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Then why is listening to the news or music on the radio considered a non-issue? Robert Siegel never stops talking when I almost rear-end people.

I had a difficult time reconciling the fact that the following two statements are in the same review:

Say you're listening to All Things Considered and Nina Totenberg is about to make an especially poignant point about the day's oral arguments at the Supreme Court ...

If you're listening to your favorite top 40 radio station and the newest Ashlee Simpson tune comes on and you want to save it ...

Yikes! Still, I think the pause feature may be a nice Tivo-ish thing, but the Season Pass concept will probably be better covered by podcasting. (Actually, there was a feature on podcasting on NPR's Day to Day: you can listen to it here, but alas, not as a podcast.)

From NPR...

"Morning Edition, January 31, 2005 The government of Brazil says it will switch 300,000 government computers from Microsoft's Windows operating system to open source software like Linux. Microsoft founder Bill Gates wants to meet with Brazil's president to discuss the change. Brazil is dropping all proprietary software."

Listen here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4471963

The Brazilians are just saying no!

No, I'm not grousing about my rejected submission of the same story... much ;)

NPR's Morning Edition had a short story on this as well: Brazil Makes Move to Open Source Software. The audio has been posted, too. It's not a deep look at open source economics, but it does make the point about Microsoft's main concern of Brazil's actions lending credence to other governments following suit. BillG has requested a meeting with da Silva to discuss it (again... they met in 2002). And, it's nice to see the topic discussed in mainstream media.

All things considered this is one of the better ways for them to do it.

I agree. All Things Considered is a damn fine radio program .

This story reminds me of a fascinating interview I heard of Temple Grandin on NPR's Fresh Air. The interview is still available to stream online.

"Temple Grandin is one of the nation's top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. In her 1995 book Thinking in Pictures, she described how her inner-autistic world led her to develop an empathy for how animals cope.

Temple Grandin is currently an assistant professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Her new book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior."

As any PBS junkie knows, there is a market for everyday people willing to hawk a merchant's wares. What is disturbing is that it appears such people are in no short supply.

Word of mouth is the best form of advertising. What bothers me is that characters that push agendas under the guise of neutrality are becoming more prevalent all the time.

Here's hoping that one of the community's most revered icons never sells out.

It's one think to pre record your own work and act it out live. It's another when you have two models out there faking it up to someone elses work.

With today's technology, it's no longer necessary to use someone else's work. You don't have to have singing ability to be able to make a studio recording any more.

I should also have included some relevant links to Internet based news sources bookmarked in Safari:

Slashdot of course.
CNN of course.
NYTimes for the writing and quality of reporting.
BBC for the big mainstream non American news perspective.
Kevin Sites for on the ground reporting in Iraq.
Dan Gillmor for news grassroots news.
CBS for financial info.
CNET for tech news.
Global Security for political defense news.
Google for a good news accumulator.
Cryptome because John manages to pull some pretty damned interesting articles out.
NPR of course. Don't forget to donate.
Reuters because they have the news.
Washington Post for beltway news.
Wall St. Journal for more financial news.
NPR Marketplace for more financial news.
CBS for mainstream US news.
Technocrat for real science oriented geek news, like Slashdot only with less noise.
Oh, yeah and
Macsurfer for a Macintosh community oriented news accumulator.

I have not read any of the articles on this, but when I heard the NPR story, I wondered what evidence they had against it simply being a scavenger along the lines of a modern hyena?

An interesting story to find on slashdot just after I hear NPR's bit on the crackberry.

' NPR is not "official US government news" by any stretch.'

NPR is propped up and funded by tax money. The same is true of PBS.

PBS receives most of its funding from (80% ) from private donations (sponsors and members); some government funding does come in via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the form of grants, but not much of it.

NPR gets most of its funding from licensing fees paid by member stations. Even these memberships stations average maybe 15% government funding, at most.

For an interesting contrast, Raytheon gets something on the order of 80% of its funding from government or "defense" sources; since all "defense" money ultimately comes from the US government (even foreign defense revenue must be approved by the US government, and I can almost guarantee you that the foreign defense revenue does not come to more than a fraction of the US defense revenue), I think we can characterize all 80% or so (I'm rounding the number to account for leaner and fatter years) as "government funding." So I guess that we can say, by your logic, that Raytheon is part of the government.

So, to summarize, PBS and NPR are independent non-profit organizations that receive some federal grant money: nowhere near as much as most of their detractors seem to think.

er, sorry, audio is here.

Color me off-topic, but NPR's Morning Edition did what I thought was a rather complementary piece on Firefox this morning. The story is posted here Security Conscious Users Test Driving Firefox Browser

Yeah, I know, there were a lot of bad parts that get washed over in the romantic review of "the good times," but when you listen to John Young talk about where we should be versus where we are, it makes you wonder if we'll ever have "the glory days" of space adventure again.

While there there has been an International Tsunami Warning system in place since 1965, the affected countries were not part of that system and had no mechanism in place to allow for early warning.

NPR has a few good reports on the problem.

Cringely has a rather interesting solution that does not rely on governmental action, though with a serious flaw. It only relies on earthquake data, which isn't necessarily conclusive, nor the only cause of Tsunami's.

While there there has been an International Tsunami Warning system in place since 1965, the affected countries were not part of that system and had no mechanism in place to allow for early warning.

NPR has a few good reports on the problem.

Cringely has a rather interesting solution that does not rely on governmental action, though with a serious flaw. It only relies on earthquake data, which isn't necessarily conclusive, nor the only cause of Tsunami's.

While there there has been an International Tsunami Warning system in place since 1965, the affected countries were not part of that system and had no mechanism in place to allow for early warning.

NPR has a few good reports on the problem.

Cringely has a rather interesting solution that does not rely on governmental action, though with a serious flaw. It only relies on earthquake data, which isn't necessarily conclusive, nor the only cause of Tsunami's.

While there there has been an International Tsunami Warning system in place since 1965, the affected countries were not part of that system and had no mechanism in place to allow for early warning.

NPR has a few good reports on the problem.

Cringely has a rather interesting solution that does not rely on governmental action, though with a serious flaw. It only relies on earthquake data, which isn't necessarily conclusive, nor the only cause of Tsunami's.

Well if Washington has its way, he might be around for much longer.

This is a really big deal for the newspaper industry.

Consider:

The main source of revenue for newspapers (and some magazines) are subscriptions (which generally cover only maybe 20% of the cost of publication), mass market advertisements, and classified ads. Of these, classified ads are by far the most profitable and desirable: [a] they are very cheap to operate (the customers provide and even pay for all the content), and [b] they are the one form of advertisement that people want to see.

Think about that: all other forms of advertising are a nuisance that people go out of their way to ignore (witness TiVo, banner ad blockers, the ritual shaking of new magazines over recycle bins to drop all the inserts, etc), but sometimes, when a person is ready to buy something -- particularly something big -- they'll buy a whole newspaper or magazine just to pore over the real estate listings, or the automotove listings, or the ads in a photography magazine or the old "Computer Shopper", etc.

Most of the time, people hate ads, but sometimes, we want them so badly that we're willing to pay for them. The newspaper industry has been using this tendency to subsidize their business model for over a century now. They know full well that Craigslist is a threat to that model.

Consider:

About a year ago, NPR ran a piece on Craigslist. In this piece, they talked about the site, and how profitable it is, and how they manage this by using job listings for the San Francisco area to subsidize all their operating expenses still leaving a lot left over as profit. For this piece, NPR interviewed Lisa DeSisto, general manager of the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, by way of comparing Craigslist to more traditional publications. The reporter claimed that DeSisto sees Craigslist as creating a new market for people that want to sell small things but don't want to pay for a traditional ad; for the soundbite in the piece, she says that "anyone who brings buyers and sellers is a threat, so yes, we absolutely view them as a threat". An honest remark, but a bland one.

A few weeks after that piece ran, I saw DeSisto, and mentioned having heard her on the radio recently. "Oh, that Craigslist thing? Yeah, they are going to kick our asses."

Much more direct and honest, eh?

But it's not just Boston.com, or the newspapers in San Francisco that the current piece talks about -- it's every market that Craigslist or someone like them goes into. Newspaper revenues have been going steadily downward for 20 or 30 years, and they're scrambling to keep up with the drain. They've more or less made their peace with the web, as it's still basically what they were doing all along, and the fact that you're reading their ads and their articles on a screen instead of a sheet of paper isn't all that important to them. But sites like Craigslist suggest that things are going to be much harder for them than they may have realized five or ten years ago: these sites may be able to keep their audience, but their ability to monetize that audience with classified ads is evaporating, compounding the decades-long slump in revenues from subscriptions and not offset by other forms of advertisement. If there is a way out of this, it doesn't seem to be obvious to anybody yet...

Notes:

• I used to work for Boston.com. Adjust salt intake accordingly.
• Some of Douglas Adams's essays touched on these topics nicely, in particular, What Have We Got To Lose?:

  "Over the last few years I've regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or film makers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into 'not very much'. ('People like the smell of

• Brief Bio
• NPR Audio Interview from Dec 15, 2004
• 2001 Press Conference Speech

Cheers,
-l

how 'bout a table saw?

Underwater Mines, for one.

But the Vehicle used by the NUWC people is a REMUS, from th Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which does all sorts of oceanographic monitoring.

Here's a link to the NPR story that was mentioned.

Or more likely they just felt like it. Those irreplaceable animators were responsible for $200 MILLION in top line revenue. That's several hundred thousand dollars per employee. I'd call that profitable.

1. That revenue was not on an ongoing basis, but based on certain years of movie profits based on their work, with no guarantee of future performance.

2. this article at NPR sums up the layoff: "The decision is part of Disney's ongoing move away from hand-drawn animation in favor of computer-generated cartoons."

3. Disney is under no requirement to continue to produce a certain type of product just to keep people employed. They are phasing out hand-drawn animation, thus they do not need to employ animators that do not work with computers. Those animators will have to find other jobs doing hand-drawn animation, create their own companies, or improve their skillsets to include computer-generated animation skills.

They ultimately do want smaller government, but they first have to create an political environment where the public will willingly let go of the government programs to which they've grown accustomed e.g., Social Security and Medicare. It's a strategy called Starving the Beast. If you drop taxes enough and increase spending enough, the country will get to a point of deficit that other countries will be less willing to finance our debt and we will be forced to either drastically increase taxes or drastically decrease spending. No one will vote for an increase in taxes in economic bad times, thus they get their small government much like the times before FDR. This is a plan concocted by Grover Norquist and the Heritage Foundation. They are GWB's main influence on economic policy. Notice this trend of spending more and more on unneeded plans while decreasing taxes. Notice the ever increasing deficit. The real conservatives do believe in smaller government, these times now are merely a means to an end.

This is an interesting interview with Princeton Economist Paul Krugman talking about some of these issues.

It would be nice if they'd find a way to repair or replace the Hubble Space Telescope, though.

Funny you should mention that. NPR's "Morning Edition" program reported this morning that NASA hired a company called The Aerospace Corporation to conduct a confidential study to determine the best way to deal with Hubble, including two completed instruments that were originally supposed to fly to Hubble aboard the Space Shuttle.

The conclusion? Well, the report itself is confidential and won't ever see the light of day. The executive summary, however, has been obtained through a FOIA request. In short, they don't think a robotic servicing mission could be completed before Hubble dies. They recommend flying a new bare-bones replacement for Hubble with the two new instruments onboard. In their opinion, it'll be cheaper and it's more likely to work.

Of course, there are those who dispute the study's findings. They say that there already exists a robot of sufficient dexterity for performing the mission. It was designed to fly on the ISS and last ten years. A Hubble service mission would last at most a few months.

It would be nice if they'd find a way to repair or replace the Hubble Space Telescope, though.

Funny you should mention that. NPR's "Morning Edition" program reported this morning that NASA hired a company called The Aerospace Corporation to conduct a confidential study to determine the best way to deal with Hubble, including two completed instruments that were originally supposed to fly to Hubble aboard the Space Shuttle.

The conclusion? Well, the report itself is confidential and won't ever see the light of day. The executive summary, however, has been obtained through a FOIA request. In short, they don't think a robotic servicing mission could be completed before Hubble dies. They recommend flying a new bare-bones replacement for Hubble with the two new instruments onboard. In their opinion, it'll be cheaper and it's more likely to work.

Of course, there are those who dispute the study's findings. They say that there already exists a robot of sufficient dexterity for performing the mission. It was designed to fly on the ISS and last ten years. A Hubble service mission would last at most a few months.

I actually heard about this anniversary this morning on npr. There are still channels to finding important news in the US. They just aren't as popular.

This was on NPR this morning. Click here for NPR story There is also an audio stream of the NPR news story

In case people are interested, you can find the actual article in the most recent issue of Nature (abstract is free but you pay for the full text). Also, there were stories about this on NPR and in the Washington Post.

Some of these stories stress that if the study is seen as proof that the preponderance of the evidence points to fossil fuels as the source of deadly heat waves, then people may begin trying to bring civil suits against fossil fuel producers and distributors on that basis. That seems far fetched to me, since it seems like the you'd have to prove the specific corporation you're suing is responsible, but who knows? It would seem to be a very liberarian solution to the problem of global warming, though, so /. oughta like it.

It's difficult to prove causality in such a chaotic system as weather patterns. But according to a recent radio segment about this research, science can say that it is 'more likely than not' that human sources caused this heat wave... which incidentally tends to be the threshhold of proof for civil lawsuits. This opens up possibilities for bringing wrongful death suits against polluters for the victims of the heat wave.

Motley Fool Radio Show. (I like the Motley Fool, but those guys have terribly live personalities. Listening to their radio show is painful.)

Ahh ... "Non Photo Realistic."

For a moment there I had a mental image of Steve Inskeep gibbing Renée Montagne. (See http://www.npr.org/ and http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/inside/ if you have no clue what I'm talking about.)

Ahh ... "Non Photo Realistic."

For a moment there I had a mental image of Steve Inskeep gibbing Renée Montagne. (See http://www.npr.org/ and http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/inside/ if you have no clue what I'm talking about.)

I think there's been around 7 cabinet-level resignations, which isn't too far above the average.

Of course, the CIA is a different story...

http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/archives/asc74/

If we cover the world in wind mills we'll destroy the climate by stoping the wind across the world!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4161624

All Things Considered interviewed the doctor who apparently directed this girl's treatment (and devised a very creative approach to the problem).

A link to the RealAudio/Windows media file is here.

-Troy

The story on NPR tonight about the pediatrician who figured out how to save her is really an amazing work of doctoring.

You can listen to it here.

I remember thinking a the time what if something like the reverse happens, where one single egg splits in 2 and is fertilized by two different sperms. Would the resulting twins, sharing half their maternally inherited genes but not the father's, be viable? You could end up with a pair of siblings that are not quit identical, but not quit fraternal either. What would it be like to have a sibling of the oposite sex which has half your chromosomes but not the same sex organs???

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4176616

Tonight's "All Things Considered" on NPR
reported that the man's name is John Lockewood
(Lockwood/Lokwood?), not John Underwood.

Online audio should be available later today at:

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/

Just FYI.

Forget the 40 vials arugment completely. It's been disproven that it was Sarin whatsoever. He was just jumping onto whatever horse he could fine. Too bad it was a dead one. Follow this link, upper left hand corner. He doesn't know what's he's talking about.

Is that so?

"You're taking the opportunity to quote me out of context, so I'll take the time to correct you where you're wrong. The fact that you actually quoted one thing but then said I said something else ought to have been evidence enough of the innaccuracy of your post. I stated exactly as you quoted: wearing panties on your head and being forced to pose nude is not an attrocity, and I still stand by that. Being beaten to death is an attrocity and should be punished as such. I never once said or indicated anything otherwise, and I am angered that you would portray my feelings otherwise."

That's funny. Even if I take a look at your whole comment, you not only say Abu Gharib wasn't an atrocity, but go on to say that just because the soldiers posed with a badly beaten body, doesn't mean it's bad, because perhaps they didn't do it (forget the fact that it's now been largely accepted that they did beat that man to death). It's not out of context. It's right in context and consistent with your views.

"Al-Qaeda is taking advantage of the unrest in an attempt to push its agenda, much like you're taking advantage of misquoting me to serve yours."

Here's a great manuveour. I mention al-Sistani and al-Sadr, neither of them al Qaeda, neither Sunni, though you just claimed that only those from the Sunni triangle give American soldiers trouble, so rather than account for that inconsistency in your claim, you just give me some line about al Qaeda that could have been taken straight from George W's campaign website. You don't bother to address what I actually said.

"Sarin gas is a WMD, and you don't need a supertanker full of it for it to be a threat."

Great, except we didn't invade because of sarin gas. If you remember what the President, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz and all the others were saying it was primarily that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program already in the works and also that we'd find "tons" of WMD. All of a sudden, you found what you claim to be 40 vials of sarin, and that's enough? Even though I'd claim it's not, let's go ahead and investigate your claims. NPR was one of the news sources that broke the 40 vials of sarin being found in Fallujah. If you follow your own link, the caption under the photo says "40 vials of suuspected sarin". Why is this important?

I'll tell you why. Because, it turns out, they weren't vials of sarin at all. Oh, that must burn a little. Go to that link, upper left hand corner. Yep, click right up there where it says "Troops' Discovery Found Not to be Sarin Gas". What that is, my friend, is vials of a chemical used to test for sarin gas. Not exactly the stuff that a single vial of "can kill hundreds of people". But don't let that get in the way of your dleusions. I'm glad that they found that stuff after you left though!

So, with your WMD argument thoroughly thrown aside, what else do you have to offer?

"I'm not a fan of this "global test" stuff, if that's what you mean, and I'm unapologetic about it."

No, I was using the word you used: "globalization". Globalization has nothing to do with the "global test stuff" made so popular by John Kerry. If you have no idea what glboalization means, which it's clear you don't, maybe you shouldn't dismiss it so quickly like you have.

"All true. Were you expecting me to be sorry? Oh, but you forgot to post the other side of that conversation where the guy was being a complete jerk."

Ah, the "he did it first" argument. I didn't know they allow four year olds to enlist in the Marines.

"No doubt you're basing your numbers on the Lancet report, which has been widely discredited."

Finally, no I'm not. What I'm sure happened here is that you read another user's comment that said the Lancet document was discredited and thought he was responding to me. Not so. The Lancet document, which I doubt you

Back in May of this year, NPR did a story on the popularity of CSI, and how the show compares to the way investigations are carried out in reality. The differences are pretty stark, but the excuse is that reality doesn't make for a gripping crime drama.

I did hear an interesting piece on npr talking about the 'Numbers Stations' phenomena. Appearently they got the name for their albumn "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" from a CD compliation of these number stations.

There's an NPR episode of Talk of the Nation entitled "Letters and Ham Radio Lessons". From the website: "...ham radio teacher Rick Stern joins Neal Conan with tips on teaching your kids about ham radio."

There is also this episode of TOTN that covers the topic, featuring the authors of the book Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio.

And in February of this year, All Things Considered ran a piece on the pending approval of a Morse code "at" symbol so that operators could tell others their email addresses. How's that for radio and the internet meeting in the middle?

There's an NPR episode of Talk of the Nation entitled "Letters and Ham Radio Lessons". From the website: "...ham radio teacher Rick Stern joins Neal Conan with tips on teaching your kids about ham radio."

There is also this episode of TOTN that covers the topic, featuring the authors of the book Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio.

And in February of this year, All Things Considered ran a piece on the pending approval of a Morse code "at" symbol so that operators could tell others their email addresses. How's that for radio and the internet meeting in the middle?