Yostivanich

“A gay rights group plans to stage a mass kiss­ing demon­stra­tion out­side the San Diego Mor­mon tem­ple as a show of sup­port for a gay cou­ple cited for tres­pass­ing in Utah after shar­ing a kiss on church prop­erty.” Awesome.

“While the com­pany had its rea­sons (appar­ently, the ver­sions it deleted were unau­tho­rized ver­sions) and did give refunds, it didn’t change the fact that it was invad­ing devices and tak­ing back con­tent which those peo­ple had (at least to their knowl­edge) legally bought. And it knows that was wrong, which is good. Com­pa­nies make mis­takes, and we’ll chalk this up to a big, dumb one by Ama­zon, because they’ve now said as much. But what also trou­bles me is that while Ama­zon apol­o­gizes for inci­dents like this, it says noth­ing about other sketchy moves. But wel­come to the 21^st cen­tury. Not only is Big Brother watch­ing, he’s got a back­door pass­code into your devices — and a kill switch.” What he said.

“The Democ­rats could find them­selves in a bet­ter posi­tion after the August recess or they could find them­selves in a worse one — how’s that for a bold pre­dic­tion! But lib­er­als’ doom-and-gloom, con­ser­v­a­tives’ glee, and the media’s near­sighted report­ing are all equally uncalled for.” Slap­ping some sense into the system.

“Basi­cally the new API is designed to give devel­op­ers full access to PayPal’s fea­tures, allow­ing them a lot more free­dom in build­ing appli­ca­tions which include the abil­ity to accept and dis­trib­ute pay­ments. PayPal’s Pres­i­dent Scott Thomp­son says that devel­op­ers will basi­cally be able to do any­thing they want off of the Pay­Pal plat­form, empha­siz­ing the “global con­nec­tiv­ity” of Pay­Pal (trans­ac­tions can be con­ducted in 19 cur­ren­cies). He says $2000 flows through PayPal’s sys­tem every sec­ond, 365 days a year. Thomp­son says that what dif­fer­en­ti­ates this new inno­va­tion is the abil­ity to main­tain secu­rity, while still extend­ing the API far from PayPal.”

“Peo­ple arriv­ing at the new main home page will be greeted by a search box, infor­ma­tion on Twit­ter trends and a panoply of more spe­cific infor­ma­tion about how they can use Twit­ter.” Good idea.

“Soon, thou­sands of orders began flood­ing the mar­kets as high-frequency soft­ware went into high gear. Auto­matic pro­grams began issu­ing and can­cel­ing tiny orders within mil­lisec­onds to deter­mine how much the slower traders were will­ing to pay. The high-frequency com­put­ers quickly deter­mined that some investors’ upper limit was $26.40. The price shot to $26.39, and high-frequency pro­grams began offer­ing to sell hun­dreds of thou­sands of shares. The result is that the slower-moving investors paid $1.4 mil­lion for about 56,000 shares, or $7,800 more than if they had been able to move as quickly as the high-frequency traders. Mul­ti­ply such trades across thou­sands of stocks a day, and the prof­its are sub­stan­tial. High-frequency traders gen­er­ated about $21 bil­lion in prof­its last year, the Tabb Group, a research firm, estimates.”

“We worked closely with Apple to bring Lat­i­tude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we devel­oped a Lat­i­tude appli­ca­tion for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Lat­i­tude as a web appli­ca­tion in order to avoid con­fu­sion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.” I’m want­ing to read the rejec­tion letters.

“Trans­la­tion: Apple rejected their native iPhone app.” What he said.

“The US Sen­ate says it will not be able to vote on a US health­care reform bill by August, in a set­back to Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s pro­posed timetable.”

“The first under­sea cable to bring high-speed inter­net access to East Africa has gone live. The fibre-optic cable, oper­ated by African-owned firm Sea­com, con­nects South Africa, Tan­za­nia, Kenya, Uganda and Mozam­bique to Europe and Asia.”

“Meet Ten­nessee state sen­a­tor Paul Stan­ley. He’s a solid con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can and mar­ried father of two, who accord­ing to his web­site is “a mem­ber of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sun­day school teacher and board mem­ber of their day school.” In a sworn affi­davit, a Ten­nessee state inves­ti­ga­tor has said that Stan­ley admit­ted to hav­ing a “sex­ual rela­tion­ship” with a 22-year-old female intern work­ing in his office, and to tak­ing nude pic­tures of her in “provoca­tive poses” in his apartment.”