Yostivanich

“Dis­senters in Iran and China per­sist despite repres­sion that is enabled in part by equip­ment from U.S. and Euro­pean com­pa­nies. In the U.S., the Obama admin­is­tra­tion is fol­low­ing a dan­ger­ous path with Bush-era spy pro­grams that should be sus­pended and pros­e­cuted, not extended and defended.” What’s the dif­fer­ence between China and Iran spy­ing on their cit­i­zens and the US spy­ing on us?

“TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000
TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” The power of twit­ter people.

“MooTools 1.2.3 was released on June 19, 2009. With this release, MooTools imple­mented Dol­lar Safe Mode. Essen­tially, MooTools no longer requires the $ func­tion for its own purposes.”

“Lebanon’s Pres­i­dent Michel Suleiman has named Saad Hariri as the country’s new prime min­is­ter, fol­low­ing par­lia­men­tary elec­tion ear­lier this month.”

“As part of the baby-free pro­gram, girls attend weekly meet­ings where they learn about absti­nence and con­tra­cep­tives. At the end of each week, $7 is put into a fund that’s off-limits until they go to col­lege. To par­tic­i­pate, girls must have never been preg­nant, cur­rently attend school, have a desire to go to col­lege, and have a sis­ter that gave birth before age 18. The pro­gram is cur­rently at its max capac­ity of 24 girls.” Um ok?

“Did any of you ever con­sider a prob­lem like this in any physics class you took? If not, why not? I spent about half a day answer­ing ques­tions about this sit­u­a­tion from the media, from ran­dom peo­ple who emailed with fol­low up quer­stions. It’s clearly some­thing peo­ple are inter­ested in. I men­tioned this to one of my less free-thinking col­leagues and was told that a prob­lem like this is “sim­ply too hard for begin­ning physics stu­dents”. Balder­dash. Doing cal­cu­la­tions with­out fric­tion when you like in a world where you can’t escape fric­tion is hard because noth­ing you cal­cu­late has any con­nec­tion to real life. Fig­ur­ing out whether a drink can go through a wind­shield and kill some­one is com­pli­cated, but I didn’t use any­thing you don’t learn in first semes­ter high school physics.” Cool story about physics ques­tions from reporters and how they chal­lenge con­ven­tional physicists.

“Gen­eral Motors and the Obama admin­is­tra­tion have reached a deal for the car­maker to assume respon­si­bil­ity for prod­uct lia­bil­ity claims filed after it emerges from bank­ruptcy as a new com­pany, even those claims involv­ing vehi­cles made by the old com­pany, accord­ing to doc­u­ments filed in bank­ruptcy court late Friday.”

George Car­lin on reli­gion and bullshit.

“About 70 Argen­tine army offi­cers can be charged with tor­ture of their own sol­diers dur­ing the 1982 Falk­lands War, a fed­eral appeals court has ruled. Vet­er­ans who brought the legal action — all con­scripted into ser­vice — also say four sol­diers starved to death, while sev­eral oth­ers were staked to the ground as punishment.”

“Pont­cy­syllte aque­duct was added to the list of World Her­itage Sites by the United Nations Edu­ca­tional, Sci­en­tific and Cul­tural Organ­i­sa­tion (Unesco). The struc­ture, built by Thomas Telford and William Jes­sop, is the longest and high­est aque­duct in Britain.”

What do you auto tune.

“A Mozilla spokesper­son con­firmed to Betanews early this evening that, if all pans out as planned, the orga­ni­za­tion will offi­cially release the Fire­fox 3.5 Web browser to the gen­eral pub­lic as soon as Tues­day, June 30. No longer a beta, users will get the first oppor­tu­nity to see a com­pletely sta­ble ver­sion of Firefox’s new Trace­Mon­key JavaScript engine, whose lat­est new fea­tures were demon­strated to us today by two of its engi­neers.” Awesome.