Yostivanich

“The advice appears in guid­ance cir­cu­lated to par­ents, teach­ers and youth work­ers, and is intended to update sex edu­ca­tion by telling pupils about the ben­e­fits of sex­ual plea­sure. For too long, say its authors, experts have con­cen­trated on the need for “safe sex” and lov­ing rela­tion­ships while ignor­ing the main rea­son that many peo­ple have sex, that is, for enjoy­ment. ” I totally agree.

“A tiny glass tele­scope, the size of a pea, has been suc­cess­fully implanted in the eyes of peo­ple with severely dam­aged reti­nas, help­ing them to read, watch tele­vi­sion and bet­ter see famil­iar faces. The new device is for peo­ple with an irre­versible, advanced form of mac­u­lar degen­er­a­tion in which a blind spot devel­ops in the cen­tral vision of both eyes.” Cool.

“So per­haps the biggest sur­prise about the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency’s furor du jour — the secret pro­gram, hid­den from Con­gress, to kill the lead­ers of Al Qaeda — is not that there was such a pro­gram, which many Amer­i­cans assumed. The real sur­prise is that in eight years of off-again, on-again brain­storm­ing, plan­ning and train­ing, the pro­gram did not kill a sin­gle ter­ror­ist. It did not even mount an attempt, C.I.A. offi­cials say.”

“Ama­zon says that that the books in ques­tion were added to its cat­a­log using the company’s self-service plat­form by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. And it says it will no longer delete books in this man­ner. Von Lohmann believes the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion may be inter­ested in Amazon’s actions. He said the gov­ern­ment agency has been look­ing into sit­u­a­tions in which peo­ple who bought music pro­tected by a dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment sys­tem find them­selves denied access to their music when the ser­vice shuts down. If Kin­dle books are rentals, he said, they should be described that way. “The Kin­dle gives you the sense that you are buy­ing the book,” he said.” Well hope­fully this won’t hap­pen again.

“In the first six months of this year, the Russ­ian human rights orga­ni­za­tion Memo­r­ial, where Ms. Estemirova worked, doc­u­mented 74 kid­nap­pings in Chech­nya, com­pared with 42 for all of 2008. Human rights groups have laid the blame for the bulk of the dis­ap­pear­ances, and the killing of Ms. Estemirova, squarely at the feet of the regional pres­i­dent, Ramzan A. Kady­rov, and his secu­rity forces.”

“To bring this great project to a close, we wanted to make sure the Out­look team had a con­stant reminder of just how strongly we all feel about their lack of stan­dards sup­port. Trend­ing top­ics on Twit­ter come and go, we wanted some­thing a lit­tle more per­ma­nent we could send their way.”

“One of the coolest things about Friend­Feed is how you can see every­thing that’s hap­pen­ing on the site in real-time. Start­ing today, this is even more true with real-time search.” Good job FriendFeed.

“As of today, 250 mil­lion peo­ple are using Face­book to stay updated on what’s hap­pen­ing around them and share with the peo­ple in their lives. The rapid pace of our growth is hum­bling and excit­ing for us, and it affirms that peo­ple every­where are real­iz­ing the power of stay­ing con­nected to every­thing they care about on Face­book.” Crazy.

“The states’ will­ing­ness to spend, even under excru­ci­at­ing bud­get pres­sures, is a mea­sure of the sup­port for expand­ing health care cov­er­age to the unin­sured as Con­gress and the admin­is­tra­tion inten­sify their nego­ti­a­tions over a new fed­eral health care bill.”

“A Chi­nese offi­cial says police shot dead 12 Uighur riot­ers in Urumqi this month, in a rare gov­ern­ment admis­sion of deaths inflicted by secu­rity forces. Nuer Baikeli, gov­er­nor of Xin­jiang region and him­self a Uighur, said those killed had ignored police warn­ing shots and were attack­ing civil­ians and shops.”

“Well, you can run change_bulb($electricity,$filament) or bulb_change($plug,$filament,$electricity) or Zend_Light_Bulb::change() or down­load a pear pack­age that has this undoc­u­mented $houseMaintenance->changeBulb() method or you can run this script I found on the inter­net that will make a web form that posts super glob­als directly into the light bulb.” Lol.

“A US space­craft has cap­tured images of Apollo land­ing sites on the Moon, reveal­ing hard­ware and a trail of foot­prints left on the lunar sur­face. The release of the images coin­cides with the 40^th anniver­sary of the first manned mis­sion to land on the Moon.” So awesome.

“The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has pro­posed a num­ber of new reg­u­la­tions and agen­cies, notably includ­ing a Con­sumer Finan­cial Pro­tec­tion Agency, which would be charged with safe­guard­ing con­sumers against things like abu­sive mort­gage, auto loan or credit card con­tracts. The new agency is to encour­age “plain vanilla” prod­ucts that are sim­pler and eas­ier to under­stand. But rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try have crit­i­cized the pro­posal as a threat to inno­va­tions that could improve con­sumers’ wel­fare. As the story of the steam engine shows, inno­va­tion often entails ten­sion between safety and power. We need to fos­ter inven­tions that bet­ter human wel­fare while incor­po­rat­ing safety mech­a­nisms that pro­tect the pub­lic. Could the pro­posed agency accom­plish this task?”

“Astro­nauts have begun the first of five space­walks to be per­formed by the crew of the shut­tle Endeav­our at the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion (ISS).”

“The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 mil­lion to $3 mil­lion in return for the group’s sup­port in a bit­ter leg­isla­tive dis­pute, then the group’s chair­man flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.” Oh fun.