Yostivanich

“UK inter­net ser­vice provider Talk­Talk has pulled the plug on its agree­ment with online behav­iour track­ing firm Phorm.” Another ISP goes down.

“Andrew Napoli­tano falsely claimed that in the GM bank­ruptcy pro­ceed­ings, “[t]here was no tes­ti­mony what­so­ever in court.” In fact, the judge over­see­ing the case stated that there was in-court tes­ti­mony. ” For being a judge how do you not know how to read a court transcript?

“The Swiss gov­ern­ment, vow­ing to pro­tect its vaunted bank secrecy laws, said on Wednes­day that it was pre­pared to seize UBS client data rather than allow the bank to hand it over to the United States to set­tle a tax case.”

“A court in Saudi Ara­bia has issued ver­dicts, pros­e­cu­tors say, in what is thought to be the first ter­ror­ism trial for al-Qaeda mil­i­tants in the king­dom. Jus­tice min­istry offi­cials say 330 had been on trial, but they did not spec­ify how many had been found guilty. One defen­dant was given a death sentence.”

“I’ve just received notice of a new mod­el­ing tool that allows edu­ca­tion researchers to play out pro­posed edu­ca­tion sce­nar­ios and poli­cies in sim­u­lated form to test for those pro­grams with favorable/positive out­comes.” Interesting.

“But the panic seems to be sub­sid­ing. Rates are still well above their post-Lehman lows, when credit mar­kets were com­pletely frozen and every­one was pil­ing into govt. debt. But they’re low by his­tor­i­cal stan­dards, and not giv­ing much ammu­ni­tion to the wor­ri­ers these days.”

“Today 23andMe has announced that it’s launch­ing a much cheaper $99 ver­sion of its prod­uct as part of a new Research Rev­o­lu­tion, which is meant to help 23andMe ini­ti­ate research stud­ies on genetic dis­eases that would oth­er­wise require major logis­ti­cal hur­dles and fund­ing. The effort is part of the company’s 23andWe research arm, which has the goal of build­ing grass­roots stud­ies from com­mu­ni­ties of mem­bers who are afflicted by var­i­ous genetic dis­eases.” Cool idea.

“This won­der­ful vac­uum tube chess set, by maker Paul Fryer, actu­ally has elec­tric­ity run­ning inside the board so that the tubes can draw power and glow as you move them from square to square. It is called, some­what appro­pri­ately, Chess Set for Tesla, and Paul actu­ally made seven sets last year.” This is awesome.

“On Thurs­day, the com­pa­nies plan to announce that Best Buy will heav­ily pro­mote TiVo prod­ucts in its 1,100 stores in the United States. TiVo will develop a ver­sion of its set-top box, to be sold in Best Buy stores, that will let the retailer adver­tise its prod­ucts and ser­vices to TiVo sub­scribers on their home televisions.”

“Under­cover inves­ti­ga­tors man­aged to smug­gle bomb-making mate­ri­als into key US gov­ern­ment build­ings on 10 occa­sions last year, a con­gres­sional report says. The Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Office said that once inside the build­ings, inves­ti­ga­tors were able to assem­ble bombs and carry them around freely. The infil­trated build­ings included the offices of a sen­a­tor and a con­gress­man. The report cited instances of guards falling asleep on the job or fail­ing to detect explo­sives at x-ray scan­ners.” Yeah Home­land Security.

“A drug dis­cov­ered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the age­ing process, research sug­gests. When US sci­en­tists treated old mice with rapamycin it extended their expected lifes­pan by up to 38%.”

“The White House has nom­i­nated Stephen Rapp, a well-known fig­ure in inter­na­tional crim­i­nal law, to be ambas­sador at large for war crimes issues.”

Kinda like strip poker only with resumes.

“Pos­ses­sion of pornog­ra­phy is now a crim­i­nal offense in Ukraine, Lenta.ru reports, after Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yushchenko signed a law to that effect today. Human rights activists and mem­bers of the Ukrain­ian artis­tic com­mu­nity had asked the pres­i­dent to veto the law.” Stupid.

“So in just three years, this community’s use of IE has gone from 63% to 18%, Fire­fox has gone from 28% to almost 50%, and Safari has tripled from 6% to 18%. So Chrome may be under 10% right now, but in three years, it could eas­ily be the lead­ing browser in this com­mu­nity. Browsers appar­ently don’t com­mand that much loy­alty and switch­ing costs are low. That said, I’m not mov­ing to Chrome unless I can take my Fire­fox exten­sions with me.”

“A piv­otal ques­tion for reg­u­la­tors is what Apple’s board knew at the time of Jobs’s Jan. 5 announce­ment that he had a hor­mone imbal­ance and a Jan. 14 state­ment that he was tak­ing a 5 ½-month med­ical leave, said the per­son, who declined to be iden­ti­fied because the probe is con­fi­den­tial. Jobs went on to have a liver trans­plant dur­ing his leave. SEC inves­ti­ga­tors want to be sure that Jobs’s Jan­u­ary dis­clo­sures didn’t mis­lead investors, the per­son said. Bloomberg News reported in Jan­u­ary that the SEC had opened the probe. ”

“Sean Han­nity decep­tively cropped Pres­i­dent Obama’s answer to a ques­tion about the Cold War to sug­gest that Obama did not acknowl­edge the actions of past U.S. pres­i­dents in free­ing East­ern Europe.” It must be hard for Sean Han­nity to lis­ten to more than 10 sec­onds of anybody.

What exactly is a petabyte.

“It looks like Ama­zon had dropped the price of the lat­est gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle 2, the 6-inch read­ing wire­less read­ing device, from $359 to $299. I’m actu­ally kick­ing myself right now because I just pur­chased the same one for the higher price a few days ago.”

“Why were so many peo­ple in the tech­nol­ogy world wrong about Hulu? It was an idea that seemed like a relic of the worst excesses of the dot-com era: a por­tal for con­tent run by a joint ven­ture of media com­pa­nies. Could any ven­ture have more going against it?” Hulu does totally work.

Usabil­ity is not everything.