Yostivanich

“The prob­lem: Many of those athe­ists used the time not to ask a ques­tion, but to tell every­one about their views of reli­gion. For exam­ple, they felt the need to com­ment on things Wil­son argued in the movie. There was no ques­tion posed to me or Chad — it was just long, ram­bling, word vomit. Or they told sto­ries about their encoun­ters with reli­gious peo­ple who made really bad argu­ments in favor of God’s exis­tence. If it hap­pened once, I could just chalk it up to a self-righteous per­son who just enjoys the sound of his own voice. Unfor­tu­nately, it hap­pened sev­eral times. And it was annoy­ing as hell: to the (mostly Chris­t­ian) audi­ence, to me, to Jeremy, and (I’m sure) many of the other athe­ists who came to watch.”

“The deal would allow Google to dig­i­tize and sell books at prices set by a new book reg­istry, a col­lec­tive rights group sim­i­lar to the music industry’s ASCAP and BMI. Civil lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tions have pointed out that the agree­ment leaves Google in a posi­tion to amass at least as much in-depth infor­ma­tion about users’ read­ing habits as libraries. For that rea­son, groups like the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion have said the set­tle­ment should have terms oblig­at­ing Google to pro­tect users’ pri­vacy — such as pro­vi­sions requir­ing the dele­tion of log­gin infor­ma­tion. Instead, the amended pact merely says that Google won’t share pri­vate infor­ma­tion with the reg­istry with­out “valid legal process.””

“Sci­en­tists have shown off an effect not unlike that of the “phasers” in the show Star Trek — but it only works on tiny worms called nema­todes. They used a spe­cial mol­e­cule that, when exposed to ultra­vi­o­let (UV) light, changes its shape. When the worms were fed this mol­e­cule and then exposed to UV light, they exhib­ited paral­y­sis. But when the worms were again exposed to vis­i­ble light, they regained their abil­ity to move.” Not so much a phaser as a trained reaction.

“A fed­eral judge in Atlanta on Wednes­day declined to grant AT&T a tem­po­rary restrain­ing order that would force Ver­i­zon to stop show­ing the ads.” No surprise.

“A Florida court has ordered tobacco giant Philip Mor­ris to pay out $300m (£180m) in dam­ages to a for­mer smoker. The judge awarded $56.6m for med­ical expenses and $244m in puni­tive damages.”

“Through­out my test, the pro­to­type behaves admirably. At its cur­rent state of devel­op­ment, the Volt is an extremely refined vehi­cle.” The Volt nine months before launch.

“The sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment is likely to sup­port the CRU. Despite con­tin­u­ing uncer­tain­ties in some areas of cli­mate sci­ence, they say offi­cially that their over­all con­fi­dence that humans are warm­ing the cli­mate is now more than 90%. One lead­ing fig­ure told me unof­fi­cially that con­fi­dence was now at 99%. But the email con­tro­versy may prove an uncom­fort­able moment in the careers of some researchers in the spot­light and will undoubt­edly pro­voke demands for renewed scrutiny of the CRU’s influ­en­tial work. These demands may sur­face in the US Sen­ate, where cli­mate change scep­tics and their allies are hold­ing up the energy and cli­mate bill which Pres­i­dent Obama needs before he can sign a legally-binding agree­ment over cut­ting emissions.”

“Hun­dreds of pri­vate e-mail mes­sages and doc­u­ments hacked from a com­puter server at a British uni­ver­sity are caus­ing a stir among global warm­ing skep­tics, who say they show that cli­mate sci­en­tists con­spired to over­state the case for a human influ­ence on cli­mate change. The evi­dence point­ing to a grow­ing human con­tri­bu­tion to global warm­ing is so widely accepted that the hacked mate­r­ial is unlikely to erode the over­all argu­ment. How­ever, the doc­u­ments will undoubt­edly raise ques­tions about the qual­ity of research on some spe­cific ques­tions and the actions of some scientists.”

“China’s mil­i­tary is close to field­ing the world’s first anti-ship bal­lis­tic mis­sile, accord­ing to U.S. Navy intel­li­gence. The mis­sile, with a range of almost 900 miles (1,500 kilo­me­ters), would be fired from mobile, land-based launch­ers and is “specif­i­cally designed to defeat U.S. car­rier strike groups,” the Office of Naval Intel­li­gence reported.”

“Democ­rats in the US Sen­ate say they have now secured the votes they need to begin a full debate on a bill designed to over­haul health­care pro­vi­sion. Two Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors whose sup­port had been in doubt say they will now back the move, assur­ing the party the 60 votes needed to pass the measure.”

“The changes — requested by Google, the designer of the Chrome browser, Mozilla, the cre­ator of Fire­fox, and Opera — aim to ensure that Microsoft does not unfairly influ­ence the deci­sion, said Hakon Wium Lie, the chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer of Opera, based in Oslo.” The best way would to dis­play them in a ran­dom order.

“A Jus­tice Depart­ment sub­poena request­ing all avail­able infor­ma­tion on all vis­i­tors to an inde­pen­dent news site is rais­ing seri­ous pri­vacy con­cerns, and ques­tions about how much infor­ma­tion the US gov­ern­ment is stor­ing about its cit­i­zens’ news read­ing habits. Pri­vacy watch­dog Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion has released an exten­sive report on a “bogus” attempt by a US attor­ney in Indi­ana to get Indymedia.us, an inde­pen­dent left-leaning news site, to hand over all the data it had about all the users who vis­ited the site on a par­tic­u­lar day. Fur­ther adding to civil lib­er­tar­i­ans’ and pri­vacy watch­dogs’ con­cerns is the fact that the Jus­tice Depart­ment ordered Indy­media to keep silent about the request.”

“Few uni­ver­si­ties make required reports to the gov­ern­ment about the finan­cial con­flicts of their researchers, and even when such con­flicts are reported, uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tors rarely require those researchers to elim­i­nate or reduce these con­flicts, gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tors found.”

Video show­ing the reces­sion county by county.

“Unless you’ve just arrived in 2009 on a time machine, you know that smok­ing isn’t good for you. Did you know, that smok­ing isn’t good for your com­puter, either? It’s true, at least accord­ing to Apple. Two read­ers in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try claim that their Apple­care war­ranties were voided due to sec­ond­hand smoke. Both read­ers appealed their cases up to the office of God Steve Jobs him­self. Both lost.”

“As detailed in Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Wash­ing­ton Fought to Save the Finan­cial Sys­tem — and Them­selves, Mor­gan Stan­ley received a $9 bil­lion invest­ment from Mit­subishi UFJ in the fall of 2008 that kept the firm from col­laps­ing. The pay­ment was sup­posed to be wired elec­tron­i­cally, but because it needed to be made on an emer­gency basis on a hol­i­day, Mit­subishi cut a phys­i­cal check, per­haps the largest ever written.”

“Long-term, there’s no deny­ing that Google is steer­ing toward a future where typ­i­cal users have no “pri­mary” com­puter, but instead where every com­puter is just a ter­mi­nal to Web-based soft­ware run­ning on servers across the Inter­net. But there’s an oppor­tu­nity today for sec­ondary com­put­ers that offer just a sub­set of the func­tion­al­ity of Mac OS X and Win­dows, espe­cially if they don’t just do less, but (like the iPhone) do less really well.”

“We are doing this early, almost a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with open source devel­op­ers. There are many of you who share our pas­sion for cre­at­ing a new model of com­put­ing. Chromium OS makes it pos­si­ble for any inter­ested devel­oper to con­tribute code, ideas and designs to help shape the future of per­sonal com­put­ing.” Google Chrome OS is sorta announced.

“It is often said when devel­op­ing inter­faces that you need to fail fast, and iter­ate often. When cre­at­ing a UI, you will make mis­takes. Just keep mov­ing for­ward, and remem­ber to keep your UI out of the way.”