Yostivanich

“A man thought by doc­tors to be in a veg­e­ta­tive state for 23 years was actu­ally con­scious the whole time, it was revealed last night. Stu­dent Rom Houben was mis­di­ag­nosed after a car crash left him totally paral­ysed. He had no way of let­ting experts, fam­ily or friends know he could hear every word they said.”

“To watch this video from Microsoft regard­ing the upcom­ing IE 9’s sup­port for stan­dards and inter­op­er­abil­ity, you are prompted to install Sil­verlight. (Via Mark Pil­grim.)” So much for open standards.

“What had started as an exer­cise in escape quickly became a cross between a mas­sively mul­ti­player online game and a real­ity show. A stag­ger­ingly large com­mu­nity arose spon­ta­neously, splin­tered into orga­nized groups, and set to work turn­ing over every rock in Ratliff’s life. It topped out at 600 Twit­ter posts a day. The hunters knew the names of his cat sit­ter and his mechanic, his favorite authors, his child­hood nick­names. They found every arti­cle he’d ever writ­ten; they found recent videos of him. They dis­cov­ered and pub­lished every address he’d ever had in the US, from Atlanta to Hawaii, together with the full name and age of every mem­ber of his fam­ily. They dis­cov­ered almost every avail­able piece of data about Ratliff, in fact, except his cur­rent location.”

“News­pa­pers should become “rad­i­cally open” if they want to make money in the online world, the co-founder of social net­work­ing site Twit­ter has said. Biz Stone said that he would “love to see what hap­pens” if news­pa­per mogul Rupert Mur­doch went ahead with plans to block Google from his web­sites. “The future is in open­ness not [being] closed,” he told the BBC. ”

“One of the points I’ve made repeat­edly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of sys­tems that get bet­ter the more peo­ple use them, and that over time, such sys­tems have a nat­ural ten­dency towards monop­oly. And so we’ve grown used to a world with one dom­i­nant search engine, one dom­i­nant online ency­clo­pe­dia, one dom­i­nant online retailer, one dom­i­nant auc­tion site, one dom­i­nant online clas­si­fied site, and we’ve been ready­ing our­selves for one dom­i­nant social net­work. But what hap­pens when a com­pany with one of these nat­ural monop­o­lies uses it to gain dom­i­nance in other, adja­cent areas? I’ve been watch­ing with a mix­ture of admi­ra­tion and alarm as Google has taken their dom­i­nance in search and used it to take con­trol of other, adja­cent data-driven appli­ca­tions. I noted this first with speech recog­ni­tion, but it’s had the biggest busi­ness impact so far in location-based services.”

“Algo­rith­mic author­ity is the deci­sion to regard as author­i­ta­tive an unman­aged process of extract­ing value from diverse, untrust­wor­thy sources, with­out any human stand­ing beside the result say­ing “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of author­ity dif­fers from per­sonal or insti­tu­tional author­ity, and has, I think, three crit­i­cal characteristics.”

“With PDC going on, we get a glimpse at the early stage of IE 9. There is some promise, albeit with omissions!”

“The DNA of most inno­cent peo­ple arrested in Eng­land, Wales and North­ern Ire­land will not be kept for more than six years, the Home Office has said. But police may be allowed to keep DNA from ter­ror­ism sus­pects, even if they are later freed or found not guilty.” Oh yeah great comprise.

“The Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nomic Co-operation and Devel­op­ment (OECD) says growth and recov­ery are expected in 2010 in just about all world regions. For its 30 mem­ber coun­tries, rich nations includ­ing the US and UK, it has more than dou­bled its growth fore­cast to 1.9% for next year, from 0.7%. The main dan­ger for rich coun­tries is unem­ploy­ment, accord­ing to the OECD’s eco­nomic out­look. In the US, peo­ple are expected to con­tinue to lose their jobs at a faster rate than new ones are cre­ated until some­time in the first part of next year.”

“So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Gov­ern­ment offi­cials, per­haps influ­enced by spend­ing too much time with bankers, for­got that if you want to gov­ern effec­tively you have retain the trust of the peo­ple. And by treat­ing the finan­cial indus­try — which got us into this mess in the first place — with kid gloves, they have squan­dered that trust.”

“So what are you wait­ing for? Do or do not. There is no Try. Whether it’s an Etsy store, or a book with Lulu, or a T-shirt or a mug or a clock or a fuck­ing teddy bear in a sweater from Cafe­Presss­in­gle … hell, if it’s a pho­to­graph you put on Flickr or a pod­cast you host on Archive.org, or a story that you write for Ficly or your own blog, just do it! Go get excited and make things, and when you’re done, come back here and link us to what you did.”

“I don’t think Apple real­izes how badly the App Store approval process is bro­ken. Or rather, I don’t think they real­ize how much it mat­ters that it’s broken.”

“Now he mostly answers email, and occa­sion­ally finds time to actu­ally pro­gram.” The life of an inde­pen­dent soft­ware developer.

“The U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce, which pur­ports to be “the voice of busi­ness,” is run by a Repub­li­can money machine. As the nation’s largest lob­by­ing shop, the Cham­ber is spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars from its cor­po­rate mem­bers against Pres­i­dent Obama’s pro­gres­sive agenda of health care, energy, and finan­cial reform. The Cham­ber claims that the “board’s mem­ber­ship is as diverse as the nation’s busi­ness com­mu­nity itself,” but this is false. A ThinkProgress analy­sis of fed­eral elec­tion con­tri­bu­tion data com­piled by the Lit­tle­Sis project has found that the Chamber’s 116-member board of direc­tors has given more than six times as much money to Repub­li­can can­di­dates and com­mit­tees ($4,741,747) as it has to Democ­rats ($778,282), with $1,074,697 flow­ing to cor­po­rate polit­i­cal action committees”

“A police offi­cer in a small Arkansas town used a stun gun on an unruly 10-year-old girl after he said her mother gave him per­mis­sion to do so. Now the town’s mayor is call­ing for an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the Taser use was appro­pri­ate. The girl’s father, Anthony Med­lock, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that his daugh­ter has emo­tional prob­lems, but that she didn’t have a weapon and shouldn’t have been Tasered.”

“Pho­ho­to­shop file with ele­ments of Android 1.5 GUI to help open-source com­mu­nity with appli­ca­tion mock-ups.”

Whose afraid of the terrorists.

“But last night on Fox, the network’s top legal ana­lyst Judge Andrew Napoli­tano — who has been known to dis­agree with Fox’s right-wing nar­ra­tives on legal issues — dis­puted that view, cit­ing the con­sti­tu­tional right to be tried in the place where the crime has been com­mit­ted. “I don’t care about the Con­sti­tu­tion!” host Bill O’Reilly responded.”

“In the offi­cial record of the his­toric House debate on over­haul­ing health care, the speeches of many law­mak­ers echo with sim­i­lar­i­ties. Often, that was no acci­dent. State­ments by more than a dozen law­mak­ers were ghost­writ­ten, in whole or in part, by Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ists work­ing for Genen­tech, one of the world’s largest biotech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies. E-mail mes­sages obtained by The New York Times show that the lob­by­ists drafted one state­ment for Democ­rats and another for Republicans.”

“When peo­ple ask me what I do all day I have a hard time sum­ming it up. I design, I edit, I think, I review, I sug­gest, I teach. Some things I mess up, some things I fix up. But what I really do most of the time is trim, tuck, iron, cut, press, and fit. I’m a soft­ware tailor.”

Cre­at­ing a blogazine.

“The Boe­ing Com­pany [NYSE: BA] in May demon­strated the abil­ity of mobile laser weapon sys­tems to per­form a unique mis­sion: track and destroy small unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles (UAVs). Dur­ing the U.S. Air Force-sponsored tests at the Naval Air War­fare Cen­ter in China Lake, Calif., the Mobile Active Tar­get­ing Resource for Inte­grated eXper­i­ments (MATRIX), which was devel­oped by Boe­ing under con­tract to the Air Force Research Lab­o­ra­tory, used a sin­gle, high-brightness laser beam to shoot down five UAVs at var­i­ous ranges. Laser Avenger, a Boeing-funded ini­tia­tive, also shot down a UAV. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Air Force and Army observed the tests.”

“West­ern cor­po­ra­tions have often behaved embar­rass­ingly in China, sac­ri­fic­ing any prin­ci­ples to ingra­ti­ate them­selves with the Com­mu­nist Party author­i­ties. Yahoo was the worst, hand­ing over infor­ma­tion about sev­eral email account hold­ers so that they could be arrested – and then dis­sem­bling and defend­ing its mon­strous con­duct. Now Microsoft is sac­ri­fic­ing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Secu­rity in Bei­jing. In effect, it has cho­sen become part of the Com­mu­nist Party’s pro­pa­ganda appa­ra­tus.” Google and Yahoo cen­sor results as well but Bing does it on all domains not just the Chi­nese TLD.

“Google’s dual-pronged operating-system strat­egy will likely pro­duce a sin­gle OS down the road, accord­ing to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.” Makes sense.

“As the Uni­ver­sity of California’s Board of Regents met Thurs­day at U.C.L.A. and approved a plan to raise under­grad­u­ate fees — the equiv­a­lent of tuition — 32 per­cent next fall, hun­dreds of stu­dents from cam­puses across the state demon­strated out­side, beat­ing drums and chant­ing slo­gans against the increase. Isaac Miller and Irene Van, who trav­eled to U.C.L.A. late Wednes­day night in a bus car­a­van from Berke­ley, said they wor­ried about how higher fees would affect ille­gal immi­grant stu­dents, who are not eli­gi­ble for finan­cial aid, and minor­ity stu­dents, already dwin­dling in num­ber since Propo­si­tion 209 pro­hib­ited affir­ma­tive action.”

“That’s unfor­tu­nate. I’m with Char­lie on this one. I think we should be able to deter­mine what we want to use to rep­re­sent our­selves pro­fes­sion­ally within rea­son (no porn, no emo­tion­ally dis­turb­ing images, etc). In my case, the “AVC avatar” has become my online brand and I use it every­where other than the usv.com web­site where we’ve opted to go with a con­sis­tent pre­sen­ta­tion across all of the pro­fes­sion­als in our firm. The good news is that Linked In seems to be aware of the issue.”

Very nice busi­ness cards.

“Build­ing your own word­press themes will open your eyes to a lot of things, mainly the fact that you’ll be retyp­ing a lot of code over and over and over again. So in this post I am going to show you ten word­press code hacks that you can add to your arse­nal that will not only save you a lot of time, but they will also set your themes apart from oth­ers who don’t come pre built with these types of features.”

“Still: I don’t know how you get from some sci­en­tist hav­ing sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Cof­fin of Anthro­pogenic Global Warm­ing. Any­one who comes to that con­nec­tion has more screws loose than the Space Shut­tle Chal­lenger. And yet that’s lit­er­ally what some of these blog­gers are say­ing! Inci­den­tally, 2009 is shap­ing up to be the 5^th warmist year on record, accord­ing to the con­spir­acists at NASA.”

“The report, by a promi­nent, inde­pen­dent sci­en­tific panel called the JASON group, con­cluded that the United States can main­tain cur­rent high lev­els of safety, secu­rity and reli­a­bil­ity indef­i­nitely with­out design­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of war­heads or test­ing cur­rent war­heads. The panel found that the arse­nal can be main­tained by two exist­ing pro­grams: the Stock­pile Stew­ard­ship Pro­gram, which mon­i­tors the arse­nal for signs of aging, and the Life-Extension Pro­gram, which refur­bishes exist­ing war­heads with new components.”

“Build appli­ca­tions where peo­ple meet, talk, share, read, work, pub­lish and explore.” Nice.

Expanded safety zone.

“A US judge has ruled that neg­li­gence by the US Army Corps of Engi­neers led to mas­sive floods in parts of New Orleans as Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina struck in 2005. The court upheld com­plaints by six res­i­dents and a busi­ness against the Corps over its main­te­nance of a nav­i­ga­tional chan­nel. They were awarded dam­ages totalling $720,000 (£431,000), and the rul­ing could lead to thou­sands more claims.”