Yostivanich

“I just thought I should tell you because the fat man stand­ing behind me at Star­bucks today shouted it so loud into his cell phone that I fig­ured he must have wanted all of you to know. He cer­tainly wanted all of Star­bucks to know.” Rethink talk­ing loud on your cell phone people.

“A gay cou­ple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints secu­rity guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thurs­day on Main Street Plaza.” What hap­pens when reli­gion is allowed to police the gen­eral public?

“This is not one of those sto­ries about old media going all-digital — The Chron­i­cle, owned by the Hearst Cor­po­ra­tion, still comes out daily on paper. But it has become the biggest news­pa­per in the coun­try to out­source all of its print­ing, to Transcon­ti­nen­tal Print­ing, a Cana­dian com­pany that pro­duces The Chron­i­cle at a new plant in Fre­mont, Calif.” Hint it won’t help.

Cre­ation­ist Response Dice Game.

Athe­ism is appar­ently dan­ger­ous, wtf sums it up.

“Mr. Fairey pleaded guilty to three charges of van­dal­ism, includ­ing defac­ing prop­erty and wan­ton destruc­tion of prop­erty under $250; 11 other charges were dropped. He was also fined $2,000 to pay for graf­fiti removal. Mr. Fairey was arrested in Boston in Feb­ru­ary as he arrived at the Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary Art for the opening-night party for a ret­ro­spec­tive of his work.”

Thank good­ness the first was stu­pid and not really all that inter­est­ing, the sec­ond is much of the same.

A fas­ci­nat­ing look at the legal bat­tle for a sin­gle Sen­ate seat.

Asbestos at Texas Tech.

“Want to cause chaos at an air­port? Leave a suit­case in the restroom:”

“There is a com­mu­ni­ca­tions rev­o­lu­tion hap­pen­ing right now. It crosses gen­er­a­tions, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of peo­ple who ben­e­fit from igno­rance and the con­trol of infor­ma­tion.” Wil Wheaton wrote this 2 years ago and he is still right.

“For the most part, the tra­di­tional news out­lets lead and the blogs fol­low, typ­i­cally by 2.5 hours, accord­ing to a new com­puter analy­sis of news arti­cles and com­men­tary on the Web dur­ing the last three months of the 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.” Makes sense since most (though not all) blogs are adding com­men­tary to news articles.

“Mil­lions of Amer­i­cans have bought musi­cal ring­tones, often clips from favorite pop­u­lar songs, for their mobile phones. Mobile phone car­ri­ers pay roy­al­ties to song own­ers for the right to sell these snip­pets to their cus­tomers. But as part of a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone com­pa­nies, the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Com­posers, Authors, and Pub­lish­ers (ASCAP) has told a fed­eral court that each time a phone rings in a pub­lic place, the phone user has vio­lated copy­right law. There­fore, ASCAP argues, phone car­ri­ers must pay addi­tional roy­al­ties or face legal lia­bil­ity for con­tribut­ing to what they claim is cell phone users’ copy­right infringe­ment.” ASCAP are morons.

Stats on Twit­ter includ­ing: “# 72.5% of all users join­ing dur­ing the first five months of 2009.
# 85.3% of all Twit­ter users post less than one update/day
# 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
# 93.6% of users have less than 100 fol­low­ers, while 92.4% fol­low less than 100 peo­ple.
# 5% of Twit­ter users account for 75% of all activity”

“Nuclear nego­tia­tors from China and South Korea have opened talks in the South Korean cap­i­tal, Seoul, about how to han­dle the threat from the North.”

“After being scarce for the first cou­ple of weeks fol­low­ing the new iPhone 3.0 soft­ware rolling out, apps with Push Noti­fi­ca­tions are now rolling out at a healthy clip. And that’s great, because the fea­ture is really use­ful. To a point. The issue I’m notic­ing now is that if you have too many apps with Push Noti­fi­ca­tions turned on, the whole sys­tem becomes a lot less use­ful. You see, Push Noti­fi­ca­tions are basi­cally Apple’s way to get around allow­ing third-party apps to run in the back­ground of the iPhone. So apps can now send these push mes­sages to your phone to let you know if there’s some kind of mes­sage or update that you should open an app for. But if you have a lot of push mes­sages com­ing in, I’m find­ing that you either have to pull out your phone every cou­ple min­utes, or risk still miss­ing noti­fi­ca­tions that you prob­a­bly want to see.” A fail­ure of the system.

“The UK must invest more in nuclear and clean coal energy and put less empha­sis on wind power if it wants a secure low-carbon future, busi­ness lead­ers say.”

“Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, cap­tured slightly more United States searches than Yahoo in the first eight days of June, accord­ing to Stat­Counter Global Stats, a firm that tracks Web use. That is a mile­stone for Bing, whose share of the search pie has been slowly ris­ing since it was unveiled on June 3.”

“The polit­i­cal news Web site Talk­ing Points Memo this week­end com­pleted a round of invest­ment, of $500,000 to $1 mil­lion. The move is intended to increase the num­ber of employ­ees, to roughly 20, from the cur­rent 11, in the next 10 months.”

“But inter­views in Alaska and in Wash­ing­ton show that a seem­ingly relent­less string of pro­fes­sional and per­sonal trou­bles quickly put that goal out of reach. Almost as soon as she returned home, the once-popular gov­er­nor was iso­lated from an increas­ingly crit­i­cal Leg­is­la­ture. Law­mak­ers who had sup­ported her sig­na­ture effort to develop a nat­ural gas pipeline turned into unco­op­er­a­tive crit­ics. Ethics com­plaints mounted, and legal bills fol­lowed. Dur­ing the cam­paign, an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Republican-dominated Leg­is­la­ture found that Ms. Palin had abused her office by lean­ing on sub­or­di­nates to get her for­mer brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper. She was forced to pay back taxes after it was dis­closed that she had billed the state for thou­sands of dol­lars in per diem expenses meant to cover travel costs while stay­ing in Wasilla. Still, of the 19 ethics com­plaints filed against her, most have been dismissed.”

“Hun­dreds of ultra-orthodox Jews have clashed with police in Jerusalem for a third con­sec­u­tive Sat­ur­day over a car park which opens on the Sab­bath. The row has high­lighted ten­sions between Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Jews, known as Haredim, and the major­ity sec­u­lar population. ”

“The Church of England’s rul­ing body, the Gen­eral Synod, is to debate whether to reduce the num­ber of bish­ops in a bid to save money. The plan’s sup­port­ers say the Church could use teams of more junior parish clergy to do the work of bish­ops. But bish­ops say their work­load is larger than ever and cut­ting their num­bers would be prob­lem­atic. There are cur­rently 114 bish­ops in the Church of Eng­land, includ­ing the 44 most senior who head the country’s dio­ce­ses. Together with deans and canons of cathe­drals and archdea­cons they make up a body of senior staff that has remained largely unchanged in num­ber for 50 years. How­ever, in the same period the num­ber of junior clergy has plum­meted and forced some parishes to merge.”

“You may have heard that Cal­i­for­nia is broke, and is send­ing out IOU slips instead of checks for income tax refunds. I thought that I would be safe as I usu­ally owe taxes, but due to an amend­ment of my return, I ended up get­ting one in the mail as well. Here is a scan for his­tor­i­cal preservation”

“Rosetta Stone Inc, a provider of language-learning soft­ware, said it filed a law­suit against Google Inc in a U.S. fed­eral court, alleg­ing trade­mark infringe­ment.” Another law­suit against Google’s prac­tice of allow­ing competitor’s trade­marks. Let me put this sim­ply, Google is in the right, you should be able to pur­chase adver­tis­ing against your com­pe­ti­tion even using their trademark.

“There is a strong link in obe­sity between moth­ers and daugh­ters and fathers and sons, but not across the gen­der divide, research sug­gests. A study of 226 fam­i­lies by Plymouth’s Penin­sula Med­ical School found obese moth­ers were 10 times more likely to have obese daugh­ters. For fathers and sons, there was a six-fold rise. But in both cases chil­dren of the oppo­site sex were not affected.” Interesting.