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A Democrat congresswoman is shot, and a federal judge and 8 others are killed. This would be shocking, except that it's not. The congresswoman "beat back a tough challenge from a Tea Party-endorsed opponent."

So we have organization that promotes having its supporters brandish weapons at its rallies, has its most prominatent supporters openly talk about advocate armed rebellion, and armed secession, and other defunct 19th century extremist ideas, demonizing a duly elected political opponent, and now we have her shot, and 9 others killed.

Hello, I teach 24 boys and girls in rural public school in the Foothills of Canada's Rocky Mountains. We learn together using MANY different kinds of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that support and enhance our learning such as wireless laptops, SmartBoards, Wikis, Blogs, video conferencing, Moodle, podcasting and we even have created a studio where students their own television programs. Our focus is not on the ICTs, but rather on how they can support teaching and learning. Our main focus is on critical thinking, asking good questions and collaboration as we work on meaningful, deeply engaging project-based learning. After over thirty years teaching in the classroom, perhaps I should let my students work speak for itself. Please visit us online at http://www.coolclass.ca/ or you can Google "Canada's Coolest Class!" Yours in teaching and learning, Bill Belsey Grade 5 Teacher http://is.gd/fuvFm

Yep, I'm using two hulking Dell Trinitron CRT 21" monitors (1600x1200) that I got for free off some dude on LiveJournal many years ago. They rock.

Although the 24" Samsung monitor my I'm testing on a machine I just built for my parents is really tempting me to switch over to LCDs.

If it helps anyone here, I blogged about this last year; Rising Tides Submersing Kiribati http://is.gd/fhE6M

Yes. It is too much. As of Thursday our government is owned by the huge corporations. No one there is going to care if individuals are treated correctly or even if corps follow through their contracts.

They'll start caring the moment the citizens exercise their first amendment right, backed up by their second amendment right. And when the citizens are finished, they can all kick back and enjoy a nice, cold glass of their twenty-second amendment right.

Yes. It is too much. As of Thursday our government is owned by the huge corporations. No one there is going to care if individuals are treated correctly or even if corps follow through their contracts.

Here is a link to the full list

This is a censorship law pushed through legislation smartly framed as "Blocking Child Pornography." So, when the question comes up, are you against or for child pornography? Of course, the correct question is, are you for or against blanket policy allowing government censorship of the only free/cheap mass information medium in the world under the pretense of protecting children?

And, in the realm of censorship, Germany seems to have the most sense (amongst Western nations incl. U.S. and England) , probably having already gone through the fiery blindness of mad political rampage in the past.

For more on framing and how it defines the political scene (esp. in the U.S.) check this interview with George Lakoff, professor in linguistics. Here's a list of his lectures on YouTube.

This is a censorship law pushed through legislation smartly framed as "Blocking Child Pornography." So, when the question comes up, are you against or for child pornography? Of course, the correct question is, are you for or against blanket policy allowing government censorship of the only free/cheap mass information medium in the world under the pretense of protecting children?

And, in the realm of censorship, Germany seems to have the most sense (amongst Western nations incl. U.S. and England) , probably having already gone through the fiery blindness of mad political rampage in the past.

For more on framing and how it defines the political scene (esp. in the U.S.) check this interview with George Lakoff, professor in linguistics. Here's a list of his lectures on YouTube.

Why can't someone build a purpose-built compression algorithm for URLs, so we can skip the URL shortener providers entirely? URLs contain lots of oft-occurring constructs, so I would think a reasonably good compression ratio could be attained.

Take a URL like http://is.gd/XXXXX - that's 18 characters where only 5 are being used to reference the URL. Couldn't a generic URL compressor do a better job on most URLs of reasonable length? Then we could build inflate support directly into the browser and skip the URL shortener entirely.

In my view the local newspaper is hardly resisting the plaintiff, they could have done a better job.

If it was posted on a blog instead of newspaper website, plaintiffs would have to drag Google or WordPress to court. I guess that would be much harder than dragging the friendly small local newspaper to court.

See blogger resisting search somewhere in Asia... it is still simmering there though.

RT @Techno_Cat http://is.gd/4JAAj "There are 40 applicants who paid
#ICANN $50,000 each" Mike Roberts said there were applicants the U.S. Government denied.

With working link: http://is.gd/4j4Hp

You forgot this.

Yes, normally, FTP is an insecure protocol, with known weaknesses including a clear-text password.

I would have to assume, however, that the actual CONTENT that was being transmitted was encrypted prior to transmission.

Is there something about the data we're talking about that would make it somehow impossible to encrypt?

I do realize that the original poster didn't actually say anything about it one way or the other, but I'd have to assume that any hospital with a legal or compliance department would be ensuring that any data that would be covered under HIPA would be sujbect to that laws data security standards (See here ).

"Just how many domains do they think they're going to be selling? At competitive rates you'd have to sell tens of thousands just to keep a single person employed to maintain the TLD, never mind having some money to give away."

Actually you have to sell 100,000 just to cover the filing fees. And that's without paying for any infrastructure or people.

Here's how the other new tlds have fared so far:
http://idashboard.icann.org/idashboards/engine.swf?dashID=159&serverURL=http://idashboard.icann.org/idashboards&guest=icannguest ( http://is.gd/28LvZ )

(Warning, slow and a cpu eater)

Plus, .green has been more vocal than .eco so far. Look at the Twitter public timeline (if you can).

Back in 1996 when this started and .com was under a million names a bunch of new tlds like Jon Pstel advocated would have taken the steam out of .com. But not that it's at 80M names most poeple who want a domain have one. "need" has not transformed to "want" and in this economy buying a .eco name or a solar AA battery charger becomes the decision of the day.

Here's some more numbers:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/dotcom/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/tlds/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/icann/IAF/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/iana/idn/

As for "Rival Green Groups Bid To Snatch .eco Domain" I hate to say it but .snatch would probably at least break even.

Why don't you read my brief, which says that you are wrong, and tell me where I went wrong in my thinking?

If this judge were to throw this out, it would be a case of exceptional judicial activism.

On the contrary, it would be an ordinary application of controlling law regarding "punitive awards", developed over 700 years. What would be exceptional "activism" would be for him to ignore that body of law and to allow a band of inflamed jurors to substitute their hatred for 700 years of jurisprudence.

It was "activism" on his part to overlook the 50 years or so of jurisprudence indicating the parameters of acceptable copyright statutory damage awards, and to permit the jury unlimited leeway in an area where they in fact had no leeway at all. The award should have been $750 per infringed work, or it should have been nothing. The jury should have been awarded no leeway to award any more than that.

Controlling precedent dictated that, as a matter of copyright law, the statutory damages award should not have exceeded approximately 4 times the actual damages sustained.

No award could have been supported based on "distribution" as the elements of a distribution were not, and could not have been, proven.

I would like you to read my brief explaining why Gore and BMW are indeed applicable, and tell me where I'm wrong.

Read my brief, and get back to me. Tell me which part of it you don't understand.

"protect Universal Music's intellectual property"

Did UM create the content? Really?

Or, are they actually exploiting the musicians they promote?

To simplify, /. style: Buying from UM hurts the musicians by supporting the entities who strip them of their intellectual property using contracts, procedures and practices that abuse the musicians' rights and interests.

Yes, I know it's the artists' choice to sign up for a label or not. In a world where most distribution of content, including radio and television, are controlled by the same companies that own the labels, I don't really see a lot of viable alternatives.

Music comes from the people. People want to hear music. A business that puts a toll in the way of this flow should offer some value. The value was there for a while, with manufacturing costs etc. is pretty much gone. So now the business entity muscles its way to stop this flow and wedge its business model by charging both artists and consumers of music... for what?

Just because someone wants to keep their cashflow going doesn't mean you should pay them.

Who's really stealing and from whom?

Oh, well, just a thought. Along the same lines, rainwater is taxable and collecting it from your own roof is a crime: http://is.gd/12Wg0

Let's criminalize artists performing their own art without a license from the recording labels and let's criminalize audiences listening to performances without paying a monthly fee to the record labels.

That will set things right, wouldn't it?

gosh damn

http://is.gd/YYiN-

That's why I camouflage the password. It's not a post-it with "Password: aa\x5Ahf". But something like:

"""
TODO:
- fix bug http://is.gd/av+a3ohW
- file header should be: aa\x5Ahf
- upgrade http://tinyurl.com/ov-eiP2o
"""

try the 'say' invoking applet by Landon Fuller:
http://is.gd/BpBp. That scared the crap out of me... what if it had invoked 'rm -rf ~'?

Then hopefully in the future you would back up your important data...

Hell, or maybe you'll do it now? Nah. Too much work.

try the 'say' invoking applet by Landon Fuller:
http://is.gd/BpBp. That scared the crap out of me... what if it had invoked 'rm -rf ~'?

You would restore from your Time Machine backup, or the off site clone that you created with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! (or rsync).

Backing up OS X is dead simple (it's mostly POSIX-compliant underneath); there's no reason not to do it.

It can run any command as the user running the browser. I usually run the browser as myself, so it could clean out my home for example.

If you're on Mac: http://is.gd/BpBp

try the 'say' invoking applet by Landon Fuller: http://is.gd/BpBp. That scared the crap out of me... what if it had invoked 'rm -rf ~'?

"Conversion Rate of Active to Paid Players

Both Paul Preece from Casual Collective and Daniel James from Three Rings shared some interesting stats from their own games on conversion rates associated with paid players (players who purchase levels, virtual goods, etc through micro-transactions). Paul said that for their single player games, they see that 2% of their active players have converted to paid players. Keep in mind this stat is for âoeactive playersâ who come back to the site regularly, not overall unique visitors. What was interesting was that for his multi-player games, 3% of active players converted to paid players, suggesting their may be some additional conversion lift from multi-player games. Daniel James echoed Paul Preeceâ(TM)s numbers, suggesting 3-4% of Three Rings users pay as well.

The key thing they stressed was that only a very small percentage of your users end up converting, because first they need to become active users that come back and are retained by your game as well as be eager enough to pay through one of a variety of ways...."

http://is.gd/vhWS

I think the rush to virtual item trading is going to crash with a big audible THUD.

People will think virtual item trading is cute for a little while most are under the impresssion they are cute little free things. The moment the vast majority of people find out in an economy like this, people are going to expect lots of money in return for those cute virtual items, there will be a wave of wide spread revulsion toward the concept that is usually reserved for the worst "crimes" of nerddom... like a full high school cheerleading squad walking in on a guy from their marching band in full Klingon battle garb (with batlif).

After that, only young children will dare be caught "trafficked" in virtual items.

I believe we should look at these diagrams to truly understand blocking of intersections. Link: http://is.gd/ovSB

What I think is of importance here is how our culture treats children.

When does a child become a citizen if not at birth?

And, if children are citizens, what is the excuse of running schools with a level of oppression more appropriate of POW camps? Or making a child do something they are not ready or willing to?

Many parents resort to spanking their child to give them a lesson. When was the last time your boss spanked you or grounded you for not meeting the project deadline?

Our culture promotes treating children as property, making it "OK" for adults to abuse children verbally and psychologically and physically, just recently (in the last 100 or so years) addressing sexual abuse. Physical abuse is still widely accepted and even recommended. The right to privacy, the right to eat when and however much you want, the right to sleep when you are sleepy and use the bathroom when you are ready, are taken away from you when you are a child.

Strip searching a 13-year old girl is just a symptom of tour collective habitual disrespect for children's core dignity.

I suggest you check out this http://is.gd/oMQM and this http://is.gd/lQwS

Incorrect: "I was spanked as a kid and I turned OK."
Correct: "I was spanked as a kid and I grew up to believe that spanking is OK."

What I think is of importance here is how our culture treats children.

When does a child become a citizen if not at birth?

And, if children are citizens, what is the excuse of running schools with a level of oppression more appropriate of POW camps? Or making a child do something they are not ready or willing to?

Many parents resort to spanking their child to give them a lesson. When was the last time your boss spanked you or grounded you for not meeting the project deadline?

Our culture promotes treating children as property, making it "OK" for adults to abuse children verbally and psychologically and physically, just recently (in the last 100 or so years) addressing sexual abuse. Physical abuse is still widely accepted and even recommended. The right to privacy, the right to eat when and however much you want, the right to sleep when you are sleepy and use the bathroom when you are ready, are taken away from you when you are a child.

Strip searching a 13-year old girl is just a symptom of tour collective habitual disrespect for children's core dignity.

I suggest you check out this http://is.gd/oMQM and this http://is.gd/lQwS

Incorrect: "I was spanked as a kid and I turned OK."
Correct: "I was spanked as a kid and I grew up to believe that spanking is OK."

I wonder how long until you can be served via Twitter. Subpoena's in 140 characters or less!

"@JasonLevine This is a legal subpoena. Respond in 30d or default judgment will be awarded against U. Read entire subpoena: http://is.gd/nyag"

(Yes, I am on Twitter. No, "JasonLevine" is not my Twitter name. I have a "Twitter/blog identity" that is completely separate from my "real name online identity.")

Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Google Maps has denied allegations that their satellites are equipped with frikken terrorist-zapping lasers which are armed and ready to activate given the appropriate legislative amendments.

The Mongrel News has more - http://is.gd/lPRw

I learned a decent amount from Essential PHP Security*. It doesn't cover everything, but should cover most of the crazy-stupid errors that crop up in a lot of novice php/mysql stuff. Not that the information isn't out there in plenty of places (just like every other topic humanity has ever thought up), but for twenty bucks it's nice to have a hard copy of the essentials in one place.

*Yes, that's a referral link to amazon. But I'd recommend it either way for people getting started with securing their basic LAMP sites.

BIOS is way, way obsolete. The bigger question is whether or not Windows 7 will be bootable on EFI machines. This article says that Windows 7 "delivers support" for EFI. It is likely that means that it will be bootable on EFI equipped machines, but there's wiggle room there.

EFI and GPT offer real improvements beyond merely sweeping away the legacy cruft of decades of backwards compatibility. It's time to move on.

They can't accurately model what our weather will look like in a year. They ignore the impact that variable solar output has on our environment. They say that Antarctica is getting warmer when in fact most of it is getting colder

Global warming theory exists to facilitate a political and economic agenda. Ridiculous concepts like carbon credit trading are designed to move money around the globe, not to improve the environment.

If we really cared about our energy situation and our environment and we wanted cleaner air to breathe and better water to drink we'd launch a Kennedyesque "Man-on-the-Moon" effort directed towards those goals. Unfortunately, doing that would not accomplish the political and economic goals of those behind global warming.

You can accurately divide the proponents of Man-made global warming into two groups: fools and liars.

IANAL, but....

Tortious interference with business?

http://is.gd/fmmX

In relevant part, "Tortious interference of business.- When false claims and accusations are made against a business or an individual's reputation in order to drive business away."

Nothing in that definition about "libel, slander or defamation", and given the scenario you presented above (in which it is made clear that the INTENT was to "cause him harm by driving away potential patients. There is intent to harm the doctor on the part of the poster."), it sounds like that particular set of actions WOULD be actionable under (some) states civil codes.

Welcome to the real world, I guess.

I'm utterly convinced those hardware limitations are well beyond the performance we trudge through. As a gamer and programmer, this just irks me to no end.
When a game is first launching, screw the 3d map loading to display behind the main menu (*cough* HL2, et al.), just give us text and load the pretty if it has time to idle. While a cut/intro movie is playing, the disc drive's lens motor should be going nuts, scanning back and forth between buffering the movie and reading data for the next level (or better yet, the disc would be laid out appropriately for this). With the same tack, do something awesome during the unavoidable en masse loadings; have us read a briefing, let us tweak our tires, show us eye candy, whatever! If Pacman was 13.4 Kb, Dr. Mario was on a 28 Kb chip, and a pair of hackers fit .kkrieger into 97 Kb, deep pocketed houses should manage more than a spinning icon. Again on en masse loadings, why do we need them at all? When you walk through an areaportal, it shouldn't just take the nearby rooms' load off of the graphics card, it should start trashing and loading distant geometry.

It's like they're not trying. On the flip side, some recent loading screen news off the top of my head:
Dungeon Siege http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/09/08/0354231.shtml
Resistance 2 interview

Am actually glad to see the transition. But one thing Jerry Yang should know and I would ask the next CEO to do (I know I would if the position comes to me) he's not Chief Yahoo anymore. In fact he's not welcome on company property any longer. You step down after driving the company into the ground, you're out. Time for new blood in the chair and at the boardroom table as well. New Board, New Leadership, New ideas, and new gains.

Employees FIRST, then CLIENTs, THEN INVESTORS. Yes it's a public company, but without the employees to run it you're screwed. Without the clients buying the products, you're screwed more, and without the investors to help move things along to support that vision with some cash...you're closed. You can please all of them, but it takes passion and vision. Two things that have been sadly lacking at Yahoo.

I challenge any incoming CEO candidate to match me: http://is.gd/82O7

I am ready to come in and make changes and turn the company around. All I need is the backing of the board and some others out there. Icahn are you reading this? If so...let's talk.

Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
former Apple CEO Candidate 1997

Who has immortal merchandising, too.

There are perfectly productive, informative, and educational reasons to watch TV.

Yes.

Google is getting increasingly influential over how the world gets access to media. There's an analysis here about how the beta launch of the Chrome browser generated 450,000 independent blogs over the course of 60 days. Google Chrome is also the top sponsored link for searches on "browser" or "web browser." On the organic search side, Google Chrome ranks near the top on Google Search, Google Blog search, and Google news.

  http://is.gd/6mJk

What do you mean that's not open development? Someone has to create the standard, whether someone is a team of engineers at Google, a bunch of people in an irc room attached to sourceforge, or some kid with a good idea. As long as the documentation is given on how to implement and use that system, there's no issue.

Creating a UNIFIED open standard is an entirely separate issue. And given how many different login systems we've all used over the years, I don't see any implementation of openID changing that in any significant way for at least five years.

Look how many sites use OpenID, and then look at how many use ReCaptcha. Two completely different concepts of course, but they've both been around for roughly the same amount of time, both provide documentation for anyone to implement it, and both provide very commonly sought-after functionality. But ReCaptcha is really easy to implement for developers and provides user interface that's simple and familiar, where OpenID is quite a bit more painful to put in place and is usually implemented in a way where it's a very unconventional login system. Guess which one is in wider use.

If Google forks OpenID, provides a system that's easier to use for users (looks like it, from TFA), and implements it in such a way that's not excessively painful for developers (haven't looked at the documentation, but the docs are there for your perusal), then it will win out.

The fact that it only currently seems to work with a gmail address (or, from what I saw, handles the requests differently if one is detected) is a separate issue, and they certainly have every reason to encourage people to have a Google account, even if us cynical slashdot types will give them shit for it.

This whole thing would practically be a non-issue if mail servers could implement this directly, but that's true for a lot of things. Ideally, your email account (any standard pop/imap/exchange account) could have some tab for identity management, where you can see the authorized domains and update passwords for each domain on a per-site basis. The service provider could post a request off to the mail server, the mail server would do its thing based off the email address, password, and sending domain, and return an appropriate response.

But alas, that's not the case. So if something that Google creates pushes us towards a login system that WILL ACTUALLY SEE ADOPTION, then so much the better IMO, even counting their vendor lock-in attempts.

the punch line/butt wiggle

I watched the video only because I wanted to see bill wiggle is butt. And boy, was I disappointed! I mean seriously, if you shell out a billion-or-so dollars for a national TV-ad, can't you at least afford a friggin butt-wiggle-stuntman?

I mean, seriously... WHAT WAS THAT?
This doesn't even look like an intentional move at all. At best this looks as if he stopped for half a second to fart or because of an itch in his crack.

Bill, look here for a fellow billionaire wiggling it for real. I'm sure he can teach you if you ask him nicely.

I pity you. I pity you. I pity you.

I pity you. I pity you. I pity you.

I pity you. I pity you. I pity you.

oO

Ah that's obvious, for the groove minister!