White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail - NY Times

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

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Five Myths About the New Wiretapping Law: Why it's a lot worse than you think. - Slate

Sometime today, the Senate is likely to approve the most comprehensive overhaul of American surveillance law since the Watergate era. Unless you're a government lawyer, a legal scholar, a masochist, or an insomniac, chances are you haven't read the 114-page bill. Don't beat yourself up: Neither have most of the 293 House members who voted for it last week. Ditto the mainstream press, who seem to have relied chiefly on summaries provided by the same lawmakers who hadn't read it.

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Be quiet: the surveillance cameras might hear you - Ars Techinica

Although crime statistics point to the fact that law-and-order issues are actually less of a problem now than in the past, the general public's perception remains one convinced that muggery and buggery hides behind every street corner. Politicans and the media stoke these fears, and we get hastily made laws and policies enacted as a result. Over in the UK, the trend over the past two decades has been to abrogate day-to-day policing of the streets to an army of CCTV cameras. Soon, if scientists have their way, the cameras will be able to train their focus on suspicious sounds automatically with new AI technology.

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Gallery: 10 Best Apocalyptic Vehicles - Wired

Global warming. Faltering economies. Dwindling resources. Mankind has finally set in motion environmental, political and social policies that will surely destroy the world as we know it.

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The Enemy Within - Who are we more afraid of: enemy combatants or federal courts? - Slate

The Supreme Court's decision Thursday in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States is - as all the big enemy-combatant cases have been - both enormously important and relatively insignificant. This is, after all, the third stinging setback and blistering rebuke the court has handed the Bush administration with respect to prisoner rights at Guantanamo. Yet you may have noticed that all of these setbacks and rebukes have mostly meant more hot days in orange jumpsuits, more solitary confinement, and ever more plus ça change for the detainees there. At his pretrial hearing in April, one of the detainees "lucky" enough to actually face a trial, Salim Hamdan, pointed out to the presiding judge that winning his own appeal at the Supreme Court in 2006 got him precisely nothing.

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Cable: deregulation good for consumers; Ars: like heck it is- Ars Techinca

If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that the cable industry in the US is focused on openness, innovation, and customer satisfaction; but if we can't keep the government's knuckleheaded regulators out of our cable lines and off our Internet, cable's nearly absurd level of innovation will be throttled down more effectively than BitTorrent uploads on Comcast's network. Well, so says the cable industry, at least.

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The Skinny on Fat: You're Not Always What You Eat - Scientific American

Ever wondered why some people seem able to gobble down anything and still stay slim? New research shows that the answer may lie in serotonin, a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger produced by nerve cells. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, (U.C.S.F.) report in the journal Cell Metabolism that the nerve messenger, a known appetite suppressant, not only controls whether and how much you eat but, independent of that, also plays a role in what the body does with the calories once they're consumed.

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Daily cell phone tracking confirms we’re creatures of habit - Ars Technica

Where does a human's typical day take it? It seems like a simple and somewhat uninteresting question, but neither of these are actually the case. The dynamic movement of human populations has implications for everything from urban planning to epidemic control. Due to ethical and privacy concerns, we actually know more about animal movements than we do about those of people, leaving human daily activity a bit of a black box. A study that will be published in today's issue of Nature opens that box by following the daily travels of cell phone users in Europe for a period of six months. The study finds that, in general, we humans are creatures of habit.

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Why doctors give out antibiotics you don't need. - Slate

While working a busy night shift in the ER recently, I evaluated a 13-month-old girl. On her chart, the triage nurse had written: "Infant with fever and runny nose. Mother here for antibiotics." The baby was fussy but probably more tired than uncomfortable. Between her squirms, she cooed and smiled at me. Her anxious and upset mother, however, was in far worse shape, repeatedly sticking a rubber bulb syringe up her infant's nostrils in a futile attempt to suck out an endless stream of snot. The mom was also really mad: She had been waiting for more than three hours for a doctor to see her daughter. Now she wanted antibiotics: specifically, a prescription for bubble-gum-flavored amoxicillin.

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The bad news about the good news about terrorism. - Slate

Terrorism, contrary to what you may think, isn't what it used to be. So says Fareed Zakaria in his column in this week's Newsweek. The proof, he contends, is in the statistics.

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Phoenix Landing Rockets May Have Already Uncovered First Ice Sample - Wired

Photos released Saturday of the ground underneath the Phoenix lander revealed a pleasant surprise, a large patch of bright smooth material, believed to be ice, uncovered from beneath two to six inches of topsoil blown off by the retro rockets.

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Warming and Storms, Uncertainty and Ethics - NY Times

Over the weekend, a pair of very different climate studies - one physical, one social - illustrated two uncomfortable, and related, realities confronting society as it grapples with possible responses to human-driven global warming.

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Perilous Landings by Soyuz Worry NASA - Washington Post

Two consecutive chaotic and dangerous landings by Soyuz space capsules, including one with an American astronaut aboard, have NASA and space experts concerned about the spacecraft's reliability in ferrying astronauts to and from the international space station.

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The Old Titans All Collapsed. Is the U.S. Next? - Washington Post

Back in August, during the panic over mortgages, Alan Greenspan offered reassurance to an anxious public. The current turmoil, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman said, strongly resembled brief financial scares such as the Russian debt crisis of 1998 or the U.S. stock market crash of 1987... But in the background, one could hear the groans and feel the tremors as larger political and economic tectonic plates collided. Nine months later, Greenspan's soothing analogies no longer wash. The U.S. economy faces unprecedented debt levels, soaring commodity prices and sliding home prices, to say nothing of a weak dollar.

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In Colorado, an unlikely alliance against drilling - CSMonitor

Plans to open up a swath of wilderness are bringing hunters and environmentalists together – and reshaping state politics.

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Deep packet inspection under assault over privacy concerns - Ars Technica

Add the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) to the list of groups concerned about the privacy implications of widespread deep packet inspection (DPI) by ISPs. CIPPIC has filed an official complaint with Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, asking her office to investigate Bell Canada's use of DPI (and we're flattered to be quoted as an expert source in the complaint). In addition, the group would welcome a wider investigation into possible DPI use at cable operators Rogers and Shaw, as well.

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Broadband: other countries do it better, but how? - Ars Technica

One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries (including those with a reputation in some quarters for "socialism") have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment.

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The computer security paradox - Raiden's Realm

One of the most prized rights of any American is the right to privacy and security. It's something people in some countries would kill for. Yet now there appears to be a very frightening trend growing. Your privacy and security are being thrown out the window wholesale in favor of easier access by law enforcement. A recent example of this can be seen with the announcement that Microsoft has been providing a tool to investigators that can effectively rip your Windows security to shreds in seconds, exposing all your private data to whoever wants to look at it.

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IBM, Microsoft Trounce Apple on Climate Friendliness Scorecard - Wired

Scorecard IBM earned top honors among electronics manufacturers on a recently-updated climate friendliness scorecard (.pdf), earning 77 out of a possible 100 points to beat runners-up Canon, Toshiba, Sony and HP in a ranking of the companies' responsiveness to climate change. IBM, which makes big, hulking servers and mainframe computers, even beat out Microsoft (38 points) and Google (55), whose products are composed entirely of electrons. Apple, which has taken heat from Greenpeace for the allegedly toxic chemicals in its iPhone, scored a pathetic 11 out of 100.

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Viacom, Google set for fight to bitter end over Safe Harbor - Ars Technica

It has been just over a year since Viacom launched its $1 billion lawsuit against Google for "brazen disregard of intellectual property laws" on YouTube. Although we haven't heard much news about the case as of late, some fightin' words have come out of both sides recently to indicate that the case is still going strong. There's no sign of an impending settlement, either, as Viacom is still beating the piracy drum and Google continues to stand its ground. Because of this, the eventual outcome of the Viacom suit may set a legal precedent that could send ripples throughout the entire Internet.

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The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox - Slate

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the available, sociable, and genuinely attractive man is a character highly in demand in social settings. Dinner hosts are always looking for the man who fits all the criteria. When they don't find him (often), they throw up their hands and settle for the sociable but unattractive, the attractive but unsociable, and, as a last resort, for the merely available.

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Defendants: RIAA's private eyes are watching us - illegally - Ars Technica

Last week a pair of rulings further muddied the waters around the RIAA's argument that making a file available over a P2P network constitutes distribution as defined by the Copyright Act. This week, the hot issue is the role that MediaSentry plays in the RIAA's legal campaign and whether the company should be licensed as a private investigator. A pair of defendants in separate cases are arguing that the company does need a license and that all evidence gathered by it should be excluded. The RIAA, in turn, is arguing that no license is necessary—and that even if MediaSentry's evidence was obtained illegally, it should still be admissible.

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Rick Rolled to child porn = you're a pedophile, says FBI - Ars Technica

Everyone has had it happen to them: a "friend" sends you a link in IM or over IRC that purports to be something like a cat in an awkward position with a hilarious caption. Soon, however, you discover that the link wasn't to a lolcat at all; instead, you've been Rick Rolled—or even worse, sent to 2girls1cup (find it on your own, but be warned: it may scar you for life). These pranks are commonplace now, but be careful of what you click on and from whom. If that link points to anything even pretending to be child porn, that's enough evidence for the FBI of intent to download it. The authorities could then raid your home and possibly throw you in jail.

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I was sad to read upon my arriving home from work today that Arthur C. Clark (1917-2008) passed away this morning. I am not going to try to put into words what many others have already done, much more eloquently.

Childhood's end: Arthur C. Clarke passes away at age 90 - Ars Techinica

Arthur C. Clarke, Premier Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 90 - NY Times

The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke - Salon

A global figure, Arthur C Clarke never lost his sense of wonder - Times

Video: Arthur C. Clarke's Last Message to Earth - Wired

House to close its doors for spying bill - AP

House doors were locked Thursday night as lawmakers prepared for their first closed session in 25 years to debate surveillance legislation.
Republicans requested privacy for what they termed "an honest debate" on the new Democratic eavesdropping bill that is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress.

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Inspector general: FBI not embracing privacy safeguards - C|Net

The FBI has wielded the Patriot Act's extraordinary surveillance powers to unlawfully collect information about American citizens and has resisted some efforts to impose additional privacy safeguards, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general.

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NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data - Wall Street Journal

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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EMI to slash antipiracy funding, but will stick with IFPI - Ars Technica

After spending a few months on the fence and even threatening to leave the group, major record label EMI has decided to stick with the IFPI and will continue contributing to the group's operations. The support comes at a price for the IFPI, however, as EMI and the other labels will slash their funding for the industry group's antipiracy effort.

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A Space Robot With Arms to Make R2D2 Jealous - New York Times

Anyone who has followed science fiction knows that a good long-duration spacecraft has to have a robot. The space shuttle Endeavour takes off for the space station on Tuesday with a large, Canadian-made robot named Dextre in its cargo bay. Endeavour’s seven-member crew will assemble the robot during three of the mission’s five scheduled spacewalks.

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Bad Phorm? UK ISPs to sell clickstream data to advertisers - Ars Technica

Deep packet inspection gear has long had the ability to peer inside users' datastreams to pull out all sorts of interesting information, but a UK company called Phorm is taking DPI to the next level by using it to sell ads. The company's ambitious goal: segment users into small and highly-accurate "channels" by reading the URLs they visit, the search terms they use, and the content of the pages they visit. The resulting channels are then sold to advertisers who are salivating at the thought of better targeting. Actual users are predictably less thrilled, however, and a row over the issue has erupted in Britain.

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AP probe finds drugs in drinking water - Associated Press

A vast array of pharmaceuticals - including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones - have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

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US seizes domain name of Spanish company selling Cuba trips - Ars Technica

The United States has often presented itself as the guardian of Internet free speech. China may censor the Internet, and otherwise-civilized nations such as Germany or France may attempt to block what they view as unacceptable material, but the United States of America likes to think of itself as a place that doesn't censor people online... unless you happen to own a foreign travel business that offers trips to Cuba. Under such circumstances, as Steve Marshall discovered, all bets are off.

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Google pulls some map images at Pentagon's request - Reuters

Google Inc has complied with a request by the Pentagon to remove some online images from its street-level map service because they pose a security threat to U.S. military bases, military and company officials said on Thursday.

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Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier - Wired

Quantico A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

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Free WiFi comes at a price in Denver International Airport - Ars Technica

The limitations of web filtering software have been extensively documented; most software arbitrarily excludes sites with educational or other sophisticated content, while clearly pornographic material sporadically slips through. Oddly, the limitations haven't stopped organizations or, in the case of Australia, an entire government from attempting to deploy them. The international airport in Denver recently took the plunge and started using filtering software when they converted their WiFi network to free access. The results are an excellent illustration of what leads an organization to choose a solution that's annoying, arbitrary, and ineffective.

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More FBI privacy violations confirmed - Associated Press

The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

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KY Rep. Seeks To Ban Anonymous Blogging - WebProNews

... Kentucky state representative Tim Couch (R-Hyden), introduced a bill to the General Assembly that would bar Kentuckians from anonymously commenting on Websites, or via their own blogs. The bill would require anyone leaving a comment to provide their real name, address, and email address to the website on which they wish to comment. Website operators would be required to enforce this policy or face fines.

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Bugs Bunny vs. Daffy Duck: Why voters always choose the wascally wabbit for president - Slate

How did we reach the point at which Sen. Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner six months ago, needs clear wins in Texas and Ohio to mute the calls for her to end her campaign?
... And here's another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.

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Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals - Wired

In the end, it turns out it's all about the emails.

The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation's secret wiretapping court is fine with that.

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FISA and Total Online Awareness - MojoBlog

New questions have arisen about what, exactly, the government hopes to surveil.

... And indeed, that would seem to be a big problem. Back in August 2007, an extremely large, bipartisan majority in Washington sought to make an extremely small, technical change to FISA to account for the fact that the NSA can't know, a priori, where the recipient of a call will be located: Under the theoretical terms of the agreement, the NSA would be allowed to listen to calls of foreign origin making their way through a U.S. switch. If the recipient happened to be in a foreign country, surveillance could continue unmolested. If the recipient happened to be located in the U.S., then the NSA could either continue surveillance with a warrant, or minimize the data.

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What piracy crisis? MPAA touts record box office for 2007 - Ars Technica

... But this sort of thing has become crucial to the MPAA. Take a look at the group's homepage; nearly everything is about copyrights and piracy. The MPAA routinely asserts that the movie business is being decimated by piracy, but the press release announcing the Weekly Reader deal sits just below a far more interesting piece of news (PDF): data that shows the US box office doing its biggest year of business ever in 2007, growing 5.4 percent over 2006 and bringing in $9.63 billion.

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Comcast Must Die - MojoBlog

Comcast, the cable TV giant, has given its customers lots of reasons to hate the company. They've refused to embrace a la carte programming, charged people $2 to stop sending them junk mail, wrecked people's credit reports, falsely advertised its Internet speed and generally abused the people who pay for its services. Comcast's customer service problems are so acute that Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield started a blog called Comcast Must Die to compile all the gripes about the company from consumers. But Comcast doesn't really need any help generating bad press.

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AT&T's degrading service and my landlord’s ban on Comcast - ZDNet

With all the negative attention headed towards Comcast lately, AT&T's problems seem to be slipping below the radar. Unfortunately for me, those problems are first hand for me as I'm personally suffering degradations in speed. As if getting 1200 Kbps downstream on a so-called 1500 Mbps service and all those outage problems (example here and here) weren't bad enough, my AT&T DSL service has declined. I suppose I could count myself lucky compared to my Mom's neighbor who only got 320 Kbps service after AT&T unilaterally and without permission "upgraded" his bill to the 1500 Mbps service without upgrading his performance.

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Great news for Microsoft: Zunes stolen! - ZDNet

Providing yet another sign that Apple's iPod is the audio and video platform, a policy think-tank on Tuesday said that thefts of the media player have skewed crime statistics. Microsoft wishes it had that publicity.

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The Gaza Bombshell - Vanity Fair

After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

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Could a Coffee Maker Be Worth $11,000? - Slate

The New York Times used words like "cult object," "majestic," and "titillating"; the Economist called it "ingenious" and "sleek." The subject of these encomiums is, incongruously, a commercial coffee machine—the Clover 1s, an $11,000 device that brews regular coffee (not espresso) one cup at a time. Could the Clover represent that much of an advance in the state of the coffee art? I had to try it for myself.

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Immune Systems Increasingly On Attack - Washington Post

First, asthma cases shot up, along with hay fever and other common allergic reactions, such as eczema. Then, pediatricians started seeing more children with food allergies. Now, experts are increasingly convinced that a suspected jump in lupus, multiple sclerosis and other afflictions caused by misfiring immune systems is real.

Gary Gygax, 1938-2008: Rest in peace, Dungeon Master - Crave

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and one of the fathers of tabletop role-playing games, died on Tuesday at the age of 69. He had suffered from heart problems.

Windows-based cash machines 'easily hacked' - ZDNet

Security experts have hacked ATMs to show how easy it is to steal money and bank account details from modern cash machines. ATMs, or automated teller machines, today face the Internet-born threat of worms and denial-of-service attacks, as well as being at risk from malicious applications that can harvest customer data or hijack machines.

Why spam isn't going away soon (Hint: Blame the Storm worm) - C|Net

Recently, Symantec said in its February 2008 State of Spam report that 78.5 percent of all e-mail is spam; they also said most of that is now coming from Europe. That's a change from previous reports that had suggested servers in North America were responsible. What the Symantec report doesn't explicitly state is that much of the European spam doesn't come from individuals sitting at their desks pumping out lists. Europe is one of the hotbeds for the Storm worm botnet, notorious for automatically co-opting its victims into spam relays.

New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations - The Sydney Morning Herald

When the PlayStation3 was released in November 2006, Gaurav Khanna's wife braved long queues so he could be one of the first people in the US to get his hands on the gaming console. But the astrophysicist was not itching to burn some rubber in Gran Turismo or shoot hoops in NBA 07. Instead he wanted to build his own supercomputer.

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison - Washington Post

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today.

No impact from Energy Saving Day - BBC

The UK's first Energy Saving Day has ended with no noticeable reduction in the country's electricity usage. E-Day asked people to switch off electrical devices they did not need over a period of 24 hours, with the National Grid monitoring consumption.

In Norway, Global Seed Vault guards genetic resources - IHT

With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts - precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world's food supply to climate change.

How To Be a Better BrowserCan a new filtering program cure the Web's information overload? - Slate

In a scant four years, the Internet, my beloved wellspring of information, has blown its top and become a geyser. Back in 2004, I heaped praise on an exciting new system called RSS. The "Really Simple Syndication" format promised to be TiVo for Web surfers - by automatically pulling content from all your favorite blogs and news sites, an RSS reader would make your Web surfing more fruitful and more efficient. While that prospect sounded enticing at the time, RSS has turned out to be more of a problem than a solution. As of this moment, I have 897 unread RSS items. I don't need a way to read more of the Net. I need a way to see less of it.

Yahoo sued by Chinese dissidents again - C|Net

Yahoo faces another lawsuit over its actions in China. Several Chinese men are suing the company and its Hong Kong subsidiary claiming they were harmed because of Yahoo's cooperation with the Chinese government.

The Internet, Politics and Power of the People - LinuxInsider

Forty-two percent of people 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the campaign from the Internet, and 20 percent of those below 30 have gotten campaign information from social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan organization studying social issues, attitudes and trends.

The Satellite Shootdown: Behind the Scenes - US News & World Report

Capt. R. M. Hendrickson stepped across the deck of the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie last Saturday afternoon to a bank of ballistic missile launch tubes, motioning to the particular 2-by-2-foot location from which a missile flew from the ship positioned at the time some 420 miles northwest of Hawaii.

F.C.C. to Act on Delaying of Broadband Traffic - NY Times

The head of the Federal Communications Commission and other senior officials said on Monday that they were considering taking steps to discourage cable and telephone companies from discriminating against content providers as the broadband companies go about managing heavy Internet traffic that they say is clogging their networks.

Survey: Many Americans Switch Faith Identity - Washington Post

Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification.

US to set 'binding' climate goals - BBC

The US is ready to accept "binding international obligations" on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, officials say, if other nations do the same.

Putin's Iron Grip on Russia Suffocates His Opponents - NY Times

Shortly before parliamentary elections in December, foremen fanned out across the sprawling GAZ vehicle factory here, pulling aside assembly-line workers and giving them an order: vote for President Vladimir V. Putin's party or else. They were instructed to phone in after they left their polling places. Names would be tallied, defiance punished.

Move Over, Oil, There's Money in Texas Wind - NY Times

The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks's ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.

via The Reporters on BBC.com

Ohio Democratic Primary

Barack Obama 5/6
Hillary Clinton 5/6

Election Winner

Democrats 1/2
Republicans 6/4
Independent 20/1

Who will be elected U.S. President?

Barack Obama 8/11
John McCain 6/4
Hillary Clinton 6/1
Michael Bloomberg 20/1
Mike Huckabee 33/1
Ron Paul 150/1

Democratic Candidate

Barack Obama 1/6
Hillary Clinton 7/2

Republican Candidate

John McCain 1/50
Mike Huckabee 14/1
Ron Paul 200/1

Secret Service defends security at Obama rally in Dallas - Star-Telegram

The U.S. Secret Service on Friday defended its handling of security during a massive rally in downtown Dallas for Barack Obama, saying there was no "lapse" in its "comprehensive and layered security plan," which called for some people to be checked for weapons, while others were not.

GOP politics in a nutshell - Glenn Greenwald/Salon

The House Republicans have produced a new dramatic ad (below) complaining about expiration of The Protect America Act and demanding immediate passage of the Cheney/Rockefeller Senate bill -- thus vesting in the government the power to spy on us with no warrants and vesting in the telecom industry license to break the law with no consequences -- as the only way for us to avoid imminent, violent death (h/t Kathryn Jean Lopez). The ad -- entitled "America at Risk" -- should immediately be mounted on a museum wall under a plaque that reads: "The Republican Party in the U.S., 2001-2008 (and counting)."

Will you trust your medical information to Google? - ZDNet

The Cleveland Clinic has announced a partnership with Google that will essentially be a soft launch of the long-awaited Google Health personal health record service. Privacy concerns may not be too far behind.

If it can happen to a Governor ... - Daily Kos

One of the most shocking stories to grow out of the U.S. attorney firing scandal was the case of Alabama's former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman. Seigelman was convicted on corruption charges last year. That conviction, and the pressure that came from the Bush Justice Department to secure it, has been a focus of Congressional hearings, and now a 60 Minutes story that will air on Sunday.

... If you haven't heard of this case, or aren't 100% clear on its details, you owe it to yourself as an American, as a voter, or just as an educated, capable adult human being with any amount of political awareness, to make yourself familiar with this travesty. CBS will only go so far in helping you do it.

Reviewing the RIAA's "Reefer Madness" for the digital age - Ars Technica

We attended a special screening last night of In Trial: Prosecuting Music Piracy, the first feature-length film produced by the National District Attorneys Association in collaboration with the Recording Industry Association of America. Prosecuting Music Piracy is a sordid tale of drugs, terrorism, and technology that artfully challenges society's preconceived notions about justice.

S braces for diplomatic backlash after rendition flight fiasco with Britain - Newsweek

The Bush administration is bracing for a diplomatic backlash after conceding it used British territory to transport suspected terrorists on secret rendition flights despite repeated earlier assurances the U.S. had not.

Google lunar challenge gets under way - C|Net

A privately funded race to land a rover on the moon could cost each team well more than the $20 million grand prize they're vying for, but all of the contestants view Google's Lunar X Prize as a new engine for business in space.

Fidel Castro retires - Reuters

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the communist country, retiring as president 49 years after he seized power in a revolution and became a central figure of the Cold War.

Sign of a faltering economy? Feds to close economic indicator site - Computerworld

It may soon be harder to track whether the U.S. is in fact sliding into a recession with the closing of the U.S. Department of Commerce's EconomicIndicators.gov Web site. The site provides a public portal to key economic indicator data from the government.

RIAA, MPAA: Be Careful what you Wish For - ITWire

Schemes are being hatched to make it harder and harder to download copyrighted material across the internet. Seems they will be just as successful as the method to stop people recording CDs to tape in the "old days." And just as ludicrous.

Fat Chance: Obesity, genetics, and responsibility - Slate

"Nature tops nurture in childhood obesity," a wire story announced last week. The article's first sentence reported that according to a new study, "Diet and lifestyle play a far smaller role than genetic factors in determining whether a child becomes overweight."

Glitch lets FBI look at slew of e-mail - SFGate

A technical glitch gave the FBI access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network - perhaps hundreds of accounts or more - instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

Whistle-blower site taken offline - BBC

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Inside the Bizarre World of Japanese Pickup Schools - Wired

Satoshi Fujita is not a good-looking man. He has oily skin, beady eyes, short legs and a boy-band wig to cover his balding head. But that hasn't stopped him from becoming Japan's most sought-after dating coach for geeks.

Many, Perhaps Most, Nearby Sun-Like Stars May Form Rocky Planets - NASA

Astronomers have discovered that terrestrial planets might form around many, if not most, of the nearby sun-like stars in our galaxy. These new results suggest that worlds with potential for life might be more common than we thought.

Under fire, Democrats seek end to spy law feud - C|Net

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have already stood up to President Bush this week, refusing to approve a controversial Senate bill that would immunize telephone companies from lawsuits alleging illegal spying. Now they're being forced to defend their actions against those who contend that inaction endangers national security--and who wonder what happens next.

Get Ready for a Crackdown on Broadband Use - PC World

As traffic increases, experts say ISPs may start charging by the gigabyte, limiting use of some services and snooping at the data passing through their networks.

If they did, it's about damb time. What the hell have they been waiting for?

Eavesdropping Law Is Likely to Lapse - NYT

Broad spying powers temporarily approved by Congress in August appear likely to lapse this week after a daylong game of chicken on Wednesday between the White House and House Democrats produced no clear resolution.

Bush, GOP Rebuke House Democrats on Surveillance Bill* - Washingon Post

House Democrats have decided to leave Washington today for a one-week recess without any further action on a terrorist surveillance bill set to expire Friday night, drawing protest tactics from Republicans and a sharp rebuke from President Bush.

House set to let warrantless eavesdropping law lapse - CSM

Neither the White House nor House Democrats blinked in a standoff over renewal of a controversial eavesdropping law, now on track to expire at midnight Saturday.

President Bush said Thursday that failure to update the Protect America Act will "harm our ability to monitor new terrorist activities and could reopen dangerous gaps in our intelligence."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in response, dubbed such talk fear-mongering. The president has every authority to continue needed eavesdropping under another law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), she said. Moreover, the authorities granted under the temporary surveillance law enacted in August will carry on for a year, she added.

President Bush is putting a lot of FUD out there about how our country will be in danger because of this impass. Harry Reid and Silvestre Reyes have written letters to the President concerning his recent remarks. Read them here.

* Be sure to read the comments - there are some really good ones.

A secret to drying clothes? Liquid. - C|Net

Clothes dryers are the second biggest hog of household energy, according to the Department of Energy. Most are so similar in terms of power hunger that the Energy Star label of efficient appliances doesn't even mark dryers.
By this fall, however, consumers could enjoy faster, greener and safer clothes dryers that draw half the power of conventional models, according to Hydromatic Technologies Corporation.
Its Dryer Miser technology would dry garments 41 percent more quickly without shrinking as much or stinking them up with the odor of burnt lint, said Michael Brown, the inventor and company president.

U.S. Plans to Shoot Down Broken Spy Satellite - Washington Post

President Bush, acting on the advice of his national security advisers, has decided to attempt to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite that is expected to crash to the Earth by early next month.

Senate Approves Telco Amnesty, Legalizes Bush's Secret Spy Program - Wired

The Senate overwhelming voted Tuesday evening to legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and grant amnesty to the phone companies that helped out with the domestic spying..

Comcast: Bloggers keep us honest - C|Net

After months of lying and evading our questions, Comcast seems to have developed a love affair with the blogosphere. Is this an early Valentine's Day present for bloggers, or is the company up to its usual tricks?

Fat People Cheaper to Treat, Study Says - AP/Wired

Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn't save money, researchers reported Monday. It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.

"It was a small surprise," said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. "But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more."

In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.

January 31, 2008

Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Attention: Roy Bostock, Chairman
Attention: Jerry Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dear Members of the Board:

I am writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of Microsoft to make a proposal for a business combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft's closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo! shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition.

Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use - EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices - this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders.

We believe that Microsoft common stock represents a very attractive investment opportunity for Yahoo!'s shareholders. Microsoft has generated revenue growth of 15%, earnings growth of 26%, and a return on equity of 35% on average for the last three years. Microsoft's share price has generated shareholder returns of 8% during the last one year period and 28% during the last three year period, significantly outperforming the S&P 500. It is our view that Microsoft has significant potential upside given the continued solid growth in our core businesses, the recent launch of Windows Vista, and other strategic initiatives.

Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.

In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that "now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction." According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board's confidence in the "potential upside" if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.(1)

While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers.(2) Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

• Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.
• Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform.(4) Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.
• Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.
• Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

We would value the opportunity to further discuss with you how to optimize the integration of our respective businesses to create a leading global technology company with exceptional display and search advertising capabilities. You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.(3a)

We have dedicated considerable time and resources to an analysis of a potential transaction and are confident that the combination will receive all necessary regulatory approvals. We look forward to discussing this with you, and both our internal legal team and outside counsel are available to meet with your counsel at their earliest convenience.

Our proposal is subject to the negotiation of a definitive merger agreement and our having the opportunity to conduct certain limited and confirmatory due diligence. In addition, because a portion of the aggregate merger consideration would consist of Microsoft common stock, we would provide Yahoo! the opportunity to conduct appropriate limited due diligence with respect to Microsoft. We are prepared to deliver a draft merger agreement to you and begin discussions immediately.

In light of the significance of this proposal to your shareholders and ours, as well as the potential for selective disclosures, our intention is to publicly release the text of this letter tomorrow morning.

Due to the importance of these discussions and the value represented by our proposal, we expect the Yahoo! Board to engage in a full review of our proposal. My leadership team and I would be happy to make ourselves available to meet with you and your Board at your earliest convenience. Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.(3b)

We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!'s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers. We hope that you and your Board share our enthusiasm, and we look forward to a prompt and favorable reply.

Sincerely yours,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

* Highlights are from various sources including: ZDNet, AdWeek,
(1) - Laying the ground work for a hostile takeover.
(2) - Google
(3) - Ballmer driving a wedge between the board and stock holders
(4) - need for scale to compete in the digital ad market.

French police deal blow to Microsoft - AFP

The French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break.

Your First Steps with Linux - Terminally Incoherent

Over the years I think I helped to influence few people here and there to actually start experimenting with linux. I count that as a personal success. I’m sure I was not the primary influence in most cases, but I’m glad I could help people to start tinker with the new OS

It's Time To Drink Toilet Water - Slate

Officials in Orange County, Calif., will attend opening ceremonies today for the world's largest water-purification project, among the first "toilet-to-tap" systems in America. The Groundwater Replenishment System is designed to take sewage water straight from bathrooms in places like Costa Mesa, Fullerton, and Newport Beach and—after an initial cleansing treatment—send it through $490 million worth of pipes, filters, and tanks for purification. The water then flows into lakes in nearby Anaheim, where it seeps through clay, sand, and rock into aquifers in the groundwater basin. Months later, it will travel back into the homes of half a million Orange County residents, through their kitchen taps and showerheads.

Crayons Down! - MotherJones

If there is a creature more fickle than your typical four-year-old, it's hard to think of one offhand. One day they're buttoning their own shirts and uttering words of ancient wisdom, and the next they're pooping on the living room floor because monsters have invaded the bathroom. They are immune to logic and can barely sit still long enough to nibble a chicken nugget. In a nutshell, "standardized" and "preschooler" are not words you'd normally use in the same sentence.

In Endorsing Obama, Kennedy Anoints a Prince and Tells Clintons To Cool It - MotherJones

Democrats don't come much more traditional than Teddy Kennedy, the grand man of the Democratic Party. So his endorsement of Barack Obama--implicitly an anti-endorsement of Hillary Clinton--has punch. Endorsements routinely don't matter much in presidential campaigns--with a few exceptions. A politician who controls a machine--say, a governor--can come in quite handy on Election Day. In this case, Kennedy brings two piping hot dishes to the Obama potluck.

The Tao of ScreenIn search of the distraction-free desktop - Slate

If your computer desktop is anything like mine - and, brother, it is - you've paved over every spare pixel in an iconistan of clutter. Desktop design originated in a wistful visual metaphor, the clean, still work surface, encouraging users to productive ends. Leaps forward in computing horsepower and the rise of constant Internet use has transformed the tabletop terra firma into a cockpit, an antic terminal for the networked self. Our desktops are now a thick impasto of tabbed windows, pull-down menus, dashboard widgets, and application alerts. No possible distraction gets left behind, no link, feed, IM, twitter, or poke unheeded.

Senate Delays Eavesdropping Vote - AP/US News

The Senate granted at least a temporary victory to the White House on Thursday, turning back an attempt to increase court oversight of the government's surveillance of phone calls and e-mails that involve people inside the United States.

Rising Anti-Americanism in Russia - US News

Vladimir Dobrovinsky, 33, a teacher at a design school in Moscow, says he's not interested in politics. But bring up America and the well-traveled, university-educated Dobrovinsky holds forth. He criticizes Washington's "crude interference" in world affairs. He complains that Russia is not treated as an important partner by the Bush administration. "A lot of Russians," he says, "are angry that America deals with us like we're Thailand."

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - NY Times

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment - NY Times

A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.

Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo model - Reuters

Entrepreneur Richard Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis as soon as next year.

Geophysicists Urge Steep Cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions - Scientific American

The scientists of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) warn that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be slashed in half to keep temperatures from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius)—or else. "Warming greater than 2 degrees Celsius above 19th-century levels is projected to be disruptive, reducing global agricultural productivity, causing widespread loss of biodiversity and - if sustained over centuries - melting much of the Greenland ice sheet with ensuing rise in sea levels of several meters," the AGU declares in its first statement in four years on "Human Impacts on Climate."

Ann Telnaes - 24 January 2008

935 Iraq Falsehoods - Washington Post

A nonprofit group pursuing old-fashioned accountability journalism is out with a new report and database documenting 935 false statements by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials hyping the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001.

The Center for Public Integrity reports that its "exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

The database also documents how Bush and others had reason to know, or at least suspect, what they were saying was not supported by the facts.

John H. Cushman Jr. writes in the New York Times: "There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the cresce