Yostivanich

“It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan’s space agency is dead seri­ous: by 2030 it wants to col­lect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.”

“Face­book devel­oper Joe Hewitt, the man behind the immensely pop­u­lar Face­book appli­ca­tion for iPhone, has just tweeted that he’s done with the project” It’s due all to the App Store policies.

“The new law will have far-reaching impli­ca­tions for all pub­lish­ers of online con­tent in Europe, as it essen­tially means that unless you agree to spe­cific terms no web­site will be able to remem­ber who users are – some­thing which will be a threat to the online adver­tis­ing indus­try and the sites that sur­vive on this rev­enue.” Can you say beyond insanity?

“jParse is a jQuery plu­gin that allows you to quickly and eas­ily parse XML.”

“U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama said on Mon­day that he plans to raise the issue of the yuan cur­rency with Chi­nese offi­cials when he meets with them in Bei­jing next week, a poten­tially dis­rup­tive topic for for­eign exchange mar­kets.” Good news.

“All reli­gions? Then why is there a Chris­t­ian cross on the plate? And what about peo­ple of no faith? Bauer doesn’t care. He doesn’t get the notion that there are peo­ple who don’t sub­scribe to Chris­tian­ity and some of us who find Chris­t­ian beliefs offen­sive. Sep­a­ra­tion of church and state ben­e­fits every­body. There’s no need for the state to issue this license plate. The judge made the right deci­sion and Bauer doesn’t know what he’s talk­ing about.”

“Lordy, lordy, lordy. They have no shame. It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo, a per­son­al­ized ver­sion of it. Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giv­ing Microsoft, which is already a monop­oly, a monop­oly on some­thing that’s been in use since 1980 and wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Here’s Wikipedia’s descrip­tion of sudo, which you can mean­ing­fully com­pare to Microsoft’s descrip­tion of its “inven­tion”. This is why what the US Supreme Court does about soft­ware patents means so much. Hope­fully they will address the topic in their deci­sion on Bil­ski. Sudo is an inte­gral part of the func­tion­ing of GNU/Linux sys­tems, and you use it in Mac OSX also. Maybe the Supreme Court doesn’t know that, and maybe the USPTO didn’t real­ize it. But do you believe Microsoft knows it?”

“JavaScript unit testing”

“When we first launched pub­lic data on Google.com, we wanted to make sta­tis­tics eas­ier to find and to encour­age debate based on facts rather than intu­ition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthu­si­asm, “Did you know that the World Bank also just released an API for their data?” Excited, I checked it out, and found an amaz­ing trea­sure trove of sta­tis­tics for most economies in the world. After some hard work and analy­sis, today we’re happy to announce that 17 World Devel­op­ment Indi­ca­tors (list below*) are now con­ve­niently avail­able to you in Google search.”

“The best thing to do is cre­ate a sim­ple “Com­ing soon” page to notify vis­i­tors of what will even­tu­ally be there. Good “Com­ing soon” pages come in two basic vari­eties: the infor­ma­tional design, which sim­ply tells vis­i­tors what will be there after launch; and the page that invites early vis­i­tors to sign up for updates or even to request a beta (or alpha) invi­ta­tion. Below are some great exam­ples of each, fol­lowed by some best prac­tices for cre­at­ing your own “Com­ing soon” page. You def­i­nitely won’t see among these the generic “Under con­struc­tion” page (with the cute con­struc­tion graphic) that used to lit­ter the Web.”

“The nation’s largest doc­tors’ group has agreed to join efforts to repeal the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ pol­icy. The Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion also voted to declare that gay mar­riage bans con­tribute to health dis­par­i­ties for gay cou­ples and their children.”

“An anti-toxin that pro­tects against ricin poi­son­ing is to move into pro­duc­tion for the first time.”

“Cre­ate and col­lab­o­rate (in real-time) user inter­face mock­ups for your soft­ware and websites.”

Neat idea.

“Google spent $750 mil­lion buy­ing AdMob today because the mobile ad net­work is grow­ing like a weed, with ad requests at 10.2 bil­lion in Sep­tem­ber, up from 2.5 bil­lion in Jan­u­ary 2008.”

“There’s a point where I think sec­u­lar­iza­tion is unnec­es­sary. I per­son­ally feel Christ­mas has pretty much lost it’s reli­gious value; rather it rep­re­sents hav­ing time off from school and work, being with fam­ily and friends, and spend­ing a crapload of money on presents (yay cap­i­tal­ism). But to require all pub­lic schools to sing reli­gious songs just isn’t right. Maybe let each school decide if it’s appro­pri­ate or not, but don’t force reli­gion on all pub­lic stu­dents in California.”

“Sagan remains an impor­tant fig­ure to the skep­ti­cal move­ment for var­i­ous rea­sons. He made it pop­u­lar to pop­u­lar­ize sci­ence, and simul­ta­ne­ously showed us how it’s done. He con­demned pseu­do­science with­out seem­ing dis­mis­sive or judg­men­tal. He empha­sized the won­der and awe of sci­ence with poetry and power. And he had a way of forc­ing you to step back and take a broader per­spec­tive on the nature of things. His sig­na­ture series – Cos­mos – was a break­through, in my opin­ion. What sep­a­rated that series from what was (and unfor­tu­nately often still remains) the stan­dard in sci­ence doc­u­men­taries was the way in which Sagan con­structed the sto­ries of sci­ence as a per­sonal jour­ney. It became our per­sonal jour­ney as we fol­lowed Sagan through the Cos­mos. Most sci­ence doc­u­men­taries are con­structed of talk­ing heads look­ing off cam­era, voice overs, and graph­ics. In Cos­mos, Sagan was talk­ing directly to us. He was tak­ing us gen­tly by the hand and lead­ing us on an adven­ture of discovery.”

“Another forehead-smack-worthy curse-laden moment: I’ve filled out a lengthy online form and hit the sub­mit but­ton only to find myself star­ing back at an empty form pep­pered with red errors. Has this hap­pened to you? Of course it has. While con­sid­er­ing how much I really need to com­plete this form, I start mak­ing notes on how I’d design it to be a bet­ter expe­ri­ence. Seri­ously, how many date for­mats am I going to have to try before I get this sucker right? Do I need to phone a friend?”

“A car­toon anthol­ogy filled with teenage angst, four-letter words and some drug and sex­ual ref­er­ences has been pulled from the stu­dent library col­lec­tions at two Sioux Falls pub­lic mid­dle schools. The school dis­trict aver­ages about one com­plaint per year con­cern­ing library mate­r­ial, but this is the first time since at least 2001 that a book has been made unavail­able to stu­dents. A com­mit­tee that reviewed the graphic novel said unan­i­mously that it’s inap­pro­pri­ate for mid­dle school stu­dents. The book’s edi­tor says the car­toons are true to life and could help strug­gling teens and pre-teens under­stand that they’re not alone.”

“A for­eign power should not be able to cen­sor pub­li­ca­tions in the United States, regard­less of whether doing so suits the country’s domes­tic law. At stake is the integrity of his­tory itself. If all pub­li­ca­tions have to abide by the cen­sor­ship laws of any and every juris­dic­tion just because they are acces­si­ble over the global inter­net, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (cen­sored by China), the Thai king (cen­sored under lèse majesté) or Ger­man mur­ders. Wikipedia appears ready to fight for write once, read any­where his­tory, and EFF will be watch­ing this fight closely.”

The people/reporters in here are beyond stupid.

“Glenn Beck fought the law and the law won. Par­ody web­site DidGlennBeckRapeAndMurderAYoungGirlIn1990.com attacked Beck using the same straw man argu­ments Beck him­self is famous for: ‘We’re not accus­ing Glenn Beck of rap­ing and mur­der­ing a young girl in 1990 — in fact, we think he didn’t! But we can’t help but won­der … Why won’t he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?’ Beck didn’t see the humour and tried to have the site shut down. He sued the cre­ator on the grounds the site ‘vio­lated his name as a trade­mark.’ But in a sud­den out­break of com­mon sense, WIPO rejected Beck’s com­plaint find­ing the site ‘can be said to be mak­ing a polit­i­cal state­ment,’ which is a ‘legit­i­mate non-commercial use’ of Beck’s name. But after win­ning, the owner vol­un­tar­ily handed Beck the domain any­way. Still, it’s com­fort­ing to know that satire — the only weapon politi­cians and talk­ing heads fear — is still safely in the hands of the pub­lic where it belongs.”

“The Mor­mon church for the first time has announced its sup­port of gay rights leg­is­la­tion, an endorse­ment that helped gain unan­i­mous approval for Salt Lake City laws ban­ning dis­crim­i­na­tion against gays in hous­ing and employ­ment.” Best part where they claim you can com­mit vio­lence towards “tra­di­tional” marriage.

“You can try to win a fea­tures arms race by offer­ing every­thing under the sun. Or you can just focus on a cou­ple of things and do ‘em really well and get peo­ple who really love those things to love your prod­uct. For lit­tle guys, that’s a smarter route. When you choose that path, you get clar­ity. Every­thing is sim­pler. It’s sim­pler to explain your prod­uct. It’s sim­pler for peo­ple to under­stand. It’s sim­pler to change it. It’s sim­pler to main­tain it. It’s sim­pler to start using it. The ingre­di­ents are sim­pler. The pack­ag­ing is sim­pler. Sup­port­ing it is sim­pler. The man­ual is sim­pler. Fig­ur­ing out your mes­sage is sim­pler. And most impor­tantly, suc­ceed­ing is simpler.”

“Amer­ica is among the 33% of coun­tries whose con­di­tions for women dete­ri­o­rated from 2008 to 2009. While dis­heart­en­ing, the rank­ing is also unsur­pris­ing, given the recession’s dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on con­di­tions of liv­ing for women. The numeric deter­mi­nants of polit­i­cal empow­er­ment included the ratio of women with seats in par­lia­men­tary bod­ies to men, the ratio of women at a min­is­te­r­ial level to men, and the ratio of the num­ber of years with a female head of state vs. a male head of state. It’s no won­der that the U.S. won 61^st place; Bangladesh, Nicaru­agua, Uganda, Angola, Malawi, China, and Pak­istan all fos­ter more women polit­i­cal lead­ers than the United States.”

“Here’s a rule that’s so inevitable that it’s almost a law: As an orga­ni­za­tion grows and suc­ceeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by get­ting bor­ing. With more to lose and more peo­ple to lose it, meet­ings and poli­cies become more about avoid­ing risk than pro­vid­ing joy.”

“Thou­sands of gamers may have been cut off from Microsoft’s online gam­ing ser­vice Xbox Live for mod­i­fy­ing their con­soles to play pirated games. Online reports sug­gest that as many as 600,000 gamers may have been affected. Microsoft con­firmed that it had banned a “small per­cent­age” of the 20 mil­lion Xbox Live users worldwide.”

“For some rea­son, the Chris­tians push­ing this “I Believe” plate think every­one else ought to pay for pro­mo­tion of their reli­gion. It’s pathetic and it’s illegal.”