Planet 無

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March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Understanding Your Computer: Web Browsers

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Understanding Your Computer: Operating Systems

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Protecting Portable Devices: Data Security

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Understanding Encryption

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Understanding Digital Signatures

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Protecting Portable Devices: Physical Security

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Recognizing and Avoiding Spyware

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Avoiding Social Engineering and Phishing Attacks

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Protecting Your Privacy

March 10, 2010 07:44 AM

Según fuentes cercanas a las negociaciones, la cooperante catalana, secuestrada en Mauritania, será liberada junto a la italiana Filomena Kaouburee.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 07:35 AM

Se trata de cáscaras de huevo de moas y de aves elefantes, dos especies de pájaros gigantes ya extintas.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 07:18 AM

Google has opened a new online store for integrated business applications. More than 50 companies are now selling apps at the store.

March 10, 2010 07:14 AM

Feds cuff JihadJane

A suburban Pennsylvania woman who went by the online alias JihadJane used the internet to recruit Islamic terrorists and to plot the assassination of a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

March 10, 2010 07:02 AM

Dual-node MS2 cluster

Criticising the pain of single silo deduplication products, Sepaton has introduced a dual-node clustered product that can be upgraded to its larger ES2 system.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

March 10, 2010 07:02 AM

Un_notas nos cuenta: «John Chambers, director ejecutivo de Cisco Systems ha presentado un nuevo modelo de 'router', el CRS-3 Carrier Routing System con unas prestaciones muy prometedoras. Prometen multiplicar por 12 la velocidad de sus competidores, llegando a 322 terabits por segundo, aunque la única demostración realizada con AT&T fue de 100Gbps. El 'router' tendrá un precio de sálida de 90.000 dólares. Los directivos de AT&T han destacado la importancia del desarrollo de estos productos ante las perspectivas sobre el tráfico futuro de Internet, a la que ya se ha bautizado como la Era del Zettabyte».

by rvr at March 10, 2010 07:00 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

去る平成22年2月22日、独立行政法人 農業・食品産業技術総合研究機構 果樹研究所が、カンキツ新品種「はるひ」を育成したとプレスリリースした。「日向夏」に似たさわやかな風味が特徴だそうだ。

このゾロ目に何か意味があるのかは分からない。もちろん品種名が何かに引っかけられているのかどうかは中の人しか知るよしもない。ともあれ同名の映画のようなヒットを祈りたい。

ちなみに、「日向夏」はリンゴのように剥いて皮の白いところごとカットして食べるのがおいしいと思う。あの白いところが甘いというのにはちょっとびっくりしたものだ。「はるひ」のお味はどんなだろうか。

すべて読む | ニュース | アニメ・マンガ

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涼宮ハルヒの消失、劇場公開中 2010年02月09日
一年中花を咲かすサクラの新品種、理化学研究所が開発 2010年01月19日
秋田の新米「萌えみのり」アキバ登場！ 2009年11月24日
甘さ2倍の小麦が開発される 2006年12月13日
渋皮が簡単に剥ける栗、「ぽろたん」開発 2006年10月05日

by hylom at March 10, 2010 07:00 AM

Las gestiones del consulado español han permitido que Toledo haya cumplido sólo la mitad de los 30 días que estableció el juez. Fue detenida en febrero en Miami.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 06:40 AM

Una investigación introduce un nuevo concepto: la esperanza de vida sexual. Ese pronóstico de comportamientos eróticos varía entre los dos sexos.  Leer

March 10, 2010 06:35 AM

Shares of drug maker Facet Biotech skyrocket after Abbott announced an acquisition bid valuing Facet at $27 a share.

March 10, 2010 06:28 AM

Friend and sometimes boss mikeyd had a friend ask him to help her with her entry into a karaoke contest. Mikey suggested that I could try out the video recording on the new camera, so I hauled out some of the old sound recording gear, bought some new mics, grabbed the camera and the tripod and headed to Avalon at Mission Bay's penthouse to film.

March 10, 2010 06:18 AM

Barclays, the U.K. bank, is looking for a major acquisition in the U.S., a report says.

March 10, 2010 06:15 AM

The non-iPad iPad clone

The publicity whores at China's Shenzhen Great Loong Brother tablet-PC maker are at it again.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

March 10, 2010 06:02 AM

Doggies digitized for your protection

Even if your beloved Westie is spending her declining years curled up by the hearth, Home Secretary Alan Johnson suggests she should be microchipped for the protection of her potential victims, and you should pony up for dog-attack insurance.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

March 10, 2010 06:02 AM

I’ve had the luck a couple times of sitting in on a presentation by Arun Ranganathan where he takes an audience through a guided tour of the Open Web with some really beautiful demos from our evangelism team showing off HTML 5 in Firefox.   Oftentimes, when Arun is presenting the future of the web as a platform, I can see attentive developers begin to imagine a web page and a browser where a set of third-party plugins (like our favorite target, Flash) isn’t necessary.  A very powerful part of the demo is when Arun presses ctrl+U to view source and web developers in the audience see exactly what is happening in the demonstration.   What makes these demos even more impressive is when you meet a company or team of inspired individuals in the audience who is bringing the Open Web to end-users with their project.

Our last trip to India was no exception.

On our first Sunday night in Mumbai (Feb 22), we co-presented with one of these organizations at a Mozilla community meetup.  The group calls themselves Pad.Ma or, in longer form, the Public Access Digital Media Archive.  The project “is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use.”  And, right on their website, they state their intentions to align with web standards:

Q:  Which browsers do you support, on which platforms?
A:  We currently support Firefox and Safari, on Linux, MacOS and Windows.  We do not support Internet Explorer. However, if you wish to endeavour to make the site work on IE, please appeal to IE to support web standards in their next version.

(In fact, for some fun, fire up IE and visit their website to view a strong statement from them regarding your present use of IE.)

More on the meetup, but let’s rewind by just a few hours before we met Pad.Ma face-to-face…

After a four hour roadtrip on the Pune-Mumbai highway, we arrived at our hotel in the cool neighborhood of Mumbai called Bandra.  Freshened up in about fifteen minutes, we piled two-by-two into autoricks and motored our way on a humid evening through the snaking streets to the event location.  Arun had treasure map-like directions that led us down narrow alleyways.  “When you see a cross on the wall, proceed a few more feet and you’ll see an apartment entrance on your right…” Arun read as we navigated through the Pali Hill district’s corridors.  Up a few stories and our eyes opened to a rooftop event with a large projection screen, bean bag chairs, a minibar with soft drinks and beer, and two big vats of local food.  We made it.

Invited by a local community member named Sanjay, about 25 people came to hear us speak about the Open Web and how we were building community in India.  After our presentation, the team from Pad.ma followed by showing their amazing work to archive movies on the web.   If you’re a movie person, this site will fascinate you, so please look around it.  The Pad.ma presentation was followed by their demo of the “Firefogg” addon, which allows you to easily convert videos to .ogg theora video compression format.

It was a nice tandem.  Arun chatting about the Open Web and explaining cutting-edge demos.  And, just when we thought we might lose the audience on how the technology could be applied, Pad.Ma presented their work and the Firefogg addon.  It was a nice blend of demos and practice and I believe the group’s imaginations were sparked.  The Open Web had been delivered to a rooftop audience in the Pali Hill neighborhood of Bandra.  Sometime during the evening, fireworks started to explode.  This was not planned.  An Indian wedding was taking place in around the corner.

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by seth bindernagel at March 10, 2010 06:00 AM

あるAnonymous Coward 曰く、

本家記事、The Telegraphなどによると、AppleがiPhoneを利用して車や家の鍵を開けられる電子キーシステム（通称「iKey」）の特許を申請しているそうだ。

「iKey」では画面に表示される金庫のダイヤルを回すようにiPhoneを回して暗証番号を入力し、錠と通信して鍵を開けるとのこと。特許ではiPhoneと錠との間の通信を全てエンクリプトすることでハッキングを防ぐ仕組みも提唱している。また、万が一不法に鍵を開けようとする兆候を検知した場合には警報を鳴らしたり、持ち主や家主にアラートを送る仕組みも提唱されているという。

デバイス間の通信に使われる規格はNFC（Near Field Communication）だそうで、今後本当にiPhoneに組み込まれるとすれば、Appleによる「お財布携帯」分野への進出も視野に入ってくると元記事は伝えている。

当然ながら、現時点でAppleは公式なコメントを拒否しているとのことだ。

すべて読む | アップルセクション | アップル

関連ストーリー：
Apple、HTCを特許侵害で提訴 2010年03月03日
「iPad」の商標問題、Appleは事前に手を打っていた？ 2010年02月09日
Apple、OS で広告を表示させる技術の特許を出願 2009年10月27日
Appleの新特許は「盗まれたiPhoneが自動で通報」機能 2009年04月07日

by hylom at March 10, 2010 06:00 AM

One stop Google bolt-on shop

The Mountain View Chocolate Factory has unveiled an online marketplace for third-party applications that hook into its Google Apps suite of web-based businessware.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

March 10, 2010 05:57 AM

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/07/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricane-katrina"&gt;The Guardian recently interviewed Dave Eggers&lt;/a&gt; and found that the Staggering Genius is no more.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it's not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Dave Eggers"&gt;Dave Eggers&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/interviews"&gt;interviews&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 10, 2010 05:46 AM

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/07/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricane-katrina"&gt;The Guardian recently interviewed Dave Eggers&lt;/a&gt; and found that the Staggering Genius is no more.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it's not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Dave Eggers"&gt;Dave Eggers&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/interviews"&gt;interviews&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 10, 2010 05:46 AM

Bank of America is expected Wednesday to eliminate overdraft fees on purchases made with debit cards.

March 10, 2010 05:45 AM

One of the most striking images from The Terminator was the weapon he carried and used in his first attempt on Sarah Connor's life: the .45 Longslide, with laser sighting. Who can forget the scene in the gun shop? The gun was likewise such a striking presence on screen it was used on the film's poster. There are T-shirts dedicated to the gun.

Terminator was released in 1984, and while laser sights on weapons are common now, when the film was first shown the red laser was able to communicate something subtle and powerful to the audience: this is a machine, deadly accurate and futuristic. It made the Terminator seem other-worldly and terrifying. At a party during CES, Deputy Editor Jon Stokes and I bumped into some representatives from SureFire, a company that specializes in tactical flashlights. We talked about some of our favorite moments with technology in cinema, and The Terminator came up.

"We created that laser!" I was told. They told me the gentleman who built the prop was named Ed Reynolds, and he was still with the company. More than a little jazzed about bumping into a fun part of film history, we knew we had to get the full story behind the Terminator's gun.

Read the comments on this post

March 10, 2010 05:30 AM

Stocks in China were lower Wednesday after exports rose by 45.7% in February.

March 10, 2010 05:20 AM

El norte, noreste y el interior estarán en alerta amarilla por las bajas temperaturas. Lloverá y nevará en Baleares.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 05:15 AM

La isla de Robinson, en Chile, sufrió de lleno el tsunami. Su único pueblo ha sido destruido. Se salvaron los que treparon a un alto.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 05:11 AM

20-something guy dressed as Edward Cullen for Halloween: So anyway, I walk in, and they are both sitting there, playing with each other's erections...

--Bedford Ave & Berry St

Overheard by: Marie Miller Barnes

Ginger kid in audience, as photo of awkward Asian teen sticking banana in his mouth is projected on movie screen: I am definitely aroused.

--Tisch School of the Arts

Joggers to another: Raging hard-ons!

--Prospect Park, Brooklyn

Overheard by: Katie

20-something girl to another: How could he not go out with you? I mean, you gave him a boner at Relay For Life!

--Union Square

Overheard by: Becca

March 10, 2010 05:00 AM

Naciones Unidas también se muestra contraria al plan de construir 1.600 nuevas casas en la parte oriental de Jerusalén.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 04:58 AM

Daniel Buchner (Jetpack project manager) is going to lead a Design Lunch this Thursday to talk about the rebooted Jetpack SDK (software development kit).

The Jetpack design team is specifically going to be looking for feedback on this proposed extension to the tools for Jetpack developers.

The design lunch is Thursday March 4, 12:30pm – 1:30pm PST. The details of how to watch or participate remotely are on the Design Lunch wiki page.

Hope to see you there!

by jonoscript at March 10, 2010 04:37 AM

En todos los casos, son heridos que tienen derecho a 30.000 euros más otros 300 por cada día que tardaron en curar las lesiones.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 04:28 AM

Undeserving Humans

by digby

Thank goodness the President has finally stepped in to put all these arguments about what to do with terrorist suspects to rest. President Huckleberry, that is.

Spencer Ackerman:

Two weeks ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), in the midst of negotiations with the White House over trading a military tribunal for 9/11 conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, floated a new proposal: “a new national security court” for terrorism detainees. Graham didn’t appear to press the point in interviews since. But his spokesman, Kevin Bishop, said Graham is busy drawing up a proposal for how such a system would work, and gave some detail about its scope. As it happens, this is less a national-security court than it is an indefinite detention system. “There has to be some type of statute– and he’s been clear on that — for indefinite detention,” Bishop said.

Primarily, the system Graham is designing is set up for handling the Obama administration’s so-called “Fifth Category” of detainees that a Justice Department task force recommended against charging and releasing. “What do you do with them? What type of system do you have to hold them indefinitely?” Bishop said. “What type of system do you establish where we can ensure that we’re looking back at their cases; that we are holding them; we still determine that they are enemy combatants; they’re too dangerous to release; but we also aren’t going to try them in either a military or a civilian court. So there has to be a system for that, and that’s why Senator Graham is looking for a legal framework.”

March 10, 2010 04:00 AM

Casttoo

A picture is worth 1,000 words. Save your breath and explanations by showing the world what's going on under that cast. Had a really bad break that you want to show off? Send us the digital file of your x-ray, and we'll send you back your break in print, ready to be applied directly to your cast.

March 10, 2010 03:55 AM

In previous posts, I've written about the possibilities offered by Python 3.1's Unicode identifier capability, as well as the new challenges posed when one tries to display them on screen.

As the final project for my Java course, I set about trying to create an editor that would allow the user to enter text right to left, but save it as valid interpretable (is that a word?) Python 3.x code:

March 10, 2010 03:55 AM

Rap Lyric Generator

The lyrics presented in Figure 5 revolve around the theme of receiving oral sex, alcohol, and going to the club. Thus, words like "club" and "bust" have relatively high TFICF scores (TFICF=1.83e-4 and TFICF=1.67e-4) than other non-related words (TFICF=4.24e-7). The lyrics presented in Figure 6 also generally revolve around the themes of sex and partying.

March 10, 2010 03:49 AM

"El éxito o el fracaso depende de que los iraquíes aprecien o no a los americanos". La frase pertenece a un manual de 1943.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 03:49 AM

Chef at Chelsea restaurant offers customers a taste of cheese made from his wife's breast milk

Chef Daniel Angerer is letting diners at Klee Brasserie munch on cheese made from his wife's breast milk.

"It tastes like cow's-milk cheese, kind of sweet," he told The Post.

Breast milk doesn't curdle well due to its low protein content, so a little moo juice has to be added to round out the texture, Angerer said.

After blogging about his efforts with the human cheese, customers started demanding a sample, he said. "The phone was ringing off the hook," the chef said. "So I prepared a little canape of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper."

Since the restaurant began offering customers a taste, Mason has been inundated with creepy queries, she said.

"Some people who clearly have issues have e-mailed me saying, 'I wasn't breast-fed as a child, so can I taste your breast milk?'", she said.

Mason politely declines the offer. "I'm not here to walk people through their psychological problems," she said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

March 10, 2010 03:43 AM

  Leer

March 10, 2010 03:31 AM

March 10, 2010 03:30 AM

ある Anonymous Coward 曰く、

百貨店業界が Google と提携し、「デパート内部を立体的な画像で閲覧する」サービスを立ち上げると NHK ニュースが報じている。詳細は不明だが、デパート内を Google ストリートビューのような感じで閲覧できるものになるのだろうか。ただ、これが販売促進に繋がるかどうかはタレコミ子的には疑問なのだが……。

ちなみに Google はすでにストリートビュー パートナープログラムという、施設内をストリートビューで公開できるサービスを提供している (参考: /.J 記事) ので、これを使うのだろうか。

すべて読む | ITセクション | Google | ビジネス

関連ストーリー：
私有地向けストリートビュー撮影用自転車 trike 2009年05月21日

by reo at March 10, 2010 03:30 AM

En la poco soportable liga de las poses, Nimri, que antes aportaba susurros a Najwajean, por fin nos cuenta algo.  Leer

March 10, 2010 03:26 AM

Apple COO Tim Cook's warning from early 2009 wasn't the only one that handset makers received before Apple sicced the lawyers on HTC last week. According to a research note from Oppenheimer analyst Yal Reiner, Apple began warning top executives at companies such as HTC and Motorola in January that it wasn't too happy about seeing allegedly iPhone-related IP showing up in proposed new products.

According to "industry checks," Cook's comments last January during the quarterly analyst call—that Apple "will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we'll use whatever weapons that we have at our disposal"—were taken seriously by the likes of LG, Samsung, and even Nokia. Though the Palm Pre openly flaunted multitouch capabilities (what most handset makers believed were at the heart of Cook's warning), its sales numbers haven't proven to be much of a concern for Apple so far.

Read the comments on this post

March 10, 2010 03:25 AM

El primer ministro griego, Giorgos Papandreu, se reunió con Obama a puerta cerrada y le explicó los esfuerzos de su país para reducir el déficit presupuestario.  Leer

March 10, 2010 03:24 AM

La escalada verbal entre la presidenta argentina y la Corte Suprema de Justicia ha desembocado en un nuevo frente de conflicto  Leer

March 10, 2010 03:08 AM

ある Anonymous Coward 曰く、

充電池のエネループの姉妹商品として、新たに「エネループ ライト」が発売されるようです (三洋電機のニュースリリース、engadget 日本語版の記事より) 。

定格容量が単 3 で 1900 mAh から 950 mAh に、単 4 で 750 mAh から 550 mAh となり、低〜中消費電力機器をターゲットにする製品。お値段も重さも 30 % ダウン。

しかしまあ、素人によくわからない微妙な仕様違いのラインナップ拡大はかえって不便という向きもあります。

すべて読む | ハードウェアセクション | 電力

関連ストーリー：
充電池「eneloop」8 色セットと犬型バッテリーチェッカー 2009年11月09日
三洋、使用回数が 1.5 倍になった第二世代 eneloop を発売 2009年10月08日
三洋電機、eneloop向けの非接触型充電器のプロトタイプを展示 2007年11月07日
三洋電機、eneloop用 USB充電器を発表。 2007年04月20日
三洋電機、太陽光でUSB給電もできる充電器発表 2006年11月01日

by reo at March 10, 2010 03:00 AM

Panda descubre 'malware' en un HTC Magic de Vodafone. Es un caso aislado pero demuestra lo fácil que es infectar un PC.  Leer

March 10, 2010 02:37 AM

Aunque no hay fecha para las presidenciales, la ley electoral indica que nadie condenado en los tribunales podrá presentarse.  Leer. Escuchar

March 10, 2010 02:34 AM

kineko 曰く、

いささか旧聞に属するが、ITmedia News の記事によると、Skype が「Skype Lite」と「Skype for Windows Phones」の提供を終了したとのこと。先月中旬頃には提供を終了していた模様。

Skype Lite は Java 搭載携帯電話向けアプリ、Skype for Windows Phones は Windows Mobile 搭載携帯電話向けアプリだったのだが、同社のサイトでは既に、これらソフトのダウンロード提供を中止している。Skype Lite については、既にインストールしているユーザーは 2010 年中まで利用可能という。

Skype はこの決定について、「優れたユーザー体験を提供できない」と説明している。Skype Lite は対応キャリアが少なく、また Skype 間通話でも携帯料金が発生することが問題となった。Skype for Windows Phones については、最新版の Windows Mobile では、キャリアの協力なしで、幅広い端末でユーザーが期待するような機能を維持するのが難しくなっている、とのこと。

Windows Mobile 採用の W-ZERO3 を持っているので、この記事を見て急いで公式サイトを見たものの、既に公開は終了していました。ソフトを持っている人は、継続して利用できるようですが不具合が発生した場合、修正版へのアップデートは出来ないので今後が不安です。

# 無線 LAN 対応、低価格な日本語対応 skype 通話が出来るアイテムなんてありませんかね ?

すべて読む | モバイルセクション | インターネット | モバイル

関連ストーリー：
Skype の月額サービスにオンライン番号はつかない ? 2009年04月23日
iPhone 向け「Skype」を正式リリース 2009年04月01日
PSPでSkypeが使用可能に 2008年01月07日

by kineko (posted by reo) at March 10, 2010 02:30 AM

いずれ憲法にも記載か… 曰く、

Reuters の日本語抄訳記事によると、BBC World Service の調査によって世界の 5 人に 4 人 (79 %) はインターネットへのアクセスを「基本的権利の一つ (a fundamental right)」と考えていることが明らかにされたそうだ (BBC News の記事、調査報告詳報 [PDF]) 。

詳報によると、調査方法は日本を含む 26 カ国 26000 人以上に 2009 年 11 月から 2010 年 2 月まで各国の成人 (15 歳以上・18 歳以上など。日本は 20 歳以上) に面談または電話による調査で行ったもので、インターネット調査ではないことに注意。フィンランドおよびエストニアのような国ではすでに法的権利として認められている (/.J 記事) 。インターネット利用者と非利用者に分けた場合、利用者は 87 %、非利用者でも 71 % が持つべき権利と答えた。全体の 78 % はインターネットによって自由が得られると答え、90 % はインターネットは学ぶのに良いところ、51 % はSNSで過ごすのを楽しんでいると答えたそうだ。

また、日本では 84 % がインターネット無しには暮らせないと答え、インターネットによって自由が得られる、学べる場所だという意見がそれぞれ 94 %、95 % に達した。加えて、インターネットへの個人情報の流出への関心が高いのも日本の特徴だそうだ。

すべて読む | ITセクション | インターネット

関連ストーリー：
フィンランド、ブロードバンド接続を法的権利として定める 2009年10月19日

by reo at March 10, 2010 02:22 AM

無料サービスではセキュリティ面が不安ですか？富士通なら安心！≪今だけ20％オフ≫

March 10, 2010 02:22 AM

Massa

by digby


I don't want to write about Eric Massa but I guess I have to. I've met the guy a couple of times and admired his strong position on DADT and the wars in raq and Afghanistan. I assumed his opposition to health care reform (for not being liberal enough) was a way to thread the needle in his conservative district. I'm not sure how well that works, but I probably prefer it to having "no" voters use conservative talking points. I actually assumed he was one who might be persuaded to change his vote in the final days.

But that's all I know except for the fact that he was from a military family, as I am, served in the Navy for decades and seemed to be something of an eccentric iconoclast.

Now he's in the public eye having a very messy, very personal meltdown. In fact, his actions seem to me to be the work of a very troubled man who is in a lot of emotional pain. I certainly don't endorse his behavior if it's true. But I do have sympathy for someone who has to endure such a personal journey in front of the entire world, especially as he hasn't, as so many do, allowed his own confusion and self-loathing to deny others the equality they deserve.

So, I'll leave it to others to excoriate him for his erratic and self-destructive behavior. I just don't have the stomach for it. Howie Klein wrote a moving essay on this today that you might want to read. No excuses. But understanding.


.

March 10, 2010 02:06 AM

Andy Baio : Wired Reread, blogging the best ads from '90s-era Wired - also, the complete SPIN archives are on Google Books

March 10, 2010 02:00 AM

ある Anonymous Coward 曰く、

本家 /. の記事より。教育現場では様々な指導技術や手法が試されたりもしてきたが、教師の占める重要性については見過ごされがちであった。Newsweek の記事や NY Times の記事では、最近「良い教師」の重要性に関する記事を相次いで掲載しているが、それによると力の無い教師に 3 年間ついた生徒は、より力量のある教師についた生徒よりも平均して点数が 50 パーセント低いことが統計学的に明らかになっているという。同じ学校で、同じ学年を教えていても教師によって大きな差が発生し得るということだそうだ。

またビルゲイツのビル & メリンダ・ゲイツ財団も教師の質に着目しており、教員の質の向上を目指して 3.35 億ドル (約 300 億円) の投資を行うことを決定しているそうだ。財団としてはこのイニシアチブを通じて教員の質に重きを置いた政策をプッシュしていきたいとのこと。

さて、/.J 諸兄方の考える「良い教師」とは ?

すべて読む | Slashdotに聞けセクション | 教育

by reo at March 10, 2010 02:00 AM

無料サービスではセキュリティ面が不安ですか？富士通なら安心！≪今だけ20％オフ≫

March 10, 2010 02:00 AM

Girl: Dave! I haven't seen you in ages! How are you?
Dave, completely serious: Who are you?

--St. Mark's Place

March 10, 2010 02:00 AM

The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple's approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

So today we're posting the "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement"—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must "sign." Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked "I agree," public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on making any "public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple's express prior written approval." But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see what rules controlled the technology they could use with their phones. NASA responded with the Rev. 3-17-09 version of the agreement.

UPDATED: we are now also posting the most recent version of the agreement, dated January 2010.

This "license agreement" is particularly relevant right now, given the imminent launch of the iPad and anytime-now issuance of the U.S. Copyright Office's ruling regarding jailbreaking of the iPhone.

So what's in the Agreement? Here are a few troubling highlights:

Ban on Public Statements: As mentioned above, Section 10.4 prohibits developers, including government agencies such as NASA, from making any "public statements" about the terms of the Agreement. This is particularly strange, since the Agreement itself is not "Apple Confidential Information" as defined in Section 10.1. So the terms are not confidential, but developers are contractually forbidden from speaking "publicly" about them.

App Store Only: Section 7.2 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple's SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you're prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia or Rock Your Phone.

Ban on Reverse Engineering: Section 2.6 prohibits any reverse engineering (including the kinds of reverse engineering for interoperability that courts have recognized as a fair use under copyright law), as well as anything that would "enable others" to reverse engineer, the SDK or iPhone OS.

No Tinkering with Any Apple Products: Section 3.2(e) is the "ban on jailbreaking" provision that received some attention when it was introduced last year. Surprisingly, however, it appears to prohibit developers from tinkering with any Apple software or technology, not just the iPhone, or "enabling others to do so." For example, this could mean that iPhone app developers are forbidden from making iPods interoperate with open source software, for example.

You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so

Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can "revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time." Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.

We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks: Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages. That's pretty remarkable, considering that Apple holds a developer's reputational and commercial value in its hands—it's not as though the developer can reach its existing customers anywhere else. So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.

Overall, the Agreement is a very one-sided contract, favoring Apple at every turn. That's not unusual where end-user license agreements are concerned (and not all the terms may ultimately be enforceable), but it's a bit of a surprise as applied to the more than 100,000 developers for the iPhone, including many large public companies. How can Apple get away with it? Because it is the sole gateway to the more than 40 million iPhones that have been sold. In other words, it's only because Apple still "owns" the customer, long after each iPhone (and soon, iPad) is sold, that it is able to push these contractual terms on the entire universe of software developers for the platform.

In short, no competition among app stores means no competition for the license terms that apply to iPhone developers.

If Apple's mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition (or "generativity," in the words of Prof. Jonathan Zittrain) than the PC era that came before. It's frustrating to see Apple, the original pioneer in generative computing, putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads. If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord. Developers should demand better terms and customers who love their iPhones should back them.

by fred at March 10, 2010 01:49 AM

Is it real? Or is it Skytap?

Skytap - the Jeff Bezos-backed startup that lets you mimic internal IT infrastructure in the so-called cloud - has introduced a new set of automation tools designed to facilitate the creation of complex network toplogies on its floating interwebs service.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

March 10, 2010 01:38 AM

I know we are all riveted on Utah today, but take a moment, please, because this is important. Jonathan Schwartz, formerly CEO of Sun, has a personal blog, What I Couldn't Say ..., where he has begun to tell us what he couldn't tell us before about events during his tenure there. He has a interesting tale to tell about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer asking Sun to pay patent royalties to Microsoft on ... OpenOffice.

March 10, 2010 01:32 AM

ある Anonymous Coward 曰く、

本家 /. 記事より。Ars Technica では広告をブロックしないよう読者に求める試みの一環として、広告ブロックツールの利用者には表示されないコンテンツを12時間掲載するという実験を行ったそうだ (Ars Technica の記事) 。今回の実験ではあるメジャーなツールのみにを対象としていたとのことで、実験は成功したという。

実験の目的は広告のブロックがサイト運営に与える影響に目を向けてもらうことにあったそうで、記事では下記のような主張が展開されている。

広告のブロックはあなたが好んで利用しているサイトにとって致命的である可能性があるということだ。広告をブロックすることが、何らかの盗み行為だとか、倫理的でないとか、不道徳だとか、悪だとかと言うつもりはない。しかし、誰かが仕事を失うことやコンテンツの減少に繋がる可能性もあり、またコンテンツの質の低下は免れられないだろう。

サイトにとってはデススパイラルに陥ることを意味するかもしれない。読者の皆もよく知っていると思うが、サイトの広告収入が減るにつれて如何わしい広告を掲載せざるを得なくなる場合が多い。

Ars Technica では広告の質について定期的に意見を交わしていることを誇りに思っており、この 12 年間、読者に代わって戦うべき時はそのようしてきた。勿論、時には隙を突いて煩わしい広告が出現したりするだろうが、そういう場合もあるということだ。しかし、このサイトの読者であれば、そのような広告は稀にしかないことはお分かり頂けるだろう。

我々は毎月、読者にそぐわないような広告を不採用にしてきている。この姿勢に対して、読者の皆には広告をブロックしないようお願いしたいだけである。

すべて読む | ITセクション | インターネット | ビジネス

by reo at March 10, 2010 01:30 AM

A typical neuroscience paper (or a typical report on one) is a laundry list of structure:function relationships between brain regions and the mental tasks they perform. The amygdala deals with registering rewards, the hippocampus handles memory, and so on. These relationships have been the result of over a century of work, starting with rare cases of brain injury and building through modern medical imaging, which can detect ever-smaller lesions and associate neural activity with specific cognitive processes. Doctors routinely rely on the combination of brain imaging and structure:function relationships for diagnostic purposes, but is wider society willing to trust it in the courtroom, where it might make the difference between guilt and innocence?

That question was handled in a rather unusual manner at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: a mock trial. Most other panels consisted of a set of scientists who each gave a fairly standard presentation. This one was presided over by Louis Rodriguez, an Orange County Superior Court Judge, and featured a law school professor and a practicing attorney, each with a neuroscientist as an expert witness. Although the proceedings were heavily scripted, anyone who's sat through a jury trial would recognize that they were a reasonable attempt to approximate a normal courtroom experience.

Read the comments on this post

March 10, 2010 01:24 AM

The trading panel and experts discussed what trades they would make in the next 12 months.

March 10, 2010 01:08 AM

nelson : iPhone dev agreement - Abusive contract

Tags : iphone apple mac software eff

March 10, 2010 01:00 AM

Five years after announcing its development, and following a month-long online campaign trailing the launch, Pentax has finally unveiled its much anticipated 645D medium format digital camera. The first digital version of the company's 645 medium format camera system, it features a 40MP, 44 x 33 CCD sensor, 921k dot 3.0" LCD and is compatible with the existing 645 system lenses. The camera will initially be available only in the Japanese market at a suggested retail price of ¥850,000 (~ US $9,400) from May 2010.

March 10, 2010 01:00 AM

In conjunction with its announcement of the 645D medium format camera, Pentax has announced the smc D FA 645 55mm F2.8 AL[IF] SDM AW lens. First in the D FA 645 lens series, this weather-resistant prime lens features a Supersonic Direct-drive Motor (SDM) autofocus drive and Quick-Shift for instant AF/MF switching. It is also the company's first 645 system lens to incorporates a rounded diaphragm.The 55mm lens will be available alongside the 645D camera at a suggested retail price of ¥100,000 (~ US $1,100).

March 10, 2010 01:00 AM

I wanted to post an update on my quest for replacing my paper-based planner with something electronic. After all, now that everyone knows that I'm crazy, I had to make sure everyone knows exactly how crazy.

I started off, very successfully, with Things on the desktop. I was in love. Data entry was quick and easy. The streamlined user interface, the general organization, flexible (hierarchical) tags, and project creation aligned perfectly with what I wanted. I spent about 2-3 weeks with Things, but ultimately I had some problems.

As I've said before, multi-machine sync is non-existant. I hacked a solution with DropBox, but every now and then I forgot to quit the app before I shut down my machine and had to go back and do it before I could run it anywhere else without possible database conflicts. Annoying. While I didn't buy the accompanying iPhone app, having to sync it on the local network while the app was running was a non-starter. When running out the door, I would never, ever, be able to do that, and that negates the entire purpose of having a portable app. The Things folks are still promising this is coming, but they have yet to ship it, so I can't rely on it.

As my free trial was winding down, I thought about taking some time and just writing my own based on Google's AppEngine. I wrote a long white paper of all the features I wanted (basically summarizing why I really liked Things), and just as I was starting to find other Googlers to help me in 20% time, I found Get It Done. It's a web-based version of Things, everything but the color scheme. Spot on. As a web app, my data is always available in the cloud. As a well-written AJAXy web app, I can use native-like gestures such as drag and drop to organize tasks and move items around.

One problem with Get It Done is that it's subscription ($40/yr). Cheaper than buying planner refills each year, but still a lot. I took advantage of the 15day trial and ended up making a lot of suggestions and reporting bugs. To my surprise, the developer responded, usually within an hour or two. Sometimes he even made minor changes I asked for on the website the same day. That's in direct contrast to the Things developers who rarely respond to the forums and don't seem to update the app that often. I figure if the developer is going to listen and be responsive, that's worth the subscription to fund future development.

I've been using GID for about a month now and while I like it, there are problems. I don't really like how projects are done. They're nothing more than tags, so to create a new project you have to add even more tags. There's no such thing as completing a project or being able to mark it as complete because it's not a real entity. Makes it hard to track completed projects. Speaking of tags, I didn't know how much I appreciated Things' concept of hierarchical tags until it was gone. In order to simulate it, I'm tagging each item with multiple tags which gets tedious and clutters the UI. There's also no way to filter on multiple tags. Finally, one of GID's greatest benefits - being a web app - is its biggest drawback. It's a web app. It's slower. It's clunky. Sometimes it feels really clunky. Entering data isn't as streamlined as a native app. While it does a really good job of emulating the native UI, it's got a long way to go to actually replicate it.

Things would be a slam dunk if only the data could be sync'd somewhere easily. I'll use GID for the time being, but I'll still be keeping an eye out to switch. Have I mentioned now nice the Things UI is?

by pinkerton at March 10, 2010 12:52 AM

Those of you that have been paying attention to the Django release roadmap will have noticed that the original estimated release date for Django 1.2 final has passed, but we haven't actually made a final release.

Although Django's release cycle is generally date-based, we also try to keep our release dates flexible to account for bugfixing time. At the beginning of the development sprints at PyCon a few weeks ago, over 300 tickets were still open on the Django 1.2 milestone. Now it's down to 120 (we've been clearing out, on average, about ten tickets a day), but that's still a lot more than we're comfortable shipping; as a result, we're pushing back the final 1.2 release a bit.

Some of the tickets still open for 1.2 are documentation or translation updates; these will be dealt with before the final 1.2 release. Others are minor bugs or edge cases which are difficult to trigger or unlikely to cause serious problems in actual deployment; these tickets will likely be bumped to a pure-bugfix release in the 1.2 series, or to 1.3 as warranted.

Over the next couple of days, the Django core team will be reviewing all of the currently-open tickets, and identifying those which:

Tickets which don't meet these criteria may be removed from the 1.2 milestone, or may simply be left out of the final release. We won't forget about these issues -- they'll still be in Trac, and they will be addressed -- but bugfix work prior to the 1.2 release will focus in major issues fitting the criteria above.

We're sensitive to the fact that during the Django 1.2 release cycle, we haven't paid as much attention to bugs and smaller features as we have done during previous releases. To address this, we're considering making Django 1.3 a "feature light" release -- that is, we will spend more time focussing on little features and long standing bugs, rather than adding lots of big features like we have done with Django 1.2. Once 1.2 lands, we'll have some more details about our exact plans for the 1.3 cycle.

Until then, we'll be posting here every few days to give you a status update, letting you know how many tickets remain, any problems we foresee, and to provide an updated estimate of the 1.2 final delivery date.

So: there are 120 tickets remaining, but quite a few of these of these will be bumped from the final release. It's difficult to know exactly how much work is left before we do the final ticket cull, but our first-cut revised estimate is for an RC1 release around March 22, with a final release around March 29. This is, for those of you who were following along during the early parts of the 1.2 cycle, roughly consistent with extra time added to the release schedule for the 1.2 alpha and beta milestones.

As always, any assistance preparing, reviewing or testing patches is most welcome; the more help we get, the sooner we can release. If you want to help out, check out the 1.2 todo list, find something that sounds interesting and dig in!

March 10, 2010 12:36 AM

Cramer said the retailer reported a great quarter and to buy on any weakness.

March 10, 2010 12:23 AM

Cramer identified 10 companies that he says need to pull their own weight if the market is going to move higher.

March 10, 2010 12:14 AM

At the backend of last I year I wrote a blog entry on decoding json on Silverlight. Well, the time has finally come and we're now encoding json to post back to our Django application. ... [292 words]

March 10, 2010 12:01 AM

Rod Begbie : Books: Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson - Great take-down of 37Signals's bluster by someone who manages real, non-internet-fairy-dust companies. "Don't try and make a name for your software company by issuing such over-heated generalisations."

Tags : 37signals bookreview theemperor'snewclothes

March 10, 2010 12:00 AM

Andy Baio : Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer - related: McSweeney's categories for the meta-awards

March 10, 2010 12:00 AM

Andy Baio : Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform Lazy Sunday live - for the first time, backed by The Roots

March 10, 2010 12:00 AM

March 9th (that's tomorrow at the time of typing) IronPython in Action is the Manning deal of the day. This is a one day offer with a special discount.

You can get the discount by buying IronPython in Action from the Manning website and using the discount code dotd0310.

It isn't only IronPython in Action that is on offer, you can also get Quick Python by Vern Ceder.

March 09, 2010 11:58 PM

Rumors the government will sell some of its toxic waste Citigroup, AIG etc spurred some bullish action Tuesday. Wednesday brings more economic data.

March 09, 2010 11:41 PM

Citigroup shares rally on a research firm report saying that the beleaguered bank is back -- that is, back from the brink and back in business.

March 09, 2010 11:41 PM

The Census is a popular topic of right-wing conspiracy theories and Fox News host Glenn Beck spent a good portion of radio show today fear-mongering about it. Going through the form, he determined that the government doesn’t have the right to ask any of the questions — except for the first one asking how many people live in your home.

He took particular issue with a question asking for the respondent’s race. But after Beck’s co-host pointed out that the question has been part of the Census since the Founding Fathers’ time, Beck twisted the three-fifths law to claim that the Census is now breeding slavery:

BECK: Why were they asking the race question, you said when, in 1790? … Right, they want to know, do you count as three-fifths? Do you count at all? So, you have to know how many slaves did you have? People find that offensive today because the idea was, if we’re going to count, we want to know how many are here for services etc. etc. and slaves would get less. Well that’s not right. One. One. ‘I’m not three-fifths, I’m one. Whites are not worth than me.’ Now reverse it, why are they asking this question today?

CO-HOST: Because minorities are worth more than whites.

BECK: Exactly right. So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a monitory. Well there is no difference. The reason you don’t answer the race question is because one, everyone counts as one. All men are created equal. If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery and that everyone should count the same, do not answer the race question. How dare you. How dare you. At least in 1790, they were doing it to slow the South down on slavery. To try to stop it as much as they can. Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery. Your dependence on the master in Washington. No way, don’t answer that question.

Listen here:

Beck seems to be arguing that because a handful of federal programs provide funding to help minority communities, minorities are “worth more” than white people. Of course, the Census actually counts everyone equally, as the Constitution requires, so Beck’s complaints seem aimed more at civil rights programs than at the Census.

Moreover, there is a big “difference” between a law that counted people as less than human and a question that helps minority communities get needed aid. The Census’ race question is “critical” to enforcing civil rights policies and is used to “promote equal employment opportunities and to assess racial disparities in health and environmental risks.” So by urging his listeners to not complete this question, he’s potentially damaging these important efforts.

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, the three-fifths law was not an abolitionist provision designed to “slow the South down on slavery,” as Beck claims. Many of the Founders were from the South and owned slaves, and there were other pro-slavery clasuses in the Constitution that Beck’s revisionist history can’t explain.

So does Beck think the Census has a “deep seated hatred of white people or white culture”?

by Alex Seitz-Wald at March 09, 2010 11:40 PM

Summary

• These weekly posts explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers. There’s a lengthy overview of the Add-on Review Process posted in this blog as well. We’re just getting started with these, so your feedback is greatly appreciated.
• Most nominations are being reviewed within 3 weeks. Our goal is to reduce this to 2 weeks before April.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days. We want to reduce this even more in the future, but nominations are the current priority.

The Review Queues

• The stats are taken from the latest queue report from last Friday.
• 94 new nominations that week. 189 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 86 new updates that week. 87 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 289 reviews performed by AMO Editors so far in March. There were 20 editors performing reviews last week.

See the Add-on Review Process and You for information on how to check your current add-on status.

Notes for Developers

• Useful Information for Add-on Authors. How to improve review times for your add-on, information about the review process, etc.
• Bugzilla information for editors. How to file AMO bugs, how to flag bugs relevant for editors, and information on current and future AMO version releases. Let us/me know if you want to help fixing AMO bugs. Thanks!
• Private Browsing Mode support will soon become a requirement for add-ons that handle browsing data.
• Adding SeaMonkey 2 support in your add-ons is easy and strongly encouraged. Learn how.
• I’m currently working on porting the XUL School Tutorial for Extension Developers to MDC. This tutorial was originally developed by Glaxstar (now Appcoast) back when I worked for them. I wrote most of it, and now Appcoast has graciously donated the full tutorial contents to Mozilla. I expect to have ported all of the material within this month. If you’re interested in translating the tutorial to another language, please contact me and I’ll help you as much as I can.

Jorge Villalobos

Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla

ShareThis

by Jorge at March 09, 2010 11:36 PM

Stale Cupcakes

by digby

Susan G at Dkos caught a brilliant illustration of the Village mentality in this New York magazine profile of Liz Cheney:

Fox is a regular pulpit, of course, but Liz is also all over NBC, where she happens to be social friends with Meet the Press host David Gregory (whose wife worked with Liz ’s husband at the law firm Latham & Watkins), family friends with Justice Department reporter Pete Williams (Dick Cheney’s press aide when he was secretary of Defense), and neighborhood friends with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Carter-administration national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. When Mika criticized Dick Cheney on her show last year, the former vice-president sent her a box of chocolate cupcakes.

[...]

Liz’s friends say she sets the bar for all-American normality: She watches Mad Men and 24 on TV, drives an SUV, attends Girl Scout meetings, and is frequently spotted on the sidelines of soccer fields, trading gossip with people like Terry McAuliffe, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, and other power players whose kids go to the Country Day School or the Potomac School.

This idea that the national press corps can cozy up to sources or people in power they cover during afternoon soccer games or over Saturday night dinners, then turn around and hold their feet to the fire is ridiculous. You know it. I know it. Everyone outside of Beltway zip codes knows that. Hell, anyone who's ever tried to challenge a neighbor at a local meeting knows it.

But the Village? Meh. They have their own rules. And cupcakes.

March 09, 2010 11:30 PM

In the GNOME beer event, I had a nice chat with ebassi about the problems around our build configuration system and how things like CMake, SCons and Waf do not get the full picture and do not cover some of the really strange corncercases that autotools supports and therefore, coming up with a solution would be a 1 year work with a team of really experienced engineers.

As stubborn as I am, I decided to prove him wrong so I give you BuilDj:

The Problem

My main problem with our current Autotools situation are these:

• It is not portable as it encourages strong use of Bash and command line tools which ends up making it really hard to use on a non POSIX system, you know, like that used by 92% of the desktop users, even if the source code itself is perfectly portable.
• It gets on your way, a lot. Sometimes I refrained from writing some testcases just to avoid to add the Autotools boilerplate.
• Really bad documented, still.
• You need to learn M4/Autoconf, Automake, Make and Bash to use it properly, as if learning C, C++ or Vala and worrying about the problem the programmer is trying to solve is not hard enough.
• None extends it because it's hard to extend.
• Its hard to read and understand even if you eventually wrote it yourself, makes code refactoring a big pain.
• You simply can't parse autotools and have an IDE or a continous integration tool to understand what's there.
• The most important one, it scares peoples away, damaging our mindshare, making potential contributors go away. It drains the fun out of our platform.

Requirements

We need a human+machine friendly project description format, that it's pleasant to the eye when you read it, that it's intuitive enough to let you understand what's going on even if you never saw it before.
A format that gets out of your way!

It should support all of the common tasks a GNOME maintainer does (in-line .pc and .desktop file definition, mkenums, gobject introspection support, cross-compilation support, pkg-config oriented, xdg mimetype registration/definition, integration with intltool), but it should suppor them in a meaningful and unobtrusive way.

It should not be a programming language, but support embedable programming extensions with a well documented API, so that IDEs can integrate it.

My Proposal

 A JSON description format called BuilDj that is build-system agnostic (although its reference implementation is done with Waf)

{
	"project":
	{
		"name": "BuilDj Test",
		"version": "0.0.1",
		"url": "http://www.codethink.co.uk"
	},
	"requires":
	{
		"gtk+-2.0": 
		{
			"type": "package",
			"version": "2.14",
			"mandatory": "True"
		}
	},
	"targets":
	{
		"my_shared_lib":
		{
			"type": "sharedlib",
			"tool": "cc",
			"input": ["lib.c"],
			"version": "1.2.3"
		},
		"my_gtk_program":
		{
			"type": "program",
			"tool": "cc",
			"input": ["gtk_program.c"],
			"uses": ["my_shared_lib"],
			"packages": ["gtk+-2.0"]
		},
		"my_vala_program":
		{
			"type": "program",
			"tool": "vala",
			"input": ["vala_program.vala"],
			"packages": ["gtk+-2.0"]
		}
}

I don't even need to explain what that means right? By the way, this stuff already works, check the git repository.

Currently it is implemented as a waf wscript that parses the project.js json file, I'm not really interested in entering the build system wars but focuing on having a reference implementation of the format.
I choosed waf because it was the only one that offered most of the features I want as an approachable API and it only adds python as a dependency.

Implementations of the format in other systems are more than welcome, but current development will stick to waf in the foreseeable future.

I'm planning to propose and mentor this work as a Summer of Code project so that we can implement the missing basic features and support for a few GNOME apps.

There's a lot of work to do, support for C++, library and function checking, system type sizes, full cross compilation support. We already have some mockups and plans for those, and the waf maintainer has shown himself quite happy to accept patches upstream for the general purpose tools and that make things easier.

Despite the missing features, it surprisingly itches some of my own scratches already.

P.S. Anjuta and MonoDevelop guys, if you're listening, I'd love to get your feedback!

March 09, 2010 11:18 PM

Agrees to safeguard customer data

An Arizona company that sells services designed to prevent identity theft has agreed to pay $12m to settle charges it oversold their effectiveness and didn't adequately protect sensitive customer data.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

March 09, 2010 11:17 PM

THE OTHER DICK DROPS: Reader “Ben H.” suggested Wonkette liveblog Eric Massa’s appearance on Glenn Beck this afternoon. Wonkette, however, is not capable of watching the Glenn Beck Show under any circumstances. This is unfortunate because: “Representative Eric J. Massa, who resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, vehemently denied any wrongdoing during a television appearance late on Tuesday even as he described having tickle fights with staffers in a house they shared. But he insisted that was as far as it went.” HAHAHAHAHAH. Tickle fights are actually gayer than anal sex, is the thing. [NYT]

by Jim Newell at March 09, 2010 11:17 PM

Would it surprise you to find out that it turns out that apparently one of the jurors might be related to one of SCO's prior corporate officers? At any rate they have the same last name, and Salt Lake City is a big place, so perhaps not. Novell noticed the similarity in names, according to our reporter today, MSS2, only after jury selection was over.

MSS2 has just sent me his first report of day 2 of the jury trial in SCO v. Novell, with more to come. Today was opening arguments by both sides. And we have lots more goodies for you from two eyewitnesses, MSS2 and Tilendor. We begin with SCO's opening argument by Stuart Singer. All I can say after reading it is maybe you needed to be there. Or SCO must be a slow learner or Mr. Singer never reads Groklaw, or ... well, see what you think.

March 09, 2010 11:14 PM

Facebook is allegedly planning to roll out location sharing capabilities next month, once again playing catch-up to other services that have gained popularity thanks to location data. The rumor comes courtesy of anonymous sources who have been "briefed on the project" speaking to the New York Times, who said that Facebook will announce the feature at Facebook's annual f8 conference in late April.

The company's plans for such a feature have not been entirely secret—Facebook hinted at location features when it updated its privacy policy in November. Like other postings made to Facebook, location information will only be made available to the people you decide to broadcast it to.

"When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post," reads the policy. "If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate."

The location features will come in the form of an API for third-party developers and from Facebook, according to the Times' sources.

The feature will undoubtedly be popular among many of Facebook's 400 million users, as it has already proven itself with other services. For example, Twitter added geolocation to its API last year, not to mention that Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Latitude, and Loopt have all built their success solely upon the use of user location data. Needless to say, it's not something that will be new to the Web, though it probably will be new to a sizable chunk of Facebook's audience. Let's just hope the company rolls it out the right way, as implied by its privacy policy, and doesn't end up broadcasting everyone's locations to the world by default.

Read the comments on this post

March 09, 2010 11:10 PM

Monitor Greece and net position data for potential upside reversals and bottoms.

March 09, 2010 11:09 PM

Toyota may be out of the frying pan for now as far as congressional hearings are concerned, but it's far from out of the fire -- as evidenced Monday a Prius that sped out of control at 94 mph on a San Diego highway.

March 09, 2010 11:07 PM

Andy Baio : Adam Savage's pursuit of the perfect Blade Runner gun replica - related: his quest for the perfect replica Maltese Falcon and dodo skeleton

March 09, 2010 11:00 PM

NYU guy #1: Yeah, she totally came!
NYU guy #2: Twice!

--Cloister Cafe

March 09, 2010 11:00 PM

Stocks rise modestly Tuesday, but the S&P 500 index is now up roughly 68% a year to the day after the markets hit their financial-crisis lows and began to rebound. Gregg Greenberg has The Real Story

March 09, 2010 10:58 PM

Last week, the Washington Post published a front-page photo of two (gay?) men kissing in the courthouse’s “gay marriage line.” Many readers were furious. Today, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander determines once and for all whether this gay kiss ever even happened.

No, something else. He is determining once and for all… something else. Was it inappropriate for the Post to display this news photo of hot man-on-man sexy kiss time so prominently in its print newspaper, which America’s seniors read in the privacy of their own homes?

A few of the readers have engaged in rants, often with anti-gay slurs. One called me to complain about “promoting a faggot lifestyle.” Another complained about the photo in an e-mail to the two Post reporters who wrote Thursday’s story about the licenses: “That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women.”

But most simply said The Post had offended their sensibilities by publishing the photo, especially on the front page.

[...]

Wrote Lee Miller of Columbia: “I would appreciate it if your cover pictures would not be so disturbing where my kids can see it easily on the kitchen table… please don’t shove this “Gay” business in our face. This is something that should have shown up on an inside page or two (without the picture).”

In comments to the ombudsman’s call-in line (202.334.7582), one reader said, “the picture of two guys kissing makes me cringe.” Another called it “ridiculous,” adding: “Put it on page 10 or page four, put it in the paper, but I do not like it right there where I can’t avoid looking at it.”

Summary:

– No fucking gay faggots should be on the front page, stupid fucking faggots. Real faggots marry women.

– “Gay business” should not be shoved down my kids’ throats.

– Show the photo on an inside page and don’t show the photo.

– Don’t put the photo on the front page, because then people can’t help but stare at it constantly, amirite? (Thank you, caller got-no-pants.)

Ombudsman Andrew Alexander, however, insults all of these folks in his final paragraph:

There was a time, after court-ordered integration, when readers complained about front-page photos of blacks mixing with whites. Today, photo images of same-sex couples capture the same reality of societal change.

Ha ha, who says these same complainers ever accepted the black/white photographs? ASK ‘EM ABOUT THOSE, IN 2010.

Readers react to photo of two men kissing [WP/Omblog]

by Jim Newell at March 09, 2010 10:56 PM

Here's how some of Monday's 'Mad Money' stocks fared on Tuesday.

March 09, 2010 10:48 PM

When I started rewriting the API for addons.mozilla.org, my views were mostly the same: get some data and render it as either JSON or XML. I also wanted all my API methods to take an api_version parameter, so I decided class based views would be best. This way my classes could just inherit from a base class.

To do this I had to implement a __call__ method. This works fine, except I wanted to store things into the class -- after all the whole point of my use of classes was to keep the code a bit more compact, and cleaner. So, why pass the api_version around everywhere? Unfortunately thread-safety comes to play, and you need a separate instance of your class for each request.

λ

Django's urlpatterns expects a callable object. So you can't give it an instance of AddonDetailView(). But you could give it a callable that creates an instance of AddonDetailView() and passes it *args and **kwargs. Luckily python has lambda functions. You can note how we solved that in our urlpatterns.

λ λ

But wrapping all your urls with lambda is tedious and remembering to pass *args and **kwargs is error prone.

So let's make a lambda function that returns... a lambda function that turns an instance of our class into a callable.

We can now return to coding and not think about thread safety.

λλλ

by Dave Dash at March 09, 2010 10:44 PM

Erin Rosa of Campus Progress reports that NumbersUSA, a “mainstream” immigration restrictionist group with troublesome ties to hate groups, hosted a public conference call last night to discuss “a variety of tactics to thwart an upcoming march on Washington DC by immigrant rights supporters.” One tactic proposed on the call involves portraying women from Mexico as the “new welfare queens”:

CALLER 1: I would like to speak out on something. I feel the new welfare queen in America today is women coming from Mexico with a bunch of babies. So I feel they’re all coming over here and having all these babies, they are the new welfare queen in America….

New people in America today with a lot of babies, ’cause they coming from Mexico having a bunch of babies. And our tax dollars is taking care of them babies, ’cause the mothers are illegal. So to me, we need to speak out about letting them know they’re the new welfare queens in America.

CALLER 2: That was well said brother!

MACDONALD: We will make a note of that. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

CALLER 3: One piece of information would be, they aren’t babies, they’re dependents. Don’t use babies. It’s emotional to them. They have dependents. We have babies.

Callers also complained that tea party organizers are “for the illegals.” Despite acknowledging that FreemdomWorks chairman Dick Armey funds and inspired the movement itself, Armey was dismissed as not being a “true Tea Party patriot” due to his pro-immigration views. Another caller indicated that tea party organizers specifically asked her to put immigration within the movement’s focus — limited taxation — and asked for more advice on “putting it in their terms.” Roy Beck, Executive Director, responded that “we’ll be a whole lot better off if when [sic] we talk about illegal immigrants we leave off the Hispanic-Latino stuff” and agreed that the tea party’s narrative was the “best way to talk about this.”

However, as long Beck counts on the support of activists who want to equate Mexican mothers with welfare queens, he may have a hard time disassociating his movement from the “Hispanic-Latino stuff.” It says a lot when even Armey perceives anti-immigrant groups as toxic. With his eye quietly on the growing Latino electorate, Armey has explicitly stated that he’s not interested in associating with folks like former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), citing his “harsh and uncharitable and mean-spirited” immigration positions as his number one reason.

Armey isn’t alone. Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) and Fox News host Glenn Beck are two tea party darlings who have also expressed a need for a more humane immigration policy. Nonetheless, anti-immigrant nativists have done their best to exploit the tea bagger rage that folks like Armey, Palin, and Beck have nurtured. As a result, groups like NumbersUSA have achieved at least some success in recruiting a number of vocal supporters who seek to define both immigrants and “tea party patriots” on their own terms.

Cross-posted on the Wonk Room.

by anill at March 09, 2010 10:41 PM

TUESDAY'S MINI-REPORT.... Today's edition of quick hits: * Israel puts Biden in an awkward spot: "Hours after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed unyielding American support for Israel's security here on Tuesday, Israel's interior ministry announced 1,600 new housing...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 10:30 PM

The Microsoft browser ballot released this month to Windows users in the EU is already doing Microsoft's rivals a favor. Two of the major competitors to Internet Explorer have seen an increase in downloads, while the other two are not willing to share data. We contacted the makers of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera; here's what they had to say.

Opera, the Norwegian browser maker that first filed a complaint with the European Union in December 2007, accusing Microsoft of violating EU antitrust law by bundling IE with Windows, is pleased with the progress its browser is making. "Since the browser choice screen rollout, Opera downloads have more than tripled in major European countries, such as Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, and the UK," an Opera spokesperson told Ars. The company said it currently did not have more detailed numbers but plans on sharing more as they become available.

Mozilla, which has a particularly solid foothold in Europe, was slightly more specific in the progress it was seeing with its browser downloads. "Early data suggests 50,000 to 100,000 new users chose Firefox as a direct result of seeing the Ballot Choice screen," a Mozilla spokesperson told Ars. "We expect these numbers will increase as the Ballot Choice rolls out in additional countries and will share updated metrics as they become available."

Apple did not respond at all, and while Google was happy to respond, the company wouldn't get specific: "We generally don't share download stats on that granular of a level," a Google spokesperson told Ars. The company did not respond to a follow-up question if Chrome saw an increase in number of downloads period. While Apple and Google haven't said much, we think it's likely that both have also seen a bump in the number of downloads of their browsers. Hundreds of thousands of users who may not have known of a world outside of Internet Explorer are being confronted with the alternatives.

The browser ballot will be presented on Windows computers across the EU for at least the next five years. Microsoft's rivals are, however, already pushing to have it appear outside of Europe as well.

Read the comments on this post

March 09, 2010 10:22 PM

American Eagle Outfitters is shedding its Martin + Osa concept.

March 09, 2010 10:18 PM

First Solar announced a deal to supply PG&E with renewable electricity.

March 09, 2010 10:16 PM

Crude oil futures slumped Tuesday, trading in a tight range before settling ahead of weak weekly inventory data.

March 09, 2010 10:14 PM

In recent days, prominent conservatives have denounced a McCarthyite ad questioning the loyalties of Justice Department lawyers who have represented Guantanamo detainees in the past. The ad was produced by Keep America Safe, the new group led by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney. Today, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) added his name to the opposition:

“I’ve been a military lawyer for almost 30 years, I represented people as a defense attorney in the military that were charged with some pretty horrific acts, and I gave them my all,” said Graham. “This system of justice that we’re so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer.”

– DJ Carella

by Guest Blogger at March 09, 2010 10:03 PM

The Big Difference

by tristero

From dsnodgrass at La Vida Locavore:

In Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case which could have an enormous effect on the future of the American food industry. This is Monsanto's third appeal of the case, and if they win a favorable ruling from the high court, a deregulated Monsanto may find itself in position to corner the markets of numerous U.S. crops, and to litigate conventional farmers into oblivion.
Here's where it gets a bit dicier. Two Supreme Court justices have what appear to be direct conflicts of interest.

Stephen Breyer

Charles Breyer, the judge who ruled in the original decision of 2007 which is being appealed, is Stephen Breyer's brother, who apparently views this as a conflict of interest and has recused himself.

Clarence Thomas

From the years 1976 - 1979, Thomas worked as an attorney for Monsanto. Thomas apparently does not see this as a conflict of interest and has not recused himself.

Fox, meet henhouse.

March 09, 2010 10:00 PM

E*Trade is reportedly being sued for $100 million in damages by actress Lindsay Lohan, who alleges a character in one of the company's commercials is named after her.

March 09, 2010 09:55 PM

Stocks were up modestly Tuesday, but the S&P is up roughly 68% a year after markets hit their 2008 lows and began to rebound.

March 09, 2010 09:46 PM

    // Only add setZeroTimeout to the window object, and hide everything
    // else in a closure.
    (function() {
        var timeouts = [];
        var messageName = "zero-timeout-message";

        // Like setTimeout, but only takes a function argument.  There's
        // no time argument (always zero) and no arguments (you have to
        // use a closure).
        function setZeroTimeout(fn) {
            timeouts.push(fn);
            window.postMessage(messageName, "*");
        }

        function handleMessage(event) {
            if (event.source == window && event.data == messageName) {
                event.stopPropagation();
                if (timeouts.length > 0) {
                    var fn = timeouts.shift();
                    fn();
                }
            }
        }

        window.addEventListener("message", handleMessage, true);

        // Add the one thing we want added to the window object.
        window.setZeroTimeout = setZeroTimeout;
    })();

by David Baron at March 09, 2010 09:45 PM

&lt;p&gt;After analyzing dozens of Hollywood films, &lt;a href="http://www.physorg.com/news185781475.html"&gt;a team of researchers has found evidence&lt;/a&gt; that the visual rhythm of movies at the shot level matches a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation, the same pattern that is found in dozens of natually occurring phenomena, including the length of the human attention span.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;These results suggest that Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length. For example, action sequences are typically a cluster of relatively short shots, whereas dialogue sequences (with alternating shots and reverse-shots focused sequentially on the speakers) are likely to be a cluster of longer shots. In this manner and others, film editors and directors have incrementally increased their control over the visual momentum of their narratives, making the relations among shot lengths more coherent over a 70-year span.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Modern action movies are particularly adept at matching the audience's attention span in this manner. &lt;a href="http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pubs/cuttingetalpsychsci10.pdf"&gt;The full paper is available here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/mathematics"&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/movies"&gt;movies&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/science"&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 09:44 PM

&lt;p&gt;In addition to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i2HKJ8GjTn5F6uP8kV5O9yznKNbQ"&gt;Australian scientists have found evidence that humans can also taste fat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;"We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive," Keast told AFP. "We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes)."&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/food"&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/science"&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 09:44 PM

&lt;p&gt;After analyzing dozens of Hollywood films, &lt;a href="http://www.physorg.com/news185781475.html"&gt;a team of researchers has found evidence&lt;/a&gt; that the visual rhythm of movies at the shot level matches a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation, the same pattern that is found in dozens of natually occurring phenomena, including the length of the human attention span.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;These results suggest that Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length. For example, action sequences are typically a cluster of relatively short shots, whereas dialogue sequences (with alternating shots and reverse-shots focused sequentially on the speakers) are likely to be a cluster of longer shots. In this manner and others, film editors and directors have incrementally increased their control over the visual momentum of their narratives, making the relations among shot lengths more coherent over a 70-year span.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Modern action movies are particularly adept at matching the audience's attention span in this manner. &lt;a href="http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pubs/cuttingetalpsychsci10.pdf"&gt;The full paper is available here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/mathematics"&gt;mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/movies"&gt;movies&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/science"&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 09:44 PM

&lt;p&gt;In addition to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i2HKJ8GjTn5F6uP8kV5O9yznKNbQ"&gt;Australian scientists have found evidence that humans can also taste fat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;"We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive," Keast told AFP. "We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes)."&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/food"&gt;food&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/science"&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 09:44 PM

Washington Mutual shares weathered a fourth-straight volatile session Tuesday amid expectations that a settlement between the bankrupt thrift and JPMorgan could come this week.

March 09, 2010 09:43 PM

LOSING OLD FRIENDS BEFORE FINDING NEW ONES.... For all the renewed sense of optimism and momentum surrounding health care reform, never, ever, overlook Democrats' capacity to shoot themselves in the foot. If health care reform stands any chance at all,...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 09:40 PM

WEIRD EDWARDS SLAVE & WIFE LITERALLY GOING TO JAIL FOR 100 YEARS: Holy potatoes, the judge actually went through with it! This is bigger than Judy Miller and Obama combined: “PITTSBORO, NC (WTVD) — A judge ordered Andrew Young and his wife jailed Tuesday until they produce a sex tape in the lawsuit filed against them by John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter.” SHOW THE INTERNET FIRST. [ABC 11]

by Jim Newell at March 09, 2010 09:38 PM

An investor expects significant upside in the stock, with a quick rally perhaps throughout the next month.

March 09, 2010 09:33 PM

Google's recent announcement of a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home testbed has communities across the US salivating—but imagine what the Internet might be like if that connection to your home were even faster. Say... 100Gbps. In less than 20 years, such speeds will be possible, but only for companies who installed the right sort of fiber architecture.

The UK telecoms regulator Ofcom commissioned a lengthy report on the future of fiber (PDF) (or "fibre," in this case) from the firm Analysys Mason. In it, the company sketched out the future of fiber capacity with a pair of handy charts. Both are clear: between 2025 and 2030, shared fiber tech will be able to offer 10Gpbs to each user; individual fiber can offer a full 100Gbps. Whether ISPs will support it or not is a separate question.

Read the comments on this post

March 09, 2010 09:33 PM

Look everyone, Red State’s Erick Erickson is trying to pilfer more money from Amazon.com, with gimmicks! (ERICK HOW CAN WE DO THIS TOO?)

What happened yesterday is that Charlie Crist suggested Marco Rubio got a back wax, and now Erick Erickson wants people to send back wax to Charlie Crist. HEY-O!

We’re glad that the right wing is caring about this Florida Senate primary, so we don’t have to. Interestingly, Erickson suggests that this Crist comment may have been racially motivated, since Rubio is Mexican like the dickens, and illegals all have back hair. SO NOW EVERYONE IS RACIST, IS WHAT YOU’RE SAYING ERICK? Stupid liberals.

[RedState via Instaputz]

by Jim Newell at March 09, 2010 09:30 PM

El reverendo Georg Ratzinger ha pedido perdón a las víctimas y dice que él también daba 'bofetadas' a los alumnos del coro, pero que siempre tuvo 'mala conciencia'.  Leer. Escuchar

March 09, 2010 09:27 PM

Netflix, SanDisk and Apple achieved 52-week highs Tuesday.

March 09, 2010 09:21 PM

Reliability boost roadmap

Pillar Data Axiom storage arrays can go a whole lot faster, use less energy, and be more reliable, thanks to a range of new features from flash drive enclosures to pre-emptive copies.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

March 09, 2010 09:18 PM

Bank of America shares have led the rally in the big banks, soaring more than 450% off their low point last March, but going higher from here will be more of a challenge for the group.

March 09, 2010 09:17 PM

Sólo en el ordenador de uno de los imputados se hallaron datos confidenciales de 800.000 personas.  Leer. Escuchar

March 09, 2010 09:09 PM

BECAUSE THE FART APP ALONE CANNOT DEFEND FREEDOM: “Those who dismiss the Tea Party movement as a bunch of rednecks may be interested to know that the Tea Party Patriots now have a new iPhone app.” Indeed! Originally designed as a GPS device for locating Thomas Jefferson’s expertly hidden geocaches, “The Tea Party Finder” can also backwards-fax Scott Brown an annotated copy of the Articles of Confederation with a preface by Ayn Rand written in glitter-sharpie. It also lets you Chatroulette with random Tea Party Leaders and their respective dangly bits. [HuffPo]

by Riley Waggaman at March 09, 2010 09:05 PM

Jim Cramer lauds Citigroup on Tuesday's 'Stop Trading!' segment on CNBC, declaring that Citigroup will soon return to trading in the $4 range.

March 09, 2010 09:05 PM

As the outlook on passage of health reform improves, Republicans have shifted to a new obstructionist strategy: attacking the process of reconciliation. Republicans claim that reconciliation was only intended to be used for bills dealing closely with the budget. In fact, when Republicans were in power, GOP lawmakers used reconciliation numerous times to pass major domestic policy legislation, including the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and important changes to health care policy. In fact, 34 of the 41 Senate Republicans have used reconciliation in the past to pass major pieces of domestic policy.

In 2005, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) famously defended reconciliation as “majority rules.” Think Progress has compiled a video of some of these 34 senators who have, in the past, defended reconciliation and railed against the filibuster. Some highlights:

– “If you’ve got 51 votes for your position, you win.” — Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), 3/15/05

– “For some time, I hoped that my colleagues who oppose reform would allow a majority in both bodies to prevail and do what the vast majority of the American public desires.” — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 10/15/99

– “It [the filibuster] is the product of a rule of the Senate passed many years after the ratification of the Constitution. This rule does not derive from the authority of the Constitution.” — Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), 5/19/05

– “Filibusters are neither an idea of the founding fathers nor a historical tradition of the Senate.” — Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), 4/27/05

Watch it:

The full list of Senate Republicans who have used reconciliation to pass major domestic policy, as well as a list of those pieces of legislation can be found after the jump:

Major domestic policy legislation that these 34 Senators have voted for through reconciliation in the past 20 years: Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, Balanced Budget Act of 1995, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, Taxpayer Refund and Relief Act of 1999, Marriage Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000, Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005, College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007

by Victor Zapanta at March 09, 2010 09:03 PM

Apple's stock hit a record high this week, but will the momentum continue?

March 09, 2010 09:00 PM

The first rule of iPhone Club is...

In the 1999 movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt famously tells a huddle of pugilistic aspirants: "The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club."…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

March 09, 2010 08:54 PM

AIG shares spiked higher Tuesday with bullishness prompted by the company's recent divestitures possibly pressuring investors who are short the stock.

March 09, 2010 08:53 PM

Citigroup shares surged Tuesday with explanations for the rise ranging from positive comments from a fund manager to a warm reception for a sale of $2 billion in trust preferred securities.

March 09, 2010 08:49 PM

THE 18TH IS NEXT THURSDAY.... I've listened to it a few times, but can't quite make out the word President Obama uses. Towards the very end of his remarks at yesterday's health care rally near Philadelphia, it sounds to me...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 08:45 PM

The new Microsoft

Adobe's ubiquitous Reader application has replaced Microsoft Word as the program that's most often targeted in malware campaigns, according to figures compiled by F-Secure.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

March 09, 2010 08:33 PM

MASSA WAS JUST COLD SLAMMIN’ EVERYBODY: It seems there’s more to the crazy Eric Massa sexytime allegations than him drunkenly telling some dude, at a wedding, how much he wanted to bone: “Former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has been under investigation for allegations that he groped multiple male staffers working in his office, according to three sources familiar with the probe. The allegations surrounding the former lawmaker date back at least a year, and involve ‘a pattern of behavior and physical harassment,’ according to one source.” Where’s the problem? These staffers are all such prudes. [Washington Post]

by Jim Newell at March 09, 2010 08:30 PM

Government Intrusion

by digby

Have I found common cause with the most right wing Republicans in the nation? Perhaps so. Think Progress reports:

The Oklahoma legislature is currently locked in a dispute over whether to tackle the state’s divorce rate, the third-highest in the nation. Although some Republicans are pushing the legislation, other conservatives are outraged at the “government intrusion” into their private lives:

Republican members proposed three pieces of legislation imposing new regulations on marriage and divorce in Oklahoma. Two of the measures were defeated, but another — requiring counseling for those planning to wed, and therapy sessions for couples considering divorce — is awaiting action.

The issue has produced sharp clashes among conservative colleagues who normally find themselves in agreement. The debates have featured charges of hypocrisy and of betraying Republican principles against government intrusion into private lives. [...]

“How far do I want government to come into my home and your home about private personal matters?” asked Rep. Leslie Osborn, a Republican from Tuttle, in a debate. She referred to state government as a “huge monster.”

[S]ome of these same lawmakers — including Osborn — have had no problem imposing “government intrusion” into women’s “private lives.” Last fall, the Oklahoma passed a law that would have collected personal details about every single abortion performed in the state and posted them on a public website. (The Oklahoma County District Court struck down the law last month because it covered too many topics for one piece of legislation.)

McDaniel noted that Republican lawmakers are now putting forth several anti-choice measures once again, as single bills. Just last week, for example, the state House passed a measure “that would require a woman be given a description of ultrasound images of her unborn child and be offered those images before getting an abortion.” Rep. Dan Sullivan (R), the sponsor of the abortion website legislation, opposed the divorce counseling bill in a Feb. 22 vote.

Oklahoma also bans same-sex couples from marrying — a clear “government intrusion” into private life that many Republican lawmakers seem to find perfectly acceptable.

March 09, 2010 08:30 PM

Sleazy but “better than John Edwards” person Andrew Young, who illegally sucked John Edwards off every night before bedtime until realizing “hey I can write a tell-all and make big bucks,” is in super big-time trouble. A judge is threatening to send him and his wife Cheri — that’s his real wife; his fake wife is Rielle Hunter — to jail for lying, on the record, about how many people they showed the John Edwards Sex Tape. Was it just a few agents and one ABC News producer, in public, as they suggested? Or was it to all sorts of New York journalists on his big screen teevee, late at night, during epic masturbation parties?

Andrew Young previously said he showed the sex tape to a producer for ABC and two book agents. After that, lawyers for Rielle Hunter, Edwards’ mistress who Young says also appeared in the video, produced an affidavit from a ghost writer who previously worked for Edwards, Robert Draper of New York.

Draper swore in the document that on March 31, 2009, he and Young met at the Youngs’ house. After Cheri Young had gone to bed, Andrew Young offered to show Draper the sex tape and played it on a big screen television in his office from his laptop, which suggested there was a digital copy stored on the laptop.

Young has turned over the original tape and a VHS copy. Federal agents have a DVD copy, but Young has sworn that other copies do not exist. He also did not disclose that he had shown it to Draper.

So this Andrew Young keeps it on his laptop and jerks off to it every night, with cool journalists.

Finally, some closure that we can believe in.

Young ‘lied’ about Edwards sex tape; judge considering contempt [Charlotte Observer]

by Jim Newell at March 09, 2010 08:18 PM

La asociación KDE España recibió una gran cantidad de candidaturas de sede para la Akademy-es 2010, muchas de ellas de una gran calidad. La afortunada ha sido la oferta de itsas, grupo para la promoción del software libre en la Universidad del País Vasco. Así pues, la Akademy-es 2010 tendrá lugar en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Bilbao, los días 7, 8 y 9 de mayo. Encontrarás más información en el anuncio oficial. Se abren también el Call For Papers y las inscripciones.

by Quique at March 09, 2010 08:18 PM

Apple subsidiary FileMaker has released version 11 of its flagship FileMaker Pro database. The updated software purports to make building and maintaining databases even easier, while acknowledging that many users are accustomed to using spreadsheets for database purposes by including pivot table-like reporting and Excel-like charting features. FileMaker Pro Server has also been updated, dropping the simultaneous client access limit for the Advanced version.

FileMaker Pro already laid claim to being one of the easiest cross-platform database tools available, but the company added additional features designed to enhance that ease of use. The Quick Start screen has been improved, offering clear ways to begin a new database. You can start from scratch; import existing data in tab or comma-separated files, Excel spreadsheets, or Bento databases; or choose from a number of Starter Solution templates. A new invoicing template has been added in version 11 to make that common business task practically a plug-and-chug operation; customer data can later be linked for other purposes.

Read the comments on this post

March 09, 2010 08:06 PM

A new study released by the research and consulting firm Spectrem Group finds that the number of millionaires in the United States increased by double digits the last year. According to Spectrem Group’s data, “families with a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding primary residences, rose to 7.8 million in 2009,” an increase of 16 percent:

The millionaires’ club in the U.S. grew by 16 percent in 2009, following a 27 percent decline in 2008.

Families with a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding primary residences, rose to 7.8 million in 2009, an increase from 6.7 million a year earlier, according to a survey of high- net-worth U.S. households conducted by Spectrem Group.

“With the markets trending upwards, we expected an increase,” George H. Walper Jr., president of Spectrem Group, said in a telephone interview. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index increased 24 percent in 2009 and has risen 68 percent over the past 12 months

While the number of American multimillionaires rose last year, Americans continued to suffer from the Great Recession. The unemployment rate reached double digits, millions of Americans lost their homes, and wages for most workers stagnated. The United States is unique among industrialized countries in its enormous income inequality. Data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that if income inequality continues to rise at the current rate, the income gap in the United States “will resemble that of Mexico by year 2043.”

by Zaid Jilani at March 09, 2010 08:00 PM

Jeremy Zawodny : Setting Up Irssi with Freenode - Setting Up Irssi with Freenode: handy

March 09, 2010 08:00 PM

En Bitelia Dani Muñoz cuenta 7 días sin Google: comenzamos: «¿Existen alternativas a Google? En Bitelia nos hemos propuesto, como bien sabéis ya, comenzar un debate sobre la calidad de los servicios que compiten con cada una de las herramientas de Google medianta una experiencia muy particular: durante una semana estaré bajo abstinencia absoluta de cualquier servicio que Google me pueda brindar. Las razones para esta propuesta son varias, pero la principal reside en saber hasta qué punto se ha adueñado Google de nuestros hábitos en la red para valorar al mismo tiempo la viabilidad de una Internet sin Google». ¿Serías capaz de vivir una semana sin Google?

by rvr at March 09, 2010 08:00 PM

Little boy, whispering to brother: That's a cop. He can arrest people.
(brother starts tickling little boy)
Little boy: Arrest him! Arrest him!
Cop: Sorry, kid. I'm off duty.

--5 Train

Overheard by: Bruce Lee

March 09, 2010 08:00 PM

I just got a call from an insistent headhunter, so to get him off the phone, I asked him to send me an email with the details of his fabulous opportunity. He said, "OK, sure! Your email address is ned @ Red Hat chelder.com?"

I guess I could create my own Linux distro now...

March 09, 2010 07:51 PM

SLOWLY BACKING AWAY.... As recently as yesterday, it looked like Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) was going to become a right-wing hero. The freshman congressman, who resigned under a cloud of scandal yesterday, was alleging a fanciful conspiracy involving congressional Dems, the...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 07:50 PM

322 Tbps of bandwidth (not quite) here

How will Cisco "forever change the internet"? With a new router.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

March 09, 2010 07:45 PM

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://themorningnews.org/tob/"&gt;The Morning News Tournament of Books&lt;/a&gt; is underway with a first round matchup between Nami Mun's Miles From Nowhere and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. As a semifinal judge, I know at least one of the final two books and for your betting purposes, I'll open the bidding on that knowledge at, say, $50K.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/books"&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 07:44 PM

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://themorningnews.org/tob/"&gt;The Morning News Tournament of Books&lt;/a&gt; is underway with a first round matchup between Nami Mun's Miles From Nowhere and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. As a semifinal judge, I know at least one of the final two books and for your betting purposes, I'll open the bidding on that knowledge at, say, $50K.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/books"&gt;books&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 07:44 PM

Trot Out The Big Puppets

by digby

There is a big health care rally happening today in DC. All the cameras are there, but nobody's broadcasting it live. But they did get a mention on MSNBC.

Get a load of this report, complete with footage from the previous tea party rally. Tamron Hall:

Tea party activists plan to converge on the nation's capital to protest president obama's health care plan. And part of their plan is to target some 50 undecided House Democrats, in a three week blitz to stop legislation from being passed. They say the reforms amount to a government takeover.

But they're not the only ones weighing in. This morning health care activists called for reform and marched to protest what they call the greedy and abusive health insurance .

Democratic House majority whip Jim Clyburn is here...

March 09, 2010 07:25 PM

Satellite TV meets YouTube meets online ad machine

Google is privately testing a television set-top box that lets users search satellite TV programming as well as video websites like its very own YouTube, according to a new report.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

March 09, 2010 07:24 PM

Recently we ordered a set of server class Linux machines to supplement our pool of VMs. They are lightning fast, especially compared to VMs, but it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride getting them ready to go to production. Most notably we’ve had an mysterious problem where they would occasionally refuse to boot, halting at a “GRUB _” dialogue. It took awhile, but we believe we have this fixed now.

This problem first occurred on 2 out of 25 slaves. Catlee quickly discovered that it could be fixed with a simple re-installation of Grub, so that’s we did, and moved on. The thought at the time was that the MBR somehow got partially overwritten or otherwise corrupted. A day later, 2 more slaves hit the same issue. Since it was the second time we hit the issue there was some more speculation and digging. We had made a few changes to the machines, including:
* Changing the hard disk controller from “IDE” mode to “AHCI”.
* Changing the kernel to a PAE version.

Both of those were pretty quickly dismissed as the causes. It seemed very unlikely that the kernel version could cause an issue with the bootloader, and the problem didn’t occur instantly after changing the disk controller mode, so that seemed unlikely too. With other important things happening we again moved on.

The next day I did some more googling, this time about GRUB in general, and came across a page detailing the GRUB boot process. In it, it talks about how to dump the contents of the MBR and view it as hex. Seeing that made me *very* eager to compare a working slave vs. a busted one. Unfortunately there was no longer a busted machine to look at.

After 5 or so days without issues, and after all other setup and configuration issue was taken care of we decided to move them to production and deal with the GRUB problems if they arose. As luck would have it, 2 machines refused to boot as they were being moved to production. After booting from a rescue disk and dumping the MBR I found that bytes 0×40 through 0×49 differed against a working slave. I also noticed that the MBR of a busted slave was identical to one that had *never* broken, and thus, never had GRUB re-installed. This seemed to rule out MBR corruption.

With some more information in my hands I looked for some help or pointers from the GRUB developers, on Freenode. One of them pointed me to this section of the GRUB Manual which documents some key bytes of the MBR. Notably, byte 0×40 is described as “The boot drive. If it is 0xFF, use a drive passed by BIOS.”. On a working slave this was set to 0xFF. On a broken one, it was set to 0×80 (which I was told means “first hard drive”). That certainly sounds like something that could affect bootability!

After thinking it over a few times I came to the conclusion that *somehow* 0×80 must end up being the wrong device to boot from. I also realized that no slave which had had GRUB re-installed had failed again. With all of that I became confident that re-installing GRUB would fix the problem permanently. I ran all of this by Catlee who told me that GRUB developers had told him that the BIOS could be re-ordering drives semi-randomly. That piece of information seems to fill in the last bit of the puzzle and I’m more confident than ever that GRUB installation will permanently fix the problem.

It’s still a mystery to me why the BIOS would be re-ordering the drives at random. There’s a “BIOSBugs” page on the GRUB wiki which describes a problem where the BIOS sends the *wrong* boot device. Since relying on the BIOS to send the boot device has fixed our problem I don’t think it’s the same thing. I haven’t been able to find any information on this specific issue, or how to find out what boot device the BIOS is sending the Bootloader, which makes it difficult to truly confirm our fix. If anyone has hit this, or knows how to get at this kind of information I’d love to hear from you.

by bhearsum at March 09, 2010 07:22 PM

IE 6 and 7 users targeted

Online thugs are exploiting a security bug in earlier versions of Internet Explorer that allows them to remotely execute malicious code, Microsoft warned on Tuesday.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

March 09, 2010 07:08 PM

THE GENERIC BALLOT AND A LINGERING ENTHUSIASM GAP.... A few months ago, Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) reflected on what his party needs to do: "We must deliver. I need to give Democrats something to be excited about." The recommendation continues...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 07:05 PM

We are proud to announce the first milestone release of the Jetpack SDK. While this release demonstrates the platform’s foundations and extensibility, it does not yet provide APIs for building rich add-ons. The next set of releases will add those APIs to the SDK. This release also marks the graduation of Jetpack from a Mozilla Labs prototype to a next-generation platform slated for production use with Firefox.

We learned a lot from creating the early Jetpack prototypes and the feedback we received from thousands of add-on developers and tens of thousands of testers. People created hundreds of add-ons and wrote dozens of articles and blog posts about their Jetpack experience. This feedback has been instrumental in the design of the new Jetpack SDK, and given us the confidence to plan out a roadmap that provides a rich, robust, extensible platform that will be fully supported for production use with Firefox.

With the Jetpack SDK, authors can take a small amount of high-level code, developed with clear API standards in mind, and turn it into a standard Firefox add-on — one that doesn’t require a restart to install or update. Minimal changes to Firefox are required to make this all work, and you can track those changes here.

The Jetpack SDK includes:

• An extensible library of capabilities and APIs for writing Firefox add-ons, as well as stand-alone web-based applications
• A set of command-line tools that package and security-harden your code into distributable packages
• A modern IDE with built-in reference guide for instant productivity

The Jetpack SDK will replace the Jetpack 0.8 prototype over the coming months. For now we recommend that authors who wish to create simple extensions continue to use Jetpack 0.8. The popular and simple IDE available in 0.8 is being revamped with major enhancements for use with the SDK and will be available for developers in Q2 2010.

Full extensibility has been a keystone to the resounding success of Firefox add-ons and fosters the creativity that has fueled nearly 2 billion add-on downloads. In creating the Jetpack SDK, it was important to make add-ons more secure and easier to write, without restricting the generativity of the platform. That’s why the SDK is being built on a rock-solid base of standards, like CommonJS, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and includes an extensible library system. With the library system, developers can write and share a module that creates an API to enable easy access to any capability of the Firefox platform.

To see the SDK in action, watch Atul Varma, the Jetpack architect, give a tutorial. Or, read through the getting started guide.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" height="360" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10039748&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=0&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=cc6600&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640"></iframe>

If you were participating or following the early Jetpack prototypes, here’s an overview of what’s changed now that Jetpack SDK is slated for production use and will be fully supported by Firefox.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" height="480" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10011379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=0&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=cc6600&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640"></iframe>

Get the Jetpack SDK

• Download & Get Started
• Read the 0.1 Release Notes
• If you got questions, head over to the Jetpack SDK FAQ

The Roadmap

Now that the underlying architecture has settled, we will work on the Jetpack SDK standard library of UI elements and capabilities to ensure that the most important APIs are covered. From this point to the 1.0 milestone we will be releasing updates every 4 to 6 weeks. The full roadmap is available here.

What Will Version 1.0 of the Jetpack SDK Look Like?

For Developers

The Jetpack SDK aims to provide the following features by the time we reach the 1.0 milestone and it is declared ready and fully supported by Firefox for production use. You can see the roadmap here.

• An easy to use, well documented set of APIs that lets you write Firefox add-ons using standard Web technology (Javascript, HTML5, and CSS).
• An integrated IDE that enables rapid add-on developement and code collaboration.
• Faster development cycle using the save-refresh model of the Web.
• A set of command-line tools that lets you package code written with the Jetpack SDK into XPIs that can run in Firefox, Thunderbird, and Firefox mobile, or as stand-alone applications.
• An extensible library system that, in addition to the built-in APIs provided in the SDK, allows anyone to create a sharable module that implements new APIs to expose anything in the powerful Mozilla platform.
• A brand new security model.

For Firefox Users

There’s not much to see yet for everyday Firefox users. Stay tuned for opportunities to try out new and exciting add-ons as developers begin to take advantage of the power and flexibility to deliver compelling new user experiences. Add-ons developed with the Jetpack SDK will feature:

• No need to restart Firefox to install add-ons.
• Add-ons are automatically compatible with all future versions of Firefox updates, so no need to wait for add-on compatability.
• Stronger and more easily understood security and privacy controls.
• Automatic add-on updates.

Participate

• Visit the Jetpack SDK Website
• Report a bug
• Grab the source code and fix a bug or add a feature.
• Discuss and debate in the Jetpack discussion group.
• Participate in our API design.
• Join us in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.

– Aza Raskin from the Jetpack Team

March 09, 2010 07:01 PM

We are proud to announce the first milestone release of the Jetpack SDK. While this release demonstrates the platform’s foundations and extensibility, it does not yet provide APIs for building rich add-ons. The next set of releases will add those APIs to the SDK. This release also marks the graduation of Jetpack from a Mozilla Labs prototype to a next-generation platform slated for production use with Firefox.

We learned a lot from creating the early Jetpack prototypes and the feedback we received from thousands of add-on developers and tens of thousands of testers. People created hundreds of add-ons and wrote dozens of articles and blog posts about their Jetpack experience. This feedback has been instrumental in the design of the new Jetpack SDK, and given us the confidence to plan out a roadmap that provides a rich, robust, extensible platform that will be fully supported for production use with Firefox.

With the Jetpack SDK, authors can take a small amount of high-level code, developed with clear API standards in mind, and turn it into a standard Firefox add-on — one that doesn’t require a restart to install or update. Minimal changes to Firefox are required to make this all work, and you can track those changes here.

The Jetpack SDK includes:

• An extensible library of capabilities and APIs for writing Firefox add-ons, as well as stand-alone web-based applications
• A set of command-line tools that package and security-harden your code into distributable packages
• A modern IDE with built-in reference guide for instant productivity

The Jetpack SDK will replace the Jetpack 0.8 prototype over the coming months. For now we recommend that authors who wish to create simple extensions continue to use Jetpack 0.8. The popular and simple IDE available in 0.8 is being revamped with major enhancements for use with the SDK and will be available for developers in Q2 2010.

Full extensibility has been a keystone to the resounding success of Firefox add-ons and fosters the creativity that has fueled nearly 2 billion add-on downloads. In creating the Jetpack SDK, it was important to make add-ons more secure and easier to write, without restricting the generativity of the platform. That’s why the SDK is being built on a rock-solid base of standards, like CommonJS, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and includes an extensible library system. With the library system, developers can write and share a module that creates an API to enable easy access to any capability of the Firefox platform.

To see the SDK in action, watch Atul Varma, the Jetpack architect, give a tutorial. Or, read through the getting started guide.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" height="360" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10039748&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=0&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=cc6600&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640"></iframe>

If you were participating or following the early Jetpack prototypes, here’s an overview of what’s changed now that Jetpack SDK is slated for production use and will be fully supported by Firefox.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" height="480" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10011379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=0&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=cc6600&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640"></iframe>

Get the Jetpack SDK

• Download & Get Started
• Read the 0.1 Release Notes
• If you got questions, head over to the Jetpack SDK FAQ

The Roadmap

Now that the underlying architecture has settled, we will work on the Jetpack SDK standard library of UI elements and capabilities to ensure that the most important APIs are covered. From this point to the 1.0 milestone we will be releasing updates every 4 to 6 weeks. The full roadmap is available here.

What Will Version 1.0 of the Jetpack SDK Look Like?

For Developers

The Jetpack SDK aims to provide the following features by the time we reach the 1.0 milestone and it is declared ready and fully supported by Firefox for production use. You can see the roadmap here.

• An easy to use, well documented set of APIs that lets you write Firefox add-ons using standard Web technology (Javascript, HTML5, and CSS).
• An integrated IDE that enables rapid add-on developement and code collaboration.
• Faster development cycle using the save-refresh model of the Web.
• A set of command-line tools that lets you package code written with the Jetpack SDK into XPIs that can run in Firefox, Thunderbird, and Firefox mobile, or as stand-alone applications.
• An extensible library system that, in addition to the built-in APIs provided in the SDK, allows anyone to create a sharable module that implements new APIs to expose anything in the powerful Mozilla platform.
• A brand new security model.

For Firefox Users

There’s not much to see yet for everyday Firefox users. Stay tuned for opportunities to try out new and exciting add-ons as developers begin to take advantage of the power and flexibility to deliver compelling new user experiences. Add-ons developed with the Jetpack SDK will feature:

• No need to restart Firefox to install add-ons.
• Add-ons are automatically compatible with all future versions of Firefox updates, so no need to wait for add-on compatability.
• Stronger and more easily understood security and privacy controls.
• Automatic add-on updates.

Participate

• Visit the Jetpack SDK Website
• Report a bug
• Grab the source code and fix a bug or add a feature.
• Discuss and debate in the Jetpack discussion group.
• Participate in our API design.
• Join us in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.

– Aza Raskin from the Jetpack Team

March 09, 2010 07:01 PM

Insurers have responded to the administration’s campaign against recent rate hikes by blaming increasing health care costs, provider cost increases and adverse selection (healthier Americans are dropping coverage) for their premium increases. To hear them tell it, the insurance industry is a low-profit industry that spends just one cent of every premium dollar on administration and strives to reduce costs by encouraging efficiencies. Insurers “do not deserve to be vilified for political purposes,” Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) told the AP:

For every dollar spent on health care in America, less than one penny goes toward health plan profits. The focus needs to be on the other 99 cents.

But the argument that insurers run a tight ship is misleading, on several counts, not least of which is the fact that insurers are planning to spend “more than $1 million” not on health care claims — as their justification for the premium hikes would suggest — but “to run television ads on cable stations nationwide beginning in the next few days to push back on the attacks on insurers.”

That $1 million ad fund will presumably come from the one penny that goes towards health care profits. But this too is misleading. Zirkelbach is clever enough to compare the private insurance industry’s administrative spending to national health care expenditures — 45 percent of which includes spending in Medicare, Medicaid and other public programs. In the context of total spending, insurers administrative costs may look small, but compared to the revenues of private insurers, administrative spending is seen as far more substantial. Insurers skim off 15-20 percent of premium dollars for administrative costs and profits which fund TV ad campaigns, Washington lobbyists, lavish company retreats and outlandish CEO salaries.

The top five earning insurance companies averaged profits of $12.2 billion, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, from 2008. And in 2008 (the last year for which data was available), CEO compensation for these companies ranged from $3 million to $24 million.” Below is a partial list of insurer/CEO profits:

Insurer profits increased even in the midst of the current recession. Last week, during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, WellPoint admitted that it increased premiums to keep up with medical costs and maintain a 2% profit. The company’s 2009 fourth quarter net income “was more than $2.7 billion, a 727 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year” — even as membership declined by some 4 percent.

Insurer profits are of course just one culprit for increasing premiums, but considering that insurers have been able to increase their returns by purging sicker Americans from the rolls and pulling out of competitive markets, the President’s strong rhetoric is more than justified. The Senate bill will start forcing insurers to earn profit by figuring out ways to deliver quality care more efficiently and they’re not very interested in accepting these changes.

by Igor at March 09, 2010 06:51 PM

The European Parliament is fed up with the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today, representatives from all the major parliamentary coalitions introduced a resolution demanding that the European Commission release all negotiating texts, inform Parliament about the negotiating process, and absolutely refuse to countenance any sort of "three strikes" Internet disconnection penalty for online copyright infringement.

The measure comes up for a vote tomorrow and looks set to pass—it has the support of all the important groups in Parliament, including the EPP, S&D, ALDE, and the Greens/EFA. One notable supporter: Christian Engström, the Pirate Party's lone MEP in Parliament, who aligns with the Greens/EFA group.

Read the comments on this post

March 09, 2010 06:38 PM

Interesting commentary:

I don't think this is really a case about ISP liability at all. It is a case about the use of a person's image, without their consent, that generates commercial value for someone else. That is the essence of the Italian law at issue in this case. It is also how the right of privacy was first established in the United States.

The video at the center of this case was very popular in Italy and drove lots of users to the Google Video site. This boosted advertising and support for other Google services. As a consequence, Google actually had an incentive not to respond to the many requests it received before it actually took down the video.

Back in the U.S., here is the relevant history: after Brandeis and Warren published their famous article on the right to privacy in 1890, state courts struggled with its application. In a New York state case in 1902, a court rejected the newly proposed right. In a second case, a Georgia state court in 1905 endorsed it.

What is striking is that both cases involved the use of a person's image without their consent. In New York, it was a young girl, whose image was drawn and placed on an oatmeal box for advertising purposes. In Georgia, a man's image was placed in a newspaper, without his consent, to sell insurance.

Also important is the fact that the New York judge who rejected the privacy claim, suggested that the state assembly could simple pass a law to create the right. The New York legislature did exactly that and in 1903 New York enacted the first privacy law in the United States to protect a person's "name or likeness" for commercial use.

The whole thing is worth reading.

by schneier at March 09, 2010 06:36 PM

BECK TARGETS CHURCHES THAT EMBRACE 'SOCIAL JUSTICE'.... On his radio show yesterday, right-wing host Glenn Beck warned his audience about churches that care about social justice. As the deranged media personality sees it, "social justice" is code for ... something...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 06:20 PM

Jaroslav Krejčí (aka “JardaK”) has just submitted a Czech language pack for KompoZer 0.8.

We’ve imported the strings from the langpack JardaK did for KompoZer 0.7.10 and added the Mozilla 1.8 strings. Then, JardaK has translated all the new strings and fixed a few problems we had in the previous version.

As a result, there are now Czech builds of KompoZer 0.8b3 on the official download page for Windows, MacOSX and GNU/Linux. Thanks a lot JardaK!

Note: most of the langpacks we had for KompoZer 0.7.10 have been upgraded to 0.8 by now, but we’re still missing the Brazilian (pt-BR), Slovak (sk) and Bulgarian (bg) ones. Feel free to drop a message if you want to upgrade one of these langpacks. ;-)

by Kazé at March 09, 2010 06:15 PM

La prensa francesa ya ha tildado la ley, un proyecto personal del propio presidente Sarkozy, de ineficaz e incluso contraproducente.  Leer. Escuchar

March 09, 2010 06:07 PM

The slides for my talk about the audio infrastructure of Linux mobile devices at BOSSA 2010 in Manaus/Brazil are now available online. They are terse (as usual), and the most interesting stuff is probably in what I said, and not so much in what I wrote in those slides. But nonetheless I believe this might still be quite interesting for attendees as well as non-attendees.

The talk focuses on the audio architecture of the Nokia N900 and the Palm Pre, and of course particularly their use of PulseAudio for all things audio. I analyzed and compared their patch sets to figure out what their priorities are, what we should move into PulseAudio mainline, and what should better be left in their private patch sets.

March 09, 2010 06:04 PM

Last month, Rush Limbaugh criticized Mitt Romney for endorsing Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in his campaign against J.D. Hayworth in Arizona’s GOP Senate primary. “I think he’s risking his career over a guy, endorsing McCain, who is so out of step with what’s going on right now,” Limbaugh complained. Newsmax asked Romney about Limbaugh’s criticism in a new interview. But while Romney (surprisingly) stuck to his position, he couldn’t help but seize the moment to pander to the Limbaugh crowd:

ROMNEY: Well, you know, I find it hard to disagree with Rush Limbaugh on topics but on this one I do. I know Senator McCain. [...] It may not be right for me politically but frankly, the country’s in a posture right now. We face such challenges right now. It’s time for people to do what they think is right for the country and to spend less time about what may or may not be good for them politically.

Watch it:

It’s remarkable that Romney would criticize someone for taking a political stand, considering he has distinguished himself as one who regularly changes his positions for political gain.

by Ben Armbruster at March 09, 2010 06:01 PM

La compañía deSteve Ballmer ultima una tableta en la que sorprende su pequeño tamaño y que tiene un aspecto de "diario electrónico".  Leer

March 09, 2010 05:57 PM

Nueva compra del gigante, esta vez para integrar la posibilidad de editar archivos de Microsoft Office en la Red  Leer. Escuchar

March 09, 2010 05:57 PM

CRS-3 tiene una capacidad de hasta 322 terabits por segundo. La compañía anuncia que "cambiará el mundo de la Red para siempre".  Leer. Escuchar

March 09, 2010 05:56 PM

Trained Seals

by digby

According to Sam Stein members the Treasury Department, including Tim Geithner himself, met with a group of progressive bloggers yesterday to tell them what a good job the administration's done all things considered, but that now they need to get the voters all charged up to help them pass a tepid financial reform bill. This is part of a larger public relations offensive to rehabilitate Geithner and the Obama economic policies:

Earlier that morning two lengthy profiles of the Treasury Secretary were published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic respectively. There too, Geithner was cast (or, perhaps, cast himself) in the role of the humble victim, doing the bidding of the country at the price of personal reputation.

"We saved the economy," he told the New Yorker, "but we kind of lost the public doing it."

After enduring months of criticism, the administration clearly has sensed that the time was ripe to re-launch the image of its economic staff. The department had not done a strong enough job communicating its agenda, one of the top ranking officials conceded on Monday. Too much ground had been ceded to the opposition and private industry. More clarity had to be drawn between what the financial sector wanted and what was good for the public. But the administration's policies -- for all the vilification they endured -- were working, officials stressed, even if the messaging was not.

The question remains whether the public can restore its faith in Treasury after months of disappointment from the progressive base and disparagement from conservative critics.

Geithner is making the case that he did what was best for the larger economy without regard to the political (or personal) cost. That he made the hard choice, not the easy one.

That's a questionable statement on many levels. Wouldn't the hard choice be going all in on real reform, rather than tinkering at the edges? Wouldn't the hard choice be demanding more accountability from the banks whose bacon got saved, rather than worrying endlessly about how investors, and marketers, would react to any harsh move?

Geithner faces an unresolvable dilemma. He's an elitist in a populist era. We heard exactly the same kind of we know what's best rhetoric on the topics of deregulation and financial sector innovation -- often delivered by men who were Geithner's mentors. There's less patience right now, on both the left and the right, for government rationalizations than I can ever remember seeing. I'm no particular fan of Old Testament justice, but my guess is that having been denied satisfaction from the current administration, the people will wreak some of their own justice at the polls in November.

March 09, 2010 05:54 PM

Microsoft today began rolling out its new MSN homepage, but not everyone will be getting it at once: the update will trickle out over the next few weeks to the site's 100 million US customers. The software giant is touting the new version as "its most significant homepage redesign in over a decade." It comes with a new MSN butterfly logo (which complements the Bing logo), a larger Bing search box and tighter integration with the search engine, local information from a new feature dubbed MSN Local Edition, as well as the addition of three social network streams: the Windows Live "What's New" feed of course, Facebook, and Twitter.

The above was previewed in November, but Microsoft says the redesign includes more than 30 updates that are based on 70,000 pieces of customer feedback. These new features include TrendWatch, which highlights the day's top trends and movers on Twitter, Hyper-local Tweets, which uses Bing to highlight tweets from your location (available on the new Local Edition), and My Cities, which allows you save up to three cities to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country in your MSN Local Edition.

Microsoft says it has seen double-digit increases in Bing search queries coming from the new homepage thanks to changes that make the decision engine more prominent. As for the MSN Local module on the homepage, the software giant says it is driving over 50 percent more traffic to the MSN Local Edition and that the main module on the new homepage also received over 50 percent more clicks than the original homepage. Microsoft made improvements to these sections based on the data it was seeing. For example, the company says the social networking additions were welcomed with open arms, so it has made sure the default social network tab is the one that the user frequents the most.

The real test, not only for the servers but for the designers, will come in the next few weeks as the majority of users start to see the new version. As we've said before, we think the new look is much cleaner than the old version, but—as Facebook knows all too well—users aren't always happy with huge revamps of major websites.

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March 09, 2010 05:51 PM

OOPP is coming together nicely and as we move from finding basic problems like crashes and hangs, I'd like for us to take a look at little look at performance. We don't have a clear way to compare performance between Firefox 3.6 and the 1.9.3a3pre nightlies, for example, when using plugins, but if there's any perceived change in responsiveness I would like your help in calling it out. Just to remind you, OOPP works in Windows and Linux trunk nightlies.
 
So far our testing has involved trying out sites with popular plugins to see if they crash and checking what the user interaction is when that happens, but as the these builds become more stable we should keep performance in mind.
 
If any of you know of test pages we can use to measure performance at least qualitatively, such that we can compare between different builds, please let us know. Similarly, if you think there's a way to run Talos on builds with different plugins loaded, or if there's any other automated way to run tests that would yield a few numbers, let us know.
 
If you use the trunk nightly as your daily browser, and you have noticed any performance changes, especially if they are negative, make a note of the sites, number of tabs, and plugins you were using and what types of problems you see and let us know, and if everything seem to be working as well as in 3.6 let the OOPP team know they are doing some awesome work!
 
juanb
MozQA
 
http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2010-03-03/firefox-safe-from-plugin-crashes/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Plugins/OOPP_Testing

by juanb at March 09, 2010 05:50 PM

&lt;p&gt;Maciej Ceglowski tells the story of &lt;a href="http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm"&gt;how the cure for scurvy was discovered, lost, and finally redsicovered&lt;/a&gt;, but not before it disrupted Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to reach the South Pole.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Antarctica"&gt;Antarctica&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Maciej Ceglowski"&gt;Maciej Ceglowski&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/medicine"&gt;medicine&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Robert Falcon Scott"&gt;Robert Falcon Scott&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/science"&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 05:45 PM

&lt;p&gt;Maciej Ceglowski tells the story of &lt;a href="http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm"&gt;how the cure for scurvy was discovered, lost, and finally redsicovered&lt;/a&gt;, but not before it disrupted Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to reach the South Pole.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Antarctica"&gt;Antarctica&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Maciej Ceglowski"&gt;Maciej Ceglowski&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/medicine"&gt;medicine&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/Robert Falcon Scott"&gt;Robert Falcon Scott&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;a href="http://kottke.org/tag/science"&gt;science&lt;/a&gt; </content>

by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 05:45 PM

Una portavoz confirmó que los primeros televisores, de 40 y 46 pulgadas, saldrán a la venta el 10 de junio.  Leer. Escuchar

March 09, 2010 05:37 PM

Podemos leer en Público que 'La lista de Sinde' llega al Ministerio de Industria: «Los responsables de más de 1.100 páginas web se declararán hoy culpables de facilitar el intercambio de archivos ante el Ministerio de Industria. La iniciativa, conocida como La lista de Sinde, comenzó a mediados del pasado diciembre ante las medidas incluidas en el anteproyecto de la Ley de Economía Sostenible (LES), que contempla la creación de una comisión administrativa para determinar si una web infringe los derechos de autor. "Si cierran una web tendrán que cerrar todas", destacan desde la página de la plataforma organizadora de la campaña, Hacktivistas.net. La lista de Sinde surgió como respuesta al listado de 200 webs que la Coalición de Creadores e Industrias de Contenidos, que agrupa a productoras y gestoras de derechos de autor, envió a Sinde».

by manje at March 09, 2010 05:32 PM

IN CASE DEMS NEEDED ADDED MOTIVATION.... A caller asked right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh yesterday where he would "go for health care" if the Democratic health care reform package passes. "I'll just tell you this," Limbaugh said. "If this passes...

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 05:30 PM

The parties are still going back and forth over pre-trial issues, specifically over the jury instructions and the verdict form. We may see even more on this, because jury instruction and the verdict form come at the very end, so there is still time to try to get it just right. Not that either side will be entirely happy with the result. SCO, of course, wants the last word.

But in truth, the wording of these documents does matter a lot, so it's typical to have quite a lot of discussion on exactly how to phrase things. After all, when the jury is deciding, they will be reading that wording, and going over it with a fine-tooth comb on any issues where they don't immediately agree, most likely. You've seen what a mess the unclear wording in the appeals court ruling created, so imagine if the jury were to be confused into thinking they *have* to rule a certain way if they actually don't, based on a misreading of an unclear phrase.

I thought it was funny yesterday that the parties couldn't come up with a proposed introduction to give the judge to read, so he wrote his own, and when they handed up one they'd finally been able to agree on, he decided to just use his own anyway. It was too late. I expect that incident was inspirational to both parties. And as you'll see in a minute, they are really trying on the jury instructions, with Novell putting the model instructions and both parties' competing phrasing all in one document, so the judge has it all in one place. And then Novell says SCO wants to file its own also.

March 09, 2010 05:30 PM

Vostro 3000 line debuts

Dell has introduced a set of new Vostro notebooks, pitching the products as "a range of new thin, lightweight and durable laptop computers".…

March 09, 2010 05:29 PM

The .xxx domain is back on the table. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will reconsider the top-level domain during a meeting in Kenya this week, nearly three years after it was shot down and nine years after it was first introduced as a way to identify pornography sites and hopefully confine them to their own Internet red-light district.

The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2001 and approved in 2005 for exclusive (but voluntary) use by the adult entertainment industry. The idea was to provide a place for porn sites online that would be explicitly obvious from the domain, which would not only help consenting adults find the sites, it would also help parents and corporations better block access to them.

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March 09, 2010 05:07 PM

The LA Times reports today on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s growing “large-scale grass-roots political operation” that is being “funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.” In 2009, the Chamber spent $144 million on lobbying and grassroots organizing, “well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees.” Some more details on its new initiative:

The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns. [...]

The new grass-roots program, the brainchild of chamber political director Bill Miller, is concentrating on 22 states. Among them are Colorado, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable; Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces an uphill reelection battle; and Ohio, where the chamber sees opportunities in numerous House races and an open Senate seat.

The network, called Friends of the U.S. Chamber, has been used to generate more than a million letters and e-mails to members of Congress, 700,000 of them in opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan. That is an increase from 40,000 congressional contacts generated in 2008.

According to the LA Times, the Chamber’s “expanding influence” is “worrisome” to top White House officials, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett. This frustration was echoed yesterday in a meeting with top Treasury Department officials, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, that ThinkProgress attended.

When asked by ThinkProgress what they think of the Chamber, officials agreed that the association — along with some other groups in the business community — are deliberately distorting the administration’s positions to the American public. They expressed particular dissatisfaction with the the Chamber’s ad campaign fear-mongering against the administration’s push for a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency. In January, the Chamber arranged to “fly-in” some representatives from small businesses to Capitol Hill and “lead” them to a pre-arranged series of anti-CFPA meetings. The association’s ad campaign contains the ludicrous claims that the CFPA would regulate bakeries and grocery stores.

As many federal lawmakers and the Obama administration push for cap-and-trade legislation, health care reform, regulatory reform, and corporate tax reform, the U.S. Chamber stands as the most well-funded opposition to progressive change. The group spent $10-$20 million of insurance-industry-provided cash on fighting reform. After Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the Chamber was quick to congratulate itself for running television ads in support of the candidate.

by Amanda Terkel at March 09, 2010 05:01 PM

TUESDAY'S CAMPAIGN ROUND-UP.... Today's installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn't generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers. * The bottom falls out: the latest survey from Public Policy Polling shows Florida Gov....

by Steve Benen at March 09, 2010 05:00 PM

Deli worker: Dude, did you just see those girls walk by outside?
Friend: Damn, dude, those girls are walking around like their shit don't stink! And it definitely doesn't.
Deli worker: Yeah, tell me about it!
Friend: Seriously, bro, I'd let both of them fart in my mouth!

--Deli, Greenpoint

March 09, 2010 05:00 PM