Yostivanich

“More plans to build homes, higher stock prices and fewer peo­ple fil­ing first-time claims for job­less aid sent a private-sector fore­cast of Amer­i­can eco­nomic activ­ity higher than expected in June. It was the third con­sec­u­tive monthly increase for the Con­fer­ence Board’s index of lead­ing eco­nomic indi­ca­tors, and another sign point­ing toward the reces­sion end­ing later this year.” Good news all around.

“Fox News’ Alisyn Camerota falsely claimed that White House chief eco­nomic adviser Larry Sum­mers recently cited Google searches, but not GDP, as evi­dence that the econ­omy is improv­ing. In fact, Sum­mers cited both, as well as sev­eral other eco­nomic indi­ca­tors.” Facts what are those?

“Cambodia’s courts have been busy in recent weeks with cases of defama­tion, dis­in­for­ma­tion and incite­ment brought by the gov­ern­ment in what crit­ics say is part of a broad assault on civil lib­er­ties. But she and other ana­lysts say the tar­gets seem care­fully cho­sen to send a chill through the free press, inde­pen­dent judi­ciary, polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion and civic orga­ni­za­tions that were intro­duced by the United Nations in the early 1990s.” Oh fun.

“As Mrs. Clin­ton con­jured up a soar­ing vision of friend­ship between the two coun­tries in a speech to a uni­ver­sity audi­ence here, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion signed off on a nuts-and-bolts tech­ni­cal agree­ment that will open the door to lucra­tive mil­i­tary sales by the United States to India. In addi­tion, India said it had des­ig­nated two sites where Amer­i­can com­pa­nies would build nuclear power plants.”

“An Egypt­ian court has over­turned a three-year jail sen­tence given to a poet for insult­ing the pres­i­dent. The court accepted the argu­ment of Mon­eer Said Hanna’s lawyer that he had been inves­ti­gated and put on trial with­out hav­ing had access to a lawyer. Rel­a­tives of the ama­teur poet told the BBC he was delighted and would not be writ­ing poems of this kind again.” So a half win, no real free­dom of speech still.

“With a high-speed cam­era, Dr Viller­maux and his col­leagues filmed a sin­gle falling drop of water — about six mil­lime­tres in diam­e­ter. They recorded how air resis­tance caused it to deform and even­tu­ally break up.”

Friend­Feed has a new api. On the list to play around with.

“With a large bankroll, a staff at the out­set of about eight jour­nal­ists and the cachet of Evan Smith, the Texas Monthly edi­tor, the new ven­ture, called the Texas Tri­bune, hopes to be an imme­di­ate force on the state’s polit­i­cal land­scape, much as Politico was two years ago in national pol­i­tics.” Cool.

“In an announce­ment on Mon­day, Barnes & Noble said that it would offer more than 700,000 books that could be read on a wide range of devices, includ­ing Apple’s iPhone, the Black­Berry and var­i­ous lap­top or desk­top com­put­ers. When Barnes & Noble acquired Fic­tion­wise in March, that online retailer had about 60,000 books in its catalog.”

“Born in super­novae, pul­sars are spin­ning neu­tron stars, col­lapsed stel­lar cores left from the death explo­sions of mas­sive stars. Tra­di­tion­ally iden­ti­fied and stud­ied by observ­ing their reg­u­lar radio pul­sa­tions, two dozen pul­sars have now been detected at extreme gamma-ray ener­gies by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Tele­scope. The detec­tions include 16 pul­sars iden­ti­fied by their pulsed gamma-ray emis­sion alone. This gamma-ray all-sky map, aligned with the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, shows the pul­sar posi­tions, with the 16 new Fermi pul­sars cir­cled in yel­low (8 pre­vi­ously known radio pul­sars are in magenta). Bizarre stel­lar corpses, the Vela, Crab, and Geminga pul­sars on the right are the bright­est ones in the gamma-ray sky. Pul­sars Taz, Eel, and Rab­bit are named for the neb­u­lae they are now known to power. The Gamma Cygni and CTA 1 pul­sars at the left also reside within expand­ing super­nova rem­nants of the same name.”

“A new way of mak­ing can­cer cells die has been dis­cov­ered by UK sci­en­tists, rais­ing hopes of potent new treat­ments. The use of anti­bod­ies to tar­get can­cer has already had great suc­cess, and the lat­est dis­cov­ery promises to make the approach even more effective.”

“While most of the soft­ware fea­tures I describe below work on any iPhone run­ning the iPhone OS 3.0, the 3GS model has one sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage that enables all of its own­ers to expe­ri­ence enterprise-class secu­rity. The iPhone 3GS includes a hard­ware encryp­tion chip that uses the industry-standard AES 256 pro­to­col (that’s the Advanced Encryp­tion Stan­dard, with a key length of 256 bits).”

Well IE8 is bet­ter than 7, now how about IE6 start disappearing.

“Trou­bled US bank CIT has approved a $3bn (£1.8bn) loan from share­hold­ers to keep it out of bank­ruptcy, reports say.”

Anger man­age­ment is not appro­pri­ate here or is it?

“The tiny Pacific island state of Tuvalu has said it wants all its energy to come from renew­able sources by 2020.”

“India’s Supreme Court has refused to put on hold a land­mark court judge­ment decrim­i­nal­is­ing gay sex in the country.”

“The police are fail­ing to use CCTV to catch as many crim­i­nals as they could, a senior offi­cer has told the BBC.”

“This is Ama­zon choos­ing its “con­tent part­ners” over its cus­tomers. There is noth­ing about copy­right law that required these dele­tions — if Ama­zon didn’t have the rights to sell the e-books in the first place, the infringe­ment hap­pened when the books were sold. Remote dele­tion doesn’t change that, and it’s not an infringe­ment for the Kin­dle owner sim­ply to read the book. Can you imag­ine a brick-and-mortar book­store chas­ing you home, enter­ing your house, and pulling a book from your shelf after you paid good money for it?” EFF again tak­ing on Amazon.

“The mar­ket for mobile appli­ca­tions, or apps, will become “as big as the inter­net”, peak­ing at 10 mil­lion apps in 2020, a lead­ing online store says. How­ever, Get­Jar say, the devel­oper com­mu­nity will decline dras­ti­cally as each devel­oper makes less money. Accord­ing to the Sym­bian Foun­da­tion, newly in the devel­oper mar­ket, apps will become more per­sonal and prac­ti­cal as their num­bers grow.” I’m not totally set in this idea. It has the poten­tal but there are drawbacks.

“Two Bosn­ian Serb com­man­ders have been found guilty of war crimes, includ­ing burn­ing women and chil­dren alive, dur­ing the Bosn­ian civil war. Cousins Milan and Sre­doje Lukic were mem­bers of a para­mil­i­tary group called the White Eagles, or the Avengers. They were accused of mur­der, per­se­cu­tion, exter­mi­na­tion and other inhu­mane acts against Bosn­ian Mus­lims near Viseg­rad between 1992 and 1994.”

“Accord­ing to news-monitoring ser­vice VMS, a cool $48 mil­lion over the past 30 days. (That’s half of what Microsoft plans to spend mar­ket­ing its biggest prod­uct launch of the year, Bing.)” Does it mat­ter if Twit­ter can’t get peo­ple using and stay­ing with the product.

“The Euro­pean Union has sus­pended more than $90m (63m euros; £54m) in aid to Hon­duras in the wake of a coup there.”

“Fox News aired an anti-choice graphic sourced to the Amer­i­can Life League fea­tur­ing a fetus and the words, “Abor­tion: grow­ing … grow­ing … gone,” dur­ing a seg­ment ask­ing if “health care reform” will result in fed­er­ally funded abor­tions.” Fox News appar­ently doesn’t have any graph­ics peo­ple on staff.

“Sri Lanka has agreed a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) loan accord from the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) to the help it weather the global eco­nomic crisis.”

“And there you have it. It is hard to have these con­ver­sa­tions and feel that some­how we have failed. The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion believe what is true, that such space travel is as much as a dream as it was prior to the 1960s. I know that some will say that was all well and good given the cost. But the cost of the entire space pro­gram over that time, in today’s dol­lars, was $176 bil­lion. And yes, that, in ret­ro­spect was too costly. Not because of the resources it took but because the expense surely had value in knowl­edge cre­ated that would built up and lead to greater things. To not have rein­vested on the back of that achieve­ment was to erode the cap­i­tal value of the ini­tial expense. Almost impos­si­ble to con­ceive at the time, the moon land­ings were a short-term pol­icy and not a seri­ous com­mit­ment to the future. It will leave us and the next gen­er­a­tion won­der­ing what could have been.”

“:A group of com­puter sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton has devel­oped a way to make elec­tronic mes­sages “self destruct” after a cer­tain period of time, like mes­sages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new soft­ware, called Van­ish, which requires encrypt­ing mes­sages, will be needed more and more as per­sonal and busi­ness infor­ma­tion is stored not on per­sonal com­put­ers, but on cen­tral­ized machines, or servers. In the term of the moment this is called cloud com­put­ing, and the cloud con­sists of the data — includ­ing e-mail and Web-based doc­u­ments and cal­en­dars — stored on numer­ous servers.” I totally want to play around with this software.

“The total expo­sure of the US gov­ern­ment to the finan­cial cri­sis could hit $23.7 tril­lion (£14.3tn), accord­ing to a watch­dog report. Neil Barof­sky, over­see­ing the Trou­bled Asset Relief Pro­gramme (Tarp), made the esti­mate in pre­pared remarks to a House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives com­mit­tee. The worst-case esti­mate rep­re­sents the max­i­mum expo­sure if all par­ties offered sup­port requested max­i­mum assistance.”

YouTube busts some myths, attempt­ing to reach adver­tis­ers and producers?

“The US Army will “tem­porar­ily” increase its size by 22,000 sol­diers for the next three years, Defence Sec­re­tary Robert Gates has announced. The addi­tional troops are intended to ease the strain of the US’s deploy­ments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Gates said. The extra man­power will raise the total num­ber of active US sol­diers from 547,000 to 569,000.”

“Still, sur­ro­gate preg­nancy is ille­gal in some states, includ­ing New York, and it remains fraught with con­tro­versy despite the fact that thou­sands of Amer­i­can cou­ples — most of them not celebri­ties or espe­cially wealthy — are hap­pily bring­ing up chil­dren they could not pro­duce on their own.” Fairly light arti­cle on the subject.

“The image was taken by the Infrared Tele­scope Facil­ity in Hawaii. This IR image is at 1.65 microns, about twice the wave­length of what the human eye can see. What this shows is the bright impact site and to its upper left par­tic­u­late mat­ter — debris — thrown up by the impact and lit by the Sun. So. Wow. Jupiter got hit by some­thing big. More obser­va­tions will be com­ing in soon, and maybe we’ll learn more about what happened.”

Can you saw awesome.

“Speak­ing in Lon­don, the Nato secretary-general said fail­ure would give free run to al-Qaeda.” Uh no duh.

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger and California’s leg­isla­tive lead­ers have agreed on a plan to close the state’s $26 bil­lion bud­get short­fall. The plan will include bil­lions of dol­lars in cuts. The rest of the deficit will be made up by a com­bi­na­tion of bor­row­ing, shift­ing money from other gov­ern­ment accounts and accel­er­at­ing the col­lec­tion of cer­tain taxes. Schwarzeneg­ger and Repub­li­can law­mak­ers refused to raise taxes any fur­ther, lim­it­ing law­mak­ers’ options.”

“The square, in the town of Suarez some 40km from the cap­i­tal Mon­te­v­ideo, has gone over to solar energy and LED tech­nol­ogy. The aim is to reduce elec­tric­ity costs and at the same time light more streets. If it works, the plan could serve as a model for other towns across the coun­try. In the cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis and upward pres­sure on elec­tric­ity prices, it should be a way of reduc­ing energy costs.” Cool.

“A key report on the deten­tion of ter­ror­ism sus­pects ordered by US Pres­i­dent Barack Obama will be delayed by six months, offi­cials have said. Although expected, the delay raises doubts about his abil­ity to meet the dead­line, cor­re­spon­dents say. Another report on the inter­ro­ga­tion of sus­pects and their trans­fer to other coun­tries would be delayed by two months, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said.”

“Inter­net Explorer 8 will no longer replace the default browser when a user selects the ‘Use express set­tings’ option dur­ing instal­la­tion.” About time, stu­pid Microsoft.

“In a dis­play of weak­ness unbe­com­ing a head of state, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama con­cluded remarks to his nation Tues­day by ask­ing a pre­tend man who lives in the clouds to watch over and guide the United States. “Thank you, and may God bless Amer­ica,” said the clearly inse­cure pres­i­dent, who, by seek­ing the aid of an imag­i­nary being who is nei­ther his ances­tor nor some­one with whom he shares a tan­gi­ble har­mo­nious rela­tion­ship, freely admit­ted that he has lit­tle faith in him­self and his inept team of jester advis­ers.” Lol.

“An Ital­ian news­pa­per has released audio record­ings and tran­scripts of what it says was a night Prime Min­is­ter Sil­vio Berlus­coni spent with an escort.” Sex and scan­dal our politi­cians are prac­ti­cally boring.

“Gates said he turned over his driver’s license and Har­vard ID — both with his pho­tos — and repeat­edly asked for the name and badge num­ber of the offi­cer, who refused. He said he then fol­lowed the offi­cer as he left his house onto his front porch, where he was hand­cuffed in front of other offi­cers, Gates said in a state­ment released by his attor­ney, fel­low Har­vard scholar Charles Ogle­tree, on a Web site Gates over­sees, TheRoot.com.” This seems really odd on the surface.

“Indeed, with unem­ploy­ment approach­ing 20 per­cent, the high­est in Europe, and the over­all econ­omy expected to shrink by 4.2 per­cent this year, bank rob­beries in 2009 are run­ning 20 per­cent ahead of 2007’s pace, accord­ing to the Span­ish Bank­ing Association.”

“Maybe so. I’m a help­ful guy. Really. So I’ve pro­vided this handy flow chart for all web design­ers and mar­ket­ing peo­ple to con­sult before they put a Flash intro in place. Use this and no mat­ter what your prod­uct, no mat­ter who your tar­get audi­ence, you will always reach the right deci­sion:” The chart is always no, lol.

“Learn­ing to move a com­puter cur­sor or robotic arm with noth­ing but thoughts can be no dif­fer­ent from learn­ing how to play ten­nis or ride a bicy­cle, accord­ing to a new study of how brains and machines inter­act. In the new exper­i­ments, mon­keys learned how to move a com­puter cur­sor with their thoughts using just one set of instruc­tions and an unusu­ally small num­ber of brain cells that deliver instruc­tions for per­form­ing move­ments the same way each day.” Oh New York Times for mis­lead­ing headlines.

The Wrath of Khan goes debugging.

“The three Apollo 11 astro­nauts appeared at the White House today, and just as he had at a speech at the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences in April, Pres­i­dent Obama spoke in glow­ing plat­i­tudes of NASA’s past and said almost noth­ing of NASA’s future.” Bahhh.

“Sci­en­tists in Cal­i­for­nia have set up a unique exper­i­ment to track the life his­to­ries of some of the world’s old­est and tallest trees. The project is designed to fol­low up research, in the Yosemite National Park, which sug­gests that giant trees are per­ish­ing as a result of cli­mate change. An analy­sis of data col­lected over 60 years has led sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton and the Yosemite Field Sta­tion of the US Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, to con­clude that the den­sity of large diam­e­ter trees fell by 24% between the 1930s and 1990s.”

Give your servers a phys­i­cal every now and then.

“To com­mem­o­rate this event the Com­mand Mod­ule code (Comanche054) and Lunar Mod­ule code (Luminary099) have been tran­scribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emu­la­tor) by the Vir­tual AGC and AGS project.” So cool.

“This sin­gle state­ment, appar­ently writ­ten by some sub-contractor they had out­sourced admin inter­face pro­gram­ming to, cost them mil­lions of NOK in lost sales.” Sucks to be that vendor.

“Some MySpac­ers are spec­u­lat­ing on the site’s forums that the hack is tied to phish­ing links in sta­tus updates, which seems to be in line with the reports we’ve seen of lit­er­ally hun­dreds of iden­ti­cal spam sta­tus updates to cer­tain band pro­files (see the screen­shot below).
Update: We’ve learned that this is in fact the case — MySpace users are falling prey to a phish­ing attack through links in sta­tus updates that invite them to renter their login infor­ma­tion, which is then used to spam their accounts. MySpace expects to have a fix for this out later today that will remove all of these links.” Go figure.

“Japan’s Prime Min­is­ter Taro Aso is due to dis­solve the lower house of par­lia­ment ahead of polls on 30 August, after gain­ing offi­cial cab­i­net back­ing. Mr Aso called the elec­tions early after his Lib­eral Demo­c­ra­tic Party (LDP) lost con­trol of Tokyo’s munic­i­pal assem­bly. Opin­ion polls sug­gest that the LDP could lose heav­ily to the oppo­si­tion Demo­c­ra­tic Party in the upcom­ing vote. A win for the Demo­c­ra­tic Party would end five decades of almost unin­ter­rupted rule by the LDP.”

“Cash machines offer an ever-growing menu of ser­vices beyond merely dis­pens­ing money. For tam­per­ing crim­i­nals, this now includes a squirt of pep­per spray in the face. The tech­nol­ogy uses cam­eras to detect peo­ple tam­per­ing with the card slots. Another machine then ejects pep­per spray to stun the cul­prit while police response teams race to the scene. But the mech­a­nism back­fired in one inci­dent last week when pep­per spray was inad­ver­tently inhaled by three tech­ni­cians who required treat­ment from paramedics.”