Liberty Newspost Feb-11-10 by Liberty Newspost

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Amidst the shivering in Washington, the case for global warming by Deborah Zabarenko (Front Row Washington)

Web site called “Short term cooling on a warming planet.” The new site went up this week, Submitted at 2/10/2010 1:30:22 PM between blizzards, and is OK, it’s cold in Washington. It’s supposed to guide consumers really cold. And snowy. And and businesses so they can adapt blizzardy. It’s hard to recall that to climate change. The Climate long-ago moment — what was it, Service itself is expected to be six days ago? — when you could up and running by the start of the go for a walk without cross- next U.S. fiscal year that begins country skis and a flask of on October 1. brandy. But just because it’s The last decade was the warmest winter doesn’t mean global on record, according to the U.S. warming is a myth. National Oceanic and B u t t h e s t o r m s g a v e Atmospheric Administration, the conservatives fresh fodder for United Kingdom’s Met Office mocking former Vice President and the World Meteorological Al Gore and his efforts on global Organization. “The bottom line climate change. Senator Jim is that current temperatures are DeMint tweeted “It’s going to w a y a b o v e t h e l o n g - t e r m keep snowing in DC until Al a v e r a g e , ” N O A A ’ s D a v i d Gore cries ‘uncle’,” Politico E a s t e r l i n g s a y s . reported. The U.N. Intergovernmental For decades, scientists have Panel on Climate Change is s t r u g g l e d t o e x p l a i n t h e certainly not backing away from difference between weather, its 2007 report that global which changes in the short term, warming is occurring and human and climate, which changes over activity is causing it. But climate the long term. There’s a good change skeptics have focused on e x p l a n a t i o n a t t h e n e w what they see as problems with government Climate Service how some of the data that led to

this conclusion were collected and reported. To most scientists, though, this is all beside the point. One sign that the planet is getting warmer is what’s happening in the Arctic Sea. It’s not as icy as it used to be at this time of year, and that means there won’t be much thick, hardy sea ice at the beginning of the spring melt season — which in turn means there will be more open water exposed. Dark-

colored water absorbs the sun’s rays, just as light-colored sea ice reflects them, so it’s likely to get even warmer up there. That’s important because the Arctic is one of the world’s biggest weather-makers. But that still doesn’t explain the unusual weather patterns — putting it politely — that have hammered the U.S. East Coast this winter. However, part of the overall long-term forecast for a warmer world is for more severe

weather events, and the current storms could qualify. So could the notable lack of snow at some venues of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Oddball weather can be a sign of climate change. That’s why they call it climate change — civilizations are used to climate being the same as it has been for millennia, and scientists believe that’s going to change on a relatively rapid timescale. Not everybody likes the term “climate change.” So how about “ global weirding“? For more Reuters political news, click here. Photo credits: REUTERS/Jason Reed (U.S. Capitol as snow falls on Washington, January 30, 2010) REUTERS/Andy Clark (A truck carrying snow to the Olympic snowboarding and freestyle venue in West Vancouver, British Columbia February 3, 2010.)

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KommandCore Combines Project Management With GTD by Christina Warren (Mashable!) Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:31:53 AM

Aww, "Valentine's" from the GOP (Holy Kaw!) Submitted at 2/11/2010 12:07:45 AM

Dear Democrats: The GOP loves you! Not. The GOP gets less than sly this February with its site gopvalentine.com, the place where you can send love to all your friends, family and lovers—and by “love,” I mean sarcastic remarks about Democrat leaders. Featuring pink

-washed pictures of Democrat politicians, the cards sport fuzzy messages like “Please Accept This Valentine in Place of a Job” and “You Won’t See This Valentine’s Card on C-Span.” Cupid’s arrow gets pointy this year. Check out the site at gopvalentine.com. More on politics. Permalink| Leave a comment »

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: KommandCore Quick Pitch: KommandCore is an innovative and absolutely new SaaS web service designed for project and communication management. Genius Idea: KommandCore makes working on group tasks — even with people outside your organization — easy. Most project management systems give you a limit on the number of projects you can create and participants it can support. We like that KommandCore doesn’t impose those limits. Depending on your pricing plan, you have different levels of available space to store files and documents inside KommandCore, but you can have as many users and projects as you want. Users can be assigned different roles and can

5 Stories to Follow at Vancouver Olympics by Mark McClusky (Wired Top Stories)

The Olympics kick off in just one day. Here are the top stories Wired is tracking from

Vancouver.

$40 a month for 10GB accounts with phone support. Small companies that might want the benefits of a web-based system, but don’t want to have user limits or pay high monthly prices, should give KommandCore a try. Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark be given access to only the parts BizSpark is a startup program of the project the manager wants that gives you three-year access them to see. to the latest Microsoft Another feature we like in development tools, as well as KommandCore: You can upload connecting you to a nationwide and attach files to messages, just n e t w o r k o f i n v e s t o r s a n d like regular e-mail. You can also incubators. There are no upfront preview files within the program. costs, so if your business is That makes making notes or privately owned, less than three adding comments much faster years old, and generates less than than having to open the file U . S . $ 1 m i l l i o n i n a n n u a l separately before commenting. revenue, you can sign up today. We also appreciate the slick Entrepreneurs can take interface that KommandCore advantage of the Azure Services utilizes. Try out the demo on its platform for their website site and play around — it’s hosting and storage needs. intuitive and has a great look and Microsoft recently announced f e e l . B u t w h a t w e r e a l l y the“new CloudApp()” contest– appreciate is that there are use the Azure Services Platform s e p a r a t e w o r k f l o w s a n d for hosting your .NET or PHP dashboards for each project app, and you could be the lucky member. The whole structure is winner of a USD 5000* ( please much more similar to a GTD see website for official rules and program than a tradition web- guidelines).” based project management app. Tags: collaboration, Pricing starts at $5 per month kommandcore, project manage, for 1GB accounts and goes up to software, web apps

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Feds push for tracking cell phones (CNET News.com)

Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their-or at least their cell phones'-Message from fivefilters.org: If whereabouts. U.S. Department of you can, please donate to the full Justice lawyers say that "a -text RSS service so we can customer's Fourth Amendment continue developing it. rights are not violated when the Two years ago, when the FBI phone company reveals to the was stymied by a band of armed government its own records" that robbers known as the "Scarecrow show where a mobile device Bandits" that had robbed more placed and received calls. than 20 Texas banks, it came up Those claims have alarmed the with a novel method of locating ACLU and other civil liberties the thieves. groups, which have opposed the FBI agents obtained logs from Justice Department's request and m o b i l e p h o n e c o m p a n i e s plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit corresponding to what their Court of Appeals in Philadelphia cellular towers had recorded at that Americans' privacy deserves the time of a dozen different more protection and judicial bank robberies in the Dallas area. o v e r s i g h t t h a n w h a t t h e The voluminous records showed administration has proposed. that two phones had made calls "This is a critical question for around the time of all 12 heists, privacy in the 21st century," says and that those phones belonged Kevin Bankston, an attorney at to men named Tony Hewitt and t h e E l e c t r o n i c F r o n t i e r Corey Duffey. A jury eventually Foundation who will be arguing convicted the duo of multiple on Friday. "If the courts do side bank robbery and weapons with the government, that means charges. that everywhere we go, in the Even though police are tapping real world and online, will be an into the locations of mobile open book to the government phones thousands of times a unprotected by the Fourth year, the legal ground rules Amendment." remain unclear, and federal Not long ago, the concept of privacy laws written a generation tracking cell phones would have ago are ambiguous at best. On been the stuff of spy movies. In Friday, the first federal appeals 1998's "Enemy of the State," court to consider the topic will Gene Hackman warned that the hear oral arguments (PDF) in a National Security Agency has case that could establish new "been in bed with the entire standards for locating wireless telecommunications industry devices. since the '40s--they've infected I n t h a t c a s e , t h e O b a m a everything." After a decade of administration has argued that appearances in "24" and "Live Submitted at 2/11/2010 4:00:00 AM

Free or Die Hard," locationtracking has become such a trope that it was satirized in a scene with Seth Rogen from "Pineapple Express" (2008). Once a Hollywood plot, now 'commonplace' Whether state and federal police have been paying attention to Hollywood, or whether it was the other way around, cell phone tracking has become a regular feature in criminal investigations. It comes in two forms: police obtaining retrospective data kept by mobile providers for their own billing purposes that may not be very detailed, or prospective data that reveals the minute-by-minute location of a handset or mobile device. Obtaining location details is now "commonplace," says Al Gidari, a partner in the Seattle offices of Perkins Coie who represents wireless carriers. "It's in every pen register order these days." Gidari says that the Third Circuit case could have a significant impact on police investigations within the court's jurisdiction, namely Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; it could be persuasive beyond those states. But, he cautions, "if the privacy groups win, the case won't be over. It will certainly be appealed." CNET was the first to report on prospective tracking in a 2005 news article. In a subsequent Arizona case, agents from the

Drug Enforcement Administration tracked a tractor trailer with a drug shipment through a GPS-equipped Nextel phone owned by the suspect. Texas DEA agents have used cell site information in real time to locate a Chrysler 300M driving from Rio Grande City to a ranch about 50 miles away. Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile logs showing the location of mobile phones at the time calls were placed became evidence in a Los Angeles murder trial. And a mobile phone's fleeting connection with a remote cell tower operated by Edge Wireless is what led searchers to the family of the late James Kim, a CNET employee who died in the Oregon wilderness in 2006 after leaving a snowbound car to seek help. The way tracking works is simple: mobile phones are miniature radio transmitters and receivers. A cellular tower knows the general direction of a mobile phone (many cell sites have three antennas pointing in different directions), and if the phone is talking to multiple towers, triangulation yields a rough location fix. With this method, accuracy depends in part on the density of cell sites. The Federal Communications Commission's " Enhanced 911" (E911) requirements allowed rough estimates to be transformed into precise coordinates. Wireless carriers using CDMA networks, such as

Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, tend to use embedded GPS technology to fulfill E911 requirements. AT&T and TMobile comply with E911 regulations using network-based technology that computes a phone's location using signal analysis and triangulation between towers. T-Mobile, for instance, uses a GSM technology called Uplink Time Difference of Arrival, or U -TDOA, which calculates a position based on precisely how long it takes signals to reach towers. A company called TruePosition, which provides UTDOA services to T-Mobile, boasts of "accuracy to under 50 meters" that's available "for startof-call, midcall, or when idle" as soon as the call begins. A 2008 court order to T-Mobile in a criminal investigation of a marriage fraud scheme, which was originally sealed and later made public, says: "T-Mobile shall disclose at such intervals and times as directed by (the Department of Homeland Security), latitude and longitude data that establishes the approximate positions of the Subject Wireless Telephone, by unobtrusively initiating a signal on its network that will enable it to determine the locations of the Subject Wireless Telephone." 'No reasonable expectation of privacy' FEDS page 30

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Peering beyond the meter in the smart grid (CNET News.com) Submitted at 2/11/2010 3:00:00 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. BOSTON--Even the most enthusiastic supporter of the smart grid realizes that there's a limit to how much consumers want to actively manage energy use. Instead, most consumers would rather just "set it and forget it," much like they do with programmable thermostats. Consulting company Accenture on Wednesday here opened the doors to a trailer that serves as a smart-grid demonstration, modeled on the experience of Xcel Energy's SmartGridCity program in Boulder, Colo. Giving consumers more awareness of their energy consumption through an energy monitor or Web site, as is the case with the Boulder pilot, should help people save money and lighten their environmental footprint with relatively simple changes to behavior. But getting a feel for the nuts and bolts of the grid at the demo reminded me that the smart grid is more than two-way meters and pie charts showing how much appliances consume each day. Equally important is the level of automation that computer technologies can add at the edges of the grid and in people's homes. A look at the home energy

management system used by Xcel Energy's smart grid program in Boulder, Colo. In addition to providing more

visibility into utility bills, the system also allows consumers to program and remotely control appliances, lighting, and heating

and cooling systems (see control screen on left).(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET) The transmission grid--the long-

distance power lines that carry high-voltage current--is pretty PEERING page 28

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Ask TUAW: iPad VGA out, changing keyboard shortcuts, Time Capsule worries, and more by Mat Lu (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 2/11/2010 8:00:00 AM

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about changing keyboard shortcuts in Keynote, the iPad's dock to VGA adapter, Time Capsule failures, Maccompatible scanners, iPhone voice control, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have. Josh asks Here's a simple one. I'm using iWork '08, making a presentation in Keynote (as I do frequently). I enjoy listening to music in iTunes while working. When I go to leave my desk, I hit the play key (F8) to pause the music. And the slideshow starts. I'd rather not need to switch applications just to pause the K e y n o t e t o n o t p l a y t h e music. Is it possible to change s l i d e s h o w w i t h t h a t k e y ?

You can easily change the keyboard shortcut for Keynote

by going the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard Preference

ASK page 29

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PEERING continued from page 26

smart already since it has sensors and can, in general, automatically react to trouble spots, said Brian Martin, a partner at Accenture's smart-grid services program, during my visit. What needs more automation and computer-aided intelligence is the distribution grid, where electricity goes from substations and pole-mounted transformers and is routed into people's homes. For example, a drop in voltage on a line, what could be called "low-quality power," could mean flickering lights or that a residence won't be able to run many power-hungry appliances at once. One way to address that problem is through smart meters, which can monitor the voltage and send signals to equipment at substations to boost voltage, Martin explained. Automation plays out within the home as well in the vision of the smart grid. With smart meters and other energy management devices, some Boulder residents in the pilot can control their homes' appliances and mechanical systems over the Internet. For example, a consumer could decide to put the heat on in the bedrooms from a smartphone while on the way home. In the long turn, these sorts of control features are what will

appeal to consumers, more than providing very detailed information on their usage, said Sander van 't Noordende, group chief executive of Accenture's Resources Operating Group. "The challenge on the consumer side is consumer behavior. Frankly, I'm not that interested in looking at my utility bill on the computer and watching it very closely--the fun wears off pretty quickly," he said. In the future, smart-grid tools will be used to create a home energy profile, much the way people buy mobile phone plans to match their usage pattern. Consumers could program heating and cooling as they do now. But smart meters and networked appliances allow for new efficiency services, such as agreeing to turn up the air conditioner thermostat when the grid is stressed in exchange for rebates or cheaper rates. "So you install it once and the system in your home automatically does what you need it to do," van 't Noordende said. He predicts that smart meters will become like PCs or mobile phones: at first consumers weren't sure they needed them, but over time they have become widespread. Data overload For all the technical promise of the smart grid, though, there are

serious challenges that have little to do with consumer involvement in managing energy. The Xcel Energy smart-grid program, in fact, has come under scrutiny from regulators because of ballooning costs. The Boulder Camera newspaper on Saturday reported that the construction costs--largely related to laying the fiber optic cables required to carry more data between utilities and customers--have grown from an anticipated $15.3 million almost two years ago to $42.1 million, raising questions over how the trial will affect utility bills. Like Xcel Energy, utilities across the country are grappling with the question of how to recoup the costs of smart grid investments. There are a number of benefits to the smart grid, including faster responses to outages, more efficient uses of energy resources, and increased use of wind and solar power. But justifying investments is tricky because the benefits are shared across different parties--power generators, utilities, and individual consumers, said van 't Noordende. In practice, the smart-grid trials, some of which are co-funded by the Department of Energy, reflect regulators' goals, said Martin. For example, some

regulations are focused on reducing consumers' electricity use to avoid building new power plants and transmissions lines. Others, meanwhile, prioritize integrating large-scale solar and wind farms into the grid or boosting distributed generation through rooftop solar, he said. On the technical side, one of the biggest challenges facing utilities is the deluge of data that a smarter grid produces. Controllers and sensors along the grid are being installed to gather data in order to avoid outages. Appliances, such as hot water heaters and dishwashers, can also become information sources, sharing information with smart meters to go into low-energy mode, for example, during peak times. In smart grid programs, such as Xcel Energy's Boulder trial, Accenture has found that making sense of all the data is a big challenge for utilities. "Utility people are usually good with the power equipment, but they struggle with how to get a handle on all the data," said Martin. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

How Biz Stone Promoted Twitter in 2006 [FUNNY] by Stan Schroeder (Mashable!) Submitted at 2/11/2010 3:00:07 AM

This is 2010, and Twitter is now a serious business. Well, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not a serious business in the context of actually making money, but in terms of millions of users, billions of tweets, and very strong potential, we take it seriously. Back in 2006, however, it was a tiny blip on the web 2.0 (remember that term?) radar, and Biz Stone had to do whatever it took to make the name (back then it was Twttr) stick in our minds. The result is below, a (partly intentionally) hilarious video from 2006, with Biz Stone sporting a crazy scientist look, speaking very fast, but telling us surprisingly little about the service in 43 seconds of the videoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s duration. Credit for finding this gem goes to Say OMG. Tags: biz stone, twitter, video

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ASK continued from page 27

Pane. In the left column choose Application Shortcuts. If an entry for Keynote already exists, then just change the key. If not, click on the plus button and add a new shortcut for Keynote with the menu title "Play Slideshow." You can set the key for whatever you'd like (here I've chosen F3). emil asks Can anyone recommend a decent but affordable piece of Mac-friendly hardware to handle scanning statements and other physical documents quickly and easily to PDF? Probably the best document scanners for the Mac are in the Fujitsu ScanSnap series. While they are not cheap, both their document handling and Mac software support seems to be the best available. If you're serious about scanning you should get a ScanSnap. I recently picked up a used S300M on eBay for $150 and have been very pleased with it. AnonymousJoseph asks I'm considering purchasing a Time Capsule, (odds are the 1TB if it makes a difference) and I want to know if people are still having problems with them dying at the 18 month mark or not. If not, what should I watch for to keep, for instance, a retailer from unloading their back stock of bad Time Capsules

onto me? From what I can tell online, it seems that the Time Capsule suffers overheating issues which then lead to failures with the power supply (specifically some of the capacitors). Since the Time Capsule does not seem to have been substantially redesigned in the last update (October 2009), it seems possible, if not likely, that the new models may still suffer similar overheating problems. Of course, Apple may have made some changes that we don't know about that will help with the issue, but I don't think we will really know the long term results until next year (i.e. 18 months after October 2009). If you want to be safe, you should probably go with an Airport Extreme (plus external USB hard drive), which don't seem to be suffering from the problems to the same degree (presumably because the AEBS has a lower heat profile without the hard drive) devildog67 asks Where is the best place to get a aftermarket battery for 15" Mac Pro? Apple still sells batteries of at the Apple Store for older MacBook models, so that's where I'd go. However, there are aftermarket batteries available

that promise better performance. Probably the most recognizable vendor is FastMac, though I have not used their products personally. Pat asks I've got an iPhone (OS 3.1.3) voice-control question. Is it not possible to use voice control to select a single song? I've had luck with the "Play songs by (artist name)", or "Play playlist_" or whatever. But it would often be nice to choose a particular song such as "Play Red Rain by Peter Gabriel" or something like that. Does anyone know if that's possible? It's not possible to select a single song using the iPhone's Voice Control. If you check out this list of the available voice commands you'll see that the most specific you can get is a particular album. (You can can also see the complete list of commands on pp. 37-38 of the iPhone User Guide(PDF link).) Knight42 asks We know that you can get a VGA connector to output to a TV/Monitor. Can anyone tell me if you can actually mirror everything or is it just the videos? Am actually thinking of buying an ipad for my parents (they want to get into Ebay etc, and Im not buying them a Windows machine) so as they

know zero about tech, this seems perfect. Im just hoping they can output to their TV so they can see bits larger when they need to. Thanks! Since the iPad hasn't been released we can't really say for sure. However, check out this post over at the AppleInsider forums. The author claims information from an Apple Engineer that the VGA output is application specific and will not simply mirror the main display. We do know that iPad version of Keynote will offer VGA output, but it seems likely that other applications will only output VGA if specifically designed to do so. As I noted above, however, we simply won't know for sure until it's released. TUAW Ask TUAW: iPad VGA out, changing keyboard shortcuts, Time Capsule worries, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Alexander McQueen Is Dead [Deaths] by Doree Shafrir (Gawker)

Forty-year-old British fashion designer Alexander McQueen

has committed suicide. This is truly tragic.

Missed Use Case? Google Buzz Reveals Who You Chat With The Most To Everyone by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 2/10/2010 8:20:00 PM

There's certainly been a lot of "buzz" (har har) about Google Buzz, which, frankly, is a bit baffling (hence us not writing about it earlier). It looks like Google's latest attempt to be Facebook/Twitter. Sorta. That said, Nicholas Carlson found a rather scary privacy flaw in the way it's set up. In order to jumpstart things, Google automatically sets you up with followers based on people you frequently communicate with via Gmail or Gtalk. And that info is public. As Carlson notes, especially as a reporter, keeping some of his sources private is really, really important. And Google just revealed them to the world. This seems like a case of the folks at Google not thinking through the implications of this. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

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FEDS continued from page 25

In the case that's before the Third Circuit on Friday, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, initially said it needed historical (meaning stored, not future) phone location information because a set of suspects "use their wireless telephones to arrange meetings and transactions in furtherance of their drug trafficking activities." U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan in Pennsylvania denied the Justice Department's attempt to obtain stored location data without a search warrant; prosecutors had invoked a different legal procedure. Lenihan's ruling, in effect, would require police to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause-a more privacy-protective standard. Lenihan's opinion (PDF)-which, in an unusual show of solidarity, was signed by four other magistrate judges--noted that location information can reveal sensitive information such as health treatments, financial difficulties, marital counseling, and extra-marital affairs. In its appeal to the Third Circuit, the Justice Department claims that Lenihan's opinion "contains, and relies upon, numerous

errors" and should be overruled. In addition to a search warrant not being necessary, prosecutors said, because location "records provide only a very general indication of a user's whereabouts at certain times in the past, the requested cell-site records do not implicate a Fourth Amendment privacy interest." The Obama administration is not alone in making this argument. U.S. District Judge William Pauley, a Clinton appointee in New York, wrote in a 2009 opinion that a defendant in a drug trafficking case, Jose Navas, "did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the cell phone" location. That's because Navas only used the cell phone "on public thoroughfares en route from California to New York" and "if Navas intended to keep the cell phone's location private, he simply could have turned it off." ( Most cases have involved the ground rules for tracking cell phone users prospectively, and judges have disagreed over what legal rules apply. Only a minority has sided with the Justice Department, however.) Cellular providers tend not to retain moment-by-moment logs of when each mobile device

contacts the tower, in part because there's no business reason to store the data, and in part because the storage costs would be prohibitive. They do, however, keep records of what tower is in use when a call is initiated or answered--and those records are generally stored for six months to a year, depending on the company. Verizon Wireless keeps "phone records including cell site location for 12 months," Drew Arena, Verizon's vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance, said at a federal task force meeting in Washington, D.C. last week. Arena said the company keeps "phone bills without cell site location for seven years," and stores SMS text messages for only a very brief time. Gidari, the Seattle attorney, said that wireless carriers have recently extended how long they store this information. "Prior to a year or two ago when locationbased services became more common, if it were 30 days it would be surprising," he said. The ACLU, EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and University of San Francisco law professor Susan Freiwald argue that the wording of the federal

privacy law in question allows judges to require the level of proof required for a search warrant "before authorizing the disclosure of particularly novel or invasive types of information." In addition, they say, Americans do not "knowingly expose their location information and thereby surrender Fourth Amendment protection whenever they turn on or use their cell phones." "The biggest issue at stake is whether or not courts are going to accept the government's minimal view of what is protected by the Fourth Amendment," says EFF's Bankston. "The government is arguing that based on precedents from the 1970s, any record held by a third party about us, no matter how invasively collected, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Norwegian Appeals Court Dismisses Entertainment Industry's Attempt To Require ISP Block Of The Pirate Bay by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 2/10/2010 10:22:00 PM

Back in November, a district court in Norway ruled that ISP Telenor did not have to block The Pirate Bay, since the ISP itself was not contributing to any copyright infringement. Not surprisingly, the entertainment industry appealed, but Kristian Bysheim alerts us to the news that the appeals court has upheld the lower court ruling(Google translation from the original) by dismissing the appeal from the entertainment industry. It's good to see more courts around the world recognizing that ISPs should not be responsible for propping up the entertainment industry's business model when those companies fail to innovate themselves. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

Best-Buy Treadmills & Ellipticals - from Consumer Reports by Press Room (Consumer Reports) Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:00:59 PM

Best-Buy Treadmills & Ellipticals - from Consumer Reports Of the 48 home exercise machines Consumer Reports

tested for the February issue, 14 are recommended. 5 were judged CR Best Buys. CR Podcast Subscribe now!

S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of

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Silicon Valley faces rough road to recovery (CNET News.com)

"Silicon Valley's innovation engine has driven the region's prosperity for 60 years, but at the Message from fivefilters.org: If moment we're stalled," said Joint you can, please donate to the full Venture's chief operating officer, -text RSS service so we can Russell Hancock, in a statement. continue developing it. "What's hard to say is whether Silicon Valley has faced tough we're stuck in neutral, which has times before. But climbing out of happened before, or whether it's its current downturn may prove t i m e n o w f o r a c o m p l e t e more challenging than ever, says o v e r h a u l . " a new report. The report highlights several Hit by the recession, overseas key challenges for the valley. c o m p e t i t i o n , a n d p o l i t i c a l Like other areas, Silicon Valley gridlock in California, Silicon has filled many of its jobs with Valley--a region virtually skilled professionals from synonymous with the high-tech abroad. But "the actions of our industry--has lost its competitive nation in the wake of 9/11" and edge and appeal, according to the growth of other global the"2010 Silicon Valley Index" regions have made the valley less (PDF) released Thursday by appealing and accessible than it Joint Venture: Silicon Valley used to be, says the report. Network and the Silicon Valley Though workers still pour in Community Foundation. As a from China and India, those result, the region has been less countries are growing on their able to attract and retain talented own and now more likely to keep workers, leaving it at a standstill their talent local. with recovery uncertain. Between November 2008 and The Silicon Valley Index is November 2009, employment in written to supplement the annual California's Santa Clara and San "State of the Valley" conference, Mateo counties fell 6.1 percent a town-hall style meeting set for versus a national average of 3.8 F e b . 1 2 t o d i s c u s s t h e percent, says the report. Silicon opportunities and challenges for Valley overall shed 90,000 jobs Silicon Valley.(Credit: Joint between the second quarter of Venture: Silicon Valley 2008 and 2009. Total Network) employment is now the same as Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:01:53 AM

study. "Our vulnerabilities don't mean Silicon Valley's best days are behind it. But they do suggest we're a region at risk." Published each year since 1995, the Silicon Valley Index is written to supplement the annual "State of the Valley" conference, a town-hall style meeting where politicians, citizens, and other concerned individuals gather to discuss the opportunities and challenges for Silicon Valley. This year's meeting takes place Friday at the McEnery San Jose Convention Center. As co-creator of the index, Joint Venture is an organization that tries to bring together it was in 2005. At the same time, funds. professionals from business, funding for higher education is California state budget woes and government, and education to dropping, not just in California political gridlock are also having discuss issues that affect the but across the country. a deleterious effect, not just on Silicon Valley region. Silicon As the economy has fallen, so business but on the quality of life Valley Community Foundation have venture capital investments, in the region, yet another factor is a community group that a primary source of funding for making it difficult for Silicon provides philanthropic grants Silicon Valley start-ups. The Valley to keep and attract skilled through different funds and helps reduced VC dollars available professionals. people determine where and how have shifted from traditional "While our region has enjoyed to donate to both local and global Silicon Valley business sectors many advantages in the past, causes. like software and semiconductors success in the future demands Five Filters featured article: to biotechnology and energy. t h a t w e t h i n k b e y o n d o u r Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: And though Washington is now prevailing assumptions, organize PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, trying to invest in research to differently, draw upon still more Term Extraction. pick up the slack, the Valley so ingenuity from our people, and far has not been able to score a forge new collaborations in order substantial share of the federal to compete globally," quotes the

G-Point Mouse Is Not a Very Good Valentine's Gift [Mouse] by Jesus Diaz (Gizmodo) Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:03:00 AM

This sleek fire red mouse may be a perfect Valentine's gift. Smooth and beautiful. Until you see the whole thing from above.

See what I mean? [ Yanko Design]

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Developer Seems To Think Trademark On 'Army Builder' Means Indie Filmmaker Hits It No One Can Use It In Conversation Big With Free Film Online by Mike Masnick (Techdirt)

Lone Wolf & Club manga), received a trademark on the term Army Builder in connection with One of the downsides of the a game that they created under modern movement to include that name. No problems there. trademark law under the same But apparently Lone Wolf has "intellectual property" umbrella been sending out cease-andas copyright and trademark law, desists to websites that have is that you get people who think nothing to do with Lone Wolf's that trademark grants the same Army Builder, and demanding sort of overreaching monopoly that the phrase be blocked in rights that copyright and patent forums on totally different law do. But trademark law is subjects. Yes, they're saying that really quite different -- it's no one can use the term in designed as something of a conversation: There are two consumer protection law, meant things that need to be done. First only to prevent confusing uses of of all, improper references to the the trademark in a way that Army Builder trademark on the would imply a product is made forums must be addressed. This or endorsed by someone else. can be achieved in either of two But since people still think of w a y s , o r p o t e n t i a l l y a trademarks like copyrights and combination of both, at your patents, they often conclude that discretion. The first option they can try to stop people who would be to remove such posts. aren't violating the trademark at Since this could appear harsh and all. potentially disrupt forum Reader Reverand Dak alerts us discussions, an acceptable to the news that Lone Wolf alternative would be to revise Development, a video game such posts to utilize a generic developer (who, we're told, has term (e.g. "roster construction no relationship with Lone Wolf tool", "list createor", or "points Roleplaying Games nor with calculator") in place of the Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:22:00 AM

"Army Builder" name. The second thing that needs to be addressed is that your forum users must be educated about the term Army Builder being a trademark and only applicable to our brand of products. This is necessary to avoid an ongoing problem and mitigate the future need for removal of improper posts. I'm sure you would also prefer that the forums continue to run smoothly and without interruption, so your assistance in getting forum users to utilize appropriate terms will benefit us all. Or, you know, instead of educating all forum users around the world that they can no longer use the term "Army Builder" in conversation, how about we just educate the folks at Lone Wolf Development on the limits of trademark law and why it almost certainly does not apply to random forum users using the term in a way totally unrelated to Lone Wolf Development's mark. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

by Mike Masnick (Techdirt)

what Hulu was. God bless the people who had the foresight to put it up there.... We were Tom sends over the story of an fortunate in that the timing of the independent filmmaker, Stevie Internet and the ability to watch Long, who wrote and acted in movies came about at the same the low-budget indie film Strictly time. I didn't have any ego about S e x u a l t h a t h a s f o u n d it as an artist, I just wanted my tremendous success by being movie to be seen." But, of online where people can watch it course, it's not hurting him for free. Apparently, Long had a financially either:"I'll give it to deal with some sort of online you in these rough terms," he distributor, who got the film on says. "The $100,000 film has Hulu, and word of mouth made it made 10 times its money." But... the most watched film on Hulu, but... but... we keep having ever:"I woke up one morning Hollywood insiders tell us in our a n d f o u n d a d o z e n o r s o comments that indie filmmakers messages in my Facebook inbox, who distribute online can't saying, 'Hey, I just saw this film, possibly make back enough and it really touched me, and I money to cover their costs. love the way it talks about Everything's impossible until breakups and relationships,' " someone does it. Long says. "And I just scratched Permalink| Comments| Email my head, saying, 'Where'd you This Story see my movie?' I had no idea Submitted at 2/11/2010 1:50:04 AM

Celebrating 20 Years of Mandela Freedom! [Anniversaries] by Hamilton Nolan (Gawker) Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:07:13 AM

Twenty years ago today, Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa after 27

years. He was imprisoned thanks to apartheid, which has since been proven to be stupid. You

know you need to watch Sarafina today, to celebrate.

Tech/

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Your first Apple, or how it all began... by Victor Agreda, Jr. (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

up to the thing. Now I'm hoping the Disk II drive will still read my copy of In Search of the Most Amazing Thing. We'd love to hear your first Apple story, so leave it in the comments. Over the next few weeks we'll also bring you the stories of TUAW bloggers and how they began as lifelong Apple customers.

Submitted at 2/10/2010 11:30:00 PM

Filed under: Apple This week, while a good part of the TUAW team is at Macworld, it's worth considering for a moment how we all came to start using Apple products. The "Switcher" campaign morphed into the "I'm a Mac" campaign, but really the idea is the same: rarely do you see people switching *back* to Windows after using a Mac. Then there's the halo effect from the iPod/iTunes ecosystem, the iPhone, and before all of that there was Apple's dominance in the educational markets and later in the design, publishing and other creative fields. But we all came to Apple in a different way. On the following pages we've published some stories from our Seed contributors on how they came to start using Apple products. For me it began in the late 70's

when my dad bought an Apple II in a bike store. There were no computer stores at the time, so this bike shop had a computer hobbyist corner, complete with Altairs and other blinking-light computer systems. He was intrigued by the keyboard, the cassette system and the color TV output. I wrote a review of the

Submitted at 2/11/2010 12:29:25 AM

Popular photo-sharing social network Flickr was launched back in February 2004 by a Vancouver-based company Ludicorp. It took one year for Yahoo to acquire Flickr, and

by Pete Cashmore (Mashable!) Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:47:11 PM

Google Buzz is shaping up to be an interesting new way to share • My First Apple, and Why It content with your Gmail friends, so why not have a button for Rocks • The story of a happy Apple sharing blog posts to the service? Our new Google Buzz buttons Macintosh convert are a first step. To make it work, • My First Apple Computer: you’ll need to make sure you’ve The Start of A Love Affair set up Google Reader and included that in your “Connected Apple II "red" manual last year. TUAW Your first Apple, or Sites” on Buzz. If you already how it all began... originally In fact, I still have that Apple in had a Reader account before m y o f f i c e , c o m p l e t e w i t h appeared on The Unofficial setting up Buzz, chances are paddles, tape deck and a bunch Apple Weblog (TUAW) on that’s already set up for you. of cassettes. One gem: AppleSoft Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:30:00 Try it now: click “Buzz This” to BASIC by a little company EST. Please see our terms for the left of this post! c a l l e d M i c r o s o f t ! W h a t ' s use of feeds. Happy buzzing! amazing is that the thing still Read| Permalink| Email this| — boots up, although I had to dig Comments Kudos to Andy Brett on this up an ancient analog TV to hook one. Reviews: Google Buzz, Google Reader Tags: Google, google buzz

Flickr Is Now 6 Years Old by Stan Schroeder (Mashable!)

Google Buzz Buttons: The New Way to Share Mashable Stories

among the company’s many acquisitions, Flickr definitely stands as one of the most successful. Being six years old (nearly the same age as Facebook) makes Flickr almost an old guy on the Internet, as many other social networks ( Bebo, hi5) have risen Although its traffic lately isn’t and fallen within that timespan. growing as it used to, it’s still

doing well, with users sharing billions of photos there. We wish you a very happy birthday, Flickr! [img credit: Flickr] Tags: birthday, flickr, photo sharing, Photos, social media, trending

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Windows 8 Will Blow Your Mind. Hopefully Not Like Vista by Stan Schroeder (Mashable!) Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:22:43 AM

The folks at Microsoft Kitchen dug up some cool quotes from Microsoft employees about the upcoming Windows OS, currently codenamed Windows 8. Though it does bring up painful memories of what was promised about Vista (the marketing campaign, you may remember, was called “the wow starts now”), Microsoft did partially redeem itself with Windows 7, so we can put some (if not all) trust in what’s said about the next version. First, John Mangelaars, regional VP of consumer and online at Microsoft EMEA, simply said that Windows 8 will be “mindblowing.” Doesn’t really reveal much, but OK, we can set our expectations to “unreasonably high” if that’s how Microsoft wants to play this. Another quote, this time from an unknown employee, tells us a little bit more: “So what are our plans for this next version…The minimum that folks can take for granted is that the next version will be something completly different

Macworld 2010: TUAW attacks San Francisco with the Parrot AR.Drone by Steven Sande (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

from what folks usually expect of Windows – I am simply impressed with the process that Steven has setup to listen to our customers needs and wants and get a team together than can make it happen. To actually bring together dozens and dozens of teams across Microsoft to come up with a vision for Windows.next is a process that is surreal! The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the

try our hands at flying this incredible little device. No, we don't know what this is going to cost, nor do we know when it Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:00:00 AM will ship other than "in 2010," F i l e d u n d e r : M a c w o r l d , but if you have your geek on, way they use them. It is the Accessories, iPhone you're going to want one of future of PCs…” OK, let's face it. It is the coolest these. Watch the above video by So besides “mind-blowing”, we can now add “surreal,” “the i P h o n e a c c e s s o r y s i n c e , our awesome videographer Chad Mumm for the scoop. future of PCs” and “completely u h h h h h h , t h e i P a d ? We're talking about the Parrot TUAW Macworld 2010: TUAW different”. I’m not exactly sure I want to enter an altered state of AR.Drone, the iPhone / iPad attacks San Francisco with the mind upon launching my brand touch-controlled quadricopter Parrot AR.Drone originally new Windows 8 PC for the first that, when it finally ships later in appeared on The Unofficial time, but I agree it’s time for 2010, will be one of the hottest Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. something completely different. geek toys on the market. T U A W b l o g g e r s M i k e Please see our terms for use of Because, you know, Windows 7 wasn’t really all that different Schramm, Dave Caolo, Steve feeds. Sande, and David Winograd Permalink| Email this| from Vista… visited with the oh-so-lucky C omments Tags: microsoft, Vista, dudes from Parrot yesterday preWindows 8 Macworld, and had a chance to

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Apple rolling out $1 TV shows for iPad launch? by Kent Pribbernow (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:00:00 AM

Filed under: iTunes, iPad According to a story posted by the Financial Times on Wednesday, Apple may be in talks with studios to bring $1 TV shows to iTunes, as part of the official iPad launch. Apparently this will be a test to model for the company to see whether cheaply-priced content will spur sales. Given yesterday's news about declining iTunes music growth due to higher prices, I'm betting it will. The story goes on to claim that Apple has been engaged in secret talks with major networks for the past few months, to cut prices on standard definition TV shows in half -- currently priced at $1.99. The reason behind this move is the iPad's 4:3 aspect ratio, ideally

suited for standard def content which Apple hopes consumers will eagerly download at a buck a pop. True or not, I just hope we see this long-rumored $30 subscription model we've been hearing about, so I can finally tell the nice folks at Comcast where they can put their cable. Hint: not in my home.

TUAW Apple rolling out $1 TV shows for iPad launch? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Submitted at 2/10/2010 12:43:15 PM

Citrix’s quiet announcement that its Receiver software will allow

Apple iPad users to run Windows 7 sessions via virtualization has caused some to

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

together and put them in the gallery below. Until tomorrow, enjoy this sneak peek! Don't forget: if you're at the Submitted at 2/10/2010 10:30:00 PM show, stop by booth #654 and Filed under: Macworld If you've say hello. We've got some never seen how a big show like stickers available (first come, Macworld is put together, you first served) and some surprises might not realize the massive in store... effort that goes into building and Gallery: Macworld 2010 presetting up all those booths. show floor There's power, networking, TUAW Macworld 2010: A peek furniture, carpeting, a ton of behind the show floor curtain boxes and paraphernalia and in originally appeared on The s o m e c a s e s s p e c i a l i z e d Unofficial Apple Weblog construction that can take a (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 suggest that the iPad may have couple of days to put together. I 22:30:00 EST. Please see our much promise as a business tool. snapped a few pictures of the terms for use of feeds. But why stop at Windows? The show floor today, including a Read| Permalink| Email this| iPad will reach beyond Apple’s few shots of the TUAW booth as Comments iPhone OS and Windows. Read we starting putting things more

Virtualization Is the Trojan Horse to Take the iPad Beyond Apple’s OS by Sebastian Rupley (TheAppleBlog)

Macworld 2010: A peek behind the show floor curtain

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Live-Blogging the Iranian Protests by Tara Mahtafar, Roshanak Taghavi (The New Republic All Feed)

the capability to enrich to more than 20 percent and (also) to more than 80 percent, but because we don't need to, we Submitted at 2/10/2010 8:33:59 AM won't do so,” he added. Message from fivefilters.org: If February 11, 2010 9:08 am. you can, please donate to the full Security has been tight, with -text RSS service so we can Rooz staff in Tehran reporting continue developing it. that, since early Wednesday The New Republic is live- morning, black armored cars blogging news of events in Iran belonging to the Revolutionary today, on the eve of 22 Bahman Guards, the country's elite (February 11), the anniversary of security force, were seen circling Iran’s 1979 revolution. The the main streets of the capital. It Iranian opposition movement is is rumored that "plainclothes slated to co-opt the state's annual agents" have also been stationed rallies to stage another mass along the demonstration routes. demonstration--the largest since Rooz cites an eyewitness report December's violent protests on that a fleet of buses was parked the Shiite holy day of Ashura. at Mehrabad airport, ostensibly February 11, 2010, 10:20am. for shuttling pro-government President M a h m o u d supporters to the rally at Azadi A h m a d i n e j a d o n T h u r s d a y Square in the early hours of declared the Islamic Republic“a Thursday morning. A video nuclear state” and said the a p p e a r e d l a s t n i g h t o n country is now able to enrich Y o u T u b e s h o w i n g I r a n i a n uranium to over 80% purity, s e c u r i t y f o r c e s u n l o a d i n g a m i d s t c l a s h e s b e t w e e n packages of food to hand out at government security forces and Thursday's pro-government rally: opposition supporters in the A little before 2 am Thursday Iranian capital. morning (roughly 10:30 am in "When we say that we don't Tehran), Enduring America build nuclear bombs, it means reported that trucks equipped that we won't do that because we with loudspeakers were roaming don't believe in having it," he the streets of Tehran blaring prosaid. "The Iranian nation is brave government slogans. enough that if one day we Up to around 3 am Eastern wanted to build nuclear bombs S t a n d a r d T i m e ( E S T ) , t h e we would announce it publicly websites of Iran's state IRIB without being afraid of you,” broadcaster, Press TV EnglishR e u t e r s c i t e s t h e I r a n i a n language news channel, official president as saying. IRNA news agency and semi" R i g h t n o w i n N a t a n z official Fars news agency are all (enrichment complex) we have down. It appears that the internet

slow-down has affected the state media as well. February 10, 2010, 6:04 pm We were able to find only two videos of tonight's "Allahu Akbar" chants. Usually there are easily a dozen, and typically more, videos posted on YouTube. One well-known Iranian blogger now living outside of Iran said in a Skype interview that the lack of information is "very disheartening" and could indicate a major decline in the flow of information tomorrow compared with previous protest days. "Based on the trend of blocking messengers and emails in the last couple days, I'm afraid that on 22 Bahman the internet might go into total lockdown," the blogger said. February 10, 2010, 5:56 pm Shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) reverberated throughout the Iranian capital late Wednesday night, as residents took to their balconies and rooftops to voice their protest as Iranians did during the aftermath of the contested June 12 elections and on the eve of every major protest since. The current use of "Allahu Akbar" as a statement of dissent is a tactic that was widely used in the run-up to the 1979 revolution. Now, the collective cry is meant to boost morale for the next day's turnout by opposition supporters. February 10, 2010, 5:02 pm. The International Campaign For Human Rights in Iran (ICHR) on

Wednesday posted an interview with a Tehran-based student activist who spoke about the feeling on Iranian university campuses ahead of tomorrow's protests. The activist, who was not named in the ICHR report for fear of retribution, says the recent spate of arrests has created a “climate of terror.” “Basij militia checkpoints have increased considerably in recent days” throughout the capital. “These days, the concept of getting arrested has become a more tangible possibility that has reached even the lowest level of activists, especially among the student population.” “What people fear most in coming out to the streets is the escalation of naked violence that [government security forces] have been using,” the activist adds. February 10, 2010, 4:20 pm. As we just mentioned, the grassroots base of the opposition has been promoting the fresh bout of protests in its own way-peppering public spaces in Tehran and other cities with graffiti in the movement's signature green color. Facebook and Flickr albums include dozens of photos featuring "22 Bahman" sprayed on all manner of surfaces: road signs, lamp posts, phone booths, and even ATM machines. The last photo (below) purportedly shows this message scrawled on a wall in the town of Rey, on the outskirts of southern Tehran:

Meanwhile, online activists have been circulating downloadable leaflets for on-the-ground distribution to promote turnout. Since last June's contested elections, the Iranian cybersphere has been replete with posters and other graphic material with various "green" messages. This recent poster, for example, urges Iranian viewers to refrain from watching Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) television. February 10, 2010, 4:18 pm. Taking a cue from their opposition counterparts back in Iran, diaspora activists in France on Tuesday night reportedly spray-painted the slogans “Where is my vote?" and "Down with the dictator" on the outside walls of Iran's embassy in Paris using green paint. French Police said the graffiti had been scrubbed clean by midmorning Wednesday, leaving only smears of green paint, according to Reuters. The activists apparently posted a video of the graffiti on YouTube: February 10, 2010, 3:40 pm. Mousavi, for his part, declared last week in a forceful interview posted to his official site Kalame.org, that the revolution had “failed to realize its objectives” and that Shah-era “tyranny” remained:“The muzzling of press and media, our overcrowded prisons and the LIVE-BLOGGING page 38

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Nice Guys Finish Last by Noam Scheiber (The New Republic - All Feed)

senator said. “You need a radius of 10 to 12 from the other side if you're going to have a shot." Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:00:00 PM But the Bush analogy suggests Message from fivefilters.org: If the opposite: If you want to end you can, please donate to the full up with a bipartisan result, the -text RSS service so we can way to get there is to be as hardcontinue developing it. nosed and partisan as Rahm’s Everyone remembers that detractors say he is. If anything, George W. Bush’s first tax cut the White House should have was contentious when Congress been even more aggressive. considered it back in 2001. So After all, much of the criticism contentious, in fact, that the Bush received was along these Bushies didn’t even try passing it same lines. Shortly after the under normal Senate procedures. House passed his tax cut bill in The GOP leadership, worried March, 2001—on a party-line that it couldn’t collect 60 votes vote, after exactly one day of to overcome a Democratic h e a r i n g s — c o n s e r v a t i v e f i l i b u s t e r , r e l i e d o n Louisiana Senator John Breaux reconciliation, the Senate rule condemned the bare-knuckle t h a t a l l o w s b u d g e t - r e l a t e d tactics. "You can't talk about measures to pass with a simple changing the way we do business majority. in Washington and bringing What fewer people remember is about a spirit of bipartisan the margin by which Bush’s tax c o o p e r a t i o n a n d t h e n r a m cut finally passed the Senate. As through a tax bill in the House," it happens, the number of yeas Breaux told The New York w a s 6 2 — i n c l u d i n g 1 2 Times. "That's why we're not Democrats. That would qualify getting things done." as a bipartisan love-fest by Old Washington hands like contemporary standards. Breaux proclaimed that Bush There’s a lesson here: For would have to take a more months now, Republicans and conciliatory approach in the many Democrats have faulted Senate, where the 50-50 partisan the White House for being too s p l i t s u p p o s e d l y m a d e i t partisan in its dealings with i m p o s s i b l e t o s t i f f - a r m Congress on health care. For Democrats. Bush wisely ignored example, in an article in The Hill the advice, resorting to a shrewd this week, one centrist senator inside-outside game instead. complained that chief of staff Inside the hallowed Senate Rahm Emanuel had “misjudged chamber, Republicans pressed the Senate by focusing on only a ahead with their reconciliation few Republicans.” “The Senate plans. Senate Majority Leader doesn't work that way,” the Trent Lott went so far as to sack

t h e S e n a t e parliamentarian—whom Republicans had hired back in 1995—after a ruling making it harder to pass the full tax cut package through reconciliation. For his part, Bush kept the pressure on by constantly turning up in the backyards of red-state Democrats. Between his inauguration and early April, Bush held campaign-style events in some 22 states—including Maine, where he hoped to light a fire under the state’s moderate Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. He ran ads on local radio stations and barraged voters with robo-calls. The Times accused him of “tactics reminiscent of President Bill Clinton's ‘permanent campaign.’” But when the Senate passed its budget resolution later that month—that is, the measure that instructs certain committees to write legislation that can’t be filibustered—it included an effective $1.2 trillion floor for his tax cut. That’s when Democrats really started dealing. A group of moderates—including Max Baucus, Bob Torricelli, Ben Nelson, and Breaux, he of the delicate sensibilities—began trekking to the White House to negotiate an even higher amount. Bush, in his infinite generosity, said he knew he’d have to compromise between the $1.2 trillion figure, which massively exceeded every Democrat’s upper limit only a few months

earlier, and his preferred $1.6 trillion price tag. In the end, Baucus hashed out a deal with his GOP counterpart on the Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley, and Bush settled for a $1.35 trillion package whose benefits skewed heavily toward the wealthy. Even Democrats from such conservative strongholds as California (Dianne Feinstein) and Wisconsin (Herb Kohl) eventually got on board. The reason all this worked is that, by casting his lot with reconciliation and ginning up support in the provinces, Bush made his tax cut seem inevitable. And once Democrats assumed they couldn’t stop it, many decided to take any deal they could get (however skimpy). By contrast, had Bush renounced reconciliation and tried to pass his bill in truly bipartisan fashion, Democrats would have had no incentive to engage. They would have known they could stuff him with a mere 40 votes. The point is that when senators’ policy preferences collide with their political interests, they tend to vote the latter. The way to fix that isn’t to appeal to their conscience or their inner wonk, or even their appetite for pork. It’s to change their political calculus. By making passage inevitable, reconciliation stripped a prospective no-vote of its major political benefit (denying Bush a victory). And when Bush campaigned for the tax cuts in

Democratic states, it created an affirmative reason to support them. To be sure, the analogy to Obama and health care isn’t perfect. The White House probably couldn’t have used reconciliation from the get-go because only legislation with budget implications is officially eligible. That means Democrats may not have been able to pass their comprehensive bill this way, just health-care related subsidies and tax increases. But, in a way, Rahm’s approach was the next best thing. The Senate Democrat quoted in The Hill complained that Rahm miscalculated by focusing narrowly on Snowe and Collins, the Senate’s most liberal Republicans. But that was exactly the right idea. By securing an additional Republican or two, the Democrats would have made health care look inevitable, which would have eliminated the chief political benefit to opposing it (i.e., roughing up Obama). If the White House made a mistake, it was by not pressuring senators in their home states, a la Bush. The inside game was right. It just wasn’t sufficient. The upshot is that liberal use of reconciliation and other ostensible crimes against Senate protocol may be the Democrats’ NICE page 41

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brutal killing of people in the streets in response to their peaceful demands for their rights demonstrate well the existence of roots of dictatorship and autocracy dating from the monarchical regime." He went a step further to add that“dictatorship, in the name of religion, is the worst kind,” and hinted at his openness to constitutional revision:“The Green Movement will by no means give up its peaceful and ethical methods in its struggle for regaining the rights of the nation. I've said and I say it again: the constitution is not a divine law and it should be open to changes.” February 10, 2010, 3:36 pm. Iranian state radio and television on Wednesday broadcast footage of Iran' s Expediency Council chief Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani calling for nationwide participation in Thursday's 22 Bahman rally. “This year is more sensitive than the previous days. The responsible forces and those who are responsible for the security of the rallies as well as people who participate in the rallies should all be careful so that we have a show of unity in our values at least,” he said. Enduring America’s Scott Lucas, citing prominent reformist website Rahesabz, reports leaked details of a meeting on Monday between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former president Rafsanjani. According to EA,

Rafsanjani urged Khamenei to release political prisoners, including Alireza Beheshti, a top Mousavi aide detained on December 28. Lucas writes that this “intervention” by Rafsanjani --who heads the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body which in theory can dismiss the supreme leader--“may also be an attempt by Rafsanjani to say to the protestors: go out on 22 Bahman.” February 10, 2010 3:16 pm. Opposition cleric Mehdi Karroubi announced in a statement Wednesday that he will attend tomorrow's rallies, reports Saham News, the official site of Karroubi's National Trust Party. Karroubi called for demonstrators to join him on Thursday to march “calmly and strongly and in silence, just as before, for their lawful and rightful demands,” Saham news reports, citing an official statement from the cleric's office. Karroubi will start marching at 10am (Tehran time) from the Second Sadeghiyeh Square in west Tehran towards Azadi (Freedom) Square, according to the report. On January 31, Karroubi and Mousavi jointly called for a large turnout in the 22 Bahman rallies in a video report on Saham News, in defiance of warnings from state security figures that any acts of dissent “ will be pushed aside.” “Enemies will have no

opportunity for maneuvering and presenting themselves," Police Chief Esmail Ahmadi Moqaddam told the semi-official Fars news agency Wednesday. February 10, 2010, 2:12 pm. The PBS Frontline Web site Tehran Bureau reports that Iranian security forces are implementing a “complex logistical scheme” to block off all possible access routes to the capital’s landmark Azadi (Freedom) square in central Tehran where annual state rallies commemorating the revolution are always held: "The two sides of Azadi Square from North and East (where the protesters always emerge) will be blocked for several kilometers in each direction. Those on these two sides will be diverted away from the eyes of the international press confined to designated areas within the square. At the same time, supporters will be marshaled en masse from the West and South ends of the square … the plan is to fill the space with die-hard supporters while checking the bags and pockets of the others wanting to gain entry to the protected zone to make sure they don't carry any Green paraphernalia." February 10, 2010, 2:02 pm. Iranian authorities have during the last ten or so days intensified a campaign of sweeping arrests that first began on the back of violent anti-government Ashura protests on December 27. Activists and analysts both

inside and outside the country say the widespread arrest of opposition activists, students, and journalists in major cities across Iran is part an effort to silence political dissent and preempt any efforts by the opposition to organize protests during government-backed demonstrations marking the Islamic Republic's “22 Bahman” (February 11) revolution anniversary. "Almost all the people that were sending news to me have been arrested and the ones that haven't have gone off the radar,” says Mohammad Sadeghi, a student who manages opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi's official Facebook page and heads an Iran -based group of online activists called “Green Revolution” from his home in Germany. “It's been more than a week where almost no one is answering their phones. A few have disappeared and may be in hiding,” he says. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said on Tuesday that the level of journalist and “netizen” arrests in the Iranian capital and provincesestimated at more than 65has been “without precedent.” A number of activists outside Iran said they fear the recent wave of arrests will make it much more difficult to access news and sources from inside Iran for tomorrow's protests. Some news sources in Mahshad, Tabriz, and Ahwaz have also been arrested, says Sadeghi. Internet service in Tehran on

Wednesday has been working “on and off” throughout the day, while gmail access is blocked and can't even be accessed through a proxy server, according to sources in Tehran. “It's been a week that Flash videos have not been working. Usually [the Iranian authorities] get ready 24 hours in advance [of demonstrations], but this time they started preparing one week in advance. The blocking has become more sophisticated,” said one source reached by telephone who works in northcentral Tehran. Tara Mahtafar is the Washington correspondent for PBS “Frontline: Tehran Bureau” and a contributor to The Century Foundation’s Inside Iran program. Roshanak Taghavi is an IranianAmerican journalist who recently returned from Iran, where she reported for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. February 11, 2010 9:08 am Security has been tight, with Rooz staff in Tehran reporting that since early Wednesday morning, black armored cars belonging to the Revolutionary Guards, the country's elite security force, were seen circling the main streets of the capital. It is rumored that "plainclothes LIVE-BLOGGING page 40

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Childhood Shmobesity by Paul Campos (The New Republic - All Feed)

dangerously fat, while launching a website which makes the alarming claim that, “for the first Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:00:00 PM time in our history, American Message from fivefilters.org: If children may face a shorter you can, please donate to the full expected lifespan than their -text RSS service so we can p a r e n t s . ” T h e g o a l o f t h e continue developing it. campaign, Mrs. Obama The Obamas are worried about emphasized, is to “eliminate this their daughters getting fat. In problem of childhood obesity in November 2008, Barack got a a generation.” promotion and mentioned to the All this is dangerous nonsense. media that, a couple years Let’s start with the Obamas’ goal earlier, he was concerned that of trying to produce an America Malia had become “a little with no fat kids. Consider what chubby.” A later visit to a we even determine to be “fat.” In pediatrician convinced Michelle recent years, government panels t h a t b o t h M a l i a a n d h e r decided to define “overweight” sister Sasha needed to slim and “obesity” as the 85th and down. 95th percentiles of body mass on She banned the girls from the height-weight growth charts w a t c h i n g t e l e v i s i o n o n for children. According to weekdays, put them on low-fat someone heavily involved in the milk, replaced sugary drinks process, they did this quite with water, largely eliminated a r b i t r a r i l y , w i t h o u t a n y hamburgers from their diet, and evidentiary justification, other monitored portion sizes at meals t h a n a v a g u e s e n s e t h a t carefully. The next time she took i n c r e a s i n g w e i g h t a m o n g them to the doctor, she reports, children was a problem that he was amazed. “What on Earth required some definitional are you doing?” he asked. markers. It’s a good question. Now, the statistically curious What Michelle Obama is doing might wonder how, given this this week is launching the next definition, it’s possible for onebig government “war” on a third of America’s children to be supposed social crisis. On too fat. The answer is that federal Tuesday, President Obama public health agencies have s i g n e d a n e x e c u t i v e o r d e r decided to use data from the directing government agencies to 1960s and 1970s to define the work with private industry to 85th and 95th percentiles. In combat “childhood obesity.” The other words, when Michelle First Lady took to the airwaves, Obama claims a third of our issuing dire warnings that one children are too fat, what she’s third of America’s children are really saying is that what was the

85th percentile on the heightweight charts 40 years ago is about the 67th percentile today. Is this a problem? Some might note that, by every objective measure, including life expectancy, and rates of chronic disease and disability, American children, like American adults, are both bigger and healthier now than they were a generation ago. (Despite claims to the contrary, Type II diabetes among children remains quite rare.) Obesity panic-mongers reply that, although the health of our children is admittedly better than ever, this trend is going to be reversed by a growing epidemic of fatness (hence claims about a generation of children that will not live as long as their parents). In fact, a new comprehensive meta-analysis of data from more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., reveals that, for a decade now, obesity rates all over the world among both adults and children have been largely flat or actually declining. The study points out that alarmist claims from public health officials about an “obesity epidemic” are all explicitly based on the mistaken assumption that obesity rates are continuing to rise. In particular, the claim that life expectancy in America is going to decline is unsupported by any demographic or epidemiological evidence. (This widely repeated claim can be traced to some datafree musings in a New England

Journal of Medicine article five years ago, from which the authors subsequently backed away.) The choice of weaponry in this unnecessary war is also unfortunate. The Obamas want to improve the nutritional value of school meals, help children become more active by making urban areas amenable to physical activity, improve labeling on food products, and decrease the number of “food deserts”–areas where it’s difficult and expensive for people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. These are all laudable goals in and of themselves, but it’s a terrible mistake to pursue them in the name of getting rid of fat kids. First, numerous studies indicate that, just as with adults, improving children’s nutrition and activity levels is beneficial to their health, but usually produces little or no weight loss (which is all the more reason to focus on health rather than weight). Nor are thin children in any less need of good food and healthy activities than fat ones. Indeed, over the past 20 years, extensive research has demonstrated that, when studies control for factors such as physical activity levels, weight simply ceases to have any meaningful correlation with health. Second, a rich literature on stigmatization shows that the health costs of social stigma are high. I don’t believe Michelle Obama wants to stigmatize fat

kids, but a campaign dedicated to eliminating them is guaranteed to do so in a profound way. On that same theme, one wonders if the First Lady has considered that putting her preteen daughters on diets is far more likely to make them eating disordered rather than permanently thin. (If the kind of obsessive monitoring of food and activity choices Obama recommends to parents actually “worked,” there would be almost no fat kids in America today, at least in the middle and upper class families where Obama’s anxieties about her daughters’ weight are all too common). And does she really think it’s a good idea for her husband to make negative comments about his daughter’s body to the nation’s media? Everyone should support reasonable attempts to make it easier for all children to enjoy a healthy balance of foods and the pleasures and benefits of physical activity. Trying to do so by stigmatizing the bodies of one out of every three American kids is a horrible idea. Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He is the author of The Obesity Myth. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Five Filters featured article: CHILDHOOD page 40

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Color Revolution? by E.J. Dionne Jr. (The New Republic - All Feed) Submitted at 2/10/2010 8:50:00 PM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. WASHINGTON -- So what exactly is the Tea Party movement and why has it risen up? The ferocity of its opposition to President Obama is mystifying to political progressives. Most of the left simply doesn't see the current occupant of the White House as especially liberal, let alone "socialist." Obama, after all, is the man who saved the banks and the capital markets. Now the bankers are secure and most of them are still rich. His health care proposals stopped far short of the singlepayer system that so many liberals have long sought, and his plan is the kind of thing moderate Republicans offered back when they were a significant force. Obama put absolutely no political muscle behind the progressives' backup idea, a public option that could have served as a beachhead for a single-payer system.

The president is also decidedly moderate on budget questions. His stimulus plan was, if anything, too small. And Obama endorsed a bipartisan commission to reach a deal on deficit reduction, an idea that originated with centrist Democrats and moderately conservative Republicans -- and that most liberals opposed. Why has this middle-of-the-road leader inspired such enthusiastic counter-organizing, and called forth such venom? The most popular theory on the left is that Obama's race is a big part of the story, and that we are seeing a reaction among some whites against the multiracial, multicultural political coalition he has brought together. The phrase "losing our country" is often on the lips of his enemies, which raises the question of who they mean by the word our. At last week's Tea Party Convention, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, famed for his attacks on illegal immigration, gave backers of the racial explanation all the ammunition they needed. In an astonishingly offensive speech, cheered by the Tea Party crowd, Tancredo declared that "people who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in

English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama." Even worse, if that's possible, Tancredo harkened back to the Jim Crow South that denied the right to vote to AfricanAmericans on the basis of "literacy tests" that called for potential black registrants to answer questions that would have stumped Ph.D.s in political science. The reason we elected "Barack Hussein Obama," according to Tancredo, is "mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country." Where is the party of Abraham Lincoln? The GOP's leaders have been shockingly silent, but Meghan McCain, John McCain's daughter, honorably stepped up to condemn Tancredo. On ABC's "The View," she said the call for literacy tests amounted to "innate racism." So, yes, parts of this movement do seem to be motivated by a new nativism, and by racism. But it would be a mistake to see the hostility to Obama only in terms of race. Something else is going on in the Tea Party movement, and it

has deep roots in our history. Anti-statism, a profound mistrust of power in Washington, goes all the way back to the AntiFederalists who opposed the Constitution itself because they saw it concentrating too much authority in the central government. At any given time, perhaps 20 percent to 25 percent of Americans can be counted on to denounce anything Washington does as a threat to "our traditional liberties." This suspicion of government is not amenable to "facts" -- not because it is irrational, but because the facts are beside the point. For the anti-statists, opposing government power is a matter of principle. If those who think this way are asked whether an economic collapse would have been better than passing a stimulus and bailing out the banks, the antistatists typically say "yes," even if they might also challenge the premise of the question. The purest expression of this disposition has come from Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican from Texas. In 2008, Paul strenuously criticized President Bush's proposed bank bailout for "propping up a failed system so the agony lasts

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longer." Without a bailout, Paul conceded, "It would be a bad year. But, this way, it's going to be a bad decade." Understanding the principled anti-government radicalism that animates this movement explains why its partisans see the conservative Bush as a sellout and the cautiously liberal Obama as a socialist. For now, their fears of Obama are enough to tether the Tea Partiers to the GOP. In the long run, establishment Republicans are destined to disappoint them. E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. (c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Jonathan Kay: The Tea Party Movement Is Full of Conspiracy Theories (Little Green Footballs)

finding new enemies. … I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as The National Post’s Jonathan a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, Kay is not a liberal. He attended not one of the bemused New the Tea Party Convention in York Times types with a media Nashville, Tennessee, and filed pass. But I also happen to be this report for Newsweek: Tea writing a book for HarperCollins Party Movement Is Full of that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy Conspiracy Theories. theories, so I have a pretty good (I know. I’ve only been trying to idea where the various screws point this out for the past year.) and nuts can be found in the After I spent the weekend at the great toolbox of American Tea Party National Convention political life. in Nashville, Tenn., it has Within a few hours in Nashville, become clear to me that the I could tell that what I was movement is dominated by hearing wasn’t just random people whose vision of the rhetorical mortar fire being government is conspiratorial and launched at Obama and his dangerously detached from political allies: the salvos reality. It’s more John Birch than followed the established script of John Adams. … New World Order conspiracy O n e o f t h e m o s t b i z a r r e theories, which have suffused the moments of the recent tea-party dubious right-wing fringes of convention came when blogger American politics since the days Andrew Breitbart delivered a of the John Birch Society. particularly vicious fulmination This world view’s modern-day against the mainstream media, prophets include Texas radio prompting everyone to get up, h o s t A l e x J o n e s , w h o s e turn toward the media section at d o c u m e n t a r y , T h e O b a m a the back of the conference room, Deception, claims Obama’s a n d s c r e a m , “ U S A ! U S A ! candidacy was a plot by the USA!” But the tea partiers’ well- leaders of the New World Order documented obsession with to “con the American people into President Obama has hardly been a c c e p t i n g g l o b a l s l a v e r y ” ; diffused by their knack for C h r i s t i a n e v a n g e l i s t P a t Submitted at 2/10/2010 6:27:26 PM

Robertson; and the rightward strain of the aforementioned “9/11 Truth” movement. According to this dark vision, America’s 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, oneworld socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan. Sure enough, in Nashville, Judge Roy Moore warned, among other things, of “a U.N. guard stationed in every house.” On the conference floor, it was taken for granted that Obama was seeking to destroy America’s place in the world and sell Israel out to the Arabs for some undefined nefarious purpose. The names Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers popped up all the time, the idea being that they were the real brains behind this presidency, and Obama himself was simply some sort of manchurian candidate. … And then, of course, there is the double-whopper of all antiObama conspiracy theories, the “birther” claim that America’s

president might actually be an illegal alien who’s constitutionally ineligible to occupy the White House. This point was made by birther extraordinaire and Christian warrior Joseph Farah, who told the crowd the circumstances of Obama’s birth were more mysterious than those of Jesus Christ. (Apparently comparing Obama to a messiah is only blasphemous if you’re doing so in a complimentary vein.) To applause, he declared, “My dream is that if Barack Obama seeks reelection in 2012 that he won’t be able to go to any city, any city, any town in America without seeing signs that ask, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’” Many of the tea-party organizers I spoke with at this conference described the event as a critical step in their ascendancy to the status of mainstream political movement. Yet with rare exceptions, such as blogger Breitbart, who was reportedly overheard protesting Farah’s birther propaganda, none of them seems to realize how off-putting the toxic fantasies being spewed from the podium were. Read the whole thing…

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best hope going forward. Moderates will complain that they risk a voter backlash by looking thuggish and partisan. But, as Bush showed, these tactics aren’t just a way to enact an agenda that the opposition is bent on blocking. They’re the most effective way to achieve bipartisanship in the process. Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Blagojevich Pleads No to Corruption (Newsmax - Politics) Submitted at 2/11/2010 2:27:11 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. CHICAGO - Ousted Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich pleaded not guilty Wednesday to revised federal corruption charges and challenged prosecutors to allow jurors to hear all of the FBI's recordings of his telephone conversations. Sounding unusually combative after the brief hearing, Mr. Blagojevich told reporters he would not ask Judge James B. Zagel to prevent jurors from hearing FBI wiretaps in which prosecutors say he schemed to sell or trade President Obama's former Senate seat. "Let me cut right to the chase, today I'm laying down the gauntlet," Mr. Blagojevich said. "I'm not going to hide behind my lawyers, nor will I hide behind technicalities in the law to try to block these tapes from being heard." But he challenged the government to play all of the

roughly 500 hours of recordings. "I'm not just going to talk the talk, I'm going to walk the walk," he said. "Play the tapes, play all the tapes." His attorneys, in court papers filed Wednesday, wrote that a full airing of the recordings will establish Mr. Blagojevich's innocence. Judge Zagel will ultimately decide how much of the recordings can be presented at the trial, which is slated to start June 3. Mr. Blagojevich, in a book published last year, said he had hoped to appoint Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to the Senate seat as part of a deal with her father, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. The attorney general has said she knew nothing about such a plan, and Steve Brown, a spokesman for her father, after the book's release called Mr. Blagojevich "a very troubled and very confused person." Mr. Blagojevich also said that he would take the witness stand in his own defense at the trial. Randall Samborn, a spokesman

for the U.S. attorney's office, said he would have no comment about Mr. Blagojevich's remarks in the courthouse lobby. The actual hearing lasted only a few minutes. "We are going to waive reading of the indictment and enter a plea of innocent to each and every charge," Mr. Blagojevich told Judge Zagel. "The record will reflect that he pleaded not guilty," Judge Zagel said. Under the law, not guilty is the correct way to state the plea and innocent is incorrect. "You know why he entered a plea of innocent because he is innocent," defense attorney Samuel E. Adam told reporters afterward. "And the tapes will prove that." Judge Zagel gave the defense attorneys about a month to file any motions aimed at postponing the trial's scheduled June 3 start. He said he didn't see anything in the newly minted indictment that would cause such a delay. Mr. Blagojevich is charged with scheming with his aides and advisers in search of a way to get a lucrative job or cash in exchange for the Senate seat. He

also is charged with pressuring potential campaign contributors, such as a racetrack owner and a hospital executive, for hefty donations in exchange for favors. The newly revised indictment against Mr. Blagojevich is similar in most respects to the old one. It doesn't allege any misconduct on the impeached former governor's part that was not contained in the previous version. But prosecutors have been concerned about the previous indictment because many of the charges are based on a federal law that makes it illegal for public officials to deprive the taxpayers of their "intangible right to honest services." Critics say that the so-called honest services fraud law is vague. ÂŠ Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

iPhone 3.1.3 firmware unlock coming soon by John Biggs (CrunchGear) Submitted at 2/11/2010 5:30:26 AM

Been waiting to upgrade your iPhone? Can't because it's unlocked? Well, wait no longer. Sherif Hashim, an iPhone hacker, has discovered an exploit that seems to unlock the latest baseband. Not a lot of other information other than now the exploit is in the Dev Team's hands and they will, like some creaky Soviet politburo, release the unlock to the masses.

Dell Mini 5: we have it by Richard Lai (Engadget)

Mini 5(aka "Streak" or " M01M") prototype for a more inSubmitted at 2/11/2010 10:27:00 AM depth look. Got a question about That's right! After all those this mysterious beast? Drop us a quick and dirty appearances, line here and we'll try to answer we've finally got our own Dell a l l y o u r q u e r i e s i n o u r

forthcoming impressions post.

Gallery: Dell Mini 5 in-depth hands-on Dell Mini 5: we have it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for

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Governors Ask Congress to Be Fair to Toyota

Baptist Pastor Says He Prayed Murtha to Death

(Newsmax - Politics)

(Little Green Footballs)

Submitted at 2/10/2010 8:23:05 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Four governors of states with Toyota plants called Wednesday for Congress to be fair to the automaker in hearings concerning safety recalls. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Alabama Gov. Bob Riley asked in a letter Wednesday that Toyota get "a responsible and fair response from the federal government." "Toyota must put the safety of drivers first and foremost," Beshear said in a statement. "However, they deserve a level and reasonable response from the federal government — one that is not tainted by the federal government's financial interest in some of Toyota's competitors."

The governor was referring to money the federal government invested in Chrysler and General Motors last year. Toyota has recalled nearly 8.5 million vehicles around the globe since November for problems that include floor mats that can entangle the gas pedal and gas pedals that can stick, causing sudden acceleration. The recalls have drawn interest in Congress, where lawmakers are looking into how the company handled the recalls and whether the government properly investigated numerous complaints. The House Oversight Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee are planning hearings, as is the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. In the letter, the governors said that Toyota employs more than 172,000 Americans in plants and dealerships across the nation and

said the company's continued success is in the national interest. "Besides the obvious goodpaying jobs provided in our states, Toyota demonstrates a commendable positive spirit not only with its own employees, but also in the communities and neighborhoods within which its plants operate," the governors said. They also criticized what they called "aggressive and questionable" news coverage "when the real story is how quickly Toyota identified the problems, found solutions and delivered those solutions to its dealers worldwide." © Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

“It’s not distasteful to pray the word of God and include somebody’s name,” he said. “I Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley didn’t celebrate his death. I said Drake, last seen at LGF when he maybe it was God’s answer to gained notoriety by praying for our imprecatory prayer.” Barack Obama to die, is now Drake regularly asks his “prayer taking credit for praying Rep. warriors” to participate in prayer John Murtha to death. targeting “unrighteous” Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley politicians. He typically uses Drake of Buena Park sent out an Psalms 109, including these email Monday night, saying that p a s s a g e s i n c l u d i n g i n h i s perhaps his prayers had been Monday email: “Let his days be answered with the death of Rep. few; and let another take his John Murtha yesterday. office.” And, “Let his children be “Maybe God took him out,” fatherless, and his wife a Drake wrote. “Maybe God widow.” Answered our IMPRECATORY At one point, Drake prayed for prayer that we prayed every 30 the death of President Barack days.” … Obama. However, he dropped I asked Drake if his statements that because he wants to see weren’t distasteful, particularly Obama faces charges that he is c o m i n g i m m e d i a t e l y a f t e r not a natural-born citizen and so Murtha’s death. He said that as a cannot be president. Drake has Christian, he didn’t buy into the such a lawsuit on appeal. sentiment of not speaking ill of (Hat tip: simoom.) the dead. Submitted at 2/10/2010 11:45:26 AM

Majority Says Obama Sincere on Bi-Partisanship (Newsmax - Politics) Submitted at 2/11/2010 2:12:49 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. UTICA, NY - Over half of likely voters agree that President

Barack Obama is sincere about working with both parties to find solutions to the nation's problems. They also rated Obama higher in that regard than George W. Bush, but not as well as Bill Clinton. The interactive survey of 2,618 likely voters also found

respondents split at 49%-49% on whether Congress should finish the process and pass a healthcare reform bill. The survey was conducted from Feb. 3-5, and has a margin of error of +/2.0%. The question about Obama and bi-partisanship was asked on a

four-point scale of agreement and disagreement. While the cumulative results for agreement and disagreement were not far apart, the survey found most voters agreeing or disagreeing strongly with the statement that Obama is being sincere. This was found with independent

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Pamela Geller: The Muslim Brotherhood Controls Every Agency of the US Government

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Daily electronics deals by Nicholas Kolman-Mandle (Consumer Reports)

HD for $179.99 w/ coupon 5ZRSN4V2?0PW4T w/ Free shipping Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:36:44 AM • GoGamer: GoGamer 48hr (Little Green Footballs) Islam has achieved absolute Daily electronics deals Madness Sale (Batman Arkham intellectual dominance. The Submitted at 2/10/2010 2:57:59 PM Today's electronics deals, Asylum $34.90, Bioshock 2 Muslim Brotherhood groups in courtesy of the Consumerist: $49.90) Today’s unbridled paranoia the United States control the • Dell Business: Save $379 • Newegg: Street Fighter IV from Pamela Geller at Andrew n a r r a t i v e . T h e y c o n t r o l instantly: Vostro 1520 Core 2 Madcatz Bundle PC Game & Breitbart’s “Big Government:” information and how it is Duo 15.4-inch Widescreen Fightstick $34.99 Free Shipping the US government is totally processed at senior levels of the Notebook PC $579 with Coupon c o n t r o l l e d b y t h e M u s l i m CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and • Lenovo: Lenovo G560 15.6- Related: TV Ratings and buying B r o t h e r h o o d . G o o d g r i e f . the various branches of the inch Intel Core i3 Laptop $699 + tips; Computer Ratings and Did you know in the FBI’s military. free shipping buying tips; Video game console Counter-Terrorism Manual, the The Muslim Brotherhood is • Best Buy: Lenovo S10-3t buying tips and video: "Choosing word jihad is not to be found? v e r y r e a l , a n d a l l t h e (Touchscreen) Intel Atom N450 a v i d e o g a m e s y s t e m " ; Not once. organizations Geller lists do have Pine Trail 10.1in Netbooks Headphone Ratings and buying This is no accident. This is checkered pasts and questionable $449.99 tips; Monitor Ratings and buying happening because for decades associations with radical groups. • Amazon: Panasonic VIERA tips. the Muslim Brotherhood (i.e., I’ve documented plenty of those TC-L32S1 32-inch 1080p LCD Neither Consumer Reports nor the Muslim American Society, associations at LGF. HDTV $379.99 + free shipping T h e C o n s u m e r i s t r e c e i v e the Council on American-Islamic But to suggest that the entire • SuperBiiz.com: Sennheiser RS a n y t h i n g i n e x c h a n g e f o r Relations, the Islamic Society of government of the United States 120 On Hook Charging Wireless featuring these deals; the posts North America, the Islamic is doing the bidding of the H e a d p h o n e s $ 6 2 . 9 9 F r e e a r e i n t e n d e d t o b e p u r e l y Circle of North America, etc.), Muslim Brotherhood is … uh … S h i p p i n g informational. These deals are has infiltrated every agency and not to put too fine a point on it, • Dell: Samsung 2494SW 24" often fleeting, with prices institution at the highest levels, bug-eyed staring loony. WS LCD Display 1080p Full changing or products becoming and they control what is said and how it can be said.

unavailable as the day progresses. These posts are not an endorsement of the featured products or the Web sites that sell them—though some of the sites may be included, and recommended, in our Ratings of retailers for computers and other major electronics(both available to subscribers). Price shouldn't be your only criterion. Be wary of lower-priced deals that seem too good to be true, and check return policies for restocking fees and other gotchas. For general buying advice for many of the products on sale above, check out our free Buying Guides. Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

Q&A: How long do I need to brush my teeth? by rss@consumerreports.org (Consumer Reports)

studies have not determined the minimum brushing time needed for that benefit. In theory, Submitted at 2/11/2010 2:59:59 AM brushing for at least two minutes Q&A: How long do I need to twice a day should lead to brush my teeth? sufficient fluoride absorption. How many minutes do I need to And most people need at least brush my teeth to get the full that long to adequately remove fluoride benefit? — F.P., Morse, plaque, which contributes to Texas gum disease and tooth decay. damage the teeth, gums, and any Fluoride toothpastes clearly But don’t exceed three minutes: exposed root surfaces. reduce the risk of cavities, but E x c e s s i v e b r u s h i n g c o u l d For more on dental health, see

our tips for cleaner teeth and our new report and Ratings on electric toothbrushes(subscribers only). Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

Weekend Project: Insulate hot-water pipes to cut down on heat loss by Consumer Reports Shopping Blog (Consumer Reports) Weekend Project:page Insulate WEEKEND 45 hot-

Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:00:59 PM

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WEEKEND continued from page 44

water pipes to cut down on heat loss The pipes that snake out from a hot-water or steam boiler and from a water heater radiate heat much like a conventional radiator or baseboard. You might welcome that heat if you spend a lot of time in the same unheated space as your boiler or water heater. But if you'd rather decrease the heat loss from those pipes (not to mention prevent any burn risk from them), follow the four easy steps in this latest Weekend Project(photos for all four steps are below) adapted from our Complete Guide to Reducing Energy Costs($19.45, including shipping). Insulated hot-water pipes can reduce heat loss and keep the water in them 2째 to 4째F higher than uninsulated pipes, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. And your water heater will not have to flush and reheat the pipes each time you run hot

water to the same area of your home during peak-usage periods. The only tools you need are a measuring tape, a pair of scissors, and a sharp retractableblade utility knife. A very important point: Check your owner's manual or on the boiler or water heater itself for the required clearance from the appliance and its flue. Certain foams could emit toxic gases if they burn. Also find out which type of insulation and tape/wire/clamp to use. The installation here shows foam insulation, but for a gasfired boiler or water heater, use unfaced fiberglass pipe wrap, held in place with either foil tape or wire. Finally, measure the diameter. Plumbing pipe is measured by its internal diameter (3/4 inch is common), but the actual outside diameter will be larger, depending on the material. The outside diameter of 3/4-inch

black iron pipe is more than 1 inch, for example. 1. Attach the first sleeve. Using the scissors, cut a 45-degree angle on one end of a length of insulation, then slip the sleeve over a section of pipe so that the angled miter cut ends up against the first turn in the pipe. At the other end, cut the sleeve to length with the utility knife. 2. Add the second section. Cut a 45-degree angle in the sleeve and fit it against the 45-degree angle already in place. 3. Continue cutting and fitting. Once you've made the first few turns, the run of pipe will likely be straight. Cover the pipes up to the point they go through the wall or ceiling and are no longer accessible. Every few feet you might want to secure the insulation to the pipe using acrylic tape, wire, or a cable tie. 4. Seal the seams. Flexible-foam sleeves like the one shown often have adhesive on the edge of the

slit so that you can seal them. Remove the protective strip on each side, then push the sides together. Essential information: Learn how to prevent frozen pipes at your home and use our advice to save on your utility bills. If you're in the market for a new boiler or water heater, find out whether that equipment is eligible in your state for a rebate as part of the$300 million cash for clunkers for appliances program. Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

Alec Baldwin Taken to and Released from Hospital Overnight (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 2/11/2010 5:33:00 AM

Alec Baldwin was taken to the hospital Wednesday night and released soon after. A rep for the actor told ET, "This was a misunderstanding on one person's part. Alec was quickly released from the hospital. He's completely fine and will be at work today." Reports allege that Baldwin's daughter Ireland called 911 after finding her father irresponsive. He agreed to go to the hospital upon the medic's arrival. After examination at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, doctors determined that he was able to return home.

Initial and Photocopy Receipts Before They Fade [Paperwork] by Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:00:00 AM

A good number of receipts are printed on thermal paper these days. Look at them after a few weeks in your wallet or other warm spots, and they're unreadable. A Consumerist comment thread picks up a few ideas on keeping them useful.

Photo by receipt on Flickr Photo Sharing!. You can't do all that much to prevent the wearing away of loose ink on cheap paper, but you can ensure that you get the tax credit, expense reimbursement, or item return you want by locking in their verification. One way of doing that is initialing the receipt with

a permanent marker before it fades and photocopying it, so the

photocopy carries a bit of authenticity. Other ideas brought up at The Consumerist blog: Scan a month's worth, zip the file, and email it to yourself. Also, burn a copy each month and store it with your receipts. ... "Photocopy, and staple both the original and copy to the inside cover of the manual. If the original still fades, you have the

copy right there. Meticulous, as-they-come-in scanning is always a smart move. If you know of another receiptsaving means or magic, tell us in the comments. How To Protect Your Receipts[The Consumerist]

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Sites disclose neighbors' purchases or Vampires Take a Bite let you brag about yours out of 'Private Practice' by Consumer Reports Shopping Blog (Consumer Reports) Submitted at 2/11/2010 3:59:59 AM

Sites disclose neighbors' purchases or let you brag about yours In going about everyday business, we’ve been running into a number of new enterprises that seem interested in our collective spending habits. It’s not exactly clear where they’re headed, and one of the sites readily admits they’re not even sure themselves. But the experiments appear interesting. One site that apparently has already been amassing purchasing data and making lots of cross-cuts into it is bundle.com. Input your

demographic data—zip code, income, age—and you can see if you’re spending more or less in restaurants than your neighbors. Or your older neighbors. Or your richer neighbors. You get the idea. The site is currently in beta, and promises to have savings data sometime in the future. And if you’re willing to risk the possibility of oversharing, there’s blippy.com. When you

disclose (securely, the site emphasizes) the accounts you have with Web sites like iTunes, Zappos and Woot!, blippy.com automatically tracks your purchases on those sites. For real exhibitionists, there’s the option of automatically tweeting your transaction via your twitter account. The site allows the user to hide purchases too, if, in retrospect, you decide the world is better off not knowing about the HDMI cabling you bought from Amazon.—Chris Horymski Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

(ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 2/11/2010 3:40:00 AM

Vampire mania hits "Private Practice" tonight when Pete ( Tim Daly) and Cooper ( Paul Adelstein) treat a teenage girl with a mysterious bite mark on her neck. But first, ET talks to Tim to find out if it really is 'Twilight' time at Ocean Wellness Clinic. ET: From the storyline, it sounds as if there is some kind of

vampire cult in Santa Monica in the next episode. What can you tell us about that? Tim Daly: It is not a cult. It is these teenage kids who become obsessed with the whole vampire craze and wind up doing vampire things. They don't need stakes driven through their hearts, or they don't need to be shot with silver bullets, but they are kind of re-enacting stuff from the 'Twilight' movies.

BarTap Keeps Tabs in Limbo to Conserve System Resources [Downloads] by Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker)

BarTap is a Firefox extension that keeps unfocused tabs from sponging up system resources. Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:30:00 AM When BarTap is active you can Firefox: If you've ever started up specify that new tabs and Firefox after a system crash and restored tabs will not be loaded had it attempt to restore all the until they are actually clicked on, eleventy-billion tabs you had turning the tabs into placeholders open, you know what a resource for the pages you will be viewing them. You can specify one action drain your tabs really are. and minimizing the amount of for restored tabs and one for BarTap helps alleviate the stress. system resources devoted to

freshly opened tabs if you prefer that newly opened tabs always load immediately. Tabs that are on your "tap" are grayed out until you click on them. Clicking on them causes the content to load at the time you access them (as oppose to the time they were created). BarTap is a clever way to have a lot of tabs open without them

bloating up your memory use. BarTap is free and works wherever Firefox does. Have a favorite extension for enhancing tabbed browsing? Let's hear about it in the comments. BarTap[via Download Squad]

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Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph by Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

people are following in common on Twitter. Tell those services who you are and they'll expose Submitted at 2/10/2010 7:16:11 PM the people from that list that you George Stephanopoulos. Wolf aren't yet following yourself. Blitzer. Ana Marie Cox. Three Services like this stand in an powerful people that you might interesting place online: they want to get in touch with, aren't too hard to build and they especially if you're in D.C. One delivery huge value to their man who has the ear of all three users, but so far they have had a of those powerful people is Tony hard time getting people to try Fratto, known as @TonyFratto them out. on Twitter. Managing Director Using social network data is at Hamilton Place Strategies, the easiest with Twitter today, founder of RooseveltRoom.net, a because of its more open nature, CNBC Contributor and a former but this kind of work is being US Treasury & White House done on top of Facebook as well. official, Mr. Fratto is the least (See this week's article The Man well-known (in Twitter terms) of Who Looked Into Facebook's the mere 41 people that all three Soul for example.) When it of our sought-after stars have comes to using people to find opted-in to following on Twitter. people, it's almost literally a 2.0 He could be the diamond in the version of what some of the rough, the guy you want to biggest companies in Web 1.0 know. He's probably got some did. important things to say, too. Adam Lindemman, CEO of a These days, it's all about who synaptic web company called you don't know. That's the theory Imindi that burned up trying to b e h i n d a g r o u p o f v e r y enter the earth's atmosphere last interesting software projects y e a r a n d h a s s i n c e b e e n being built on top of the giant mothballed, put it very well: g r a p h o f f r i e n d / f o l l o w e r "This is essentially collaborative connection data that Twitter f i l t e r i n g used in exposes about its users. These recommendation, for people as tools unearth potential connected the object rather than Books, influencers like Tony Fratto. CDs or Movies (Amazon) or Sponsor search results (Page Rank). In Using People to Find People other words we are seeing the Name 3 people whom you emergence of something like the admire, despise, work with or kinds of tools that helped us otherwise pay attention to and navigate the information and etools like HiveMind, Follower commerce glut in Web 1.0 and Wonk and Twiangulate will using them to help us manage the quickly calculate who all those main glut of Web 2.0 - which is

the abundance of people and the need to literally mine that noise for signal." We spoke with the creators of those three services in particular (Twiangulate, HiveMind and Follower Wonk) to find out what they're thinking as they build and promote social graph analysis tools on top of Twitter. The Fabulous Uses of Friend Network Analysis Henry Copeland, the creator of 8 -year old blog ad network BlogAds, is building Twiangulate on the side, late at night. Copeland is the one who told us about Tony Fratto, based on the Twiangulate map of common connections among those three media stars. He also points to a map his service created of the most inter-connected, yet otherwise obscure, friends of actress Demi Moore. That's kind of creepy. A more benevolent use case? Say you're a reporter covering New York city schools. Who might be a good source to contact? Here's what Copeland recommends: Look at Mayor

Michael Bloomberg's list of followers on Twitter. See which ones look like education-related organizations. Use Twiangulate to see who both that organization and the Mayor are following. Look for an education-related organization on that list and add it to your comparison. Repeat, until you've replaced the Mayor and are just looking at a list of who is being followed by 3 of the most-connected education organizations in the city. There's a good list of people to be in contact with. That's pretty hot stuff. Freaky Geeky Stuff Why are services like this not taking off like wildfire yet? "Right now we're each building a fascinating tool, but we haven't quite shaped the handle right so it fits in the user's hand," Copeland says of the three companies we looked at doing similar kinds of work. "Then, what exactly does the customer look like? In many cases the right user doesn't yet exist. There is not yet 10k people designated as blahblahblow specialists at companies across America. There are geeks and aficionados and crazy people with visions of something that might be palm trees on the horizon... or might be a mirage. "People need to develop habits of thinking about this stuff. They need someone to explain it to them. They need to develop an easy-to-use vocabulary set for understanding it and

communicating about it. Right now 'social network analysis' just doesn't trip off the average person's tongue." It may not roll of the average person's tongue, but there's clearly some very serious interest in it. Kevin Marshall is the creator of a bundle of social graph analysis tools called Wow.ly, including one much like Twiangulate, called HiveMind or Grou.pe. HiveMind will show you who you aren't following that a group of selected Twitter users are - and it will email you when that list changes. "I have a couple of friends that are in the VC business around New York city," Marshall told us. "They wanted make sure that they knew about any new deals and companies at least as fast as their competitors. So this is all just one tool to help with that sort of thing...without having to constantly check who their competitors are following manually. "It actually feels a little like an invasion of privacy when you start getting the alerts though, because you get to see when people you are interested in start or stop following other people. But from a 'business' point of view, I think it's really powerful." The Low Hanging Fruit No potential privacy violation MEET page 49

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Open Thread: The Internet Is Hard by Jolie O'Dell (ReadWriteWeb)

employ the term "user" here to indicate the non-geeky, average person who uses the Web Submitted at 2/10/2010 11:09:27 PM primarily as a way to navigate Earlier today, we had a runaway his or her real life. Feel free to hit of a post that went viral disagree with this terminology or within a few hours, getting suggest new nomenclature in the unbelievable pageviews and comments. h u n d r e d s o f r e t w e e t s a n d 1. Users don't care about what comments. you care about. The trouble was, it wasn't This quote from another RWW because of the post's content. post pretty much sums it up: Due to some interesting SEO "Especially in Silicon Valley, magic, the post was one of the where it's easy for entrepreneurs first search results for the term to isolate themselves in circles "Facebook login." As a result, with like-minded techies and hundreds of confused readers fellow entrepreneurs, I feel that a bombed us with angry comments huge amount of startup CEOs about how much they hated the and designers... make product "new Facebook," a.k.a. our decisions that appeal to their own Facebook Connect comment interaction behaviour with such login. We could laugh (and we applications or what they think did), but we could also consider their friends will find cool. that these are our customers and "Building for geeks makes for users - the people we make the great customer immersion if Web for. you're building something like How can we balance making the (the wonderfully useful) GitHub, Web simple enough for all users but that same process doesn't while still creating tech cool work so hot if you're building a enough to satisfy geeks like us? site for middle-aged moms." And who says either group - You and your geek friends != nerds or users - is "normal," middle aged moms. And your anyway? users are often statistically more Sponsor likely to be middle-aged moms. Here are some valuable lessons 2. Users don't read your copy or we were taught today by the look at your branding. commenters on the thread. We'll Banners, logos, carefully crafted

commenters scrolled down far enough to find the Facebook Connect button for logging into the comments section - as evinced by the fact that their Facebook profiles were then linked to their comments. I've often criticized the rippedoff look of social media UIs, but once a UI becomes familiar, is it wordsmithery - this is all filler, not a service to certain types of we've found out. Users have end users to continue in that been calloused by 15 or so years v e i n ? T w o h a c k n e y e d of surfing through bad ads and expressions will back me up, one marketing babble, and they are about reinventing wheels and the u n c o n s c i o u s l y t u n i n g o u t other about not needing to fix everything but the one thing they things that aren't broken. came to find. As a tech geek of the 12-hours-a For example, none of the 200 or -day-online variety, I appreciate so confused Facebook users who innovative and intuitive web commented on our earlier post interfaces. But a lot of users read the post itself, the huge logo don't. Even if it's simple, it needs at the top of the page, the many to be familiar. Why do you links to non-Facebook-related suppose some of our current, content or the huge, all-bold deeply entrenched web design p a r a g r a p h a b o u t h o w elements - from buttons to text ReadWriteWeb is not, in fact, blocks - even exist? some ill-conceived redesign of 4. Users rule the Internet. Facebook. They simply searched Finally, this is the reason we've for "Facebook login" and, upon stopped mocking the poor folks navigating to our site, scrolled who left those comments long until they found the one button enough to write this post. they wanted to click. Which 400 million people now use brings us to our third assertion. Facebook, and they don't all have 3. Users gravitate toward the C S M a s t e r ' s d e g r e e s f r o m simple and the familiar. Stanford. But if you work in the A t o n o f t h e c o n f u s e d IT/tech/Internet/online media

industries, they do manage to pay your bills. They're the ones who open emails, click ads, make purchases, sign up for subscriptions and generally take the majority of actions that make our whole ecosystem work. And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They've chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I'll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too. As a user, a developer, a designer, a marketer, a startup dude or lady, whatever you happen to be, how do you balance the need to find or create cool tech and apps with the need to build with these kinds of users in mind? Do you get frustrated? Do you get feedback? Do you kill features and make buttons bigger? What have been your successes and failures, or where have you learned lessons? We'd love to know, so please tell us in the comments. Discuss

Devi Kroell Flat Boots by ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog)

Emily Dougherty, Beauty/Fitness Director, in Devi Kroell boots

â&#x20AC;&#x153;These are my most exciting flats.â&#x20AC;? Photo: Kelly Stuart

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MEET continued from page 47

would be complete without politics and advertising. Sure enough, our third miner of the new social graph focuses on those two parts of the world. Peter Bray lives in Portland, Oregon and built FollowerWonk.com. Follower Wonk displays common followers, as well as people that users are following mutually. It also offers some visualizations and the ability to search inside users' Twitter bio fields. Bray thinks this technology has real potential to change the world, in the short term even. "As Follower Wonk matures, we imagine an application where a political campaign or a brand can slice & dice followers into highly leveragable segments. For example, a Democratic candidate might be able to find cross-over votes by targeting Twitter users who follow the competing GOP candidate, but also, say @sierra_club or @barackobama. Campaigns, or brands, can find and utilize these natural 'tension points', not only in terms of actual individual users, but also

what interests (environment?) or messages might be potent. As social media matures, these sorts of strategies, already so common in the world of list management, are naturally going to play a significant role." We asked Mr. Bray, if these tools were so darned potent, why aren't more people excited about them yet? "In the universe of Google users, the percentage using, say, Google Analytics or Website Optimizer is teensy," he replied. "Similarly, the total number of Twitter users that are going to find value in slicing & dicing their followers is small. But I think that the benefits of such user profiling and tracking are potent, and increasingly evident among brands and campaigns. "We've seen this in one of our other applications, Versionista.com, where the McCain site used our Web page tracking and versioning tool to highlight changes to Obama's policy pages. Who would have thought that tracking changes to a campaign Web site would

reveal important talking points? And similarly, you're right that few people right now realize the power of Twitter, and social media generally, in terms of the ability to find and engage a receptive audience through advanced profiling and analytics. Or the ability to deduce new messages and arguments." Can One of These Visions Come to Fruition? These are three men have built different tools that do roughly the same things but in different ways, and with different go-tomarket visions. There are others, too, like Tickery and Klout. Will any of them be able to popularize something where there's a level of strategic thought required in order to capture substantial value from a social networking world all-toooften dismissed as trivial? It's a complicated but thought provoking question. One that will be discussed on Twitter no doubt. Even there, Henry Copeland, Kevin Marshall and Peter Bray will take different approaches, though. There is not

a single person that all three of them are following! There also wasn't anyone else that was following all three of these trailblazers, either. Until I just did. Is this kind of analysis a privacy violation? How can privacy on sites like Twitter, Facebook and whatever comes next be balanced with interests in innovation and profit? These are the kinds of questions that the web will need to ask if services like these three become popular. They offer so much value, it seems inevitable that they will. You can find and follow the ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here and on Facebook here. Disclosure: Color commentary above was provided by CEO of Imindi, a company the author has had a consulting relationship with in the past. It was also quite articulate. Discuss

Video: Kristin Chenoweth Gets Fitted to Walk Runway (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 2/11/2010 3:50:00 AM

The ladies in red are returning to the runway! ET goes behind the seams of Emmy winner Kristin Chenoweth's red dress fitting as she prepares to raise awareness for women's heart disease. Chenoweth -- known for her role on ABC's "Pushing Daisies" and most recently FOX's hit show "Glee" -- chose a dazzling Swarovski gown for the big event. "Diamonds and/or crystals are a girl's best friend. ... I'm a lucky girl to get to wear it," she says of the gorgeous get-up. The Red Dress Collection 2010 fashion show will take place on Thursday, February 11, and more than 20 celebrities are scheduled to walk the runway including Chenoweth. All proceeds will go to the American Heart Association.

Monopoly: Resident Evil Edition by Doug Aamoth (CrunchGear) Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:30:53 AM

Finally an answer to the agesold question: How much crossover is there between

Resident Evil fans and Monopoly fans? Apparently enough for one enterprising individual named Nick “Neptune” Endean to dream up Monopoly: Resident Evil Edition.

You won’t be buying this in

stores (yet?) but there’s a full 24 pages of the story behind the making of the game, photos of the custom made property, chance, and community chest cards, and details on plans to make custom money and die-cast

game pieces. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get started on Monopoly: King’s Quest Edition. Resident Evil Monopoly[Project Umbrella via Kotaku]

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Mobile Data Traffic Surge: 40 Exabytes by 2014 by Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:10:49 AM

In only four short years, the worldwide mobile data traffic will reach 40 exabytes per year. This is according to new research from Cisco which sees the traffic jumping from 0.09 exabytes per month in 2009 to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014. And in case you don't know what an exabyte is, it's 1 billion gigabytes. That's one quintillion bytes. It appears that not only does the mobile web have a future, the mobile web is the future. Sponsor Global mobile data traffic has increased 160% over the course of the past year and is now at 90 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 23 million DVDs, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Forecast for 20092014. By 2014, it will have reached 3.6 exabytes per month, a 39-fold increase. The researchers said there are two major global trends driving up the data usage. One, obviously, is the increase in the number of data-ready handsets. Simply put, more handsets capable of browsing the web means more data usage. By

September 2009, for example, U.K.-based research firm Coda reported that we'll be using 1.8 exabytes of video per month by 2017. Another way to get a handle on the increase is to look at the average mobile broadband connection and how much data 2014, there could be over 5 traffic it uses. Right now, the b i l l i o n p e r s o n a l d e v i c e s average connection uses 1.3 connecting to mobile networks gigabytes per month - the and over 400 million of those equivalent of 650 MP3 music devices may represent the only files. By 2014, the average means of connecting to the connection will use 7 gigabytes Internet that some people will of traffic per month or the equivalent of 3500 MP3's. have. However, it's important to note The Middle East and Africa will that in Cisco's study, they also have the highest compounded counted laptop air cards as annual growth rate (CAGR), mobile Internet devices, so these with a rate of 133%. Following numbers don't just speak to the that region is Asia-Pacific (119% proliferation of smartphones CAGR), and North America themselves, they speak to how (117% CAGR). India will be the we will increasingly be using country with the highest CAGR cellular data networks to access they'll be at 222%. China will follow with a 172% CAGR and the Web in the future. The other major trend driving up South Africa will have a 156% the data traffic numbers is the CAGR. These are just some of the consumption of mobile video content. By 2014, mobile video highlights from Cisco's research. will account for 66% of all If you're interested in learning mobile data traffic worldwide. more, you can read through the T h i s r e p r e s e n t s a 6 6 - f o l d entire report here. increase from 2009, the highest Image credit: Toshiba netbook of any mobile data application. via Slashgear Discuss This expected increase has been noticed by other studies, too. In

Find Names, Topics, or Themes from TV with Clicker.com Search Within [Search Techniques] by Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)

the fly as you type. Once you've pinned down a network, show, or other sub-category, you can then Which episode of Modern s e a r c h f o r g u e s t n a m e s , Family had Ed Norton playing characters, topics, or whatever the Spandau Ballet bassist? else might identify the show. When did Mario Batali tackle If that doesn't get you to what homemade g n o c c h i ? you wanted to watch (or, more Clicker.com's "Search Within" likely, show your friends and feature has expanded to cover a coworkers), you could search lot of ground, making it a Hulu's closed caption database. convenient stop for finding For a demonstration of how precise media moments. Clicker.com's search works, Clicker.com covers more than there's this demonstration: just the streaming television New on Clicker: "Search offered on Hulu, Amazon.com, Within" Everywhere! from Netflix, and other sites, but it Clicker on Vimeo. makes its mark as a TV hub. So How do you pin down a its Search Within function particular episode, line, or video becomes quite helpful when moment in your favorite shows? you're trying to pin down a Share your search secrets in the certain episode or show. You can comments. New on Clicker: search for topics ("kidnapping") " S e a r c h W i t h i n " inside broad categories like Everywhere![Clicker Blog] Drama, and the results change on Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:00:00 AM

Tech News/

E-reader News Edition

Stop Google Buzz From Showing the World Your Contacts [Privacy] by Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 2/11/2010 4:30:00 AM

Whether you call it a huge privacy flaw or just an annoyance, Google Buzz can put the contacts you automatically follow—a.k.a. those you most frequently email or chat—on a public profile page. Here's how to undo that. Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen felt he had to avoid following certain Buzz contacts, as he didn't want to expose his social circle to the wider net. He's right—if you have a Google Profile, once you set up Buzz, those you're following, and those following you, are shown on your profile page in a right-hand link list. Update: This might not apply if you haven't touched much inside Buzz, or haven't set up a Google Profile, or that Profile is set to be hidden from the public. If so, you're mostly in the clear. But keep in mind that, once you post to Buzz, your profile will likely be created, and you'll want to know what's getting put up on the web. To turn this off, sign into your Google account (via Gmail or elsewhere) and head to your Google profile—that link should work if you're signed in. Look

for the two links showing "Following X people" and "X people following me." There's a gray note underneath those numbers, indicating whether they're visible to just you or to everyone. If they're visible to everyone, hit the "Edit Profile" link on the right-hand edge of the blue bar in the middle of the page, to the right of "About me," "Buzz," and "Contact info." In the third column of options there, there are checkboxes that control privacy features, and one of them is labeled "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me." Un-check that box, and now your list of followers and followees is

private—or at least seen only by those you're following, perhaps. Want Google Buzz gone entirely? Log into Gmail, then look at the bottom of your inbox page for a "Turn off Buzz" link. If you're mainly annoyed at Buzz's constant, um, buzzing, read up on removing Buzz updates from your inbox. This tip came courtesy of Contributing Editor Lisa, who was similarly shocked to see Google dropping everyone's frequently-contacted names on the net. If you've found a similarly crucial privacy tweak for Buzz, tell us about it in the comments.

OpenOffice.org 3.2 Improves Startup Times, Office 2007 Compatibility [Downloads] by Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)

support for "complex" (multirow or column) copy and paste, pivot table importing, cell sorting Windows/Mac/Linux: The latest and merging, and much more. version of OpenOffice.org, the Importing Office 2007free and open-source office suite, formatted files seems to have improves startup times by over gotten lots of attention in this 40 percent (by some tests), release as well, and passwordimproves importing and support protected files can successfully for password-protected and 2007 be loaded, provided you've got office files, and improves many the password. If you're an areas of the Calc spreadsheet. OpenOffice.org fan and see You can check out the full something new and great, share feature list at OpenOffice.org, it in the comments. but the majority is nitty-gritty OpenOffice.org 3.2 is a free stuff. That said, the Calc tool download for Windows, Mac, seems to have picked up quite a a n d L i n u x s y s t e m s . f e w i m p r o v e m e n t s a n d OpenOffice.org Downloads compatibility features, including Submitted at 2/11/2010 5:10:00 AM

Tech News/ Gadgets/ Entertainment/

IBM Gives Students A Cloud Filled With Its Tech - Now That's Smart by Alex Williams (ReadWriteWeb)

it reaches students who will go on to associate IBM with cloud computing as they begin their Submitted at 2/10/2010 4:18:15 PM professional careers. We often hear how cloud The Academic Skills Cloud computing makes it more provides students with access to affordable for customers to use leading cloud computing services that in the past would technology and new methods for have been packaged as software developing applications. Courses and required buying, installing and work material can be and maintaining on any number accessed anywhere the student is of individual machines. professors who are being offered located. But we often forget how it is the use of IBM software and Professors can teach practices also much cheaper for the vendor databases through a cloud that students will see in the t o p r o d u c e a n d d i s t r i b u t e i n f r a s t r u c t u r e I B M c a l l s workforce once they graduate. services through the cloud. the"Academic Skills Cloud." Machines do not need to be Cloud vendors do not need to Sponsor continually updated with new test software on any number of Programs now available to software. It's all available online. operating systems. Version college students and professors Students who learn about cloud control is a nagging task. it's i n c l u d e I B M R a t i o n a l , computing today stand a far unnecessary when the service is W e b S p h e r e , a n d I n f o r m i x . better chance of adapting to a cloud-based. The idea of a Services to be added to the cloud world where working with online software disc seems almost over time will include Cognos, services will be the way business antiquated. is conducted. IBM is making Lotus and Tivoli. IBM seems to get this whole This is a smart move by IBM. It guarantees that they will be top c o n c e p t p r e t t y w e l l . T h e shows how deeply ingrained of mind for students once they company has realized that it can cloud computing has become at move on to the professional u s e a c l o u d c o m p u t i n g Big Blue. It leverages the power world. Discuss infrastructure to market its web- of the cloud to offer IBM based services. Their target right technology at minimal cost. Plus, now are college students and

E-reader News Edition

DMI releases the EB605WT and EB604 eReader by Tablet (BestTabletReview.com)

It looks to be a very capable eReader and quite stylish to boot. No word on pricing which will Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:38:14 AM really dictate whether the DMI Message from fivefilters.org: If EB605WT has a chance in the you can, please donate to the full crowded eReader market. But -text RSS service so we can wait! There’s more… continue developing it. DMI has also released the Above is a video demonstration EB604 which also has a 6-inch of DMI’s (Digital Machines EPD display (minus any touch International) new EB605WT capability). It supports ePub, EPD eReader. The EB605WT TXT, PDF, HTML, DOC, FB2, uses a 6-inch Sipix responsive CHM, DJVU and RTF eBook 600 x 800 resolution touchscreen formats and also has image and display, has embedded WiFi, MP3 support as well as a USB 1GB of internal storage and a 2.0 and headphone output. microSD slot for expandable Again, no word on price or sale space. In addition to supporting date as of yet. We’ll update the ePub, PDF, TXT, HTML and post when we get it. You can RFT eBook formats, it also view a video demo of it here. views JPG, PNG and BMP Source: Teleread(on EB605WT) image files as well as plays Leave a Reply MP3s through its external Five Filters featured article: speaker. It’s only 0.35 inches Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: thick and 8.5 ounces in weight PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, (both of which are less than the Term Extraction. Kindle 2).

Blackwater Allegedly Put Prostitute on the Payroll [Scandals] by Hamilton Nolan (Gawker)

whilst doing the work of god and country overseas: they billed Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:38:01 AM you, the taxpayer, for the Just the latest outrageous s e r v i c e s o f a p r o s t i t u t e , allegation against Blackwater, allegedly. For morale purposes! the prosecution-proof mercenary The Washington Post reports tha "assert that Blackwater officials army that somehow ran amok t former Blackwater employees

kept a Fillipino prostitute on the company payroll for a State Department contract in Afghanistan, and billed the government for her time working for Blackwater male employees in Kabul. The alleged prostitute's

salary was categorized as part of the company's 'Morale Welfare Recreation' expenses, they said." Hey, it's not as bad as postmurder bribery, okay? Allegedly.

Tech News/ Gadgets/ Entertainment/

E-reader News Edition

Twitter Hires Pixar Financial Chief, Preps for More Profitability by Jolie O'Dell (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 2/10/2010 4:46:19 PM

Two months after announcing that the startup managed to turn a profit in 2009, Twitter has announced that it will be hiring Pixar finance head Ali Rowghani as its chief financial officer. Twitter's CEO Evan Williams told Reuters today that the new hire represents the company's direction toward "creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it." Rowghani will join Twitter officially in March. Sponsor Last year, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company around $25 million - about $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. These two deals were enough to make the company profitable last year. For a fairly young company that offers a simple, free web

application for end users, this is quite a feat. Other revenue channels include creating a revenue-sharing scheme that would let Twitter share the profits generated by third-party applications. The details of this plan are still under wraps, but Twitter's platform director Ryan Sarver announced at LeWeb that the company would announce details about this plan early in 2010. Other possible sources of revenue are multi-user accounts, which Twitter has been testing

internally. Twitter has also recently made another high-profile hire, calling on Current TV's Robin Sloan to work on media partnerships, covering "everything at the intersection of Twitter and media, from live events on TV to citizen journalism on the web." We're excited to see how the startup that's managed to become a cultural zeitgeist within a few short years will continue to grow and profit. Particularly in its early days, many who lived through the dotcom crash were skeptical about the monetization potential of a free web service. Without incorporating advertising - something that no users wanted to see - Twitter has managed to create a sustainable business. We can't wait to see what ideas Rowghani will bring to the table. Discuss

a movie version of TV's "The Big Valley," playing the part of Victoria Barkley, originated by Oscar-winning actress Susan Barbara Stanwyck. The Western Sarandon is considering a 'Big' series, which ran on ABC from change. 1965-69, focused on a ranching She's currently in talks to star in family in the 1870s San Joaquin Submitted at 2/11/2010 4:32:00 AM

by Vladislav Savov (Engadget) Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:23:00 AM

You know, as much as we love our complex high-minded gadgets, we've always had a soft spot for simple, low-tech solutions to the problems posed by modernity. To wit, check out HP's latest data center, which is strategically located in a blustery part of northeast England and avoids costly and energy-sapping Valley. The film is a labor of love as it cooling systems in favor of good is being produced by co-creator old wind cooling. Equipped with Louis F. Edelman's daughter, eight 2.1-meter (just under seven feet) intake fans and a bank of Kate Edelman Johnson. contaminant filters, the Winyard facility is purpose-built for the circulation of cold external air through and around the servers

Susan Sarandon Talking 'Big' Move (ETonline - Breaking News)

HP opens wind-cooled, rain-collecting data center within. It's said to be HP's most efficient data center yet, and its natural cooling solution is estimated to save a healthy ÂŁ2.6 million ($4.07 million) in annual energy bills. A couple other optimizations bear mentioning too -- such as the rainwater collection which is used to humidify the air if it's too dry, and the choice of lighter-colored servers racks, which saves on lighting costs inside. Hit the source link to learn more. HP opens wind-cooled, raincollecting data center originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| PC World| Email this| Comments

Gadgets/ Fashion/

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Proximity-Sensing T-Shirt Review: Glowing Reminder of My Facebook Relationship Status [Badvalentine] by Rosa Golijan (Gizmodo)

I'll admit it. I laughed when I opened the box of shirts. It's not as if I'm going to find my I received some proximity- Valentine with them by say sensing t-shirts from ThinkGeek strolling through the mall, to review, and got excited. continuously monitoring my Would I discover the love of my heart levels. If I did find life while playing high-tech hide- someone that way, would I really and-seek? Or would I wind up want to date a person who lonelier than before? (Hint: Their willingly wears a shirt like that? high-pitch sound scares away So, since using them as a way to dogs.) aid my lovelife was out, the next Since Valentine's Day is all logical idea was to play hide-and about getting touchy-feely with -seek. The Locked On shirts other people while calling seem made for it. Sadly it was attention to the things going rainingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Florida equivalent boom-ba-boom-boom in our o f the Northeast's chests, I called in ThinkGeek's Snowpocalypseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and things just most appropriate products: The 8 aren't fun when trying to play a -Bit Dynamic Life shirt and the game in a small indoor space. Locked On Proximity Sensing There's only so many places to shirt. hide, and the shirts light up when The concept's the same for both they're within about 12 feet of its shirts: Your chest half-glows counterpart. And in case you're until you find someone else with wondering, the two pairs are a matching shirt. Then your incompatible, so a four-way whole chest glows. It's fun, but match was out of the question. there's a chance you'll find Great, I can't even lure a few yourself doomed to wearing a people over to play then. What shirt with only 2.5 hearts lit up, do I do with these shirts now? or one flashing an eternal Wait, What's That Sound? "scanning" pattern. Why in While wearing the 8-Bit shirt, Cupid's Name Do I Want These I'd noticed it was emitting a high Things? -pitched noise. At first I thought Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:20:00 AM

it was just my imagination, but the sound was all the more obvious with the Locked On shirt. It's high-pitched, it's annoying, and as soon as I stepped close to my neighbor's dog, it made him run away. I think the poor pooch is now hiding somewhere, paws over his violated ears. And I'm left sitting

here, even lonelier than I started out. The Fun Wore Off Too Fast It's almost sad to say, but the interactive shirts are kinda fun for a few minutes. There's something amusing about watching your front light up when near a similar shirt, but when you're all alone, that

Street Chic: New York by ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 2/11/2010 4:00:00 AM

A punchy print adds character to a black-and-tan palette. Photo: Anne Ziegler Think you are Street Chic? E-

could appear in ELLE.com's Street Chic Daily. Follow ELLE on Twitter. mail us your photo and you

excitement is short-lived. If you and your significant other each wore them to bed (lumpy threeAAA battery packs and all), you might even be able to read a Kindle by their strong glow. But by yourself, with just half the luminosity, you'd be hard pressed to see much more than the hand in front of your face. Great for animal-haters since dogs will run away. Decent battery life. I didn't manage to kill any of the AAAs (three per shirt) used during testing. No more expensive than an average gimmicky shirt. The electronic parts of the shirt are removable for washing. They're kinda dorky looking, aren't they? Having a battery pack poking your side or back gets annoying really quickly One is a very lonely number. You need either a pair of shirts or a special device to take advantage of the interactive aspect of the shirts.

Gadgets/ Entertainment/

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Nokia N8-00: first Symbian^3 handset with 12 megapixel camera, 720p video, and HDMI leaked in summer roadmap?

Stars Kick Off Snow Boots for amfAR Fashion Week Gala

by Thomas Ricker (Engadget)

The stars ditched their snow boots for their more fashionable stilettos and plowed their way to the amfAR Annual New York Gala to Kick Off Fashion Week. Celebs, ranging from movie stars to fashion icons to artists sitting atop the music charts to television personalities, turned out to raise awareness and funds for the HIV/AIDS charity. Guests such as Meryl Streep, Julia Stiles, Heidi Klum, Stanley Tucci, Cynthia Nixon, and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen were treated to a performance by M•A•C Viva Glam spokesperson Lady Gaga.

Submitted at 2/11/2010 8:51:00 AM

Nokia's already tipped its hand for the year Twenty Ten by publicly stating its intent to deliver a sleeker, more attractive, and faster Symbian UI; fewer nags; and at least one Maemo handset before the year is done. What we've been missing though, are the details. While we still don't have the complete story, it is beginning to take shape according to alleged leaks received by Tom's Guide. First up is a new naming convention, something already telegraphed by Nokia's Xseries launch and Cseries trademark. According to the French language site, Nokia

will end the use of monikers like XpressMusic or Classic as it simplifies around the following five ranges: • C: voice-centric handsets. • X: targeting youth, entertainment.

• E: business focused. • N: high-end. • S: limited editions.

today. Click through for the gossip. Continue reading Nokia N8-00: first Symbian^3 handset with 12 megapixel camera, 720p video, and HDMI leaked in summer roadmap? Nokia N8-00: first Symbian^3 handset with 12 megapixel camera, 720p video, and HDMI leaked in summer roadmap? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Nokia Blog| Tom's Guide| Email this| Comments

Tom's Guide claims to be privy to 14 new models, a few of which it spilled the beans on

(ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 2/11/2010 4:00:00 AM

Where Microsoft's Money Really Comes From [Data] by John Herrman (Gizmodo)

products that aren't Windows and Office fall under two divisions: Entertainment and Devices, and It's no shock to see that with Online Services. Xbox, Zune unglamorous but vital products (both services and devices), l i k e W i n d o w s a n d O f f i c e , cellphone software and to some Microsoft is basically printing extend Media Center all fall money. But where's the Xbox? under E&D, which has been The Zune? Windows Mobile? skipping from minor profit to Bing? Oh, they're there. You just minor loss for years. Online record, steadily bleeding money have to look a little closer. services, like Bing and Hotmail, from the company month after M i c r o s o f t ' s m o s t v i s i b l e have a more consistent track Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:27:05 AM

month, with only the slightest hints of stopping. Granted, Silicon Alley Insider's chart only covers of Operating Profit, so it doesn't reflect how much revenue each division accounts for, or in a broader sense, how important and large each of these products is within Microsoft. (you can obviously assume that, even if its division isn't making much money, the

Xbox is considered a major product.) But still, it's hard not to see a trend: exciting, risky products—some of the ones we spent the most time talking about— don't make money.[ SAI]

Gadgets/ Picture/

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Report: Acer will launch an ultra-thin notebook this year by Matt Burns (CrunchGear) Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:00:14 AM

Let’s not forget Acer’s quest to overtake HP as the number 1 computer maker in the world. That’s important to remember as the company is reportably getting into the ultra-thin notebook market this year along with making a Chrome OS netbook and ebook reader. 2010 will be Acer’s year as the company lays outs its plans, which, surprisingly, doesn’t include outing a iPad-ish tablet clone. The Acer Timeline series lead the industry into the CULV game last year, but even those thin laptops look huge next to a MacBook Air or Dell Adamo XPS. So that brings us to right now as a report just surfaced claiming that

sometime this year Acer will launch a true ultra-thin notebook based on Intel’s next-gen Capella ULV processors that bring conventional notebook performance to ultra-thins. Nothing else is really known about the upcoming notebook just yet. Although we’re certain something will leak curiosity of Mr. BlurryCam. But hopefully Acer’s model will offer not only good looks, but also a more affordable price than the Dell Adamo XPS.

Now We Are Six by Heather Champ (Flickr Blog) Submitted at 2/10/2010 12:16:12 PM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it.• About Flickr Flickr is a revolution in photo storage, sharing and

organization, making photo management an easy, natural and collaborative process. Get comments, notes, and tags on your photos, post to any blog, share and more! Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Robot Land theme park gets investors, conceptual renders by Joseph L. Flatley (Engadget)

yet to be built) to hash out details, with the result of the government ponying up some Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:44:00 AM $229 million of a promised $600 Plans for the Robot Land theme million. But not everyone is park in Masan, on South Korea's happy about all this -- indeed, South East Coast, have been organizers of Incheon City's gaining momentum since we first robot theme park are unamused took note way back in 2007. by the thought of a similar According to Plastic Pals, a attraction competing for those group of private investors hard-earned tourist dollars. Of recently met with the city council course, there's one way to settle (probably Masan's city council, any potential conflict that as Robot Land's city council has E n g a d g e t w h o l e h e a r t e d l y

supports: Robot theme park fight! Just as long as the winner doesn't turn on us. Gallery: South Korea's Robot Land theme park Robot Land theme park gets investors, conceptual renders originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Plastic Pals| Robot Land| Email this| Comments

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Palm says long taps are 'meta-taps,' impresses Solaris admins worldwide by Tim Stevens (Engadget)

Windows Alt and Ctrl keys. Why bother with the clarification? Well, for one thing, "meta-tap X" What do you call a long press in is a heck of a lot easier to type the gesture area on a webOS than "hold your finger in the phone? Well, it doesn't matter, notification area and then press because unless you said "meta- X on the keyboard," and that's tap" you're wrong. That's what the sort of efficiency we can get the Austrians. -Swarovski Elements to decorate Palm has decreed such a touch behind. Spec-wise, the two Swarovski the front panel, stones with a will be called and so it shall be Palm says long taps are 'metam o d e l s f e a t u r e W V G A more beautiful sparkle than called -- at least officially. A taps,' impresses Solaris admins (800×480) resolution, Sony’s ordinary Swarovski crystals. long press in that area plus a key, worldwide originally appeared TruBlack Technology, a 16:10 The Japan-only Swarovski like X, C or V to cut, copy, or on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb aspect ratio, slideshow function, photo frames will go on sale on paste, has been given this 2010 10:07:00 EST. Please see JPEG/BMP/TIFF/RAW file March 5. Prices: $220 for the moniker by Palm in something our terms for use of feeds. support, 256 of internal memory white model and $200 for the of a nod to the concept of a Permalink| PreCentral| Email (enough for about 500 pictures), black model. If you’re interested UNIX meta key, a keyboard this| Comments an SDHC/SD slot, a memory but live outside Japan, ask Geek modifier that works like the stick (duo) slot, and a USB port. Stuff 4U if they can get one for A p p l e C o m m a n d k e y o r Sony says they designed they you. used so-called CRYSTALLIZED Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:07:00 AM

Sony’s Swarovski crystal-studded photo frames by Serkan Toto (CrunchGear) Submitted at 2/11/2010 5:00:18 AM

For some reason, Austrian luxury brand Swarovski loves cooperating with Japanese electronics makers. Now Sony has announced[JP] a total of six 7-inch digital photo frames for the Japanese market, two of which (the DPF-D75 (WZ) in white and the DPF-D75 (BQ) in black) were jointly designed with

Gadgets/ Entertainment/

E-reader News Edition

Cup holder, schmupholder – you need a full tray for your morning commute

StyleWatch Publisher Quits [Internal Memos]

by Doug Aamoth (CrunchGear)

by Hamilton Nolan (Gawker)

to work maybe it’s time to class things up a bit with this $11 Swivel Car Tray. Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:00:46 AM According to the product What an odd array of breakfast description: items in this product shot: Egg Whether you’re eating on the McMuffin, sure. Apple juice, run or holding necessities, this okay. Fries? You might be on to swivel tray puts what you need at something there. Whatever the your fingertips. It attaches to a case, if you’ve been eating food standard cup holder–the jointed out of a bag while careening arm swivels from driver to down the highway on your way passenger and may be raised or

degree swivel design locks in place. If food’s not your thing, might I suggest that you mount an iMac instead? The new one’s ought to fit but the older ones with the circular base might fit perfectly. Swivel Car Tray[Collections Etc. via Red Ferret] lowered to your liking. It has a textured center to keep items from rolling or sliding. 360-

Hey, iPad, We Got Your iBallz Right Here! Get It? Get it? [Accessories] by Brian Barrett (Gizmodo)

absorbing attachments could come in handy. They're actually pretty well So how do you drum up conceived: four balls, connected publicity for a conceptually basic by stretchable cord, protect your accessory to a product that's not e-book reader from drops by even out yet? You put "ballz" in absorbing the blow, and also the name! That's Marketing 101. keep a resting device elevated But actually, these shock- just high enough off of a table to

ordered now for $15, and they'll work just as well on a Kindle or Sony Reader as they will on the iPad. But "Sony Reader Ballz" just doesn't quite roll off the tongue. [ iBallz via Wired]

Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:00:00 AM

Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:20:48 AM

The following email just went out to Time Inc. staffers, informing them that People StyleWatch publisher Michelle Meyers has quit, for unexplained reasons. Know more? Email us. I regret to announce that Michelle Meyers has decided to resign her position as StyleWatch publisher. A replacement for Michelle will be announced shortly; in the interim, please contact Julie Arkin or me directly should you have any business issues or concerns. We thank Michelle for her many contributions and wish her well in the future. Paul Caine | President & Group Publisher

save it from spills. A set of four iBallz can be pre-

A First Look at Robot Land (Disneyland for Terminators) [Robots] by Mark Wilson (Gizmodo) Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:23:11 AM

$230 million of Robot Land's$600 million budget has been secured. And in case the project never breaks ground (or

the robots don't let us in), we the Business Incubation Center to bring a family of four to a have a load of renders showing (as some of the grounds are theme park? [ Robot Land via us what it would have looked reserved for industrial services), Plastic Pals via Engadget] like. we think it's a great idea. Featuring attractions like Robot Though, not to sound prejudice W a t e r P a r k , R o b o t B a t t l e Robot Museum and, of course, or anything, but since when do Stadium, Robot Flower Island, robots have the spending money

Apple/

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How-To: Setup a SVN Server Under OS X 10.6 by Andrew Bednarz (TheAppleBlog)

security it’s always best to have a dedicated user to run a specific service such as SVN. This limits any possible vulnerabilities in the SVN software from harming the rest of your system; if an exploit is used to end up with a command line ability, the attacker can only damage files belonging to the SVN user. • Open System Preferences and go the Accounts page. • Add a new standard user named svn with a suitable password.

file and enable the passwd file for user authentication. An easy way from the terminal to edit a Submitted at 2/10/2010 10:30:44 AM file is by using the nano text Last year I took a look at a editor: sudo -u svn nano number of Subversion clients for /Users/svn/svnroot/conf/svnserve OS X, finally settling on .conf Versions as my client of choice Remove the # from line 20 so it for my personal coding needs. At looks like this:### Uncomment the time, I was running a Linux the line below to use the default server on some old generic password file. password-db = GED -bool FALSE hardware from the days before I passwd You can also delete all the drank the Apple Koolaid. After If using nano, press Control+X default directories created under deciding to upgrade my wife’s and save your changes. Next edit the/Users/svn/ directory if you 17 iMac with the new i5 27 the passwd file: sudo -u svn nano prefer a neat and tidy file system. model, I realized I could ditch /Users/svn/svnroot/conf/passwd Creating your SVN repository the old Linux hardware and get This user will be included in the Then add the desired usernames We now need to create the some great power savings (and OS X login screen when you and passwords, in my case I’m specific root directory for our hence reduced electricity bill) in start your computer. Since there adding the user ‘bed’ for repository and create it using the the process. The first task I had i s u s u a l l y n o r e a s o n f o r myself:### This file is an svnadmin command by was moving my SVN repository somebody to log onto the example password file for launching the OS X Terminal over from the Linux machine desktop with this user, it can be svnserve. ### Its format is application and entering the (Ubuntu 9.10) to the iMac hidden from the login screen. similar to that of svnserve.conf. following commands. sudo -u running OS X 10.6…and this is You can do so by opening the As shown in the ### example svn mkdir /Users/svn/svnroot how I did it. Terminal application and running below it contains one section sudo -u svn svnadmin create All of the SVN application the following command: sudo labelled [users]. ### The name /Users/svn/svnroot binaries, including the server, d e f a u l t s w r i t e and password for each user You can now view already come pre-installed with /Library/Preferences/com.apple.l follow, one account per line. the/Users/svn/svnroot directory O S X 1 0 . 6 , l o c a t e d i n oginwindow HiddenUsersList [ u s e r s ] b e d = and see that new files have been the/usr/bin/ directory, so we just array-add svn beds_secret_svn_password created to form the base of your have a few steps to get that If you ever do want to login as Scheduling the server to start new repository. running. the svn user to the desktop, you automatically Creating SVN users (optional) • Create a system user for SVN. can click the new ‘Other’ option OS X uses the launchd If you are working on your own • Create a new repository to that appears in the login screen subsystem for automatically code and you know without a store your code in. and manually enter the starting background services. doubt that nobody else will be • Optionally create specific SVN username. On the other hand, if The easiest way to configure accessing your repository, you users for submission tracking. you don’t want the ‘Other’ svnserve to run automatically via can skip this step. However it • Configure the server to run option at all you can also disable launchd is by using Lingon. You doesn’t hurt to configure a automatically at system startup. this by entering the following in can grab the latest version from dedicated user now even if it’s a terminal window: sudo defaults Sourceforge. For more details on just for your sole use, so that Creating an SVN user w r i t e using Lingon see this previous code check-ins are properly While you could easily run the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.l article I put together, but for this attributed. To do this we first SVN sever with the root user o g i n w i n d o w task we just need to add a new need to edit the svnserve.conf account, for better system SHOWOTHERUSERS_MANA User Daemon:

• Run Lingon, click the New button and select User Daemons. • Fill out the dialog as follows: Name: org.subversion.svnserve What:/usr/bin/svnserve --inetd -root=/Users/svn/svnroot/ We now need to click the “Expert” button at the bottom and add the following text under the section: Sockets Listeners SockFamily IPv4 SockServiceName svn SockType stream inetdCompatibility Wait Umask 2 UserName svn GroupName staff So that it looks like this: Click the save button again and then reboot your computer to give it a test by connecting to localhost or your IP address with your favorite SVN client, ie: svn://bed@localhost. Your SVN server is now ready to be used! The SVN server will only be launched when you first try and use it, so it won’t be taking up any unnecessary resources. Migrating an existing repository If you’re like me, and want to migrate an existing repository from another system you can do so easily by skipping the svnadmin command in step two, and just copy the repository directory from the old system to the new system. I would advise to upgrade your existing repository first to ensure that it is compatible with the version of SVN that comes with OS X HOW-TO: page 60

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Apple Job Posting Suggests iPad Camera At Least Being Considered by Darrell Etherington (TheAppleBlog)

The job description accompanying the call leaves little room for error about the Submitted at 2/10/2010 8:27:09 AM nature of the position: Evidence continues to mount The Media Systems team is that early adopters are going to looking for a software quality get a bit screwed with the Apple engineer with a strong technical iPad, which has yet to even be background to test still, video officially released for public and audio capture and playback consumption. As my colleague frameworks. Build on your QA Liam points out, that shouldn’t experience and knowledge of really be less than anyone digital camera technology (still expects, but a new job posting and video) to develop and must twist the knife even still for maintain testing frameworks for those planning to pick up both capture and playback Apple’s first iteration of the pipelines. device. And then later in the description The new listing has Apple of the ideal candidate for the looking for “ Performance QA position, things are again made Engineers” for the iPad Media fairly evident: department, and judging by the Familiarity with and interest in description, the job focuses photography, video as well as almost exclusively on video and media file formats is highly image capture and playback. It’s desirable. Experience with n o t u n e x p e c t e d , s i n c e tuning of and image pipeline, p r e s u m a b l y A p p l e h a s including, but not limited to considered the possibility of A W B , C o l o r C o r r e c t i o n , putting a camera in the iPad at A u t o E x p o s u r e , F r a m e R a t e some point in the future, even if a d j u s t m e n t s i s a p l u s . it doesn’t 100 percent intend to Now I’d say job descriptions do so already, but it still stings. r a n k w e l l a b o v e p a t e n t

HOW-TO: continued from page 59

(SVN version 1.6.x). Also you’ll want to ensure that the copied file’s owner becomes the new SVN user created in step one.

applications in terms of predicting what’s coming next from Apple, but that doesn’t mean everything the company advertises for is automatically included in a future iteration of its products. Add the advertisement to what we already know about space

If I didn’t have a vested professional interest in getting my hands on an iPad as soon as is humanly possible, I would not be buying one this time around. It’s not an experience that I need or miss in terms of my current gadget usage, between my iPhone and my Macs. If part of my job didn’t directly involve Apple hardware, I’d have a heck of a time justifying the investment to myself, and I honestly don’t think I would use it after the novelty wore off. The consumer in me would wait until it gets more features, and maybe gets cheaper, but the professional in me is glad I don’t have to exercise that degree of patience. Related GigaOM Pro Research: • Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s supposedly existing in the iPad’s iPad Hits Right Notes guts for a camera module, • 5 T i p s f o r D e v e l o p e r s photographic evidence taken T a r g e t i n g t h e i P a d from the iPad’s unveiling, and • How AT&T Will Deal with good old common sense about iPad Data Traffic how Apple operates, and it’s becoming pretty hard to deny that iPad 2G will sport still/video capabilities.

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Macworld 2010: Life Without Apple Quickoffice Adds DropBox, Google Docs support by Weldon Dodd (TheAppleBlog)

Submitted at 2/10/2010 1:05:32 PM

Macworld Expo 2010 kicked off without the traditional Apple keynote on Tuesday morning. The iPad event last month and the Aperture 3 announcement yesterday highlight the difference between years past and this year’s Expo. Without Apple on the floor the show is a bit smaller, but the Mac faithful are still showing up in large numbers to attend training, mingle with colleagues and see what 250 exhibitors have to show to world. What to See The keynote this year is not a big Apple shindig on Tuesday morning as has been the tradition, but rather a Thursday musical variety show with David Pogue of the New York Times. Pogue is sometimes clever and always entertaining and a good choice to carry the big event at Macworld Expo. Some other feature presentations that I would recommend are the Macworld DEMO: Best of Show, Guy Kawasaki’s presentation on Revolution from the Rest of Us, and John Gruber on Friday. The recently added iPad special event on Saturday might be interesting, but I suspect that we still don’t have enough information about the device to make it much more than a rehash of Apple’s announcement last month.

by Mark Crump (TheAppleBlog) Submitted at 2/10/2010 11:52:13 AM

Macworld Without Apple Apple decided to pull out of Macworld because it did not like being tied to making product announcements in the first week of January and had the retail stores to let people touch its latest products. As Tuesday passed by yesterday without Steve Jobs up on stage at Macworld, I reflected a bit on what that event might have looked like if Apple had stayed in the show. The iPad event last month and the Aperture 3 announcement yesterday were big news, but probably still not enough for a “traditional” Macworld keynote. We would have wanted iLife ‘11, MacBook Pro updates, Mac Pro announcements and more than just one hardware and one software product. I have a feeling that people would have

been disappointed if Steve Jobs came out on stage yesterday with only the iPad and Aperture 3. Of course, if Apple had stayed, the Expo might have remained in the first week of January and nothing would have been ready to announce then. I wonder if Jobs had the foresight to see that there would not be any big products ready for 2010 a year ago when Apple announced that they would not be at this year’s event? Macworld 2010 should provide a bigger stage for third parties to make big announcements and get some press attention without being upstaged by Apple or Adobe. There are some cool things coming this week, which we hope to show you over the next few days.

I’ve written about my love affair with Quickoffice before, but there’s always been one issues I’ve had with it: the only cloud storage service it supported was MobileMe’s iDisk. I’ve come close to plunking down the money for MobileMe a few times, but because Dropbox works for me, I’ve been hesitant. Quickoffice just announced its new iPhone app Quickoffice Connect which now lets you access and edit files on Box.net, Dropbox, Google Docs and Apple MobileMe. It’s available for an introductory price of $9.99, but it showed as a free upgrade for my existing Quickoffice application. In my very brief testing, it has worked as advertised. I was able to connect to my Dropbox account, browse all the files and open a Word doc and edit it. The usual disclaimers apply: the formatting is still rough (the document I tested with has

extensive formatting and fonts not available on the iPhone, so the results were a little rough), and editing documents on a small screen can be a dicey proposition. It’s this type of functionality I think will make QuickOffice much more valuable to business users on the iPad than the iWork suite — assuming Quickoffice will be coming out with an iPad version; I’m betting they will.

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'Friday Night Lights' Will Wrap With 2011 Season

Molly Shannon Latest Star Cast on 'Glee'

by Allison Waldman (TV Squad)

Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:38:00 AM

Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:22:00 AM

Unless you've been like able to enjoy the complete fourth season of'Friday Light Lights' that just wrapped up on DirecTV last night (click here if you don't mind spoilers), you may not get as excited news from Michael Ausiello in Entertainment Weekly that there will be a fifth season of 'Friday Night Lights' to end the run of the award-winning drama series about Texas high school football. However, you should be ecstatic. Quality TV like 'Friday Night Lights' deserves to be given its due and given the time to complete the stories it's been telling. So, you can count on the Dillon football teams to mature with new players, the Taylor family to

by Kona Gallagher (TV Squad)

Look, I'm not saying that'Glee' can do no wrong (the fake pregnancy storyline obviously refutes that), but they sure do a lot of things right. Not only do they have Kristin Chenoweth returning, Idina Menzel joining the cast, but now Molly Shannon deal with Julie's impending is coming to wreak havoc at leaving for college while Eric McKinley High. and Tami make it work back According to Michael Ausiello, home, the Riggins men to face Shannon is playing Brenda upheaval and a bunch of new Castle, McKinley's newest c h a r a c t e r s t o c o n t i n u e t o astronomy teacher/ badminton fascinate, including Becky, coach (did your high school have Vince, Jess and Luke. either of these things? Mine sure Continue reading'Friday Night didn't). Not only that, but she's Lights' Will Wrap With 2011 set to become Sue Sylvester's Season arch-nemesis, which is brilliant F i l e d u n d e r : I n d u s t r y , for several reasons. Programming, OpEd, Pickups One, because if Sue Sylvester and Renewals, Friday Night has another arch nemesis besides Lights, Reality-Free Will, then that means more P e r m a l i n k | E m a i l t h i s | | screen time for Jane Lynch, Comments

Investors unconvinced by EU deal over Greece (Financial Times - US homepage) Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:13:14 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. 15:00 GMT. News that a meeting of European leaders had agreed a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;dealâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to assist Greece in tackling its debt crisis received a fat raspberry from markets on Thursday. The FTSE World equity index had initially risen for the third which improves any show by at day in a row on hopes that least 65% (FACT). support for Greece would C o n t i n u e r e a d i n g M o l l y prevent sovereign debt default Shannon Latest Star Cast on fears spreading through the 'Glee' eurozone. A modicum of risk Filed under: Saturday Night appetite returned, hitting the Live, Celebrities, Casting, dollar, supporting the euro and Reality-Free, Glee boosting commodities. P e r m a l i n k | E m a i l t h i s | | Five Filters featured article: Comments Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

'Human Target' - 'Run' Recap by Mike Moody (TV Squad) Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:30:00 AM

(S01E05) High-speed car chases! Police baton beat downs! Seat belt strangulations! The 14-year-old kid in me loves this show.

So does the currently overworked and underpaid adult version of me. Like a lot of folks these days, I'm just looking to wash away the week's stresses with some fun, old-fashioned h u m p d a y e n t e r t a i n m e n t . happy to oblige. Thankfully,'Human Target' is

This week's energetic hour offered more kicks and wittier one-liners than last week's mountaintop tussle. "Run" was a confident episode. It felt strong and sturdy, not unlike the series' awesome third outing ("Embassy Row").

Continue reading'Human Target' - 'Run' Recap Filed under: Other Drama Shows, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Episode Recaps Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Lucy Lawless Heading to 'Caprica' for Final Five Arc? by Mike Moody (TV Squad)

Scheyer pulls Duke away from pesky Carolina by Associated Press (ESPN.com) Submitted at 2/11/2010 12:03:18 AM

Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:00:00 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full With'Caprica' struggling to find -text RSS service so we can an audience, it seems natural for continue developing it. Fast the show to hail the mother Facts ship,'Battlestar Galactica', for a • Duke ended its three-game little help. losing streak against North According to TV Guide, Carolina, winning for the second 'Caprica' will soon begin an arc time in the teams' last eight that reveals the backstory of meetings. 'BSG's "Final Five" Cylons. • Jon Scheyer and Kyle Singler It's unclear if the actors who combined to score 43 of the Blue originally portrayed The Five Devils' 64 points. will return for the 'BSG' prequel, • The win secured the 26th 20with one possible exception. Five Arc? Word is that 'Caprica' producers F i l e d u n d e r : O t h e r S c i - win season of Coach K's career. h a v e a l r e a d y a s k e d L u c y Fi/Supernatural Shows, Industry, Only four coaches in history have more. by Allison Waldman (TV to hang Christmas decorations Lawless to reprise the role of Battlestar Galactica, Casting, • North Carolina has lost four Squad) outside the house, and -- oh, yes D'Anna, one of 'BSG's most Reality-Free P e r m a l i n k | E m a i l t h i s | | straight and seven of its last eight -- the big local high school troublesome toasters. Submitted at 2/11/2010 3:30:00 AM overall. Continue reading Lucy Lawless C omments football game. The Clash of the -- ESPN Stats & Information (S04E13) One of the stranger Cats - Lions versus Panthers. Heading to 'Caprica' for Final Five Filters featured article: things about'Friday Night Lights' More about the game, the guests, Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: airing on DirecTV -- before this and the tough decisions to be PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, same season airs on NBC made after the jump. Term Extraction. starting April 30th -- is the fact Continue reading'Friday Night that this was the season finale Lights' - 'Thanksgiving' Recap a n d i t w a s a l l s e t a r o u n d Season Finale Thanksgiving. We may be Filed under: OpEd, Friday Night (Financial Times - US Wednesday the world’s leading after President Barack Obama’s contemplating Valentine's Day Lights, Episode Reviews, Reality homepage) e c o n o m i e s w e r e c l o s e t o move last month to raise $90bn on other shows and in our own -Free agreeing a global bank tax, amid (£57.7bn) from a US bank levy. Submitted at 2/10/2010 3:22:05 PM lives, but in Dillon, Texas, it's a Permalink| Email this| | hopes in Downing Street that a Five Filters featured article: Thanksgiving turkey feast, time C o m m e n t s Message from fivefilters.org: If deal can be concluded at the G20 Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: you can, please donate to the full summit in Canada in June. PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, -text RSS service so we can Mr Brown believes that opinion Term Extraction. continue developing it. has shifted decisively in favour G o r d o n B r o w n s a i d o n of a globally co-ordinated tax

'Friday Night Lights' 'Thanksgiving' Recap Season Finale

Global bank tax near, says Brown

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Which Star Is Irrationally Paranoid of Being Hit by Lightning? [Blind Items]

Eurozone leaders back Greek rescue plan

by Brian Moylan (Gawker)

(Financial Times - US homepage)

breasts, which look a little strange on her otherwise asexual body." [ Blind Gossip] She's so afraid she won't leave 3."An up-and-coming actress on the house when it rains. Plus a doomed hour drama was the moisture ruins her hair. Another top choice to headline a muchstarlet ruined her body with buzzed-about pilot - you know, liposuction, and lightning won't the sort that could've turned her strike twice for a contract-bound from a "soon-to-be" to an "is." actress. Your daily blind The series' big-shot producer items—it's electric! wanted her. The network wanted 1."This MTV reality star thinks her. Everyone wanted her. But… she's pretty hot stuff. So hot in well, you knew there'd be a fact, that she believes that if she "but." Even though it would take goes out into the rainy Los a miracle of biblical proportions Angeles weather right now she to save her current show, its suits just might melt. She refuses to let refused to release her from her the rain touch her and is holed up contract. "We could be back next in her home. She's canceled season," they insisted. Uh, yeah, several appointments (which is She is said to think that because few years. Whether she's heavier so could my humility. As a how we heard about this) and if of her fame, the lightning is more or thinner, though, her body result, the almost-leading lady the sky is even cloudy, she won't drawn to her than to ‘normal' remains completely boyish: no got screwed. Who is she, and step outside. She doesn't want to people. We're not joking, she hips, flat butt. It wasn't always what going-going-gone drama's be photographed with moisture thinks fame is some sort of that way, though. Earlier in her producers were so deluded, or so in the air, believing it turns her lightning rod and it's looking to career, she had curves, and then nasty, that they wouldn't give her skin colors and ruins her hair. get her. Not Tila Tequila." [ she had liposuction. It was the all clear? Sound off below." [ We think no one really cares that BuzzFoto] completely overdone, though, EW] much. She also has an extreme 2 . " T h i s y o u n g s t a r h a s and left her devoid of curves. fear, bordering on paranoia that fluctuated in weight over the past Well, except, that is, for her fake she might be struck by lightning. Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:08:06 AM

Submitted at 2/11/2010 5:34:27 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Leaders of countries in the eurozone on Thursday promised to help Greece if it slashed its budget deficit, saying they would provide “determined and coordinated action if needed to safeguard stability” in the bloc. Under an agreement hammered out in last minute negotiations in Brussels, the 16-country eurozone stopped short of providing immediate financial support for Greece, but gave an implicit assurance to help Athens if it encountered problems in refinancing its sovereign debt later this year. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Chat With Championship Crew Chief Chad Knaus by Holly Cain (FanHouse Main) Submitted at 2/10/2010 11:30:00 AM

Filed under: Crew Chiefs Chad Knaus, crew chief of the No. 48 Lowe's Chevrolet driven by Jimmie Johnson, will join

AOL FanHouse for a chat on Wednesday night at 7:30PM ET live from Daytona International Speedway. Don't miss this rare opportunity to ask questions of Knaus, the four-time defending NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship

for the Feb. 14 season-opening third installment of HBO Sports' Daytona 500 and a quest for an documentary, "24/7 Jimmie unprecedented fifth consecutive Johnson: Race to Daytona." Cup title. You can catch a behind-thescenes look at Knaus, Johnson crew chief as he prepares the No. and the whole team on Tuesday, 48 Hendrick Motorsports team Feb 9 at 10PM ET/PT in the

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Vancouver’s Dreaming of a White February (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

talks with Vonn about her second Sports Illustrated appearance in as many weeks — From where your Fixer sits in first on the cover in her ski suit, New York City, every look out and now as a model in the Sports the window at what’s turning out Illustrated swimsuit issue. t o b e a p r e t t y i m p r e s s i v e Vonn is hardly the only U.S. snowstorm is a reminder that it’s medal contender on skis. What’s just about time for the Winter s u r p r i s i n g a b o u t f e l l o w Olympics. The games are just c o n t e n d e r s s u c h a s T o d d two days away, which makes this Lodwick, Bill Demong and as good a time as any to survey Johnny Spillane is the sport in what will be going on in British which they compete: the obscure Columbia. Everything required s k i - j u m p i n g / c r o s s - c o u n t r y for an entertaining Olympics is c o m p e t i t i o n c a l l e d N o r d i c in place. Well, except for snow. combined. Their very presence Reuters At least Lindsey Vonn on the scene attests to the will have enough snow for her success of an American initiative pursuit of gold. to branch out into the Olympics’ At ESPN, Jesse Huffman reports l e s s - k n o w n s p o r t s . “ T h e on Cypress Mountain’s attempt Vancouver Games may be to construct a viable setup for the remembered as a major turning snowboarding competition. p o i n t f o r t h e U . S . W i n t e r Helicopters are involved. “The O l y m p i c m o v e m e n t , ” t h e mountain looked as if it were Journal’s Matthew Futterman under military siege, not an w r i t e s . “ S p e c i f i c a l l y : t h e O l y m p i c s i t e d a y s f r o m moment when this nation of 304 competition,” Ian Austen and million got over itself and John Branch write in the New learned how to compete in York Times. offbeat sports like Nordic “Welcome to paradise,” the combined.” Vancouver Sun’s Cam Cole Lofty though they are, the w r i t e s . “ S o r r y a b o u t t h e expectations facing Vonn are weather.” nothing compared to those Luckily, there’s plenty of snow confronting Canada’s men’s at Whistler, where Lindsey Vonn hockey team. A public poll in will be chasing downhill skiing Canada indicates that 35 percent gold and hoping to overcome a of Canada’s population would shin injury that she first revealed consider the Olympics a failure if publicly only recently. In the the hockey team fails to bring M i n n e a p o l i s S t a r T r i b u n e , home the gold. In the Los Rachel Blount profiles the Angeles Times, Philip Hersh singularly determined skier. In addresses just how heavily Sports Illustrated, Tim Layden Olympic athletes feel the weight Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:58:48 AM

revenues, little of which works its way down to the athletes who power the money machine. While the question of how to remedy this iniquity — or whether it even needs to be remedied — is a decades-old debate, a recent ruling in U.S. District Court in California of their nations’ expectations. Of course, simply competing at promises to make the argument the Olympic level can place notably less abstract. Judge shattering pressure on athletes, Claudia Wilken denied a request whether they’re competing by the NCAA to dismiss a classwithin walking distance of their action case brought by former hometowns or not. Wild Bill UCLA star Ed O’Bannon that J o h n s o n b e c a m e t h e f i r s t aims to get former players a American man to claim a gold piece of the action, and restrict medal in an Alpine event at the the NCAA’s right to use former Olympics when he won the players’ images in video games, downhill event at Sarajevo in television advertisements and 1984. But over the years that r e b r o a d c a s t s , a n d o t h e r followed, Johnson was just as m o n e y m a k i n g v e n u e s . famous for his hard-edged, hard- “O’Bannon’s attorneys can now partying personality as he was begin the discovery process that for his skiing. Johnson suffered may unlock how the business through a tumultuous decade in operates, which could have the ’90s before attempting a impact beyond this case,” comeback, at age 40, for the Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel writes. 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake “O’Bannon is one of several City. What could’ve been a great former athletes arguing that his story instead became a horror one-year scholarship agreements show: A serious spill on the never granted the NCAA use of slopes of Whitefish, Mont., led h i s n a m e a n d l i k e n e s s i n to Johnson spending three weeks perpetuity The case could lead to in a coma. In the Los Angeles former student-athletes getting a Times, Chris Erskine catches up cut of the multi-billion dollar with Johnson, who recovered college sports revenue pool and well enough to ski again, but is dramatically impact the way n o w i n f a i l i n g h e a l t h a n d college athletics operates.”* * * wondering what might’ve been.* Given the serious debt that many teams in the English ** Everyone knows this: Big-time Premier League carry and the college sports generate huge ongoing struggles of the global economy, it’s not especially

surprising to see a big-time soccer team threatening to slip into receivership, or out of existence entirely. Nor is it terribly surprising that the team in question would be Portsmouth, currently cellardwelling in the EPL and on its fourth ownership group in six months. Still, that can’t explain the extent of Portsmouth’s abjectness, which was on display during a Tuesday court hearing in which Portsmouth sought forgiveness on its tax debts, which are $11.7 million of a total team debt that amounts to nearly $94 million. In the Financial Times, Roger Blitz surveys the wreckage and ponders what’s next for the Premier League.* * * Few rituals in professional sports are more reliably entertaining than pro boxing’s press conferences and weigh-ins. But while those events have been home to goofy theatrics and prowrestling-style bombast since Muhammad Ali revolutionized the form decades ago, the Journal’s Hannah Karp reports that boxing’s rowdy, unpredictable, occasionally brawl-intensive pre-bout events have become strangely stagemanaged and sedate. “Veteran promoters say the physical risks and logistical hassles associated with pre-bout VANCOUVER’S page 69

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Lindsey Vonn plans to test ailing shin in training run by Associated Press (ESPN.com)

isn't too intense. "Tomorrow I will try and ski for the first time since my crash, Submitted at 2/11/2010 4:19:43 AM hopefully I can do it," Vonn said Message from fivefilters.org: If o n h e r T w i t t e r a c c o u n t you can, please donate to the full W e d n e s d a y . -text RSS service so we can The trip down the hill could continue developing it. Vonn provide all the data Vonn needs: Battling Shin Injury Vonn Might she ski only part of the Battling Shin Injury VIDEO course? Can she tolerate the pain PLAYLIST enough to even try skiing? â&#x20AC;˘ Vonn Battling Shin Injury "We honestly don't know how Vonn Battling Shin Injury it's going to respond," her â&#x20AC;˘ Sport Science: Lindsey Vonn husband said. "We potentially Sport Science: Lindsey Vonn could get up there and she could say, 'OK, this works. I can do V A N C O U V E R , B r i t i s h this.' And it could be not that big C o l u m b i a - - B e f o r e t h e of a problem. Or she could get Olympics even start, Lindsey out there with the painkillers and Vonn has gone from a favorite to she could say, 'There's just no w i n m u l t i p l e m e d a l s t o a chance." question mark of how many, if Vonn, 25, revealed Wednesday any, races she'll even ski. that she hurt her shin during a Vonn slalom training run in Austria Because of a badly bruised and last week. The injury is so swollen right shin, Vonn might painful that it's a struggle to slip wind up sitting out a race or two on a ski boot in her hotel, let before healing enough to be able alone ski down a slope. to participate in later events, said If the games had started three Thomas Vonn, a former U.S. days ago, Vonn wouldn't have Olympic skier who acts as a been ready. She has time -- and coach and adviser to his wife. time is what she needs. The "It is entirely possible that she super-combined race doesn't could race in all five events and begin until Sunday, and even that be fine. It is possible, for sure. I could be pushed back by adverse would be very, very surprised if weather, which is in the forecast. she didn't race in anything," he "I hope I'm able to push through said Wednesday. the pain and I'm able to still ski Her status may become clearer OK," Vonn said Wednesday. "I after a training run Thursday, w o n ' t r e a l l y k n o w u n t i l when the two-time reigning tomorrow when I actually get on overall World Cup champion skis and they can actually assess could test her shin -- if the pain the situation and see how bad it

week, but other than that, the news was kept hush-hush. Her mother didn't even know, finding out about it in an interview with NBC's "Today" show that was taped Tuesday night and aired Wednesday morning. Vonn insists she wasn't trying to hide anything, simply hoping the shin could heal in time. But with the training sessions beginning and the start of the supercombined looming, she felt she had to disclose the full nature of the ailment. "I didn't want to announce it," Vonn said. "I'd rather it had is." To even get to this point, healed by now. I wouldn't have though, sure beats what she was had to say anything and I'd be thinking when it first happened - able to ski fine. That wasn't the - that her Olympics might be case and I wanted to tell you over before she even took her guys because if I'm not racing tomorrow or training, I wanted to first run. "She went from being really explain myself before it was a happy, as well prepared as you big problem." can be for an Olympics, to just Vonn has skied in pain plenty of hitting the bottom really hard," times before. Thomas Vonn said. "The day of At the 2006 Turin Olympics, the injury was a very tough day." she took a bad spill in training, a Vonn elected to skip getting X- fall that bruised her back and rays when the injury happened, sent her to the hospital. fearing it might reveal something However, less than 48 hours later, Vonn -- known then by her more than a bad bruise. "I pretty much stuck my fingers m a i d e n n a m e , K i l d o w - in my ear and just pretended like recovered in time and went on to I didn't hear what was going on," finish eighth in the downhill. she said. "I didn't want to hear That comeback to the course that my shin was fractured. At serves as motivation this time. the time, that's what it looked "I draw a lot of confidence knowing that I've done it like." The U.S. Ski Team and USOC before," Vonn said. "Torino, was aware of Vonn's injury last especially, was a really painful situation for me and something

that I wasn't sure if I could even do. I was able to push through it and I competed. ... I've got to go out there and do the best I can with the situation that I have. Hopefully I can ski, hopefully I can ski well, and hopefully I can still get a medal." Don't bet against it. "She's a tough girl," said Bill Sterett, a U.S. Ski Team doctor who first treated Vonn when she broke her leg at age 13. "I think you can never discount Lindsey and how tough she is and how much she wants this." Vonn did her best to smile through her news conference. She did, however, sigh occasionally as she talked about the pain in her leg and the possibility of needing to pull out of one -- or all -- of her five events. "It's hard to stay positive, you know," Vonn said. "A week ago ... I was feeling great, I was feeling healthy, I had no problems. And now I'm sitting here today questioning whether I'll be even able to ski. So it's not where I want to be, by any means." Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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The Count: Jerry Rice’s Two Hall of Fame Careers (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

to 1990, leading the NFL in receiving yards three times and touchdown catches four times There were plenty of Pro and winning two Super Bowls Football Hall of Famers, current while setting numerous Super and future, gathered at the Super Bowl records. His career was Bowl in Miami on Sunday. But short, but counting playoff none were better than Jerry Rice, games Rice A played 35 more who was voted into the Hall of games than Hall of Famer Gale Fame the day before the big Sayers. Rice B lasted longer than game. That’s said with all due Rice A, from 1991 to his respect to other Class of 2010 retirement in 2004. And he was members, including Emmitt at or near the top of nearly every Smith and John Randle; future major career receiving ranking, Hall of Famers Peyton Manning including catches, yards and and, probably, Drew Brees, who TDs. played in the game; and Hall of Both Rices, Smith wrote, would Famer Len Dawson, who carried be locks for enshrinement in the Lombardi Trophy to Brees Canton, and no other all-time and his Saints teammates after great produced two Hall of Fame the game. None of them, nor careers. Or at least none had by perhaps any other Hall of Famer, 2004; Brett Favre might have a had not one, but two Hall of case if he sticks around and Fame playing careers, as Rice produces more seasons like his did. Reuters The outcome of Hall career-best at age 40 this past of Fame voting for Jerry Rice season for the Vikings. Manning was considerably less surprising has 11 good or great years under than that of the game the next his belt, and will need quite a day in Miami. few more to match Rice in Consider Jerry Rice A and Jerry sustaining greatness for so long. Rice B, as Michael David Smith At Pro Football Reference, did in “ Pro Football Forecast Chase Stuart divided Rice’s 2004.” Rice A played from 1985 career into odd and even years, Submitted at 2/10/2010 1:01:11 PM

half’s worth of games, Rice caught 134 passes for 2,177 yards and 23 TDs, and ran for one score as well,” Stuart writes. “That’s an average season of 89 catches, 1451 receiving yards and 16 touchdowns, or roughly the career best season for nearly and found that both halves also every WR who has ever played would merit Hall of Fame the game.” Later, when Rice was induction. Building on prior catching balls from Jeff Garcia work by his colleague Doug and Rich Gannon, his numbers Drinen, Stuart went further, declined. But that may have had attempting to answer critics who something to do with his age in say that Rice’s greatness was in those years, between 37 and 41. large part the product of his His five years at those ages were collaboration with Hall of Fame five of the six most productive quarterbacks Joe Montana and for a receiver 37 or older in NFL Steve Young. Even Rice’s history. Rice had 2,509 receiving f o r m e r c o a c h , B i l l W a l s h , yards after age 40. No one else s u g g e s t e d a s m u c h i n a n has even a single receiving yard interview with Allen Barra after reaching that age. No before Walsh’s death, wondering wonder defensive players Rod of Tim Brown, “If he’d have Woodson, Ray Lewis, Deion been lucky enough to be drafted Sanders and Darren Sharper tell by a team with great passers like ESPN’s Mike Sando they think Joe Montana and Steve Young, Rice may be the greatest player who’s to say he couldn’t have ever, at any position. surpassed Jerry Rice?” Stuart analyzed 24 games Rice played with other QBs when Montana and Young were injured. “In exactly a year and a

XSEED now publishing Samurai Shodown Sen by JC Fletcher (Joystiq) Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:40:00 AM

The odd swapping of games between Ignition Entertainment and XSEED continues. First, Ignition obtained the rights to Marvelous's Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Arc Rise Fantasia, both initially to be published by XSEED. Now, XSEED has announced that it will publish Samurai Shodown: Edge of Destiny on Xbox 360 -a game that we played at Ignition's E3 booth. XSEED is publishing the fighter under the name Samurai Shodown Sen, with a release planned for sometime this spring. Along with Atlus's announcement that it's publishing Metal Slug XX, this move provides evidence that Ignition's co-publishing deal with SNK has ended. XSEED now publishing Samurai Shodown Sen originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Could Be Cheesy Games if Vonn Sits Out by Jay Mariotti (FanHouse Main)

If Vonn can't compete, well, consider the Super Bowl without Drew Brees and the World Series Submitted at 2/10/2010 3:21:00 PM without Derek Jeter. Poised to be She gazes at us from a doublea darling of the Games, she's page spread in Sports now one medical decision away Illustrated's new swimsuit issue, from giving you one less reason wearing a two-piece, red-andto watch. white number that successfully "It's hard to stay positive, you sells her sexuality. It's part of know," Vonn said. "A week ago, Lindsey Vonn's marketing I was feeling great, I was feeling assault on the American healthy, I had no problems. And consciousness, an all-out swarm now, I'm sitting here today intended to combine her questioning whether I'll be even telegenic looks, Midwestern able to ski. So, it's not where I background and estimable ski a n d h a s b e e n k e e p i n g h e r much less produce the kind of want to be, by any means. It's talents to transform her into medical condition a secret consistent drama that holds a TV probably the worst place that you America's golden girl and medals because, in her words, "I didn't audience for two weeks. Now, can have an injury, because machine at the Winter Olympics. want to alarm anybody." When one of the Games' marquee you're constantly pushing against But now, she's just another Vonn finally broke the news names is suffering from an injury your boot, and there's no way wounded athlete who wraps her Wednesday, she did more than she describes as "excruciatingly around it. right shin in cheese, hoping a 20- alarm NBC boss Dick Ebersol, painful," mostly because the shin "It's hard to focus on just being year dream hasn't been ruined Olympic organizers and the area is where a skier applies prepared for the Olympics when pressure when her boot meets you have such a big injury like again by a deep, six-inch bruise. companies she endorses. Hyped relentlessly as the world's She cast gloom over an every- her leg. She couldn't have this. It has definitely changed my premier female Alpine skier and four-years event that, frankly, suffered worse luck at the worst whole perspective coming into a potential winner of five isn't nearly as popular as it once possible time, having been these Games, and definitely is medals, perhaps two gold, Vonn- was and needs her to create unable to walk for two days, not the place that I want to be." couver is petrified that the injury interest. As it is, no one is sure if having to stay off skis for a week So she could pull out officially might rub her out of the Games. Vancouver will have enough and experiencing pain simply as soon as Thursday? "Yeah, She hurt the shin during a slalom snow and cold weather to create when she tries to put on a boot in that's a possibility," Vonn said. training run last week in Austria a Winter Games atmosphere -- her hotel.

White House sees improvement in jobs market (Financial Times - US homepage) Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:59:52 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The White House estimates that an average of 95,000 jobs will be added to the economy each month this year, according to the annual Economic Report of the President. The report saw the gains as a welcome change, saying the labour market “appears to be healing” and that job gains should reach an average of 251,000 a month by 2012. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Heather Goldberg's New Necklace Line, Shadowplay by ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 2/10/2010 4:09:00 PM

Former intern of New York design collective ThreeasFour and LA-based label Band of Outsiders, Heather Goldberg is

making a name for herself with Shadowplay (yes, after the Joy Division song), a completely organic line of necklaces. Inspired by the earth’s inherent beauty, from deep sea to outer space, each necklace is made of dyed yarns, certified fair trade the finest organic and naturally- b l a c k s i l v e r c l o s u r e s , a n d

C r y s t a l l i z e d S w a r o v s k i her LA studio Elements. Each delicate piece is Shadowplay “Sonnet” necklace handmade by Goldberg in her Shadowplay “Minter” necklace LA studio and can be found exclusively on her site www.shadowplaycollection.com. —Erin Boyle Designer Heather Goldberg in

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Lakers injury updates for Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum and Lamar Odom by Dave McMenamin (ESPN.com)

customary massage and pregame ankle-taping routine. Bryant has missed the Lakers' Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:04:03 AM past three games with a sprained Message from fivefilters.org: If left ankle. Bryant first injured the you can, please donate to the full ankle seven games ago, on Jan. -text RSS service so we can 29 in Philadelphia, after a thirdcontinue developing it. quarter collision with Sixers SALT LAKE CITY -- Kobe f o r w a r d E l t o n B r a n d . T h e Bryant sat out the Lakers' 96-81 condition of the ankle worsened victory over the Utah Jazz on in a 99-97 victory over the Wednesday with a sore left Hornets on Feb. 3 when Lamar ankle. Odom stepped on Bryant's left More on the Lakers foot just before halftime, For more news, notes and a g g r a v a t i n g t h e i n j u r y . analysis of the Lakers, check out Andrew Bynum was also the Land O' Lakers blog from the inactive Wednesday night with a Kamenetzky Brothers. Blog It bruised right hip. He missed his was not a big surprise, since second straight game. Lakers coach Phil Jackson had If the swelling in Bynum's hip said before the game, "I don't does not subside on its own, he anticipate him playing." plans to have the hip's bursa sac The next decision is whether drained after the All-Star break. Bryant plays in Sunday's All-Star He said he will make the Game. determination Monday. Bryant was on L.A.'s active Bynum's right hip was injured roster Wednesday night at Utah, Saturday when he was fouled by but he did not dress and was not Portland's Juwan Howard with with the Lakers on the bench. He 10:58 remaining in the first had been seen in the locker room quarter and landed hard on the napping on the trainer's table but floor. He played the next four was not going through his minutes before subbing out and

heading directly to the locker room to have his hip attended to. He did not play in the second half and missed the Lakers' following game against the Spurs. Bynum said he is hopeful that his hip's swelling follows the same course as his left knee, which was bothering him after a knee-to-knee collision with Charlotte's Stephen Jackson last week but has healed naturally. Odom left practice on Monday to receive an MRI and CAT scan on his sore right foot, but he did play Wednesday in the victory over the Jazz. Odom scored a game-high 25 points (7-of-9 on FGs, 11-of-12 on FTs) and added 11 rebounds, three steals and two blocks. Dave McMenamin covers the L a k e r s f o r ESPNLosAngeles.com Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

VANCOUVER’S continued from page 65

tussles outweigh the extra ticket sales that brawls can spark, and they’ve switched strategies,” Karp writes. “Now, instead of cramming six fighters into a tiny hotel room and waiting for sparks to fly, they roll out the red carpets in spacious venues and script the boxers’ jokes in hopes of engineering the knockout sound bite.” Of course, that doesn’t mean that boxing is suddenly all about love. In the Philadelphia Daily News, Bernard Fernandez describes the long-simmering feud between veteran light heavyweights Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr., who will meet April 3 in a rematch of their IBF title bout from 1993, when both were middleweights. The two most bankable and brilliant fighters in the sport, Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr., are still trading long-distance jabs over the dissolution of what promised to be an ultra-blockbuster bout between the two. In the Orange County Register, Mark Whicker reports that Pacquiao still has Mayweather on his mind as he prepares for his March 13 fight against Joshua Clottey.* * * In the broad scheme of things, this is a pretty good time to be a hockey fan. The NHL is brimming with young talent, and new rivalries have brought renewed interest to the game. And yet the NHL, for a host of reasons, is unmistakably fourth of the four major sports in the

U.S., and even strong NHL teams are the weakest brands in crowded markets. In the Washington Post, Gene Wang chronicles the attempts of the Washington Capitals to build fan interest through forward-thinking work on the Web and an aggressive approach to socialnetworking sites.* * * New Orleans celebrates the Super Bowl. With Mardi Gras looming and the Super Bowl champion Saints returning home for their victory parade, Tuesday in New Orleans was more or less the epicenter of all things party-time in the United States. While every year sees at least one Super Bowl Champs Have Their Parade story, it’s safe to say that the version of this familiar piece Gordon Russell wrote for the New Orleans Times-Picayune is both exponentially more colorful and notably more full of “Who Dat”s than any previously printed anywhere else. — Tip of the Fix cap to reader Fred Sternburg and fellow Fixer Garey Ris. Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfix@wsj.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

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Blue Devils Finish Off Heels' Hopes Report: Owners of St. Louis Rams have signed agreement to sell team by Jim Henry (FanHouse Main)

Wolfpack by 20 points in Raleigh, N.C. Virginia Tech made its first 10 shots and Submitted at 2/10/2010 4:26:00 PM sprinted to a 26-7 lead to win for Filed under: Duke, UNC, ACC the seventh time in nine games. Going, going ... gone? Honestly, 2-7 could easily end 5 North Carolina's season has -11 for UNC in the ACC. The slipped away. Wednesday night Tar Heels simply have not been was pretty much it for the Tar able to steady itself, even in a Heels, who played well but not muddled league chase. Seven of well enough in a 64-54 home the 12 teams have at least five defeat to No. 8 Duke. ACC losses. UNC started the The defending national season at No. 6 and as co-ACC champions have lost eight of 10 favorite with Duke-- but fell out since the start of 2010, including of the poll two weeks ago. four in a row overall to tumble "We can't give up, we can't give near the basement of the Atlantic should have had for the whole up," said UNC freshman John Coast Conference standings, one season." Henson, who had seven boards step above last-place North The remainder of the season and six points. Carolina State. expects to be a grind -- take a "We've got to keep pushing. I Don't look for coach Roy quick peek at the Tar Heels' think that as a team, we're going Williams' sour mood to improve schedule. to see who we are as people either. He continues to question They only have three home through this stretch and I feel his squad's toughness and work games remaining: against N.C. like we'll keep pushing and ethic, though he saw both State, Florida State and Miami. things are going to get better." qualities during the game's first Road games include Wake "It's tough. No one in that locker 30 minutes. Forest, Duke, Georgia Tech and r o o m e v e r e x p e r i e n c e d "For 30 minutes I thought it was Boston College. something like this at any level. a really good basketball game," Making matters worse, nobody It's tough, but we've got to push Williams said. is winning much on the road in through it and we've got to get "But there are no moral victories. the ACC these days. better every day and keep We have got to play better. I FSU, Boston College and making progress." thought we really had the Georgia Tech tumbled away intensity during the first thirty from home Wednesday, although minutes that we needed and V i r g i n i a T e c h b l i t z e d t h e

by ESPN.com news services (ESPN.com)

keeping the team in St. Louis, according to the report. The sale must be approved by Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:16:13 AM the NFL's owners. Message from fivefilters.org: If Frontiere's heirs, who took you can, please donate to the full control of the team when she -text RSS service so we can died in 2008, considered several continue developing it. bids for the company, including The owners of the St. Louis one from a group headed by St. Rams have entered into a signed Louis Blues chairman Dave agreement to sell a majority Checketts. share of the team, the St. Louis According to the Post-Dispatch, Post-Dispatch reported, citing Khan started working for Flex-N multiple NFL sources. -Gate in 1970 and has owned the Owners Chip Rosenbloom and company since 1980. Lucia Rodriguez, who inherited Stan Kroenke owns the the franchise from their late remaining 40 percent of the mother, Georgia Frontiere, have Rams and held right of first a signed agreement to sell their refusal to purchase the team. But 60 percent stake in the Rams to as the owner of the Denver Shahid Khan, the newspaper Nuggets and the Colorado reported. Avalanche, he would be Khan, 55, is the president of prevented from owning the team Flex-N-Gate Corp., an auto parts d u e t o t h e N F L ' s c r o s s manufacturer based in Urbana, o w n e r s h i p r u l e s . Ill. Sources describe him as a Five Filters featured article: Rams fan who has attended Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: home games at the Edward Jones PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Dome and is committed to Term Extraction.

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Stallworth Was Wrong but Unlucky

Fall 2010 Fashion Week Preview: One Hour With Yigal Azrouël

by David Whitley (FanHouse Main)

by ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog)

Submitted at 2/10/2010 12:00:00 PM

Submitted at 2/10/2010 6:13:40 PM

Filed under: NFL Police Blotter Donte' Stallworth has hit the job market. If you checked his resume and noticed that he'd killed a man, would you hire him? That's the question NFL teams are facing, and you already know the answer. Sure they will, at least if Stallworth didn't lose a step during that brutal 24-day stretch in a Miami jail. The theoretical question is whether Stallworth should be allowed to play after his DUI manslaughter conviction. I must hold my nose and say yes. Stallworth has paid his debt to society, such as it was. Once any criminal has done that, he or she can't be denied the right to earn a living if somebody wants to hire that person. It's no solace that the potential employer is the Detroit Lions, who gave Stallworth a tryout Wednesday. There was probably

“I’m like a little kid when I begin designing each season,” explains Yigal Azrouël two days before his fall 2010 ready-to-wear collection hits the runway in New York. “I get very excited and have a million ideas floating around in my head.” With model castings and fittings in full more football talent in the prison swing, Azrouël, and stylist Kate yard than on Detroit's roster, but Young, give us a glimpse at his that's beside the point. a play on the ice. “structured, cohesive” new The point is people are still by Kevin Blackistone I h o p e t h e l e a g u e d o e s collection, complete with killer outraged that Stallworth got (FanHouse Main) something quickly to maintain bags, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and drunk last March, killed a guy, Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:14:00 AM Masterton's singular tragedy, Pamela Love jewelry. The spent less than a month in jail because week after week, it d e s i g n e r d e s c r i b e s h i s and is now primed to resume his Filed under: NHL multi-million dollar career. For half a century, the NHL was seems now, hockey highlights relationship with Young as a Meanwhile, Michael Vick got lucky. Then Minnesota North are darkened by the image of a “long happy marriage”—the two two years for killing dogs. Stars center Bill Masterton player prone or prostrate on the met in an elevator years ago and Plaxico Burress is doing two carried the puck into the Oakland ice, not moving, apparently have been collaborating ever Seals zone and, after making a unconscious. What deposited since. For fall, we can expect years for shooting himself. We want to put our foot down pass, was checked by two Seals. him there was a shot to the head. texture (think chunky knits with On Monday, it was Devils a structured shoulder), edge on this one. Call it the Stallworth Masterton fell backwards. The back of his head smashed into defenseman Anssi Salmela who (sleek zipper and stud details), Rule. One drunken strike and the ice. Blood poured out of his was blindsided by a shoulder-to- and, of course, subversive you're out. mouth and nose. He passed out. shoulder hit from Flyers forward sexiness. Two days later, on Jan. 15, Jeff Carter. It knocked Salmela —Violet Moon Gaynor 1968, Masterton was dead. He out face down on the ice. He was Get the latest runway news on was 29. An annual trophy was carted away and is now suffering ELLE's 2010 Fashion Week named after Masterton. He is still a concussion. Central >> the only NHL player killed from

NHL Must Use Head on Head Shots

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NCsoft 2009 financials get high on Aion by Richard Mitchell (Joystiq)

million) for its fiscal 2009, an 83 percent increase over the Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:00:00 AM previous year. Actual Generally speaking, when a income(profit, in other words) company can post a year-over- reached KRW185.4 billion ($160 year growth in the double digits, million), a 623 percent increase it's doing pretty well. We write over 2008. up a lot of financial news here at Narrowing things down solely the 'Stiq, and it's not often that to the company's 4th quarter, we can report that a company income was actually up 100 9 managed a 623 percent increase percent over the same period last in its income. And yet, here we year, with NCsoft reporting are, as GameSpot reports that KRW72.1 billion ($62 million). NCsoft has done exactly that -- F o u r t h q u a r t e r r e v e n u e s , thanks in no small part to its meanwhile were up 99 percent at latest MMO, Aion. Specifically, K R W 1 9 7 . 3 b i l l i o n ( $ 1 7 0 NCsoft reported revenues of m i l l i o n ) . K R W 6 3 4 . 7 b i l l i o n ( $ 5 4 6 Again, all this is mostly on the

fantastic back of Aion, which brought in 43 percent of the company's game revenue for 2009, followed by Lineage II with 26 percent, the original Lineage with 23, City of Heroes with 4, Guild Wars with 3 and other titles with 1 percent. [Via Edge] NCsoft 2009 financials get high on Aion originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

BioShock 2 players report multiplayer freezing issues by Griffin McElroy (Joystiq) Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:03:00 AM

We've received a number of reports from readers who've been participating in BioShock 2's multiplayer component and succumbing to a variety of gamecrashing bugs. The reported causes of the freezing are widespread -- some Xbox 360 players encounter it during the post-game recap, while some have reported freezing up while in their apartment hubs. We've contacted 2K to find out if anything is being done to patch whatever issue might be causing the breakdowns.

We were going to make a joke about the freezes being caused by the overzealous use of the Winter Blast plasmid, but that would have been one of the dumbest things we'd ever written. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in!] BioShock 2 players report multiplayer freezing issues originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Smile Through Your Heartache With Smile Smile's New Album

Serious Sam HD: Second Encounter pushed to April by Justin McElroy (Joystiq) Submitted at 2/11/2010 9:00:00 AM

Our beloved sister site, Big Download, reports that Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter has been slightly delayed to April -- and, frankly, if you can't trust your own sister, who can you trust? (That's on PC, mind you. No word on the 360 port's timing.) BD was also told that a deathmatch and dedicated servers update for the first game would arrive soon and that The Second Encounter would ship with both of those features. We're happy for the tidbits, but

Ars mole: Splinter Cell: Conviction, Final Fantasy XIII getting 250GB Xbox 360 bundles

by ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 2/10/2010 1:54:18 PM

Feeling lonely or simply let down by love? Crack a beer and pop in Smile Smile’s new Truth by Justin McElroy (Joystiq) same specs except with Final on Tape, a break-up album that F a n t a s y X I I I a n d w h i t e will lift your spirits and maybe Submitted at 2/11/2010 10:30:00 AM even open your heart to controllers. possibility— but not necessarily we can't figure out why Devolver We're devoted fans of the Ars Considering the the mole's track the romantic kind. This Dallas Technica mole, who has nailed record, we wouldn't be surprised Digital would give all that cool, duo is known for blending pop, big stories like the PS3 Slim and to see an official announcement manly news to our dumb little piano chords and swingy country sister. She still plays with My the Resident Evil 5 bundle. As a any day now. guitar into catchy indie-folk result, we feel pretty comfortable A r s m o l e : S p l i n t e r C e l l : Little Ponies and Polly Pocket. songs; until their love flamed getting excited about two new Conviction, Final Fantasy XIII What does she know about a out, they were also known for game where dudes have bombs Xbox 360 bundles Ars highlights g e t t i n g 2 5 0 G B X b o x 3 6 0 their intense on-stage chemistry. today. The first, a Splinter Cell: bundles originally appeared on for hands? Here’s how it all went down: Conviction-themed bundle, will Joystiq on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 Serious Sam HD: Second Ryan Hamilton, a self-taught Encounter pushed to April reportedly include a not-in-any- 10:30:00 EST. Please see our guitarist, and Jencey way-branded system packing a terms for use of feeds. originally appeared on Joystiq on Hirunrusme, a classically-trained 250GB hard drive, two black Read| Permalink| Email this| Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST. pianist, hit it off at a Texas bar in Please see our terms for use of controllers and the game, all for Comments 2005. Within months, they’d $400. The other bundle will, feeds. moved in together, turned their according to Ars, have all the Read| Permalink| Email this| love letters into lyrics, formed Comments Smile Smile (the band’s name no doubt reflecting their giddy, lovestruck feelings), and had become engaged to wed. Their whirlwind romance turned into a SMILE page 74

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tornado once they began touring and promoting their debut album, Blue Roses, and both started to feel overwhelmed. Then Hirunrusme met someone else and the couple split up. The devastated Hamilton expressed his pain and anger in new songs that he sent to his ex. She was smitten anew, but with the music, not the musician, and the pair decided to get back together with the sole aim of recording a second album. This could have been a disaster, but instead of devolving into bitterness, Truth on Tape(out yesterday) is an admirable attempt to salvage something beautiful from the wreckage of a relationship. (The tense collaboration was made slightly easier, Hamilton has admitted, by the fact that

Hirunrusme’s other relationship didn’t work out.) The songs don’t mince words about the betrayal, but Hamilton’s respect and affection for his former fiancée is touching. Even when singing, “I’m so foolish for believing/you cared more for me than you did yourself,” he sounds more disappointed than accusatory. And when we hear the sad, distracted way he trails off the line “What you are is in my way,” while she joins in with, “Tell me you love me like you mean it,” our hearts go out to them both. Singing along with the jilted lover can be comforting for those of us who have been there before, but it would have been interesting to also hear Hirunrusme’s side of story. We also can’t help but wonder about

their motives: Is putting the Truth on Tape a form of breakup justice for Hamilton? Is it musical penance for Hirunrusme’s mistakes? Regardless, it’s reassuring to hear two former lovers put aside their differences for the sake of their art (and they say they’re committed to making music professionally). Kind of makes those of us who have been similarly wronged want to take the high road, too— after we finish this drink, of course. —Corrie Pikul Follow ELLE on Twitter. Become our Facebook fan!

Iran, democracy and nukes: Fearless or foolhardy? (The Economist: News analysis) Submitted at 2/11/2010 12:53:43 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Iran, democracy and nukes Iran's government dangerously ups the nuclear ante and faces resilient protesters at home Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition IRAN’S brittle but brutal regime is being squeezed from within by the relentless protests of the

opposition and from without by the threat of more sanctions unless it backs down over its controversial nuclear plans. Yet Iran’s rulers, rather than parrying, sidestepping or giving ground, seem determined to fight on both fronts at once. After months of rising tension they seem to be asking for a double showdown, sooner rather than later. Since last summer’s disputed presidential election, the opposition Green movement, IRAN, page 75

Scribd Looks To Apps And E-Readers To Lift Its Profile (paidContent.org via Yahoo! Finance) (Yahoo! News Search Results for e-readers) Submitted at 2/10/2010 7:44:56 PM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Social publishing site Scribd is hoping to capitalize on the hype over apps and e-readers with a slew of products aimed at portable devices in the coming weeks. The San Francisco company's founder Trip Adler

tells the WSJ Scribd will unveil a "send to mobile" feature this month that will make it easier to bring its 10 million documents to smartphones and e-readers. The effort is part of an "open strategy" that will make Scribd's documents compatible with all manner of e-reader devices, including the iPhone, iPad, Amazon's Kindle, Google's Android system and beyond. Scribd, which wants to build on the roughly 50 million users it attracts every month, realizes it's

going up against the forces of DRM, although the EPub open format has been getting some traction. Still, Scribd will have to convince mobile users that the trade-off for free and open document sharing requires putting up with ads around some content and paywalls on copyrighted works from its ecommerce store, which offers publishers an 80 percent take of the revenue. E-commerce has been an area

Scribd has wanted to grow. And while it sees an opportunity with the proliferation of devices, the e -commerce effort has remained fairly small since it started last spring. Currently, the WSJ notes, only 5 percent of the e-books on Scribd are copyrighted. For now, with devices fighting over prices for copyrighted material, Scribd is content to make its big mobile push with free stuff. After it hooks more users with its free docs and e-books, the hope is that it could make some more

moves on the e-commerce end. Related • Scribd Releases Co-Branded Reader For Media Sites With An Eye Towards Ad Sales • Simon & Schuster Adds 5,000 E-Books To Scribd Store Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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uniting followers of the thwarted candidates with other critics of the conservatives who now dominate the government, has taken advantage of Iran’s memorial-saturated Islamic revolutionary calendar. The latest anniversary, celebrating the 1979 overthrow of the Shah, on February 11th, was a chance for it to claim that it is the revolution’s true inheritor. Clashes between security forces and protesters erupted anew in Tehran, Iran’s capital, and in other cities. Early reports of the events were hard to verify, as the authorities severely curbed internet and mobile-phone messaging services, the Greens’ crucial tools, and appeared to block Gmail, Google’s e-mail service. The handful of foreign reporters granted visas were carefully herded to points from which only loyalist rallies could be viewed. Rattled by the scale and fury of the last big protests in December, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government pulled out the stops to prevent another big show of protest. Loyalists brought in by bus in their thousands to support the regime were duly shown on television chanting such timehonoured slogans as “Death to

America!” YouTube and the unofficial news media showed wobbly films of protesters here and there—but how many had turned out was hard to say. In January the conservativecontrolled judiciary handed down its first death sentences for political crimes since the unrest began in June. Two protesters were hanged. There was a new wave of arrests of opposition campaigners, especially journalists, at least 65 of whom are in jail. Among those held, according to a website, was a granddaughter of the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Unlike the December protest, which was not backed strongly by the opposition’s main leaders, this one clearly had their backing. Mir Hosein Mousavi, widely thought to have bested Mr Ahmadinejad in the disputed poll if votes had been fairly counted, called for a big turnout. So did his fellow candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist cleric, along with a former president, Muhammad Khatami, whom many reformers still admire. The Greens want to keep up the momentum of protest to sustain their loose coalition, which includes outright secular liberals as well as Islamists who

think the revolution has gone astray. Still, it is unclear whether Mr Ahmadinejad and, more crucially, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are bent on repression as their sole means of retaining power. In recent weeks milder conservatives, including another former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have tried to defuse the crisis by urging restraint. Perhaps as a result, several high-ranking reformists have been freed from jail. A similar hint of hesitation and even confusion has been evident in the nuclear sphere. At his rally on February 11th Mr Ahmadinejad boasted that a nuclear plant at Natanz had successfully enriched uranium from 3.5% to 19.75% for the first time. That is potent enough to fuel a research reactor in Teheran—but also that much closer to the 90% level needed for a bomb. By contrast, earlier presidential statements had suggested that Iran might agree to an American plan to export low-enriched uranium in exchange for imports of higherenriched stocks for producing medical isotopes. Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads Iran’s Atomic Energy

Organisation, quickly made a qualification. He suggested that Iran’s move was a bargaining chip to secure better terms to enable Iran to accept last year’s American offer. Specifically, it would exchange uranium in batches rather than send the bulk of its low-enriched stocks abroad before getting back the rods that can be used solely for the isotopes, as America had proposed. America, Britain and France, the UN Security Council’s Western veto-wielding trio, instantly denounced Iran’s latest move and called for tighter sanctions to be imposed within weeks. Russia, sounding unusually unamused, may agree. Of the veto-wielders, only China, which remains loth to punish Iran, stayed mute. The ruling ayatollahs must be feeling nervous. Readers' comments The Economist welcomes your views. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Europe.view: Turn east, Lady Ashton (The Economist: Daily columns) Submitted at 2/11/2010 12:08:46 AM

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Europe.view The EU could make a real difference in Ukraine Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist online PIGEONHOLING and false analogies are not part of formal international relations studies. But from the way that diplomats, policymakers and analysts talk about Ukraine, you would think they were compulsory courses. Take the optimistic point that Ukraine’s elections are now unlike Russia’s. True, Ukrainian voters had a real choice in that country’s recent presidential poll. The incumbent, Viktor Yushchenko, gave up power peacefully. (In Russia, he might have handed power over to an ex -spook, amid bogus terrorist attacks to panic the public into accepting authoritarian rule). The vote count was fair. Ukraine’s media is far more pluralist than Russia’s. And so on. All this is fine. But Ukraine’s election was also unlike Kazakhstan’s. It is easy to make something look EUROPE.VIEW: page 76

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Nigerian politics: Good luck, Jonathan (The Economist: News analysis)

repeatedly put off filling the vacuum, knowing that a change at the top could threaten their Submitted at 2/10/2010 9:59:20 PM privileged positions. Investors Message from fivefilters.org: If and oil people grew querulous. you can, please donate to the full However, amid growing calls -text RSS service so we can for action, Nigeria’s parliament continue developing it. has at last passed a resolution Nigerian politics Nigeria's new that transfers full power to Mr president will have to live up to Jonathan until the president his name, as he takes over in returns to work. The resolution murky circumstances used Mr Yar’Adua’s faltering Feb 11th 2010 | LAGOS | From BBC telephone interview last The Economist print edition month as the official “sick note” WEARING the wide-brimmed t o p a r l i a m e n t t h a t t h e hat favoured by tribal chiefs in constitution requires for a his corner of Nigeria, Goodluck handover. Jonathan this week assumed Mr Jonathan could now be in office as the country’s acting the top job until elections president. In a televised address s c h e d u l e d f o r n e x t y e a r . to his 150m people, the erstwhile Although he has been the de vice-president said that the f a c t o l e a d e r s i n c e M r “circumstances” that had led to Yar’Adua’s departure, he has his promotion were “uncommon, been largely passive. Some sober and reflective”. attribute this silence to Until now, Africa’s most spinelessness, others to tactical populous country had been guile. “If he had overdone it leaderless for almost 80 days, earlier, people would have said since President Umaru Yar’Adua he was power-grabbing,” says a a b r u p t l y l e f t f o r m e d i c a l businessman in Lagos, the treatment in Saudi Arabia. He commercial capital. “He has failed formally to transfer power been clever.” to Mr Jonathan before his In his address on February 9th, departure, leaving Nigeria in a Mr Jonathan unveiled his aims. state of limbo. The president’s In the Niger Delta region, his i n n e r c i r c l e a n d c a b i n e t homeland, where militants have

long campaigned for a greater share of their land’s oil revenues, he vowed to build on Mr Yar’Adua’s amnesty of last summer. Thousands of youths gave up their weapons in return for promises of stipends and training, but the leaderless government has been slow to make good on those pledges and the peace is fraying. It is hard to predict how much the acting president will assert himself in the coming months. In many ways an unknown entity, Mr Jonathan has a history of assuming big roles by being in the right place at the right time. When the Bayelsa state governor was arrested on moneylaundering charges in 2005, Mr Jonathan, then deputy governor, found himself at the helm. On February 10th, chairing his first cabinet meeting, he had the confidence to reshuffle some of the ministers known to be allies of Mr Yar’Adua. But there was no hint that he was about to sweep away the ancien régime. Moreover, his accession is still dogged by controversy and uncertainty. The parliamentary resolution does not strictly adhere to Nigeria’s constitution, which states that a handover can

only take place if the president writes a letter stating he is unable to serve or the cabinet sends a medical team to examine him. Neither has happened, and Mr Yar’Adua has said nothing. “The resolution is an illusion,” says Rotimi Akeredolu, president of the Nigerian Bar Association. “The legal issues will cloud how active Jonathan can be.” Meanwhile, the race is on to be next year’s presidential candidate for the ruling People’s Democratic Party, which rotates its leadership between the largely Muslim north and Christian south every two terms. Mr Yar’Adua, a northerner, had served only part of one term, and northern hopefuls are already laying claim to the second. Until then, unless he is bold, the southern Mr Jonathan may be allowed to do little more than keep the seat warm. Readers' comments The Economist welcomes your views. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

EUROPE.VIEW: continued from page 75

good by choosing a dismal comparator. It is also tempting but wrong to compare Ukraine now with Russia in the 1990s. True, oligarchs rule the roost in both countries, with politicians as their puppets. True, Western money keeps Ukraine afloat, as it did in 1990s Russia. There, the West hoped to avert nuclear anarchy or a Communist revanche. In Ukraine the money is intended to stave off take-over by Russia. But there is no sign of, or appetite for, a Ukrainian version of Vladimir Putin, not least because the West has not (yet) incinerated its credibility in Ukraine the way it did in Russia in the 1990s. Ukrainian politicians of all stripes, and the public, continue to want European values and European integration. Brussels has yet to respond to that desire. European leaders missed the chance presented by the orange revolution (though to be fair, Mr Yushchenko and other Ukrainian politicians botched their opportunities even more badly). The European Union’s leaders also failed to make much of the recent election. Ukraine is a long way from Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s nominal foreign-policy chief, seems distracted, to put it mildly. EUROPE.VIEW: page 77

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The EU is treating Ukraine like Turkey—too big, too poor, and destined to wait indefinitely for membership. (That’s a false comparison too, but never mind). Yet Ukraine is perhaps the one place where Lady Ashton and her new External Action Service could make a real difference. Ukraine badly needs attention, and unlike America or China it is not a place over which other EU leaders will be jostling for influence. Done properly, the gains from renewed EU involvement could be huge. The European policy so far has been engagement with Ukraine’s political class. This has proved expensive, and mostly fruitless. Attention should now move to the citizenry. Imagine the effect if the EU opened 50 “Europe Houses” in the main towns and

cities of Ukraine. The excellent new House of Europe in Tbilisi should be the model. That project aims to be the Georgian centre for all sorts of Europerelated cultural events, as well as debates and lectures, with a library and internet café as added attractions (readers with spare cash please note: it needs donors). It will have far more impact than the piecemeal efforts of individual European countries’ cultural institutes. In the tense Ukrainian region of Crimea, a big EU presence would make it harder for Russia to hide its mischief-making (that should be a lesson from Georgia, where the EU’s absence was a lethal element in the run up to the 2008 war). More generally, the new policy will focus the EU’s biggest asset: its soft

power. The EU’s military capability is meagre; its ability to stand up to Russian divide-andrule tactics in energy security is feeble. But the EU does have something that the Kremlin doesn’t: attractiveness. Projecting that into Ukraine will give Lady Ashton and her staff something worthwhile to do. It could even work. Readers' comments The Economist welcomes your views. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Voters Divided Over Obama vs. Republican Candidate in 2012 (All Gallup Headlines)

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Submitted at 2/10/2010 8:00:00 PM

VOTERS page 78

Orion Nebula Fully Unveiled in New Telescope Image by Jeremy Hsu (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now) Submitted at 2/10/2010 12:03:50 PM

This shot seems a bit below the belt ... Orion's belt Amateur and professional astronomers alike know the Orion Nebula as one of the most recognizable constellations in the

night sky, and a new image from Europe's powerful VISTA telescope has captured it in a stunning new light. But rather than just seeing the visible cloud of gas enshrouding the stellar nursery, VISTA turned its infrared vision upon the young stars emerging in and around the nebula. Four such youngsters at the center of the nebula have cleared

out their immediate surroundings with ultraviolet radiation that

causes nearby gas to glow. A red region directly above the center of the image reveals young stars that continue to form amidst clouds of interstellar gas. Such stars can eject gas at speeds of almost 435,000 miles per hour (700,000 km/hr). Fainter red features below the Orion Nebula also represent lesser spots of activity where stars are being born.

Those features would typically be hidden from ordinary visiblelight telescopes. But don't let that stop you from pointing your own camera toward the night sky -- as PopSci's Eric Adams noted in his DIY astrophotography guide, it's all worth the trouble. [ European Southern Observatory]

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you can, please donate to the full -text RSS service so we can continue developing it. PRINCETON, NJ -- Registered voters are about equally divided as to whether they would more likely vote to re-elect Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, or vote for the Republican candidate. These results are based on a Feb. 1-3 Gallup poll. Forty-four percent of U.S. registered voters say they are more likely to vote for Obama, 42% for the Republican candidate, and the remaining 14% are undecided or would vote for another candidate."It is clear at this early date that most Republicans have not developed a preference, with 42% not having an opinion or volunteering that they do not prefer any candidate." A year into his first term as president, Obama's approval ratings are hovering around 50%. The 50% approval figure has been a strong predictor of an incumbent president's reelection: presidents who averaged 50% or better from January of an election year through Election Day have all been re-elected. This includes George W. Bush, who averaged 51% in 2004, though his approval rating was 48% in Gallup's final pre-election poll. Most Democratic voters and

Republican voters plan to support their own party's candidate for president in the 2012 election. Independents currently show a greater preference for the Republican candidate than for Obama, by 45% to 31%, though about one in four do not have an opinion. However, even with independents leaning in the Republican candidate's direction, Obama is tied among all voters because of the greater proportion of Democratic identifiers in the registered voter population. The re-election question pits Obama against an unnamed Republican candidate. Several prominent Republicans have already visited the early caucus and primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and later this year, some may announce their intention to seek the party's nomination. The poll asked Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to name, without prompting, whom they would most like to see as the party's 2012 presidential candidate. It is clear at this early date that most Republicans have not developed a preference, with 42% not having an opinion or volunteering that they do not prefer any candidate. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Alaska

Gov. Sarah Palin are most frequently mentioned, by 14% and 11%, respectively. Seven percent mention Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 nominee. Newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, former Arkansas Gov. and 2008 candidate Mike Huckabee, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich are each mentioned by at least 3% of Republicans. Whereas conservative (15%) and moderate or liberal (14%) Republicans are about equally likely to mention Romney as their preferred nominee, Palin is much more likely to be mentioned by conservatives (14%) than by moderates and liberals (3%). Conservatives generally outnumber moderates and liberals by about 2 to 1 within the Republican Party. When Gallup asked Republicans last July which of several candidates they would be most likely to support in the 2012 primaries, Romney, Palin, and Huckabee received the most support. Early tests of nomination preferences often reflect candidates' name recognition as much as their potential viability as candidates. Historically, however, early Republican frontrunners usually have won the party's nomination. That did not

hold in 2008, however, as Rudy Giuliani typically led early nomination tests but performed poorly in the primaries and caucuses, with McCain emerging as the eventual nominee. Bottom Line American voters are at this point about equally divided as to whether they would re-elect Obama or the Republican candidate as president. The current data update Obama's reelection prospects, but generally would not hold much predictive value for the actual election outcome more than two years from now. As the election draws near, such trial-heat races -- in addition to his approval rating -become more predictive of the ultimate outcome. Obama's re-election chances partly hinge on whom the Republicans nominate, because it is not clear whether a "generic" Republican (as measured in the current data) would perform better or worse than a specific candidate. At this point, Romney and Palin can be considered the early front-runners for the GOP nomination, a position that has proven advantageous in most past Republican nomination campaigns. Survey Methods Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,025 national adults, aged 18 and older,

conducted Feb. 1-3, 2010. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of error is Âą4 percentage points. For results based on the sample of 942 registered voters, the maximum margin of error is Âą4 percentage points. For results based on the sample of 490 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, the maximum margin of error is Âą5 percentage points. Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only). In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Virginia Legislators Outlaw Involuntary Implantation of Microchips by Jeremy Hsu (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now)

and Georgia have also approved similar bans. But the bill also took on religious overtones due a belief shared by some fundamentalist Submitted at 2/10/2010 2:08:26 PM Christians that microchips may Concerns include privacy issues represent the marks described in and preventing the apocalypse the Book of Revelation. It's a Virginia legislators claimed view supported by Mark Cole, victory today against implantable the Virginia delegate who microchips by passing a bill that sponsored the bill. prevents employers or insurance That has allowed some critics to companies from forcing patients complain that the bill represented to accept the devices. Privacy a "sideshow" that distracts from topped the reasons for concern, more pressing concerns, such as but the bill's sponsor also saw the Virginia's $4 billion budget gap. microchips as the "mark of the Microchips have also found beast," according to the growing use in medical Washington Post. applications such as helping to Presumably most of the 88 reverse blindness. But the legislators who voted in favor of implantable microchips that the bill did so because of privacy seem to worry people the most concerns (just nine voted nay, i n v o l v e t h o s e t h a t w o u l d and there was one abstention). somehow track or monitor Virginia also does not stand people. alone in taking a dim view of Related Articles Text Messages forced microchip implants -- from a Microchip on Your several states such as Wisconsin Shoulder Remind You to Take

Your Pills Retinal Microchip Puts Images Directly Into Brain Tracking Students With Microchips Tags Technology, Jeremy Hsu, antichrist, book of revelation, implants, mark of the beast, microchips, privacy For instance, a UK school experimented with having students wear RFID chips on their bodies to track their movements. Microchips have also become popular in certain regions of the world where kidnapping poses a major threat. Regardless of religious belief, most people can probably agree that no one wants a corporation or government to forcibly implant microchips. But that doesn't mean plenty of patients couldn't benefit from a chip on their shoulder reminding them of when to take their pills. [via Washington Post]

Sandy, Salty Swirls by Amina Elahi (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now)

to determine which areas warrant an expensive and difficult visit. The concentric shapes on the left are sandstone hills, rising above white salt flats. White rivers Submitted at 2/11/2010 7:48:24 AM snake through the rocks-the salt A satellite peers down on a remains after being leached from hellish landscape in south-central the soil by the rare rainstorms Algeria that pass through the Sahara In the Tanezrouft Basin of south Desert. Prevailing wind usually -central Algeria, vegetation is shapes sand dunes into curves or sparse and sand is plentiful. lines, but the yellow cluster of Images like this one, taken by dunes, known as Erg Mehedjibat, J a p a n ' s A d v a n c e d L a n d grows upward instead of Observing Satellite, provide horizontally, suggesting that this researchers with an easy look at region may lack consistent hard-to-reach areas to survey directional winds. And that thin natural resources, monitor line in the upper right, squiggling disasters, and track vegetation above the Erg? That's the only coverage. road for miles. Such imagery allows scientists

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Poplar Science: Producing More Biomass from Genetically Beefed-Up Trees by Clay Dillow (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now) Submitted at 2/10/2010 2:45:15 PM

While an all-biofuel economy is a nice notion, we often overlook the fact that biofuel sources, while renewable, are limited in their supplies just like fossil fuels. When you get down to the economics of it, there are still limited biofuel stocks to go around at any given time, and that can create economic pressures that are decidedly undesirable. So a group of Manchester, UK, researchers have identified the specific genes that make plants grow thicker in hopes of juicing trees and other plants species to produce more biomass. Plants tend to grow from the inside out -- picture the rings of a

tree -- with a solid core of wood in the center and surrounding cells dividing outward over time. The researchers identified the two genes that tell plants to grow outward, with plans to harness that knowledge to push plants to grow thicker faster, providing extra biomass per plant.

Since this genetic coaxing only involves cells in the stalks of plants, it doesn't interfere with seeds, grains, fruit, etc. That means it could potentially beef up the stalks of food crops like corn without affecting the food crop itself, so it doesn't engender competition between biomass

production and essential food sources. Like steroids lift baseball players' performances above and beyond what nature endowed them with, a means to beef up biofuel feedstocks by even ten percent could be the difference between the ball dropping at the warning track or making it over the fence -- a home run being analogous to meeting America's lofty goal of generating a third of all liquid fuel from renewable sources by 2025. The research team is currently growing poplar trees in the lab to see if they can replicate the initial successes they had beefing up Arabidopsis plants. If it turns out this gene therapy works, look for a larger breed of timber on the horizon.

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U.S. Army in Afghanistan Takes Delivery of New Bacterial Bioreactors to Clean Wastewater by Jeremy Hsu (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now) Submitted at 2/11/2010 6:51:24 AM

Bacteria have deployed to Afghanistan to help the U.S. Army clean polluted wastewater. The microbes commonly appear in handfuls of dirt, but now form the main component of two new bioreactors made by scientists at Sam Houston State University in Texas. More specifically, the "proprietary bacterial consortium" helps create a biofilm that can self-regulate and has proven highly efficient at cleaning wastewater. Researchers demonstrated the system's ability to clean wastewater within 24 hours at

several city and military sites, so that less than ten percent sludge remained by volume. That contrasts with traditional septic systems that can take 30 days and leave 40 or 50 percent sludge, the researchers said. The demo apparently impressed

the Army enough to order two of the units, which arrived at Afghanistan inside 20-foot shipping containers. "The technology is scalable," said Sabin Holland, the lead scientist on the project. "We can make the units as large as

required for large scale treatment applications, or as small as a single home unit." Sam Houston State partnered with the private firm PCD Inc. to create a limited liability corporation called Active Water Systems, which is managing commercialization of the bioreactors. But there's no word so far on cost. Microbes have done similar cleaning duty in other applications, such as a fuel cell that makes salt water drinkable and generates power in the bargain. We imagine technologies like this could go a long way toward helping renovate America's aging infrastructure.