Yostivanich

Bunch of neat lit­tle stuff you see every­day already done for you.

About time all gov­ern­ment data except for stuff that is clas­si­fied will be pub­licly available.

“T-Mobile is plan­ning an aggres­sive push deep into the home with a vari­ety of com­mu­ni­ca­tions devices that will use Google’s new Android oper­at­ing soft­ware that already runs one of its cellphones.”

“Sci­en­tists have shown scratch­ing helps relieve an itch as it blocks activ­ity in some spinal cord nerve cells that trans­mit the sen­sa­tion to the brain. How­ever, the effect only seems to occur dur­ing itch­i­ness itself — scratch­ing at other times makes no dif­fer­ence.” That is weird.

“On April 1 Google started ban­ning South Korean users from post­ing videos or leav­ing com­ments on YouTube unless they use real names. The move was done to com­ply with a law that South Korean web sites with at least 100,000 daily vis­i­tors must force users to reg­is­ter with ver­i­fi­able real names.” Really Google, good job there.

Be pre­pared to waste an after­noon read­ing this.

“So maybe instead of get­ting your com­pany on twit­ter, pay­ing mar­keters to men­tion you are on twit­ter, and pay­ing peo­ple to blog about your com­pany, for­get all that and just make awe­some stuff that gets peo­ple excited about your prod­ucts, hire peo­ple that rep­re­sent the com­pany well, and when your stuff is so awe­some that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media mar­ket­ing” after all.”

Did Obama break copy­right law by giv­ing a gift to the Queen of Eng­land of an iPod and music.

Pretty please Congress?

Very use­full.

“The jurors found that Mr. Churchill’s polit­i­cal views had been a “sub­stan­tial or moti­vat­ing” fac­tor in his dis­missal, and that the uni­ver­sity had not shown that he would have been dis­missed any­way.” Good news for aca­d­e­mic freedom.

Seven fig­ures and 10 books.

“A field of genet­i­cally iden­ti­cal amoe­bas in Texas raises the pos­si­bil­ity that cells might orga­nize on much larger scales than once thought.” Sci­ence is so so cool some days.

“The big news last week was a speech by Zhou Xiaochuan, the gov­er­nor of China’s cen­tral bank, call­ing for a new “super-sovereign reserve cur­rency.” So what Mr. Zhou’s pro­posal actu­ally amounts to is a plea that some­one res­cue China from the con­se­quences of its own invest­ment mis­takes.” That makes a lot more sense that what the media was saying.

Vote on Facebook’s new “State­ment of Rights and Responsibilities”.

“Nancy Keenan, pres­i­dent of NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­ica, today hailed the North Dakota state Sen­ate for reject­ing a dan­ger­ous so-called “per­son­hood” bill that would out­law abor­tion and could lead to bans on birth con­trol, stem-cell research, and in-vitro fer­til­iza­tion. The Sen­ate, which has an anti-choice major­ity, rejected the extreme mea­sure by a vote of 29–16.”

Pretty much com­pletely messed up.

I wasn’t all that hyped up about this deal anyways.

“The num­ber of peo­ple employed in the US fell by 663,000 in March, accord­ing to fig­ures from the Depart­ment of Labor. The job­less rate rose to 8.5% from February’s fig­ure of 8.1%, mean­ing it is still at its high­est since 1983.”

“The Iowa Supreme Court unan­i­mously rejected a state law Fri­day that banned same-sex mar­riage, and oppo­nents wasted lit­tle time in push­ing for a state con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment that could send the issue to voters.”

“Two ultra-Orthodox Jew­ish news­pa­pers have altered a photo of Israel’s new cab­i­net, remov­ing two female min­is­ters.” Are you kid­ding me, what about that the men weren’t wear­ing Ortho­dox clothing?

“Sockso is an open source music server appli­ca­tion that lets you share the music files eas­ily with every­one.” In case you are want­ing to deal with a law­suit in the next few days.

“Exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion for the highest-paid chief exec­u­tives at pub­lic com­pa­nies fell in 2008, the first such down­turn in five years. And the bot­tom dropped out of the bonus pool, the incen­tive that angered investors after the con­tro­ver­sial bonus pay­outs at the Amer­i­can Inter­na­tional Group.” Might not be such a bad thing con­sid­er­ing how far apart the pay scales have gone.

I want a cross­bow, that is all.

Stop sugar coat­ing your cor­po­rate speak and be more open and hon­est with your customers.

“JREF fan Clare Zim­mer­man alerted us to this bril­liant video that illus­trates per­fectly the basic prob­lem with the all-too-common accu­sa­tion that skep­tics are closed-minded.” Really good video.

“A suc­cess­ful designer, who has a show­case of his own work avail­able online, has had a stock image site accuse him of copy­right infringe­ment over his own illus­tra­tions, cit­ing dam­ages of $18,000.” Ok peo­ple copy­right is totally messed up.

Ouch.

“Afghan Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai has ordered an urgent review of a con­tro­ver­sial new law that crit­ics say might tol­er­ate rape within mar­riage. Among its pro­vi­sions are that • wives are obliged to have sex­ual rela­tions with their hus­bands at least once every four days • women can­not leave home with­out their husband’s per­mis­sion Crit­ics say the law lim­its the rights of women from the Shia minor­ity and autho­rises rape within marriage.”

Very cool. “The CA10 sent the case back down to the dis­trict court, and Fri­day, Judge Bab­cock granted our motion for sum­mary judg­ment, hold­ing that the URAA vio­lated the First Amend­ment to the extent it restored copy­right against par­ties who had relied on works in the pub­lic domain.”

Basi­cally in some cases fact, oth­ers ficition.

New space­ship to replace the Soyuz, which is 40+ years old design.

I’m so intrigued at the dif­fer­ent point of views about an Apple consumer.

Happy Yuri’s Night.

Good stuff for iPhone development.

“god isn’t dead. peo­ple are.”

“North Korea failed in its attempt to get a satel­lite into space after a rocket launch early on Sun­day, US and South Korean offi­cials say.” North Korea claimed the satel­lite reached orbit.

“After years of watch­ing late-night porn in anony­mous hotel rooms — for research pur­poses — its pur­pose is clear, says Clive James. To keep one’s mind off sex while one’s part­ner is absent.” Inter­est­ing mini-dissertation into porn.

Bye, bye Polaroid.

Many for­mer Black­wa­ter employ­ees will now be work­ing for the com­pany that took over Blackwater’s con­tracts in Iraq. Some­how I don’t think that’s going to change the root prob­lem. Though I do under­stand it would be hard to find enough peo­ple to fill those posi­tions with­out draw­ing on Black­wa­ter employees.

Pretty cool twit­ter gad­get for Gmail.

“Yet for the first time since Hewitt Asso­ciates began track­ing 401(k) accounts in 1997, Amer­i­can work­ers in Feb­ru­ary held less than half of their 401(k) money in stocks.” Just an inter­est­ing factoid.

Bye bye, the first fully open source cell phone.

Who doesn’t love a good short story.

“A British teenager who took a drugs over­dose has been saved after the Amer­i­can girl he was chat­ting to online raised the alarm.” Who said the Inter­net kills people?