not actually a denial at all, right? DailyKos commenter bluedonkey08 says in response, “You know, sometimes I think it’s not worth trying to understand what she says. Your sanity will appreciate it.” Noted.
- Palin’s brother called the cable news to give his own theory, based on some conversation with Sister Sarah at a ski resort somewhere, two months ago. According to this relative, Palin has been spending “80% of her time defending herself” from the Media. You know, because it’s super important to yell at David Letterman for weeks at a time, for being a teevee comic who makes jokes about politicians. (Sarah Palin apparently spends the remaining 20% of her time at ski resorts.)
- Mean old Washington Post beltway neocon Charles Krauthammer said the other day on Fox News that Palin is “not a serious candidate” for Republicans. Did Krauthammer make emo Sarah cry and quit?
- She’s just plain crazy and you’re just wasting your time trying to make sense of her erratic behavior. This is the theory suggested by CBS News, which described her speech as “rambling and sometimes confusing.”
by Ken Layne at July 03, 2009 11:09 PM
Smoking scenester #1 to another, after seeing toy poodle: Hey, look, that must be one of them dumb city rat dogs.
Girl with poodle to smoking scenester #1: Hey, look, you must be one of those dumb bridge & tunnel cunts.
--11th & 1st
July 03, 2009 11:00 PM
FRIDAY'S MINI-REPORT.... Today's edition of quick hits: * Yesterday, U.S. troops faced minimal resistance in Afghanistan. Today was far more difficult: "Taliban insurgents stepped up attacks Friday against U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, forcing troops in some...
by Steve Benen at July 03, 2009 10:25 PM
Man #1, to dog: See you later, Cody.
Man #2 (dog owner): His name is Toby.
Man #1: But I've been calling him Cody for ten years!
Man #2: I know.
--Hell's Kitchen
Overheard by: M. Blair
July 03, 2009 09:00 PM
PALIN TO RESIGN.... Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) decided to shake up an otherwise slow news day with an astounding announcement: not only has she decided to skip a re-election campaign next year, she's also resigning from office altogether later...
by Steve Benen at July 03, 2009 08:40 PM
Some of us have been on vacation since Wednesday, at the delightful Beach, but how could we miss Sarah Palin’s latest cosmic sack o’ lies and demons and terror? Watch her “I’m going to resign because governing a state is hard when you have absolutely no interest in governing a state” speech, it is packed with funnies. We are sobbing. There are evil monsters screeching in the background. And Piper’s feet itch! [YouTube]
by Jim Newell at July 03, 2009 08:39 PM
SonyInsider dug up an FCC filing that indicates that the forthcoming PSP Go will have a significantly faster top processor speed than than current PSP models. Specifically, the Go's CPU can clock up to 480MHz, compared to the 333MHz speed of the existing models.
The site ends the post by asking the obvious question: "What will a 480MHz PSP Go bring to the table?" I suspect the answer to this is, "Nothing that hasn't already been announced." Let me explain.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 03, 2009 08:34 PM
Come on, we are supposed to be celebrating AMERICA this July 4th Weekend, but of course with Sarah Palin, it’s all about Sarah Palin. So she has RUINED our Independence Day by announcing that she’s quitting the governor’s job (boring!) and handing over power to the lieutenant governor, and this apparently means she’s running for the GOP nomination for PRESIDENT (we just elected one!) in 2012, the end? Probably not. [Fox News/CNN]
by Ken Layne at July 03, 2009 08:04 PM
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) announced this morning from her home in Wasilla that she will not be seeking re-election and that she will be stepping down in a few weeks. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated as Alaska’s governor on July 25. A local NBC affiliate reports that “there was no immediate word as to why she will resign, though speculation has been rampant that the former vice presidential candidate is gearing up for a run at the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.” Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News yesterday that Palin “is not a serious candidate for the presidency.” “You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you’re running for the presidency,” he said.
After running through her accomplishments as governor during the announcement, Palin said, “This success I am proud to take credit, for hiring the right people.” She said she decided to “veto” those “stimulus dollars” because “some of those dollars would harm Alaska and they harm America.” “So that Alaska may progress, I will not seek re-election as governor,” she said, adding, “I’ve determined it’s best to transfer the authority of governor to Lieutenant Governor Parnell.” Watch it (note the video feed cut out before Palin finished her statement):
by Ben Armbruster at July 03, 2009 08:00 PM
QUOTE OF THE DAY.... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada. Reid says he expects the tactic of gentle persuasion to work best, given the size of his Senate Democratic flock and the political divergences within it. "I don't...
by Steve Benen at July 03, 2009 07:25 PM
Guy #1: He wouldn't stop telling me to eat the cactus, so I just broke down and did it.
Guy #2: Wow, what about the needles?
Guy #1: I put it in a blender first, dumbass.
Guy #2: Oh. So what happened?
Guy #1: I drank like three quarters of it and I threw up. A lot. Like "mother of god."
Guy #2: Sheesh, then what?
Guy #1: I passed out for about 9 hours.
Guy #2: Awesome.
Guy #1: Yeah.
--G Train
July 03, 2009 07:00 PM
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen opened up a can of worms when he made the case for unmasking passwords in his blog. I chimed in that I agreed. Almost 165 comments on my blog (and several articles, essays, and many other blog posts) later, the consensus is that we were wrong.
I was certainly too glib. Like any security countermeasure, password masking has value. But like any countermeasure, password masking is not a panacea. And the costs of password masking need to be balanced with the benefits.
The cost is accuracy. When users don't get visual feedback from what they're typing, they're more prone to make mistakes. This is especially true with character strings that have non-standard characters and capitalization. This has several ancillary costs:
- Users get pissed off.
- Users are more likely to choose easy-to-type passwords, reducing both mistakes and security. Removing password masking will make people more comfortable with complicated passwords: they'll become easier to memorize and easier to use.
The benefits of password masking are more obvious:
- Security from shoulder surfing. If people can't look over your shoulder and see what you're typing, they're much less likely to be able to steal your password. Yes, they can look at your fingers instead, but that's much harder than looking at the screen. Surveillance cameras are also an issue: it's easier to watch someone's fingers on recorded video, but reading a cleartext password off a screen is trivial.
In some situations, there is a trust dynamic involved. Do you type your password while your boss is standing over your shoulder watching? How about your spouse or partner? Your parent or child? Your teacher or students? At ATMs, there's a social convention of standing away from someone using the machine, but that convention doesn't apply to computers. You might not trust the person standing next to you enough to let him see your password, but don't feel comfortable telling him to look away. Password masking solves that social awkwardness.
- Security from screen scraping malware. This is less of an issue; keyboard loggers are more common and unaffected by password masking. And if you have that kind of malware on your computer, you've got all sorts of problems.
- A security "signal." Password masking alerts users, and I'm thinking users who aren't particularly security savvy, that passwords are a secret.
I believe that shoulder surfing isn't nearly the problem it's made out to be. One, lots of people use their computers in private, with no one looking over their shoulders. Two, personal handheld devices are used very close to the body, making shoulder surfing all that much harder. Three, it's hard to quickly and accurately memorize a random non-alphanumeric string that flashes on the screen for a second or so.
This is not to say that shoulder surfing isn't a threat. It is. And, as many readers pointed out, password masking is one of the reasons it isn't more of a threat. And the threat is greater for those who are not fluent computer users: slow typists and people who are likely to choose bad passwords. But I believe that the risks are overstated.
Password masking is definitely important on public terminals with short PINs. (I'm thinking of ATMs.) The value of the PIN is large, shoulder surfing is more common, and a four-digit PIN is easy to remember in any case.
And lastly, this problem largely disappears on the Internet on your personal computer. Most browsers include the ability to save and then automatically populate password fields, making the usability problem go away at the expense of another security problem (the security of the password becomes the security of the computer). There's a Firefox plugin that gets rid of password masking. And programs like my own Password Safe allow passwords to be cut and pasted into applications, also eliminating the usability problem.
One approach is to make it a configurable option. High-risk banking applications could turn password masking on by default; other applications could turn it off by default. Browsers in public locations could turn it on by default. I like this, but it complicates the user interface.
A reader mentioned BlackBerry's solution, which is to display each character briefly before masking it; that seems like an excellent compromise.
I, for one, would like the option. I cannot type complicated WEP keys into Windows -- twice! what's the deal with that? -- without making mistakes. I cannot type my rarely used and very complicated PGP keys without making a mistake unless I turn off password masking. That's what I was reacting to when I said "I agree."
So was I wrong? Maybe. Okay, probably. Password masking definitely improves security; many readers pointed out that they regularly use their computer in crowded environments, and rely on password masking to protect their passwords. On the other hand, password masking reduces accuracy and makes it less likely that users will choose secure and hard-to-remember passwords, I will concede that the password masking trade-off is more beneficial than I thought in my snap reaction, but also that the answer is not nearly as obvious as we have historically assumed.
by schneier at July 03, 2009 06:42 PM
PONDERING RATINGS SUCCESS.... Reader D.R. posed a question via email the other day, and I promised him I'd respond online. He asked: I detest Fox News (except Shepard Smith) but why are their ratings zooming so high? They are on...
by Steve Benen at July 03, 2009 06:35 PM
There is another bill [PDF] in the SCO bankruptcy for us to go over with a fine-toothed comb, this one from Pachulski Stang, their 20th bill. There is another from Tanner [PDF]. And we have finished doing the text of the exhibits to SCO's proposed sale, and I noticed some things in the trademark list I thought I might highlight. It always pays to do these text versions. You do notice things that otherwise don't seem to stand out.
First, I notice a trademark on the list is actually dead, WEBMIN, cancelled as of January of this year, so I think it might be useful to go through that list more carefully than SCO did. Certainly a potential buyer would want to know what it is actually getting, I would think. And creditors might want to know if the sale price makes any sense.
And that's not the only odd thing.
July 03, 2009 06:34 PM
Cryptofascist warblog The Politico has won the long weekend (and, by retroactive default, the Revolutionary War) with their crucial SCOOP on Obama’s weird obsession with pronouncing proper nouns—names of places he’s visiting, names of people he’s speaking to, that sort of thing—in the way in which they are actually intended to be pronounced. Quoth Politico’s Carol “Robert” E. Lee: “In Obama’s view, pronouncing someone’s name or hometown correctly is a simple way of showing respect.” This is called Obamanomics, and it’s foreclosing America’s jobs.
This is because Barack Obama’s name (”Barack Obama”) has also been mispronounced on occasion! ACTUAL LEDE of this patriotic linguistic exegesis:
“Bill Clinton. George Bush. Jimmy Carter. They’re all pretty easy to pronounce.
But Barack Obama is not so simple.”
Phonetically, it is “Blagojevich.” But the Queen’s English was not invented by Jesus for use towards such recalcitrant vowelage!
We’re going to get into some heavy psychological shit for a minute, but we totally get it, you know? Obama’s wonky obsession with “correctness” and “facts” is mayhap tied to America’s habitual inability to properly intone the 6 letters—of which all 6 are vowels—of the Hawaiian alphabet. But that still begs the question: Why is Liz Becton blogging for Politico under the pseudonym “Robert E. Lee”?
[It's Pronounced "Drudge Bait"]
by Juli Weiner at July 03, 2009 06:06 PM
RELEVANT FACTS AREN'T 'SMEARS'.... The far-right's obsession with Alan Carlin continues. Today, the Wall Street Journal ran this wildly unpersuasive piece from Kimberley Strassel on the subject. [Carlin is] a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics...
by Steve Benen at July 03, 2009 05:45 PM
In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.
If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they've been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.
We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 03, 2009 05:32 PM
asmodeo nos cuenta: «Al final no ha habido acuerdo entre los creadores de navegadores sobre que formato se usaría como estándar en las nuevas etiquetas video y audio de HTML 5, con lo que las cosas seguirán, más o menos, como hasta ahora, leemos en Infoworld» Junto al lanzamiento de Firefox 3.5, que ha sido precisamente el primero en soportar HTML5 y las etiquetas de audio y video, hay una discusión para decidir qué codecs se soportará en el estándar. La discusión se centra en el interés por parte de Mozilla en soportar formatos abiertos (Ogg) frente al de Apple, que prefiere el estándar H.264, formato rechazado por Mozilla y Opera por los costes de licencia. El hilo de la discusión se encuentra resumido en este mensaje de Ian Hickson, el responsable del desarrollo de la especificación HTML5.
by JuanjoAI at July 03, 2009 05:20 PM
Psystar has filed a Debtor's Motion to Voluntarily Dismiss Case [PDF]. They would like to leave Chapter 11, and of course that means they have to have a viable plan to present to the bankruptcy court.
They claim they have a new product that will dazzle the world and be more profitable. But they kind of had to say something like that, I think, because they already told the court in their bankruptcy petition back on May 21 that they don't make "a significant profit" on each sale of their prior products. So they couldn't just say, "Oops. This didn't work. We thought we could stay in business while in Chapter 11 without Apple being able to sue us, so we could make money while they could only grit their teeth in frustration. But they got the judge to lift the stay. So get me out of here."
They have to show the judge instead that if they leave Chapter 11, they will be able to make a profit and pay off creditors. So they have to show the court a plan for survival after they leave Chapter 11. What can they show? Something had to be different. The old business plan wasn't enough. Hence a new product announcement.
In short, bankruptcy didn't protect them from Apple the way they hoped, I surmise. Apple on June 17 prevailed on its motion to lift the bankruptcy stay on the litigation, and Psystar says it can't afford to do both the litigation and the bankruptcy. So it wants to be relieved of the bankruptcy expense. They can't get out of bankruptcy now unless the court believes they can be viable. So they announce a new product. I expect Apple will oppose and instead ask for Chapter 7. A plan based on a hope for future profits? Sounds like SCO to me.
July 03, 2009 05:13 PM
Black guy in suit: Gimme a hug!
Black lady: I'll give you a hug once you pay me.
--Lexington Ave & 43rd St
Overheard by: dees
July 03, 2009 05:00 PM
Last week, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) and VoteVets Chairman Jon Soltz sparred on MSNBC about reinstating funds for new F-22s. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called for capping production of the F-22 Raptor, a fighter that has never seen combat in the Iraq or Afghanistan theaters. Despite the fact that the OMB recommended a veto if the defense authorization budget contains new F-22s, members of Congress in the House Armed Services committee, lead by Gingrey, slipped the funding in anyways. In his debate with Gingrey, Soltz said:
The Congressman cares about the Lockheed Martin stock price, and I care about the men and women who fight on the group. And this weapon system does nothing for us.
Watch it:
Indeed, Gingrey’s 2008 personal finance disclosure reveals that the Congressman owned between $50,000 to $100,000 in Boeing stock, a company that joined with Lockheed to manufacture the F-22. Gingrey’s latest personal finance disclosure report, filed late this year and posted online this week, shows he still owns Boeing stock, but it has dropped in value to $15,000 to $50,000. Because Lockheed Martin is Boeing’s partner in building the F-22, Gingrey does have an actual incentive to see an additional $369 million in unnecessary spending for new F-22s.
by Lee Fang at July 03, 2009 04:30 PM
There's no denying that gaming publisher Midway has had a rough time in the past year. After an insane saga of strange twists, turns, accusations, and increasingly dire news, most of us weren't entirely certain that the beleaguered publisher would actually survive to see 2010. Despite our doubts, it turns out that Midway is living to see another day, having just been acquired by Time Warner for $33 million.
For those of you new to the situation: after the company's much-hyped Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe earned lukewarm reviews and reasonable (though not amazing) sales numbers, Sumner Redstone sold his controlling interest in Midway for $100,000, and the publisher wound up laying off roughly 25 percent of its workforce and killed many games that were currently in development. It was then revealed that, even though employees weren't getting paid what was owed to them and the publisher was filing for bankruptcy, executives were still raking in a great deal of cash during all this.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 03, 2009 03:32 PM
Sun recently merged with Oracle, but they bought out some virtual machine software like Virtual Iron, Xen, etc to combine over four virtualzation technologies into VirtualBox.
July 03, 2009 02:49 PM
Sigma has released an update to its Photo Pro image-editing software. Version 3.5.2 for Windows and v3.3 for Mac claim to improve processing of highlight areas in RAW images and now offer the 'ProPhoto RGB' color space. Exposure warning is also displayed for RGB channels in the histogram in the Windows version.
July 03, 2009 02:15 PM
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which spent the summer in Mars' northern polar regions performing a variety of science experiments, caused quite a stir when rumors circulated that it had discovered signs of life on the Red Planet. NASA eventually held a press conference to dispel the rumors, promising that more details would eventually be revealed when scientists got around to publishing papers that would describe the experiments in detail. That day has finally arrived; today's issue of Science contains four papers that describe various findings from the mission. There's no sign of alien life, but the studies do reveal an active water cycle on Mars—including night-time snowfall.
The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 03, 2009 01:05 PM
The right wing has a new target: Kevin Jennings, whom President Obama appointed Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (OSDFS). Jennings has had a distinguished career as a teacher, author, and founder of Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), an organization that works to make schools safe for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
It is primarily Jennings’ work with GLSEN that has so outraged the far right. The Family Research Council (FRC) launched the “Stop Kevin Jennings” campaign this week, warning that he is a “radical homosexual activist” who has “worked tirelessly to bring the homosexual agenda into our nation’s classrooms.” “His history demonstrates disregard for our obligations to safeguard the health and well being of the student population,” writes FRC President Tony Perkins.
ThinkProgress investigated FRC’s claims and spoke to people who have worked with Jennings. A look at some of the “facts” about him:
FRC CLAIM: “Jennings’ and GLSEN’s concept of ’safe schools’ means special protections for privileged groups (especially homosexuals), rather than safety for all.”
FACT: As the gay son of a Southern baptist preacher, Jennings had a “childhood of prejudice, taunts, and harassment.” As an education leader, he has used those experiences to promote tolerance and anti-bullying measures in schools nationwide. ThinkProgress spoke with Molly Spearman, executive director of the South Carolina Association of School Administrators. Spearman first heard Jennings speak at the 2007 convention of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). Spearman said that she was so impressed with Jennings, she decided to invite him to speak at her organization’s October 2007 summit on bullying:
I was a little nervous, being in South Carolina, a very conservative state. But once again, he handled it extremely professionally. He did a magnificent job, and it was a huge success. We had a waiting list of people who wanted to come. … We had several hundred people there. … He was very very well-received — absolutely rave views. And that was in conservative South Carolina. So he handled what could have been a very sensitive topic in a very professional way that was accepted by everyone.
Spearman added that while Jennings did present statistics on the harassment of LGBT students, he more broadly focused on the bullying of all students, pointing out that it was a problem that wasn’t specifically confined to one group.
- - - - -
FRC CLAIM: “Jennings is viciously hostile to religion.”
FACT: As proof of this claim, FRC points to a passage from Jennings’ memoir:
God…had done nothing but cause me pain and anguish through His inaction and malevolence throughout my childhood. … What had he done for me, other than make me feel shame and guilt? Squat. Screw you, buddy — I don’t need you around anymore, I decided.
As the blog Good As You noted, Jennings was relaying “his frustrations as a gay teen, when his inability to ‘overcome’ his gay desires convinced him that he was detached from God.” FRC also doesn’t bother to include what Jennings writes a few sentences later: that he later returned to religion. “Decades passed before I opened a Bible again.” Jennings later went on to serve as an active member on the board of the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, the nation’s most prestigious Protestant seminary. ThinkProgress spoke with Rev. Serene Jones, President of UTS, who disputed any claims that Jennings was anti-religion:
In my role as the president [of UTS], and as pastor, I have met few people as deeply Christian and as deeply committed to the work of justice in the world than Kevin Jennings. He’s a man of enormous faith, and not just in terms of prayer and church attendance — both of which he does devoutly — but in terms of his care for the poor, the suffering, the children, the vulnerable in our society. [...]
He’s an active member of the board at Union Theological Seminary and Kevin Jennings tithes, not only in terms of his use of money, but his use of his time and his values and I just wonder how many of the people who are attacking him have taken their own faith serious enough to make the kind of financial, moral, vocational commitment that Kevin Jennings has made with his life.
FRC also points to a speech Jennings gave in 2000, where he allegedly said, “We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. … I’m trying not to say, ‘F*ck ‘em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! Drop dead!” There appears to be no full transcript available of this 2000 speech; it seems to first appear in a 2002 article on the right-wing website Concerned Women for America. The same day that article was published (4/10/02), Jennings told NPR that he had “no recollection of [that] quote whatsoever.”
- - - - -
FRC Claim: Jennings is “unfit for the post to which he’s been assigned.”
FACT: Jennings, in fact, will be the first head of OSDFS in years to have a background as an educator. His predecessor, Deborah Price, received her BS degree in home economics, worked on the National Prayer Breakfast, on the Senate Republican Policy Committee, and then doing student aid in the Department of Education. Her predecessor, Eric Andell, was a judge from Texas and was eventually fired. He “pleaded guilty in federal court to one misdemeanor count of conflict of interest that included using federal money to pay for personal expenses.” Jennings has received many mainstream education awards, including the Distinguished Service Award of NASSP. ThinkProgress spoke to NASSP Executive Director Gerald Tirozzi, who wrote a recommendation letter on Jennings’ behalf. He said that he has “always been impressed with Kevin and his forthrightness. He’s a very courageous young man.” Tirozzi stressed that Jennings’ work on school bullying made him an ideal fit for this particular position.
- - - - -
As Good As You has noted, FRC and other right-wing sites are trying to take other parts of Jennings’ memoir — such as the fact that Jennings admitted to using drugs while in high school and that he wanted to make sure that a high school student had practiced safe sex — as evidence that he doesn’t have the “ethical standards needed for public service.”
So what is FRC’s real problem with Jennings? Tellingly, FRC Vice President for Policy Peter Sprigg — the author of the anti-Jennings talking points — once said, “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society.”
by Amanda Terkel at July 03, 2009 01:00 PM
Good essay -- "The Staggering Cost of Playing it 'Safe'" -- about the political motivations for terrorist security policy.
Senator Barbara Boxer has led an effort to at least put together a public database of ash storage sites so that people can judge the risk to the areas where they live. However, even this effort has been blocked not by coal companies or utilities, but by the DHS. How could it possibly be a national security interest to cover up the location of material that's "not toxic or anything?" It's not. In fact, even if the ash turns out to be as bad as its worst critics fear, blocking the database is far more dangerous than revealing the location of these sites. Not only has there not been any threat against these sites by terrorists, and no workable scenario by which they might cause a problem, coal slurry impoundments are already failing with regularity, dousing parts of America with millions of gallons of this material. It doesn't take terrorists to make this happen.
Blocking the release of this information doesn't protect the citizens of the United States in any way. It's just another example of the same creeping secrecy that makes cities more difficult to manage because of secrecy over facilities. The same creeping secrecy that "blurs" national monuments from images and puts intentional gaps in public information. The same creeping secrecy that increasingly elevates the most unlikely attack -- the shoe bombers of the world -- above our right to know what's going on around us so that we can make informed decisions. The same secrecy that defends torturers.
by schneier at July 03, 2009 12:18 PM
On Tuesday, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum discussed the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano on Frank Beckman’s radio show. The ruling overturned a decision made by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and two other judges on the 2nd Circuit. Though Santorum made the common conservative claim that all nine justices actually disagreed with Sotomayor, he went further than most, claiming that the liberal justices who dissented, particularly Justices Souter and Stevens, only dissented in order to “protect” Sotomayor:
SANTORUM: I could be wrong on this, but believe it or not, politics does inject itself into the Supreme Court and I think there were probably a lot of justices who may or may not have been on that side of that issue, but came down on that issue that way in a sense to protect her because she knew she was coming on the court, had to make sure she could get on the court. And to me, this should have been a nine-nothing decision. You know, there are a couple, you know, like Ginsburg, who is very much like Sotomayor, probably would have felt this way. But guys like Souter and Stevens and you just wonder why are they making decisions like this. This is, you know, identity politics and quotas and race-based kinds of decisions that really have no place in our Constitution.
Listen here:
As esteemed Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse noted in an op-ed this week, the court’s ruling wasn’t really about Sotomayor and her colleagues. “One thing that is clear from reading the Supreme Court’s 89 pages of opinions in the case is that Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues played by the old rules, and the court changed them.” wrote Greenhouse. “Although ‘Sotomayor Reversed’ was a frequent headline on the posts that spread quickly across the Web, it was actually the Supreme Court itself that shifted course.”
Transcript:
BECKMAN: Now, let’s talk a little bit about what happened on the Supreme Court yesterday.
SANTORUM: Yeah.
BECKMAN: The Ricci case came up and the Supreme Court overturned the decision that had been made by Sonia Sotomayor and her appeals court. That favored the New Haven city council and not the firefighters who claimed they’d been discriminated against.
SANTORUM: Right.
BECKMAN: By reverse discrimination. What does that mean for Sotomayor’s hearings in the Senate? Is it still a done deal that she will be rubber stamped or will this have an impact?
SANTORUM: Yeah, I think the fact that it was a 5-4 decision and the person she was replacing came down on the same side that she came down on is going to help her. I — I don’t, I could be wrong on this, but believe it or not, politics does inject itself into the Supreme Court and I think there were probably a lot of justices who may or may not have been on that side of that issue, but came down on that issue that way in a sense to protect her because she knew she was coming on the court, had to make sure she could get on the court. And to me, this should have been a nine-nothing decision. You know, there are a couple, you know, like Ginsburg, who is very much like Sotomayor, probably would have felt this way. But guys like Souter and Stevens and you just wonder why are they making decisions like this. This is, you know, identity politics and quotas and race-based kinds of decisions that really have no place in our Constitution.
BECKMAN: Judge Ginsburg wrote that this decision knocks the pegs out from under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
SANTORUM: Yeah, that’s, you know, this is this distorted view. You know, I guarantee you that nobody who was involved in the Title VII, putting the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s had any idea that this would be the result. You know, Title VII was to make sure that people were judged on the content of their character and race was not used against them. It wasn’t meant to use race as a hammer to make sure that freedoms and opportunities and meritocracy that’ve ruled this country is eliminated.
BECKMAN: We’ve got an editorial in the Free Press this morning suggesting we need, we need new legislation now to deal with the race issue in the work place. Do we?
SANTORUM: No, no, no. Absolutely, we do not. I mean the bottom line is that we have the president of the United States who’s an African-American. We have people that are able to rise in our society and accomplish things that heretofor back in the 60s was inconcievable when these things were put together. You know, we need a level playing field. We don’t need, you know, we don’t need a playing field, you know, every one of us has a background where someone, you know, whether you are an Italian who was discriminated against or a black or a woman or whatever, we’ve all had discrimination. We’ve all had crosses to bear throughout, throughout the course of our country where our country has fallen short of true equality. That doesn’t mean that we need to continue to make reparations today for things that happened hundreds of years ago or even twenty or thirty years ago. The bottom line is we need to seek toward equality and opportunity and stop using categories to elevate people because of past injustices.
BECKMAN: Rick Santorum, always appreciate the time, thanks so much.
by Matt Corley at July 03, 2009 12:00 PM
MITsu_at_mit-net、iwakuralain、yyok がタレコんでくれて曰く、
technobahn japan の記事によると、ロスアラモス国立研究所が光の速さを超えて電波を送信する装置の開発に成功したそうです。
この装置はパルサーで生じているシンクロトロン偏光 (Polarization Synchrotron) の原理を応用したものとの事で、装置の全長は 2 メートル程。安定して光速の壁を超えて電波の送受信を行うことは困難なものの、装置間の同期を調節することによって光速の壁を超えて電波を送ることが可能だとしている。これを応用する事で衛星経由でも遅延が生じなくなる事から、次世代型携帯電話等に応用することを考慮しているそうだ。
この話題の元ネタは恐らく Current の記事か、Universe Today の記事である (日付からすると Universe Today の記事は Cureent の記事を元に加筆したものだろう) 。記事の題名も ``Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light'' に ``Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light'' と、なるほど大変それっぽい。しかし Universe Today の記事の末尾に記された参考文献は 2004 年のものであり、どういう関連があるのかの説明もない。
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by reo at July 03, 2009 10:30 AM
Hasselblad has announced the CFV-39 digital back to be used in conjunction with its V series of camera bodies. Featuring a 39 megapixel sensor, it offers two capture formats: 4:3 and square (at 29MP). It allows tethered shooting and offers a capture rate of 0.7fps. The bundled image processing software features digital lens correction for Carl Zeiss lenses that corrects distortion, lateral chromatic aberration and vignetting.
July 03, 2009 10:09 AM
Un Mundo Libre nos cuenta: «El Departamento de Justicia de los Estados Unidos ha anunciado la apertura de una investigación a Google por prácticas monopolísticas relacionadas con su iniciativa de poner a disposición de todo el mundo miles de libros a través de Google Books con lo que se podría estar infringiendo la Ley Sherman, un texto de 1890 que a día de hoy sirve de base legal para todos los procesos vinculados a evitar monopolios.»
by amieiro at July 03, 2009 10:00 AM
insiderman 曰く、
イギリスで「経営心理学者」を自称するDavid Taylor氏が、従業員の「チーム力」を強化するために「丸一日、全裸で業務を行う」ことを提案したそうだ（英The Sun紙の記事）。
この提案を受けたのはイギリスNewcastleのデザイン/マーケティング企業で、経営不振に陥っていたためにTaylor氏に助言を依頼したところ、この「全裸での業務」が提案され、ある金曜日にこれを実際に実行したところ、目に見える成果があったという。
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by hylom at July 03, 2009 07:30 AM
"We extracted the colours from 10 million of the most 'interesting' Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour."
July 03, 2009 06:42 AM
soda 曰く、
明日7月4日土曜日、東京大学本郷キャンパスにて、日本NetBSDユーザーグループ 第11回定期総会と、NetBSD BOF 2009 が開催されます。参加費は無料。
ただし、総会・BOFのどちらについても、
事前登録が必要ですのでご注意ください。また定期総会の参加については、上記事前登録ページにてユーザーグループの会員登録が必要です。もっとも、会員の義務は流量が年間数通以下のメーリングリストを購読することだけですので、この機会に是非御登録ください。詳しくはお知らせのページをご覧ください。
あと、/.jp ではスレッドが立っていませんでしたが、NetBSD-5.0 が 4月29日にリリースされています。5.0 の最大のトピックは、SMP マシンでの性能向上です。MySQL の sysbench OLTP が、8core の Xeon 上で、Linux (Fedora Core 10) や FreeBSD (7.1) に比べて 20% も速いといった成果が得られています。BOF では、このあたりの話もする予定です。多数のご参加をお待ちしています。
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NetBSD5.0のリリースに向けブランチが切られる
2008年11月04日
日本NetBSDユーザグループ定期総会 および NetBSD BOF 2008 開催
2008年07月03日
NetBSDが誕生15周年を迎える
2008年03月26日
NetBSD 4.0リリース
2007年12月20日
日本 NetBSD ユーザ会定期総会 & NetBSD BOF 開催
2005年08月25日
by hylom at July 03, 2009 06:26 AM
Driver 曰く、
PostgreSQLの新バージョン、8.4が6月29日にリリースされた。前バージョンである8.3から約15ヶ月ぶりのメジャーバージョンアップとなる。
今回のポイントは
- ウィンドウ関数実装
- 再帰クエリの対応
- 並列リストア
- カラムパーミッション
- ロケールをDB毎に実装（今まではinitdb時にしか指定できなかった）
- ハッシュIndexの性能向上
- EXISTS、NOTEXISTSの性能向上(INを使った場合よりパフォーマンスが悪かった)
- FreeSpaceMapの自動サイジング
- SSLの証明書認証対応
- その他諸々・・・
だが、前回のバージョンアップまで、auto vacuumは毎回テコ入れされていたが、十分な機能となったためか今回のバージョンでは新機能の追加と「auto vacuum以外のテコ入れ」となっている。詳細はリリースノートを確認下さい。
個人的には「並列リストア」くらいしか気になる点はなかったが、再帰クエリもテーブル構造次第では非常に有益だと思う。
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| オープンソース
| データベース
関連ストーリー：
MySQLの生みの親がプロジェクトのforkを計画
2009年04月24日
MySQL生みの親Michael 'Monty' Widenius氏、サン・マイクロシステムズを去る
2009年02月06日
パラミーダが信頼できるオープンソースプロジェクトのトップ25を発表
2008年12月19日
MySQL 5.1 GAリリース
2008年12月01日
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2008年06月25日
PostgreSQL 8.3リリース
2008年02月05日
反撃ののろしを上げるPostgreSQL
2007年11月12日
by hylom at July 03, 2009 06:01 AM
capra 曰く、
本家/.、New Scientistより。
米在住のBrooke Greenbergさんは今年1月に16歳になったが、見た目にも知能的にも幼児のままだそうだ。一見「時が止まっている」かのように見える彼女だが、そうではないという。University of South Florida College of Medicineの Richard Walker博士によると、Brookeさんは一個体として調和した成長をしているのではなく、身体のパーツが非同期でそれぞれ独自に成長しているとのこと。脳は幼児期とほぼ同程度とみられ、発声はできるが言葉は話せないという。骨は年齢からすると非常に小さいが、細胞や構造などをみると10歳児程度に成長しているとのこと。しかし歯は8歳児程であり、未だに乳歯のままだという。
Walker博士によると、このような一貫しない発育秩序の報告例はBrookeさんが初めてとのこと。研究者らは原因を解明するため、まずプロジェリア症候群やウェルナー症候群などの早老症でみられる遺伝子変異を調べたが、Brookeさんにこの変異は確認されなかったそうだ。彼女の場合恐らく成長を調節するレギュレータの役割を担う部分が欠如していると考えられており、その仕組みの解明はすなわち成長や老化の仕組みの解明に繋がる可能性が高いと考えられている。
なお、abc NEWSでは記事と共にフォトギャラリーも掲載されている。
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| サイエンスセクション
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関連ストーリー：
脳の老化は27歳からスタートする
2009年03月18日
大麻が老いた脳のアルツハイマー病予防に役立つ？
2009年01月29日
老化防止レタス？ ヒトチオレドキシンをレタスで作る
2008年04月30日
遺伝子ドーピング実験に成功
2004年02月17日
老化を司る遺伝子がもうすぐ解明されるかも
2001年08月29日
by hylom at July 03, 2009 05:00 AM
あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、
本家/.「Staying In Shape vs a Busy IT Job Schedule?」より。
7ヶ月前に始めた今の仕事は、大企業のネットワークオペレーションセンターでの夜7時から朝7時までの12時間の夜勤シフトだ。UNIXやWindows、Linuxやアプリケーションに関することなど、本当に深刻な問題以外の全てを担当している。通勤には1.5時間かかるため、週のうち4、5日は毎日15時間程度座っていることになる。身支度にかかる時間や家に帰って少しゆっくりする時間を考慮すると、運動する時間なんて全くとれない。
さらに、自分はたぶん代謝が悪いタイプなようで、食べる量や食事内容に関わらず、積極的に運動しないとすぐにポチャってくる体質である（もちろん、飢えない範囲での話だが）
一週間のうち4日、最低でも60時間位の勤務時間の人（週によってはもう1日、12時間程増える）が体型を保つにはどうすればいいだろうか？時によっては7～10日間の連続勤務となることもある。定期的に運動が大事と皆口を揃えるが、現実的にはなかなかそうもいかない。睡眠も大事なので早起きなどで睡眠時間を削るのも避けたい。なにか良いアドバイスはないだろうか？
そんな都合の良い方法はないように思うのだが、いかがだろうか？運動する時間が無いほど忙しいときは、太らないようにするというのも大事な気がする。健康や体型を気にかける忙しい/.Jerの皆様の食事の取り方のコツなどもあったらぜひシェアして頂ければと思う。
すべて読む
| 医療
関連ストーリー：
コカコーラ、お前もか !
2009年06月05日
メタラー要注意！ヘッドバンギングに健康リスク
2008年12月19日
「最悪に不健康」な軽食/ファストフードは？
2008年12月18日
ゲーマーは意外と身体的に健康…でもちょっぴり憂鬱？
2008年09月20日
男は一夫多妻制のほうが長生き
2008年08月23日
by hylom at July 03, 2009 04:00 AM
ある Anonymous Coward 曰く、
来る 7 月 22 日 (水)、日食が発生する (国立天文台による 2009 年 7 月 22 日皆既日食の情報より) 。日本全国で部分日食が観察できるほか、奄美大島北部、トカラ列島、屋久島、種子島南部では皆既日食も観察できるとのこと。
国立天文台のページによれば、
日本の陸地に限ると、皆既日食が観察できるのは 1963 年 7 月 21 日の北海道東部で見られた皆既日食以来、実に 46 年ぶりです。次回も 2035 年 9 月 2 日の北陸・北関東などで見られる皆既日食まで 26 年間起こりません。
とのことで、日本では 10 時 50 分 ～ 11 時 15 分ごろに最大の食を観察できる。食分 (太陽の直径に対する食の割合) は札幌で 0.506、東京で 0.749、京都で 0.809、那波で 0.917と、かなりの欠けを観察できるとのこと。
なお、日食の観察はやり方を間違えると目を痛めたり、失明する可能性もある。国立天文台では日食を観察する方法として安全な観察方法が解説されている。日食グラス等もさまざまなところで販売されているので、十分留意して日食観察を楽しんでほしい。
肉眼や双眼鏡は論外として、すすガラスやサングラス、下敷きや CD もアウトなので要注意。詳しくはasahi.com の記事および世界天文年 2009 による日食観察ガイドを参考のこと。
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| サイエンスセクション
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| 宇宙
関連ストーリー：
2009 年は世界天文年
2009年01月08日
2009年は「世界天文年」
2007年12月28日
by reo at July 03, 2009 03:00 AM
 | | 新型インフルエンザに備えるビジネスモバイル活用術をご紹介！詳細・申込はこちら！ |
July 03, 2009 03:00 AM
The combination of Pitt and Soderbergh and Lewis wasn't enough to keep the Moneyball movie afloat...Sony canceled it "days before shooting was to begin".
Accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.
Sony was probably looking for something more BIG RED TEXTish.
Tags: books Brad Pitt Michael Lewis Moneyball movies Steven Soderbergh
July 03, 2009 01:32 AM
The combination of Pitt and Soderbergh and Lewis wasn't enough to keep the Moneyball movie afloat...Sony canceled it "days before shooting was to begin".
Accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.
Sony was probably looking for something more BIG RED TEXTish.
Tags: books Brad Pitt Michael Lewis Moneyball movies Steven Soderbergh
July 03, 2009 01:32 AM
It isn't often that you find AT&T and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in agreement, but consensus has been reached on one matter: ASCAP's demand that wireless companies pay it license fees for ringtones is, well, ridiculous.
On Wednesday EFF called the move "outlandish" and "a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies." The advocacy group filed a friend of the court brief with the United States District Court for the Southern District New York this week, which is hearing the dispute between ASCAP, AT&T, and Verizon over whether the telcos have to pay the music licensing body royalties for wireless ringtones. Joining the amicus brief are Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Meanwhile CTIA - The Wireless Association, to which the big telcos belong, has also filed an amicus brief in the case.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 03, 2009 12:49 AM
Yesterday in an interview with Phoenix’s KTVK 3TV, the local news anchor asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to play a quick word association game. McCain was left tongue-tied and speechless when the reporter asked him to give a one-word response to what he thinks about the controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio:
HOST: Health care.
MCCAIN: Needs reform.
HOST: That’s two words. [weird laugh] Iraq.
MCCAIN: Success.
HOST: Arizona.
MCCAIN: The best.
HOST: US-Mexico Border.
McCain: Cartels.
HOST: GOP.
MCCAIN: Transition.
HOST: Sheriff Joe Arpaio:
MCCAIN: Umm…
Watch it:
Though McCain — who is up for re-election — failed to provide his own constituents with a clear answer last night, he offered CNN’s national news anchor John King a much more extensive reaction when asked about Arpaio back in February:
KING: You have had a roller-coaster relationship with this sheriff [Joe Arpaio]. He says he is just simply enforcing the law. He goes into businesses, he’s rounding up people. John Conyers, others in Congress say racial profiling. Is the sheriff in line or out of line in your view?
MCCAIN: Having been engaged in the presidential campaign, I haven’t paid as close attention. I’ve disagreed with the sheriff fundamentally about the fact that we need to have a comprehensive approach to illegal immigration.
Watch it:
Here’s some one-word responses McCain could offer next time when asked about Arpaio: dangerous, unconstitutional, racist, wasteful, stubborn, self-promoting, media-whore.
by anill at July 03, 2009 12:45 AM
July 02, 2009
This afternoon, Roanoke television station WDBJ-TV, announced they will be refusing to air a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad attacking freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), citing factual inaccuracies. The NRCC had been planning to run television ads against Democratic members of Congress, like Perriello, who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation that passed last week. After receiving information about the factual inaccuracies in the ad, the station pulled it from rotation.
For any objective observer, the the ad is pulled out of thin air. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.” According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day. An EPA estimate of the bill found similar results, projecting the cost to be about $80 to $111 per a year.
Still refusing to accept reality, the Republican leadership is instructing its members to lie about the clean energy economy bill:
– Last week, Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) posted a message erroneously claiming that clean energy legislation will amount to “a national energy tax of up to $3,100 on all Americans.”
– Republican leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) posted on his website that the clean energy bill will cost “$3,100 a year,” then modified that number to “$3,000 per household per year.”
– Republican conference chair Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), not to be outdone, claimed the clean energy bill would be “over $4,000 a year.”
All the numbers cited by Republicans are at least seventeen times the highest possible projection by the CBO and EPA.
Clearly, Republicans opposed to the clean energy bill seem willing to justify their opposition using outright falsehoods. But fortunately, at least some stations are not willing to propagate it.
by Lee Fang at July 02, 2009 10:18 PM
"MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all.
Horrible things aren't always crimes
The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor. Drew was due to be sentenced today.
But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 09:31 PM
In a new article, Time’s Michael Scherer describes how Vice President Biden has been aggressively reaching out to mayors on the their use of stimulus money. “My rear end is on the line just like yours,” said Biden on a recent conference call with five mayors and county executives. “I’m the guy in charge of this deal. So if this doesn’t work, it’s me.” In a follow-up blog post, Scherer reveals that Biden has talked to “dozens of mayors and 47 of the 50 state governors about the Recovery Act”:
One interesting fact that didn’t make it into the story. Since March, Biden has talked, usually in conference calls, to dozens of mayors and 47 of the 50 state governors about the Recovery Act. The three governors who have not yet been on the line, though they have been invited: Alaska’s Sarah Palin, Texas’ Rick Perry and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal. You can draw your own conclusions.
by Matt Corley at July 02, 2009 09:30 PM
SCO has been a busy bee, filing a motion to amend/correct its complaint against AutoZone and a motion to amend/correct the protective order in SCO v. IBM.
What it wants in the IBM motion is to get to use documents it got in discovery in that action in the bankruptcy, to demonstrate "the value of its claims". Heh heh. Not sure how well that will work out for SCO. I think we may safely expect an opposition from IBM.
And in AutoZone, it would like to "expand" its copyright claims to include OpenServer. Surprise. Surprise. That's all it reliably has left to use to be annoying, I think. It also wants to add a claim for breach of agreements. Presumably this is to try to avoid losing outright, now that Novell has been ruled the owner of the copyrights SCO initially sued about. So, even if Novell is upheld by the appeals court, SCO evidently wants to continue somehow, in some way, whatever works. SCO tells the court that the court can allow the amendment, if justice so requires. I am not sure justice is the foundation on which I'd build my house, if I were SCO. People might start to have deep thoughts.
July 02, 2009 08:36 PM
A federal district court judge today threw out the misdemeanor convictions of Lori Drew after the judge determined that the federal anti-hacking statute under which Drew was prosecuted was inapplicable to the allegation that she violated MySpace's terms of service. Drew was convicted by a jury in November of 2008 of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) which bars "unauthorized access" to a computer. Prosecutors argued that Drew had violated the CFAA by harassing 13-year-old neighbor Megan Meier through the use of a fake Myspace profile, harassment that prosecutors say directly led to Meier's suicide.
EFF, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology, Public Citizen, and 14 law professors and faculty members, filed an amicus brief in August arguing that the court should dismiss the CFAA claims against Drew because terms of service violations do not constitute crimes under the Act. Regardless of whether Drew could be held criminally liable under a different theory, EFF argued that the theory pursued by prosecutors was inappropriate.
U.S. District Judge George H. Wu stated that his opinion would become final when his written opinion was filed, likely next week.
by mattz at July 02, 2009 08:30 PM
A leading right-wing argument against offering a public health insurance option as part of any health reform initiative is that such a plan would drive private health insurance companies out of the market. The health insurance lobby group AHIP called a public option “potentially lethal” to their industry. Similarly, Republican Conference Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said in May that adding a public plan would be akin to asking mice to compete against an elephant. “There wouldn’t be any mice left after a while,” he insisted.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) recently used this talking point himself in arguing against a public option for the National Review. Yesterday, however, DeMint appeared to inadvertently offer an example that demonstrates that the notion that the public plan would drive out competition is false. On Bill Bennett’s radio show, DeMint called blocking health care reform the top Republican priority, arguing that of all the items on President Obama’s legislative agenda, it would be the hardest to reverse. To support his point, he offered “government schools” — public education — as an example. “You can never, with another piece of legislation, change it,” DeMint said:
DEMINT: I think the biggest issue is health care. I think if they succeed in a government take over of health care the situation may be irreversible. It will be like government schools. I mean you can never just, with another piece of legislation, change it.
Listen here:
DeMint’s example of education is instructive, not because it is hard to repeal, but because it’s a prime example of successful public-private competition. Indeed, while state and local governments own and run the public education system — to a much greater extent than either Obama or members of Congress are suggesting with a public health insurance option — private schools are competing against the government and thriving in this country. Further, such competition actually improves outcomes. As the conservative Hoover Institution found, competition between public and private schools “improves achievement for both public and private school students and decreases the amount spent per pupil.”
As Joseph Hacker explains, such public-private competition works well not just in education, but in many other sectors of the U.S. economy:
In many areas of American commerce, private and government programs comfortably co-exist. FHA insured loans and non-FHA loans, Social Security and private pensions, public and private universities–all have long thrived side by side. Each side of the divide has strengths and weaknesses, but in every case the public sector is providing something the private sector cannot: A backup that’s there if and when you need it; a benchmark for private providers; and a backstop to make sure costs don’t spin out of control.
Igor Volsky recently explained the actual impact of having a competing public plan, writing, “In an environment where private plans are forced to compete with a new efficient public program, inefficient, over-bloated insurers will go out of business, but private plans with good networks of providers or better services will continue attracting new enrollees.” Jonathan Cohn has more on the effects of public-private competition.
by Ryan Powers at July 02, 2009 08:25 PM
Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!
Tags: baseball Ben Fry infoviz sports
July 02, 2009 07:57 PM
Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!
Tags: baseball Ben Fry infoviz sports
July 02, 2009 07:57 PM
One of the recently leaked builds of Windows 7 has more juice in it than just a new default wallpaper. In the Windows 7 Home Premium edition—as noticed by Kristan Kenney—, the Microsoft Software License Terms has an additional clause that mentions a Family Pack licensing plan that would cover up to three computers in a household. This is no accident: other editions like Professional and Ultimate do not contain the Family Pack wording.
Here's the whole clause:
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 07:48 PM
In his column today, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz devotes his column today to the question of: “Does Race Play a Role in Coverage?” He readily admits that “no one raises questions when an Irish American male reporter covers a pol named Murphy,” but that doesn’t stop him from writing a 1,600-word article raising questions about black women:
Rachel Swarns of the New York Times and The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan were among those herded behind the rope Monday. They and the other main beat reporters — Newsweek’s Allison Samuels, Darlene Superville of the Associated Press and Politico’s Nia-Malika Henderson — have something in common: They are all African American women. [...]
Whether racial and gender identification produces a gauzier, more favorable portrayal of Obama is perhaps too early to judge.
As Adam Serwer observed, “You would never ever see a media critic like Kurtz questioning the ability of white men to cover other white men objectively, or for that matter the ability of white men to cover women or people of color, despite the fact that if newsroom coverage were to be affected, it would be by the prevailing cultural biases of the better represented population in the newsroom.”
by Think Progress at July 02, 2009 07:31 PM
Earlier this week, former CIA operative and torture apologist Michael Scheuer appeared on Fox News, where he told Glenn Beck (who nodded in agreement), “The only chance we have” to repair our national security apparatus “is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.” Yesterday, on Alan Colmes’ radio show, Scheuer made similar comments about the national security stance of the U.S., saying that he doesn’t believe that President Obama wants to protect the country “if it costs him votes”:
COLMES: You don’t think the President of the United States, Barack Obama, cares about protecting this country.
SCHEUER: No, I don’t. Because I don’t think he realizes what the world is like outside the United States. [...]
COLMES: You don’t think he wants to protect the country?
SCHEUER: I don’t think he can, sir. [...]
COLMES: He doesn’t want to protect the country?
SCHEUER: Not if it costs votes.
Listen here:
A number of progressive bloggers castigated Scheuer for his remarks on Beck’s show. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, however, expressed disappointment in Scheuer’s comments and hoped that he was “being taken out of context,” citing his respect for Scheuer’s previous national security work. Unfortunately, it appears that Scheuer meant what he said.
by Ryan Powers at July 02, 2009 06:36 PM
Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads.
Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.
The industry didn't need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company's CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 06:13 PM
Yosu Cadilla nos cuenta: «Según leo en Facturae.org, a partir de 2010 será posible matricular un coche en 10 minutos, desaparecerán las colas para matricular en Tráfico. El Ministerio de Industria y la DGT quieren simplificar y abaratar el proceso. Todos los usuarios deberán utilizar un sistema de firma electrónica para acceder y utilizar el nuevo servicio. El nuevo sistema será accesible por internet las 24 horas al día durante todo el año. El sistema fue probado con éxito en mayo y demostró el gran ahorro de tiempo. Hasta ahora los trámites para matricular un coche no podían realizarse en menos de dos días, mientras que la nueva plataforma electrónica permite hacerlo en diez minutos.» Según esta nota de prensa de SEAT, este fabricante demostró recientemente en el Salón Internacional del Automóvil de Barcelona el nuevo sistema de matriculación telemática. Parece que poco a poco se va adentrando la firma electrónica en nuestras vidas, aunque aun le queda mucho camino por recorrer.
by JuanjoAI at July 02, 2009 05:31 PM
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove went on Fox News this morning and attacked President Obama’s health care town hall meeting yesterday as “pre-packaged, organized, controlled, [and] scripted,” adding that the Bush administration would never have done something so audacious:
ROVE: This White House has carried pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted events to a new height, and they’re getting away with things that in any previous White House, the media would have eviscerated the press secretary and the White House for it.
Watch it:
ThinkProgress contacted a White House spokesperson who said that at yesterday’s health care town hall event in Virginia, half of the tickets were given out by the school (to “students, faculty, staff, as well as members of the health community from the area”) and the other half by the White House (”grassroots activists and people involved in the issue in the area”). The spokesperson then explained how questions were chosen:
The President posted a video on YouTube several days ago, saying respond to this video with questions for me on health care, and we got hundreds, and all of those are online. So in terms of the videos that were selected, anyone can look at the range and see which ones we did and didn’t select. That’s fully transparent. They’re all up on YouTube; they were all up yesterday on our website.
Because YouTube doesn’t actually have a voting function, our new media staff took videos that were rated highly by other users and selected, from among those, questions that represented the range of things being asked. So a lot of people in the progressive community still want a single-payer system, so the first question was from a single-payer advocate. We took a question from a Republican member of Congress, Mike Burgess, about medical malpractice reform.
The spokesperson then noted that there were also questions taken from people who were following along on Twitter and Facebook. When asked whether these questioners or audience members were pre-screened for their political ideology or whether they agreed with the President, the spokesperson replied, “Absolutely not.”
Of course, pre-screening for political ideology is exactly what the Bush administration did.
In March 2005, people seeking tickets to a Social Security event were quizzed about their support of President Bush and his Social Security plan ahead of time. In April 2005, Bush’s security detail threw out three people from an event in Colorado because they had a bumper sticker reading “No More Blood For Oil.” White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that if there’s any evidence people might “disrupt the president,” they “have the right to exclude those people from those events.”
Bush even screened the assembled group of soldiers he would meet in Iraq during a 2003 Thanksgiving visit: Soldiers had to fill out a questionnaire asking whether they supported Bush.
Transcript:
HEMMER: This was the scene at the White House in the press room before the town hall event took place on health care. Roll this with Helen Thomas.
(VIDEO) THOMAS: You have left open the suggestion that you are pumping the answers.
REID: Even if there’s a tough question, it’s a question coming from somebody who was invited or was screened — the question was screened.
GIBBS: Chip, Chip, let’s have this discussion at the conclusion, how about that?
THOMAS: No, no, no. We are having it now.
GIBBS: Well I’d be happy to have it now. Which question did you object to at the town hall meeting, Helen?
THOMAS: It’s a pattern. It isn’t the question. It’s a pattern of controlling the press. (END VIDEO)
HEMMER: Now, Chip Reid’s next to her from NBC. Look, people are talking about this today, not the town hall meeting. How does that hurt the cause and the message about health care reform?
ROVE: Well, look. I thought — I’m like Jonah Goldberg; I really find it unusual to be in agreement with Helen Thomas. But notice what Gibbs said. He said, in essence, you have the right to end in a question by e-mail and we have the right to determine whether or not we ask it, so what’s the problem? It was sort of like, it’s a free-flowing town hall meeting if you get to send in via Twitter or e-mail your question, not if we have free-flowing questions in the room.
This White House has carried pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted events to a new height, and they’re getting away with things that in any previous White House, the media would have eviscerated the press secretary and the White House for it.
HEMMER: And when something like this happens, you know, the credibility is shaken and the argument stands on weaker ground. It’s plain and simple.
ROVE: Well, they got what they wanted.
by Amanda Terkel at July 02, 2009 05:30 PM
Can anyone guess the entry codes for these door locks?
There are 10,000 possible four-digit codes, but you only have to try 24 on these keypads. The first is most likely 1986 or 1968. The second is almost certainly 1234.
by schneier at July 02, 2009 05:09 PM
Social networks like MySpace still cannot be held responsible for assaults that happen offline, according to California's Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. The court was asked to review the case of four underage girls (referred to as Julie Does) who, along with their parents, had sued MySpace for gross negligence and strict product liability after they were all sexually assaulted by older men whom they met on the service.
Despite the scary circumstances in which these events took place, the judge said that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 04:44 PM
In his third op-ed on Iran in a major newspaper in the last month, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton wrote in the Washington Post today that the time is right for Israel to launch an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:
Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.
Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. [...]
Those who oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons are left in the near term with only the option of targeted military force against its weapons facilities. Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people.
Despite his suggestion that now is time for an attack, in reality, it’s always a great time to attack Iran if you’re John Bolton, considering he never passes up an opportunity to use turmoil in the Middle East to suggest war with Iran.
- Kyle Schmidt
by Guest Blogger at July 02, 2009 04:30 PM
ThinkProgress recently bid farewell to our dear friend and colleague, Ali Frick. For nearly two years, Ali passionately devoted her energy to delivering consistently interesting, insightful, and high-quality posts for ThinkProgress. Around the office, she was always brimming with exuberance, driven in equal parts by her strong desire for progressive reform and her anger at right-wing distortions and lies. A look at some of her greatest hits:
Right-Wing Apoplectic Over Pixar’s WALL-E: ‘Malthusian Fear Mongering,’ ‘Fascistic Elements’ [Link]
REPORT: Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed [Link]
McCain Takes Bold Stance On Torture: ‘We Cannot Ever Torture Any American’ [Link]
Freshman Rep. Cao: ‘I Hope That The GOP Will Not Tolerate’ Extreme Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric [Link]
‘El Rushbo’ Endorses Himself For President: I Have ‘The Qualifications’ As Clinton’s ‘Real Co-President’ [Link]
Chris Matthews Stumps Right-Wing Radio Host: ‘Tell Me What Chamberlain Did?’ ‘I Don’t Know’ [Link]
O’Reilly creates a ninth day of Hanukkah. [Link]
G. Gordon Liddy On Sotomayor: ‘Let’s Hope That The Key Conferences Aren’t When She’s Menstruating’ [Link]
Rep. Culberson Offers Incoherent And Illogical Stance On Gay Marriage [Link]
Ali will be attending Yale Law School in the fall. We wish her the best of luck in the next chapter of her life. She’ll always be (the most spirited) part of our team.
by Think Progress at July 02, 2009 04:10 PM
Once again, news has arrived from the land of Hollywood that another major video game franchise is being adapted for the silver screen. Last week, it was announced that Uncharted would get a celluloid makeover; this week, it's a much older franchise that's being adapted. It turns out that Asteroids, the Atari game from 1979 (thus making it older than many in the current generation of gamers) will be coming to theaters sometime in the future.
Astonishingly, not only is Asteroids being made into a movie, but there was an actual bidding war between four major studios for the rights. Universal Studios has emerged the winner.
As a result, Matthew Lopez is set to write the script and it will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Lopez has written the screenplays for the recent Disney films Escape to Witch Mountain and Bedtime Stories, as well as for the upcoming The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Meanwhile, di Bonaventura's latest ventures include Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the soon-to-be-released G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
While there are some big Hollywood players involved with this project, the inherent problem with making a movie out of Asteroids is that it doesn't have a plot, or characters, just a triangular spaceship blowing up some oddly-shaped polygons.
On the other hand, one could look at this with the perspective that it's pretty much impossible to screw up the game's story. However, this news implies something much larger and much more unsettling: Hollywood may officially be out of original movie ideas.
July 02, 2009 03:51 PM
Cosmic rays can flip bits in memory cells or processor datapaths. Once upon a time, Sudhakar and I asked the question, "can an attacker exploit rare and random bit-flips to bypass a programming-language's type protections and thereby break out of the Java sandbox?"
A recently published science-fiction anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments contains a story, "Single-Bit Error" inspired by our research paper. What if you could use cosmic-ray bit flips in neurons to bypass the "type protections" of human rationality?
In addition to 9 stories and 6 original illustrations, the anthology is interesting for another reason. It's an experiment in do-it-yourself paying-the-artists high-editorial-standards open-source Creative-Commons print-on-demand publishing. Theorists like Yochai Benkler and others have explained that production costs attributable to communications and coordination have been reduced down into the noise by the Internet, and that this enables "peer production" that was not possible back in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now the Appendix to Thoughtcrime Experiments explains how to edit and produce your own anthology, complete with a sample publication contract.
It's not all honey and roses, of course. The authors got paid, but the editors didn't! The Appendix presents data on how many hours they spent "for free". In addition, if you look closely, you'll see that the way the authors got paid is that the editors spent their own money.
Still, part of the new theory of open-source peer-production asks questions like, "What motivates people to produce technical or artistic works? What mechanisms do they use to organize this work? What is the quality of the work produced, and how does it contribute to society? What are the legal frameworks that will encourage such work?" This anthology and its appendix provide an interesting datapoint for the theorists.
by Andrew Appel at July 02, 2009 03:45 PM
Yesterday, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the body of openly gay Seaman August Provost was discovered in a guard shack at Camp Pendelton. A “person of interest” in connection to the suspected homicide is now being held in the Navy brig at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. According to Provost’s sister, he had recently complained to his family that “someone was harassing and bothering him.” According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Provost likely didn’t report the harassment because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:
The Navy would not comment on whether Provost’s orientation had anything to do with the death.
“While ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ is in place, anybody in the military who is a homosexual has no place to go to get assistance or counseling,” said Ben Gomez of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group for gays in the military.
(HT: Raw Story)
by Matt Corley at July 02, 2009 03:35 PM
Attention, all high speed Internet lovers—the government has released its first Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) and is asking for applications to spend that broadband stimulus money. This is phase one of the roll-out of that $7.2 billion worth of broadband stimulus cash contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. You can bet your best router that folks across the country are reading the NOFA backwards and forwards in preparation for the application window, which begins on July 14, 2009 at 8:00am eastern time and closes on August 14, 2009 at 5:00 pm.
Here's the thumbnail version of what the key agencies are looking for—they being the Department of Commerce's
Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and the Department of Agriculture's
Rural Utility Service's Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 03:20 PM
The Politico reports that the Washington Post, for a price of $25,000 to $250,000, is “offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, non-confrontational access to ‘those powerful few’ — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.” While the Politico notes that on-the-record events and conferences are becoming a trend in the newspaper industry, this type of closed, pay-for-access event raises serious ethical concerns. The flier for the event, titled “Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans? The reform and funding debate,” reads:
Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth [...] Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama Administration and Congressional leaders […] Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. [...] Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 […] Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post [...] An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. [...] July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m.
In recent weeks, the Washington Post has editorialized against a public option as a part of health care reform. Defending the status quo of a private insurer-dominated system, the Post wrote, “A public plan is not necessary to maintain a competitive market in health insurance.”
by Lee Fang at July 02, 2009 02:45 PM
santiago-ve del Grupo de Usuarios PostgreSQL de Venezuela nos cuenta: «El Grupo Global de Desarrollo de PostgreSQL ha publicado la versión 8.4, continuando con el rápido desarrollo de la base de datos de código abierto más avanzada del mundo. Esta versión contiene una gran cantidad de mejoras para que la administración, consulta y programación en PostgreSQL sea más fácil que nunca. Con las 293 funcionalidades nuevas o mejoradas en la versión 8.4, hay aún más motivos para escoger PostgreSQL para sus futuros proyectos. La mayoría de los cambios en PostgreSQL 8.4 son herramientas y órdenes de administración y monitorización. Para probarla se pueden usar las descargas oficiales, los instaladores "de un click" provistos por EnterpriseDB para Linux 32 y 64, Windows y Mac o usar el código fuente.De entre las nuevas funcionalidades destacan la restauración de la base de datos en procesos paralelos, la posibilidad de granularización de privilegios por columna y las mencionadas herramientas de monitorización.
by mig21 at July 02, 2009 02:25 PM
Firmware development for all Nikon digital cameras and interchangeable lenses will now be undertaken by a new company named Nikon Imaging Systems. The new company is a joint venture between Fujitsu Broad Solution & Consulting Inc. and Nikon Systems, a subsidiary of Nikon Corporation. The initial investment will be around $1m and the company will employ 100 people.
July 02, 2009 01:51 PM
Yesterday, the National Security Archive released declassified FBI reports detailing both the bureau’s interrogations and “casual conversations” with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to the documents, Hussein told FBI agent George Piro (one of only a few agents who spoke Arabic) that he let the world believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he feared appearing weak to what he considered his country’s real threat, Iran:
Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. … Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. [...]
“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”
Saddam “felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from ‘fanatic’ leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a ‘security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.’” If that could not happen, only then, he said, would Iraq reconstitute its WMD programs.
Piro revealed to CBS’s 60 Minutes last year that Saddam “didn’t want to associate” with Osama bin Laden and viewed him “as a threat to him and his regime.” The new documents expound on Saddam’s distrust of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, whom he called “a zealot”:
Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot…that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”
When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and numerous members of the Bush administration repeatedly cited the (now debunked) threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD program and Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to Al-Qaeda as the main justifications for launching the invasion of Iraq more than six years ago. The U.S. could end up spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and today, 130,000 U.S. troops remain there, 4,321 have died (4,639 total from coalition forces), and more than 30,000 have been wounded. Over 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion while millions have been displaced.
by Ben Armbruster at July 02, 2009 01:50 PM
Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday. The new version of the popular open source web browser has attracted considerable attention and is already seeing rapid adoption. It was downloaded over 5 million times during the first 24 hours. This falls short of the record-setting 8 million downloads that Firefox 3 had during its first day, but it still reflects the intense enthusiasm of the browser's fans.
Firefox's popularity has rapidly climbed over the past few years, bringing it up to between 20-30 percent of the global browser market, according to various Web analytics firms. Based on data collected from 850,000 web sites, tracking firm whos.amung.us says that Firefox 3.5 by itself now accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of the browser market, more than the total marketshare of rival Opera.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 01:03 PM
Twenty five years ago, when Steve W. worked for a military subcontractor, he'd often roll his eyes when meetings were denoted "CONFIDENTIAL". It's not that he didn't take confidentiality seriously, it's just that everything they did was confidential. By labeling most everything "CONFIDENTIAL", there was no way of knowing when some things – like performance reviews and should-we-fire-so-and-so discussions – were really, really confidential. At least, not until you were actually in the meeting.
At one meeting, it was was really, really confidential. It was a one-on-one and across the table from Steve sat the Project Manager. These kind of solitary meetings took place either because you're doing something very wrong... or you're getting canned.
"Hey Steve," the project manager started, "I need a fresh set of eyes on a performance problem we've been facing with the EC Unit."
Steve perked up at this. And not just because he wasn't getting fired, but because the EC Unit — EC being short for Electrical Capabilities — was a pretty big deal as of late. It was a "switch" on one of their new automated testing stations with hundreds of relays configurable to variety of electrical ratings: 50 Milliamps at 0.01 Volts, 400 Volts at 200 Amps, you name it. Being about the size of a VW Bug and having a panel of blinking indicator lights which actually meant something, it was an impressive sight... and had an equally impressive budget to boot.
The project manager continued, "it's taking in the neighborhood of eight hours to run through an engineer test script and that is really hurting us on turnaround. If you can crack this nut, you just might be the hero of the project."
A HERO'S WORK
Eagerly, Steve got to work on familiarizing himself with the EC's software. Basically, the idea behind the program was that, as part of a test, the engineer would write a statement like "Apply X amps at Y volts to circuit C with waveform..." and the program would compute the least electrically expensive path.
Developed by the primary contractor, the code weighed in at about 5,000 lines of Pascal and, with a myriad of functions and high math, it was certainaly no picnic. For days, he poured through the logic. After single stepping though the program and creating enough flow charts and flow diagrams to cover two walls, nothing jumped out at him. However, when Steve added a global counter in every function in the application (as there was no profiler available), he hit paydirt.
While most functions were called proportionally to the number of connections to be analyzed, the following worst offending function was called over a billion times.
function eval_strings_are_equal(s1:string[255], s2:string[255]):Integer
«reasonably efficient string compare function implementation here»
end
The funny thing about that innocent looking function was how the program handled the parameters. Can you see it? No matter what the size of the string data — even as few as two characters — the program would copy two 255 byte sequences to the stack, one byte at a time. Steve found that if he changed the parameter declaration to the *even* number 256, the parameters would be copied to the stack *two* bytes at a time and reduced the runtime by half!
But, was 256 bytes...overkill? Steve looked further and found that the longest strings ever passed would only be 8 bytes long - he reduced the parameter length to match. The end result: an analysis that would ordinarily take an entire business day would be done in a half hour.
No doubt about it - Steve was the man. And better yet, it wasn't even his company's fault: the primary contractor was responsible for that particular module.
AFTERMATH
At their next "CONFIDENTIAL" meeting, the Project Manager started without a word of small talk. "So do you have something for me?"
Steve smirked and nodded, with a smug Yeah, you better believe I do! and handed over the documentation with a very nice "before and after" graph on the first page.
"WOW!" the project manager was shocked, "This is good!...REALLY GOOD!"
Before Steve could even explain how he did it, the project manager jumped in again. "However," he said slowly, "we're going to have to sit on this for now. We can't tell them about this."
Steve shot back a quizzical look as the project manager explained. As it turned out, there was a big political fight going on with the primary contractor about the project. The primary was blaming Steve's company for overall Electrical Capabilities slowness and Steve's company was blaming the hardware supplied by the primary. Not that it really mattered, because there was a planned upgrade to the Electrical Capabilities system that, among other things, promised much higher performance.
"It's only a single line code change," Steve implored, "it would take all of five seconds to explain. Then the users would be up and run-"
"Yeah, yeah," he brushed off, "we'll keep it as our 'ace in the hole' in case they complain about slowness after the upgrade. We'll show 'em that we're not the ones who are causing all the problems."
"But isn't the upgrade several months away?" Steve rhetorically asked, "we can get them to implement it now and save thousands of client man hours in the mean time."
The project manager glared, "you're not going to share the patch information. It's confidential."
As the planned upgrade date came closer and closer, the likelihood of actually upgrading seemed less and less likely. When the date had come and gone, the upgrade project was "put on hold until next quarter". And it stayed on hold for quarter after quarter after quarter.
Five years later, when it came time for budget cuts, the entire Electrical Capabilities project — military personnel and all — was cut for good. Apparently, the auditors weren't too thrilled that engineers just sat around all day, waiting for some program to run.
Brought to you by the
Non-WTF Job Board:
July 02, 2009 01:00 PM
Now that the dust has settled in the Seventh Generation console wars, with the Nintendo Wii emerging the clear winner and the XBox360 and PlayStation 3 duking it out in the dust behind, game manufacturers are already tapping out prototypes of their next-generation consoles in the race for the Eighth Generation console war.At stake is billions in licensing and sales revenue, and each company is straining to optimize its next-generation offering to slaughter its competition. And as before, Nintendo is playing it cool and designing a low-footprint, system that will zip between its peers' enormous specs and straight to players' hearts.
July 02, 2009 12:51 PM
On Tuesday, the US Department of the Interior announced plans that should radically streamline the process of building utility-scale solar facilities in the US Southwest. After having surveyed terrain administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the DOI has identified the best sites for solar facilities. It will now withdraw these areas from consideration for other uses and undertake a single environmental review for all of them. Assuming their use for solar power production is approved, the land may be able to produce roughly 30 percent of current US residential energy use.
The program, which was published in the Federal Register in order to solicit public comment, was jointly announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Senate leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, one of the states included in the program; the rest are Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. The move follows a general solicitation for comments on solar production using BLM lands that was initiated last year. Participants obviously thought it was a good idea, and the stimulus bill provided the DOI with $41 million specifically to promote the production of renewable energy on public land.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 02, 2009 11:18 AM
The plant caladium steudneriifolium pretends to be ill so mining moths won't eat it.
She believes that the plant essentially fakes being ill, producing variegated leaves that mimic those that have already been damaged by mining moth larvae. That deters the moths from laying any further larvae on the leaves, as the insects assume the previous caterpillars have already eaten most of the leaves' nutrients.
Cabbage aphids arm themselves with chemical bombs:
Its body carries two reactive chemicals that only mix when a predator attacks it. The injured aphid dies. But in the process, the chemicals in its body react and trigger an explosion that delivers lethal amounts of poison to the predator, saving the rest of the colony.
The dark-footed ant spider mimics an ant so that it's not eaten by other spiders, and so it can eat spiders itself:
M.melanotarsa is a jumping spider that protects itself from predators (like other jumping spiders) by resembling an ant. Earlier this month, Ximena Nelson and Robert Jackson showed that they bolster this illusion by living in silken apartment complexes and travelling in groups, mimicking not just the bodies of ants but their social lives too.
Now Nelson and Robert are back with another side to the ant-spider's tale - it also uses its impersonation for attack as well as defence. It also feasts on the eggs and youngsters of the very same spiders that its ant-like form protects it from. It is, essentially, a spider that looks like an ant to avoid being eaten by spiders so that it itself can eat spiders.
My previous post about security stories from the insect world.
by schneier at July 02, 2009 11:11 AM
rjw57@vega:~/Development/repos/bzr/firtree/packaging/jaunty$ lintian ../build-area/*.deb | wc -l
17
Fail :(.
July 02, 2009 10:02 AM
"Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another."
July 02, 2009 08:00 AM
New York - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court Wednesday to reject bogus copyright claims in a ringtone royalty battle that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardize consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation.
Millions of Americans have bought musical ringtones, often clips from favorite popular songs, for their mobile phones. Mobile phone carriers pay royalties to song owners for the right to sell these snippets to their customers. But as part of a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) has told a federal court that each time a phone rings in a public place, the phone user has violated copyright law. Therefore, ASCAP argues, phone carriers must pay additional royalties or face legal liability for contributing to what they claim is cell phone users' copyright infringement. In an amicus brief filed Wednesday, EFF points out that copyright law does not reach public performances "without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage" -- clearly the case with cell phone ringtones. If phone users are not infringing copyright law, then mobile phone service providers are not contributing to any infringement.
"This is an outlandish argument from ASCAP," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!"
ASCAP has responded by saying that it does not plan to charge mobile phone users, just mobile phone service providers. But if ASCAP prevails, consumers could find themselves targeted by other copyright owners for "public performances." Worse, these wrongheaded legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges.
"Because it is legal for consumers to play music in public, it's also legal for my mobile phone carrier to sell me a ringtone and a phone to do it," said von Lohmann. "Otherwise it would be illegal to sell all kinds of technologies that help us enjoy our fair use, first sale, and other copyright privileges."
The Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge also joined the EFF brief.
For the full amicus brief:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/US_v_ASCAP/US%20v%20ASCAP%20EFF%20ATT%...
For more on this case:
http://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-ascap
Contact:
Rebecca Jeschke
Media Relations Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org
by rebecca at July 02, 2009 07:32 AM
The Supreme Court has spoken in Ricci v. Stefano, the New Haven firefighter’s case. An employer developed what it thought was a purely job-related exam and said that they would promote the people who did well on the test. The alternatives presumably would have been promotion based on seniority or popularity with supervisor (i.e., suckuptitude). When it transpired that some blacks and Hispanics whom the city had hoped to promote based on the exam failed to score well, the city tossed out the results. The Supreme Court has ordered the city to live by the test results and self-proclaimed advocates for blacks and Hispanics are broadcasting their displeasure.
Initially it seems reasonable that advocates for groups that did poorly on an exam would advocate against an exam culture. But thinking about it a bit more, I found myself surprised.
Suppose I am a member of Group A within society. The average manager thinks that members of Group A are incompetent and doesn’t want to hire anyone in Group A. Membership in Group A can be easily recognized in a face-to-face interview by skin color and therefore, unless nobody else has applied, no member of Group A is likely to get a job after a face-to-face interview.
An employer switches to using a written exam, graded by a computer program unaware of the group membership of test takers. The highest scoring test takers will be given jobs.
This should be a dream come true for me and the rest of Group A. To get a job or a promotion, all that I have to do is study for a written test. I don’t have to worry about my skin color anymore. If Group A has a particular dialect of English or funny accent that turns off employers, I am also freed from worry about how I speak.
If the belief is that Group A is being discriminated against because employers are prejudiced, one would think that any advocate for Group A would welcome a method of hiring or promoting that is blind to personal characteristics.
Suppose that all jobs in the U.S. were exam-based. We would not have had the election of 2004 in which John Kerry and George W. Bush competed for our top job. Neither of them did especially well on exams, as evidenced by their mediocre grades in college. Had ability to be President been judged by an impartial computer system rather than voters, it is unlikely that two white guys from Yale would have been the top contenders.
[Separately, has anyone seen any of the exam questions? A tremendous amount of journalistic ink has been spent on this lawsuit yet I have not seen any sample questions from the exam. Perhaps they were lifted from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76rblackperspective.phtml, e.g.,
You have been invited over for cocktails by the officer of your trust fund. Cocktails begin at 4:30, but you must make an appearance at a 6:00 formal dinner at the Yacht Club. What do you do about dress?
A. Wear your blue-striped seersucker suit to cocktails and change into your tuxedo in the bathroom, apologizing to your host for the inconvenience.
B. Wear your tuxedo to cocktails, apologizing to your host for wearing a dinner jacket before 6:00 PM.
C. Walk to the subway at Columbus Circle and take the "A" Train uptown."
Julian Bond, Black Perspective, Saturday Night Live, April 9, 1977]
by philg at July 02, 2009 04:54 AM
Microsoft's recent lawsuit against TomTom, alleging infringement of filesystem patents, has left many questions unanswered about the legal implications of distributing open source implementations of Microsoft's FAT filesystem. A new Linux kernel patch that was published last week offers a workaround that might make it possible to continue including FAT in Linux without using methods that are covered by Microsoft's patents.
The patent dispute erupted in February when Microsoft sued portable navigation device maker TomTom. Microsoft claimed that TomTom's Linux-based GPS products infringe on several of its patents, including two that cover specific characteristics of FAT, a filesystem devised by Microsoft that is widely used on removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives and memory cards. The dispute escalated when TomTom retaliated with a counter-suit, but it was eventually settled in March when TomTom agreed to remove the relevant functionality.
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July 02, 2009 02:52 AM
There are two competing ideas on the process that governs the formation and maintenance of beliefs: 1) people maintain a belief because they have limited access to opposing beliefs, or 2) because they actively filter information in a way that avoids conflicting views. A new meta-analysis of past studies confirms the existence of active avoidance; when people are offered an opposing viewpoint, they will ignore it in favor of a supportive viewpoint in two out of three instances.
The meta-analysis was performed by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida. They managed to identify a total of 91 relevant studies that included nearly 8,000 participants. The studies were all on the subject of selective exposure, or how people filter out incoming information based on how it jibes with their current beliefs. The studies attempted to determine whether people wanted to view or read something that either supported their point of view or challenged it.
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July 02, 2009 02:30 AM
July 01, 2009
Microsoft's recently relaunched search engine, Bing, has managed to win the company some market share during its first month of operation. According to numbers gathered by StatCounter, Microsoft gained a full percentage point during the month of June, stealing bits and pieces from both Yahoo and Google.
The firm says that Microsoft's share of the search market increased from 7.21 percent in April of this year to 8.23 percent in June. Comparatively, Google's share was at 79.07 percent in April and 78.48 percent in June—a drop of just over a half a percentage point. Yahoo had 11.04 percent of the market in June.
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July 01, 2009 11:03 PM
Is it just the Owl, or are travelers ruder than ever these days? One of our editors is answering travel etiquette questions on ABCnews.com in an effort to try to do something about it. In this edition: "saving" beach chairs;...<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?i=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:dnMXMwOfBR0"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?i=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?i=21S31-GU2Pw:XXflrL1BDvM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a>
</div></content>
by The Snarky Owl at July 01, 2009 10:48 PM
More bills to go over with a fine-toothed comb, and SCO has filed an third amended Schedule F for SCO Operations. That's the list of unsecured creditors. Here's the previous version, if you'd like to compare, and I hope you do, and the original [PDF].
We have now finished the exhibits to SCO's latest proposed APA, and I want to say thank you to everyone who pitched in. What a job that was!
July 01, 2009 10:01 PM
Some black holes are too big. Some black holes are
too small.
A letter appearing in this week's edition of Nature describes how astronomers may have found one that is just right.
The letter, written by a team of British and
French astronomers, does not state that they have found an intermediate
mass black hole—one that could be termed just
right—but that they have found an object where most other explanations fail to explain its behavior.
The object, 2XMM J011028.1-460421 or (more conveniently) HLX-1, is a source of ultraluminous X-rays near the spiral galaxy ESO
243-49. These X-rays have been postulated to be the product of an intermediate mass black hole, one between 100 and 10,000 solar
masses, but to date no candidate object has been widely accepted.
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July 01, 2009 08:59 PM
It's not hard for Americans to work themselves into a lather over the state of broadband in this country, which is improving but still not on par with the 100Mbps fiber lines widely offered in countries like South Korea and Japan. But it's worth taking a step back every once in a while to consider the global picture: much of the world has broadband penetration rates under 20 percent, and the largest single group of countries has penetration rates of between 0 and 5 percent.
The consultants at TeleGeography track broadband deployment in 127 countries and have released a chart that shows world broadband deployments by percentage of households that have service. Out of the 127, only 10 countries are above 80 percent—mostly small places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, and South Korea. Together, the ten countries in this bracket account for only two percent of the world population.
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July 01, 2009 07:37 PM
Joost, the P2P online video service once hailed as the new way to watch TV, has announced that it's ditching its consumer video offerings. Instead, the company plans to offer services to other media companies—such as cable and satellite providers—as a "white label video platform." The company will be doing quite a bit of restructuring in order to accommodate its new role by shedding employees and replacing its CEO.
Joost originally sprang forth from the minds of Skype's Janus Friis and Kazaa's Niklas Zennström in 2006, dubbed originally as The Venice Project. The service was launched with the goal of offering ad-supported television content over the Internet, but through a distributed streaming model like that of BitTorrent—instead of pulling video content from a central server, it would instead stream it from multiple users around the 'Net.
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July 01, 2009 06:19 PM
txenoo nos cuenta: «Ya están disponibles los horarios y ponencias de la VI GUADEC Hispana que se organiza dentro del Gran Canaria Desktop Summit los días 8 y 9 de julio de 2009. Este año el programa es para tódos los niveles contando con ponentes de Chile, España, México y Perú. La ponencia inagural será impartida por Federico Mena co-fundador de GNOME.»
by acs at July 01, 2009 06:06 PM
The Obama administration came to office with promises of greater openness about government activities and improved technical capabilities. On Tuesday, the US CTO, Vivek Kundra, announced a new Web resource that promises to allow citizens to track IT spending across all government agencies. Although this undoubtedly represents a positive step towards more useful public disclosure, on some levels it's simply the latest example of an ongoing trend in the US government's approach to public information.
The new site is called the IT Dashboard. (In a sign that the government truly gets the latest trends in Web services, it bears a prominent beta label.) The Flash-based application allows you to select any one of ten government agencies (or an "Other" category), and get a glimpse into what they're spending on IT projects, as well as whether the projects are considered on track. So, for example, Health and Human Services is spending $2.3 billion on IT, spread over 65 major projects. Although only one of these is rated as being of significant concern when it comes to cost, 15 are apparently behind schedule.
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July 01, 2009 05:11 PM
Just posted! Our waterproof camera group test. Summer time means visiting the seaside, riverside, or your local pool - these are times for fun in and out of the water. And your camera should be able to keep up with you every step of the way. In our latest group test we look at five waterproof cameras to see which is the most deserving of your hard-earned cash so you can enjoy a summer of worry-free shooting.
July 01, 2009 04:33 PM
You can run, but you can't hide. Here are a few of the latest things I've seen, in no particular order.
- On a PHPBB-style chat board which I sometimes frequent, there was a thread about do-it-yourself television repair, dormant for over a year. Recently, there was a seemingly robotic post, from a brand new user, that was still on-topic, giving general diagnosis advice and offering to sell parts for TV repair. The spam was actually somewhat germane to the main thread of the discussion. Is it still spam?
- In my email, I recently got a press release for a local fried chicken franchise celebrating their 40th anniversary. My blogging output generally doesn't extend to writing restaurant reviews (tempting as that might be), although I do sometimes link to foodie things from Google Reader which will also show up in my public FriendFeed. Spam or not spam?
by Dan Wallach at July 01, 2009 04:16 PM
A federal judge yesterday found Usenet.com liable for just about every copyright infringement claim on the books: direct infringement, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement, and (just for good measure) vicarious infringement. Not content to be loud and proud about its pro-pirate agenda, Usenet.com also resorted to stonewalling legal questionnaires, sending employees to Europe to avoid depositions, wiping hard drives, and failing to turn over e-mail after being sued in 2007 by the music labels.
The recording industry's high-octane litigation campaign has on many occasions suffered from "poor targeting," but it's hard to see any complexities in this case. When Usenet.com employees privately suggested that the service's tag line should be "piracy, porno, and pictures —Usenet," "Usenet is full of music and movies so get your pirate on!," or "Bless the Usenet and all that it steals!," it's clear they knew why people were paying $4.95 to $18.95 a month for the privilege of accessing the newsgroups. And not only did they know, they allegedly took steps to encourage the infringement.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 01, 2009 04:01 PM
Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski gave his first pep talk to the whole Commission staff on Tuesday. He promised to "green the agency, and improve overall operations of the FCC—running efficiently, communicating effectively, and opening the agency to participation from everyone affected by the FCC's actions."
"And, stay tuned," he added, "we will have a new FCC website." It is not immediately clear what any of these things mean, but a day earlier Genachowski announced his own staff. That is something that an FCC watcher can work with.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 01, 2009 01:08 PM
As a postgrad in the late '80s, Neil Bowers made some extra book money by acting as a helper in the computing lab. At the time, undergrads were all working on a grindingly slow VAX-11/780, and Neil and his fellow postgrads were posted there for hands-on help. This tended to be focused at the start of the year, when there were groups discovering Unix and programming for the first time.
One time, an Irish girl asked Neil for some help, saying that she couldn’t understand what was going on: she thought her program looked right, but for some reason, each time she ran it she got partial output, and varying amounts of output each time. The homework assignment she was working on involved writing a program that generated various values and wrote the results in ascii tabular form to a file.
Neil went over to her workstation and had a look at her source code. Everything looked fine. She showed him the file generated by her last run, and indeed, it looked truncated. Hmmm. "Ok," Neil asked, "can you run your program for me, so I can see what happens?".
She typed ./a.out and hit return. Her left hand darted to the keyboard and she hit Control-C. Neil was still mentally processing this when she cat'd the output, and turned to say, "See!" It did indeed contain partial output. Again.
"Um," he paused, "can you just run it again please?" Neil figured that he must have not seen right. But once again she typed ./a.out, hit return, then whap! she hit Control-C. Neil asked her why she hit Control-C every time she ran her program.
"Well," she said confidently, "I discovered that Control-C makes the % prompt come up quicker!"
Brought to you by the
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July 01, 2009 01:00 PM
There are many reasons for Chicagoans to poke fun at the northwest suburb of Schaumburg, but the existence of red light cameras soon won't be one of them. Officials expect to get rid of Schaumburg's sole red light camera in July after the local police department has determined that it provides no appreciable safety benefits.
The city originally installed the camera at a busy intersection near the ever-popular Woodfield Mall sometime last year as a testing ground before the city installed more cameras. According to Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson, the city had been sold on pitches from red light camera companies claiming that the devices would help prevent serious accidents.
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July 01, 2009 11:24 AM
Olympus has released an update to its Master and Studio image-editing software. Version 2.2 of the Master and v2.3 of Studio enable users to apply Art Filter effects to RAW files, rather than having to choose them as you shoot. It also extends RAW support to the E-P1 and now includes a video editor to edit that camera's HD videos.
July 01, 2009 10:48 AM
Odiseo70 nos cuenta: «Se ha publicado la versión 3.0 de VirtualBox, el popular software de virtualización que es actualmente impulsado por Sun Microsystems. Llama la atención dentro de las novedades de la versión, la adición de capacidades de multiprocesamiento simétrico (SMP, siglas en inglés), y el soporte mejorado para 3D, lo que permitiría que una máquina virtual ejecutando windows pudiera aprovechar las funcionalidades de Direct3D 8 y 9, como se lee en el log de cambios. ¿Estamos más cerca de poder ejecutar vídeo juegos en una máquina virtual?»
by JuanjoAI at July 01, 2009 10:02 AM
ojete_oscuro nos cuenta: «Volvemos a la carga, los impuestos recaudatorios por parte de los supuestos adalides de la cultura, así como su afán de enriquecimiento, no tienen fín, y nos sorprenden día tras día. Esta vez le toca el turno a los aparatos decodificadores de TDT con disco duro integrado, según la siguiente noticia. ¿Quién será el próximo? Se aceptan apuestas, personalmente voto por las conexiones a internet...»
by acs at July 01, 2009 09:09 AM
Ricoh has released a firmware update for the CMOS-based CX1 digital compact camera. Firmware v1.24 resolves minor issues pertaining to image orientation data and printing. The firmware is available for immediate download from Ricoh's website.
July 01, 2009 08:45 AM
If you're a parent, or a soon-to-be parent, the noise about gaming and children can be deafening. Video games turn kids into killers. Video games are addictive. Video games get in the way of learning. There is nothing good to be gained from playing games.
If you don't play games yourself, it can be an intimidating thing to have a child who is into video games. You don't understand the hardware. The controller looks complicated. You don't get the games. At the same time, isn't it a little drastic to simply not allow video games in the house?
In this article, we'll take a look at some of the issues that surround video games and the family, and we'll give you some real-world advice on what to look for, what the dangers are, and what you can do to have gaming be a safe and fun part of your household. What we hope you'll find is that most of this advice is common sense, and that by using your head and doing a bit of research you'll eliminate most of the problems that can pop up with children and gaming. In fact...
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July 01, 2009 04:31 AM
Kodak last week announced that it was discontinuing its venerable Kodachrome film, sending it gently into that good night after 74 long years. Like Polaroid's discontinuation last year of all instant films, Kodachrome's demise makes it the latest victim in the transition from chemical, film-based photography to digital sensors, Photoshop, and archival inkjet printers. Though it may seem like an anachronism that has lived far past its prime, the oldest color film was a mind-blowing revolution when it was first introduced in 1935.
I don't mean to suggest that color photography didn't exist before Kodachrome—not by a long shot. The first known color photographs were taken in 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's process, the foundation upon which later commercial processes were developed in the early 1900s, involved exposing three plates, each filtered by red, green, or blue. The resulting plates could then be projected simultaneously using the same red, green and blue filters, creating what was at the time the most accurate reproduction of color available. Photographic plates in those days weren't fully sensitive to the full visible spectrum, so this method wasn't fully exploited until the photographic documentation of Russia by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky between 1909 and 1918.
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July 01, 2009 03:13 AM
Un pobrecito hablador nos cuenta: «Leemos en Libertad Digital que una empresa sueca pretende comprar The Pirate Bay por 5,5 millones de euros. La compañía de software sueca Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) ha anunciado la compra del portal sueco The Pirate Bay, uno de los principales del mundo para intercambiar archivos por Internet, con la intención de introducir "un nuevo modelo" que implique pago a "los dueños de los derechos de autor". En una cuestionada sentencia por las dudas acerca de la imparcialidad del juez que la dictó perteneciente a dos organismos de gestión de derechos de autor condenó el pasado 17 de abril a los cuatro responsables de "The Pirate Bay" a un año de cárcel y a pagar una indemnización de 30 millones de coronas (2,7 millones de euros) por violar la ley de propiedad intelectual. La sentencia consideró a los cuatro acusados cómplices de un delito contra la legislación de derechos de autor, ya que al proporcionar la tecnología necesaria, el portal, creado en 2004, facilitaba (supuestamente) la descarga ilegal de archivos.» La compañía GGF, con recientes problemas económicos, asegura que pagará "al menos" 30 millones de coronas y que la compra está supeditada a conseguir la financiación necesaria.
by JuanjoAI at July 01, 2009 03:00 AM
Even at the best of times, Internet traffic in Iran is subject to extensive filtering. But in the wake of the disputed election and the civil unrest that has followed, the government appears to have taken more aggressive steps to police online communications. Nevertheless, news and images continue to make their way out of Iran, and a limited amount of organization by groups within the country appears to be continuing despite both online and real-world crackdowns. This can be ascribed in part to a number of volunteer efforts to provide Iranian citizens with secure ways of accessing the 'Net through secure proxies.
According to the OpenNet Initiative, Iran is ranked up with places like China and Burma as having pervasive filtering of online content. The ONI completed a report on the nation immediately before the election that suggested the country was following a trajectory similar to China's. Internet use is booming, having grown roughly 25-fold in this decade alone. The government had initially relied on off-the-shelf software to block sites deemed offensive for political or cultural reasons, but has developed an expertise and sophistication that matches the growth in the number of users it must police.
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July 01, 2009 01:45 AM
The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice. Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it's both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge. As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public's access to knowledge.
Tim Barton, the head of OUP USA, discussed his views on the settlement in an essay that appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He starts it off with a telling anecdote: a professor at Columbia, when grading an essay assignment, found that most of the class cited a work that had been published in 1900, which had largely been forgotten since. Why so many citations? It was in Google Book Search. More recent and relevant work isn't.
Click here to read the rest of this article
July 01, 2009 12:12 AM
June 30, 2009
Scott Bellware has announced
the MonoSpace Conference in
Austin Texas on October 27-30th.
Scott has made
a Call
for Speakers:
The Monospace Conference is looking for teachers to give
tutorials on the Mono framework, tools, languages, and
platforms supported by Mono.
Some tutorials are aimed at .NET developers with little
experience with operating systems other than Windows, and
others are geared to experienced Mono developers with exposure
to the various Mono platforms.
The tutorials are two hour to three hour interactive sessions
that can be any combination of follow-along examples, labs,
and lecture.
We're looking for tutorials on subjects such as Linux, Mac,
Windows, web, desktop, servers, message queues, databases,
iPhone, Android, Amazon's EC2, among others.
You can track the progress of the conference at
the MonoSpace
Conf Blog.
You can also follow the progress
on twitter.
Scott was one of the founders of the Alt.Net series of
conferences.
June 30, 2009 08:50 PM
Yesterday we shipped Mono 2.4.2, our long-term supported
version of Mono. It ships Microsoft's opensourced ASP.NET
MVC stack for the first time (you could get it before on your
own, but now it is integrated) and fixes over 150 reported bugs.
Chris Toshok
announced M/Invoke
a tool to port applications that use P/Invokes on Win32 to
Linux and MacOS.
What Chris does not talk about on his post is that
he was trying to use some .NET software that interfaces via
USB to his glucose meter and was trying to get this to run on
Linux. The tool is mostly .NET with the usual handful of
P/Invokes to Win32. And this is how M/Invoke was born: a
tool to retarget P/Invoke happy applications into becoming
pure managed applications.
This opens new doors to forcefully port more apps to Linux.
Alan
McGovern released
a new version
of Mono.Nat
one of the libraries used by MonoTorrent.
Jordi Mas released
a new version
of Mistelix a DVD
authoring tool for Linux:
Jordi's GBrainy
brain teaser
game was
picked up
by MoLinux, a regional
Linux distribution, and shipped it translated to Spanish:
Joe
Audette's mojoPortal
was
being installed
four times as much when it got included in in Microsoft's
Web Platform Installer site (more stats here).
For years I have loved the Joel on Software rules for
software engineering. And one of those rules is "Build in
one step". We have not always succeeded, but we have always
tried. Lluis
delivers the one step to build and run for MonoDevelop on
Windows: Load solution, Hit F5, up and running.
Google Chrome really lead the way here, and I want very
badly to have all of Mono building in Visual Studio with one
keystroke, but we are not there yet.
Stephane reports on
some nice
startup performance improvements for F-Spot. Loading time
for 10 images from Stephane's own image collection went from
1.2 seconds to .5 seconds.
MonoDevelop got
some enhanced
support for autoconf integration.
Jeremy
Laval released
another version of ZenComic a desktop Comic reader:
David
Siegel announced
a new release of Gnome
Do on behalf of the Gnome Do team. In particular, it is
now easier to write "Docklets" for the Gnome Do panel and for
those of us that like the Emacs keybindings, it is now
possible to use C-N and C-P for navigation
And of course the Google Summer of Code is in full swing:
And we have
various very
exciting projects brewing.
Jonathan Pobst has
been exploring
integration points for Mono and Visual Studio 2010:
Guadec: I will sadly not be attending the Guadec/Akademy
conference in Canaria next week. This is going to be a busy
summer for us as we are shipping a lot of code in the next few
months: Moonlight 2.0, Mono for Visual Studio, MonoTouch 1.0
and Mono 2.6.
June 30, 2009 08:41 PM
Podemos leer en el blog de Inconexo que: Mozilla acaba de sacar la versión 3.5 final de su navegador justo un año después de la sonada versión 3. La mejora que más ha destacado la fundación es la velocidad, que dicen ha llegado al doble de la versión anterior. Para mí es más histórico el soporte de HTML 5, el nuevo estándar de la web, cuyo efecto más visible es la capacidad para reproducir audio y vídeo de forma nativa. Otras características destacadas son varias funciones de privacidad y un sistema para que el navegador comparta información, si el usuario lo permite, con los servidores webs (como la localización).
by Inconexo (posted by grex) at June 30, 2009 08:10 PM
This is very odd. Remember at the last bankruptcy hearing on June 15 SCO represented that there were several different possible purchasers SCO was considering? Both SCO CEO Darl McBride and Frank Caplan, a lawyer for Berger Singerman, testified about that. Caplan mentioned at least four deals. But Berger Singerman has just filed its Interim Application for Compensation [PDF], plus the usual attachments for the month of May, and all I can find is reference to one real deal in the making. McBride did say that the York discussions were in February through April, but where are the rest? And we get a real insight into the legal preparations for the hearing. I find it fascinating, and I'll try to explain to you why.
June 30, 2009 07:04 PM
Verizon's fiber to the home system is wicked fast and fires lasers through tiny glass tubes—undeniably cool stuff. But Verizon claims far more than the mantle of "cool;" the company says that its FiOS system is now the "leading real estate development amenity."
"Home shoppers use to scan the prospect for a Jacuzzi or an intercom," says Verizon vice president of corporate marketing Bill Heilig. "Now, not so much. They look for the Verizon Optical Network Terminal and the Verizon broadband home router so they know they'll have the best Internet and TV service over the best home network available today."
Click here to read the rest of this article
June 30, 2009 06:48 PM
The Chinese government has decided to delay the implementation of its controversial client-side filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort. The deadline for PC makers to preinstall or package the software was originally set for July 1, but it has now been pushed back to an unspecified date.
A representative from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) confirmed to Xinhua that the deadline had been moved at the request of some computer makers. As a result, the deadline of July 1 won't be enforced for PC makers, though the ministry still plans to provide free downloads of Green Dam for schools and Internet cafes as of that date. "The ministry would also keep on soliciting opinions to perfect the preinstallation plan," wrote Xinhua.
Click here to read the rest of this article
June 30, 2009 05:31 PM
Micron Technologies has announced the first flash memory cards to use its 34-nanometer process technology. Its subsidiary, Lexar, will incorporate the new 32Gb NAND chips into its 32GB Platinum II SDHC memory card. A 16Gb microSDHC card (commonly used in mobile devices), will also make use of the 34nm technology NAND chips. Lexar has said it will incorporate the technology into an increasing proportion of its flash memory card range.
June 30, 2009 04:57 PM
In a world of increasingly virtual human interactions, the idea of money is becoming more fluid than authorities find comfortable. China has officially outlawed the practice of exchanging virtual currency for real goods, and minors are no longer able to buy the virtual cash. These rules will help the government control trade in China, but they could also impact the huge gold-farming industry that exists in the country.
Click here to read the rest of this article
June 30, 2009 04:32 PM
Mozilla has announced the official release of Firefox 3.5, the next major version of its popular open source Web browser. The new version boosts performance, introduces useful new features, and delivers strong support for emerging Web standards.
Mozilla aims to "upgrade the Web" by improving the Firefox user experience and expanding the range of tools that are available to Web developers. The company boasts that Firefox 3.5 includes over 5,000 enhancements that span nearly every aspect of the browser's functionality and behavior. Among the most compelling advancements in this release is support for the HTML 5 video element, which enables native video playback in the browser without requiring proprietary plugins such as Flash.
Click here to read the rest of this article
June 30, 2009 03:24 PM
"According to new regulations released jointly by the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Culture last week, virtual currency should be exchanged only for virtual goods and services provided by the issuer of the currency. Gambling and lotteries involving virtual money are also prohibited under the new rules, which could put a big dent in online game activities. According to Sohu.com, 90% of online games in China include loopholes that allow users to bet with virtual money. "
June 30, 2009 01:03 PM
It was the early 1990s and Frank was living the dream – unshaven, in pajama bottoms and his favorite hockey jersey, having just woken up at 12:18 PM, was now working in the dim light of his basement on one of his freelance projects. Just as he was sipping a cup of coffee, the phone rang.
Frank tried fruitlessly to fight an unexpected open-mouthed yawn when he picked up the receiver. "OOOOAAAaaahhhh... hello?"
"Hi, Frank. We have a very exciting opportunity for a qualified individual like you. Interested?" Odd that this caller hadn't even identified what company he was with, Frank thought. After sleepily getting some of the details, yeah, Frank was mildly interested, and he agreed to an interview in 30 minutes... at a bagel shop that was 25 minutes away.
Ten minutes late and having not changed at all aside from putting on non-pajama pants and shoes, he was immediately flagged over by a man in a nice suit. "You have the look like a computer genius, I already know you're perfect for this," he said without a hint of sarcasm. He asked lots of vague questions about computers; stuff like "So you know computers? What about, like, servers?" Frank had all the traits of a young man in IT – beyond his physical appearance, he was brash, overconfident, and narcissistic. Throughout the brief interview, he didn't restrain any of these traits, but still, he was only vaguely interested in the position, so he winged all the questions. Ten minutes later, the man pulled out a marker, wrote something on a napkin, and slid it across the table. "That's what your hourly rate would be." The man arched his eyebrow. "Interested?"
Frank was already pulling in some respectable bank, but this was more than twice what he was currently making. Gears started turning in his brain while he mulled it over. Well, I guess if I was to take this jo-"YES." On his way home from the interview, Frank picked up a razor, stopped for a haircut, and generally got himself kempt.
The Job
The day after the interview, he was sitting opposite the Executive Vice President of Data Processing, who was giving a second interview. "Let's say I asked you to consolidate twelve server facilities into one. How would you do it?" Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"
"Well," Frank started, winging his second interview in as many days, "I'd take a systematic approach. Figure out where everything was, how the different systems were integrated, how they communicate, and gradually migrate servers over."
The Bank Boss was clearly impressed since Frank was given a contract on the spot; no references or background checks. And not just that, Frank was given keycard access to everything – all of the different datacenters and various facilities. He didn't encounter anything his keycard didn't give him access to (though he never tried the bank's vault). He was also given passwords to every sensitive system, including the money transfer system, responsible for transferring money in the range of around one trillion dollars every day.
It quickly became clear that the interview question wasn't a hypothetical, and Frank was dealing with the impossible. And maybe that's why they hired him – he was an idealistic hard worker, a badass who could do anything. What he lacked in experience then he'd make up for in tenacity. At least that's what Frank was having a harder and harder time reminding himself.
And for better or for worse, he'd effectively be on his own. As it turned out, his team and the man that hired him were electricians. Back in those days, the bank (and, more importantly, their union contract) considered moving servers to be "electrical work" and, therefore, only union electrician companies were allowed to do it. Or those that the electricians hired.
The Problem
In short, the bank had a dozen VAX datacenters that they wanted as a single cluster in a new building. Everything communicated over DECnet, which was a network protocol not too dissimilar from TCP/IP. One of the nice things about DECnet was the ability to route datagrams (packets) around the network in different ways to avoid failures, a fact which later proved to be useful.
The problem with the banks infrastructure was that either no one knew everything that was running in each datacenter, how it all worked, or how they'd work together in a single facility. Even worse, the people at the datacenters didn't want to talk to Frank, as the sooner Frank finished his job, the sooner they'd lose theirs.
The visits to the various datacenters always left Frank in a worse mood. All of them were in various states of disrepair – dirty, perhaps a flickering light, disorganized, but one stood above the others. Its floor was almost completely torn up due to a major renovation project following an asbestos contamination. All of the systems in this room were caked with dust, so much so that the labels were completely illegible. Only one system had lights blinking on its network port; so Frank brushed the dust off its label. "VDL-23 – Maintenance Test Box." Why does that sound so familiar?
Earlier that morning, Frank had done some network analysis, and found that all redundant links between the Money Transfer System and the other datacenters (aside from VDL-23) had been down for quite a while. Since DECnet routed around the failures and no one had thought to set-up network monitoring, no one had noticed that all of the other links had gone down. And before Frank discovered it, no one knew (or no one would tell him) where the box was physically. Immediately, Frank got cracking on a plan to bring the redundancy back online while keeping VDL-23 up, thanking the stars that the architecture of DECnet prevented the network from going down with all of the other servers. Still, something told him that the twisted, crushed, mistreated cables strewn across the floor might not remain reliable for transfers of $1T/day for long...
His watch alarm went off before he finished, it was a reminder that he had a mandatory meeting for all staff involved in the migration – about two hundred people in total. Frank rushed back to the main office, taking shortcuts using his everything-access keycard, and arriving just as the meeting was starting.
"Thank you all for coming," the executive vice president said, voice quivering, with a sweaty brow. "We're required to migrate the network to TCP/IP by the communications standard director." Frank winced.
The VP of communications chimed in, equally nervous. "Well... it's DECnet... it uses the non-routable LAT protocol. I... *ahem* we may need to push the deadline out..." The executive VP frowned, and asked for an update from the apps team.
The VP of Applications looked equally nervous, stammering out "we're still gathering information on the applications... and... we're not totally sure if we can actually run this all in one system..."
In a hushed tone, the executive VP took the floor again. "You're telling me we're going to miss our deadline. The board is very firm about our deadline. I'm not happy."
Frank craned his neck and looked around the room, everyone was staring at the floor. This was his moment. Once again feeling like a badass he rose from his seat dramatically, and in his most heroic voice, he boomed "There is a way."
Success!
Three months later, a beautifully appointed datacenter hummed along, processing transfers and perfectly replicating all of the functionality from the former twelve separate datacenters. Pristine rows of computers and neatly arranged drive controllers worked dutifully, everything in perfect order. The board came through the datacenter to inspect the work, and left with no complaints. It had been completed on schedule and was looking great, everyone was happy.
Under the raised floor, the tangle of cables told the real story. What was really in that room was the original twelve datacenters, all of the systems sitting pretty on the raised floor, underneath which were piles of cables connected exactly the same way they'd always been connected, and with back-hauled communication lines running between the systems. As they say, out with the old, in with the old.
And off in one corner, on upgraded hardware, was VDL-23; still responsible for routing all of the money transfer traffic, now safely sitting in a datacenter where it would remain unperturbed.
Brought to you by the
Non-WTF Job Board:
June 30, 2009 01:00 PM
A sign from the lobby of a hotel in Cusco, Peru: Yes, that is a clump of hair stuck to the tape. Lovely. Thanks to OhioBeachBum for sending this to us!<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?i=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:dnMXMwOfBR0"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?i=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?a=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TripAdvisor?i=MmS-82aBjjo:ZlPja5IrIhI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a>
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by The Snarky Owl at June 30, 2009 12:49 PM
Cooliris has released the latest version of its image browsing plug-in. Version 1.11 allows the Cooliris 3D Wall to be used within a browser tab, enabling toggling between tabs of image walls. Users with Flickr accounts can now browse images complete with title, author, description and tags, and can choose to view their own sets and pools. It also supports MySpace, Facebook and other social networking websites.
June 30, 2009 10:39 AM
fmgc nos cuenta: «Ya está disponible la nueva versión de Molinux 5.0. Basada en Ubuntu 9.04, dispone de muchas novedades como Gnome Control Center, CompizConfig, Tucan y WebContentControl entre otras aplicaciones. Además se incorpora un aspecto gráfico muy cuidado. En esta ocasión se ha publicado en formato DVD para poder incluir todas las mejoras y añadidos. Se puede encontrar más información en las notas de publicación en la web de Molinux. En principio está disponible para descargar la versión corporativa de Molinux5.0. El día 8 de julio estará disponible la versión Educativa, que también contará con diversas novedades.»
by acs at June 30, 2009 04:22 AM
Things will be significantly slower than usual around here this week...I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I'll see you next week.
Tags: kottke.org
June 30, 2009 03:26 AM
Things will be significantly slower than usual around here this week...I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I'll see you next week.
Tags: kottke.org
June 30, 2009 03:26 AM
June 29, 2009
As turmoil over the disputed election in Iran continues, many techs are trying to find ways to help Iranian citizens safely communicate and receive information despite the barriers being established by Iranian authorities. One tactic that even moderately tech-savvy Internet users can employ is to set up a Tor relay or a Tor bridge.
More sophisticated users can skip this paragraph, but for the rest, here's the basic outline. Tor (an acronym of "The Onion Router") is free and open source software that helps users remain anonymous on the Internet. Normally, when accessing websites, your computer asks for and receives a webpage out in the open, a process that exposes your IP address, the URL of the website, and the contents of the site, among other information to third parties. When accessing websites while using Tor, your computer essentially whispers its requests for a website, to another computer, which passes the request on to another computer, which passes it on to another computer, which passes it onto the computer where the website is hosted; the reply returns in the same, chain-message manner. The whispers are encrypted, so that neither outside authorities, nor the computers in the middle of the chain, can tell what is being said, and to whom. And the website itself does not have your IP address either.
Internet users in Iran are using Tor to both (a) circumvent censorship systems and (b) remain anonymous while reading and writing on the Internet. Both are critically important to the safety of protesters, many of whom fear retaliation from the government. Preliminary reports indicate that use of the Tor client in Iran has increased in the days after the contested election.
However, Tor's design relies on a robust network of "volunteer computers" (a.k.a. relays) to pass messages back and forth. This means that the speed and quality of a Tor users' browsing experience relies extensively on the number of volunteer computers there are to pass messages along. This is where volunteers can make a difference -- setting up additional relays improves access for dissident Iranians and other users of the Tor network. The more people who help out, the better and more quickly the network runs. If you're interested in helping out, find and follow instructions for configuring a Tor relay on the Tor website.
Those looking to help fight censorship should also consider providing a Tor bridge. Bridges come into play when an ISP decides to try blocking users' access to the Tor network. (For now, there seems to only be anecdotal evidence of Iran attempting to block the use of Tor. However, Iran has recntly been practicing reactive and centralized blocking, which makes any effective block of Tor far more likely.) The Tor bridge configuration differs from a relay in that your computer does not appear in the public Tor network. Instead, users looking for access to the Internet through Tor can receive your Tor routing information through more private channels, then configure their Tor client to transmit requests through your computer. By not appearing in the public Tor network, your Tor routing information is less likely to end up on an ISP filter and can provide help for a longer period of time -- but recognize that the network needs both relays and bridges.
Tor provides strong protections for its users, but if you plan to use it to access the Net, take time to fully understand its limitations. Check the Tor "Warning" section for more information. You should also consider any limitations that may exist in your arrangement with your ISP.
If you have other questions about setting up a Tor bridge or relay, please check the Running a Tor relay FAQ page. For other concerns, The Onion Router Wiki may help.
For understanding the technical conditions of the Iranian Internet, we have found the Open Network Initiative's ongoing research, Arbor Network's network analyses, and the Tor Project's own blog status reports to be informative.
by richard at June 29, 2009 08:44 PM
Because of the bloody stupid Andy Murray, BBC2 has now become BBC1 and what was BBC1 has now become BBC ‘lets-eek-the-time-before-the-inevitable-failure-out’. Consequently, the one decent programme on tonight, ‘The Supersizers…’ has been cancelled.
I just sent the following to the BBC:
OK. I’m going to hold up my hand Auntie. I really don’t care if Andy ‘Tim’ Murray wins his match. I am in the minority I realise. The rest of my household loves the silly fool and cares deeply about his progress.
One thing we all agree on, however, is how much we love the Supersizers… And how we’re all capable of watching the Murray match on any one of the thousand or so *other* ways Wimbledon can be enjoyed on the BBC.
Imagine our suprise when, upon tuning in to get our weekly fix of the garrulous gastronomes, we were presented with the tail end of Panorama. Subsequent investigation revealed that, no, our digibox was not suffering from some confusion, BBC2 had indeed become BBC1.
If the BBC is going to launch BBC Murray, please have the good grace to do it sooner rather than later so that I can sit safe in the knowledge that the, already inordinately huge Wimbledon coverage, won’t be extended to quite frankly cringeworthy proportions.
Now, I know that the response to this will inevitably be ‘we decided that the Murray match was important and you are just some crotchety old fool who is probably sat at home counting his collection of interesting 1950s biscuit tins’. If not in so many words, then indeed in spirit. Well, I’ll have you know that said collection of tins is terribly interesting. If this were the One Show, we’d have a Z-list commedian or someone who was the offspring of someone else famous come and look at them. We’d have a nice little interview where I’d give a couple of soundbites that Adrian Chiles can mock in a nice gentle manner while the interchangable ‘regional presenter’ rolls her eyes.
So, BBC. Stop pandering to the stupid ‘Murray Mania’ and realise that you are providing a programme of television, i.e. a set of *different things*.
Right. Demons have be exorcised and this crotchety old man (28 years old BTW) can go back to his train set.
June 29, 2009 08:17 PM
There is a new Firtree demo up on YouTube. This shows Firtree’s integration with GStreamer so that it can process video.
The video is also embedded below so that I can make all your RSS aggregators eat CPU :).
June 29, 2009 05:34 PM
Today, I'm pleased to announce CITP's visitors for the upcoming academic year.
Deven R. Desai, Visiting Fellow: Deven is an Associate Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and a permanent blogger at Concurring Opinions. Professor Desai’s scholarship centers on intellectual property, information theory, and Internet-related law. He plans to work on a major project exploring the ways trademark law can foster, or limit, online innovation.
James Katz, Visiting Fellow. Jim is Professor, Chair of the Department of Communication, and Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, where he holds the University's highest professorial rank. He has devoted much of his career to exploring the social consequences of new communication technology, especially the mobile phone and Internet. Currently he is looking at how personal communication technologies can be used by teens from urban environments to engage in informal science and health learning. This research is being carried out through an NSF-sponsored project with New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center.
Rebecca MacKinnon, Visiting Fellow (spring term): Rebecca is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre. She is currently on leave, as an Open Society Fellow, to work on a book tentatively titled "Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World." She will spend the spring 2010 semester at CITP, continuing to work on the book. Rebecca is a cofounder of Global Voices, a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, and a former television journalist, having served as CNN's bureau chief in Beijing and, later, Tokyo.
Jens Grossklags, Postdoctoral Research Associate: Jens, a new PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information, studies information economics and technology policy. He focuses on the intersection of privacy, security, and network systems. His approach is highly interdisciplinary, combining economics, computer science, and public policy. Currently, he is investigating the ways institutions and end users make decisions about complex computer security risks under conditions of uncertainty and limited information.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Visiting Postdoctoral Research Associate: Joe, whose work is supported by the NSF ACCURATE Center, also earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information. His dissertation examined public policy mechanisms for making computerized voting systems more transparent. He continues to work along the same lines, drawing lessons from voting machines, gaming machines and other technologies on how to best protect users from error and malicious activity.
In addition to these full time appointments, the Center will also welcome two Visiting Research Collaborators on an occasional basis: Alex Halderman, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan (and recently in the news for his research group's analysis of China's Green Dam software), and David Lukens, an attorney who has been collaborating on the Center's transparency work.
by Ed Felten at June 29, 2009 03:45 PM
"This coupon increased the chances of me trading in my car by about 0.79%," Josh notes.
"The rent looks okay to me," Stephan Rose writes, "but I'd be a bit unsure about being able to do the deposit."
"I know manufactures and consumers are demanding more out of today's batteries," Frank writes, "but this seems a little extreme."
"I received this on a birthday card," Ralph Nevins wrote, "I wonder how many tests they run?"
"I saw this on Amazon," wrote Ed Burnette, "but what if I want the Paperback edition?
"Apparently my last name is not appropriate," Andrew Young wrote, "the completely fake address I put is just fine though."
"I'm glad to know an error couldn't have happened," writes Ben Wyatt, "otherwise, I might think there was a reason I couldn't print that document."
"Such a deal," Angus Scott-Fleming said, "Pay $12/yr for 1 year, or $20/yr for 2 years, or $28/yr for three!"
"I don't know if checking the box puts DHS onto me," noted George, "but I figured that life's short enough as it is. I'd rather not influence the purchase of malware as much as its donation."
"The BBC website recently ran a report on children with weird names," Edd comments, "but I didn't expect them to actually employ one of the story's protagonists."
Brought to you by the
Non-WTF Job Board:
June 29, 2009 01:00 PM
With the loss of our great leader, wherein he was replaced by a foreign-born communist candidate from manchuria, we now find ourselves on the threshhold of nationalizing everything in sight. The two largest, most classically American industries have recently faltered under the attack of hippy socialism. First, our banking industry, the white-shining industry-on-the-hill, the capitol of Capitalism, has already folded under the enormous pressure of overwhelmingly intrusive government regulation. And then went Automobiles, a highly competitive industry which provided millions of jobs to the most Real Americans you could find in the heart land of Real America. Now, for his final trick, the Evil One has turned his gaze upon America's last shining achievement, the last industry where we are known to be the most innovative, the best of the best. Healthcare is the conservatives' last stand, it is where we, my brethren, must interlock our arms against the unwash-ed waves of liberals (sneer), socialists (scowl) and ho-mo-sexuals (gag), lest we forever lose the Real America to these immoral hordes. This will require some sacrifice on the part of us Real Americans, us Conservatives. However, these concessions will not come without great reward. So I implore you, in order to facilitate salvation for our wayward country, to unify under one theory: That life is just not that sacred.
June 29, 2009 12:48 PM
