Yostivanich

“The issue of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of Face­book groups that pro­mote hatred of reli­gious and eth­nics groups and the hate speech those groups per­pe­trate. While you may have your doubts, I sub­mit that this includes those who pro­mote the fringe revi­sion­ist the­ory of Holo­caust Denial.”

“News Corp is plan­ning to intro­duce micro-payments for indi­vid­ual arti­cles and pre­mium sub­scrip­tions to the Wall Street Journal’s web­site this year, in a mile­stone in the news industry’s race to find bet­ter online busi­ness mod­els.” Micro­pay­ments are one of the worst ideas to come from the media com­pa­nies. Who deter­mines the value of con­tent and how do you decide if an arti­cle is worth the price. How do you charge peo­ple for the content.

“Last month, Google has offi­cially announced Android 1.5 update, dubbed “cup­cake.” Geek’s Joel Evans had a chance to briefly play with the beta, enough to give us first look of excit­ing new things to come. Barely a month later, the new soft­ware is appar­ently ready to roll on Android-powered devices. Make no mis­take, Android 1.5 is a major upgrade. The soft­ware brings a host of new capa­bil­i­ties, some of which can’t be found on rival mobile platforms.”

“Vet­eran games devel­oper 3D Realms has closed down because of a lack of funds. Founded in 1987, the firm pop­u­larised the con­cept of share­ware gam­ing and pub­lished the sem­i­nal Duke Nukem and Wolfen­stein 3D first-person shoot­ers. The com­pany was work­ing on a follow-up title, Duke Nukem For­ever, which after being in devel­op­ment for 12 years has become the object of indus­try deri­sion.” Duke Nukem will now never be built.

“Los Ange­les Dodgers bat­ter Manny Ramirez has been handed a 50-match sus­pen­sion after test­ing pos­i­tive for a banned performance-enhancing drug.” That will hurt the Dodgers.

“Sudan’s gov­ern­ment says it will invite new aid groups to work in Dar­fur and allow those still oper­at­ing there to expand their activ­i­ties.” Good to hear.

“A new interim gov­ern­ment has taken office in the Czech Repub­lic. It will lead the coun­try through the last two months of the EU pres­i­dency and to early elec­tions in October.”

“Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez has sent troops to take over com­pa­nies that pro­vide ser­vices for the oil industry.”

“Chad has won a “deci­sive vic­tory” over rebels in the east of the coun­try, Defence Min­is­ter Adoum Younousmi said after two days of fierce fighting.”

“Well, appar­ently if you speak loudly enough on the web with enough swear words, Apple does lis­ten. After ini­tially reject­ing an update to Nine Inch Nails’ iPhone app, Apple has relented and accepted it back into the store. So what did NIN do to change the app? Noth­ing. Appar­ently, Apple’s def­i­n­i­tion of “objec­tion­able” changed.”

“For­get Ash­ton Kutcher and Oprah Win­frey, there’s a gen­uine queen on Twit­ter these days: Rania Al Abdul­lah, Queen of Jor­dan, joined the tweet­ing masses yes­ter­day and she really has a feel for the micro-medium too!” Tell me that isn’t coolest thing you have heard at least this week?

“The gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia has launched a new ini­tia­tive to com­pile open source text­books for the state. He hopes that the plan will help cut costs and improve the qual­ity of edu­ca­tion. The effort seems very promis­ing, but the state’s com­plex stan­dards and ardu­ous text­book eval­u­a­tion process will pose major chal­lenges.” I’ll be won­der­fully sur­prised if this works.

“Con­gress is seri­ously con­sid­er­ing pro­pos­als to pro­vide tax cred­its or other sub­si­dies to employ­ers who offer well­ness pro­grams that meet fed­eral cri­te­ria. In addi­tion, law­mak­ers said they would make it eas­ier for employ­ers to use finan­cial rewards or penal­ties to pro­mote healthy behav­ior among employ­ees.” I’m against this idea, while I under­stand the rea­son­ing behind it, health­ier employ­ees means less insur­ance costs, etc, this a pretty big intru­sion by both employ­ers and the gov­ern­ment into people’s per­sonal lives.

“Teach­ers don’t need to rip DVDs to get clips for class­room use—they should just use a cam­corder to record the DVD play­ing on a TV screen! So says the MPAA in a video it showed to the US Copy­right Office in an attempt to argue that nobody should be rip­ping DVDs, even for edu­ca­tional use.”

“The orga­ni­za­tion showed a film to the US Copy­right Office, in the tri­en­nial hear­ing to spell out exemp­tions to the DMCA, giv­ing instruc­tions for how a teacher could use a cam­corder to record a low-quality clip of a DVD for edu­ca­tional use” Oh MPAA how you manip­u­late copy­right law to serve your agenda. There is a very spe­cific exemp­tion for edu­ca­tional purposes.

“Cel­e­brated US financier War­ren Buf­fett has seen his invest­ment firm report its first loss in eight years due to a badly-timed pur­chase of oil stocks. Berk­shire Hath­away made a loss of $1.53bn (£1bn) in the first three months of 2009, com­pared with a profit of $940m a year earlier. ”

“Pres­i­dent Obama’s chief eco­nom­ics fore­caster said on Sun­day that the coun­try was not likely to see pos­i­tive employ­ment growth until 2010, even if the econ­omy began to grow later this year.”

“There were a lot of secu­rity con­ser­v­a­tives after 9/11 — and my guess is that the Repub­li­cans were win­ning the vast major­ity of them pro­vided they were either social con­ser­v­a­tives or eco­nomic con­ser­v­a­tives. With home­land secu­rity issues hav­ing faded into the back­ground, how­ever, and for­eign pol­icy issues start­ing to work against the Repub­li­cans, the strange-bedfellowness of the rela­tion­ship between social and fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tives is now becom­ing more appar­ent.” Take on Huckabee’s com­ments on social and eco­nomic con­ser­a­tives and the future of the GOP.

“The bank stress test, released last Thurs­day, found that the nation’s 19 biggest banks could expect nearly $82.4 bil­lion in credit card losses by the end of 2010 under what fed­eral reg­u­la­tors called a “worst-case” eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion. But if unem­ploy­ment breaches 10 per­cent, as many econ­o­mists pre­dict, the rate of uncol­lectible bal­ances at some banks could far exceed that level. At Amer­i­can Express, Cit­i­group, and J.P. Mor­gan Chase, one-fifth of the credit card bal­ances are expected to go bad over the next 20 months, accord­ing to stress test results. At Bank of Amer­ica and Wells Fargo, about a quar­ter of card loans are expected to sour.” Credit card looks to be the next big prob­lem for banks.

“Mr. Gates pre­dicted more of these messy, uncon­ven­tional wars, and he argued that this kind of con­flict requires Amer­ica to shift spend­ing to items like mine-resistant vehi­cles, sur­veil­lance drones and medical-evacuation heli­copters, at the expense of tanks, bombers and air­craft car­ri­ers.” Per­son­ally I have to agree with Gates, I think the future of con­ven­tional war­fare is com­ing to a close, espe­cially when we have such an over­whelm­ingly pow­er­ful mil­i­tary. That being said Con­gress’ com­ments about being unpre­pared to fight a con­ven­tional war shouldn’t be dismissed.

“I hear sto­ries like this all the time, and usu­ally they don’t amount to much indi­vid­u­ally except as as silly story. But taken as a sum, they do in fact inflict dam­age: peo­ple believe in fan­tasies which can hurt them phys­i­cally, finan­cially, and emo­tion­ally. It destroys their abil­ity to think crit­i­cally. And then we get peo­ple like Jenny McCarthy, or the par­ents who used home­opa­thy and killed their child, or the proven fraud Peter Popoff mak­ing a come­back and bilk­ing peo­ple out of mil­lions of dollars.”

“The optics of this one are not good: The de facto leader of the GOP (accord­ing to Dems and some in the media) is reit­er­at­ing his claim that a high pro­file black Repub­li­can and dec­o­rated mil­i­tary man’s endorse­ment of the country’s first black pres­i­dent was only about race. And that he should leave the party.”

“Dick Cheney’s frosty rela­tion­ship with fel­low Bush cab­i­net mem­ber Colin Pow­ell was a well-reported aspect of the past admin­is­tra­tion. On Sun­day, how­ever, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent took a very pub­lic dig at the one-time Sec­re­tary of State, say­ing he wasn’t even sure if Pow­ell was still a Republican.”

“Two months after key inter­na­tional aid agen­cies were expelled from Sudan, the UN is cau­tiously opti­mistic about the human­i­tar­ian sit­u­a­tion in Dar­fur. Vis­it­ing the region, the UN’s emer­gency relief co-ordinator said there was no hard evi­dence that more peo­ple had died because of the dis­rupted aid effort. How­ever, John Holmes said the sit­u­a­tion remained fragile.”