Yostivanich

I needed this a while back.

“We’ve writ­ten before about con­ser­v­a­tives claim­ing that Con­gress, or Obama, or Wash­ing­ton, or Democ­rats in gen­eral want the U.S. to have a Canadian-style, government-run health care sys­tem. The truth of the mat­ter is that the pres­i­dent has repeat­edly said he doesn’t. In fact, since being sworn in as pres­i­dent, Obama has riled advo­cates of such single-payer sys­tems by largely exclud­ing them from the health care debate. He has answered sev­eral ques­tions from mem­bers of the pub­lic who asked at town hall events: “why not” have such a sys­tem. Sen. Max Bau­cus of Mon­tana, chair­man of the Sen­ate Finance Com­mit­tee and one of the lead­ers in draft­ing leg­is­la­tion, has said bluntly: “single-payer is not going to get even to first base in Con­gress.” Yet, the Canada claims continue.”

“It’s time for another episode of the Up the Moo Herd: MooTools Tips and Tricks series, where we’ll talk about classes, the back­bone of MooTools. Other JS libraries thrive using plu­g­ins and exten­sions, but MooTools keeps its object-oriented focus by using classes and mix­ins to new func­tion­al­ity to the frame­work.” Cre­at­ing classes in MooTools.

“Human tri­als of a vac­cine to pro­tect against the H1N1 swine flu virus have begun in Aus­tralia. Vax­ine and CSL have both started inject­ing vol­un­teers this week, but it will be at least six weeks before the ini­tial results are known.” It’s going to be a fun flu season.

“Mor­gan Stan­ley made a loss of $159m (£97m) between April and June, a sig­nif­i­cant drop on the $698m profit it made in the same period a year ear­lier. It is the third con­sec­u­tive loss for the Wall Street bank and was worse than ana­lysts had expected. It was also hit by the cost of repay­ing gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Includ­ing that charge, losses totalled $1.3bn. How­ever, a num­ber of Mor­gan Stanley’s rivals have reported sig­nif­i­cant jumps in sec­ond quar­ter profits.”

“Some design­ers cre­ate things to show you what they did. I design things to tell you what I solved.”

“The devel­op­ers I know would rather rip up $50 bills, long sequences of them, than do some­thing that, in their best judg­ment, is against the best inter­ests of the soft­ware and its users. And that’s why it’s kind of insult­ing, because it goes right to a developer’s pride and crafts­man­ship. It sug­gests they’d ditch all that for $50.” With my involve­ment with build­ing a prod­uct I would totally agree.

“A for­mer Ukrain­ian gen­eral sus­pected of car­ry­ing out the high-profile mur­der of jour­nal­ist Georgiy Gongadze has report­edly con­fessed to the killing. A senior police offi­cial said Olek­siy Pukach had also impli­cated senior polit­i­cal fig­ures in the mur­der.” This is why it’s impor­tant to not just say you have free­dom of the press, but to actu­ally have it.

“The gist of the human-rights-violation argu­ment is that multimillion-euro fines should only be issued by crim­i­nal courts, not as a result of an admin­is­tra­tive pro­ceed­ing.” Prob­a­bly won’t fly in the EU court system.

“A court in the Indian city of Mum­bai is due to decide whether to accept the guilty plea made by the main sus­pect in last year’s deadly attacks in the city. The rul­ing is expected one day after Moham­mad Ajmal Amir Qasab told the court he is ready to be hanged after admit­ting his role in the vio­lence. Pros­e­cu­tors said he changed his plea to guilty to secure leniency. They want the trial to pro­ceed but the defence says it should end if the court accepts his plea.”

“Show sup­port for “MooTools FTW” and add a twib­bon to your twit­ter pro­file image.” Khabi-MooTools.

“So when it comes to cre­at­ing a fun sum­mer activ­ity for 30 peo­ple, I turn to oth­ers for their advice. The first answer out of everyone’s mouth?”

“Ousted Hon­duran Pres­i­dent Manuel Zelaya should return home on Fri­day, medi­a­tor Oscar Arias has said. The country’s interim author­i­ties, who removed him, repeated that they would not rein­state him, but said they would sub­mit the mediator’s plan to Congress.”

“News has just bro­ken that Amazon.com has pur­chased hot ecom­merce up-and-comer Zap­pos for 10 mil­lion Ama­zon shares or $880 mil­lion. (The Ama­zon release said it was $807 mil­lion, but that was based on a trail­ing 45-day esti­mate of its share price. Clos­ing price today bumps the deal up to $880 mil­lion.) Zap­pos employ­ees also will get $40 mil­lion in cash and restricted stock. In other words the deal is more like $920 mil­lion all told. And Zap­pos man­age­ment will remain in place.”

“Not too long ago, the CTO at Dud­ley H.‘s com­pany had a star­tling rev­e­la­tion: there should never, ever be a need for tech­ni­cal sup­port. If a client has an issue using one of their prod­ucts, then the prob­lem is most cer­tainly in the prod­uct. Maybe the UI is a lit­tle con­fus­ing. Maybe it’s not doc­u­mented enough. Maybe the doc­u­men­ta­tion isn’t clear enough. What­ever the case, every client issue means that some­one — be it the devel­oper, tester, or helpdesk tech­ni­cian — didn’t do their job prop­erly and should strive to improve them­selves. Of course, the coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to the CTO’s rev­e­la­tion, lob­bied pri­mar­ily by the helpdesk staff, was that many users are sim­ply lazy, stu­pid, or lazy and stu­pid, and no amount of improve­ment could ever change that. Not that it mat­tered, though. The CTO was deter­mined and set a new pol­icy that all client issues were to have “problem/improvement” reports writ­ten about them, and that all reports were to be reviewed at the higest level.”

“The com­pa­nies announced on Wednes­day that Ama­zon was acquir­ing Zap­pos, based in Hen­der­son, Nev., for 10 mil­lion shares of Ama­zon stock, worth nearly $900 mil­lion at its cur­rent level. Ama­zon also said it would give Zap­pos employ­ees an addi­tional $40 mil­lion in cash and stock.” Awe­some news for Zappos.

“Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, filed an appeal Wednes­day chal­leng­ing the Euro­pean Commission’s record €1.06 bil­lion fine and rul­ing in May that it had abused its dom­i­nance in com­puter proces­sors by offer­ing rebates to com­puter mak­ers who used more of its chips. The appeal will not delay Intel’s pay­ment of the $1.45 bil­lion fine, the largest ever assessed in Europe in a market-dominance case.” So sur­prised Intel filed an appeal.

“The report found that nearly half of all African-Americans and English-speaking His­pan­ics (the study did not include a Spanish-language option) were using mobile phones or other hand-held devices to surf the Web and send e-mail mes­sages. By com­par­i­son, just 28 per­cent of white Amer­i­cans reported ever going online using a mobile device. Not only are African-Americans the most active users of mobile Inter­net, they are also the fastest grow­ing group to adopt the tech­nol­ogy: the per­cent­age of African-Americans using mobile phones or another type of con­nected gad­get to share e-mail, exchange instant mes­sages and access the Inter­net for infor­ma­tion on an aver­age day has more than dou­bled since late 2007, jump­ing to 29 per­cent, from 12 per­cent. By com­par­i­son, 19 per­cent of Amer­i­cans over all log on to the Inter­net on a mobile device on a typ­i­cal day.”

“And today the com­pany unveiled the FREETALK Every­man head­set, a USB super wide­band audio head­set. While first and fore­most the goal was to ensure great call qual­ity, Skype also notes that this head­set is, “light­weight and folds flat so you can throw it in your bag with your laptop.””

“An Amer­i­can man has been charged with giv­ing al-Qaeda infor­ma­tion about the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem in New York City, US court papers say. The man, named as Bryant Neal Vinas, 26, is also accused of fir­ing rock­ets at US troops in Afghanistan last year.”

Fun stuff.

“Com­plaints from cus­tomers about the air­line indus­try have risen by 11% in a year, a con­sumer sup­port group says. The Air Trans­port Users Coun­cil (AUC) han­dled 12,307 com­plaints and enquiries in 2008–9, com­pared with 11,077 the pre­vi­ous year. Can­cel­la­tions, delays and mis­han­dled bag­gage topped the gripes list but new tech­nol­ogy has also led to new types of com­plaints, the AUC said. It accepted that com­plaints came from a “tiny” minor­ity of passengers.”