Yostivanich

“More than 30,000 sin­gle moth­ers have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army, the most heav­ily deployed branch of the mil­i­tary, gives women just four months to stay state­side with their new­borns before deploy­ing to the war zone, leav­ing them lit­tle time to bond with or nurse their infants. The divorce rate for female sol­diers is nearly triple that of the men who wear the same uni­form. These are just a few of the unset­tling sta­tis­tics con­tained in a new report pub­lished Wednes­day by Iraq and Afghanistan Vet­er­ans of Amer­ica , the nation’s first and largest orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing Amer­i­cans who’ve served since Sept. 11, 2001.”

“Untested rape kits, and closed cases, can mean lost jus­tice for some rape vic­tims, and lost oppor­tu­nity for a Chicago com­mu­nity that cares about pre­vent­ing sex­ual violence.”

“The 30 Sen­a­tors who signed the let­ter in sup­port of the pub­lic option received an aver­age of $15,937 in cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from the health insur­ance indus­try between Jan­u­ary 2003 and June 2009, 57% less than the $37,322 received by the 70 sen­a­tors who did not sign the let­ter. Omit­ting the 40 Sen­ate Repub­li­cans, the num­bers are sim­i­lar: the 30 Sen­a­tors who signed the let­ter in sup­port of the pub­lic option received an aver­age of $15,937 in cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from the health insur­ance indus­try between Jan­u­ary 2003 and June 2009, 54% less than the $34,400 received by the 30 Sen­ate Democ­rats (or Inde­pen­dents that cau­cus with Democ­rats) who did not sign the let­ter.” More evi­dence in spe­cial inter­est v. Congress.

I so wish I could go.

“While that might sound like a wel­come prospect, it raises some seri­ous con­cerns about polit­i­cal vendet­tas and fed­eral inter­fer­ence with local mat­ters. More gen­er­ally, the statute does seem dan­ger­ously broad. As Lip­tak notes, civil lib­er­ties attor­ney (and Rea­son con­trib­u­tor) Har­vey Sil­ver­glate, in his new book Three Felonies a Day, cites hon­est ser­vices fraud as a catch-all charge that, like mail fraud, con­spir­acy, and rack­e­teer­ing, invites abuse by ambi­tious or vin­dic­tive pros­e­cu­tors.” Well intended laws can still be abused.

“Already, Google is teas­ing at what may be in store. Dur­ing the call, Google exec­u­tive men­tioned at least three times that mobile searches on Google were up 30 per­cent from the sec­ond quar­ter. Of course, they wouldn’t say how many total mobile searches there were or what per­cent­age of all searches they rep­re­sent (prob­a­bly still a very small sub­set), but they are very bull­ish about the company’s mobile prospects.” Good for Google.

“The aver­age in-state tuition, room and board at U.S. four-year pub­lic col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties was $14,915 for the 2007-08 aca­d­e­mic year. That’s more than dou­ble the cost in 1990.”

“Sub­lime Text is a sophis­ti­cated text edi­tor for code, html and prose. You’ll love the slick user inter­face and extra­or­di­nary fea­tures.” More than just a lit­tle cool.

“Put another way, the idea that Win­dows 7’s qual­ity will spur upgrades from XP is pred­i­cated on the fact that the peo­ple hold­ing out on XP make their com­put­ing choices based on qual­ity. But if that’s the case, why exactly are they still run­ning Win­dows XP? Why are they still using Inter­net Explorer? I think it’s hard to over­state the fact that, with the explo­sion of the Inter­net as a uni­ver­sal com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium, hun­dreds of mil­lions of PCs have been pur­chased around the world by peo­ple who don’t care about com­put­ers or soft­ware at all.” Lots of peo­ple who buy com­put­ers don’t really care about them, it’s just a tool.

“Lebanese group Hezbol­lah has broad­cast a video which it says dis­proves Israeli claims that it removed muni­tions from the scene of an explo­sion on Mon­day. The Hezbol­lah footage sug­gests the objects in Israel’s spy-plane video were debris from the blast not weapons. Pend­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion, it is impos­si­ble to ver­ify either claim. Israel says its film shows vio­la­tion of a cease­fire deal ban­ning armed activ­ity in the area. Hezbol­lah says over­flights by Israel’s spy-planes are a violation. ”

“One is that YouTube is now mon­e­tiz­ing over a bil­lion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serv­ing over 1 bil­lion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is mon­e­tiz­ing one every seven video views. The com­pany also noted that 90% of the top 50 adver­tis­ers accord­ing to AdAge have now run ads on YouTube. And of its home­page ad inven­tory, 90% of it sold out for the quar­ter in the U.S., with lower, but still impres­sive sale rates for the rest of the world. Google also noted that YouTube was just start­ing to unleash its pre-roll inven­tory and let its sales­force have a go at sell­ing that to adver­tis­ers, which should bring in more money.” Always nice to see a com­pany make money on a product.

“Afghanistan’s ambas­sador to the US says a run-off vote to set­tle the country’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is likely. Ambas­sador Said Tayeb Jawad said the run-off should be held within a month. A spokesman for Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai said ear­lier a run-off was unlikely. Ini­tial results sug­gest Mr Karzai won the first round out­right with about 55% of the vote, with his near­est rival, Abdul­lah Abdul­lah, on 28%. But the August elec­tion has been dogged by alle­ga­tions of mas­sive fraud. The UN-backed Elec­toral Com­plaints Com­mis­sion has been inves­ti­gat­ing the alle­ga­tions, audit­ing about 10% of votes cast, and is expected to rule within days.” I think they need a runoff for the vote to look legit to the inter­na­tional community.

“Twit­ter has just rolled out its new Lists fea­ture to a huge por­tion of its user base right now. The fea­ture allows you to group users you fol­low together and then lets you share those for oth­ers to also fol­low.” Hazz­iah people.

“Wow. Amazon.com is now offer­ing same day ship­ping – same day ship­ping — in seven major cities across the U.S. with more on the way in the near future. If you live in New York City, Philadel­phia, Boston, Wash­ing­ton D.C., Bal­ti­more, Las Vegas, or Seat­tle then you’re already in one of the same day deliv­ery zones.” Neat.

“But there’s pretty com­pelling evi­dence a cou­ple of par­tic­u­larly inflam­ma­tory quotes that have been attrib­uted to Lim­baugh on CNN and at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are things he sim­ply never said. There’s no audio file, there’s no YouTube, there’s no tran­script — there’s no sourc­ing of any kind to speak of, and given that Rush is one of the most listened-to and tape-recorded peo­ple in the his­tory of the world, you’d cer­tainly think that there would be. There’s not even some kind of half-assed back­story — “Oh, he said these things off the record at a fundraiser for Alexan­der Haig” — or any­thing like that. The quotes appear, in other words, to have been com­pletely made up.”