[Medianews] Home Depot to sell Philips LED to replace 60-watt bulb
by Martin LaMonica http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20018915-54.html Home Depot later this year plans to carry a Philips LED bulb designed as a replacement for the common 60-watt incandescent. The bulb, now called the 12-watt EnduraLED, will be available by the beginning of December and will cost between $40 and $50, representatives from Philips and Home Depot said today. Home Depot started selling a line of LED bulbs under the EcoSmart label earlier this year, which includes both spotlights and general-lighting LEDs. The Philips bulb will likely be sold under a different name than 12-watt EnduraLED, Philips representative Silvie Casanova said. I have been using an early production version of the Philips bulb around my house for the last few days. At first blush, I'd say this is the sort of product that could finally help nudge out the beloved, if wasteful, incandescent bulb. Philips LED glows warm (photos) I never thought I'd get excited about light bulbs before, but when I received the Philips EnduraLED 60-watt replacement, I was eager to try it out. For starters, the bulb has got a funky look. Rather than the familiar bulbous shape, the top looks like a crown with a flat top. It has three orange-yellow plastic chambers around the top and cast aluminum fins go down the sides to take away heat. And there's the familiar screw-in base. In terms of light quality, this LED is impressive, at least to my eyes. It gives out 806 lumens, the equivalent of a 60-watt bulb, which makes it much more useful for general lighting. I last tried out LED bulbs which maxed out at 429 lumens, or a 40-watt equivalent, which just isn't enough light for many spots around my house. Another notable feature of the Philips 12-watt EnduraLED is the light color. It's rated at 2700 Kelvin, which is at the warm white end of the white light spectrum, according to the Department of Energy's new Lighting Facts label. Philips put the phosphors, which convert the blue light from LED light sources into white light, on the bulb itself rather than the LEDs as is often done. That warm white is in contrast the light from the bulbs now being sold under the EcoSmart brand at Home Depot. For example, the general-purpose bulb A19, which is a 40-watt replacement, is rated at 3,032 Kelvin, making the light a clear white (but not blueish). Obviously, color temperature is a personal preference but I think the warm yellow white will feel familiar to people used to incandescents and halogens. Some LED manufacturers offer the option of warm or white light versions of their bulbs. The shape of the Philips bulb was designed specifically to improve the light dispersal, Casanova said. By their nature, LEDs direct light, which makes them very good for downlights or flood lights. I used the Philips bulb in an overhead lamp and was happy with it; I'd say it would work fine in table lamp, too. In terms of efficiency, the lumens per watt on the 12 watt EnduraLED comes in at 67. That's slightly better than EnergyStar-certified CFLs, which put out 800 lumens with 13 watts to 15 watts for an efficacy of between 53 and 61. But, this LED is rated to last 25,000 hours, about three to four times that of CFLs. The EnduraLED is also dimmable. The design of the 12-watt EnduraLED is the same that Philips used in its entry into the L-Prize, a Department of Energy contest to develop a bulb able to put out 900 lumens and use under 10 watts. So far, it's the only bulb that's entered the contest. Competition for commercial LEDs aimed at consumers is most likely going to get fierce. In addition to Philips, other LED companies are developing their own attempts to dethrone the 60-watt incandescent and prices are projected to come down over the next few years. Obviously, paying between $40 to $50 for a light bulb seems like a lot for people used to spending a few dollars at the hardware store. But for people willing to take a longer view, energy efficient lighting with LEDs looks like it'll be a compelling option. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20018915-54.html#ixzz125RPhpHw ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Pirate Radio Station Gets the Hook (Florida)
http://big1059.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=122821; article=7687821 A group of alleged gang members are arrested after creating the pirate station. Friday, October 8, 2010 Two people were arrested after a police discovered a pirate radio station being run out of a Lauderdale Lakes home, according to the Broward Sheriff's Office. BSO spokeswoman Dani Moschella said that listeners at two stations -- 89.3 FM, a Christian station, and 89.7, which plays classical music -- called the stations recently to complain that their signals were being interrupted by profane hip-hop music. The stations called the Federal Communications Commission to report the interruptions. BSO investigated and discovered that a pirate radio station called Trap Radio was being run from the garage of a home at 3911 NW 34th Way, according to investigators. According to police, the gang unit was involved in the search of the house because someone who lives there has known gang affiliations. Moschella said the people running the pirate station had a relatively small setup, using a laptop, two microphones and a mixer attached to a computer, with a cable running out a window and to a large antenna. Mikhail Rhodd, 22, whom police described as an aspiring rapper who is on probation, faces charges of unauthorized transmissions to or interference with a public or commercial radio station licensed by the FCC, a third-degree felony, and probation violation. Maurice Roland, also 22, was arrested on a battery warrant from Miami-Dade County, police said. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Apple Making Verizon-Ready iPhone by Year End
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870373580457553619164934757 2.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And TING-I TSAI Apple Inc. plans to begin mass producing a new iPhone by the end of 2010 that would allow Verizon Wireless to sell the smartphone early next year, said people briefed by Apple. The new iPhone would be similar in design to the iPhone 4 currently sold by ATT Inc. but would be based on an alternative wireless technology called CDMA used by Verizon, these people said. The phone, for which Qualcomm Inc. is providing a key chip, is expected to be released in the first quarter of next year, according to the same people. The new iPhone would be similar in design to the iPhone 4 currently sold by ATT. An Apple CDMA iPhone would spell the end of the exclusive U.S. arrangement with Apple that ATT has had since 2007, when the original iPhone debuted. Separately, Apple is also developing a new iPhone model, said people briefed on the matter. One person familiar with the new iPhone plan said the fifth-generation iPhone will be a different form factor from those that are currently available. It was unclear how soon that version will be available to Verizon. Spokeswomen for Apple and Qualcomm declined to comment; a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, declined to comment. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/energy-environment/06noise.ht ml By TOM ZELLER Jr. Published: October 5, 2010 VINALHAVEN, Me. - Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on. In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground, Mr. Lindgren said. Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud. Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable. They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power - a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels - is not without emissions of its own. Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families have sued to have 100 turbines removed from a wind farm there. A judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case in June. Like the Lindgrens, many of the people complaining the loudest are reluctant converts to the antiwind movement. The quality of life that we came here for was quiet, Mrs. Lindgren said. You don't live in a place where you have to take an hour-and-15-minute ferry ride to live next to an industrial park. And that's where we are right now. The wind industry has long been dogged by a vocal minority bearing all manner of complaints about turbines, from routine claims that they ruin the look of pastoral landscapes to more elaborate allegations that they have direct physiological impacts like rapid heart beat, nausea and blurred vision caused by the ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations from the machines. For the most extreme claims, there is little independent backing. Last year, the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, along with its Canadian counterpart, assembled a panel of doctors and acoustical professionals to examine the potential health impacts of wind turbine noise. In a paper published in December, the panel concluded that there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects. A separate study financed by the Energy Department concluded late last year that, in aggregate, property values were unaffected by nearby wind turbines. Numerous studies also suggest that not everyone will be bothered by turbine noise, and that much depends on the context into which the noise is introduced. A previously quiet setting like Vinalhaven is more likely to produce irritated neighbors than, say, a mixed-use suburban setting where ambient noise is already the norm. Of the 250 new wind farms that have come online in the United States over the last two years, about dozen or so have generated significant noise complaints, according to Jim Cummings, the founder of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, an online clearinghouse for information on sound-related environmental issues. In the Vinalhaven case, an audio consultant hired by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection determined last month that the 4.5-megawatt facility was, at least on one evening in mid-July when Mr. Lindgren collected sound data, in excess of the state's nighttime sound limits. The developer of the project, Fox Island Wind, has contested that finding, and negotiations with state regulators are continuing. In the moonlit woods behind a neighbor's property on a recent evening, Mr. Lindgren, a retired software engineer, clenched a small flashlight between his teeth and wrestled with a tangle of cables and audio recording equipment he uses to collect sound samples for filing complaints. At times, the rustle of leaves was all that could be heard. But when the surface wind settled, a throbbing, vaguely jetlike sound cut through the nighttime air. Right there, Mr. Lindgren declared. That would probably be out of compliance. Maine, along with many other states, puts a general limit on nighttime noise at 45 decibels - roughly equivalent to the sound of a humming refrigerator. A normal conversation is in the range of 50 to 60 decibels. In almost all cases, it is not mechanical noise arising from the central gear box or nacelle of a turbine that residents react to, but rather the sound of the blades, which in modern turbines are mammoth appendages well over 100 feet long, as they slice through the air. Turbine noise can be controlled by reducing the rotational speed of the blades. But the turbines on Vinalhaven already operate that way after 7 p.m., and George Baker, the chief executive of Fox Island Wind - a for-profit arm of the island's
[Medianews] Twitter founder steps down as CEO
By Laurie Segall, CNN October 4, 2010: 6:21 PM ET http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/04/technology/new_twitter_ceo/index.htm?cnn =yeshpt=Sbin NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is stepping down as the company's CEO, with COO Dick Costolo taking over as the company's new chief executive. Before joining Twitter one year ago, Costolo was the founder and CEO of media distribution service Feedburner, which was acquired by Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Promoting Costolo frees Williams up to be completely focused on product strategy, Twitter's creator wrote in a blog post announcing Costolo's new role. Building things is my passion, and I've never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build, Williams wrote. Costolo says he and Williams are perfectly complementary business partners. He takes a very long view and thinks very hard about the product strategy and the product vision, Costolo told CNNMoney.com in a recent interview. I kind of take the 'here are the things we need to do day-to-day operationally, and this is what we need to have done by tomorrow and this is the way we need to measure that to move forward.' So the two of us working together works beautifully. Over the last couple months, Twitter has rolled a number of major changes to its four-year-old messaging system. On Monday, just a few hours before naming its new CEO, Twitter launched promoted accounts, using an algorithm to link advertisers with users likely to be receptive to their message. In September, Twitter completely revamped its site to allow users the ability to embed photos and video clips into their tweets. The new Twitter, which is gradually rolling out to users, also includes a sidebar that shows users more information when they click on a tweet. 0:00 /3:58Twitter COO: Still not profitable As the company has expanded, so has its business model. I think that the advertising platform will be one pillar of the monetization strategy, and then we'll have a commercial pillar, Costolo said recently. The commercial pillar will involve things like ... making it easier for people to buy things on Twitter, making it easier for people to do things like make reservations, select coupons for local offers -- that sort of thing. Costolo -- who already has a hash tag, #newtwitterceo, to go with his new title -- says it's the ideal time for him to step into a new role at Twitter. The company now has 300 employees supporting 165 million registered users, firing off 90 million tweets a day. The team is incredible, we have awesome stuff in the pipeline, and we're ready to accomplish more in the next two years than we've accomplished in the last four, Costolo said in a written statement. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Actor shot during performance of Passion
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/8040230/Actor-sh ot-during-performance-of-Passion.html A West End musical has been suspended after an actor was apparently shot in the face by accident during an on-stage duel. By Victoria Ward Published: 11:00PM BST 03 Oct 2010 A West End musical has been suspended after an actor was apparently shot in the face by accident during an on-stage duel. Stephen Sondheim's Passion was immediately cancelled after the incident which occurred during a matinee performance on Saturday. Actor David Birrell, 35, who plays Colonel Ricci in the musical, was rushed from the Donmar Warehouse theatre to hospital with a serious eye injury. He was taking part in a scene in which his character challenged another to a duel. But it is understood that there was a fault with the gun used on stage, which was meant to fire blanks. Audience members were not necessarily aware of what had happened as Mr Birrell's character was shot by another character in the scene. London Ambulance Service was called to the scene at 4.15pm and confirmed they had attended a 35-year-old man who was then taken to University College Hospital. Eyewitnesses said they saw the actor being carried to an ambulance looking shaken and with his right eye bandaged following the show. Audience members were told that Saturday's performance was cancelled but no reasons were given. The Donmar does not carry understudies so there was no cover available. Theatre staff are investigating the incident in a bid to determine what happened. But online blogs and Twitter were last night abuzz with news of the accident. Simon Bailey, the actor who plays Lieutenant Torasso in Passion, tweeted: Thank you all, we had an incident this eve, I won't divulge, but keep good thoughts for my friend please fellow twits xx Another Tweeter, WestEndWhingers, wrote: Did they both reach for the gun? Passion cancelled due to firearms accident apparently. Hope actor's OK. One user of Musical Theatre News blogspot said: It seems there was a problem with a gun. A Donmar spokesman confirmed the actor had suffered an eye injury but said they were still looking into what happened. He said: During the matinee performance of Passion on Saturday David Birrell sustained an injury to his eye for which he is currently being treated in hospital. Our priorities are to David's well being and recovery; and to theatregoers who have purchased tickets for performances in the coming days. The spokesman confirmed that all performances were cancelled until Wednesday and that patrons would be refunded. It is hoped the musical will resume on Thursday although it was unclear whether Mr Birrell would be taking part. Mr Birrell is stage veteran and starred in Monty Python's Spamalot. He has also had roles in TV shows including Coronation Street, Midsomer Murders, Heartbeat and The Bill. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] No laps for warm laptops; skin damage is possible
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101004/ap_on_he_me/us_med_laptop_toasted_sk in By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner, Ap Medical Writer - 2 hrs 37 mins ago CHICAGO - Have you ever worked on your laptop computer with it sitting on your lap, heating up your legs? If so, you might want to rethink that habit. Doing it a lot can lead to toasted skin syndrome, an unusual-looking mottled skin condition caused by long-term heat exposure, according to medical reports. In one recent case, a 12-year-old boy developed a sponge-patterned skin discoloration on his left thigh after playing computer games a few hours every day for several months. He recognized that the laptop got hot on the left side; however, regardless of that, he did not change its position, Swiss researchers reported in an article published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. Another case involved a Virginia law student who sought treatment for the mottled discoloration on her leg. Dr. Kimberley Salkey, who treated the young woman, was stumped until she learned the student spent about six hours a day working with her computer propped on her lap. The temperature underneath registered 125 degrees. That case, from 2007, is one of 10 laptop-related cases reported in medical journals in the past six years. The condition also can be caused by overuse of heating pads and other heat sources that usually aren't hot enough to cause burns. It's generally harmless but can cause permanent skin darkening. In very rare cases, it can cause damage leading to skin cancers, said the Swiss researchers, Drs. Andreas Arnold and Peter Itin from University Hospital Basel. They do not cite any skin cancer cases linked to laptop use, but suggest, to be safe, placing a carrying case or other heat shield under the laptop if you have to hold it in your lap. Salkey, an assistant dermatology professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School, said that under the microscope, the affected skin resembles skin damaged by long-term sun exposure. Major manufacturers including Apple, Hewlett Packard and Dell warn in user manuals against placing laptops on laps or exposed skin for extended periods of time because of the risk for burns. A medical report several years ago found that men who used laptops on their laps had elevated scrotum temperatures. If prolonged, that kind of heat can decrease sperm production, which can potentially lead to infertility. Whether laptop use itself can cause that kind of harm hasn't been confirmed. In the past, toasted skin syndrome has occurred in workers whose jobs require being close to a heat source, including bakers and glass blowers, and, before central heating, in people who huddled near potbellied stoves to stay warm. Dr. Anthony J. Mancini, dermatology chief at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said he'd treated a boy who developed the condition from using a heating pad hours at a time to soothe a thigh injured in soccer. Mancini said he'd also seen a case caused by a hot water bottle. He noted that chronic, prolonged skin inflammation can potentially increase chances for squamous cell skin cancer, which is more aggressive than the most common skin cancer. But Mancini said it's unlikely computer use would lead to cancer since it's so easy to avoid prolonged close skin contact with laptops. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] China launches second lunar exploration probe
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101001/sc_nm/us_china_space BEIJING (Reuters) - China launched its second lunar exploration probe on Friday, boosting the country's efforts to rise as a major space power eventually capable of landing a man on the moon and perhaps one day exploring far beyond. The Chang'e-2 lunar orbiter blasted off from a remote corner of the southwestern province of Sichuan a few seconds before 7 p.m. (1100 GMT), state media said, on the same day the country celebrates 61 years since the founding of Communist China. Chang'e-2 lays foundation for the soft-landing on the moon and further exploration of outer space, Xinhua news agency quoted head of the orbiter's design team Wu Weiren as saying. It (will) travel faster and closer to the moon, and it will capture clear pictures, Wu added. State television delayed the start of its main evening news to carry live pictures of the launch, bumping a story about the country's top leaders attending National Day ceremonies on Beijing's central Tiananmen Square into second place. The Chang'e-2 is expected to fly as close as 15 km (9.3 miles) above the moon, testing skills and technology intended to pave the way for an unmanned landing planned in about 2013. It will take high-resolution photos of the moon's Bay of Rainbows, where engineers plan to land Chang'e-3, the official China Daily said. China is jostling with neighbors Japan and India for a bigger presence in outer space but its plans have faced international scrutiny. Fears of a space arms race with the United States and other powers have mounted since China blew up one of its own weather satellites with a ground-based missile in January 2007. China says its aims are purely peaceful. The Chang'e is named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon. A successful Chang'e-2 mission would mark another advance in China's plan to establish itself as a space power in the same league as the United States and Russia. Chief designer Huang Jiangchuan told Xinhua before the launch that Chang'e-2 may be given an extra mission -- flying into outer space to test China's capability to probe further into space. He did not elaborate. In 2003, China became only the third country, after the United States and Russia, to send a man into space aboard its own rocket. In October 2005, it sent two men into orbit, and in 2008 it staged its first space walk, when an astronaut floated outside a vehicle orbiting the Earth. Chinese space officials said they are considering a manned landing on the moon by 2025-2030, state media reported last year. China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e-1, in October 2007, accompanied by a blaze of patriotic propaganda celebrating the country's technological prowess. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life
http://news.discovery.com/space/earth-like-planet-life.html THE GIST * A new planet that's the right size and location for life has been discovered 20 light-years away. * The newly discovered world exists in a solar system very similar to our own but much smaller. * Current technologies won't allow scientists to study the planet's atmosphere for chemical signs of life. A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It's called Gliese 581g, and the 'g' may very well stand for Goldilocks. Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that's the right size and location for life. Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it, Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News. The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface. This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface, astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday. Everything we know about life is that it absolutely requires liquid water, he added. The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it's not too hot, not too cold... and then it has to have surface gravity so that it can hold on to a substantial atmosphere and allow the water to pool. With a mass three times larger than Earth's, the newly discovered world has the muscle to hold atmosphere. Plus, it has the gift of time. Not only is its parent star especially long-lived, the planet is tidally locked to its sun -- similar to how the moon keeps the same side pointed at Earth -- so that half the world is in perpetual light and the other half in permanent darkness. As a result, temperatures are extremely stable and diverse. This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever, Vogt said. If life can evolve, it's going to have billions and billions of years to adapt to the surface. Given the ubiquity of water, it seems probable that this thing actually has liquid water. On the surface of the Earth, everywhere you have liquid water you have life, Vogt added. The question wouldn't be to defend that there is life at Gliese 581g, says Butler. The question, he said, would be to demonstrate that there isn't. Current technologies won't allow scientists to study the planet's atmosphere for chemical signs of life, but astronomers expect many more similar life-friendly planets to be discovered soon. If one or more of those cross the face of their parent star, relative to our line of sight, then it's possible to gather atmospheric data. This system is not in an orientation such that this planet would ever transit, so unfortunately this is not a case where nature has thrown us a bone, Vogt noted. That being said, it is so close and we have found this thing so soon that it suggests we will start finding a lot of these things in the future and eventually we will find systems that do transit. This is a harbinger of things to come. The research appears in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Vdara Hotel projects death rays onto pool area
http://www.wtsp.com/news/national/story.aspx?storyid=148766catid=81 Las Vegas, NV - Talk about a hunka, hunka burning solar love. This is one of the most bizarre hotel stories ever. A condo owner at the Vdara Hotel Spa in Vegas' CityCenter -- just across the way from the Elvis tribute show at the Aria resort -- says he was fried while sunning at the pool. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the pool, which sits under a south-facing glass tower -- has hot spots which can singe hair and melt plastic drink cups and bags. It has a diagram of how the sun could bounce off the curved glass and do damage. Lawyer Bill Pintas of Chicago, who co-owns a Vdara condo, told the Review-Journal that around noon Sept. 16, he took a dip and then flopped on his stomach on a recliner. He became so uncomfortable that he had to move. He said he tried to put on his flip-flops, but they were too hot to touch. So he ran to a shady spot. I was effectively being cooked, Pintas told the newspaper. He smelled an acrid odor -- some of his hair was scorched, he said. Pool staffers told him they dubbed the phenomenon in certain areas of the pool the Vdara death ray. When he returned to his chair, he noticed a plastic bag holding a newspaper was burned and melted in places. Gordon Absher, a spokesman for MGM Resorts International, which owns Vdara, told the newspaper the company was aware of hot spots that designers thought they had resolved by installing a film on south-facing windows. He said they are working on an effective solution. Pintas told the paper he doesn't plan to sue, but expects the hotel to rectify the problem. Review-Journal staffers visited the pool -- a few stories above ground -- unannounced and found a hot spot during one visit around noon. I have stayed at Vdara and briefly observed bathers and sunners at the pool, but neither felt nor heard reports of hotspots. It's ironic that one of the all-suite hotel's biggest drawing cards -- its soaring windows with great views of Vegas -- is turning into a liability. Readers, have you experienced anything similar while sunning at a hotel in Vegas or elsewhere? ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Russia to launch commercial space station by 2016
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j-sqBvsOxF3gUVbw1NhR3R 0nWEtAD9IHG2980?docId=D9IHG2980 (AP) - 8 hours ago MOSCOW - A private Russian space firm and a state-controlled spacecraft manufacturer are planning to build and operate the world's first commercial space station and expect it to launched by 2016. Sergey Kostenko, chief executive of the Moscow-based Orbital Technologies, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the station will cater to space tourists and researchers. Kostenko said the station will initially be equipped to host seven people but will be capable of significant expansion. The Russian state space agency, which stands to benefit from the proposed station by leasing launching pads for service modules, says it could be used as a safety back-up for the International Space Station in emergencies. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] RIM falls 4% despite PlayBook announcement
http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/28/technology/rim_stock/ NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Research in Motion shares fell 4% in early trade Tuesday, one day after the BlackBerry maker unveiled its PlayBook tablet computer. As expected, RIM made the PlayBook announcement at its BlackBerry Developer conference in San Francisco on Monday. Analysts were impressed with the PlayBook's specs, which include a 7-inch screen, Flash-capable video and a front and rear high-definition camera. Investors seemed optimistic, too -- RIM shares rose about 2% in after-hours trade Monday. But by Tuesday, RIM (RIMM) was down as much as 5% shortly after the open before recovering a bit. Investors may have been spooked by the lack of details on pricing, and a release date of early 2011. The stock market was also down overall. The PlayBook's limited Internet connectivity may also have disappointed investors. For now, the tablet can connect to the Internet only via Wi-Fi. RIM said it plans to offer 3G and 4G models sometime in the future. 0:00 /3:17Meet the BlackBerry PlayBook Many rival tablets -- including the Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPad -- offer 3G connectivity over a cell phone network. RIM's stock is down more than 30% so far this year, as investors remain concerned that the company is falling behind Apple. Also, smartphone makers have increasingly been using Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android operating system. Still, analysts at Stifel Nicolaus said in a research note that they were pleasantly surprised by the tablet's features. RIM has been widely criticized for falling behind on the innovation curve the new tablet appears to put RIM back on the leading edge of technology, the Stifel analysts said in their note. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Microsoft may be turning a new page in dropping Live Spaces
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/microsoft-may-be-turning-a-new-page-in-dropping-live-spaces.ars By Peter Bright | Last updated about 4 hours ago Since 2004, Microsoft has had a free blogging-cum-social networking platform it called Windows Live Spaces (née MSN Spaces). Though it attracted a few users, it never gained a huge amount of traction in the market, and lacked the range of features found in more mainstream blogging platforms. So it's perhaps unsurprising that Microsoft is killing off Live Spaces. What is surprising is what Microsoft is replacing it with. Try to create a Live Space blog now, and you'll be directed to WordPress.com, the hosted blogging service powered by the WordPress blog software. For its part, WordPress now includes some additional features to make it a suitable slot-in replacement for Live Spaces; old Spaces can now be imported into WordPress.com blogs, and WordPress.com blog updates can be published via Messenger Connect. Windows Live Essentials 2011 will also update the Windows Live Writer WYSIWYG blog editor so that it defaults to publishing to WordPress.com accounts. The decision is not, in and of itself, likely to cause any real upheaval or upset. WordPress is a better platform than Live Spaces was, and as a platform, WordPress is far more widely used. WordPress also has a rich selection of extensions and paid upgrades, a reflection of its popularity. Existing users will have to learn a new platform, but they'll be better off for doing so. You mean other people make software worth using? But this is a remarkable decision nonetheless. Microsoft is king of Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. The company has historically chosen to reinvent the wheel on many occasions: creating its own audio and video codecs, its own network protocols, and its own programming languages. It's not just external inventions that get ignored. Product teams within Microsoft even reinvent other Microsoft software: many of the programming tools overlap and duplicate functionality, many teams have recreated the same user interface concepts over and over. For example, there are at least four different ribbon implementations (Office, native Windows Ribbon Framework, MFC, WPF) which all look and behave slightly differently from each other. This is bad for users-programs that look superficially similar have different behavior depending on the which ribbon they use-and wasteful for Microsoft. The developers can always have some rationale (i.e., the other team's code isn't good enough for some reason, leaving no choice but to start from scratch), but this ignores a much larger issue. Even if teams think their own implementation is superior, hence making their software better, they're actually making their software worse, because it's now needlessly inconsistent and slower to develop. In its most extreme form, it leads to waste of hundreds of millions of dollars; as part of the KIN debacle, Microsoft bought the successful phone-and-online-services company Danger, and then made Danger rewrite its software to make it use Windows CE instead of NetBSD. Not because there was anything wrong with NetBSD, mind you, but NetBSD wasn't a Microsoft product, so it simply could not be used. One might argue that this may have been the right move long-term, but in the short-term it was a disaster, resulting in a product that was 18 months late and doomed to irrelevance. Not Invented Here syndrome is not universally bad-sometimes reinventions are a marked improvement on the original. We're all better off for Apple having reinvented Xerox's GUI concept, for example. Bing could be considered to be a reinvention of Google, but Microsoft regards the search market as strategically important: developing the capability in-house makes sense here. But when it is a consistent, almost reflexive response to any problem-and particularly when the reinvented versions are inferior to the originals-it is a problem. It wastes time and money, and leaves the re-inventor trailing behind its competitors. As such, the switch to WordPress.com-a blog platform written in PHP, hosted on Apache-marks a distinct break from Microsoft tradition. In the blog post announcing the change, the company freely acknowledged that the focus should be on providing the best possible consumer experience, and when this means using best-of-breed third-party services, that should be the approach. Windows Live: working with you, not against you The Windows Live team has realized it's no longer necessary to try to build everything in-house and try to compete in every single possible market. Instead, the company is focusing on those areas where it can provide unique value-the Windows Live Writer blogging software, the Windows Live social networking aggregation, integration with Messenger, and so on. In a similar vein to this, a few weeks ago Microsoft told Ars nobody wants another Facebook. Facebook
[Medianews] Retrial starts in Pirate Bay file-sharing case
By LOUISE NORDSTROM , 09.28.10, 10:31 AM EDT http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/09/28/general-eu-sweden-pirate-bay_7 965939.html?boxes=Homepagebusinessnews STOCKHOLM -- One of the four defendants failed to show up in court Tuesday at the start of the second round in the battle between file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and the entertainment industry. Defense lawyer Ola Salomonsson said he had received text messages from Gottfrid Svartholm Warg's mother, saying her son had fallen ill in Cambodia and wouldn't appear in front of the Svea Court of Appeal. A lower court last year convicted Svartholm Warg, along with Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom, of assisting to copyright infringement by helping millions of Pirate Bay users illegally download music, movies and computer games. They were sentenced to one year in prison each and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($4.4 million) in damages to entertainment industry groups, including Warner Bros., Sony ( SNE - news - people ) Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures. The Pirate Bay, however, remains in operation. All four defendants have denied the charges, and their defense lawyers argue they should be acquitted because The Pirate Bay doesn't actually host any copyright-protected material itself. Instead, it provides a forum for its users to download content through so-called torrent files. The technology allows users to transfer parts of a large file from several different users, increasing download speeds. The appeals court gave Svartholm Warg until Oct. 7 to produce a doctor's certificate and have his case tested in a separate hearing. If he fails to meet the deadline, the district court ruling against him will stand. He has told me all along that he wants to be here. That's what makes me believe that this is a medical condition, Salomonsson said. Sunde said he felt assured the previous verdict would be overturned. I think our chances are good. It will be difficult to make a similar judgment this time, he said. I don't see Pirate Bay as something illegal at all. Prosecutor Hakan Roswall said he found it hard to believe the ruling would be overturned. Andre Rickardsson, an expert on file-sharing and information technology security at Sweden's Bitsec Consulting, said he sees a 50-50 percent chance that the verdict is upheld but believes the sentences will be reduced. No one has been sentenced to prison for file-sharing (in Sweden), he said. Rickardsson also noted The Pirate Bay has changed since the 2009 verdict, because developments in torrent technology mean it no longer needs its own bit-torrent tracker - a server that assists the communication between file-sharers. The 2009 court case focused on dozens of works that the prosecutor said were downloaded illegally. They included songs by the Beatles, Robbie Williams and Coldplay, movies such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and computer games including World of Warcraft - Invasion. The lower court said Svartholm Warg, Sunde and Neij were administering the site, while Lundstrom helped finance it. Associated Press writer Malin Rising contributed to this report. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Xmarks browser sync tosses in towel
Browsers' built-in sync, failure to make money lead to demise By Gregg Keizer September 28, 2010 06:41 AM ET http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9188323/Xmarks_browser_sync_tosse s_in_towel Computerworld - The Xmarks browser bookmark sync service will pull the plug in early 2011, the firm's co-founder announced Monday, citing competition from Mozilla and Google. The company supported Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and was one of the few to sync bookmarks between different browsers. Todd Agulnick, who in 2006 founded what was originally called Foxmarks with Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame, also said that his company couldn't come up with a way to turn a profit from its free sync service. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service, Agulnick said in a lengthy blog post. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down. Xmarks will stop synchronizing users' data on Jan. 10, 2011, three months and two weeks from Monday. Agulnick said the company explored several ways to monetize the information it acquired from its two million users -- creating a search engine from the sites users bookmarked, enhancing Google's results or even selling ads to ranked sites -- but none panned out. Xmarks also considered moving to a freemium model, where some features would be given away in the hope that enough users would pony up for a more robust premium service. But the prospects there are grim too: With the emergence of competent sync features built into Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it's hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free, said Agulnick. Mozilla has offered a synchronization service since 2007 through a Firefox add-on, but has baked sync into Firefox 4, the next major upgrade slated to ship later this year. Although Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and Apple's Safari lack built-in sync, the former's bookmarks can be synchronized with other copies of IE using the free Windows Live Essentials. Safari users can sync to other machines running the browser via Mobile Me, Apple's $99 per year service. Xmarks remains a popular Firefox add-on. As of Monday, it was the 25th-most-downloaded add-on in the browser's extensions library. Users bemoaned Xmarks' death in comments added to Agulnick's blog, with many piping up that they would have paid for the sync service, if only someone had asked. I actually have to say 'why didn't you say anything sooner?' I too would have paid for this. said a user identified only as Josh. I would have easily paid money for Xmarks if someone asked, added someone labeled Sean. Xmarks had an answer for those people. Our research showed not enough people would be interested in a premium service, especially when there are free alternatives available, some built right into the browser, a shutdown FAQ stated. We didn't want to charge a few people, then turn around a few months later and shut down anyway. After the service is shuttered, Xmarks promised that it will wipe its servers. The company also said it would not sell any of its data. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] AOL Acquires Online-Video Distributor
By NATHAN BECKER http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870388240457551983132083819 8.html AOL Inc. bought Web video-syndication company 5min Inc. as the Internet giant looks to make its own video content more widely available. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. 5min, based in New York, has a library of 200,000 videos from media companies and independent video producers that it distributes to website publishers. 5Min's videos are mostly short instructional and do-it-yourself clips that are delivered with advertisements and automatically matched based on the website's content or audience. The deal is part of a push for AOL toward furthering its video offerings. The company in January bought StudioNow, a platform for online video creation and distribution, for about $36.5 million. The 5min acquisition provides a missing piece in the AOL value chain that completes our end-to-end video offering, AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong said. The move comes as AOL also is reported to be in talks to buy technology blog TechCrunch, in what would be a high-profile marriage between the Web giant and one of the most influential blogs in Silicon Valley. AOL has lately increased its appetite for media business-it also recently has hired hundreds of writers to create more original news and local and entertainment content. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870388240457551983132083819 8.html#ixzz10q7aehsT ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Long-Lost Footage of Apollo 11 Mission Surfaces
http://news.discovery.com/space/apollo-11-moon-landing-footage.html Lost for decades and found badly damaged, the footage offers a brief glimpse of Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk. Long-lost footage of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module will be screened in public for the first time in Sydney next week, a prominent astronomer told AFP. The footage runs for a few minutes and is considered to be some of the best footage of the historic 1969 moonwalk, but the film was lost in archives for many years and was badly damaged when found, said John Sarkissian. It depicts the first few minutes of Armstrong's descent which was recorded in Australia as NASA was still scrambling for a signal, showing a far clearer image than was initially screened worldwide. Telescopes in remote Australia played a key role in the Apollo 11 mission, including provision of the television signal, after Armstrong decided to attempt the moonwalk early, putting the United States just beyond the horizon. Sarkissian -- historian and astronomer in charge of the Australian side of the recordings restoration project -- said the unseen minutes were the best quality of Armstrong descending the ladder. NASA were using the Goldstone (California) station signal, which had its settings wrong, but in the signals being received by the Australian stations you can actually see Armstrong, he said. In what people have seen before you can barely see Armstrong at all, you can see something black -- that was his leg. The segment which runs for just a few minutes will be screened at the awards night of Australian Geographic magazine next Wednesday, at which Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin will be the chief guest. When we heard Buzz was going to be the guest of honor we thought 'what a great opportunity', Sarkissian said. The Armstrong footage, which has only previously been seen by Apollo veterans and other members of the astronomy community, would form part of a highlights reel of restored, digitized moonwalk footage at the awards, he added. There was a long detective story involved in the search for the footage and Sarkissian said it took painstaking frame by frame work to shift the material from the deteriorating black and white film to digital format. It was very damaged tape as well, that segment of Armstrong at the beginning, he said. Digitizing the recording was significant in the space flight history context allowing it to be preserved and copied for future generations, said Sarkissian ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Netflix CEO Considering Streaming-Only Option in U.S.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369642,00.asp Netflix is considering the launch of a streaming-only U.S. subscription option in the next few months, chief executive Reed Hastings said Thursday. On Friday, Netflix also expand its licensing agreement with NBC Universal to allow members to watch select NBC content via its Watch Instantly streaming library for the first time. The U.S. streaming-only option would allow users to sign up for access to Watch Instantly, but not its DVD delivery service. All Netflix subscriptions currently provide access to its streaming library, but the cheapest option in the U.S. is now $8.99 per month, which allows users to check out 1 DVD at a time. We are looking at adding a streaming-only option for the USA over the coming months, Hastings said in a blog post. Netflix this week launched its service in Canada, where it is offering a streaming-only option for $7.99 per month. Hastings's blog post was not simply to announce a planned U.S. streaming-only launch, but to apologize for a comment he made about Americans being too self-absorbed. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Hastings was asked if Americans would ask for the same $7.99 streaming-only option Canadians were receiving. Hastings responded, How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world? It's something we'll monitor, but Americans are somewhat self-absorbed. Hastings said Thursday that his comment was an awkward joke. I was wrong to have made the joke, and I do not believe that one of the most philanthropically-minded nations in the world (America) is self-absorbed or full of self-absorbed people, he wrote. My apologies to anyone offended by my self-absorbed comment. It's been a week of apologies for the company. Also on Thursday, Netflix apologized for allowing hired extras to misrepresent themselves as potential Netflix customers and speak to the news media at a launch event for Netflix in Canada. Despite the gaffes, Netflix is likely to survive. The company added 3.06 million subscribers in the last quarter to just over 15 million. Netflix also said that the percentage of subscribers who viewed Watch Instantly, or more than 15 minutes of a TV episode or movie, sometime during the second quarter was 61 percent, versus 37 percent for the same period a year ago, and 55 percent for the first quarter. The company's Watch Instantly library does not provide access to Netflix's entire content library; most new releases, for example, are not available. But Netflix has inked several content partnerships in the past few months that will bulk up the number of options in the library, including deals with Nu Image/Millennium Films, Epix, and Relativity Media. On Friday, those options expanded to include NBC content, including episodes of Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, The Office, Law Order: SVU, Friday Night Lights, and Psych. Netflix will also add more than 75 episodes of Syfy's Battlestar Galactica. The multi-year NBC-Netflix deal kicks off next week. A Netflix spokesman said Friday that he did not have additional details on whether Watch Instantly would be further expanded for a U.S. streaming-only launch. In August, Netflix released a version of its mobile app that is compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch. The upcoming Apple TV will also have access to Netflix. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Eddie Fisher, Singer And Ex Of Elizabeth Taylor, Dies
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1648615/20100924/story.jhtml Eddie Fisher, Singer And Ex Of Elizabeth Taylor, Dies 82-year-old was the father of 'Star Wars' actress Carrie Fisher. Eddie Fisher, one of Hollywood's original bad boys, died on Wednesday at the age of 82. Fisher, as well known for his string of top 40 hits as he was for a scandalous personal life that included struggles with addiction and multiple marriages to Hollywood starlets like Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds, died in Berkley, California, due to complications from recent hip surgery, according to a statement released by his family. He was loved and will be missed by his four children: Carrie, Todd, Joely, and Tricia Leigh as well as his six grandchildren, read the statement, according to Reuters. He was an extraordinary talent and a true mensch ['decent person' in Yiddish]. The fourth of seven children born to Russian-born Jewish immigrant parents in Philadelphia on August 10, 1928, Fisher began his singing career as a child, singing in local amateur contests and radio shows. He eventually dropped out of high school in his senior year to pursue a musical career and was discovered in the late 1940s. After a stint in the Army, he embarked on a multi-faceted career that included two television series, a string of hit singles and bookings in popular nightclubs. A teen idol at a time when the first seeds of rock and roll were being sown, Fisher was a middle-of-the-road singer whose popularity was so great that Coca-Cola signed him to a then-princely $1 million contract to be its spokesperson and headline his first TV series, Coke Time With Eddie Fisher. When rock finally broke through and the more dangerous and alluring Elvis Presley eclipsed Fisher on the charts, Fisher's musical career fizzled. He began a string of notorious celebrity marriages (and divorces) as he struggled with addictions to cocaine, methamphetamine and prescription drugs. In his autobiography Been There, Done That, he admitted that his romantic entanglements would probably overshadow his artistic legacy: It isn't the music that people remember most about me. It's the women, he wrote. His first marriage was to movie star Debbie Reynolds, with whom he had two children. One was Carrie Fisher, the noted author and movie star who portrayed Princess Leia in the original Star Wars films. That marriage fell apart in 1958, when Fisher set off one of the most notorious celebrity scandals of the era by starting an affair with screen queen Elizabeth Taylor while trying to console her about the death of her husband, and Fisher's good friend, movie producer Mike Todd. The scandal cost Fisher his second TV series, The Eddie Fisher Show, and essentially sank his career. But it made Taylor an international sex symbol and superstar. Fisher married Taylor in 1959 and they co-starred in the movie Butterfield 8, but when rumors emerged that Taylor was having an affair with Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton, Fisher was on the outs. Taylor dumped him and married Burton in 1964. Next up for Fisher was actress Connie Stevens; their two-year marriage ended in divorce and produced two more children. One was actress Joely Fisher, best known for her TV roles on the shows Ellen and 'Til Death. Over the years he was romantically entangled with a number of other starlets, including Marlene Dietrich, Dinah Shore, Angie Dickinson and Kim Novak. He also married two more times, to Terry Richard (which lasted one year) and to Betty Lin, who he stayed with from 1993 until her death in 2001. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Glitch delays space station crew's return to Earth
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g9y8S88sR2gY5r7jgLcsQ _USt-BQ (AFP) - 1 hour ago MOSCOW - The Soyuz capsule failed Friday to undock for the first time in a decade of flights to the International Space Station, forcing three crew members to remain an extra day in orbit. The Russian mission control centre near Moscow said the shuttle's return to Earth was rolled back to Saturday over fears that the capsule was not fully airlocked after a computer malfunction. The landing of the Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft and crew... has been pushed back by 24 hours to Saturday September 25 due to technical problems, Russia's space agency chief Anatoly Perminov said in a statement. The new plan calls for the Soyuz crew to undock at 5:59 am Moscow time (0159 GMT) and land in the central Kazakh steppes at 9:23 am (0523 GMT), a mission control official told the Interfax news agency. US astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko had been due to make their fiery descent locked in the capsule on Friday morning, after more than six months in orbit. But the manoeuvre was first delayed by a few hours due to small glitches, before being cancelled outright on Friday, Russian space officials said. When the crew attempted to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) one of their computers sent up a red flag -- showing the airlock was not fully sealed, Roskosmos chief Perminov explained. The onboard computer system is picking up a false signal that there is no airlock on the station after the hatch is closed, Perminov said. We have carried out checks on the air tightness. The airlock is confirmed on the ISS and the Soyuz, which is the most important thing for today. Perminov stressed that the Soyuz crew members were in no immediate danger and had all re-boarded the space station to prepare for the new landing schedule. We could have done it (the undocking) today but we need extra time to avoid further risks. There is no reason to rush. The most important thing is to guarantee the safety of the crew, he added. We need to figure out completely the reason for the false signal and fully guarantee that the dynamic processes of the operation are safe. In the event of another computer bug, the crew will pilot the undocking manually, according to a specialist with Roskosmos' human space flight programme. If tomorrow the automatic system again does not allow the Soyuz to undock, cosmonauts will shift to a manual work regime, the unnamed specialist was quoted by Interfax as saying. Friday's incident was the third docking problem at the station in four months after the automatic system failed on two unmanned Russian supply shuttles, causing one to fly past the station in June. The string of mishaps in a space programme that usually strives for and achieves pinpoint accuracy comes just before NASA mothballs its shuttle later this year, leaving the ISS entirely dependent on the Russian Soyuz. It's a regrettable situation which should not have occurred with a system that has always functioned well, Igor Lisov, an expert with leading Russian space science journal Novosti Kosmonavtiki, told AFP. It's the first time that the Soyuz has been unable to undock from the ISS. But a space industry expert cited by the ITAR-TASS news agency revealed that the Soyuz had already had troubles undocking in May, although he said these were swiftly resolved. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Warning over 'Stuxnet' computer worm
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/09/24/stuxnet.worm.ft/index.html?hp t=T2 San Francisco, California and London, England (FT.com) -- A piece of highly sophisticated malicious software that has infected an unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories over the past year is the first program designed to cause serious damage in the physical world, security experts are warning. The Stuxnet computer worm spreads through previously unknown holes in Microsoft's Windows operating system and then looks for a type of software made by Siemens and used to control industrial components, including valves and brakes. Stuxnet can hide itself, wait for certain conditions and give new orders to the components that reverse what they would normally do, the experts said. The commands are so specific that they appear aimed at an industrial sector, but officials do not know which one or what the affected equipment would do. While cyber attacks on computer networks have slowed or stopped communication in countries such as Estonia and Georgia, Stuxnet is the first aimed at physical destruction and it heralds a new era in cyberwar. At a closed-door conference this week in Maryland, Ralph Langner, a German industrial controls safety expert, said Stuxnet might be targeting not a sector but perhaps only one plant, and he speculated that it could be a controversial nuclear facility in Iran. According to Symantec, which has been investigating the virus and plans to publish details of the rogue commands on Wednesday, Iran has had far more infections than any other country. It is not speculation that this is the first directed cyber weapon, or one aimed at a specific real-world process, said Joe Weiss, a US expert who has testified to Congress on technological security threats to the electric grid and other physical operations. The only speculation is what it is being used against, and by whom. Experts say Stuxnet's knowledge of Microsoft's Windows operating system, the Siemens program and the associated hardware of the target industry make it the work of a well-financed, highly organised team. They suggest that it is most likely associated with a national government and that terrorism, ideological motivation or even extortion cannot be ruled out. Stuxnet began spreading more than a year ago but research has been slow because of the complexity of the software and the difficulty in getting the right industry officials talking to the right security experts. Microsoft has patched the vulnerabilities in Windows but experts remain concerned because of the worm's ability to hide once it is in a system. Experts have only begun publishing more of their analyses in the last few weeks, hoping that such steps will get more answers from private companies and government leaders. Siemens said that since July 15, when it first learnt about Stuxnet, 15 of its customers had reported being infected by the worm. The company would not name the customers but said that five were in Germany and the rest were spread around the world. Siemens said critical infrastructure had not been affected by the virus and in each case the worm had been removed. The German conglomerate said it had offered its customers a fix for the virus and that since the Stuxnet virus was detected, there had been 12,000 downloads of its anti-virus software. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Blockbuster files for bankruptcy
http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/23/news/companies/blockbuster_bankruptcy/in dex.htm?cnn=yeshpt=Sbin NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy Thursday in its latest attempt to overcome nearly $1 billion in debt. The movie rental store's U.S. businesses filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. As part of its recapitalization plan, Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) said it would attempt to reduce its debt load to $100 million or less. In a release Thursday, the company said it has secured $125 million in financing from senior bondholders to keep its remaining U.S. businesses open during the bankruptcy proceedings. Its stores, DVD vending kiosks, by-mail and digital businesses will continue serving customers. But the company will have to implement major cost-cutting measures to repay its investors, said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. Blockbuster is under the gun now to generate as much cash as possible, he said. When they were run by shareholders, the company was making investments and trying to grow. Now that they've been seized by creditors... Blockbuster will have to manage the business as lean as possible. Blockbuster has struggled for survival ever since media conglomerate Viacom (VIA) spun off the company in 2004. As a part of the deal, the company had to pay Viacom shareholders a $5 per-share dividend, and the movie rental giant racked up about $1 billion of debt in the process. The company also suffered losses from unprofitable stores and increased competition from both Netflix (NFLX) and Coinstar's (CSTR) Redbox. Blockbuster's advantage over its competitors continues to be its selection of new releases and large volume of titles in every store, Pachter said. But customers who look for lower prices have turned to Redbox, and those who prefer the ultimate convenience of never leaving home often prefer Netflix's by-mail service, he said. Blockbuster warned of a possible bankruptcy as early as March of this year. To help solve its debt problems, Blockbuster began shutting down a third of its 4,500 U.S. stores last year, and now operates about 3,000 locations in the United States. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Heading off disaster, one tweet at a time
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/22/natural.disasters.so cial.media/index.html?hpt=Sbin Denver, Colorado (CNN) -- -When word came of a huge explosion in San Bruno, California, FEMA chief Craig Fugate grabbed his cell phone and logged on to Twitter. I got out my little Android phone and went on Twitter and pulled up the grid to search for 'explosion' and got tweets coming out of the area, he said. After a few minutes he says he determined the gas explosion and ensuing fire, though horrible, was a localized event and wouldn't spread to other communities. I got better situational awareness [from Twitter] before we got official word, he said. Four or five years ago I wouldn't have gotten that quality of information. Fugate, aka @craigatFEMA on Twitter, is at the forefront of a movement to harness the power of social media during disasters. It is a way to get a sense for what people are seeing or hearing, he explained. Then I can see if it's matching up with the response. Fugate's openness to social media is unusual for a government official, according to Russ Johnson, who is working to make social media data more usable for first responders. Public safety officials are still trying to get their heads around social media. They are trying to catch up, Johnson says. What do you do when the social media knows more than you do? Johnson, who spent 32 years as a firefighter, now focuses on harnessing the power of social media for a government contractor called the Environmental Systems Research Institute. To help government officials, ESRI takes info from social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, and inputs the data onto maps for first responders. See ESRI's map for first responders The data is really unstructured -- when you wrap it around a map suddenly you have a micro and a macro view, Johnson said. All of a sudden social media is a really relevant piece of data that can increase situational awareness. Sometimes first responders can't ignore the data from social media because [they] may not have anything else. Fugate agrees that the federal government has been slow to adapt to the new social media reality. At many agencies, he said, employees can't even access websites such as Twitter because the government computer networks hide these sites behind firewalls. Fugate says he is battling an attitude within government that dismisses information that doesn't come from government sources. This phenomenal thing [is] about us not trusting the public, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said. The first concern a lot of people have in government is, 'Is this a hoax? Are they trying to trick us?' Indeed, the reliability of information is the biggest hurdle agencies face when trying to effectively using social media. The sheer number of people using social media during emergencies tends to make the information more reliable, according to Fugate. If I have lots of people reporting things it probably has more truth, he said. Like Johnson, Fugate says that government ultimately must embrace social media, whether they like it or not. It doesn't matter what we think. The public is doing it and we need to use it to communicate, Fugate said. Digital volunteers When disaster strikes, a new wave of digital volunteers isn't waiting for the government to get on board with social media. These web-savvy volunteers spring into action, gathering and sharing data from websites such as Twitter and Facebook. An unusual array of these digital volunteers teamed up to help those affected by the recent wildfires in Boulder, Colorado. I felt like an imposter, joked David Wild, a British college professor living in Indiana. I'm not involved in this but [because of social media] I am involved. Wild runs a blog called All Hazards. After hearing about the Boulder fire, which began on September 6 and destroyed more than 160 homes, Wild jumped on the Internet from his home in Bloomington, Indiana, 1,000 miles from the blaze. I was looking at some of the news sites and Twitter feeds, and some interesting things started to emerge, he said. He found that people were looking for information about where they could get help. Wild searched for reliable information and posted it to his blog, then blasted it out on Twitter. Very quickly I started to see lots of hits on my blog and people saying it was useful and giving me more info to post, he said. If everyone has access to all the information it will be, hopefully, self-correcting. Even farther away, Laura Madison had her ears glued to online feeds of Colorado police and fire scanners from her home in Kenora, Ontario. She gathered information from those feeds as well as Twitter postings and tweeted back the essentials using the #boulderfire hashtag. Crowdsourcing, that's what we're taking about, she said. We got information from wherever we could and tweeted it. Dozens of people in the Boulder area sent photos and video of the
[Medianews] Facebook CEO polishes image with $100M donation
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9187581/Facebook_CEO_polishes_ima ge_with_100M_donation After taking some hits to his and his company's image in recent months, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have just bought $100 million worth of good will. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications reported Wednesday night that Zuckerberg is donating $100 million to help the struggling school system in Newark, N.J. The official announcement is expected to be made on the Oprah Winfrey Show on Friday. Facebook today declined comment on reports of the donation. While the donation should bolster an ailing school system, it also might give a boost to Zuckerberg's tarnished image. In recent months, Facebook has taken it on the chin from users angered and frustrated over the site's privacy policies and tools. And in recent weeks, instant messages that Zuckerberg has since admitted sending while he was in college have come to light, giving users an image of a young man a bit drunk on power and cavalier with users' privacy. Zuckerberg reportedly has been cringing in anticipation of the Oct. 1 release of the movie The Social Network , which is the story of the creation of Facebook and Zuckerberg's tumultuous rise to riches and global fame. According to reports, the movie doesn't paint Zuckerberg in the best light but shows him to be a socially awkward Harvard student who created Facebook to meet girls as he pursues fame and fortune. In a public speech, Zuckerberg was quoted as calling the movie fiction. In July, Facebook reached 500 million worldwide users. With his financial gains, he's also passed Apple's Steve Jobs on Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg topped Vanity Fair's list of 100 Influential Leaders. Could announcement of the $100 million donation be designed to polish Zuckerberg's image, just days before The Social Network hits screens nationwide? I hate to look any gift horse in the mouth, said Augie Ray, an analyst at market research firm Forrester. While the timing of this donation might seem coordinated with the release of the film, The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg's image has been in need of some aid for some time. He's been the target of several scathing books and plenty of angry blog posts about his opinions on personal privacy and Facebook's privacy settings. I'm inclined to feel this is part of a longer-term effort for Zuckerberg to give back to others, while improving his reputation rather than a specific broadside at the upcoming movie. Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Current Analysis, said the timing of the donation is tough to look past, despite what a boon the donation will be for Newark students. Regardless of what the truth may be regarding the motivations behind the timing of this donation, the perception that this was planned as a means of countering the rumored negative depiction in the upcoming film about Mr. Zuckerberg cannot be overlooked or ignored, he added. The best thing he could do would be to demonstrate his commitment to the Facebook user community through continued actions to improve security and privacy, and to create transparency into Facebook's business practices. But maybe people who doubt Zuckerberg's motives are simply cynics, said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. Well, $100 million is expensive PR, Enderle said. I actually think he is trying to give back, as he could get much of the same value for $1 million ... Wouldn't it be better for these folks to put their money into schools than into the super homes, jets or mega yachts they normally fund? In the end, the why shouldn't matter as much as the what, and he is doing a good thing here. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Verizon CEO throws wet blanket on iPhone rumors
By Chris Foresman | Last updated about 2 hours ago http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/09/verizon-ceo-throws-wet-blanket -on-iphone-rumors.ars Though rumors about the possibility of Apple launching a CDMA-compatible iPhone on Verizon have been picking up steam lately-our own sources have told us that an LTE-capable iPhone has been in testing in Boston for several months-Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg suggested Thursday that it might not be coming in January as many had hoped. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York, Seidenberg made no mention of an iPhone model being made to work on Verizon's current EVDO/CDMA network. Instead, he hoped that Apple would consider making an iPhone to work with its nascent LTE 4G network. We would love to carry [the iPhone] when we get there, but we have to earn it, Seidenberg told investors. I think 4G will accelerate the process, and any other decisions Apple makes would be fine with us. Hopefully, at some point Apple will get with the program. Those comments may be bad news to the significant percentage of current iPhone users locked to ATT in the US who would likely switch to Verizon if given the chance. Our own reader survey earlier this year also suggested that there are plenty of existing Verizon customers who would be interested in an iPhone that worked on the largest US network. Though Verizon has been very successful with a strong lineup of Android-powered smartphones from Motorola and HTC, pent-up demand for a CDMA-compatible iPhone definitely exists. However, other evidence suggests that a CDMA-compatible iPhone is in the works, even if Seidenberg isn't willing to work with Apple to bring it to his network. Component suppliers have hinted that Apple is prepping to build at least 3 million CDMA iPhones in December, which would track with a manufacturing ramp-up for a rumored January launch. As mentioned above, we've heard through the grapevine that an LTE/CDMA iPhone has been in testing on Verizon's network in the Boston area, and that the rumored January launch was contingent on Verizon meeting its stated goal of launching its LTE network in 30 major markets by year's end. If Verizon isn't on track to meet that goal, it may have resulted in Apple changing its mind. Still, a CDMA-compatible iPhone could launch on other networks, including Sprint in the US, and China Mobile and SK Telecom in Asia. Whatever the problem is between Verizon and Apple, though, customers certainly don't care-they just want the popular device to work on their preferred network. It would be beneficial to both Verizon and Apple to work out a deal, and work it out soon, while demand is still high. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Verizon CEO expects data pricing tiers within six months
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9187559/Verizon_CEO_expects_data_ pricing_tiers_within_six_months It's following ATT's lead, but not with same plans, Seidenberg says By Matt Hamblen September 23, 2010 02:23 PM ET Computerworld - Tiered data pricing is coming to Verizon Wireless customers within four to six months, Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg said at an investor conference early Thursday. Verizon is expected to begin tiered pricing along with the launch of 4G LTE networks and devices, something that Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam had predicted at a different investor conference in May. Verizon Wireless is a division of Verizon Communications. ATT introduced a two-tier pricing scheme earlier this year, but Seidenberg said the tiers would be different for Verizon. We didn't need to be first on tiered pricing, he said at a Goldman Sachs conference. (An audio replay is available online.) Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse on Wednesday said Sprint is not expected to impose tiered pricing, which is also sometimes called metered pricing. But he said, we will watch it closely. Carriers are concerned that smartphones with large screens and fast processors will sap network capacity with heavy data downloads, thereby limiting capacity for other users. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Facebook Plans Deeper Phone Integration
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/showArticle.jhtml? articleID=227500560cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News A two-year-old partnership with INQ Mobile is expected to give Facebook a more pervasive presence on some mobile phones. By Thomas Claburn InformationWeek September 23, 2010 02:05 PM Facebook is reportedly working with mobile handset maker INQ Mobile to deliver a customized Android phone that's scheduled to debut in Europe in the first half of 2011 and then in the U.S. Bloomberg says that three people familiar with the matter have confirmed the project and that ATT is considering whether to carry the devices in the U.S. Facebook confirmed only that has a longstanding relationship with INQ and that the company believes social networking generally enhances users' interactions with devices. While we can't speak for their future product development plans, we can say that our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social, said a Facebook spokesperson in an e-mailed statement. Mobile integrations that we are currently working on include everything from an HTML5 version of the site to apps on major platforms to full Connect support with SDKs to deeper integrations with some manufacturers, like INQ. Facebook's mobile presence has been growing rapidly. In November 2008, the company said it had 15 million Facebook users accessing its Web site through mobile devices. Today, that number has risen to 150 million. The company says that over 200 mobile operators in 60 countries are working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile services. What remains to be seen is the extent to which deeper Facebook integration on Android phones steps on Google's toes. Based on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments in a TechCrunch interview, Facebook is still trying to figure out at which level of the computing stack it should operate on mobile devices. Zuckerberg says that Facebook isn't pursuing its own mobile OS, the bottom of the stack. But the company is likely to experiment with integration at various higher levels: libraries that provide social features to all apps on the device; application frameworks; mobile SDK support for Facebook APIs; and simple, stand-alone apps. One area where Facebook might seek to gain advantage would be through the integration of Facebook Connect, the company's single sign-on API. The idea would be that one's Facebook identity would be deeply linked to the device such that one's actions with the device would bring more data to Facebook to enhance its advertising business. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] JetBlue to Deploy Advanced Inflight Wi-Fi by 2012
JetBlue to Deploy Advanced Inflight Wi-Fi by 2012 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369583,00.asp JetBlue will bring advanced Wi-Fi to all 160 of its aircraft by late 2012, the company announced Thursday. The airline is partnering with California-based telecommunications company ViaStat to provide satellite broadband and TV service on its entire fleet. Rather than invest in current technology, designed to transmit broadcast video and audio, we elected to partner with ViaStat to create broadband functionality worthy of today's interactive personal technology needs, JetBlue chief executive Dave Barger said in a statement. ViaSat will provide JetBlue with its Ka-band antenna components and SurfBeam 2 modems for use on the airline's EMBRAER E190 and Airbus A320 planes, as well as bandwidth services and satellites. Jetblue subsidiary LiveTV will handle the integration of ViaSat technology onto JetBlue planes and provide Wi-Fi service. The Federal Aviation Association must test the service before its implementation. ViaSat and LiveTV also intend to partner and bring this technology to other airlines. JetBlue first offered Wi-Fi service in December 2007 on its Airbus A320 with LiveTV, and Yahoo and Research in Motion as partners. According to a July report from Computerworld, one-third of domestic planes already offer Internet access. JetBlue competitors AirTran and Virgin Atlantic have it and Delta and Southwest plan to implement the feature on all of their planes by the time JetBlue begins installation. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Computers set for quantum leap
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8c0a68b0-c1bc-11df-9d90-00144feab49a.html By Clive Cookson in Birmingham Published: September 16 2010 19:18 | Last updated: September 16 2010 19:18 A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today's devices. Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously. As the amount of electronic data stored worldwide grows exponentially, the technology will make it easier for people to search with precision for what they want. An early application will be to investigate and design complex molecules, such as new drugs and other materials, that cannot be simulated with ordinary computers. More general consumer applications should follow. Jeremy O'Brien, director of the UK's Centre for Quantum Photonics, who led the project, said many people in the field had believed a functional quantum computer would not be a reality for at least 25 years. However, we can say with real confidence that, using our new technique, a quantum computer could, within five years, be performing calculations that are outside the capabilities of conventional computers, he told the British Science Festival, as he presented the research. The breakthrough, published today in the journal Science, means data can be processed according to the counterintuitive rules of quantum physics that allow individual subatomic particles to be in several places at the same time. This property will enable quantum computers to process information in quantities and at speeds far beyond conventional supercomputers. But formidable technical barriers must be -overcome before quantum -computing becomes practical. The team, from Bristol university in the UK, Tohuku university in Japan, Weizmann Institute in Israel and Twente university in the Netherlands, say they have overcome an important barrier, by making a quantum chip that can work at ordinary temperatures and pressures, rather than the extreme conditions required by other approaches. The immense promise of quantum computing has led governments and companies worldwide to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the field. Big spenders, including the US defence and intelligence agencies concerned with the national security issues, and governments - such as Canada, Australia and Singapore - see quantum electronics as the foundation for IT industries in the mid-21st century. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Astronauts' Fingernails Falling Off Due to Glove Design
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/100913-science-space-ast ronauts-gloves-fingernails-injury/ If you're headed for space, you might rethink that manicure: Astronauts with wider hands are more likely to have their fingernails fall off after working or training in space suit gloves, according to a new study. In fact, fingernail trauma and other hand injuries-no matter your hand size-are collectively the number one nuisance for spacewalkers, said study co-author Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The glove in general is just absolutely one of the main engineering challenges, Newman said. After all, you have almost as many degrees of freedom in your hand as in the rest of your whole body. (See a space exploration time line.) The trouble is that the gloves, like the entire space suit, need to simulate the pressure of Earth's atmosphere in the chilly, airless environment of space. The rigid, balloonlike nature of gas-pressurized gloves makes fine motor control a challenge during extravehicular activities (EVAs), aka spacewalks. (See pictures of early U.S. space exploration.) A previous study of astronaut injuries sustained during spacewalks had found that about 47 percent of 352 reported symptoms between 2002 and 2004 were hand related. More than half of these hand injuries were due to fingertips and nails making contact with the hard thimbles inside the glove fingertips. In several cases, sustained pressure on the fingertips during EVAs caused intense pain and led to the astronauts' nails detaching from their nailbeds, a condition called fingernail delamination. While this condition doesn't prevent astronauts from getting their work done, it can become a nuisance if the loose nails gets snagged inside the glove. Also, moisture inside the glove can lead to secondary bacterial or yeast infections in the exposed nailbeds, the study authors say. If the nail falls off completely, it will eventually grow back, although it might be deformed. For now, the only solutions are to apply protective dressings, keep nails trimmed short-or do some extreme preventative maintenance. I have heard of a couple people who've removed their fingernails in advance of an EVA, Newman said. Astronaut Gloves Make Gripping a Pain In the current glove design, astronauts wear a pressurized inner layer under a thick outer layer that offers protection from the cold and any passing micrometeorites. On Earth, wearing such space suit gloves might feel like donning a thick set of gardening gloves-a bit restrictive but not too uncomfortable. When the glove pressurizes, that nice, flexible fabric surface becomes stiff, like putting air into bicycle tires, said Peter Homer, founder of commercial space suit design company Flagsuit LLC in Maine and two-time winner of NASA's Astronaut Glove Challenge. What you find is, depending on the design of the glove, there's pressure on the hard points the hand presses against, and that can give you blisters or cuts, said Homer, who was not involved in the new study. Also, the materials tend to be rubberized to make the gloves airtight, but that creates a lot of friction against the skin, and that can again create blisters. During EVAs, astronauts have to work in these gloves for six to eight hours at a stretch, Homer said: It amazes me that astronauts push through all that pain and get stuff done. (Related: Find out what it takes to be an astronaut.) To help design more comfy space suit gloves, MIT's Newman and colleagues initially tested whether fingernail trauma is related to the length of astronauts' fingers. The team first collected data from the Injury Tracking System, a database of astronaut medical logs at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Of the 232 crewmembers with complete injury records and body measurements, 22 reported at least one case of fingernail delamination. Surprisingly, an analysis of hand measurements among injured astronauts and a noninjured control group showed no statistical relationship between finger length and the instances of nails falling off, according to the study. Instead, the team found that fingernail trauma was a bigger problem for people with a wider hand circumference, or the size of the hand around the metacarpophalangeal, or metacarpal, joint, where the fingers meet the palm. If you take a pencil and grip it, you're using your metacarpal joint, Newman said. That's a really difficult thing to repeat when you have a pressurized glove on. A hard palm bar in the soft fabric glove ... helps make that crease, but the bar also puts pressure on the joint. The team's analysis, to be published in the October issue of the journal Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, showed that astronauts with hand circumferences greater than about 9 inches (22.8 centimeters)-what Newman called the large to extra-large range-had a 19.6 percent chance of fingernail injuries
[Medianews] NASA's Hubble Harvests Distant Solar System Objects
NASA's Hubble Harvests Distant Solar System Objects http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2010/pr201015.html Cambridge, MA - Beyond the orbit of Neptune reside countless icy rocks known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). One of the biggest, Pluto, is classified as a dwarf planet. The region also supplies us with comets such as famous Comet Halley. Most TNOs are small and receive little sunlight, making them faint and difficult to spot. Now, astronomers using clever techniques to cull the data archives of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have added 14 new TNOs to the catalog. Their method promises to turn up hundreds more. Trans-Neptunian objects interest us because they are building blocks left over from the formation of the solar system, explained lead author Cesar Fuentes, formerly with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and now at Northern Arizona University. As TNOs slowly orbit the sun, they move against the starry background, appearing as streaks of light in time exposure photographs. The team developed software to analyze hundreds of Hubble images hunting for such streaks. After promising candidates were flagged, the images were visually examined to confirm or refute each discovery. Most TNOs are located near the ecliptic -- a line in the sky marking the plane of the solar system (since the solar system formed from a disk of material). Therefore, the team searched within 5 degrees of the ecliptic to increase their chance of success. They found 14 objects, including one binary (two TNOs orbiting each other like a miniature Pluto-Charon system). All were very faint, with most measuring magnitude 25-27 (more than 100 million times fainter than objects visible to the unaided eye). By measuring their motion across the sky, astronomers calculated an orbit and distance for each object. Combining the distance and brightness (plus an assumed albedo or reflectivity), they then estimated the size. The newfound TNOs range from 25 to 60 miles (40-100 km) across. Unlike planets, which tend to have very flat orbits (known as low inclination), some TNOs have orbits significantly tilted from the ecliptic (high inclination). The team examined the size distribution of TNOs with low- versus high-inclination orbits to gain clues about how the population has evolved over the past 4.5 billion years. Generally, smaller trans-Neptunian objects are the shattered remains of bigger TNOs. Over billions of years, these objects smack together, grinding each other down. The team found that the size distribution of TNOs with low- versus high-inclination orbits is about the same as objects get fainter and smaller. Therefore, both populations (low and high inclination) have similar collisional histories. This initial study examined only one-third of a square degree of the sky, meaning that there is much more area to survey. Hundreds of additional TNOs may lurk in the Hubble archives at higher ecliptic latitudes. Fuentes and his colleagues intend to continue their search. We have proven our ability to detect and characterize TNOs even with data intended for completely different purposes, Fuentes said. This research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe. For more information, contact: David A. Aguilar Director of Public Affairs Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 617-495-7462 dagui...@cfa.harvard.edu Christine Pulliam Public Affairs Specialist Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 617-495-7463 cpull...@cfa.harvard.edu ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] 'Nokia is back - and we're not sorry that we're not Apple' declares exec
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/14/nokia-is-back-declares- savander PaidContent: biggest mobile phone maker declares intention to win against rivals Nokia's beaten-down top dogs opened their annual Nokia World show in London Tuesday morning with a blunt and rousing pep talk and a direct riposte to their competitors. We're not going to apologise for the fact that we're not Apple or Google or anybody else - we're Nokia and we're unique, markets executive vice president Niklas Savander said. Nokia's going through a tough, challenging transition and we have a LOT more work to do. But we have laid the foundation for success. Bullish, Savander mocked Apple's Scott Forstall for borrowing Nokia's corporate slogan to talk about iPhone recently: Connecting People is more than just a feel-good tagline - it's our mission. In return, standing on stage in front of Nokia's developer community, Savander borrowed back a Steve Jobs catchphrase and took aim at iPhone 4... One more thing, he said, before talking about Nokia's flagship new N8 handset: They perform - day in, day out - no matter how you hold them. In the past quarter, people bought far more Nokia phones than Apple and Android combined. On average, people buy 260,000 new Nokia smartphones every day - that's more smartphones sales than any other company by far - period. The N8, which has been taken on by over 100 carriers globally, is the first Nokia handset to be released with the re-engineered Symbian 3 OS on which Nokia's smartphone future will depend, and Nokia expects to ship at least 50 million. But, in services, too, Savander also dared to declare: Contrary to popular perception, Nokia - not Google (NSDQ: GOOG) - is the leader in mobile navigation. functionality quality and reach. Ovi Maps is far, far less hungry than the Google service. Why? Because it's optimised for mobile use. He also said Ovi Maps offers walking navigation that Google Maps does not. On location sharing, Savander said over 800 million people will use GPS-enabled phones by 2013. Soon, everything on the internet will have a location coordinate - it is a space that we intend to OWN. In fact, Google launched walking navigations for Android's Google Maps last week, and no phone manufacturer is necessarily winning the location-sharing game ahead of dedicated services like Foursquare themselves. I recognise that we haven't been as competitive as we want to be in smartphones. Well, that's about to change. Today, we shift in to high gear in Nokia's fightback in smartphone leadership. Nevermind the past, Savander said: Today is about the here and now, about three words. NOKIA IS BACK. Executive vice president Ansi Vanjoki, who received warm applause after his resignation was announced on Monday, told delegates in another confident address: The reality is that Nokia invented the smartphone. Nokia's fightback amounts to four new handsets - the N8 entertainment smartphone, mid-market C6 and C7 phones targeted at social network users, and an E7 corporate communicator - packing Symbian 3. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Bing Overtakes Yahoo In Search
Bing Overtakes Yahoo In Search Microsoft's decision engine now trails only Google as so-called MicroHoo alliance takes effect. By Paul McDougall InformationWeek September 14, 2010 01:02 PM Microsoft Bing is now the nation's number two search engine, as it surpassed Yahoo in terms of total share in August, according to new numbers from market watcher Nielsen. Google remains in the top spot. For the month, Bing garnered 13.9% of all U.S. search traffic, up from 13.6% in July, according to Nielsen. Yahoo's share over the same period declined from 14.6% to 13.1%. Google, meanwhile, made a slight gain, as its share increased from 64.2% in July to 65% in August. That Bing has overtaken Yahoo shouldn't be surprising. Yahoo agreed to outsource search to Microsoft under an alliance struck last year, and the integration went live Aug. 24. Bing is now serving up search results on Yahoo sites. The integration is thus far complete only in the U.S. and Canada, with other countries to follow. Yahoo also plans to adopt Microsoft's adCenter as its online advertising platform. Microsoft officials have said that work should be complete in the fall. Microsoft and Yahoo announced the alliance on July 29, 2009. Under the ten-year pact, Microsoft will place its Bing search engine on all Yahoo sites and, initially, keep 12% of the revenue from Yahoo-driven searches. Yahoo will handle sales and marketing for premium search ads for both its own properties and Microsoft's. Also, Microsoft agreed to hire a minimum of 400 Yahoo employees on a full-time basis as it extends Bing to Yahoo's Web sites. It also agreed to hire an additional 150 Yahoo workers to help with the transition. Yahoo can terminate the arrangement if search traffic generated by the alliance falls below a specified percentage of rival Google's traffic. Yahoo also retains the right to expand the partnership by adding Microsoft's mapping and mobile search services to its Web properties. Microsoft must submit to Yahoo copies of all data it collects from its sites while providing search services, according to SEC documents filed by the companies. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said that, by in effect outsourcing search to Microsoft, her company can save $200 million in annual capital expenditures through reduced spending on search-related operations. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Wal-Mart introduces wireless plan under own brand
By PETER SVENSSON The Associated Press Monday, September 13, 2010; 6:07 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR201009 1303160.html?hpid=sec-tech NEW YORK -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Monday that it is introducing the first cell phone plan that uses the chain's own branding, further demonstrating its clout in getting special deals from wireless carriers. The Wal-Mart Family Mobile service will run on T-Mobile USA's network. Unlimited calling and texting will cost $45 per month for the first line and $25 for each additional line for the family. The service will be offered starting next week in most of its stores across the nation. Since last year, Wal-Mart has been the exclusive seller of the Straight Talk service, which runs on the Verizon Wireless network. Wal-Mart is also trying out another service from Sprint Nextel Corp. called Common Cents. Those are both prepaid plans, under which customers pay in advance and don't need to sign contracts. Wal-Mart Family Mobile will be postpaid like conventional contract-based plans, so the family bill is paid at the end of the month. But in other ways it works much like prepaid service, and it won't come with a contract requirement or early termination fees. Buyers also won't need to go through credit checks. Greg Hall, vice president of merchandising at Wal-Mart U.S., said there's a perception among customers that prepaid service doesn't offer access to the best phones or the best network quality. He said the postpaid nature of the plan is a way to avoid that. Starting Monday, the chain plans to sell five phones, including a full-blown smart phone, the Motorola Cliq XT, which will cost $249. T-Mobile sells it for $329 without a contract, or gives it away to buyers who sign two-year contracts (with monthly fees that are higher than the no-contract option). The cheapest phone for the service will be a simple Nokia phone for $35. Straight Talk also costs $45 per month for unlimited calls and texting, but doesn't offer a discount for additional lines. And while Straight Talk offers unlimited free data, there are no smart phones available for it; the new Family Mobile plan includes only a small amount of free data. Common Cents is a basic pay-by-the-minute service. What we saw was an opening in the marketplace for really bringing family savings and a family plan and T-Mobile was a great partner there, Hall said. The plan undercuts T-Mobile USA's own prices, but Jim Alling, its chief operating officer, said that Wal-Mart putting its own stamp on the brand name was a tremendous endorsement. While there's no contract, Ailing said the phones will be locked to Wal-Mart Family Mobile, so they won't be usable on another network, or even under a T-Mobile-branded plan. There will also be a prepaid component to the service: extra charges for data use and international calls will come from a prepaid account, pooled for the whole family. For instance, one gigabyte of data usage will cost $40. By comparison, ATT's contract customers pay $25 per month for 2 gigabytes of usage, but the data allowance doesn't carry over from month to month the way Wal-Mart's will. T-Mobile USA is a subsidiary of German phone company Deutsche Telekom AG. Shares of Wal-Mart, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., increased 24 cents to $52.21 Monday. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats
http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on- chats?skyline=trues=i We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses. David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users' accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment, we've learned. Barksdale met the kids through a technology group in the Seattle area while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google's Kirkland, Wash. office. He was fired in July 2010 after his actions were reported to the company. It's unclear how widespread Barksdale's abuses were, but in at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her. In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer. What motivated Barksdale to snoop on these teens is not entirely clear. Our source said Barksdale's harassment did not appear to be sexual in nature, although his online communication with the minors (such as inviting underage kids to attend to the movies with him) demonstrated extraordinarily questionable judgment on Barksdale's part. My gut read on the situation was that there wasn't any strong sexual predatory behavior, just a lot of violating people's personal privacy, our source explained. Barksdale declined to speak with us by phone. Via email, however, he confirmed that he'd been fired by Google, although he refused to elaborate on the circumstances behind his departure or the specific allegations made against him. You must have heard some pretty wild things if you think me getting fired is newsworthy, he responded by email. It seems part of the reason Barksdale snooped through the teens' Gmail and Gtalk accounts was to show off the power he had as a member of a group with broad access to company data. A self-described hacker, Barksdale seemed to get a kick out of flaunting his position at Google, which was the case when, with a friend's consent, he pulled up the person's email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs-even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account-within seconds. The friend wasn't concerned; Barksdale seemed to him to be a silly, good-natured nerd. The parents of the teens whose Google accounts were violated by Barksdale were hardly amused, however. Several attempted to cut off Barksdale's access to their children and withdrew them from the technology group where they'd first encountered the Google engineer. (Barksdale was kicked out of the group after his abuses came to light.) In July, officials at Google were notified of Barksdale's actions. We've obtained an email exchange between one person who complained about Barksdale to Google and Eric Grosse, an Engineer Director in Google's security group at the company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. Grosse quickly responded to the complaint with a curt email: Thank you very much for reporting; we'll investigate quietly and get back to you if we need anything more. If Google was already aware of Barksdale's privacy violations, Grosse didn't mention it. But while Google seemed initially helpful and friendly when dealing with those who'd notified Google of his conduct, they became increasingly tight-lipped as company officials realized the seriousness of the problem. Later, when asked if Google had taken steps to deal with Barksdale, Grosse would only say, I am personally satisfied that we've taken decisive steps to limit any additional risk. When emailed again several weeks later about whether Barksdale was still employed by Google, or if the company had determined the extent of his privacy violations, Grosse refused to get into any specifics: Google has taken the appropriate actions, I can't say more. Right around the same
[Medianews] Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!: 'Springer Show' turns 20
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2010-09-12-jerry-springer_N.htm?loc= interstitialskip Amid the ever-changing television landscape, one thing remains constant: Jerry Springer. On Monday, Springer will mark the 20th anniversary of The Jerry Springer Show with a new season. The topic of his first show? It's unclear and it doesn't matter because one thing's certain: It involves a fight. Punching, hair-pulling and crying has been a staple of the show since its began. We're now getting the children of our original guests, says Springer, which is just wrong because they were told not to procreate. Springer, 66, jokes about the syndicated show that has been denounced by Oprah Winfrey and others, as one of the leaders in the trash TV genre. It was once voted Worst TV Show Ever by TV Guide, but he says he knows why it has lasted. No. 1, it has a niche; No. 2, there's no show like it; and No. 3, there are always young people who want to watch it. Our show is a fraternity party, he says, adding that he's well aware of the criticism, particularly from Winfrey. It's hard to put her and me in the same sentence, says Springer. She's No. 1 and she runs a real talk show. We do a circus. We're tongue in cheek. And she's phenomenal. I admire her more than anyone. He continues, We're just crazy. If anything, it's that people realize I don't take it seriously. I'm not up there pretending that this show is saving the world. Our show is just plain silly. It has no function, other than momentary entertainment. Through the years, he says, he has noticed that the more reality-based shows, such as his, have driven out soap operas in the daytime programming arena. The stories are the same, but 'real' always wins. People can relate to it. He knows his shows features fights, but says that's just part of the authenticity. The problem is if you want people to always behave and just agree, then you won't get anything that's real. We were a very polite society in the 1950s and we had discrimination. All those Southern manners? Sometimes good manners isn't always the right thing. Springer insists the show is not low-class or low-rent. There has never been a story on our show that hasn't been in the papers involving wealthy people. This notion that they're the underclass is fiction, he argues, saying that you can find similar cheating stories among high-class folks, too. I always give the example: If an English professor from Harvard came home one night and found his wife in bed with next door neighbor, he wouldn't say, 'Forsooth, my dear, what have I found?' he says. He'd act exactly like the people on my show, chasing the guy, trying to hit him with a chair, cursing. But doesn't it ever get to him? Wouldn't he like to retire? Well, in fact, he says, I have already notified NBC universal that I'm going to stop, he pauses, when I'm 107. Why not keep doing it? he says. He works two days a week - taping three shows on Mondays and two on Tuesdays. It leaves plenty of time for other jobs, such as his hosting Baggage, a dating program on the Game Show Network, and for hosting the America's Got Talent's live road show, which kicks off Oct. 1 and will tour 25 cities. He won't say who his favorite is on the show, which is down to the final four and will crown a winner next week. That wouldn't be fair, he says. Talent is the personification of the American dream. You don't have to be rich, famous, have a parent in the business, he says. You can live in Middle America, up in your bedroom singing into a hairbrush in the mirror. Everyone gets a shot. There are very few life experiences where you get to put everything you have in your body and soul into a performance that will be judged by a whole nation, he says. I honestly love the (contestants). I don't have celebrity friends. I feel more comfortable with regular people (who) aren't looking for headlines, coming with their agents. They're like everyone else in life - they want to be happy. And that makes him happy. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Diamond star thrills astronomers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3492919.stm A diamond that is almost forever Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk. Astronomers have decided to call the star Lucy after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Twinkle twinkle You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond, says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it. The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa. The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon. For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently. The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations. By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth. We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond, says Metcalfe. Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system. Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever, says Metcalfe. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Nokia drops Kallasvuo as chief executive
Nokia drops Kallasvuo as chief executive http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/09/10/nokia.kallasvuo.ft/index.html?hpt=T2#fbid=Wv4MjC3MB3Lwom=false Stockholm, Sweden (FT.com) -- Nokia has removed Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as chief executive and appointed Stephen Elop from Microsoft to replace him in a bid to raise its game against Apple and Google in the smartphone market. Mr Elop, currently head of Microsoft's business division, will take charge of the world's biggest handset maker on September 21 when Mr Kellasvuo steps down after four years in charge. The time is right to accelerate the company's renewal; to bring in new executive leadership with different skills and strengths in order to drive company success, said Jorma Ollila, Nokia chairman, on Friday. The change follows months of mounting unrest among Nokia investors over the group's plunging share price and its failure to come up with a high-end smartphone good enough to match the Apple iPhone. The company's share price has fallen by almost two-thirds since the iPhone was launched in 2007, wiping about €60bn off group's market capitalisation. On Friday morning, following the announcement of Mr Elop's appointment, Nokia's shares were up 4.7 per cent. The appointment comes ahead of Nokia's annual product trade fair in London next week, when the group will unveil a new model, the N8, aimed at narrowing the gap with Apple and a growing range of phones based on Google's Android software. Some investors had called for new leadership with more US experience to tackle Nokia's weakness in North America and emulate the faster innovation shown by Apple and Google in the smartphone market. Before joining Microsoft, Mr Elop held senior positions at several US technology and media companies including Juniper Networks, Adobe Systems and Macromedia. The Nokia board believes that Stephen has the right industry experience and leadership skills to realise the full potential of Nokia, said Mr Ollila. He highlighted Mr Elop's strong software background and proved record in change management as key assets as Nokia bids to accelerate its transformation from a hardware company into one more focused on software and mobile services. We believe that Stephen will be able to drive both innovation and efficient execution of the company strategy in order to deliver increased value to our shareholders, Mr Ollila added. Nokia is the world's biggest maker of smartphones by volume but it has struggled to compete with devices such as the iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry at the top end of the market, where profits are greatest. This has led to a sharp drop in the operating margin of Nokia's core handset business from from 22.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 9.5 per cent in the three months to June 30. John Strand, chief executive of Strand Consult, a telecoms research company, said Mr Kallasvuo's biggest failure was his poor communications with investors and consumers, in contrast to the showmanship of Apple's Steve Jobs and others. Elop is a communicator and a salesman. He will do a better job telling the Nokia story, said Mr Strand. The appointment of a foreign chief executive could herald a broader shake-up of Nokia's Finnish-dominated management culture, which some analysts say has been too bureaucratic and lumbering. Mr Elop said he was excited by the move and committed to strengthening Nokia's position as the undisputed leader of the mobile communications industry. Mr Kallasvuo, urged the board to end speculation over his position, will receive a severance package of €4.6m, or 18 months' gross salary, as well as the value of 100,000 Nokia shares granted to him in 2007 that are due to vest on October 1. He will step down from the board with immediate effect but remain a non-executive board member at Nokia Siemens Networks, the group's wireless equipment joint venture. Mr Kallasvuo joined Nokia as a company lawyer three decades ago and eventually succeeded Mr Ollila as chief executive in 2006. The whole board of directors joins me in thanking Olli-Pekka for his 30 years at Nokia, during which he has been deeply involved in developing the company and its operations, said Mr Ollila. His dedication and contribution throughout the years has been exceptional. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Android usage to surpass BlackBerry, iOS by year end
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/09/android-to-challenge-symbian -for-1-market-share-spot-by-2014.ars Android is on its way to taking the silver medal in mobile market share worldwide, and gold in North America-as long as the platform maintains its currently strong growth numbers. According to market research firm Gartner, the mobile world will be dominated by Symbian and Android devices by 2014, with RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS projected to come in third and fourth place, respectively. Symbian will maintain its market dominance thanks to Nokia's sheer sales volume, while Android will outpace the rest of the competition because of the impending launch of many new budget Android devices by the end of 2010 that will help the OS get into the mass market. Other players, such as Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, will follow a similar strategy. This trend should help Android become the top OS in North America by the end of 2010, wrote Gartner. Gartner's predictions are based on Android's current growth trajectory, which has been explosive as of late. This year has already been filled with reports from other firms, such as AdMob and comScore, about Android's rise to the top at the expense of RIM and Apple, and there are undoubtedly more tales to come as Android phones continue to flood the marketplace. Gartner's numbers have Android's share of the mobile market at 17.7 percent (up from just 3.9 percent in 2009), projected to grow to 29.6 percent by 2014. Comparatively, Symbian is expected to drop from 40.1 percent in 2010 to 30.2 percent in 2014-just enough to keep it on top, but probably not for long after that. This isn't to say the other players won't be doing their share to boost smartphone sales in the years ahead. The firm says that the introduction of iOS 4.x, as well as the impending release of BlackBerry OS 6, Symbian 3 and Symbian 4, and Windows Phone 7 will all make positive contributions to smartphone growth. Still, single-source platforms (iOS and RIM's OS) will only increase in unit terms and not share, and despite the widely anticipated release of Windows Phone 7, the firm projects it to only hold 3.9 percent of the mobile market in 2014. By 2014, open-source platforms will continue to dominate more than 60 percent of the market for smartphones, Gartner said. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Steal someone else's game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.
FarmVillains Steal someone else's game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat. http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/ One of the Internet's greatest success stories in 2010 can be found in a former potato chip factory on Vermont Street in Potrero Hill. This is the original office of Zynga, the S.F.-based creator of online social games - FarmVille, a simple application in which participants plant and harvest crops, is the company's best-known product - that in three years has gone from scrappy startup to the toast of Silicon Valley. Since launching its first Internet game in 2007, Zynga has grown rapidly. The company's true earnings are unknown to outsiders, but industry observers estimate that its annual revenue could now be $500 million or more. In May, social-media analyst Lou Kerner estimated Zynga's total price tag at $4 billion, based on corporate filings for a stock issuance. In light of Zynga's phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. What was Zynga's secret? Not long after starting work, he got an answer. It came directly from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting. And it wasn't what he expected. I don't fucking want innovation, the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers. The former employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about his experience at Zynga, said this wasn't just bluster. Indeed, interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas - and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators - was business as usual. Criticisms and speculation about Zynga's theft of ideas have been aired before, chiefly in tech-industry blogs that have remarked on apparent design similarities between Zynga's smash hits - including FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, and Mafia Wars - and predecessors published by other companies. But company insiders have never discussed the frankness with which Zynga, led by Pincus, based its lucrative business model on exploiting the achievements of competitors. None allege that Zynga knowingly broke laws. Although the company has been sued for copyright infringement, stealing concepts for games is not in itself illegal. Specific game mechanics and design elements must be copied extensively before intellectual-property protections kick in. Former employees nevertheless describe a corporate ethos based in a predatory attitude toward rival companies and gamers. Unlike innovative and socially useful business enterprises such as Twitter or Google, Zynga sought to cash in quickly by repackaging, and then furiously peddling, the ideas of others. As the former senior employee who listened to Pincus rant against innovation recalls, workers at Zynga were fond of joking (albeit half-seriously) that their firm's unofficial motto was an inversion of Google's famous Don't Be Evil. Zynga's motto is 'Do Evil,' he says. I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I've run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I've tried my best to make sure that friends don't let friends work at Zynga. The derivative nature of Zynga's high-grossing games isn't just an ethical liability. While the company has recently enjoyed a spate of bullish mainstream media coverage, some industry experts say that its star could soon be on the wane. The audience for its signature application, FarmVille, has collapsed by 26 percent from its high of 84 million monthly users. As a new generation of social gamers demands more sophistication in online entertainment, some observers - including at least one of Zynga's founders - question whether the company can adapt. You can't make the cheap little viral games like you used to, says Tom Bollich, an early Zynga investor and former lead engineer who owned more than 400,000 shares of the company in 2008, and who has now divested completely. These games, it's like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it. You can get a lot of people, but they don't stick around. Officials at Zynga declined to be interviewed on the record for this story, although Dani Dudeck, the firm's general manager of corporate communications, provided contact information for several investors and former colleagues of Pincus'. Michelle Kim, a public-relations official with Brew Media Relations, which helps handle Zynga's press inquiries, said the company is loathe to cooperate with stories, absent guarantees of mostly positive coverage. Unless they know everything about the article, and that there's not going to be anything negative in it, they're probably not going to give
[Medianews] Microsoft gets legal might to target spamming botnets
Microsoft gets legal might to target spamming botnets http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-09-08-botnets08_ST_N.htm SEATTLE - With a judicial assist, Microsoft has perfected a new superweapon to shoot down botnets, the engines cybergangs use to deliver malicious Internet attacks. The U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia last week granted a motion that, in effect, gives Microsoft permanent ownership of 276 Web domains once used by the Waledac cybergang to send instructions to hundreds of thousands of spam-spreading PCs. Cybersleuths and attorneys at Microsoft's digital crimes unit actually decapitated the Waledac botnet in February by persuading District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema to issue a temporary restraining order to take the 276 domains offline. Brinkema's order was unusual because the owner of the domains could not be reached and thus did not have a day in court to protest, says Microsoft senior attorney Richard Boscovich Sr. With permanent ownership of the domains, Microsoft now has a proven legal means to take aim at U.S.-registered domains - including .com, .net, .biz and .org domains - shown to be conducting criminal activity. It's open season on botnets, says Boscovich. The hunting licenses have been handed out, and we're coming back for more. The Waledac botnet was a major source of spam and PC infections, at its peak in 2009 delivering 1.5 billion spam messages daily. Microsoft added detection and filtering for Waledac infections to its free malicious software removal tool. But cleaning infected PCs one by one did not stop the command PCs. By December, Microsoft Hotmail accounts were getting swamped with more than 650 million e-mail spam messages sent out by Waledac. That helped motivate the company to pursue a court order to shut down the command domains. Even after the botnet's command center got knocked out, tens of thousands of infected PCs continued trying to phone home for instructions. Internet service provider Cox Communications has contacted several hundred of its subscribers by phone to guide them to Microsoft's free cleanup tool. Lingering Waledac infections pose a risk, says Jason Zabek, safety manager at Cox. You never know if something else will pop up to try to use it, he says. Indeed, Microsoft in one recent seven-day period counted 58,000 PCs attempting 14.6 million connections to the 276 Waledac domains it now owns. The company advises using its free Security Essentials program, which will clean up Waledac and many other infections. Meanwhile, it is back at the hunt. There are dozens of major botnets and hundreds of smaller ones, says T.J. Campana, Microsoft senior program manager. Botnets remain the backbone of criminal activity. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Statement from Discovery Communications (regarding hostage situation 9/1/10)
http://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-news/statement-from-discovery-c ommunications/ Statement from Discovery Communications September 1, 2010 (Silver Spring, Md.) David Leavy, Discovery Communications Executive Vice President Global Communications and Corporate Affairs stated: First and foremost, Discovery Communications wants to express how relieved and grateful we are that all employees and the children from the Discovery Kids Place daycare center are safe. Employees in Silver Spring demonstrated courage, compassion and cooperation throughout the situation, which aided law enforcement efforts -- for which we are thankful and proud. In coordination with Montgomery County, Md., Police, an evacuation procedure was executed for all persons in the building. The evacuation procedures were handled with professionalism and with safety as Discovery's primary concern. Discovery thanks the Montgomery County Police and Fire Rescue and other state and federal safety personnel whose quick thinking and fast action ensured the safety of the employees and children in the building as well as the Silver Spring, Md., community. The events of today showed the strong heart of the Discovery family. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Facebook post gets Detroit-area juror in hot water
MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. - A judge removed a juror from a trial in suburban Detroit after the young woman wrote on Facebook that the defendant was guilty. The problem? The trial wasn't over. Hadley Jons, of Warren just north of Detroit, could be found in contempt when she returns to the Macomb County circuit court Thursday. Jons, 20, was a juror in a case of resisting arrest. On Aug. 11, a day off from the trial and before the prosecution finished its case, she wrote on Facebook that it was gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're guilty. The post was discovered by defense lawyer Saleema Sheikh's son. Circuit Judge Diane Druzinski confronted Jons the next day and replaced her with an alternate. You don't know how disturbing this is, Druzinski said, according to The Macomb Daily. A message seeking comment was left for Jons on Monday. I would like to see her get some jail time, nothing major, a few hours or overnight, Sheikh said. This is the jury system. People need to know how important it is. Sheikh's son, Jaxon Goodman, discovered the comment while checking jurors' names on the Internet. He works in his mother's law office. I'm really proud of him, Sheikh said. Without Jons, the jury convicted Sheikh's client of a felony but couldn't agree on a separate misdemeanor charge. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100830/ap_on_re_us/us_facebook_juror ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] University Attendance Scanners Make Some Uneasy
by Daniel Kraker http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129482104 When classes begin on Monday, some students at Northern Arizona University will have a little extra incentive to roll out of bed for that 8 a.m. calculus class. The school is installing electronic scanners outside some large lecture halls to track attendance. NAU may be the first American educational institution to try the technology. When I started here, I was of the mindset that this is college - students should decide for themselves whether they should show up or not, says associate professor Brandon Cruickshank, who has taught Chemistry 101 in a cavernous classroom at the university for 15 years. This is no longer high school. But over the years, he's seen that attending class does matter. So now he factors class participation into his students' grades. Most of his students are freshmen. We do have to say to a lot of those students that it really is important that you do show up to class - you are not going to do well if you're not there, he says. Research suggests that missing even one class can result in a lower GPA for first-year students. And a freshman's grades, in particular, are really important, says Karen Pugliesi, NAU's vice provost for academic affairs. The stronger a student's grade performance in the first year, the far more likely they are to persist at NAU and graduate, she says. Efforts To Boost Graduation Rates Universities across the country are struggling to boost lagging graduation rates. At NAU, only about 30 percent of incoming freshmen will earn a degree in four years. About 3 in every 10 students drop out after the first year. And if something as simple as going to class could help turn that around, Pugliesi thinks it's appropriate to make it a priority. There's a lot of compelling things out there, there's a lot of competing choices that a student can make, she says. We ought to do everything we can to make that choice the most likely. The university received $85,000 in federal stimulus funds for its new electronic attendance pilot project. The school has installed scanners outside 20 large lecture halls - including Cruickshank's chemistry classroom - where it's not practical to take roll. Getting A Green Light, Student Opposition When students flash their ID cards near a scanner, a light turns green, and they get checked off on an attendance report. I don't see why we need to be told what to do anymore, says junior Rachel Brackett. I feel like it's a move toward that - treating us as though we were juveniles. Brackett has mobilized student opposition to the project. She has launched a Facebook page, gathered 2,000 signatures and organized a rally against the plan. Brackett says part of the college experience is learning to make your own decisions, and living with the consequences. I really felt like NAU is not giving students enough initiative, Brackett says. They coddle us - I almost feel like - in a lot of our classes. She also doesn't like how the school could track where she is in a Big Brother way. Linda DeAngelo, with the Higher Education Research institute at UCLA, shares those concerns. Rather than focusing on, 'Did students go?' - in other words, 'Did they scan their card?' - the more important thing to think about is what are they doing in the classroom; are they actively participating? DeAngelo says. Universities also have a strong financial incentive to retain their students. It costs about $400 to recruit a single student to a public school and nearly $2,000 to a private college. Every time a student drops out, that process starts all over again. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] One letter on a plane ticket says a lot about you
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20100825/ap_tr_ge/us_travel_flight_pla n_ticket_codes?cheapskateisacoolword Wed Aug 25, 5:25 pm ET NEW YORK - There are a few bits of information to pay close attention to on an airline ticket: the flight number, gate number and boarding time. Fare basis code? Not a common concern. But the single-letter code can make a big difference in some parts of the travel experience, even though most passengers don't pay any attention. A fare basis code further divides passengers into classes based on how much they paid and how far out they booked. There are about a dozen in coach class alone. When you're on the plane, there's no difference in service between a passenger who has a Y or Q - a full-fare and a discounted ticket - if you're both in coach. But the codes are still important: Some indicate your trip isn't eligible for frequent-flier miles or an upgrade; others tell a ticket agent where to rank you on a standby list. Deciphering the code The letters airlines assign to certain levels of coach can vary widely, but a couple are universal. Y class is a widespread denotation for the highest class in coach among most major airlines, according to Jami Counter, senior director of TripAdvisor Flights and a former pricing strategist at American Airlines. These tickets are usually fully refundable, last-minute coach fares purchased mainly by business travelers. They're the most expensive tickets, but they have the most flexibility. Some others that are generally used among the airlines: J or C usually indicate business class. F and P denote first class or premium. Why are the codes there? Airline tickets weren't always so complicated. Codes were developed as the airlines created complex systems that let them make more money per ticket. The fare basis code is found on most e-tickets by itself, but it can also be shown as the first letter of a longer code with a mix of other letters and numbers. The rundown The good news: The better code you have, the better your chance of not getting bumped. You also might receive more frequent flier miles if you're in the top tiers. The bad news: The main way to improve your code is to pay more. Most leisure travelers wouldn't think of forking over double or triple the usual fare for a refundable ticket or more perks. But there are ways to avoid hassles without paying through the roof. One way to prevent bumping with a discounted ticket? Check in early. In addition to ranking by price, airlines also prioritize passengers by check-in order. Get in the habit of checking in online 24 hours before your flight. You can even check bags online through most airlines, and just drop them off at a counter when you arrive at the airport. [Video: Better than a plane? See the flying car] But fare classes aren't just important when it comes to keeping your seat. Fare classes are also key if you want to upgrade your ticket. Generally, Y, B and M are the only coach fares that are upgradeable. You can search by fare class directly on most airline websites. If building up frequent flier miles is important to you, avoid auction tickets on sites like Hotwire and Priceline where you name your own price, or don't see all the flight information before you book. Those tickets, like Hotwire Hot Rates, are often ineligible for frequent flier miles. The cheapest tickets doled out to certain travel agents also aren't always eligible, either. It's important in these cases to always read the fine print, because whether you're going to the next state or around the world, you may be out of luck. On the other end of the spectrum, Counter said passengers with the highest-ranked fare basis codes are eligible to get more than the standard miles, sometimes 150 percent, for their flight. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Navy Drone Violated Washington Airspace
Navy Drone Violated Washington Airspace By ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: August 25, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/26drone.html?_r=1 WASHINGTON - The skies over the nation's capital are crowded with presidential aircraft, military flyovers and the Delta shuttle, but this month a strange new bird was briefly among them: a United States Navy drone that wandered into the restricted airspace around Washington before operators could stop it. Navy spokesmen could not say Wednesday if anyone on the ground was alarmed by the drone - officially an MQ-8B Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing unmanned aerial vehicle - which looks like a small windowless helicopter and was flying at 2,000 feet. The Navy did say that the drone got within 40 miles of Washington before operators were able to re-establish communication and guide it back to its base in southern Maryland. Still, the Aug. 2 incident resulted in the grounding of all six of the Navy's Fire Scouts as well as an inquiry into what went wrong. The Navy is calling the problem a software issue that foiled the drone's operators. Or, as Cmdr. Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, put it: When they lose contact with the Fire Scout, there's a program that's supposed to have it immediately return to the airfield to land safely. That did not happen as planned. Navy spokesmen said the Fire Scout, made by Northrop Grumman, was a little more than an hour into a test flight operating out of Naval Air Station Patuxent River on the Chesapeake Bay when operators lost its control link. The drone then flew 23 miles on a north-by-northwest course to enter Washington's restricted airspace. A half-hour later, Navy spokesmen said, operators re-established control and the drone landed safely back at Patuxent. The Navy did not describe the scene inside the ground control station as operators sought to re-establish communication with the drone. The Fire Scout, about 31 feet long and 10 feet high, is a surveillance aircraft that can take off from Navy warships. In April, a Fire Scout was part of a drug arrest in the waters off Central America. According to the Navy, the Fire Scout relayed video of a suspicious fishing vessel to the Coast Guard and law enforcement officials, who moved in and seized 60 kilos of cocaine. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Queens man lives in bathroom to cut off tech addiction
http://www.amny.com/urbanite-1.812039/queens-man-lives-in-bathroom-to-cu t-off-tech-addiction-1.2232128 Queens man lives in bathroom to cut off tech addiction Monday August 23, 2010 6:42 PM By Heather Haddon and Tim Herrera Enter bathroom. Lock door. Kick Web addiction. A 34-year-old Astoria comedian is flushing his digital dependency by holing up in his bathroom for five days, with the wacky campaign kicking off in the tiled, pink room Monday. I fell like I was losing control and needed to do something extreme, said Mark Malkoff, while sitting in the tub that now doubles as his bed. All jokes aside, Internet addiction has become a serious problem, with the potential to strain relationships, rob sleep and fuel other compulsions such as gambling and pornography, psychologists say. You can lose your bearings of what's going on with your life, said Peter Kanaris, coordinator for public education at the New York State Psychological Association. Some New Yorkers are fighting back by getting off the tech-grid entirely. We're making ourselves sick by constantly being connected, said Ann Webster, a Manhattan psychologist, who swears off technology on Sundays. It's very refreshing. One New Yorker we spoke to said Malkoff is setting a good example. We are too addicted, said Chris Parker, 22, of Queens. It's cool that someone's putting a spotlight on it. I should probably cut back, too. Others, though, weren't quite ready to drop their tech gear. I don't think it's a problem, said Lauren Burkh, 28, of Queens. I depend on my BlackBerry for work, life and everything. In recent years, Malkoff had become a full-blown tech addict, checking his iPhone constantly and flipping through Twitter, Facebook and the Drudge Report all day. The prankster has had previous similar schemes to live in unusual places, including sleeping in an Ikea store. While he spends the next few days in his new apartment, Malkoff's storing his clothes in a shower caddy and keeping his food in the bathroom cabinets. To pass all his new free time, Malkoff intends to read a friend's screenplay, write letters to friends and finish a book proposal. When his wife needs to use the bathroom, he'll gather up his sleeping bag and then go right back in after she's done. I'm not quite thrilled with this inconvenience in my life, said Christine Peel-Malkoff, 32. As of yesterday afternoon, Malkoff was feeling a bit anxious about his bold move into his loo. It's a lot harder than I was expecting, he said. Dealing with your tech addiction: - Recognize if you have a problem. Are things not getting done around the house? Are your relationships strained? - Put time limits on Web surfing. Don't check your phone while having a face-to-face conversation with someone. Put the BlackBerry away during dinner. - Take an electronic-free day or part of a day periodically. Lock away the phone and reconnect with other parts of life. The calls and messages can wait. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Carp knocks kayaker out of competition
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/08/25/2176196/carp-knocks-kayaker-out-of- competition.html COLUMBIA | A flying Asian carp has cut short a world-class Texas kayaker's attempt to finish the 340-mile Missouri River race that began Tuesday in Kansas City, Kan. Houston resident Brad Pennington was considered a favorite among men's solo racers in the Missouri River 340, a contest for canoes and kayaks. Race officials said Pennington arrived at the Lexington, Mo., checkpoint and reported that he was dizzy and could not continue after being smacked in the head by the carp. The carp, which have infested rivers since being imported in the 1970s to control algae and plankton in fish ponds, are known to panic and jump in response to passing vessels. It felt like a brick hit me, said Pennington, who got a pounding headache but stayed on as a spectator. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] China traffic jam vanishes overnight?
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0826/China-traffic-jam-v anishes-overnight The China traffic jam that clogged over 60 miles along Beijing-Tibet highway for almost two weeks between Beijing and Hebei province has vanished, according to reports from MSNBC and the French news agency, AFP. Virtually overnight, local authorities had managed to disperse the congestion, writes Adrienne Mong of MSNBC. By the time we reached the area, all we encountered were the garden-variety traffic jams here and there. AFP reporters also ventured the 260 kilometers to inspect the congested zone and did not encounter anything but intermittent traffic jams at toll booths. If the reports are accurate, does this mean smooth sailing for travelers along China's G110 National Expressway from now on? Not likely. Not with coal production in Inner Mongolia steadily on the rise and a growing appetite for it in Beijing, not with construction on the G110 highway set to continue until at least mid-September, and not with this being the second of such bizarre incidents in the same region in two months. In fact, though a bit on the extreme side, the 11-day traffic jam mirrors similar incidents that occur frequently and regularly across the country, most of which last anywhere between a few hours to a few days. Trucks and construction are regarded as the main culprits in this most recent case, but state media reported that smaller accidents and broken-down cars aggravated the situation, for you can always count on China's impatient and inexperienced drivers to make matters worse. The Daily Telegraph's Tim Collard paints an accurate picture of the reality of driving in China when he writes that in Beijing, the lanes of the motorway [disintegrate] into anarchy as everyone struggle[s] to get his nose in front of everyone else and steal a couple of feet of ground. Other commonplace driving tendencies include sleeping during a traffic jam, stopping in the middle of a road or expressway to look at a map or call for directions, driving on opposite sides of the street or on sidewalks as desired, and honking vigorously at other cars, bikes, and pedestrians - or simply at the world in general. Meanwhile, buckling seatbelts, checking rearview mirrors, giving ambulances priority and respecting a pedestrian's right of way are practically nonexistent behaviors - all of which factor into why China averages 3.5 times more traffic-related deaths than the US, according to Global Times. Last year, China overtook the US as the world's largest car market, with an estimated 75 million vehicle owners by the end of this year. Unfortunately, notes The Economist, many of the people driving all these shiny new cars are themselves new to the practice, and not yet very good at it. China may have just stepped into its automobile age, but Beijing has already made it to the top of IBM's 2010 Commuter Pain Survey as having the world's most painful, unreliable, and anger-inducing commutes. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Microsoft Stunt Backfires As Half-Naked Women Turn Up For Australian Conference
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/microsoft-stunt-backfires-as-half-naked- women-turn-up-for-australian-conference-082610 Updated: Thursday, 26 Aug 2010, 7:31 AM EDT Published : Thursday, 26 Aug 2010, 7:29 AM EDT By Cate Swannell GOLD COAST - NewsCore - A promotional stunt for Microsoft backfired spectacularly this week after the technology giant hired iconic Gold Coast meter maids to appear at its Australian TechEd conference -- not realizing the women would show up half-naked, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported Thursday. The company apologized after complaints from staff and conference participants about the meter maids, who traditionally feed parking meters in the Gold Coast, a beachside tourist city in Australia, while dressed in skimpy gold bikinis. It seems that there are still marketing and promotional folks in the IT world who consider objectification of women to be OK, female IT worker Kate Carruthers told the Sydney Morning Herald. Carruthers said the meter maid stunt detracted from Microsoft's long history of supporting and encouraging women in the information technology sector. And ironically the conference, which is aimed at encouraging developers to write software for Microsoft, also devoted a key session to women in IT. Even some of Microsoft's own icons, Nick Hodge and Catherine Eibner, went on Twitter to express their disapproval. Eibner said it was a badly done attempt at providing local Gold Coast context. Microsoft released a statement saying they would like to sincerely apologize for any offense caused by the promotional staff. We were unaware of their exact costuming until the day of the event, at which time it was too late to be addressed, the company said. Read more: http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2010/08/26/250705_gold-coast-news.ht ml ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Garmin recalls 1.25 million Nuvi GPS navigation devices for fire hazard
Garmin on Wednesday announced that it is voluntarily recalling about 1.25 million Nuvi personal GPS navigation devices, about 796,000 of which were sold in the U.S. The problem? The batteries inside - manufactured by a third-party supplier, of course - can cause the unit to overheat and become a fire hazard. The units in question are within a defined date code range and have a specific printed circuit board design that, in conjunction with the other parts, can lead to the problem. Garmin says it has identified the issue in fewer than 10 cases, none of which caused significant property damage or injuries. To determine if your Garmin Nuvi GPS device is involved in the recall - models 200W, 250W, 260W, 7xx and 7xxT, where xx is a two-digit number, are affected - you can visit Garmin's website and plug your unit's serial number in. http://www.garmin.com/nuvibatterypcbrecall You can also call: * In the United States and Canada, call ? (At press time, Garmin omitted this number. -Ed) * In North America and South America outside the U.S. or Canada call +913 397-8200 * In Europe, Middle East, and Africa, call (At press time, Garmin omitted this number. -Ed) * In Asia, call 886/2.2642.9199 * In Australia, call 1800 113 738; and in New Zealand call 0800 427 652 Garmin says it will replace the battery and insert a spacer on top of the battery next to the PCB before returning the device to affected customers free of charge. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/garmin-recalls-125-million-nuvi- gps-navigation-devices-for-fire-hazard/17403 ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Two Planets Transiting the Same Star
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/two_planet_orbit.html NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star. The transit signatures of two distinct planets were seen in the data for the sun-like star designated Kepler-9. The planets were named Kepler-9b and 9c. The discovery incorporates seven months of observations of more than 156,000 stars as part of an ongoing search for Earth-sized planets outside our solar system. The findings will be published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science. Kepler's ultra-precise camera measures tiny decreases in the stars' brightness that occur when a planet transits them. The size of the planet can be derived from these temporary dips. The distance of the planet from the star can be calculated by measuring the time between successive dips as the planet orbits the star. Small variations in the regularity of these dips can be used to determine the masses of planets and detect other non-transiting planets in the system. In June, mission scientists submitted findings for peer review that identified more than 700 planet candidates in the first 43 days of Kepler data. The data included five additional candidate systems that appear to exhibit more than one transiting planet. The Kepler team recently identified a sixth target exhibiting multiple transits and accumulated enough follow-up data to confirm this multi-planet system. Kepler's high quality data and round-the-clock coverage of transiting objects enable a whole host of unique measurements to be made of the parent stars and their planetary systems, said Doug Hudgins, the Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Scientists refined the estimates of the masses of the planets using observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The observations show Kepler-9b is the larger of the two planets, and both have masses similar to but less than Saturn. Kepler-9b lies closest to the star with an orbit of about 19 days, while Kepler-9c has an orbit of about 38 days. By observing several transits by each planet over the seven months of data, the time between successive transits could be analyzed. This discovery is the first clear detection of significant changes in the intervals from one planetary transit to the next, what we call transit timing variations, said Matthew Holman, a Kepler mission scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. This is evidence of the gravitational interaction between the two planets as seen by the Kepler spacecraft. In addition to the two confirmed giant planets, Kepler scientists also have identified what appears to be a third, much smaller transit signature in the observations of Kepler-9. That signature is consistent with the transits of a super-Earth-sized planet about 1.5 times the radius of Earth in a scorching, near-sun 1.6 day-orbit. Additional observations are required to determine whether this signal is indeed a planet or an astronomical phenomenon that mimics the appearance of a transit. NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data. For more information about the Kepler mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Rich exoplanet system discovered
By Victoria Gill http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11070991 Science reporter, BBC News The researchers say the finding marks a new phase in the hunt for exoplanets Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun. The star is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus. The researchers used the European Southern Observatory (Eso) to monitor light emitted from the system and identify and characterise the planets. They say this is the richest system of exoplanets - planets outside our own Solar System - ever found. Christophe Lovis from Geneva University's observatory in Switzerland was lead researcher on the study. He said that his team had probably found the system with the most planets yet discovered. This also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research - the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets, he said. The research has been submitted for publication to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Eso's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (or Harps) instrument was responsible for the discovery. Harps measures the wobble of a star; this gives a measure of how much it is being tugged on by an orbiting planet. If there is one planet it will induce a little movement - the star will come towards us and move away, Dr Lovis explained to BBC News. And what works for one [planet] works for many. With many planets orbiting the star, its movement becomes a very complex superposition of several different planet-induced movements. Using Harp, Dr Lovis and his team were able to measure this and break it down, in order to calculate how many planets were in the system, how great each of their masses was, and even the path of each individual planet's orbit. The researchers said the system around HD 10180 as unique in several respects. It has at least five Neptune-like planets lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, making it more populated than our own Solar System in its inner region. And all the planets seem to have almost circular orbits. Dr Lovis said: Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system. False alarm? So far, the astronomers have picked up clear signals from five planets, along with two slightly fuzzier signals. One of these possible sixth and seventh planets was estimated to be just 1.4 times the mass of the Earth; if its presence in the system was confirmed, it would be the lowest mass exoplanet yet discovered. It is also predicted to be very close to its host star - just 2% of the Earth-Sun distance, so one year on this planet would last only 1.2 Earth days. Dr Lovis said he was 99% certain that this small planet was there. There are five signals that are really strong that we have no doubt, but we have another two with a 'false alarm' probability of 1%, he said. Martin Dominik, an astronomer and exoplanet hunter from the UK's University of St Andrews said the complexity and structure of this system made it an interesting discovery. The richness of the system of planets around HD 10180 with its many characteristic features marks the way forward towards gathering the information that will put our own existence into cosmic context, he told BBC News. He cautioned against describing this as the richest system saying that it was not clear whether other systems that had already been detected hosted further planets. Dr Dominik added: I am tempted to consider the detected system as one of the most 'informative' ones. Like most discoveries in science, the findings come with more questions than answers; but in my opinion, this is what really advances a field. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] 3 Colombian teens on Facebook hit list killed in past 10 days
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/08/24/colombia.facebook.killings/ index.html?hpt=T2 (CNN) -- Three teens who were on a 69-name hit list posted on Facebook have been killed in the past 10 days in a southwestern Colombian town, officials say. Police say they do not know who posted the list or why the names are on it. It is still not clear, Colombian national police spokesman Wilson Baquero told CNN. This is part of the investigation. But officials note that a criminal gang known as Los Rastrojos and a Marxist guerrilla group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia operate in the area. The hit list on Facebook, which was posted August 17, gave the people named three days to leave the town of Puerto Asis or be executed, said Volmar Perez Ortiz, a federal official whose title is defender of the public. Police at first thought the posting was a joke, Perez said in a statement issued Saturday. But the publication of a second list with 31 additional names led authorities to convene a special security meeting Friday, Perez said. The posting of the lists and the meetings occurred after the first two killings, which took place August 15, Perez said. On that day, officials say, 16-year-old student Diego Ferney Jaramillo and 17-year-old CD retailer Eibart Alejandro Ruiz Munoz were shot and killed while riding a motorcycle on the road between Puerto Asis and the town of Puerto Caicedo. Both their names were later found on the first published hit list. Also on the list was Norbey Alexander Vargas, 19, who was killed August 20, Perez said. Another young man, 16-year-old student Juan Pablo Zambrano Anacona, was wounded in the same incident when he gave chase to the assassins, Perez said. Colombian media said Monday the number of those threatened has grown and panic has overtaken Puerto Asis, with some parents sending their children out of town because their names are on the Facebook notice. The names of 31 women were posted on the other list, said Radio RCN, semana.com and other news outlets. Residents have been overcome with panic and anxiety, several news outlets quoted Putumayo state official Andres Gerardo Verdugo as saying. Several of those residents posted their concerns on Twitter, an online messaging site. Panic in Puerto Asis, Putumayo, because of threats against young people, wrote a user who goes by JuanSepulvedah. Our youth must be protected. Someone who posted under the name JulianEco brought up the Facebook connection. The situation in Puerto Asis is tenacious, that a social site be used to add fire to the Colombian conflict, the post said. Twitter user hugoparragomez likened the situation to the drug-fueled crime waves in other Colombian cities. What is happening in Puerto Asis, Putumayo, is grave, the same as in Medellin, the tweet said. Authorities should take control of the situation. Who is investigating? Still others inflated the death count. In Puerto Asis they have killed 20 young people threatened on Facebook and the authorities have not said anything, wrote jesusmhenriquez That is Colombia. Federal officials say they are taking the threats seriously and have sent investigators from Bogota, the nation's capital, to Puerto Asis. Internet experts are among the investigators assigned to the case. Authorities also are offering a reward of 5 million pesos (around $2,750) for information on the killings. Perez, the federal defender of the public, noted that the Los Rastrojos criminal gang is active in Puerto Asis, executing violent actions, resolving community conflicts, imposing living and conduct norms, intimidating and meting punishment against ... drug sellers and consumers, sex workers, people with criminal and unlawful histories and threatening social leaders, business people, taxi drivers and motorcycle taxi drivers. Perez said the Marxist guerrillas, commonly known as the FARC, also are active in the remote area, which borders Ecuador. Two Facebook representatives did not return a message Tuesday asking for comment. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] NASA to Reveal Big News From Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday
By Denise Chow SPACE.com Staff Writer posted: 23 August 2010 04:56 pm ET http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/nasa-to-announce-latest-kepler-fin dings-100823.html NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds. The space agency has scheduled an afternoon teleconference with reporters to announce the results from Kepler, which include the discovery of an intriguing planetary system, NASA officials said Monday. Participating in the teleconference will be senior NASA scientists and Kepler mission researchers, including principal investigator William Borucki, at the space agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The Kepler space observatory hunts for Earth-like planets around other stars. In June, mission scientists announced it had found over 700 candidates, including five systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet. The spacecraft monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate that alien planets are passing in front of them as seen from Earth. To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system. NASA launched the $600 million spacecraft in March 2009. It is currently staring at a patch of the Milky Way that contains over 156,000 stars - a star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Astronomers have been using the data from Kepler to determine whether orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars. Follow-up observations are necessary to distinguish between actual planets and false alarms such as binary stars, which are two stars that orbit each other. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Solar System Similar to Ours? Richest Planetary System Discovered
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/10082408.htm ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2010) - Astronomers using ESO's world-leading HARPS instrument have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets, orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180. The researchers also have tantalising evidence that two other planets may be present, one of which would have the lowest mass ever found. This would make the system similar to our Solar System in terms of the number of planets (seven as compared to the Solar System's eight planets). Furthermore, the team also found evidence that the distances of the planets from their star follow a regular pattern, as also seen in our Solar System. We have found what is most likely the system with the most planets yet discovered, says Christophe Lovis, lead author of the paper reporting the result. This remarkable discovery also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets. Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system. The team of astronomers used the HARPS spectrograph, attached to ESO's 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile, for a six-year-long study of the Sun-like star HD 10180, located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus (the Male Water Snake). HARPS is an instrument with unrivalled measurement stability and great precision and is the world's most successful exoplanet hunter. Thanks to the 190 individual HARPS measurements, the astronomers detected the tiny back and forth motions of the star caused by the complex gravitational attractions from five or more planets. The five strongest signals correspond to planets with Neptune-like masses -- between 13 and 25 Earth masses [1] -- which orbit the star with periods ranging from about 6 to 600 days. These planets are located between 0.06 and 1.4 times the Earth-Sun distance from their central star. We also have good reasons to believe that two other planets are present, says Lovis. One would be a Saturn-like planet (with a minimum mass of 65 Earth masses) orbiting in 2200 days. The other would be the least massive exoplanet ever discovered, with a mass of about 1.4 times that of the Earth. It is very close to its host star, at just 2 percent of the Earth-Sun distance. One year on this planet would last only 1.18 Earth-days. This object causes a wobble of its star of only about 3 km/hour -- slower than walking speed -- and this motion is very hard to measure, says team member Damien Ségransan. If confirmed, this object would be another example of a hot rocky planet, similar to Corot-7b (eso0933). The newly discovered system of planets around HD 10180 is unique in several respects. First of all, with at least five Neptune-like planets lying within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars, this system is more populated than our Solar System in its inner region, and has many more massive planets there [2]. Furthermore, the system probably has no Jupiter-like gas giant. In addition, all the planets seem to have almost circular orbits. So far, astronomers know of fifteen systems with at least three planets. The last record-holder was 55 Cancri, which contains five planets, two of them being giant planets. Systems of low-mass planets like the one around HD 10180 appear to be quite common, but their formation history remains a puzzle, says Lovis. Using the new discovery as well as data for other planetary systems, the astronomers found an equivalent of the Titius-Bode law that exists in our Solar System: the distances of the planets from their star seem to follow a regular pattern [3]. This could be a signature of the formation process of these planetary systems, says team member Michel Mayor. Another important result found by the astronomers while studying these systems is that there is a relationship between the mass of a planetary system and the mass and chemical content of its host star. All very massive planetary systems are found around massive and metal-rich stars, while the four lowest-mass systems are found around lower-mass and metal-poor stars [4]. Such properties confirm current theoretical models. The discovery was announced Aug. 24 at the international colloquium Detection and dynamics of transiting exoplanets, at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France. Notes [1] Using the radial velocity method, astronomers can only estimate a minimum mass for a planet as the mass estimate also depends on the tilt of the orbital plane relative to the line of sight, which is unknown. From a statistical point of view, this minimum mass is however often close to the real mass of the planet. [2] On average the planets in the inner region of the HD 10180 system have 20 times the mass of the Earth, whereas
[Medianews] George David Weiss, Writer of Hit Pop Songs, Dies at 89
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/music/24weiss.html?_r=1 George David Weiss, Writer of Hit Pop Songs, Dies at 89 By MARGALIT FOX Published: August 23, 2010 George David Weiss, a songwriter who had a hand in some of the biggest hits of midcentury pop music, recorded by some of the biggest stars, died on Monday at his home in Oldwick, N.J. He was 89. The death was of natural causes, his wife, Claire, said. Among his most famous numbers were Can't Help Falling in Love, recorded by Elvis Presley; The Lion Sleeps Tonight, recorded by the Tokens; and What a Wonderful World, recorded by Louis Armstrong. Can't Help Falling in Love, introduced in Presley's 1961 film Blue Hawaii, was a million-seller. It has words and music by Mr. Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore. The Lion Sleeps Tonight (1961), based on a South African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics (In the jungle, the mighty jungle/The lion sleeps tonight) by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore. Their adaptation, which kept the refrain - Wimoweh, wimoweh - popularized in a 1950s version by the Weavers, became a million-selling hit for the Tokens. Widely recorded since, the song has been used in many motion pictures, including The Lion King (1994). What a Wonderful World (1967), with words and music by Mr. Weiss and Bob Thiele, came to renewed attention after Armstrong's recording of it was featured on the soundtrack of the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam. The Armstrong version has since become a contemporary standard. Mr. Weiss's other standards include Lullaby of Birdland (1952), the vocal version of George Shearing's jazz standard, and many songs with his frequent collaborator Bennie Benjamin, among them Surrender (1946), recorded by Perry Como; Confess (1948), recorded by Patti Page; and Wheel of Fortune (1952), recorded by Kay Starr. He collaborated on several Broadway musicals, the best known of which is Mr. Wonderful (1956), starring Sammy Davis Jr., for which Mr. Weiss contributed original music and lyrics with Jerry Bock and Larry Holofcener. His other Broadway credits include First Impressions (1959), an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice starring Polly Bergen, Hermione Gingold and Farley Granger, for which Mr. Weiss wrote music and lyrics with Robert Goldman and Glenn Paxton; and Maggie Flynn (1968), starring Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, with book, music and lyrics by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore. Mr. Weiss was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984. As president of the Songwriters Guild of America from 1982 to 2000, he spoke widely about copyright issues and testified before government bodies. George David Weiss was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1921. He wanted to be a musician. His mother wanted him to be a lawyer. The ensuing emotional battle, he later said, drove him to consult a doctor. As Mr. Weiss recounted in a 1995 interview with The Miami Herald, the prescription was simple. The doctor asked: Mrs. Weiss, what would you rather have? A live bum of a musician or a dead lawyer? Mr. Weiss, who played the violin, piano, saxophone and clarinet, earned a bachelor's degree in music theory from the Juilliard School and afterward served as a military bandleader in World War II before beginning his songwriting career. Mr. Weiss's first marriage, to Bea Foster, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Rosalyn Marks. In addition to his wife, the former Claire Nicholson, whom he married in 1976, he is survived by a sister, Harriet Harbus; two sons, Barry and Jeffrey, and a daughter, Peggy Self, from his first marriage; a son, Robert, from his second marriage; and eight grandchildren. In an interview with The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1995, Mr. Weiss described the making of one of his early hits, Oh! What It Seemed to Be (1946), written with Mr. Benjamin and Frankie Carle. After finding a publisher for the song, the writers went in search of a singer. They called on Frank Sinatra, and a nervous young Mr. Weiss played it through for him. Before I had finished it Sinatra was on the phone calling the record company and telling them he just heard a great song and wanted to record it, Mr. Weiss recalled. You can imagine what happened to me - I froze at the piano. I just kept playing. See, the publisher had told me that no matter what happens, I should keep playing to make sure the tune got into their heads. He continued: So everyone sat down and discussed horses and women and gossip for a half hour or so, and I'm still playing that song at the piano. Finally, the publisher comes over to me, lifts me up under the armpits and says, 'Say goodbye to Frank.' I said goodbye and they led me out like a zombie. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] From Sex Assault Fury to Internet-Fueled Fortune
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/sex-assault-fury-internet-fueled-fortun e/story?id=11413687 Antoine Dodson Capitalizes on Accidental Fame With Facebook, Twitter, Web Page, Merchandise 16 comments By KI MAE HEUSSNER Aug. 17, 2010 For many people who dabble with fame, it's their face that determines their fortune. But Antoine Dodson's ticket to success isn't his face, it's his fury. The Bed Intruder song has made Ala. native Antoine Dodson a viral celebrity. Three weeks ago, the 24-year-old man was struggling to complete an associate's degree at a college in Huntsville, Ala., while living with his mother, three sisters and a niece. Now, he's an Internet superstar with Facebook fans by thousands, YouTube views in the millions and enough money of his own to move his family into a new house. All because of a televised rant that attracted a rabid following. On the local news in late July, Dodson unleashed an animated diatribe the likes of which even the Internet had never seen, denouncing an intruder who allegedly attempted to rape his 22-year-old sister, Kelly, in her bed one night. Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park, the 24-year-old called out to the camera. He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up, trying to rape them; so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, because they're raping everybody out here. He ended the video with a sharp warning to the still-at-large perpetrator: We're looking for you. We gonna find you. I'm letting you know that. So you can run and tell that, homeboy! Gregory Brothers Turns Dodson Video Into 'Bed Intruder Song' The next day, Dodson said, the online video surpassed one million views, making him a local celebrity. A few days later, his star rose even higher when the Gregory brothers, the masterminds behind the popular Auto-Tune the News videos, turned his blustering into the iTunes hit, Bed Intruder Song. Last week, the song broke through to No. 16 on iTunes' pop charts and the Gregory brothers estimate that, in total, the song has attracted about 15 million views. I love it, said Dodson, who now sits atop a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, a personal website and even official merchandise. We laugh and joke about the videos. ... We watch it every day. He declined to say exactly how much money he's made from the video and his new celebrity. But between a PayPal account on his website, which lets people donate to help his family, his merchandise and YouTube ad sales (the Gregory brothers split the earnings 50-50), he said he's made a nice amount of money. It was enough to move my family from the projects, said Dodson, who is known by his first name Kevin at home. But though he owes his fame to comedy, he said he never forgets that the situation underneath it all is far from humorous. The police have been helpful, he said, but they still haven't found the man he saw attacking his sister. I want people to realize that this is funny. It is funny -- I'm not going to lie, 'cause we're laughing too. But this is a serious matter, he said. I really thought that when I went into Kelly's room, he was choking her life out of her. I was terrified. ... It was so crazy. But God allowed me to save her and that's what I did. Now that three weeks have passed since the alleged assault, Kelly said she enjoys the video and her brother's success. But when she first saw it, she said laughing about it was the last thing she wanted to do. When I first seen it, I was very upset about it because they were taking it as a joke and I was feeling like they were not looking at the part where I was the victim, she said. If Antoine wouldn't came in, I probably would be dead. As time has passed, she said, she's taken a different view. They wasn't laughing at the situation, but Kevin's reaction or how he was acting, she said. He is funny. Richard Figueroa, a Huntsville, Ala.-based talent scout, thought Dodson was funny, too. So funny, in fact, that immediately after seeing the viral video making the rounds online, he drove right over to the Dodsons' home. I said, 'This guy is going to be a sensation,' Figueroa said. He's a hero. What an amazing person. I've never seen nothing like this before. ... I was like, 'Wow, he's going to need a good manager, representation, with all of this fame. Along with scout and photographer Beth Boldt, Figueroa now manages Dodson's career and image, while a lawyer makes sure that all the deals that come Dodson's way are legitimate. He says he wants to write songs, Figueroa said. Also, he loves fashion, he loves clothes, he likes designers. Given the connections he and Boldt have developed in the fashion world, he said, We're going to try to get him some exposure in that side of the industry first. With Dodson's long, lean frame and photogenic face, Boldt said she thinks he has great modeling potential, but television and film could be in the future too. Andrew Gregory, part of
[Medianews] Study: Astronauts as weak as 80-year-olds in space
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - A new study shows that astronauts can become as weak as 80-year-olds after six months at the International Space Station. The research raises serious health concerns as NASA contemplates prolonged trips to asteroids and Mars. Weakness could be an issue during an emergency landing on Earth or an urgent spacewalk on the red planet. The Marquette University biologist who led the study stresses that the accelerated space aging is temporary. Astronauts' muscles recover after a few months back on Earth. And he thinks astronauts can avoid becoming weaklings with more research and the right exercise equipment in space. The study was based on calf muscle biopsies from nine astronauts. The NASA-funded research will be in September's Journal of Physiology. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9HNEJO00show_article=1 ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Gold bullion stolen from Florida treasure museum
(Reuters) - Thieves stole a $550,000 gold bar from a treasure museum where it went on display after a Florida salvager recovered it from the wreck of a Spanish galleon that lay on the ocean floor for centuries, the museum's executive director said. The 74.85-ounce gold bar was stolen on Wednesday from the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, Florida, in what executive director Melissa Kendrick called a very quiet smash and grab. The 11-inch (28-centimeter) gold bar was inside a glass case with a small opening where visitors could stick a hand inside and lift the bar to examine it. Footage from the museum's security camera clearly showed two culprits who made off with it, and the FBI and local police were investigating. The museum's insurer offered a $10,000 reward for its safe return, Kendrick said on Thursday. Gold has hovered near historic highs after hitting a record $1,266.50 an ounce in June, but the stolen bar's $550,000 valuation reflects historic value far beyond its melt-down worth. Mel Fisher, a Key West treasure hunter who died in 1998, recovered the bar in 1980 from the wreck of the Santa Margarita, a Spanish galleon that sank off the Florida Keys during a hurricane in 1622. Kendall said the bar had several distinctive markings, including Roman numerals signifying it was 16-karat gold, a symbol identifying its owner, and a series of dots indicating what taxes the owner had paid to the Spanish crown. It's a one-of-a-kind piece, Kendall said. The theft was the talk of Key West, an island town of 25,000 people at the southern tip of the Florida Keys. Fisher and his crew found the wreck of the Santa Margarita while searching for its sister ship, the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. The ships were part of a flotilla carrying gold, silver, emeralds and pearls from the colonial New World back to Spain. Fisher and his crew found the Atocha's motherlode in 1985, hauling up one of the world's greatest sunken treasures of gold, silver bars and coins, as well as jewelry, gems and housewares owned by the sailors, soldiers, noblemen and clergy who perished when the ship sank. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67J0PN20100820?type=domesticNews ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Moon is shrinking, say astronomers
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jlDbh9ps37TzjOIO188kP UoIgfwA (AFP) - 1 day ago WASHINGTON - The Man in the Moon has become the latest victim of contraction in the housing market. Astronomers reporting on Thursday in the US journal Science said they had found previous undetected landforms which indicate that Earth's satellite has been shrinking... albeit by only a tiny amount. The intriguing features, called lobate scarps, are faults created when the Moon's once-molten interior began to cool, causing the lunar surface to contract and then crinkle, they said. Relative to the Moon's age, estimated at around 4.5 billion years, the contraction is recent, occurring less than a billion years ago, and is measured at about 100 metees (325 feet). Lobate scarps were first spotted near the lunar equator in the 1970s by panoramic cameras aboard the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions. Fourteen new faults have been been spotted in high-resolution images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The new discoveries show that the scarps are globally distributed and not clustered in equatorial regions, and this provides powerful evidence for the contraction scenario. The investigation was headed by Thomas Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian Museum's National Air and Space Museum, Washington. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Big brother wants to sift through Cleveland's garbage for non-recyclers, fine them $100
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/08/city_of_cleveland_to_use_high-.h tml High-tech carts will tell on Cleveland residents who don't recycle ... and they face $100 fine CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It would be a stretch to say that Big Brother will hang out in Clevelanders' trash cans, but the city plans to sort through curbside trash to make sure residents are recycling -- and fine them $100 if they don't. The move is part of a high-tech collection system the city will roll out next year with new trash and recycling carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes. The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn't been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables. Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard. City Council on Wednesday approved spending $2.5 million on high-tech carts for 25,000 households across the city, expanding a pilot program that began in 2007 with 15,000 households. The expansion will continue at 25,000 households a year until nearly all of the city's 150,000 residences are included. Existing carts might be retrofitted with the microchips. We're trying to automate our system to be a more efficient operation, Owens said. This chip will assist us in doing our job better. The chip-embedded carts are just starting to catch on elsewhere. The Washington, D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Va., earlier this year announced it would issue carts to check whether people are recycling. Some cities in England have used the high-tech trash carts for several years to weigh how much garbage people throw out. People are charged extra for exceeding allotted limits. Cleveland officials want to automate nearly all residential waste collection under a program being financed in part by a new fee that went into effect earlier this year. The automated trucks allow drivers to remain in the cab and empty carts using a remote-control arm. Cleveland owns three of these trucks and plans to buy nine more. Recycling is good for the environment and the city's bottom line, officials said. Cleveland pays $30 a ton to dump garbage in landfills, but earns $26 a ton for recyclables. The city last year sent 220,000 tons of garbage to landfills and collected 5,800 tons of recyclables. City Council approved updated trash collection ordinances last month to include a section on automated waste collection and curbside recycling. The new law changes infractions of the law from a minor misdemeanor to a civil penalty. The recycling law only applies to residents who have been issued the carts. The new law also prohibits people from setting out excessive amounts of trash on tree lawns, which officials say has been an ongoing problem. Fines for excessive trash will range from $250 to $500 depending on the amount. In either case, the property owner receives the citation. Landlords are responsible for making sure their tenants follow the law. Owens said Cleveland will conduct a public-service campaign to educate residents about the new collection system and recycling program. The city stepped up enforcement of ordinances governing trash collection last year by issuing 2,900 tickets, nearly five times more tickets than in 2008. Those infractions include citations for people who put out their trash too early or fail to bring in their garbage cans from the curb in a timely manner. The Division of Waste Collection is on track to meet its goal of issuing 4,000 citations this year, Owens said. We're trying to make sure Cleveland stays clean and residents are properly informed on how these things should be set out, he said. By issuing these tickets, it's helping us change the attitude or perception on how things should be set out. Councilman Martin Keane, who represents the West Park neighborhood, said he would prefer that the Division of Waste Collection use more discretion when deciding whether to issue a ticket. A warning in many instances would suffice, he said. Everybody knows the ones who blatantly disregards the law, Keane said. Those are the people we should hit with a $100 ticket. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Rock Out In Space: NASA Lets Public Pick Wake-Up Songs for Astronauts
By SPACE.com Staff posted: 20 August 2010 05:01 pm ET http://www.space.com/news/nasa-space-shuttle-astronauts-songs-contest-10 0820.html Call it American Idol in space: NASA has launched a new contest that allows the public to pick - or even create - wake-up songs for astronauts flying on the agency's two final space shuttle missions. NASA opened its new Wake-up Song Contest website Friday to allow the public to choose from a list of 40 previously played songs in the hopes of having it played during the final flight of space shuttle Discovery in November. Voting is going on now here: https://songcontest.nasa.gov/home.aspx Traditionally, wake-up songs are chosen by an astronaut's family and friends. But with the new website, Earth-bound masses will choose two songs to rouse Discovery's crew during the 11-day mission. The songs with the most votes win, NASA officials said. Discovery's upcoming flight will deliver a humanoid robot and storage room to the International Space Station. The project is modeled after NASA's Face in Space program which allows the public to send photos of themselves on the final space shuttle missions. Write a space song For those with musical aspirations, it gets even more exciting. NASA is asking for original song submissions for the very last planned shuttle mission aboard Endeavour, which is set to launch Feb. 26, 2011. That 10-day mission will deliver a $1.5 billion astrophysics experiment to the International Space Station. Contestants must upload their musical stylings to the Wake-up Song Contest website by Jan. 10. NASA folks will cull the entries, and the surviving songs will be put to public vote. Again, the top two songs will reach astronauts' ears. Astronauts are awaiting your input, and your tunes, with bated breath. Space shuttle crews really enjoy the morning wake-up music, said Mark Kelly, commander of Endeavour's final mission. While we don't have the best-quality speaker in the space shuttle, it will be interesting to hear what the public comes up with. Music in space This is not the first time NASA has turned to music to reach out to the public. Earlier this week, NASA teamed up with RB singer Mary J. Blige to encourage young women and girls to pursue careers in math and science. In 2008, the space agency joined forces with singer Paul McCartney, of Beatles fame, to broadcast the song Across the Universe, into the cosmos using the Deep Space Network. NASA has been flying reusable space shuttles into orbit for nearly 30 years and will retire its three remaining shuttles (Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour) next year to make way for a new plan to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025. Atlantis flew its last scheduled flight in May and will be primed as a rescue ship for Endeavour's final flight before being formally retired. There is also discussion in Congress over a possible third shuttle mission, to be flown in summer of 2011. Earlier this month, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would approve the extra flight. The House is expected to revisit its own NASA bill in September. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] China tests space station module to launch in 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100817/ap_on_sc/as_china_space BEIJING - China has finished the first module of a planned space station and is testing its electronics and other systems before launching it into orbit next year. The official Xinhua News Agency reported on the module's schedule Tuesday. It also said changes were being made on a two-stage Long March 2F rocket that will carry the 8.5 ton Tiangong 1 module into a set orbit. The Shenzhou 8 spacecraft will dock with it in the second half of 2011, with the Shenzhou 9 and 10 to follow in 2012, Xinhua said. That spacecraft is part of China's manned space program, but no dates were given on when the space station would be finished or manned. China also plans to launch a second lunar probe in October and an unmanned moon landing in 2012. A possible manned lunar mission has also been proposed for 2017. China launched its first manned flight in 2003, joining Russia and the United States as the only countries to launch humans into orbit. However, habitual secrecy and military links have inhibited cooperation with other nations' space programs - including on the actively manned International Space Station. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Ray Bradbury hates big government: 'Our country is in need of a revolution'
August 16, 2010 | 8:23 am http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/08/ray-bradbury-is-sick -of-big-government-our-country-is-in-need-of-a-revolution-.html Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon, says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever. The man who wrote Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine and The Illustrated Man has been called one of America's great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics. I think our country is in need of a revolution, Bradbury said. There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people. The native of Waukegan, Ill., has never been shy about expressing himself -- he described President Clinton with a word that rhymes with knithead back in 2001-- nor is he timid about correcting people when it comes to his own perceived legacy. Bradbury chafes, for instance, at the description of his work as science fiction -- in the past he has pointed out that, to his mind, Fahrenheit 451is the only sci-fi book in his vast body of work -- and despite his passion for more national space projects, he is not technology obsessive by any means. We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now. Bradbury wrote darkly about bookburning in Fahrenheit 451, but he sounds ready to use a Kindle for kindling. I was approached three times during the last year by Internet companies wanting to put my books on an electronic reading device, he said. I said to Yahoo, 'Prick up your ears and go to hell.' -- Susan King ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Did Lou Gehrig NOT have Lou Gehrig's Disease?
Study Says Brain Trauma Can Mimic Lou Gehrig's Disease http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/sports/18gehrig.html?_r=1 In the 71 years since the Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig declared himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, despite dying from a disease that would soon bear his name, he has stood as America's leading icon of athletic valor struck down by random, inexplicable fate. A peer-reviewed paper to be published Wednesday in a leading journal of neuropathology, however, suggests that the demise of athletes like Gehrig and soldiers given a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, might have been catalyzed by injuries only now becoming understood: concussions and other brain trauma. Although the paper does not discuss Gehrig specifically, its authors in interviews acknowledged the clear implication: Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig's disease. Doctors at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass., and the Boston University School of Medicine, the primary researchers of brain damage among deceased National Football League players, said that markings in the spinal cords of two players and one boxer who also received a diagnosis of A.L.S. indicated that those men did not have A.L.S. at all. They had a different fatal disease, doctors said, caused by concussionlike trauma, that erodes the central nervous system in similar ways. The finding could prompt a redirection in the study of motor degeneration in athletes and military veterans being given diagnoses of A.L.S. at rates considerably higher than normal, said several experts in A.L.S. who had seen early versions of the paper. Patients with significant histories of brain trauma could be considered for different types of treatment in the future, perhaps leading toward new pathways for a cure. Most A.L.S. patients don't go to autopsy - there's no need to look at your brain and spinal cord, said Dr. Brian Crum, an assistant professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. But a disease can look like A.L.S., it can look like Alzheimer's, and it's not when you look at the actual tissue. This is something that needs to be paid attention to. The finding's relevance to Gehrig is less clear. But the Yankees legend had a well-documented history of significant concussions on the baseball field, and perhaps others sustained as a battering-ram football halfback in high school and at Columbia University. Given that, it's possible that Gehrig's renowned commitment to playing through injuries like concussions, which resulted in his legendary streak of playing in 2,130 consecutive games over 14 years, could have led to his condition. Here he is, the face of his disease, and he may have had a different disease as a result of his athletic experience, said Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the neuropathology laboratory for the New England Veterans Administration Medical Centers and the lead neuropathologist on the study. Gehrig's name does not appear in the paper; his case was discussed in interviews merely as an illustration of the new uncertainty surrounding cases resembling his, said Dr. Robert Stern, who serves with Dr. McKee as co-director of Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. The cause of his disease will most likely never be determined because his remains were cremated, and now lie in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y. More significantly, both doctors said, the finding solidifies a long-suspected connection between A.L.S.-like motor disease and head trauma experienced in collision sports and combat. People are being misdiagnosed clinically while they're alive as having A.L.S. when in fact they have a different motor-neuron disease, Dr. Stern said. He added, Scientists will be able to get at a faster understanding of the disease in general, and therefore effective treatments, by knowing more about who's at risk and who's not. According to the A.L.S. Association, up to 30,000 people in the United States currently have A.L.S., an incurably fatal disease among primarily 40- to 70-year-old men that results in the swift and steady atrophy of all voluntary muscle control. Gehrig was its first prominent victim, dying two years after his 1939 diagnosis; some others, like the British physicist Stephen Hawking, now 68, can live for decades with fully functioning brains inside bodies that have wasted away. The new finding could be double-edged for organizations fighting A.L.S.: it sheds some light on possible causes and research avenues, but also suggests that Gehrig might not have had it. It's extremely interesting - it builds a more interesting picture, but what this all exactly means about how the disease plays out requires further investigation, said Dr. Lucie Bruijn, the chief scientist for the A.L.S. Association. Dr. Bruijn described Gehrig as an important fund-raising tool, similar to the actor Michael J. Fox having Parkinson's disease. It's a name
[Medianews] WDVX asking for listeners help to fix transmitter
WDVX asking for listeners help to fix transmitter WBIR.com Updated: 8/13/2010 4:57:04 PM Posted: 8/13/2010 4:42:17 PM http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=130591catid=2 WDVX will be able to replace a broadcast transmitter thanks to a grant from the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, but they will need to raise some of the funds to make it happen. According to a release, in order to satisfy the grant match and purchase other equipment that is needed, the station needs to raise $11,000 on it's own. The station is reaching out to its viewers for help to receive the funds on August 25, 2010. The station's transmitter on Cross Mountain in Campbell County was damaged during a storm on May 5, 2010. Although the webcast remained, the station was off the air for five days with only few local broadcasts. The funds will allow the station to receive a new transmitter and antenna which is 40 feet higher than the old one for a clearer sound, transmission lines, surge protectors, and electrical work. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] First Trojan for Android Phones Goes Wild
First Trojan for Android Phones Goes Wild [UPDATE] By SARAH PEREZ of ReadWriteWeb Published: August 10, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/08/10/10readwriteweb-f irst-trojan-for-android-phones-goes-wild-u-38084.html Google Android phones must be popular - they've just been targeted with their first Trojan. An SMS Trojan called Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a has already infected a number of mobile devices, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab. Purporting to be a harmless media player application, the Trojan, once installed, actually sends out SMS text messages without the users' knowledge or consent. The Trojan penetrates Android-based smartphones disguised as an ordinary application, says Kaspersky. Users are prompted to install a small file of around 13 KB that has the standard Android extension .APK. But once the app is installed on the device, the Trojan bundled with it begins texting premium rate phone numbers (those that charge). The criminals are actually the ones operating these numbers, so they end up collecting the money via charges to the victims' accounts. From Russia, With Love According to Denis Maslennikov, Senior Malware Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, there's not an exact number of infected devices available at present, but the outbreak is currently regional. For now, only Russian Android users can actually lose money after installing the Trojan, but anyone can be infected. The Trojan-SMS category of malware is relatively common in the mobile ecosystem, but this is the first to specifically target Android-based devices. However, FakePlayer is not the first malware designed for Android, says the firm, as there have been isolated incidents of Android devices infected with spyware, the earliest occurring in 2009. The choice of targeting Android devices in particular should come as no surprise to those following mobile industry trends. Given Android's meteoric rise in market share, it's no surprise to Kaspersky, either: The IT market research and analysis organization IDC has noted that those selling devices running Android are experiencing the highest growth in sales among smartphone manufacturers, says Maslennikov. As a result, we can expect to see a corresponding rise in the amount of malware targeting that platform. Does Android Need AV? According to a statement from Google, the application installation process is designed to protect users from attacks like these since it details what information and system resources the app has permission to access - such as sending an SMS. Users must explicitly approve this access in order to continue with the installation, the statement reads. We consistently advise users to only install apps they trust. In particular, users should exercise caution when installing applications outside of Android Market. However, the release of a Trojan disguised as an app is an inventive way to get malware onto mobile devices. In this case, the Trojan takes advantage of users' lack of attention to the installation process as well as Google Android's openness - this operating system isn't tied to a closely managed and curated marketplace of approved applications like the iPhone is with iTunes. Although Google does step in to remove apps from its Market when security concerns are present, nothing prevents developers - especially nefarious ones like these - from forgoing official channels and publishing their own apps elsewhere, then tricking users into installing them. But even if the Trojan came through backdoor channels, it's at least a small blow for an OS with security at the forefront of its design. The security firm says it plans to release a version of Kaspersky Mobile Security for the Android operating system in 2011. We can already picture the Apple vs. Android TV ads now: iPhones aren't susceptible to the viruses plaguing Android phones... Justin Long will smugly state. Now, who will play Android guy? ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] U.S. Air Force May Slow Planned GPS 3 Production Pace
By Turner Brinton ShareThis http://www.spacenews.com/military/100716-af-slow-gps-production.html GPS 3 satellite. Credit: Lockheed Martin artist's concept GPS 3 satellite. Credit: Lockheed Martin artist's concept Enlarge Image WASHINGTON - The primary payload for the U.S. Air Force's next-generation GPS 3 navigation satellites recently was cleared for production even as the service contemplates slowing down the program based on the health of the current GPS constellation. Current plans call for GPS 3 prime contractor Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver to deliver four satellites per year, with the first slated to launch in 2014, but the Air Force is currently re-evaluating the production rate, said Dave Podlesney, Lockheed Martin's GPS 3 program director. The health of the existing constellation and launch rate of the current-generation GPS 2F craft - to date just one of 12 of the Boeing-built satellites has been launched - are factors, he said in a July 13 interview. The U.S. Department of Defense, in a 2010 budget reprogramming package submitted to Congress July 2, is seeking permission to redirect $2.7 million that had been appropriated for GPS 3 parts procurement to other activities. It is not clear whether the request has any connection to a possible slowdown of the program. The Air Force currently plans to fully fund three GPS 3 satellites in 2012, two satellites in 2013, five satellites in 2014 and two satellites in 2015, according to Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Angie Blair. She declined to say if any possible changes to this schedule are being considered. Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, is slightly ahead of schedule on the multibillion-dollar program, having completed 62 of 65 program reviews in preparation for hardware manufacturing, Podlesney said. The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center and GPS 3 contractor team will conduct a critical design review in August, which would clear the way for production to begin, he said. One critical GPS 3 component, the primary navigation payload being supplied by ITT Geospatial Systems of Rochester, N.Y., already has cleared critical design review and production of a prototype has started, Podlesney said. ITT has the supplied payloads for all previous generations of GPS craft. The initial payload is slated for delivery by the end of 2011 for integration with the GPS Non-flight Satellite Trailblazer, a prototype that will closely resemble the flight-model spacecraft, Podlesney said. The construction of the Trailblazer is one example of the new and more cautious approach being taken on GPS 3 to avoid the cost and schedule problems that have plagued military satellite procurements in recent years. Lockheed Martin was put under contract in May 2008 to deliver the first two of as many as 12 satellites under the initial GPS 3 block, known as Block 3A. The next two blocks, GPS 3B and GPS 3C, are planned to feature improvements such as better anti-jamming capabilities. GPS 3 satellites are designed to produce more accurate signals than previous GPS satellites thanks to improved on-board atomic clocks. The spacecraft also will feature a more powerful M-code signal for military users and compatibility with the European Galileo navigation satellites, scheduled to begin launching as early as 2012. GPS 3 is one of the first procurements to be managed according to the Air Force's so-called back-to-basics approach to satellite development, which was adopted following the problems experienced on programs that were placed under contract in the 1990s and early 2000s. Experts have attributed the problems - many of which occurred on Lockheed Martin-led programs - to factors including inadequate up-front systems engineering and the adoption of commercial-like practices featuring less government oversight. The reduced oversight extended to quality control on parts. The Air Force previously had maintained a meticulous catalog of specifications for space-qualified parts, which was not kept up to date during what is sometimes referred to - with some irony -as the acquisition reform era. GPS 3 marks a new era of closer Air Force involvement in the engineering and integration of satellite systems, which will pay dividends for future development programs as well, said Keoki Jackson, Lockheed Martin's GPS 3 deputy program director. We have come to recognize that there have been problems in the industry with parts, and a response was needed, Jackson said. With the way the [military] standards had not been kept up, we are essentially blazing a new industry standard for parts procurement, so this is going to be a tremendous value to the Air Force as a whole from the standpoint of space procurement. The government and contractors put a lot of thought into overall mission assurance and risk reduction. However, as often happens with corrective measures, the pendulum may have swung too far back the other way in the
[Medianews] Nasa could land probe on asteroid hurtling towards Earth
Asteroid 1999 RQ36, which has a one-in-1,000 chance of hitting the Earth before the year 2200, would cause an explosion equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs detonating at once. An analysis of its orbit has predicted that it is most likely to hit us on September 24, 2182 but scientists want to collect a sample of the rock to help forecast its trajectory more accurately. If Nasa gives the plan the green light, the spacecraft would blast off in 2106 to map out and collect rock samples from the asteroid, which is 1,800 feet-wide. The planned mission, called OSIRIS-Rex, is one of two finalists in competition for funding as part of the cash-strapped US space agency's New Frontiers program. The other contender is a mission to land on Venus. The competing plans will come under discussion at a two-day Nasa workshop in Washington DC starting on today. The winner will be announced next year. Nasa has officially classified RQ36 as a 'potentially hazardous asteroid' as it passes within about 280,000 miles of Earth. Its orbit, which brings it closer to Earth, makes it easier to reach than other asteroids. Michael Drake, who would lead the OSIRIS-Rex team if the project was chosen, said: Being one of the easiest targets to get to coincidentally means that it also can easily hit us, too. Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said an impact from RQ36 would cause a catastrophic explosion. It would be an enormous impact, like hundreds of the biggest nuclear bombs ever built exploding at once, creating a crater maybe 10 kilometers across, he told National Geographic magazine. An expert panel appointed by Barack Obama, the US president, to assess Nasa's future space programme last year recommended bypassing the Moon in favour of a mission to land on an unidentified asteroid. The plan mirrors the plot of the 1998 Hollywood film Deep Impact, in which the White House sends a spaceship to land on an asteroid which is hurtling towards the Earth. The European Space Agency announced in 2008 that it plans to select a small asteroid, less than 0.6 miles across, near Earth and send a spacecraft to drill for dust and rubble for analysis. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7936145/Nasa-could-land-probe-o n-asteroid-hurtling-towards-Earth.html ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] NASA working on Plan B for space station repair
Second spacewalk due Wednesday after first effort stalls NASA engineers are once again scrambling to find a way to restore the International Space Station's ailing cooling system to full strength after weekend spacewalk repair efforts were stalled. Leaking ammonia coolant and a stuck hose forced American astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson to cut short their attempts to replace a faulty cooling system pump during a Saturday spacewalk. The astronauts plan to stage another spacewalk to tackle the problem on Wednesday, and then - if all goes well - finish replacing the pump during an extra spacewalk on Sunday. We are pressing ahead with the second spacewalk on Wednesday, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias told Space.com. Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson spent more than eight hours working outside the space station Saturday to try to disconnect the oven-sized ammonia pump from its mooring on the space station's right side. But one of four liquid ammonia hoses initially refused to budge, and then began leaking ammonia once Wheelock freed it by hammering on the connector with a tool. The ammonia pump failed July 31 and knocked out half of the space station's main cooling system. The space station crew has turned off some systems and left others running without backups to prevent the orbiting lab from overheating. [ Graphic: Inside and Out: The International Space Station] The faulty pump is in one of two cooling loops serving the space station's U.S. segment. A second loop is working fine, mission managers have said. The space station's Russian segment also has its own independent cooling system, they added. NASA engineers and mission managers spent all of last week planning Saturday's attempted spacewalk repair. The job was already so complicated that two spacewalks would be necessary, station managers said at the time. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38630196/ns/technology_and_science-space/ ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Former Alaska Senator, NASA administrator among those believed to be aboard plane
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/10/national/main6759648.shtml?tag =breakingnews A congressional source tells Reuters that former Sen. Ted Stevens was aboard a small plane that crashed in Alaska and that Stevens may not have survived. Reports are that five of the nine persons on board died in the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement. The Associated Press is citing a government official saying that Alaska authorities believe Stevens was aboard. And a defense contractor source tells the AP that former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe was also aboard. O'Keefe is now North American CEO for the European aviation and defense giant EADS http://www.eads.com/eads/int/en/our-company/our-governance/executive-co mmittee/members/Sean_O-Keefe.html . The plane crashed in southwest Alaska and rescue crews were trying to reach the wreckage early Tuesday, authorities said. A doctor is believed to be on the scene, Reuters reported. An NTSB investigative team has been dispatched from Washington, D.C., and was expected on the ground Tuesday morning. Alaska National Guard spokesman Maj. Guy Hayes said the Guard was called to the area about 20 miles north of Dillingham at about 7 p.m. Monday after a passing aircraft saw the downed plane. But severe weather has hampered search and rescue efforts. Friends of Stevens told the Anchorage Daily News http://www.adn.com/2010/08/09/1402798/plane-with-8-on-board-crashes.htm l#ixzz0wCygZ8xO that he was traveling to a lodge owned by the Anchorage-based communications company, CGI, to which the plane was registered. A woman who answered the phone at the Anchorage home of retired Air Force Gen. Joe Ralston, a good friend of Stevens, said Ralston was with Stevens' wife, Catherine, comforting her and trying to find out what was going on, the newspaper reported. Stevens, 86, was defeated in 2008 after facing criminal and Senate ethics charges for not reporting gifts. He was the longest serving Republican senator in U.S. history. The criminal charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct. Hayes said about five good Samaritans were on scene early Tuesday helping the crash victims. He said he was told by Alaska State Troopers that there were eight or nine people on board, though a spokeswoman for the troopers, Megan Peters, refused to comment. She said all the agency could say for sure is that a plane went down and crews were aggressively trying to reach the crash site but having difficulty doing so. As of 4 a.m. Tuesday, she said she still hadn't received word that crews had reached the site. I can't go beyond, 'We're responding to a plane crash,' she said. The National Weather Service reported rain and fog at Dillingham, with low clouds and limited visibility early Tuesday. Conditions ranged from visibility of about 10 miles reported at Dillingham shortly before 7 p.m. Monday to 3 miles, with rain and fog, reported about an hour later, according to the agency. The aircraft is a 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter. A woman at the Regional Operations Center told The Associated Press all further information was pending notification of next of kin. Dillingham is located in northern Bristol Bay, about 325 miles southwest of Anchorage Greg Williams | SAIC Service Desk Account Processor | SAIC Service Desk | phone: 877-WWW-SAIC ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Report suggests iPhone will launch on Verizon
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/08/09/iphone.verizon.wired/index.htm l?hpt=T2 By Samuel Axon August 9, 2010 9:23 a.m. EDT | Filed under: Mobile (Mashable) -- Evidence continues to mount to support expectations that Apple's iPhone 4 will finally launch on Verizon this coming January. The latest: Sources close to Apple's hardware suppliers say that Apple has ordered millions of CDMA chipsets from Qualcomm. CDMA is the wireless technology used by Verizon. The report comes from TechCrunch contributor Steve Cheney, who says that the chipsets are due in December, implying a January launch for the Verizon device. This follows a rumor from seven months ago that Qualcomm hadlanded a deal to provide Apple with chips. You might also recall that ATT dedicated a significant portion of its recent SEC filing to assurances that it would be a-okay without U.S. iPhone exclusivity, a probable sign that the carrier is expecting to lose said exclusivity before the original5-year deal runs its course. TechCrunch doesn't disclose any details about its sources for this rumor; it describes them only as sources with knowledge of this entire situation, a reference to the long chain of manufacturers from Apple on down through Qualcomm and other component-makers. The January release date was supported by an earlier, less-specificreport from Bloomberg about a coming Verizon iPhone. Somesurveys have predicted that as many as half of Verizon's current customers will abandon their current phones for the iPhone if it becomes available to them. If this rumor pans out, will you be abandoning your current Verizon phone for an iPhone? Or if you're an existing iPhone customer, will you drop ATT and make the move to Verizon when it gets the iPhone? ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Skype plans $100 million initial offering
By David Goldman, staff writerAugust 9, 2010: 2:42 PM ET http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/09/technology/skype_ipo/index.htm NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Skype, the Internet video phone service, is planning a $100 million initial public offering, according to a regulatory filing Monday. The company said it would offer American depositary shares, and the company's headquarters would remain in Luxembourg. Since EBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) sold the company in September 2009, Skype has done very well. This year, the company has generated more than $406 million in sales, with 560 million registered users -- up 41% from a year earlier. Paying users, though just a fraction of the overall user base, jumped 23% to 8.1 million from 6.6 million a year ago. Still, Skype said an IPO can help it do better. In the filing, the company said it had achieved significant global scale and user growth, but the penetration of our connected and paying users is low relative to our market opportunity. Skype made headway when it landed a deal with Verizon Wireless (VZ, Fortune 500) this year. Mobile providers had been hesitant to allow the service to be used on their networks, since Skype users would not have to pay the wireless network for the voice minutes used. But wireless companies are quickly learning that data service can be a strong revenue driver too -- good news for services like Skype and rival Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) Voice, which are starting to be embraced. EBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, only to sell it four years later for $2.75 billion to an investment group led by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. The online auction company had hoped to use Skype to facilitate communication between auction buyers and sellers, but that never quite happened. EBay actually planned an IPO for Skype, but opted for the straight sale instead. The match of Skype and EBay may not have panned out, but the company has been a consistent revenue driver for years. EBay estimated that the Internet phone company is on track to break $1 billion in revenue by 2011. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] NASA aims for more space station repairs Wed.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h-YHhQkzu3ft-uaqgZ3J_x 9prr5wD9HG3V1O0 By MARCIA DUNN (AP) - 2 hours ago CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA is scrambling to put together a new plan of attack to get the International Space Station back to full cooling. A jammed connector and ammonia leak prevented two spacewalking astronauts from removing a broken pump Saturday. Until the pump is replaced, the space station has to limp along on only half its cooling power. The system keeps electronic equipment from overheating. NASA is still targeting Wednesday for the next spacewalk. First, though, flight controllers need to relieve pressure in the ammonia line that is still attached to the failed pump, and get rid of any residual ammonia. If the bathtub-sized pump is removed Wednesday, a spare would be installed during a third spacewalk Sunday. The breakdown occurred more than a week ago. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Is Twitter a national mood ring?
Is Twitter a national mood ring? http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/08/03/mislove.twitter.research/index.htm l?hpt=T2 (CNN) -- How are fads started and spread? Do certain influential people play a key role, or is it truly random? How does a trend go from new and exciting to old and passe so quickly? Does having happy friends have an effect on our own happiness? Maybe Twitter can tell us. Every second, millions of people across the world are sharing their thoughts in the form of 140-character messages using Twitter. The tweets range from the mundane to the profound, and convey, for example, what people are doing, thinking and reading at any moment. The amount of information in any individual tweet is highly variable, but in aggregate the more than 65 million tweets composed per day represent a detailed, real-time trace of the collective thoughts and feelings of a significant fraction of the population -- potentially offering valuable information to everyone from politicians to advertisers to social researchers. To demonstrate the unique power of Twitter data, our research group at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School recently began a study to infer the mood of Twitter users in the United States from their public tweets. We can observe very distinct patterns over the course of the day, as well as weekly patterns that match conventional wisdom, such as the tendency of users to write happier tweets on weekends. We also observe geographic variations, with users from Hawaii, California, and Florida, for example, using happier words in their tweets. With Twitter, we now not only know which users are communicating, but we also know what they are saying. From a research perspective, Twitter is more than just a new tool; it's an entirely new kind of tool. Never before have academic researchers had access to this much real-time public information about what people are thinking and saying. It is analogous to being allowed to tap into millions of water-cooler conversations, school rooms and other public conversations across the globe. Our study is preliminary; we need more data to do a proper evaluation, and the results are subject to any number of biases (people using language differently across the United States, and different demographics using Twitter at different times). Our approach simply looks, for example, for occurrences of happy or unhappy words in tweets. However, because we take words out of context, our approach will not correctly interpret tweets like I am not happy. Even so, initial results demonstrate that Twitter data contain a wealth of information, and that even relatively simplistic approaches such as ours can extract interesting results. In fact, other research groups have also begun to examine Twitter data and have demonstrated that it can be used to predict the box-office success of an upcoming movie. And Twitter data yields much more detailed polling when compared to traditional methods, enabling real-time feedback for issues that are of local, national or international interest. In the past, researchers studying traces of human communication, such as phone records, have shown that the social network that connects us has rich hidden complexity. But legal and privacy concerns have caused these previous studies to almost universally omit the content of the communication. Because most users leave their tweets public, Twitter represents an unprecedented opportunity. This is why researchers owe a debt of gratitude to Twitter for its policy of open access to public tweets (exemplified by the recent donation of its entire public tweet history to the Library of Congress). Like any scientific tool, the ability to use the data for research is subject to caveats and limitations. Unlike many existing tools, such as surveys and polls, researchers cannot ask a question of the Twitter users directly; instead, researchers must determine whether the question is one that the Twitter data can answer. Should we determine how to extract information reliably, which we're working on, the potential applications of the data are almost endless. For example, monitoring the mood of the public chatter on Twitter could allow businesses to quickly identify and respond to incidents, mitigating the effect of negative publicity on their brand. The data could be used to inform public policy, allowing public officials and politicians to receive feedback from their constituents in real time. From a scientific standpoint, Twitter data can shed light on how information spreads through society. Researchers can also investigate network effects: How does what our friends discuss influence what we discuss? In short, the data that is now becoming available from Twitter and related websites offers a new lens through which we can view society. It promises new approaches to understanding social phenomena, what some colleagues have dubbed computational social science. This new kind of data presents new
[Medianews] Google Wave Slayed by Facebook and Twitter
http://www.pcworld.com/article/202722/google_wave_slayed_by_facebook_and_twitter.html?tk=hp_new Was it a social network or a collaboration tool on steroids? Nobody could quite agree, and it's one reason for the demise of Google Wave. The company is disappointed with the user adoption and has announced it will discontinue developing Wave as a stand-alone product. Google Wave was largely an Australian developed product. Google will maintain the service through the end of the year and will roll the technology into other projects, according to senior vice-president for operations, Urs Hölzle. Jonathan Yarmis, a senior research fellow with analyst Ovum, said Wave's strength -- its lack of definition -- was also its greatest weakness as you could do any of the things incorporated into Wave in other, more accessible, fashions. The ongoing growth of things like Facebook and Twitter probably killed Wave, as conversations that might have taken place there instead migrated to either a social platform -- Facebook - or a more conversational tool - Twitter, said New York-based Yarmis. Even Google Buzz played a role in Wave's death as the two were somewhat similarly targeted but Buzz, being more Twitter-like, was easier to understand and embrace. Ovum went so far as to call Google a 'one trick pony', referring to the company's dominance in search and advertising. Everything else is merely distraction, or survives in its ability to feed the advertising beast, which represents 98 per cent of Google's revenue. Of course, fortunately for Google, that one trick is a really good trick. The analyst thinks Wave may be reincarnated in very different fashion if Google launches its rumoured Facebook competitor. If and when Google introduces its platform -- and really, it's just a question of when -- this would have obsoleted Wave anyhow, Yarmis said. This way they just put a bullet in it now, so when they introduce the next platform, the focus isn't on how this co-exists with Wave or what this means for Wave or anything like that. Wave is gone, will be quickly forgotten and when Google does the next thing, for the most part no one will focus on Wave. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Beatles, iTunes deal still at impasse
Beatles, iTunes deal still at impasse http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/beatles-itu nes-deal-still-at-impasse/article1664171/ Don't hold your breath waiting for Beatles songs to go on sale at iTunes or other online retailers, Yoko Ono said on Thursday. The Fab Four have long resisted the allure of digital downloads, instead selling millions of old-fashioned compact discs last year after remastering the catalogue. Apple Corps, the group's holding company has been unable to agree on terms with EMI Group, which licenses the Beatles' recordings. And then there's the unrelated Apple Inc. (AAPL-Q259.81-1.89-0.72%), owner of iTunes, the world's largest music retailer. Apple and Apple have had a difficult history over rights to the name. But that trademark dispute was settled in 2007, and speculation has regularly popped up ever since that the two companies would strike an iTunes deal. (Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he's a brilliant guy, Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. There's just an element that we're not very happy about, as people. We are holding out. Don't hold your breath ... for anything, she said with a laugh. NEW LENNON DOCUMENTARY Ono, who was promoting an upcoming public television documentary about her husband, LENNONYC, declined to go into detail. Former member Paul McCartney was similarly vague in 2008 when he said there were a couple of sticking points. Ono said her comments did not necessarily reflect the opinions of the three other equal shareholders in Apple Corps - McCartney, bandmate Ringo Starr and Olivia Harrison, the widow of George Harrison. But she added that the infamous rancour of the past has been replaced by smooth consensus because we're older and more experienced. Apple Corps may be reluctant to enter the digital age, but the company is far more open to new ideas that it was in the past, Ono said. The company's day-to-day operations are run from London by Jeff Jones, a former Sony Music executive who took over as CEO in 2007. She said Jones was an action person, while his late predecessor Neil Aspinall - who worked with the Beatles for 40 years - kept the Beatles elite and closed-off, which served its purpose at the time. Jones has overseen not only the reissue of the Beatles catalogue, but also a Beatles: Rock Band video game. The band's music has also been getting a new life in a Cirque du Soleil Love stage show that has been running in Las Vegas since 2006. Ono was reluctant to discuss upcoming Beatle-related activities, but has plenty of projects in the works to commemorate Lennon's 70th birthday on Oct. 9, and the 30th anniversary of his murder on Dec. 8. LENNONYC will premiere nationally on Nov. 22, as part of PBS' American Masters series. It focuses on the couple's time together in New York from 1971 to 1980, boasting previously unseen video footage and unheard studio recordings from sessions for his final album, Double Fantasy. That album will be reissued on Oct. 5 (a day earlier internationally), along with seven other studio releases, such as 1971's Imagine. Double Fantasy will also be available in a newly remixed stripped down version that enhances Lennon's vocals on such songs as Starting Over and Woman. Ono said she was putting a lot of care into the projects, because of her increasing age. I'm 77, so I think this could be my last effort, so I'm really trying very hard, she said. Ono will once again oppose parole for Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman when his case comes up for review later this month. She said Chapman, now 55, posed a risk not only to her and to Lennon's two sons, but to the public and even to himself. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Moon's shell may be wet, but inside is bone dry
Moon's shell may be wet, but inside is bone dry http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38579955/ns/technology_and_science-space/ Recent studies have found vast amounts of water ice at or near the lunar surface. But the inside of the moon is bone dry, a new study finds. A recent study of lunar rock samples from NASA's Apollo missions could mean the moon's interior harbors less water than thought. In fact, a new examination of the lunar rocks' chlorine composition indicates that the moon is essentially dry without any water deep inside at all. Lots of publications about water being found on the moon talk about ice that resides on the lunar surface, Zachary Sharp, a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, N.M., and the study's lead researcher, told Space.com. This is not what we're talking about. We're talking about water that was initially in the moon as it formed. Secrets of moon rocks Sharp and his colleagues compared the composition of Earth rocks, primitive meteorite samples, and lunar volcanic rocks. In particular, they measured the prevalence of two kinds of chlorine atoms, called isotopes chlorine-35 and chlorine-37. They found that the ratio of chlorine-35 to chlorine-37 was very constant, and only varied by about 0.1 percent. Similar results were found with the primitive meteorite samples. But when the researchers performed the same measurements on lunar samples, they found surprising results. ( 10 Coolest New Moon Discoveries) We quickly found huge variability in the lunar chlorine isotope ratio, Sharp said. It was 25 times that of Earth. We were confounded. Story continues below More below This information helped the scientists calculate how widespread other elements are on the moon including hydrogen, a key ingredient in water. Knowing the chlorine content, we can back-calculate the amount of hydrogen, Sharp said. We found that the hydrogen content had to be really low, so essentially the moon was extremely dry relative to Earth. What chlorine tells us about water Because of its chemical properties, chlorine is very attracted to water (this is called being hydrophilic). Therefore, it is an extremely sensitive indicator of the presence of hydrogen, and thus, water. If the moon contained large amounts of water in its interior, that would have greatly affected the properties of chlorine there, too, the researchers said. In particular, there wouldn't be so many different ratios of the two types of chlorine rather, they would be found at steady levels all over the moon, as they are on Earth. On Earth, chlorine bonds with hydrogen to create the compound hydrogen chloride (HCl), which is released as a gas during volcanic processes.Chlorine-35 and chlorine-37 are atoms that contain the same number of protons, but chlorine-37 has two more neutrons in its nucleus. Thus, the latter flavor of chlorine weighs more, as it has a slightly greater atomic mass. During volcanic processes on Earth, as chlorine vaporizes from the cooling molten rock, the volatile gas hydrogen chloride (HCl) is released. This compound is more often made with chlorine-37 than chlorine-35. That means that when the gas is emitted into the atmosphere, more of the former atom is lost than the latter, leaving behind cooled volcanic rocks that are enriched with chlorine-35. But, this is only half of the process, Sharp said. The lighter element is also released as a vapor in other processes on Earth. The net effect on Earth is that there is essentially no fractionation the two cancel each other out, Sharp said. However, on the moon, this cancelling out process hasn't occurred, so there are wildly different ratios of the two isotopes in different areas. That must be because there wasn't enough hydrogen around for chlorine to bond to, to create HCl, the scientists reason. Instead, on the moon, chlorine has bonded with metals to create compounds such as sodium chloride, magnesium chloride and zinc chloride, Sharp said. The levels of hydrogen had to be less than the chlorine, otherwise we would have HCl rather than these chloride salts, Sharp said. If we had made HCl, we wouldn't have fractionation. Knowing the chlorine content gives us an upper limit on the hydrogen content. So, we know that there had to be less hydrogen than chlorine. With such low concentrations of hydrogen, the researchers suggest that the interior of the moon is anhydrous, or without water, as scientists had initially proposed long ago. Furthermore, if this explanation is correct, Sharp and his colleagues would also hope to find salts on the lunar surface that were re-crystallized following the vaporizing process. We do see this on a number of lunar materials, Sharp said. We find these little decorations of salt crystals on the surface. Previous studies of water in the moon's interior In 2008, research of volcanic glass beads from the moon brought attention to the fact that there might be more water in the lunar interior than scientists had
[Medianews] KIAH-TV's plan to air anchorless news has NYC anchors wondering where bond with viewers has gone
KIAH-TV's plan to air anchorless news has NYC anchors wondering where bond with viewers has gone Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2010/08/06/2010-08-06_plan_t o_drop_anchor_jolts_news_biz.html#ixzz0vpqXfDal Word that a Houston station is considering anchorless news has folks wondering whether this is the next wave of TV news or just a stunt to draw attention by a station with low ratings. The answer is somewhere in between, but the mere thought of ditching anchors has TV news staffs wondering if it could happen here. You're talking to a news person; I hope not, Susan Sullivan, WNBC/Ch. 4 vice president of news, said earlier this week. I'm very curious to see what they do. She's not alone. News people have spent eons seeking ideas to freshen the decades-old local news format, with little success. I'm interested in how it's going to flow, Sullivan said. They're going to need people to tell the story. ... People relate to people. The pilot for the newscast, which will air on KIAH-TV in Houston, was shot here at WPIX/Ch. 11. In addition to producing its own news, WPIX has also doing pilots for other Tribune channels. As reported earlier, some of the pilots have included Jodi Applegate, Curtis Sliwa and Laurie Dhue. A Tribune spokesman said there's no fixed air date for the anchorless test in Houston and called the concept still a work-in-progress. The idea is flawed, say some local insiders (some of whom concede that they are paid to be on the air). They say that a key to local news is the tie between anchors and viewers. Audiences are shrinking, they agree, but add that there's an intimate and familiar bond with anchors, for better or worse. Take that out of the equation, and there's a risk of losing a link - real or perceived - between the station and the audience. Tribune brass have been pushing a change mantra for a while now. For example, look at how they post new jobs. One recent opening sought producers/editors for a new morning news/infotainment show, and asked applicants to sell management on, among other things, your fiery passion to help reinvent the '80s-rooted, focus-grouped, yuppie anchors and a news desk, super Doppler ultra weather style. Few would argue that local TV doesn't need to be reworked, tweaked and updated to survive. But revolutionary is not a word synonymous with the news format. Heck, just evolutionary is a difficult concept in this field. But no anchors? Not yet. When was the last time you heard anyone say, 'Turn on Channel 6,' said one local anchor, 'I love their sound bites and video.' That would be, ah, never. Random observations: - Ch. 11's PIX Morning News yesterday aired a Tamsen Fadal segment outdoors featuring a gelato vendor wearing a shirt promoting and talking about Julia Roberts' film Eat, Pray, Love. Fadal also mentioned a Sony Pictures giveaway tied to the movie. That news segment was followed by a commercial for the movie. Shocking, right? - Could there be a more annoying commercial than Quiznos' spot for its $5, $4 and $3 prices, which uses cats screeching a version of Three Blind Mice? Let's hope that those cats get run over by a bus. rh...@nydailynews.com ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Senate approves bill adding extra space shuttle flight
BY STEPHEN CLARK SPACEFLIGHT NOW Posted: August 6, 2010 http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1008/06senate/ The U.S. Senate passed a compromise NASA bill Thursday night that would order the agency to fly an extra space shuttle mission next June and immediately start work on a new heavy-lift rocket for human voyages beyond Earth. The vote on the Senate floor occurred late Thursday night, just before lawmakers leave Washington for the traditional August recess. The Senate's authorization of NASA was unveiled in July as it was approved by the body's commerce committee. The legislation calls for the launch of another shuttle flight in June 2011, at the earliest. NASA's official shuttle manifest now includes two more missions launching in November and February. The extra flight, designated STS-135, would keep much of the shuttle workforce in place for another year and resupply the International Space Station. Workers are already preparing equipment for a launch-on-need mission that would fly as a rescue if the two scheduled shuttle flights ran into serious trouble. The STS-135 flight would use the existing hardware if a rescue mission is not required. Under the Senate authorization bill, NASA would also begin developing a new heavy-duty booster this year for human missions to asteroids and Mars. The legislation directs NASA to use existing contracts, workers and capabilities from the space shuttle and Constellation programs, including the Orion and Ares 1 vehicles. The heavy-lift rocket should be ready for orbital missions by the end of 2016, according to the Senate. The authorization act budgets more than $11 billion through 2013 for the government-owned launch vehicle and capsule. About $1.6 billion would be set aside in the next three years by the Senate authorization act for up-and-coming commercial space transportation systems, including capsules to take over the job of sending astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2015. The bill was presented as a compromise last month, but a White House spokesperson was not immediately available for comment on Thursday night's passage. In a statement July 15, the White House told Spaceflight Now the Senate bill contains critical elements necessary for achieving the president's vision for NASA. The compromise represents an important first step in fulfilling President Obama's goals for NASA, the July statement said. The White House's original NASA policy proposed terminating the Constellation program, providing more than $3 billion to private space companies through 2013, and planning for piloted deep space expeditions at an indefinite time in the future. The proposals did not include adding another shuttle flight. In a visit to Florida in April, President Obama set a timetable to begin development of a heavy-lift rocket by 2015. Senate legislation would move up the development to fiscal year 2011, which begins in October. The Senate's NASA appropriations bill is still awaiting consideration on the floor. The spending legislation passed the Senate Appropriations Committee in a July 22 hearing. The House is working on its own NASA authorization bill, but its language is far different from the Senate legislation. NASA would still fly the STS-135 shuttle mission and retain key parts of the Constellation program if the House legislation was adopted. But the House provides much less funding for the commercial spaceflight initiative and does not call for building a heavy-lift rocket as soon as the Senate bill. Instead, the House would direct the agency to continue developing a government-owned rocket and capsule like the Ares 1 and Orion architecture that was to be scrapped by the White House. The legislation was approved by the House science committee July 22, but plans to bring the bill to a vote on the House floor last week faltered after intense opposition. The House probably won't take up the NASA bill until it reconvenes in September. The differing versions must be reconciled through a conference committee between the Senate and House. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
Re: [Medianews] Get a free legal DVD-to-MP4 converter
I was notified that this software is also available for free: http://www.iskysoft.com/flv-converter-windows.html iSkysoft FLV Converter for Windowsv2.3.2 FLV Converter for Windows is designed to convert popular videos to Youtube FLV or convert FLV video to popular video formats such as convert flv to avi, flv to mp4, etc. This FLV Video Converter is capable of converting most standard videos files like AVI, WMV, RM, RMVB, MOV, MKV, ASF, MPG, and MPEG. What's more, it gives a full support to High Definition videos such as HD MKV (H.264, MPEG-2), HD WMV (VC-1), MTS (AVCHD, H.264), M2TS (AVCHD, H.264),etc. The powerful editing performances empower you to crop, clip, adjust video effect, add watermark and plug-in subtitle. It helps you get tailor-made video/audio for uploading onto YouTube or transferring to your portable devices. It gives a full support to Windows 7. Note: Giveaway for three months, expired on September 1st, 2010. You can get iSkysoft FLV Converter for Windows for free. Enter your email address and the keycode will be sent to you. You can't get free upgrade and technical support. Greg Williams -Original Message- From: medianews-boun...@etskywarn.net [mailto:medianews-boun...@etskywarn.net] On Behalf Of George Antunes Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2010 2:37 PM To: medianews@etskywarn.net Cc: Mike Kohl Subject: Re: [Medianews] Get a free legal DVD-to-MP4 converter A correction to this post. You DON'T need Facebook to download the software. You DO need Facebook to get a free key to activate the software. If you use Facebook go for it. If you are a Facebook abstainer (like me) you are SOL. On 8/4/2010 1:23 PM, George Antunes wrote: [Note: contrary to what the article says, you don't need to go to Facebook to get the software. Just click here: http://www.iskysoft.com/software-giveaway.html A new ruling makes decrypting encoding your DVDs for personal use completely legal. Free software offer ends August 9th. ] -- George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Google Earth Used To Find Unlicensed Pools
Updated: Monday, 02 Aug 2010, 10:14 AM EDT http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/long_island/Google-Earth-Used -To-Find-Unlicensed-Pools-20100801-apx RIVERHEAD, N.Y. - A town on New York's Long Island is using Google Earth to find backyard pools that don't have the proper permits. The town of Riverhead has used the satellite image service to find about 250 pools whose owners never filled out the required paperwork. Violators were told to get the permits or face hefty fines. So far about $75,000 in fees has been collected. Riverhead's chief building inspector Leroy Barnes Jr. said the unpermitted pools were a safety concern. He said that without the required inspections there was no way to know whether the pools' plumbing, electrical work and fencing met state and local regulations. Pool safety has always been my concern, Barnes said. But some privacy advocates say the use of Google Earth to find scofflaw swimming pools reeks of Big Brother. Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms, she said. A representative for Google said she did not know of any other community using Google Earth as it has been used in Riverhead. She did not respond to a question about whether Google has any concerns about how the town is using the service. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] NASA: Spacewalks may be used to fix space station cooling problem
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/02/space.station.warning/index.html?hpt=T2 (CNN) -- Crew members on the International Space Station may need to conduct spacewalks this week to fix the station's cooling system, NASA said Sunday. Warning alarms awakened crew members Saturday night when a circuit breaker tripped, shutting off power to the pump that feeds ammonia to part of the station's cooling system, NASA said in a statement. The crew is not in any danger and is monitoring systems and relaxing on an otherwise off-duty day, NASA said. Engineers are reviewing preliminary plans for two crew members to conduct one spacewalk this week to replace the failed pump, and then another spacewalk several days later to complete fluid and electrical connections, NASA said. NASA said the cooling loop shut down around 8 p.m. ET Saturday after monitors detected a power spike in the pump that sends ammonia through the loops. The problem forced other systems on the space station to shut down, NASA said. The alarms came two days after NASA officials warned space debris could pose a risk to the station. Later Thursday, scientists said the debris was no longer a threat. Six people -- three Americans and three Russians -- are on the International Space Station. The station's crew members are conducting more than 100 ongoing experiments in biology, physical sciences, technology development, and Earth and space sciences, according to NASA. NASA says that without temperature controls, the temperature of the orbiting station's sun-facing side would soar to 250 degrees (121 degrees Celsius), while thermometers on the dark side would plunge to minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit (-157 degrees Celsius). ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Gel that can help decayed teeth grow back could end fillings
Gel that can help decayed teeth grow back could end fillings By Pat Hagan Last updated at 2:50 PM on 27th July 2010 A gel that can help decayed teeth grow back in just weeks may mean an end to fillings. The gel, which is being developed by scientists in France, works by prompting cells in teeth to start multiplying. They then form healthy new tooth tissue that gradually replaces what has been lost to decay. Researchers say in lab studies it took just four weeks to restore teeth back to their original healthy state. The gel contains melanocyte-stimulating hormone, or MSH. We produce this in the pituitary gland, a pea-sized gland just behind the bridge of the nose. MSH is already known to play an important part in determining skin colour - the more you have, the darker your flesh tone. But recent studies suggest MSH may also play a crucial role in stimulating bone regeneration. As bone and teeth are very similar in their structure, a team of scientists at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Paris tested if the hormone could stimulate tooth growth. Their findings, published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano, could signal hurtnot just an end to fillings, but the dreaded dentist drill as well. Tooth decay is a major public health problem in Britain. Around £45m a year is spent treating decayed teeth and by the age of 15, teenagers have had an average of 2.5 teeth filled or removed. Decay is caused by bacteria, called streptococcus mutans, that live in the mouth and feed on sugar in the diet. Once the bacteria stick to the enamel, they trigger a process called demineralisation - they turn sugar in the diet into a harmful acid that starts to create holes in the teeth. For decades, the main treatment for cavities has been to 'drill and fill'. However, an estimated one in five Britons suffers from dental phobia, a fear of dentists which means some would rather endure pain and suffering than face the prospect of having their teeth drilled. The new treatment is painless. And although fillings halt decay, they can come loose and sometimes need refilling. Experts believe new tooth cells would be stronger and a permanent solution. The French team mixed MSH with a chemical called poly-L-glutamic acid. This is a substance often used to transport drugs inside the body because it can survive the harsh environments, such as the stomach, that might destroy medicines before they get a chance to work. The mixture was then turned into a gel and rubbed on to cells, called dental pulp fibroblasts, taken from extracted human teeth. These cells are the kind that help new tooth tissue to grow. But until now there has been no way of 'switching' them back on once they have been destroyed by dental decay. The researchers found the gel triggered the growth of new cells and also helped with adhesion - the process by which new dental cells 'lock' together. This is important because it produces strong tooth pulp and enamel which could make the decayed tooth as good as new. In a separate experiment, the French scientists applied the gel to the teeth of mice with dental cavities. In just one month, the cavities had disappeared. The gel is still undergoing testing but could be available for use within three to five years. Professor Damien Walmsley, the British Dental Association's scientific adviser, said the gel could be an interesting new development, but stressed it is unlikely to be able to repair teeth that have been extensively damaged by decay. 'There are a lot of exciting developments in this field, of which this is one,' he said. 'It looks promising, but we will have to wait for the results to come back from clinical trials and its use will be restricted to treating small areas of dental decay.' Scientists have developed a 'tongue' gel as part of a new approach to tackling bad breath and preventing tooth decay. Halitosis is usually caused by bacteria in the mouth. The latest treatment, developed by Meridol, takes a mechanical and chemical approach. It consists of a tongue scraper, gel and mouth wash. The extra-flat tongue cleaner is used to scrape bacteria off the tongue. The tongue gel and mouthwash are anti-bacterial and contain chemicals that attach themselves to odour-producing compounds, which are then flushed out with the mouthwash. Both gel and mouthwash contain fluoride. * gaba.com Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1297850/Gel-help-decayed-teeth-grow-end-fillings.html#ixzz0uzkHtVZR ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] NASA's Deep Space Camera Locates Host of 'Earths'
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/25/nasas-deep-space-camera-locate s-host-earths/?test=latestnews Published July 25, 2010 Scientists celebrated Sunday after finding more than 700 suspected new planets -- including up to 140 similar in size to Earth -- in just six weeks of using a powerful new space observatory. Early results from NASA's Kepler Mission, a small satellite observing deep space, suggested planets like Earth were far more common than previously thought. Past discoveries suggested most planets outside our solar system were gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn -- but the new evidence tipped the balance in favor of solid worlds. Astronomers said the discovery meant the chances of eventually finding truly Earth-like planets capable of sustaining life rose sharply. NASA so far formally announced only five new exoplanets -- those outside our solar system -- from the mission because its scientists were still analyzing Kepler's finds to confirm they are actually planets. The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way [which has more than 100 billion stars] will contain 100 million habitable planets, and soon we will be identifying the first of them, said Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a scientist on the Kepler Mission. There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Birds force Kings of Leon from St. Louis stage
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/24/kings.of.leon.pigeons/index. html?hpt=T2 (CNN) -- Pooping pigeons forced the Kings of Leon to abandon their St. Louis, Missouri, concert after just three songs Friday night, the rock band's management said Saturday. An infestation of the birds in the rafters of the Verizon Amphitheatre bombarded the musicians as soon as they took the stage, according to Andy Mendelsohn of Vector Management. Jared (Followill) was hit several times during the first two songs, Mendelsohn said of the band's bassist. It's not only disgusting -- it's a toxic health hazard. They really tried to hang in there, Mendelsohn added. Followill, who describes himself as a germophobe, said there was already poop on his pedal and carpet when he walked out on stage. The aerial attack began during the opening song -- Closer -- when he was bombed in the face. His bass tech wiped most of it off with a sanitary wipe, he said. Excrement struck each of his arms over the next two numbers, he said. I was hit by pigeons on each of the first three songs, he said. We had 20 songs on the set list. By the end of the show, I would have been covered from head to toe. Followill said he couldn't see the pigeons above him and he had no idea how many there were. The last thing I was going to do was look up ... but if that was only a couple, we must have caught them right after a big Thanksgiving dinner, he quipped. The group was determined to play for St. Louis fans even though they had fair warning earlier about the pigeon problem. Opening bands The Postelles and The Stills came offstage complaining of getting riddled with large amounts of excrement, their publicist said. The Kings of Leon decided to carry on regardless, they said in a statement released Saturday. The band felt it would be unfair to the fans to cancel the show at that late moment. We couldn't believe what The Postelles and The Stills looked like after their sets, Followill said. We didn't want to cancel the show, so we went for it. We tried to play. It was ridiculous. Followill's mother called him when she heard from friends at the show that it had been abruptly ended. I was attacked, Mom, but not by humans, Followill said he told her. Venue managers told the band's representatives earlier Friday about a significant pigeon infestation problem with summer shows over the years, but they were doing all they could to fix it, the statement said. We want to apologize to our fans in St. Louis and will come back as soon as we can, Mendelsohn said. Concertgoers were apparently spared the aerial bombardment. No fans got pooped on as far as we know, the band's publicist said. Verizon Amphitheatre and concert promoter Live Nation did not immediately respond to CNN requests for comment. The band is set to perform at First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, on Saturday night. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] UAE says BlackBerry is security threat
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/UAE-BlackBerry-phones-could-apf-959472235. html?x=0 United Arab Emirates declares BlackBerry smartphone a threat to national security Adam Schreck, AP Business Writer, On Monday July 26, 2010, 9:03 am EDT DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- The United Arab Emirates has declared BlackBerry smartphones a potential threat to national security, saying the devices operate beyond the jurisdiction of national laws and are open to misuse. The move raises concerns of another attempt by the government to control the flow of information in the Arab Gulf nation, which actively censors websites and other forms of media seen as harming national security or conservative local values. At the same time, however, the UAE is trying to establish itself as an international business hub. This is the second major controversy over the Blackberry in the UAE. A year ago, the Middle East country's biggest state-run mobile operator was caught encouraging unwitting BlackBerry users to install software on the devices that could allow outsiders to peer inside. The government has never made fully clear what happened in that case. In the latest flap, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority voiced fears that the BlackBerry manages data in a way that could allow it to be misused. BlackBerry devices were singled out because they are the only phones operating in the country that automatically relay users' information to privately managed data centers overseas, the regulator said. As a result of how Blackberry data is managed and stored, in their current form, certain Blackberry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions, the regulator said in a statement carried on the state news agency late Sunday. It said that BlackBerry devices operate beyond the jurisdiction of national laws because they immediately send data abroad to be managed by a foreign, commercial organization. That is apparently a reference to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion's system of relaying data such as e-mail messages to network servers that are separate from those operated by local mobile providers. The TRA said the devices were launched in the UAE before safety, emergency and national security legislation regulating their use was enacted in 2007. It did not specify what changes it is seeking. The comments raised questions about the gadgets' legality in the country, home to the Mideast business hub of Dubai. An official at the TRA said Monday the agency had no further comment, and that no decision about the phones' future in the country had been made. She would not provide her name, as is customary among Emirati government officials. Spokeswomen for BlackBerry maker RIM said the Canadian company did not yet have any comment. Just over a year ago, RIM criticized a directive by UAE state-owned mobile operator Etisalat telling the company's more than 145,000 BlackBerry users to install software described as an upgrade ... required for service enhancements. RIM said tests showed the update was in fact spy software that could allow outsiders to access private information stored on the phones. It strongly distanced itself from Etisalat's decision, and provided details instructing users how to remove the software. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Wal-Mart plan to use smart tags raises privacy concerns
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2010-07-25-wal-mart-smar t-tags_N.htm By Anne D'Innocenzio, Associated Press NEW YORK - Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) is putting electronic identification tags on men's clothing like jeans starting Aug. 1 as the world's largest retailer tries to gain more control of its inventory. But the move is raising eyebrows among privacy experts. The individual garments, which also includes underwear and socks, will have removable smart tags that can be read from a distance by Wal-Mart workers with scanners. In seconds, the worker will be able to know what sizes are missing and will also be able tell what it has on hand in the stock room. Such instant knowledge will allow store clerks to have the right sizes on hand when shoppers need them. The tags work by reflecting a weak radio signal to identify the product. They have long spurred privacy fears as well as visions of stores being able to scan an entire shopping cart of items at one time. Wal-Mart's goal is to eventually expand the tags to other types of merchandise but company officials say it's too early to give estimates on how long that will take. There are so many significant benefits in knowing how to better manage inventory and better serve customers, said Lorenzo Lopez, a Wal-Mart spokesman. This will enhance the shopping experience and help us grow our business. Before the rollout, Wal-Mart and other stores were using the tags, called radio frequency identification tags, only to track pallets or cases of merchandise in their warehouses. But now the tags are jumping onto individual items, a move that some privacy experts describe as frightening. Wal-Mart, which generated annual revenue of a little more than $400 billion in its latest fiscal year and operates almost 4,000 stores, has huge influence with suppliers. That makes other merchants tend to follow its lead. This is a first piece of a very large and very frightening tracking system, said Katherine Albrecht, director of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering. Albrecht worries that Wal-Mart and others would be able to track movements of customers who in some border states like Michigan and Washington are carrying new driver's licenses that contain RFID tags to make it easier for them to cross borders. Albrecht fears that retailers could scan data from such licenses and their purchases and combine that data with other personal information. She also says that even though the smart tags can be removed from clothing, they can't be turned off and can be tracked even after you throw them in the garbage, for example. Wal-Mart officials said they are aware of privacy concerns but insist they are taking a thoughtful and methodical approach. Dan Fogelman, a Wal-Mart spokesman said that the smart label doesn't collect customer information. Wal-Mart is using it strictly to manage inventory. The customer is in complete control, he said. Fogelman added that Wal-Mart's readers identify only inventory it has in the store. To placate privacy concerns, Wal-Mart, which is financing some of the suppliers' costs, is asking vendors to embed the smart tags in removable labels and not embed them in clothing. Wal-Mart plans to educate customers with the new program through in-store videos and through signs posted in the stores that educate customers about the program. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Dam fails in eastern Iowa, causing massive flooding
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/24/iowa.dam.breach/index.html (CNN) -- A dam on an eastern Iowa lake suffered a catastrophic failure Saturday, sending a massive amount of water into nearby communities and forcing residents to flee, officials said. The Lake Delhi dam, about 45 miles north of Cedar Rapids, failed as a result of massive rain -- a very unusually high amount this season, according to Jim Flansburg, communications director for Gov. Chet Culver. Culver told CNN that nearly 10 inches of rain had recently fallen in a 12-hour period in the area and was too much water for the dam to hold. The roads on either side of the dam -- which were part of the cement dam's containment measures -- apparently gave out as a result of the rainfall, Flansburg told CNN. The National Weather Service reported a 30-foot-wide gap in the berm alongside the dam. Video showed massive amounts of water violently gushing from the pool behind the dam into the Maquoketa River below. Nearby homes and buildings were under water up to their eaves. However, as of Saturday evening, the waters appeared to be receding, Flansburg said. Much of the flooding occurred in farm areas instead of well-populated neighborhoods, Flansburg said, adding a would-be catastrophe was avoided. Earlier Saturday, residents in Hopkinton, a town of about 700, were given minutes to flee approaching floodwaters, Flansburg said. No injuries were reported. The town of Monticello, where Culver was meeting with emergency personnel, was also under a flood warning. Amanda Duck, a trained weather spotter along with her husband in Monticello, told CNN she had been watching the water slowly rise all day. By evening, water was beginning to seep over a road that runs behind her house and into her neighbor's yard, she said. We're both just in a state of shock, Duck said. We're just trying to keep our wits about us and help our neighbors. Culver activated the National Guard in the area to help with recovery efforts, his office said. He also issued disaster proclamations for Delaware and Jones counties due to the flooding. Culver credited the lack of injuries to local officials providing early warning to residents in the flood plain about the possibility of a dam breach. The governor said such a failure had never happened before. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Now THIS is the kind of wedding I like to hear about
http://www.sheboyganpress.com/article/20100726/SHE0101/307260040/Fond-du -Lac-wedding-keeps-police-busy Fond du Lac wedding guests keep police busy Gannett Wisconsin Media * July 26, 2010 FOND DU LAC - They came for a wedding, but numerous guests ended up in run-ins with police after the reception on the south end of Lake Winnebago. It started with a noise complaint, said Fond du Lac police Lt. Rob Duveneck. And went downhill from there. A short time later, police received a report of a domestic dispute on Merrill Avenue, he said. The people involved in the dispute were wedding guests. A few hours later and a few blocks farther south - at Forest and Main streets - another domestic dispute was reported. Again, the people involved were wedding guests, Duveneck said. A bit after that, another domestic dispute - again involving wedding guests - was reported near Ninth and Morris streets. Police also received a report of a battery at Big O's Bar and Grill. The perpetrators? Police say they'd been at the wedding. The night ended with a car striking a house on 11th Street near Linden Street, Duveneck said. The occupants? You guessed it, they had been at the wedding. The driver fled on foot and the passenger was taken to the emergency room with head injuries. While police were investigating the hit-and-run, a wedding crasher intruded. Officers arrested a bystander, who was not a wedding guest, for obstructing their efforts. The bride and groom were not involved in any of the incidents, but in all, their guests accounted for three domestic disputes, a tavern fight and a hit-and-run crash. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Still the Butcher After All These Years
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/sports/26wrestler.html By MIKE TIERNEY STOCKBRIDGE, Ga. - Abdullah the Butcher hobbles into a middle school gymnasium, where a few hundred patrons await a night of professional wrestling's choreographed mayhem. A sturdy cane supports the 400-something pounds that fill out his cartoonish 73-year-old (or is it 69-year-old?) body, which is badly in need of a new hip, among other repairs. It's another night on the job for Abdullah, wrestling's legendary bloodletting brute, who competed as the card's headliner. He can no longer split open opponents' heads with a swinging chair or stalk them across the ring; in fact, he rarely even enters the ring anymore. But the Butcher can still mete out embellished punishment with forearms, fists and his signature prop: a dinner fork, which he removes from his costume and stabs away, drawing opponents' blood. Abdullah, after all, has a reputation to maintain as the man who popularized, if not instigated, what is known as hard-core wrestling. When he is not appearing before crowds at middle school gyms like this one outside Atlanta, he is big in Japan, performing before thousands. Just as the blood keeps trickling down from the four ribbony scars on his bald pate, the revenue keeps trickling in from appearance fees, signed photos, DVD's - even the fork he tries to sell after the show. Ten bucks, he says. I love this business. Wrestling's Methuselah was born Larry Shreve, a Canadian of African descent, some seven decades ago. (Fudging on age is a common wrestling practice.) He has endured in the game for a half-century, give or take a year or three. No one knows how many times his act has enthralled or enraged audiences. Abdullah the Butcher, as a character, is one of the most memorable in history by far, the wrestling historian Greg Oliver said. He lived the character. He didn't want to be called Larry. He carried that fork with him everywhere. He was all about the violence. He brought a lust for blood that hadn't been popularized. His mass and his look made it easy for him to be scared of. How large is Abdullah's legacy? His stage name has its own stage name, the Madman From Sudan, and the affectionate abbreviation Abi. The respectful refer to him as Mr. Abi. By any fake name, he has ridden through wrestling's peaks and valleys, becoming a hit in far-flung places. Closer to his Atlanta base, the Southeast circuit once offered him up to 10 gigs a week. But he endures, and on this June night, Abdullah is, as usual, the oldest person in the building, the Charlie Watts at the Rolling Stones concert. Scattered about the audience are children, brought by fathers, just as they have done for generations. (Son, I remember when Abi. ...) In character, he dresses like a shirtless shepherd, with a ragged head cover and baggy trousers that rise to his chest, exposing rolls of blubber. There are some codgers in the crowd. One rises from his wheelchair, steadies himself on the nub of a right leg lost to diabetes and shakes his fist at Abdullah. As Abdullah and his 53-year-old opponent, Tommy Rich, lock arms and slow dance away from the ring, a middle-aged man predicts gleefully to two youngsters in his care, This one's headed to the parking lot, boys. Not quite. Soon after the ring announcer, on cue, describes Rich's mug as a crimson mask of blood, Abdullah disappears. The referee, whom both wrestlers whaled on when they took a break from each other, has recovered enough to declare an old-fashioned double disqualification. Rich was a teenager, fresh out of Nashville, when first pitted against Abdullah in Atlanta. He beat me in 30 seconds, Rich remembered, implying that Abdullah went against script with a quick, though agonizing, match. I got back to the locker room and said, 'I'm headed back to Tennessee.' Three years later, Rich was body-slammed by the Butcher like never before, or since. That whole building went whomp, Rich says. It ain't easy going against Abdullah. He's a big ol' man. About the notion of Rich's wrestling in 20 years, when he reaches Abdullah's current age, Rich says, I hope I'm still alive. After the double disqualification, Abdullah sits on an overwhelmed bench in the dressing room and dispenses wisdom to a small, rapt audience. He is their Buddha, the triple-plus-size version. Get your hands up! Look mean! he scolds some Generation Y rasslers. Their poses for the cameras are not menacing enough to suit him. They passively clench and raise their fists, eliciting a stare that drips concern about wrestling's next generation. He motions to a 20-something masked man from Japan - stage name Tiger - to step forward for consultation. Later, Tiger explains through an interpreter that his matches in Japan are bloodless, with less show business. The interpreter speculates that Tiger might incorporate shtick in which some baddie cuts off the mask with a knife. Perhaps leaving a scar. The
[Medianews] Carl Gordon, a Late-Blooming Actor, Dies at 78
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/arts/23gordon.html By MARGALIT FOX Published: July 23, 2010 Carl Gordon, who four decades ago, nearing midlife and feeling trapped in a series of dispiriting jobs, heeded a surprising call and became a successful character actor on television and the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78. The cause was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his family said. To television viewers, Mr. Gordon was best known as the patriarch on Roc, a situation comedy about a working-class black family in Baltimore, broadcast on the Fox network for three seasons starting in 1991. In a highly unusual move, Seasons 2 and 3 were televised live, an approach to sitcoms that had been attempted rarely if at all since the 1950s. The show starred Charles S. Dutton as Roc Emerson, a sanitation worker, and Mr. Gordon as his proud, irascible father, Andrew. So proud was Andrew Emerson that he seeded the family home with pictures of Malcolm X and maintained that a certain member of the Boston Celtics was far too good a basketball player to be a white man: Larry Bird was born and bred in Harlem, Andrew declared in one episode. His real name is Abdul Mustafa. On Broadway, Mr. Gordon originated the part of Doaker, the upright uncle in The Piano Lesson (1990), by August Wilson, one of two Pulitzer Prize-winning installments in the playwright's 10-part cycle about black life. He reprised the role in the television adaptation, broadcast on CBS in 1995. Rufus Carl Gordon Jr. was born on Jan. 20, 1932, in Goochland, Va.; he later jettisoned the Rufus. When he was a child his family moved to Brooklyn, where he grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As a young man he spent four years in the Air Force, serving as an airplane mechanic during the Korean War. Afterward, Mr. Gordon attended Brooklyn College but left to work before graduating. By his late 30s he had reached a low point. He was twice divorced and seemed consigned to unfulfilling jobs, including sheet-metal worker and department store stockroom clerk. One night, as he recounted in interviews afterward, Mr. Gordon fell to his knees, weeping. Lord, tell me what I need to do, he said. From somewhere within him, an answer arose: Try acting. To Mr. Gordon, the idea seemed preposterous: he had never considered acting and had barely been to the theater. But who was he to question the Lord? Before long, he had enrolled in the Gene Frankel Theater Workshop. There, as The New York Times later wrote, Mr. Gordon was the oldest student, the only African-American and the only one without a college degree. But little by little, audition by audition, he built a career. Mr. Gordon's other screen work includes the film The Brother From Another Planet (1984), directed by John Sayles, and guest roles on Law Order and ER. Among his other Broadway credits are the musical Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), with book, music and lyrics by Melvin Van Peebles, and a 2003 revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, by Mr. Wilson, starring Mr. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg. He also appeared in many productions by the Negro Ensemble Company. Mr. Gordon is survived by his third wife, Jacqueline Alston-Gordon; a son, Rufus Carl III; five daughters, Gloria Gurley and Candise, Demethress, Yvette and Jasmine Gordon; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. When Roc went live, interviewers asked Mr. Gordon and his cast mates if they were daunted by the prospect. Not at all, they said, for most, like him, were veterans of the stage. It feels good, Mr. Gordon told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1992. It's like going back to Broadway. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] 'Pristine' Earth impact crater discovered
Published: July 23, 2010 at 12:49 AM http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/07/23/Pristine-Earth-impact-crater- discovered/UPI-70401279860574/ CAIRO, July 23 (UPI) -- Scientists say a meteoric impact crater found in the remote Egyptian desert may be the best-preserved ever found on Earth. The Kamil crater is pristine, unlike most Earth impact sites that are partially or severely eroded, and maintains much of its structure, including the rays of ejected material thrown from the crater when the space rock hit, SPACE.com reported Thursday. This crater is really a kind of beauty because it's so well preserved that it will tell us a lot about small-scale meteorite impacts on the Earth's crust, Luigi Folco, meteorite curator at the Museo Nazionale dell'Antartide in Siena, Italy, said. It's so nice. It's so neat. There is something extraordinary about it. Craters this well preserved are usually only seen on the moon or Mars, where there are fewer environmental and atmospheric processes to erode and eventually destroy them, he said. The 148-foot-wide crater was first spotted in Google Earth satellite photos by Italian researchers. Scientists think it was caused by the impact of an iron meteorite about 4.3 feet in diameter traveling at 7,920 mph, SPACE.com reported. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Source: Johnson joins cast of 'Survivor'
http://sports.espn.go.com/dallas/nfl/news/story?id=5397434campaign=rss; source=twitterex_cid=Twitter_espn_5397434 Former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jimmy Johnson will appear on the CBS reality show Survivor: Nicaragua this fall, according to a source. The 67-year-old Johnson, who was unavailable for comment, joins the show's 21st season this summer. The series has been taped in various exotic locations, including Panama, the Fiji Islands, Kenya and Brazil since it started in 2000. This year's show will tape in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Johnson, who won two Super Bowl titles with the Cowboys in the 1990s, will be grouped with strangers in an isolated area where contestants must complete challenges to win awards or immunity from getting kicked out of the game show. Since retiring from the NFL as a head coach, Johnson has worked for Fox Sports as a pregame show analyst. The taping of Survivor is not expected to conflict with Johnson's job on Fox. Several former Cowboys figures have been involved in popular television shows in retirement. Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin, part of The Triplets along with Troy Aikman who played for Johnson, competed in the ABC series Dancing with the Stars. Smith won the ballroom dance show in 2006. Irvin appeared on the show in 2009, but didn't win. Former Cowboys quarterback Gary Hogeboom was a contestant on Survivor: Guatemala, in 2005 and finished in seventh place. In nine NFL seasons, with the Cowboys and Miami Dolphins, Johnson compiled an 80-64 record, which places him 49th on the all-time win list. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Zombie Satellite Forces More Evasive Maneuvers for Other Craft
By Peter B. de Selding Space News posted: 20 July 2010 05:20 pm ET http://www.space.com/news/zombie-satellite-more-evasive-maneuvers-sn-100 720.html PARIS - Satellite fleet operator Intelsat has successfully negotiated the passage of its out-of-control Galaxy 15 satellite across the path of its Galaxy 13 spacecraft with no signal interruption for Galaxy 13 customers in the second of what likely will be at least four such maneuvers before Galaxy 15 shuts down on its own in August, Intelsat said. Galaxy 15 stopped responding to commands in April and has since been drifting eastward along the geostationary arc 36,000 kilometers above the equator. Industry officials say it is the first time an uncontrolled satellite has remained electronically active, its transponders still looking for signals to rebroadcast even as it strays far from its assigned orbital position. Galaxy 15 traveled through the orbital slot of Luxembourg-based SES's AMC-11 satellite in mid-May. That event caused no service disruptions as Intelsat and SES took measures that included routing some AMC-11 traffic through a 19-meter-diameter antenna at Intelsat's Clarksburg, Md., teleport. Unable to shut the satellite down, Intelsat officials then prepared for the Galaxy 13 fly-by July 12-13, using some of the same interference-avoidance techniques developed for the AMC-11 encounter. The procedure was completed without incident, Intelsat Chief Technical Officer Thierry Guillemin said in a July 15 statement. We will now be implementing the interference-mitigation plan for the fly-by of Galaxy 14, expected to occur at the end of July. Luxembourg- and Washington-based Intelsat said that at one point during the Galaxy 15 transit through the Galaxy 13 orbital slot, the two satellites were within 0.05 degrees of separation. Some customers continued to use the Galaxy 13 and were able to do so because the satellite's signal reception had been reset as low as possible to permit signals to be sent without attracting Galaxy 15's interest. Unlike AMC-11, Galaxy 13 also carries Ku-band transponders in addition to its C-band payload, meaning Intelsat was limited in its ability to move the satellite to the extreme eastern edge of its orbital slot to avoid Galaxy 15 before performing a leapfrog maneuver back westward as Galaxy 15 continued its eastward move. Galaxy 15 is on course to enter the Galaxy 14 orbital neighborhood in late July, with a peak interference threat expected July 30, according to Intelsat. In mid-August, it will be Galaxy 18's turn to avoid Galaxy 15. Intelsat officials are hopeful that sometime in mid-August, Galaxy 15, whose attitude control is slowly degrading, will lose its lock on the sun. Its power will then drain and the satellite will shut down on its own. Intelsat is already preparing customers using Galaxy 23 for a similar avoidance procedure in late August in the event Galaxy 15 is still active by then. The company has also begun coordinating with satellite fleet operator Telesat of Canada, whose Anik F3 satellite will have to contend with Galaxy 15 in mid-September. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Glenn Beck Announces He Could Lose His Vision
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,597262,00.html In true Glenn Beck form, sarcasm shone through his tears as he announced he was suffering from a condition that could eventually make him blind to an audience of 6,000 attending his American Revival tour in Salt Lake City Saturday. Following the initial announcement, Beck joked that he was too darn lazy to learn Braille. His loyal fans wouldn't expect anything less. The Fox News host showed a clip of the announcement Monday night on his show, Glenn Beck. Yes, I have a problem with my eyes, Beck said in his announcement. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the doctor because I can't focus my eyes ... So I went to the best doctor I could find ... he did all kinds of tests, and he said I have macular dystrophy. Click here to watch Glenn Beck make his announcement. Beck, 46, jokingly admitted to viewers that when he got the news from his doctor, he had confused the term macular dystrophy with muscular dystrophy saying, Is that the Jerry Lewis thing? That telethon that he does? Cause I should have given more. Macular dystrophy affects a tiny portion of the retina called the macula - the part of the eye responsible for seeing sharp details and recognizing faces. Symptoms of macular dystrophy include: - Difficulty with reading print and identifying faces; - Blurred vision; -And trouble focusing. Dr. Douglas R. Lazzaro, chairman of the department of ophthalmology at Long Island College Hospital, told FoxNews.com that macular dystrophy does have the potential to cause blindness in Beck. Macular dystrophy usually affects more than one family member, however, Beck did not say if anyone else in his family had the condition, or identify what type of the rare disease he is suffering from. Lazzarro, who has not treated Beck, said that there are several different types of macular dystrophy that effect vision during different periods of a patient's life. Macular dystrophy is very different from macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness over the age of 60 in America. One of the more severe forms of the disease is known as cone dystrophy, and this usually affects your vision soon after birth, Lazzaro said. Stargardt's dystrophy begins to affect vision before the age of 20 at a very gradual rate, however the patient can still become legally blind. Another type of macular dystrophy is Best's disease, but more than likely Beck is not suffering from this type, because symptoms usually appear in childhood, and go through a number of stages, Lazzaro added. With Best's disease, severe vision loss usually develops after the age of 45. With some macular dystrophies, doctors can see yellow spots in the retina or changes in the pigment layer of the retina. But no matter which form of the disease Beck may be suffering from, the bottom line is his retinas are degenerating. He said things were blurry, so he could have any of these dystrophies, or even pattern dystrophy, Lazzaro said. For Beck, the severity of the disease determines whether or not he will lose his vision, and if so, how long it will take. There is no cure or treatment for macular dystrophy. He may become legally blind, which is 20/200 or worse, Lazzaro said. Put it this way, (when you are legally blind) you can't drive, and it may be difficult to read without magnification tools. It impacts your life, but usually patients retain some vision with these diseases. Beck seemed to take the news in stride, adding his own brand of humor to a very personal medical issue. I plan on dealing with it with a smile and dignity, and quite honestly, at least I'll be able to get away with a blind joke from time to time, Beck said. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Man on motorcycle struck by lightning in Henderson, Ky.
Amber Douthit had just left her nursing classes at Henderson Community College between 4:30 and 5 p.m. when she saw the man stiffen from what appeared to have been a small bolt of lightning after a larger bolt struck nearby. He went rigid, she said of the motorcyclist. He fell right off the bike once he got off the side of the road. Douthit said she and a tow truck driver who had been behind the motorcyclist stopped to help the man, whom dispatch said later was taken to Methodist Hospital in Henderson. The motorcyclist was not identified. Dispatch said a first responder arrived at the scene between U.S. 60 and Old Corydon Road about five minutes after Douthit called 911. Before that help arrived, Douthit said the truck driver took the man's helmet off and put him in the tow truck. She added that the rain was pouring so hard that she ran to get back into her car. The man apparently was able to sit up and was talking, according to dispatch. About 1 to 2 inches of rain fell on the Tri-State during the brief but intense thunderstorm. Reports of damage in Evansville mainly consisted of downed power lines and trees. There were also lightning strikes, including one reported in the 1600 block of South Elliott Street about 4:45 p.m. According to Vectren Corp., about 500 of its customers remained without power Monday night. That number peaked at about 3,500 shortly after the storm, said Chase Kelley, a Vectren spokeswoman. Wires were reported down on North Green River Road and on Conlin Avenue as wind gusts of about 60 mph barreled through trees and knocked over trash cans along the streets. Damage also was reported in Poseyville and Wadesville, Ind., where trees were knocked down, as well as in Oakland City, Ind., where a wind gust was measured at 61 mph. There also were reports of downed trees in Gibson County. A barge passing Dress Plaza in Evansville reported a man in a boat was having problems with the wind, but firefighters responding to the scene found the man a short time later. The man, who declined to be interviewed and was not identified by authorities, told rescue crews he had docked his boat near the water treatment plant as the storm rolled in and was never in danger. In Henderson, a water rescue call also was dismissed. http://www.courierpress.com/news/2010/jul/20/man-on-motorcycle-struck-by -lightning-in-ky/?partner=popular ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] Report: Journalists Debated Whether Government Should Shut Down Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/21/journalists-reportedly-debate d-government-shut-fox-news/ Published July 21, 2010 A group of liberal journalists used a now-defunct listserv to debate the merits of whether the federal government should forcibly shut down Fox News, according to a report in The Daily Caller. The online publication earlier reported that the journalists in the private group discussed ways to shield Barack Obama from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal when Obama was a presidential candidate. The latest article showed that several members of Journolist aired complaints about Fox News on the listserv in March of this year and debated how best to rein it in. Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, who said he was genuinely scared of the network, reportedly said peer pressure and self-regulation were not working. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework, he said. According to the report, UCLA law professor Jonathan Zasloff urged the federal government to stop the network. I hate to open this can of worms, but is there any reason why the FCC couldn't simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires? he wrote. Time's Michael Scherer said Fox News used criticism only to build tribal identity, but questioned whether the White House should be distinguishing between media organizations like that. But Zasloff went further, suggesting it was acceptable for the White House to pick and choose which reporters get press passes -- a concept Scherer again questioned. According to the report, the New Republic's John Judis said Scherer's skepticism would make sense pre-fox. Now it is only tactical, he wrote. Tucker Carlson, a Fox News contributor who started the online Daily Caller, said Wednesday that the listserv commentary as a whole proves the press took sides in the presidential election. It's an appalling story. It's something that a lot of us suspected was going on. This verifies, in fact, it was going on, he told Fox News. In 2008, journalists working for Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic expressed outrage on the listserv over the tough questioning Obama received from ABC anchors Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos at a debate. Some of them plotted to protect Obama from the swirling Wright controversy, according to the Daily Caller. Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent pressed his fellow journalists to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by shifting topics to one of Obama's conservative critics, the Daily Caller reported. Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares - and call them racists, Ackerman wrote. Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, urged his fellow members of Journolist to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn't about defending Obama, he wrote. This is about how the (mainstream media) kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people. Journolist was shut down last month after leaks exposing member Dave Weigel's scornful remarks of conservatives led to his resignation at the Washington Post as a blogger covering the conservative movement. ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
[Medianews] San Francisco's unluckiest thief
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=68288 There are unlucky thieves, and then there is Horatio Toure. According to San Francisco police, the 31-year-old city resident rode a bicycle up to a woman Monday afternoon in the South of Market neighborhood, snatched an iPhone out of her hands, and then pedaled away. Problem was, the woman was carrying the phone as part of a company's demonstration of a real-time GPS tracking program. If the bandit would have taken a peek at the screen, he would have seen himself traveling across a map of San Francisco. Toure was captured a half-mile away about 10 minutes later, at 4:01 p.m., said police Sgt. Troy Dangerfield. He was booked into jail on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property. This reminds me of the bank robber who arrives during the security test, said the phone's owner, David Kahn. Kahn is the chief executive of Covia Labs of Mountain View. He was in San Francisco on Monday demonstrating a product called Alert Respond to his public relations folks at their South of Market office. Geared for police and the military, the program allows for real-time tracking of the location of officers and other people and resources. It also allows for the integration of phones, computers and other devices and communication between them. Kahn said he had asked an assistant, Jordan Sturm, to take his phone out on the sidewalk so he could track her location on his laptop. Seconds after she left, though, a curious thing happened. She appeared -- according to Alert Respond -- to be running at high speed down the street. But Sturm no longer had the phone. After she hurried back into the office, she called police and the company relayed the phone's ever-changing location to officers. Kahn said he had considered using some of the program's other features during the episode -- turning on a microphone to hear the thief, or remotely snapping a picture. But he didn't want to clue in his adversary. What are the odds, Kahn asked, that you would grab someone's cell phone during a demonstration of the ability to track the phone's location in real time? That's what this unfortunate thief did. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=68288#ixzz0uLN ZQmM7 ___ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
