Yostivanich

“Ver­i­zon Wire­less, a joint ven­ture of Ver­i­zon and Voda­fone Group PLC, asked a U.S. court for a judg­ment that its adver­tis­ing claims to be “America’s Most Reli­able 3G Net­work” were truth­ful, which rival AT&T called “mis­lead­ing” on Mon­day.” Oh fun.

“A human rights char­ity has begun a legal fight to force the UK gov­ern­ment to reveal what it knew about an alleged CIA “ren­di­tion flight” in 2002.”

“One rea­son pro­gram­mers dis­like meet­ings so much is that they’re on a dif­fer­ent type of sched­ule from other peo­ple. Meet­ings cost them more.” I agree with this whole heartily.

“What I truly don’t under­stand is how any­one could pos­si­bly think that jok­ing about rape is being edgy or some­how fight­ing against the main­stream — which seems to be what the comics in this Guardian arti­cle are argu­ing. They say they’re tak­ing taboos head-on. But the thing is, rape jokes and mock­ing vio­lence against women are main­stream. They’re not a taboo at all — they’re the norm, sadly. So all of these come­di­ans giv­ing them­selves a pat on the back for being sooo con­tro­ver­sial — when all they’re doing is uphold­ing the sta­tus quo — really fuck­ing irk me.”

You know moral­ity with­out reli­gion is such a con­tro­ver­sial thing.

“Seven US men have been charged with con­spir­ing to pro­vide sup­port to Islamic mil­i­tants and con­spir­ing to mur­der and kid­nap peo­ple abroad.”

“Researchers at San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries in Liv­er­more, Calif., are cre­at­ing what is in effect a vast dig­i­tal petri dish able to hold one mil­lion oper­at­ing sys­tems at once in an effort to study the behav­ior of rogue pro­grams known as botnets.”

“If there’s ever been a time to be furi­ous with Apple, now is it.” Pretty much.

“The head of Iran’s judi­ciary has ordered a deci­sion within a week on the fate of pris­on­ers arrested after dis­puted elec­tions, Iran­ian media say. A spokesman for the judi­ciary chief, Aya­tol­lah Mah­moud Hashemi Shahrudi, also said some pris­on­ers should be freed, the Mehr news agency reported. The spokesman, Ali Reza Jamshidi, said about 300 peo­ple remained behind bars.”

“Instead, I wanted to men­tion an essay by Ellen E. Fairchild which dis­cusses “Chris­t­ian priv­i­lege” — ben­e­fits that Chris­tians get in our soci­ety that are denied to the rest of us — despite our nation’s sep­a­ra­tion of church and state. Those ben­e­fits all con­tribute to this false belief that we are a Chris­t­ian nation. With all that in mind, it takes a lot of work for an admin­is­tra­tor to make non-Christians feel included. The rest of the paper explains how we can chal­lenge this “Chris­t­ian nation” idea and instead cel­e­brate our nation’s diversity.”

“US stock mar­ket reg­u­la­tors have made per­ma­nent a rule aimed at reduc­ing abu­sive short-selling. The emer­gency rule on “naked short-selling” was intro­duced at the height of last year’s mar­ket tur­moil, and was due to expire on Fri­day. Short-sellers usu­ally bor­row shares, sell them, then buy them back when the stock falls and return them to the lender keep­ing the dif­fer­ence in price. “Naked” short sell­ing is when sell­ers do not even bor­row the shares. The US the Secu­ri­ties Exchange Com­mis­sion (SEC) acknowl­edges that short sell­ing can help limit mar­ket bub­bles in indi­vid­ual shares. But it has been con­cerned that the prac­tice can also be used to manip­u­late the market.”

“Luck­ily, it seems that Apple has been lis­ten­ing: over the past few days, we have received word from a num­ber of devel­op­ers stat­ing that they are now able to request promo codes for their 17+ apps. While Apple has not made any offi­cial com­ment on the issue, it appears that they have qui­etly con­ceded this bat­tle to the devel­op­ers, once again enabling them to dis­trib­ute promo codes as needed for all of their apps.” One good move.

“Nev­er­the­less, in wave elec­tions, things have a way of just hap­pen­ing. We don’t know whether 2010 will resem­ble 1994 or 2006. But if health care falls apart and the econ­omy remains sour, I wouldn’t put too much lim­i­ta­tion on the Repub­li­cans’ upside.”

“The Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity relied on a rushed, flawed study to jus­tify its deci­sion to locate a $700 mil­lion research facil­ity for highly infec­tious pathogens in a tornado-prone sec­tion of Kansas, accord­ing to a gov­ern­ment report. ” Because that’s a smart place place to study?

“Lim­it­ing what’s on the shelves — or acces­si­ble on a pub­lic com­puter — is not cen­sor­ship. It’s dis­cre­tion. And pornog­ra­phy and other mate­ri­als blocked by some fil­ter­ing pro­grams are still widely avail­able for per­sonal use and pur­chase else­where.” Renam­ing some­thing doesn’t make it dif­fer­ent. Cen­sor­ship is still cen­sor­ship, the point at which we allow fil­ter­ing to become main­stream, means what was once “widely avail­able” will no longer be available.

“The 911 caller who reported two men pos­si­bly break­ing into the home of black Har­vard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. did not describe their race, acknowl­edged they might just be hav­ing a hard time with the door and said she saw two suit­cases on the porch.”

“The hard truth is that Offi­cer Crowley’s defense that he was just doing his job just doesn’t wash. Hav­ing ver­i­fied the facts, he had every oppor­tu­nity to apol­o­gize to Pro­fes­sor Gates for the mis­un­der­stand­ing and leave. The hard truth that Amer­ica needs to hear is that inci­dents of racial pro­fil­ing and unfair treat­ment by the police and judi­ciary are oppres­sive facts of life for African Amer­i­can men even today. The hard truth that Pro­fes­sor Gates needs to hear is that he is the one who handed over his power to Offi­cer Crow­ley. Let­ting his agi­ta­tion get the bet­ter of him, Gates lost the abil­ity to shape the out­come of the encounter and set up his own vic­tim­iza­tion by a poorly trained police offi­cer.” Pretty even handed treat­ment of the Gates-Crowley affair.

“The Afghan gov­ern­ment has agreed a truce with Tal­iban insur­gents in the north-western province of Badghis ahead of elec­tions next month, offi­cials say. The Tal­iban have pledged not to attack vot­ing cen­tres and to hand key areas to gov­ern­ment forces, offi­cials say. There has been no word from the militants.”

“The annual rate of US new home sales jumped 11% in June, gov­ern­ment fig­ures have shown, a fur­ther indi­ca­tion that the hous­ing sec­tor is over the worst.”

“Yahoo is close to mak­ing Microsoft’s Bing its search provider. The deal, which would make Microsoft a more cred­i­ble com­peti­tor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a rev­enue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped.” Yahoooo, I mean Binggg?

“Tra­di­tion­al­ists, of course, find noth­ing wrong with using he to refer to an any­body or an every­body, male or female. After all, hasn’t he been used for both sexes since time immemo­r­ial? Well, no, as a mat­ter of fact, it hasn’t. It’s a rel­a­tively recent usage, as these things go. But how, you might ask, did peo­ple refer to an any­body before then? This will sur­prise a few purists, but for cen­turies the uni­ver­sal pro­noun was they. Writ­ers as far back as Chaucer used it for sin­gu­lar and plural, mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were offi­cially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Usage explains, writ­ers were com­fort­able using they with an indef­i­nite pro­noun like every­body because it sug­gested a sex­less plural.” I agree “they” is the proper form.

“Rather than wait­ing for big projects to be planned and awarded to con­struc­tion com­pa­nies, or for tax cuts to trickle through the econ­omy, state offi­cials hit upon a New Deal model of try­ing to put peo­ple directly to work as quickly as pos­si­ble. They are using wel­fare money from the stim­u­lus pack­age to sub­si­dize 300 new jobs across Perry County, with employ­ers rang­ing from the state Trans­porta­tion Depart­ment to the milk­shake place near the high school.”

“For­tu­nately, Google has recently come out with a num­ber of smart­phone apps for Black­Berry and Android that obvi­ate the need for any extra steps, mak­ing Google Voice a nat­ural replace­ment for your phone’s native dialer. The iPhone still lacks an offi­cial client, but that hasn’t stopped a hand­ful of third party devel­op­ers from releas­ing their own apps, which have been avail­able on the App Store for the last few months. Today, how­ever, it sounds like Apple has made the deci­sion to crack down on these: Sean Kovacs, the devel­oper behind the pop­u­lar app GV Mobile, has writ­ten on his blog that Apple is going to be remov­ing his appli­ca­tion, cit­ing the fact that it “dupli­cates fea­tures that come with the iPhone”.” Stu­pid Apple.

“Mean­while, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jer­rold Nadler, Demo­c­rat of New York, has intro­duced a bill called the Say No to Drug Ads Act. It would amend the fed­eral tax code to pre­vent phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies from deduct­ing the cost of direct-to-consumer drug adver­tise­ments as a busi­ness expense.” That one makes the most sense to me. “The United States is one of only two coun­tries that per­mit direct-to-consumer drug adver­tise­ments. The other is New Zealand, where sev­eral years ago some health offi­cials and politi­cians tried and failed to ban drug ads.”

“Walt Moss­berg lets you know what the REAL, TERRIFYING dan­gers of Win­dows 7, and exactly what you need to do to sur­vive it. This is per­haps the most impor­tant video you will ever see.”

“Well, mys­tery solved — thanks to White House Deputy Press Sec­re­tary Bill Bur­ton, who very kindly responded to our bar­rage of ques­tions on this impor­tant mat­ter of national secu­rity yes­ter­day. In so doing, he laid to rest some of the extrap­o­lated con­clu­sions drawn from the 22-second clip of Gibbs on C-SPAN, notably that White House staffers were banned from Twit­ter (they’re not), that the same peo­ple are respon­si­ble for both @WhiteHouse and @BarackObama (they’re not) and that nobody tweets from the White House (they do!). It’s true, chil­dren: It’s com­ing from inside the house.”

“The Blueline’s grim num­bers stem entirely from two per­verse eco­nomic incen­tives: the driver’s salary is wholly depen­dant on how many fares he picks up, and each bus is in direct com­pe­ti­tion with every other bus on the route.” This is insane and shows how extreme cap­i­tal­ism can and does cause problems.

“By releas­ing your chart, instead of mean­ing­fully edu­cat­ing the pub­lic, you will­fully obfus­cated an already com­pli­cated pro­posal. There is no sim­ple pro­posal to solve this prob­lem. You instead chose to shout “12! 16! 37! 9! 24!” while we were try­ing to count some­thing. So, to try and do my duty both to the coun­try and to infor­ma­tion design (a pro­fes­sion and skill you have loudly shat upon), I have taken it upon myself to untan­gle your delight­ful chart.” Awesome.