March 2012
61 posts
Leave our net alone →
BuzzMachine:
The internet’s not broken.
So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada — as well as the European Union and the United Nations — are trying to exert...
February 2012
57 posts
Satphones, Syria, and Surveillance →
EFF:
Yesterday morning, journalist Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London was killed, along with French photographer Rémi Ochlik, in the beseiged city of Homs, Syria, where more than 400 people have been reported dead in recent weeks.
Disturbingly, the Telegraph, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the Associated Press all reported that Colvin and Ochlik were likely deliberately killed by...
FBI shuts off thousands of GPS devices after... →
Teehee
BoingBoing:
A recent US Supreme Court ruling that overturned the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices “has caused a ‘sea change’ inside the U.S. Justice Department.” Following the ruling, the FBI turned off an estimated 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use. But how to locate the little buggers to take them home?
From the WSJ, quoting FBI General...
The freedom to impose religion on others →
America Blog:
I have to disagree with the people who claim that the GOP is somehow winning from their current jihad against contraception. Even if the GOP was trying to ‘move the Overton window’ as Gaius suggests, the GOP is still left discussing a social issue that most people imagine was settled some time in the 1930s. The main reason that the Griswold decision came so late...
Hollywood Vs. Silicon Valley: California... →
NPR:
There’s a civil war going on in California. It’s the north vs. the south — Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley. And much like that other American Civil War, there are two different economic worldviews at stake. One of the highest-profile battles was fought last month, when large Internet sites like Wikipedia staged an online blackout to protest anti-piracy bills in Congress.
The...
Obama Administration Unveils Promising Consumer... →
EFF:
Today the White House proposed a framework for protecting privacy in the digital age. The plan, laid out in detail in a white paper, includes a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights based on well-established fair information practice principles. EFF, which has previously proposed a Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users, believes this user-centered approach to privacy protection is a...
Obama unveils online privacy plan →
POLITICO:
The Obama administration is taking a two-pronged approach to online privacy, calling on Congress to pass a “consumer privacy bill of rights,” while putting the onus on companies like Google and Facebook, as well as privacy watchdogs and online advertisers, to forge new data handling rules for the digital age.
The highly anticipated report released Thursday reflects...
Guy Walks Into A Denny's, Cooks A Burger, Gets... →
Funniest story ever.
NPR:
This alleged crime in Madison, Wis., is odd enough — or funny enough, depending on your point of view — to begin with.
It seems that 52-year-old James B. Summers went into a local Denny’s restaurant Tuesday afternoon and said he was the new general manager. This was a surprise to the folks working there.
Summers, though, insisted that he was indeed...
Bloomberg Defends Legality Of NYPD Spying On... →
Mr. Bloomberg. The NYPD is a Police Force. They are not The CIA, they are not the FBI, they are not an Anti-Terrorist strike force. They are a POLICE DEPARTMENT. They are supposed to keep the peace, RESPOND to emergencies, and protect the safety of everyone. The important word in there is RESPOND. It is not your job to spy on people and assume that they are going to commit a crime before they do....
Something Important is Happening. I Can Feel It.
Up until about three years ago, to me, it just felt as if the world were on autopilot. Everyone was going about their daily lives, the world was progressing steadily, politicians were squabbling, but essentially, the planet and everyone on it were just going with the flow, with not big changes. Perhaps this perception is simply a result of my youth, naïveté, or apathy toward politics and world...
Now it’s illegal for gays to flirt in Michigan →
America Blog:
It’s one thing for the city to say they’d rather not have public sex in a park, it’s quite another to say that it’s against the law to meet someone in a park and ask them home with you. Yet that’s what one Michigan town is saying, and doing - arresting gay men for simply talking about going home with you. The ACLU is on the case. From the Grand...
Another court finds Defense of Marriage Act... →
High fives all around!
POLITICO:
Another federal judge has found unconstitutional a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law which forbids providing federal government benefits to same-sex spouses.
U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White, who sits in San Francisco and was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, issued the ruling Wednesday afternoon in a case...
WatchAlison Gopnik: What do babies think? | Video on TED.com
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74... →
I think this guy actually WAS the most interesting man in the world.
NYTimes:
He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.
At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his...
Pain Without Gain →
Paul Krugman, NYTimes:
Last week the European Commission confirmed what everyone suspected: the economies it surveys are shrinking, not growing. It’s not an official recession yet, but the only real question is how deep the downturn will be.
And this downturn is hitting nations that have never recovered from the last recession. For all America’s troubles, its gross domestic product has...
WatchMike Biddle: We can recycle plastic | Video on TED.com
Gay Won’t Go Away, Genetic or Not →
NYTimes:
That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless.
By hinging a whole movement on a conclusion that...
Kidnapped for Christ: documentary about children... →
Yes, I realize that not all religious people are like this. No, I really don’t care. Any group is only as good as it’s worst members.
BoingBoing:
Here’s a trailer for a documentary-in-progress called “Kidnapped for Christ,” which tells the stories of children whose evangelical Christian parents pay military-style boarding school to render them to an offshore...
Swiss ‘Satellite Janitor’ Aims To Clean Up Space... →
TPM:
The Swiss have had about enough with how messy with space junk low-earth orbit is becoming. And so the Swiss Space Center is doing something about it.
The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s...
WatchChristoph Adami: Finding life we can’t imagine | Video on TED.com
WatchBen Goldacre: Battling bad science | Video on TED.com
Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down... →
Forbes:
Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.
Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this...
America's homeless resort to tent cities →
Mitt Romney says he is not concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net, and it’s working. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.
BBC:
Just off the side of a motorway on the fringes of the picturesque town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a mismatched collection of 30 tents tucked in the woods has become home - home to those who are either unemployed, or whose wages are...
Sony raised price of Whitney Houston albums after... →
BoingBoing:
At The Guardian, Josh Halliday writes about Sony’s rush to profit from Whitney Houston’s death.
Sony Music has come under fire after it increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on Apple’s iTunes Store hours after the singer was found dead.
The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston’s greatest hits...
BitTorrent doesn't hurt US box-office, delayed... →
BoingBoing:
Economics researchers at Wellesley College and U Minnesota have published a study showing that feature films’ US box office returns are not correlated to BitTorrent sharing. They also show that shorter delays between the US exhibition and overseas releases result in less file-sharing — that is, people outside the US download movies because they can’t buy tickets...
Sen. Mike Lee: Employers Have Right To Fire People... →
Think Progress:
There isn’t much Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) finds constitutional, from child labor laws and food safety protections to medical malpractice reform, FEMA, and poverty aid. Apparently, though, Lee’s version of the Constitution protects employers’ rights to fire workers just because they are gay.
Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), ThinkProgress asked...
Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in... →
Mother Jones:
My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve—dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations...
Severe Conservative Syndrome →
Paul Krugman - NYTimes:
Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr....
Watch
“This government hates religious organizations so much it lets them keep a hundred billion dollars a year in offerings TAX FREE. Persecute my ass like that!”
“You’ve confused a war on your religion with not always getting everything you want. It’s called living in a society!”
Jon Stewart NAILS the War on Religion debacle, last night on The Daily Show....
Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal →
The New York Times always does an excellent interactive infographic for the budget proposal. Go play with it!
WatchStephen Coleman: The moral dangers of non-lethal weapons | Video on TED.com
Plastic-eating fungus could help deal with... →
SCIENCE!
TG Daily:
A team from Yale University has discovered a fungus deep in the South American rainforest that can live entirely on plastic - offering hope for new methods of waste disposal.
Pestalotiopsis microspora, found in the jungles of Ecuador, can digest polyurethane - which often currently ends up in landfill and takes generations to decay.
The fungus can live entirely...
House Passes Bill That Would Ban Insider Trading... →
This is a good thing. But read on in this article…
NPR:
The House on Thursday passed a bill that would ban congressional insider trading. The STOCK Act passed overwhelmingly, 417-2, despite some partisan disagreements over its scope.
With congressional approval at all-time lows, the bill was widely seen by lawmakers as a small step in restoring public confidence. But differences remain...
U Washington's best-of-breed 3D printing lab shuts... →
BoingBoing:
Michael sez, “The Open 3DP lab at UW has been doing some amazing things with 3D printing. More amazingly, they have prioritized sharing what they are learning with everyone else in order to make 3D printing better. A change to UW’s intellectual property policy has essentially forced them to stop sharing what they are up to with everyone else. That strikes me as...
Money and Morals →
Paul Krugman - NYTimes:
Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
So...
The temporary, pop-up corporation →
Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine.com:
A stat I heard repeated all over Davos: that the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is now 15 years, according to Cisco’s John Chambers. Trying to confirm that figure, I found others saying the number is less than 50.
Whatever. It’s far from forever.
So what if corporations more and more become short-lived enterprises? What would that mean?
...
Senate panel votes, 11-7, to open Supreme Court to... →
SCOTUS, welcome to the 21st century!
POLITICO:
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted, 11-7, Thursday morning for legislation that would open Supreme Court arguments to television coverage.
The bill has a provision which would allow a majority of justices to close arguments in a specific case if due process required it. Many justices have resisted opening the court to cameras, though they...
UC Students Propose Alternative To Tuition... →
NPR:
Chris LoCascio, a junior at UC Riverside, feared that there was no end in sight for tuition increases at the University of California. The state kept cutting subsidies, students kept protesting, but no one had any answers. So he and other students decided to turn the discussion on its head.
What if, he says, “instead of charging students upfront for their education, students...
Obama quasi-endorses constitutional amendment to... →
POLITICO:
Just as President Barack Obama gave the green light Monday to ramp up fundraising for a Super PAC supporting his re-election bid, he also gave conditional approval to a constitutional amendment that would beef up Congress’s ability to control the flow of money into politics.
“And the President favors action — by constitutional amendment, if necessary—to place...
Ninth Circuit Rules Prop 8 Is Unconstitutional →
A qualified Hooray! is in order here. This is good, but not yet over.
This ruling can still be appealed to the entire 9th Circuit Court, or to the Supreme Court
The Court gave a very narrow ruling, not commenting on the constitutionality or legality of Same Sex Marriage, but simply on Proposition 8 itself.
This battle is nowhere near over. But for now, we can be happy.
TPM:
A federal...
Tebow: I'd 'possibly' run for office →
Oh god no…
POLITICO:
Tim Tebow’s name has been invoked a few times on the campaign trail this year, but what if the Denver Broncos quarterback jumped into politics himself?
He’s not ruling it out. Via Playbook, in an interview with Golf Channel’s David Feherty that aired on Saturday, Tebow was asked whether he’d consider running for office someday.
“For me, it could be something in...
Santorum suggests abortion causes breast cancer →
Hey Rick Santorum! Abortions do not cause cancer.
The Raw Story:
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested that Susan G. Komen for the Cure shouldn’t provide grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings because abortions cause breast cancer, a false claim that has been repeatedly debunked.
The candidate told Fox News host Chris Wallace that he...
Watch(via Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity | Video on TED.com)