-
"We're not against people making attention-getting statements for effect, but what's with constantly attacking the Prius? Can't a car just get 50 MPG in peace?"
-
As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino’s monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny I can’t help thinking the open web community is losing something vital - a commitment to net neutrality and platform openness....
October 2009 Archives
-
IN NOVEMBER 1864 Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman arrived in Milledgeville, then Georgia’s capital, with 30,000 soldiers. He left a couple of days later after sacking the statehouse, destroying the state arsenal and powder magazine, burning the state penitentiary, railroad depot and Oconee bridge, and taking everything edible or of value from the surrounding countryside.
Now the national economy, aided by the forces of Georgia government, appears intent on seeing if they can finish the job.
...Sherman almost did it in — after first having burned Rome down. Both cities, along with many others, struggled back and remained viable communities. It would be terrible to stand by and watch some Georgia bureaucrats finally accomplish what Sherman couldn’t.
-
The functional act of constructing a tweet or a status update is very similar. Produce text in roughly 140 characters or less inside a single line text box and click a button. Voila! Even the stream based ways in which the text gets consumed look awfully similar. Yet, the more I talk with people engaged in practices around Twitter and Facebook, the more I'm convinced these two things are not actually the same practice. Why? Audience. There are two critical structural differences between Facebook and Twitter that are essential to understand before discussing the practices: 1) social graph directionality; 2) conversational mechanisms.
-
Links and quoting direct excerpts is good for the whole media ecosphere
-
After more than two hours of debate, council members voted 12-0 to approve the $7.25-million contract that would move all 30,000 city employees to Google's so-called cloud over the coming year.
-
Where is here? (City? State? Neighborhood?) How do you translate that to search? Outside.in tries: For the past six months, our team has been working incredibly hard on an entirely new platform for outside.in, one that allows true geographic search at lightning speed. It went live on the site late last week. Now every page at outside.in contains two search fields: "what" and "where." This lets you do all kinds of queries that are impossible on other platforms that aren't natively aware of geography. You can do Radar-style queries: show me everything related to "crime" or "playgrounds" within one mile of my home address. You can search an entire neighborhood: "music" or "condos" in Adams Morgan, DC. Or you can search an entire city.
-
Terrific profile of Gillis. EXCERPT: He uses just two programs: Adobe Audition to cut up and manipulate individual samples, and AudioMulch to turn samples into loops and then combine loops into songs. For Gillis, the first stage in the creation of a Girl Talk song is the easiest one: listening to tons of music, whether it’s the local hip-hop station or his parents’ old James Taylor records, keeping an ear out for possible samples, anything from the perfect half-second squeal of guitar feedback to a piano intro or percussion breakdown that he can pluck out and turn into a loop. (While working on Feed the Animals, he collected 8,803 samples, which he sorted into sixty-nine different folders on his laptop.)
-
The good news? Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says the company is cooking up a broadband video delivery service that doesn't require that you sign up for the company's mail-delivered DVD service. The bad news? It won't be made available in the United States, and Netflix isn't saying which country will get the service.
-
NYTimes from August on a freemium company expected to break even in 2011
-
The investigation, completed in 2007, apparently did not result in any punishment for Toussaint, who later was promoted to senior chief. His second-in-command, Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer Valdivia, committed suicide as the investigation was nearing completion after posting a message that she was upset with being held responsible for the others' mistakes.
The hazing came to light only last month as a result of media interviews with Joseph Rocha, now a junior at the University of San Diego, who served in the unit from 2004 to 2007.
Rocha said Toussaint identified him as homosexual soon after he joined the unit and orchestrated gay-themed harassment that targeted him because he refused to patronize prostitutes or join in raunchy heterosexual banter.
BUT IS IT ENOUGH?
YOUTH RADIO INVESTIGATED AND BROKE THE STORY: What follows is a link collection containing all the posts and supporting documentation we have for the story: Sailors' Abuse Kept Silent in Navy Canine Unit.This collection will update as new material is posted online.
Trying to serve his country, a young man faced bigotry and abuse: He tells his story.
-
A first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.
-
Learning to juggle leads to changes in the white matter of the brain, an Oxford University study has shown.
-
Failed in Portlans, "The Idaho Stop" law would have made it legal for bicyclists to treat stop signs like yield signs. A cyclist approaching an intersection controlled by a stop sign, would be permitted to roll through the stop sign after yielding the right of way if there are other vehicles at the intersection.
-
"That small, wrinkled-ass paper bag allowed the corner boys to have their drink in peace, and gave us permission to go. and do. police work...the kind of police work that's actually worth the effort. That's worth actually taking a bullet...
There's never been a paper bag for drugs. Until now."
Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.
And I'm Tech Editor. We're #33 (up from 46). TechPresident:
Here's January's top 50 list, with the new Technorati ranking alongside each blog. Note, for the new listings I am just drawing from Technorati's "U.S. Politics Blogs" subcategory, which wasn't available back in January. So some blogs that lack a new ranking haven't disappeared, they just have been reclassified by Technorati...1. HuffingtonPost (1)
2. Boing Boing
3. Daily Kos (8)
4. CNN Political Ticker (3)
5. Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish (21)
6. The Caucus (New York Times)
7. Treehugger
8. Threat Level (39)
9. Think Progress (2)
10. 538 (10)
11. Talking Points Memo
12. Washington Wire (Wall Street Journal)
13. Michelle Malkin (14)
14. Ben Smith, Politico (22)
15. The Corner (National Review Online)
16. Pajamas Media
17. Hot Air
18. Political Radar (ABC News)
19. Crooks and Liars (13)
20. Newsbusters (5)
21. Glenn Greenwald (Salon) (4)
22. Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic)
23. Swampland (Time)
24. Powerline (9)
25. Redstate
26. Americablog
27. Firedoglake (20)
28. Gateway Pundit (11)
29. Matthew Yglesias (40)
30. Hit & Run (Reason)
31. Feministing
32. TruthDig
33. Buzzmachine
34. CQ Politics
35. Open Left
36. Hullabaloo (28)
37. Talk Left
38. Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (33)
39. Mother Jones
40. Pam's House Blend
41. MyDD
42. Balloon Juice
43. Stop the ACLU (41)
44. The Next Right
45. The Moderate Voice (33)
46. Feministe
47. Real Clear Politics
48. Atrios
49. Little Green Footballs
50. Wizbang
-
An AP story. Disturbing. Especially so because of the first amendment defense.
-
Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, but in one respect she now ranks ahead of Obama. The president's current favorable rating of 56% is down 22 percentage points since January. Over the same time span, Clinton's favorable rating has changed little, and now, at 62%, it exceeds Obama's.
-
As Facebook Nears 100M U.S. Visitors, Twitter Falls Further Behind In The Rear-View Mirror
-
In the past day there has been a swarm of no less than 21 powerful quakes in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean. And that number is bound to grow. The magnitudes have ranged from 4.9 to 7.8 with all those greater than 6 listed below (via the US Geological Survey):
-
One of the subjects of the important Frontline documentary when kids get life... an update: Eleven years after Nathan Ybanez was caught unloading his mother's body from the trunk of her car, a judge is considering whether to grant him a new trial or reduce his prison sentence of life without parole.
-
According to their website, www.solarroadways.com, the idea revolves around "a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road PanelsTM that collect and store solar energy to be used by our homes and businesses. This renewable energy replaces the need for the current fossil fuels used for the generation of electricity. This, in turn, cuts greenhouse gases literally in half."
-
San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon held a press conference Wednesday to tout the department's recent raids shutting down illegal marijuana grow houses in the city.
Interestingly, the first question from a reporter was about whether legalizing marijuana could prevent the devastating house fires that sometimes result from illegal grow operations.
The good chief answered by noting how when alcohol prohibition ended, lots of the associated problems like violence and crime went away.
-
The obesity/median income map strongly resembles maps that show percentages of people voting for McCain and Obama.
Ads 'n Such
Love them...
