Internet News Record
Edition
Is Sarah Palin trading Alaska for
Rhode Island?
By Tabassum Zakaria (Front
Row Washington)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 10:14:19 AM
Talk about a political football.
The Anchorage Daily News in
Alaska is reporting, and The
Providence Journal is repeating,
a tantalizing rumor that Sarah Palin
is going to move to Rhode Island.
No one has confirmed that
(including us, and we tried). Even
the Anchorage paper which started
the speculation says it’s probably
not true.
But frankly, Sarah Palin — the
former Republican vice presidential
candidate and Alaska governor —
is a queen of surprises so one never
knows…
Just in case, let’s look at what
Palin would gain from moving to
the scenic geographically smallest
state on the Atlantic from the scenic
geographically largest state on the
Pacific.
On the favorite Palin pastime of
hunting, Rhode Island offers
whitetail deer and pheasant,
somewhat smaller game than bear
and caribou in Alaska.
Politically, Rhode Island – the
last of the 13 original colonies to
enter the Union in 1790 — has
voted Democrat in all but four
presidential elections since 1928.
That compares to Alaska — the
49th state to enter the Union in
1959 — which has voted for a
Republican in the White House in
all but one election since 1960.
But Rhode Island with
four electoral votes has one
more than Alaska. Hey every vote
counts.
In the 2008 presidential contest,
President Barack Obama won 63
percent of the vote in Rhode Island
versus 35 percent for the McCain-
Palin ticket.
So if Palin does have presidential
aspirations, not sure that Rhode
20/08/09 - 21/08/09
Island would be the obvious choice
of abode for a conservative
Republican.
Although the view is pretty nice
from mansions along the cliffs of
Newport and the shopping is great
in Boston and New York.
Click here for more Reuters
political coverage
Photo credit: Reuters/Fabrizio
Bensch (Alaska brown bear);
Reuters/Shannon Stapleton (People
listen to music at Newport Folk
Festival)
LibertyNewsprint.com U.S.
Ridge says he was pushed
to raise terror alert before
election
By Deborah Charles (Front
Row Washington)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:37:58 PM
The nation’s first Homeland
Security secretary is airing some
dirty laundry from the Bush
administration: He says he was
pushed to raise the terror alert level
on the eve of the 2004 presidential
election.
The level was never raised but
Tom Ridge reveals how threats of
terrorism were used to influence
voters in his upcoming book”The
Test of Our Times: America Under
Siege … and How We Can Be Safe
Again”.
According to the promotion but politics were never discussed at
material released by the book’s that meeting.
publisher, Ridge said the DHS was Politico quotes former White
pressured to connect homeland House chief of staff Andy Card
security to the international “war on saying the Bush administration was
terror”. He also said he effectively very disciplined in its efforts to
thwarted a plan to raise the alert make sure politics did not influence
level before the 2004 election, national security decisions.
which Bush won. So were politics involved? What
Several other Bush administration do you think?
officials disagree with Ridge’s For more Reuters political news,
characterization. Former Homeland click here.
Security adviser Frances Fragos Photo credit: REUTERS/Mike
Townsend called it “way off base”. Segar (Ridge addresses 2008
She said there was a debate about Republican National Convention)
raising the alert level at that time
2 Politics/
The First Draft: too Mr. Nice Guy?
By Tabassum Zakaria (Front
Row Washington)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:30:12 AM
It doesn’t matter that the
healthcare debate has picked apart
every argument from every side
until nobody knows what actually
is going to happen on that front.
There are still fresh opinions to be
found every day.
Pointing out Paul Krugman in
The New York Times today saying
“It’s hard to avoid the sense that
Mr. Obama has wasted months
trying to appease people who can’t
be appeased, and who take every
concession as a sign that he can be
rolled.”
Don’t miss the exchange between
host Jon Stewart and Betsy
McCaughey, who started the saber-
rattling on what later became
known as death panels, last night
on“The DailyShow”.
President Barack Obama will
have a closed-door healthcare
consultation today with someone
who is quite well-versed in the
politics of Washington: former
Senate Majority Leader Tom
Daschle, who was Obama’s first
Will Bernanke be reappointed?
By Kristina Cooke (Front Row
Washington)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:52:02 PM
Policy-makers, academics and
analysts from around the world are
gathered at a remote lodge in
Wyoming's Jackson Hole this week
to reflect on the financial crisis.
One of the topics of conversation
on the sidelines of the conference is
whether President Barack Obama
will reappoint the chairman of the
U.S. central bank -- Ben Bernanke -
pick for health secretary.
Republican critics must
be savoring the sight of Democrats
unable to come together on
healthcare even when they control
Congress and the White House.
And we want to hear from you. Is
Obama being too “Mr. Nice Guy”
in the healthcare debate? What
should he do next? What about
opponents of the healthcare
overhaul — are they playing their
cards right?
- whose term ends early next year.
Two veteran Fed-watchers weigh
in:
GLENN HUBBARD, DEAN OF
COLUMBIA'S GRADUATE
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
"I think the bar for replacing
Bernanke would have to be very
high, in the middle of the crisis he
has shown determination to take
very bold action and his own
knowledge has been very specific
and helpful in the crisis."
MICKEY LEVY, CHIEF
The Obama family is off on
vacation to Martha’s Vineyard next
week, Congress is still on summer
break, but it’s doubtful the
healthcare debate will take a
breather.
Click here for more Reuters
political coverage
Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin
Lamarque (Obama speaks at a
healthcare forum)
ECONOMIST, BANK OF
AMERICA
"From the Obama administration's
point of view, he has done a lot
right...financial markets have
stabilized, in part due to the very
aggressive actions by the Fed. I do
think he'll be renominated and then
once that occurs he faces just
enormous challenges that go way
beyond the traditional monetary
policy discussions about inflation
and economic growth."
The First Draft: the
other war
By Tabassum Zakaria (Front
Row Washington)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:54:24 AM
Washington is watching the
election in Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama,
who has ordered a troop build-up to
fight the Taliban, is almost
certainly keeping a close eye on
the election which brought
millions of voters to the polls
across Afghanistan despite threats
of violence. It remains to be seen
whether the president will be
picked in one round.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai,
who voted at a school near
his palace in Kabul, faces a strong
challenge from former foreign
minister Abdullah Abdullah and
must win more than 50 percent of
the vote to avoid a second round.
Not easy when there are about 30
challengers.
A new Washington Post-ABC
News poll finds that 51 percent of
Americans see the war in
Internet News Record
Afghanistan as not worth fighting,
that’s up 6 percentage points from
last month.
In the political war on healthcare
reform, David Ignatius writes in
The Washington Post that perhaps
Obama should roll out the medical
equivalent of General David
Petraeus to unite the country
around his strategy.
Who do you believe could be a
uniting force on healthcare?
In the meantime, Obama
continues to pitch his proposal to
both ends of the political spectrum.
The president appears
on Conservative radio host Michael
Smerconish’s program at 1:10 p.m.
and then holds a healthcare forum
at Democratic National Committee
headquarters at 2:45 p.m.
Click here for more Reuters
political coverage
Photo credit: Reuters/Caren
Firouz (Woman walks out of
cardboard voting booth in
Afghanistan)
Internet News Record
Autistic teens master social cues, find friends (AP)
(Yahoo! News: U.S. News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:55:42 AM
LOS ANGELES – Thirteen-year-
old Andrea Levy ticked off a
mental list of rules to follow when
her guest arrived: Greet her at the
door. Introduce her to the family.
Offer a cold drink.
Above all, make her feel
welcome by letting her choose what
to do.
"Do you want to make pizza now
or do you want to make it later?"
the lanky, raven-haired teen
rehearsed in the kitchen, as her
mother spread out dough and
toppings.
This was a pivotal moment for
Andrea, a girl who invited just one
acquaintance to her bat mitzvah.
Andrea has autism, and
socializing doesn't come naturally.
For the past several weeks, she's
gone to classes that teach the
delicate ins and outs of making
friends an Emily Post rules of
etiquette for autistic teens.
For Andrea, this pizza date is the
ultimate test.
The bell rings. The door opens.
Can she remember what she needs
to do?
More important, will she make a
friend?
Even for socially adept kids, the
teen years, full of angst and peer
pressure, can be a challenge. It's an
especially difficult time for kids
with autism spectrum disorders, a
catchall term for a range of poorly
understood brain conditions from
the milder Asperger's syndrome to
more severe autism marked by lack
of eye contact, poor communication
and repetitive behavior such as
head-banging.
An estimated 1 in 150 American
children has some form of autism.
There's no known cure. Some
research suggests autistic kids who
get help early can overcome some
of their deficits. But the social
skills they learn as a toddler may
not be so useful to a teen.
"A lot of our kids need a tune-up.
They need new skills to help them
survive in their new social world,"
said clinical psychologist Elizabeth
Laugeson of the University of
California, Los Angeles, who runs
a 3 1/2-month friendship program
for high-functioning autistic teens
like Andrea.
Growing up, Andrea hardly had
friends at all. They either moved
away or grew tired by her inability
to emotionally connect.
When she was 18 months old, her
parents noticed something was
amiss. Instead of babbling, she
would cry or scream to get
attention. She had no desire to play,
even with her older brother.
Some doctors said not to worry;
others thought she had a speech
impairment.
None of the answers made sense
to Andrea's parents until two
medical experts, including a
pediatrician who specialized in
developmental disorders, diagnosed
her as autistic.
The family soon enrolled Andrea
in special play therapy.
"We try and help her make
friends, but she's always a step
behind her peers," said her mother,
Gina Levy.
In some respects, Andrea is a
typical teenage girl who is crazed
about celebrity gossip magazines,
romance novels, drama and chorus.
But she can be withdrawn and
doesn't always get the subtleties of
body language and other nonverbal
signs.
Whenever she gets stuck in a
conversation, she tends to stare,
making people around her
uncomfortable. She doesn't mean to
be impolite it's just her way of
watching and learning.
"I know I'm weird and I know I'm
not normal," said Andrea, who
looks like a young Anne Hathaway
with braces. "I've always known
I'm not normal."
Andrea found company from nine
other high-functioning autistic
teens who enrolled in a 14-week
friendship boot camp earlier this
year. More than 100 teens have
graduated from the UCLA Program
for the Education and Enrichment
of Relational Skills, or PEERS for
short, which costs $100 a session
and is covered by many insurers.
Unlike other autism interventions,
parents also must participate. They
learn to become social coaches for
their children so that their new
skills can be retained when the
program is over.
Every week, Laugeson, a peppy
clinical psychologist known as "Dr.
Liz," leads the students through a
maze of social survival skills: how
to have a two-way conversation,
how to trade information to find
common interests, how to
gracefully enter a conversation and
how to be a good host. In class, the
teens role-play with one another
and also must practice what they've
learned outside of class in weekly
homework assignments.
Laugeson peppers the lessons
with friendly reminders about
proper etiquette:
"Don't be a conversation hog."
"Give a cover story for why you
are calling."
"Don't be an interviewer."
"Say you're sorry when you make
someone angry, sad or upset."
"You need to trade information at
least 50 percent of the time during
the get-togethers."
Earlier this year, Laugeson
published a study in the Journal of
Autism and Developmental
Disorders on how the parent-
involved training has worked so far.
In a study of 33 autistic teens, those
who went through the program had
more friends come to their houses
than those who did not.
"There isn't much research on
social group training that
incorporates parents. That's a key
factor for success," said Barbara
Becker-Cottrill, who heads the
West Virginia Autism Training
Center at Marshall University. She
has no connection with PEERS, but
has reviewed Laugeson's research.
"Parents are children's first and
probably best teachers."
Despite the gains, Laugeson said
the program is not a cure-all.
Parents know this and don't expect
their children to blossom into social
butterflies overnight.
Andrea's mother has two goals: "I
hope she becomes a better
conversationalist and feels more
comfortable around her peers."
Andrea's journey through an
unfamiliar social world has been
filled with some stumbles.
During a role-playing exercise,
she was paired with a classmate to
talk about their favorite book.
Andrea was so eager to share her
love of " Gone with the Wind" that
she lapsed into a two-minute
monologue about the plot. A
counselor stepped in and reminded
her not to be a "conversation hog."
One of Andrea's early attempts to
inject herself into an existing
conversation revealed some
awkwardness. As a group of
classmates chatted away about an
animated movie, Andrea stood
aloof, avoiding eye contact and
unsure of what to do. Laugeson
pulled her aside, advised her to
listen and find a pause.
By the time Andrea rejoined the
group, the discussion had switched
to macadamia nuts. Andrea saw an
opening and chimed in: "Well, I've
tried macadamia nuts and they're
pretty good. When I was little, I
would eat a lot."
As time went on, Andrea's
Top News/ 3
confidence improved. Through
practice, she has let go of her
tendency to be an interviewer
during phone calls. On her own, she
came up with the idea of asking the
kids who were signing her
yearbook to jot down their phone
numbers too, a ploy that won her
praise from the counselors and gave
her a pool of potential friends to
call.
Other teens in the class also
progressed, but at a slower pace.
A fellow 13-year-old, Elias
Cazares Jr., was diagnosed with
autism two years ago. He displays
more outward signs of the disorder
rocking back and forth, constantly
blinking, fidgeting with his face.
Elias is obsessed with video games
and talks of nothing else.
Unlike Andrea who got therapy
growing up, this is the first time
Elias has had professional help.
At times the pressure is too much.
One day after class, Elias had a
meltdown and refused to do the
following week's homework
calling someone outside of the
group. Elias confided to Laugeson
that he was teased at school and did
not want to befriend the bullies.
She calmed him down and said he
could dial a cousin instead.
Despite the struggles, Elias' father
is proud of the small steps he's
taken: He recently called his
neighbor to schedule a get-together.
He also started making small talk
with a younger kid in his hip-hop
class, but he's been too afraid to ask
for his phone number.
"What I want for him is a more
normal life, to have at least one or
two friends," said Elias Cazares Sr.
As the teens hone their bonding
skills, parents gather separately for
their own lesson.
UCLA postdoctoral fellow Alex
Gantman, "Dr. Alex," runs the
AUTISTIC page 7
4 Top News/
Anger at Lockerbie bomber welcome
(BBC News | Americas | World
Edition)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:57:10 AM
Please turn on JavaScript. Media
requires JavaScript to play.
Megrahi was welcomed by well-
wishers on his arrival in Tripoli
Britain and the US have strongly
condemned the jubilant welcome
given in Libya to the man convicted
of the bombing of a US plane over
Lockerbie.
British Foreign Secretary David
Miliband described the scenes as
"deeply distressing".
Crowds greeted Abdelbaset Ali al
-Megrahi off the plane in Tripoli
after he was freed from a Scottish
prison on compassionate grounds.
Many relatives of the victims of
the 1988 bombing are angry at his
release.
Most of the 270 people who died
when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up
over the Scottish town of Lockerbie
were Americans.
US President Barack Obama said
Megrahi's release, eight years into
his life sentence, was "a mistake".
He said his administration had
told the Libyan government that
Megrahi, who has terminal cancer,
should not receive a hero's
welcome and should be placed
under house arrest.
Megrahi was convicted of murder
in January 2001 at a trial held under
Scottish law in the Netherlands but
has always denied being behind the
bombing.
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny
MacAskill announced the release
order on Thursday morning, saying
the prisoner probably had about
three months to live.
'Deeply upsetting'
Mr Miliband said images of
Megrahi being welcomed in the
Libyan capital were very disturbing
for the families of those who died
in the bombing.
I think the last thing the Libyans
want in the run up to the 40th
anniversary of the revolution, on 1
September, is this international
condemnation.
There's no further news of al-
Megrahi himself. It's a very quiet
day in Tripoli - the first day of
Ramadan. The streets are deserted,
there's not much news in the media.
We are told he might be taken
south to a town in the desert to
meet Col Gaddafi - presumably to
thank him for all the lobbying he
has done on his behalf.
And we now have it on a second
source that he is actually a distant
relative of Col Gaddafi, which
might explain why the colonel has
taken such a personal interest.
"Obviously the sight of a mass
murderer getting a hero's welcome
in Tripoli is deeply upsetting,
deeply distressing," he told the
BBC.
The fact Megrahi's victims had
been shown no compassion was
"not a reason for us to deny
compassion to him and his family
in his final days", he said.
Mr Miliband said the decision to
release Megrahi had been a choice
for the Scottish justice secretary
alone. Libya's response would be
closely scrutinised, he added.
"It's very important that Libya
knows that how the Libyan
government handles itself in the
next few days will be very
significant in the way the world
views Libya's re-entry into the
civilised community of nations,"
Mr Miliband said.
In a country where movement is
carefully restricted, the fact that
Libya allowed supporters on to the
runway to greet Megrahi in Tripoli
clearly signals the Libyans were
determined to salute his freedom,
the BBC's Christian Fraser reports
from Tripoli.
But Friday saw no sign of that
triumphalism from government
ministers and Col Gadaffi has still
to give his reaction to the release,
he says.
However Megrahi is treated in
Libya in the short time he is
believed to have left to live, he will
go to the grave a convicted
murderer, our correspondent adds.
Some major British oil and gas
companies, bidding for highly
competitive contracts with the
country, could benefit from
improved relations between Libya
and the UK following Megrahi's
release, our correspondent says.
However, the British Foreign
Office said on Friday it was
reviewing whether a royal visit by
the Duke of York to Libya,
scheduled for September, should
now go ahead.
This would be Prince Andrew's
third trip to Libya in his role as
Britain's special representative for
trade and investment.
Internet News Record
'Brave decision'
Hundreds of people turned out to
meet Megrahi's plane as it landed in
Tripoli, many waving flags.
Megrahi, who had changed from
the tracksuit he wore to leave
Greenock prison in Scotland into a
dark suit, was met by Col Gaddafi's
son on arrival.
Seif al-Islam Gaddafi thanked
both the Scottish and British
governments for their "brave
stance" although the British
Government has insisted the
decision to release Megrahi was a
purely Scottish affair.
"I would like to express my deep
gratitude to the Scottish
government for taking this brave
decision and for taking into account
the special humanitarian
circumstances," the younger
Gaddafi said in a statement.
"I would also like to thank our
friends in the British government
who played an important part in
bringing about this happy ending,
and I will say that the Libyan
people will not forget this brave
stance taken by the British and
Scottish governments..."
There was a "considerable
amount of new evidence" to show
Megrahi was innocent, he added,
without giving details.
Megrahi was taken to his family
home where his wife, Aisha, said
she was "overjoyed".
"It is a great moment, which we
have been waiting for for nine
years," she said. "The house is full
to bursting, everyone who loves
Abdelbaset is with us."
Bereaved families voiced
growing anger and outrage at the
decision to release Megrahi.
Stephanie Bernstein, whose
husband was killed in the bombing,
accused Mr MacAskill of being
naive.
ANGER page 5
Internet News Record
Authorities hunt reality TV star in model slaying
(AP)
(Yahoo! News: U.S. News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:02:07 AM
BUENA PARK, Calif. – U.S. and
Canadian authorities pressed their
manhunt Friday for a reality TV
contestant charged with killing a
former swimsuit model and
removing her teeth and fingers. The
woman's relatives pleaded with his
friends and family not to help "an
animal" evade capture.
Ryan Alexander Jenkins, a
Calgary, Alberta, native, was a
contestant on the VH1 series
"Megan Wants a Millionaire,"
about a woman seeking to land a
wealthy bachelor.
Police said Thursday that Jenkins,
32, removed the teeth and fingers
of 28-year-old Jasmine Fiore,
presumably to impede authorities in
their efforts to identify the naked
body, which was found stuffed in a
suitcase in a California trash bin
over the weekend.
Fiore and Jenkins were briefly
married in a quickie Las Vegas
wedding this year, and had been
fighting in recent months.
Prosecutors said the two checked
into a San Diego hotel last
Thursday, and Jenkins checked out
the next morning. Fiore was not
seen alive again.
Friends and family members,
including Fiore's mother, sobbed at
a news conference Thursday as a
former boyfriend begged for help in
capturing Jenkins.
"This message goes out to the
family, his mother and father and to
the friends that are helping him try
to leave this country. Ryan Jenkins
is an animal, what he has done to
Jasmine is unspeakable and it's just
not right and I'd appreciate your
help," said Robert Hasman, Fiore's
former boyfriend.
Jenkins vanished after Fiore's
body was found Saturday stuffed in
a bloodstained suitcase and Buena
Park police Lt. Steve Holliday said
he's possibly armed with a
handgun. A preliminary coroner's
report indicated Fiore was
strangled.
Prosecutors recommended a bail
of $10 million for Jenkins upon
arrest and said he had significant
resources to finance his flight.
On the show, Jenkins was
identified as an investment banker
who had a couple million dollars.
A resume posted on the
professional networking site
LinkedIn.com says Jenkins has a
license to fly commercial airplanes
and worked in investment sales and
as president of a boutique
development company focused on
cutting-edge green technologies.
"Anyone helping Mr. Jenkins hide
from the police may go to prison
themselves," said Orange County
District Attorney Tony Rackauckas.
Jenkins is believed to have driven
1,000 miles to Washington state
and then hopped in a boat to a
peninsula on the border, where he
walked into Canadian territory. A
Canadian police official said
ground, air and canine units are
involved in the search for Jenkins.
"At this time, although we believe
he crossed the border, we're not 100
percent sure of that," U.S. Marshal
Chief Inspector Thomas Hession
said. "There will be no stone
unturned and we'll look under every
rock for him."
A car and empty boat trailer
belonging to Jenkins were found at
a marina in the remote northwest
Washington town of Blaine.
Whatcom County Sheriff's
deputies received a report
Wednesday that a man matching
Jenkins' description arrived by boat
at Point Roberts, Wash., about 10
miles from Blaine at the tip of a
peninsula. The point is reachable by
land only from Canada, and Jenkins
is believed to have walked across
the border from there.
Canadian Public Safety Minister
Peter Van Loan said police
agencies across Canada are on the
lookout for Jenkins.
After taping for "Megan Wants a
Millionaire" finished in early
March, Jenkins met Fiore in Las
Vegas casino and the two got
married on March 18, said Fiore's
mother, Lisa Lepore.
But in May, "they had a big
blowout," and fought because he
was jealous of her ex-boyfriends,
Lepore said. "She had the marriage
annulled."
Jenkins then went to Mexico to
do another reality TV show, but
struggled to get Fiore back when he
returned. It was not immediately
clear which show he appeared on.
"He convinced her during that
month that he was really the guy
for her," Lepore said. "He wrote
poems and stories, and prayed, and
(claimed he) had this huge spiritual
awakening."
The federal government was
issuing a federal warrant, which
would allow Canadian authorities
to take Jenkins into custody there,
Capt. Ken Coovert said. If Jenkins
is arrested in Canada, California
can request that he be extradited to
the U.S., but only with reassurances
from U.S. authorities that he would
not face the death penalty.
Farad Emami, a spokeswoman
with the Orange County district
attorney's office, said her office had
Top News/ Gadgets/
not yet discussed whether to pursue
the death penalty.
Court records show that Jenkins
was charged in June in Clark
County, Nev., with a misdemeanor
count of "battery constituting
domestic violence" for allegedly
hitting Fiore in the arm and will be
tried in December.
Jenkins also has a criminal
history in his hometown of Calgary.
He was sentenced to 15 months of
probation in January 2007 on an
unspecified assault charge,
according to the Alberta, Canada
Ministry of Justice. No further
details were available.
Neal Tomlinson, a partner at the
law firm representing Jenkins in the
Nevada case, did not return an e-
mail seeking comment sent after
business hours Thursday. He
declined to comment earlier in the
week.
Jenkins reported Fiore missing
Saturday night to the Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department, police
said.
VH1 said it has postponed any
future airings of the show. The
statement also said that the show
was an outside production licensed
to VH1, but that it was produced
and owned by 51 Minds
Entertainment.
51 Minds said in a statement that
Jenkins never would have been
accepted for its show if the
company had known of his past
criminal history.
____
Associated Press writers Robert
Gillies in Toronto, Jeremy
Hainsworth in Vancouver, Robert
Jablon and Raquel Maria Dillon in
Los Angeles and Doug Esser in
Seattle contributed to this report.
5
ANGER
continued from page 4
"This shows not compassion, it
shows weakness," she told the
BBC.
In contrast, British relatives'
spokesman Dr Jim Swire, who lost
his daughter Flora in the atrocity,
reiterated his view that Megrahi
had "nothing to do with" the
bombing.
"I don't believe for a moment that
this man was involved in the way
that he was found to have been
involved," he said.
Print Sponsor
This steampunk flash
drive makes the
meme sexy again
By Matt Burns (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:50:55 AM
The steampunk movement is
official dead - except on
Warehouse 13- but this handmade
flash drive is still eff’n cool.
Apparently some of the gears even
move when the flash drive is
powered. The Russian maker used
some old clock and electronic parts
found at a “rag fair.” All I know is
that it’s sweet and I want one. [
ModNews.ru via English Russia]
6 Top News/ Gadgets/
Tech giants unite against Google
(BBC News | Americas | World
Edition)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 2:31:34 AM
Three technology heavyweights
are joining a coalition to fight
Google's attempt to create what
could be the world's largest virtual
library.
Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo
will sign up to the Open Book
Alliance being spearheaded by the
Internet Archive.
They oppose a legal settlement
that could make Google the main
source for many online works.
"Google is trying to monopolise
the library system," the Internet
Archive's founder Brewster Kahle
told BBC News.
"If this deal goes ahead, they're
making a real shot at being 'the'
library and the only library."
Back in 2008, the search giant
reached an agreement with
publishers and authors to settle two
lawsuits that charged the company
with copyright infringement for the
unauthorised scanning of books.
In that settlement, Google agreed
to pay $125m (£76m) to create a
Book Rights Registry, where
authors and publishers could
register works and receive
compensation. Authors and
publishers would get 70% from the
sale of these books with Google
keeping the remaining 30%.
Google would also be given the
right to digitise orphan works.
These are works whose rights-
holders are unknown, and are
believed to make up an estimated
50-70% of books published after
1923.
Comments on the deal have to be
lodged by 4 September. In early
This Bell Palm Pre ad looks familiar…
By Matt Burns (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:00:22 AM
October, a judge in the Southern
district of New York will consider
whether or not to approve the class-
action suit.
In a separate development, the
US Department of Justice is
conducting an anti-trust
investigation into the impact of the
agreement.
'Open access'
Critics have claimed the
settlement will transform the future
of the book industry and of public
access to the cultural heritage of
mankind embodied in books.
"The techniques we have built up
since the enlightenment of having
open access, public support for
libraries, lots of different
organisational structures, lots of
distributed ownership of books that
can be exchanged, resold and
repackaged in different ways - all
of that is being thrown out in this
particular approach," warned Mr
Kahle.
The non-profit Internet Archive
has long been a vocal opponent of
this agreement. It is also in the
business of scanning books and has
digitised over 1.5 million to date.
All are available free.
As the 4 September deadline
approaches, the number of groups
and organisations voicing their
opposition is growing. But with
three of the world's best-known
technology companies joining the
chorus, the Open Book Alliance
can expect to make headlines the
world over.
Microsoft and Yahoo have
confirmed their participation.
However, Amazon has so far
declined to comment because the
alliance has not yet been formally
launched.
Hmmm, where have I seen this ad
before? It looks a lot different than
the weird Palm ad spots shown here
"All of us in the coalition are
oriented to foster a vision for a
more competitive marketplace for
books," said Peter Brantley, the
Internet Archive's director of
access.
"We feel that if approved, Google
would earn a court-sanctioned
monopoly and the exploitation of a
comprehensive collection of books
from the 20th Century."
'Trust'
Much of the focus of the
proposed settlement has been on
anti-trust and anti-competitive
concerns, but just as many are
worried about privacy.
The Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the ACLU of Northern
California and the Consumer
Watchdog advocacy group wrote to
Google to ask the company to
"assure Americans that Google will
maintain the security and freedom
that library patrons have long had:
to read and learn about anything...
without worrying that someone is
looking over their shoulder or could
retrace their steps".
"We simply don't like the
settlement in its current form," said
Consumer Watchdog advocate John
Simpson.
"There are serious questions about
privacy and Google seems to be
taking the view 'let us put this in
place and we will do the right thing
down the road'. That is simply not
good enough."
The American Libraries
Association (ALA) agrees.
"We do think the product in
essence is good but the proposed
settlement asks us to trust Google
and the other parties a little too
much," the ALA's associate director
Corey Williams told BBC News.
in the States, so that’s not it. There
isn’t a dude in a creepy king
costume, I don’t think it’s
"When it comes to privacy, the
agreement is silent on the issue and
with regard to what Google intends
to do with the data it collects. It's a
great idea but it requires more trust
than I think we feel comfortable
being able to extend at this point,"
said Ms Williams.
'Brave new world'
In its defence, Google has argued
that the deal brings great benefits to
authors and will make millions of
out-of-print books widely available
online and in libraries.
In a statement, the company said:
"The Google Books settlement is
injecting more competition into the
digital books space, so it's
understandable why our
competitors might fight hard to
prevent more competition."
Despite the increasing tide of
criticism over the settlement, there
are some who believe there is not
that much to fear.
Michelle Richmond is the author
of New York Times best seller The
Year of Fog, which is also being
turned into a movie starring Rachel
Weiss.
"The thing I keep hearing from
authors is 'I don't know what this
settlement really means'. But this is
the brave new world and we don't
really know where it is going," Ms
Richmond told BBC News
"Most authors work for so little
and start from the point of we are
doing this for the love it. But when
there is this company that has
nothing to do with the creation of
the book or its publication, I think a
lot of authors are concerned about
this being a portal to greater access
to their work without compensation
for writers."
Print Sponsor
reminding me of Burger King. Oh,
wait, I know. It’s a combination of
these two ads.
Internet News Record
Amazon, Microsoft
and Yahoo unite
against Google Books
By Vladislav Savov (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:23:00 AM
Microsoft, its new pet dog Yahoo,
and Amazon have decided to join
together in the soon to be formed
Open Book Alliance. You might
expect this to be a revolutionary
new collaborative effort at
delivering the written word in a
way that makes Google Books pale
into insignificance, but you would,
of course, be wrong. Far from
trying to compete with Google, The
OBA is set to act as the collective
mouthpiece for all those opposed to
Google's recent $125 million
settlement deal with book
publishers and authors. With the
US Department of Justice already
investigating antitrust concerns
relating to the case, the other big
dogs just couldn't restrain
themselves from pitching in
together for a united whinge.
Should the settlement be cleared, it
will permit Google non-exclusive
rights to orphan works (those
without an established writer) and
will give it a 30 per cent cut of
books sold via Google Books, both
things that authors have agreed to.
So what's there to moan about,
fellas -- we all trust Google to do
the right thing, right?
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo
unite against Google Books
originally appeared on Engadget on
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:23:00 EST.
Please see our terms for use of
feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
Internet News Record
Bermuda, US coast warned as Bill
stays offshore (AP)
(Yahoo! News: U.S. News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:56:35 AM
MIAMI – Hurricane Bill
weakened slightly early Friday but
still threatened to flood Bermuda's
coastlines and generate dangerous
waves and riptides along the
eastern U.S. coast.
The Category 3 storm's maximum
sustained winds lost a little strength
to near 115 mph, from 125 mph late
Thursday. Forecasters said the
hurricane was becoming less
organized but could still regain
some strength. The storm was
forecast to start gradually
weakening Saturday.
Bill was expected to cause
significant flooding along the
Bermuda coastlines Friday and
Saturday and Bermuda issued a
tropical storm warning.
Along the eastern U.S. coast,
waves of 20 feet and more offshore
and rip currents at the beach are
expected over one of the summer's
last weekends. Forecasters warned
boaters and swimmers from
northeastern Florida to New
England because of incoming
swells as Bill passes far out to sea
on a northward track for Canada's
Maritime provinces.
Emergency managers in New
England warned boaters, swimmers
and surfers to take added
precautions this weekend, when
waves are expected to swell to 35
feet off the coast.
ADVERTISEMENT:
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:20:00 AM
The National Weather Service
said seas will get increasingly
dangerous on Saturday into
Sunday. Waves of up to 20 feet are
possible south of Martha's
Vineyard and Block Island and east
of Cape Cod, and up to 35 feet on
portions of the prime fishing area of
Georges Bank, the weather service
said.
President Obama and his family
plan to travel to Martha's Vineyard
on Sunday for vacation.
Mariners from Rhode Island up to
Maine were told to stay close to
port because of the high seas and
what could be tropical storm-force
winds. Steve Kass of the Rhode
Island Emergency Management
Agency said anybody offshore
south of New England will face
"absolutely dangerous conditions."
"If you own a boat and you like to
go out any distance, this is not the
weekend to do it," he said.
Bermuda's storm warning means
winds of 40 mph or more were
expected to arrive within a day, and
the island remained under a
hurricane watch that indicated even
stronger winds were possible within
36 hours.
Thursday's warning came a day
after former U.S. President Bill
Clinton and his wife, Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton,
arrived in Bermuda on Wednesday
for a 3- or 4-day getaway.
The government urged islanders
to secure boats and finish other
Rocket Booster: Let the Private Sector Help NASA
By Jason Paur (Wired Top
Stories)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 3:00:00 PM
Some question if startups like
SpaceX are capable of sending
storm preparations. Officials put up
warning signs at beaches along the
south shore because of large swells
and rip currents ahead of the storm.
The storm's center is expected to
pass between Bermuda and the U.S.
eastern coast on Saturday.
Forecasters said large swells from
the storm were affecting Puerto
Rico, Hispaniola, The Bahamas and
Bermuda.
The center's five-day track
showed Bill staying well out to sea
off the U.S. coast and inching
closer to land off Canada's
Maritime provinces before veering
back out into the North Atlantic.
Just before 8 a.m. EDT Friday,
the storm was centered about 385
miles south of Bermuda, or about
820 miles southeast of Cape
Hatteras, N.C., and was moving
northwest around 17 mph.
Bill is the first Atlantic hurricane
this year after a quiet start to the
season that runs from June through
November. The Miami center
lowered its Atlantic hurricane
outlook on Aug. 6 after no named
tropical storms developed in the
first two months.
The revised prediction was for
three to six hurricanes, with one or
two becoming major storms with
winds over 110 mph. Researchers
at Colorado State University have
also lowered their Atlantic season
forecast to four hurricanes, two of
them major.
people into space. But with the
future of NASA's manned
exploration programs in question,
the private sector may be the only
option.
Top News/ Business/ *
AUTISTIC
continued from page 3
parent session. It is a chance for
them to talk about their kids'
problems and progress and for
Gantman to give pointers on
helping the teens navigate their
social surroundings.
One hard truth to face: There's a
50-50 chance that a kid will be
rejected by peers, Gantman said,
and it's OK to let them know that.
He points out that follow-up
phone calls are critical in a budding
friendship.
"Teens move on really quickly.
Somebody else gets their attention
and boom, they're gone unless you
really develop a strong friendship
bond," he said.
Gantman is working to expand
the training to young autistic adults.
They often struggle with dating
skills as portrayed in the summer
romance movie, "Adam," about a
young man with Asperger's who
falls in love with his neighbor.
The PEERS program deals only
with friendships, and teens must
use the skills they learn in class in
the real world. As part of their
homework during the last month of
the training, they had to play host to
potential friends outside of the
group.
Andrea invited over a fellow
drama classmate with something in
common. Both had a digestive
problem that meant they couldn't
eat foods containing wheat. So the
two girls were going to make a
gluten-free pizza.
Before the guest arrived, Andrea,
dressed in a denim skirt and blouse,
went over the steps of being a good
host. The door bell buzzed. Her
ponytailed guest was five minutes
early and wearing a shy smile.
After exchanging pleasantries, the
two gathered in the kitchen. Andrea
got off to a slow start, standing at
7
times with her arms crossed in front
while her mother chatted away.
Then, she remembered her
hosting duties and asked if the
classmate wanted to add the pizza
toppings first.
The guest deferred. "You can go
first."
Andrea demonstrated: "So you
put a little bit of sauce ... and
sprinkle on the cheese."
"Perfect," the classmate replied.
After pizza, Andrea, with some
prompting from her mother, asked
what to do next.
The guest was indifferent so the
two migrated to Andrea's room to
watch a movie. After they got
bored, they headed to the living
room to play video games where
Andrea got a chance to practice
good sportsmanship.
Despite beating her guest in
almost every round, Andrea threw
out words of praise: "Good job"
and "Come on. You can do this."
"You did well," Andrea said after
winning the last round.
The two haven't hung out since
the culinary experience. It's been an
up-and-down time. But Andrea
managed to have four get-togethers
with a girl she met in chorus. And
she's felt those familiar teen pangs
of loss when she was stood up by
another girl.
The older, wiser Andrea shook it
off. She focused on a new set of
possible friends she met while
awaiting her turn to dive at the
local swimming pool.
After overhearing that her
schoolmates were on Facebook, she
persuaded her mother to let her
create a profile. She sent out "a
gazillion friend requests" hoping a
few will bite.
She has 33 friends and counting.
8 Top News/ Business/ *
2 walk away from fiery small plane
crash in NJ (AP)
(Yahoo! News: U.S. News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:36:45 AM
TETERBORO, N.J. – Two men
ferrying medical specimens walked
away from a fiery small-plane crash
Friday morning at an airport, and
emergency responders found them
at a nearby bus stop, alert and
conscious, but badly burned.
Both men were taken to St.
Barnabas Medical Center. The
pilot, identified as George Maddox,
54, of Sinking Springs, Pa., was
listed in critical condition. Co-pilot
Sanil Gopinath, 42, of Laurel, Md.,
was listed in serious condition.
Teterboro is the same airport
where a plane took off earlier this
month before colliding with a
sightseeing helicopter over the
Hudson River. Nine people were
killed aboard the two aircraft.
Little Ferry police officer Adam
Warne, who was among the first to
respond to the scene, said he was
taken aback to find the men alive
and talking after the crash the aiport
in Teterboro.
"They were sitting at the curb at
the bus stop. Both of them were
alert and conscious and answering
Telecom companies to have their day in front of
the FCC
By Mark Fightmaster
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:30:00 AM
Filed under: Google (GOOG),
Apple Inc (AAPL), AT and T (T)
According to USA Today, Apple
(NASDAQ: AAPL) and AT&T
(NYSE: T) are expected to saunter
up to the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) and explain
why they will not allow Google's
questions," Warne said.
Warne said one man was
"severely burned." Little Ferry
Police Chief Ralph Verdi said
Maddox had burns over 20 percent
to 30 percent of his body.
"The one who had more burns sat
there and was in a daze," he said. "I
saw the wreckage, they both said
'We were in the plane.' I was a little
taken back, you know."
The plane was carrying blood
specimens for Quest Diagnostics,
which is just down the street from
the airport, when it crashed just
after 3 a.m. while trying to land,
police said.
The aircraft carries medical
specimens to a lab at Teterboro that
serves the New York metropolitan
area, said Quest Diagnostics Gary
Samuels.
He said the flight originated in
Reading, Pa., and made stops in
Hardford, Conn., Norwood, Mass.,
and Pottstown, Pa., before heading
to Teterboro.
The twin-engine Beechcraft baron
ended up in a grassy area near the
parking lot of a warehouse on
Route 46.
Federal Aviation Administration
(NASDAQ: GOOG) free Google
Voice application on the iPhone.
The problem is that Google is
throwing stones while it lives in a
glass house. Let me explain here --
Google has done the same thing to
Skype when it blocked it from use
with Google Android. This is truly
the pot calling the kettle black, as
Google is getting a taste of its own
medicine. The question is, why
can't these kids get together and
spokesman Jim Peters said the pilot
was cleared to land on a runway.
"We're unclear whether he ever
touched down on Runway 1 and
we're looking into that," Peters said.
National Transportation Safety
Board investigator Robert Gretz
said the pilot aborted the landing
for some reason and was attempting
do to a go-around and try it again
when he clipped some trees,
sending the plane into the parking
lot of a nearby warehouse, where it
crashed and burst into flames.
In 2005, a corporate jet went off
the runway at Teterboro, crashed
through a fence and crossed a
highway before smashing into a
warehouse. Twenty people were
injured.
Joanne and Michael DeVito of
nearby Little Ferry looked out at
the wreckage from the back of a
local building.
"It's scary," Joanne DeVito, 38,
said. "The big planes come in so
low you could wave at the pilot. It
shakes everything in the house."
___
Beth DeFalco and Shawn Marsh
from Trenton contributed to this
report.
play nice?
Continue reading Telecom
companies to have their day in front
of the FCC
Telecom companies to have their
day in front of the FCC originally
appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri,
21 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Comments
Lutherans start last
debate on gay clergy
proposal (AP)
(Yahoo! News: U.S. News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:51:22 AM
MINNEAPOLIS – Opponents
made a last stand Friday against a
proposal to allow sexually active
gays and lesbians in committed
relationships to serve as clergy in
the nation's largest Lutheran
denomination.
Gays and lesbians are currently
allowed to serve as Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America
ministers only if they remain
celibate.
At 4.7 million members and
about 10,000 congregations in the
United States, the ELCA would be
one of the largest U.S. Christian
denominations yet to take a more
gay-friendly stance on clergy.
"We are today part of a church
denomination that is changing, and
it will make possible sexual moral
standards that are contrary to the
Bible which is what brings Jesus
closer to us," said convention
delegate Al Quie, a former
Republican governor of Minnesota.
The debate over the so-called
"ministry recommendations" got
under way first thing Friday, and
Quie proposed an alternative
proposal: "Practicing homosexual
persons are excluded from rostered
leadership in this church."
The proposal, which would have
left the church's policy more or less
7 Reasons to Avoid Windows 7
By Brian X. Chen (Wired Top
Stories)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:06:00 PM
A list of reasons you might
Internet News Record
unchanged, failed. In addition,
conservatives lost an important vote
Wednesday night when the
convention's 1,045 delegates
approved by a two-thirds
supermajority a "social statement
on human sexuality" that said the
ELCA could accommodate
diverging views on homosexuality.
The Rev. Katrina Foster, a pastor
in the Metropolitan New York
Synod, pointed out that the church
has ordained woman and divorced
people in violation of a literal
interpretation of scripture.
"We can learn not to define
ourselves by negation," Foster said.
"By not only saying what we are
against, which always seems to be
the same against gay people. We
should be against poverty. I wish
we were as zealous about that."
Some critics of the proposal have
predicted its passage could cause
individual congregations to split off
from the ELCA, as has been the
case with other Christian
denominations, including the
Episcopal Church.
The Rev. Tim Housholder of St.
Luke's Lutheran Church in Cottage
Grove, Minn., who spoke in favor
of Quie's alternative, described
himself as a rostered ELCA pastor
"at least for a few more hours."
"This assembly is not the ELCA,"
Housholder said. "This is an agenda
-driven group."
consider avoiding an upgrade to
Microsoft's new Windows 7
operating system, set for release
Oct. 22.
Internet News Record
Markets rise on US recovery hopes
(BBC News | Americas | World
Edition)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:26:45 AM
Stock markets have risen around
the world after Federal Reserve
chairman Ben Bernanke said the
US economy was nearing the start
of a recovery.
"The prospects for a return to
growth in the near term appear
good," Mr Bernanke told a
conference in Wyoming.
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones
index rose more than 1%, while
European markets were also sent
higher.
But the Fed boss said
unemployment, which is expected
to top 10% in the US, would fall
"only gradually".
Mexico probe over kidnap deaths
(BBC News | Americas | World
Edition)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:05:44 PM
The anti-kidnapping chief of
Mexico City has been suspended
from duty following a disastrous
rescue attempt that left four dead.
Police shot two of their own men
and the man they were attempting
to arrest shot his hostage. Juan
Maya Aviles will remain off duty
pending a probe.
Mexico City has one of the
highest kidnapping rates in the
world.
The authorities are in the midst of
a campaign to root out corruption
and increase professionalism in the
police.
FBI-trained
Red Ink Turns NASA Panel Away From Red Planet
By Alexis Madrigal (Wired Top
Stories)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:45:00 PM
Mr Bernanke was speaking as
data showed sales of existing US
homes rose by more than 7% in
July.
That was the largest monthly
increase in the 10 years that the
National Association of Realtors
has been keeping records.
'Slow at first'
But Mr Bernanke warned that the
road to recovery would be a long
one.
"The economic recovery is likely
to be relatively slow at first, with
unemployment declining only
gradually from high levels," he
said.
The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) has predicted that the US
economy will expand by 0.75%
next year, after earlier predicting no
Last month police were alerted
that a middle-aged woman from
Mexico City had been kidnapped
and was being held in a house in
the capital.
Such information is hardly
uncommon. Dozens of people are
believed to be kidnapped across
Mexico every day.
But what happened in the hours
following the call appears to be a
lesson in what not to do in such
circumstances.
As the police approached the
house, the kidnappers began
shooting at them with AK47
automatic rifles.
The police returned fire and in the
process shot two of their own men
in the back. Both of those killed
were members of the city's FBI-
Human spaceflight is about to get
overhauled as a blue-ribbon NASA
panel gets ready to offer the Obama
administration a set of radically
growth.
The Fed chief was also upbeat on
the prospects for the world
economy.
"After contracting sharply over
the past year, economic activity
appears to be levelling out, both in
the United States and abroad," he
said.
The IMF has previously said that
the global economy was "starting to
pull out of recession".
At 1600 BST, the Dow Jones was
up 123 points at 9,473. The Nasdaq
and the S&P 500 also rose by more
than 1%.
London's FTSE 100 climbed
1.8% to 4,841, while markets in
Frankfurt and Paris were up by
more than 2%.
Print Sponsor
trained rapid response team. One
was the group's chief.
Inside the house the hostage was
murdered by her kidnapper, who
then killed himself.
To make matters worse, it has
also emerged that the woman's
driver had earlier tipped police off
about a probable kidnap attempt,
raising suspicions of possible
complicity on the part of the police.
Mexico City's attorney general
has suspended the capital's anti-
kidnap chief pending a thorough
enquiry.
The Mexican media are
portraying the incident as evidence
of the urgent need in this crime-
ridden capital for a better trained
police force.
Print Sponsor
different options on the role of
people in space exploration.
Top News/ Business/ *
US wiretapping challenge
rejected
(BBC News | Americas | World
Edition)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:59:25 AM
A US judge has rejected a
challenge to a law that allows
intelligence services to eavesdrop
on overseas conversations to gather
intelligence.
The Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act allows the US to
monitor the calls and emails of non-
US citizens abroad.
Human rights groups contended
that their workers might be bugged
for talking to people under
surveillance.
But District Judge John Koeltl in
New York said the mere fear of
surveillance was not enough to
bring a lawsuit.
Fears about the law's effect on
them were "subjective", the judge
added.
The judge said the organisations
had not claimed that their
communications had been
Salesforce.com's super quarter
By Tom Taulli (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:20:00 AM
Filed under: Earnings reports,
Management, Microsoft (MSFT),
Oracle Corp (ORCL), Books,
salesforce.com inc (CRM)
Marc Benioff, the founder and
CEO of Salesforce.com(NYSE:
CRM), has a new book coming out
in November: Behind the Cloud:
The Untold Story of How
Salesforce.com Went from Idea to
Billion-Dollar Companyand
Revolutionized an Industry.
I actually got an advance copy of
it -- and it is awesome. In great
9
monitored, or that the government
had sought permission for such
surveillance.
"The plaintiffs in this case have
made no showing that they are
subject to the statute they seek to
challenge, and therefore have made
no showing that they face a danger
of being harmed," wrote Judge
Koeltl.
The law was challenged by
Amnesty International, Human
Rights Watch, a group of
international criminal defence
lawyers and an organisation of
women.
Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil
Liberties Union lawyer who
represented them, said: "This
statute allows the mass acquisition
of Americans' international
communications."
The ruling effectively meant that
US citizens' privacy rights would
be left to the mercy of politicians,
he said.
Print Sponsor
detail he provides the strategies for
building a game-changing
company. And based on
Salesforce.com's latest earnings
report, the momentum seems
unstoppable, despite the recession
and tight information technology
(IT) budgets.
Continue reading
Salesforce.com's super quarter
Salesforce.com's super quarter
originally appeared on
BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 10:20:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Permalink|
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10 Gadgets/
CrunchGear interviews up-and-coming inventor ‘East Side’
Dave McDonald from ‘The Ron and Fez Show’
By Nicholas Deleon
(CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:00:01 AM
In our continued effort to bring
you the best interviews with
today’s top talent, I’m happy to
present my recent conversion with
“East Side” Dave McDonald. He’s
an up-and-coming inventor who
can be heard on “ The Ron and Fez
Show” every weekday, 11am to
3pm, on Sirius XM. He also
occasionally co-hosts a show, “
Special Delivery,” along with
“Prime Time” Sam Roberts (yes,
that Sam Roberts) on Sirius XM.
He’s also quite funny.
CrunchGear: First I wanted to
congratulate you on your Star Wars
trivia victory from the other day.
[Dave beat “Ron and Fez” co-host
Fez in an epic trivia challenge
earlier this week, avenging his
earlier loss in the Batman trivia
challenge.]
East Side Dave: Thank you, thank
you. I appreciate that.
CG: It was a big day in radio
history.
ESD: I know. Well, I’m a
champion’s champion. I thought I
was going to be victorious, and I
proved that I have the heart of a
Wookie.
CG: OK, let’s get right into this.
Knissors—can you tell me what
they are and what was the
inspiration behind them?
ESD: Okay. Knissors are two
knives—two knives—that can bolt
together to act like a pair of
scissors. The inspiration came
when one day I needed to open
several boxes. Some of the boxes I
thought, “you know, I need a
knife,” but then for some of the
packaging I needed strong scissors,
and I didn’t want to keep
reaching—here’s a knife and here’s
a scissor, and here’s another knife
and here’s another scissor. And all
of sudden there’s 40 knives and
scissors, and there’s a pile of knives
and scissors, and you can’t even see
anymore! So I thought, “no. No,
that’s where the shit ends. I will
take two knives and bolt them
together.” They can act like serious,
perfect knives, and then what
happens is, if you want to cut some
meat you just take ‘em apart.
CG: Now have you made an
actual working prototype, or is this
still in the design phase?
ESD: I have duct tapped two
knives together, but that has not
been a successful model. I also
nailed two knives together with the
wood handles, but that, too, has
failed, so I’m going to go a
different route with my knissors.
I’m going to try and figure
out—maybe someone who’s
actually good with their hands, as
opposed to me, maybe they can
help me figure it out? But once I
have figured out how it will
work—and I don’t think it should
be that complicated—then I feel
like knissors will take America by
storm.
CG: They will. There’s no doubt
about knissors being the next big
thing in America. They’re gonna be
as big as Beanie Babies were.
Everyone will have ‘em, it’ll be
crazy.
ESD: I agree. I mean, think about
the popularity of the Ginsu knife
back in, what, the 80s or whatnot.
Now imagine if with that same
Ginsu knife you could easily make
paper dolls, you could easily cut
hair. All of that stuff you’ll be able
to do with knissors.
CG: That’s good. It’s a recession,
nobody has any money, you get one
product and it does 1,000 things,
you’re all set.
ESD: That’s right. And I’m not
going to be selling it for $49.95.
I’m not going to be selling it for
$29.95. Hell, I’m not going to be
selling it for $19.95. You’re going
to get one pair of knissors for
$9.95, and I might even through in
a second pair for the first 10,000
people who buy knissors.
CG: You’re a gentleman. You’re
a gentleman, Dave.
ESD:: Thank you very much.
CG: Now besides the knissors, do
you have any other inventions that
you’re particularly proud of? I
know on the show you’ve talked
about several.
ESD: My other one that I was
very proud of was the Uncle Davey
Mac’s Travel Chopper. This, of
course, is going to be a gigantic
helicopter that will come complete
with your own room, your own bed,
and your own desk. You can take a
nap, you can do what you want. For
first class people I’m even going to
put televisions in their rooms. It’s
just going to make your commute a
heck of a lot better. Now the second
travel-oriented invention I have is
the Davey Mac Walking Boat. I’m
going to put a giant boat on one
side of the Hudson River, on the
New Jersey side. What will happen
is you’ll walk from the rear of the
boat to the front, and the boat will
stretch all the way across the
Hudson and the front of the boat
will touch Manhattan. So by the
time you’ve ended your walking on
the boat you’ll be in Manhattan.
CG: Did you receive any formal
science or math training in school,
or is this just from the heart?
ESD: I received no training. I did
get above average grades in science
and astrology. I got below average
grades in physics and calculus, and
I got average grades in spelling and
phonics.
CG: And when you were growing
up did you have any math or
science guys that you looked up to?
ESD: I looked up to—what’s
that’s guy’s name, Don whatever—
Mr Wizard. I looked up to him, and
I looked up to Asa Aarons from
NBC. He had a little segment called
“Ask Asa,” and I never had a
chance to ask him anything. but I
wish I had.
CG: Now are you constantly
thinking of ways to improve this
product or that product? Do you
look at something and say, “Well
Internet News Record
that’s wrong”?
ESD: I am, I am. I always try to
evolve. I understand how things
work. I mean, look, knissors or the
first iPhone—there’s gonna be
kinks in the armor, you know? And
yeah, I’ll put my shit up against Bill
Gates. Any time that [expletive]
wants a war he’s got one.
CG: Well Steve Jobs is the
iPhone, not Bill Gates.
ESD: Whoever it is. If it’s Steve
Jobs or Bill Gates. What does Bill
Gates do?
CG: Nothing. He’s a bum.
ESD: Anyway, yes, I’m always
thinking of ways to improve
products. That’s just how my mind
works. It’s how special people like
myself, our minds work. What can I
do? I can’t help the fact that I’m
advanced in the mental department.
CG: Fair enough. I wanted to get
your opinion on the TV pitchmen
shows. Do you think it’s too
circusy, or is that just another part
of the business?
ESD: You know what, I’m for the
shows because I feel like the shows
represent my peers, my colleagues,
and represent who we are as
inventors and pitch people. Sure,
some of the folks are a tad
enthusiastic, but you know what?
That didn’t hurt anybody. Did that
hurt Moses when he was getting
shit done? Absolutely not.
Enthusiasm is a good thing, so I
like those shows.
CG: Ron said the other day that
he’s a little concerned that the best
and brightest minds in America are
so devoted to trivial things like
figuring out how to download old
Foghat songs. Do you feel that
America’s inventive spirit is sort of
going to waste?
CRUNCHGEAR page 11
Internet News Record
CRUNCHGEAR
continued from page 10
ESD: I do, I do. I think that not
enough people are being
introspective, and as a result
products such as knissors and
Davey Mac’s Travel Chopper are
not coming to fruition. If you start
looking inward you can see what
problems exist in the world, and
how you can solve them. Me? I
solve problems through knissors.
CG: Do you pay any attention to
the gadget world? I would think
that as an inventor you’d keep on
top of the latest BlackBerry or
iPhone or whatever.
ESD: Well, I just bought my first
BlackBerry last week, and I joined
The Twitter a few months ago. And
I also just got a wireless remote
control for my television. And I
have a Discman, so the answer is
yes.
CG: Speaking of Twitter, the
other day there was a study that
showed that 40 percent of all tweets
are just useless babble. What do
you think: is Twitter a waste of
time, a world saver, or something in
between?
Munster inhales fumes of prophecy, foresees Apple TV TV
By John Biggs (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:48:28 AM
Gene Munster of 1313
Mockingbird Lane and Piper
Jaffray is positing that because the
Apple TV isn’t doing so well that
Apple will soon sell a TV with
Apple TV features built-in, an idea
so ludicrous that it caused me to
spit out my Metamucil.
Let’s look at his reasoning: the
Apple TV is “losing ground” to
other subscription services - I’d
argue it’s lost ground to everything
and is now, in its current
incarnation, an also-ran - and so
Apple will create a DVR
combo/download system with
ESD: I like The Twitter, and I’ll
tell you why: I can post little
videos—little vignettes, if you
will—and for a split second not
only am I the great inventor you see
before you, but I’m also a mini
Stanley Kubrick. That’s who I also
aspire to be: the world’s greatest
pitchman and the world’s greatest
film maker.
CG: Did you grow up in the 80s?
You’re in your early 30s, I think.
ESD: I was born in ‘77, so I guess
you can say I’m an 80s child and a
90s teenager
CG: Is there one piece of
technology that’s out there today
that, if you could go back in time
somehow and give it to Young
Dave, what would it be?
ESD: I would give Young David
my Digital Video Disc player and
the four or five discs inside that.
Those discs inside it right now are:
There Will Be Blood, The Empire
Strikes Back, Raging Bull, The Big
Lebowski, and Suck My Ass
Volume Seven
CG: Oh, Volume Seven, that was
Hulu, Joost, FARK, Digg, JDate,
and other web services built-in. So
that’s not so far fetched, right? But
get this: Munster thinks a TV is
also in the cards.
An Apple television set within the
next two years that could wirelessly
sync with iPods, iPhones and Macs.
“Such a device would command a
premium among a competitive field
of budget TVs; we believe Apple
could differentiate itself with
software that makes home
entertainment simple and solves a
pain point for consumers
(complicated TV and component
systems).”
He’s got all the points right -
Apple sells at a premium, Apple
your favorite of the series?
ESD: Yes it was. It had a little bit
more punch than Six.
CG: My last question Dave is, if
you could snap your fingers and
invent anything, anything at all,
what would it be?
ESD: A really, really, really big
shirt that you could wear as a shirt
and pants and shoes and hat.
CG: Wow, that needs to happen. I
don’t know who you need to
contact, but that needs to happen.
ESD: And I want to make that
happen. It will happen eventually,
but one thing at a time. I need to
have the knissors out there first.
CG: OK, thanks a lot, dave. I
know you’re busy with the show
and everything.
ESD: Take care.
Photo: Some dude’s MySpace(I
realized too late, “Oh, I should have
just gone down to the studio to take
a few professional-looking photos.”
Next time.)
thinks different, Apple can solve
pain points - but he gets one thing
wrong: TVs are so off Apple’s
message that he might as well be
proposing the manufacture and sale
Contest Reminder:
Superion Autobot up
for grabs
By Peter Ha (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:35:47 AM
This will serve as the last contest
reminder for the day. Don’t forget
to enter for your chance to win one
of five Target exclusive Superion
Autobots. Head on over to the
original contest page and enter.
You have until 12PM ET today.
of spear-fishing gear.
Apple is in the living room race,
to be sure. But a TV isn’t the way
they’re going to win it. The set-top
box is much more logical and they
Gadgets/ * 11
The Witches are
Back in
'Eastwick'!
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 12:24:00 AM
When "Eastwick" hits the small
screen this fall on ABC, it will be
with a wink and a nod to both the
John Updike book and the movie
version of 'The Witches of
Eastwick,' which starred Cher,
Susan Sarandon and Michelle
Pfeiffer.
Now Rebecca Romijn, Lindsay
Price and Jamie Ray Newman,
respectively, take on the roles of
three women who are discovering
who they are as they come into
their magical powers -- and they
talk to Kevin Frazier about this new
magical mystery tour.
"I feel like I can brag when I get
to say I'm playing a witch, but I get
to brag even more when I get to say
I'm playing Cher," Romijn tells ET.
could build a kick ass DVR inside a
sexy little box. They sell hardware
with an upgrade cycle of about
eight months - a year on the topside
- so for them to blow out a TV
would be non-conducive to their
goals. Something smaller that sits
next to the TV can be upgraded an
infinitum. Most folks keep their
TVs for years, even decades. Why
would Apple want to be in that
market?
Apple knows it’s got a winner
with the iPhone OS and an App
Store-containing, video-streaming,
DVR-ing UberApple TV is a sure
bet. However an Apple TV TV?
Not so much.
12 Gadgets/ *
FCC reveals Logitech Squeezebox
Radio, could make all those Amazon says PS3 Slim
streamy dreams come true already facing supply
By Tim Stevens (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:56:00 AM
It's hard not to like new-school
tech named after old-school
instruments, and so Logitech's (
Slim-developed) Squeezebox
lineup has at least that going for it.
Decently solid reviews, too, for the
models we've seen thus-far, and
thanks to our old friends at the FCC
we know that a new model is
coming soon. Dubbed the
Squeezebox Radio X-R0001, it's
described as "a compact tabletop
network music player and internet
radio that lets you listen to virtually
any internet radio station." How it'll
handle the variety of streaming
formats and functions remains to be
seen, but it'll also go fetch your
local music collection over an
How YouTube's 'Search and Delete' is Monetizing Instead
By Eliot Van Buskirk (Wired
Top Stories)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:25:00 AM
internal network and play it all
through its combination of 3/4-inch
tweeters and 3-inch woofer. A 2.4-
inch LCD is on the front, 802.11b/g
WiFi and wired Ethernet are
standard features, and it's all
enclosed in a "compact design."
That's all we know at this point
(assuming you don't care that it has
a 11.11dBm rating at 2.412MHz
when in 802.11g mode), but
hopefully Logi will set this one free
from the Faraday cage soon.
Filed under: Home Entertainment
FCC reveals Logitech
Squeezebox Radio, could make all
those streamy dreams come true
originally appeared on Engadget on
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:56:00 EST.
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You know how digital music
works: People get sued, content
gets deleted, start-ups go bankrupt.
But with its ContentID program
shortages, Sony disagrees
By Paul Miller (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:42:00 AM
Been holding off on that PS3 Slim
pre-order, waiting for Sony to tell
you that this whole PS2 backwards
compatibility issue was just a big
misunderstanding, and of course
Sony will keep trying its best to
reintroduce PS2 compatibility into
the PS3? Well, you might want to
rethink that strategy, cowboy,
because Amazon is warning of
"shortages of this product across
the US." It's already limiting Slim
sales to one per person, and has a
more lax five-Slims-per-person
strategy in the UK. Meanwhile,
Sony in Europe is saying not to
YouTube has created a mechanism
that makes it just as easy for
copyright owners to monetize
unauthorized uploads as order them
worry, since it has "trucks and
trailers" of the new console already
on the road . We just don't know
who to believe these days, but if
you're not prepared to wait past
September 1st for a crack at the
Slim, you've got some deciding to
do.
Read- GamesIndustry.biz
Read- MVZ
Filed under: Gaming
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facing supply shortages, Sony
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deleted, the system’s design
purpose. And they are starting to
get with the program.
Internet News Record
Ricoh GR Digital III
hits the review bench,
collects plaudits
By Vladislav Savov (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:27:00 AM
The dudes and dudettes at
Photography Blog are nothing if
not thorough, and their latest
review is no exception. The GR
Digital III and its peculiar 28mm
wide-angle fixed focal length lens
(i.e. no optical zoom) have been
subjected to an inspection and the
verdict is an exuberant thumbs up.
The aluminum alloy body
impressed them right from the off,
and the reviewers also liked the
customizable menus, improved
shutter speed, Dynamic Range
double shot, and Adobe DNG
RAW output. Those were all mere
cherries, however, to the cake of
"excellent" image quality and
"stand-out" Macro performance.
The sole blemishes found were the
price (£529 / $699) and noise issues
beyond ISO 800, but then the latter
is a well known weakness of
compact cameras. Check out the
read link for sample images and the
(very) full review.
Filed under: Digital Cameras
Ricoh GR Digital III hits the
review bench, collects plaudits
originally appeared on Engadget on
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:27:00 EST.
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Internet News Record
Video: Another look at PS3
Slim and its removable HDD
By Ross Miller (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:58:00 AM
Sure, you've seen the pictures
already, but just in time for the
weekend, we thought we'd put
together this video showing off the
PlayStation 3 Slim, both on its
lonesome and as it compares to the
classic PS3 and its Xbox 360
competitor. There's also a small
segment that confirms what many
readers have asked about: yes, the
2.5-inch Serial ATA hard drive is
indeed removable and is done so
with Sony's blessing (i.e. no
worries, it won't void your
warranty). The HDD enclosure is
MSI Wind 210 with AMD Athlon Neo announced for Europe
By Joseph L. Flatley
(Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 11:15:00 AM
We see what MSI is doing. First,
they released a followup to the Intel
-packin' X-Slim X600 with an
otherwise-identical AMD-based
machine called the X610. And now
they're making the MSI Wind U200
available with an AMD processor
located behind a front panel just
under the disk drive, which is a
snap to pull out once you undo the
blue screw from the bottom of the
console. Confused? Check out the
video after the break, you'll see
what we mean.
Continue reading Video: Another
look at PS3 Slim and its removable
HDD
Filed under: Gaming
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and its removable HDD originally
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as well. And what do you think
they're calling it? the U210, of
course. Starting at €399, the Wind
U210-002 sports an Athlon Neo
MV-40 1.6GHz processor with
1GB memory, 160GB HDD, and
XP Home. The Wind U210-010 ups
the ante a bit with 2GB memory,
250GB HDD, and Vista Home
Premium, going for €449. We don't
have the exact release date, but
Windows 7 runs free without
activation for 120 days with
simple command
By Paul Miller (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:10:00 AM
We know how it is: you've paid
$300 for your brand new copy of
Windows 7, but what a hassle to
enter in that activation code! Well,
you don't have to worry about it
now for a good four months after
install: Microsoft has given its sort-
of blessing to a simple hack to keep
that non-activated copy of
Windows 7 humming for a full 120
days before full-on nag mode sets
in. All you have to do is enter
"slmgr -rearm" into the command
prompt at the end of every 30 day
period, and your copy of Windows
gets a whole new lease on life -- an
action that can be repeated three
times. The same command is
available to Vista users, and we
have to say that Microsoft has come
a very long way since its
unforgiving WGA kill switch days.
[Via Telegraph]
Aug. 21, 1989: Voyager 2 Reaches Triton
By Tony Long (Wired Top
Stories)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 9:00:00 PM
Voyager 2 caps the planetary
we're sure by then the company will
have more laptops to shove an
Filed under: Software
Windows 7 runs free without
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exploration phase of its mission
with a rendezvous at Triton,
Neptune's oddball, bitterly cold
moon.
AMD processor into.
[Thanks, Tom]
Filed under: Laptops
MSI Wind 210 with AMD Athlon
Neo announced for Europe
originally appeared on Engadget on
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:15:00 EST.
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Gadgets/ * 13
Duracell announces
myGrid wireless
charger, WildCharge
feels a little KIRFed
By Joseph L. Flatley
(Engadget)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:51:00 AM
No, someone didn't just Photoshop
the Duracell logo on a WildCharge
pad -- this actually is the newest
product from the ubiquitous battery
maker. Available this October,
myGrid kits (including charger and
one power sleeve) will be available
for Nokia, Motorola, and
Blackberry handsets, as well as the
many flavors of Apple's iPhone and
iPod touch. No price yet, but you'll
know as soon as we do.
Update: Of course, this is
probably the product of some sort
of licensing deal -- but you'd think
someone at WildCharge or Duracell
would have mentioned it, right?
[Via PhoneMag]
Filed under: Cellphones,
Handhelds
Duracell announces myGrid
wireless charger, WildCharge feels
a little KIRFed originally appeared
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14 Gadgets/ Business/ *
The Archos 2 Vision doesn’t
look that great in person
By Matt Burns (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:30:16 AM
A product shot appeared a few
days ago of the Archos 2 Vision. It
looked nice. But the French site
ArchosLounge.net recently got
some face time with the upcoming
PMP and, well, it doesn’t look that
great anymore. The original press
shot looked slick and smooth, but
this hands-on shot makes it looks
like a no-name Chinese player. It’s
an Archos so it probably runs great,
but I hope I’m not the only one
Sharp Japan links cordless phone to a touch panel
By Serkan Toto (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:21:33 AM
Even in cell phone-crazy Japan,
the fixed-line phone isn’t quite
dead yet. And Sharp Japan’s JD-
7C1CL/CW[JP], announced
How to Join the Hunt for Evan Ratliff
By Nicholas Thompson (Wired
Top Stories)
disappointed with the design.
But then again, maybe it just
doesn’t look that great on camera.
Some gadgets and people are like
that. I once dated a girl that always
looked horrible in pictures. I think
it was her dumb smile. Anyway,
maybe this PMP looks good
enough, but this shot really doesn’t
show it. Thankfully the hardware
and specs are acceptable.
Click through for more live shots
of the Archos 3 Vision, the cute and
little Clipper, and the Archos 10s.
yesterday, is proof there’s still
room for mild innovation in that
area. The cordless phone is bundled
with a 7-inch touch panel that can
be used for various functions.
The screen (800×480 resolution)
serves as a status indicator, address
Many people are asking how they
can join Wired's hunt to track down
technology journalist Evan Ratliff.
1.5 million Durabrand DVD
players recalled because they can
burn down your house!!!
By Matt Burns (CrunchGear)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:27:41 AM
This is what you get. You knew
there was a good reason why that
Durabrand DVD player only cost
$30 at Walmart when the rest
averaged $80. It’s because they can
catch on fire, burn down your
house, and kill your cats according
to a recall. So far there have been
12 cases of the players overheating
with five of them catching on fire
and causing property damage.
book, FAX display, clock and -
Here are tips for people who are not
computer savvy.
Think of the cats! The recall affects
1.5 million DVD players sold at
Walmart from January 2006 to July
2009. Think hard. Is this the DVD
player you bought for Grandma?
The good news is that it’s easy to
get your $30 back. Just take you
fire starting DVD player back to
any Walmart and the lovely
customer service person will refund
your money. You can also call
Walmart at (800) 925-6278 to bitch
anonymously.
CPSC via Engadget
perhaps most importantly - a photo
frame. It’s equipped with 128MB
of internal memory and infrared,
meaning it can receive, store and
display pictures you transmit to it
with your cell phone. In addition,
the frame supports SD/SDHC cards
Internet News Record
Insider buying
at Citigroup (C)
By Steven Halpern
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 11:00:00 AM
Filed under: Newsletters,
Citigroup Inc. (C), Stocks to Buy,
Financial Crisis
" Citigroup(NYSE: C) used to be
the world's #1 bank; it is now
ranked #15 after the financial
crisis," points out long-standing
investing and trading expert Mark
Skousen.
Yet, in his premium Hedge Fund
Trader service, the leading advisor
ranks the bank as a speculative buy.
Here's his review.
"The stock fell to $1 a share from
$40 a share two years ago. But now
Citigroup is showing some
breathing room after selling Smith
Barney to Morgan Stanley for $6.7
billion and pushing revenues up to
$34 billion.
Continue reading Insider buying
at Citigroup (C)
Insider buying at Citigroup (C)
originally appeared on
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2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our
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as well as memory stick and
memory stick PRO.
Too bad the $400 combo is Japan
-only (release date: September 25).
Internet News Record
Cramer on Airlines stuck with double-digit
BloggingStocks: Mortgage revenue drop
meltdown is history
By Jim Cramer
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:00:00 AM
Filed under: Market matters,
Regions Financial (RF), Cramer on
BloggingStocks, Financial Crisis
From TheStreet.com Network
• Morgan Stanley on Hiring Spree:
Report
• China to Tighten Bank Capital
Rules
The Street.com's Jim Cramer says
that now it is all about who is going
to take advantage of the
opportunities.
Did anyone listen to Bill Isaac
yesterday? Did anyone listen to the
man that was instrumental in
solving the banking crisis of 1987-
1991 when he was on "Squawk
Box?"
I don't think they did. If they did,
they wouldn't be nearly as fretful
about housing or the bank stocks or
the mortgage problem or the toxic
bonds as they seem to be, because
Isaac talked about 1,600 banks that
had to be closed and about how
there simply was no place to put the
bad assets at all. He talked about
major banks collapsing day after
day after day, the largest banks in
the most important regions in the
country. He talked about how
Zombie Comic 'Walking Dead' Wobbles Toward TV,
'Simpsons'-Style
By Scott Thill (Wired Top
Stories)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:46:00 PM
Gallery: Brutal Roman Naval Battle Rocks New York
By Bryan Derballa (Wired Top
hardly a day went by when a bank
that they were not prepared to deal
with went under because of
mortgage loans.
Continue reading Cramer on
BloggingStocks: Mortgage
meltdown is history
Cramer on BloggingStocks:
Mortgage meltdown is history
originally appeared on
BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Permalink|
Email this| Comments
Writer Robert Kirkman talks
about taking his undead apocalypse
scenario to the next level in this
video interview.
New York City artists and
museum types get together to stage
By Tom Johansmeyer
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:30:00 AM
Filed under: Industry, Southwest
Airlines (LUV), AMR Corp
(AMR), Economic data, JetBlue
Airways (JBLU)
The Air Transport Association
announced that passenger revenue
plunged 21% in July relative to the
same month last year. This was the
ninth month in a row that the
industry has had to contend with
what has been a brutal market for a
perpetually beleaguered business.
The number of passengers
hopping on flights fell 4% from
July 2008 to July 2009, and the
revenue situation wasn't helped by
a decline of 18% in the average
Oil hits a new 2009 high above
$74 per barrel
By Connie Madon
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:40:00 AM
Filed under: International markets,
Market matters, Commodities, Oil
Oil prices hit a 2009 high of
$74.48 a little earlier. Recently, as
of 9:47 a.m. EDT, the October oil
futures contract traded at $74.05
per barrel. The oil market is
moving in tandem with the stock
market, which is moving slightly
higher.
The September dollar contract is
trading at 78.025 down 0.425 at
9:36 am EDT. Oil, which is
denominated in U.S. dollars, very
often moves in the opposite
direction of the dollar. With the
a mock Roman naval battle. Watch
out for flying tomatoes.
price a passenger paid to fly one
mile.
Continue reading Airlines stuck
with double-digit revenue drop
Airlines stuck with double-digit
revenue drop originally appeared
on BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Read|
Permalink| Email this| Comments
dollar weaker, it gives yet another
support for oil prices.
Continue reading Oil hits a new
2009 high above $74 per barrel
Oil hits a new 2009 high above
$74 per barrel originally appeared
on BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 10:40:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Read|
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Business/ * 15
Cash for Clunkers'
success actually proves
what a horrible program
it was
By Zac Bissonnette
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:00:00 AM
Filed under: Politics
With Cash for Clunkers set to end
on Monday because all the money
has been spent, pundits and
politicians are applauding the
program as a great success.
Transportation Secretary Ray
LaHood said the program has been
"a lifeline to the automobile
industry, jump starting a major
sector of the economy and putting
people back to work." He added
that his department was "working
toward an orderly wind down of
this very popular program."
Continue reading Cash for
Clunkers' success actually proves
what a horrible program it was
Cash for Clunkers' success
actually proves what a horrible
program it was originally appeared
on BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Permalink|
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16 Economy/
U.S. Economy: Now Comes the Hard Part
(Financial Sector and Stocks
Analysis from Seeking Alpha)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:37:06 AM
By Jeffrey Bronchick, CFA
It would be nice to say that the
financial markets have
“normalized” and the debate over
their future has neatly shifted to the
disheveled morass of what now
constitutes global economic
activity. After all, the stock market
is up, credit spreads have narrowed,
tens of billions of dollars have been
raised to ease any number of garden
variety financial stresses and
companies around the globe have
become extraordinarily adept at
using shades of green paint to
construe earnings and revenue
declines of 20% to 50% or more as
“signs of a bottom.”
But a fair definition of
“normalized” might consider some
of these data points culled from the
good folks at Bianco Research:
The Federal Reserve is printing
money to buy Treasuries,
mortgages and agencies (over $500
billion at last count).
• The FDIC is now guaranteeing
almost $350 billion of bank debt
(TLGP).
• The Federal Reserve is the
largest buyer of Commercial Paper
(about $250 billion at last count).
• The Treasury is now
guaranteeing muni debt (“Build
America” bonds).
• The Federal Reserve is providing
financing for the purchase of
securitization and has committed as
much as $1 trillion.
• The Department of Education is
the largest buyer of securitized
student loans, more than the private
sector.
• Fannie ( FNM) and Freddie (
FRE) are buying over 60% of new
securitized mortgages, more than
the private sector.
• • The Federal Reserve’s Term
Auction Facility (TAF) has pumped
$500 billion into the LIBOR
market. The market has been so
overwhelmed by “Federal Reserve
money” that some say it is no
longer the reference rate for new
short-term loans.
• 49.9% of the capital raised by
banks has come from various
governments (including Sovereign
Wealth Funds), 51.1% from the
private sector.
• Government spending for fiscal
2009 is projected to be 28% of
GDP. Only 1944 and 1945 were
higher in the last 150 years.
This cannot help but be troubling
to even a casual observer of
financial markets. We agree with
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben
Bernanke that he has all the tools to
cede the world’s financial markets
back to private investors over time.
We just have thunderhead size
doubts as to whether he and his
institution have the backbone to
counter the enormous political
influences that seem to grow day by
day, much less the skill set to
adeptly execute a withdrawal.
History is not kind to his argument
that he does.
We suggest that the overt display
of political opportunism from the
Federal Reserve, whether it is
offensive or defensive, will be a
massive and distinct long-term
negative for the United States
economy and the state of our
finances and currency. Whether or
not you approve of opaque,
backroom mumbling and hazy
indeterminate monetary and
economic targets, this model of a
Fed Chairman is clearly superior to
what seems to be emerging - a
political appointee whose job
clearly embeds the political
economy of the day and whose
battles are fought on the Op-Ed
page of The New York Times.
The Federal Reserve needs to be
utterly walled off from the sausage
factories of Washington and the
demagoguery of the blogosphere to
pursue what should be its only goal
- “conduct the nation’s monetary
Internet News Record
policy by influencing monetary and
credit conditions in the economy in
pursuit of stable prices.” There is a
bunch of other mumbo jumbo on
the Fed’s website involving its
Mission Statement on “ensuring
full employment,” “supervising and
regulating banking institutions,”
“maintaining the stability of the
financial system” and “protecting
the credit rights of consumers.” We
have to assume the website is out of
date because no rational human
being would claim to be in charge
of all that over the past three years.
Anything that blurs the Federal
Reserve’s focus on maintaining
stable pricing and all the good that
comes from it weakens the
institution’s ability to pursue that
very goal. New legislative
proposals giving the Fed expanded
regulatory powers are a quantum
uptick in adhesing the central bank
to the political inanity of
Washington and can only end
badly. There are numerous
acronyms in Washington fruitlessly
spending money and interfering
with the basic functions of
commerce and finance and there is
no reason why they are not
perfectly capable of continuing to
mangle the possibility of at least
reasonably effective financial
regulation without getting the Fed
involved.
All of this, of course, leads the
reader to the “where do you stand
on inflation” discussion. One
argument is that we are simply in
the midst of cleaning up an
enormous leverage problem which
on its most basic level involves
massive asset sales at lower and
lower prices. Thus you are kidding
yourself if you think anything the
government is doing right now will
have any material effect on
inflation for years. (See websites of
U.S. page 17
Internet News Record
U.S.
continued from page 16
A n n a l y . c o m a n d
Hoisingtonmgt.com for well-
reasoned commentary on this line
of thinking.)
The other argument of course, is
one we have been sketching above.
We are running unprecedented
experiments in monetary and fiscal
policy and they are being managed
by “people,” regardless of how
many may have worked for
Goldman Sachs. People make
mistakes, and these mistakes tend
to be compounded when you are
part of an enormous organization
like the federal government that is
not entirely motivated by economic
results. While it is correct to
presently say (thank you David
Rosenberg) that “deflation is a fact
and inflation an opinion,” we lean
toward the argument that it will not
take much for facts and opinions to
change places.
In the meantime, the enormous
move from the “generational”
opportunities offered during the
market lows in late 2008 and early
2009 (which we think will hold in
case you wanted to pry a real
opinion out of us) have made things
a bit more difficult from here. In
our view, the fat part of the
probability curve as it relates to
what happens now in financial
markets remains bloodied and
scarred by lagging economic and
socio-political trends that cannot be
solved by anything but the passage
of time required to rebuild the
actual and mental capital of the
world’s economic participants.
(Although some argue mid-term
elections might hasten this
process.) While there are always
company-specific ideas that have
their own catalyst for valuation
change and we spend much of our
waking hours looking for them,
many stock prices today require
some semblance of at least a
reasonably plodding economy to
fundamentally justify our idea of an
appropriate longer-term valuation.
A “growth cyclical” like say,
Parker Hannifin ( PH) or 3M (
MMM), is arguably overvalued if
your goal in life is to inanely apply
a multiple to the cash flow
generation of either the last twelve
or the next twelve months, and a
disturbing amount of print and
virtual space is devoted to this sort
of drivel. But clearly Parker
Hannifin is undervalued for the
longer run if it approaches even an
approximation of our estimate of $5
to $6 per share of earnings power.
Achieving this will require a
legitimate resumption of actual
revenue growth. The longer we live
without specific economic progress
that is identifiable by a few line
items on an income and cash flow
statement, like say, the top line
(sales), it will prove difficult to
continue the fine and pleasing
progress of the past four months.
That is the obvious and main
point that can conveniently be
reached by anyone – we need
definitive economic growth from
here in order for the equity markets
to generate decent returns. It can
also be definitively stated that our
ability (and by “our” we mean you
the reader as well) to answer that is
as woefully inadequate as at nearly
any other time in history.
So why should this be any
different than any number of
numerous historical instances in the
past? The economy goes up and it
goes down. Politicians come and
go. Stock valuations get depressed
and then giddy. Do the work, buy
well-researched value in companies
with staying power, buy with
conviction while the other guy is
running for cover, be patient. Don’t
guess the immediate future, you
will be wrong. As we have noted
many times, the beauty of being a
value investor is that if you can buy
cheaply enough, you can leave the
big thoughts to the other guys. We
see very few headlines noting the
acquisition of a $40 million New
York penthouse by anyone whose
waking hours appear to be
consumed by blogging on
economic issues and being
endlessly quoted by the financial
media as to when the recession is
going to end. “There is never a
shortage of sticks if you really want
to beat the economic dog,” says
Gloria Mae Smith, philosopher at
large and mother of our own
marketing maven, Michael Smith.
This is essentially our 1982-1984
scenario. Stocks reached
generational lows after years of
investor apathy driven by a series
of global economic crises
compounded by disastrous political
and monetary decision making.
Stocks rally sharply in the midst of
miserable economic news and
climb a steep wall of worry. The
market then sits for a year and
effectively waits for the economy
to catch up – which it does. Life
goes on irregularly up an 8%-ish
grade. Thanks to the magic of
Google ( GOOG), one can go back
and pull some brilliant quotes from
that day and age, referencing a
litany of fears in regard to “budget
deficits,” “greed outdistancing
fear,” the “aging bull-market” and
“fussiness over corporate profits.”
After all, the Dow just had a record
run to 1200.
But while we are all in some
ways victims of our circumstances,
we do sense that bigger picture
items seem to loom larger today
than perhaps at anytime since the
early 1980s, and while our
tendency has always and correctly
been to focus on the micro issues of
business/value/people, there are a
number of enormous
“unprecedented” things going on
the world that seem to want to
impinge on our process. From 1982
through 2007, there was a global
explosion of worldwide wealth no
matter how you distribute it. The
global backdrop trends were
declining inflation and interest
rates, increasing globalization, less
taxation at both the business and
personal level, less regulation and a
sublimely low cost basis from
which to begin a rally. It is now
hard to argue that most of these
trends have flat-lined at best, and
raises negative thoughts that push
decent economic activity past the
time horizon of many investors.
(Please insert timing joke here.)
We are staring at an enormous
amount of “change” out of
Washington and the natural
reaction of any business or
individual who has a perceptible
sense that someone is tugging on
his wallet for a yet defined new
obligation, is to clam up and wait.
Why not wait to do nearly anything
economic until you see exactly
what it may cost you? In the
meantime, most of the private
sector is arguably in the middle
innings of what effectively is a
massive recapitalization that is
transferring private
irresponsi-bil-ity to the public
sector.
And contrary to the sheer populist
idiocy that constituted the recent
Rolling Stone piece on Goldman
Sachs ( GS), memorable for a truly
great quote suggesting that
Goldman was “a great vampire
squid wrapped around the face of
humanity,” the fact is that Goldman
is merely a very, very successful
middleman and the squid lies not in
downtown New York, but hovers
tirelessly over Capitol Hill (the
analogy works much better with an
Alien movie reference anyway).
While we like to count ourselves as
one of the last ten people on the
planet to be forced onto the witness
stand defending Goldman (11
interviews in 1984 and not one job
offer?), the “other side” of a
Goldman trade has the private
17
ability to enter into what in
retrospect may be a complete sham
or an overpriced risk/reward. No
such luck with the edicts from
elected officials.
So representatives from the
world’s leading investment banks
have had problems picking stocks
and making decisions that are in the
best interest of its potential clients.
(Shocking, simply shocking!) Are
we going to be better off with the
proposed Financial Services
Oversight Council that would
include the heads of the Treasury,
Federal Reserve, Commodity
Futures Trading Commission,
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.,
Securities and Exchange
Commission and Federal Housing
Finance Agency, and the directors
of two new agencies the Obama
administration wants to create: the
Consumer Financial Protection
Agency and the National Bank
Supervisor? Are not these the same
people asleep at the wheel during
every angle of the financial
excesses of the past decade? Aren’t
these the same people who are
bemoaning the lack of credit
available to “average Americans
and small business” and yet pass a
credit card reform bill that began to
reduce credit to average Americans
and small businesses before the ink
even dried?
Maybe we should turn the whole
thing over to Representative Barney
Frank, who had this to say about
Fannie and Freddie Mac:
I worry, frankly, that there’s a
tension here. The more people, in
my judgment, exaggerate a threat of
safety and soundness, the more
people conjure up the possibility of
serious financial losses to the
Treasury, which I do not see. I
think we see entities that are
fundamentally sound financially
and withstand some of the disaster
U.S. page 22
18 Economy/
Tech.view: Sticker shock
(The Economist: Daily columns)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 1:32:09 AM
Tech.view
Aug 21st 2009
From Economist.com Ignore the
230 miles-per-gallon claims being
touted for GM's plug-in hybrid
SO, THE Chevrolet Volt—the
plug-in hybrid car on which
General Motors is pinning its
resurrection—will get a staggering
230 miles per American gallon (or
97 kilometres per litre) in stop-go
city driving? Well, er, no. That is
just marketing hype, albeit prose
that is permissible under the draft
guidelines for “extended range”
electric vehicles that America’s
Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) is currently working on.
When it is launched, late in 2010,
motorists who have bought the
dream will awaken to find their
shiny new Chevy Volts get around
50mpg in traffic.
True, 50mpg is still pretty good
for a roomy five-seater. Though
slightly smaller and a good deal
cheaper than the $40,000 Volt,
Toyota’s latest Prius already boasts
50mpg for combined motorway and
city driving in the United
States—and considerably more in
Japan, where the method of
calculating fuel consumption is
different. And that is the problem.
There is no easy way to compare
the efficiency of an electric
vehicle—plug-in hybrid or pure
electric—with a fossil-fuelled
equivalent.
Comparing the performance of
self-charging hybrids like the
Toyota Prius and the Ford Fusion is
easy. As far as their fuel bills are
concerned, the motorist pays only
for the bit that comes from the
pump. The regenerative energy
captured during braking—which is
used to charge a hybrid’s
battery—is, in effect, free. Like any
other fossil-fuelled car, a self-
charging hybrid’s official fuel
consumption is simply the number
of miles it can eke from a gallon of
petrol while being tested on the
EPA’s cycles that mimic driving on
city routes and faster roads.
Not so the hybrid’s plug-in
siblings. The Volt, for instance, has
enough electrical storage to travel
40 miles (64 kilometres) on battery
power alone. GM reckons that is
enough to enable three out of four
Americans to travel to work and
back on a single charge. But if
owners were to restrict their
motoring to trips of less than 40
miles between charges from the
grid, the Volt would give them, not
the claimed 230mpg, but an almost
infinite number of miles per gallon.
Such quirks make a mockery of the
EPA’s tests.
The EPA has yet to reveal its
draft methodology for testing the
Volt and other plug-ins. It clearly
takes into account some
contribution from the vehicle’s
petrol-powered generator. It also
seems to factor in the cost of the
electricity (a national average of 11
cents per kilowatt-hour is quoted)
used to recharge the battery. But
how 230mpg can be claimed for the
Volt is difficult to fathom.
Start with what is known about
the vehicle’s traction system. GM
reckons the platform needs only 25
kilowatt-hours of energy to cover
100 miles of city driving. At 11
cents a kilowatt-hour, that would
cost $2.75 for 100 miles. If petrol
costs $3 a gallon (as regular does
today), then the Volt would be able
to travel 109 miles for the same
price as that of a gallon of petrol.
What if the owner does 50 miles
between charges instead of 40
miles? Then the Volt’s 1.4 litre
petrol-engine has to kick in to cover
the extra ten miles—not to drive the
wheels directly, like the Prius’s
engine does, but to recharge the
battery, which then feeds juice to
the electric motor, which, in turn,
drives the wheels.
If that were an efficient way of
delivering torque to the wheels, all
cars would have electric
transmission systems instead of
mechanical ones. They don’t, for
good reason. So expect no more
than 20mpg for a car the size and
weight of the Volt when running
under petrol power. In that case, the
fuel used for a 50-mile journey
would be half a gallon and the
efficiency would be 100mpg.
(Alternatively, you could take the
figures for the price of motoring
given above, and calculate an
efficiency of 58mpg.) Go 60 miles
and it would drop to 60mpg using
the first measure, or 44mpg using
the second.
And this assumes that no power-
sapping components are switched
on and the owner drives with a
featherlight foot. In the real world
the Volt’s 40-mile range on battery
power alone is likely to be 30 miles
at best—and perhaps half that if
driver is in a hurry, the terrain is
hilly and the lights, wipers and air-
conditioning are turned on. Any
reduction in battery-only motoring
hits the Volt’s overall fuel economy
hard.
The efficiency ratings that makers
are claiming for their plug-in
hybrids are nonsense. They are
little more than figures plucked
from the air because they depend
on specific sets of circumstances.
That makes comparisons with fossil
-fuelled cars almost impossible.
Petrol cars and diesels can also
get more or fewer miles to the
gallon depending on how they are
driven, but irrespective of the
distance the owner drives. And they
are, of course, oblivious to
electricity rates. So if any
meaningful comparison is to be
made (and one needs to be, so
customers can make intelligent
choices), the best way would be to
determine how many miles could
be driven for the energy used—that
is, the miles per kilowatt-hour. In
those terms, a plug-in hybrid that
uses 25 kilowatt-hours of energy to
go 100 miles would have a “fuel”
consumption of four miles per
kilowatt-hour.
To find out what that is
equivalent to in miles per gallon,
you need to compare the energy
content of the natural gas or coal
used to generate, say, 25 kilowatt-
hours of electricity with the energy
content of the gallons of petrol
needed to go 100 miles. To be
meaningful, however, the
calculation must account, on one
side of the equation, for all the
energy wasted in turning natural
gas or coal into electricity,
transporting it over the grid and
then pumping it into a battery. To
ensure apples are compared with
apples, the other side of the
equation has to take into account all
the energy wasted in refining and
transporting the petrol and pumping
it into a car.
Such an analysis has actually
been done by engineers at AC
Propulsion, a firm in the Los
Angeles area that makes parts for
electric cars. Their conclusion was
that around eight miles per kilowatt
-hour is the equivalent of 100mpg.
So forget GM’s outlandish claims:
the Chevy Volt will get at best
50mpg in the city. As your
correspondent noted at the
beginning, that is not at all
bad—but it is nowhere near the
preposterous 230mpg being touted.
Back to top ^^ Readers'
comments
The Economist welcomes your
views.
Internet News Record
Most Bank Failures
Can't Be Blamed
on Exotic Products
(Financial Sector and Stocks
Analysis from Seeking Alpha)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:11:57 AM
Good new Floyd Norris column at
the NYT pointing out that most of
the banks that are failing in the U.S.
aren't doing so because they were
over-exposed to debt exotica like
CDOs, SIVs, or CDO-squareds.
Instead, they are failing because
they made bad loans, which new
regulations won't change, of course.
The severity of the current string
of bank failures shows that many of
the proposed remedies batted about
since the financial crisis erupted
would have done nothing to stem
this wave of closures. These banks
did not get in over their heads with
derivatives or hide their bad assets
in off-balance sheet vehicles. Nor
did their traders make bad bets;
they generally had no traders. They
did not make loans that they
expected to quickly sell, so they
had plenty of reason to care that the
loans would be repaid.
What they did do is see loans go
bad, in some cases with stunning
rapidity, in volumes that they never
thought possible.
The takeaway is that stability
breeds instability, as Minsky wrote,
and Norris reminds us. Fair
comment, and true, as far as it goes.
But the reason why all these
banks had the opportunity to so
quickly make so many bad loans,
and why so many banks and loans
failed so fast, is because of the
systemic problems in banking,
many of which were tied to loan
exotica. In other words, it didn't
matter that the failing banks didn't
pee in the pool, other banks did.
And in banking, like life, the notion
of a peeing and a non-peeing
section in a swimming pool is
meaningless.
Internet News Record
War footing
(The Economist: News
analysis)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:24:43 AM
Aug 20th 2009
From the Economist Intelligence
Unit ViewsWire The latest bout of
fighting in northern Yemen looks
like becoming a proxy war between
Iran and Saudi Arabia
The Yemeni armed forces are
fighting their sixth campaign since
2004 against the Houthi rebellion
involving Zaydi Shias in the
northern Saada province, which
borders Saudi Arabia. The latest
fighting has been particularly
intense, with the government
launching air strikes against rebel
position, and the rebels hitting back
with Katyusha rockets. The conflict
also has a regional dimension, with
the government accusing Iran of
backing the rebels and the Iranian
media alleging that Saudi Arabia is
providing air support for the
Yemeni armed forces.
Intermittent skirmishes that have
been ongoing for the past few
months finally erupted into full-
scale conflict in mid-August after
government troops, supported by
fighter-bombers, launched a large
offensive against Houthi insurgents
in the Saada region. The renewed
campaign came after the president,
Ali Abdullah Saleh, stated that
“continued violations by rebels and
acts of sabotage prove their refusal
to adhere to the peace option”. A
ceasefire, secured with Qatari
mediation, went into effect in mid-
2008, but was not backed up by any
subsequent political accord.
Two weeks of fighting have
resulted in scores, if not hundreds
of dead, including civilians, and the
displacement of at least 17,000
families. The media's continued
exclusion from the area has
severely restricted information on
the progress of the campaign, and
communication to Saada has been
cut off. However, reports and
claims from the two sides seem to
indicate that the Houthis made
some early gains, taking four
districts and overrunning a number
of army positions, but that the
security forces have since fought
hard to retake several areas. In a
notable development, on August
16th the government claimed that it
had killed a senior rebel leader in
Amran province, Hussein Kamza.
This was followed by a visit to the
front line by Mr Saleh, who was a
Lieutenant-Colonel in the army
when he first assumed power in
1978 (he now holds the rank of
Field Marshal). However,
subsequently a spokesman for the
Houthis darkly warned that the
group had not even started the real
war yet, and, as if to verify this
claim, the rebels have started firing
Katyusha rockets at army positions.
Earlier, the government had once
again offered a ceasefire, on
condition that the rebels withdraw
from the frontline; remove their
roadblocks; release kidnapped
foreign hostages, as well as military
prisoners; hand over military
equipment; and cease their
interference in local political
affairs. The Houthis, however,
denied they were holding any
foreign hostages (the governor of
Saada had claimed that 15 Red
Crescent workers had been
captured), and rejected the truce
offer outright, claiming it was an
attempt to “mislead public opinion”
as to the nature of the conflict and
argued that “self-defence is a
legitimate and sacred right". The
Ministry of the Interior proceeded
to demand the arrest of 55
prominent Houthi figures. Foreign
hands
Both sides have also resorted to
the time-honoured ploy of alleging
the other has been receiving
clandestine foreign assistance-in
the case of the Houthis, Iranian
arms; and in the case of Yemeni
security forces, Saudi combat air
support. However, the situation has
been given an added twist by the
fact that it was Iran's state radio that
reported the alleged Saudi air
strikes on Houthi positions.
Although the story was vigorously
denied by the Yemeni
government—on August 18th a
spokesman hinted that the Iranian
ambassador had been summoned by
the foreign minister, Abu Bakr
Abdullah al-Qirbi—it appears that
the war in Saada is fast becoming a
new arena in the wider regional
power struggle involving the Saudis
and Iranians (a contest that
incorporates, among other things,
Lebanon, Iraq and Iran's nuclear
programme).
Iran's Arabic-language television
station, Al-Alam, has meanwhile
issued a statement refuting Yemeni
government allegations that its
broadcasts on the conflict are
heavily biased towards the Houthi
side. Al-Alam reported on August
19th on a visit to Saudi Arabia
earlier in the week by Brigadier-
General Ali al-Ansi, the head of
Yemen's national security agency.
The report quoted the Saudi Press
Agency as saying that the Yemeni
visitor was greeted by Mohammed
bin Naif bin Abdel-Aziz al-Saud,
Saudi Arabia's deputy interior
minister and the head of the
kingdom's counter-terrorism
programme. Al-Alam said that Mr
Ansi discussed the Saada situation
with the Saudi officials and
explored ways to strengthen
military co-operation (the official
Saudi report made no mention of
the agenda of the talks). Al-Alam
reported that the Houthis blame
Saudi Arabia for instigating the
current conflict, and it quoted
Yahya al-Houthi, a spokesman for
Economy/ Social Net/ 19
the rebel movement, as saying that
"Saudi Arabia is inciting the
Yemeni president to strike at the
Houthis in their region in a
sectarian, doctrinal and immoral
war"—implying that the war is part
of the wider struggle between
Sunnis and Shias.
Whatever the level of foreign
Geek Eye Candy:
involvement (and evidence remains
sparse), given that five years of
HD Video on the
intermittent conflict has failed to
resolve the government’s
iPhone 3GS
differences with the Zaydi By Stan Schroeder (Mashable!)
insurgents, the decision to once Submitted at 8/21/2009 12:55:34 AM
again revert to the military option
would seem to indicate a paucity of In iPhone 3GS, the “S” stands for
ideas. Moreover, yet another “speed.” Among other things, it
offensive is not expected to achieve means a faster processor, but up
particularly much, and may in fact until now, no one was really sure if
only add to the grievances of the the iPhone 3GS is capable of
Saada residents—numerous playing high definition (720p and
accounts of civilian areas being hit 1080p) video. Well, now we know.
have leaked out of the area. There As explained on a Chinese forum,
are particular concerns at present you need the free FileAid
that the fighting will enter Saada application (file manager and
town proper, which would expose a viewer for iPhone and iPod Touch),
large number of both locals and and you can check it out for
refugees to the fighting. The aims yourself. The folks at Engadget
of the Houthis are often viewed as tested a couple of HD videos,
being both multiple and opaque, but including the recently unveiled,
seem to stem from a general feeling gorgeous Avatar trailer, and though
of exclusion, based on the there were hiccups, it worked.
perceived political, economic and Check out the beauty of
religious marginalisation of the 1920×1080 pixel videos crammed
Zaydis since the end of the imamate into iPhone’s screen in the video
in 1962. Overcoming such below.
grievances by military means Tags: hd video, iphone 3Gs
appears to be a relatively futile
exercise—the present bout of
fighting has been termed the "sixth
war" since violence broken out in
mid-2004—and it is difficult to
foresee a quick victory, for either
side.
Back to top ^^ Readers'
comments
The Economist welcomes your
views.
20 Economy/ *
Private security contractors: Blackwater's dark
heart
(The Economist: News
analysis)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 1:21:59 AM
Private security contractors
Aug 21st 2009 | WASHGINTON,
DC
From Economist.com New
revelations about an American
private-security contractor
THE “war on terror” has left
many blots on America’s
reputation—weapons of mass
destruction, Abu Ghraib prison,
Guantánamo Bay—and one stain
continues to darken with time. This
week the New York Times reported
that the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) had once hired
Blackwater, a private-security
contractor, to plot assassinations of
al-Qaeda operatives. It was the
latest in a string of controversial
news. This month Erik Prince,
Blackwater’s founder and
chairman, was accused of
facilitating or committing murder.
Blackwater released a statement
calling the allegations
“unsubstantiated and offensive”.
Blackwater is not the only
security contractor in the Middle
East. The Congressional Budget
Office estimates that America spent
between $6 billion and $10 billion
Host of Young Stars in Hunt at Wyndham
By Shane Bacon (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 8:29:00 PM
by Shane Bacon
Filed under: PGA
This week's Wyndham
Championship is the last
tournament of the year for players
to earn a little more cash, and jump
a few more spots in the FedEx Cup
on the services of these firms from
2003 to 2007. But Blackwater is the
most prominent. In 2004 insurgents
in Fallujah killed four of its
employees, burned their bodies and
hung two from a bridge over the
Euphrates. The sight of charred
American bodies caused uproar at
home. Marines stormed Fallujah
days later. By 2007 Blackwater was
accused of being a perpetrator. The
company’s employees opened fire
on a busy square in Baghdad,
killing 17 Iraqis. The incident
strained America’s relations with
Iraq. Blackwater exemplified an
American effort gone terribly
wrong.
The latest revelation is that the
CIA hired Blackwater in 2004 for a
multimillion-dollar plan to locate
and kill members of al-Qaeda. In
June a horrified Leon Panetta, the
new director of the CIA, called an
emergency meeting to brief
Congress on the programme, which
had been kept secret. According to
the New York Times, Blackwater
helped with training, planning and
surveillance. It is unclear whether
the CIA intended to use Blackwater
to carry out the assassinations—no
suspected terrorists were killed
under the auspices of the
programme. But the scheme adds to
point standings, hoping to make
their way into the playoffs that kick
off next week. Basically, it is the
best shot for people that aren't
having their best year to do a little
more to make sure they aren't left
out when the Barclays begins and
only the top-125 on the FedEx Cup
point list are invited.
On a weather-shortened Thursday
doubts over the role of private-
security firms in the war and efforts
to hold contractors accountable.
A case in court in Washington,
DC, may eventually shed some
light on the way the company
works. In December 2008 federal
prosecutors charged five
Blackwater employees with
manslaughter for the Baghdad
shootings in 2007. A sixth
employee has already pleaded
guilty.
In the meantime, Blackwater
faces some of the most serious
allegations yet. A group of Iraqis,
aided by the Centre for
Constitutional Rights, a New York-
based human-rights pressure group,
is suing Blackwater for war crimes,
wrongful death and more. In sworn
statements submitted for the case
on August 3rd, two former
employees allege that Mr Prince
may have helped to murder at least
one person who had divulged, or
was about to divulge, damning
information to the government. He
denies the claims. The affidavits
also claim that Mr Prince smuggled
weapons into Iraq and that he
“views himself as a Christian
crusader tasked with eliminating
Muslims and the Islamic faith from
the globe”.
at Sedgefield Country Club, a few
players did just that. Chez Reavie,
With these cases plodding
through America’s courts, security
contractors continue to work
abroad. Blackwater no longer has
an operating licence in Iraq—local
officials refused to renew it—and
the firm has lost a big contract to
defend diplomats. But many former
employees of Blackwater are now
working for the new holder of that
contract, Triple Canopy. And
Blackwater has rebranded itself as
Xe Services.
As the number of contractors in
Afghanistan grows, the mistakes of
Iraq may be repeated. Training for
Afghanistan’s security contractors
is weak and efforts to monitor them
are disjointed, according to a report
released in June by the Commission
on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and
Afghanistan, a bipartisan group set
up by Congress. Four Xe
employees are under investigation
for the death of an Afghan man in
May. Critics may be gladdened to
learn that there is at least some
semblance of oversight. The main
body charged with supervising
contractors in Afghanistan is also a
contractor.
Back to top ^^ Readers'
comments
The Economist welcomes your
views.
who won the Canadian Open last
season but has struggled mightily in
'09, shot a 6-under 64, his best
round of the year, to tie Brandt
Snedeker and Ryan Moore atop of
the leaderboard. All three leaders
have had lackluster years, but
Reavie is the one that needs the
biggest boost.
Host of Young Stars in Hunt at
Internet News Record
Lawyer for Dr. Arnie
Klein: He Has Not Been
Questioned by LAPD
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:17:00 PM
Two of Dr. Arnie Klein's lawyers
spoke out to Larry King on CNN's
"Larry King Live" Thursday night,
disclosing new information about
an LAPD investigation into
Michael Jackson's death.
Lawyers for Klein, Richard
Charnley and Garo Ghazarian,
disclosed tidbits of information,
including stating that Klein has not
been questioned by the LAPD, and
also explaining that when the
Coroner's office visited Klein's
office on Wednesday, they weren't
looking for anything new, but were
rather looking to corroborate.
When asked by King why Klein
hired Ghazarian, a criminal defense
attorney, Ghazarian replied,
"Apparently when the news media
started producing reports that
started painting a picture of him,
his personal counsel thought it
would be appropriate for me to be
brought into the picture."
Wyndham originally appeared on
Fanhouse Golf Blog on Thu, 20
Aug 2009 20:29:00 EST . Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
Blogs| Comments
Internet News Record
Europe.view: No comparison
(The Economist: Daily columns)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 3:25:33 AM
Europe.view
Aug 21st 2009
From Economist.com
Criminalising historical
investigation is wrong
Correction to this article
HOW far does context determine
blame and praise? That is a
question facing anyone who wants
to pass a judgment or make an
observation on Hitler, Stalin or the
weather. Taken to one extreme,
when every attribute is seen in
complete isolation, morals and
reason disappear. Hitler was nice to
animals. Stalin loved children.
Churchill drank too much. John F
Kennedy was a philanderer. It is a
cool day in summer, so global
warming is a nonsense.
At the other extreme, when
everything is connected, judgment
becomes impossible for fear of
leaving out some important
comparison. Why complain about
Stalin when you could write about
Mao? What about the 19th century
colonial empires? They killed
millions more than the totalitarian
regimes of the 20th century. Who
are you as a British/American
/German/Chinese/Russian
Outstanding Contraction: Weekly Commercial Paper Review
(Financial Sector and Stocks
Analysis from Seeking Alpha)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:38:10 AM
The Commercial Paper (CP)
market is essentially a private debt
market used by corporations as a
cheaper means of funding typical
recurring operations than drawing
on a line of bank credit.
Commercial paper, as financial
instrument, is by no means a recent
commentator to say anything about
Russia/Germany/China/America/Br
itain? That may be a good debating
tactic, but it leads to mental
paralysis: when everything matters,
nothing matters.
The stormy response to a recent
column about an OSCE resolution
equating Stalin and Hitler
highlights the issue. One line of
attack goes like this: the article
“forgot” to mention the crimes of
the British. It is certainly true that
Britain has much to be ashamed of
before, during and after the second
world war. The Munich agreement
with Hitler to eviscerate
Czechoslovakia is one (which the
article mentioned); the deportation
of Cossacks and other anti-Soviet
forces to certain death after the war
in Operation Keelhaul is another. A
third was decades of denial that the
Katyn massacre was the work of
the Soviets, not the Nazis (that
subject occasionally surfaces in this
column too).
But the article was not trying to
argue Soviet history is more (or
less) wicked than Britain’s. Any
such comparisons are fraught with
difficulty, not least over how you
measure wickedness. It does not
come in convenient units (evils,
giga-evils, tera-evils) that can be
innovation and, in fact, you can
read about how the CP market was
affected by the many historic
financial shocks experienced by the
U.S. (read Panic on Wall Street: A
History of America’s Financial
Disasters).
Although the Federal Reserve
was able to artificially bring CP
rates down significantly since the
shocking 615 basis point spread
blowout (A2/P2 spread) of late
neatly added up to produce a
balance sheet of murder and
mayhem.
What can be said, quite clearly, is
that Britain, like almost all other
countries that claim to be civilised,
does not criminalise investigation
into its history. If you are an
Australian who wants to research
the genocidal treatment of
Tasmanians, or an American who
wants to write about the bombing
of German civilians, you may even
get a scholarship. Unlike in Russia,
you certainly don’t risk a jail
sentence. The resolution by the
Parliamentary Assembly of the
Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe is chiefly
admirable because it challenges the
Kremlin’s attempt to put this area
of inquiry off limits.
The OSCE resolution is open to
legitimate challenge. John
Laughland, a British historian at the
pro-Kremlin Institute for
Democracy and Co-operation in
Paris, argued on the Russia Today
channel that politicians make bad
historians. Nobody comes out well
from the run-up to the second world
war. Poland, he noted, helped
dismember Czechoslovakia, seizing
the town of Cieszyn/Tšin. Hitler’s
plan to attack Poland predates the
2008, they have apparently not
been successful in preventing an
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so that
deal, shameful though it was, did
not provide the definitive go-ahead
for the invasion. Mr Laughland also
argues that Nazism’s central
features were war and racial
persecution, whereas Soviet
communism was neither racist nor
(under Stalin) expansionist.
These are indeed good subjects
for historians. But it does not mean
that politicians should ignore them.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is not
a uniquely iniquitous event. Even
Mr Putin (shown here speaking on
the issue at a press conference on
May 10th 2005) seems a bit hazy
about the details. So the 70th
anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler deal
is a good time to raise it in
discussion—particularly in
countries where doing so runs no
risk of prosecution.
Correction: An earlier version of
this article said that Vladimir
Putin's press conference took place
on December 12th 2007. In fact it
took place on May 10th 2005. We
regret the error. This article was
corrected on August 21st 2009.
Back to top ^^ Readers'
comments
The Economist welcomes your
views.
overall contraction in the CP
market.
The Federal Reserve calculates
and published the total amount of
CP outstanding every week and as
of the latest published period,
commercial paper outstanding is
contracting at nearly the fastest rate
on record, registering a whopping
37.87% decline year-over-year.
Another important insight, at
$1.110 trillion the total CP market
Economy/ * 21
International Manhunt:
Jasmine Fiore Murder
Details Revealed
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:41:00 PM
The grieving family of model
Jasmine Fiore stood by as Buena
Park, CA police revealed details of
her murder and the latest on the
whereabouts of "Megan Wants a
Millionaire" reality star Ryan
Alexander Jenkins at a press
conference this afternoon. Read on
for the latest details…
Jenkins has been charged with the
murder of his ex-wife Jasmine in
the wake of her body being
discovered in a suitcase left in a
dumpster in Buena Park over the
weekend. A $10 million warrant
has been issued for his arrest.
Lt. Steve Holliday revealed to the
press that the "fingers and teeth
were removed" from the body,
which was found stuffed in a large,
blood-stained grey suitcase. He
added that police are "looking into
a motive right now" but cannot
share that info at this time.
is now 12.73% smaller than the
$1.272 trillion seen at the bottom of
the last contraction in late 2003.
The CP market that expanded
wildly throughout 2004, 2005, 2006
and most of 2007 is now no more,
replaced instead by one smaller and
contracting faster than at any other
time in this century.
click to enlarge
22 Economy/ *
U.S.
continued from page 17
scenarios. ( House Financial
Services Committee hearing, Sept.
25, 2003)
Or the thoughts of Sen.
Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) who
just wanted to briefly say, “Mr.
Chairman [Greenspan], obviously,
like most of us here, this [Fannie
and Freddie] is one of the great
success stories of all time."(Senate
Banking Committee, Feb. 24-25,
2004)
But we digress again. Contrary to
fraying opinion, while Washington
fiddles the marketplace does not
burn; it finds solutions. The
bankruptcy court managed to
provide a forum that overcame
Federal intervention and found a
way to restructure a piece of the
auto industry via Delphi and
producing a great quote for the
decades, “What’s so special about
Platinum (the federally mandated
choice)? They’re just guys in suits.
Why can’t the other guys in suits
just pay more?”
While one ill-thought out half-
baked mortgage loan modification
plan after another has been
launched and flopped, lower prices,
lower interest rates and the
fledgling confidence of the greatly
maligned American consumer has
begun to hack at the inventory of
unsold homes, putting in place the
modest (very at this point)
infrastructure for a return to trend
line housing growth. The personal
saving rate has skyrocketed, putting
many Americans in better financial
shape. Corporate America
continues to “lean” itself, and is
Mark Lester Says Jackson Was 'Anxious About Sex'
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:02:00 AM
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking
able to refinance, thanks to the
recognition by many banks that
there has not been a better time in
decades to dictate terms and put out
money at terrific returns, even on a
higher capital base.
Yes, we admit that the next 12
months are unusually uncertain
even within the context of a
perpetually uncertain future. There
are giant looming monetary
uncertainties that are particularly
unusual to contemplate both in term
of size and actual
unprecedentedness. There is a
significant amount of possibly
awful and politically based
economic changes that may be
enacted. And yes, many stocks
have come a long way in a hurry
and have gotten ahead of
themselves to use traditional Wall
Street parlance.
But we just can’t shake a
stubborn belief (well supported by
history) that buying a reasonably
diversified mix of good businesses
at cheap to reasonable prices
remains the way to long-term
wealth creation on an after-tax,
after-possible inflation basis. We
had a superb first half in all
strategies on both an absolute and
relative basis, which is a lot more
fun to say when you are up double
digits.
Given some of the hesitations
noted above, our portfolio is
structured with a blend of offensive
and defensive opportunities. If the
economy takes four more years to
get going versus something positive
in 2010, then we will be sitting on
News, World News, and News
about the Economy
Former child star Mark Lester
took his paternity claim over the
our performance duffs for longer
than desirable. At current prices
most of our stocks have livable
downside within the context of a
longer time horizon, but material
upside in a return to a decently
growing economy. Your
investments should be similar to
what someone has said about
marriage – start with low
expectations, you won’t be
disappointed.
About the Author
Reed, Conner & Birdwell,
LLC(RCB), a Los Angeles-based
investment advisor, was established
in 1959 and is registered under the
Investment Advisers Act of 1940.
The opinions expressed herein are
those of Reed Conner & Birdwell
are subject to change without
notice. Past performance is not a
guarantee or indicator of future
results. You should not consider the
information in this letter a
recommendation to buy or sell any
particular security. These securities
may not be in your account by the
time you receive this report, or may
have been repurchased for your
account. These securities do not
represent your entire account and
may represent only a small
percentage of your account. You
should not assume that any of the
securities discussed in this report
are or will be profitable, or that
recommendations we make in the
future will be profitable or equal
the performance.
daughter of Michael Jackson to the
Today show this morning.
He told Matt Lauer that he has
"no idea" if he is Paris Jackson's
This week's top stories
[21 August 2009]
(The Economist: News
analysis)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:00:22 AM
The coming days
Aug 2nd 2009
From Economist.com New
evidence of the state of the
American economy, and other news
• IN IRAN president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is expected to
consolidate his grip on power, after
disputed elections. On Monday
August 3rd the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will hear
Mr Ahmadinejad give the oath of
office. Later in the week a public
ceremony is planned. Although Mr
Ahmadinejad has emerged
triumphant in his contest with
opposition figures, his dominance
of Iranian politics has been
constrained by fellow conservative
politicians.
See article
• AMERICA'S secretary of state,
Hillary Clinton, sets off on a seven-
country trip to Africa beginning on
Wednesday August 5th. Mrs
Clinton will travel to Kenya, South
Africa, Angola, Congo, Nigeria,
Liberia and Cape Verde. She has
sidelined recently by a broken
elbow, by President Barack
Obama's recent trips, including one
to Africa, and by the vice-president,
Joe Biden, who has been
enthusiastically travelling the
world.
For background, see article
• MORE evidence of the state of
health of America's economy will
become available on Friday August
biological father, but that it is a
possibility. He says Jackson
"wanted kids but was anxious about
sex," adding the singer was "shy
Internet News Record
7th, when monthly unemployment
figures are published. The housing
market has started to show some
encouraging signs of life and rallies
of various stockmarkets around the
world have given optimists cause to
cheer. President Barack Obama has
suggested that the recession in
America is nearing an end.
However unemployment typically
continues to rise for a period even
after a recession has ended. A rapid
increase in unemployment would
not only be bad news for the jobless
but could indicate a greater risk of a
weak recovery or a double-dip
recession.
For background, see article
• MEXICO'S president, Felipe
Calderón, will welcome Barack
Obama and Stephen Harper,
Canada’s prime minister, to a two-
day summit of North American
leaders in the western city
Guadalajara starting on Sunday
August 9th. Discussions are likely
to centre on measures to tackle
greenhouse-gas emissions, the
threat of swine flu and prospects for
economic recovery. Canada and
Mexico want assurances that
America will not resort to
protectionism particularly in light
of Mr Obama’s election rhetoric,
which suggested that he wanted to
renegotiate the North American
Free Trade Agreement.
For background, see article
Back to top ^^ Readers'
comments
Readers have commented on this
article (the window for new
comments is now closed).
when it came to women."
Additionally, he says "Michael
confided in me that he found it very
difficult to do the sexual act."
Internet News Record
The Lockerbie decision: A long
shadow
(The Economist: News
analysis)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:18:34 AM
The Lockerbie decision
Aug 20th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The controversial decision to free
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the
Lockerbie bomber
THE bombing that blew up Pan
Am flight 103 in the sky above
Lockerbie, a small Scottish town,
on December 21st 1988, was the
worst terrorist atrocity in British
history. Of the 270 people who
died, 189 were Americans; 11 were
killed on the ground by falling
debris. On August 20th the only
person convicted of the crime was
released from prison in Scotland.
After a tortuous diplomatic and
legal process, Abdelbaset al-
Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence
agent, was tried in the Netherlands,
but under Scottish law, in 2000-01.
His co-accused was acquitted; Mr
Megrahi was sentenced to life, with
a minimum term that was later set
at 27 years. Now suffering from
advanced and terminal cancer, Mr
Megrahi had asked to be released
on compassionate grounds.
Separately, under a prisoner-
transfer agreement that they
recently agreed with Britain, the
Libyan authorities requested in
May that he be sent home to serve
out the rest of his sentence.
Under Scotland’s devolution
LeAnn Rimes & Eddie Cibrian Make Public Outing
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:48:00 AM
LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian
were spotted together at a very
public outing.
The rumored couple hit the golf
settlement, a little improbably the
man responsible for deciding Mr
Megrahi’s fate was Kenny
MacAskill, the Scottish justice
secretary. Mr MacAskill, had three
options: release (as sanctioned by a
Scottish law of 1993); transfer; or
keep Mr Megrahi in Greenock
prison for his few remaining days.
Mr MacAskill rejected the transfer
request, managing several digs at
the British government as he did so.
But he approved the compassionate
release; there was talk of the
prisoner being whisked back to
Libya in a jet sent by Muammar
Qaddafi, the country’s erratic
leader.
Many Americans vociferously
opposed sending Mr Megrahi back.
In unusually strident language,
Hillary Clinton, the secretary of
state, said it would be “absolutely
wrong” to free him. Ted Kennedy,
John Kerry and others also weighed
in. So did some relatives of the
dead.
But others, including some
relatives of British victims, will be
disappointed for a different reason.
There are lingering questions about
Mr Megrahi’s role and those of
other individuals and states. (In
return for the lifting of sanctions,
Libya compensated the families of
the dead and acknowledged
responsibility for the
bombing—thought by some to be
retaliation for the 1986 American
air strike on Tripoli—but Libyan
course Thursday afternoon in
Valencia, CA. The two were
spotted enjoying a day together on
the greens and driving around in a
golf cart. Both stars were in blue
Polo tops, with LeAnn in khaki
shorts. She has recently stopped
Economy/ * 23
officials implied the move was
motivated by pragmatism rather
than guilt.) The Scottish Criminal
Cases Review Commission, which
investigates potential miscarriages
of justice, had referred the case for
a second appeal. But to be eligible
for transfer, on August 18th Mr
Megrahi dropped this appeal. So
the evidence will now not be re-
examined in court.
Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first
minister, insisted before Mr
MacAskill’s decision was
Navigators Group:
announced that “there will be no
consideration of international
power politics or anything else.”
Turning the Corner
But the Lockerbie case has always (Financial Sector and Stocks business mentioned in the report
been intertwined with high politics, Analysis from Seeking Alpha) and highlighted in the conference
in particular with Mr Qaddafi’s Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:42:56 AM call was Director's and Liability
efforts to launder his reputation and insurance.
drag Libya out of international One of the largest holdings in my "Our Directors and Officers
isolation. His country’s rich individual accounts and a top ten Liability business grew
hydrocarbon deposits and its role in holding in accounts managed by significantly as we continue to
the fight against Islamist terrorism Freedom Mountain Investments is benefit from market dislocation and
may also be considerations. The Navigator's Group ( NAVG). I have a flight to quality." I believe that
fact that his son recently bumped outlined the basic case for this flight from troubled firms like AIG
into Lord Mandelson, Britain’s company in February 2008. has benefited Navigator's.
powerful first secretary, on holiday NAVG has had a few soft Other business lines such as
in Corfu, has fuelled speculation quarters of late along with pretty construction related insurance did
about a stitch-up. Whether or not much every other Property and not show signs of improvement.
such chatter is overheated, and Casualty Insurance company. But Overall this is a top notch P&C
whatever the demands of when NAVG reported earnings last insurance firm. NAVG is
compassion, justice seems not to Thursday, the report while not conservative in writing insurance
have been well-served. gangbusters, did sound a much and refuses to chase unprofitable
Back to top ^^ Readers' more positive note. business. It concentrates on niches
comments Navigators’ Chief Executive where it can have competitive
The Economist welcomes your Officer Stan Galanski commented: advantage. It will grow and
views. We are very pleased with the continue to prosper as the economy
second quarter results. Strong improves. It is not selling at an
operating performance and extreme bargain currently (around
improved investment valuations $50), but I would recommend
enabled us to increase book value purchases (as I have in the past
wearing her wedding ring. 5% during the quarter. year) if the price goes below $45.
Rimes and Cibrian met while One of the growing lines of
filming the Lifetime TV movie
"Northern Lights," and since
completion of the project tongues
have been clicking about a romance
between the two stars.
24 Economy/ Social Net/ *
A sunny outlook
(The Economist: News
analysis)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 1:18:33 AM
Aug 21st 2009
From the Economist Intelligence
Unit ViewsWire Indonesia's robust
economy continues to grow
Indonesia has proved to be less
exposed to the global recession
than many of its neighbours, and its
economy expanded by 4.2% year
on year in the first half of 2009. As
a result, the Economist Intelligence
Unit has revised up its forecast for
real GDP growth to 4.1% (from
2.6% in our previous forecast) in
2009 and 4.4% (from 3.4%
previously) in 2010.
The government's Rp71.3trn
(US$7.1bn) stimulus package for
2009, which includes cash transfers
and higher salaries for civil
servants, is supporting household
expenditure. So are lower prices for
food and fuel, which have provided
a boost to personal disposable
income.
However, we forecast that fixed
investment will expand by only
0.5% this year, as domestic firms
will experience difficulty in
obtaining capital. Before the onset
of the global financial crisis,
domestic non-financial corporations
obtained almost 50% of their
financing from abroad. The
Western investors that provided
much of this cash have since
Court Rules Against NCAA in Florida State Public Records Case
By Jim Henry (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 10:49:00 PM
by Jim Henry
Filed under: Florida State The
NCAA will need to re-examine
how it conducts business, at least
under the Florida sun.
NCAA documents in an
infractions case against Florida
scrambled to sell assets to meet
their own short-term liabilities,
which have become difficult to roll
over. As a result, many investment
plans in Indonesia are being
postponed or dropped. Moreover,
weak overseas demand will
continue to prompt companies in
the export sector to reduce
investment. Although firms have so
far not moved to lay off employees
in large numbers, possibly because
of the high severance costs that
they must pay to sacked workers,
we expect the unemployment rate
to rise in response to the
contraction in investment.
Although exporters will struggle
amid economic weakness in 2009,
imports are also likely to decline
significantly. We therefore expect
the foreign balance to continue to
make a positive contribution to
growth. Indeed, this contribution, at
1.2 percentage points, will be
double that in 2007 and 2008.
There are still downside risks to
our forecast. The international
financial crisis could deepen, with a
more damaging impact on global
economic growth and capital
inflows to Indonesia than we
currently expect. The rupiah's
exchange rate is also important to
the health of the Indonesian
economy. Although the currency
has appreciated since mid-March,
renewed weakness is possible, and
the effect of a collapse in the value
State University are public records
under state law, a Leon County
circuit judge ruled Thursday.
NCAA vice president David
Berst said from the witness stand in
Tallahassee, Fla., the ruling that
documents dealing with cheating at
FSU are public records sets a
precedent that will "rip the heart out
of the NCAA" and its efforts to
of the rupiah (not our central
forecast) would be to lower the
spending power of most
Indonesians. A weaker rupiah
would also make it more difficult
for local corporations to meet their
external debt obligations, raising
the number of bankruptcies.
In addition, political risks exist: if
deteriorating economic conditions
spark social unrest, investment
growth could be even more
sluggish than currently forecast as
investors lose confidence in the
country. That said, the outlook
remains broadly encouraging. The
convincing re-election of the
president, Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, is likely to boost
political stability and will give the
new administration a strong
mandate to pursue economic
reforms—even though many of
these will have to wait until the
worst of the global economic
downturn has passed. There are
also signs that the rate of
contraction in the global economy
has slowed in recent months, while
conditions in global financial
markets have also improved. A
stronger recovery in the global
economy than we currently forecast
would enable Indonesia's economy
to grow at a faster rate.
Back to top ^^ Readers'
comments
The Economist welcomes your
views.
ensure competition is fair and
equal.
WOW: Facebook
Launches a Twitter App
By Adam Ostrow (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:00:33 PM
This is a bit of a shocker.
Facebook, who has seemingly been
in a race to emulate many of
Twitter’s features, just announced
that it’s launching the ability for
Facebook Page admins to
simultaneously update both their
Page and Twitter.
Facebook explains how this will
work in a blog post:
“If you manage a Facebook Page,
you now will be able to decide
whether to share updates with their
Twitter followers, and you also will
be able to control what type of
updates to share: status updates,
links, photos, notes, events or all of
them.
If you have multiple Pages, you
will have the option to link each of
those Pages to different Twitter
accounts. This new feature will
only link Facebook Pages to
Twitter, not your individual profile.
It will soon be available at
http://www.facebook.com/twitter”
While that makes a lot of sense
from a convenience standpoint –
many big time Twitter users also
have popular Facebook Pages and
vice versa – it’s surprising to see
Facebook so openly acknowledge
Twitter’s reach. That said, by
Berst, a former 25-year head of
NCAA enforcement, also said if the
records were made public, it could
nix FSU's ongoing appeal in the
cheating scandal. "Possibly you
would have to withdraw the usual
due process opportunity for such an
institution," Berst said.
Court Rules Against NCAA in
Florida State Public Records Case
Internet News Record
giving users the ability to update
both services via Facebook, they’re
clearly hoping that the Facebook
Page will become the first stop for
admins.
That would mean lots of “via
Facebook” messages showing up in
tweets, and in fact, it’s not hard to
imagine Facebook quickly
becoming one of Twitter’s most
popular clients. However, I
wouldn’t expect this functionality
to be extended to user profiles
anytime soon, which would clearly
be a bigger win for Twitter than
Facebook.
We did suspect that Facebook
might be working something along
these lines last month when
messages “ via penguin FB”
showed up on Twitter by way of a
Facebook engineer. But now, we
know the details, and it definitely
creates a lot more intrigue in the
ongoing Facebook vs Twitter
battle. Reviews: Facebook, Twitter
Tags: facebook, twitter
originally appeared on Fanhouse
NCAA Football Blog on Thu, 20
Aug 2009 22:49:00 EST . Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
Blogs| Comments
Internet News Record
Capstead Mortgage: Despite Crisis, Still in Good
Shape
(Financial Sector and Stocks
Analysis from Seeking Alpha)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:06:55 AM
Capstead Mortgage, ( CMO), is a
mortgage REIT which invests
mostly in residential Adjustable
Rate Mortgages that are issued and
backed by U.S. government
agencies, Fannie Mae ( FNM),
Freddie Mac ( FRE), and Ginnie
Mae.
Obviously, the residential ARM
market has been a tumultuous place
during the housing and credit crisis,
but CMO has managed to make it
through the crisis in good shape,
and appears to be in a sweet spot
for the next few quarters.
CEO Andrew Jacobs stated
recently,
Looking out over the next several
quarters, we anticipate somewhat
higher mortgage prepayment levels,
along with lower asset yields
resulting from lower coupon
interest rates on currently resetting
ARM securities and lower yields on
acquisitions. As a result, we
anticipate financing spreads will
decline modestly in the third
quarter before beginning to
improve in the fourth quarter and
into the first half of 2010... If
current market conditions persist,
we should continue to generate
what we believe to be very
From the Windup: About Last Winter
By Matt Snyder (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:00:00 PM
by Matt Snyder
Filed under: AL Central, AL East,
AL West, NL Central, NL East, NL
West, MLB Transactions
From the Windup is Matt
attractive dividends for our
common shareholders.
We are confident our core
investment strategy of managing a
conservatively leveraged portfolio
of agency-guaranteed residential
ARM securities can produce
attractive risk-adjusted returns over
the long term while reducing, but
not eliminating, sensitivity to
changes in interest rates.
CMO increased its book value by
over 25% for the 6 months ending
6/30/09, from $9.14 to
$11.48/share, largely as a result of
improvements in the value of
interest rate swap agreements.
Their profitability also benefitted
from lower short term borrowing
costs, while diluted EPS was steady
at $.058. Here are some industry
Snyder's extended look at some
aspect of America's pastime each
Thursday.
Every Hot Stove season, each
team reshapes its roster in an
attempt to better themselves. After
each transaction, whether a free
agent acquisition, trade or
comps: Capstead Mortgage vs. Real
Estate Industry Capstead Industry
Dividend Yield 17.13% 5.68%
LongTerm Debt/Equity 11.25%
165.00% Total Debt/Equity 7.49
2.13 P/Book 1.17 2.03 P/Free
cash/Share 16.49 38.28 P/E 6.72
27.80 ROI 17.67 1.43 ROE 18.62
3.39
Looking at their current debt
load, you can see that CMO is more
highly leveraged than their
industry, but when you compare
them to the other 3 high dividend
paying stocks with strong ROE and
ROI figures in this group, that
figure, although still higher than
this sub-group, isn't as outlandish:
Obviously, this group of high
dividend stocks employs heavy
leverage to turn a profit. If you're
something else, writers and
Economy/ * Social Net/
OK with that, and you're confident
that the U.S. government will
continue to stand behind its
agencies' debts, then CMO could be
a good dividend stock to add to
your "best stocks" watch list. The
other caveat is that if and when
rates go up, their margins will most
likely shrink.
There's not a lot of volatility in
CMO, but it has recently been
pushing higher - it closed Thursday
at $13.77. If you're looking for a
cheaper price, or for another way to
profit, you might consider selling
the November $12.50 puts,
(CMOWV), which currently have a
$.40-$.60 bid/ask.
Disclosure: Author is long CMO
shares
bloggers everywhere provide knee-
jerk reactions on each particular
move. Though the majority of the
analysis is educated, it's still just
conjecture. Today, we'll take the
long view and look back at some of
the maneuvering this past offseason
and see how it played out on the
25
Eric Dane Nude
Video Under Police
Investigation
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 1:03:00 AM
Police are now involved in an
investigation of the nude video that
surfaced online of "Grey's
Anatomy" star Eric Dane, his wife
Rebecca Gayheart, and Miss U.S.
Teen Kari Ann Peniche.
According to People.com, The
LAPD has confirmed that
detectives are investigating a DVD
that they received from an unnamed
source in July.
The LAPD tells People that the
source claimed the DVD
"contained images that could link
celebrities engaging in illegal
activity," but that the footage was
leaked onto the internet before
Police could determine if a crime
was committed.
Social Good
Conference Event and
Livestream Next Friday
By Adam Hirsch (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:35:51 AM
Mashable’s first ever Social Good
SOCIAL page 26
field.
From the Windup: About Last
Winter originally appeared on
Fanhouse MLB Blog on Thu, 20
Aug 2009 19:00:00 EST . Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
Blogs| Comments
26
SOCIAL
continued from page 25
Conference is approaching. Held on
Friday, August 28 at the historic
92nd Street Y in NYC, the
conference will be a one-day
educational event celebrating the
finale of the Summer of Social
Good charitable campaign. The
conference features keynotes from
Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg and
All For Good’s Jonathan
Greenblatt, and presentations from
well known and respected
organizations and professionals
within the space focused on the
theme of “Social Media for Social
Good”.
Thanks to Livestream, if you
can’t make it to New York City,
M a s h a b l e a n d
Livestream.com/Mashable will be
hosting a stream of the event (with
chat) all day. Be sure to RSVP for
up to date information and
reminders on our Facebook Event
page.
Donations close on August 29th,
2009. If you have not donated yet
to our Summer of Social Good
fund, we ask that you please do.
Many thanks in advance and thanks
to everyone who has donated so far.
A limited number of updated
discounted tickets are on sale:
$50 General Admission for First
50 people (Max 2 tickets per
purchase) to use discount code:
Mash50Good
The brightest and biggest names
in fundraising will be there to
network, exchange ideas, and share
first-hand experiences on how to
use social media for social good.
Discover which messages resonate
most with passionate donors; cut
through the chatter on Twitter; get
more fans to your Facebook Page;
find out which formats are rising…
and fading. And learn how to use
social media to connect with others
who, like you, dream of a better
world.
Your attendance will not only
enhance your knowledge — every
single dollar from ticket sales also
helps further the vital missions of
four non-profit organizations that
are making a difference –
LiveSTRONG, WWF, The
Humane Society, and Oxfam
America. Date and Time
Date: Friday, August 28th, 2009
Time: 9:00 am — 7:00 pm EST
Location: 92nd Street Y, 1395
Lexington Avenue, New York, NY
Ticket Sales
Thanks to sponsorship from
Zappos and MailChimp, money
from all ticket sales will be donated
to the Summer of Social Good
fund.
*VIP tickets include breakfast,
lunch and Wine & Cheese Hour
**Volunteer Opportunities are
first-come first-served first-
approved. Agenda
Host: Shira Lazar, Co-Host of
This Week in YouTube
“ Shira Lazar currently hosts
Mahalo’s This Week In YouTube
and is the Editor-At-Large for
CondeNast’s Jaunted.com travel
blogging from around the globe.
She is also the founder of the The
Society For Geek Advancement,
which aims to bring together geek
culture for social good. Previously,
Shira hosted NBC’s 1ST LOOK
and OPEN HOUSE, DirecTV’s
HAVOC ON THE 101 and was a
correspondent on Reelz Channel’s
DAILIES. She has developed and
hosted online video content for
Movies.com, Hollywood.com, Live
Earth, Yahoo! TV, Verizon
VCAST and more. She was
recently the official video blogger
of Internet Week, red carpet host
for the 2009 Webby Awards and
participated as a social media
maven on Ashton Kutcher’s 24
HOURS AT SUNDANCE. Shira
also appears frequently on Fox
News Channel, CBS, and CNN. As
a crossover personality and hybrid
journalist, Shira Lazar continues to
bridge the gap between old and new
media and be a voice for the
millennial movement.”
Opening Remarks: Adam Hirsch,
Chief Operations Officer,
Mashable.com
“Adam Hirsch, Chief Operations
Officer, joined Mashable in Fall of
2007 as Community and Marketing
Manager. Adam oversees
Mashable’s business development,
including marketing, partnerships,
advertising and sponsorships, and
events. His initiatives include the
Summer of Social Good, the Open
Web Awards, as well as event
series such as the Summer Mash
Tour of 2008 and the 92YTribeca
NextUp NYC educational series.
As Pete Cashmore’s “2nd in
Command,” Adam is always on the
hunt for partnerships and
opportunities to improve Mashable
and connect with its dedicated
readership. Adam is a New York
City native and a graduate of
Cornell University.”
Pete Cashmore, CEO and
Founder of Mashable
“Working as a web technology
consultant in mid 2005, Pete
Cashmore founded Mashable from
an unlikely location: a small town
in the north of Scotland. Focusing
on up-to-the-minute news on social
networks and new websites, it
rapidly grew to be one of the top 10
blogs in the world according to the
blog ranking service Technorati.
The site’s writers have been quoted
in The New York Times, The
Washington Post and hundreds of
technology publications. Pete was
selected as a Top 25 Forbes Web
Celeb in 2007, while Mashable was
chosen as a must-read site by both
Fast Company and PC Magazine.
In mid 2007, BusinessWeek
featured Mashable as one of the
world’s most profitable blogs.”
Morning Social Media for Social
Good Keynote
Randi Zuckerberg, Marketing
Director, Facebook
“Randi Zuckerberg manages
marketing initiatives at Facebook,
where she has led the company’s
US election and international
politics strategy, as well as
pioneered several large media
partnerships. Included in The
Hollywood Reporter’s 2008 Digital
Power List, Randi has led projects
ranging from the ABC
News/Facebook Presidential
Debates to the CNN/Facebook
Inauguration Day Partnership and
Comcast’s Facebook Diaries. She is
also a television spokeswoman for
Facebook and has made
appearances on Good Morning
America, The Today Show, France
2, and World News to discuss
Facebook’s marketing and political
initiatives. Most recently, Randi
represented Facebook as a
correspondent for CNN.com’s
Inauguration Day live broadcast.”
Social Media Platforms for
Charities
Presentations by:
GlobalGiving
“GlobalGiving is an online
marketplace that connects you to
the causes and countries you care
about. You select the projects you
want to support, make a tax-
deductible contribution, and get
regular progress updates – so you
can see your impact.”
Causecast
“Causecast is a platform where
media, philanthropy, social
networking, entertainment and
education converge to serve a
greater purpose. People want to do
good, want to be inspired, and want
to inspire others to join them in
giving back. Causecast makes this
easy by providing users with means
to CONNECT with people, leaders,
charities, nonprofit organizations,
and brands that inspire them.”“The
Online Offline Connection”
Presentations by:
Summer Rayne Oakes, Model-
activist and Discovery Planet Green
Internet News Record
host
“ Summer Rayne Oakes is a
model-activist, host on Discovery
Network’s Planet Green, and author
of Style, Naturally. She works with
many brands, including Discovery,
Payless, Portico, RecycleBank, and
others – both in-front of the camera
as well as behind-the-scenes as a
sustainability advisor and
consultant. In April 2009, she
launched zoe&zac, a line of
sustainable shoes with Payless. Her
latest venture is an online site that
will streamline the sustainable
design chain set to launch in 2010.”
Kari Dunn Saratovsky, VP,
Social Innovation, The Case
Foudnation
As Vice President of Social
Innovation at the Case Foundation,
Kari Dunn Saratovsky brings with
her a decade of experience in the
government and nonprofit sectors.
Her portfolio is centered on
strengthening civic engagement and
volunteerism, developing cross-
sector partnerships, and using
technology to accelerate new
approaches to giving and
philanthropy. She is also publisher
of the Case Foundation’s Social
Citizens Blog. Kari joined the
Foundation in November of 2006
after directing the President’s
Council on Service and Civic
Participation, a presidential
commission to support and expand
volunteer service throughout the
country and around the world. Kari
brings a decade of experience in the
government and nonprofit sectors,
but her favorite role is that of a
connector — connecting passionate
people, good ideas, and new
approaches in an effort to address
social problems.
Andy Ridley, Executive Director
of Earth Hour
“Andy Ridley is the Executive
Director of Earth Hour – the global
SOCIAL page 27
Internet News Record
SOCIAL
continued from page 26
climate change campaign that was
held in over 4,000 cities and towns
in 88 countries this year with
hundreds of millions of people
taking part. Andy started with
WWF-Australia in 2002 as
Communications Director and was
co-creator of Earth Hour in 2007,
becoming Executive Director of
Earth Hour after its initial success
that year.” Charities on Social
Media
Presentations by:
Oxfam America
“Forty percent of the people on
our planet — more than 2.5 billion
— now live in poverty, struggling
to survive on less than $2 a day.
Oxfam America is an international
relief and development
organization working to change
that. Together with individuals and
local groups in more than 100
countries, Oxfam saves lives, helps
people overcome poverty, and
fights for social justice. To join our
efforts or learn more, go to
www.oxfamamerica.org.”
The Humane Society
“The Humane Society of the
United States is the nation’s largest
and most effective animal
protection organization, backed by
10 million Americans. Established
in 1954, The HSUS seeks a humane
and sustainable world for all
animals—a world that will also
benefit people. We are America’s
mainstream force against cruelty,
exploitation and neglect, as well as
the most trusted voice extolling the
human-animal bond. We advocate
for public policies to protect
animals, enforce existing laws,
educate the public, and rescue pets
and other animals when disasters
strike. Learn more about our work
to create meaningful change for
animals at humanesociety.org.”
WWF
“With nearly 5 million members
worldwide, WWF is the world`s
leading conservation organization,
working in 100 countries for nearly
half a century, and is dedicated to
delivering science-based solutions
to preserve the diversity and
abundance of life on Earth, halt the
degradation of the environment and
combat climate change. Among one
of its highest priority issues, WWF
works to stop global climate change
and its far-reaching consequences
for the world’s economies,
communities and ecosystems.”
LiveSTRONG
“At the Lance Armstrong
Foundation, we fight for the 28
million people around the world
living with cancer today. There can
be — and should be — life after
cancer for more people. That’s why
we kick in at the moment of
diagnosis, giving people the
resources and support they need to
fight cancer head-on. We find
innovative ways to raise awareness,
fund research and end the stigma
about cancer that many survivors
face. We connect people and
communities to drive social change,
and we call for state, national and
world leaders to help fight this
disease. Anyone, anywhere can join
our fight against cancer. Join us at
LIVESTRONG.org.” Social Media
for Social Good
Presentations by:
Beth Kanter, Author of Beth’s
Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use
Social Media
“ Beth is the author of Beth’s
Blog, one of the longest running
and most popular blogs for
nonprofits. In 2009, she was named
by Fast Company Magazine as one
of the most influential women in
technology and one of Business
Week’s “Voices of Innovation for
Social Media.” She is the 2009
Scholar in Residence for Social
Media and Nonprofits for the
Packard Foundation.”
Geoff Livingston, Senior Vice
President at CRT/tanaka
“ Geoff has worked as a public
relations strategist in the
Washington, D.C. region for more
than 16 years. Dubbed a “local
blogging guru” by the Washington
Post, Geoff’s award-winning book
on new media “Now is Gone” was
released in 2007. The book has
been cited by the Wall Street
Journal as a valuable resource for
social media. Some of his
experiences include United Way of
America, Save Darfur, the
Goodwill of Greater Washington,
Environmental Defense Fund,
ChildFund International, the
Campus Kitchens Project, the
Philanthropy 2.0 Project, Network
Solutions, Sully Erna (Godsmack
lead singer), and many others.”
Scott Henderson, Cause
Marketing Director at MediaSauce
During his career, Scott has
served as a major gift fundraiser,
foundation executive, magazine and
website editor, marketing
consultant, and president of a
capital campaign firm. Today, he is
cause marketing director at
MediaSauce, helping corporations
and non-profits create and
implement online strategies to bring
their next big idea to life. Recent
accomplishments include the
creation and launch of
www.pledgetoendhunger.com,
which helped Tyson Foods deliver
560,000 meals to four different
cities for families in need, raised
$28,000 for Share Our Strength,
and assembled an army of nearly
5,000 childhood hunger awareness
champions. He is also the publisher
of rallythecause.com
Drew Olanoff,
#BlameDrewsCancer
“i’m a geek, Director of
Community at GOGII and you can
see my stuff at ReadBurner,
BurnURL, @drew on twitter, and
downloadsquad. Oh and you can
blame my cancer for stuff.” Closing
Social Media for Social Good
Keynote
Jonathan Greenblatt, President,
Our Good Works
“Jonathan is the president of Our
Good Works, the parent
organization of All for Good, the
open source initiative to engage
more people in service. He
previously served as CEO of
GOOD Worldwide, co-founded
Ethos Water, the premium bottled
water that helps children around the
world get clean water, and sold
Ethos to Starbucks Coffee
Company in 2005. Greenblatt
worked as an aide focused on
international economics in the
Clinton White House and served on
the Technology and Innovation
Team of the Obama-Biden
Presidential Transition effort. He
also has advised innovative
nonprofit organizations, including
the United Nations Foundation and
the X PRIZE Foundation.” VIP
Wine and Cheese Hour – Wine
Library TV and Cabot
Thanks to Wine Library TV for
the wine donations and Cabot
Creamery for the cheese donation
for the VIP Wine and Cheese hour.
Representatives from both
companies will be on-hand at the
event.
“Gary Vaynerchuk hosts Wine
Library TV, the Internet’s most
passionate wine show. With his
unconventional, often irreverent
commentary on wine, Gary has
attracted a cult-like following of
more than 90,000 viewers a day.
Gary’s informed yet informal
approach resonates with novice and
experienced wine drinkers alike.
Wine Library TV recently
surpassed 700 episodes, and has
featured celebrity guests such as
hockey legend Wayne Gretzky,
rock star Maynard James Keenan,
Mad Money’s Jim Cramer,
esteemed wine critics Jancis
Robinson and Daniel Rogov, and
several celebrity chefs. Visit
tv.winelibrary.com to join the
27
legion of viewers who are changing
the wine world.”
“ Cabot Creamery Cooperative
has been in continuous operation in
Vermont since 1919. Known as
makers of “The World’s Best
Cheddar,” Cabot is owned by 1200
dairy farm families located
throughout New England and
upstate New York. Cabot supports
positive social deeds to make the
world a better place to live.
Therefore, we are proud supporters
of the Summer of Social Good and
the Social Good conference.”
Livestream
Thanks to Livestream the event
will be broadcasted live on
Livestream.com and Facebook.
“Livestream is the most powerful
online broadcasting platform. Our
technology democratizes television
on a global scale. We provides a
highly effective, easy to use TV
studio, with the power to create live
original programming, controlled
by users, and embeddable on any
website. Livestream has introduced
several new groundbreaking
innovations, in addition to paying
homage to traditional TV, and we
have even bigger plans for
innovation and interactivity on our
roadmap! Basically, we want to
help you become the next media
mogul.” Event Production by
Swank Productions
“ Swank Productions is one of
New York City’s premier event
planning, design, and production
firms. Chic brides, big brands,
papered teens and business moguls
all called upon Swank Productions
to produce stylish and sophisticated
events that make a stunning
impression, even on those who’ve
seen it all. In New York City and
around the world, Swank offers its
clients a chance to throw
breathtaking events that are
decadent in details and dramatic in
SOCIAL page 28
28 Social Net/ Tech Musings/
Would You Gamble With Your Twitter
Followers?
By Ben Parr (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 8:04:43 PM
There are Twitter apps for just
about everything – managing your
account from your desktop, finding
local tweeters, tweeting on-the-go,
and more.
The one we just stumbled across
though, Bet Your Followers, is
unlike any app we’ve ever
encountered before.
Bet Your Followers is part social
experiment and part Twitter game.
You compete head-on against other
Twitter users. But instead of
competing for points or cash,
you’re gambling followers – your
followers. Wager up to 5 followers
per match. Win, and you gain new,
legitimate followers. Lose, and
your opponent gets to keep them.
Yes, this game will really take
and give you followers. Once a
match starts, you have the
opportunity to improve your chance
of winning new followers by …
shaking a giant gorilla.
You compete through different
r o u n d s , p l a y i n g
against@BetYerFollowers to start.
You do actually gain points for
winning as well, which seems to
affect the level of difficulty of each
match.
(As a note to my followers, I did
not gamble you – I tested this game
on an abandoned account.) Why
Build This?
At this point, you might be a bit
shocked and appalled, as we were.
None of us want to follow someone
unless it’s of our own free will,
right? This can’t be legal under
Twitter’s Terms of Service, right?
From the 'It Seems To Me' Department
(Scripting News)
Well, to answer those questions
the creators of Bet Your Followers,
a small group of geeks from San
Francisco’s famous SOMA district,
actually wrote a letter directed
towards Twitter on their website.
I’m reposting the entire letter so
you understand just they built this
app:
Dear Twitter,
We realize that Bet Your
Followers isn’t your typical Twitter
app. We created it to examine new
behaviors and explore the value of
Twitter relationships. The reason
we made an app that lets people
risk their followers was to pose the
question: If a mass of Twitter
followers constitutes social
currency, can it be gambled and
exchanged like real currency?
We’ve been enthusiastic Twitter
users since the early days and we
genuinely value Twitter as a social
service (not to mention as a lovely
API — thank you!). Our own
followers are dearly important to
us. But as Twitter grows, we’ve
watched the race to accrue
followers become a strange
obsession. Whenever a sizeable
group believes something to be
sacred, it historically falls to artists,
scientists, and hackers to question
and play with that assumption. It is
with this curious spirit that we
created Bet Your Followers. It was
also a lot of fun to make.
We realize our efforts could be
construed as a violation of your
API Terms of Service but we hope
you see the value in our exploration
of these issues. We’d love it if you
sent us a d-message before giving
us the boot, if you’re even thinking
Sometimes 140 characters is
enough to express an idea.
of that — of course, we would
never risk unfollowing you
Sincerely,
@sferik,@jm3,@takeitez,@ryanem
mm,@kev_in
Summary: This game is a social
experiment using Twitter, albeit
one that clearly violates Twitter’s
Terms of Service. There doesn’t
seem to be any malice on the end of
the developers, just curiosity. Are
Followers Like Poker Chips?
So let’s talk about this social
experiment, before it potentially
disappears. Let’s address the key
question they pose:
“If a mass of Twitter followers
constitutes social currency, can it
be gambled and exchanged like real
currency?”
The question is built on the
assumption that Twitter followers =
social currency. And while for
some people it does, for many
others, this is not the case. Many
Twitter users could care less if they
have 10 or 10,000 followers, while
others really only care about the
ones that engage them. Spam
followers only add clutter to the
real value of Twitter. We believe a
better measure of social currency is
the retweet, the @reply, and the
quality of the conversation
generated.
But for now, let’s pretend that
Twitter followers = social currency.
Can they be exchanged like real
currency? Our answer is that, while
you could exchange them, the value
of the followers dramatically
changes. Thus, it cannot act like a
currency.
You follow people for a reason–
usually because you know them,
know of them, or just think they’re
interesting. If you suddenly follow
someone else, there’s no guarantee
that what they have to say is of any
interest at all. Your engagement
with them is going to drop, you will
retweet them less, and you may
even unfollow them because they
don’t talk about what you care
about. See how “social currency”
has become significantly devalued
in this exchange?
We appreciate the curiosity of the
Bet Your Followers team, but
heavily disagree with any assertion
that Twitter followers are social
currency. People are not currency,
and even alluding to such treads
into dangerous waters.
It’s your choice to try out this
app, but remember that what you
gain in return for what you risk is
almost certainly going to be a
losing proposition. You may lose
the entire house if your Twitter
followers find out that you used
them as barter.
At least, this is what we believe.
We’re curious to hear your
thoughts, opinions, and insights in
the comments. Reviews: Twitter
Tags: twitter
Internet News Record
SOCIAL
continued from page 27
impact.” Thanks to the Summer of
Social Good Sponsors
Thanks to Zappos and
MailChimp for sponsoring the
Summer of Social Good. Their
generous sponsorship covers the
campaign and event costs, so that
100% of your donations and ticket
sales go to the fund.
“Visit Zappos.com and outfit your
life with a new head-to-toe
wardrobe for men, women, and
kids! Step into all the clothes, bags,
shoes and more from all your
favorite brand names! Plus, enjoy
our 365-day return policy, fast &
free shipping, free return shipping
& 24-hour customer service!”
“ MailChimp is a powerful, easy-
to-use email marketing service.
You design, me deliver.
We make it easy to send email
newsletters to your customers,
manage your subscriber lists, and
track campaign performance.
Unlike some of our competitors, we
don’t ‘dumb things down.’ We take
extremely powerful tools that
sophisticated marketers use (like
segmentation, a/b testing, and ROI
tracking), and we make them
accessible to anyone.”
Tags: Events, social good
Internet News Record
6 Gorgeous Facebook Visualizations
By Stan Schroeder (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:52:57 AM
Like every complex network,
Facebook offers unlimited
possibilities of visual representation
of the various connections between
its users. We’ve chosen six
beautiful visualizations that will
awaken the (visual) geek within
you.
You don’t have to stop at merely
watching. Some of the
visualizations on the list come with
tools that you can use to create
beautiful Facebook visualizations
of your own with very little effort.
Enjoy!
Know of a beautiful Facebook
visualization? Let us know in the
comments!
1. Nexus
This Facebook add-on lets you
easily create 3D graphical
representations of the connections
in your Facebook network. You can
also view graphs for other users,
fine tune the settings to create
Project Runway Season 6: Lifetime Still Can’t Beat Bravo on
the Web
By Jennifer Van Grove
(Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 8:03:41 PM
If you’re a Project Runway fan,
you may have missed the legal
battle that ultimately moved the
show with no home to Lifetime. It’s
been an ordeal rife with Hollywood
dirt, but the bottom line is that
Project Runway season 6 will air on
Lifetime tonight, not on Bravo,
where it has developed a huge fan
base over the past five seasons.
various graphs, zoom and pan your
graph, and choose between a light
and a dark theme. The results can
be stunning, especially for users
with a lot of Facebook friends. 2.
Project Palantir
This project visualizes all the data
Facebook receives, on a global
scale. See the Facebook infoverse
as it flies around the planet!
Unfortunately, it’s not freely
available for everyone to play with,
but the video above is visually
stunning enough to make your
mouth water. 3. The Road to 200
Million Users
This wonderful illustration,
created by Lee Byron from the
Facebook data team, shows how
Facebook has evolved from being a
social network for universities to
the global social networking
powerhouse it is today, with over
200 million users. 4. Facebook
Friend Wheel
Friend Wheel is a simple
Facebook application that creates a
radial graph out of all your
We’re not in the business of
unraveling network and product
company melees, but we are quite
curious about how a show that now
has two prominent web presences
will affect the Lifetime premier and
season ratings.
Bravo has five years of Project
Runway Google juice under its belt,
which means regardless of legal
arrangements it securely holds the
top search spot for “ project
runway.” The first Lifetime listing
appears third, but could easily be
Facebook friends. Nexus can do the
same thing, but Friend Wheel’s
results are a tad more colorful. The
application also exists for Twitter.
Check the FAQ to read about its
limitations and instructions on how
to update the Wheel to display new
friends. 5. TouchGraph Facebook
missed by mainstream searchers.
This problem is potentially
Browser
This Java based application lets
you see the connections between
your Facebook friends, with
emphasis on photos; i.e., you can
see which friends have taken
photos together. This makes this
tool actually useful, in addition to
exacerbated by the flood of Project
Runway related searches today.
This situation is particularly
interesting as it sheds light on some
of the implications of building a
successful brand online. Bravo, a
property of NBC Universal, was
been at the forefront of supporting
social media connections between
fans and show personalities,
especially by encouraging continual
blog updates from the people in
front of the camera.
Now all that social media savvy
Social Net/ 29
being visually appealing. There’s
another cool feature: interactive
tags. Your friend’s names in the
photos are clickable; click on a
friend’s name to see them in
another photograph. 6. Mutual
Friend Network Visualization
Still images really don’t do
justice to this one. It’s a Flash web
application (it requires access to
your Facebook account, but it
opens right there on the author’s
site) which creates a graph of
mutual friends between you and
one of your Facebook friends. The
graph is constantly being updated
as new data flows in, and it has a
cute wobbly effect while it does it –
pure eye candy. The colors on the
graph aren’t meaningless, either:
red means female, blue is male, and
green is unknown. Reviews:
Facebook, Twitter
Tags: facebook, visualizations
and organic SEO could potentially
pose a problem to Lifetime’s effort
to pick up where Bravo left off. Of
course they’ve got a website of
their own, a Twitter account, and
Facebook Fan Page, but that still
hasn’t been enough to get them to
rank at the top of search listings.
Interestingly enough, the network
has paid for a sponsored listing,
possibly in the hopes to rectify
search confusion.
Tags: bravo, lifetime, project
runway, project runway season 6
30 Social Net/ *
Wolfram Alpha Has P. Diddy: To Be a True
Grown a Lot. You Star, You Must Also Be a
Should Try it Out Again Facebook Star
By Stan Schroeder (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 12:14:15 AM
That, at least, is what Stephen
Wolfram, founder of computational
knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha,
has tried to convince us in a lengthy
post over at the official blog.
Personally, I’ve encountered a
serious usability problem with
Wolfram Alpha that pretty much
stopped me from using it: it’s very
broad in scope, but on the other
hand it doesn’t always work
perfectly. After a while, I’ve moved
back to simple, specific tools
(found via Google) created for the
purpose of various calculations.
An example: in a recent article I
mentioned calculating your daily
calorie intake with Wolfram Alpha.
A commenter pointed out that you
cannot actually do that; you can do
various other similar calculations,
but not that one – and calculating
daily calorie intake is precisely
what most users need.
Search Google images on your cell phone
By Jessica Dolcourt
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:14:00 PM
Google image search is no longer
restricted to iPhone and Android
phones.(Credit: Screenshot by
Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)
Last March, Google's mobile
team made it possible to search for
Now, without giving specific
examples, Stephen Wolfram says
that Wolfram Alpha has grown
tremendously. Here are some
numbers: 2 million lines of
Mathematica code were added,
meaning the engine has grown by a
52%; there have been nearly 50,000
manual groups of changes to its
data; thousands of bugs were
squashed, and the team behind the
project has grown a lot.
Read the entire post for all the
details, but it can be summed with
one important sentence. “It’s been a
great first summer for
Wolfram|Alpha. It was a mad dash
to launch Wolfram|Alpha when we
did,” claims Wolfram. It means:
Wolfram Alpha is just a baby, don’t
leave it yet. I’ll make sure to give it
another go; will you? Reviews:
Google
Tags: wolfram alpha
images on your iPhone and
Android phone. On Thursday, they
rolled out image search for feature
phones; that is, for pretty much any
cell phone make and model with a
Web browser.
Image search will work roughly
the same way it does through a
desktop browser. Starting from
Google.com in the mobile browser,
By Stan Schroeder (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 3:38:06 AM
Sean “Diddy” Combs, also known
as P. Diddy, digs Facebook. He just
launched a new competition show
on MTV called Starmaker. The
show is similar to American Idol,
but Diddy claims the rules of
stardom have changed, and that
he’ll be putting great emphasis on
social media and social networking
tools such as Facebook.
“Before, it was just at live shows,
now you have to be able to do a
great live show, you have to be able
to do a great online interview, you
need to have a great Facebook
page, you have to have a great
television performance,” he said.
There’s no arguing with that.
Another sentence, however, proves
that Diddy is onto something that
the record industry as a whole still
largely ignores: “You have to
understand how to be able to brand
yourself,” he said. Exactly. As a
musician, today you can do more
for your image and your fans
through simple, freely available
tools such as Twitter, Facebook,
Wordpress, than an army of spin
click "Images" in the top
navigation, then fill in your search
doctors hired by record companies.
Learning to leverage these tools, as
proven by musicians such as Nine
Inch Nails, Radiohead, Josh Freese,
Amanda Palmer and others, will be
a crucial part of every musician’s
career, while record companies, in
their current form, might become
more or less irrelevant.
[image credit: Wikipedia]
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter,
Wikipedia, WordPress
Tags: facebook, music,
musicians, P Diddy
term. Google will return thumbnail
images in the results page; between
eight and fourteen, Google wrote in
a blog post.
Click on one of these pictorial
results to see a larger thumbnail
image. Below, there's a link to view
the photo in its original Web page
and another one that takes you to
the full-size image. You're also able
Internet News Record
Michael Jackson Film to
Have Two-Week
Limited Release & New
Date
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:40:00 PM
A film comprised of Michael
Jackson's rehearsal footage from his
"This Is It" tour has a new arrival
date, and will be shown in a two-
week limited release worldwide,
says a new report.
The Associated Press reports that
'Michael Jackson: This Is It' will be
released a couple days earlier than
previously reported.
The film, which is set to hit the
big screen on Oct. 28, will be
directed by Kenny Ortega('High
School Musical 3: Senior Year'),
who had also worked with the King
of Pop on the "This Is It" tour,
according to the AP.
to navigate "left" and "right" arrows
to view other image results.
As with all Internet-dependent
mobile apps, the slower your data
or Wi-Fi connection is, the slower
these images will be to load.
Internet News Record * 31

A back-to-school guide for college students

By Don Reisinger
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 10:56:03 AM

It's almost time for college

students to head back to class. It's
an exciting time for both the
students and those who want to see
their loved ones succeed. But doing
it alone with no help from the Web
doesn't make much sense
nowadays.
That's why I've compiled a list of
resources for students to use when
they head back to college. Whether
it's finding textbooks or getting
help with tough subjects, every
student should use at least some of
these sites.
College tools
BuddySchool BuddySchool helps
you find tutors that can assist you
with some of your difficult class
subjects.
When you get to the site, you'll
need to find the class topic you're
having trouble with. Once you find students on your campus. Simply need to perform, when it's due, and price. classes to the site. In some cases,
what you're looking for, find your school, choose the listing how long you estimate it will take I was genuinely impressed by the classes are already available for
BuddySchool lists several tutors on topic you're looking for, and you're to complete it, GradeFix charts sheer number of textbooks particular schools. If your class isn't
each subject. Those listings include all set. You can even subscribe to your homework schedule until it's Half.com lists on its site. From yet included in the database, you
a brief synopsis of the tutor's each listing's RSS feed, so you complete. You can also tell the site accounting to literature, the site has can quickly add it to NoteMesh.
expertise, how they can help, and don't miss when new products are when you have tests, so it can help just about anything students might From there, it walks you through
how much they charge for their added. It's a great idea, but you determine when to study for be looking for. Its search function five steps to take notes in your
time. If you like what you see, you unfortunately, not too many exams. It's a great time- works well. The site's design makes class. Classmates can then look at
can set up a time to be tutored. All colleges are listing products. That management tool. My only finding textbooks quick and easy. your notes, modify them as they see
payments are sent through the site said, larger schools tend to have complaint is that it's not easy to And since all the textbooks listed fit, or add items to the notes you
to ensure the tutor is getting paid more listings. Your mileage may tweak your homework settings. on the site are categorized based on might have missed. Of course,
before they help. The site also vary. And if you have more than seven their condition, students can choose NoteMesh requires you to have a
features a review listing, so you can CollegeClassifieds features tasks, you'll need to get the paid just how much they're willing to laptop in class. If you do, it's a fine
determine if other users' several listings on its site.(Credit: plan, which will set you back $5 pay for that psychology textbook. collaborative tool to try out.
experiences were positive or not. Screenshot by Don per month. It's a great service. NoteMesh will help you
BuddySchool lists several tutors Reisinger/CNET) GradeFix helps you chart your Half.com features some nicely collaborate with friends on
for you to consider.(Credit: GradeFix If you're having trouble homework schedule.(Credit: discounted textbooks.(Credit: notes.(Credit: Screenshot by Don
Screenshot by Don optimizing the amount of time Screenshot by Don Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Reisinger/CNET) you're spending on homework, Reisinger/CNET) Reisinger/CNET) TuitionCoach TuitionCoach is a
CollegeClassifieds If you're GradeFix is the place to be. Half.com eBay's Half.com is a NoteMesh NoteMesh is a great resource for any college student
looking to find some on-campus After you sign up for GradeFix, great place for students to find way to collaborate with other who might be concerned about
merchandise, CollegeClassifieds is you're asked to input all the classes textbooks. The site allows students classmates on notes. paying for college.
for you. you're currently taking. Upon doing who already completed a class to To sign up for NoteMesh, you'll When you get to the site, you can
As the name suggests, so, the site lets you add all the sell their books. Students entering need to have a college e-mail immediately input your personal,
CollegeClassifieds provides assignments you have yet to those same classes can buy them address. After you sign up, you can
classified listings from college complete. Based on the work you from those students at a discounted immediately start adding your BACK-TO-SCHOOL page 35
32 * Internet News Record
Google's 64-bit Chrome starts
emerging--on Linux
By Stephen Shankland
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:41:00 PM
Google has begun work on a 64-
bit version of Chrome for Linux, a
move likely to whip Linux loyalists
into a lather of excitement.
"The V8 team did some amazing
work this quarter building a
working 64-bit port. After a handful
of changes on the Chromium side,
I've had Chromium Linux building
on 64-bit for the last few weeks,"
said Chrome engineer Dean
McNamee in a mailing list message
Thursday.
V8 is Chrome's engine for
running programs written in the
JavaScript language common on
the Web. Chromium is the open-
source project behind Google's
branded and supported Chrome
browser, and McNamee shared
instructions for programmers to
build 64-bit Chromium.
Virtually all PCs today come with
64-bit processors from Intel or
Advanced Micro Devices, but for
desktop computing, 32-bit
operating systems and software are
common. The transition to 64-bit
software is well under way--notably
with Linux and Mac OS X--but the
change isn't simple. In the browser
world, for example, it can be
problematic running a 64-bit
browser with a 32-bit plug-in such
as Adobe Systems' Flash,
Microsoft's Silverlight, or Sun
Microsystems' Java.
In 64-bit versions, programs can
take advantage of larger amounts of
memory, performance can benefit
from extra storage spaces called
registers on processors, and some
mathematically intense computing
tasks can run faster. But along with
issues such as broken plug-ins, 64-
bit software can hog more disk
space, complicate programmers'
testing and support chores, and
often doesn't really run appreciably
faster, so the transition isn't
necessarily a top priority.
For example, Mac OS X already
is most of the way through its 64-
bit transition, but 64-bit Safari
won't arrive until Mac OS X 10.6,
aka Snow Leopard, which is due in
coming weeks. Apple, by the way,
says that JavaScript will run much
faster on the 64-bit version of
Safari.
But Linux fans, who offset their
smaller numbers with higher
technical proficiency and a
fondness for programming, are
champions of 64-bit software. They
hammered Adobe until it released a
64-bit version of Flash Player for
Linux, and now they're agitating for
64-bit browsers.
Indeed, a discussion emerged on
Wednesday about why a 64-bit
version of Firefox isn't a higher
priority.
"Optimizations such as the
Tracemonkey JIT engine (a just-in-
time compiler for JavaScript) have
yet not been implemented for x86-
64, which means that the i686 build
will be faster than the x86-64
build," among other reasons,
replied Mozilla's Benjamin
Smedberg.
Windows is another matter
altogether for browser makers;
although 64-bit Windows is a
common option nowadays on new
machines, the vast majority of
existing ones are still using 32-bit
Windows, and there are plenty of
late adopters.
A 64-bit version of Internet
Explorer ships with Microsoft's 64-
bit versions of Windows, but Safari
for Windows won't be available
alongside the Mac OS X version
when it debuts. The work to rebuild
JavaScript engines for 64-bit chips
applies to multiple operating
systems, so producing a version for
one operating system does help
move a given browser to the others.
So what's standing in the way of
64-bit Chrome for Windows?
"Motivation," according to
another message by Google's Marc-
Antoine Ruel. Well, not just that.
Google or others also need to work
on the sandbox security mechanism
and gyp programming tools, he
said.
Originally posted at Deep Tech
Twitter API getting
location data
By Rafe Needleman
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 3:46:00 PM
Biz Stone from Twitter has
announced that the service will
soon get a new feature in its API:
the capability to optionally put
geolocation data into tweets.
Currently, geo-focused apps like
Foursquare must hack location data
into updates by linking them to
Web pages. Once Twitter lets
developers embed geo into tweets
themselves, a new and interesting
world for developers will likely
open up.
As Stone says in his post, "For
example, with accurate, tweet-level
location data you could switch from
reading the tweets of accounts you
follow to reading tweets from
anyone in your neighborhood or
city--whether you follow them or
not. It's easy to imagine how this
might be interesting at an event like
a concert or even something more
dramatic like an earthquake."
By having the geodata available
only to developers, though, and not
via the general Twitter.com user
interface, the company may also
shift the economics of Twitter a bit.
If geodata in tweets can only be
written and read by apps and third-
party Web services, those services
will become even more valuable,
possibly kicking off yet another
round of Twitter client battles.
Which I'm in favor of.
Another change this move may
presage is an expansion of
information that Twitter stores with
tweets. Obvious items that
developers could go to town with in
an expanded Twitter API include
conversational and retweet data
(which Twitter is already working
on), and of course embedded
URLs. Twitter could, arguably, let
developers put links directly into
Tweets without relying on fragile
third-party URL shorteners.
This move also may show that
Twitter is willing to let its SMS
roots go by the wayside. If a user
reads a geocoded tweet in a text
message, they will only get part of
the message (the text, without the
geodata). If Twitter is finally able
to shed the SMS encumbrance,
what might happen to the core of
Twitter itself, the 140-character text
limit, which itself is based on the
limits of text messaging?
Originally posted at Rafe's Radar
Internet News Record * 33

GReactions pulls Web

chatter into Google
Reader
By Josh Lowensohn
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:09:00 PM

If you're a frequent Google Reader grabbing them from Twitter,

Google Apps Script gets green light
By David Meyer
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 5:39:00 AM
Google Apps Script automates
processes such as sending e-mails
regarding spreadsheet data.(Credit:
Google Enterprise Blog)
Google officially rolled out its
Apps Script functionality for
enterprise users Wednesday,
following a limited pilot release
earlier this year.
Google Apps Script works mainly
within the Spreadsheets app to
automate various processes. For
example, users can automate the
sending of e-mails based on data
held in a spreadsheet, or create
scripts that communicate with other
Web services.
"Back in May we announced a
pilot release of Google Apps Script,
and after thousands of hours of use,
and lots of valuable feedback, we're
excited to launch Google Apps
Script to all Google Apps Premier
and Education Edition customers
today," Google Apps products
manager Evin Levey wrote in a
blog post Wednesday.
Giving an example of how Apps
Script can be used, Levey described
an expense approval scenario, in
which the script automatically
converts foreign currency to local
currency, pulls historical exchange
rates from external Web services,
picks up on missing data, and flags
certain expense categories for
review.
"Even more useful, the script can
figure out whose approvals are
needed and automatically request
approval from those people," Levey
wrote. "And once approved, the
script sends a note to the finance
department for payment -- all
without writing a single e-mail."
Google Apps Premier and
Education Edition customers can
locate the scripts functionality
through the Tools menu in the
Spreadsheets app. Levey wrote that
the Apps team is seeking feedback
on what customers come up with in
their use of the tool.
Also on Wednesday, Google's
enterprise team announced another
tool called Side-by-Side search.
The tool allows users to compare
the results of two separate searches
based on the same body of data,
which the team said would allow
the evaluation of the Google Search
Appliance (GSA) against a
company's existing enterprise
search product.
The team also announced an
upgraded suite of GSA Connectors,
including an Enterprise Labs
release of a connector for the
Salesforce CRM system.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK
reported from London.
Originally posted at News -
Business Tech
user, you know full well that user
comments on blog posts do not
come along for the ride. On some
blog feeds, it can tell you how
many user comments there are, but
on others, you typically have to
visit the post to know.
A new solution called GReactions
has attempted to fix this by slurping
up comments from around the Web
that are related to the post you're
looking at. When it works, it's a
seamless experience.
The Firefox extension is powered
by Context Voice, which does the
dirty work. This service tracks
related conversation in places like
Twitter, Digg, Reddit, WordPress
blogs, and FriendFeed. It then
clumps together those bits of
conversation it picks up, and orders
them chronologically.
To help sort through this mess,
the tool lets you filter by source.
You're also given a time line, which
breaks down when each comment
or mention is from.
GReactions sucks in comments
from a variety of sources. Here it's
WordPress and FriendFeed.(Credit:
CNET)
In my brief testing with it
installed, it was most useful with
older content that had been given a
chance to be passed around the
Web. Newer items, especially from
niche blogs, had no related
discussion.
For heavy Google Reader users,
this is an extension that's definitely
worth installing. It doesn't actually
do any of its magic until you hit the
"comments" button that's added to
the Google Reader interface when
installed. This means it's not going
to slow down the initial load of
your feed, or interfere with things
like Gears.
Google continues to run its own
internetwork comment system on
top of blog posts, which can only
be seen by other Google Reader
users. So short of visiting each site
to see what other users are talking
about, this is the next best way to
quickly eyeball user discussion.
Originally posted at Web Crawler

How a Darkhorse Could Win the Heisman

By Clay Travis (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:01:00 PM
by Clay Travis
Filed under: Heisman Last week I
wrote a piece explaining that Eric
Berry was Tennessee's redemption
for Charles Woodson's unjustified
Heisman Trophy in 1997. I was
pleased to see that every Michigan
fan that responded agreed that
Woodson's victory was illegitimate.
It's so nice when we can all come
together and agree on things.
Let's now look at something for
this season: Can anyone other than
Tim Tebow, Sam Bradford, or Colt
McCoy win the Heisman? I think
the answer is yes.
How a Darkhorse Could Win the
Heisman originally appeared on
Fanhouse NCAA Football Blog on
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:01:00 EST .
Please see our terms for use of
feeds.
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34 * TechTips/ Tech Musings/
Twitter pro accounts coming by end
of '09
By Caroline McCarthy
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:06:01 AM
Well, it looks like they'll actually
do it.
In an interview with
VentureBeat's Matt Marshall,
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone
elaborated on the company's goal to
put out a revenue model before the
end of the year. He said that yes,
it'll involve offering paid accounts
to businesses that use the
microblogging platform for
marketing, customer relations,
publicity, and what-have-you.
That's something Twitter has been
hinting at for about a year now.
There's not a whole lot of detail
available. But paid accounts will
Wordpress gets own URL shortener
By Rafe Needleman
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 5:28:00 PM
As I have said in recent stories
about short URLs, I believe that
content management systems
(blogging platforms, for example)
should have their own short-link
generators. Why hand over control
of your traffic -- and your analytics
-- to a third party, after all?
Automattic's Wordpress.com has
launched just exactly this: its own
built-in short-link generator. When
you're creating a post on the
Wordpress.com service, you get an
64-Bit Google Chrome Coming to Linux [Browsers]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:00:00 AM
Linux users are some of the first
to tout (or demand) the benefits of
definitely involve statistics and
analytics that aren't available
through Twitter's existing
application program interface
(API), and possibly a whole
separate "commercial API" for
business-related applications. This
adds to a move earlier this year in
which Twitter started rolling out an
account verification process for
In fact, Stone told Marshall, the
first test phase of these accounts is
already underway with a few
companies. Considering Twitter's
status as marketing heaven, this is
probably a product that will sell
quite well. And since Twitter,
option to create a wp.me link
alongside the post's default link.
Wordpress.com users can now get
short links from the blog entry
page.(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe
Needleman/CNET)
The big advantage to these links,
over links from third parties, is that
they are pretty much guaranteed to
work as long as the Wordpress.com
system lives. There's no additional
point of failure you introduce by
using one of these links. They're
also really easy to generate -- you
get a short link as you're writing
your post.
Short links have been created for
64-bit computing, and it looks like
the devotion may pay off. CNET
points to Chrome developer mailing
list posts indicating that a 64-bit
build of Chrome's open-source,
which has raised $55 million in
venture funding, has yet to turn a
profit, that's good news.
Marshall points out something
important: "It might be hard to
tease out who is using the service
professionally and who is using it
for personal reasons, and then
charge them for it. So the idea is to
build a set of features that people
are willing to pay for." Stone made
it pretty clear in the interview that
ordinary Twitter users won't be
forced to pay up.
Another interesting tidbit: Stone
said that Twitter had been looking
to acquire social-network
aggregator FriendFeed, which
eventually sold to Facebook earlier
this month.
Originally posted at The Social
every post created using the
Wordpress.com platform, which
also means that the short links
aren't as short as they could
otherwise be. When I tried to get
development-stage Chromium
Randy Jackson to Testify on
Memorabilia Deal
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 2:26:00 AM
Michael Jackson's brother Randy
is expected to testify in court in Los
Angeles on Friday, read on for
more details.
Randy, an accountant, and a
lawyer are scheduled to testify
about why a memorabilia tour may
The FCC loves RSS
(Scripting News)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:20:20 PM
It came through in a tweet today,
and I gotta say it's great news.
"We discovered RSS! More to
come soon."
Coool! Can't wait to see what's
coming soon.
RSS is totally an FCC kind of
new short links for posts on my
own blog, the identifying part of
the link was eight characters long.
New and sparely used shorteners
create shorter links: Vb.ly is still
counterpart is well underway,
ahead of versions for Windows or
OS X. So while Microsoft and
Apple will have built-in 64-bit
browsers for their 64-bit systems,
Internet News Record
not be beneficial for the late King
of Pop's estate, the Associated Press
reports.
According to the AP, AEG had
planned to coordinate the tour at the
same time as the opening of the
film that includes Jackson's final
rehearsal footage, but Jackson's
mother Katherine did not support
the proposed deal.
thing. It's a package of net
neutrality. A level playing field in a
box. It's mom and apple pie,
baseball, hot dogs, and (do they still
make Chevrolets).
If anyone at the FCC is listening,
if you liked RSS, wait till you see
rssCloud. It makes RSS updates
happen in an instant!
creating two-character identifiers.
The Wordpress.com link
shortener is "bespoke," Automattic
founder Matt Mullenweg told me.
"The whole point," he said, "is to
couple the permanence of the
shortened URL with the canonical
one."
Mullenweg also said that
Wordpress software users (as
opposed to users of the
Wordpress.com platform) can get
access to the shortener if they use
the Stats plugin.
Originally posted at Rafe's Radar
Linux gets a helping hand in the
browser field from the big G.
Internet News Record
BACK-TO-SCHOOL
continued from page 31
non-identifiable financial
information. It asks how many
people live in your home, what
your household income is, and
more. It then calculates an estimate
of what you'll likely be asked to
pay out of your own pocket for
college. Once you figure it out, you
can use TuitionCoach to help you
find special grants or loans you
might qualify for to reduce your
attendance cost. I wasn't able to dig
too deep into its savings methods (it
asked for school information that I
obviously don't have), but it looks
like it might be a handy tool worth
checking out.
TuitionCoach asks you to input
your personal financial
information.(Credit: Screenshot by
Don Reisinger/CNET)
Tutorz Tutorz is a site that's
designed to help you with difficult
subjects.
Unlike BuddySchool, Tutorz has
an extremely simple, nice design to
help you find local tutors. Simply
input the class you're looking for
Gary Sheffield, Mets at Odds Over Contract Extension
By Ed Price (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:03:00 PM
by Ed Price
Filed under: Mets NEW YORK --
The greatest constant of Gary
Sheffield's career has been not
home runs nor postseason
appearances but his overriding
concern with his next contract.
help with followed by your ZIP
code. The site will then list tutors
living in your area. They also tell
you how much their service costs.
The site has several tutors. You'll
find someone to help you in just
about any location, regardless of
how close you are to a major metro
area. If you like what you see, you
can contact the tutor from the page.
Tutorz is simple and convenient.
Tutorz will help you find tutors
on a variety of subjects.(Credit:
Screenshot by Don
Reisinger/CNET)
My top 3
1. NoteMesh: Collaborating on
notes is quite appealing with
NoteMesh.
2. Tutorz: Finding a tutor to help
you with any class is best done with
the help of Tutorz.
3. GradeFix: If you need help
managing your time, GradeFix is
the site for you.
According to reports on the
websites of the New York Post and
Newsday, Sheffield Thursday asked
the Mets for a contract extension
and was refused.
That led to his being pulled from
the lineup as, according to the Post,
he threatened to leave the team. But
Sheffield stayed for the game,
striking out as a pinch hitter in the
Without the NBA Age
Minimum, Is Derrick
Rose a Cheater?
By Tom Ziller (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:00:00 AM
by Tom Ziller
Filed under: Bulls, Grizzlies,
NBA Draft I don't aim to defend
the practice of cheating on your
SAT, as Bulls star Derrick Rose is
alleged to have done prior to
enrolling at the University of
Memphis in 2007. Even at age 17,
Rose should know better. His
brother Reggie Rose should have
known better. Any other advisers
potentially involved in the alleged
fake-out should have known better.
No excuse erases that.
But humor me for a second.
We're told by David Stern that the
NBA age minimum is a business
decision, that the league's owners
benefit from being able to see these
bucks play for a year elsewhere
(college, Europe, D-League). That
the league benefits from being able
to remove its scouts from high
school gyms and AAU
tournaments. That, in the end, the
players benefit from the softer
transition from amateur to pro.
eighth inning.
More Coverage: Mets Release
Rose, one of the league's brightest
young stars, saw his reputation take
a massive hit Wednesday, all for a
violation that never would have
occurred if he didn't have to wait a
year to join the league. The age
minimum rule essentially paved the
way for the criminalization of
Rose's image. And Rose isn't the
only one.
Without the NBA Age Minimum,
Is Derrick Rose a Cheater?
originally appeared on Fanhouse
NBA Blog on Fri, 21 Aug 2009
08:00:00 EST . Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
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Livan Hernandez
Gary Sheffield, Mets at Odds
Over Contract Extension originally
appeared on Fanhouse MLB Blog
on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:03:00 EST
. Please see our terms for use of
feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
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* 35
On Fifth Team in Seven
Years, Has Javier
Vazquez Finally Found
Home?
By Ed Price (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:00:00 AM
by Ed Price
Filed under: Braves,
Diamondbacks, White Sox,
Yankees NEW YORK -- Maybe
Javier Vazquez has finally found a
home.
Despite remarkable consistency,
Vazquez has been traded four times
in the past six years and has made
100 starts for just one of the five
franchises for which he has played.
The latest is Atlanta, where
Vazquez is having a strong but
somewhat overlooked season.
"I love it here," Vazquez told
FanHouse. "It was always a place
that I saw myself playing one day.
It never happened until this year,
but I'm happy it did."
On Fifth Team in Seven Years,
Has Javier Vazquez Finally Found
Home? originally appeared on
Fanhouse MLB Blog on Fri, 21
Aug 2009 10:00:00 EST . Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
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36 * TechTips/ Entertainment/
Fantasy Football Thursday Chat:
Aug. 20
By R.J. White (FanHouse)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:00:00 PM
by R.J. White
Filed under: Expert Chats
Brett Favre. Brett Favre. Brett
Favre. There, that should get
everyone's attention.
I know you're in full preparation
mode for your fantasy football
draft, so you're probably busy
tweaking your cheat sheets and
plowing through mock drafts. If
you have some questions you want
answered or if you just want some
Entertainment Weekly's Fall Preview
issue will have a 40 minute ad from CBS
By Bob Sassone (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:30:00 AM
When you think of print
magazines, what do you want to see
in them? More pages? More
features? More color? Less
advertising?
How about more advertising?
How about video advertising? How
about 40 minutes of video
opinions on particular players and
situations around the league, then
join us at 6 PM ET today for our
weekly fantasy football chat. We'll
do our best to get you primed and
prepared for the big day. The
Season Is Near: Play FREE Fantasy
Football at Fleaflicker
Fantasy Football Thursday Chat:
Aug. 20 originally appeared on
Fanhouse Fantasy Football on Thu,
20 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EST . Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Linking
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advertising? That's what CBS is
putting in the September Fall
Preview issue of Entertainment
Weekly(in limited areas only).
Here's the video.
[via Adfreak]
Filed under: Industry,
Programming, Video, Reality-Free
Permalink| Email this| |
Comments
Remains of the Day: Is the Music Industry
Seriously Still Upset About Lyric Search
Edition [For What It's Worth]
By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:00:00 PM
Our favorite pop-up-free lyrics
site LyricWiki has to shutdown its
API because of complaints from
music publishers, Mozilla's Bespin
gets some nice collaboration
features, and Mark Pilgrim helps
developers dive into HTML 5.
• The end of free lyrics? Much-
loved lyrics search engine
LyricWiki is forced by publishers
to shut down its API, much to the
chagrin of developers (including
this dabbling developer of
MixTape.me). [MacWorld]
• Collaboration in Bespin Mozilla
Bespin, the previously mentioned
web-based text editor, continues its
progression, this time with
impressive in-browser
collaboration. [Joe Walker]
• Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a
Vicious Stress Loop Stressing out
over the work, the economy, etc?
Apparently your brain's not really
helping. [NYT]
• Apparently The Safest Browser
Is Whoever Is Paying Yahoo The
Most Yahoo stirs up some dust,
recommending the Firefox users try
the "New, Safer IE8."
[TechCrunch]
• Milk the Cow Dashboard Widget
for OS X If you're smack dab in the
overlapping zone of the Venn
diagram of RTM lover and
Dashboard lover, this will be good
news. [RTM Blog]
Internet News Record
• Dive Into HTML 5 Programmer
and writer extraordinaire Mark
Pilgrim releases the beginning of
his opus on HTML 5 to the web.
• Open Source Textbook
Company Now BMOC at 400
Colleges We offered our tips for
finding your textbooks for free (or
cheap), but Wired highlights how
open-source textbooks are starting
to catch on for students wanting to
save money and professors willing
to give it a shot. [Wired]
• Study Finds That Online
Education Beats the Classroom
Thinking about getting an
education online? One study thinks
you may be making the smart
choice. [NYT]
Internet News Record
Listen for Android Finds and Plays
Podcasts, Audio Clips [Downloads]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:30:00 AM
Android: Google's come out with
a free app, Listen, that searches,
downloads, queues and plays
podcasts and audio clips. It's great
at finding and playing audio, but
could be more intuitive in
managing your download schedule.
I'd previously pointed out Acast
as a highly configurable, worthy
podcast manager in our roundup of
10 neat and productive Android
apps. While Listen is a bit easier to
get into, and includes non-RSS
audio in the mix, the type of users
that does heavy podcast listening
may find themselves wishing for a
few of ACast's options.
When you first arrive in Listen,
you'll want to search out podcasts
to subscribe to. Listen's search is
powerful and accurate, as you
might expect, but clicking on a
result gives you the option to "Add
Best Video-Sharing Site? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]
By Jason Fitzpatrick
(Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 5:00:00 PM
A decade ago sharing high-
resolution video over the internet
was unheard of. Now we swap
video with astounding speed and
ever higher quality, thanks to
several popular web sites.
Photo by jordan a.m..
This week we want to hear about
the service you use to share video.
to queue" or "Listen now," with
"Subscribe" tucked away as a check
box in the upper-right corner.
Adding a show to your "Listen
Queue" from any screen gives you
the ability to download, stream it,
What makes your service of choice
so great? Whether it's the interface,
the built-in editor, or the lack of
size restrictions, we want to know
what makes the service stand out.
Hive Five nominations take place
in the comments, where you post
your favorite tool for the job. We
get hundreds of comments, so to
make your nomination clear, please
include it at the top of your
comment like so: VOTE: Video-
Sharing Site. Please don't include
or play it if it's already downloaded,
but that leads to the kind of second-
guessing—will this show here
stream or download when I'm done
with my current listening?—that
makes software a less fluid
experience. On the plus side, you
can save and subscribe to podcast
searches as well as feeds, so if you
wanted to keep up on every podcast
discussing, say, healthcare reform
(and, hey, more power to you), you
could do so across the broad
spectrum of audio out there.
Listen isn't too confusing for the
simple grabbing and listening of
podcasts, and having another free
podcast client in the Android
Market is definitely a good thing.
But giving users the ability to better
control when podcasts are
downloaded, perhaps only over Wi-
Fi or in a separate queue, would
make it even better. Listen is a free
download for Android devices
only. Listen[Google Labs]
your vote in a reply to another
commenter. Instead, make your
Google Labs Launches
Listen Podcast App
By Dana Oshiro
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:44:31 PM
Google Labs just launched Listen-
an "audio magazine" that allows
Android users to subscribe to
programs and search terms to queue
up their podcasts for easy listening.
While Listen only offers English
audio podcasts for now, the
company plans on expanding to
index video and content in other
languages in the coming months.
The product allows you to keep a
couple hours of audio on your
phone for your daily commute, lets
you share podcasts with friends,
and helps you find the latest
updates for breaking news stories.
Sponsor
To get started, users can search
for specific podcast titles or topics
including technology, politics or
vote and reply separate comments.
If you don't follow this format, we
may not count your vote. To
prevent tampering with the results,
votes from first-time commenters
may not be counted. After you've
made your nomination, let us know
what makes it stand out from the
competition.
About the Hive Five: The Hive
Five feature series asks readers to
answer the most frequently asked
question we get: "Which tool is the
TechTips/ Web/ 37
news. From here, you can start
listening immediately or choose to
subscribe to a program and save it
for a later date. The Listen Queue
also allows users to rearrange their
episodes in the order of their
choice. The ability to search for
new content via the device is
something missing from many of
the current iPhone services like
RSS Player.
Listen is currently only available
for Android-powered phones such
as the G1 and myTouch 3G from T-
Mobile. To download the
application, users can scan the
enclosed QR code and follow the
onscreen instructions or look for
Listen in the Google Android
Market. Discuss
best?" Once a week we'll put out a
call for contenders looking for the
best solution to a certain problem,
then YOU tell us your favorite tools
to get the job done. Every weekend,
we'll report back with the top five
recommendations and give you a
chance to vote on which is best. For
an example, check out last week's
Hive Five Best Apartment Search
Tools.
38 TechTips/
Would You Pay More for Better Call
Quality? [Ask The Readers]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 5:30:00 AM
Freakonomics author Stephen J.
Dubner made a call with "real land
lines," and was amazed he could
"actually hear." He believes we've
traded fidelity and reliability for
price and convenience. We're
wondering if you'd pay more for
better call quality.
Photo by the JoshMeister.
We'd all like to have crystal-clear
audio and a .01 percent chance of a
call dropping out for the prices we
currently pay, but it does appear
cell carriers and digital phone
providers are, in Dubner's words,
engaged in a race to the bottom. He
suggests there might be room for a
player to offer high-quality calls,
Turn an iPhone Box into an iPhone Dock
[IPhone]
By Jason Fitzpatrick
(Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:30:00 AM
You just blew some cash on an
iPhone, why spend anymore on a
dock? Using just the stuff that came
with your iPhone you can make a
sturdy and novel-looking stand.
For what they are, docks of all
sorts—not just iPhone docks—can
be a bit on the pricey side.
Who wants to pay too much for
something that amounts to a hunk
of plastic that holds a USB cable in
the right spot? Not Flickr-user
Sayesbury that's for sure.
He built a zero-cost dock out of
the packaging and parts in the
the kind where you can actually
hear the other person just fine, for a
premium over what we pay now for
the ability to mostly make out
words. There are other, social
iPhone's box.
I wanted a dock stand for the
iphone, but I could not believe
Apple want £35 for it.
Seeing as the iphone already
Internet News Record
perks, too:
Better cell quality would cut
down on the annoyance factor of
overhearing other people's calls
(because they are often shouting,
since they can't hear the person
they're talking to) and maybe even
auto safety (since poor audio
quality is yet an additional
distraction to a driver).
So let's hear how Dubner's
suggestion plays among our phone-
savvy crowd. Tell us what you
would and wouldn't pay for from a
carrier, and what you'd specifically
like fixed if you were an All-
Powerful CEO, in the comments.
Use a Camcorder to Spur
Why Is Phone Fidelity So
Poor?[Freakonomics Blog /
More Exercise Reps [Mind
NYTimes.com]
Hacks]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) ... To combat this mental block, I
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:00:00 AM started placing a camera next to me
and recording myself doing
Reader Dave is working his way
through the One Hundred Push-Ups
pushups. To keep myself from
inadvertently counting, I'll count
comes with a dock plate, it was just program, but found himself random numbers. Afterwards, I
a simple matter of glueing the dock stopping after hitting a "magic play the video to count the reps,
cable to the plate and mounting it number." To spur himself onward, and sure enough, I almost always
onto a box. he uses guilt psychology, random do more reps than the minimum for
You will have to trim the bottom numbers, and a video recording. the last set.
of the dock plate so the dock We definitely get Dave's point Dave adds that he doesn't actually
connector will sit square on the about hitting the "magic number," a watch the video playbacks in real
plate. somehow preset point at which time, but uses his video player's
The box the iPhone comes in is your lazy brain tells your body that, speed controls to count the reps and
quite sturdy and once slightly hey, it's okay, 25 or whatever is track his progress.
modified makes a great stand. You perfectly fine. Dave fights against it Got your own means for
could even weight the bottom of the by using the self-consciousness of defeating your brain's lazy
box if you wanted it to be extra- being on camera, and also defeating tendencies? Do tell in the
stable. Check out the link below for his brain's internal counting ticker: comments.
additional pictures showing how
the DIY iPhone Dock[via The
Unofficial Apple Weblog]
Internet News Record
GReactions Pulls Net
Discussion into Google Reader
Items [Downloads]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:00:00 AM
Firefox: Want to see what the net
is saying about something you're
intrigued by in Google Reader?
gReactions, a free Firefox add-on,
gives you a glimpse at what's being
said on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg,
and other spots with one click.
It's a fairly simple extension with
no options, and only adds a single
button to the bottom toolbar on
Google Reader's feed items. Hit
"Show comments," and you'll see at
My Three Favorite Science Visualization Videos of 2009—So Far [Video Cache]
By Jesus Diaz (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:10:00 AM
Wired Science has picked the best
science visualization videos of
2009. And from there, I've picked
my three favorite ones. Note to self:
a glance what folks are posting and
discussing in relation to the main
link from the RSS item. It doesn't
show these comments by default,
which is a pretty great thing, and
while it would be great to have a
sorting option or two other than
reverse chronological, gReactions
delivers what it promises.
gReactions is a free download,
works wherever Firefox does.
While you're adding to your own
Reader's abilities, check out our
collection of custom Send To links.
gReactions[via Download.com]
Don't go to Los Angeles or
anywhere near the San Andreas
fault.
Here's a simulation of the Big
One, a 7.8 earthquake on Southern
California. It starts south of Palm
Springs and ends obliterating Los
Retweet.com is No Competition for
Tweetmeme
By Sarah Perez
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:33:39 AM
When a service makes its debut by
getting accused for stealing code
from one of its competitors, you
know that it's going to be a tough
road ahead. That was the case with
the Twitter aggregator application
Retweet.com which went live
earlier this week. Apparently, the
company snagged the code for both
their retweet button Javascript and
the Wordpress plugin from their
rival and current top aggregator,
Tweetmeme.
Now with Retweet's official
launch, you may be tempted to give
them a second look... especially
considering that $10,000 they're
giving away. Don't bother. The
service is still buggy, still using that
stolen code (or so it seems), and
that $10K? Well, you had better
read the fine print.
Sponsor
The 10K Contest
A contest to promote the new
service isn't really a bad idea on
Retweet.com's part. But with this
contest, there's no guaranteed
winner. If, and only if, the site
reaches their goal of 1 million
visitors will that "lucky blogger"
receive any money. And then
there's the fact that their
promotional video doesn't even say
"visitors," it says "page views"(or
Angeles, Ventura, and Santa
TechTips/ Web/ Gizmos/
"page votes"...it's kind of hard to
tell). Obviously, 1 million page
views is quite a different thing than
visitors. In fact, it's quite a different
thing than unique visitors, which is
what they're actually counting by
the looks of it.
Bugs
Still, if you're thinking of taking
your chances, be warned that your
button might not end up displaying
the correct number of tweets, which
is the entire point of the service. As
one Twitter user discovered, the
button seems to have gone
completely haywire in this case:
Over 3 million tweets? We don't
think so. Normally, we'd give a
new service a pass when they first
launch, expecting there to be bugs
here and there, but considering that
Retweet.com stole the button code
from Tweetmeme, you would think
they could get it right. Stolen Code
Oh and that stolen code?
Apparently even by launch day,
they were still using it...or at least it
appears that way. As Milo
Yiannopoulos and others
discovered when receiving errors
on their link submissions, the table
name referenced in the database
erro r s till r e a d s
Barbara. 12 terabytes of simulation
data was used in this.
This is a Type Ia supernova,
which in theory is a exploding
white dwarf star in a binary system.
Nice fireworks.
This video shows the seasonal
39
"tweetmeme_web.firstlinks_new."
That's right, the table name. For
those of you who aren't all that
familiar with databases, this is
much more troubling. Notes one
commenter, this means that the
Retweet.com folks somehow
managed to get their hands not just
on Tweetmeme's front-end code,
but also their database schema and
backend code, too. Either that, or
they decided to write their own
code using the names of their
competitor for the table names.
Which are you inclined to believe?
Tyson Quick of Mesiab Labs, the
company behind Retweet.com,
responded to the blog post angrily
saying"I can assure you that Mesiab
Labs isn't using any of tweetmeme's
code." However, he made no
mention of the screenshot or how
the word "tweetmeme" got in there.
We would still like to know.
Even with all of this drama, an
imitator such as this still stands a
chance, unfortunately. That's why
it's encouraging to see Tweetmeme
taking the high road and staying
busy creating new features for us
like the upcoming " retweetable
comments," for example. The
comments are a part of a major
overhaul which will also bring
improvements to the news filtering,
spam detection, and search features
as well as other small changes.
Hopefully, Retweet.com won't try
to rip off these features too. Discuss
carbon dioxide cycle, base on data
collected by NASA's Goddard
Earth Observing System Model,
Version 5.
Head to Wired Science to see the
rest of the eye candy. [ Wired]
40 Web/ Internet News Record

Top 10 Most Exciting Web Apps or Services

By Richard MacManus adopter readers. Gmail17 Google Maps
(ReadWriteWeb) Facebook slipped in at number 5, Google Reader11 Google Notebook
Submitted at 8/20/2009 4:00:55 PM so it too seems to have kept up its Google Wave11 Google Voice
reputation for being innovative. Facebook6 Hype Machine
Yesterday we asked what 3 web Top 5 Lesser Known Apps Blip.fm4 Instant XRay
apps or services you find the most 6. Spotify( RWW coverage): this Dropbox4 Instapaper
exciting right now. Not your 3 most Swedish online music app is about Hootsuite4 iWantMyName
used or favorite, but the apps that to launch in the U.S. and is highly Wolfram Alpha 4 JaJah
currently make you tingly with anticipated by that market. It's so Pubsubhubbub3 JobTitled
excitement. We got some great exciting that we've predicted it may Scribd3 Jolicloud
responses in the comments, so in even threaten Apple's near Seesmic3 Jott
this post we pick out our top 10 monopoly iTunes product. We'll tracking this innovative product Spotify3 justbought.it
from your choices. have to wait and see what happens closely. It's a self-described Wordpress3 Know Thy Congressman
We've chosen the 10 in two on that front, but Spotify certainly "computational knowledge engine" Apture2 kreeo
batches. Firstly, the services that has a lot of people salivating! Other and while it's not quite the Google Boxee2 Lala
got the most number of mentions. online music services mentioned killer some predicted, it has many Delicious2 Layar
As expected, these are well known multiple times in our poll were potential uses- which makes it an Flickr2 LinkedIn
apps that millions of people are Blip.fm and last.fm. exciting app to follow for us. foursquare2 metafilter
using (or will use when it's 7. Dropbox: this was listed as one 10. Pubsubhubbub:With a name getsatisfaction2 mint
launched, in the case of Google of ReadWriteWeb's 5 Favorite harder to say that 'ReadWriteWeb,' Google2 MobileMe
Wave). We didn't want this to be Online Storage Services in this new Google Code project has last.fm2 My Name is E
purely a popularity contest though, September last year. At the time it excited the web development PixelPipe2 Nanovor
so we've also selected 5 lesser had only just opened to the public, community. It's not a product, but a Posterous2 Newsmap.jp
known web apps or services. Those but it has since gained many fans. protocol. The project page Skype2 Pachube
apps all got multiple mentions and Its integration with the desktop is describes it as a "simple, open, TweetDeck2 Parade
in our estimation they're each perhaps the most exciting feature of server-to-server web-hook-based Xmarks2 Peoplebrowsr
worthy of being labeled 'exciting.' this product. Other features we like pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol Appboy PocketSmith
Sponsor are the sharing of folders and as an extension to Atom (and Bespin Ponoko
Note: we offer the full list of apps preservation of every revision of RSS)." In laymans terms, it delivers Bit.ly PopUrls
voted for at the bottom of this post. every file. your RSS feeds to you much Bloom Prezi
Top 5 Apps 8. Seesmic: A number of Twitter quicker - in near real time. Brightkite Primal Fusion
1. Twitter 25 votes clients were mentioned, like To understand the context of Caspio Salesforce
2. Gmail 17 votes Hootsuite and TweetDeck. But one Pubsubhubbub and similar exciting chi.mp Shapeways
3. Google Reader 11 votes which has impressed us a lot in initiatives more, read Marshall Cliqset SocialText
4. Google Wave 11 votes recent months has been Seesmic. In Kirkpatrick's fine analysis of Deezer SoundCloud
5. Facebook 6 votes July we reported that Seesmic, Distributed Social Networking. Digg Sweetcron
This was fairly predictable, with previously only a desktop client, There you have it, the top 10 Dizzler Tarpipe
Twitter well out in front. There's had released a web-based version most exciting web apps and Dopplr TimeXchange.net
been such excitement and activity and a new version of the Seesmic services according to the Edmodo Tracer
around Twitter this year, that desktop. The web-based version of ReadWriteWeb community! Let us Evernote Tumblr
nobody could really argue against Seesmic recreates most of the know your further thoughts in the Feedly tweetworks
Twitter being the most exciting features that are currently available comments. FriendFeed Twitterfall
web or service around in 2009. in the desktop application. Our own Here is the full list, a snapshot Gmail chat urtak
Twitter was followed by no less Frederic Lardinois listed Seesmic taken when the original post had 66 GMX Mail W3C QA Toolbox
than 3 Google products, one of Web as one of his 3 most exciting comments (sans links, but Google - Google Analytics XCODE
them as yet unreleased! (Google apps. or Bing - any app that catches your Google Analytics API Youtube
Wave). This shows that Google still 9. Wolfram|Alpha: Ever since eye). Google APIs Cat pic: Mr.Thomas Discuss
has that aura of being 'exciting,' at Wolfram|Alpha's admittedly much Twitter25 Google Docs
least with ReadWriteWeb's early hyped launch in May, we've been Google insight
Internet News Record
Dorthy.com: A (Semantic) Search
Engine for Dreams
By Sarah Perez
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:08:03 AM
Dorthy.com, a site we've been
hearing about since late last year,
has just raised $4 million from
angel investors for their "new agey"
concept of a search engine for
dreams. Currently in private alpha,
the site makes fluffy claims about
how they're "reversing the
traditional search process,
continuously filtering and focusing
the Universe of online content, to
connect you with the best stuff
around your interests and
aspirations."
If you're not clear on what exactly
that means, don't feel bad...but don't
write them off either. Instead, think
of Dorthy.com as a new take on the
old 43Things, the site which
encourages users to list goals, share
progress, and cheer each other on.
Dorthy does the same but gets you
there by making interesting use of
Web 3.0 technologies like AI and
natural language search.
Sponsor
Semantic Search for Dreams
According to Jim Anderson, the
About.com co-founder who was
hired as Dorthy's CTO earlier this
year, the site's search engine doesn't
use keyword-based search but
rather has the user enter a fully
formed question, statement, or
iPhone's Sonar Ruler App Measures Distance Using Sound [IPhone]
By Adam Frucci (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:30:00 AM
Here's a cool trick: the new Sonar
Ruler app uses the iPhone's speaker
to send out a short click and then
phrase like"run a marathon in 4
hours." Not only does the search
engine parse the semantics of your
input using its proprietary
algorithms, it also learns from you,
incrementally enhancing your
results upon every visit.
As an example, Anderson
describes how a fictional user
named Jennifer might search for
information about a trip to Paris.
Because Jennifer had previously
shared other background
information like the fact that she's
an avid marathon runner, fluent in
French, wants to learn to cook
French food, and hates cruises,
Dorthy.com will retrieve specific
information related to those
interests. The results would be
filtered to highlight info on cooking
schools, shopping, and popular
running routes in Paris - things that
would be interesting to Jennifer
specifically.
This example doesn't even
necessarily count as a "dream," it
seems - you could plan an actual
trip to Paris using Dorthy's
technology, too. However, the
overall point of the service is to
provide you with information about
measures how long it takes for the
sound to bounce off a surface. It
then tells you the distance.
It's not perfectly accurate,
however. It works best on large, flat
surfaces that are perpendicular to
a particular goal or aspiration and
then connect you with others who
feel the same. Using Dorthy
When performing searches on
Dorthy, you'll have the option to
create your own page on a specific
topic or view the topic pages others
have already created. These pages
feature popular articles, videos,
photos, and blog entries from the
web and are constantly being
updated with new content. When
you find content you like, even if
it's on someone else's page, you can
easily copy it over to a page of your
own.
After this initial "discovery"
process is complete, you can use
Dorthy's "Connect" feature to meet
others also interested in your topic
so you can share your progress and
encourage each other on, much like
how the above-mentioned 43Things
operates.
In the future, Dorthy hopes to
expand their offering to go beyond
simply being a consumer targeted
web-based service to one that could
benefit the enterprise (think"I want
to go to a virtualization conference
in Las Vegas"), or so reported
eWeek earlier this year. They also
plan on moving to mobile at some
point, too.
At the moment, Dorthy.com is in
private alpha, but you can sign up
to join here.
Discuss
the phone, which will provide
Is AT&T's Denial of
Service to Hacker
Justified?
By Dana Oshiro
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 8:30:48 PM
Hacker turned security expert
Kevin Mitnick has been denied
service by both his web host and
his cell phone provider.
HostedHere.net and AT&T argue
that the barrage of hacker attacks
on Mitnick's accounts make them
too difficult to defend. Said The
Register's Dan Goodin, "In asking
Mitnick to take his business
elsewhere, [the companies] seem to
be making the tacit admission that
they are unable to secure the
accounts of users whose only fault
is being a high-profile target."
Really? Is the public surprised that
hackers can penetrate these
systems?
Sponsor
When you wear the badge of"the
most wanted computer criminal in
United States history", you become
a moving target. Companies cower
at your name, fellow hackers aim to
dethrone you, and governments put
you in solitary confinement for fear
that your Captain Crunch-style
phone phreaking skills will ignite
nuclear war. Kevin Mitnick has
paid dearly for his past life and has
been made an example from his
first arrest. But is it really
surprising that AT&T and
measurements accurate within an
inch. It won't work on smaller
objects, however, and things like
temperature and wind can affect the
readings. So you won't want to use
it to measure where to cut a piece
Web/ Gizmos/ 41
HostedHere.net are denying him
service?
Mitnick is probably a formidable
security expert, but the simple fact
of the matter is that one man, let
alone one company, is unlikely to
be able to defend against multiple
and persistent attackers. While
Mitnick spends up to $20,000 per
year on his phone bill, companies
are likely spending at least twice
that to protect his accounts.
Said Mitnick, "You'd think they'd
like to talk to me and say 'how do
you think these guys are getting
in?" Despite the fact that Mitnick
has turned over a new leaf, one
might understand why a company
like AT&T would rather wash its
hands of Mitnick as a client, rather
than taking advice from him. After
all, Mitnick's combination of
hacking and "social engineering"
once gave him illegal access to
computer systems at Motorola,
Nokia, Siemens and allegedly the
Pacific Bell Telephone Company -
better known as AT&T California.
Discuss
of wood. But still, that's a damned
neat trick for a phone to be able to
do. [ iTunes Link via Laan via
Kottke]
42 Web/ Internet News Record

NY Transportation Authority Cites Wikimedia Celebrates

Schedules as Copyrighted Material
By Dana Oshiro
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 10:30:00 PM
New York's Metropolitan
Transportation Authority has sent a
take down notice to Greenwich
man Chris Schoenfeld for using
Metropolitan Transportation
Authority schedules to power his
StationStops iPhone application.
The popular blogger created an
$2.99 application that gives
commuters access to MTA train
and bus schedules. He received a
DMCA last Friday to remove the
application from the app store The
MTA claims that its scheduling
information is copyrighted
intellectual property. You read that
right. Public train schedules are
being treated as copyrighted
material.
Sponsor
In an interview with the Stamford
Advocate Schoenfeld said, "The
copyright law is very clear that you
cannot copyright facts and tables of
data. A train schedule itself might
be considered intellectual property,
but the data itself has nothing
artistic about it." Schoenfeld
believes the DMCA came as a
result of him delaying licensing
negotiations. The blogger was
expected to pay the MTA 10% of
his app profits and $5000 in
advance royalties.
StationStops is an iPhone
application that allows Metro-North
Railroad riders to check their train
departures and arrivals from Grand
Central Station even when they do
not have a wireless connection. The
application remembers a user's
home station and offers both train
track numbers and departures.
While these are simple functions,
the MTA does not have this data
readily accessible. Rather than
having to wait at Grand Central's
departure screens, riders with the
iPhone app are free to relax until
their train arrives. Essentially
StationStops is a 3rd party
application that does a better job of
information outreach than the
official public entity.
The MTA's cease and desist letter
comes at a time when government
agencies and semi-public entities
are slowly carving out their policies
on standardized public data. In late
June, even as Mayor Bloomberg
launched the first NYC Big Apps
contest committing to the
publication of machine readable
city data, Council's application to
expose raw data for web and
mobile app development was
denied. In an interview with
PolitickerNY assistant counselor to
the mayor, Sami Naim spoke out
against releasing the data saying,
"It's not how much paper you can
put up on the Internet. It's more,
how much can you engage New
Yorkers. It starts and ends with the
customer."
Judging by StationStop sales and
the public outcry for Schoenfeld,
customers want a better way to
access their transportation
information and they don't care
whether it's city-run, state-run or
citizen-driven. To see more user-
generated transportation solutions,
visit DIY City or Apps for
Democracy. Discuss
Hewlett Grant
By Dana Oshiro
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:42:14 PM
The Wikimedia Foundation just
emailed ReadWriteWeb to
announce receipt of $500,000 in
grant funding from The William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The
grant is a part of a $100 million
dollar program to fund open
education resources, and given
Wikimedia's mission to encourage
the growth, development and Foundation and kick start its
distribution of free, multilingual strategic planning process.
"The Hewlett Foundation's
content, the Hewlett Foundation
couldn't have chosen a better org. support comes at a critical time,"
said Wikimedia Foundation's
Sponsor
Wikimedia has contributed to Executive Director Sue Gardner,
"We've just begun the planning that
open education in a number of
ways including by providing full will help us identify how to
maximize our impact around the
courses and textbooks through
Wikiversity and Wikibooks and a world. This support will help us to
execute our priorities for the
number of learning resources and
commons material through current year, and enable us to plan
for the future."
Wikisource and Wikicommons.
Three days ago the organization In true crowd sourced Wikimedia
fashion, the organization launched
celebrated Wikipedia's 3 millionth
English article and 2 days ago it a public wiki for community
strategic planning. To add your
launched its official iPhone app. In
a week of landmark input in how the community is
shaped in the next 5 years, visit the
announcements, the company has
managed to charm the Hewlett Call for Proposals page. Discuss

Facebook Pages to Automatically Publish to Twitter

By Dana Oshiro
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 6:49:46 PM
Facebook just announced that
administrators of Facebook Pages
will be able to publish their updates
to their Twitter accounts
automatically. Administrators will
decide which info to share from a
Page including status updates,
photos, notes and events. A number
of well-known groups and
celebrities are already using the
feature including Dane Cook,
Livestrong and the World Wildlife
Fund.
Sponsor
According to the Facebook blog
post, "If you have multiple Pages,
you will have the option to link
each of those Pages to different
Twitter accounts. This new feature
will only link Facebook Pages to
Twitter, not your individual
profile." This separation between
Pages and profiles ensures that
users don't have to worry about
muddying their business-related
updates with their personal ones.
Said feature developer Michael
Gummelt, "Twitter was a natural
next step to link with Facebook
Pages because it is a powerful tool
for broadcasting short messages
widely." Bands, companies, non
profit organization and celebrities
are likely to benefit from this new
feature as their updates will be
more widely distributed and Twitter
followers are likely to retweet and
redirect new audiences to Facebook
Pages. To try out this new feature
visit facebook.com/twitter
Visit the new and improved
ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page!
Discuss
Internet News Record
Death of the Nile
By Jack Shenker (World news
and comment from the
Guardian | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 5:09:03 AM
The Nile Delta is under threat
from rising sea levels. Without the
food it produces, Egypt faces
catastrophe
Maged Shamdy's ancestors
arrived on the shores of Lake
Burrulus in the mid-19th century.
In the dusty heat of Cairo at the
time, French industrialists were
rounding up forced labour squads
to help build the Suez Canal, back-
breaking labour from which
thousands did not return. Like
countless other Egyptians, the
Shamdys abandoned their family
home and fled north into the Nile
Delta, where they could hide within
the marshy swamplands that fanned
out from the great river's edge.
As the years passed, colonial
rulers came and went. But the
Shamdys stayed, carving out a new
life as farmers and fishermen on
one of the most fertile tracts of land
in the world. A century and a half
later, Maged is still farming his
family's fields. In between taking
up the rice harvest and dredging his
irrigation canals, however, he must
contemplate a new threat to his
family and livelihood, one that may
well prove more deadly than any of
Egypt's previous invaders. "We are
going underwater," the 34-year-old
says simply. "It's like an
occupation: the rising sea will
conquer our lands."
Maged understands better than
most the menace of coastal erosion,
which is steadily ingesting the edge
of Egypt in some places at an
astonishing rate of almost 100m a
year. Just a few miles from his
home lies Lake Burrulus itself,
where Nile flower spreads all the
way out to trees on the horizon.
Those trunks used to be on land;
now they stand knee-deep in water.
Maged's imperial imagery may
sound overblown, but travel around
Egypt's vast, overcrowded Delta
region and you hear the same terms
used time and again to describe the
impact climate change is having on
these ancient lands. Egypt's
breadbasket is littered with the
remnants of old colonisers, from
the Romans to the Germans, and
today its 50 million inhabitants
jostle for space among the
crumbling forts and cemeteries of
those who sought to subjugate them
in the past.
On the Delta's eastern border, in
Port Said, an empty stone plinth is
all that remains of a statue of
Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who
built the Suez Canal; somewhere
along the Delta's westernmost
reaches, the long-lost tomb of
Cleopatra lies buried. With such a
rich history of foreign rule, it's only
natural that the latest hostile force
knocking at the gates should be
couched in the language of
occupation.
"Egypt is a graveyard for
occupiers," observes Ramadan el-
Atr, a fruit farmer near the
antiquated town of Rosetta, where
authorities have contracted a
Chinese company to build a huge
wall of concrete blocks in the ocean
to try to save any more land from
melting away. "Just like the others,
the sea will come and go – but we
will always survive."
Scientists aren't so sure. Two
years ago, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change declared
Egypt's Nile Delta to be among the
top three areas on the planet most
vulnerable to a rise in sea levels,
and even the most optimistic
predictions of global temperature
increase will still displace millions
of Egyptians from one of the most
densely populated regions on earth.
The Delta spills out from the
northern stretches of the capital into
10,000 square miles of farmland
fed by the Nile's branches. It is
home to two-thirds of the country's
rapidly growing population, and
responsible for more than 60% of
its food supply: Egypt relies
unconditionally on it for survival.
But with its 270km of coastline
lying at a dangerously low
elevation (large parts are between
zero and 1m above sea level, with
some areas lying below it), any
melting of the polar ice caps could
see its farmland and cities –
including the historical port of
Alexandria – transformed into an
ocean floor. A 1m rise in the sea
level, which many experts think
likely within the next 100 years,
will cause 20% of the Delta to go
underwater. At the other extreme,
the 14m rise that would result from
the disappearance of Greenland and
western Antarctica would leave the
Mediterranean lapping at the
northern suburbs of Cairo, with
practically all of the Delta
underwater.
Already, a series of
environmental crises are parking
themselves on the banks of the
Nile. Some are subtle, like the
river's quiet vanishing act in the
Delta's northern fields; others, like
the dramatic collapse of coastal
lands into the ocean, are more
striking. Major flooding is yet to
become a reality but, from
industrial pollution to soil salinity,
a whole new set of interconnected
green concerns is now forcing its
way into Egyptian public discourse
for the first time.
"The Delta is a kind of
Bangladesh story," says Dr Rick
Tutwiler, director of the American
University in Cairo's Desert
Development Centre. "You've got a
massive population, overcrowding,
a threat to all natural resources
from the pressure of all the people,
production, pollution, cars and
agricultural chemicals. And on top
of all that, there's the rising sea. It's
the perfect storm."
Follow the Nile north out of
Cairo on the old agricultural road,
and you find it hard to pinpoint
where the city ends and the lotus-
shaped Delta begins. Carpeted with
redbrick apartment blocks and
spliced with streets in every
direction, the lush greenery of the
Nile's splintered arteries is almost
impossible to appreciate in
isolation. This is where the urban
and the rural get lost in each other,
with livestock living in doorways
and workers camping out in fields.
In the past, literary giants venerated
the Delta's wild marshlands; today,
any clear-cut divisions between the
metropolis and the countryside
have long faded away.
Urban encroachment – the steady
chipping away at arable land
through unauthorised construction
– haunts the Delta everywhere you
look. Despite a web of legislation
outlawing illegal building practices
and theoretically "fencing off"
agricultural land, in every direction
the sweeping vista of wheat fields
and rice paddies always ends
abruptly in a cluster of half-built
homes. There are more than 4,000
people per square mile in the Delta;
it's hard to think of any other place
where humans and the environment
around them are more closely
intertwined. With Egypt's present-
day population of 83 million set to
increase to more than 110 million
in the next two decades, the
seemingly unstoppable spread of
bricks and mortar over the soil is
both the most visible symptom of
the country's demographic time-
bomb and an inevitable response to
it.
More people in the Delta means
more cars, more pollution and less
land to feed them all on, just at a
World/ 43
time when increased crop
production is needed most. Yet the
desertification of land through
human habitation is, worryingly,
only the beginning of the problem.
Although few in the Delta have
noticed it yet, the freshwater of the
Nile – which has enabled Egypt to
survive as a unified state longer
than any other territory on earth – is
creaking under the strain of this
population boom. The world's most
famous river has provided the
backdrop to all manner of dramas
throughout history, real and
fictional. Now, around its
northernmost branches where the
minarets and pylons thin out and
the landscape becomes more
windswept, another is playing out
to devastating effect.
The villain is salinity. I visit one
of the worst-affected regions, Kafr
el-Sheikh, on a Friday morning
when the fields have emptied out
for the noon prayer. The streets are
eerily silent; with its people gone,
the area takes on the appearance of
one of Italo Calvino's fantastical
string cities, chock-a-block with the
shells of human habitation but no
living souls remaining. The
exception is Maged, who owns six
feddan (about six acres) of land
near the village of el-Hadadi.
Maged is halfway down a hole
when I approach his house.
Clambering out apologetically, he
explains that German experts
visited this area last year and
declared that the fresh water being
pumped to local villages "wasn't fit
for a dog to drink". After months of
phone calls to the national water
company, none of which were
answered, Maged decided to lay
down a new set of pipes himself in
the hope it would improve the
quality of drinking water for his
two young daughters. It's hot,
DEATH page 44
44
DEATH
continued from page 43
exhausting work, which he fits in
between his farming duties and a
new part-time job as an accountant
in a local alfalfa plant. "We don't
have much time on our hands at the
moment," Maged says, dusting
himself off and gulping down some
fresh melon juice. "Nobody can
make a living solely off the land
any more."
On a tour of his fields, I see why.
The rich brown soil has greyed out
in recent years, leaving a barren salt
-encrustation on the surface. The
cause is underground saltwater
intrusion from the nearby coast,
which pushes up through the soil
and kills off roots. Coastal farmland
has always been threatened by
saltwater, but salinity has
traditionally been kept at bay by
plentiful supplies of fresh water
gushing over the soil and flushing
out the salt. It used to happen
naturally with the Nile's seasonal
floods; after the construction of
Egypt's High Dam in the 70s (one
of the most ambitious engineering
projects on earth), these seasonal
floods came to an end, but a vast
network of irrigation canals
continued to bring gallons of fresh
water to the people who worked the
land, the fellahin, ensuring salinity
levels remained low.
Today, however, Nile water
barely reaches this corner of the
Delta. Population growth has
sapped its energy upstream, and
what "freshwater" does make it
downriver is increasingly awash
with toxins and other impurities.
Farmers such as Maged now
essentially rely on waste water – a
mix of agricultural drainage and
sewage – from the nearby town of
Sidi Salim.
The result is plummeting fertility;
local farmers say that whereas their
fathers spent just a handful of
Egyptian pounds on chemicals to
keep the harvests bountiful, they
now have to put aside between 25
and 80% of their profits for
fertilisers just to keep their crops
alive.
"We can see with our own eyes
that the water is no good, it's less
and less pure," Maged says. He
points out huge swaths of
neighbouring land that once
glimmered with rice paddies;
recently they have been dug up and
replaced by fish farms, the ground
too barren for crop cultivation.
Further out, in the village of
Damru, the green fields of 10 years
ago are cracked and brown, now
put into service as informal football
pitches and rubbish dumps.
Experts believe the problem is
only going to get worse. "We
currently have a major water deficit
in Egypt, with only 700 cubic
metres of freshwater per person,"
explains Professor Salah Soliman
of Alexandria University. "That's
already short of the 1,000 cubic
metres per person the UN believes
is the minimum needed for water
security. Now, with the population
increase, it will drop to 450 cubic
metres per person – and this is all
before we take into account the
impact of climate change."
That impact is likely to be a 70%
drop in the amount of Nile water
reaching the Delta over the next 50
years, due to increased evaporation
and heavier demands on water use
upstream. The consequences of all
these ecological changes on food
production are staggering: experts
at Egypt's Soils, Water and
Environment Research Institute
predict that wheat and maize yields
could be down 40% and 50%
respectively in the next 30 years,
and that farmers who make a living
off the land will lose around $1,000
per hectare for each degree rise in
the average temperature.
The farmers here feel abandoned
by the state; there are regular
dismissive references to the "New
Age", a euphemism for the much-
hated regime of President Hosni
Mubarak, whose neoliberal reform
programmes and widespread
corruption scandals have provoked
a wave of popular discontent across
the country. This disconnect
between the state and its people has
led to distrust of government
scientists who think coastal erosion,
rather than freshwater scarcity, is
the main reason for the farmers'
problems. And, in a worrying twist
for Egypt's creaking economy, the
erosion isn't only affecting farmers.
"Unfortunately, most of our
industry and investment has been
built on sites very close to the
shore," says Soliman. "There's only
so much water we can hold back."
Ras el-Bar is a small holiday
resort at the mouth of the Nile's
Damietta branch. This was the
summer paradise that Nobel
prizewinning novelist Naguib
Mahfouz's well-heeled characters
would escape to when the heat of
the capital became unbearable;
today its squat pink lighthouse and
endless boulevards of deserted, low
-rise holiday homes have the faded
feel of a 50s Disneyland.
Although still popular in July and
August, Ras el-Bar has been
overtaken as a seaside destination
by the brash consumerism of a new
generation of towns: Sharm el-
Sheikh, Marina, Hurghada. In place
of tourists, however, new factories
have arrived here in abundance,
including some that nearby
residents believe are poisoning the
air. The arrival of one industrial
plant in Damietta, which coincided
with the ministry of environment's
last-minute decision not to
designate the area a protected
nature reserve, is a familiar story of
shady backdoor deals, public
outrage and the studious disregard
of local opinions. In this case, the
locals managed to postpone the
factory's construction, but other
plants remain. "In the morning here
you can see nothing but smoke,"
says Mohammed Fawzia, who is
fishing in a canal down by the side
of an industrial complex run by the
state-owned Mopco company.
"Take photos of it for us so we can
show who is killing our children.
We want the factories gone."
Many Cairo-based experts,
however, insist that the task of
coping with the dramatic ecological
changes faced by the Delta is made
harder by the ignorance of people
such as Mohammed. They claim
the fellahin are too uneducated to
change their ways. But they are
wrong: while farmers in the
southern Delta, where Nile water is
still relatively plentiful, have little
knowledge of climate change, those
in the north are painfully aware of
the science behind the death of their
land. However, they also have little
time to listen to the harrying of a
government which is widely seen to
preach green rhetoric on the one
hand but is only too willing to sell
out the environment on the other,
along with the local people.
Money talks in Egypt, and
sustainable development is
forgotten when the interests of the
rich and powerful – such as the
industrial plants in Damietta or the
influential Badrawi clan in
Daqahliyah – are at stake. The
repression and self-interest of
Mubarak's inner circle have left
them bereft of any moral authority
on environmental issues.
And while scientists, academics
and community organisers are
making a concerted effort to
educate Egyptians about the
dangers of climate change, there is
confusion over whether the focus of
all these programmes should be on
promoting ways to combat climate
change, or on accepting climate
change as inevitable and instead
encouraging new forms of
adaptation to the nation's uncertain
ecological future.
Internet News Record
Efforts are further hampered by a
popular feeling that this is a crisis
made by the west. "We're not
responsible for climate change,"
says Soliman, pointing out that
Egypt's contribution to global
carbon emissions is an
underwhelming 0.5%, nine times
less per capita than the US. "But
unfortunately the consequence of
climate change is no respecter of
national borders."
The scale of the crisis – more
people, less land, less water, less
food – is overwhelming, and has
infected discussion of climate
change with a toxic combination of
cynicism and fatalism at every
level. There are senior
environmental officials in top
scientific jobs here who do not
believe climate change is real;
others are convinced the problem is
so great that human intervention is
useless. "It's down to God," one
environmental officer for a major
Delta town tells me. "If the Delta
goes we'll find new places to live. If
Egypt was big enough for Mary and
Joseph, then it will be big enough
for all of us."
Of course, if sea levels do rise
significantly, "then the debate is
over," says Dr Tutwiler. "The land
will be underwater and crop
production will be over."
As a result, many now believe
that Egypt's future lies far away
from the Delta, in land newly
reclaimed from the desert. Since the
time of the pharaohs, when the
Delta was first farmed, Egypt's
political leaders have rested their
legitimacy on their ability to feed it
by taming the Nile. Mohammed
Ali, Lord Cromer and Gamal Abdel
Nasser all launched major projects
to control and harness the river's
seasonal floods; now Mubarak is
following in their footsteps – not by
saving the Delta, but by creating a
DEATH page 50
Internet News Record
Whole Foods chief in healthcare row
By Leo Hickman (World news
and comment from the
Guardian | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 3:04:49 AM
John Mackey rejects Obama's
healthcare proposals and outrages
customers
Earlier this year, John Mackey,
the CEO and co-founder of the US-
based Whole Foods retail chain,
was asked to name his perfect
summer meal.
He began by explaining that he
had recently given up all refined
oils, including olive oil, as part of
his new health kick, before
revealing that he now likes nothing
better than to sit down to a salad of
sweet potato, cooked greens and
mung beans, with a dressing of
miso, tahini, rice vineger and yeast.
If you were looking to construct a
stereotype of the typical Whole
Foods customer, you'd be hard
pressed to match this one.
But Mackey didn't stop there. He
added that he was considering
"bribing" some of his staff with
larger bonuses to help them lose
weight should they choose to
follow his new healthy-eating
regime. And his customers were in
his sightlines, too.
"We sell a bunch of junk," he
admitted. "We've decided if Whole
Foods doesn't take a leadership role
in educating people about a healthy
diet, who the heck is going to do
it?"
Predictably, Mackey's comments
attracted the wrong sort of
headlines.
To news editors, the story was
simple: here was a man admitting
that his company was selling
rubbish. It had echoes of Gerald
Ratner's disastrous remark in 1991
that his jewellery company sold
items that were "total crap", and
that the earrings on sale were
"cheaper than an M&S prawn
sandwich but probably wouldn't
last as long". Whole Foods had
been "ratnered" by its own CEO.
But August is turning into a long,
hot month for Mackey. No sooner
had the furore of his "bunch of
junk" remark begun to reach its sell
-by date than he was at it again, this
time in the right-leaning opinion
pages of the Wall Street Journal,
not somewhere considered a natural
read for the average liberal Whole
Food customer.
Mackey, who often positions
himself as a free-market libertarian
and is strongly anti-union, chose to
criticise the healthcare reforms
currently being promoted by
President Obama. It proved too
much for many loyal Whole Food
customers, who in particular
objected to his belief that
"healthcare is a service that we all
need, but just like food and shelter
it is best provided through
voluntary and mutually beneficial
market exchanges". He also went
on to say that "unfortunately, many
of our health-care problems are self
-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans
are now overweight and one-third
are obese."
The outrage among some Whole
Foods customers quickly escalated
into calls for a consumer boycott.
By yesterday – a week into the
furore – almost 20,000 people had
joined the Boycott Whole Foods
Facebook page, and a dedicated
blog ( wholeboycott.com) had been
set up to follow events and promote
discussion.
Mackey, who regularly takes to
the blogosphere himself under the
username "rahodeb" (an anagram of
his wife's name Deborah), quickly
posted a response on the Whole
Foods website stressing that the
Wall Street Journal had used a
misleading headline for the article
("Whole Foods Alternative to
Obamacare") and this had
contributed to the "antagonistic
feelings by many". Although the
tone of the post offered a sprinkle
of humility, he did nothing to refute
his original article's core message.
Again, he chose to quote Margaret
Thatcher: "The problem with
socialism is that eventually you run
out of other people's money."
The blog had now attracted
around 2,000 comments, with
views ranging from "God Bless you
Mr Mackey. You are a true Patriot.
Please run for office!", through to
"I love your store but not more than
I love my country. You are out of
touch with the people who made
your store popular and your article
proves this point. I will no longer
be shopping at your store."
Meanwhile, Whole Foods is
reported to have sent out letters to
some of its aggrieved customers
apologising for any offence caused
by Mackey's remarks.
Whole Foods can ill-afford this
controversy. As one of the world's
leading retailers of organic and
health foods, it has been at the
brunt of the economic downturn,
with customers becoming
increasingly price sensitive. As all
food retailers are noting, customers
are struggling to justify the kind of
extravagances – artisan cheeses,
biodynamic wines, fairtrade
chocolates – that made Whole
Foods so popular in the boom
years.
In 2007, when expansionist
desires among retailers were all the
rage, Whole Foods boldly entered
the UK market, launching a vast
flagship store on Kensington High
Street in central London. But two
years on, the UK arm of Whole
Foods is reporting big losses.
Earlier this month, it announced
that its operating losses for 2008
totalled an indigestion-inducing
£36m.
"They have experienced a series
of set-backs in the UK," says
Natalie Berg, grocery research
manager at the consultancy Planet
Retail. "The Kensington store is
way too big. The rent is far too
high. Their attempt to create a
flagship store to launch their brand
in the UK was a mistake. They
should now look to expand their
smaller stores, which were formerly
known as Fresh and Wild before
they were quietly relabelled as
Whole Foods stores earlier this
summer."
Last month, the US-based parent
group Whole Foods Market Inc –
which has already been forced to
write off almost £50m relating to its
foray into the UK — flew its
troubleshooter Jeff Turnas to
London. He announced that the
company is still looking for new
sites, but only in the Greater
London area. Last September, the
Bristol branch of Fresh and Wild
was closed with the loss of 60 jobs.
"Whole Foods says it believes the
UK market is similar to the
Canadian market, but they have
underestimated the competition
from supermarkets here," says
Berg. "And ill-chosen words by a
CEO of a company can be
damaging. Whole Foods customers
are pretty liberal and like to speak
freely on such matters."
Thirty-one years ago, a 24-year-
old John Mackey launched Whole
Foods – then known as Safer Way,
an in-joke aimed at the retail giant
SafeWay – with his girlfriend
Renee Hardy out of a garage in
Austin, Texas. It pitched itself as a
vegetarian co-op that sourced its
produce from local farmers and
sold it to the city's university
students. It was the quintessential
hippy business and the company
has traded on these roots ever since.
Today, Whole Foods boasts 282
stores, employs 51,000 "team
members" and last year recorded
World/ 45
sales worth $8bn: it is the big guy
who says it tries to look out for the
little guy.
But there has always been a hard-
nosed, some would say ruthless,
streak. "We are Whole Foods, not
holy foods," Mackey once said. In
an interview three years ago he
asked, "Why is it important to be
monolithically consistent? Who
is?"
If having the ability to upset
customers is indeed a strength, then
the past few weeks have shown that
Mackey has a potency worthy of
admiration. But for this month at
least he has said his piece: he is
reported to have just set off on an
extended hiking holiday.
Taking the Mackey
Some of his classic gaffes
"The last thing our country needs
is a massive new healthcare
entitlement that will create
hundreds of billions of dollars of
new unfunded deficits and move us
much closer to a government
takeover of our healthcare system"
(August 12, 2009)
The maverick chief executive
cheerfully shreds Obama's
healthcare programme in an
opinion column in the Wall Street
Journal.
"Basically, we used to think it was
enough just to sell healthy food, but
we know it is not enough. We sell
all kinds of candy. We sell a bunch
of junk" (August 5 2009)
Mackey attempts to outline plans
for his company to put more
emphasis on healthy eating; his
comments are described as a
"Ratner moment" in the UK press.
"I like Mackey's haircut – I think
he looks cute!" – Rahodeb (17 July
2007)
The internet ID "Rahodeb"
becomes notorious when it emerges
that it belongs to John Mackey and
WHOLE page 46
46 World/ Gizmos/
CIA hired Blackwater for hitman project
By Ewen MacAskill (World
news and comment from the
Guardian | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 2:01:12 AM
• Blackwater staff recruited in
2004 for secret plan
• Former CIA director plays down
significance of programme
The CIA enlisted the notorious
security firm Blackwater in a secret
programme to hunt and kill al-
Qaida leaders, US intelligence
sources confirmed today.
Blackwater staff, many of whom
are former US special forces and
CIA members, were recruited in
2004 as part of the programme,
estimated to have costs millions of
dollars.
However, the New York Times,
which broke the story, said it was
unclear whether Blackwater had
been engaged to carry out
assassinations or simply to help
with intelligence-gathering,
planning and training.
No raid to capture or kill al-Qaida
leaders was ever carried out and the
programme was closed down this
year. But the employment of
Blackwater raised new questions
about the legality of the CIA's
behaviour during the Bush
administration and about the
agency's widespread use of outside
contractors. There is also a question
about whether the programme was
deliberately kept hidden from
Congress.
The CIA today refused to discuss
the involvement of Blackwater, but
did not deny it either. George Little,
a CIA spokesman, acknowledged
that there had been a counter-
Windows Mobile 7 Epically Delayed? [Windows Mobile 7]
By matt buchanan (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:03:03 AM
Mary Jo Foley says that the real
news about the rumor Windows
terrorism effort and it amounted to
"more than a PowerPoint
presentation".
General Michael Hayden, the
director of the CIA from 2006 to
this year, today defended the use of
outside contractors, saying the
agency used "whoever was best
suited for the job". Speaking at a
press conference in Washington, he
denied that contractors had been
used so the CIA could avoid blame.
"We do not go outside the agency
in order to deflect responsibility,"
he said. "Period."
Without going into the specifics
of Blackwater's involvement,
Hayden played down the
significance of the programme,
saying that if he had regarded it as
important, he would have briefed
Congress. He insisted he had never
been asked by the former vice-
president, Dick Cheney, to
withhold information from
Congress.
Hayden was adamant that the
CIA did not carry out
assassinations but, when asked if
killing al-Qaida leaders amounted
to assassination, he said: "No. That
is killing in self-defence."
The CIA has been banned from
carrying out assassinations since
1976, after congressional hearings
into targeted killings in Vietnam
and Latin America, including 26
attempts to assassinate Fidel
Castro.
Tim Shorrock, author of Spies
For Hire: The Secret World Of
Intelligence Outsourcing, expressed
concern that private contractors
could have been used by the CIA as
a way to evade responsibility.
Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile 7
will co-exist—which she doesn't
find surprising—is that it means
Windows Mobile 7 has in fact been
pushed back by several months. It
"There is no accountability for
contractors. We have seen it time
and again with Blackwater," he
said.
He added that Congress had been
trying for years to get the CIA to
release the names of the private
contractors it uses. His estimate is
that the CIA outsources 70% of its
work. The agency claims that more
than 90% of its core activities is
carried out by permanent staff, with
contractors being engaged mainly
in support and logistical work.
Blackwater, which first started
working for the CIA in various
roles a few days after the
September 11 attacks, was banned
from Iraq after a 2007 massacre of
civilians involving its staff. It has
since changed its name to Xe
Services.
The company could not be
contacted today for comment.
Barack Obama's new CIA
director, Leon Panetta, raised the
alarm in June when he went to
Congress to report that he had just
heard about a previously unreported
covert operation, although he did
not name Blackwater. The House of
Representatives intelligence
committee is investigating why the
CIA withheld the information.
Earlier this week, there was a
report on the Daily Beast website
suggesting that Panetta had
overreacted, and that the secret
programme amounted to no more
than a PowerPoint presentation.
Without specifically mentioning
Blackwater, Little said today:
"Director Panetta thought this effort
should be briefed to Congress, and
he did so. He also knew it hadn't
was originally supposed to be
released to manufacturers by the
been successful, so he ended it.
Neither decision was difficult. This
was clear and straightforward."
But Little dismissed the report
that the programme had amounted
to no more than a PowerPoint
presentation: "Director Panetta did
not tell the committees that the
agency had misled the Congress or
had broken the law. He decided that
the time had come to brief
Congress on a counterterrorism
effort that was, in fact, much more
than a PowerPoint presentation."
The CIA is braced for further
headlines on Monday when a
previously unpublished internal
investigation into its interrogation
techniques under George Bush's
administration is scheduled to be
published.
Hayden said that there were
several paragraphs in the report that
would show that valuable
information about al-Qaida was
gained through the interrogation of
terrorist suspects, and said that
would help to put the criticism of
the agency into perspective.
• CIA
• Al-Qaida
• US foreign policy
• US national security
• Obama administration
• George Bush
• Global terrorism
• Barack Obama
• United States
Ewen MacAskill
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
end of this year to hit devices in
April 2010, not Q4 2010. Ruh roh. [
Internet News Record
WHOLE
continued from page 45
he has been using it to post positive
messages about his company on
Yahoo's stock forum.
"By buying [Wild Oats] we will . .
. avoid nasty price wars in Portland,
Boulder, Nashville and several
other cities which will harm
[Whole Foods'] gross margins and
profitability." (21 June 2007)
Not the smartest thing for a CEO
to say when his company is bidding
to buy a rival, Wild Oats. His
words were in a memo issued to
staff. Unsurprisingly, the Federal
Trade Commission was soon
moved to cite antitrust concerns
and blocked the $565m deal.
"The union is like having herpes.
It doesn't kill you, but it's
unpleasant and inconvenient, and it
stops a lot of people from becoming
your lover."
Famously anti-union, these words
have haunted Mackey for years.
Abhinav Ramnarayan
• Whole Foods
• US healthcare
• US domestic policy
Leo Hickman
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
ZDNet]
Internet News Record
WHO looks to limit Tamiflu use
By Owen Bowcott (World news
and comment from the
Guardian | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:44:31 AM
World Health Organisation
advises against giving antiviral
drug if symptoms are mild
Healthy people who catch swine
flu need not be given Tamiflu, the
World Health Organisation (WHO)
has announced. The advice appears
to contradict the UK's policy of
making the antiviral drug readily
available to those who call the
national pandemic helpline or
approach their GPs.
Hundreds of thousands of doses
have been given to British patients
although the majority have not been
severely ill. Fears have been voiced
that mass use of Tamiflu will make
the virus resistant to it.
The latest advice from the WHO
said: "Worldwide, most patients
infected with the pandemic virus
continue to experience typical
influenza symptoms and fully
recover within a week, even
without any form of medical
treatment. Healthy patients with
uncomplicated illness need not be
treated with antivirals."
Previously the WHO had said
antivirals should be given to
patients with "serious progressive
illness". The new guidance is the
first time it has specifically advised
against otherwise healthy
individuals being given the drug.
The recommendation is based on
Run Windows 7 Without Activating It For 4 Months [Windows]
By Adam Frucci (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:50:00 AM
Say you've bought a legit copy of
Windows 7, but you don't want to
enter that activation code. A
common situation! Well, there's a
the conclusion of an international
panel of experts that includes
representatives from the UK. The
advice added that Tamiflu, also
called oseltamivir, and the similar
drug Relenza, also called
zanamivir, should be given quickly
to seriously ill or deteriorating
patients.
The WHO guidance said at-risk
groups should receive the drugs.
"For patients with underlying
medical conditions that increase the
risk of more severe disease, WHO
recommends treatment with either
oseltamivir or zanamivir.
"These patients should also
receive treatment as soon as
possible after symptom onset,
without waiting for the results of
laboratory tests. As pregnant
women are included among groups
at increased risk, WHO
recommends that pregnant women
receive antiviral treatment as soon
as possible after symptom onset."
Some medical researchers have
expressed concern about the side-
effects of Tamiflu, particularly
sickness, nightmares and insomnia
in children. A team from Oxford
University said this month that
children with mild symptoms
should not be given Tamiflu and
urged the Department of Health
(DoH) to urgently rethink its
policy.
Figures released by the DoH
show that 45,986 courses of
antivirals were given to patients in
England in the week ending 18
simple trick for extending that free
limbo period for four months.
All you've got to do is enter
"slmgr -rearm" into the command
prompt at the end of every 30 day
period, and you're set. You can do
it three times, extending the whole
August. In the previous week
90,363 courses of antivirals were
given out. The data relates to
people collecting the drugs after an
assessment via the National
Pandemic Flu Service. Many more
have collected antivirals via their
GP.
The DoH said the new WHO
guidance was not too different from
its own position that people with
mild symptoms could recover
without antiviral drugs.
The new WHO statement said:
"Worldwide, around 40% of severe
cases are now occurring in
previously healthy children and
adults, usually under the age of 50
years.
"Some of these patients
experience a sudden and very rapid
deterioration in their clinical
condition, usually on day five or six
following the onset of symptoms."
The first death of a patient in
Wales with swine flu has been
announced, bringing the number of
UK deaths to 60. The 55-year-old
woman was admitted to the Royal
Gwent hospital in Newport on 2
August and given antiviral drugs
but she developed cardiac problems
and died on Saturday.
The Department of Health has
hinted that accumulating evidence
about the degree of severity of the
outbreak might lead to a change in
policy. A spokesman said: "We
believe a safety-first approach of
offering antivirals, when required,
to everyone remains a sensible and
deal to 120 days. The same trick
World/ Gizmos/ AppleBlog/
responsible way forward. However
we will keep this policy under
review as we learn more about the
virus and its effects.
"The WHO recommendations are
in fact in line with UK policy on
antivirals. We have consistently
said that many people with swine
flu only get mild symptoms and
they may find bed rest and over-the
-counter flu remedies work for
them.
"WHO state that 40% of severe
cases worldwide have been in
previously healthy children and
adults and that serious cases should
be treated immediately. This
emphasises the need not to become
complacent about the mildness of
the illness and the reasoning behind
a precautionary policy.
"People with underlying health
conditions, pregnant women and
parents with children under the age
of one should speak to their GP if
they have symptoms. If people have
any doubts about taking antivirals
they should contact their GP."
• Swine flu
• Flu pandemic
• Flu
• Health & wellbeing
• Health
Owen Bowcott
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
worked on Vista, and it's nice to see
Microsoft allowing the little trick to
keep working on 7. You know, for
those of us who hate entering
activation codes. [ Telegraph via
Engadget]
47
First Look: Watermark
your iPhoto pictures
with Impression
By Steven Sande (The
Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW))
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:00:00 AM
Filed under: iLife, Software,
Graphic Design, First Look Blue
Crowbar Software is a small
Belgian Mac development firm that
is quickly making a name for itself
for its innovative iPhoto and
Aperture plugins. We've previously
covered iPhoto2Twitter here on
TUAW, and now Blue Crowbar has
announced a new iPhoto plugin for
adding watermarks to pictures in
your iPhoto library.
Watermarks are those faint,
transparent designs that websites
often use to mark exclusive photos
when breaking a big story. For
example, many of the great fake
iTablet "photos" that we've
received during the past few weeks
have been emblazoned with a
watermark for one Mac site or
another. Impression(€9.90 -- about
US$14.10) works in iPhoto to put
watermarks onto your iPhoto
pictures. If you're worried that a
watermark might ruin a perfectly
good picture, don't be. Impression
makes a copy of the picture, then
creates a watermarked version
which is also saved into your
iPhoto library.
Continue reading First Look:
Watermark your iPhoto pictures
with Impression
TUAW First Look: Watermark
your iPhoto pictures with
Impression originally appeared on
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW) on Fri, 21 Aug 2009
07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
Sponsored Topics: Apple- IPhoto
- TUAW- ILife- Graphic Design
48 World/ AppleBlog/ Tech Games/
US TV contestant wanted for murder
By Haroon Siddique (World
news and comment from the
Guardian | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:17:52 AM
Police believe suspect Ryan
Jenkins fled to Canada after
murdering his ex-wife
A manhunt is under way for a US
reality TV show contestant believed
to have fled to Canada after killing
his ex-wife.
Ryan Jenkins, who was a
contestant on the VH1 show Megan
Wants a Millionaire, was charged
today with the murder of former
swimsuit model Jasmine Fiore. The
couple married in a Las Vegas
wedding this year.
Police said Jenkins had removed
Fiore's teeth and fingers in an
apparent attempt to impede efforts
to identify the naked body, which
was found stuffed in a suitcase in a
California litter bin over the
weekend. A preliminary coroner's
report indicated she had been
strangled.
Jenkins had reported her missing
on Saturday night and then
vanished after the body was found.
Authorities suspect he drove 1,000
miles to Washington state and then
hopped in a boat to a peninsula on
Friday fakes: The best of the bogus
By Steven Sande (The
Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW))
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:00:00 AM
Filed under: Hardware, Humor,
Rumors, Odds and ends TUAW
presents to you the best of the
obviously fake device shots we've
seen in the last couple of weeks. On
occasion they're beautiful
renderings that are worth a second
glance, other times they're out of
the border, where he walked into
Canada. Canadian police said
ground, air and canine units were
involved in the search.
"At this time, although we believe
he crossed the border, we're not
100% sure of that," a US marshals
chief inspector, Thomas Hession,
said.
"There will be no stone unturned
and we'll look under every rock for
him." Police believe he may be
armed with a handgun.
A car and empty boat trailer
belonging to the 32-year-old native
of Calgary, Canada, were found at a
marina in the remote north-west
Washington town of Blaine.
Jenkins, variously described as an
architect, real estate developer and
investment banker, appeared in at
least three episodes of Megan
Wants a Millionaire, about a
woman seeking to land a wealthy
bachelor by putting suitors through
their paces.
The couple had been fighting in
recent months, according to Fiore's
mother. Prosecutors said the two
checked into a San Diego hotel on
13 August and Jenkins checked out
the next morning. Fiore was not
seen alive again.
Police received a report yesterday
focus shots that tipsters swear were
taken quickly at a meeting on the
Apple campus. In any case, they're
a lot of fun.
Let's begin with this gem from
the French blog Le Journal du
Geek. In a post titled " Encore un
peu de MacBook Touch?" ("Again
a little MacBook Touch?"), we see
what looks like a page from an
Apple website:
This fake is fabulous! It shows
the device being about the size of
that a man matching Jenkins's
description had arrived by boat at
Point Roberts, Washington, about
10 miles from Blaine at the tip of a
peninsula. The point is reachable by
land only from Canada, and Jenkins
is believed to have walked across
the border from there.
After taping for Megan Wants a
Millionaire finished in early March,
he met 28-year-old Fiore in a Las
Vegas casino and the two got
married on 18 March, said Fiore's
mother, Lisa Lepore.
But in May, "they had a big
blowout", and fought because he
was jealous of her ex-boyfriends,
Lepore said. "She had the marriage
annulled."
Fiore's ex-boyfriend Robert
Hasman urged Jenkins's friends and
family to help police find him.
"Ryan Jenkins is an animal, what
he has done to Jasmine is
unspeakable and it's just not right
and I'd appreciate your help," he
said at a news conference.
If Jenkins is apprehended north of
the border, authorities there could
extradite him but only with
assurances that he would not face
the death penalty. Farrah Emami, a
spokeswoman with the Orange
County district attorney's office,
what everyone would like to see,
with about a 10" diagonal display.
said the death penalty issue had not
been addressed yet. Prosecutors
have recommended bail of $10m
(£6m).
"Mr Jenkins is considered
dangerous, possibly armed, and has
the financial means to hide
anywhere in the world," said the
Orange County district attorney,
Tony Rackauckas. "Anyone
helping Mr Jenkins hide from the
police may go to prison
themselves."
Court records show that Jenkins
was charged in June in Clark
county, Nevada, with "battery
constituting domestic violence" for
allegedly hitting Fiore in the arm
and was due to be tried in
December.
Jenkins also has a criminal
history in his home town of
Calgary. He was sentenced to 15
months' probation in January 2007
on an unspecified assault charge,
according to the Alberta ministry of
justice. No further details were
available.
• United States
Haroon Siddique
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
They give it a plausible name
instead of the lame "iPad" moniker,
the power button is located away
from the middle of the device, and
the faux photos show it being used
with a dock, as a music keyboard in
GarageBand, and flipping from
landscape to portrait. Very cool,
and they even endow the MacBook
touch with drool-worthy specs on
the website.
Continue reading Friday fakes:
The best of the bogus
Internet News Record
First Majin: The
Fallen Realm
trailer is charming
By Justin McElroy (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:35:00 AM
If you want to demand innovation
in your games, you have to be
willing to embrace things when you
don't totally get them. Take this
trailer for Majin: The Fallen Realm.
for instance. We don't exactly
understand the relationship between
this young boy and his mossy Wild
Thing, but we're ready to clasp both
of them to our bosom until we "get
it."
The picture painted of the
friendship seems like a really
interesting one, especially in that
last shot. Honestly, we're just glad
to see man and monster's
relationship evolving beyond
oppressive slavery.
First Majin: The Fallen Realm
trailer is charming originally
appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 09:35:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Email this| Comments
TUAW Friday fakes: The best of
the bogus originally appeared on
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW) on Fri, 21 Aug 2009
09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
Sponsored Topics: Apple-
TUAW- Unofficial Apple Weblog-
MacBook- Macintosh
Internet News Record
Libya plays down bomber's return
(World news and comment
from the Guardian |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:50:12 AM
Celebrations apparently scaled
down after warning by Barack
Obama not to give Abdelbaset al-
Megrahi a hero's welcome
Libya appeared today to be trying
to play down the return of the
Lockerbie bomber, keeping him out
of the public eye and making little
official mention of him, amid
outrage by families of the US
victims and a warning by President
Barack Obama not to give him a
hero's welcome.
A crowd threw flower petals as
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi landed at
Tripoli airport last night following
his release from prison by Scotland,
and the son of the Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi escorted him
home.
But even as Megrahi descended
from the plane, Libya seemed to
scale down its planned more
elaborate welcome. Hundreds in the
crowd were rushed away by
authorities and the arrival was not
broadcast live on state TV.
By midday, it was not known
where Megrahi had been taken and
officials had no comment on his
whereabouts.
It was an unusually low-key
approach for a country that in the
past has snapped up any
opportunity to snub the west and
could easily bring out hundreds of
thousands to cheer if it chose to. It
suggested that Libya is wary of
hurting its ties with the US and
Europe, which have improved
dramatically after years as a pariah
state – in part over the 1988
Lockerbie attack, in which 270
people, mostly Americans, were
killed.
Megrahi, who is dying of prostate
cancer, was freed by Scotland on
compassionate grounds after
serving eight years of a life
sentence over the attack. The
decision infuriated the families of
many of the US victims. On
Thursday, Obama said he was in
touch with Libyan authorities and
told them Megrahi, a former Libyan
intelligence officer, should not be
"welcomed in some way but instead
should be under house arrest".
A former western diplomat once
based in Tripoli, speaking on
condition of anonymity, pointed out
that the Libyan government has
been conspicuously silent about his
return.
The diplomat said that even the
prime minister, Baghdadi al-
Mahmudi, had passed up an
opportunity during a joint press
conference yesterday with the
Swiss president to comment on the
Lockerbie bomber's return.
There were signs of a last-minute
change of plans during Megrahi's
arrival to tone down the reception.
Ahead of his plane's landing,
thousands of young men were
bussed in to the airport. They
danced to nationalist songs while a
DJ encouraged them along. Many
hoisted small solid-green Libyan
flags while others held aloft
Scottish flags.
But within minutes of the
landing, authorities rushed most of
them away, paring the crowd down
to around 300 and the nationalist
songs were halted. International
media who had been brought to the
airport were hastily taken away just
before the arrival.
A Libyan TV channel connected
to Gaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam
Gaddafi, had been granted
exclusive rights to broadcast
Megrahi's arrival live. But it did not
do so. Instead, hours later it carried
short clips of him coming down the
plane's stairs. Authorities said there
were technical difficulties with the
live broadcast.
Also, neither Megrahi nor Seif al-
Islam Gaddafi – who escorted him
on the flight – appeared later at a
planned rally at Tripoli's Green
Square, a sweeping plaza where
thousands of chairs had been set up.
The rally was organized as part of
celebrations of the 40th anniversary
of Libya's revolution – not in
connection with Megrahi – and his
return did not appear to be
mentioned during speeches at the
rally.
• Abdelbaset al-Megrahi
• Libya
• United States
• Scotland
• Barack Obama
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
Chinese factory poisons
1,300 kids
By Jonathan Watts (World
news and comment from the
Guardian | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:37:24 AM
• Second case in a month
involving mass poisoning of pupils
| Read this in Chinese
More than 1,300 children have
been poisoned by a year-old
manganese factory in central China,
the state media reported today,
amid national fears about the
prevalence of heavy metal
pollution.
The exposure of mass lead
contamination in Wenping
township, Hunan province, is the
second case in as many weeks,
prompting accusations that the
authorities have failed to
adequately regulate toxins that
build up over time.
A local government official told
the Xinhua news agency that tests
of children living nearby showed
that 60% to 70% had unhealthy
levels of lead in their blood. The
authorities closed the factory last
week and detained two executives
on suspicion of "causing severe
environment pollution".
Li Liangmei, 36, the mother of
two affected children, aged 13 and
eight, said 600 to 700 villagers
rioted earlier this month after news
broke about the lead poisoning,
overturning police cars and
smashing a local government sign.
The plant, which is within 500
metres of a primary school, a
middle school and a kindergarten,
World/ 49
opened in May 2008, reportedly
without the approval of the local
environmental protection bureau.
Although the factory had been
operating for only a year, 1,354
children were found to have more
than 100mg of lead per litre of
blood, the limit considered safe. A
gradual build-up of lead in the
bloodstream can lead to anaemia,
muscle weakness and brain
damage.
The plant is unlikely to have gone
ahead without support from the
local government. Many poor
districts ignore environmental
regulations to attract investment,
and Hunan is notorious for its
heavy metal industry. The Wugang
city government said it had
demanded an overhaul of more than
100 plants, including seven other
smelters.
But the problem is likely to be
nationwide because authorities are
not obliged to conduct expensive
tests for heavy metals, which tend
to accumulate over time rather than
be emitted in noticeable bursts.
In Shaanxi, northern China, last
week, 615 children tested positive
for lead poisoning attributed to a
smelter, which is due to cease
operating this Saturday.
• Pollution
• Waste
• China
Jonathan Watts
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
50 AppleBlog/
DEATH
continued from page 44
bewildering array of canals and
pumping stations that draw water
out from the Nile into sandy valleys
to the east and west, where the
desert is slowly being turned green.
You can see evidence of these
new lands on the Delta's fringes;
mile upon mile of agri-business-
owned fields peeking out behind
the advertising billboards of the
Cairo-Alexandria desert road. The
billboards depict gated compounds
and luxury second homes, escapist
dreams for the Egyptian upper-
middle class.
The new lands behind them are
another sort of escape, this time for
the whole country. Their very water
-intensive existence is, though, only
hastening the demise of the Delta;
once the glittering jewel of Egypt
and bedrock of its survival, but now
a region whose death warrant may
already have been signed.
Invasion of the Nile: The Delta's
troubled history
• 4,000 – 3,000 BC approx – The
Delta is populated by migrants
from the Sahara and intensive
farming begins in the region
• 1,300 BC approx – According to
the Bible, the Delta is home to the
Israelites, and miraculously
survives God's plague of hail
• 343 BC – The Persians kill
Egypt's last native pharaoh,
ushering in more than 2,000 years
of foreign rule over the Delta
• 332 BC – Alexander the Great
invades and founds Alexandria at
the tip of the Delta
• 30 BC – Cleopatra and Marc
Anthony kill themselves
• 639 AD – Muslim Arabs sweep
into the Delta, forcing out the
Byzantine rulers
• 1517 AD – The Delta is
absorbed into the Ottoman Empire
and ruled from Turkey
• 1798 AD – Napoleon Bonaparte
begins a three-year French
occupation
• 1805 AD – The Albanian pasha
Muhammad Ali seizes power but
his dynasty falls under the control
of the British Empire
• 1952 AD – Gamal Abdel Nasser
restores Egyptian rule for the first
time in two millennia
• 1970 AD – The Aswan Dam is
completed, ending seasonal
flooding in the Delta
• 2007 AD – Delta declared
among top three areas vulnerable to
rising sea levels
Alexandria: An ancient city under
threat
Alexandria has been through
several reincarnations: as a small
Pharaonic town in the 4th century
BC, as the capital of Egypt for
1,000 years, and as a cosmopolitan
melting-ground in the early 20th
century. While most of its former
glories are already lying on the
seabed, scientists now fear the city's
outer fringes could be among the
first victims of any rise in sea
levels.
A rise of only 1m will leave the
city centre cut off from the
mainland. If it does disappear, its
literary chroniclers may provide
some comfort. Lawrence Durrell
called it "the capital of memory", a
city where recollections stay
"clinging to the minds of old men
like traces of perfume upon a
sleeve". The Greek poet
Constantine Cavafy shared
Durrell's sense of being trapped by
history. In what may prove a
remarkable piece of foresight, he
wrote in The City:
You'll find no new places, you
won't find other shores.
The city will follow you. The
streets in which you pace
will be the same, you'll haunt the
same familiar places,
and inside those same houses
you'll grow old.
You'll always end up in this city.
Don't bother to hope
for a ship.
• Sea level
• Climate change
• Farming
• Pollution
• Food
• Flooding
• Egypt
• Agriculture
• Climate change
Jack Shenker
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
Internet News Record
Wikimedia Foundation
creates official iPhone
app
By Mel Martin (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 8/20/2009 2:30:00 PM
Filed under: iPhone, App Store,
iPod touch, App Review The
Wikimedia Foundation has just
released a free app for accessing the
web based encyclopedia right on
your iPhone or iPod touch.
Wikipedia Mobile[iTunes link]
brings the full boatload of
Wikipedia knowledge to a nicely
formatted iPhone screen. In my
tests, it responded quickly, and
without any glitches over Wi-Fi
and the 3G network.
The only issues really are that
there are already dozens of similar
apps available for the iPhone. In
fact, if you go to the Wikipedia site
in Safari things are nicely
optimized for the iPhone screen. Of message saying a microphone is
needed. Huh?
course the app has a built in history
button, but Safari does too. However you access it, Wikipedia
is a great resource, and the
Some of the other Wikipedia apps
I've tried are Wikipanion[ iTunes Wikimedia Foundation says it will
be updating the app frequently
link], which has more features,
including changing the font size, based on user requests. The current
version is 0.1, so I think this app is
and Wikiamo[iTunes link] that
allows landscape view, reading of just getting started.
TUAW Wikimedia Foundation
saved material offline, and links to
other languages. creates official iPhone app
originally appeared on The
I'd like to see the ability to email
entries to myself or others, and the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Wikipedia Mobile support page just on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:30:00
goes to the home page of EST. Please see our terms for use
Wikipedia. That's not too helpful. of feeds.
One other odd thing. When trying Read| Permalink| Email this|
to install the software on a first Comments
generation iPod touch, users are Sponsored Topics: iPhone- App
reporting it fails with an error Store- Safari- Apple- IpodTouch
Internet News Record
Karzai and Abdullah both claim
victory in Afghan election
By Jon Boone (World news and
comment from the Guardian |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 2:33:28 AM
Candidates ignore Clinton's
request to wait for official results,
as officials investigate allegations
of electoral fraud
Despite calls by the US for the
leading candidates in Afghanistan's
election not to claim victory, both
Hamid Karzai and Abdullah
Abdullah said they won yesterday's
vote.
Although the first early official
results are not expected until
Saturday or even Sunday, both
campaign teams claimed they were
ahead, with President Karzai's staff
saying he had taken a majority of
votes, making a second round run-
off unnecessary.
Abdullah's spokesman, Sayyid
Agha Hussain Fazel Sancharaki,
said the former foreign minister
was ahead with 62% of the vote.
Pajwok, an Afghan news agency
that began last night to collate
unofficial results published by
individual polling centres, said the
two candidates were "virtually in a
Leno says he's not destroying the TV drama
By Bob Sassone (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:03:00 AM
Leno has heard all of the
complaints (many of them from
YOU, the one reading this right
now) about how he is taking away
the 10PM slot that could go to one-
hour dramas, and he doesn't want to
hear about it anymore.
The comic and Jay Leno Show
host says that he is not only
dead heat", with Abdullah doing
best in the provinces immediately
north of Kabul and Karzai grabbing
votes in the south and east.
The US had hoped to avoid such
speculation and the secretary of
state, Hilary Clinton, announced
three days before the poll that she
expected people to "refrain from
speculation until results are
announced". Fearing that disputes
between candidates could turn ugly,
she called on "candidates and their
supporters to behave responsibly".
Foreign election observers also
urged caution, saying a poll
conducted in virtual combat zones
in some parts of the country was
particularly hard to analyse.
The country's deputy chief
electoral officer, Zekria Barakzai,
called on candidates to await the
official results.
He said turnout was between 40%
and 50%, far lower than the 70% of
voters who took part in
Afghanistan's first presidential
election in 2004. Figures on
regional turnouts will be eagerly
awaited as expected low turnout in
the south could eat into Karzai's
support.
employing 22 Writers Guild
members on his show, he says that
if he didn't do this show then there's
World/ AppleBlog/ Entertainment/ 51
According to the official
timetable of events, preliminary
results are not due until 3
September, with the final certified
results coming in two weeks later.
That will give election officials
time to investigate widespread
allegations of fraud. The campaign
team of Ashraf Ghani, another
leading candidate, said they were
particularly worried about reports
of ballot box stuffing in areas in the
south where election observers
were unable to visit.
Suspiciously high turnouts of
women in the south will also be
scrutinised as huge numbers of fake
voter registration cards in the name
Apple Remote Desktop
of women are known to be in
circulation.
• Afghanistan
3.3 now available
• Hamid Karzai By Michael Jones (The improved performance when using
• United States Unofficial Apple Weblog a shared screen.
• US foreign policy (TUAW)) If you're just starting out with
• Hillary Clinton Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:15:00 AM ARD, be sure to check out some of
Jon Boone the great tutorials Apple has posted
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News Filed under: Enterprise, Software online. From getting set up, to
& Media Limited 2009 | Use of this Update, Apple Apple has released providing remote assistance to
content is subject to our Terms & version 3.3 of its remote users, to automating routine tasks;
Conditions| More Feeds administration tool, Apple Remote as Apple might say, "there's a
Desktop (ARD). The update is tutorial for that."
available both via Software Update, Thanks to TUAW reader Jim for
and from the Apple website. giving us the heads up!
According to the release notes,
the update comes with a number of
TUAW Apple Remote Desktop
3.3 now available originally
no guarantee that NBC would put improvements, including the long- appeared on The Unofficial Apple
dramas in that slot because most of desired ability to send function Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 21 Aug
them fail and they could just put in keys and system shortcuts (Force 2009 10:15:00 EST. Please see our
reality shows like The Biggest Quit, cmd-Tab for application terms for use of feeds.
Loser or news shows like Dateline switching, cmd-shift-Q to log out) Read| Permalink| Email this|
in the slot. to the remote Mac; previously those Comments
Continue reading Leno says he's commands would execute on the Sponsored Topics: Apple- Apple
not destroying the TV drama administrator's machine, which Remote Desktop- TUAW-
Filed under: Other Comedy could cause undesired behavior. Unofficial Apple Weblog- Apple
Shows, Celebrities, Reality-Free Also included are support for wide- Software Update
Permalink| Email this| | area Bonjour connections and
Comments
52 AppleBlog/ TechNews/
MindMeister for iPhone, mind map
in the cloud!
By Brett Terpstra (The
Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW))
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:30:00 PM
Filed under: Productivity, iPhone,
App Review
I've mentioned some options for
iPhone-based mind mapping
before, but I'm pretty excited to let
everyone know about the release of
MindMeister for iPhone( iTunes
Link). MindMeister is a web-based
mind mapping application with
excellent import and export features
for most major formats.
They've been focused on
collaboration from the beginning,
allowing realtime editing of mind
maps by multiple participants, and
including Skype integration. The
iPhone version allows you to
download your maps from your
account (or start from scratch) and
sync changes back to your maps,
share maps, and export as
MindManager, Freemind, Word,
PDF or image files.
MindMeister for iPhone (and
iPod touch) is an evolution of the
MindMaker application, which was
acquired by MindMeister. While
the online version of MindMeister
allows for a range of icons, images
and metadata on each node, the
iPhone version currently lacks a lot
of this functionality. However, it
provides a fast, simple way to edit
the text of nodes, adding to existing
maps or creating new ones on-the-
go. The navigation is an intuitive
pan-and-zoom, tap-to-edit interface
which is pretty standard among
iPhone mind-mapping apps. It also
incorporates the GeistesBlitz
feature of MindMeister, which
allows you to instantly add ideas to
a default map, or create a basic map
from scratch, through email or a
variety of other methods (there's a
REST API available if you feel like
adding your own points of access).
As an aside, I'd like to point out
that the online version has some
cool tricks. For example, you can
import a tab-indented outline from
a text file and turn it into a map
automatically (just go to "Import
Mindmap" and select a text file).
Also, if you're editing a map, select
a node and then click the image or
note button ... not the dropdown
menu, just click the button. It will
do a quick search of Google Images
or Wikipedia, respectively, and
insert the results. Don't like the
image it found for your text? Click
again. Try it, it's fun.
While I'm not completely sold on
iPhone mind-mapping (paper is
pretty fast), the syncing, sharing,
rapid-entry features of MindMeister
make it my top pick. It's not just
about device portability, it's about
data portability; with MindMeister,
my maps can end up in just about
any format I want them to, and I
can share them directly and get
feedback instantly. MindMeister for
iPhone is currently $6.99 in the
App Store. If you're a MindMaker
user, it's a free upgrade. The
MindMeister.com online service
has plans ranging from free to
$6/month, with a $15/year
academic option.
TUAW MindMeister for iPhone,
mind map in the cloud! originally
appeared on The Unofficial Apple
Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 20 Aug
2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone- App
Store- Apple- ITunes- IPod Touch
Pre ad is to iPhone ad as
dude is to lady in Aerosmith
song of the same name
By Victor Agreda, Jr. (The
Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW))
Submitted at 8/21/2009 1:30:00 AM
Filed under: Odds and ends,
iPhone What can I say? White
background, disembodied finger
and digi-creepy stillness of the
device... the Bell [Canada] version
of an ad for the Palm Pre looks
hilariously like an iPhone ad. View
the videos and judge for yourself.
Then get a Pre if you are compelled
to do so. It has maps and Twitter
and you can touch and rotate and
slide it.
Bell version
and an iPhone ad
Spooky, isn't it? Of course, there
are only so many ways to illustrate
the feature set of a multi-touch
smartphone, aren't there? It's like
Why Do Ebooks Cost So Much?
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:48:00 AM
Jeff Malfant points us to a nice
little rant over at News.com
wondering why ebooks are so
damned expensive. He points out
that many seem to be priced at
about the same going price as the
physical books, despite no physical
product to produce and ship. My
guess is that companies and
Internet News Record
when Newhart was sued by the guy
who also wrote a handyman book.
There are, in fact, only so many
ways to explain how to nail a nail,
Dick explains. Lucky us, all
smartphone ads will now follow
this format, making it much easier
to determine which phone is best
for us. Thanks, Bell!
[thanks to Philip Lam for the tip!]
TUAW Pre ad is to iPhone ad as
dude is to lady in Aerosmith song
of the same name originally
appeared on The Unofficial Apple
Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 01:30:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: IPhone-
Smartphone- palmpre- Apple-
Twitter
publishers think they can get away
with it for now, since people are
"used to" paying the price of books,
but it won't last. It just becomes an
opportunity for smarter folks to
start offering cheaper books (or
even free ebooks). And, at some
point, a lot of people will just stop
paying for the higher priced
ebooks.
Permalink| Comments| Email
This Story
Internet News Record
Apple Store UK says Snow
Leopard ships by August
28th
By John Burke (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 8/20/2009 11:00:00 PM
Filed under: OS, Software Update,
Apple, Snow Leopard
There's been a lot of news
circulating around about the
upcoming release of Mac OS X
10.6. First, Snow Leopard hit
Amazon's pre-order list(and soon
topped it) and days later, there were
reports that Snow Leopard had
finally reached gold master.
Today, Apple's UK store has
posted information about Snow
Leopard and Apple's "Up-to-Date"
program, with an interesting note:
Ships by August 28th. If this is
true, it would confirm rumors that
the next major release of the Mac
So, The PS3 Slim Can Bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio
After All? [PS3 Slim]
By Danny Allen (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:30:00 AM
The PS3 Slim only just got
announced, but its full abilities are
starting to emerge. The latest:
Apparently it actually can bitstream
Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD
Master Audio directly to your
operating system would be released
ahead of the September release date
set by Apple.
While the page is public, there's
no way to order it yet. This could
be a simple error or an outdated
page but has Mac fans in a buzz as
the release gets closer.
[via MacRumors]
TUAW Apple Store UK says
Snow Leopard ships by August
28th originally appeared on The
Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:00:00
EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard
- Apple- Mac OS X- Operating
system- Unofficial Apple Weblog
receiver. Can I get a w00t from the
audiophiles?
Audio nerds had suspected (or at
least hoped) the PS3 Slim would
offer such support. We've not yet
confirmed it ourselves, but
Japanese Tech News site, AV
Watch, makes it sound like a done
deal.
MINI Roadside Assistance
can get you and your MINI
out of trouble spots
By Sang Tang (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 8/20/2009 11:30:00 PM
Filed under: iPhone, App Store,
iPod touch
Our colleague, Sam Abuelsamid,
at Autoblog has pointed out the
release of a roadside assistance app
from automaker MINI. The app,
MINI Roadside Assistance[ iTunes
link], is a collaboration between the
automaker and insurance company
Allstate and allows one to access
roadside assistance as well as the
specify its cause
So, say you're driving your MINI
to Las Vegas for your buddy's
bachelor party. During the drive,
your car overheats; it's 120 degrees
and you forgot were too lazy to
check the coolant before you left,
what'd you expect to happen? Well,
no need to worry -- roadside
assistance is just a few taps away
with MINI Roadside Assistance.
MINI Roadside Assistance is
available as a free download. MINI
Cooper not included. More info and
a demo video are available at Sam's
article.
The HDMI chip used by existing
AppleBlog/ Gizmos/ Tech Games/
TUAW MINI Roadside
Assistance can get you and your
MINI out of trouble spots originally
appeared on The Unofficial Apple
Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 20 Aug
2009 23:30:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone- App
Store- Apple- IpodTouch- TUAW
fatty PS3 models doesn't support
the relatively recent Dolby TrueHD
and DTS-HD MA codecs. This
forces them to decode internally,
and send the audio to your receiver
via LPCM, a potentially lossy
process.
Bottom line: Great news if you
use the PS3 for watching Blu-ray
53
Overheard@GamesCom:
The adorable little beers
in Cologne attack
By Alexander Sliwinski (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 1:00:00 AM
OK, we're gonna level with you,
some devs and folks working aren't
looking their best this morning.
Between a full day of press
interviews yesterday and a couple
evenings of ... well, stuff, it all
appears to be taking a toll. In one
meeting this morning, one
developer was not looking his best.
He cleared his throat, apologized,
and said, "I'm suffering from
excess."
Considering the main beer served
in Cologne is Kölsch, which comes
in a deceptively small 0.2 litre
glass, "excess" requires the
dishwasher getting a good workout.
[ Image]
Overheard@GamesCom: The
adorable little beers in Cologne
attack originally appeared on
Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug 2009
01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds.
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movies with a high-end surround
sound system. If not, just nod and
know that this is a good thing.
Wanna know more? Check out
Giz Explains: Dolby, DTS and
Home Theater Audio Codec
Confusion. [ AV Watch(translated)
via Engadget]
54 Gizmos/ Entertainment/
PS2 Compatibility Never
Returning to the PlayStation 3
[PS3]
By Mark Wilson (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:10:00 AM
Sony pretty much implied that
backward compatibility was dead
when they released the PS3 Slim
(without PS2 support), but just in
case, Sony's John Koller put a few
nails in that coffin during two
recent interviews.
Koller said, "It's not coming back,
so let me put that on the table,"
before later adding "won't be
returning" to Ars.
Then, to Kotaku, Koller flipped
the whole table metaphor around
(but said the same thing) with the
assertion that "backwards
compatibility is off the table."
Some eyewitnesses claimed that
Koller then stood from his chair,
squatted to the floor and teabagged
the first generation of PS3s that
included hardware backward
compatibility. Then, with an equal
amount of ceremony, he teabagged
the second generation of PS3s the
included software emulated
backward compatibility.
Sony's stance is that PS2-
compatibility is simply no longer a
relevant draw to PS3 buyers. And
while that's an easy enough point to
scoff at, I will admit, I don't know
the last time I loaded a PS2 disc
into my PS3. [ Ars and Kotaku]
HTC's Cheap Android Phone
On Video, Looking Surprisingly
Not Cheap [Android]
By John Herrman (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:50:00 AM
Android phones: Still expensive!
At least, until the Click, HTC's
rumored first budget Android
phone, hits the market. Here, a
member of Tinhte gives the Click a
timid whirl, and to be honest,
Android's cut-rate future doesn't
look so bad.
The Click's most distinctive
difference from the G1 and
MyTouch, besides its old-style
HTC shell and terrible aftermarket
engraving, is its screen size, which
isn't really apparent until you see it
next to its bigger brother. Aside
New HBO movie to star Samuel L. Jackson
and Tommy Lee Jones
By Brad Trechak (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 11:01:00 AM
Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy
Lee Jones will be starring in an
HBO movie The Sunset Limited.
The movie is written by Cormac
McCarthy (adapted from his own
play of the same name), the same
guy who wrote No Country For Old
Men, which also starred Jones. To
further his connection with
McCarthy, Jones will also be
directing.
Given the high quality of paid
cable fare, I'm not surprised that
these two stars are willing to do an
HBO movie. Even the premise
from that, it doesn't look like the
Click cuts to many corners—I'm
seeing a 3.5mm jack, GSM
compatibility, and Donut—and the
handset looks like a fine piece of
Android hardware—especially if it
hits a $100, or even better, $0 price
point, which it probably could, if it
tried.
Update: Yes, the demo dude has
horrifying extraneous appendage on
his right hand. New theory! The
Click is made from freshly depleted
nuclear waste, and it's cheaper than
the Magic because it may cause you
grow tiny withered horror thumbs. [
Tinhte via Slashgear]
sounds interesting: Jackson's
character saves Jones' character
from being hit by a Harlem subway
train, leading to a debate on their
Internet News Record
Self-Balancing eniCycle
is Like a Segway for the
Circus [Transportation]
By Danny Allen (Gizmodo)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:10:00 AM
Finally, a unicycle that even I
could ride! Designer, Aleksander
Polutnik, says it takes only minutes
to learn how to ride the eniCycle,
SELF-BALANCING page 55
relative upbringings and value of
their lives.
The article doesn't indicate if the
movie is intended for their network
or a theatrical release. It wouldn't
surprise me if it went theatrical. It
sounds like the sort of movie that
the Academy would love. I'm just
hoping that Jackson will say at
some point in the movie that he's
had it with these motherf***in
brakes on these motherf***in
trains.
Filed under: Celebrities, Pickups
and Renewals, Casting, Reality-
Free
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Internet News Record
SELF-BALANCING
continued from page 54
because it uses mini-gyroscopes
and an embedded processor to keep
you balanced. Watch it in action:
The eniCycle's electric-powered
1000 watt motor kicks into gear as
you lean forward—similar to riding
a Segway. The gyroscopes help you
stay upright while measuring your
Kelly Clarkson and Joe
Jonas to guest judge
American Idol
By Jason Hughes (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:36:00 AM
The rotating guest judge slots in
the wake of Paula Abdul's
departure continue. The latest
celebrities guest judging American
Idol are Kelly Clarkson and Joe
Jonas of the Jonas Brothers. I'm
starting to see an upside for the
show post-Paula.
With ratings on the decline the
past couple of years, it's also been
observed that the median age for
the show had been getting older as
well. As we all know, old people
don't exist to advertisers, so youth
is where it's at. Kelly Clarkson is a
great choice to bring in a hip and
young crowd, and she's a great
story for the show. Here's their first
crowned champion coming back to
offer sage advice and wisdom ... or
at least a lot of "Y'all!"
Joe Jonas is sure to bring legions
of screaming pre-pubescent girls to
the screen. And nobody obsesses
vertical angle 100 times a second.
So far Polutnik has built two
prototypes, and is looking for big
business to help him sell the thing. I
hope he does. [ Enicycle via
Core77 via DVICE]
over stars like pre-pubescent girls.
I'd love to see the permanent slot
filled by an artist as current and
relevant as these two. Maybe Amy
Winehouse is available; it'd be like
Paula never left!
Filed under: American Idol,
Judges, Alumni, News and Gossip,
Casting
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Entertainment/ 55
NBC renews deal with the NFL
By Allison Waldman (TV
Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:29:00 AM
If there's one night of television
that NBC has a handle on, it's
Sunday. At least during football
season. Football Night In America
works, and you know the old
saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it." That said, NBC has renewed its
NFL deal for two more years. The
new deal - the extension - secures
that NBC will be broadcasting NFL
that John Madden is gone?
games through 2013, so there will
be plenty of games for all those
analysts to yap about.
Probably not, especially if the
games are good.
NBC has nearly enough guys to Continue reading NBC renews
field a team on the pre-game show: deal with the NFL
Bob Costas, Dan Patrick, Keith Filed under: Sports, Industry,
Olbermann, Tony Dungy, Tiki Programming, OpEd, Pickups and
Barber, Rodney Harrison ... with Al Renewals, Reality-Free
Michaels and Cris Collinsworth Permalink| Email this| |
calling the games. Will we notice Comments
Spoilers Anonymous
By Isabelle Carreau (TV
Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:00:00 AM
This is Spoilers Anonymous, a
weekly column here at TV Squad
where we supply you with the dirt
on some of the more popular shows
on the air. We'll never put spoilers
up here on the main page in order
guaranteed, if you wish to remain Supernatural and Ugly Betty.
to help the reformed stay unspoiled.
If you have anything to add to the as such. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!)
This week we have spoilers for: Continue reading Spoilers
group, feel free to step up and let
yourself be heard, either with our Bones, Brothers & Sisters, Chuck, Anonymous
Desperate Housewives, Fringe, Filed under: Spoilers
tips form or by emailing us at
tvsquad at gmail dot com, or call Gossip Girl, Greek, Grey's Anonymous, Reality-Free
Anatomy, Heroes, House, Lost, Permalink| Email this| |
and leave a message at(775) 640-
8479. Your anonymity is One Tree Hill, Scrubs, Smallville, Comments
56 Entertainment/ Tech Games/
Daniel Wright getting a second
chance on The Biggest Loser
By Jason Hughes (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:35:00 AM
Yesterday, NBC revealed the cast
for the new season of The Biggest
Loser, and I was thrilled to see that
last season's heaviest contestant
Daniel Wright was among the new
losers. Daniel was heavily crippled
in his weight loss goals by the
"Couples" format in place last
season.
Dan had a great attitude and
really wanted to make things work,
but his partner David didn't have
the drive to change, which
ultimately cost them both the
chance to continue beyond the
fourth week. Daniel, who started at
454 pounds (the heaviest contestant
ever until this season), still
managed to drop to 312 pounds by
the finale.
LGJ: Welcome to the Big Leagues of Deception
By Mark Methenitis (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 2:00:00 AM
Each week Mark Methenitis
contributes Law of the Game on
Joystiq("LGJ"), a column on legal
issues as they relate to video
games:
There are, in the legal profession,
certain kinds of activities that really
make a statement after the fact
about just how big a company is.
One of those activities is using
subterfuge in either getting a deal
done or in filing with the
government. When I say
Continue reading Daniel Wright
getting a second chance on The
Biggest Loser
Filed under: Other Reality Shows,
OpEd, Casting
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subterfuge, I don't mean with the
intent to defraud anyone, but rather
with the intent that things be kept a
secret. Walt Disney used dozens of
companies to acquire the land that
would later become Disney World,
and now Sony is using alternate
entities to file for FCC clearances
on the PS3 Slim. Of course, I'm
sure many of you are wondering
how all this works, and why
companies go to all this trouble.
The why is a slightly simpler
answer than the how. Put simply:
the company doesn't want the
public to know. The reasons for the
Letterman beating O'Brien with old
shows
By Danny Gallagher (TV
Squad)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:01:00 AM
NBC must be doing a lot of
regretting these days for moving
Jay Leno to 10 p.m., and not just
because it screws up the perfect
headline alliteration with his former
competition.
It seems that David Letterman's
Late Show reruns are getting higher
ratings than Conan O'Brien's brand-
spanking new Tonight Show
episodes.
The margins aren't very wide, but
it must hurt when a rival is kicking
your lily-white hide and he's not
even throwing any punches. It's like
getting your ass kicked by a one
why are pretty varied. In Sony's
case, they were trying to preserve
the surprise we've talked about in
previous LGJ columns. In the
legged Stephen Hawking.
Continue reading Letterman
beating O'Brien with old shows
Filed under: Late Night, News,
Ratings, Reality-Free
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Disney case, they were trying to
prevent people from either buying
up the land they were trying to
acquire to then re-sell it to Disney
Internet News Record
at a huge markup or prevent people
from prospectively buying up all
the land around the development.
While a theme park is an extreme
example, the same could apply if,
say, Microsoft, decided to build a
new campus somewhere other than
Redmond.
Continue reading LGJ: Welcome
to the Big Leagues of Deception
LGJ: Welcome to the Big
Leagues of Deception originally
appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 02:00:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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Internet News Record
Capcom: Dark Void delay
made room for more
features
By JC Fletcher (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:00:00 AM
Dark Void wasn't just pushed back
into 2010 to avoid "the crowded
fall game season" (the crowded Q1
game season is so much nicer).
Dark Void associate producer
Shana T. Bryant offered another,
more content-related reason to
Kotaku, presumably right before
she shot their correspondent out of
a cannon.
"The main reason we delayed
Dark Void was because we really
wanted to spend the extra time we
needed to re-polish it and add a
new feature," Bryant explained.
The new feature is hovering: by
hitting the jump button twice, you
can now hover in place, rising
higher by continuing to hold the
jump button. In happy news for
people who want to play Dark Void
without going insane with
frustration, the damage model has
also been tweaked such that wall
collisions don't result in instant
death.
It actually sounds like we're
benefiting from the Dark Void
delay. Don't tell anyone, though!
We don't want the few publishers
who haven't moved everything to
spring 2010 to think it's a good
idea.
Gallery: Dark Void
Capcom: Dark Void delay made
room for more features originally
appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our
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Battlefield 1943 PC joins
the Q1 2010 party
By JC Fletcher (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 11:00:00 AM
PC gamers have been patiently
waiting for September to come
around so they could join in the
Battlefield 1943 fun, having been
told that it takes extra time and
effort to implement a Frostbite
Engine game on PC. It appears that
DICE originally underestimated the
amount of time it would take. In
other words, keep waiting. DICE is
now targeting Q1 2010.
Producer Gordon Van Dyke tells
The Feed that it's "a hard pill to
swallow, but it was absolutely
needed to ensure the features and
functionality that PC Players have
come to expect from Battlefield on
PC are not missing." Those features
include, Van Dyke says, "Things
like support for DirectX 9 and 10,
higher player count (up to 32-
player matches), wide peripheral
support; i.e., Joysticks for flying,
VoIP and ranked server provider
hosting."
However, if you can't wait, the
console versions are there for you.
If you find the idea of spending that
much on a console distasteful, just
tell yourself it's a really big video
card.
Gallery: Battlefield 1943
Battlefield 1943 PC joins the Q1
2010 party originally appeared on
Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug 2009
11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds.
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Tech Games/ 57
Bat-Knowledge! Bone
up on your Arkham
Asylum history
By Xav de Matos (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 10:32:00 AM
With Batman: Arkham Asylum's
release just around the corner, and a
slew of videos introducing the
game's cast of characters already
available, we didn't think there was
much more to say about Batman's
upcoming video game adventure
(until our review later today!). We
were wrong. In the latest and
perhaps last trailer for Batman:
Arkham Asylum, Eidos drops
knowledge on something we're
(admittedly) not familiar with: the
history of Gotham's Arkham
Asylum.
Listen carefully to a haunting
journal from the asylum's founder
Amadeus Arkham, as the 1920s-era
mogul slides deeper into madness
attempting to rehabilitate Gotham's
worst citizens. If only Amadeus
would have lived long enough to
see a giant bat punching the
"criminally insane" in the face,
maybe things would have worked
out better for the good doctor. It
really is amazing how much
medicine has progressed over the
years.
Gallery: Batman: Arkham
Asylum
Bat-Knowledge! Bone up on your
Arkham Asylum history originally
appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 10:32:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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58 Tech Games/ TechNews/
DJ Hero coming Oct. 27 in
US, 'late October' worldwide
By Alexander Sliwinski (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 9:00:00 AM
Speaking to Joystiq at
GamesCom, Activision has
officially confirmed what retailer
listings have indicated for quite
some time: DJ Hero will wind up
on shelves starting October 27th in
the US and "late October"
elsewhere -- likely the week of the
27th. However, the retailer-derived
price of $120 (and $200 for the
pictured " Renegade Edition") has
yet to be confirmed.
DJ Hero will come with 93
mixes, comprised of 100 individual
tracks. The game's guitar mode will
Newspapers And The Saywall: Lots Of Talking... Few Paywalls
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 7:33:00 PM
All year long we've been hearing
story after story of newspapers
insisting that they're going to
implement a paywall and make
readers pay like they used to. Of
course, the idea that they ever paid
for the news is a myth, but to date
be compatible with Rock Band axes
and microphones. Yes,
microphones. Though plugging in a
microphone offers no major
gameplay additions, the peripheral
can be handed to the drunkest
person in the room for random
shoutouts and other foolish
remarks. USB mics are a go, but
we're following up to see if wireless
mics will also be accepted.
DJ Hero coming Oct. 27 in US,
'late October' worldwide originally
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2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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the bigger myth seems to be that
newspapers are going to start
charging. Sure, there are a few that
have been charging for a while, but
for all the talk about paywalls,
they've really just been "saywalls."
No one's actually made a move.
Alan Mutter seems to be suggesting
that the folks who run newspapers
are all pretty much paralyzed by
Final Fantasy XIII's English
voiceovers are 'complete'
By David Hinkle (Joystiq)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 11:28:00 AM
Klee Kuo, one of Square Enix's
marketing Moogles, just dropped
word that the English voice work
for Final Fantasy XIII is complete.
In fact, that isn't the only detail
offered on the Twitter account.
Kuo's also made sure to say how
impressed he is with the new
Summons ( marketing, ho!) and
how the game will incorporate a "
fear. They know that charging will
kill off ad revenue, and they're not
really convinced that the paywall
will fix that. They're right. Putting
up a paywall is a dumb strategy that
will fail for all but a very small
number of publications. So why are
they all talking about it without
doing it? My guess is it's a
signaling method. They're hoping
unique level up system in FFXIII
like Sphere Grid in FFX and
License Board in FFXII."
So, Squenix, now that you have
the voice work out of the way, can
you get us that demo? Please?
Final Fantasy XIII's English
voiceovers are 'complete' originally
appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Aug
2009 11:28:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
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Comments
that if they can sort of peer pressure
each other into it, a bunch of papers
may all do it at once and there
would be some sort of safety in
numbers. In reality, it's a failure of
understanding the basic business
they're in, and a timid response,
rather than a smart one. It's
frustrating, but the answer is for
newspapers to shut up or put up. If
Internet News Record
There Is No
Harmony In A
Patent Thicket
By Kevin Donovan (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 5:50:00 PM
This is the sixth post in a series of
posts looking at the question of
intellectual property rights in both
China and India. We've got one
more post to go
Why Intellectual Property Is
Insufficient For Economic
Development In China And India
The strong focus on intellectual
property presented by advisers to
China and India miss the ecosystem
in which useful innovation takes
place. This ecosystem includes,
among other things, education,
entrepreneurship and openness. For
example, intellectual property can
only add to growth when coupled
with trade liberalization, something
India significantly lacks ( Gould
1996). However, because a larger
market provides a larger incentive
for commercial innovation, some
researchers have found that with
increased market size should come
decreased intellectual property (
Boldrin 2005). This finding, that
for every 2% of economic growth,
the duration of IP should be
THERE page 59
they say they want a paywall, put it
up, and let's watch it fail. Or if they
want a real strategy, they should try
giving us a call, and we'll lend them
a hand.
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Internet News Record
THERE
continued from page 58
reduced by 0.5% would have
significant implications in rapidly
growing China and India, but it
receives little to no attention amidst
the drive for ever stronger
intellectual property. Finally, even
though intellectual property may
stimulate cross-border licensing of
technology, it is unlikely to bring a
sudden inflow of foreign
investment because other facts
account for the variation in the
behavior of MNCs in different
countries ( Fink 2005).
Watch out for the Patent Thicket
As China and India are exhorted
to increase intellectual property
protection and enforcement to
higher standards - “harmonization”
in the rhetoric of its proponents -
they risk emulating the detrimental
IP systems of the developed world.
The United States, widely viewed
as the most innovative nation in the
world, has a patent system that has,
according to Jaffe, "become sand
rather than lubricant in the wheels
of American progress” ( Jaffe
2004). Even more worrying, the
trend in international intellectual
property is actually speeding past
the American level of protection,
raising concerns that the incredibly
strong IP in countries will diminish,
rather than promote, innovative
capabilities.
Patent thickets - "a dense web of
overlapping intellectual property
rights that a company must hack its
way through in order to actually
commercialize new technology" -
and the "tragedy of the
anticommons" - where "too much
ownership... wrecks markets, stops
innovations and costs lives" - are
useful concepts for policy-makers
in China and India to keep in mind
as they are encouraged to increase
their intellectual property. Instead
of being incentives for innovation,
47% of firms are using patent
portfolios in negotiations and 50%
as defensive protection from
lawsuits ( Boldrin 2008). If China
and India grant patents too broadly,
they risk overshooting
privatization, likely stunting the
domestic growth of complex
technologies and innovations
whose production will be covered
by dozens of competing patent
claims ( Jaffe 2004). This will only
be exacerbated by bad standards
that do not restrict exclusive rights
to truly novel, useful and non-
obvious inventions ( Boyle 2008).
Are China and India
Overshooting Optimal Intellectual
Property?
There is already evidence that the
two emerging superpowers are
making these errors. East Asian
countries are patenting at a per
capita rate of 4 times the developed
world, leading to quick patent
quantity convergence ( Brahmbhatt
2007). China, whose patent office
led the world with 800,000
applications in 2008, is now also
home to the most patent lawsuits
per year (“ Battle of Ideas”). While,
prima facie, the enormous absolute
populations of China and India will
likely make their patenting activity
among the highest, given the
relatively small sectors engaged in
truly innovative work, these figures
are worrying. In fact, the same
motivations that have been fingered
as the causes of the American
patent system’s woes – government
downsizing and competitiveness –
are currently present in China and
India, increasing the likelihood that
they follow America’s folly ( Jaffe
2004).
Another American policy of
uncertain quality that is being
emulated in China and India is
university commercialization. The
Bayh-Dole Act, passed by
Congress in 1980, encouraged
universities to commercialize their
innovations through patents, but its
effectiveness is highly suspect.
Bayh-Dole changed “academic
norms regarding open, swift and
disinterested scientific exchange” (
So 2008). In India, this is already a
concern with 71% of surveyed
executives feeling “that lack of
collaboration between industry and
research institutes was the main
hurdle to innovation in India” (
Dutz 2007). The facilitators of that
exchange, Technology Transfer
Offices, have “become gatekeepers
that in many cases constrain the
flow of inventions and frustrate
faculty, entrepreneurs, and
industry” ( So 2008). Yet, China
and India are both encouraging
university patents(Graff 2007).
Flying Right Past the USA
Unfortunately, simply recreating
the flawed American system is
unlikely. The world’s largest
economic force, the USA, is
actively using its trading power to
increase international IP standards
beyond the current TRIPs-
mandated level. Through bilateral
free trade agreements (FTAs) and
the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement, currently being
negotiated in secret, the United
States is promulgating even more
expansive intellectual property
policies. The FTAs have
strengthened intellectual property
rights beyond the high standard
already set by TRIPs in dozens of
countries. These measures include
extending copyright for an
additional 20 years, preventing
parallel importation of patented
pharmaceutical products, limiting
compulsory licensing ability,
limiting copyright exceptions and
limitations through the
illegalization of technological
circumvention measures, and
explicitly extending patents to
biological innovations ( Fink 2005
PDF). Countries accept these
provisions in return for lower tariffs
and better quota allotments, but
while those are temporary, the
expansive intellectual property
policies are not.
In addition to all the previously
explained reasons why this is likely
detrimental to the developing
nations who agree, it is useful to
note that these policies promoted
by the USTR are deeply
hypocritical, especially when it
comes to copyright. The United
States copyright laws give
considerable breadth to consumers
through the fair use provision. This
limitation on exclusive rights has
59
been estimated to contribute $4.5
trillion per year to the US economy
( Rogers 2007 PDF). Consumer
International, a nonprofit, ranks the
United States as among the best
copyright policies in regards to
consumer protection; notably, it is
joined by China and India,
condemned by the USTR and
copyright industries as too
permissive (“ IP Watch List” 2009).
Speaking of intellectual property
as unidirectional makes little sense
when one recognizes that the
benefits are neither clear-cut nor
absolute. Additional costs of further
strengthened IP in China and India
will be higher administrative costs,
less imitation, and a decrease in the
incremental innovation that
provides real growth ( Reichman
1997). Other posts in this series:
• Do China And India Really
Want Stronger Intellectual
Property?• A Brief History Of
Intellectual Property In China And
India• Why Might China And India
Want To Strengthen National
Intellectual Property Policy?• Why
Increased IP In China And India Is
Likely To Disproportionately
Benefit The Developed World• In
China And India, Stronger
Intellectual Property Is
Unnecessary• There Is No
Harmony In A Patent Thicket
Kevin Donovan is an expert at the
Insight Community. To get insight
and analysis from Kevin Donovan
and other experts on challenges
your company faces, click here.
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60 TechNews/
Amazon sidesteps battle over Dan Brown book
(CNET News.com)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:00:00 AM
Amazon.com's Kindle may be the
most-popular e-reader on the
market, but that doesn't mean
everyone is happy with it.
Amazon announced earlier this
week that it will, in fact, sell a
Kindle version of "Da Vinci Code"
author Dan Brown's latest novel,
"The Lost Symbol." The book is
slated for release on September 15.
The Kindle version of "The Lost
Symbol" was in limbo since
Amazon first placed the hardcover
version on its site for preorder. Its
publisher, Random House, was
concerned with releasing a Kindle
version on the same day as the
hardcover version. The company
reasoned that with such a low price
($9.99 on the Kindle) compared
with the hardcover version, which
Amazon is currently offering for
$16.17, that Kindle sales would
cannibalize hardcover sales.
Random House's issues set the
stage for what could have been a
major battle between Amazon and
publishers. Dan Brown's book
promises to be a bestseller the day
it's released. Random House might
have had some leverage.
But after entering into discussions
with Amazon, Random House
announced last week that it had
approved a Kindle version.
"Now that all of our security and
Cable Companies Appear To Be Screwing Up TV Everywhere
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 9:44:00 PM
Back in March, some cable
companies announced plans for an
offering called TV Everywhere,
which was designed not to actually
add value to your cable
subscription plan, but to pressure
TV networks to stop putting their
logistical issues surrounding the e-
book of 'The Lost Symbol' have
been resolved, the e-book will be
released simultaneously with the
hardcover on September 15," the
publisher announced. It didn't
elaborate on what those issues
were.
Amazon followed up that
statement with its own confirmation
this week.
It's interesting that Amazon felt
the need to write its own press
release to announce the book's
Kindle availability. It underlies the
importance of Brown's book and
perhaps of Amazon's desire to show
other publishers that Random
House is allowing one of the
content online for free, and offer it,
instead, via cable authentication.
For users, it would mean the ability
to watch their cable subscriptions
online, but only after they
authenticate themselves, which
seemed like a big hassle. It may be
an even bigger hassle. Apparently,
in this effort to take on things like
Hulu (and, to a lesser extent,
biggest books of the year to hit the
Kindle at a reduced price on the
same day it's offered as a hardcover
in stores.
Stephen King's next book, "Under
the Dome," which is slated for a
November 10 release, could
potentially challenge Kindle policy
if its publisher, Simon & Schuster,
decides to press the issue.
Publishers are wary of some
aspects of the Kindle.(Credit:
Amazon)
Amazon will continue to face
those discussions as long as
publishers only worry about their
hardcover sales. Publishers believe
that if people can buy a book on the
Kindle store for $10, they will have
YouTube) no one at the cable
companies got the message that
simplicity is what made those sites
work: CBS Interactive president
Quincy Smith this week proclaimed
that there's no unified standard
among cable companies for the
project, and dozens of companies
are all approaching back-end
technology differently. There's also
no reason to buy a hardcover
version for $16--or more.
Amazon's troubles are quite
similar to Apple's battles with the
music industry. Publishers are set in
their ways. They don't necessarily
welcome e-books, and they're
deathly afraid of Amazon building
too much power in the space
through both hardcover and Kindle
sales. The larger the Kindle's
following, the less leverage they
will have, they believe.
Apple can relate. It has been
forced to deal with a wary music
industry since its iPod started
becoming the dominant force in the
industry. The music industry is
scared of iTunes and Apple. Book
publishers don't want to put
themselves in the same position
with the Kindle and Amazon.
But it's possible that they are.
Random House has already backed
down. Simon & Schuster is up next
to challenge Amazon and its
Kindle. It will be interesting to see
whether it goes to battle or follows
Random House's example.
In either case, its decision will set
a precedent.
Disclosure: Simon & Schuster is
owned by CBS. CNET News is
published by CBS Interactive, a
unit of CBS.
Check out Don's Facebook
profile, Twitter stream, and
FriendFeed.
no real consensus between cable
companies on how to proceed. One
result? Users not having a central
resource for video content.
Bowman suggested that projects
like TV Everywhere may not yield
a single site that will contain
content from dozens of
programmers. Instead, the
authentication system the industry
Internet News Record
DARPA 3D
reasoning engine to
identify urban threats
(CNET News.com)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:00:00 AM
DARPA is spending millions of
dollars to identify trash cans, which
may have raised a few eyebrows,
except these and other common
urban objects could in the course of
today's combat missions prove to
be tactically significant.
BAE Systems received a $7.1
million contract to work on Phase II
of the Urban Reasoning and
Geospatial Exploitation
Technology (URGENT) program,
which is designed to improve the
quality and timeliness of geospatial
intelligence U.S. troops receive
when facing enemy threats in urban
environments.
This phase of the program's goal
will be to "develop a 3D reasoning
engine to query over object shapes,
locations, and classifications for
rapid urban mission planning,
mission rehearsal, and situation
analysis," according to DARPA.
DARPA's contention is that since
target recognition in urban
environments is so far removed
from what soldiers have historically
focused on, i.e. military objects
such as tanks and armored
personnel carriers, that the need to
preemptively identify urban objects
DARPA page 61
develops may be used to point pay-
TV subscribers to several different
sites to view their pay-TV content
online. Now that sounds like a
winner.
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Internet News Record
If The AP Is About Clear And
Concise Reporting... Why Can't It
Explain Its New Plan?
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 2:22:35 AM
We've been discussing the
Associated Press attempt to DRM
the news using some technology it
clearly doesn't understand. But the
most infuriating part is that the AP
simply hasn't been able to answer
the myriad questions thrown at it
about this silly plan -- and when
pressed, suddenly announced it
wasn't talking any more.
This seems especially ironic
when you realize that the AP is
supposedly in the business of
explaining complex news events to
the world. John Temple, a former
newspaper editor, is pointing out,
amusingly, that the AP really
should have found an editor to go
over its plan before it released it --
because that editor would have
hopefully done a better job forcing
the AP to explain itself: So why do
DARPA
continued from page 60
has become an important
requirement.
That's going to be news to
veterans of Chechnya, Hue, and
Sarajevo.
Still, the reasoning is that tanks
and cannons have unique signatures
and were usually positioned in
relatively isolated areas away from
I say AP's planners needs an editor?
Because editors make writing clear
and understandable. And this "plan"
is neither.
When reporters write news stories
about the challenges an industry
faces, it's important that they be
clear -- and, of course, accurate --
about what the problems are and
what steps are proposed to address
them. The reporters' job is to help
readers understand the problems
and evaluate possible solutions. It's
also important that reporters be
clear about the potential industry or
company conflicts that stand in the
way of or complicate possible
solutions.
The first paragraph of the AP
document makes a bald assertion
without the facts to back it up that a
good editor would require of any
reporter. It talks of news content
being monetized without fair
compensation and "rampant"
civilians and that's not so with
today's asymmetric threats, where
troops are forced to engage enemy
combatants in cities with large
civilian populations.
"Even the most common urban
objects can have tactical
significance: trash cans can contain
improvised explosive devices,
unauthorized use of AP content on
literally tens of thousands of Web
sites. It says the problem is quickly
spreading. The document goes on
in this vein and seems to mix and
muddle two concerns: unauthorized
use -- the blatant stealing of entire
stories or photographs -- and the
use of headlines and snippets by
search engines and others. It never
makes clear how big the first
problem is. Is there really that
much revenue being stolen from the
owners of content as a result of
bloggers and others cutting and
pasting AP stories? I don't know
the answer from reading this
document. Of course, one might
argue that the reason the document
is so unclear is because the
Associated Press itself doesn't
understand it.
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doors can conceal snipers, jersey
barriers can block troop ingress,
roof tops can become landing
zones, and so on," hence the need
for an all-knowing system.
BAE contribution will be to fuse
Light Detection, and Ranging and
Geographic Information Systems'
data to automatically detect and
Paulo Coelho: Content
Creators Will Be Punished For
Not Sharing Their Ideas Freely
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 4:18:14 AM
We've written a few times about
best-selling author Paulo Coelho,
and his embrace of file sharing and
openness -- and how it helped him
sell a lot more books. Reader Esahc
writes in to alert us to the text from
a speech Coelho gave. The actual
speech appears to be from last year,
so a bit out of date, but it's still well
worth reading:
He talks about the success of his
own projects, from "pirating" his
own books, to having the
community make their own movie
out of one of his books. At the
same time he discusses the rise of
technology and the folly of
pretending you can fight the
technology. It's really a great
overall statement on embracing
new technologies for anyone who
thinks they need to rely on
copyright. On top of that, it again
confirms the basic premise that
we've stated here time and time
again: for those who work to
connect with their fans directly,
there are plenty of ways to do well,
even without specifically relying on
copyright to do so. We are facing a
new era, so either we adapt or we
die. However, I did not come here
classify an urban object's attributes,
function and geospatial features,
company officials said.
The BAE team has already
developed "a system that combines
a suite of complementary feature
extraction and matching algorithms
with higher-level inference and
contextual reasoning to detect,
TechNews/ 61
to share solutions, but my own
experience as an author. Of course,
I make a living out of my
copyrights, but at this very moment
I am not concentrating on this. I
have to adapt myself. Not only by
connecting more directly with my
readers -- something unthinkable a
few years ago -- but also by
developing a new language,
Internet-based, that will be the
language of the future: direct,
simple, without being superficial.
Time will tell me how to recover
the money I myself am investing
alone in my social communities.
But I am investing in something for
which every single writer in the
world would be grateful: to have
his texts read by a maximum of
people.
The Internet has taught me this:
don't be afraid of sharing your
ideas. Don't be afraid of engaging
others to voice their ideas. And
more importantly, don't presume
who is and who is not a creator --
because we all are. And the key
point he makes? In the past,
heretics were punished for sharing
their ideas. These days, you'll be
punished if you don't share your
ideas.
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segment, and classify urban entities
of interest in a fully automated
fashion."
Next up could be the market to
identify domestic urban threats-like
errant shopping carts and guys with
squeegees.
62 TechNews/
Moving To A Single Currency... Or
Lots Of Local Currencies?
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 12:17:06 AM
A few days ago, Kyle Brady sent
over his blog post wondering if the
world would eventually move to a
single currency. His suggestion
would be that it would be based on
the Euro, though can you just
imagine the political uproar in the
US if anyone actually took a step in
that direction? Politically, it's a total
non-starter. If you think that people
are freaking out over health care
reform, just wait until anyone in
power suggested something like
this. It simply won't happen.
Brady's post goes on to suggest that
this could help us move to a more
digital currency, though I think
we're already pretty much there.
Twitter pro accounts coming by end
of '09
(CNET News.com)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 8:06:01 AM
Well, it looks like they'll actually
do it.
In an interview with
VentureBeat's Matt Marshall,
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone
elaborated on the company's goal to
put out a revenue model before the
end of the year. He said that yes,
it'll involve offering paid accounts
to businesses that use the
microblogging platform for
marketing, customer relations,
publicity, and what-have-you.
That's something Twitter has been
hinting at for about a year now.
There's not a whole lot of detail
Actual paper money is a tiny
fraction of the real money supply
these days. Money is digital for all
intents and purposes right now.
However, just after reading that...
I came across an article suggesting
pretty much the exact opposite: that
we're perhaps more likely to move
to more splintered currencies as
local regions start creating their
own currencies. The article, in
particular, talks about Brooklyn
trying to create a Brooklyn-specific
currency. Such things are hardly
new. Having spent five years of my
life in Ithaca, NY, I was quite
familiar with Ithaca Hours, the
local currency that is often held up
as the model on which such local
currencies can work. Of course,
we've seen other attempts to do this
available. But paid accounts will
definitely involve statistics and
analytics that aren't available
through Twitter's existing
application program interface
(API), and possibly a whole
separate "commercial API" for
business-related applications. This
adds to a move earlier this year in
which Twitter started rolling out an
account verification process for
In fact, Stone told Marshall, the
first test phase of these accounts is
already underway with a few
companies. Considering Twitter's
status as marketing heaven, this is
probably a product that will sell
quite well. And since Twitter,
which has raised $55 million in
in the past, and I'm not sure any can
really get big enough to matter. But
I can see how they are appealing to
some during economic downturns,
as they look for better ways to try
to get people to focus on local
businesses. Designing a currency
that encourages you to spend
locally might seem like a good
idea, and it can work in small
doses. In the end, though, I doubt
either movement (single world
currency, splintering local
currencies) is likely to become that
big of a deal in the near future. The
system we have now actually works
pretty well (despite the economic
mess faced today).
Permalink| Comments| Email
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venture funding, has yet to turn a
profit, that's good news.
Marshall points out something
important: "It might be hard to
tease out who is using the service
professionally and who is using it
for personal reasons, and then
charge them for it. So the idea is to
build a set of features that people
are willing to pay for." Stone made
it pretty clear in the interview that
ordinary Twitter users won't be
forced to pay up.
Another interesting tidbit: Stone
said that Twitter had been looking
to acquire social-network
aggregator FriendFeed, which
eventually sold to Facebook earlier
this month.
Hearing set for appeal
of Word injunction
(CNET News.com)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:24:00 AM
A federal appeals court has
scheduled a hearing next month to
decide whether to uphold a ruling
that would force Microsoft to stop
selling Word in its current form.
A district court judge last week
issued an injunction that would halt
sales of any version of Word that
includes a custom XML function
that was found by a jury to infringe
on a patent from Canada's I4i. In
May, that jury also dinged
Microsoft with $200 million in
damages, an amount that the judge
hiked to more than $290 million at
the same time he ordered the
injunction, which he scheduled to
go into effect 60 days after the Aug.
11 ruling.
In a statement, I4i said that
Microsoft's appeal will be heard on
Sept. 23. Microsoft had asked for
an expedited hearing on the matter.
"We firmly believe that the U. S.
District Court made the right
decision on the merits of the case,"
Trading halted in stock of
Pirate Bay bidder
(CNET News.com)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:31:00 AM
The authorities that govern that
Sweden''s stock markets have
halted trading in Global Gaming
Factory X, the software company
that is due in less than a week to
complete an acquisition of The
Pirate Bay.
According to Swedish paper SvD,
authorities stopped trading Friday
without detailing why, but
separately the paper said it learned
Internet News Record
I4i Chairman Loudon Owen said in
a statement. "We are confident that
we will prevail on the appeal."
Owen said that I4i welcomes the
speedy hearing. "This is a vital case
for inventors and entrepreneurial
companies who, like i4i, are
damaged by the willful
infringement of their patents by
competitors; particularly
competitors as large and powerful
as Microsoft."
In addition to the appeal,
Microsoft could also pursue a
technical workaround that allows
the custom XML function to work
in a different way that doesn't
infringe on I4i's patent, remove that
feature from word, or pursue a
settlement.
For its part, Owen told CNET
News last week that I4i isn't
seeking to see Word pulled from
the market, but rather just to get
Microsoft to stop infringing on his
company's patents.
Microsoft was not immediately
available for comment.
that regulators had begun an
investigation of insider trading
involving Global Gaming.
"It is our duty to examine trade in
the context of large price-sensitive
news," Peter Gönczi, vice president
of Aktietorget, the stock market
where Global Gaming's shares are
traded, told SVD. "We saw that
there was a risk that information
had leaked."
News of the investigation comes
TRADING page 63
Internet News Record
Rather Than Waiting For Someone
Else To Leak Your Music, Why
Not Leak It Yourself?
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 6:19:12 AM
A couple people have sent in the
news about how Simon Cowell
apparently has called in the police
to go after hackers who supposedly
hacked into a computer at his
record company and leaked a new
song by a singer named Leona
Lewis. It's now clear what evidence
there is that there was an actual
hack, rather than the leak coming
from somewhere else, but that
seems besides the point. If the
computers were broken into, then it
seems fair enough to go after those
who did the hacking.
But, either way, it seems that
more and more musicians are
Memphians Brace for NCAA Hammer
(WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 8:13:21 AM
The Memphis Tigers will vacate
their 38 wins and trip to the
championship game against Kansas
in the 2007-08 basketball season
sometime Thursday. Reports out of
Memphis say the NCAA will come
down hard on the program for
violations committed under former
coach John Calipari, now at
Kentucky. Getty Images Kentucky
coach John Calipari has shown an
impeccable sense of timing for
switching jobs throughout his
career.
The Tigers’ 26-game winning
streak? Gone. A perfect 16-0 record
in Conference USA? Gone. Wins
over Michigan State, Texas and
UCLA in the NCAA Tournament?
Gone, gone and gone. Or at least
that’s what reporters and Memphis
fans are expecting Thursday
recognizing that they might as well
leak the songs first, so that such
things aren't even an issue. Last
week, we noted that Radiohead had
leaked its own track, and it seems
that less well-known bands are
doing the same thing. The band
Kay Kay and His Weathered
Underground apparently wasted no
time at all getting their new tracks
online. Even though they're still
working on the details of the actual
album release, the band finished the
album last week, and put it online
almost immediately. Why wait for
some artificial "album release"
when the music itself is ready to
go?
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This Story
morning.
Losing a Final Four appearance is
nothing new for Memphis or
Calipari. The Tigers had their Final
Four appearance stripped in 1985,
and Calipari’s Massachusetts team
lost its 1996 appearance.
“It will not be a proud day for
Memphis sports,” Geoff Calkins
writes in the Commercial Appeal.
“No university wants to be
smacked hard by the NCAA. No
fan base wants its memories sullied
by scandal. The glorious season of
2008 will forever be known as the
tainted season of 2008. … But as
much as they might like to pretend
otherwise in Lexington, this is less
about the basketball program at
Memphis than it is about its former
coach.”
CBS Sports’s Mike Freeman has
had a change of heart about
Calipari. “I can’t believe I once
tried to — somewhat — defend
TRADING
continued from page 62
a day after one of the main players
in the proposed new Pirate Bay
expressed doubts about Global
Gaming.
Johan Ljungberg, CEO of
Peerialism, told CNET News that
his company has not received
money from Hans Pandeya, Global
Gaming's CEO, since being
contracted to start some of the
production work on the new site
Calipari,” Freeman writes. “I went
against my better instincts and
thought at the time: no one can be
as dirty as his rivals claim. Boy was
I wrong. His critics underplayed his
scumminess.”
In Calipari’s new home, the
Lexington Herald-Leader ran only a
wire story on his Memphis
misdeeds, with reporter Ryan
Alessi instead focusing on
Calipari’s promise to bring exciting
basketball to Kentucky and to mesh
some confident newcomers into the
team. The headline: “Calipari: New
TechNews/ Sports/
two months ago. In June, when
Pandeya announced his intention to
buy The Pirate Bay, he also said he
would acquire Peerialism, a
Swedish maker of software that
improves the transferring and
storage of data over peer-to-peer
networks.
More to come
players ‘think they poop ice cream.’
”* * *
As baseball enters the stretch run,
the Philadelphia Phillies are
showing signs they’re a solid bet to
make some postseason noise, and
perhaps repeat as World Series
champions. Pitcher Cliff Lee,
whom the Phillies recently acquired
from Cleveland, is 4-0 with a 0.82
ERA after Wednesday’s 8-1 rout of
Arizona, which left Philadelphia
with a 5 1/2-game lead over Florida
in the National League East. Lee
even carried a no-hitter into the
sixth inning Wednesday.
“Lee threw 106 pitches last night.
An incredible 81 of them were
strikes,” Sam Donnellon enthuses
in the Philadelphia Daily News.
“Those are numbers that translate
well in either league, which is why
he was 22-3 with the Indians last
season, before their offense went
south and their front office shaved
63
down the payroll. Last night’s
victory put him at 16-2 in 26 career
starts against National League
teams, a total of 174 1/3 innings
pitched.”
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bob
Ford wonders whether Ryan
Howard’s three-run home run
signals a return to form for a
slugger who had a pretty quiet
summer until recently. “He has hit
five home runs in the last six
games, and his slugging percentage
is up to .590 for August,” Ford
writes. “Is this a hot streak on the
horizon or another blip that will be
swallowed by a string of
strikeouts?”
While Phillies fans have
something to look forward to in
September, the New York Mets do
not. It’s well known the Mets have
underperformed — stunk is a better
MEMPHIANS page 65
64 Sports/
World Records Become Broken Records for Bolt
(WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 8/21/2009 7:06:03 AM
There was no photo finish
Thursday at the world track-and-
field championships in Berlin.
Since Usain Bolt arrived on the
scene, there hasn’t seemed to be
much of a need for one in his
events. The Jamaican obliterated
the field in the 200-meter final,
finishing in 19.19 seconds, an
absurd 0.62 second ahead of
Alonso Edward of Panama. In the
process, Bolt lopped 0.11 second
off the world-record time he set at
the Beijing Olympics last year. It’s
the second time this week he’s
trimmed 0.11 second off a world
record. He also did it in the 100-
meter final last weekend (9.58
seconds). Associated Press Usain
Bolt ran around the Berlin track
twice in the time it took to take this
photo.
“Given his size and confidence,
Bolt’s potential to become the
ultimate speed freak seems
unlimited,” Allan Maki writes in
the Globe and Mail. “Not only does
he possess the mental fortitude to
produce under the most intense,
pressure-packed conditions, those
who are monitoring his progress are
convinced he can move faster yet.”
Before the race, American track
legend Michael Johnson had
wondered whether missing a month
of training because of an auto
accident would hinder Bolt in the
200. “With a minimum of fuss, Bolt
dispensed of that theory,” the
Guardian’s Anna Kessel writes.
“The question is, what on earth
would he have done to the record
had he prepared properly? In an
event where the world record has
been broken just four times — now
five — since electronic timing
began in 1977, compared to the 14
times the 100m record has fallen,
Bolt’s achievement last night was
simply extraordinary.”
Bolt is now the only runner ever
to hold world records in the 100
and 200 simultaneously. “The
biggest difference between his
performances in Berlin and Beijing
has been the huge improvement in
his start, and yesterday he had the
quickest reaction time in the field,
making up the stagger on Edward
in the adjacent lane in a matter of a
few strides,” the Telegraph’s Simon
Hart writes. “The race was pretty
much over from the gun.”* * *
Plaxico Burress took a relatively
lousy deal and avoided being stuck
with an even worse one. The
former New York Giant accepted a
two-year prison sentence Thursday
for carrying an unlicensed gun into
a Manhattan club last November.
Burress accidently shot himself in
the thigh. He was looking at 3 ½
years if he had been convicted in a
trial.
The sentence doesn’t seem right
to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Phil
Sheridan. “Earlier this year, another
NFL wide receiver, Don’té
Stallworth, served 24 days in jail
for striking and killing a man while
driving under the influence. That’s
one day for every month Burress is
facing,” Sheridan writes. “Throw in
Michael Vick — the Eagles’ new
quarterback and spiritual
reclamation project — and you can
cause serious synaptic damage
trying to get it all to make sense:
Stallworth’s 24 days compared with
Vick’s 18 months in prison
compared with the term Burress is
facing.”
At Yahoo Sports, Jason Cole says
Burress’s history of resisting
authority led to his downfall. In the
New York Daily News, Gary
Myers writes that general managers
think Burress will have a difficult
time returning to the NFL at age
34.* * *
John Calipari wasn’t implicated
in the NCAA’s decision Thursday
to vacate the Memphis Tigers’ 38
wins and their trip to the Final Four
in 2008 over the use of an ineligible
player. (That player has been
reported to be Chicago Bulls star
Derrick Rose, but he was not
named in the report.) The player
found a substitute to take his SATs
for him so he could become eligible
to play at Memphis. The school
plans an appeal.
But in the opinion-osphere,
Calipari is far from blameless. “[I]f
you think Calipari didn’t know how
his star player qualified to play
basketball at Memphis, I have a
2007-08 Final Four banner I’d like
to sell you,” the Commercial
Appeal’s Geoff Calkins writes. “Of
course he knew. He absolutely
knew. This is a coach who knew
the name of the fan who won a big-
screen TV in a promotion in FedEx
Forum’s upper deck. You think he
didn’t know how Rose, on the brink
of losing his eligibility at Memphis,
planned to pass his standardized
test?”
The Louisville Courier-Journal’s
Eric Crawford says that while the
NCAA ruling sullies Calipari’s
reputation as he prepares for his
first season at the helm of
Kentucky, “If he wins big and
makes it stick, those black marks
will recede to footnotes. If he
builds another façade for the
NCAA to tear down, he’ll be the
footnote.”
Sports Illustrated’s Luke Winn
wonders whether Calipari will run
from Kentucky at the first sign of
trouble, while Yahoo Sports’s
Jason King thinks the punishment
was too light against Calipari and
Memphis.* * *
There will be plenty of bells and
whistles Friday night when the
Dallas Cowboys open their mega-
expensive Cowboys Stadium to
football fans for the first time for an
exhibition game against Tennessee.
In the Dallas Morning News, David
Internet News Record
Moore writes that the Statue of
Liberty could be air-dropped on the
field and the roof closed without
scraping the tip.
Today, attending a sports event is
as much about the “experience” as
about the result on the field. That’s
left the Miami Herald’s Greg Cote
a little melancholy. “This isn’t a
bah-humbug thing but a simple
longing for the halcyon days when
the game was the star (the only one
needed) and the only enhancement
required of a fan’s experience was a
great effort by the home team and,
on a good day, maybe a win,” Cote
writes. “Gradually, the essence of a
sporting event (ostensibly the
reason we are there) has gotten
away from pro teams, who now
adorn stadiums and arenas with so
many bells and whistles that the
noise, literally and figuratively,
drowns the senses.”* * *
It’s been 34 years since Daniel
Ruettiger, the undersized walk-on
at Notre Dame, had his moment of
glory, getting a sack against
Georgia Tech quarterback Rudy
Allen in the final game of his senior
year. The inspiration for the movie
“Rudy,” Ruettiger today runs a
foundation and is a motivational
speaker, Dan Bickley writes in the
Arizona Republic.
Found a good column from the
world of sports? Don’t keep it to
yourself — write to us at
dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll
consider your find for inclusion in
the Daily Fix. You can email Garey
at ris84rap@gmail.com.
Internet News Record
The Count: Was Ichiro Right To Run?
(WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 8/20/2009 11:18:52 AM
On Saturday, with the Mariners
trailing the Yankees 2-0 while
batting in the bottom of the seventh
inning with two outs, Ichiro Suzuki
stood at second base and Jose
Lopez stood at first. The count
went to 2-0 on Russell Branyan
when Ichiro took off for third. He
ran “inexplicably,” according to
Larry Stone of the Seattle Times,
who called it “a bad decision.”
“That was the dumbest thing Ive
seen on a baseball field in a long,
long time,” wrote Dave Cameron,
who blogs about the Mariners and
contributes to the Wall Street
Journal’s sports coverage. Getty
Images
Ichiro Suzuki’s attempted steal
would have looked smarter if he
hadn’t been tagged out — and if his
teammate had known it was
coming.
As you might have guessed, New
York catcher Jose Molina threw
Ichiro out. But he had a pretty good
chance of making it to third, which
made his decision defensible — if
somehow he could have
communicated to Lopez that he was
running. A mere steal of third base
with two outs wouldn’t have added
much to the Mariners’ chances of
coming back to win the game. A
double steal, though, really could
have helped.
Seeing why requires the use of a
strategic tool for baseball decision-
making. Win-expectancy
calculators report on each team’s
chance of winning a game in a
certain situation — inning, outs,
home team batting or fielding,
baserunners — based on historical
data about those situations. (For
more on these calculators, see this
2006 column I wrote out of — what
else? — frustration about the Mets.)
For the Ichiro steal, the relevant
situations are:
1. Home team batting in the
bottom of the 7th, down two runs,
two outs, runners on first and
second. (Before the steal)
2A. Home team batting in the
bottom of the 7th, down two runs,
two outs, runners on first and third.
(Ichiro steals successfully, Lopez
doesn’t)
2B. Home team batting in the
bottom of the 7th, down two runs,
two outs, runners on second and
third. (Successful double steal)
2C. Visiting team batting in the
top of the 8th, up two runs, no outs,
no one on base. (Either runner
thrown out)
The Mariners’ probability of
winning in those particular
situations are, respectively: 21.5%,
21.3%, 25% and 13%. That second
percentage isn’t a typo — games
between 1977 and 2006, as
collected by Christopher Shea,
suggest that a successful steal by
Ichiro, on its own, would have hurt
the Mariners. That’s a reflection of
one of the shortcomings of this
approach: For any single situation,
the historical record is sparse. The
difference between those two
situations, each of which happened
fewer than 1,000 times during those
years, is clearly within the margin
of error. Also, these numbers are
based on past years, but each year’s
run environment is different. In a
low-scoring season, each out is less
costly and it might make more
sense to steal than in a season
where hits come more easily. Also,
any given situation differs based on
the pitcher, the batter, the batting
count and other factors.
Still, operating under the
assumption that using some data is
better than managing (or stealing)
based on decisions from the gut,
let’s look at what these win-
expectancy numbers suggest. A
double steal would have added 3.5
percentage points to the Mariners’
probability of winning; an out on
the bases would have lowered it by
8.5 percentage points. That
suggests that a 71% success rate on
the double-steal attempt was the
break-even point, and if Ichiro
thought he and Lopez could beat
that rate, it was worth it.
(Incidentally, the equivalent break-
even rate for the 8th and 9th
innings is about 50%, suggesting
that such a maneuver is more
logical when remaining
opportunities to score are scarcer.)
Depending on how you look at it,
Ichiro may well have had reason to
believe a double steal had a better
than 71% chance of working — or
it was a terrible decision. He’s been
successful on 81% of his steal
attempts in his career, and 84% of
his attempts to steal third base. And
the league-wide stolen-base success
rate this season is 78% for third
base, and 73% overall. (That Ichiro
and baserunners as a whole are
more successful stealing third base
suggest that only the best
baserunners try to steal third, and
only when their odds are good —
not necessarily that stealing third is
easier.) On the other hand, runners
testing Molina’s arm are successful
just 58% of the time in his career
overall, and just 65% of the time
when trying to steal third. And
Lopez has been successful in just
63% of his attempts at stealing
second base. However,
conventional wisdom has it that a
double-steal attempt is as
successful as its lead runner. (I
didn’t find data on that, though the
success rate on such attempts has
been similar to leaguewide stolen-
base success rates in recent
decades.)
There are also, as Cameron notes,
qualitative factors that call Ichiro’s
decision into question, including
the 2-0 count and that almost half
of Branyan’s hits this year have
gone for extra bases. Such a hit
probably would have scored both
runners, wherever they stood.
Sports/ 65
MEMPHIANS
continued from page 63
word — this season, although
they’ve had a plethora of injuries.
And they stunk again Wednesday,
laying an egg in a 15-2
embarrassment to Atlanta. While
the New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro
writes that Mets management must
admit its failures, the Daily News’s
Filip Bondy would love to see the
first no-hitter in Mets history. At
least that would take the sting off a
season to forget. But only a little.*
**
Gender ambiguity has entered the
world track-and-field
championships in Berlin. Caster
Semenya of South Africa breezed
her way to a gold-medal victory in
the women’s 800-metre race
Wednesday, finishing in 1 minute,
56.72 seconds. Now competitors
and others are questioning her
gender. “This ought to have been
an uplifting story of how an 18-year
-old sports science student from
Pretoria University, who grew up in
Ga-Masehlong, a village near the
northern city of Polokwane,
became world champion,” Matthew
Syed writes in the Times of
London. “It ought to have been an
inspirational story of personal
triumph against the odds. It ought
to have been a story of hope and
optimism, only morphing into
something different in the event of
a failed test.”
In the Washington Post, Michael
Wilbon loves following Usain Bolt,
who set a world record in the 100-
meter final on the weekend and
who races in the 200-meter final
Thursday. But still Wilbon wonders
whether Bolt is clean. “Yes, it’s a
cynical question, but who doesn’t
wonder these days, especially as it
pertains to track and field, where
chemists and the dope police have
been trying to outwit each other for
decades?” Wilbon writes. “I was in
Seoul during the 1988 Summer
MEMPHIANS page 66
66
MEMPHIANS
continued from page 65
Games when we got the word, at
about 4 a.m., that Ben Johnson had
tested positive for steroids, wiping
out that wondrous performance
(9.79 when the world record was
9.93) he’d turned in against Carl
Lewis a couple of days earlier.
Sorry, but there simply is no more
benefit of the doubt, especially not
as it pertains to baseball before
2004 and track and field the past 25
years, at least.”* * *
The Syracuse University footbal
team hasn’t had a winning record
since 2004, so fans will look to new
quarterback Greg Paulus to bring
better results. Better or not, the
results should be interesting. Paulus
went to Syracuse in the offseason
after graduating from Duke, where
he played hoops for the Blue
Devils, averaging more than 11
points a game during his
sophomore and junior seasons. But
Paulus played quarterback in high
school. “Any number of basketball
players have become dangerous
tight ends after leaving football
behind — most notably Antonio
Gates, and Jimmy Graham will give
it a try at Miami this season — but
quarterback is another animal
entirely,” Luke DeCock writes in
the Raleigh News & Observer.
“Paulus hadn’t picked up a
playbook in four years before this
summer. Now he’ll be expected to
make split-second decisions just as
if he had never put one down.”* * *
Just because you reach the age of
50 doesn’t mean you’ve stopped
enjoying the thrill of athletic
competition. MaryAnn Levenson is
just glad to be able to race again.
She suffered serious injuries when
she was hit by a drunk driver in
Internet News Record
2006. But as Scott Herhold writes
in the San Jose Mercury News,
she’s got lots of resilience.
***
The bad news for Women’s
Professional Soccer is that no teams
in the U.S. league made money this
season. The good news is that the
league met its modest attendance
goals for its inaugural season and
will celebrate its championship
Saturday when the Los Angeles Sol
meets the New Jersey Sky Blue FC,
Grahame L. Jones writes in the Los
Angeles Times.
Found a good column from the
world of sports? Don’t keep it to
yourself — write to us at
dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll
consider your find for inclusion in
the Daily Fix. You can email Garey
at ris84rap@gmail.com.