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US diplomat in Peshawar awarded heroism prize By David Alexander (Front Row Washington)

their homes. For her efforts, Tracy was presented Monday with the Submitted at 12/7/2009 12:08:05 PM Secretary of State’s Award for Lynne Tracy was headed to Heroism. work as principal officer at the “Determined and unflappable, U.S. consulate in Peshawar, she stayed in Peshawar to look Pakistan, in August 2008 when after the remaining consulate gunmen wielding AK-47 rifles staff,” Hillary Clinton said in ambushed her car. presenting the honor. The gunfire flattened her “Her decision to stay and lead not vehicle’s front two tires and only boosted morale but inspired riddled the body of the car with a n e v e n g r e a t e r f o c u s o n bullets as her driver jammed into strengthening the bonds of reverse and sped away. collaboration with the people of Tracy and her Pakistani driver Pakistan to promote peace, and bodyguard all survived the stability and security throughout Aug. 26, 2008, attack. the region,” she said. She made her way to the Tracy, who completed her consulate later in the day and in assignment in Peshawar in the coming weeks led an effort to August 2009 and will soon boost security even as some of assume the post of deputy chief her colleagues were moved to o f m i s s i o n i n A s h g a b a t , Islamabad or told to work from Turkmenistan, paid special

along with the area’s police and military forces, saying the “challenges before them are serious and far-reaching.” “I am mindful of how many innocent Pakistanis have suffered and are continuing to suffer from violence perpetrated by those who are so bankrupt in their ideology and vision that they are reduced to murdering women and children in markets and worshipers at mosques,” Tracy said. “This is a common foe and a common cause.” For more Reuters political news, tribute her Pakistani driver and I was able to continue doing my click here. bodyguard. job,” she said. “We have an Photo credit: Reuters/Hyungwon “My brave Pakistan driver was incredibly brave, loyal and Kang (Clinton presents Tracy the real hero of the day of the talented local staff at the U.S. with award as Tracy’s parents attack and every day after that, Consulate in Peshawar.” look on) a l o n g w i t h m y P a k i s t a n i She also thanked the governor of bodyguards, who made sure that the North West Frontier Province

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Public forecast for Afghan strategy – MetLife rises on strong stalemate preliminary Q4 results, anticipates acquisitions By Tabassum Zakaria (Front Row Washington)

By Trey Thoelcke (BloggingStocks)

Submitted at 12/7/2009 10:33:43 AM

Americans have doubts over whether President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy will ultimately result in victory, but a majority say the war is morally justified. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp poll finds that 57 percent said the most likely outcome for the United States in Afghanistan would be a stalemate, with 29 percent predicting victory. When asked whether a victory was possible or not possible, 58 percent of those surveyed said it was possible, while 41 percent said it was not possible. But asked the same question about defeat, the responses were quite similar: 60 percent said defeat was possible, while 38 percent said defeat was not possible. A majority — 63 percent — said U.S. action in Afghanistan was morally justified.

Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:30:00 AM

A column in The New Yorker says that this time the cliche is true: there are no good options in Afghanistan. A Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 53 percent of American voters support Obama’s plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and 47 percent support his plan to being withdrawing in 18 months — but only 20 percent agree with both parts of the strategy.

So it’s a bit of a confused muddle, but perhaps that is precisely where public opinion is… Are you predicting victory or defeat for the Obama Afghan strategy? Click here for more Reuters political coverage Photo credit: Reuters/Zohra Bensemra (U.S. soldier in Afghanistan)

Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, Amer Intl Group (AIG), MetLife Inc. (MET) Shares of MetLife Inc. ( MET), the largest life insurer in the U.S., rose Monday after the company released preliminary fourth quarter and full-year 2009 financial results, as well as guidance for 2010. New York-based MetLife said it now expects to report operating earnings for the fourth quarter between $740 million and $785 million (90 to 95 cents per share), compared with from $132 million (17 cents per share) in the fourth quarter of 2008. Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2009 are expected to total between $8.5 billion and $9.1 billion, up about

7% from the fourth quarter of 2008. Continue reading MetLife rises on strong preliminary Q4 results, anticipates acquisitions MetLife rises on strong preliminary Q4 results, anticipates acquisitions originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

Giveaway: 500GB G-Drive mini external hard drive By Matt Burns (CrunchGear)

away a sexy 500GB G-Drive mini? It’s small, has both USB and Firewire interfaces, and sexy Everyone needs more storage. like it’s big brother I just But why spend the cash an reviewed. external drive when we’re giving All you need to do is leave a Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:00:37 AM

comment with the storage

capacity of your first computer with a dedicated hard drive. Mine was a 1.2GB drive in a Compaq desktop. I thought I would never fill that up. Vote only once and the winner

must have a US shipping address. We’ll pick the winner on 12/15/2009. Good luck!

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Tory block on third Heathrow runway a big mistake, says British Airways chief By Dan Milmo (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

Warning that scrapping a third runway would be a major error, Walsh said: "We will look back years from now and say, what a Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:35:21 AM disgrace." Willie Walsh says Conservative He added: "We expect plan to bar third runway on governments to have policies that e n v i r o n m e n t a l g r o u n d s i s are coherent. I don't see this as incoherent coherent." The British Airways chief Walsh also used the economic executive, Willie Walsh, has case for expanding Heathrow – rounded on the Conservative that major businesses need well p a r t y i n t h e w a k e o f t h e connected local airports in order Committee on Climate Change t o t h r i v e – t o a t t a c k t h e report into aviation and warned C o n s e r v a t i v e s t a n c e . that it will make the "biggest " I w a n t t o k n o w i f t h e mistake ever" if it blocks a third Conservatives don't want to build runway at Heathrow. a third runway how are they In a tirade at one of David g o i n g t o p o s i t i o n t h e U K Cameron's flagship policies, the economy to compete on a global boss of Heathrow's largest airline scale in the future." said the party's line on airport Walsh said the Conservative expansion was incoherent and embargo on new runways at "seriously undermined" the Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick opposition's environmental – the UK's three largest airports – credentials. carried no environmental benefit Walsh's comments follow the because the party refused to rule publication today of a report by out expansion elsewhere. "Their the government's advisory panel environmental credentials are on climate change, which makes seriously undermined," he said. the case for a third runway by BA's close rival Virgin Atlantic admitting that British airports can also joined in the attack at a handle up to 140 million more conference hosted by the Airport passengers a year by 2050. Operators Association in The shadow transport secretary, London. Steve Ridgway, Virgin Theresa Villiers, said the Tories Atlantic chief executive, said : "It stood by their policy and warned is very difficult where they [the that a third runway would exact a Tories] are at the moment. It is " h o r r e n d o u s p r i c e " o n t h e wrong in terms of what this environment. country needs and there is a job

to be done in terms of convincing them that this is the right thing to do. Somehow we have to find a way to convince them." Colin Matthews, chief executive of BAA, the owner of Heathrow, said the need for a new runway at Heathrow "has been there for years". The Conservative party today stood by its commitment to block new runways at Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick, despite the Committee on Climate Change findings that it would be possible to expand Heathrow, Stansted and Edinburgh without breaching greenhouse gas emission targets. The government has ruled that carbon dioxide emissions from the aviation industry in 2050 must not exceed 2005 levels. "We have got a coherent, well thought-through and principled position on Heathrow expansion. We very strongly believe that the environmental costs of a new runway would outweigh any potential economic benefits," Villiers said. Asked how the Conservatives would manage their relationship with BA if they won the election, she said: "I am well aware that Willie Walsh does not share our view but we are on the right side of the argument." Villiers added that the extra growth outlined by the committee – an increase of around 60% on

2005 figures – could be taken up by regional airports rather than major hubs such as Heathrow. "There is a very real possibility of regional airports being left to wither on the vine." The first signs of a schism within the aviation industry over who benefits from the 60% increase emerged today as Birmingham International Airport criticised the "preposterous" committee report. Referring to the date when Heathrow launched as a commercial airport shortly after the second world war, Paul Kehoe, chief executive of the airport, said allocating the growth to Heathrow was a "1946 solution" to a modern problem. "I find it difficult that we are developing a 2030 strategy with a 1946 solution. Heathrow sucks in traffic, we have to support it and if you don't support it you are made to look like climate change deniers." Sparking an onstage row with Walsh, Kehoe added that Heathrow's importance as an international hub was dwindling in the face of economic growth in Asia. "If China builds 94 airports they will not want to connect through Heathrow. Hubs are moving eastwards so let's connect through Dubai." The environmental lobby

continued to describe the committee report as a victory today despite its theoretical endorsement of a third runway. Jeff Gazzard, a board member at the Aviation Environment Federation, said investors would refuse to back runway projects that had government limits on aviation growth hanging over them. "The capital costs of expanding airports, particularly in London and the south-east, are firmly under the microscope as airport businesses will now have to invest and operate in a demandconstrained framework through to 2050 that must curtail their aggressive plans for Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted," he said. • Heathrow third runway • Conservatives • British Airways • Transport policy • Carbon emissions • Climate change • Transport • Airline industry • Green politics • Air transport Dan Milmo guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

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Copenhagen in disarray after draft leak By John Vidal (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:40:41 AM the bulk of the CO2, should take Developing countries react o n f i r m a n d b i n d i n g furiously to leaked draft c o m m i t m e n t s t o r e d u c e agreement that would hand more greenhouse gases, while poorer power to rich nations, sideline the nations were not compelled to U N ' s n e g o t i a t i n g r o l e a n d act. The draft hands effective abandon the Kyoto protocol control of climate change finance • Read the 'Danish text' to the World Bank; would • In pictures: Copenhagen day abandon the Kyoto protocol – the two only legally binding treaty that The UN Copenhagen climate the world has on emissions talks are in disarray today after reductions; and would make any developing countries reacted money to help poor countries furiously to leaked documents a d a p t t o c l i m a t e c h a n g e that show world leaders will next dependent on them taking a range w e e k b e a s k e d t o s i g n a n of actions. agreement that hands more power The document was described last to rich countries and sidelines the night by one senior diplomat as UN's role in all future climate "a very dangerous document for change negotiations. developing countries. It is a The document is also being fundamental reworking of the i n t e r p r e t e d b y d e v e l o p i n g UN balance of obligations. It is countries as setting unequal to be superimposed without limits on per capita carbon discussion on the talks". emissions for developed and A confidential analysis of the developing countries in 2050; text by developing countries also meaning that people in rich seen by the Guardian shows deep countries would be permitted to unease over details of the text. In emit nearly twice as much under particular, it is understood to: the proposals. • Force developing countries to The so-called Danish text, a agree to specific emission cuts secret draft agreement worked on and measures that were not part by a group of individuals known of the original UN agreement; as "the circle of commitment" – • Divide poor countries further by but understood to include the creating a new category of UK, US and Denmark – has only developing countries called "the been shown to a handful of most vulnerable"; countries since it was finalised • Weaken the UN's role in this week. handling climate finance;

• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes. Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations. "It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless. Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: "This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed." Hill continued: "It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility[a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none

were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks." The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week. Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15. • For news and analysis of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen sign up for the Guardian's environment email newsletter Green light • Copenhagen climate change conference 2009 • Climate change • United Nations • Carbon emissions • Kyoto protocol • Aid and development John Vidal guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

X-ray gains: Experts eye Varian Medical (VAR) By Steven Halpern (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:30:00 PM

Filed under: International markets, Newsletters, Stocks to Buy, Obama Picks Two growth stock specialists have turned bullish on the prospects for medical equipment maker Varian Medical Systems ( VAR), despite uncertainty surrounding health care legislation. Here's a look at the company from Louis Basenese, senior analyst with The Oxford Club, along with commentary from Mark Skousen, from his specialty service, The Turnaround Alert. Mark Skousen suggests, "One stock that should benefit from 'ObamaCare' is Varian Medical Systems, the world's leader in radiation technology and X-ray imaging. Continue reading X-ray gains: Experts eye Varian Medical (VAR) X-ray gains: Experts eye Varian Medical (VAR) originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Met Office figures confirm noughties as warmest decade in recorded history By John Vidal (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

year is 0.44C above the longterm average of 14C. According to the Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:04:59 AM the Met Office, the figures The past 10 years have been the " h i g h l i g h t t h a t t h e w o r l d warmest decade recorded in 160 c o n t i n u e s t o s e e g l o b a l years, despite 1998 being the temperatures rise, most of which warmest year on record is due to increasing emissions of The past 10 years have been the g r e e n h o u s e g a s e s i n t o t h e warmest in recorded history, atmosphere and clearly shows according to the UK Met Office. that the argument that global Figures released today at the UN warming has stopped is flawed". climate talks in Copenhagen A third paper released today, show that despite 1998 being the from the German research group warmest year on record, the Germanwatch, showed that noughties has been the warmest B a n g l a d e s h , B u r m a a n d decade recorded in 160 years. Honduras were the three The Met Office also released the countries most affected in the raw data from around 1,500 past 20 years by extremes of global monitoring stations in an climate. Also in the top 10 were effort to satisfy critics who have Vietnam, Nicaragua, Haiti, India, demanded that researchers be the Dominican Republic, the more transparent with their data Philippines and China. in the wake of the email hacking "We cannot attribute all extremes row at the University of East of weather to climate change but Anglia. we are already recording an In a separate announcement, the i n c r e a s e i n f r e q u e n c y a n d W o r l d M e t e o r o l o g i c a l intensity. It shows we are living Organisation(WMO) in Geneva in a globally warmed world," said today that 2009 will be one said Saleemul Huq, head of of the 10 warmest individual c l i m a t e c h a n g e a t t h e years recorded. The provisional I n t e r n a t i o n a l I n s t i t u t e f o r figure for warming during the Environment and Development

in London. With the Copenhagen talks intent on holding temperature rises to 2C, Huq warned that further extreme weather events and disasters were inevitable. "A 2C rise in temperatures is safe for some, but not for the poorest. A 1.5C rise gives a safer world for everyone, but there is a vast difference between the two." "The question is 'do we give up on the poor and most vulnerable?' If we declare war on climate change, then yes we can do it. It can be done," he said. Only four developed countries were in the top 20 of countries most prone to weather disaster: Italy at 12, Spain at 14, Portugal at 14 and the US at 18. The 2003 drought in southern Europe, which led to tens of thousands of deaths and huge insurance losses, as well as a series of category five hurricanes in the US are responsible for these rich countries being placed so highly in the league table. The figures from Germanwatch do not include African countries in the top 20 because they are based on death tolls and recorded financial losses, neither of which

PicScout expands catalog; adds Ito as adviser By Josh Lowensohn (Webware.com)

Image rights-finding service PicScout is making its catalog more than 7 million images

larger. Originally posted at Web Crawler

figure strongly in the prolonged droughts and desertification which are mainly seen in Africa. The Met Office data forms part of the HadCRUT record of global temperatures - one of three major analyses of global temperature that are part of the scientific information used in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the UN body that reviews climate change literature and reports back to world governments. It has made public more 150m temperature reading going back more than 100 years. Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London said the Met Office and WMO annoucements reconfirm the strong warming trend that scientists have observed over the last century. "Individual years can be warmer or colder than the last, just like individual days," he said. "However when we look at decades, the warming trend is striking. Each decade since the 1950s has been warmer than the previous one. The 'noughties'

stand out as being by far the warmest decade since temperatures were first measured." Greenpeace climate change campaigner Joss Garman said: "This is an unmistakable climate signal that shows how humans are warming the Earth. The core of the sceptics' case was that we've been experiencing global cooling, but that claim was never justified by the science." "This won't stop some people pushing the conspiracy theory that climate change isn't happening, but here in Copenhagen the new data is being discussed by governments and is sure to focus minds." • Climate change • Copenhagen climate change conference 2009 • Climate change • Natural disasters and extreme weather John Vidal guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

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Ex-spy chief admits regret over 45 minutes claim (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:10:35 AM

Sir John Scarlett says it was never his intention to mislead in controversial dossier The former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee said today that it would have been better to have made clear that the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes did not refer to ballistic missiles. "It would have been much clearer and better, the matter would not have been lost in translation, if it had been spelt out in the dossier that the word was 'munitions' not 'weapons'," Sir John Scarlett told the Chilcot inquiry into the war in Iraq. But the former JIC chairman said it had never been his intention to mislead. "There was absolutely no conscious intention to manipulate the language or obfuscate or create a misunderstanding as to what they might refer to," he said. The man who drew up the government's now notorious Iraq dossier also distanced himself from Tony Blair's claim that intelligence had established "beyond doubt" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Scarlett, who was the chairman

of the JIC – the senior UK intelligence body – at the time of the invasion, said he regarded Blair's foreword to the dossier as being "quite separate" from the rest of the document. Giving evidence to the official inquiry into the war, Scarlett said that he did not believe that it was for him to alter the prime minister's wording, which he described as an "overtly political" statement. "I saw the foreword as quite separate from the text of the dossier itself. The foreword was an overtly political statement by the prime minister so it was his wording and his comments throughout," he said. "I didn't see it as something that I would change. My memory of the time is that this was quite clearly something that the prime minister wrote." Scarlett said the dossier, which was published by Blair in September 2002 – six months before the invasion – had been drawn up against a background of strengthening intelligence about Saddam's WMD capabilities. He described a JIC meeting on 4 September in which what was described as "reliable and authoritative" new intelligence about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons was discussed. "In the view of the committee

that intelligence was sufficiently authoritative to firm up whether or not Iraq did currently possess chemical and biological agents," he said. As a result, he said, the Cabinet Office assessments staff – who draft JIC reports to ministers – were instructed to "firm up" their judgment in a paper which was issued five days later. Scarlett also disclosed how two separate intelligence reports came in the final days before the war, casting doubt on whether Saddam would be able to use chemical or biological weapons. The first, which came in on 7 March – 13 days before the invasion – said Iraq had no missiles that could reach Israel and none that could carry germ or biological weapons. It added that the Iraqi leadership had ordered the dismantlement of its Al Hussein ballistic missiles, in order to avoid detection, although they could be quickly reassembled. The Ministry of Defence's defence intelligence staff noted that, while it was possible they could be reassembled in one or two days, it could take longer. A further report then came in on 17 March saying that Iraq's chemical weapons had been disassembled and dispersed and would be difficult to reassemble. No order had been issued by Saddam to reassemble them and

he had not asked about chemical weapons. Scarlett said intelligence was discussed by the JIC on 19 March – the eve of the invasion – and a report was issued that was available to ministers. "I was certainly working absolutely on the basis that these updates were being read carefully," he said. "The intelligence reports went through to the prime minister and to senior ministers." However, he stressed that the assessment that Iraq had useable chemical and biological warfare capabilities that could be delivered by artillery, missiles and possibly unmanned aerial drones had not changed. Scarlett went on to become head of MI6, the foreign intelligence service. He stepped down earlier this year. • Politics and Iraq • Politics past • Iraq • Iraq war inquiry • Defence policy • Military • MI6 • Civil service • Foreign policy guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

BlueAnt releases a Bluetooth headset for motorcycle riders By Matt Burns (CrunchGear) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:40:01 AM

Bluetooth headsets are great in a car but even more awesome on a motorcycle. It’s not like you can use your phone while cruising down the road on a bike. You might drop the phone and no one wants that. BlueAnt is the latest company to release a system that fully utilizes all the capabilities of Bluetooth for motorcycle riders. These days, Bluetooth isn’t just for phone calls. With the A2DP profile, the systems can stream all sorts of audio which makes a lot of sense for the average rider. The Stereo F4 Interphone Motorcycle Kit has an intercom mode, can receive audio from some GPS units, stream music, and of course connect to your phone for calls. The system works both fullfaced and open-faced helmets, is fully weatherproof and can connect to two devices simultaneously. All this Bluetooth fun doesn’t come cheap though. The system has an MSRP of $225.

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45-minute WMD claim 'may have come from an Iraqi taxi driver' By Andrew Sparrow (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were. Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:44:51 AM Holloway, a former Grenadier Tory MP and defence specialist G u a r d s m a n a n d t e l e v i s i o n Adam Holloway says MI6 got journalist who is now a member information indirectly from a taxi o f t h e C o m m o n s d e f e n c e driver who had heard Iraqi committee, made his comments military commanders talking in a report he has written about weapons claiming that MI6 always had An Iraqi taxi driver may have reservations about some of the been the source of the discredited information in the dossier but claim that Saddam Hussein could that these reservations were u n l e a s h w e a p o n s o f m a s s brushed aside when Downing destruction within 45 minutes, a Street was preparing it for Tory MP claimed today. publication. Adam Holloway, a defence In the report he wrote: "Under specialist, said MI6 obtained pressure from Downing Street to information indirectly from a taxi find anything to back up the driver who had overheard two WMD case, British intelligence Iraqi military commanders was squeezing their agents in talking about Saddam's weapons. Iraq for information. One agent The 45-minute claim was a key did come up with something: the feature of the dossier about Iraq's '45 minutes' or something about weapons of mass destruction that missiles allegedly discussed in a was released by Tony Blair in high level Iraqi political meeting. September 2002. Blair published "But the provenance of this the information to bolster public i n f o r m a t i o n w a s n e v e r support for war. questioned in detail until after the After the war the dossier became Iraq invasion, when it became hugely controversial when it apparent that something was became clear that some of the wrong. In the end it turned out information it contained was not that the information was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord credible, it had originated from Butler into the use of intelligence an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqiin the run-up to the war revealed Jordanian border, who had that MI6 had subsequently remembered an overheard a

conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier. "Indeed, in the intelligence analyst's footnote to the report, it was flagged up that part of the report probably describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. They verifiably did not exist. "The footnote said it in black and white ink. Despite this glaring factual inaccuracy, which under normal circumstances would have caused the reliability of the intelligence to be seriously questioned, the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier." The report was published today on the first defence website. Holloway told the Guardian that he had not seen the intelligence report himself but that he had been told about it by two reliable sources. He said that, although he was not clear whether the footnote related to suspect information about 45 minutes or about missiles or both, he was "100% certain" that it existed. Sir John Chilcot, the chairman of the Iraq inquiry, said at the opening of this afternoon's hearing that the Holloway allegations might be relevant to his investigation but that he

would not be asking about them when he took evidence today from Sir John Scarlett, the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The September dossier did not specify what weapons Iraq could deploy within 45 minutes. Intelligence officials subsequently revealed that it was meant to be a reference to battlefield weapons, not longrange missiles. But, when it was published, some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error. • Politics and Iraq • Iraq • Iraq war inquiry • Butler inquiry • Defence policy • Foreign policy • Military • Politics past Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

Android-based Archos 5 Internet Tablet surfaces in 8GB form for $250 By Darren Murph (Engadget) Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:28:00 AM

The Archos 5 Internet Tablet hasn't had the smoothest ride into the commercial realm, but thanks to a few firmware updates, the Android-based player seems to finally be humming along just fine. That said, not everyone's interested in shelling out big bucks for a capacious version, which makes the latest edition perfect for those simply curious to see how Google's mobile OS fares on a portable media player. The 8GB model has surfaced over at Radio Shack, bringing with it all the goods on the larger siblings but with far less internal space. The best part? That $249.99 price tag (and that little "In Stock" icon beside it). Android-based Archos 5 Internet Tablet surfaces in 8GB form for $250 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Pocketables| RadioShack| Email this| Comments

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More than 100 killed in Baghdad explosions By Mark Tran (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

Mohammed Abdul Ridha, one of the 197 wounded in the blasts, told Reuters. About an hour before those Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:07:03 AM blasts, a suicide car bomber B o m b s g o o f f i n q u i c k struck a police patrol in the succession across Iraqi capital, mostly Sunni district of Dora in wounding more than 190 people southern Baghdad, killing at least Iraq today suffered one of its three police officers and one worst days of violence this year civilian, and injuring five people. as insurgents struck government The explosions underlined the buildings in Baghdad, killing at precarious nature of security in least 112 people and injuring up Baghdad ahead of an auction of to 197. oilfield contracts at the weekend The explosions happened within a n d w i t h e l e c t i o n s d u e i n minutes of each other, with February. Iraqi and US military police saying there could have officials fear that insurgents will been as many as four or five. step up their attacks to weaken Insurgents, who included suicide the authority of Nouri al-Maliki, bombers, detonated powerful the prime minister, ahead of explosives near the labour elections that are meant to m i n i s t r y b u i l d i n g , a c o u r t showcase Iraq's return to political complex near the Iraqi-protected stability. Green Zone and the new site of Although violence has declined the finance ministry after its sharply recently – the health previous building was destroyed ministry last month reported the in attacks in August. lowest monthly death toll of An interior ministry official said civilians in six and a half years – at least 99 people were killed and insurgents continue to target Iraqi 192 injured in those three security forces and civilians. assaults. In an attack yesterday, at least "We had entered a shop seconds eight people died in an explosion before the blast, the ceiling caved outside a primary school in a in on us, and we lost Shia district of Baghdad consciousness. Then I heard yesterday. Six children, aged screams and sirens all around," between six and 12, were among

the dead. Today's attacks are the deadliest in Baghdad since late October, when at least 155 people died in car bomb attacks outside municipal offices. That attack, and a similar bombing in August, marked a change of tactics. Rather than frequent small-scale attacks against soft targets, such as markets or mosques, insurgent groups have recently carried out far more spectacular and lethal attacks against heavily defended government buildings. Iraqi authorities blamed the October attacks on loyalists to Saddam Hussein's banned Ba'athist party, and paraded on national television three suspects who gave what officials termed confessions. But there are questions over whether Iraqi leaders are seeking to divert attention from a possible resurgence of Sunni insurgency led by al-Qaida in Iraq. A rise in violence could undermine the government's claims that it can provide security without the help of US troops. In a move that heightened fears of violence, the presidential council postponed Iraq's parliamentary elections by seven

weeks and named 6 March 2010 as the date for the vote. The election date was set only after parliament approved a new law on balloting guidelines during an emergency session convened just before a midnight deadline Sunday. Failure to pass the new law would have forced Iraqi authorities to revert to rules used in its last parliamentary election in December 2005, a move that had the potential to sow political chaos. The US, which strongly condemned the attacks, plans to withdraw all but 50,000 of its roughly 120,000 troops from Iraq after the elections. But the delay could complicate the timetable for a drawdown. American commanders have said a pullout will occur 60 days after the election. • Iraq • Global terrorism Mark Tran guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

Nielsen: Viewers watching video content all over the place By Don Reisinger (Webware.com)

Survey company releases study Surprisingly, 99 percent of on video consumption during the viewers still use a TV to watch t h i r d q u a r t e r o f 2 0 0 9 . shows.

Seagate finally shows up at the solid state drive party with an enterprise offering By Doug Aamoth (CrunchGear) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:00:00 AM

Seagate, the big huge hard drive company, has just now officially announced its first ever solid state drive. The press release title says “Seagate Introduces Its First Solid State Drive: Pulsar” and above the title it says “December 08, 2009.” To be fair, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins hasn’t been keen on solid state drives, saying a little over a year ago that his company wasn’t really considering the solid state market aside from these enterprise-level drives that have just been announced. So enterprise-class SSDs: great. But will we see consumer offerings from Seagate? As prices continue to fall and demand rises, it’d be foolish for the company to not eventually get into the consumer SSD market. Just don’t plan on anyone with a Seagate nametag showing up to the party before most of the other guests. [ Press Release| Product Page]

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Europe softens Middle East statement after condemnation from Israel By Rory McCarthy, Ian Black (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

Sweden had wanted the EU to provide sufficient support for the Palestinians to encourage them to return to long-stalled negotiations with Israel, but this latest Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:55:53 AM statement from Brussels seemed EU foreign ministers agree to unlikely to achieve that. The drop call in draft document for Palestinians say they will not east Jerusalem to be capital of resume talks unless Israel halts future Palestinian state all settlement construction in line European foreign ministers with the 2003 US road map. today agreed a watered-down I s r a e l h a s a g r e e d o n l y a statement on the Middle East so temporary and partial settlement that it now stops short of an freeze. explicit call for east Jerusalem to EU diplomats said they regretted be the capital of a Palestinian that the leak had exposed internal state but still contains strong debates, but the point was to set criticism of Israel. out parameters for a final Israel had condemned a leaked agreement at a time of impasse in draft statement by Sweden, the peace process, questions h o l d e r o f t h e r o t a t i n g E U about the role and influence of presidency, mentioning east the US, and concerns about Jerusalem as a future capital for unilateral Israeli moves in east the Palestinians. Jerusalem. "When you start EU foreign ministers reverted to looking at the endgame there will more familiar wording that said: a l w a y s b e s o m e t h i n g f o r "If there is to be genuine peace, a everyone to dislike," said one way must be found through official. negotiations to resolve the status Israel captured east Jerusalem in of Jerusalem as a future capital of the 1967 war and then annexed it two states." – a move the international

community never recognised. Underlining that lack of recognition, the EU said it would accept no change to the prewar borders without IsraeliPalestinian agreement. That position is a challenge to Israel. Nearly 500,000 of its citizens live in settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, even though settlements on occupied land are banned by international law. Israel fully expects to hold on to its east Jerusalem settlements and the larger West Bank settlement blocs in any future peace deal. The EU ministers took "positive note" of Israel's temporary, partial settlement freeze. But they criticised all settlements, the Israeli separation barrier and the demolition of Palestinian homes, saying they were "illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible". Israel's foreign ministry welcomed the fact that the "extreme draft" statement had

been changed but said the EU had failed to contribute to the renewal of peace negotiations. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, however, described the statement from Brussels as a "victory for international legitimacy". Luxembourg's foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, told reporters: "I don't really understand why Israel does not accept that Palestine consists of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. The Israelis have a right to live in Israel; the Palestinians have a right to live in Palestine." • Israel • Palestinian territories • Middle East • European Union • Sweden

CrunchDeals: Lost seasons 1-5 on Blu -ray for only $108 By Matt Burns (CrunchGear) Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:00:11 AM

Lost is about to start back up again and Amazon has the first five seasons on sale today. How convenient. Actually the deal is rather nice. You get a whole lot of Blu-ray on the cheap. The first five seasons only costs $108. According to Amazon, that’s 70% off the list price. If you’re into Blu-ray just yet, the same set is on standard DVDs for only $72.99. [ Amazon via DealNews]

Rory McCarthy Ian Black guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

CrunchDeals: Gateway NV5212u for $400 (today only) By Doug Aamoth (CrunchGear) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:30:00 AM

Best Buy has lopped $80 off the price of the 15.6-inch Gateway

NV5212u (I reviewed a similar model earlier this year), bringing it to just $399.99 for the store’s Deal of the Day. The computer has a dual-core AMD Athlon CPU, 4GB of

RAM, DVD burner, six-cell

battery, 320GB hard drive, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. It’s a beast to lug around but if it’ll be spending most of its time in the same location, it’s a pretty solid buy for $400.

G a t e w a y NV5212u[BestBuy.com]

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Chasing Value: Ten Pay czar may cave after stocks for 2010 -- Part 7 AIG execs threaten to quit By Sheldon Liber (BloggingStocks)

By Elizabeth Harrow (BloggingStocks)

Submitted at 12/8/2009 1:00:00 PM

Filed under: International markets, Management, Competitive strategy, General Electric (GE), Brazil, Deere and Co (DE), Bargain stocks, Chasing Value Only three weeks to go before the list of contenders are finalized into my ten picks for 2010. There were 14 before I added three more today and moved one of the stocks on the fence up, leaving another three still on the fence. I continue to read everything I can get my hands on and recommend doing the same to anyone else seeking to do some stock picking. A lot of the recommendations I come across

Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:30:00 AM

Filed under: Employees, Amer Intl Group (AIG), Politics, Financial Crisis project possible appreciation of During the past year, there's 10% to 15%, and that would be been no shortage of discussion great, but I am seeking at least about executive pay at American the potential to double that. International Group ( AIG) -- and Continue reading Chasing the deluge continues. CEO Value: Ten stocks for 2010 -- Robert Benmosche reportedly Part 7 threatened to walk last month Chasing Value: Ten stocks for over frustrations with the Obama 2010 -- Part 7 originally appeared administration's pay caps, but on BloggingStocks on Tue, 08 was persuaded to stay by the Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please company's board. see our terms for use of feeds. Apparently, Benmosche's Permalink| Email this| Comments maneuver inspired five other AIG execs to issue similar threats, with the group warning last week that they might walk if pay czar Kenneth Feinberg gets too

New customized Christmas gifts available from Shapeways By Scott Merrill (CrunchGear) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:30:25 AM

Shapeways are at it again, with an assortment of custom fabricated gifts available for handsy with their compensation Christmas. They ran a little packages. contest recently, and the top three Continue reading Pay czar may e n t r a n t s a r e a v a i l a b l e f o r cave after AIG execs threaten to purchase now, including the cute quit “ Punk Angel” pictured above, a Pay czar may cave after AIG snowflake ornament with custom execs threaten to quit originally message, and a snowflake candle appeared on BloggingStocks on holder. Each of these is under Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:30:00 EST. $30, so they’re sure to please Please see our terms for use of without breaking the bank! feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

Retail sales increase compared to a year ago, decrease compared to a week ago By Mark Fightmaster (BloggingStocks)

compared to the same week last year. However, the survey, from the International Council of Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:00:00 AM Shopping Centers (ICSC) and Filed under: Economic data, Goldman Sachs, also showed that Recession consumer activity dropped 1.3% A retail survey released this from the week earlier. morning showed that last week's ICSC chief economist Michael chain-store sales increased 2.6% Niemera stated, "The now annual

post-Thanksgiving week lull in consumer holiday-gift buying

once again showed up as consumers continued to be well behind on their holiday-gift buying completion pace." Continue reading Retail sales increase compared to a year ago, decrease compared to a week ago Retail sales increase compared to a year ago, decrease compared

to a week ago originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Why It's Finally Time To Get a Home Theater PC [Prof. Dealzmodo] By Sean Fallon (Gizmodo) Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:00:00 AM

I hear a lot about those damned netbooks as hot buys this season, but Prof. Dealzmodo suggests getting something that's actually, you know...useful. HTPCs baby. There has never been a better time: I say that because HTPCs have never been smaller, cheaper or more powerful. A little over two years ago, we were talking about how purchasing an HD-capable PC would leave you with an empty bank account. Take this Sony Vaio TP1 for example. The wheel of cheese design was considered compact and "living room friendly" at the time, but it is still probably twice as big as current nettop models. The specs are lacking even by 2007 standards and it started at $1600. Today I can easily go out and find a more powerful, feature rich nettop for less than $400. And it would be small enough to tuck behind your HDTV due, in part, to cheap, compact, graphicsfriendly chipsets like Nvidia Ion. Today's Most Affordable HTPCs Seriously...HTPCs for less than $400. Sure, you could spend a lot of cash on something more elaborate, and will have to if you want to access your own digital cable stream, or if you want to go with Blu-ray as your high-def source of choice, but if you

simply want a compact 1080p device that competently opens up the entire internet to your HDTV, here is a good place to start: • Dell Zino HD: The cheapest of the bunch at a base price of $230, the Dell Zino HD offers a range of AMD Athlon processor options, up to a 1TB HDD, up to 8GB of RAM and a choice between integrated graphics and an ATI Radeon HD 4330 512MB card. Plus you get HDMI, four USB ports, and two eSATA for easy expansion. Even with a few bells and whistles like a dualcore processor, a bump in RAM to 4GB or a boost in the HDD capacity, you can keep the Zino under $400. [ Dell]

• Acer AspireRevo R6310: Features include a dual-core 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor, Nvidia Ion graphics, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, HDMI, eSATA, VGA, 6 USB ports, card reader and wireless-N in a $330 package. They even throw in a wireless keyboard and mouse for good measure. I have spent some time with the AspireRevo, and I can say that it is a very capable HTPC for the money. Power web surfing can be sluggish at times, as is Flash playback—but Adobe has promised support for NVIDIA graphics acceleration in Flash 10.1 that should remedy that situation. All-in-all though, it handles video quite well. [ Acer]

cable subscription online. Check out my article on living without cable or satellite to learn more about what programming and software is available to you online. Remotes None of the HTPCs mentioned above come with a remote control out of the box, but this can be easily and cheaply remedied. Most infrared remotes require only that you have a free USB port for the included adapter, so just about any PC with Windows Media Center can be converted to work with a remote. If you are just looking for something basic, a remote like the MCE PC will do the job just fine—and it costs under $20. If • Asus EeeBox EB1012: A you have an iPhone, you can also release date and price have not d o w n l o a d a p p s l i k e officially been confirmed, but the AirMouse(iTunes link) and EeeBox EB1012 offers basically MediaMote(iTunes link) to the exact same feature set as the handle these tasks. Gmote is also AspireRevo—minus a USB port available for those of you with or two. Hopefully, when it is Android phones. Networking Keep in mind that if your released, the price point will be even more aggressive than m o d e m i s f a r f r o m y o u r computer, and you'll be relying Acer's. [ Asus] As a side note, if you are on Wi-Fi to connect to the interested in using a CableCard internet and move files between tuner to turn your PC into a cable computers, you are probably DVR, that has become a lot going to want something capable easier for the average Joe. o f h a n d l i n g w i r e l e s s - N H o w e v e r , p r o g r a m s l i k e (802.11n). Fortunately, all of the Comcast's upcoming Xfinity( PCs mentioned above can do that f o r m e r l y k n o w n a s T V right out of the box—although Everywhere) might easily bridge WHY page 17 this gap by putting your current

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Fusion Garage JooJoo Tablet Hands-On [Joojoo] By Jason Chen (Gizmodo) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:49:53 AM

From the webcast yesterday, the JooJoo(previously named Crunchpad) seemed flimsy and barely working. But now that we spent a good deal of hands on time with it, we can say that Fusion Garage executed an internet tablet quite well. Specs Here are some new facts I gathered from the meeting. First, the device runs a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB RAM. The guys at JooJoo said they weren't ready to reveal specs yet, but I saw the bootup sequence—a standard BIOS setup that displayed what it was booting to—and saw the specs. Chandra, CEO of Fusion Garage, says that the demo hardware was basically the final hardware, so it's easy to put two and two together. As for the graphics card + CPU combination, it's probably an Nvidia Ion chipset. They claim that it handles 1080p YouTube video fine—we only got to see a few seconds of 720p and 1080p HD YouTube video because the internet connection was acting up—so it's probably an Ion. But the HD video we tested looked just fine on its 12-inch, 1366x768 resolution screen. Again, the Ion chipset is just an educated guess, but there are few other hardware options that can handle 1080p video smoothly, and an Atom CPU by itself (which we did see) can't do it on its own.

There is a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a built-in webcam at 1.3 megapixels, a charging port and a USB slot. The external card slot present in the prototype isn't going to make it to the final version, but they are thinking of making it available to put a 3G card in there in the future. No TV out/HDMI out yet, but they are thinking about that. There are built-in speakers for playing back audio without headphones, and they're decent enough that you can actually

listen to them, but you'll want to plug them in to speakers for any kind of extended video consumption. Performance The tablet actually handled pretty well, with browsing web pages, transitioning between tabs (windows) and opening up new web pages working fine. There's an accelerometer in there to detect between vertical and horizontal orientations. The body is solid, sturdy and graced with a bright 12-inch

screen. The back is curved and made of a plastic that feels nice in your hand, and the whole thing doesn't seem too heavy to prop up on a bed or a toilet. In short, it's an actual web browsing tablet that you'd be perfectly fine using. The software The entire system is basically a gateway to your browser, which is based off WebKit, the same code that powers Safari and Google's Chrome. It's fast, and handles gestures (pinching to go

back a level, swiping to move up and down) just fine. There are other gestures that will be included in the final build, like two finger swiping for going back and forth in history and a bookmark swipe, but we didn't get to see that. But, you can't zoom into text. That's partially because the pinching is already used for going in and out of your windows into the home screen, but also partially because the screen is 12 inches. You don't need to really zoom into text on a laptop-sized screen of 12 inches. And they also said they may make LARGER sized tablets as well, with 12 being their smallest size. JooJoo's keyboard looks like this, and takes up only a portion of the screen. It's usable, but you don't want to use it to bang out a blog post; this is mainly for consuming media. Fusion Garage's concept for the product is that the "internet is the application", which means you can't save photos or files locally and you can't access any of the 4GB of storage to do any user level stuff. The most you can dictate is how much each internet application (e.g. Gmail or Google Wave) can have for a local cache. It does support Flash as usual, except when you play HD Flash it'll force you into fullscreen mode to render better/faster. And if you want to read PDFs, it'll force you into Google's webFUSION page 18

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What Lala Means for the Streaming Future of iTunes [Apple] By matt buchanan (Gizmodo)

PortalPlayer—again, Apple bought the rights to the hardware and software, but not the It still seems strange, on the face company (which was later picked of it. iTunes is the ginormousest up by Nvidia). force in digital music, beaming Finally, and most recently, out billions of bits a day. Apple Apple bought PA Semi, an entire paid $80 million( maybe) for chip company, likely so Apple Lala, a streaming site you've can design its own chips for never heard of. Why? iPhones and iPods (we haven't First, let's look at what Lala is. seen the fruits of this venture yet, (Or was.) It's three things, really: though we likely will soon). So, A CD trading site (its original there's a couple different models emphasis), a streaming site, here: Buy the tech, buy the brains where you can "upload" your behind it; buy the tech; buy the own music and stream it company, the tech and the brains. anywhere (your collection is In each instance, though, the matched with what Lala's got, thing purchased became wholly and anything they don't have is an Apple thing, fully assimilated, actually uploaded); and a as if its past life had never streaming site that'll let you existed. stream a song once for free, or Looking at Lala, it's likely true, pay 10 cents to stream it an as the NYT says, that Apple is unlimited number of times. In "buying Lala's engineers, other words, It's a music service including its energetic co-founder that's all about streaming and the Bill Nguyen, and their experience cloud, both for the music you with cloud-based music already own, and for finding and services," as Apple did with playing new music. iTunes so many years ago. But That obviously looks a lot that's not all Apple was after, not different from iTunes—you pay if they paid $80 million ( or for things, you download them, whatever) to outbid at least two you have a library of stuff. It's pass just about pays for itself). c o m p a n i e s , h i s t o r i c a l l y , iTunes, and Robbin is now the other competitors, as some kind of a dated, restrictive model, iTunes needs to refresh itself. especially when it comes to iPod VP for consumer applications at reports say. It seems clear, really. Only being able to listen Okay, so Lala obviously fits into and iTunes. Apple. Cover Flow, which is now looking at the history of Apple's to the small slice of music that's that need. But what's Apple iTunes actually began life as an slathered on top of basically iTunes acquisitions, Lala and its banked on my hard drive, it feels going to do with it specifically? acquisition. In 2000, Apple was every app Apple makes, was f e a t u r e s a r e g o i n g t o b e cramped and very 2004. Zune Bring Lala under iTunes? Kill looking to buy MP3 software and o r i g i n a l l y a n i n d e p e n d e n t integrated into iTunes in a very feels like a generation ahead with Lala and assimilate its features wound up purchasing a little program developed by Steel fundamental way. Zune Pass, which essentially into iTunes? Keep Lala running? program called SoundJam MP, Skies. Apple bought Cover Flow, After all, one of the central expands my library ad infinitum, Well, there's actually some pretty along with its lead developer, Jeff though not the company. The conceits of Lala—streaming your with full access to most of the good case studies when it comes Robbin—it was re-engineered iPod itself was mostly developed own music library anywhere—is service's 6 million songs (plus I to Apple buying up smaller into what you now know as b y a c o m p a n y c a l l e d WHAT page 18 get to keep 10 a month, so the Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:52:25 AM

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WHY continued from page 14

the Dell Zino requires a $45 upgrade for that option. If you want to upgrade an older PC to handle wireless-N, all you need is a compatible router and a USB adapter. Decent wireless-N routers will run you about$60 on the lower end, and compatible USB adapters can be had for an additional$30 or $40 bucks. If you just plan on connecting to the internet and you live in a smaller home or apartment, you should be fine with 802.11g. Networked Storage Although not an essential component to owning an HTPC, at some point you are probably going to want a networked storage solution so you can dump all of your files in one place. Traditionally, setting up a home server to centrally store files from multiple computers (and multiple platforms, potentially) required another major investment, but things have definitely improved in this area. For example, HP's LX195 Windows Home Server with a 640GB drive can be had for $250, and it performs quite well

for the price. The same can be said for the Iomega Ix2-200 NAS. It runs on Iomega's proprietary software as opposed to Windows Home Server, but for the money, it has a killer feature set that makes it a pretty awesome deal. Capacity runs up to 4TB, but the base delivers 1TB at $270 and it is user-expandable. Even if you want to bake your own NAS server there is opensource software like FreeNAS that can help to keep the costs down. Maximum PC has provided a great guide to building a NAS server using these free open source tools. If you have the hardware lying around, it's not going to cost a penny. Either way, building from scratch can be fairly inexpensive depending on how much storage space you need. Avoid Expensive Set-Top Boxes Amusingly enough, as I was writing this article, my father called to ask me about the Roku player his IT guy was raving about. Yes, Roku's three models are priced between $80 and $130, a figure even the cheapest

HTPCs can't match, but the fact that they are still limited to Netflix and Amazon On Demand makes them less valuable. Would you say that Netflix and Amazon VOD are worth $130 of the AspireRevo's $330 price tag? I should hope not. There are certainly good reasons to pick up a $100 HD media streamer, like the Asus O!Play, if you're aware of the limitations, but what's the excuse for Apple TV and others like it? Apple's set -top box costs $229. I have iTunes on my HTPC...so where is the value? Throw an HDMI port on a Mac Mini and then we'll talk. The $300 Popcorn Hour player may play a ton of file formats and have an integrated BitTorrent client, but you have to pay extra to add a hard drive, and by the time you do, you're squarely in HTPC territory. To me, spending a little more actually saves money, because I don't need to buy so many competing boxes. It's like going to the grocery store and choosing between the regular-sized bag of

coffee and the jumbo bag of coffee. The smaller bag costs lest money, but buying in bulk is cheaper pound for poundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and you know I will be drinking all of that coffee. HTPCs Are Resilient Forget about netbooks and elaborate set-top media boxes this holiday season. If your budget is anywhere over $300, go with an HTPC. Set-top boxes will always hold you to whatever content deals their makers can set in place (or whatever you can go through the trouble of hacking or modding in, yourself). And I'm not interested in netbooks until they handle HD well enough to be used as a portable HTPC. It's only a matter of time before everyone watches TV through the internet, so you had better get on the bandwagon while cable companies are still scrambling to figure out how best to screw you. No matter how weird it gets, at least with a PC you know you'll be able to roll with it.

This Is What's Wrong With eBooks: Amazon Loses $2 On Every eBook Sold By Mike Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:49:00 AM

We've had stories about consumers complaining that ebooks are too expensive and about book publishers complaining that ebooks are too cheap. Guess who's getting squeezed in the middle? According to this unsourced report (so, perhaps take it with a grain of salt), Amazon is losing $2 per ebook sale, because publishers are wholesaling the books at $12, while Amazon wants to keep selling its ebooks at $10. The conclusion is the same all the way around, however: the publishers are living in a fantasy world if they think that $12 makes sense as a wholesale price for an ebook. Without the cost of printing, binding and distribution, the wholesale price should be a hell of a lot lower. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

ZyXEL to debut 'world's first' LTE router at CES 2010 By Joseph L. Flatley (Engadget) Submitted at 12/8/2009 1:01:00 PM

If we're able to avert this looming " spectrum apocalypse" we've heard so much about, it looks like 2010 will be the year that many of you get to partake in

LTE. What better way to indulge your lust for airborne data than ZyXEL's newest, the ZLR-2070S LTE CPE/SOHO router? Apparently "the world's first," this guy features two VoIP ports, a four port 802.11n wireless switch, a USB port for storage or to 50Mbps. Not bad, eh? We printer sharing, and data rates up expect to hear more about this

one in short order -- it will make its society debut at next year's CES. In the meantime, peep the PR for more info -- it's after the break. Continue reading ZyXEL to debut 'world's first' LTE router at CES 2010 ZyXEL to debut 'world's first'

LTE router at CES 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| | Email this| Comments

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FUSION

WHAT

continued from page 15

based PDF doc reader. So it handles PDFs, but not "natively". Your home screen is composed almost entirely of icons—shortcuts—to web applications. The screen is customizable with your own applications, eventually, and has a weird feature where it displays a different color background whenever you go back to it. Fusion Garage is thinking of taking this out, or swapping it with some other feature. As for multitasking, Fusion Garage says that they will have specific APIs available to webapps to incorporate in order to pass notifications up to the user. For example, if Twitter refreshes in another window and you're watching a YouTube video, a popup will show and tell you you have something else going on. The APIs will be available at launch, but it's up to websites to support them.

continued from page 16

How good is it? Despite its weird birth issues this past week with all the Arrington trouble, the JooJoo is surprisingly solid. You can tell Fusion Garage spent a good deal of time polishing the hardware, by the fact that they managed to include a 12-inch screen that's decent enough to not have lousy viewing angles, plus support 1080p HD video playback. The only trouble right now is software, which is only about 75% done. Fusion Garage plans to ship devices about 8-10 weeks after preorders, which start this friday. If FG can manage to finish the software and get it to a point where it's transparent to the user who just wants to get online, $500 isn't too outrageous a price to pay. Decent netbooks are around that price, and it's about the price you'd expect Apple to charge for their tablet, if not even more. We'd of course be very

happy if it were down at $300 or $400, but it's basically a new device in a new market, and you'll have to hand over a little extra for being an early adopter. So right now we're at a wait and see status. The JooJoo seems good, from our time with it, but it really needs to be taken home and thoroughly tested with different webapps, watching a lot of HD video and streaming music. At the very least, we'll see how much of that 5-hour battery life stands up to constant use. You can pre-order it yourself this Friday, but, since there's some legal troubles on the horizon, you probably want to wait until the whole thing clears up first before putting any money down. [ JooJoo]

something Apple's been looking at for a while, and it doesn't alter the fundamental iTunes model, the one that's so deeply tied to your own music collection. It just expands it. Lala, actually, was even in the midst of getting its streaming iPhone app approved. And that's most likely what Lala is going to look like inside of the iTunes beast: You'll be able to stream your own library anywhere. The other half of Lala, the true streaming service, with its 10-cent songs, as a part of a new iTunes too, would radically alter the entire iTunes model by introducing one organized around streaming—while still preserving that core tenet of paying for and owning songs. The kind of value hierarchy that Apple is devoted to still works—songs you have more ownership of, that stay on

your hard drive, cost more (like when DRM-free songs used to cost more) while ones that stay in the cloud are cheaper—even as it completely changes the way we'd buy music from iTunes, and if history's any guide, maybe digital music as a whole. (Oh, and iTunes' new web interface practically begs to be a streaming site.) It'd be a big step, even for a company that killed their most popular iPod, the mini, to introduce a brand new one, the nano. True, we won't know precisely what Apple's going to do with LaLa until they do it. But we've got some rough ideas.

Our Century of Fallout: Every Nuclear Detonation, Mapped [Data] By John Herrman (Gizmodo) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:49:44 AM

Everyone's got a notion of how the last century went, in terms of nuclear explosions. There was Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. There were some nuclear tests out in the desert, and the ocean. But would you believe there've been over 2000?

In this map, which takes into account all the documented nuclear tests since 1945, two things really stand out. The few days in 1945 that saw the only use of nuclear weapons on humans register, when measured on the unfeeling scale of kilotons, as two small blips, aberrant in their location but unremarkable key: The scale is not linear. If it in their size. Then you see the was, the larger explosions would

cover most of the map. That's the thing with nuclear weapons: It's easy to lose your sense of scale when it comes to how powerful they are, or what havoc they can wreak. It paints (or visualizes) an unflattering portrait of the fifties and sixties not as golden years of postwar recovery and American prosperity, but as the years that

the US and the Soviet Union, in blind competition with one another, spent all their time and untold amounts of their money blowing their own countries up. History! [ DataVis] UPDATE: Swapped image for original infographic, from Radial Cartography—Thanks, Adam!

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Buy 200GB of Google Storage, Get a Free Eye -Fi Card [Dealzmodo] By matt buchanan (Gizmodo) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:23:31 AM

Kind of nice: If you buy 200GB of Google storage for $50, you'll get a free 4GB Eye-Fi card. Since the card's$60, you could also look at it as "buy an Eye-Fi card, By Paul Miller (Engadget) The anodized aluminum exterior quoted, so probably around three Check out a quick video hands- get 200GB of Google storage." is smooth to the touch and gives in real life. We're also a little on after the break, and stand by All in all, it's pretty simple. Just Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:38:00 AM the frame of the entire laptop a disappointed that the $450 base for our review that should s i g n i n w i t h y o u r G o o g l e What if you took an original great amount of stiffness; none of price rips out the SD card and hopefully arrive later this month. account, drop in your credit card Adamo, shaved a couple pounds that bendy nonsense that can be ExpressCard slots, and that you Gallery: Dell Vostro V13 hands- digits and tell 'em where to send off the weight and a grand off the found in some of the $500ish thin can't get a Windows 7 version for on your card. (Oh, and yes the p r i c e ? Y o u ' d e n d u p w i t h -and-light competition. We were under $600 -- even though the Continue reading Dell Vostro 200GB is a yearly subscription. something pretty close to the new also pleasantly surprised to find a U b u n t u d e f a u l t i s m i g h t y V13 hands-on impressions: 'yes' So the first year pays for itself, to Dell Vostro V13. We just got a antigloss (not quite matte) t e m p t i n g . S o , t h e r e a r e Dell Vostro V13 hands-on be more precise.) [ Google] quick look at the machine, and d i s p l a y u n d e r t h e h o o d . compromises, just like in life, but impressions: 'yes' originally while some of the cheaper Unfortunately, the compromises for the most part this is one of the appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 materials Dell is using here begin with the keyboard, which least timid computers we've seen Dec 2009 11:38:00 EST. Please certainly came through, the total is a bit bendy and "clacky" (the from Dell in a while: not afraid to see our terms for use of feeds. package is still quite impressive - bad version of "clicky"), and the step on the toes of its brandmates Permalink| | Email this| - and the price unimpeachable. 6 volt battery gets 4.75 hours as and make a name for itself. Comments

Dell Vostro V13 hands-on impressions: 'yes'

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DigiProtect Now Handing Pre-Settlement Threat Amounts Over To Collections Agencies By Mike Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:02:00 AM

We've covered how various companies in Europe have built up an extremely profitable business by purposely seeding content they have the rights to on file sharing networks, and then sending "pre-settlement" letters demanding money from the holder of any IP address that connects to them, even if the IP address is not accurately indicating who was involved. They're now sending out these letters at a massive rate, and while they're not actually filing lawsuits, it appears that at least one of the firms involved, DigiProtect, is getting a collections agency involved in some cases. That seems pretty nasty. There's no actual debt here, because the person has not agreed to pay up, but by handing it over to a collections agency, the person will now get hounded with demands for payment. It's Continue reading Powering difficult to see how this is even Google's PowerMeter: testing close to legal. TED 5000 and AlertMe Energy Permalink| Comments| Email Powering Google's PowerMeter: This Story testing TED 5000 and AlertMe Energy originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| | Email this| Comments

Powering Google's PowerMeter: testing TED 5000 and AlertMe Energy By Tim Stevens (Engadget)

its bar graphs in green, getting more pale the greedier you become. Google has partnerships There are plenty of ways to be with some utility companies in green these days, but without the US, Canada, and India, some sort of feedback it's hard to meaning a select few of you can know just what shade you are. do this sort of tracking by Enter Google's PowerMeter, a default. The rest of us were left service that tells you how much out -- until now. Two devices on current you're responsible for the market let you track your consuming. Why, it even shades usage in PowerMeter regardless Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:02:00 PM

of just how backwards your utility company is: The Energy Detective's TED 5000 and the AlertMe Energy. We've been experimenting with these two for about a month now, finding that they serve the same purpose in very different ways and at very different costs. Click on through to see which one can best help you get greener.

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Nokia ships E72 and 5800 Navigation Edition to the US of A By Darren Murph (Engadget)

to ship to America (according to the company, anyway), with the former listed as "coming soon" We know it's the N900 you're on Nokia's webstore and as "in jonesing for, but if you're looking stock on December 10th" over at to let those "other guys" put Amazon. The latter is available to Maemo 5 through the ringer order now for $299 sans contract, while you continue to use an OS so good luck holding off for that's been around the block, Google Maps Navigation to Nokia's got two more for you to make this thing look dated. choose from starting today. Both Update: Seems this is the second the QWERTY-packin' E72($407) time Nokia has stated that its E72 notification or two before pulling a n d e a g e r - t o - r o u t e 5 8 0 0 was available in the US, so we'd the trigger. Can't ever be too Navigation Edition have started probably wait for at least another careful! Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:55:00 AM

Gallery: Nokia ships E72 and 5800 Navigation Edition to the US of A Nokia ships E72 and 5800 Navigation Edition to the US of A originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| E72, 5800 Navigation Edition| Email this| Comments

Magazine publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme By Joseph L. Flatley (Engadget)

Meredith, News Corporation, and Time Inc. was imminent. Essentially a vehicle for selling Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:19:00 AM publications for just about any The joint venture between four device (including smartphones, eleading publishers has issued a readers, and laptops), the content press release highlighting a few will be optimized for multiple of the finer points of its plan to operating systems and display create a platform for digital sizes, and according Time exec magazine distribution -- we guess John Squires, it will all be DRMthat The New York Observer free. They've yet to announce a (or, perhaps, the iMags Store). wasn't kidding when it said that a name for this beast -- although PR after the break. Continue reading Magazine deal between Conde Nast, Hearst, we're leaning towards Magulu

publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme Magazine publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| | Email this| Comments

US Laws Don't Apply In Case Involving Yahoo's China Subsidiary Handing Over Info To Gov't By Mike Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 12/8/2009 4:05:01 AM

You may recall a few years ago all the negative publicity Yahoo got after it came out that its Chinese operations handed over information on certain users that resulted in some Chinese dissidents being arrested. This resulted in some lawsuits filed in the US. However, in one such case, the court has noted that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which protects user data in such cases, doesn't apply outside the US, and since this happened entirely within China, there's not much of a case to be made about it. Either way, Yahoo recognized what a blackeye it got from the PR in these cases, and has settled some of them, and I'm guessing the company is now a lot more aware of the potential backlash in dealing with these kinds of issues. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

Google brings Chrome beta to Mac, Linux Hands-on with the JooJoo By Stephen Shankland (Webware.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:41:00 AM

The search giant issues the first beta versions of its browser for Mac OS X and Linux. Maturity could spread adoption, and the

stable version is due in a month. Originally posted at Deep Tech

By Rafe Needleman (Webware.com) Submitted at 12/7/2009 4:34:00 PM

Formerly know as the

CrunchPad, this Web slate is a really cool device everyone will want, but it's far too expensive. Originally posted at Rafe's Radar

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Apple ordered to pay damages in Opti patent case, Apple appeals By Donald Melanson (Engadget)

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Moneydance 2010 for Mac arrives; another personal finance alternative By Steven Sande (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

• Create, edit and record scheduled reminders and transactions right from the home page calendar

Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:00:00 AM

Filed under: Software Whenever TUAW reports on personal Full-time IP licensor Opti sure finance applications for Mac, has been keeping itself busy in particularly if we're reporting the last few years suing the likes about Quicken for Mac, we get a of NVIDIA, AMD and Apple, known as predictive snooping flurry of comments from readers and it looks like its case with the (hence the relatively small who recommend one solution or l a t t e r m a y n o w f i n a l l y b e damages). Apple apparently isn't another. Lately, many of those drawing to a close. After a few quite ready to call it a day just yet comments have been about years of battling it out in the though, and has reportedly Moneydance, a Java-based crosscourts in Texas, the judge in the already filed a formal appeal to p l a t f o r m p e r s o n a l f i n a n c e case has ordered Apple to pay have the case overturned. manager from The Infinite Kind, Opti $19 million for three Apple ordered to pay damages in LLC. instances of patent infringement, Opti patent case, Apple appeals Available in Windows, Linux, as well as $2.7 million in pre- originally appeared on Engadget and Mac flavors, with an iPhone judgment interest. The judge on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:36:00 client on the way, Moneydance didn't find that Apple willfully EST. Please see our terms for 2010 is the latest version of this violated the patents in question, use of feeds. Permalink| PC US$39.99 application. This h o w e v e r , w h i c h c o n c e r n a World| Email this| Comments newest update, available now memory access technology from the Moneydance website, includes these features: • Sidebar for always-visible By Brian X. Chen (Wired Top A simple invention sets the stage account status and navigation Stories) for trans-Atlantic telephone, between accounts, budgets, cable TV and broadband internet. reports and graphs Submitted at 12/7/2009 9:00:00 PM • Downloads transactions from all online connected accounts in Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:36:00 PM

Dec. 8, 1931: Coaxial Cable Patented

Offline Gmail access now a full-fledged feature By Stephen Shankland (Webware.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:02:00 AM

A key part of Google's promise for the Gmail Web application-the ability to read and compose messages while offline--becomes

a standard feature. Originally posted at Deep Tech

the background • Downloaded transactions are automatically merged, no manual confirmation required • Improved automatic cleanup and categorization of downloaded transactions • More reports and graphs including capital gains reporting • More options for filtering reports and graphs by tags • Account register filtering by date or cleared status • Quick-search to find transactions right from the home page • Budget bars on home page show budget status details at a glance

A full-featured demo of the app can be downloaded at no cost from the Moneydance website and is good for up to 100 transactions. What's your favorite personal finance manager for the Mac? We'd like to know! Leave a comment below, and let us know what Mac application reigns supreme for keeping your checking, savings, investment, and credit card accounts up to speed. TUAW Moneydance 2010 for Mac arrives; another personal finance alternative originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Video: Dissecting the Phony Climategate Scandal (Little Green Footballs) Submitted at 12/7/2009 1:54:37 PM

Here’s another excellent video on the phony scandal

unimaginatively titled “Climategate,” with extra added sarcasm.[Video]

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Latte-Sipping, Arugula-Eating Android Users Will Soon Enjoy NPR News App [Apps] By Brian Barrett (Gizmodo) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:26:06 AM

The Android Market continues to grow. On the heels of yesterday's addition of Yelp comes National Public Radio's NPR News app, expected to hit later this month. It'll also be using Android to do things its

iPhone counterpart simply can't. On Android, the NPR News app will be open and fully customizable by member stations and users. That means local stations can include their own content, not just the main NPR feed. You'll also be able to stream NPR content in the background while using other

smartphone functions, something Apple doesn't permit.

It's exciting to see developers take full advantage of the Android mobile OS instead of just making copycats of their existing iPhone versions. Especially if it eventually forces Apple to loosen their grip to stay competitive. [ PaidContent via All Things D]

Vancouver Olympics Silences Indie Rock Acts With Contractual Gag Order By Mike Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 12/7/2009 11:05:00 PM

We've covered how the Olympics has time and time again abused intellectual property law to try to silence all sorts of reasonable activity, and the upcoming Vancouver Olympics have been no exception. In the latest move, sent in by drewmo(though he forgot the link, and made us go searching...) is that a Vancouver-based musician, Carey Mercer, is pointing out that the Vancouver Olympic Committee is pushing contracts on musicians that include a gag order against saying anything bad at all about

the Olympics. The Olympics always has a "cultural component," a cultural Olympiad, and this year, to quote their puke-in-my-mouth inducing website, they have made a backpatting hullabaloo about including "cutting edge indie rock." And each and every "cutting edge" performer that has agreed to play has signed a contract that includes the above clause. A clause that states, in case you skimmed over it, that these artists must never say anything negative about an entity that will spend 900 million dollars on "security." An entity that has already infuriated antipoverty and anti-homeless groups

who accuse VANOC of not living up to its promise of providing affordable housing. Most participating artists claim to be unaware of this clause. Part of Mercer's complaint is that no one seems to be able to determine if the Olympics is a public or private entity, since censorship by a government entity would seem like a big no-no: No one, including our courts, can figure out if it is a public or private entity. It seems to be public when it needs tax dollars (6 billion), but private whenever it is challenged... And, sure, you can understand why the Vancouver Olympics might not want musicians it hires to say anything

bad about them, but putting a contractual gag clause in there seems to suggest that the organization simply can't take any criticism. Mercer is also concerned about what this does for the musicians who signed these gag orders, often without realizing it: When artists are not allowed to critique their government, or the governing agency that endows them with grants and funding, then what they are asking for is nothing more than propaganda. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

Parents of Dead Teen Sue School Over Sexting Images By Kim Zetter (Wired Top Stories)

The parents of a teenage girl who committed suicide last year are suing the girl’s ex-boyfriend

and several other former high school classmates who circulated a nude photo of her and harassed

her about the image.

Boxee Beta is cleaner, better, still closed By Rafe Needleman (Webware.com) Submitted at 12/7/2009 5:00:00 PM

Media-viewing app gets new interface in beta version, but you can't get it yet. The beta will open to all around the time of the Consumer Electronics Show. Originally posted at Rafe's Radar

Book of the Week: Climate Cover-Up, The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Little Green Footballs) Submitted at 12/7/2009 8:23:38 PM

Here’s a new book I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning about the deceptive personalities and industry-funded groups behind the flood of global warming denial propaganda: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. Hoggan and Littlemore are two of the writers at DeSmogBlog, an excellent source for credible information on global warming, and a tireless debunker of the denial industry. Warning: reading their well-documented book may make you angry, when you realize how much you’ve been lied to, about one of the most important issues of our time.

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MIT floats ideas in DARPA balloon challenge (Q&A) (CNET News.com)

computer science. Both Pickard and Madan are Ph.D candidates, and Pan is preparing for his MS Balloon 10 was located at degree. As researchers in the Centennial Park in Atlanta. Or, Human Dynamics Group at more precisely, N 33? 45' 33" W MIT's Media Lab, the five study 84? 23' 33"(Credit: DARPA) the science of how people MIT's Riley Crane only found interact with technology. out about DARPA's red balloon On Monday I spoke with Crane challenge a few days before it to discuss his thoughts on started. Yet his team went on to entering and winning DARPA's win the contest through its savvy offbeat challenge. use of the Internet. First, congratulations on winning The challenge posed by the the challenge. Second, can you Defense Advanced Research tell me how you entered the Projects Agency asked people to contest and what methods or find the coordinates of 10 red strategies you used to find the weather balloons floating above positions of the balloons? the U.S. in one day. Since no one Crane: Sure, I think the key individual could plot the location factor as to why our team ended of all 10, participants had to up able to pull this off--I mean, figure out how to work with we had some great competitors others to solve the puzzle. that we only learned about after Team MIT's strategy was to the fact--is that we really build a Web site designed to designed a system that allowed attract more and more followers-- people to [see it] as sort of a people who might know the recursive incentive. So on the balloons' locations themselves surface, I think some people see and those could bring aboard it as sort of a pyramid scheme, others who knew the coordinates, when in fact, it's exactly the essentially creating a chain opposite. I can illustrate it with effect. an example of a friend of mine in The five-member MIT Red Europe who wrote back and said B a l l o o n C h a l l e n g e T e a m "There's no reason I should join consisted of group leader Crane because I'm in Europe. I'm not and Manuel Cebrian, both post- g o i n g t o f i n d o n e o f t h e doctoral research fellows at the balloons." And that's exactly the M a s s a c h u s e t t s I n s t i t u t e o f point. We designed this sort of Technology. Rounding off the recursive incentive. Of course, team were three students-- Galen he's not going to find the Pickard, Wei Pan, and Anmol balloons. But he might know Madan. someone in the U.S., and that Crane holds a Ph.D in physics, person may find a balloon. And w h i l e C e b r i a n h a s h i s i n so if he can put us in contact with Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:04:00 AM

that person, then he should get some type of a reward as well. So the system we built is as simple as that. If you heard about our Web site and went to sign up directly, and you found a balloon,

you would get $2,000, and $2,000 would go to charity. If instead you signed up and then you told your friends, and one of your friends found a balloon, that person would still get $2,000

because they found the balloon. And you, because you signed someone up who found the balloon, would also be rewarded with $1,000, and then $1,000 would go to charity. We think this recursive incentive allowed people to feel as though they were a part of a team helping to solve this proverbial needle in the haystack challenge. And they could participate in a meaningful way, even if they really had no chance of finding a balloon themselves. We had a lot of feedback of "We won." And people really felt they were a part of the team because of this. One of the interesting things is that in trying to understand what we actually did, a lot of people might think of viral marketing. But again, this is the wrong point because it's not that our approach was to get a message out. It was more that we wanted people to send information back to us. You could really see a fun way of engaging people that they can see how influential and how resourceful they could be at getting people to join this challenge and recruiting them for the greater good. So it was kind of a snowball effect? Crane: Absolutely. The key is to try to make this as selfpropagating as possible so that we can really get as many people engaged. Riley, do you have a sense of MIT page 27

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EMC rolls out FAST (CNET News.com)

while older data that hasn't been touched for a while will move to slower, cheaper storage. The EMC hasn't exactly kept its fully fundamental idea is that a automated storage tiering ( relatively small amount of FAST) a secret. The company fast/expensive storage can let an has talked about the technology application run almost as quickly at analyst events and its global as if all the storage were fast and marketing CTO, Chuck Hollis, expensive. has blogged on the topic. The concept is similar in some But now version 1 has officially respects to Sun's storage pools in launched, despite earlier reports its ZFS file system, a component that it wouldn't arrive until 2010. of Solaris. I'll get to why there have Unsurprisingly, given that EMC probably been some mixed tends to view storage as being in signals about availability in a bit, the middle of things in the data but first let's look at what FAST center, in its case, FAST lives in is. the array. Three of its product Different types of storage lines are supported: Symmetrix V a s s o c i a t e d w i t h c o m p u t e r s -Max (high-end storage area perform relatively better or network arrays), CLARiiON worse. Faster is usually better of CX4 (mid-range storage area course. But faster also tends to network arrays), and Celerra NS mean more expensive per unit of (file-based network-attached capacity. This relationship holds s t o r a g e ) . T h e b a s i c F A S T pretty generally. After all, if a concept is the same across these technology were simultaneously products, but details differ in slower and more expensive, no how they are managed and in one would probably use it. There some low-level specifics. a r e s o m e o t h e r r e l e v a n t This is because Symmetrix and c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s , s u c h a s CLARiiON come from largely permanence, removability, and so separate technology roots--and forth but price and performance because Celerra operates at the are two of the big ones. file rather the block level. FAST automates the placement However, EMC told me in a of data based on the way it is recent briefing that its goal in a c c e s s e d . F o r e x a m p l e , a FAST version 2, slated for middatabase index that is frequently 2010, is to largely mask platform read and written to will migrate differences from users using to high-performance storage m a n a g e m e n t a n d o t h e r Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:07:00 AM

administrative interfaces. And this is where I think some of the mixed signals about release dates come from. FAST v1 certainly brings interesting and useful capabilities to the market. However, in v1, Symmetrix and CLARiiON also only apply migration policies at the logical unit number (LUN) level, a concept analogous to a drive letter on a Windows PC likely to correspond to many gigabytes of storage. FAST v2 will enable the relocation of blocks of under 1 megabyte. And v2 will also see additional important capabilities such as the introduction of chargeback accounting in Ionix ControlCenter for those organizations that want to more precisely allocate costs to different business units. In short, without suggesting that v1 isn't fully baked, clearly v2 following in just six months or so will be a significantly more complete and integrated technology suite. EMC is making a huge deal of FAST, as well they should. If you look at where different storage technologies sit today, change is a-brewing. Let me explain. The idea of storage tiers aren't new. They historically featured tape as a major piece, but solid state (flash) drives have been

around for a long time as well. Disks and disk arrays have also long used memory caches, sometimes backed up with batteries, to improve performance. But the caches, on the one hand, were limited. In the case of disk arrays, they mostly served the purpose of minimizing the performance degradation associated with certain RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) configurations which store parity information that allows recovery in the event of a disk failure. And the other parts of the hierarchy were rather manual. This was sometimes OK in the case of tape used to archive data according to some preset policy. But solid state long remained a niche. You just needed too much of it to gain its performance benefits. In addition, for a long time, bottlenecks in storage controllers and in the connection between server and storage limited the performance benefit of solid state anyway. But some dynamics are changing today. The first is that we've pretty much reached the performance limits of "spinning rust" (as storage folks like to jokingly call disks). Drives continue to get bigger certainly. But 15,000 rpm Fibre Channel disks aren't going

Printable, Moldable Batteries Made From Paper and Nanotubes By Rachel Ehrenberg (Wired Top Stories)

Using ink made from carbon scientists are working on creating nanotubes and ordinary paper, l i g h t w e i g h t , p r i n t a b l e a n d

moldable batteries.

to get a whole lot faster. Sure, we can always add more of them-and that helps some--but then you have wasted capacity, more power and heat, and higher costs. Another is that tape is going away for many purposes. Yes, it will be a long slow decline, but that's the trend. And solid state is getting cheaper. It remains significantly more expensive than disk drives for a given size but its now affordable in quantities that are interesting for mainstream commercial computing. Add those together and techniques allowing enterprise fibre channel drives (and tape) to be largely replaced over time by a combination of solid state and capacity/power-use-optimized SATA or SAS disk drives start to look very interesting. EMC's description of this new hierarchy is FAST, Thin, Small, Green, Gone. In other words, solid state for performance, a reduced number of active high performance disk drives, deduplicated data, low-activity drives that are spundown when not in use, and final data that is purged when no longer needed. This is certainly a long-term vision. Change does not happen quickly in enterprise storage. But it's starting to happen. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Google, open source alter who gets paid for what (CNET News.com)

people prefer to discover news content. New packaging is rising, including Google News, that will Open source, like digital media, shift who makes money on news doesn't suck money out of content. hitherto profitable industries. Reporters will still get paid. Instead, the opening up of They'll just have a new employer software and information simply on their payroll check. Maybe it changes where the money gets will be Google. made. Think about what is happening This is obvious to the Googles of in music. I could download New the world. It's probably equally Order's "Regret" for free using obvious to the Microsofts of the LimeWire, but I bought it on world. The difference is that the i T u n e s b e c a u s e o f t h e latter can see the train coming but "packaging" which makes my is powerless to stop it, and the experience easy, high-quality, former is driving the train. and legal. T h e e v i d e n c e f o r t h i s i s Still, the primary drivers are ease increasingly clear and is driven and quality. by a shift in how content is sold Such packaging is worth a lot of and consumed. The problem is money--and to an entirely new neatly summarized by Google breed of vendor--as a quick look CEO Eric Schmidt in a Wall a t G o o g l e ' s l a t e s t i n c o m e Street Journal op-ed piece s t a t e m e n t s u g g e s t s . d i r e c t e d a t t h e n e w s p a p e r It's happening in software, too, industry: particularly in open-source [T]he Internet has broken down software. Red Hat is an example the entire news package with of a company that does a great articles read individually, reached job of turning software license from a blog or search engine, and into an ongoing service contract abandoned if there is no good that enterprises buy. It does this reason to hang around once the by packaging the power of others' story is finished. It's what we development in the form of a have come to call internally the subscription, as Red Hat CEO atomic unit of consumption. Jim Whitehurst recently That newspaper was "the h i g h l i g h t e d . package," but is increasingly too But Red Hat is just Open Source slow and out-of-sync with how 1.5. Open Source 2.0 looks more Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:00:00 AM

like Google or IBM. For every dollar Red Hat makes selling subscriptions to use open-source software like Linux and JBoss, both Google and IBM make multiples of that dollar using open-source software to sell something else, something they've packaged in hardware or Web-based services. The hardware is running open source. The services are based on open source. The money is made in the packaging of open source. But it's not just enterprise software and search. Such packaging is also why we buy TiVos, which is just free Linux packaged in a set-top box. Even iTunes, which does so much to streamline music discovery and delivery, heavily relies on open-source software. Of course, not everyone is prepared to move to a Googleesque model today. The Microsofts of the world are very likely to end up buying into open source as they seek to disrupt their competitors. It's therefore not surprising, as Vyatta's Kelly Herrell points out, that while open-source companies have been sold for high premiums, they haven't been picked up by incumbents in their respective markets, but rather by those seeking to disrupt such

markets. Herrell writes: A large handful of major opensource companies have been acquired for anywhere from 20 to 500 times their trailing revenues-astronomically high compared to other acquisition price ranges. Here's the key: Not one major open-source acquisition has ever been initiated by the proprietary incumbent. Instead they were acquired by a company in an adjacency (e.g., Xen by Citrix, SpringSource by VMWare, MySQL by Sun, JBoss by Red Hat, etc.) This is the dynamic caused by the constant shifting of technology markets: Stand still and other vendors will morph around you, surrounding your offering and reducing your industry power. Aggressive acquiring companies push this envelope, crafting strategies that are missing a key component-one that is unfortunately the property of another proprietary software company. They covet that missing piece, so they choose to acquire the opensource inheritor of the space--and in the process, pay a large strategic premium. Such "adjacencies," as Herrell styles them, use the open-source product to cripple the incumbent and drive developers to their

Monday Afternoon Music: John Mayer, 'Gravity' (Little Green Footballs) Submitted at 12/7/2009 3:48:49 PM

A great live performance of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Gravityâ&#x20AC;? by John Mayer and his excellent band, from the album

Continuum. (Here it is at the iTunes Store.)[Video]

platforms, making connections to developers with open source but selling an ancillary proprietary product. This makes sense, as open source is a fantastic strategy for attracting and encouraging developers, but offers relatively weak direct revenue models. Whether disrupting "the past," as in using open-source developer communities to destabilize market incumbents, or disrupting the future, as in using open source to build proprietary hardware and services businesses, there's one constant: The money is in the packaging. Oh, and that the incumbents carp on the new packagers for not delivering value commensurate with their revenues. It's a criticism leveled at both Red Hat and Google, and it's incorrect in both cases. There's plenty of value provided by both, but it's different from the old-world value. Packaging has always mattered. The only thing that has changed is who is most effectively packaging products like news and software today, and therefore selling it. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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MIT continued from page 24

how many people were engaged through your site? Crane: The shocking thing on our side is that I actually only found out about the challenge four days ago. A friend of mine sent me a link and said, "Oh, I guess you must have a team over there at MIT." And we were kind of joking around within our group and very quickly hit upon this idea. In two days, I built a site and got it running. And then we only officially launched the site on Thursday evening. We sent out five e-mails because there are five members of the team. And within 48 hours, we had gone up to 5,000 [e-mails]. And we had something on the order of a few hundred thousand page views of people who may not have signed up but came and took a look. So it was an incredible bootstrapping approach that really got us up to speed. Do you have a sense of what tools or sites other people used to spread the word? Did they use traditional social-networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or other resources? Crane: I'm not entirely sure, but I do know of a few other competitors, one of which used an iPhone application. I think

there was another one, a videologger, who had a few hundred thousand followers and a pool of thousands of people that they could call and ask them to verify [the locations of the balloons]. How were you were able to verify the responses from people who sent you the coordinates of the balloons? Crane: That's the only thing we can't discuss at this point. I can tell you that we received a lot of spam and had indirect, private communications with one of the other teams who was happy they had been so successful at spamming us. We received a lot of Photoshopped images of balloons in different places in the U.S. It was a very exciting Saturday for us in our lab up here in the Human Dynamics group. But as for the actual way we did it, we'll discuss in a forthcoming release. As far as the prize money, it sounded like whatever amount goes to a single individual, that same amount would also go to charity? Crane: Not the same amount. Each balloon had a value of $4,000. If you came directly to us without a referral, you got $2,000, and the charity got

$2,000. If you came with one referral, if one person referred you to us, then you still got your $2,000, the referrer gets $1,000 and the charity gets $1,000. This goes on from $2,000, $1,000, $500, $250, $125, and so on. This goes on down the chain. It essentially gets to the point where you would be splitting pennies if the chain were extremely long. So if you took the $40,000 cash money, can you extrapolate how much would go to participants and how much would go to charity? Crane: We would be able to, but at this point we haven't looked at the data. We're trying to be as transparent as possible. So we've actually asked the MIT auditing department within the greater Massachusetts Institute of Technology to verify our results and make it official so that there's complete transparency in how the process is handled. Do you know yet which charity would be the recipient of any of the funds? Crane: No. That will be announced at some point, how that would be done. But at this point, we have no comment on that. And if I could add, from our

point of view, what the message of this was. I think it's important to point out that there's a tremendous scientific opportunity in all of this, and from our side, we were never in it for the 10 balloons. Of course, that was the challenge, and that was exciting. But from a broader scientific perspective, we were in it to understand how to mobilize the vast resources of the human network, to face challenges and explore opportunities in living in such a connected society. And as a footnote to that, I think some of the applications that might come out of this would be: Can we use this technology we've developed to find missing children or something along those lines where there's an incentive for people to really participate and help out? Often, the police will offer a reward for finding a missing child. Can we restructure that in a way that we tap the vast resources of this network? Again, maybe you don't live in the state where a child was abducted, but maybe you know someone who does. Or during an emergency, maybe we need to find 10 people in a region who can operate heavy machinery, maybe a building collapsed. And how can we use these new tools to solve

Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo: The VSS Enterprise By Jason Purr (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 12/8/2009 5:32:00 AM

On a cold and windy night at the Mojave Air and Space Port, the VSS Enterprise is unveiled to the public. Attached to its mother

ship, the vehicle better known as SpaceShipTwo is expected to be the first commercial spacecraft when it enters service with

Virgin Galactic.

those challenges to help society? That's kind of the broader message that comes out of this from our side. I know DARPA seemed to go into the challenge with the same point of view. Their goal was not to have the positions of the balloons uncovered. Their ultimate goal was to gauge how the Internet and social networking could be used and harnessed for more widespread issues and problems and puzzles. Crane: Yeah, I think there's a subtlety in there. I think it actually only works because there's a benevolent or greater good. You know, somebody had asked us if they thought we could use this to do something bad. And I think it really wouldn't work. The incentives were designed specifically so that people feel good about the fact that they're participating, that maybe if they don't solve it, that somehow they're helping charity or helping science in the greater good. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Music Publishers Lawsuit Against Yahoo, Microsoft, Real Tossed For Failing To Prove They Hold Copyrights

Climate Deniers and Saudi Arabia Agree on 'Climategate'

By Mike Masnick (Techdirt)

Right wingers screaming for investigations into “Climategate” are on the same side as the apartheid theocracy of Saudi Arabia. COPENHAGEN — Saudi Arabia called for an independent investigation into “climategate” Monday, warning that the scandal over stolen e-mails threatened to undermine the global-warming negotiations beginning here. “We believe this scandal — or what has been referred to as the ‘climategate’ scandal — we think this is definitely going to affect the nature of what could be trusted in our deliberations,” the Saudi Arabian negotiator said. Now, why would one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world want to promote “Climategate” as a crisis of confidence for global warming? Hmm. It’s a head-scratcher, all right. The very last thing the Saudis want is for the western world to get serious about alternate sources of energy. And climate change deniers are playing right into their hands.

ridiculous copyright law is today that even in setting up a big Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:37:00 AM music operation from a major Back in June, we wrote about an company with the major record odd lawsuit from a bunch of labels, no one was exactly sure if independent music publishers all the proper rights were headed by MCS Music America secured. against Microsoft, Yahoo and Either way, Microsoft, Yahoo RealNetworks claiming that all and Real were quick to ask for three failed to secure licenses on the lawsuit to be dismissed and the compositions. This seems Eric Goldman sent over the strange, of course. You would rather short ruling from last assume that big companies like month that does, in fact, dismiss Microsoft, Yahoo and Real the case stating (surprisingly) that would make sure to secure all the the music publishers failed to necessary licenses for their music show they hold the copyrights d o w n l o a d a n d s t r e a m i n g they were arguing over. That's operations. However, MCS and rather incredible, seeing as the the others suggested that the original lawsuit went on for three companies only secured the pages and pages, claiming to hold licenses on the recordings, but various licensing rights. But the not the compositions. What c o u r t w a s n ' t b u y i n g i t : appeared to have happened, was Defendants' Motion to Dismiss that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real All Causes of Action of Plaintiff licensed the songs from the major MCS Music America, Inc. record labels, who also own ("MCS") is granted on the many publishing operations, and ground Plaintiff MCS has failed in were told that they had to state a legal claim for received licenses for both the copyright infringement. To recording and composition. The establish a claim of copyright problem is that not all of those infringement, two elements must m a j o r l a b e l s h o l d t h e be satisfied: (1) ownership of a composition rights. In some v a l i d c o p y r i g h t , a n d ( 2 ) cases, those rights are still held unauthorized copying of the by independent music publishers o r i g i n a l w o r k . Feist -- and there was a fair amount of Publications, Inc. v. Rural confusion over who owned what. Telephone Services Co., Inc,. It was a perfect example of how 499 U.S. 340, 111 S.Ct 1282

(1991); Jones v. Blige, 558 F.3d 485 (6th Cir.2009). MCS has failed to demonstrate ownership of any of the copyrights at issue. Plaintiffs allege MCS is a licensing administrator and an exclusive licensing agent of the copyrights at issue, but do not allege MCS to be an owner of such works. Without demonstrating legal ownership, MCS is not able to plead all of the necessary elements of copyright infringement. Plaintiffs ask the court to consider the affidavit of Janice Bane with regard to MCS's rights. The court will not consider Ms. Bane's affidavit in deciding this issue. In ruling on a motion to dismiss, a court properly may consider only evidence contained in or asserted in the pleadings. As a general rule, matters outside the pleadings may not be considered in ruling on a motion to dismiss unless the motion is converted to one for summary judgment under Rule 56. Jackson v. City of Columbus, 194 F.3d 737, 745 (6th Cir.1999). Weiner v. Klais & Co., 108 F.3d 86, 88-89 (6th Cir.1997). Furthermore, even if the court were to consider Ms. Bane's affidavit, it does not indicate any ownership on the

part of MCS, thus rendering its consideration moot. Defendants' Motion to Dismiss All Causes of Action of Plaintiff MCS is GRANTED. On top of that, MCS requested the right to amend the lawsuit, and the court shot them down there as well: Plaintiffs have moved to amend their complaint a second time. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state "... a party may amend its pleading only with the opposing party's written consent or the court's leave. The court should freely give leave when justice so requires." Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(a)(2). However. Plaintiffs have not demonstrated their amended complaint would show MCS has ownership of any of the copyrights at issue and would therefore be futile. For that reason, Plaintiff's Motion to Amend Complaint is DENIED. So much for that, then. Somewhere along the line, it looks like these publishers got some really poor legal advice, as this case didn't last long at all, and to be tossed out so early is pretty bad. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

(Little Green Footballs) Submitted at 12/7/2009 10:02:39 PM

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Google brings Chrome beta to Mac, Linux (CNET News.com)

out of beta almost exactly a year ago. Google doesn't emphasize The beta version of Chrome for product version numbers in the Mac OS X is available. Google project, instead automatically released its browser beta for delivering updates behind the Linux too.(Credit: Screenshot by scenes to the browser that take Stephen Shankland/CNET) effect when it's restarted. But it Two key pieces of Google's does use version milestones to effort to make Chrome a more keep track of development competitive browser fell into internally. place on Tuesday as Google The biggest new feature of released beta versions of the Chrome 4.0 is support for browser for Mac OS X and extensions, which let people Linux. customize the browser. In the Tuesday's software release is a Mozilla world, they're called addversion of Chrome that had ons, and they've been a big part previously been available only as computer users, has importance of Firefox's success. developer preview software for of its own: it's the foundation for Extensions aren't useful, unless Mac and Linux machines. "It Chrome OS. That's the browser- people can find them, though. took longer than we expected, but based operating system Google G o o g l e o n T u e s d a y a l s o we hope the wait was worth it," h o p e s w i l l b e p o p u l a r o n launched a Chrome extensions product manager Brian Rakowski Netbooks starting next year. gallery page. said in a blog post. There are more than 300 According to the Chromium Macs are widely used, if not as development calendar, the beta extensions available for Chrome, common as Windows machines, v e r s i o n s a r e s c h e d u l e d t o extensions programmers Aaron and there's been some demand in graduate to the next level of Boodman and Erik Kay said in a tech circles for the Mac version maturity, "stable," on January 12. blog post. of Chrome. Linux, while less Chrome for Windows graduated This content has passed through widely used among ordinary fivefilters.org. Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:41:00 AM

Boxee Unveils Public Beta, 'Boxee Box' Hardware By Eliot Van Buskirk (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:34:00 AM

Boxee, the open-source media center software known for putting internet video on

televisions unveiled a new public beta version, content partners, and a dedicated set-top-box at a well-attended event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Disney CEO: I Can't Figure Out Ways To Adapt My Business, So I Need Government Protection By Mike Masnick (Techdirt)

of it was focused on the need for stronger intellectual property protection from the government, We had high hopes for Robert and no talk about all of the Iger when he took over Disney innovative business models that from Michael Eisner (whose others are creating without views on intellectual property relying on governments to prop were positively wacky). Iger up their business model. In surprised a lot of people by discussing his talk, he noted: So taking a very progressive view when you hear about "stealing towards digital and online intellectual property," a term that content, as well as recognizing may have little meaning to you, the need for new business think about it as a means of models, rather than attacking contributing to unemployment your fans and customers. In and harming our economy. Of 2006, he noted that the recording course, there's no indication that industry had screwed up and he this is actually true. Even if i n t e n d e d t o r e s p o n d people are saving money by not differently:"The bottom line is spending on Disney content, they they were not in tune with what a r e s p e n d i n g t h a t m o n e y their customers wanted and what elsewhere, contributing to jobs in the world was demanding of those sectors. If you want to use them and I think it hurt them Iger's logic, you could just as significantly." So we were easily claim that copyright laws disappointed last year when Iger allow them to charge monopoly came out strongly in support of rents on products, thus depriving rules to force ISPs to kick many other industries of money customers off the internet based and jobs. Thus -- again, using on a "three strikes" plan, where Iger's own logic -- copyright accusations, not convictions, are contributes to unemployment and all that matter. the harming of our economy. It seems that he's not giving up. Not sure he really wants to go Chris points out that, at President there. Obama's recent "Jobs Summit" Permalink| Comments| Email Iger gave a speech where much This Story Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:56:00 AM

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Dragon Dictation comes to the iPhone. Wow. By Mel Martin (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:00:00 AM

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Review Put this into the 'I didn't think they could ever get this to work on an iPhone' category. I'm talking about Dragon Dictation[ iTunes link] from Nuance, the developers of the very popular Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC. Nuance also provides the speech recognition engine for MacSpeech Dictate on the Mac platform. To dictate on the iPhone you just launch the app, press the record button, and start talking. Your dictation can be a brief sentence, or a much longer treatise. Once the text has been created from your speech, it's possible to email it, send it as a text message, or put the result in your clipboard. After recording your message, you can edit the resulting text before you send it off for others to read. It's pretty slick! When you

the app to work, but having this speech-to-text capability is going to be very important to a lot of people, who will find all sorts of uses for it. I tested the app for about a week and found the accuracy to be very good. Accuracy diminishes if you are in a very noisy environment, as I found when I tried some dictation while being driven down the interstate. There were a few errors, but they were easy to correct. To add punctuation to your text, you can say 'period', 'question mark', or 'new paragraph,' and Dragon Dictation adds the appropriate punctuation. Continue reading Dragon record your message, it is quickly transmitted to Nuance servers Dictation comes to the iPhone. where a speech recognition Wow. algorithm is run against your TUAW Dragon Dictation comes data. The resulting text is to the iPhone. Wow. originally returned to your iPhone very appeared on The Unofficial q u i c k l y ; m y i n f o r m a l Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, benchmarks showed that it took 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST. about a second for text to be Please see our terms for use of processed on a Wi-Fi network, feeds. and less than 5 seconds over 3G. Read| Read| Permalink| Email You'll need a data connection for this| Comments

Hands On With the JooJoo, Formerly Known as CrunchPad By Priya Ganapati (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 12/7/2009 5:24:00 PM

Touchscreen tablet CrunchPad is

back in a new avatar -- a $500 device called JooJoo. Wired.com got some hands-on time with the device. Check out our first impressions.

Offline Gmail access now a full-fledged feature (CNET News.com)

to being able to access their mail whether or not they're online, and Offline Gmail brings this After more than five years as a f u n c t i o n a l i t y r i g h t t o t h e publicly available test version, b r o w s e r , " W h y t e s a i d . Gmail shed its beta label in July. Google Apps, a bundle that Now one feature key to the Net i n c l u d e s G m a i l , G o o g l e g i a n t ' s c l o u d c o m p u t i n g Calendar, and the Google Docs aspirations, offline access to suite of online applications, is Gmail, also has grown up less available for free for educational than a year after its debut. users or smaller organizations. "Offline Gmail is graduating Premiere accounts cost $50 per from Labs and becoming a person per year, and Chief regular part of Gmail," Google Executive Eric Schmidt called p r o g r a m m e r A a r o n W h y t e such enterprise-oriented services announced the change Monday in Google's "next big billion-dollar a blog post. opportunity." Offline Gmail support, which Gears is built into Google's relies on a Google browser plug- Chrome browser, but other in called Gears, lets people read, browsers rely on a plug-in. search, organize, and compose e- However, Google has stopped mail even when there's no Net developing Gears in favor connection; sent messages are HTML5's equivalent features. queued up in an outbox for That overhaul of the standard for delivery when the network access displaying Web page includes is restored and the account on the local data storage on a computer computer can resynchronize with as one feature, and it's now the server. enabled by default in Chrome "Offline Gmail has proven even though HTML5 isn't a final particularly useful for business standard yet. and schools making the switch to This content has passed through Google Apps from traditional fivefilters.org. desktop mail clients--they're used Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:02:00 AM

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Google Chrome Extensions Go Live! ACORN Sting Videos Were Heavily Edited By Jennifer Van Grove (Mashable!)

been anxiously awaiting a single repository to find and install extensions. While you’ll no Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:16:20 AM doubt notice that the 300 It’s only Tuesday, but it appears extensions available don’t match as if we’re in the midst of Google the quality and quantity of Week. Yesterday saw the launch existing Firefox extensions, the of Google real-time search, Chrome browser does offer one Google Goggles and even more huge competitive advantage: no Wave invites. Today, it’s all begins to deliver on our initial restart required for install or about Google Chrome. vision. Extensions are as easy to uninstall. Google Chrome for Mac just create as webpages. Users can Watch this video for an went live this morning, and now install and uninstall them quickly explanation of how to manage Google is announcing that the without restart, and extensions and install extensions for Google Google Chrome Extensions beta have a great polished look that Chrome: is open, too, with more than 300 fits in with Google Chrome’s Reviews: Chrome, Firefox, extensions already available. Mac minimalist aesthetic. When Google, Google Chrome users, be forewarned, extensions developers upload an extension it Tags: Firefox, Google, google only work for the Windows is available to users immediately, c h r o m e , g o o g l e c h r o m e version of the Chrome browser. with limited restrictions and extensions, google goggles, A c c o r d i n g t o G o o g l e ’ s manual reviews only in a few google real-time search, Google announcement on the release: situations.” Wave, mac, Windows “Today, we’re really happy to Today’s release is huge news for release a beta of extensions that existing Chrome users who have

(Little Green Footballs)

insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. Submitted at 12/7/2009 9:52:31 PM O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s Earlier I linked to a report at comments, which makes it Politico that an outside review d i f f i c u l t t o d e t e r m i n e t h e found no illegal conduct at questions to which ACORN ACORN. But TPM points out employees are responding. A another very interesting finding comparison of the publicly of the review: Those ACORN available transcripts to the sting videos were heavily edited. released videos confirms that The videos that have been large portions of the original released appear to have been video have been omitted from the e d i t e d , i n s o m e c a s e s released versions. substantially, including the

Accidental Download Leading To Prison Sentence? By Mike Masnick (Techdirt)

content, and laws against those who end up having any on their hard drive, even as that could No one denies that child make a felon out of someone just pornography is a serious problem because they receive an email. that needs to be addressed. Take, for example (as pointed out However, it often seems like the by Slashdot), this story of a man laws related to child pornography who was searching online for are targeted at the wrong thing. regular (legal) pornography, but That's why we get laws requiring accidentally downloaded some filters, rather than the shut down underage pictures -- which he of whoever is producing the immediately deleted. Though the Submitted at 12/8/2009 1:58:37 AM

FBI officials who eventually searched his hard drive admit that the images had been deleted and could not be accessed, he was still charged with child pornography and is pleading guilty to get a shorter sentence (3.5 years, 10 years probation, and a lifetime on the sex offenders list). Though this article serves as a warning of why you shouldn't go

looking for porn online -- it would seem that the stronger argument is why the laws on possession should change. In cases like this, where the guy was clearly not out there seeking out or collecting such content, it seems ridiculous that he should be charged and feel the need to plead guilty. Anti-child porn efforts should really focus on those who produces and

distributes such content. As for those who collect it, I would assume that mental health help would be a more appropriate response than jail time. And, for those who accidentally come across it... it seems fairly ridiculous to charge them as well. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

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V-Studio 100: not a piece of cake but a great piece of hardware By Josh Carr (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:00:00 AM

Filed under: Hardware, Software, Productivity, Music Most aspiring musicians, at least those of us who are computer nerds, have spent time recording their music to distribute it digitally ... to Grandma. Most of us pass GarageBand with flying colors, graduate from Logic Express and eventually get a masters in Logic Pro. I'm admittedly in the learning stages of Logic Pro. I've graduated from my analog mixer and have just begun to learn the real world of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations). Please keep in mind that I'm admittedly not a sound engineer, just a musician who likes to dabble with audio recording. Recently, we were contacted by the awesome folks at Cakewalk who asked us if we'd like to review the V-Studio 100. I jumped at the chance to test it out and was pleasantly surprised at how versatile it really was. For

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Sponsored Post: Windows 7 Needs an Extra Layer of Security – Get it Now, for Free! By Sponsored Post (Mashable!)

Anti-Virus Free 9.0 is a fullfeatured solution that’s free forever. So your PC will always Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:30:52 AM have the best protection against AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 works web threats. with Windows 7 to provide your But then that’s what you’d PC with the best protection expect from a global security against web threats. Get your free leader like AVG. Led by Chief download now at free.avg.com. Research Officer Roger T h e e x p l o s i v e g r o w t h o f Thompson, AVG continues to dynamic content makes the web a deliver true protection against f e r t i l e a t t a c k v e c t o r f o r viruses, spam, cyber-scams and infiltrating PCs. Forums, social hackers on the Internet. networking sites, and content But remember – not all free antithe last two weeks, I've learned Continue reading V-Studio 100: d e l i v e r e d b y a d v e r t i s i n g virus software is created equal. the hardware and software not a piece of cake but a great networks are prime targets for the Only Anti-Virus Free 9.0 gives included in this package that piece of hardware delivery of malicious code. you superior protection against helps you sound good: the end TUAW V-Studio 100: not a According to IDC, up to 30% of web threats. goal of any musician. I'll just do piece of cake but a great piece of c o m p a n i e s w i t h o v e r 5 0 0 So whether you’re running a brief overview of what's hardware originally appeared on employees have been infected Windows XP, Vista or Windows included because there's a lot The Unofficial Apple Weblog through web surfing. 7, AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 there and the conclusion is that (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 That’s why over 2.4 million provides an extra layer of it's a winner. It's a lot to learn, 10:00:00 EST. Please see our people download AVG Anti- security that’s so critical to your especially if you're not familiar terms for use of feeds. Virus Free 9.0 every week. In PC. Get your free download now with the software or DAW Read| Permalink| Email this| fact, it’s the CNET Top Weekly at free.avg.com. controllers for that matter, but it's Comments Download for free anti-virus (This post is brought to you by a huge step up from my analog software. AVG Anti-Virus. For more mixer. Hit the read link to learn And this free download is not a information on sponsored posts about its abilities. light version of the software, or a please read here.) limited time trial offer. AVG

Apple Pulls 1,000 Apps After Developer Scam

Fitch strips Greece of A-grade credit rating

By Charlie Sorrel (Wired Top Stories)

(Financial Times - US homepage)

Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:11:00 AM

Apple has sent a clear message been kicked out, along with over to any developers who try to 1000 of its iPhone application game its iTunes App Store: Software developer Molinker has

Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:22:23 AM

Fitch strips Greece of A-grade credit rating By David Oakley, Capital

Markets Correspondent Published: December 8 2009 13:34 | Last updated: December 8 2009 15:22 This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Dragon's Lair ships for iPhone and iPod touch By Mike Schramm (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

you can, though apparently it's so original that not even the developers recommend it -- you end up skipping sequences and Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:00:00 AM it's really, really hard. Much Filed under: Gaming, Software, more appetizing to today's whiny Developer, iPhone, App Store easy mode gamers is the Home Guys, if there was any doubt that mode, which not only can t h e i P h o n e i s a s e r i o u s include a "guide" on the screen to application platform, just go show possible controls, but will ahead and put it to rest right now let you play through sequences -- Dragon's Lair has officially over again until you get them been ported over. The Don Bluth right. -animated laserdisc game was Touch Arcade says that even at immensely popular upon release $4.99 [ App Store link], it's a in 1983, and since then has been must-buy for nostalgia's sake, ported to almost every single and if you have any interest in system that can run it. Now, the playing the game at all, it's worth iPhone joins those ranks, and the price (especially if you hung seems well done. If you want to around arcades when it came out, play the original Arcade mode, as you've probably already put

that much and then some into the game). If, on the other hand, you aren't impressed by the gameplay above and/or are too young to remember what a laserdisc is(it's like a record-sized DVD... wait, did you just ask what a record was?), you might not be intrigued. TUAW Dragon's Lair ships for iPhone and iPod touch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Accepting Friend Requests from People You Don't Know Is a Recipe for ID Theft [Security] By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)

they went to school, the town in which they live, and a lot more—basically it's a great start According to a study conducted gathering all of the things an by computer security company identity thief would need to get Sophos, anywhere from 41 to 49 the ball rolling. Do you blindly percent of users (by age group) a c c e p t f r i e n d r e q u e s t s o n they test-requested friendship Facebook? And if you do, do you with on Facebook accepted their have a limited profile set up for invitation. The problem, as they those people you don't know that see it: After they became friends limits the personal information with people they don't know, they can see? Let's hear it in the they've got access to dates of comments. [ Sophos via CNET] birth, email addresses, the places Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:35:00 AM

Your Next Car Radio Might Be Pandora By Christina Warren (Mashable!)

That might be changing. As GigaOm reports, Pandora is preparing to aggressively target Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:04:29 AM the automotive space. Here at Mashable, we’re big fans According to GigaOm, Pandora o f I n t e r n e t r a d i o p r o v i d e r CTO Tom Conrad says half of Pandora. Lots of us enjoy it on the Internet radio’s mobile users our laptops, on our mobile listen to Pandora in the car (like phones and even in the car — us, they just connect their phones using various adaptors. to their stereos). Conrad says Plugging your iPod touch or Pandora is working with car iPhone (or Droid, if you will) manufacturers to support Pandora into your car stereo isn’t the most via in-dash controls. safety conscious activity, but it’s This means that instead of the only way most of us can fumbling with your iPhone or access our streaming Internet Droid and potentially getting in radio favorites while on the go. an accident, you could change the

station or go to a different saved playlist from your dashboard. This would work using a tethered-handset mode that would connect the mobile device by Bluetooth or another technology to the dash for playback.

Pandora already has a deal with Ford and its SYNC technology (co-developed with Microsoft), and Conrad hinted at some announcements planned for CES in January. Would you pay more to have Pandora in your car? How do you listen to music while driving? Let us know in the comments. Reviews: Bluetooth, Pandora, iPhone Tags: car, car stereo, pandora

Ohio inmate becomes 1st to die under 1drug method (AP) (Yahoo! News: U.S. News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:56:10 AM

MISTER C buzzed up: Woods' mother-in-law in hospital with stomach pain (AP) 10 seconds ago 2009-1208T10:05:04-08:00 This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Enter the Zappos Sharing Happiness Google Launches $3,000 Shopping Spree Giveaway Chrome for Mac Contest By Jennifer Van Grove (Mashable!)

By Adam Hirsch (Mashable!)

By submitting, you are agreeing to the full rules and restrictions. Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:15:44 AM Final entries are due on this post Mashable is proud to present the by Wednesday, December 15th at Zappos.com Sharing Happiness 11:59 PM PT. Giveaway Contest! A Big Thanks to Zappos! To get into the spirit of the “Visit Zappos.com and outfit holiday season, we’re asking the your life with a new head-to-toe question,“How do you use the wardrobe for men, women, and web to improve your life and/or this post.) kids! Step into all the clothes, make people happy?”. One lucky Mashable will highlight some of bags, shoes and more from all recipient will receive a $3,000 our favorites on Friday and we’ll your favorite brand names! Plus, shopping spree at Zappos.com. a n n o u n c e a w i n n e r o n enjoy our 365-day return policy, To enter: Wednesday, December 16th. fast & free shipping, free return 1. Leave your answer in the Contest Rules and Restrictions: shipping & 24-hour customer comments section below and/or, You must be 18+ years of age service!” Reviews: Mashable, 2. Tweet out your answer with and currently reside in one of the Twitter t h e h a s h t a g 50 US States. If you would like Tags: contest, sharing happiness, “#SharingHappiness”(Be sure to to participate but are not of valid sharinghappiness, Zappos leave the URL of your Twitter age/residence, please note “not comment in your comment on eligible” in your comment below.

Pictures and Specs of the First Official Boxee Box [Media Center] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:30:00 AM

You've seen what Boxee's beta media center software will look like. Now you can peek at pictures and specifications for DLink's official Boxee Box, a small computer with HDMI optical and composite audio outputs made specifically to run ports, an SD card slot, and a the open-source media center. It somewhat weird, post-modern comes with two USB ports,

form that makes it appear to have been wedged into your entertainment center. It's expected to be using Nvidia's ION graphics chips for 1080pcapable playback, and Gizmodo hears it could be priced at around $200 when released in the second quarter of 2010. [ D-Link via Gizmodo

Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:31:16 AM

The day has finally come. As we were expecting, Google has just released Chrome for Mac, which can now be downloaded by Mac OS X 10.5 or later users. If you’re anything like us, you’ve been anxiously awaiting the chance to get your hands on the new browser since last year’s release of the Windows version. Of course, Google Chrome for Mac is just a beta release, and, as we’ve previously reported, you won’t be able to use applications like Gmail that run on Google Gears, but you can take advantage of other Chrome improvements such as speed and Google search right from the address bar. Here’s a video demo that Google has released: After you install Chrome on your Mac, you can optionally import your Safari or Firefox settings, which means your bookmarks and certain

preferences can carry over from your existing favorite browser. Given that Google Chrome Extensions should launch any day, you might not even have to live without your favorite addons for very long (though at this time extensions are not available for the Mac version). We’ve just installed it for ourselves, and after taking it out for a test drive, our first impressions are that this thing is slick. While we compile our notes, let us know what you think of Google Chrome for Mac in the comments. Reviews: Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, Google, Google Chrome, Safari Tags: Google, google chrome, mac, trending

Stocks tumble on fresh debt worries (Financial Times - US homepage) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:36:58 AM

Stocks tumble on fresh debt worries By Jamie Chisholm, Global

Markets Commentator Published: December 8 2009 07:27 | Last updated: December 8 2009 16:36 This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Bento for iPhone / iPod touch reaches sales milestone By Steven Sande (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

Beta Beat: Google Chrome beta for Mac available By Dave Caolo (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:00:00 PM

Filed under: Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch While it's no big deal for a free game or social networking app to reach a million downloads from the App Store, it is definitely news when a brandname productivity app sells 100,000 copies. Bento for iPhone / iPod touch[US$4.99, iTunes Link] reached that milestone today, according to a press release from FileMaker, Inc. Bento works very well as a standalone iPhone app, and becomes even more powerful when synced with the desktop version of the app (2.0v5 or 3.0 for Mac). The app comes with 25 pre-defined templates that can be customized to your needs, or you can create your own databases (Bento calls them "libraries") by opening a blank template and

Submitted at 12/8/2009 1:00:00 PM

adding your choice from a selection of fifteen different field types. I've personally found the standalone app to be a lifesaver when I need to create a custom database for storing information on my iPhone. The FileMaker announcement should come as welcome news for developers who are working on more mainstream or enterprise -oriented apps for the iPhone /

iPod touch platform. TUAW Bento for iPhone / iPod touch reaches sales milestone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, Beta Beat Earlier today Google released a beta of their Chrome browser for the Mac, nearly 14 months after the Windows version. Chrome is built on the WebKit engine, just like Safari. I've only used it briefly (I'm writing this post with it now), yet a couple of things are immediately apparent. First is the lack of a search box. Instead, Google has built the "Omnibox," which combines the search and address field. Begin typing and a list of results appears beneath the text field, including recent browsing history, search options and more. For a complete view, browse all of the results in a new tab. That's neat, but it'll take some getting used to. When first launched, it offered to import my Safari bookmarks; a task it completed so quickly I thought there was an error. Tabs

slide in and out of view and are smart enough (supposedly, I haven't tested this) to isolate crashes and keep them from bringing the whole browser down. Give it a try, but remember that it's a beta. Leave your missioncritical tasks to the tried and true. TUAW Beta Beat: Google Chrome beta for Mac available originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

ET phones home at Christmas, finds nobody cares By Bob Sassone (TV Squad) Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:25:00 AM

The ET game that Atari came

out with in 1982 is known as one of the biggest disasters in video game history. It was rushed into production because of the movie

and it wasn't that great a game Here's the ad that introduced it at Free and it didn't sell well, forcing Christmastime. Permalink| Email this| | thousands of cartridges to be F i l e d u n d e r : V i d e o , Comments buried in landfill in New Mexico. Commercials, Festivus, Reality-

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Timberlake and Twitter Deal: Eisenberg’s Facebook CelebrityTweet Acquired Movie Gets a Release Date by Russell Simmons By Jennifer Van Grove (Mashable!)

Tiger Woods' Mother-in-Law in Stable Condition (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:04:00 AM

By Adam Ostrow (Mashable!)

The blonde woman taken from Tiger Woods' home on a stretcher has been identified as the pro You would think that Web sites The Social Network, the movie golfer's mother-in-law, Barbro that simply aggregate tweets based on Aaron Sorkin’s Holmberg, and ET can confirm from lists of users would become narrative about Mark Zuckerberg she is in stable condition. somewhat irrelevant with the and the creation of Facebook, ET received the following introduction of Twitter Lists. will be released on October 15, But apparently, hip-hop mogul CelebrityTweet will continue to statement from Holmberg's 2010, according to ComingSoon. with Brad Pitt, Fight Club. office, "Last evening Barbro was Russell Simmons doesn’t think Columbia Pictures has set the Also noteworthy is that the book so, as his Web site GlobalGrind o p e r a t e a s i t s o w n s i t e , a d m i t t e d t o H e a l t h C e n t e r date, which means that we’ll be that inspired the film, Accidental has just acquired CelebrityTweet, syndicating its content back to Hospital with stomach pain. She seeing Justin Timberlake grace Billionaires, was not without its a site that aggregates the tweets GlobalGrind. Terms aren’t being i s i n s t a b l e c o n d i t i o n a n d the screen as Sean Parker in just o w n d r a m a w h e n i t h i t of famous people, both on the disclosed, but considering the site undergoing evaluation. This is under a year’s time. bookshelves earlier in the year — Web and via mobile applications. has rather modest traffic, you confirmed by a member of the have to imagine this deal is more Production on The Social many thought that the dramatic Here’s why Simmons says about “buy versus build” than a family." Holmberg is the mother Network, otherwise known as nature of the book made it more they’re doing the deal: of Woods' wife Elin. the“Facebook movie,” began in fitting for the “Fiction” section. “ Twitter is the most dynamic major financial acquisition. At 2:35 a.m. ET, paramedics Nonetheless, it marks yet responded to Woods' Florida October, with scenes already Given the somewhat scandalous way for celebrities to connect to being shot on location in the content, the allure of Facebook their fans in real-time day & another deal in the Twitter app h o m e . M i n u t e s l a t e r , a n Boston area. and its now-famous creator, the night. CelebrityTweet is the most space, which has recently seen ambulance arrived at the hospital, There’s also already been plenty big-name director and the cast authoritative destination in the the likes of MSNBC get involved carrying an unidentified, middleof hype surrounding the movie members, we expect there to be space and we view it as having a ( t h r o u g h a d e a l w i t h a g e d b l o n d e w o m a n o n a and its cast and crew. As you even more buzz surrounding the natural synergy with Global @BreakingNews). Reviews: stretcher, WKMG, the local CBS may recall, David Fincher, the f i l m a s i t s r e l e a s e d a t e Grind’s strength in providing Twitter affiliate in Orlando, confirms. m o v i e ’ s d i r e c t o r , h a s a l s o approaches. Reviews: Facebook exclusive content directly from Tags: russell simmons, twitter directed movies like 2002’s Panic Tags: facebook movie celebrities.” Room, and the acclaimed drama Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:16:11 AM

Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:49:27 AM

Review: Castle - The Fifth Bullet By Kona Gallagher (TV Squad)

direction? That's what Castle did in this week's episode, and it turned out to be one of my Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:10:00 AM favorites of the season so far. (S02E11) Don't you just love it As soon as J walked in with when a series uses a tired cliche, amnesia, I groaned. Amnesia? only to take it in a completely Really? When it turned out that that, in a Theodore Rooseveltd i f f e r e n t ( a n d f a s c i n a t i n g ) he was also a shooting victim and like twist, it was a book that had

saved his life, it became more interesting to me. However, I still thought I knew exactly what was going on -- and it's a testament to this episode that I was so very wrong. Continue reading Review: Castle - The Fifth Bullet

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Boxee goes beta By Aron Trimble (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

Tea Party Organizations Dissolving Into Angry Chaos (Little Green Footballs)

Submitted at 12/7/2009 11:00:00 PM

Palin as its keynote speaker. But there are fractures in the movement that threaten its future. Even as a poll shows that they And if history’s any guide, such have more influence than the movements tend to flame out. Republican Party, the tea party The Tea Party movement movement is falling apart, erupted on April 15 — tax day — fracturing into angry little over criticism of President fragments of bad craziness and Obama’s economic policies and conspiracy theories. what organizers called big W a s h i n g t o n ( C N N ) — I t government out of control. The emerged in anger and it threatens movement, made up of local, to split in anger. state and national groups, One major group in the Tea continues to protest what it Party movement — named after considers fiscally unsound the famous Boston Tea Party — policies. is set to host its first convention And the movement is well in February, with former Alaska funded. Action groups like governor and 2008 Republican FreedomWorks — chaired by vice-presidential candidate Sarah former House Majority Leader Submitted at 12/7/2009 6:14:15 PM

Filed under: Multimedia, Music After what has seemingly been a never-ending "alpha" period for the famous XBMC fork, Boxee, tonight the Boxee crew have finally ( as expected) unveiled the first beta release of Boxee. For starters, they have totally revamped the user interface especially surrounding the home screen. Up top are the usual suspects movies, TV shows, music, etc. On the far left is the news feed which aggregates content recommendations from friends on Boxee, Facebook and of course Twitter. Proudly, in the middle, is the "featured" section which contains recommendations from Boxee staff and associated partners (read: this is where money is made). And on the right is a list of items in your queue, but more on that in a moment. Read on for the TUAW

overview of the Boxee prerelease beta. Continue reading Boxee goes beta TUAW Boxee goes beta originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Dick Armey — helped organize and fund its April 15 rally in Washington. Other groups, including Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party Nation and Tea Party Patriots, are also vying for the helm of the movement, and it’s creating what some are calling “competitive chaos.” Some Tea Partiers have voiced anger and concern over whether the powerful groups are “astroturfing” what is supposed to be a grass-roots coalition — the idea that the movement is being organized by old-fashioned GOP bigwigs to promote their agenda. (Hat tip: reine.de.tout.)

Yelp Hops onto Android for Location-Aware Reviews [Downloads] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:30:00 AM

Android: When you need nearby food, drinks, coffee, or other spots that are open and wellreviewed, review site Yelp is the go-to source. Now that the app's

on Android, more people can find and rate their food and shop finds. It's a really easy to use app. From the home screen, you pick a category like restaurants, bars, drugstores, or the like. The app Fi location or GPS, and shows finds nearby picks based on Wi- the reviews, details, hours, and

other essentials. There is, alas, no hidden augmented reality feature, but there are lots of helpful business details. Yelp is a free download for Android phones, along with iPhones, Palm Pre phones, Windows Mobile, and

BlackBerry models. It's time to break out the Robot, Yelp for Android is HERE[Yelp Official Blog]

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EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Threaten Health and Environment (Little Green Footballs)

as a result of human activities, GHG concentrations in the Submitted at 12/7/2009 4:43:53 PM atmosphere are at record high In a press release obviously levels and data shows that the timed to coincide with the Earth has been warming over the opening of the Copenhagen past 100 years, with the steepest climate change summit, the increase in warming in recent E n v i r o n m e n t a l P r o t e c t i o n decades. The evidence of humanAgency has announced that induced climate change goes greenhouse gases threaten the beyond observed increases in public health and welfare of the average surface temperatures; it American people: 12/07/2009: includes melting ice in the Arctic, E P A : G r e e n h o u s e G a s e s melting glaciers around the Threaten Public Health and the w o r l d , i n c r e a s i n g o c e a n E n v i r o n m e n t / S c i e n c e temperatures, rising sea levels, o v e r w h e l m i n g l y s h o w s acidification of the oceans due to greenhouse gas concentrations at excess carbon dioxide, changing unprecedented levels due to p r e c i p i t a t i o n p a t t e r n s , a n d human activity. changing patterns of ecosystems EPA’s endangerment finding and wildlife. covers emissions of six key President Obama and greenhouse gases – carbon Administrator Jackson have dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, publicly stated that they support a h y d r o f l u o r o c a r b o n s , legislative solution to the perfluorocarbons and sulfur problem of climate change and hexafluoride – that have been the C o n g r e s s ’ e f f o r t s t o p a s s subject of scrutiny and intense c o m p r e h e n s i v e c l i m a t e analysis for decades by scientists legislation. However, climate in the United States and around change is threatening public the world. health and welfare, and it is Scientific consensus shows that critical that EPA fulfill its

obligation to respond to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined that greenhouse gases fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants. EPA issued the proposed findings in April 2009 and held a 60-day public comment period. The agency received more than 380,000 comments, which were carefully reviewed and considered during the development of the final findings. This is a welcome change from the obstructionist policies of the Bush administration: Survey Finds Bush Administration Interfering with EPA Scientists. WASHINGTON, DC, April 24, 2008 (ENS) - The Bush administration has frequently meddled with scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a survey released today by a scientific advocacy group. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that nearly two-thirds of the 1,586 staff EPA scientists who responded to a questionnaire

complained of recent political interference with their work. The reported interference is greatest in offices where scientists write regulations and conduct risk assessments. “Our investigation found an agency in crisis,” said Francesca Grifo, director of Union of Concerned Scientists’s Scientific Integrity Program, who contends the report reflects an effort by the administration to distort science to “accommodate a narrow political agenda.” The investigation shows that researchers “are generally continuing to do their work, but their scientific findings are tossed aside when it comes time to write regulations,” said Grifo. The report is the latest addition to a long list of complaints by scientists across the federal government who say the Bush administration has inappropriately interfered with their work and frequently manipulated science for the benefit of industry.

Kate Gosselin's Interview with Barbara Walters: The Sneak Peek (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:33:00 AM

ET has the latest... Kate Gosselin gets emotional while opening up on" Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2009," saying her kids cried when they found out "Jon & Kate Plus 8" was canceled. "They cried in the van on the way home from school the other day," she tells Barbara, according to abcnews.com. "I finally admitted to them, they kept asking, 'Where's the camera crew? Where's the camera crew? We miss them.' And I said, 'Our show is over.' Eight sobbing kids driving home from school." Meanwhile, the Gosselin matriarch admits she's scared of being a single mom.

The Bonnie Hunt Show To End This Spring By Bill Gorman (TVbytheNumbers) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:00:05 AM

Struggling sophomore Warner Bros. talker The Bonnie Hunt Show, which was sold to the

NBC stations stations in a twoyear window, will wrap up production at the end of this season. Season to-date (through Nov. 22), Bonnie ranks 12th out of 13 households, with a 0.8 rating syndicated talk shows in (and no change from the

comparable year-ago period), This content has passed through according to Nielsen Media fivefilters.org. Research data. The ranking among key women 25-54 is also 12th, with a 0.3 in the demo. via MediaWeek.

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Become the Ultimate Gift Giver with Evernote [Gift Giving] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)

when you walk by the window and hear a sentence starting with "I've always wanted ..." Last year, December 20-24 were If you're doing the pen and paper dark days I'd like to forget. This thing, you've only got the what year, I had found 80 percent of and the who to worry about, then my gifts by December 1. The big scan it in later when suspicious difference? Smart use of the free eyes aren't around. If you're using Evernote service to keep a yeara cameraphone, grab as clear and round gift idea database. head-on a shot as you can, and Photo by alancleaver_2000. try to grab the most important Adam's previously covered the title or text on the object or box basics of using Evernote to clearly. Evernote will expand your brain, focusing on automatically run a text note-taking and memory aiding. recognition filter through your Below, I'm going to go step-bypictures, so even if you get lazy step through how I use Evernote and forget to tag this picture the as singular spot for capturing gift way you should (explained next), ideas all year long, so that when there's a good chance you can do birthdays, holidays, and special What you'll need gets even better with a quick have to be able to do two things: a vague search for "coffee" later occasions come up, you're never • Free Evernote account: If you keyword bookmarklet set up, recognize when they're wishing and find the Keurig model your stuck buying hey-I-barely-tried get addicted to Evernote's brain- too—but we'll get into that in a for something out loud, and have dad's been dreaming of. gift cards or trying to jam a last- expanding ways, you can pay for bit. the neurotic drive to capture it If you're using a standard phone minute shopping dash into your expanded storage, faster image-to without web access or email right then and there. schedule. -text conversion, and premium You can, of course, install Not the next time you have your capabilities, check if you can Used wisely, Evernote is the support. For me, and probably Evernote's desktop software and phone or notes handy. Not after send SMS messages to an email perfect gift idea tool, both for most people, however, Evernote's smartphone applications, install it lunch. And, for goodness' sake, address. Most phones can, and friends and relatives and for your 40 MB of upload allowance per as a"Send to" item in Google not when you get home. Do it Evernote gives you a private own birthdays and holiday lists. month is plenty. Reader, and even tweet your right that very instant. You can address (found in your account It's available to you almost • A capture tool you always have notes to Evernote. For the wait a few seconds if you don't settings) that you can send anywhere you have a phone, a around: For me, it's my Android- purposes of just gathering and want to tip your hand, but, trust pictures and text to, with the computer, or just something to powered G1 and its camera. For saving gift ideas, though, any me, most people have forgotten subject becoming the note title write on, its tags and text you, that might be a regular camera or SMS-capable phone is that you seemed suspiciously and the text included as notes. If recognition, and search are cellphone with a camera, text usually fine, and the bookmarklet note-take-y by the end of the you've got a smartphone with the powerful, and it won't get lost messaging, and/or email abilities. works just fine on most browsers. week, let alone in a few months. Evernote app installed, well, this with all your other notes and to- If you're the type to rock a pen Capturing gifts and notes Act like you just remembered to is a piece of cake, no? dos. From a single web page, you and paper in the Hipster PDA The key to using Evernote as a pay a bill, or you just received an For your web-inspired gift ideas, can search out cheap gifts for a fashion, that's fine, too—you can premiere gift idea database isn't unexpected text message, or that put the Evernote web clipper certain friend, brilliant gifts for scan your notes in later, and actually using Evernote—it's you want to snap a picture for somewhere in your bookmarks. If your spouse, and quickly tally up Evernote will usually convert ubiquitous capture. When you're your own wish list. Get your you're using Firefox or a browser your own personal wish list your handwriting to search-able hanging out with your spouse, secret agent on and try to lose that supports keywording, create months after you last thought text. friends, relatives, co-workers, or them in the store and double- the quickest shortcut you can (I about that wireless printer • The Evernote bookmarklet anyone you like enough to ever back, if you have to. Just don't BECOME page 40 adapter. (a.k.a. Web Clipper): This one spend time or money on, you wait too many seconds beyond Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:00:00 AM

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BECOME continued from page 39

use "ev"), and type that into your address bar (usually reached by Alt+D) whenever you hit a page with something gift-worthy on it. Need a deeper how-to on this? We've got you covered. I prefer to highlight just the relevant part of the page—a name, price, and picture—and then hit the bookmarklet, and un-check the "Clip full page" option, because the bookmarklet sometimes gets a little funny with formatting pages on Amazon and elsewhere. The tagging system Evernote's tagging is what makes it better than most tools as an idea-catcher. You can tag any item with multiple tags you make up, then filter those items later with certain tags and not others. Once your stuff is tagged, you can also narrow things down by the date created or modified, which tool you used to capture, and more criteria. Ubiquitous capture is all about the path of least resistance. If you used Evernote for other things, you could create a separate

notebook for your gifts, but I just tag everything that's a potential gift, for me or others, as "gift." If it's for my friend Josh, I add a "Josh" tag. If it's for my own wish list, I add "me." For me, that creates a 99.8 percent improvement over a late-night Amazon search on Dec. 14. If you wanted, you could get more specific and filter-friendly by adding tags like: • cheap or pricey to balance out spending. • mall, online, local, or homemade to generate mini-lists of things you can buy all at once to save time or shipping, or items you plan to make yourself. • genius or backup for gifts you really want to make sure you grab, because they're brilliant, and gifts you can always grab two days before if things don't work out.

however, kinda-sorta get around that by adding your own Twitterstyle hashtags to your notes. In the message body of your upload, or on the paper you're writing on, add#gifts and#josh, for example. When you're later searching Evernote for your gift ideas, a search for the word "gifts" should pull up both your tagged and hash-tagged items, though you can try "gifts or#gifts" to be sure. Tools for even easier gifting Evernote's web site and universal upload tools work fine on their own, but you can get faster, easier, and geekier with these helpers. • Price tracking tools: Whenever you enter in an item that you're sure will vary in price from store to store, month to month, be sure to also enter it into a price tracking tool. There are plenty of them, many of which we've covered: PriceDrop for Firefox( The one big downfall to paper Original post), Price!pinx( note scanning and SMS/email O r i g i n a l p o s t ) , a n d T h e uploading is the lack of support Camelizer( Original post) should for tag recognition. You can, get you started.

• An Eye-Fi card: Plugging this SD card into your camera allows it to wirelessly upload to Evernote without cords. Right now, you can buy one for $50 and get 200 GB of Google web storage with it. • Hook as a "Send to" in other apps: If you're a frequent user of reQall, Google Reader, TweetDeck, or even just Windows, it's all too easy to drop gift ideas and images into your account.

Kirstie Alley Begins Weight Loss Program, Calls First Weigh-In 'a Nightmare' (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:11:00 AM

Actress Kirstie Alley is working towards a healthier way of life and she's tweeting about the "nightmare" of first stepping on the scale. According to her Twitter handle, Kirstie has begun her new docuseries and weight loss plan, writing on Monday night, "OH That's how one editor uses MY GOD. ... I weighed in and it Evernote for his annual gift- was a nightmare ... TOO MANY buying and list-providing rituals. stones ... good news, I'VE It's a fairly open-ended process, BEGUN!!!" though, so we'd love to hear in On Tuesday morning, the actress the comments how you use responded to tweets regarding her Evernote, or any other capture weigh-in, saying, "The first tools (OneNote, anyone?) to weigh-in is always the worst. become the gift giver everyone But, to make it EVEN worse, I gives an A++ to. HAD to weigh at NIGHT in front of a film crew!!! Lord help me."

As The World Turns cancelled By Bob Sassone (TV Squad)

World Turns. The show has been on the air for 54 years. The last episode will air First Guiding Light and now in September. this: CBS confirmed this This is actually really morning that they are canceling depressing. Soap operas (daytime another long-running soap opera. soap operas, not prime time Don't worry Young & The shows like Melrose Place) are a Restless fans (for now), the show g r e a t d r a m a t i c f o r m a t a n d that is going away is As The deserve a place on the television Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:56:00 AM

landscape. Unfortunately, it looks like the

networks are moving further and further away from them, looking for cheaper alternatives. It's weird to think about, but now the only soaps that are left are Y&R, The Bold and the Beautiful, All My Children, General Hospital, One Life To Live, and Day Of Our Lives. And I bet none of those are safe (especially the

ones on CBS). Continue reading As The World Turns cancelled Filed under: Other Drama Shows, Daytime, Cancellations, Reality-Free Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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'As the World Turns' Canceled After 54 Years (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:49:00 AM

Chrome Extensions Gallery Officially Opens [Chrome Extensions] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:20:00 AM

Right after the Mac and Linux betas of Google Chrome arrived, Google threw open the doors to its Chrome extensions gallery. Jump in, browse the most popular and highly-rated addons, and grab something good for your new browser. As noted, the big letdown is that these extensions don't work on Chrome's Mac beta, at least for the time being. On a Windows machine running the dev version, or in the Linux release, it's a twoclick install for most extensions. You can sort by popularity and rating, and see what's being featured by the Chrome team. You can also browse by most

recent uploads, but that seems like it'll get out of hand before too long. The obvious point of comparison is Mozilla's Add-Ons gallery for Firefox. Notably lacking from Chrome's gallery is RSS feeds for search terms and popular/recent categories. On the other hand, Chrome's gallery seems far more friendly to multiple, big screenshots, which we all can appreciate. Find a great app in the Chrome gallery? Tell us about it in the comments. We're definitely taking a look around, and taking suggestions, for more coverage. Google Chrome Extensions[via Download Squad]

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux Finally Hits Beta; Very Fast, Pretty Stable [Downloads] By Adam Pash (Lifehacker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:00:00 AM

Mac/Linux: If you're a Mac or Linux user who's been waiting patiently for Chrome to hit at least a beta release before you felt comfortable kicking the tires on Chrome (or jumping on the bandwagon entirely), today's your lucky day. Google today officially released Chrome for Mac and Linux as a proper beta—that is to say, it's still not a final release that we'd go encouraging people who don't know their way around a computer to make it their full-

time browser, but we figure most Lifehacker readers would be perfectly comfortable giving it a go. Chrome for Mac/Linux beta doesn't have all of the features available to Chrome on Windows, and if you've been using the dev builds of Chrome before this, you probably won't notice any significant changes. Chrome for Mac/Linux beta is a free download, works with Intel Macs running Leopard or Snow Leopard or Linux PCs. Google Chrome for Mac Google Chrome for Linux

Long-running daytime drama "As the World Turns" will end its run on CBS after 54 years in September 2010. “Throughout our history, 'As the World Turns' has remained dedicated to sharing compelling stories that have entertained fans for more than five decades,” said executive producer Chris Goutman. “We are disappointed and saddened by the news that the show is not being renewed. It will certainly be a loss for all of us, and for the show’s loyal audience.” “'As The World Turns' has been a cornerstone of our business and a tremendous asset to the company,” said Brian T. Cahill, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, TeleNext Media, Inc. “We are proactively seeking a new outlet to carry the show, and are open to exploring innovative formats and relationships that will enable the future success of 'ATWT.'”

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Buy 200 GB of Google Storage, Get Video: Tiger Woods' Mother-in-Law Arrives a Free Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card by Ambulance to Hospital [Dealhacker] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:00:00 AM

Want 200 GB of online space for your Picasa web albums and Gmail attachments? Grab it for $50, and Google will give you a 4 GB Eye-Fi card with wireless uploading capabilities for free. The 200 GB of space is an annually renewing cost of $50, but you can downgrade to a lesser plan or cancel after one year. The Eye-Fi card, on the other hand, is yours to keep. It's

an SD card (technically an SDHC) that automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to online accounts

like, say, Picasa, when it's on the same wireless network as your laptop or home desktop. Adam's had nice things to say about it, and based on an approximate value of $70, you can consider this deal getting an Eye-Fi card for free after buying Google storage, or buying an Eye-Fi for $20 off with thrown-in Google storage. Buy 200 GB of storage for $50 and get a free Eye-Fi card[Picasa via Official Gmail Blog]

(ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:01:00 AM

ET has the latest... ET has obtained the footage of Tiger Woods' mother-in-law arriving at the hospital after a 911 call was made from the golfer's Florida home. Barbro Holmberg, the mother of Tiger's wife Elin, was taken by ambulance at 2:35 a.m. Tuesday

after suffering from stomach pain. "Last evening Barbro was admitted to Health Center Hospital with stomach pain," her office said in a statement. "She is in stable condition and undergoing evaluation. This is confirmed by a member of the family."

Google Sues "Google Money" Scam Artists By Jolie O'Dell (ReadWriteWeb)

Google is suing Pacific WebWorks and a rash of unnamed defendants. Submitted at 12/8/2009 1:05:03 AM Sponsor Fresh from the official Google In a joint post from search blog, we have news that Google quality engineer Jason Morrison is taking a group of online and senior litigation counsel scammers to court. Stacey Wexler, the company We've all seen the ads: "Use stated, "Google hasn't created or G o o g l e t o M a k e 1 0 0 0 s o f endorsed any of the sites like Dollars!" "Easy Cash with those described in our complaint. Google: You Could be Making Misleading ads try to take up to $978 a Day Working from advantage of consumers... As far Home!" Finally, the search giant as we can tell, thousands of has announced it's going to do people have been tricked into s o m e t h i n g t o p r o t e c t i t s sending payment information and trademark and help spare a few being charged hidden fees by suckers from getting scalped. questionable operations."

Google can bash away at the digital manifestations of these shady companies, but it's nearly impossible to get rid of them forever without going after the people involved. We hope the lawsuits go well and help to get these scammers off our tubes. Here's a brief list from Google of names associated The scammers' URLs will be de- w i t h s c a m a r t i s t s . T h e s e indexed, and Google will also be companies are not affiliated with permanently disabling AdWords Google in any way: accounts linked to poor user • Google Adwork experiences. But, as Morrison • Google ATM and Wexler note, treating the • Google Biz Kit symptoms of a scam circle is a • Google Cash bit like playing Whack-A-Mole. • Earn Google Cash Kit

• Google Fortune • Google Marketing Kit • Google Profits • The Home Business Kit for Google • Google StartUp Kit • Google Works As always, be smart online, and remember that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. For more tips on how to avoid getting ripped off on the Internet, check out an informative Google blog pos t from this summer. Discuss

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Top 10 Failures of 2009 By Jolie O'Dell (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 12/7/2009 7:25:28 PM

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009, we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk. We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009. Sponsor Google Wave Sucked This is one case where the hype was as noisy as the app - and both were deafening. We have to hand it to Google's publicity team; we don't know one geek who wasn't positively salivating for a Wave invite. The ReadWriteWeb back channel was a complete melee when the first invites were rolled out to team members. But once we got there and saw the new tech tricks, like watching one another type, we started thinking about use cases. And the more we struggled to understand and use this product, the more frustrated and bored we became. Blame it on the steep learning curve. Blame it on our misunderstanding the product. Mount whatever feeble defense you like, but techies know Wave

was a flop. The TabletPads Went to the Deadpool All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises - lies, all lies. We'd have been better off if we'd spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-ASketch. Although the Crunchpad has resurfaced as the JooJoo, the price has been marked up considerably, and the whole project just seems wrong to us now. Moreover, five will get you ten that Michael Arrington, father of the Crunchpad and a former attorney, is fixing to get litigious right about now, which might significantly delay the product's appearance on the market. Powerset Resurfaced as Bing In 2008, Powerset was one of the stealthiest, sexiest startups on the Silicon Valley block. About five minutes after launching, Powerset got snatched up by Microsoft to the tune of $100 million. When everyone had retrieved their dentures from the ground and changed their pants, they noticed that Powerset's everso-sexy tech had been folded quietly into the Borg for assimilation. And about a year later, Bing was born, reportedly from the tech that Microsoft scraped off the infant carcass of Powerset. And Bing sucked. We had such high hopes. Twitter

party designs. But worst of all, we are still consistently experiencing downtime at a level that is unacceptable for any major web app. Google couldn't get away with this kind of failure; why should Twitter be allowed to do so? The Great Firewall of China Drama Continued and Worsened Failed to Innovate While some of us had our money To date, China's "Golden Shield on a Twitter sale in 2009, others Project" restrictions on Internet were simply waiting for the use are throttling traffic from that company to debut a radical, country to websites such as interesting, mutually beneficial Twitter, Facebook, Bing, and revenue model. At the very least, many, many more. Banned sites most users were hoping that the include news organizations that scalability issues and downtime cover controversial events, prothat made Twitter the tragic democracy sites and blogs, any heroine of 2008 would be put to site acknowledging the existence of Taiwan, YouTube, most rest. Twitter's failures this year were blogging websites (Wordpress, less about the headlines they Blogger, etc.) and anything the made than the ones they didn't government deems to be obscene make. Rumors to the contrary or profane. In countries where notwithstanding, Twitter didn't creative self expression and the capitalize on their massive ability to browse, learn and make adoption increase (a.k.a., their decisions independently are Oprahtization) and sell. Worse freedoms too often taken for yet, they didn't buy. When one granted, these restrictions are recalls the purchase of Summize indeed unthinkable. The project and then contrasts it with this began in 1998 and still made year's explosion of excellent plenty of headlines this year for Twitter apps, one wonders why its renewed affronts to freedom none of these small startups or on the Internet. For example, in one-off side projects were June, the Chinese government acquired. Perhaps this was a case announced it would be rolling out of "Hey, we can do that!" as censorship software on every Twitter certainly seemed intent n e w c o m p u t e r s o l d i n t h e on pilfering features (such as lists c o u n t r y . and retweets) from third-party Microsoft Dumped Don Dodge Not too long ago, we at developers. Too bad the "official" Twitter features suck a ReadWriteWeb were shocked to lot more than the original third- learn from startup guru and

longtime Microsoft ambassador Don Dodge that the Big M had given him the kiss-off. Dodge was seen by many as an intelligent, approachable personality in front of a huge, out -of-touch, unpopular brand. It was the tech industry equivalent of FOX cancelling the Simpsons. It's been noted that Microsoft makes its paper from the enterprise, not startups, which would make Dodge a natural candidate for the chopping block. Still, the move was hugely criticized by bloggers, VCs and others. Microsoft's PR plot thickened a few days later when Google snatched up the briefly unemployed Dodge. Spotify Didn't Launch in the US... Yet It tops our list of Most Highly Anticipated Products Yankees Can't Get Their Mitts On. Streaming music service Spotify is changing the world - with the exception of the United States. We've already got a crowded market of players here, including Pandora, Last.fm and Imeem. Call us greedy, but we want the new hotness that is Spotify, too. The Web 1.0 Comeback Campaigns Were Embarrassing to Watch Now, we at ReadWriteWeb have no desire to kick a company when it's down, but a couple of the mastodons of the mid-nineties dotcom boom have been valiantly attempting to stage comebacks, some more successfully than TOP page 46

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Offline Gmail Becomes Standard Feature (But Still Uses Gears?) By Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb)

January of this year. Using Gears, an open source plug-in technology designed by Google, Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:08:34 AM email messages are downloaded This morning Google announced to your local machine when you that "offline Gmail" is leaving switch to offline mode. Also, if the Gmail Labs testing area and your internet connection is w i l l b e i m p l e m e n t e d a s a dropped unexpectedly, offline standard feature for all users. Gmail is automatically enabled. Once enabled, this feature allows In the year in which offline you to access your Gmail even Gmail has been in testing, the when no internet connection is company says they received a lot available. You can read and of feedback from users. Some of respond to messages, star them or the requested features have label them just as you would if already been implemented, y o u w e r e o n l i n e . W h e n a including the ability to choose connection is restored, all the which messages get downloaded changes you made are synced for offline use and the ability to with Google's servers and any send attachments while offline. messages in your Outbox are sent According to the Google blog out. post, anyone who was already As of today, all Gmail users will running the Labs version of now have this feature turned on offline Gmail won't have to make by default, however those who any changes but those who had have never used it before will never turned on the setting will need to configure it first in order need to do the following: t o t a k e a d v a n t a g e o f t h e • Click the "Settings" link in the enhanced functionality. top-right corner of Gmail. Sponsor • Click the "Offline" tab. Gears Makes a Public Debut • Select "Enable Offline Mail for The Labs section of Gmail is this computer." where experimental and in- • Click "Save Changes" and development programs, add-ons, follow the directions from there. and extra features are housed, allowing Gmail users to switch But Isn't Google Switching to them on or off as desired. Offline HTML5? Gmail was one of those At first it seems like experiments, launched back in "graduating" offline Gmail from

Labs is step in preparation for next year's launch of Google Chrome OS, the web-based operating system that ditches the desktop, the hard drive, and computer applications for a web browser where everything users access lives online. Because online applications require an internet connection to work, there have been some concerns as to how functional this OS will be in a world that is not yet blanketed in Wi-Fi or 3G. Since Google has made no mention of built-in hardware providing 3G and cellular access as a backup to WiFi, there will be a lot of programs that simply don't work when you go offline... that is, except for the programs that Google develops itself. The company has already implemented its Gears plug-in on two other products in addition to Gmail: Google Reader and Google Docs. Meanwhile, other companies have also adopted the technology including online office suite Zoho and to-do list app Remember the Milk. What's odd about this launch of Google Gears into primetime via Gmail is that this seems to conflict a bit with what Google execs announced last month

regarding the company's plans for its upcoming operating system, Chrome OS. During the Q&A session at the end of the press event, an audience member asked about Google Gears support to which Google's vice president of product management, Sundar Pichai, replied by saying that Chrome OS will take advantage of HTML5 for local storage. He made no mention of Gears. HTML5, a proposed revision to HTML, the markup language of the World Wide Web, includes offline storage as one of its many new features. And it's this specification that Google plans to support in the future, not Gears, according to numerous reports. For example, in a recent article in the L.A. Times, a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites." Also, Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google told PC Magazine that the company was abandoning its

work on Gears 2, the next version of the plug-in, and will be focused on HTML5 instead. "You can almost think of what's in HTML5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2," he said. "That's how we view it." Upson noted, too, that the company would be able to influence the adoption of HTML5 through their web browser, Google Chrome, the foundation of the new Chrome OS. "Now that we're a browser vendor, we can help move HTML5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome," Upson said. So in other words, the Gears functionality being switched on now in Gmail may not be the same technology used a year from now when Google Chrome OS hits the market. That begs the question: why bother? If Google plans to replace Gears with HTML5 in the near future what's the point of rolling out the soonto-be abandoned plug-in to all its users now? Will Gears and HTML5 converge somehow or will Google just rip out the plugin in favor of HTML5's "plug-inless" technology instead? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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Apple Kicks Cheating Developer Out of the App Store By Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb)

question had only rated applications from Molinker. Despite this fact, one of the Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:16:22 AM applications ("ColorMagic"), had Apple has just booted a major made it to the front page of the iPhone developer out of the App Store where it was featured iTunes App Store along with under the App Store "Staff their catalog of 1,000-plus apps, Favorites" section. (On a side a number so high it represented note, this makes us wonder almost 1% of all the apps in the whether those "Staff Favorites" store. The developer, Molinker are genuine picks from Apple I n c . , h a s b e e n a c c u s e d o f employees or if there's some sort attempting to game the ratings of automated algorithm that system where application users simply highlights high-rated are allowed to review the various applications.) programs using a five-star In a detailed letter to Phil system. As discovered by an Schiller, Apple's senior vice unnamed Internet user and a president of Worldwide Product reader of the iPhoneography Marketing, the accuser noted that blog, the ratings scam involved a the developer was likely using set of iPhone application their promo codes (every r e v i e w e r s w h o o n l y r a t e d developer receives 50 per app) on Molinker apps, giving them each 50 of their own accounts to create a five-star review. Most of the t h e r e v i e w s . S h o r t l y a f t e r apps in question ended up with receiving the letter, Schiller 50 or so of these five-star confirmed that this was indeed a reviews, representing what was scam and the developer apps clearly an attempt to boost sales "have been removed from the by pumping up ratings through App Store and their ratings no artificial means. longer appear either." Cheating Sponsor Won't Get You Ahead, But What According to the user who Will? unearthed the scam, the highly While obviously we don't ranked reviews were poorly support unscrupulous developers written and the reviewers in who attempt to game the system

For some developers, it has become a case of "desperate times call for desperate measures," apparently. We wouldn't doubt for a second that this ratings scam is the only one of its kind. It probably won't be the last one either; developers in order to get ahead, we do will just be more careful to not be understand the temptation. At as obvious as Molinker was. present, the Apple iTunes Store Unfortunately, the real losers houses over 100,000 applications h e r e a r e n ' t t h e c h e a t i n g and development shows no sign developers, but iPhone owners. of slowing down. Developers Without a trustworthy ratings who have invested their time, system in place, it's harder than energy and money into building ever to pick out the best app from an iPhone application business a handful of similar applications. are becoming desperate for ways Can you count on the stars as an to make sure their apps get indicator? Are the reviews out-of noticed. -date? Are the complaints The problem has become so bad referring to problems fixed ages that an entire ecosystem of"app ago through updates? Is the discovery" services and websites download count a true indicator has risen up to fill the void. of popularity? As more and more A l t h o u g h A p p l e r e c e n t l y applications fill the virtual l a u n c h e d a n " A p p s f o r shelves, users will need a better Everything" section on their ranking system than what's website to allow for category- currently in place. We hope the based discovery, and back in geniuses at Apple are working on S e p t e m b e r e x t e n d e d t h e i r something like this right now. " g e n i u s " r e c o m m e n d a t i o n Discuss technology to include the App Store, none of these solutions have really addressed the discoverability problem.

Alien Invasion [Open Caption] By Brian Moylan (Gawker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:50:13 AM

[ A German photographer's "Get away from her, you bitch" didn't work on Sigourney Weaver who

took over the paparazzi line

while promoting her latest extra terrestrial movie, Avatar, in Berlin today. Image via Getty]

Kate Gosselin Prepping for New Show? (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:58:00 AM

ET has the latest... Not even a month after "Jon & Kate Plus 8" took its final bow, Kate Gosselin is spotted with a camera crew in tow. Raleigh, NC local news station WRAL is reporting that the reality show mom spent three hours at a local restaurant called Finch's serving food as cameras were on hand to capture her every move. Gosselin's longtime bodyguard, Steve Neild, told a WRAL reporter that they were shooting a test segment for a future program and then asked the reporter to leave the eatery.

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Dyyno Launches Free 1080p Live Streaming Solution By Frederic Lardinois (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:01:00 AM

Dyyno, which allows its users to stream and record live video from any application on their desktops, is launching a major upgrade of its service today. The company's service will now allow users to stream live and recorded video streams in full 1080p HD resolution. Dyyno has also dropped the price for personal accounts - which can stream HD video - to zero. These personal account support up to 100,000 concurrent viewers. Previously, these accounts started at $10 per month. Sponsor For the time being, Dyyno can only stream videos from Windows PCs. The company does offer a browser plugin for watching these videos on the Mac and Windows. The company's CEO Raj Jaswa told us that a Mac client is on the company's roadmap. We took a closer look at the service's features when the company launched in August. While the desktop client has evolved since then, the basic features remain the same. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised and the image quality of the 1080p streams was

very high. It takes a decent broadband connection to work well, however - the HD video streams take up about Broadcast at 3Mbps. Dyyno supports up to 30 frames per second and encodes its videos in H.264. The company does not automatically scale the video streams down for users with slower connections, though for on-demand video, content owners can choose different bitrates for their videos. Running Dyyno's desktop client is very easy. After installing the application, you just have to drag the Dyyno logo from the client to any window on your computer and it will automatically start to stream this video on your personal Dyyno page. In addition to live streaming, users can also create a "WebTV" channels that plays videos at a set time. Requires a Plugin The fact that it takes a browser plugin to run the service could be a roadblock for some potential users, however. On the other hand, no other service that we are aware of offers free 1080p live streaming. Pricing As Dyyno's platform is based on a P2P architecture, it only makes

TOP continued from page 43

others. Yahoo! did some good things for developers this year, but AOL/Aol's rebranding was pitiful. And don't get Dana Oshiro started on the affront to end-user dignity that is Friendster. Oracle Acquired MySQL Open-source geeks have been sporting metaphorical black armbands for the loss of MySQL, the world's largest open-source database, to Oracle, the largest pay-to-play database, following that company's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. We reported last week that MySQL usage is expected to drop by around 10 percent over the next 5 years. Here's another handy stat: Oracle also this year raised their own prices by 40 percent. Will MySQL remain free-as-in-beer and open source? Or will it succumb to corporate lameness? And the Worst Fail of 2009... LeapFish Made a God-Awful Promotional Video Tonight, we dine in hell!

sense for the company to offer the live streams for free. After all, the more users watch the stream, the easier it will be for Dyyno to deliver the video. The company does charge users who want to store more than 1GB of video for on-demand streaming on Dyyno's servers $10 per month. Dyyno does not charge for bandwidth. The P2P architecture doesn't lend itself for on-demand streaming, so Dyyno chose to charge for this aspect of its service. The company also offers business channels for $100 month, which include a total of 10 video channels and up to 100GB of storage. The company's high-end account, the Dyyno Broadcast station, costs $1,000 per month, and allows users to store an archive of up to 1,000GB of video and broadcast more than 100 concurrent video streams. Both the business and the broadcast accounts are stripped of all Dyyno's branding. Dyyno plans to offer an ad r e v e n u e s h a r e m o d e l t o (Financial Times - US companies that subscribe to these homepage) higher-end accounts and who Submitted at 12/8/2009 4:47:36 AM want to make use of Dyyno's ondemand streaming solutions. Investor sentiment took a knock on Tuesday after the Dubai Discuss government said talks to restructure a troubled statebacked conglomerate at the centre of the emirateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s financial

LeapFish's bombastic promo clip (which you have to watch in 10second segments to avoid waves of misplaced inspiration alternating with waves of nausea) is as horrifying as the company itself is sketchy. The startup says it made $10 million before it even launched, and the CEO Ben Behrouzi is an infamous contrepreneur with a background in lead generation and threatening employees. So, there you have it: our list of the worst tech-related disasters of 2009. What did we omit? Let us know in the comments below, and don't hold back. Clearly, we didn't. And to the companies mentioned in this report: 2009 isn't over yet. You've still got three weeks to make it right with end users. Discuss

Dubai World debt talks to take months crisis could drag on beyond a previously requested deadline. Abdul Rahman al-Saleh, Dubaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finance chief, insisted that Dubai World had sufficient assets to meet its obligations but said it would take more than six months to work out a restructuring plan. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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User Data Easier Than Ever to Phish on Facebook, New Study Shows By Jolie O'Dell (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:45:25 AM

Would you give a complete stranger your email address and date of birth? How about personal information about your friends? If results of a new study on Facebook user behavior is any indication, around half of us would answer "yes" to those questions, depending on how old we are. The study also shows that Facebook users are becoming more lax with protecting their personal data than they were three years ago. What do these results signify in light of recent concerns about user privacy on the world's largest social network? And now that some user data will be indexed by Google, will users have to adjust what information they share? Sponsor In the summer of 2007, Internet security company Sophos conducted a study showing how much (or little) users understood and protected the data the made available on Facebook. In this study, 200 friend requests were sent from a bogus account

featuring a green plastic frog named Freddi Staur. The results were distressing. More than 40 percent of the Facebook users contacted responded to the fake account, and almost all of these users gave "Freddi" access to personal information. • 72% of respondents divulged at least one email address • 84% of respondents listed their full date of birth • 87% of respondents provided

any less gullible than their 2007 counterparts? Have we learned to be less vulnerable to phishing schemes? This year, Sophos created two fake accounts- one for a cat and one for a plastic duck - and went after another 200 Facebook users, this time distinguishing between 20-somethings and middle-ages users. Here's a snapshot of the information each group revealed: Eight users friended the catthemed fake account of their own accord, without having been contacted as part of the study; in so many words, these users pretty much volunteered to have their data phished. As Sophos noted, "Ten years ago, getting access to this sort of details about their education or hobbies, employer details and detail would probably have taken workplace other personal facts. A company a con-artist or an identify thief • 78% of respondents listed their rep write at the time of the several weeks, and have required current address or location survey, "In addition, many users the on-the-spot services of a • 23% of respondents listed their also disclosed the names of their private investigator." Apparently, current phone number spouses or partners, several in the 2.0 era, all you have to do • 26% of respondents provided included their complete résumés, is click to send a friend request, their IM screen name while one user even divulged his a n d t h e d e s i r e f o r o n l i n e m o t h e r ' s m a i d e n n a m e - popularity and more "friends" Moreover, the folks at Sophos information often requested by makes a phisher's job easier than were able to get access to users' websites in order to retrieve giving free candy to kids. Discuss photos of family and friends, account details." information about likes/dislikes, So, are users at the end of 2009

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It's Google Chrome Day! Extensions The IRS vs. Pamela & Mac Version Available Now Anderson By Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

you really should. Poor little Firefox is a great community project and has done wonders for Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:08:47 AM the web, but it's grown bloated Google Chrome may be the best and slow over the years. Chrome browser on the market. It's faster was built with web applications, and more stable than Firefox and not pages, in mind. It runs today began opening up to user separate processes in each tab so modification with the availability one tab can't drag down or crash of more than 300 browser the others. The latest builds of extensions. Official Mac and Chromium for Mac are Linux versions were just made outperforming Firefox with and many extensions have links J a v a s c r i p t ( k e y f o r available today as well. Can Chrome remain so much to their developer sites where you responsiveness) by up to 10 stronger than Firefox once a pile c a n f i n d M a c i n s t a l l s times. In other words, Chrome of extensions or added on? unencumbered. You should runs circles around Firefox. It That's the question and now is probably just install Chromium, makes us sad, but most of the your chance to start finding out savvy readers. If you're on a ReadWriteWeb staff now runs the answer. It's been more than a Mac, download this app that Chrome or Chromium and we've year since Google launched TechCrunch made to easily been on the edge of our seats for Chrome, but today is a big day upgrade your developer install the launch of extensions. with just a click at any time. for the browser. Now we'll see how a Chrome I n t h e m e a n t i m e , t h e loaded down with extensions can Sponsor s i t e do. Google says it shouldn't be a The one bit of bad news is that i n d e p e n d e n t neither the official Mac version ChromeExtensions.org remains a problem: "Chromium's extensive nor the developer version we've great place to find extensions for p e r f o r m a n c e m o n i t o r i n g been testing for months - called your browser. The site is infrastructure has helped us Chromium- are allowed to install crawling right now, though. ensure extensions affect Google extensions from the official I'm currently using GleeBox, Chrome's speed as little as extension directory. You can, TooManyTabs and Glue. How possible." Discuss however, get a good view of the about you? breadth of extensions available, If you haven't tried Chrome yet,

By Brad Trechak (TV Squad) Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:20:00 AM

Pamela Anderson may have to start spending a little less time at the beach. Apparently she owes the Internal Revenue Service almost $2 million in back taxes. Obviously, this was a miscalculation on the part of her accountants. Given Anderson's history and reputation, it's not as if we're expecting her to do her own taxes. Nor are we expecting her to develop a new cancer vaccine or do rocket engineering anytime soon. Perhaps Hollywood could have some sort of fundraiser for her. "Pam-Aid", perhaps? She could auction off the outfit she wore on The Girls Next Door. Oh wait, she wasn't wearing one. Her former Baywatch co-star David Hasselhoff could even sing one of his hits at the concert. She is expecting to make some money soon. Her new music single is being released in 2010.

Bryant Gumbel Reveals Cancer Battle (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:27:00 AM

Bryant Gumbel announced his battle with lung cancer on

Tuesday. While co-hosting "Live! with Regis and Kelly" on Tuesday morning, the veteran news man revealed that he had a secret

surgery to remove a malignant tumor in his chest and part of his lung. "We had told a few people, we told my family, obviously," he

said. "I even kept it from my staff at 'Real Sports.' So I'm okay for the time being."

Sales are expected in the dozens. Things may get so desperate that she'll have to sell one of her boobs. It's okay. Others can be made. Filed under: OpEd, Celebrities, Reality-Free Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Predicting 2010: iLife, iWork & iTunes By Chris Ryan (TheAppleBlog)

Probability: Possible The addition of Faces and Places to iPhoto ’09 was just the Submitted at 12/7/2009 1:32:05 PM beginning. The next version of With 2010 around the corner, iPhoto will support more accurate Apple is poised to begin a new facial recognition and integration year that should yield lots of with Twitter. Those who enjoy g r e a t a d v a n c e m e n t s i n i t s the photo slideshow themes that consumer software arena. Here’s were added to the last version our predictions for what could be will enjoy a larger selection of in store for the latest versions of new themes that will be added in iLife, iWork and iTunes. (These the new version. I also predict predictions are not substantiated that the next version will bring by rumors or other “inside support for bulk renaming of files e v i d e n c e ” a n d a r e p u r e l y (similar to how Aperture can do s p e c u l a t i o n b a s e d l o t s o f this upon import) and better e x p e r i e n c e w i t h t h e s e performance when dealing with applications and their histories.) larger libraries. I also predict iLife X revised or better photo editing Probability: Guaranteed controls with additional effects. When the last version of iLife iMovie launched, it adopted the moniker Probability: Possible “iLife ’09.” Recently however, I believe the next version of Apple has modified most of its iMovie will boast support for website to drop the date from the posting videos directly to more title. Now simply called “iLife,” I I n t e r n e t s e r v i c e s , s u c h a s wonder if Apple will be quick to F a c e b o o k a n d F l i c k r . A n release a new “yearly” iteration expanded set of new themes as at the outset of 2010. well as more advanced title Based on previous versions, the options will be present as well. next iteration of iLife will require The user experience of the Mac OS X 10.6. By requiring application will be refined, for Snow Leopard, this does make those who are still frustrated by iLife an Intel-only release. the intense switch from iMovie Though some users will be left HD to the last two versions. behind, significant performance iDVD gains should be recognized by Probability: Guaranteed taking advantage of 64-bit iDVD will likely see one of the technology included in Snow most significant updates that it Leopard. has ever seen in quite a while. Within the apps themselves, I 2010 will mark the beginning of believe we’ll continue to see new ways of enjoying media. significant updates. Here’s the From the possibility of the first roundup. iPhoto out-of-the-box Blu-ray drives on

the “beta” of iWork.com, including a paid plan if Apple deems the project a huge success, or inclusion with MobileMe if Apple feels the product isn’t strong enough to stand on its own footing. All three applications will see new templates and a refined Inspector palette. It seems very un-Apple like to mandate users bring up a palette for colors, a the Mac to iTunes Extras & LPs iWeb will support more themes separate one for fonts, another for to the elusive Apple Tablet, the a n d a f e w m o r e w i d g e t s , media and yet another master presentation of digital content including a widget that provides Inspector to control everything remains a key focus for Apple. a live feed of your Twitter stream else. Additionally, I predict the The next version of iDVD will on your website. GarageBand Media Browser will be updated help push this agenda forward, Probability: Possible across all apps to support Faces allowing users to create Blu-ray GarageBand will likely see an and Places from iPhoto. discs or optimize their video expanded music lesson store with I also predict Pages will provide content into formats like iTunes more artist lessons and lessons support for (or perhaps work Extras. Such a dramatic update for drums and bass. I also predict d i r e c t l y w i t h ) t h i r d - p a r t y would likely warrant changing Apple will make it easier to share applications like bibliographic the name of the application, but GarageBand creations beyond software such as Endnote or that’s also within the realm of iTunes and iWeb. Similar to the R e f w o r k s f o r a c a d e m i c possibility. iDVD has definitely other apps, I believe we will see p u b l i c a t i o n s . i T u n e s been late to the party for the past support for exporting to other Probability: Guaranteed two years, seeing only small web services such as Facebook or iTunes is an interesting maintenance updates. While YouTube. iWork X application as every version many speculate that Apple plans Probability: Possible seems to bring about a large to axe DVD creation altogether I p r e d i c t t h e b i g g e s t number of extra features that (foreseeing the death of the improvement to the iWork suite many people don’t expect, or at digital disc in favor of digital will be a tighter integration with first glance, really need. distribution), I believe Apple has the iPhone and iPod touch. On I predict the next major version been working on a successor the short side, I see iWork.com of iTunes, iTunes 10, will bring application to take advantage of coming to the iPhone as an app to support for syncing with the new forms of distribution (a la a l l o w q u i c k b r o w s i n g o f mythical iTablet, as well as better Blu-ray or iTunes Extras-styled documents. In an ideal world, syncing support (including over media). iWeb Apple will eventually build the air syncing of content if on a Probability: Possible lightweight mobile versions of its Wi-Fi network). Furthermore, iWeb is one of those apps that is iWork apps to allow users to iTunes 10 should feature better d i f f i c u l t t o p a c k f u l l o f create and edit Pages, Keynote support for managing larger compelling new features every and Numbers files on the go. PREDICTING page 52 year. I predict the next version of I believe we’ll see an update to

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Predicting 2010: Apple and the Cloud By Alfredo Padilla (TheAppleBlog)

cloud. So, without further ado, here are my 2010 predictions for Apple Submitted at 12/7/2009 1:31:54 PM and the Cloud. iTunes will begin Going into 2010, the landscape streaming music of computing continues to be Probability: Guaranteed dominated by the slow, but Not much of a risk here, Apple inevitable, move towards the has thankfully tipped its hand cloud. For a computing platform with its acquisition of Lala.com, company like Apple, this move a music streaming service. This is presents a particular challenge. the direction the industry is Apple’s expertise is producing going, with services like Spotify, the best computing experience by Pandora and Last.fm all growing controlling both the software and rapidly. Adding a subscription the hardware. This is antithetical streaming model to iTunes and/or to the whole concept of cloud allowing you to stream your computing, which is generally iTunes library is a no-brainer for a g n o s t i c t o w a r d s b o t h t h e Apple. What will be interesting is software and the hardware. seeing how such a potential Not surprisingly, then, Apple’s service integrates with the iPhone moves towards cloud computing and iPod lineup. iTunes will offer have been cautious. MobileMe, s t r e a m i n g m o v i e s a n d / o r iWork.com and in some ways t e l e v i s i o n iTunes, can all be seen as cloud- Probability: Possible based services, but none of them This prediction follows logically have offered ground-breaking from the one before. If Apple is solutions. It’s obvious that going to offer streaming music, Apple’s cloud strategy is based why not also offer to stream mostly around complementing its v i d e o c o n t e n t a s w e l l ? computer based-solutions. It Unfortunately, the likelihood of continues to feel strongly that the such a service is as constrained best place to create and/or edit by the veracities of the rightsfiles is on your computer, where holders of Apple’s interest, as you can take full advantage of such I only deem this prediction a today’s hardware and the power possibility. MobileMe will see a of OS X. Looking forward to significant price drop 2010 I don’t expect this general Probability: Possible philosophy to change, but I do MobileMe has always been expect Apple to move more d o g g e d b y s t i c k e r s h o c k . aggressively towards tying its Although the $8 or so a month services even more closely to the the service costs isn’t that high,

would be much more convenient if I could just tell Mobile Me to automatically synchronize my home folder across computers, just as I do with my calendars and contacts. With the speed of Internet connections only increasing, this is not only possible today, but it’s inevitable. paying $100 all at once is a bit Whether it happens next year is more difficult to swallow. What’s less certain, but it will happen more, MobileMe offers very little eventually. iWork.com will add that can’t be had for free in other document editing places. I’m allowing my Mobile Probability: Possible Me subscription to lapse this year As I mentioned above, Apple as I’ve replaced all the services seems strongly opposed to with free alternatives. Although I moving document creation and don’t expect Apple to make the editing to the cloud, but if it service free, I do expect it to try decides to start experimenting and expand the universe of with some could-based document subscribers by offering a drop in editing, this is likely the place price, and perhaps moving to a w h e r e i t w i l l h a p p e n . I t s monthly subscription model c o m p e t i t o r s i n t h i s s p a c e , instead of paying for an entire Google, Microsoft and Zoho, all year up front. MobileMe will add are offering document editing to p h o t o , m u s i c a n d f i l e some extent. I wouldn’t expect the entire iWork suite to be synchronization ported to the cloud, but I do think Probability: Possible MobileMe is still the best way to the addition of basic editing is a keep your PIM data synchronized possibility. OS X is ported to the across your Macs and your cloud iPhone, but one glaring weakness Probability: Absurd i s m u l t i m e d i a a n d f i l e It may seem like an absurdity, synchronization. Sure you can and I certainly don’t expect it to keep everything on your iDisk, happen next year, but the idea of but this lacks the elegance that is porting OS X to the cloud is one typical of Apple as it requires that Apple will certainly want to you to move everything that consider at some point in the should be in your home folder to future. The strength of Apple’s another place. It’s also extremely computing platform has always limited in terms of storage. It been the operating system and

development tools that underly it. If you truly believe that in the long run computing will be a server-client model, than in order to retain its competitive advantage Apple will have to move these strengths to the cloud. Adapting OS X and Xcode to become the foundation of a cloud-based operating system and development environment is the obvious long-term strategy for Apple. Steve Job’s consciousness will be uploaded to the cloud to ensure he rules Apple forever Probability: Absurd Steve Jobs’ health problems last year and his temporary absence from Apple proved once again that the tenure of Apple’s messiah is not assured to run forever. I think Apple needs to turn all of its prodigious talent towards ensuring that Jobs’ genius remains with us forever, and what better way than to upload his consciousness to the cloud? There he can ensure that we continue to pour the contents of our wallets into Apple’s coffers in perpetuity. You can bet Apple’s share-holders will be in support of this, despite that small probability that Jobs-in-the-cloud may someday turn into Skynet.

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Predicting 2010: iPod and iPhone By Darrell Etherington (TheAppleBlog)

that trend. Video Comes to the Touch Probability: Guaranteed Submitted at 12/7/2009 1:31:19 PM The evidence all but guarantees The dawn of a new year never that video is meant to come to the fails to make me excited about all iPod touch sooner or later, and I the potential for new devices predict it will be sooner, rather we’ll inevitably see released. than later. Tear-downs of the This year is no different, and for most recently released iteration Apple’s iPod and iPhone, there of the touch revealed a space are some storms that have been perfectly designed for the same brewing for quite a while that camera guts found in the new should break in 2010. Hope you iPod nano, so unless Apple is just packed a raincoat. very interested in toying I recently came across my still maliciously with Apple rumor functional (including decent hounds, this one is basically in battery life) 30GB iPod Video the bag. It doesn’t hurt that it’s w h i l e r o o t i n g t h r o u g h m y the next logical step for the rising drawers looking for a proprietary star of Apple’s iPod lineup. USB cable. After I charged it and iPod Classic Gets Retired booted it up, the palpable feeling Probability: Possible of the HDD platter spinning up, It’s served long, and it’s served a n d t h e f a i n t s o u n d t h a t well, but the HD-based iPod a c c o m p a n i e s s a i d a c t i o n Classic is not long for this world, reminded me of just how far in my opinion. Apple’s already we’ve come, and of how far streamlined the Classic to a we’ve yet to go with Apple’s single available model, and as the portable devices. Here’s where I price of flash memory begins to think we’re headed next. The trend downwards again in 2010, I iPod think they’ll do away with the It’s long been the linchpin in beast altogether and focus on A p p l e ’ s l i n e u p o f p r o d u c t turning Classic customers into offerings, and it deserves eternal iPod touch devotees. respect for the role it had in Touch-based Control Returns to r e v e r s i n g t h e c o m p a n y ’ s Shuffle fortunes, but the iPod no longer Probability: Possible enjoys the place of highest favor One of Apple’s most among Apple products, mobile or questionable decisions made in otherwise. I predict, as a general the service of sexy design is the trend, a continued downplaying loss of any and all buttons on the of the iPod’s role at Apple, and iPod shuffle. I think it will s i g n i f i c a n t c h a n g e s t o t h e respond to mixed reviews and products on offer as a result of c o n s u m e r s k e p t i c i s m b y

reason the 3GS still has the same distinctive look as the 3G. Other probable reasons include a rushed roll-out, and more emphasis on internal changes. I think next time around, we’ll be treated to a new look, and I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that we may have already seen some early prototypes of this design change. Better Peer-to-Peer Probability: Guaranteed The future of mobile tech is in peer-to-peer interaction between devices. Apple knows this, and returning some form of manual lineup. The upgrades made with t h a t ’ s w h y i t o p e n e d u p (ie. non-voice) control to the the 3GS were logical enough, Bluetooth interaction between device itself. That doesn’t since many of them amounted to devices when it released iPhone necessarily mean buttons will putting things in that should 3.0. I think Apple will make return, if they can figure out probably have been there in the further efforts to make P2P experiences technically better some way to make use of the first place. and more seamless in the next multi-touch tech it’s so clearly in The Usual update. That might come via love with. Probability: Guaranteed Nano Gets Incremental Video There are the standard upgrades improved Bluetooth, or using the Upgrades to be expected with any new recently revealed Wi-Fi Direct Probability: Guaranteed model. These things include tech that Apple’s thrown its Look for the iPod nano to get storage bumps (64GB next time support behind. steady improvements in the around), improvements to the Physical Keyboard quality of its video camera, and camera and video recording Probability: Absurd No. Just kidding. The Big in what you can do with said (bump up to 5 megapixels video on and off the device. possible, but by no means a sure Picture Apple’s made its big changes to thing), and improvements to the Flash-bang upgrades will all go the device, and will now move p r o c e s s i n g a n d g r a p h i c s to the iPhone, while the iPod line into what amounts to a holding rendering capabilities of the will get natural but relatively pattern in which it upgrades the iPhone. They’re boring and we s m a l l a n d l e s s s h o w y upgrades it’s already introduced. know they’re coming, so let’s not enhancements. The reason being, Apple is using the iPod touch and And consumers will continue waste time on this. its brethren to herd consumers shelling out with each bump up. New Look towards the iPhone, which is the The iPhone Probability: Possible Predicting where the iPhone will T h e i P h o n e i s i n c r e d i b l y real cash cow and the better bet go is a bit more challenging than recognizable, and that probably for long-term investment. making calls about the iPod had something to do with the

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Apple Dealt $21.7 Million Judgement for Violating Chip Patent By Darrell Etherington (TheAppleBlog) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:27:35 AM

In a decision made final last week, Apple was ordered to pay out $27.1 million to OPTi, a semiconductor company that now deals only in licensing its intellectual property. The decision came down from Eastern District of Texas court judge Chad Everingham, and it is a penalty for patent infringement on Apple’s part. The lawsuit, filed in January 2007 and tried before the court in April of this year, centered around the accusation by OPTi that Apple had violated a patent Opti held detailing “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.” I had no idea what it meant, either. Turns out this is what it means, according to The Mac Observer: When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes. The controller then allows the burst access to take place between secondary memory and the PCI-bus master, and simultaneously and

isn’t to say the matter is over with. Apple intends to appeal the decision, sources say, and it has a few channels to go through before it expends all of its options. The good news for Apple with this ruling is that the judge found no evidence of “willful infringement,” meaning that any violation that occurred was just the innocent result of having used the same idea that OPTi had patented coincidentally, and not with the express purpose of predictively, performs an inquire ripping them off. As a result, cycle of the L1 cache for the next Apple wasn’t required to pay cache line. In this manner, if the OPTi’s legal fees in the matter, PCI burst continues past the according to a press release(PDF) cache line boundary, the new issued by the winning party. inquire cycle will already have While I understand the need for taken place, or will already be in a system in which smaller progress, thereby allowing the companies can protect their burst to proceed with, at most, a intellectual property against short delay. Predictive snoop much larger ones, cases like this, cycles are not performed if the which aren’t exactly patent first transfer of a PCI-bus master trolling but which involve a access would be the last transfer company whose sole purpose has before a cache line boundary is become the licensing of ideas, really get my goat. The problem reached. I’m slightly more informed now, being, they affect Apple’s bottom but I’d be lying if I said I had the line (which is why they’re technical expertise to point out fighting it so adamantly, even where exactly this kind of tech is though $21.7 million isn’t a huge being used in Apple products. hit to them). Every time one of Whatever the case, the judge these suits goes against the Mac thought it strong enough to maker, the consumer ends up decide in favor of OPTi. Which being the one who pays.

PREDICTING continued from page 49

libraries of content and the need to split those libraries across multiple hard drives in a simple but effective manner. Conclusion Finally, I’d like to see iWork and iLife dropping in price back to the familiar $49 from years past. In light of economic conditions and Apple’s vocal attempts of providing quality products to more and more users, a price drop seems wise as it would also

help generate better market penetration. Again, many of these predictions are pure speculation and hopes and dreams on my part. What do you think we’ll see in these areas over the coming year?

The Bonnie Hunt Show is coming to an end By Allison Waldman (TV Squad) Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:02:00 AM

After a two year stint in syndication, The Bonnie Hunt Show is coming to an end. In a syndicated world where the gossip-mongering of TMZ, The Insider and Extra thrive, a sweet talk show like Bonnie's just didn't cut the mustard. Apparently, there's only room for one show like that and it's called The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Warner Brothers, which syndicates The Bonnie Hunt Show, announced its decision to take it off the air at the end of this season. Bonnie addressed her staff immediately. I'm sure Bonnie Hunt's agent is busy lining up new projects for her. She's too funny, too talented and

too good to be out of work for long. I hope the employees on her show do as well. Continue reading The Bonnie Hunt Show is coming to an end Filed under: OpEd, Daytime, Celebrities, Talk Show, Cancellations, Ratings, RealityFree Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Chrome for Mac Beta Available Now By Darrell Etherington (TheAppleBlog) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:44:13 AM

The developer builds of late have been pretty stable, but now you can download the official Google Chrome for Mac Beta. Released today, the Beta should offer Mac users a more stable browsing experience, one that hopefully is more representative of what the full release will eventually look like. It’s been a long time coming for us Mac users, but was the wait worth it? I’m going to try my best to use Chrome as my default browser for a decent length of time, in order to give it a fair shake. But I am a little worried about potential feature scarcity. As has been reported before, the Chrome beta is missing some things that its Windows counterpart offers. Below is a brief list of what’s been omitted, and why it worries me that some of these things aren’t there with this new beta. • App Mode: One of Chrome’s greatest strengths is its ability to create Fluid-like single site browser instances that work more like apps than websites. It’s great for Gmail, Google Docs, and any

focus on 64-bit performance. It’s not a major strike against it, since the browser is still blazingly fast in my experience, but it could become an issue down the road if Google doesn’t give its browser a bump up. There are other things I’ve left off my list, like full-screen browsing, for the simple fact that I don’t use them that often and other web app that has its own they probably won’t affect my dashboard, menus, etc. The experience. And despite my option is there, it’s just grayed complaints about what isn’t in this beta, what is there is very out for now. • Gears: I know Gears is dead in impressive indeed. The speed g e n e r a l , a s p e r a r e c e n t with which Chrome renders announcement, but for now the pages never ceases to impress, no existing implementation is much matter how many times I take the appreciated. I’d like to hold on to browser out for a spin on either it as long as possible, pending Windows or Mac machines. HTML 5’s gradual rollout, but Tabs also still do run as isolated the Chrome Beta isn’t onboard. processes, which is the major • Multi-touch Gestures: Both the advantage Chrome brought to the trackpad and the Magic Mouse’s table in the first place. Now when multi-touch gestures won’t work I have 57 tabs open across five in this beta of Chrome. That’s a windows on three screens, a big omission when you’ve badly coded Flash ad on one of become as dependent on multi- them won’t force me to start touch as I have, especially in fresh. Wait, that might not be a good thing… terms of mobile computing. • 64-bit Support: Chrome is 32bit only, despite Snow Leopard’s

Syfy’s Alice averages 2.454 million for 2 hour pt 1. By Robert Seidman (TVbytheNumbers) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:56:32 AM

The two hour part one of “Alice” on Syfy on Sunday night from 9p -11p averaged 2.454 million. Clearly nowhere near the the reimagined “Oz” miniseries it put on a while back. It was a case where Bill and I made slightly different predictions about “Alice” and yet were both right. Bill had remarked (I’ll try to phrase this generously) that he had seen an awful lot of Internet-PR out of Syfy for a show he didn’t think very many people would watch. I told him it wouldn’t do “Oz”-

like numbers, but that it would do OK by Syfy standards. The truth is, I’m guessing Syfy hoped for a bit more, but it was Syfy’s most-watched programming of the week, topping “Ghost Hunters’” 2.436 million (barely, but still), “Ghost Hunters Academy” (1.635 million) a repeat of “National Treasure” (1.441 million) and “Stargate Universe” (1.34 million — a series low against the “Monk” finale — for those wondering how the encore did at 11pm, it averaged .748 million). This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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New Study Says Apple is Most Reliable, Not Asus By Darrell Etherington (TheAppleBlog)

Bryant Gumbel reveals that he had cancer surgery

Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:31:17 AM

By Joel Keller (TV Squad)

Last month, I reported the results of a study detailing notebook reliability numbers. Many commenters disagreed with the results of the study by U.S. warranty company SquareTrade, and provided excellent reasons for doing so. Today, another study reinforces the opinion unsurprisingly shared by many of our readers; namely, that Apple is indeed the top computer maker when it comes to reliability. The new study, by Rescuecom, which is a U.S. firm specializing in computer repair, puts Apple at the top of the list when ranking computer makers. Previous studies by the repair franchise had seen Asus take the top spot, in keeping with the results of the SquareTrade study, but the most recent numbers (Q3 2009) show Apple with a commanding lead, according to Electronista. Apple scored 374, which is more than double Asus’ 166. The PC maker scored third. Rescuecom’s rankings are based on the numbers of machines that it sees come in for repairs, as measured

Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:45:00 AM

against the number of computers each company ships. The methodology for the study also includes factoring in things like system construction quality and manufacturer post-sale support, in order to bring some influence outside of Rescuecom’s operation to the table. Apple’s sales accounted for nine percent of the market in Q3, while only making up 2.4 percent of Rescuecom’s repair calls. CEO David Millman suggests that Asus’ recent slip may be due to the growing presence of netbooks in its lineup of offerings. “Now that many of the netbooks by ASUS have been out for a while, there is obviously a higher need for service,” said Millman. It’s true that while Asus makes some of the most sturdy netbooks around, to achieve the incredibly low price points they offer to consumers, corners have to be cut in parts and

manufacturing quality. Lenovo also fared better in Rescuecom’s study, placing a strong second behind Apple with a score of 320. Toshiba and HP rounded out the top five with fourth and fifth place scores of 165 and 134, respectively. The common thread? All of these manufacturers offer at least one netbook-type computer. There’s no way of saying for certain that low-cost netbooks are definitively affecting the reliability scores of computer makers, but it is beginning to look like Apple was wise to abstain from joining the fray, at least in this regard (though not in others). No doubt Apple’s introduction of unibody aluminum construction, which requires far fewer moving parts and better overall structural strength is also contributing to its increasing product dependability.

Talk about keeping a secret... Subbing for Regis Philbin on Live with Regis and Kelly, Bryant Gumbel just revealed that, like Reege, he's also recovering from recent surgery: he recently underwent cancer surgery in his chest and lungs. According to Gumbel, he had a tumor removed from his chest, and part of one of his lungs also got removed; in addition, he needed what he called "more treatment" to make sure all the cancerous cells had been eliminated. He didn't mention what that treatment was, though. The 61-year-old (!) Gumbel has kept a relatively low profile in recent years, popping up on his Real Sports show on HBO and occasional stints as a sub for

Regis. So it's easy to see how this could have been on QT. Continue reading Bryant Gumbel reveals that he had cancer surgery Filed under: Sports, News, Daytime, Celebrities, Talk Show, Reality-Free Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Apple Bans a Thousand Apps Over Review Fraud By Charles Jade (TheAppleBlog) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:22:48 AM

A story that began 10 days ago with a blog posting at iPhoneography and a letter to Apple VP Phil Schiller has ended with Apple banning prolific developer Molinker from the App Store. The developer has been charged with review fraud (not to mention poor grammar). Molinker developed a lot of travel apps, guides, currency conversion tools, translation software, as well as photo editing software. A few reviews from NightCam Pro can be seen above. Like other Molinker software, the reviews are good…a little too good. A reader of iPhoneography, SCW, thought in the above example it was “a little odd that 42 of 44 U.S. reviews are poorly written & that all users have only written reviews for either All Molinker photography apps…or the same two apps.” Apparently, short, effusive, English-assecond-language reviews are common for Molinker apps. SCW goes further, too, asserting that it is likely the all-positive reviews are derived from apps redeemed with developer promo codes. Seeing as Molinker has promptly disappeared from the App Store, this could very well be. As for

Fat People Can't Get Jobs, and Unemployed People Can't Get Thin [Synchronicity] By John Cook (Gawker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:14:25 AM

the developer’s response, Appfreakblog contacted the company and received this reply: Actually, we do not know what’s wrong so far. We had contacted Apple for such sudden changes, hope we can get quick response and actions from Apple. Well, it appears Molinker got its wish, at least in terms of “quick response and actions,” though it’s not the first company to suffer a mass banning. Content aggregator Perfect Acumen was banned along with 900-plus apps in August for alleged copyright violation and other complaints. Going forward, it’s likely there will be more mass bannings if

Last week, we highlighted a scary county-by-county map that a commenter posted to#tips showing metastasizing unemployment growth. Today, it occurred to us that we'd seen a graphic like that somewhere before: A CDC map of obesity allegations regarding the use of by county. promo codes and astroturfing The left map is a snapshot of reviews are found to be true. county-level unemployment rates While some will argue this is yet from October 2008; darker another “black eye” for the App c o u n t i e s h a v e h i g h e r Store, possibly with Schiller unemployment (the time-lapse d o i n g a n o t h e r i n t e r v i e w map we grabbed it from goes to defending the review process, October 2009, at which point the maybe some new restrictions on whole country is basically black). promo codes, does it really matter? The App Store, backed by more than 60 million iPhone OS devices and counting, remains the place to be for developers of mobile applications. A thousand bans here or there just don’t add up to much next to that.

At the right is a CDC map released last month of obesity rates in 2007—it's the first county-level rendering of obesity data. (You can click the maps to see a larger version.) With the exception of the West Coast, it looks as though Ground Zero of the employment crash aligned fairly faithfully with the Obesity Belt: Appalachia, Michigan, the Deep South and the Southeast Atlantic Coast all shared early unemployment spikes and higher rates of obesity, while Texas, the Upper Midwest, and the plains states are thinner and have better job security.

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“The Big Bang Theory” Soars To Series Highs By Robert Seidman (TVbytheNumbers)

ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” coverage of the Ravens at Packers game aired on the Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:25:56 AM CBS affiliate, delivering a via press release: 20.0/30. CBS’s ratings are “THE BIG BANG THEORY” tentative and subject to change. SOARS TO SERIES HIGHS THE BIG BANG THEORY was “Two and a Half Men” Notches first in households (8.6/13), Best Ratings of the Season viewers (14.72m), adults 25-54 CBS Wins Monday in All Key (6.6/14), adults 18-49 (5.7/13) Measures and adults 18-34 (4.4/11). THE THE BIG BANG THEORY BIG BANG THEORY improved posted its best ratings ever in on its TWO AND A HALF MEN viewers and key demographic lead-in by +5% in adults 25-54, categories, and TWO AND A +12% in adults 18-49 and +19% HALF MEN delivered its highest in adults 18-34. If the ratings ratings of the season, leading hold, these are series highs for CBS to a convincing nightly win, THE BIG BANG THEORY. according to Nielsen preliminary TWO AND A HALF MEN was live plus same day ratings for first in households (9.0/13), Monday, Dec. 7. viewers (15.16m), adults 25-54 Editors Note: In Baltimore, (6.3/14), adults 18-49 (5.1/12)

and adults 18-34 (3.7/10). If the ratings hold, these are season highs for TWO AND A HALF MEN. CSI: MIAMI was first in households (8.2/13), viewers (12.94m), adults 25-54 (4.7/11),

adults 18-49 (3.8/10) and adults 18-34 (2.9/08). At 8:00 PM, HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER was first in viewers (9.15m), adults 25-54 (4.1/10), adults 18-49 (3.5/10), adults 18-34 (3.3/10) and tied for

first in households (5.6/09, with FOX). ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE was first in adults 2554 (3.6/08), adults 18-49 (2.9/08), adults 18-34 (2.3/07), second in households (5.0/08) and viewers (8.30m). For the night, CBS was first in households (7.4/12), viewers (12.20m), adults 25-54 (5.0/12), adults 18-49 (4.1/11) and adults 18-34 (3.2/09). Updated Monday ratings will be available this afternoon. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

ESPN Dominates Primetime Cable Ratings By Bill Gorman (TVbytheNumbers)

much wider than typical margins. It didn’t hurt that they also had a Thursday night Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:43:41 AM college football game. USA, With the monster Patriots v. boosted by the Monk series finale Saints Monday Night Football was a strong #2, but nobody was g a m e E S P N t u r n e d i n i t s getting close to ESPN this week. strongest cable primetime ratings Nickelodeon remains, as always, win in recent memory leading on the top of the total day both the primetime weekly cable average viewership. 30 – December 6, 2009 ratings for adults 18-49 and Prime-time Average Viewers average viewership ratings by (Live+SD) Week of November

MediaDailyNews: CNN Invests In Local Blog Outside.In (MediaPost | Media News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:52:13 AM

CNN.com has invested in startup

Outside.In, which provides neighborhood blogs and other local news and information to the Web sites of newspapers, TV

stations and other media, per The Wall Street Journal. No financial details were revealed. Outside.In and similar start-ups either hire

staff to write neighborhood news or collect and organize relevant releases. This content has passed through

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Cowboys-Giants 27.8 Million Average Viewers Gives FOX Week’s No. 1 Show…Again By Robert Seidman (TVbytheNumbers) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:09:48 AM

via FOX Sports release: COWBOYS-GIANTS GAME GIVES NFL ON FOX WEEK’S NO. 1 SHOW…AGAIN Season-to-Date Audience Up +16% Sunday’s NFL on FOX National Game, lead by the New York Giants upset over the Dallas Cowboys, posted a sensational 16.6/29 average household audience/share, with 27.8 million viewers, according to national figures released today by Nielsen Media Research. The game easily ranks as the highest-rated and most-watched broadcast of the week in all of television in households, across all key male and adult demos and placed among the top three across key

women demographics. This marks the seventh time in seven tries that FOX’s National Game has been the highest-rated and most-watched telecast of its week this season, and through Week 13 the five most-watched Sunday games on all networks have all

fourth time this year a FOX game has exceeded the 15.0 household rating nationally, the first time ever FOX has had four such games in a single season. Through seven broadcasts this season, the NFL on FOX National Game is averaging an outstanding 15.6/29 and 26.2 million viewers, up +12% and 16%, respectively, over last year’s 13.9/27 (22.5 million viewers), +21% and +22%, respectively, compared to CBS’s National Game (12.9/25, 21.4 mill) and +31% and 34%, respectively, compared to NBC’s been on FOX. The rating for the NFL on FOX SNF (11.9/19, 19.6 mill). The Week 13 National game is up NFL on FOX National Game +8% over last year’s comparable ranks as the No. 1 program in all Week 13 National Game on CBS of television across all key male ( 1 5 . 4 / 2 7 ) a n d u p + 9 % i n and adult demographics. a u d i e n c e ( 2 5 . 5 m i l l i o n ) . This content has passed through Sunday’s 16.6/29 marks the fivefilters.org.

New Condos For The Poor [Solutions] By Hamilton Nolan (Gawker)

condominium tower nearby." Which is probably languishing unsold! Just give everyone a free condo, the end. [ NYT.]

Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:41:25 AM

The NYC Housing Authority is spending $248 million to renovate two shitty Brooklyn housing projects, while "a

developer recently spent...$152 million [building a]

Bryant Gumbel reveals he had lung cancer surgery By Associated Press (ESPN.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:29:22 AM

NEW YORK -- Bryant Gumbel has revealed that he's had surgery for lung cancer. Gumbel dropped the bombshell while co-hosting "Live With Regis and Kelly" when Kelly Ripa tried to get him to dance and he told her he wasn't up to it. Gumbel says "they opened up my chest, they took a malignant tumor and they took part of my lung and some other goodies." He says "the pathology on most of the stuff came back benign, but enough aggressive cells escaped the tumor that it warranted some treatment." He says "it's done now." He says he's OK "for the time being" and is hoping to return to his golf game. Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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What's On Tonight: Biggest Loser, Better Off Ted, Chopped, Joe Buck Live

Around the Net In Media: Major Mag Publishers Ready New Digital Debut

By Bob Sassone (TV Squad)

(MediaPost | Media News)

episodes of Arrested Development. • At 10, HBO has a new Joe Buck Live. • Bravo has a new Tabatha's Salon Makeover at 10.

Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:23:00 PM

• At 8, ABC has A Charlie Brown Christmas, followed by Disney's Prep & Landing, a new Scrubs and the season premiere of Better Off Ted. • NBC has the two-hour season finale of The Biggest Loser at 8, then a new Jay Leno Show. • FOX has a new, two-hour So You Think You Can Dance at 8. • The CW has two new episodes of 90210 and Melrose Place. • ABC Family has The Year Without A Santa Claus at 8, followed by A Miser's Brothers Christmas and Rudolph's Shiny N ew Year. • At 9, Food Network has a new

Christmas Chopped. • Discovery has a new Dirty Jobs at 9, followed by a new Ghost Lab. • Syfy has two new episodes of Scare Tactics at 9, then a new ECW.

Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:19:38 AM

Time Warner and magazine publishers Conde Nast and Hearst Corp are prepping a new digital joint venture to ready their Check your local TV listings for print titles for digital devices from e-books to tablets. more. They are creating a digital After the jump, the late night newsstand next year that would talk shows. Continue reading What's On deliver their titles and content to Tonight: Biggest Loser, Better mobile devices, according to Off Ted, Chopped, Joe Buck sources Users of the service would get a • History Channel has a new Live F i l e d u n d e r : L a t e N i g h t , digital newsstand where they How The Earth Was Made at 9. • VH-1 has 2009: That Really Programming, Celebrities, Talk c o u l d b u y s u b s c r i p t i o n s , Show, What To Watch Tonight, potentially by the month or year. Happened at 9. This content has passed through • Spike has a new Super Dave's Reality-Free fivefilters.org. P e r m a l i n k | E m a i l t h i s | | Spike-Tacular at 9. • Also at 9: IFC has two C o m m e n t s

Magic Shoes and Magic Cookies: Bullshit [Fitness] By Hamilton Nolan (Gawker)

to your legs and butt," "toning you up as you strut." Yea, bullshit. You know what else is bullshit, 1. There is no such thing as besides juice cleanses? The idea "toning." Never speak this word that wearing some ugly Reeboks again. with a curvy sole will give you 2. The New York Times has a an Ass of Steel. Bullshit. Also, story about these shoes today, cookie diets? Bullshit. confirming that the idea that With its "Easytone," Reebok's somewhat unstable shoes will just the latest shoe company to give you great muscle tone is make these magical ugly thick- pseudoscience. Along with your muscle toning is backed by a soled unstable shoes that are " "stability balls." single study involving just five designed to help give definition But the claim that the shoes offer Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:11:38 AM

people, not published in a peerreviewed academic journal... But it remains to be seen whether such effects will make a difference over time. In a July 2008 study of instability boards and balls, Canadian researchers found that among experienced exercisers, moderate instability balls like the Bosu had little effect on muscle activation. Oh, and diets based on eating prepackaged Diet Cookies for two meals a day? They are not so

healthy. Surprising, right? Because you would think that "eat a prepackaged preservativefilled 'cookie' product for breakfast and also for lunch and then eat a light dinner, restricting yourself to a near-starvation-level daily calorie intake" would be a recipe for a lifetime of healthy living. You can't squat with wobbly shoes and a cookie in your mouth.

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Gossip Girl : Bonfire of the Banalities [Power Rankings] By Brian Moylan (Gawker)

Personality Flaw: Has a problem with feelings: -2 Power Play: Is haunted by the There is cheap stunt cheaper ghost of character actors past: -1, than putting a lead character in Not only does he have ghost dad automotive peril. It's so cheap it messing with him, his fake step makes Serena's wardrobe look mother Lily is on him too: -2, wholesome. Why, oh, why can't Throws out Lily's flowers, which she die in a car wreck? Teasing kind of ruled: +2, Better than his us makes us powerless. dad: +1 Almost as powerless as Serena, Serena Bonus: For not being who managed to be stupider and Serena: +3 sluttier than usual last night, and Sexual Intrigue: Blames Blair she spent most of the hour either for feeling like a disappointment. trapped in a country house or Oh, hell no: -1 lying in a hospital bed and she Social Schemes: Doesn't throw still managed to get on our the homeless people out of his nerves. Her mother didn't do any new building: +3 better, as ultimate mean girl Lily WTF: Has a full-on LSD fell prey to a conniving bitch and flashback in the hospital: -1, It her slutty daughter. Eric and helps him grieve and get closer to Jenny had the lamest popularity Blair: +3 feud in the history of television, Total: 7 Dan got the cold dready shoulder Season to Date: 29 from Vanessa, and Chuck Bass Power Position: Up was seeing things. Things were a Blair: little bit different on the Upper Fashion Points: Giant East Side, so the power was in a houndstooth print blouse: +2, serious state of flux. '30s inspired hat and coat: +1, Dorota: Gets compliment on her outfit: Power Play: Vanya gets a name +1 check but she doesn't? She's Power Play: Dan has to tell her slipping!: -3 about Serena's accident: -1, Was Total: -3 right about Trip: +2 Season to Date: 55 Quip: "This is a homeless Power Position: Down shelter. A) gross and B) really?": Chuck: +1 Family Secrets: His mother is Serena Bonus: Is not Serena: +3 alive!: +2 (for having a mom), Sexual Intrigue: Brings Chuck His mother is alive!: -2 (for not breakfast in bed. She is not the knowing) help: -1, Chuck blames her for Fashion Points: Has a giant feeling like a failure: -2, Chuck is painting of Rachel Zoe on his ignoring her booty calls: -1 wall. We read it as ironic: +1 Total: 5 Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:04:29 AM

WTF: Hid pot in a book at the family summer home. That's our kinda guy: +2 Total: 5 Season to Date: 11 Power Position: Down Jenny: Fashion Points: This outfit finally happened: -1, Exercises her accessory superiority: +2 Serena Bonus: For not being Serena: +3 Social Schemes: Banishes a minion to walk across the street: +2, Her minion is plotting against her: -1, So are Eric and his trolly little friend: -1, Please, like Eric poses a threat: +2, Has to buy her friends: -1, She still has minions Season to Date: 27 to control: +2, Apologizes to Power Position: Up Eric: -2, Still manages to hold on Nate: Family Secrets: Lets Serena to power even though she's a know his grandfather is away and shitty queen: +2, This is the that Trip has to be lying to her: worst popularity skirmish ever: 3 +2 WTF: Drug dealer Jenny! I'm so Fashion Points: Manbangs: +1 Personality Flaw: He does not excited, I'm so excited, I'm so scared for this storyline: +20 do indignant well: -1 Power Play: Advises Dan to Total: 24 "man up." Please. Like this queen Season to Date: 1 even knows what it is: -1, Power Position: High Punching Trip is the butchest Rufus: Family Secrets: Knows Lily is thing he's ever done: +2 Serena Bonus: For not being keeping secrets: +2, Doesn't Serena: +3, For wanting to bone know what they are: -1 Personality Flaw: Has essentially her: -2 Sexual Intrigue: Thinks drama become a Real Housewife of majors are sexy. Of course: -1, New York: +2, Stop feeding Can't help Serena: -1, Knows that everyone!: -1 the fastest way to Serena's heart Power Play: Get's Lily's co-op is to give her drugs: +1, Stays at p r o x y . T h a t m a y s o u n d the hospital with Serena, which is demeaning, but there have got to kind of cute: +1, But she's be some seriously powerful folks who now have their fate in Rufus' Serena: -1

guitar-strumming, chili-stirring hands: +4 Serena Bonus: For not being Serena: +3 Sexual Intrigue: Lily wants to use "alone time" to confess her secrets, not engage in "rich lady and house painter" roleplay: -1, The co-op lady he is going to bang is a hot piece: +2 Total: 10 Season to Date: -4 Power Position: Up Vanessa: Power Play: Has a friend with a country house: +1, Worried about Serena even though they're not friends: +1 Serena Bonus: No Serena Bonus because she is Vanessa, after all. That's just as bad. Sexual Intrigue: Dating some dude: +2, We haven't seen him, so he's either busted or imaginary: -1, Shoots down Dan: +20, Really, V? This guy bagged Serena and awesome Olivia. He also has serious man guns and you're going to say no? That's unwise: -3 Total: 20 Season to Date: -8 Power Position: Up Eric: Money: Is so rich that he doesn't know how a vending machine works: +3 Personality Flaw: Is a lousy queenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in all senses of the word: -1 Power Play: Has a minion: +2, She's a weird little troll: -1 GOSSIP page 60

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GOSSIP continued from page 59

Serena Bonus: For having to put up with Serena for the rest of his life: +6 Social Schemes: Has a plan to take down Jenny: +3, It's kind of lame: -1, His plot gets foiled by Jenny: -1, This is the worst popularity skirmish ever: -3, Is friends with the real queen again: +2 Total: 9 Season to Date: -20 Power Position: Up Lily: Family Secrets: Her secret is getting out: -1, We have a feeling it's not so bad: 0 (just observation), Rufus still doesn't know: +1, Didn't tell Rufus when she should have: -1 Money: Her coat closet is bigger than most East Village studio apartments: +5, And that is just her closet for coats!: +2 Personality Flaw: Forgot it was the anniversary of her husband's death: -1 Power Play: Serena won't talk to her: -1, Wait, it's Serena: +2, Maureen thinks she's a skank: -1, Tries to save Chuck: +1 Serena Bonus: For not being Serena: +3, For giving birth to her: -6

WTF: At least we now know where Serena learned to be skanky and stupid: -1 Total: 2 Season to Date: -22 Power Position: Down Serena: Fashion Points: Manages to show major skanky cleavage while hanging in a cold country house alone. Can't someone give this girl a Snuggie?: -2, Put on her hospital gown backwards so she could show off her boobs: -1 Personality Flaw: "I want coffee and cable." Shut up, you whiny bitch. No wonder Trip left you alone: -2, As Maureen points out, she is "just a phase," like lesbianism in college: -2, Prefers Fitzgerald to Hemmingway. We hate to agree with her on an intellectual matter, but: +2, Wouldn't even get a Chappaquiddick joke if we made one: -1, No one will believe her over Trip because she is a skanky crack ho and he is a U.S. Rep: -1 Power Play: Needs to turn up her tacky music: -1, Doesn't want Trip to run over some wolves because she thinks they are the wolf pack from Twilight: -2, Somehow, through all of this

drama, she managed to help Chuck find his feelings: +2 Serena Bonus: For being Serena: -3 Sexual Intrigue: He boyfriend totally diddled Barney Frank to get a position on his committee: 1, Demoted from Jackie O to Marilyn: -2, Trip is totally playing her: -1, Her boyfriend leaves her for dead: -1, She turns on Trip faster than she'd inhale a line of coke off one of the tables at Marquee: +2, At least Nate still wants her: +1 WTF: She is trapped alone in a house in the woods. Why, oh why, couldn't there be a serial killer involved in this horror movie set up?: -1, She thinks she can leave Trip and catch a cab in the wilderness. You can't even catch a cab above 145th Street, what makes her think there will be little yellow life saver in this god-forsaken place? This is perhaps the stupidest thing Serena has ever said, and that is a very high bar: -5 Total: -19 Season to Date: -25 Power Position: Down, down, down, down, down Dan:

Power Play: Finds out about Serena's accident first: +2, Invites stupid Vanessa to the hospital. Does she even like Serena?: 0 (because we don't know, or care) Serena Bonus: For not being Serena: +3 Sexual Intrigue: Like he really needs to date another actress right now: -1, His new piece decorated her dorm room like it's the set from Clarissa Explains It All: -1, This slutty actress is serving him a piece on a silver platter and he turns it down: -1, Manages to grow a set and confesses his love for Vanessa: +2, He loves her after like a week?: -1, And it's Vanessa: -3, Vanessa doesn't want to date him. He went from bagging Serena and awesome Olivia to getting dissed by Our Lady of the Dreads: -100,000,000 Total: -100,000,000 Season to Date: -100,000,013 Power Position: He is devoid of all power

Ohio Killer Executed by 1st 1-Drug Lethal Injection in U.S. (FOXNews.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:10:25 AM

LUCASVILLE, Ohio Ohio has executed a killer through the first U.S. lethal injection using a single drug, a longer but supposedly less painful method than previous executions that required three drugs. Kenneth Biros was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. EDT Tuesday, about 43 minutes after he entered the death house at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Ohio changed from three drugs to a one-drug method after a failed attempt at putting a different inmate to death in September. The new method uses a drug common for euthanizing pets. Other states still use a combination of three drugs. Biros was sentenced to die for killing a woman in 1991. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Optical Genius: Natalia Brilli By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 12/7/2009 10:34:11 AM

It’s a crying shame that this Natalia Brilli leather contact lens

travel kit ($220) isn’t available in stores now because it would definitely be on my wish list for Santa. It’s an obvious jet-setting must-have, so I’ll patiently wait until spring to snag one of

Brilli’s “rockabilly” pieces of

studded leather with the hopes her brilliant creations will save me from my mounting contact lens catastrophes. For more on Natalia Brilli’s collection visit nataliabrilli.fr

—Natasha Clark, Associate Fashion Credits Editor Follow ELLE on Twitter. Become our Facebook fan!

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The New iTunes for Magazines (Or an Irrelevant Venture) Is Here! [Media] By Hamilton Nolan (Gawker) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:32:06 AM

Today, four prestigious magazine publishers, and News Corp, officially announced their new "digital storefront" for magazines and stuff. Buy it and put it on your E-reader! Are you sick of E-readers yet? You will be! And you'll be using one. Today's initiative has been variously billed as "iTunes for Magazines" (correct philosophically, but wildly overstated) and "Hulu for Magazines" (incorrect, since Hulu is free). Basically you can now go to this digital storefront and buy all your favorite Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, Time Inc., and News Corp publications, to read on your "portable digital device" of choice. Your crappy mobile phone, or iPhone, or upcoming Apple tablet, or, hey, Time Inc. is making its very own tablet, & ad infinitum. And, of course, this is not the only"digital storefront" thing—Hearst, a partner in this venture, is also going forward with its own personal digital storefront called Skiff, and there are similar services already operating, although, hey, there's not dominant iTunes-type player

yet, so you never know. This could be a successful venture. Then again, it could fade into irrelevance in months. Somebody will make the dominant digital storefront for content like this, just like someone will make the dominant digital reader. Magazine publishing companies, one would think, are likely to get smoked by someone like Apple in this particular sector. But they think it's worth the gamble, after

watching what happened to the music industry. But it'll take a few years. How much would you pay to read Sports Illustrated on your Ereader right now? You don't have an E-reader. And you can read Deadspin for free. So, you'd pay nothing. Changing that dynamic is what media companies need to worry about. And here's Time Inc's announcement to employees, just because we have it:

platform they choose. We already know that the next generation of mobile devices will be loaded with color touchscreens, flexible displays, video capabilities and other features that will make them ideal for consuming rich content and an appealing environment for advertisers. These devices will allow us to combine the best of what consumers love about magazines – quality, curated journalism, engaging content and beautiful photography – with the speed, convenience and portability of the latest technology. While Time Inc. is pursuing a number of initiatives that will help us expand our current digital businesses and develop new products and revenue streams, our participation in this venture is December 8, 2009 an important part of our efforts. To: Time Inc. Employees You'll be hearing more about it in From: Ann Moore the coming weeks and months. Re: New Digital Venture Today, five leading publishers In the meantime, for a look at including Time Inc., Conde Nast, some of the work Time Inc. is Meredith, Hearst and News doing around portable devices, Corporation announced the check out the demo Sports formation of a new venture to Illustrated developed, which will develop a digital storefront and a give you an idea of how our common reading application that digital content might be enjoyed will allow consumers to enjoy in the near future. their favorite magazine and www.si.com/tablet n e w s p a p e r c o n t e n t o n a n y A.M.

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Dan Abrams Wants to Be the Next Nick Denton [Media Crack] By Hamilton Nolan (Gawker)

Semi-related: We've heard from some recently laid-off Conde people that a contract clause says In your tremendous Tuesday that if they're offered an media column: Dan Abrams is "equivalent" job at the company trying to take us on, bloggers and they refuse, they're out of now just as glorious as grizzled their severance pay. So you could war reporters, Conde needs a PR be enjoying a job at a great person, and the New York Times Conde mag one day, then be Co. continues downward, dog. more or less ordered to go work PR Man and Mediaite overlord on a different mag there that you Dan Abrams is taking a page hate. Not that they would ever do from Gawker Media's weird virtue by comparison! that! Anyhow, send us Conde website naming book, launching Uh oh: A new CJR report finds Nast gossip, come on. t h r e e n e w s i t e s : S t y l e i t e , that "At least 68 bloggers, Web- The New York Times Co. today Geekosystem, and Sportsgrid, based reporters, and online said that they "currently project covering (guess!). Abrams tells e d i t o r s a r e i m p r i s o n e d , print advertising revenues to us: "Mediaite will be connected constituting half of all journalists decrease approximately 25 to the other three sites in that now in jail." God damn bloggers percent in the fourth quarter," they will share content and staff. already stole the hard work and and that online ad revenue is Abrams Research is, and will the jobs from real journalists. projected to rise 10%, and remain, a distinct and separate Now they steal the imprisonment severance costs to tally $50 business (much the same way so glory, too? million in the quarter. Also, the many other media companies Some PR people were canned in company is going to hang onto have content arms separate from the latest round of Conde Nast its paper in Worcester, MA, other parts of their businesses.)" layoffs, but now the company has probably because nobody wanted We welcome new competition a job listing on Mediabistro for a to pay a decent price for it. from Dan Abrams, because it PR director for the Fairchild gives us an undeserved feeling of Fashion Group and its CEO. Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:09:50 AM

Obama unveils boost for job creation (Financial Times - US homepage) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:29:02 AM

Barack Obama on Tuesday announced that at least some of the $200bn in lower-thanexpected spending under the

troubled asset relief programme would go towards projects aimed at ensuring that jobs growth â&#x20AC;&#x153;matches economic growthâ&#x20AC;?. In a speech on jobs to the Brookings Institution, the US president laid out a series of initiatives to spur this growth.

These included measures aimed at stimulating lending to small businesses, which have been hit hard by the drying up of credit over the past 15 months. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Sources: Brad Penny agrees to deal with St. Louis Cardinals By ESPN.com news services (ESPN.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:04:12 AM

Latest From Winter Meetings Latest From Winter Meetings The St. Louis Cardinals and right-handed pitcher Brad Penny have agreed to a deal, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Buster Olney. Law: Cards Get Penny's Worth One year of Brad Penny at $7.5 million is an excellent move for the St. Louis Cardinals, writes Keith Law. Blog Penny's one-year contract is worth $7.5 million and contains $1.5 million in performance bonuses, according to sources. The deal is pending a physical, which will likely be done on Tuesday. Penny recently turned down a one-year offer to stay with San Francisco. The two-time All-Star quickly drew interest from the NL Central champion Cardinals, facing the loss of free-agent pitchers Joel Pineiro, John Smoltz and Todd Wellemeyer. Penny went a combined 11-9 with a 4.88 ERA in 30 starts for Boston and the Giants last season. He won a career-high 16 games in 2006 and 2007 with the Los Angeles Dodgers and was an

All-Star both seasons. He was slowed by shoulder trouble in 2008. The Red Sox signed Penny to a $5 million, one-year contract during the last offseason. He never found his rhythm with Boston and went 7-8 with a 5.61 ERA. Penny went 1-6 in his last 11 starts for the Red Sox, and they cut him in late August. He joined the Giants, who were still in the wild-card race, on Aug. 31 and found his old form back in the National League. Penny was 4-1 with a 2.59 ERA in six starts for San Francisco. He is 105-84 lifetime and won twice for Florida in its 2003 World Series victory over the Yankees. The Cardinals won their division behind big years from aces Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright and a fine season from Pineiro. Smoltz made seven starts after being released by Boston and Wellemeyer made 21 starts during an injury-interrupted season. Information from The Associated Press contributed to this report. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Iverson Shows Up Late, but Still a Hero? By Jay Mariotti (Fanhouse Main)

dump him three years ago, he was treated like a conquering god by a rocking sellout crowd at Submitted at 12/7/2009 4:50:00 PM Wachovia Center. Never mind F i l e d u n d e r : N B A his arrests, his domestic issues. PHILADELPHIA -- He needs Never mind his embarrassing rant them. And, somehow, they need about the tedium of "prac-tiss," a h i m . T h i s i s a s t r o k e o f word he mentioned in jest 20 considerable good fortune for times in what mushroomed into a Allen Iverson, one of sport's Y o u T u b e - h e a v y s y m b o l o f galling misfits of the last dozen petulant athletes in the 21st years, a man-child who doesn't century. Never mind his frequent deserve love from the public after tantrums, his crude rap music, his a r e i g n o f m i s b e h a v i o r , fights with Larry Brown and immaturity and defiance that other coaches. Never mind how overwhelmed his spectacular he refused to enter a game in the talent and magnetism. But just as fourth quarter and literally was his career seemed lost and maybe sent home on Dec. 6, 2006, dead, he found home again. which led Sixers management to The team he defined for years, trade him to the Denver Nuggets. the Philadelphia 76ers, has been And never mind that he showed an NBA non-entity. Of the 15 up late at the arena just as he did teams in the Eastern Conference, in the old days -- at 5:55 PM they are next-to-worst in the Iverson Standard Time -- only an standings. Of the 30 teams in the hour and five minutes before league, they are next-to-last in tipoff against, of all teams, the a t t e n d a n c e i n a r e n o w n e d Nuggets. "Traffic," he mumbled, basketball town. They needed a t h o u g h h i s t e a m m a t e s a n d reason for people to care, an coaches had to fight the same infusion of life, any sort of rush-hour conditions on a winter conversation piece in a town afternoon. dominated by the Eagles and He's back anyway, with all Phillies. And who should drop p r e s e n t a n d p r e v i o u s b . s . f r o m t h e s k y , w i t h o u t a forgiven. "No. It didn't mean p a r a c h u t e , b u t A . I . , a n anything to me," said coach unexpected potential Answer to Eddie Jordan, already dealing the question of why the Sixers with the late arrivals that drove became so irrelevant, miserable Brown and other coaches crazy. and awful. "We don't run through plays for Unless, of course, he just makes five guys who are going out there them more irrelevant, miserable to shoot shots (before the game)." and awful. Or in the words of general Monday night, in his return to manager Ed Stefanski, the man the franchise that couldn't wait to who had the brainstorm -- or

brain cramp -- to bring him back: "He's like a rock star." When Iverson ran onto the court for warmups, he received a long, loud standing ovation. When the big-screen TV played a fiveminute video montage of his first Philadelphia experience, he received another standing ovation. When he was introduced and kissed the team logo at midcourt, the noise was deafening. When he took the court, hugging everyone in sight and shaking hands with workers at the scorer's table, he received another loud ovation. When he took his first shot, all of 11 seconds into the game, they cheered even though he missed the gimme layup. They roared when he made his first shot. They got excited every time he was passed the ball, moaning when he missed. And they almost fainted when he bowed to them. Sophisticated fans, they are not. When he finally left after playing almost 38 minutes, shooting 4-of-11 for 11 points while adding six assists, they

gave him one last thundering tribute. They did so despite the fact the Sixers, who led by seven points late in the third quarter, stopped playing defense in the fourth, allowed 14 consecutive points and lost 93-83 to a superior Denver team. And they did so even though Iverson was schooled by the player for whom he was traded last year, Chauncey Billups, who had 31 points, eight assists and eight rebounds in the victory. It was the Sixers' 10th straight loss, dropping their record to an inescapable 5-16. Yet afterward, as mobs of reporters surrounded his new locker, Iverson insisted he was thrilled to be here. "The way the fans reacted made it real hard on me and made me more nervous than I already was. ... That's the best feeling of all, to feel appreciated." - Allen Iverson on his reception Monday"It was deja vu. I was back home, a real good feeling," he said, slumped in a chair. "The way the fans reacted made it real hard on me and made me more nervous than I already was. I didn't expect them to act how they did toward me. That's the best feeling of all, to feel appreciated. That's all you want when you have a relationship with someone, whether it's a marriage or a friendship or anything like that: to feel appreciated. That's what drives me to give them everything I have on the court. "I thought maybe I'd play five or

10 minutes tonight. That's what drove me to play 37 minutes. I wanted to be out there for the fans. Not being on the court for (a while), and just having one day of practice, I'm trying to learn everything on the fly. So I'm proud of myself. My heart was saying yes, but my body was saying no. My legs were weak, my arms were weak. But I gave it all I have, because I owe it to the fans." The fans actually buy into this shlock. They do so in a town where Donovan McNabb, who sat courtside, has been crucified for not winning a Super Bowl while living a much more upstanding life than Iverson. There are times when Iverson seems quite disingenuous when offering up his nonsense, such as when he signed with the Sixers last week and swore things would be different despite having problems in three subsequent cities: Denver, Detroit and Memphis, where he mysteriously bailed after a brief stop. At one point during his first press conference, he choked up. Did it show he has a heart? Or fantastic acting skills? "In your dreams, you always hope for the best," he said. "That's what I'm doing. I love these people here. They know that. They love me back. Just seeing people I'm accustomed to seeing, seeing the reporters, seeing some of the fans when I IVERSON page 69

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BCS Quarantines TCU, Boise in 'Separate But Equal' Bowl By Clay Travis (Fanhouse Main)

should be a playoff -- those have been done plenty of times in the past. This is a column about the Submitted at 12/7/2009 2:50:00 PM BCS's inability to prevent a Filed under: Boise State, TCU, playoff from happening. In fact, Bowl Games If you needed a each of these moves has provided sign that the BCS muckety- further evidence that the BCS mucks are beginning to tremble will crumble before all is said behind the Big Six castle walls, a and done. Why? Because each of Fiesta Bowl matchup between these decisions is an attempt at Boise State and TCU is the latest pacification. And pacifiers only evidence that something is rotten work for babies. in Denmark. Let's begin with the web site I've written before about which does for the BCS what C o n g r e s s ' s a n t i t r u s t MTV's Jersey Shore does for the investigations and the fig-leaf state of New Jersey. That is, it design of the BCS entity-- it's not confirms that all of your worst actually named -- that makes impressions about the state and everyone gnash their teeth at the the system are actually true. end of the season. The Fiesta Don't believe me, read this B o w l m a t c h u p b e t w e e n language taken directly from the Mountain West and WAC teams front page of the site:"Just try to is the latest in a string of create an eight-team playoff panicked moves that demonstrate b a s e d o n l a t e s t r a n k i n g s true BCS fear. (December 6th). Should two-loss First, the BCS named a new Oregon (10-2, #7) and Ohio State leader, then, and you can't even (10-2, #8) get in but not the other make this stuff up, they added FOUR teams with two losses: Ari Fleisher, formerly the White Georgia Tech (11-2, #9), Iowa House spokesperson for George (10A2, #10), Penn State (10-2, W. Bush, to help with public #13), BYU (10-2, #14)? If you relations. Next the BCS added a think the BCS is controversial, Twitter page,@insidethebcs, that try sorting that out. A playoff reads, strangely, as if the Iranian w o u l d g u a r a n t e e b i g g e r government joined Twitter. problems, more controversy, Finally, in perhaps the biggest more disappointed teams and snafu of all, they created a Web more frustrated fans." Read that s i t e c a l l e d , w a i t f o r i t , last sentence again. playoffproblem.com Seriously, read it again. All of these moves reflected an Let's break it down argument inability to comprehend the style. Keeping in mind, of rapidly shifting sands of social course, that this is the BCS's media in the modern era. So this official position on why there is isn't a column about why there no playoff.

Per their Web site, playoffproblem.com, which, by the way, looks as if was designed by eighth graders for a school assignment, the BCS anti-playoff rationale relies on four key points: A playoff would: A.) "guarantee bigger problems" Such as? If your son or daughter came up to you and said, "I have to get a new car or we're guaranteeing bigger problems," you'd laugh at them, right? You'd be insulted that they thought so little of your intellect that merely saying, "guarantee bigger problems" would make you consider their situation anew. Well, the BCS doesn't respect your intellect. That is their argument. B.) "more controversy" Again, if you take words that exist with a negative connotation, such as controversy, and put the word "more" in front of them, you aren't really making a constructive argument. You just sound like a lame politician used a charged word to elicit a reaction. For instance, who is in favor of

more robbery? More abortion? Put simply, tossing the word more in front of a word like controversy is the last refuge of scoundrels. C.) "more disappointed teams" Here we go again with the use of the word more. This time it's paired with another negative word. Who in the world could be in favor of more disappointment? I'll tell you. Proponents of genocide and playoffs. As evidence for their argument, the BCS has once again, brought the strong intellectual capital. They capitalized FOUR in the paragraph, "the other FOUR teams with two losses." Presumably, these would be the disappointed teams, those that are narrowly left out of a playoff. Even if, you know, the teams that are left out include three teams that didn't win their conference and one, Georgia Tech, that not even Tech fans would defend in the wake of the Georgia loss. Since they want to play the argument via capitalizing words game, I'll play along. Only, I'll raise them one all caps number. FIVE. As in: There are FIVE undefeated teams this season. That means THREE teams that haven't lost a game have nothing to play for. d. "more frustrated fans" Really? Would the teams that are left out of the playoff really be more

frustrated than they are now? Would teams like Boise State and TCU, who will never get a chance to play for a championship, really be more frustrated by this outcome? Which brings me to this, matching Boise State and TCU proves that the BCS is running scared. Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook Why? Because putting both these teams together eliminates any chance that the non-big six teams could run their record to 5-1 in BCS games. A record, mind you, that would be better than any other single big six conference's record in BCS games on a percentage basis. And a record that would crush the ACC's 2-9 overall performance in twice as many games. Matching either of these teams against big six conference foes would have put the BCS on trial, offering up ready-made proof, yet again, that non-big six teams can contend for the title and beat erstwhile favorites. Already Utah has twice proven they can stand toe-to-toe with the big conference teams. So has Boise State in their memorable Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma. Only Hawaii has been embarrassed. And ask Ohio State or Oklahoma if you think Hawaii is the only team with embarrassing losses in the BCS. Matching either of these teams against big six conference foes BCS page 71

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McNair Lessons Cast Pall Over Tiger By Lisa Olson (Fanhouse Main) Submitted at 12/7/2009 4:20:00 PM

Out of the nightclubs they slink, itching to sell the details about their trysts with Tiger Woods to the highest bidder. The alleged particulars are lurid, perhaps even embarrassing to Tiger if he has a soul -- he is said to enjoy hair-pulling; he is miserable in his marriage; there were encounters with a porn star; a sexual rendezvous with a flapjacks waitress in his SUV before Tiger drove her home to the trailer park -- and if Woods escapes this scandal with only a few scratches, a $164 careless driving fine and dents in his false image, he should wear his lucky red shirt every day. As one British tabloid put it Monday, Tiger is at 7-under, and we'll probably reach the 19th hole before the week is through. I'm not suggesting all the mistresses share the same crazy gene, but the more rocks that get turned over, the more it appears Tiger ought to give thanks that his "personal failings" and "transgressions" -- such brilliantly crafted reasoning from his PR machine -- didn't lead him down the same garden path as Steve McNair. It's been a shade over five months since McNair, the former NFL quarterback, was executed by his mistress Sahel Kazemi, who then turned the gun on herself. Kazemi, a 20-year-old

waitress who had been openly dating the married McNair, was said to be distraught over learning he was also involved in another extramarital affair. Kazemi was a lovely, confused and foolish young woman who became unhinged by what she thought was love gone wrong. She did an evil, horrible thing, killing McNair and herself, and in the bloody aftermath, the sports world pretended it had actually learned a few things. The reflection and handwringing lasted about five minutes, or roughly the time it took for the next groupie to pout her lips, flip her hair and lure the latest willing athlete off the court or out of the bunker. Woods, the fortunate cad, has

and crisis counselors to make the White House folks blush. It's reasonable to assume the witness is Tiger's wife Elin, who told Windermere, Fla., police she used a golf club to smash out the back windows of the Cadillac Escalade to rescue him. When police arrived, Elin was kneeling over Woods, who was bleeding from cuts on his lips. The vehicle engine was still running, its front door was jammed and both rear door windows were broken. A golf cart was in the road, two golf clubs lay nearby. Both Tiger and Elin have refused to answer questions from the police about the accident, or the events that precipitated it. If there was a domestic violence incident, and if the genders had been plenty on his plate: the latest according to a police report reversed, no PR machine in the world would have the power to reports, tucked inside the never- released Monday. ending river of salacious details In the report, Evans writes, "A c u r b t h e d e m a n d f o r a n about his gal-pals ("Tiger used witness stated that the driver had explanation. But since it's a me as a sex toy!" "She's a sex- consumed alcohol earlier in the beautiful, slight woman who is addicted cougar!"), are far more d a y a n d t h e s a m e w i t n e s s believed to have attacked her noalarming than his prowling. removed the driver from the good cheating dog of a husband, There's a Florida trooper, one of vehicle after the collision. Also, it's a Saturday Night Live skit the first on the scene after the the same witness stated that the celebrating a scorned chick's world's No. 1 golfer crashed his driver was prescribed medication revenge. Elin reportedly packed SUV into a fire hydrant and a ( A m b i e n a n d V i c o d i n ) . her bags and moved out of the t r e e i n h i s e x c l u s i v e Impairment of the driver is also couple's palatial estate Monday. neighborhood around 2:25 a.m. suspected due to the careless Everything is twisted in this on Nov. 27, who suspected driving that resulted in the traffic Tiger tale. Even the statement he released following the accident Woods was driving under the crash." influence. The trooper, Joshua A first-responder's account isn't dripped with arrogance. Evans, sought a subpoena for sufficient evidence? Seems like Everything is twisted in this Eldrick Tiger Woods' blood the prosecutor's decision might Tiger tale. Even the statement he results from the hospital where be different if the driver didn't released following the accident W o o d s w a s t a k e n , b u t also happen to be the first athlete dripped with arrogance. He prosecutors rejected the petition to earn a billion dollars, if he MCNAIR page 73 for insufficient information, didn't employ enough lawyers

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Packers Outslug Ravens in Ugly Monday Night Flag-Fest By Dan Graziano (Fanhouse Main)

anything like that. There were 23 penalties in the game, and nine were for pass interference. And Submitted at 12/7/2009 5:59:00 PM of the 310 total penalty yards, Filed under: Packers, Ravens, 205 came on those nine pass NFL Analysis GREEN BAY, interference calls. It got to the Wis. -- The Packers knew the point where you wondered if Ravens' reputation. They spent that's just the way the two sides t h e i r w e e k s t u d y i n g t a p e , had decided to play pass defense watching Ray Lewis and his -- just commit interference on friends play defense. They met every play and hope they don't and talked and planned and call it. decided that the best way to try "I was like, 'We might as well and beat the Ravens was ... to keep throwing it up there, play as much like the Ravens as because either we're going to possible. catch it or they're going to throw "Their defense is notorious for a flag,'" Baltimore receiver Mark being physical and shutting teams Clayton said. "When the game down," Packers linebacker Nick g e t s l i k e t h a t , t h o s e D B s Barnett said. "And we thought it (defensive backs) just want to do would be a good week to go out everything they can to make sure and do what everybody says they it's not complete. Some might do." have been close, but pretty much, The result may have looked they were certainly blatant." hideous to a national Monday Remember, this is a guy on the Night Football audience -- a 27- losing team talking. If the Ravens 14 Packers victory that included were upset about the way the the second-most total penalty game was called, they were yards of any game in NFL stunningly professional about it. history. But to the Packers, who Coach John Harbaugh said, "On improved to 8-4 and stayed very some of them, I don't know what much alive in the NFC playoff they were calling," and Ravens race, it was a beautiful, flawless receiver Derrick Mason got win. whistled for an unsportsmanlike "It was tough, because some of conduct penalty after he was those penalties put them right on flagged for an offensive pass the goal line," Barnett said. "But interference penalty that wiped when you have a physical game out a 46-yard fourth-quarter like that, you hate to be out there completion. But when the game saying, 'Hey! Be Safe! Don't grab was over, the Ravens seemed 'em!' " almost impressed with the Certainly, there was no evidence Packers and the boldness with on this night that anybody said which they'd stood up to them.

"Some of the penalties you question and some you don't," Ravens linebacker and noted officiating critic Ray Lewis said. "But the bottom line is, you can't come into somebody's house and have that many penalties." The Ravens took the long view, and they were right to do so. If anything, they came out on the long end of the penalty calls. They actually gained nearly as many yards on Packer penalties (175) as they did with their own offense (185). Twice, a Packer pass interference call set Baltimore up with a first-andgoal on the one-yard line. But only once did the Ravens turn that very big break into points. And that, in the end, was the reason they lost. Baltimore trailed 24-14 with 9:46 left when Packers cornerback Tramon Williams was called for pass interference in the end zone for the second time in the game. The Ravens' first attempt from the one-yard line lost two yards as Willis McGahee was tackled behind the line of scrimmage. And on second down, Baltimore

quarterback Joe Flacco rolled out to the right, avoided a sack and then -- when throwing the ball out of the back of the end zone would have been the wise thing to do -- threw an inconceivably bad interception to (irony!) Williams. "A stupid decision and a worse throw," Flacco said, accurately and to his credit. "It was second down, so you don't really need to make a play there. You can give yourself another shot on third down and still kick a field goal. I didn't set my feet, didn't get enough on the ball and I underthrew it." Pretty much a recipe for disaster, and if that didn't cost Baltimore the game then Flacco's next throw, two minutes later after a three-and-out by the Packers, did. Because that one was intercepted too, albeit on a much more challenging defensive play by Green Bay linebacker A.J. Hawk. It was actually the third interception of the night for Flacco and the seventh total turnover in one of the flat-out ugliest NFL games of the season. "The penalties were unbelievable for both sides," Packers coach Mike McCarthy said. "I thought it was a tightly officiated football game with two competitive, physical football teams. That's the game we anticipated coming into Monday night throughout our preparation." That was the Packers' mantra all week. They wanted to play like

the Ravens -- be physical, intimidate and don't be afraid to get called for penalties. "Games like this are ugly sometimes," Barnett said. "But no matter what it looked like on the exterior, on the interior it was still a win. We don't want to lead the league in penalties, but at the same time, we've got to play football the way we know how." On this night, they wanted that to include an homage to their opponent, and their hope was that their opponent would feel it in all the wrong ways. They appear to have got their wish. While the Packers stayed very much afloat in the NFC playoff hunt, the Ravens fell to 6-6 and remained a game back of Jacksonville for the final wild-card spot in the AFC. On his way out of the locker room, somebody asked secondyear Ravens running back Ray Rice (54 yards on 14 carries) what he thought of his first visit to Lambeau Field. "Just Lambeau Field," Rice said. "I mean, it's out in the middle of nowhere, it's old, it's cold. Everything about this place is terrible, to be honest with you." All depends on your perspective, Ray. But when you lose as ugly as the Ravens did Monday, it's bound to leave a bad taste. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

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Heisman Trophy finalists: Texas Longhorns' Colt McCoy leads finalists for award By Associated Press (ESPN.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:31:34 AM

Heisman Trophy Picks Heisman Trophy Picks VIDEO PLAYLIST • Heisman Trophy Picks Heisman Trophy Picks • Heisman Trophy Finalists Announced Heisman Trophy Finalists Announced • Mike Golic On Heisman Finalists Mike Golic On Heisman Finalists NEW YORK -- Tim Tebow added another Heisman first to his long list of accomplishments just by being selected a finalist for this year's trophy. Tebow became the first player to be invited to the Heisman Trophy presentation ceremony three times when the Florida quarterback -- along with Colt McCoy, Mark Ingram, Toby Gerhart and Ndamukong Suh-was named a finalist Monday for college football's most prestigious player of the year award. "Having the chance to go back to New York means a lot to me," Tebow said in statement. "It is a special honor but it wouldn't be possible for me to have this opportunity without my teammates and coaches." The Heisman Trophy will be

awarded Saturday at 8 p.m. on ESPN. The presentation ceremony has been televised since 1981 and since 1982 at least three players have been invited to attend. The last time as many as five players were invited to New York was 2004, when USC quarterback Matt Leinart won the award. Tebow, who was the first sophomore to win the Heisman in 2007, is trying to become the second two-time Heisman winner, joining Ohio State's Archie Griffin. Tebow finished third in the voting last year, while getting the most first-place votes. He's also the first player -- and sixth overall -- to finish in the top five of the Heisman balloting three times since Georgia tailback Herschel Walker did it in the early 1980s. McCoy was the runner-up last season to Oklahoma's Sam Bradford and has led Texas to the BCS national championship game this season. Ingram has rushed for 1,542 yards and scored 15 touchdowns for Alabama. Stanford's Gerhart, meanwhile, has run for more yards (1,736) and scored more touchdowns (26) than any player in the nation. And Nebraska's Suh had 4½ sacks in an attention-grabbing

performance against Texas in the Big 12 title game. He is the first defensive player to be a finalist since 1997, when Michigan cornerback Charles Woodson became the first full-time defensive player to win the Heisman. Tebow and McCoy entered this season as heavy Heisman favorites, but neither has played as well as last year and neither will go into Saturday's presentation as the clear frontrunner. Tebow returned for his senior season to try and lead the Gators to a third national title in four seasons, but he won't reach that goal. After being No. 1 almost all season, Florida lost to Alabama 32-13 in the Southeastern Conference title game on Saturday and was knocked out of the national championship race. Long Odds For Suh? Ndamukong Suh, the first defensive Heisman finalist since Charles Woodson in 1997, still has the odds stacked against him. Woodson is the single primarily defensive player to ever win the Heisman Trophy. Defensive players who finished Top 5 in Heisman Voting Since 1970: The loss likely damaged Tebow's chances at a second Heisman, too. He has passed for 2,413 yards and rushed for 859 yards this year, but he hasn't been

quite as productive as he was the past two seasons. Like Tebow, McCoy also returned for his senior season to make a championship run. He has Texas a victory away from its first national title since 2005, but his numbers also have fallen off compared to '08. McCoy has passed for 3,512 yards with 27 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. He also nearly threw away the Longhorns' national championship hopes on the second-to-last play of the Nebraska game, coming within a second of letting the clock run out before Texas could attempt the winning field goal in a 13-12 victory. McCoy could become the first player to win the Heisman the season after finishing second since Walker did it in 1982. If there is a favorite, it seems to be Ingram. Hesimanpundit.com, which polls 13 voters throughout the season, had Ingram on top of it's latest results, just ahead of Gerhart. Ingram could become Alabama's first Heisman Trophy winner. He gave his Heisman campaign a late boost by running for 113 yards and scoring three touchdowns in the SEC title game against Florida. "I'm looking forward to the experience and appreciate the opportunity to represent our team

at the Heisman ceremony," Ingram said in a statement. Gerhart also ended his season with a flourish, running for 205 yards and three touchdowns and throwing a touchdown pass in a victory against Notre Dame. "I am most pleased that my efforts along with those of so many others this year have put Stanford Football back on the national map," Gerhart said. But nobody finished stronger than Suh, who put together one of the most dominant defensive games in recent college football history in Nebraska's near-upset of Texas. "It is good to see that the Heisman voters have recognized the true impact a dominant defensive lineman like Suh can have on a football game," Nebraska coach Bo Pelini said. Suh finished the season with 12 sacks in 13 games. Among the top players who didn't make the cut were Clemson's versatile tailback C.J. Spiller and Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore. Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Philly Fans Still Love Iverson, Sixers Still Lose (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

Dennis Deitch saw encouraging signs from Iverson despite the loss. Allen Iverson created buzz, if At CBS Sports, a cynical Ken not a victory, in his first game Berger sees Iverson’s signing in a back in a Philadelphia uniform. different light. “Instead of Hoping for a boost at the box adapting his game and his office and in the box score, the p e r s p e c t i v e o n h i s o w n 76ers recently signed Iverson, i m p o r t a n c e , h e r a n i n t o who spent the first 10 years of his comforting arms,” Berger writes. p r o c a r e e r w i t h t h e m . O n “He chose the easy path, the one Monday, the Sixers sold out for that will allow him to play out his the first time this season, but the days in a place where people still result was the same: their 10th revere him as the superstar that straight loss, 93-83 to Denver, h e w a s — a n d w h e r e h i s the team to which Philly exiled teammates, coaches, and handlers Iverson in 2006. Associated Press will give him the kid-glove Allen Iverson does not believe an treatment he requires.”* * * infraction occurred. Green Bay beat Baltimore 27-14 Iverson admitted to nerves in a game as ugly and brutal as before his latest Sixers debut, in the freezing temperatures at which he managed 11 points, six Lambeau Field. The teams assists and five rebounds. Not combined for seven turnovers bad for someone battling to get and 310 yards in penalties. But back in shape after he quit the Packers emerged from the p l a y i n g f o r t h e M e m p h i s wreckage to capture their fourth Grizzlies after three games a straight win. They’re now 8-4 month ago. “Whatever comes of and in good position for a playoff this surreal back-to-the-future berth. experiment, it must be said that “Despite the ugly nature of the Game 1 of the Second Iverson contest, a win is a win, especially Epoch was a smashing success,” against a stubborn Baltimore Phil Sheridan writes in the team. This time of year, there are Philadelphia Inquirer. “The moments when ugly can still be Wachovia Center was the place beautiful,” Mike Freeman writes to be.” at CBS Sports. The Delaware County Times’s In the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:56:39 AM

has plummeted, despite the Jaguars’ 7-5 record, putting them in playoff contention. In the Los Angeles Times, Sam Farmer looks at the two possible relocation options for the smallmarket team: Los Angeles or London.* * * Penn State’s cigar-smoking Mike Vandermause credits the Packers for settling down after women’s volleyball coach has a the Ravens turned a rout into a penchant for swearing. And game by scoring touchdowns winning. In his 31st season, Russ only 30 seconds apart late in the Rose has led the Nittany Lions to a record 98 straight victories, the third quarter. The Baltimore Sun’s Mike longest in NCAA Division I Preston says Ravens second-year women’s sports. Part of Rose’s quarterback Joe Flacco showed success comes from using the unofficial statistics he scribbles he still has a lot to learn. In Pittsburgh, the defending into his notepad every game, not champion Steelers aren’t looking the official stats, John Branch like the team that won the Super writes in the New York Times.* Bowl in February. Far from it, * * after losing their fourth straight Danica Patrick is expected to game Sunday, 27-24 to Oakland. announce today she’ll drive in Fans want to blame cornerback N a s c a r p a r t - t i m e i n t h e Ike Taylor, who gave up two big Nationwide Series while still pass plays against the Raiders, competing in the IndyCar Series. for the loss. The Pittsburgh She’s made oodles of money and Tribune-Review’s John Harris has even won a race, the 2008 says it’s unfair to blame Taylor Indy Japan 300, making her the first woman to win an openfor the Steelers’ woes. NFL.com’s Steve Wyche says w h e e l r a c e . S h e ’ s b e e n Pittsburgh doesn’t deserve to competitive in her five seasons, earning 41 top 10 finishes. So her make the playoffs.* * * Anyone reading the NFL box addition of Nascar races is scores closely has noticed that surprising, especially when it’s to Jacksonville’s home attendance the minor leagues of the circuit,

not to the top-level Sprint Cup Series. She’ll race for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s JR Motorsports. Yahoo’s Jay Hart calls this a bold move. At Fox Sports, Larry McReynolds says Patrick faces a steep learning curve.* * * Jesus Leonardo claims to have won $450,000 over the past decade playing the ponies without buying a ticket. Leonardo is a stooper, someone who runs discarded tickets through a ticket scanner. Most are losers, of course, but the New Yorker has found enough winners to make it lucrative to hang around racetracks and betting parlors. In the New York Times, Vincent M. Mallozzi writes that the “Secretariat of stoopers” came by his quirky career by accident. – Tip of the Fix cap to reader Don Hartline. 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 Garey at ris84rap@gmail.com

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IVERSON continued from page 63

go out to eat at night. Just the smell of Philadelphia when I go outside." The smell of Philadelphia? Cheesesteaks, Tastykakes and oil refineries? Let's move on to the past. Address all the drama issues for us, Allen. Have you really changed? "It's a bad rap. And I've done a lot of things to bring it on myself, mistakes and decisions I've made throughout my career. That bad rap followed me and ended up hurting me," he said. "I'm human. During my time here, I'm going to make mistakes again. It's going to happen. You need something the size of a phone book for all the issues people have with me." Good answer. But is it believable after three additional failures in other towns? "You never know what you've got until it's gone," Iverson said. "I thought all those situations were going to work because that's the confidence I have in myself. I ran into some bad situations. I always thought it was strange having another uniform. I couldn't feel comfortable with another uniform. When I had the opportunity to come back here, I couldn't turn it down. I'm just happy." But for how long? When will he start wanting 30 shots a game, especially if resident star Andre Iguodala -- who was introduced as the ceremonial last player -keeps going off for 31-point

nights as he did against Denver? And when will he start encountering problems off the court? "With the mistakes I've made in my life, I've created a picture of me that's not me," Iverson said. "I did a lot of things when I was young that I'm not proud of. But I think those things helped me to be the man that I am now. The last couple of years have been hell. All I want to do is play basketball and help the guys that I play with. "I want to fit in. I want to be a part of any success we have. I just want to be one of the guys. I don't need a whole bunch of praise. I don't need a whole lot of accolades. I just want to play basketball. And this is where my love is." But his love quickly could turn to resentment and turmoil if the losses keep piling up. If Iverson is smart, he will study the career path of Gary Payton. Like Iverson, Payton encountered controversy on and off the court. But he had the wisdom to accept different roles late in his career, grow up, win a championship and secure a better Hall of Fame legacy for himself. Right now, Iverson still is known as a problem child first and a great player second. He'll go to the Hall of Fame and, yes, he's the best little guard ever to play the game. But this is a critical time for him. He is defining how he'll be remembered at the end of his career.

Can he muster up some dignity without winning a championship? Or even contending for the playoffs? "Yes, because I'm happy -- it's the only thing that matters to me,'' he said. "A championship is a goal of mine and it's something I want in my life, but it won't kill me. I don't wake up every day thinking I haven't won a championship. If I leave this game with no championship, I have accomplished a lot, been around a lot of great people. The NBA has been a blessing for me. I'm in a situation now where I'm happy, win or lose. At this point of my career, that's what I want. I don't want to be somewhere where I'm not looking forward to go to practice every day." Practice? Allen Iverson looks forward to prac-tiss? I mean, it's prac-tiss. Why does he need to prac-tiss? For now, it appears he's happy because the Sixers are using him as a starter, something that wasn't happening in Memphis and drove him away. Should the Sixers grow tired of his act, they can set him free Jan. 10 with a minimum of expense. If they keep him, they'll only have to pay him $650,000 for his one-year, prorated deal. That makes him the lowest-paid player on the floor virtually every night, a far cry from his maximum-salary years. This explains why Sixers management is so enthusiastic, at least for now. They more than

paid for his salary with Monday night's sellout crowd of 20,664. "This kid has a legacy here in Philadelphia," said Stefanski, speaking of a "kid" who's 34. "He's arguably one of the top players to ever play in this city. If he doesn't get back in the NBA and play the way we want him to and the way he needs to, it's not going to help him. He wants it, and he wants it badly, to show that he is (still) an NBA player and who he is, especially coming back to Philly. This is a low risk for the organization and a high reward." "I would like to compare him to Brett Favre," said Jordan, really stretching things. "A guy who people think is too old to play and he's almost having an MVP year. I woke up and thought maybe he could do that. It's not a big maybe. I think he could be that." It's not only a big maybe, it's a big impossibility. But they love Iverson anyway in Philly, not caring that many of the fans arrived at the arena before he did. During introductions, they played "Eye of the Tiger" when A.I. trotted out. Rocky Balboa, he is not. But a rocky road, it has been. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Atlus announces PhotoWorld for DSi -- through the ESRB By JC Fletcher (Joystiq) Submitted at 12/8/2009 1:00:00 PM

Using its cost-effective ESRB method of announcing new games, Atlus revealed a new DSi program called PhotoWorld. As you may expect from a game with that title, it involves taking pictures with the DSi camera. Players shoot a self-portrait and then "customize the pictures with a variety of stamps, photo effects, and text boxes." As Siliconera notes, Atlus already sort of has a program like this on DSiWare. Nintendo's Sparkle Snapshots is based on Atlus's popular Print Club (Purikura) booths. We look forward to finding out how this one differs -- there's absolutely no way it could be any more sparkly, that's for sure. Of course, we aren't even sure this is DSiWare -- while this sounds like the kind of thing you would sell as a download, all we know is that it's for the DSi. Atlus announces PhotoWorld for DSi -- through the ESRB originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Tiger Woods' mother-in-law taken to hospital from Woods' home By ESPN.com news services (ESPN.com)

transferred it to Orange County Fire Rescue. Orange County Fire Rescue Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:06:29 AM spokeswoman Genevieve Latham Tiger's Mother-In-Law Taken earlier wouldn't confirm the To Hospital Tiger's Mother-In- address but said an adult was Law Taken To Hospital taken to Health Central Hospital WINDERMERE, Fla. -- Tiger in Ocoee, Fla. Woods' mother-in-law is in stable Woods' agent, Mark Steinberg, condition after suffering stomach did not immediately respond to pains, which prompted a 911 call an e-mail requesting comment, from his home for the second The Associated Press reported. time in two weeks. According to WESH-TV, a radio Barbro Holmberg was taken by log showed the patient initially ambulance early Tuesday to refused transport, but was later Health Central Hospital, hospital listed as an advanced life support spokesman Dan Yates said. He patient. The station also reported said her condition was not that a black Cadillac SUV was serious but he could not be more seen leaving the hospital shortly specific because of privacy laws. after the ambulance arrived, and Holmberg is the mother of that the license plate was similar Woods' wife, Elin. to the one involved in the crash Yates said Holmberg was in a that involved Woods on Nov. 27. private room and the family has WESH-TV showed footage of a hired additional security to keep woman -- now confirmed to be the media away. He said family Holmberg -- being taken on a members have visited her, but he stretcher into the hospital. would not say who. Advanced life support is a term "She's in a wing that helps typically used by paramedics or protect her privacy," Yates said. EMTs for resuscitation efforts Health Central is the same that extend beyond basic CPR. hospital where Woods was Typically, it includes things such treated after he crashed his sport as IV therapy, intubation, and/or utility vehicle outside his home drug administration. last month. Eva Malmborg, a spokeswoman O r a n g e C o u n t y S h e r i f f ' s for Holmberg, said she could not spokesman Jim Solomons told comment on Tuesday's reports. The Associated Press the office Malmborg confirmed Holmberg got a 911 call from Woods' home had taken a week's leave from at 2:35 a.m. ET Tuesday and her job as Gavleborg County

governor in central-east Sweden, but said she did not know where Holmberg had gone. The news comes a day after reports that a Florida trooper who suspected Woods was driving under the influence sought a subpoena for the golfer's blood results from the hospital he was taken to after crashing his SUV, but prosecutors rejected the petition for insufficient information, according to a police report released Monday. A witness, who wasn't identified in the report, told trooper Joshua Evans that Woods had been drinking alcohol earlier. The same witness also said Woods had been prescribed two drugs, Ambien and Vicodin. The report did not say who the witness was but added it was the same person who pulled Woods from the vehicle after the accident outside his home. Woods' wife, Elin, has told police that she used a golf club to smash the back windows of the Cadillac Escalade to help her husband out. "Impairment of the driver is also suspected due to the careless driving that resulted in the traffic crash," Evans wrote in the report dated Nov. 30 that was released by the State Attorney General's office. Woods' attorney, Mark NeJame, didn't return a phone call for comment.

The world's No. 1 golfer hit a hydrant and a tree around 2:25 a.m. on Nov. 27. The Florida Highway Patrol last week cited Woods for careless driving and fined him $164. The accident -- and Woods' refusal to answer questions about it -- fueled speculation about a possible dispute between the golfer and his wife. Tabloid reports have linked Woods to several other women. Monday night, three-time Grand Slam tennis champion Lindsay Davenport told "Entertainment Tonight" that Elin Nordegren Woods didn't "go after [Woods] physically." Davenport, who said she has spoken to Woods' wife since the reported incident, told ET: "She's incredibly hurt by what has gone on but she handles herself with class and she's working it out as best she can." Last week, Woods issued a statement saying he had let his family down with unspecified "transgressions" that he regrets with "all of my heart." He did not elaborate. Information from The Associated Press is included in this report This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Street Chic: Los Angeles By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 12/8/2009 4:00:00 AM

Who: Nathalie Nattrap What: Turquoise stripes add a jolt of color to a cozy camel coat and black bottoms. Wear: F21 jeans, Seaton sweater, vintage jacket, Sue London flats Photo: Anne Ziegler Think you are Street Chic? Email us your photo and you could appear in ELLE.com's Street Chic Daily. Follow ELLE on Twitter. Become our Facebook fan!

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would have put the BCS on trial, offering up ready-made proof, yet again, that non-big six teams can contend for the title and beat erstwhile favorites. Would it strike at the firmament of the BCS if both Boise State and TCU finished undefeated behind the winner of Alabama-Texas with wins over big six teams? Definitely. Putting them together in a game? Now no matter what happens these teams can't prove they belonged at the big boys table and one of them gets knocked off. With a nod to Dan Wetzel at Yahoo, the BCS has set up their own Plessy v. Ferguson matchup, separate but equal. What a joke. At this point, it's probably time to explain how this game happened. Of course, the BCS manipulators are probably hoping that we don't actually call them on what they did, intentionally bring about this game to be certain that the big six powers weren't challenged. How can we be certain of how the teams were picked? By the posted rules governing how the teams were selected. Here's the story, when Alabama and Texas qualified for the national championship game, the

Sugar and Fiesta bowls lost their tie-in teams, Alabama from the SEC and Texas from the Big 12, respectively. This mean that the Sugar and Fiesta bowls received first pick to replace those teams. The Sugar selected Florida, another SEC team. That left the Fiesta, given there was no other Big 12 team available, with a completely open selection. They could take Cincinnati, they could take Iowa, they could take any team that was selectable. That means they got the team of their choice. They took TCU. Next pick went to the Orange Bowl as "the bowl played on the date nearest to the National Championship Game." The Orange Bowl selected Iowa. Now it was the Fiesta Bowl's pick once again. Amazingly, the Fiesta Bowl had their pick of matchups. They took Boise State. Voila, the two non-big six teams had, remarkably, been drafted to play against each other. The Sugar Bowl then took their only remaining choice, Cincinnati, an automatic qualifier from the only conference, the Big East, without a definite tie to the bowl structure. As if this weren't enough, the BCS cartel rules then permitted

the bowls to consider other factors that might make these matchups more or less desirable. Among those considerations, "C. whether the same two teams will play against each other in a bowl game for two consecutive years; and D. whether alternative pairings may have greater or lesser appeal to college football fans as measured by expected ticket sales for the bowls and by expected television interest, and the consequent financial impact on Fox and the bowls." Boise State and TCU also played last year. But that's no big deal, the BCS fix was in. Now when Congress reexamines the bowl structure, the BCS will trot out the bloody flag of the Fiesta Bowl 2010 and assert that the playing field is entirely equal. Even if you and I both know it isn't. But when Boise State-TCU turns into the second-highest rated bowl game of the season, an awful lot of football fans will be voting with their eyes. And once more, another brick on the BCS castle will come tumbling off the parapets. Because no matter how cynical the BCS suits are, we can all see right through them, they're the entity without a name that isn't wearing any

clothes. Right now all the BCS can do is keep attempting to defend a broken system and stave off all attacks. But with every defense of the system, their own position weakens, because you and I are smart enough to see that there's no basis whatsoever for that defense. Ultimately, the BCS can't win the modern era's war of ideas because their idea is plain wrong. And if you can't win the war of ideas in a 21st century media environment, you're as good as dead. Coming soon the BCS's own Joshua, the evolving social media landscape that democritizes criticism and makes mass protest possible, is going to blow his horn. And on that day, the mealymouthed defenses of a broken system will magically cease as the BCS walls come crumbling down. Until then, the BCS is foredoomed to failure. It's a dead plan walking. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

McChrystal backs Obama’s Afghan strategy (Financial Times - US homepage) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:37:17 AM

General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, has promised members of Congress that he will beat back the Taliban insurgency by mid-2011 and has pledged full support for President Barack Obama’s strategy. Appearing before the House of Representatives on Tuesday – after months in which Republican legislators called for him to testify – Gen McChrystal painted a picture of a daunting but surmountable challenge in Afghanistan. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

View a photo that Bob Howarth (Poynter Institute) (Yahoo! News Search Results for e-readers) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:35:54 AM

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11:24 a.m. ET Mediaite tweaks obits list To include people of color. (Mediaite.com) Harvard Crimson drama

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Notre Dame Fighting Irish to interview Cincinnati Bearcats coach Brian Kelly on Tuesday By ESPN.com news services (ESPN.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:35:44 AM

Best Coaching Fit At Notre Dame Best Coaching Fit At Notre Dame VIDEO PLAYLIST • Best Coaching Fit At Notre Dame Best Coaching Fit At Notre Dame • Joe Schad On Notre Dame Coaching Search Joe Schad On Notre Dame Coaching Search • Notre Dame To Interview Brian Kelly Notre Dame To Interview Brian Kelly • Will Weis Return To The NFL? Will Weis Return To The NFL? Notre Dame plans to interview Cincinnati's Brian Kelly regarding its head-coaching vacancy Tuesday, most likely in New York City, a person close to the situation told ESPN's Joe Schad on Monday. Kelly met with his undefeated team Monday afternoon and told players he will "listen to what they have to say." Kelly confirmed the meeting on his

Twitter account. "Just informed our team that Notre Dame has contacted me and I will listen to what they have to say," Kelly tweeted. Mike and Mike in the Morning ESPN college football analyst and former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz explains where Notre Dame has gone wrong in recent years, bringing in coaches with no head-coaching experience and those guys have not been equipped to handle everything. More Podcasts » Meanwhile, Stanford's Jim Harbaugh denied a report that he is also set to meet with or has already met with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. The New York Times reported the story on Monday, but in an interview with ESPN's Michele Tafoya during "Monday Night Football," Harbaugh denied the report. "There's no meeting," Harbaugh said. "I haven't talked to anyone at Notre Dame. I haven't talked to Notre Dame about a meeting." Harbaugh was at the game in Green Bay watching his brother,

John, coach the Ravens against the Packers. He was asked if he will stay at Stanford. "I love Stanford, and God willing Michele, I'll be back at Stanford," Harbaugh said. Stanford athletic director Bob Bowlsby also told the newspaper he is "100 percent confident" that Harbaugh is not a candidate. Bowlsby called Swarbrick a close friend whom he has given advice on the search. Big East blog ESPN.com's Brian Bennett writes about all things Big East in his conference blog. • Blog network: College Football Nation Bowslby also told the Times that Harbaugh's agent, Jack Bechta, denied the report, but Bechta did not return calls to the paper. Stanford (No. 19 BCS, No. 21 AP) will be making its first bowl appearance in eight years at the Brut Sun Bowl against Oklahoma. Kelly declined to discuss the Notre Dame job after his team beat Pittsburgh 45-44 on Saturday afternoon, but at least

two Bearcats players have said their coach told them he was staying put. The 12-0 Bearcats (No. 3 BCS, No. 4 AP) will cap their season against fifth-ranked Florida in the Allstate Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day. "He said, 'It's not an issue; I'm not going there,'" safety Aaron Webster said of Kelly about a Thursday conversation. "He said, 'I love Cincinnati, and I'm staying here.'" Kelly has chided the media for spreading what he called "misinformation" and added, "You folks need to get a handle on this, because it's ridiculous." Kelly has been rumored to be one of Notre Dame's top candidates and told ESPN this week that he would "entertain" a request from the Irish to speak to him after the Pitt game. Information from ESPN.com's Brian Bennett and The Associated Press was used in this report. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Your Best Shot 2009: Four Seasons By Heather Champ (Flickr Blog) Submitted at 12/7/2009 8:56:22 PM

We’ve had over 9,000

remarkable photos contributed to Your Best Shot 2009. If you have a few minutes, hit slideshow and watch the world go by. Oh, and Vivaldi? Eat your heart out.

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Carradori,*setsuna, Knut Burmeister, and Andy McGlothlin. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

The Count: BCS Computers Have Actually Made Progress (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix) Submitted at 12/7/2009 2:28:59 PM

Never before in modern college football history have so many undefeated teams entered bowl games ranked so highly. An examination of the sport’s history shows that teams outside the major conferences have gotten more recognition and a better chance at a national championship, even if they still have a ways to go. Getty Images The Cincinnati Bearcats won’t be crowned national champs, but they had reason to celebrate their come-from-behind victory over Pitt. This year five ranked teams enter the bowl season without a loss. All five are ranked in the top six in the final pre-bowl Associated Press poll, and four will play each other in two bowl games — Alabama-Texas in the so-called national-title game, and Boise State and Texas Christian in the Fiesta Bowl — while the fifth, Cincinnati, gets to play the consensus top one-loss team, COUNT: page 74

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whined about "tabloid scrutiny," as if TMZ and the National Enquirer would have been gunning for him if he were merely lunging at Jack Nicklaus' record of 18 majors and not shaking his nine-iron at every cocktail waitress and party planner who caught his wandering eye. What Tiger failed to offer in his mea culpa was a shout-out to all the golf writers and sports media who've protected him over the years. I cover about two golf events a year; his carousing has often been a hot topic in the press room and on the course. But it was always just gossip, not news, and sports journalists were correct not to write about it, just as we shouldn't be in the business of dishing about the affairs of McNair or any other professional athlete. If we did, there wouldn't be enough bandwidth to report anything else. But when the world's top golfer gets in a car accident, when the hospital that treats him sends out a statement saying he's in "serious" condition, when he pulls out of his own tournament

because of injuries sustained that night, it's news. When McNair was spotted squiring pretty young things around Nashville, it wasn't a story, but it was news, terrible, tragic news, when he was murdered by his jealous, unstable girlfriend. Tiger's harem -- his girlfriends, his mistresses, his road beef, his sex toys, his hos, whatever you want to call them -- all seem to be vying for the right to be the top chick in his life, after the wife, of course. There's the reality show contestant, the cocktail waitress, the Manhattan party girl, the British TV broadcaster, the porn star, the Las Vegas club hopper, the pancakewaitress who says she hooked up with Tiger in a church parking lot and at his home while the pregnant Elin was out of town. He has his type: store-bought bosoms, buffed bodies, puffy lips, long, processed straight hair, Caucasian ("The question everyone in America wants to ask you is, how many white women does one brother waaaant?" goes one parody song making the radio rounds.) Tiger's

obvious tastes sure made it easy for his enablers -- his friends, bodyguards, agents and lackeys on the payroll -- to corral the girls and, if they passed the cut, arrange their flights and hotels for liaisons on the road. What Woods needed, and this is going far beyond the obvious suggestion of keeping it in his pants, was someone to detect whether these women were simply narcissist, moneygrubbing twits whose discretion could be bought, or full-on crazy loons who might put the precious golfer and his wife and two kids in serious danger. Tiger willingly, ruthlessly ruined his carefully crafted image as the super cool, conservative family guy who could sell cars and apparel to grandmas unfamiliar with golf. He's lucky that's not all he's lost. Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Nationals, Ivan Rodriguez Agree to Two-Year Deal By Ed Price (Fanhouse Main)

get Rodriguez to the woeful Nats, the team expects prospect Derek Norris to be ready in 2012. Filed under: Nationals, MLB Rodriguez, 38, last year passed Injuries, MLB Transactions Carlton Fisk for the career record INDIANAPOLIS -- The worst in games caught. He has won 13 team in baseball has added a Gold Gloves, been to 14 All-Star potential Hall of Famer, as the Games and is a career .299 hitter. N a t i o n a l s h a v e a g r e e d i n Rodriguez, the 1999 AL MVP, is principle to sign catcher Ivan also the all-time leader in games Rodriguez to a two-year deal started at catcher and total worth $2.5-3 million per season, chances and putouts at the according to a major-league position and is tied with Gary source. Carter for sixth all-time in home With Jesus Flores coming off runs as a catcher (298). shoulder surgery, Washington Washington catchers last year hit was seeking a veteran catcher to . 2 5 0 w i t h a . 3 1 0 o n - b a s e handle every-day duties for the percentage and 121 strikeouts. first month or two of the season, Permalink| Email this| Linking until Flores is fully recovered, Blogs| Comments and then mentor Flores. And while it took a two-year deal to Submitted at 12/7/2009 4:47:00 PM

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Florida, in the Sugar Bowl. It’s almost like a playoff, albeit one that ends after one round. Contrast that with 2004, when five teams also finished undefeated. Auburn and Utah were left out of the national-title game, and didn’t play each other, so each finished undefeated but outside of the top spot. Boise State, meanwhile, finished with a No. 10 ranking and was left out of all BCS bowls. Boise State was also left out of a BCS bowl game despite finishing undefeated last year, as were Marshall in 1999 and Tulane the year before. (Boise State has entered the bowl season undefeated in four of the last six seasons, suggesting it may have outgrown the WAC.) At no other time since 1992, when the top bowl games began working together to crown a national champion, have more than three ranked teams entered the bowl season undefeated. But it happened often before then, and the earlier era did a much

worse job of sorting out undefeated teams — or even acknowledging them. Nearly two dozen teams between the advent of the AP poll in 1936 and 1991 ran the table heading into the penultimate AP poll but failed to crack the top 10. Ohio teams had a particularly tough time in the rankings. Toledo didn’t lose a game between 1969 and 1971, but never finished the season ranked higher than 12th. Miami of Ohio — twice — and Ohio also saw undefeated seasons end with rankings outside the top 10. (My alma mater, Yale, suffered the same indignity in 1960.) The sport was more regionally focused then, and it was possible that the teams deserved no better ranking, though it’s unlikely many voters were able to see all the undefeated teams. And with fewer bowl games, some didn’t even have that form of postseason showcase to validate their season. Today we have computer rankings to help sort out teams in

different conferences. And these are unanimous that Alabama is No. 1, while suggesting nearly across the board that Texas is a worthy No. 2. Oregon and Florida also get some recognition for that spot. Of the other undefeateds, only Cincy is ranked second by any computers, and those three computer algorithms discard margin of victory, which human voters aren’t required to do. In college football, this marks progress: Every undefeated team appears to be ranked pretty fairly, and each one got a plum bowlgame matchup. There’s still no playoff, and therefore still the reality that some teams had no chance to win the national title when the season started. But two out of three ain’t bad. AP Poll Archive was very useful in re-creating the history of ranked undefeated teams.

Yakuza 3 heads west in March 2010 By Ludwig Kietzmann (Joystiq)

adherence to its cultural origins -not to mention Sega's budget. "As part of the lengthy Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:00:00 PM localisation work Yakuza 3 will As fans of Sega's Yakuza series feature full English subtitling," (known as Ryu ga Gotoku in he wrote, "whilst maintaining the Japan) will quickly point out, the rich Japanese voice actors that l e n g t h y w a i t f o r l o c a l i z e d bring an extremely engaging versions is somewhat of a atmosphere to the game - this disorganized crime. With two will no doubt please the purists P l a y S t a t i o n 3 - e x c l u s i v e out there!" installments already available in Plus, you wouldn't want to upset Japan (and a third on the way), those rich Japanese voice actors Sega Europe's online community by replacing them. Who knows manager, Kevin Eva, offers an how well they're connected? enthusiastic answer to the Continue reading Yakuza 3 impatient question: "YAKUZA 3 heads west in March 2010 IS COMING TO THE WEST." Yakuza 3 heads west in March So enthusiastic, it seems, he's 2010 originally appeared on already busting some CAPS. Joystiq on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 W r i t i n g o n t h e E u r o p e a n 12:00:00 EST. Please see our PlayStation Blog, Eva confirmed terms for use of feeds. that Yakuza 3 will hit the US, Read| Permalink| Email this| Europe and Australia in March Comments 2010, and emphasized the game's

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Move Over Madden, Gillette Hex Is Real By Jon Weinbach (Fanhouse Main) Submitted at 12/7/2009 1:37:00 PM

Filed under: Sports Business, Sports Media Forget about the Sports Illustrated jinx, the Madden curse, or even the Campbell's Chunky soup mystery. What today's athletes should really fear is the Gillette Hex. If you're a human with a pulse, you know full well that Tiger Woods is enmeshed in the sports world's biggest sex scandal since ... ever. What you may know less well is that one of Tiger's endorsement deals is with Gillette, the grooming gear company that's owned by Proctor and Gamble, the Cincinnatibased consumer products behemoth. Along with Swiss tennis champion Roger Federer and French soccer star Thierry Henry, Tiger is featured in Gillette advertisements, TV spots and promotional materials around the world. Since 2007, the three athletes have been the centerpieces of the company's "Champions" marketing campaign, and have appeared together in a series of fairly unmemorable ads.

Morey: Yao Won't Opt Out of Contract By Chris Tomasson (Fanhouse Main) But over the last month, the sports-marketing gods have had their way with the well-coiffed trio. Federer was the first victim, as tennis' all-time Grand Slam champion lost twice at the recent ATP World Tour Finals in London. Then Henry, the suave Gallic striker, got himself into a hot mess after he admitted to intentionally handling a ball in the waning moments of France's crucial World Cup qualifier against Ireland. The un-penalized infraction led to an all-important France goal -- and howls of

protest in the soccer world. FIFA, world soccer's governing body, may even take the extraordinary step of suspending Henry from matches at next summer's World Cup. FIFA president Sepp Blatter called Henry's handball a "blatant and unfair" play. And now, of course, Tiger has landed in tabloid hell thanks to allegations related to a string of alleged extra-marital affairs. The British press is already having a field day poking fun at the foibles of Gillette's pitchmen, as evidenced here and here. For

its part, Gillette has said that it has no plans to end its affiliation with Tiger. There is one notable Gillette pitchman who's managed to escaped the Hex so far: New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, who was recently named Sports Illustrated's "Sportsman of the Year." But there's plenty of time until spring training ... Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Submitted at 12/7/2009 6:45:00 PM

Filed under: Rockets, FanHouse Exclusive Don't expect a very big guy to be available during perhaps the NBA's biggest freeagency summer ever. That's the word from Houston general manager Daryl Morey about 7-foot-6 Yao Ming. He has no doubt the center, out all season following foot surgery, won't opt out of his contract next summer to become a free agent. "He's very loyal, and he's going to opt in,'' Morey said in an interview Monday night with FanHouse. "He's definitely coming back.'' When asked if Yao has told him specifically he won't opt out of his contract, Morey didn't MOREY: page 76

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consider that necessary. Morey said he and Yao regularly have talked about next season. "He loves Houston and he's very loyal,'' Morey said. "He's coming back. (Next) summer we'll talk about how to integrate him (back with the Rockets).'' Yao can opt out next summer of the final season of a five-year deal paying him $17.69 million. If he doesn't opt out and the Rockets don't sign him to an extension by June 30, 2011, he would become an unrestricted free agent July 1, 2011. Morey said Yao, injured during last May's Western Conference

finals against the Lakers, is making fine progress from his July 21 surgery for a fractured left foot. He expects Yao to be fully healthy for next fall's training camp. "He's doing very well,'' Morey said. "Everything is healing with an operation that was pretty intense. He's ahead of schedule. The smart thing to do is hold him out until next year. ... Everything the doctors are telling us is he'll be available (next season).'' Yao is making $16.38 million this season. Insurance will reimburse the Rockets about $6.7 million of that.

By Griffin McElroy (Joystiq)

Conference in New York City, that, if successful, OnLive would "meaningfully and beneficially transform the economics of our business." However, he later added that the digital distribution -centric system "doesn't really speak to our business model." Zelnick noted the benefits in not having to worry about costs associated with production and distribution, but explained that "the bulk of our business is packaged goods because initial

With Yao apparently not a candidate for free agency, attention mostly should focus on three other top players who can opt out of their deals. They are Cleveland's LeBron James, Miami's Dwyane Wade and Toronto's Chris Bosh. Chris Tomasson can be reached at fanhouse.com or on Twitter@christomasson. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Aussies gather in Brisbane to promote R18+ rating Zelnick: OnLive 'beneficial' to gaming industry, doesn't fit with Take-Two's business model Submitted at 12/8/2009 11:30:00 AM

Though most gaming enthusiasts received the announcement of the streaming game service known as OnLive with raw, unmitigated zeal, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick isn't convinced of the platform's revolutionary properties. According to GamesIndustry, Zelnick explained during the UBS Global Media and Communications

A "rally" in Brisbane, Australia AUSSIES page 77

releases are for the console business." He later claimed that OnLive's bold distribution model "probably won't be a sea change

in our business." Shortly after that, he did 1,000 sit-ups, and then arm wrestled everyone in the audience simultaneously.

Needless to say, he won. Zelnick: OnLive 'beneficial' to gaming industry, doesn't fit with Take-Two's business model originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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in support of an R18+ rating for video games attracted approximately 50 people -- so maybe more along the lines of a "gathering," then. But let's not dwell on the meager turnout, let's focus on the intent and message, which GamePolitics reports was uploaded to YouTube ( 1, 2, 3, 4). Speaking at the event were Nicolas Suzor of Electronic Frontiers Australia and Ethan Watson of Treat Us Like Adults. Thankfully, it appears nobody was doing cosplay, a tactic that a previous rally considered implementing. The first priority of the groups is to have Commonwealth Minister of Home Affairs, Brendan O'Connor, release the R18+ discussion paper that the "censorship ministers" have been

slow to make public. Yes, a report on censorship is being censored. South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson had previously tried a political maneuver to bury the report and put the debate on an R18+ rating on indefinite hold. [Via GamePolitics][Image: Andrew Wade] Aussies gather in Brisbane to promote R18+ rating originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

PSP Minis playable on PS3 with firmware update 3.15 By Andrew Yoon (Joystiq) Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:30:00 AM

Analyst: China's online game revenues to reach $11 billion by 2012 By Griffin McElroy (Joystiq)

however, it also estimates MMO market penetration to only be at 27 percent, a number it expects According to a report recently will increase as internet access published by typographically- becomes more readily available c h a l l e n g e d r e s e a r c h f i r m to Chinese citizens. Of course, all Analysys, revenues from China's the internet access in the world online gaming industry will reach won't bolster online gaming 73.1 billion yuan ($10.7 billion) revenues if all the good ones within three years. If you're one keep getting shut down for no of those people who have a hard reason whatsoever. time telling whether numbers are Analyst: China's online game large, let us assure you that this revenues to reach $11 billion by one is very large indeed. As a 2012 originally appeared on point of reference, the entire U.S. Joystiq on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 gaming industry pulled in $11.7 10:00:00 EST. Please see our billion in revenues last year. terms for use of feeds. The report expects online Read| Permalink| Email this| gaming revenues for the nation to Comments reach $3.8 billion this year -Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:00:00 AM

Alan Wake teaser shows us the power of light

Light is,ALAN by most a pageaccounts, 78

PS3 is getting yet another firmware update -- this time optional -- "very soon" according to a post on the European PlayStation.Blog. The preChristmas update brings a feature we reported on earlier: support for PSP Minis on the PS3. Like PSone classics, a single purchase from the PlayStation Store will work on both platforms. If you've bought a Mini and want to play it on your PS3, you'll be able to access it from the Store's archived Download List. In addition to adding Minis support, update 3.15 will simplify the process of moving data from one PS3 to another. For example, if you own both a PS3 Phat and Slim, you'll be able to connect the two systems via a LAN cable and transfer data from one system to the next. For more details on how to do just that, visit the PlayStation.Blog. PSP Minis playable on PS3 with firmware update 3.15 originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 08 PSP page 78

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pretty good thing. It's warm, it makes plants grow and, perhaps most importantly, allows us to see. At least, that was its most important function. Now, thanks to Alan Wake, we know that light's ultimate purpose is to disintegrate monsters. In the small mountain town of Bright Falls, a simple flashbang becomes a weapon of mass destruction and an ordinary road flare is transmogrified from a beacon of hope to a harbinger of doom. If you don't believe us, check out the new teaser-- part of a week-

continued from page 77

long Alan Wake feature at 1UP-after the break. Continue reading Alan Wake teaser shows us the power of light Alan Wake teaser shows us the power of light originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Dec 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Miami Art Basel: Aperture and the Rubell Collection By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 12/7/2009 2:18:09 PM

No trip to Miami Art Basel is complete without a perusing some of the amazing book dealers that convene at the fairs. One of our favorites is Aperture, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to promoting photography. Founded in 1952 by photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Minor White, it's published books by, amongst others, Nan Goldin, Stephen Shore, Sally Mann, Erwin Olaf

and Mary Ellen Mark. We swung by to talk to the lovely ladies of Aperture at their Pulse fair booth about their first Miami fair experience. Christina Caputo, Events and Marketing Manager tell us, “As a non-profit this is fantastic exposure, especially for our limited-edition photographs program.” Although the art fairs are the main attraction, Miami itself has some mind blowing personal collections that are on view to the public. We always hit the Rubell Collection, one of the leading a n d M e r a R u b e l l . I t s n e w contemporary collections in the exhibition “Beg, Borrow and art world, started in 1964 by Don Steal” is made up of 260 pieces

by 74 artists included Jason Rhodes’ installation, Untitled (Chandelier Piece), 2004, an inyour-face neon extravaganza, on permanent view in honor of the artist’s untimely death at '41 of heart failure. Other pieces that caught our eye included British artist Adam McEwen’s painting New York, New York, 2009, in which a light gray canvas was covered with chewing gum that had been discarded on the New York City streets. A room comprised of Dan Flavin’s florescent light installation and ten prints from Peter Coffin’s Untitled, Design for Colby Poster

Company, 2008 seemed to vibrate with the light as the two pieces played off one another. We walked away from the exhibition amazed that one family could amass such a risky and thought provoking collection. —Kate Greenberg and Hilary Schaffner Christina Caputo and Kellie McLaughlin of Aperture Jason Rhodes’ installation, Untitled (Chandelier Piece), 2004 photo by Hilary Schaffner Follow ELLE on Twitter. Become our Facebook fan!

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Heist Gallery Hosts Stephen Floyd By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 12/7/2009 10:24:21 AM

A funny thing happened to Brooklyn-based artist Stephen Floyd on his drive out to Montana a few years ago. “I was picking up my wife from taxidermy school,” he recalls, “when I noticed all these empty billboards along the highways—they reminded me of blank canvasses.” And just like that, Floyd made some calls, rented some space in remote Colorado (Fairplay, CO, to be specific), blew up two of his playful drawings, each featuring a signature color-blocked cursive script caption, and added yet another medium to an eclectic portfolio that already includes intricate cut-outs, hurricane

portraits, and what Floyd is most known for: his self-described “self-indulgent, compulsive” drawings, 64 of which you can view (and purchase) right now at Heist Gallery. Though Floyd, a Galveston, TX native, may err on the side of

subway ads, and media images into provocative statements,” Eisenberg says. “He does not endeavor to give a moral value to any of his ideas, he simply points out that the[y] exist.” For a smart, unique art experience without the pretension of man berets, make your way over to the Lower East Side soon and check out Stephen Floyd’s aptly named "I Love America and America Loves Me" exhibit, on display at Heist until December 18th. modesty when it comes to his —Johanna Cox, Junior Editor w o r k , H e i s t o w n e r T a l i a Welcome to Stephen Floyd’s Eisenberg has nothing but praise w o r l d ( s o o n w i t h m o r e for the young artist and his b i l l b o a r d ! ) deceptively simple approach. Photos: Courtesy of the artist “Stephen transforms his (and and LLR Consulting our) everyday experiences, conversations, dirty jokes,

Woods' Mother-in-Law in Stable Condition After 911 Call (FOXNews.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:49:45 AM

Tiger Woods' mother-in-law was admitted to the hospital with stomach pains early Tuesday after a pre-dawn 911 call was made from his Florida mansion, according to a hospital spokesman. Health Central Hospital spokesman Dan Yates said someone called 911 from the golfer's Orlando-area mansion about 2:35 a.m. Tuesday and Barbro Holmberg, the mother of Woods' supermodel wife Elin Nordegren, was taken away by ambulance. Holmberg was in stable WOODS' page 80

Ohio man executed by single drug (BBC News | Americas | World Edition)

because of concerns that prisoners could suffer extreme pain if the first of the usual three Submitted at 12/8/2009 10:06:23 AM drugs fails to work effectively. The US state of Ohio has Critics say the method - which become the first in the country to uses a dose of thiopental sodium carry out an execution with a and can take twice as long to take single-drug injection, instead of a e f f e c t is human combination of three. experimentation. Officials deny Kenneth Biros, 51, was put to that. death after the US Supreme 'Experimental use' Court denied his final appeal. Biros was pronounced dead Biros had been convicted of the about 10 minutes after the murder of a 22-year-old woman injection was administered, the in 1991. AP news agency reports. On The new method was introduced average death took seven minutes

under the previous method in Ohio. The total process of Biros' execution lasted for about 43 minutes, AP said, adding that the execution team took about 30 minutes to find a suitable vein for the insertion of the needle. The change of approach follows a failed attempt to execute a prisoner in Ohio in September, when officials struggled for two hours to try to find a suitable vein into which to inject the drugs. All executions were put on hold while another method was

sought. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction had estimated that it would take 15 to 30 minutes for prisoners to die using the new method, but it would be less painful. Officials rejected suggestions that the technique was experimental, noting its widespread use as an anaesthetic. "It's not an experiment drug, it's used in existing protocol and it's used in hospitals all across this nation and in the world," Terry Collins said.

Other states which have the death penalty were reported to be watching closely but some including Florida, Kentucky, Texas and Virginia - have said they intend to keep the tripledrug method. Of the 36 death penalty states which have lethal injection as a means of execution, all but Ohio use the three-drug method. Print Sponsor This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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condition later Tuesday, Yates said, adding that her condition was not serious but he could not be more specific because of privacy laws. Holmberg lives in Sweden and arrived in the U.S. a few days ago. Health Central, in Ocoee, Fla., is the same hospital where Woods was treated after he crashed his sport utility vehicle outside his home last month. Yates said Holmberg was in a private room and the family has hired additional security to keep the media away. He said family members have visited her, but he would say who. "She's in a wing that helps protect her privacy," Yates said. Media attention has been focused on the world's No. 1 golfer since he hit a hydrant and a tree around 2:25 a.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving. According to WESH-TV, Woods' mother-in-law was transported by ambulance from his multimillion-dollar home "on advanced life support" after firefighters received a call at 2:36 a.m. Tuesday. Footage shot outside Health Central showed a blond woman on a stretcher being taken inside. Click here for video.

A black SUV — similar to the one Woods crashed the day after Thanksgiving — showed up at the hospital minutes later, according to witnesses. The license plate number had one character that was different from the plate on Woods' vehicle. A witness told Fox News that a "nice-looking blond woman" who resembled Woods' wife was driving the SUV that arrived at the hospital. Earlier Tuesday, Holmberg's spokeswoman Eva Malmborg declined to comment on the situation. "I haven't been in contact with her and like I said I don't know where she is — and so I can neither confirm or deny anything," Malmborg told The Associated Press. Malmborg confirmed Holmberg had taken a week's leave from her job as Gavleborg county governor in central-east Sweden, but said she did not know where Holmberg had gone. There was no sign of emergency workers later Tuesday morning at the Woods' gated community, the AP reported. Luxury SUVs and cars drove in and out as a few reporters and television news trucks milled

around outside. Meanwhile, RadarOnline.com reported that Woods' wife moved out of the couple's home and is living in a house nearby. The report came after several women claimed to have engaged in relationships with the golf star. Click here for photos of the women linked to Woods. Woods was taken to the hospital on Nov. 27 after crashing his SUV into a fire hydrant and tree just outside his mansion. TMZ reported early Tuesday that Woods was admitted under the alias "William Smith" as having suffered an overdose. Sources at the Health Central Hospital reportedly said Woods’ admissions chart specified "OD" and mentioned that he was having trouble breathing. A police report on the crash released Monday showed that a Florida trooper who suspected Woods was driving under the influence sought a subpoena for the golfer's blood results from the hospital he was taken to after the crash, but prosecutors rejected the petition for insufficient information. A witness, who wasn't identified in the report, told trooper Joshua Evans that Woods had been

drinking alcohol earlier. The same witness also said Woods had been prescribed two drugs, Ambien and Vicodin. The report did not say who the witness was but added it was the same person who pulled Woods from the vehicle after the accident. Woods' wife, Elin, has told police that she used a golf club to smash the back windows of the Cadillac Escalade to help her husband out. His injuries were minor. The sister of a neighbor who called 911 after the crash told troopers that Holmberg and Woods' mother were also at the scene, but the AP has not been able to confirm that. The Florida Highway Patrol cited Woods for careless driving and fined him $164 after the crash but said no further investigation would be done and no criminal charges would be filed. The accident — and Woods' refusal to answer questions about it — fueled speculation about a possible dispute between him and Elin. A story by the National Enquirer published two days before the crash alleged Woods had been seeing a New York nightclub

hostess, Rachel Uchitel. Uchitel and Woods have denied the affair. Uchitel's high-profile attorney, Gloria Allred, abruptly canceled a scheduled press conference last week to address the matter, fueling reports that a financial settlement had been reached between Uchitel and Woods. After the crash, Us Weekly reported that a Los Angeles cocktail waitress named Jaimee Grubbs claims she had a 31month affair with Woods. Woods issued a statement last week indicating he had let his family down and citing unspecified "transgressions" that he regretted with "all of my heart." The golf star did not elaborate. Click here for photos of the car crash. Click here for more from MyFoxOrlando.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Mass. voters taking 1st step to fill Kennedy seat (AP) (Yahoo! News: U.S. News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:27:06 AM

BOSTON â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Massachusetts voters on Tuesday began the process of selecting a replacement for the man who represented them in the U.S. Senate for nearly half a century. Four Democrats, from political insiders to newcomers, and two Republicans were competing in their party primaries for the opportunity to fill the seat held by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who died of brain cancer in August at age 77, since 1962. The winners will face off in a Jan. 19 general election. Kennedy's widow, Vicki, called each of the Democratic candidates early Tuesday to wish them well, an aide said. His family has been careful not to endorse any one candidate. Polls were scheduled to stay open until 8 p.m. Tuesday. Secretary of State William Galvin was expecting a 10 percent to 25 percent turnout. Attorney General Martha Coakley, who led in preprimary public opinion polls, started her day by voting at a school near her Medford home. U.S Rep. Michael Capuano voted at the Somerville Department of Public

Works garage. City Year cofounder Alan Khazei voted in Brookline, and Boston Celtics co -owner Stephen Pagliuca voted at a Weston school. State Sen. Scott Brown, the leading Republican candidate, voted in his hometown of Wrentham, then hit the phones to call supporters. The other Republican in the race, Jack E. Robinson, voted by absentee ballot two weeks ago and started his day by greeting commuters at North and South stations in Boston, an aide said. Voters were doing something they had not done in Massachusetts since 1984: vote in a U.S. Senate race with no incumbent. Not since Paul Tsongas decided to step down after a cancer diagnosis have they had the chance to fill a Senate seat with a newcomer. John Kerry, who went on to be the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nominee, won that race and every re-election since. Kennedy's seat has been held on an interim basis by Paul G. Kirk Jr., a Kennedy friend and the former Democratic National Committee chairman. He will step down when his replacement is sworn in.

The campaign was notable for its lack of drama. "I think the candidates have acquitted themselves well," said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. "In a very short period of time, they have offered intelligent and reasoned campaign stands, and they've competed vigorously." Coakley, 56, targeted women and abortion rights supporters. Her last-minute pitch included prerecorded robocalls from former President Bill Clinton, who said, "You can trust her to get results in the Senate just as she has as your attorney general." Brown, 50, is an attorney, lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard and triathlete who has carved out a decidedly more conservative record. While Coakley opposes sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Brown supports President Barack Obama's buildup. He also gained some notoriety as the father of an "American Idol" contestant and for his nude centerfold in Cosmo when he was in college. Capuano, 57, is a six-term congressman who targeted the relatively small crowd of party loyalists by highlighting his votes against the USA Patriot Act and

the war in Iraq. Khazei, 48, is a political newcomer who started the youth activism program City Year and other civic engagement programs. Pagliuca, 54, also is a first-time political candidate. He made a fortune estimated at $400 million by working at the private equity and venture capital firms that enriched 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The 49-year-old Robinson has become a perennial candidate after unsuccessful Senate, House and secretary of state campaigns. A Boston Globe survey last month found Coakley leading Capuano 43 percent to 22 percent among likely voters, but it also found that only about a quarter of respondents said they had definitely settled on a candidate. Another quarter said they were leaning toward a candidate, while half described themselves as uncertain. A Suffolk University poll last month found Brown leading Robinson 45 percent to 7 percent, with 47 percent undecided. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

McChrystal backs US troop surge (BBC News | Americas | World Edition) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:44:02 AM

The top US commander in Afghanistan has said there are "no silver bullets" for success there, but the troop surge will help reverse the Taliban's momentum. Testifying to US Congress, Gen Stanley McChrystal said President Barack Obama's deployment of 30,000 extra troops meant success was possible. He said the next 18 months would be crucial, but that he did not expect to need more troops to get the job done. But Gen McChrystal warned the Afghan mission was "undeniably difficult". He said coalition forces faced "a complex and resilient insurgency" and that Afghans lacked confidence in their government. "Success will require steadfast MCCHRYSTAL page 84

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Snow, Ice Shuts Down Major Calif. Interstate (FOXNews.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 12:47:19 AM

LOS ANGELES A cold storm brought heavy rain, snow and strong winds to California on Monday, causing hundreds of traffic accidents and shutting down a portion of Interstate 5, the state's major north-south route. The powerful storm threatened to spawn mudslides in wildfiredevastated areas — where residents in Los Angeles' foothill communities were packed and ready to flee — but no damage was reported as of Monday night. Nine homes were placed under mandatory evacuation for most of the afternoon in Sunland, northeast of downtown Los Angeles, where residents were threatened by the huge Station Fire this summer. The blaze charred 250 square miles of the Angeles National Forest while burning 89 homes and reducing slopes of water-retaining timber and brush to stumps and ash. The evacuation order was lifted and a flash flood watch was canceled by evening, but a winter storm warning for the mountains, a freeze watch and wind advisories for the valleys were in effect overnight.

Interstate 5, the main road out of Southern California, was closed in both directions over the Grapevine in the Tehachapi Mountains due to snow Monday evening, California Highway Patrol Officer Monica Posada said. Emergency Management Department spokesman Chris Ipsen said the storm blew through quickly and dumped most of its precipitation on Orange County and San Diego. In Southern California's mountains, the storm dumped about a foot snow as low as 2,000 feet, the National Weather Service said. Snow dusted San Francisco's suburbs at elevations of only 350 feet, delighting children and impressing weather experts, who said it was unusual to see the white stuff in the Oakland Hills and in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Downtown Los Angeles got almost an inch of rain, while coastal areas got slightly more, Weather Service forecaster Stuart Seto said. The storm broke rainfall records at San Diego's Lindberg Field. A task force several months ago identified nine canyon homes as being in a potential site of mudslides or flooding, but no

problems were reported Monday, Ipsen said. Sandbags and concrete barriers were put in place not long after the fire was doused near La Canada Flintridge, about 14 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. In the Paradise Valley neighborhood, homeowner Gary Stibal kept watch on the burned mountain slope that rises sharply from his backyard. His yard was freshly cleared of 5 feet of mud that gushed down during a brief cloudburst earlier this fall. His car was packed and, like others in the neighborhood, was parked in the driveway facing the street for a quick getaway. "People are nervous," he said as raindrops pattered on his umbrella. "It's letting up a little bit now, but I guess there's more heavy stuff coming in later." Police officers went to the top of Haines Canyon and advised residents in a handful of homes that they should be ready to leave, said resident April Faieta. The homes are just below a flood control debris basin with towering denuded slopes. Faieta said she and several neighbors would remain in their homes, noting that she evacuated three times due to the Station Fire

and the home was not affected. "Everybody left a little too early. ... Everybody's just waiting," she said. Meanwhile, rescuers dove into the rushing water of the Los Angeles River near downtown to fish out a man who got stranded on a grassy island Monday. Another woman was helped off the steep concrete river bank earlier and treated for hypothermia. In the Central Valley, California's agricultural heart, a hard freeze was expected Tuesday with lows in the upper 20s. The National Weather Service issued a warning of high winds for San Diego. Gusts up to 60 mph were forecast. Back-to-back storms from the tropical Pacific are predicted to arrive on Thursday and Saturday, Seto said. "It'll be weaker, but on top of the inch of rain we just got, it's going to raise some serious concerns," he said. More from MyFoxLA.com This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

FBI Probing in Pakistan for Chicago Terror Suspect Links (FOXNews.com) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:13:10 AM

ISLAMABAD The FBI is sending a team to Pakistan as part of an investigation into links with a Chicago terror suspect, the U.S. Embassy said Tuesday. The announcement came a day after the probe expanded to include a retired Pakistani army officer — highlighting long-held fears of Pakistan's central role in global extremism. David Coleman Headley, an American of Pakistani descent, was arrested in Chicago in October and accused of planning an attack on a Danish newspaper after it ran cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. On Monday, he also was accused of conducting extensive surveillance on potential targets in the Indian city of Mumbai before the terrorist attacks there in November 2008 that left 166 people dead. The U.S. charges said Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, had attended militant training camps in Pakistan and conspired with members of the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba to launch terrorist attacks in India. A retired major in the Pakistani military identified as Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed also was FBI page 84

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Big storm targets Midwest with snow, wind (AP) (Yahoo! News: U.S. News)

Clinton and Elk City, leaving truckers to wait out the storm. Mitch Dodson, a trucker hauling DES MOINES, Iowa â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A fierce soda pop out of Durango, Colo., winter storm was moving into the to Virginia, was waylaid at the nation's midsection Tuesday, Travel America plaza near the promising to wallop the region town of Sayre. with heavy snow and strong "It's just a sheet of ice from winds. Amarillo to here," Dodson said. Officials were warning residents "It's a disaster." in parts of the west and Midwest Misty Willis, the assistant to stay close to home. manager at the plaza, said I-40 "Anybody traveling tomorrow had become a "skating rink." morning is really taking a huge "I drove 20 miles an hour to get risk I would say â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a risk of here," she said. "I literally slid being stranded and not having into my parking space." anybody be able to help you for 6 In Schaller, Iowa, Sparky's One or 12 hours, probably," Karl S t o p g a s s t a t i o n a s s i s t a n t Jungbluth, a meteorologist with manager Rose Jansen said they the National Weather Service in were bracing for the storm. Johnston, Iowa, said Tuesday. "Snow and lots of it!" Jansen The storm already blanketed said. "We'll be here, no matter much of the mountain west with what." snow and drenched Southern Jungbluth said a "classic, big, California with rain. In the deepening winter storm" was P h o e n i x a r e a , f i e r c e w i n d affecting more than a dozen brought down power lines, left states. He said it would take four hospitals temporarily shape over Oklahoma and without power and created wide Kansas on Tuesday, then swing outages. northeast through Missouri and I c e w a s t h e p r o b l e m i n the Upper Midwest before Oklahoma, where Interstate 40 heading toward Lake Michigan. was closed for about 25 miles in A foot or more of snow was western Oklahoma between expected in parts of Iowa, Illinois Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:09:51 AM

and Wisconsin. Wind gusts of up to 40 mph could create snow drifts of 8-15 feet. Kent Barnard, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation's Twin Cities district, said preparations for the storm began well before dawn Tuesday as crews treated curves, bridge decks and other slippery spots with chemicals. The storm had hit much of the West on Monday, from subzero wind chills in Washington state to heavy snow that closed schools and government offices in Reno, Nev. Big rigs were left jackknifed across highways in several states. In New Mexico, two people were killed in traffic accidents blamed on slick conditions. The National Weather Service said the upper elevations of the Sierra mountains could get up to 3 feet of snow, with up to 4 feet forecast for the mountains of southern Utah. Reno schools closed, and many state government workers were told to stay home. Several flights into and out of Reno-Tahoe International Airport were delayed or canceled. Chains or

snow tires were required across the region. "Motorists are going to have to chain up," Trooper Chuck Allen with the Nevada Highway Patrol said. "Otherwise, we end up with a parking lot." In northern Arizona, state officials closed parts of Interstate 17 and I-40, saying early Tuesday that some stretches of the highways were snow-packed and visibility levels were near zero. Department of Transportation spokesman Rod Wigman advised people to stay home if possible as the brunt of the storm sweeps through. "When the sun goes down, people need to go home," Wigman said. ___ Associated Press Writers Justin Juozapavicius in Oklahoma City, Okla., Chris Williams in Minneapolis and Nigel Duara in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed to this report. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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commitment and incur significant costs," he told the House Armed Services Committee. The commander said the 30,000 US reinforcements would "provide us the ability to reverse insurgent momentum and deny the Taliban the access to the population they require to survive". He said he did not think he would need to ask for any more troops in a year's time, but would not hesitate to recommend more if circumstances changed. The US ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, who reportedly questioned the troop build-up during White House deliberations last month, also endorsed the new approach as "the best path to stabilise Afghanistan". The new battle plan includes an 18-month timeline before the first US troops would begin to come home. 'US committed' Hours before the panel convened, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates held talks with

Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the capital, Kabul. Speaking at a joint news conference afterwards, President Karzai warned that it would take 15 years before Afghanistan was able to pay for the cost of its own security forces, which the US wants to quadruple in size to 400,000 troops by 2013. Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Robert Gates: "We know that you prefer to have Afghans protecting Afghans" "We hope that the international community and the United States, as our first ally, will help Afghanistan reach the ability to sustain a force," he said. For his part, Mr Karzai said he hoped the US and the international community would continue funding them, adding the US would not abandon Afghanistan. The two countries would need to be long-term partners, he said. The defence secretary said Mr Karzai needed to take a tougher line on corruption, but added that

many ministers were competent and did not need to be replaced when a new cabinet is announced in the coming days. Mr Karzai said he was committed to doing so and that he would inform parliament of the names of a number of proposed ministers. Both men then agreed that it was a priority to strengthen the Afghan security forces in order to help international troops tackle insurgents. But Mr Karzai was also cautiously optimistic that his country would be able to begin taking over responsibility for security in some "critical" parts of the country within two years, before taking charge nationwide in five years' time. 'Civilians martyred' The president later condemned what his office said was the killing of six civilians in an overnight operation by Nato-led forces in the eastern province of Laghman. Local residents have protested against the reported civilian

deaths, which they and provincial officials say number 12. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said its troops killed seven militants and detained another four after coming under hostile fire while pursuing a member of the Taliban responsible for suicide bombings in the area. Meanwhile, in a sign of the country's security difficulties, there were reports on Tuesday that Afghan officers had opened fire during a protest by villagers over the deaths of civilians, which they say occurred during a Nato operation. According to one report, the Afghan soldiers fired into the air, but at least one person was killed. Print Sponsor This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

allegedly spanned three countries has increasingly come into focus as new details emerge about the case and Headley's links to the country. The country's security agencies have a long history of supporting Lashkar and other militant groups as proxies against the much larger Indian army in the disputed region of Kashmir.

Islamabad says it no longer does this, but many powerful Pakistani politicians and army officers are believed to remain sympathetic to the militant cause, raising concerns they could be potential recruits for al-Qaida. U.S. Embassy spokesman Rick Snelsire said Tuesday that a team from the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department will brief Pakistani

security officials about the probe into an alleged plot against Denmark and India. American investigators "have been consulting closely with Pakistani authorities on this case and are working with them on following up on leads related to Headley's activities and connections in Pakistan," he told The Associated Press in an e-

SC first lady: I wouldn't have stood with governor (AP) (Yahoo! News: U.S. News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:51:20 AM

CHARLESTON, S.C. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Even if her straying husband had asked her to, South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford says she wouldn't have stood with Gov. Mark Sanford when he faced cameras to tell the world about his affair with an Argentine woman. Jenny Sanford told ABC's Barbara Walters for a special airing Wednesday her husband's actions have caused consequences but not robbed her of her self esteem. Excerpts of the interview were released Tuesday. As she has said in earlier interviews, Sanford told Walters she found out about her husband's affair last January and forbid him to see the other woman. She said she told him not to see his four boys or her for a FIRST page 86

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charged Monday with conspiring to attack the Danish newspaper and its employees, according to U.S. court documents. Pakistan's army has confirmed it has a retired major in custody for questioning over alleged links with Headley and a co-defendant but officials declined to give more details. Pakistan's role in the plot that

mail. Headley could be sentenced to death if convicted on the charges involving the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Headley's attorney, John T. Theis, said he would "continue to look at this and see what the evidence is," but declined to comment further. FBI page 87

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Woods' mother-in-law in hospital (BBC News | Americas | World Edition) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:23:49 AM

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Tiger Woods' mother-in-law has been visiting her daughter Golf star Tiger Woods' motherin-law is in a stable condition after being taken from his Florida home in an ambulance, a hospital spokesman says. Health Central Hospital spokesman Dan Yates said Barbro Holmberg had been admitted suffering from stomach pain. Last week, Woods apologised to his family for letting them down amid speculation about his private life. His statement came days after he was found bleeding and semiconscious after crashing his car outside his home. Woods' mother-in-law, who is governor of Gavleborg county in central Sweden, has been visiting her daughter Elin, a former model to whom Woods has been married for five years. The couple have two children. A 911 emergency call was received from Woods' home in a gated community near Orlando in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Local TV footage showed a

Obama announces job creation plan (BBC News | Americas | World Edition) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:35:28 AM

blonde woman being wheeled on a stretcher into the hospital in nearby Ocoee. Health Central is the same hospital where Woods was treated after he crashed his car into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home last month. The hospital spokesman said Ms Holmberg's condition was not serious but he could not be more specific because of privacy laws. Mr Yates said she was in a private room and the family had hired additional security to keep the media away. Woods' car crash on 27

November followed a story in a US gossip magazine that he had had an affair with a Los Angeles cocktail waitress. The crash fuelled speculation that Woods had had a dispute with his wife. The world number one golfer, a 14-time major champion, was later charged with careless driving and fined $164. A police report released on Monday showed that a Florida Highway Patrol trooper had suspected Woods of driving under the influence, and sought a subpoena for the golfer's blood

results from the hospital where he was treated following the crash. A witness, who was not identified in the report, told the trooper that Woods had been drinking alcohol earlier, and had been prescribed the drugs Ambien and Vicodin. Prosecutors rejected the request for a subpoena. Print Sponsor This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Obama outlines proposals for small businesses US President Barack Obama has outlined a number of proposals aimed at boosting employment, including winding up the $700bn (ÂŁ425bn) US bank bail-out fund. Mr Obama said the remaining money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp) could be used to facilitate lending to small businesses. Speaking at the Brookings Institution think tank, he also called for tax cuts for small businesses. However, there were few details on the scale or cost of the measures proposed. The unemployment rate in the US currently stands at 10%. The Tarp fund was set up in the last few weeks of the Bush administration as a bail-out OBAMA page 87

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Gas line explodes at Ill. factory; debris kills 1 (AP) (Yahoo! News: U.S. News)

Tollway Oasis on Interstate 90, Illinois Tollway spokeswoman Joelle McGinnis said. Boone BELVIDERE, Ill. – A gas line County Coroner Rebecca Wigget e x p l o d e d M o n d a y a t a identified him as truck driver technology plant in northern R o n a l d G r e e n f i e l d , 6 3 , o f Illinois, sending aloft debris that C h e s t e r t o n , I n d . killed a man at a nearby highway Wigget said Greenfield was rest area. walking to his truck at the rest The explosion rocked the NDK area, which also has several America Inc. plant in Belvidere, restaurants, when he was struck about 70 miles northwest of by a large piece of flying debris. C h i c a g o , s e n d i n g t r e m b l e s She refused to describe the extent through buildings as far as a mile of his injuries. An autopsy is away and echoing throughout the scheduled for Wednesday. community of about 20,000 Jim Fealtman, a regional sales people. manager at NDK America's "It sounded like a traffic accident office in Webster, Mass., the — a boom," said Greg Brown, a company's other U.S. location, school district official. "We said no one at the Belvidere plant t h o u g h t s o m e o n e d r o p p e d was injured in the blast. He had something on the roof. It was like no other information. a little earthquake." Three sides of the NDK plant, The man who was killed was which makes synthetic crystals pronounced dead at the Illinois for computers, collapsed in the Submitted at 12/7/2009 6:11:22 PM

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month last summer as well. "My hope was that he would wake up from whatever he was in blast, WIFR-TV in Rockford the throes of and maybe see what he might lose," she said. reported. The entrance to the plant, which "Certainly his actions hurt me, is in a large empty field, was and they caused consequences for blocked Monday night. The rest me, but they don't in any way take away my own self-esteem," area is visible from the plant. NDK had moved to a new she said. "They reflect poorly on 55,000-square-foot factory in him." Belvidere in September 2003 and Jenny Sanford said she did not e m p l o y s a b o u t 3 0 p e o p l e , know where her husband was for a c c o r d i n g t o G r o w t h five days last summer when his D i m e n s i o n s , t h e e c o n o m i c disappeared from the state. development agency for the city The governor told his staff he of Belvidere and Boone County. was hiking the Appalachian Trail The building housed four 75-ton although he was in Argentina "autoclaves" — each 50 feet tall seeing his lover. State lawmakers and 3 1/2 feet in diameter — in are considering whether to which the crystals were grown. impeach Sanford for abandoning the state when he took the trip. ___ Associated Press Writers Don When he returned, Sanford, at a Babwin, Michael Tarm and t e a r f u l n e w s c o n f e r e n c e , Sophia Tareen in Chicago c o n f e s s e d t h e a f f a i r . c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h i s r e p o r t . But Jenny Sanford was not This content has passed through beside him and she told Walters that the governor never asked her fivefilters.org. to appear. "I wouldn't have. If he had asked me, I would have said no," she said. Many of Jenny Sanford's

counterparts have stood with their spouses for similar moments of scandal, including the wives of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who outed himself as gay; former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who acknowledged he was the client of a call-girl ring; and Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who was arrested in an airport bathroom sex sting. The Sanfords no longer live together. The governor remains in Columbia at the Governor's Mansion while Jenny Sanford and their four sons live at the family's beachfront home on Sullivans Island, 120 miles away. Jenny Sanford's memoir, to be published by Ballantine Books next May, will describe her dealings with this year's difficulties. " Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2009" airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST on ABC. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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US to pay Native Americans $1.4bn (BBC News | Americas | World Edition) Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:32:46 AM

The US government has settled a long-running case over royalties owed to American Indians. Under the deal the interior department will share $1.4bn (£859m) among 300,000 tribe members as compensation. The tribes claim they have been cheated out of billions of dollars worth of natural resources since 1887. The agreement ends a case which has been running for 13 years. The secretary of the interior department said it would aid reconciliation. "This is an historic, positive development for Indian country,"

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement released by the department. Contentious case The dispute dates back to the 1887 Dawes Act, which seized Indian land - much of it rich in natural resources - and gave it to white-owned companies to exploit. Under the Act, the land was divided into plots and each Indian family was assigned a parcel of land, a concept alien to their culture in which all land belonged to the tribe. The idea was for them to be "compensated" for the use of their land, however disputes arose almost immediately, perpetuated as ever smaller parcels of land were inherited by

new generations. Attorney General Eric Holder said the parties had tried to reach an agreement "many, many times". "But today we turn the page. This settlement is fair to the plaintiffs, responsible for the US, and provides a path forward for the future," he said. On its website the department for the interior said that the litigation had included hundreds of motions, dozens of rulings and appeals, and several trials. The agreement must be approved both by Congress and a federal judge. Print Sponsor This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

OBAMA continued from page 85

package for US banks. On Sunday, a Treasury Department official said the longterm cost of the package would be at least $200bn less than previously estimated. Mr Obama acknowledged that it was an unpopular. With regards to small businesses, he proposed a oneyear elimination of capital gains tax on new investments, and adding a new tax cut to encourage small business hiring in 2010. In the last few years, small businesses had created 65% of new job growth, he said. 'False choice' "We avoided the depression many feared," Mr Obama said, before adding, "Our work is far

Biggest Waves in a Decade Predicted in Hawaii (FOXNews.com)

The surf grew so large that a few beaches on Oahu and Maui were Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:40:23 AM closed because lifeguards feared HONOLULU Thousands of inexperienced sightseers could spectators and surfers are drown, according to state flocking to Hawaii's beaches to o f f i c i a l s . see the biggest waves in years "After the water comes in, it can crash ashore. drag you back out with it," said Heavy traffic backed up for Eric Basta, a manager at Surf N miles Monday along roads Sea in Haleiwa. "Be mindful of leading to Oahu's North Shore. how powerful the surf really is." Some of the world's most daring As violent as the waves were, surfers took on the powerful and they may grow in strength by d a n g e r o u s w a v e s , w h i c h Tuesday, according to the forecasters say could reach National Weather Service. The heights of 50 feet. high waves are expected to

continue through Wednesday. A legendary big wave surfing contest, the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau, may be held Tuesday for the first time since 2004 if waves reach a height of about 40 feet, organizers said. The event is only held in perfect conditions, and the waves weren't quite big or smooth enough yet Monday. "The swell energy is continuing to grow, and the waves may get larger," said Robert Ballard, a forecaster for the National Weather Service. "A large storm

over the North Pacific has sent a wave train at us." Hawaii hasn't seen such large waves since 2004 or 1998, he said. Teams of tow-in surfers — who use jet watercraft to race into waves too big to paddle — are flying to Maui from Brazil, South Africa and Australia, The Honolulu Advertiser reported. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

from done." He stressed that boosting jobs was the best way to tackle the massive US deficit. "There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other. But this is a false choice," he said. The president reiterated his commitment to halve the massive US deficit - which stood at $1.3 trillion when he took office - by the end of his first term. Other measures put forward included more money for infrastructure projects and rebates to consumers who made OBAMA page 88

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Headley and Chicago businessman Tahawwur Rana, 48, a Canadian national, were charged in October with plotting to attack Denmark's Jyllands Posten newspaper. Federal prosecutors said at the time of his arrest that Headley admitted his role in a plot against the newspaper and that he had received training from Lashkar-eTaiba. Authorities in Washington said Headley has cooperated with investigators in both the Danish and Indian plots since his arrest. A two-count complaint against the retired Pakistani major was FBI page 88

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filed under seal Oct. 20. It says he coordinated surveillance of the Danish newspaper and participated in planning the attack there along with Lashkar-e -Taiba and al-Qaida linked Ilyas Kashmiri â&#x20AC;&#x201D; described as a leader of the terrorist group Harakat-ul Jihad Islami. Authorities say Headley visited Pakistan in January and at that time, Abdur Rehman took him to western areas of the country where a number of terrorist groups have allegedly found

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MediaDailyNews: CIMM Taps Former Time Warner Research Diva Jane Clarke

refuge. The aim was to solicit Kashmiri's help in launching the attack against the Danish paper, the charges say. A search of Headley's luggage at the time of his arrest turned up a list of phone numbers including one (MediaPost | Media News) allegedly used to contact Abdur Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:10:21 AM Rehman. This content has passed through The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) fivefilters.org. this morning named Jane Clarke its managing director. Clarke, who most recently was vice president-insights and innovation at Time Warner Global Media Group, will oversee all day-today operations for CIMM, including management of the RFI process, vendor relationships and the resulting research studies. She will report directly to the CIMM Executive Board. CIMM was created by big agencies, advertisers and TVcentric media companies to spur research and development on better forms of media measurement, and has issued to RFPs to date: One focused on how to utilize digital set-top data for TV audience measurement; and another on so-called "crosschannel," or "three-screen" audience measurement of video

research chief at Interpublic's Magna unit, who was also a candidate for the CIMM job. "Over the years, only when something has emerged to spur them to do something, have the moved quickly to innovate. And I think CIMM will do that." Other candidates are believed to have included former NielsenConnect CEO Jon Mandel, and former Clear programming appearing on TV, Channel Outdoor global research chief Tony Jarvis. online and mobile devices. The industry remains divided on As managing director, Clarke what CIMM's real end goal is, w i l l b e r e s p o n s i b l e f o r and whether it is simply a developing CIMM's strategy and stocking horse to motivate vision as it promotes innovation Nielsen Co. to develop necessary in traditional and new media improvements in its measurement m e a s u r e m e n t . C l a r k e w i l l methods and systems, or whether coordinate communications the plan ultimately is to foster among and supply monthly n e w c o m p e t i t i o n i n t h e updates to CIMM member companies, while facilitating new marketplace. "Monopolies like Nielsen have m e m b e r s h i p f o r i n t e r e s t e d no incentive to innovate. There's television content providers, no reason for them to do that," media agencies and advertisers. noted Steve Sternberg, the former This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Business.view: Analysis catalysis (The Economist: Daily columns)

Mr Brown argues that a holistic approach to tackling problems produces more breakthroughs Submitted at 12/8/2009 3:00:44 AM than the MBA’s traditional urge Business.view to make incremental Dec 8th 2009 improvements to existing From Economist.com Designers products or processes. He says think they can teach MBAs and the uncompromising focus on philanthropists a thing or two predictability and quality-control TIM BROWN, the boss of exemplified by Six Sigma (see IDEO, a consultancy that helped article), a form of statistical shape Apple’s first mouse, does a n a l y s i s p o p u l a r w i t h not have solutions to daunting manufacturers, can lead to global problems such as climate “ a n a l y s i s p a r a l y s i s ” b y change, epidemics and persistent discouraging sweeping changes poverty. But he believes he that may cause disruptions in the knows how to find them: with short term but yield big benefits “design thinking”. in the long run. By design thinking, Mr Brown In contrast, design is often a means the open-minded, no- “Trojan horse” for momentous holds-barred approach that ideas, maintains John Kao, a designers bring to their work, former academic, since it marries rather than the narrow, technical rigorous methods with more view of innovation traditionally empathetic and intuitive ones, taught at many business and from lengthy anthropological engineering schools. Firms that studies of consumers to the think like designers, he claims in production of experimental a n e w b o o k , “ C h a n g e b y prototypes. With funding from Design”, stand to win huge new Deloitte, a consultancy, he has markets and profits. The concept set up the Institute for Large may sound pat and woolly, Scale Innovation, an outfit encompassing everything from dedicated to “building the new savvier marketing to radical innovation agenda necessary for technological leaps. Yet design t a c k l i n g w i c k e d g l o b a l thinking is winning many p r o b l e m s ” . converts in both industry and Roger Martin, head of the philanthropy. Rotman School of Management

at the University of Toronto and a pioneer in this field, says that true “design thinking” involves a deep understanding of people’s habits and preferences. As evidence, he points to the expensive Aeron chair (pictured), which Herman Miller designed based on lengthy observation, not just answers given in focus groups. The firm mimicked some elements of the lawn chairs that consumers seemed to find particularly comfortable, and the result was a blockbuster. IDEO applied a similar approach in a campaign it devised for Bank of America. Its researchers noted that consumers feel empowered by saving even trivial sums of money, such a collections of pennies in a jar. So they came up with a scheme called “Keep the Change”, in which the bank automatically rounds up deposits to the nearest dollar—a huge hit with customers. Philanthropists are beginning to bring similar methods to bear on big social problems. The Gates Foundation has worked with IDEO to develop a “humancentred design toolkit” to help charities develop new programmes in collaboration with locals. VisionSpring, an American charity that sells

inexpensive reading glasses to the poor, used the toolkit to make its vision tests less intimidating to children, and thus reach more of those in need. Focusing on people need not mean losing sight of the big picture, design thinkers argue. George Kembel, the head of Stanford University’s Institute of Design, points to Embrace, a fledgling health firm created by a group of his former students. The problem they set out to fix was the appalling lack of proper medical care for premature babies in poor countries. One reason for this is that sophisticated incubators can cost $20,000 or more; even if a country receives the machines from donors, the lack of proper training and money for maintenance undermines their effectiveness. Many attempts had been made to reduce the cost of such incubators, but the Stanford team took a different approach, by talking to locals in rural areas. In the process, it dawned on them that most babies in the developing world are not born in hospitals, and so are unlikely to benefit from incubators even if they are working properly. The team designed a cheap and

cheerful proxy: a tiny sleeping bag made of material that, when dipped in boiling water, retains heat for hours. Embrace hopes to start selling this $25 “incubator” soon. Even newspapers, in dire straits in much of the rich world, are embracing design thinking. Michael Maness of Gannett, which publishes USA Today among other papers, describes how employees working from IDEO’s Californian office are using “anthropological and ethnographic tools to get much closer to the consumer”. The result is a web-based news service catering to local communities (recently launched in Beta form) that he hopes will help the firm make money online. If design thinking can even help the sinking newspaper industry, then tackling global warming should be a doddle. Back to top ^^ Readers' comments The Economist welcomes your views. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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Iraq: Blown apart (The Economist: News analysis) Submitted at 12/8/2009 3:56:24 AM

Iraq Dec 8th 2009 | BAGHDAD From Economist.com Bloody car-bomb attacks in Baghdad bode ill for next year's election THE political point being made by insurgents with their latest attack in Baghdad is unmistakable. Five bombs went off killing at least 112 people on Tuesday December 8th, the same day that the Iraqi government announced the date of the next parliamentary poll. The election campaign leading up to a poll now set for March 6th 2010 is likely to be bloody. Shortly after 10am a series of loud explosions across the city shook buildings many miles away. The biggest target was a court complex near the west side of the Green Zone, where the prime minister and parliament reside. Eye-witnesses saw a blue van barging through a checkpoint on the main road. It carried on despite coming under fire by a security guard, forcing its way through a second barrier before exploding in the parking lot of the Karkh court, responsible for hearing half the city's civil and criminal cases. Young lawyers queuing nearby to be interviewed for jobs as clerks fled, but most were killed

by the blast. So were many of those in courtrooms, after the roof caved in and buried many people under concrete and masonry. The entire facade of the main building was ripped off by the bomb and dozens of cars were set alight, causing a string of secondary explosions. Brickwork tumbling from the walls quickly filled the large crater made by the bomb. Just before that explosion four more car-bombs had gone off in different parts of Baghdad. A compound belonging to the ministry of the interior in Palestine Street was hit, as was a law academy by the al-Nidaa mosque and a series of buildings inShoja district used by the finance ministry after its old home was destroyed in a previous bombing. A fourth carbomb exploded in Dora district close to Baghdad's main oil refinery. The bombings were unusually well planned. Two previous attacks this year, in August and October, involved multiple car bombs. In both cases two large vehicles exploded close to government ministries, killing more than 250 people. This time insurgents used smaller vehicles—minibuses instead of lorries—indicating that the longstanding government ban on large vehicles in the city centre is at last being enforced.

Furthermore, the attackers no longer seem able to hit highprofile buildings such as the foreign ministry, which was attacked in the summer. Yet the degree of co-ordination suggests that the attackers are getting better at their awful jobs. The continuing attacks in Baghdad highlight a partial failure to achieve political reconciliation. While some of the alliances competing in the forthcoming election are nonsectarian, the blame for the attacks follows a familiar pattern. Sunnis say that the Shia government is failing to protect Iraqi citizens. Some Shias accuse Sunni politicians of secretly allying with insurgents, while other Shias point fingers within their divided camp. Hadi alAmeri, head of the security committee in parliament and a leading opponent of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, told alSharqiya TV that all the commanders of the security force in Baghdad, who are appointed by Mr Maliki, ought to be replaced. Such recriminations play into the hands of insurgents, thought to be Sunni extremists variously identified as Baathists, Saddamists or al-Qaeda in Iraq. A divided country is less likely to find the courage to turn up at polling stations. This could undermine the legitimacy of the

next government and trigger further recriminations between the parties vying to form the next administration, especially if the bombings continue, as seems likely. Only last week, Baghdad'a residents were told that violence is at the lowest level since 2003. But the war is not over. The Sunnis who started fighting the Americans six years ago have lost, yet refuse to give up. Tens of thousands of former guerrillas, known as “Sons of Iraq”, were integrated into the security forces over a year ago, but in recent months no more insurgents have been enticed into joining the legitimate political process. Instead, the remnants of the oncemighty insurgency are intent on paralysing the Shia-dominated government. They have done so fairly successfully. Government buildings across the city emptied even before the last explosion was heard on Tuesday. Civil servants live in such fear that the sound of a car backfiring is sometimes enough to clear a ministry. Back to top ^^ Readers' comments The Economist welcomes your views. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

MediaDailyNews: Forecasters Reveal 'Structural' Shifts In Ad Economy: GroupM Begins Buying 'Wholesale,' Re-Selling Optimized Media (MediaPost | Media News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:20:48 AM

WPP's GroupM is buying media at "wholesale" and re-selling it to clients at retail prices, albeit in a greatly enhanced and "optimized" form, the holding company's chief economist said this morning during a series of presentations by Madison Avenue's leading forecasters at the UBS Media Week conference in New York. "We're going to own that inventory outright," said GroupM futures director Adam Smith, adding that GroupM's clients are "opting into this. It's completely transparent." Smith, who is Futures Director of WPP's GroupM unit, was speaking in response to a question about how much of the shifts taking place in the advertising economy are due to "structural" changes vs. the cyclical impact of the global economic recession, and his response was that a significant part of the changes taking place now are due to a fundamental shift in the way advertisers and agencies think about the value of media, and who defines it. "The long-term change is about MEDIADAILYNEWS: page 91

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who optimizes media," Smith asserted, adding that Madison Avenue is moving away from "industry standard metrics" for defining the value of media to "things that only the client knows." The surface manifestation of that, he said, was a shift toward behavioral-based targeting and performance-based measures of ROI, and away from the impressions-based models that have historically been used to plan, buy and sell media. "When I started buying TV airtime 20-years ago, we bought audiences. Now we are trying to buy outcomes. We're trying to buy results," Smith said. While he did not specify exactly how GroupM was procuring and reselling media, he alluded that it has moved beyond the kind of demand-side online advertising networks formed by big agency holding companies such as Havas, Publicis, Interpublic and others, to encompass TV inventory as well. GroupM has been a leader in both the fields of online behavioral targeting, as well as in the development of its TV advertising equivalent: addressable TV ads. Among

other things, he has an equity stake in Invidi, a leading developer of addressable TV advertising. If GroupM has managed to begun buying and optimizing TV that way - by pooling inventory and reallocating to it to advertisers - it would represent a significant leap forward, as other agency holding companies, principally Interpublic's Mediabrands, have said they also plan to eventually create demandside networks and exchanges that procure television audiences the way they've begun to do for online users - on a user-by-user basis. "For me, that is the most fundamental structural issue," Smith declared. All of the executives presenting this morning, including Brian Wieser, global director of forecasting at Interpublic's Magna unit, and ZenithOptimedia CEO Steven King, agreed that at least part of the shifts taking place now are part of long-term structural changes that will linger beyond the affects of the global economic recession. Those shifts also include changes in the underlying value

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Business. MobiTV has around 8 million mobile users. Flo TV, a new startup, hasn't disclosed the number of mobile users. MobiTV

uses a carrier's data network; Flo TV, a television spectrum. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Madison Avenue places on specific media, the increasing role of performance metrics, the increasing role that emerging markets play on the overall advertising economy, and the role that so-called "below-theline" or unmeasured media and marketing are having on the overall mix. The medium that appears to be most challenged, according to the industry forecasters is not traditional media like TV, radio or newspapers, which are actually doing better than many observers believe, but is consumer magazines. "Newspapers are not the worst medium. They are actually growing globally," Interpublic's Wieser said, adding, "Radio is not the worst... Magazines actually, universally, are underperforming all other media. And that doesn't bode well for that sector." GroupM's Smith concurred that magazines have fared worst among the major media, though he said the recession has actually led many traditional media to address "productivity" problems that were being masked in healthier economic times. ZenithOptimedia's King did not

specifically address the vitality of magazines in his comments, but the forecast he released this morning showed consumer magazines' share of global ad spending declining to 10.3% this year from 11.6% in 2008, and projected it would fall to 8.9% by 2012. Interestingly, the forecasters said that TV's share of ad spending has actually increased during the recession for two reasons. One is that consumers are actually watching more of the medium, not less of it. And two is the fact that it's still proving an effective medium in terms of marketing ROI. And if GroupM's Smith is right, may actually be increasing its relative ROI via new means of targeting and performance metrics. Many of those advances, of course, were pioneered by online media, which continues to be the fastest-growing of the major media, and the only one to grow significantly during the recession. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

MediaDailyNews: Flo TV Adds ABC, Disney Muscle To Lineup (MediaPost | Media News) Submitted at 12/8/2009 8:12:30 AM

One of the two big mobile TV providers Qualcomm's Flo TV has added some major programming punch to its lineup -- ABC and Disney Channel. This deal gives Flo TV all four of the big networks. Flo TV already operates ESPN MobileTV, as well 800 live events, including College Football, College Basketball, Major League Baseball. Flo TV users will now have access to shows such as "Grey's Anatomy," "Desperate Housewives," "FlashForward," "Ugly Betty" and "Lost," as well as those on the Disney Channel, including "Hannah Montana," "Wizards of Waverly Place," "The Suite Life on Deck" and "Jonas." Disney Channel shows will be simulcast. "ABC Mobile and Disney Channel offer some of the most iconic and popular programming on television," said Jonathan Barzilay, senior vice president of programming and advertising of Flo TV. Flo TV now has 17 channels, with competitor MobiTV having around 40 networks. MobiTV channels include: NBC Mobile, NFL Network, Disney Channel, A&E Mobile, Discovery Mobile, ESPN Mobile TV and Fox MEDIADAILYNEWS: page 91

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The New iTunes for Magazines (Or an Irrelevant Venture) Is Here! (Valleywag) (Yahoo! News Search Results for e-readers) Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:44:12 AM

This could be a successful venture. Then again, it could fade into irrelevance in months. Somebody will make the dominant digital storefront for content like this, just like someone will make the dominant digital reader. Magazine publishing companies, one would think, are likely to get smoked by someone like Apple in this particular sector. But they think it's worth the gamble, after watching what happened to the music industry. But it'll take a few years. How

much would you pay to read Sports Illustrated on your Ereader right now? You don't have an E-reader. And you can read Deadspin for free. So, you'd pay nothing. Changing that dynamic is what media companies need to worry about. And here's Time Inc's announcement to employees, just because we have it: December 8, 2009 To: Time Inc. Employees From: Ann Moore Re: New Digital Venture Today, five leading publishers

ideal for consuming rich content and an appealing environment for advertisers. These devices will allow us to combine the best of what consumers love about magazines – quality, curated journalism, engaging content and beautiful photography – with the speed, convenience and portability of the latest technology. While Time Inc. is pursuing a number of initiatives that will help us expand our current digital businesses and develop new products and revenue streams, our participation in this venture is an important part of our efforts. You'll be hearing more about it in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, for a look at some of the work Time Inc. is doing around portable devices, check out the demo Sports including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Illustrated developed, which will Meredith, Hearst and News give you an idea of how our Corporation announced the digital content might be enjoyed formation of a new venture to in the near future. develop a digital storefront and a www.si.com/tablet common reading application that A.M. Send an email to Hamilton will allow consumers to enjoy their favorite magazine and Nolan, the author of this post, at n e w s p a p e r c o n t e n t o n a n y moc.rekwag@notlimaH. This content has passed through platform they choose. We already know that the next fivefilters.org. generation of mobile devices will be loaded with color touchscreens, flexible displays, video capabilities and other features that will make them

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Barnes & Noble Nook demo units arrive, but sales of e-reader delayed (Network World) (Yahoo! News Search Results for e-readers)

for sale at a "date to be determined." But signs inside a Framingham, Mass., store last Submitted at 12/8/2009 2:09:26 AM week indicated Barnes & Noble today put its some Nook e-readers would be Nook e-readers on display at its available this week. retail stores, but acknowledged The company blog also said that that it won't be selling any pre-orders received online or in of the $259 device at the stores stores today would ship about until after the holidays. The latest Jan. 15. plan contradicts earlier in-store Less than a month ago, on Nov. signs announcing that 20, BarnesandNoble.com had the product would go on sale reported that pre-ordered Nooks this week. were out of stock, and that "We have ... decided that based deliveries on the high volume of pre-orders, would start Jan. 4. Meanwhile, w e w i l l n o t h a v e f o r - s a l e rival Amazon.com announced inventory in our stores until last week that it had Kindle eafter the holidays," Barnesand readers in stock, while Sony said Noble.com reported in a blog it would have trouble fulfilling note posted on its Web site late orders of the Daily Edition elast week by someone identified reader for the holidays. only as Kevin. "We will provide The Barnes & Noble decision to details as the put demo units in all of its 1,400 dates become more clear." stores, and not to sell any from A w e e k a g o , a c o m p a n y the stores until after spokeswoman had said via emai the holidays has not caused that demo units would not be much customer concern, at least displayed at every store and that in Framingham, said Margaret some "very Moore, a community relations limited inventory" would be manager

for the Framingham store. "People are understanding" about rollouts of new technologies, she said. She said the store personnel have taken "lots" of pre-orders. The first customer deliveries of the Nook are supposed to arrive the middle of this week, Kevin said in the Barnes & Noble blog post. "We are excited about this and we can't wait to hear your feedback..." However, some online c o m m e n t s a t Computerworld.com and elsewhere said that Barnes & Noble is "missing the boat" by delaying sales of the e-reader, while others wondered whether the delay is indicative of the quality of the product. Several potential customers at the Framingham store today played with two working Nooks on display with the help of a store employee. One woman, who gave her name only as Pam, said she thought it functioned well, but was concerned about whether the

size of the screen and the font sizes are adequate for long periods of reading text. She said she doesn't have an e-reader or smartphone to read e-books, but has friends who like them. "The biggest drawback is that it's still a tiny page" to read from for a long time even if you adjust the font size, she said in an interview outside the store after using the Nook for 20 minutes. She said the $259 price tag is "way off" -- half that would be reasonable. Nonetheless, she said she is still interested in possibly buying one because she lives in a small apartment with many books. An e-reader would help her avoid having to add more physical books to the space. For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

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How to Salvage the JooJoo (PC World) (Yahoo! News Search Results for e-readers)

whose primary feature is low price. It's just hard to deliver Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:17:34 AM something that has eluded the Michael Arrington's original rest of the world. Why Arrington vision for his CrunchPad remains t h o u g h t h e c o u l d p r o d u c e compelling. It's just that the something that Asia Inc. had device, renamed the JooJoo and m i s s e d m a y b e t h e m o r e introduced by Fusion Garage, is perplexing question of the whole way too expensive. That doesn't a n d somewhat sad make the idea bad, just the C r u n c h P a d / J o o J o o s t o r y . product a failure. However, even if Arrington and Some will say those of two sides his (former) friends cannot of the same coin. Yet, by deliver today, there may come a ratcheting back its ambition--not time when something more like to mention screen size and price-- the original CrunchPad concept the JooJoo could yet become can emerge phoenix-like from the something approaching a success. ashes of the JooJoo. It could even Arrington initially targeted a be later this year. $ 2 0 0 p r i c e p o i n t . H a d h e The key appears to be decreasing achieved it, street talk about the the screen size to bring the price JooJoo would be very different. down. I'd love to see what the People would be lining up to Fusion Garage folks could purchase one. deliver for $299. Make it At the actual price, $499, a few compatible/competitive with edevices will be sold, but nothing readers and the potential for a l i k e t h e p o t e n t i a l m a r k e t win still exists. Arrington had targeted. The current JooJoo could be the Of course, it doesn't take a high-end model and the smallergenius to imagine a product screen model aimed more at

reading than browsing. Like the Kindle e-reader, the JooJoo could be offered in two sizes at appropriate price points. In getting a prototype complete, Fusion Garage has shown it can actually create a product and do some smart things with it. Turning the existing JooJoo into a smaller device that combines the best features of what exists today (great user interface, good screen, etc.) with a more agreeable price is the best way to go. If the JooJoo can magically drop in price from the current $499 down to Arrington's initial "under $200" or even a $300 price point, it has a chance for success. If not, it will continue to warm a seat in Darwin's waiting room. David Coursey has been writing about technology products and companies for more than 25 years. He tweets as@techinciter and may be contacted via his Web site. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Publishers make pact on e-readers official (MacNN) (Yahoo! News Search Results for e-readers)

expected to evolve away from static images to take advantage of Internet connections and more Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:12:13 AM powerful hardware. True to a late leak, five major As expected in one leak, Time American publishers today executive VP John Squires is cemented plans for a joint leaving to run the venture and venture to promote a universal hopes to become CEO later on. standard for digital magazines Most of the companies involved and similar content. Cond Nast, i n t h e v e n t u r e h a v e b e e n Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and preemptively developing their T i m e e x p e c t t h e u n n a m e d own platforms, such as Hearst's company to develop digital Skiff, but are expected to magazines that will be readable ultimately work together. The on many platforms, including p u b l i c a t i o n s a r e p r i m a r i l y different operating systems and targeting e-book readers but have screen sizes, such as computers, b e e n d e v e l o p i n g w i t h t h e smartphones and tablets. The expectation of supporting a still technology will also be designed rumored but widely anticipated such that it should scale up to Apple tablet, with Cond Nast and color reading devices with mixed Time going so far as to prototype media like animations and video. a t a b l e t f o r m a t w i t h t h e The format will also aim to expectation they could adapt it to centralize the storefront and give the touchscreen slate through an rights to read a publication on app. any supporting device no matter This content has passed through w h e r e i t ' s b e e n b o u g h t . fivefilters.org. Advertising is ultimately

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Gallup Economic Weekly: Spending Remains Weak (All Gallup Headlines) Submitted at 12/7/2009 8:00:00 PM

PRINCETON, NJ -- Despite an uptick in economic confidence and a better job situation compared to a year ago as measured by Gallup economic data, consumer spending was down 21% last week from the same holiday week in 2008. Holiday spending is not looking good this year, even when compared to last year's dismal Christmas season, providing little holiday cheer for the nation's retailers. What Happened (Week Ending Dec. 6) â&#x20AC;˘ Economic Confidence improved a little last week. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index was -28, versus -30 the prior week and -30 for all of November. Americans' views of the country's economic prospects improved, with 38% saying the economy is "getting better," versus 35% and 34%, respectively, the prior two weeks, and 36% for all of November. Fifty-eight percent said the economy is "getting worse," compared to 59% the previous week. Consumer assessments of the current economy were somewhat mixed, with 45% rating the economy "poor" -- a slight improvement from 47% the prior week and 48% for all of November. At the same time, 9% rated the economy "excellent" or "good," compared to 12% the

previous week and 11% for November. Overall, economic confidence is up a little in early December compared to its November average. â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;˘ Consumer Spending continued to disappoint last week, as selfreported daily spending in stores, restaurants, gas stations, and online averaged $75 -- up $6 from the previous week. Given that last week included a pay period, this increase in spending was minimal at best. More importantly, it was down 21% from last year's comparable, when average spending was $95 per day. Still, the average spending for the week was at one of its highest levels of the year and it is not entirely clear how the 2008-2009 spending decrease will affect Christmas gift expenditures versus other discretionary spending such as eating out, traveling, or going to the movies. Regardless, it appears as though there will need to be a major surge in consumer discretionary spending during the next couple of weeks if this year's holiday expenditures are going to come anywhere close to matching last year's dismal performance. What to Watch For The decoupling of economic confidence from consumer spending was evident in Gallup's economic data last week. Even as confidence increased for the week and by even more

week's employment report. The decline in the number of jobs lost and in the unemployment rate is good news. And Gallup's job data show that job-market conditions today have improved considerably compared to earlier this year. In fact, Gallup's Job Creation Index suggests that hiring and firing conditions are better now than they were at this same time a year ago. Still, the improvement in the unemployment rate last month resulted in part from a decline of about 100,000 Americans in the labor force, as discouraged workers simply dropped out and compared to a year ago, stopped looking for work. consumer spending continued to Further, a survey by Kronos Inc. trail that of last year, by 21% -- shows that hiring by the nation's and that during a paycheck week. retailers rose to its highest level On Friday, Reuters/University of of 2009 last month, suggesting Michigan will report on its the job-market improvement may preliminary measurement of have much to do with new partc o n s u m e r s e n t i m e n t f o r time and temporary jobs. December. Gallup data show In this regard, probably the most confidence up slightly in early important jobs figure right now is December compared to the Gallup's hiring measure, which month of November, and this remains in a 24% to 26% range -should be reflected in Friday's essentially where it was at this report. Regardless, investors time a year ago. Most of the should not overreact to the improvement in job-market consumer sentiment preliminary conditions so far in 2009 seems report. Not only is it based on a attributable to a reduction in small number of interviews, but layoffs as opposed to a muchGallup data show that whatever needed increase in job creation. link may have existed between Last week, just before release of e c o n o m i c c o n f i d e n c e a n d the government's unemployment consumer spending in the past, it report, the president held a jobs summit in the nation's capital. does not continue in 2009. Similarly, it may not be wise to Such an effort to address the overstate the improvement in the current job crisis is clearly a step job market suggested by last in the right direction. However, it

seems clear that much more discussion and idea exchange are needed before political consensus can be reached about what the nation needs to do, not only to prioritize but simultaneously to stimulate new job creation. While the decline in the unemployment rate from 10.2% to 10.0% may be better than the alternative of a further deterioration, it does not suggest an end to the current jobs crisis. Gallup data suggest that the unemployment rate is likely to increase further next year -- and the increase could be substantial as retailers shed their temporary help, particularly if people who have given up the job search begin to look for jobs again. Review and export the complete daily trends on these measures: Economic Indexes; Consumer Spending; Economic Outlook; Economic Conditions; Job Market Learn more about Gallup's economic measures. Sign up for Gallup e-mail alerts or RSS feeds Get Gallup news on Facebook and Twitter Survey Methods For Gallup Daily tracking, Gallup interviews approximately 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older, each day. The Gallup consumer perceptions of the economy and consumer spending results are based on random halfsamples of approximately 500 GALLUP page 96

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national adults, aged 18 and older, each day. The Gallup job creation and job loss results are based on a random half sample of approximately 250 current fulland part-time employees each day. Results from the week of Nov. 30-Dec. 6, 2009, are based on telephone interviews with 3,375 adults for the consumer perceptions and spending questions. For these results, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is Âą2 percentage points. Results for the job creation and job loss questions are based on interviews with

1,939 employees, with a maximum margin of error of Âą3 percentage points. Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones and cellular phones. 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. This content has passed through fivefilters.org.

Tiniest Transistor Ever Runs Electric Current through a Single Atom By Jeremy Hsu (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now)

Revamped Google Search Pulls In Real-Time News Updates From Twitter, Blogs By Jeremy Hsu (Popular Science - New Technology,

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the future of quantum computing. Scientists have already begun creating quantum processors that store information as qubits (quantum bits), which can Submitted at 12/7/2009 2:22:09 PM represent both the 1 and 0 of A tiny working transistor binary computer language at the provides a glimpse of the future same time. The newly developed in quantum computing transistor provides not just an Ever-faster computers face a extreme example of transistor slowdown because of upcoming limits, but also points toward the physical limits on the size of development of qubits. transistors, the small switches "In fact, our purpose was not to that control electronic processes. build the tiniest transistor for a N o w r e s e a r c h e r s h a v e classical computer, but a demonstrated the world's tiniest quantum bit which would be the transistor, which passes electric heart of a quantum computer that c u r r e n t t h r o u g h a s i n g l e is being developed worldwide," p h o s p h o r u s a t o m - - a n said Mikko Mottonen, an applied achievement that goes beyond p h y s i c i s t a t t h e H e l s i n k i classical computing and hints at University of Technology in

Finland. Mottonen worked with Finnish and Australian colleagues to experiment with the single phosphorus atom as an electron donor. The spin degree of freedom in an electron of the phosphorus could form the qubit "switch" that someday allows researchers to control quantum processes. Classical computers won't go by the wayside immediately. But we're holding onto hopes of eventually seeing the world's tiniest snowman perform a nanoscopic robo-jig on YouTube, thanks to its mini-transistors. [via ScienceDaily]

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Google joins Twitter, Facebook and Myspace in combining news search results with social networking updates Google wants to freshen up those static search pages for queries the latest sports scores, weather conditions or mass cultural happenings. The Internet giant plans to roll out changes over the next few days that include a real-time feed added to their standard results page with instant updates from Twitter, Facebook and other news sites and blogs for instant zeitgeist readings. "Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, on the Official Google Blog. Clicking on "Latest results" or

selecting "Latest" from a search options menu displays the full page of live content scrolling past on Google, whether in the form of social network updates or from mainstream news sources. Users can also filter results to only see updates from the likes of Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku, etc. Putting the new features in place required Google to go beyond its real-time search algorithms, and enlist the cooperation of Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Twitter. iPhone and other mobile users now also have more search modes beyond text, including voice, location and sight. Android-capable devices can now recognize Japanese voice searches, and "what's nearby" displays some suggestions for destinations centered on mobile phone locations. Then there's a visual search

application called Google Goggles that searches by image, based on your camera phone -sounds like it makes use of image -recognition algorithms similar to those powering Image Swirl. More info is here at the Google Mobile Blog. You can test the new search features now at Google Trends, where the search engine now also includes the latest hot topics among netizens. As of this posting, the top search is â&#x20AC;Ś "tiger woods women." Well, we suppose that even Google can only work within what the people want. [ Google Blog]

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All of that would just be more pie-in-the-sky battery research if it were not for this: the paper battery technology is basically market-ready. That's not to say that researchers won't need some time to iron out the kinks, but power sources based on this technology could be commercialized very soon compared to a lot of the nanonoise circulating in scientific circles. The fact that the process is also very cheap means devices

like these could be powering your paper-replacing devices sooner than you think. Get the details straight from Stanford's Yi Cui below. [ PhysOrg, Forbes]

Virgin Galactic Unveils Spaceship 'Enterprise' By Clay Dillow (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The We've seen concepts and a rare VIRGIN pageFuture 98 Now) look behind the scenes during assembly, and now in the flesh:

Making Powerful, Lightweight Batteries From Nothing But Nanotube Ink and Paper By Clay Dillow (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now)

around other surfaces (energystoring wallpaper, anyone?). The carbon nanotube ink adheres to the surface of the paper just like normal ink would, making paper Submitted at 12/8/2009 7:15:46 AM the ideal vehicle for these thin, Reading the electronic-media lightweight storage devices. narrative as it plays out in many Since earlier research has shown popular tech and news blogs, one that silicon nanowire batteries would think we are hurtling can be up to 10 times more toward a future where paper is all p o w e r f u l t h a n l i t h i u m - i o n but unnecessary. But a new batteries, researchers are hopeful d e v e l o p m e n t i n b a t t e r y the paper batteries will be able to technology could bring paper p o w e r e v e r y t h i n g f r o m right back around to its former automobiles to laptops to phones place of prominence, using it to with smaller, lighter, more power the very digital devices -- powerful and longer-lasting smartphones, Kindles, laptops, batteries. The method can also etc. -- that are increasingly create simple supercapacitors replacing print. with large surface areas that By coating regular copier paper allow rapid energy discharge, a in ink made of carbon nanotubes requirement for automobile and silver nanowires, Stanford power sources that lithium-ion researchers have created highly batteries have trouble satisfying. conductive storage devices that MAKING page 97 can be bent, folded, and wrapped

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Head-Up Display Brings Ski Goggles Into the Future By Clay Dillow (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now)

haven't seen a prototype, we have to admit the idea is not only intriguing but completely feasible, though the finished product might come in a bit too Submitted at 12/7/2009 2:30:55 PM expensive for the average When you're bundled up in your weekend warrior's budget. We're mountain wear and strapped into even more excited by the your downhill gear, the last thing possibilities of something like the you want to do is take off your Alpine Goggle mashed up with gloves and fumble with augmented reality; floating icons electronics. Bringing high-tech to that point to your buddies' realhigh places, Recon Instruments' time locations even when they're goggles bring all that digital info far down the mountain, and trail you need, from temperature to markers that appear in your field altitude to where the hell all your of vision, pointing the way long ski buddies are, directly to the your eyes. When they launch in 360 toe-grab off the funbox. The before you hit that fork in the 2010, the Alpine Goggle will GPS can even guide rescue crews trail. inside of your goggle lens. The head-up display technology allow users to call up trail maps - directly to you, should you The company promises that a fits directly into the goggle - complete with the real-time require assistance after that last couple of models will become frame, along with GPS tech and locations of other skiers in your 360 toe-grab off the funbox. available next fall, starting at T h e r e ' s o n e t h i n g R e c o n around $350. other sensors that put navigation, party -- your speed, the altitude, communication and performance- the temperature, and even how Instruments can't let you see yet: [ DVICE via Recon Instruments] based information right before much vertical you got off that last a working model. But while we

Guess This Tool #4 Revealed: The Lathe Boring Bar By Vin Marshall (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now) Submitted at 12/8/2009 6:00:51 AM

If recognized this as an important bit of metal lathe tooling, you're a winner The object pictured here (which you guys nailed almost GUESS page 99

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Raising champagne glasses in the shadow of a full-size ice statue of an Apollo astronaut, a group of soon-to-be space tourists joined Sir Richard Branson at the unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, now named “ VSS Enterprise,” in the Mojave desert last night. With test flights beginning in 2010, the Enterprise is expected to enter service in 18 months, jetting well-heeled passengers

paying $200,000 per seat to the very edge of space. Enterprise will be shuttled to 50,000 feet by it’s carrier vessel, known as “Eve” after Sir Richard’s mother, at which point Enterprise will ferry its six passengers and two pilots to a sub-orbital altitude of 65 miles above the Earth. Moving 2,500 miles per hour, passengers will experience about five minutes of weightlessness and be able to see

the curvature of the Earth. Enterprise then re-enters the atmosphere with its wings folded up, gliding unpowered part of the way back to earth before landing back at Spaceport America outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, from which it will operate. Built by legendary aerospace designer Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, the project culminating in Enterprise has been marked by delays and even

tragedy – in 2007 three of Rutan’s employees died when an engine they were testing failed – so seeing the finished product roll onto the tarmac marked not only a milestone for Rutan and Branson’s vision, but for space tourism and private space travel as a viable industry [read our January 2010 issue cover story on that very topic here]. It also made for some awesome photos. See more here.

[ Virgin Galactic, Telegraph, Los Angeles Times]

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Chinese Woman Surgically Switches Fingerprints To Evade Japanese Immigration Officers By Stuart Fox (Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now)

attempting to sneak back in Japan. Lin, a 27-year-old Chinese national, paid around $14,600 to have the fingerprints on her left hand switched with the Submitted at 12/8/2009 9:16:15 AM fingerprints on her right hand. When attempting to evade Customs agents discovered the biometric sensors, most go with fraud when they saw scars from the Tyler Durden or the John Doe the surgery on Lin's fingers. from Se7en route, and simply cut While the BBC says this is or burn off their fingerprints. Japan's first case of biometric Unfortunately, that's a little fraud, the Mainichi Daily News obvious. So, for criminals claims that Lin is the eighth l o o k i n g t o s l i p t h r o u g h person arrested this year in Japan f i n g e r p r i n t i n g i n J a p a n e s e for altering their fingerprints in fingerprint surgery to help airports, fingerprint transplant some fashion. According to citizens slip past customs. surgery is all the rage. Japanese police, Chinese doctors Lin was first deported from That's what Lin Ring did when run a booming business in Japan in 2007; then, after she

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immediately) is known as a boring bar [insert drinking pun here], which is used on a metal lathe to cut the inside of a part. I use this tool less frequently than most of my other lathe tooling, but it is nonetheless indispensable. More about what to do with this sucker after the jump. The boring bar is used on a metal lathe, a machine tool that spins a part while moving a cutting tool to remove material from the part, to enlarge the inside diameter of a work piece and, potentially, to cut that

dimension to a tight tolerance. Typically, drill bits are used to machine smaller diameter holes in the center of work pieces, but if you've got a 2-inch hole to make in a piece of steel, you're reaching for the boring bar. The large block on the right attaches it to the tool holder. The bar on the left is where the action happens, holding the cutting tool out away from the tool post, which allows it to be inserted into the center of a rotating work piece (assuming you've already got a hole in it big enough for the boring bar to fit in

and, well, begin boring). Making one of these is a reasonable project for the home machinist, and a useful one. Just don't talk too much about it or people may find you ... dull. Congrats to PopSci user "1177", who guessed this tool right away! /2009-10/guess-what-4#comment -49519

snuck back into the country with the fake prints, she was investigated for faking a marriage with a 55-year-old Japanese man. Customs agents discovered the phony fingerprints and she was deported again. The lesson here: when getting surgery to defeat biometric sensors, shell out the extra dough for the high-class Helen Mirren package, not the low-rate Tara Reid job. It may cost a little more, but it's totally worth it. [ The Register]