links for 2009-06-03

"Employee noncompete agreements prohibit employees from engaging in conduct competitive with their employers after the employment relationship terminates. In many states, such agreements have historically been the most effective way for a company to protect a company's investment in training, the development of special skills, trade secrets, confidential information and goodwill. Now, that's all changing. In recognition of our currently dismal economy and the need to permit people to work, some courts — even in states that generally enforce noncompete agreements — have demonstrated a reluctance to enforce these agreements." I'm not a fan of non-competes for just this reason.

"Last.fm and CBS respond in no uncertain terms to rumors that the two companies were involved in transferring user data to either the RIAA or a music label. Last.fm speculates that the company may be the target of slander." That's pretty much that.

"Houston-based blogger Lyndal Harrington was jailed last week for failing to turn over her computer as part of a defamation case involving the late Anna Nicole Smith. The 53-year-old grandmother claimed that her house was broken into and her computer was stolen after the court had subpoenaed it for evidence. US District Judge Tony Lindsay didn't buy the story, however, and jailed her for contempt." A police officer isn't collaborating her story about the laptop being stolen, so she may be lying regarding that.

"The National Association of Realtors said its seasonally adjusted index of sales contracts signed in April rose 6.7 percent, to 90.3, far exceeding analysts’ forecasts. It was the biggest monthly increase since October 2001, when pending sales rose 9.2 percent." That's good news.

"Inspired by his example, I propose curbing gun violence not by further restricting the availability of guns but by expanding and reorienting it. Men would still be forbidden to walk the streets armed, in accordance with current laws, but women would be required to carry pistols in plain sight whenever they are out and about. Were I to board the subway late at night, around Lincoln Center perhaps, and find it filled with women openly carrying Metropolitan Opera programs and Glock automatics, I’d feel snug and secure. A train packed with armed men would not produce the same comforting sensation. Maybe that’s because men have a disconcerting tendency to shoot people, while women display admirable restraint. Department of Justice figures show that between 1976 and 2005, 91.3 percent of gun homicides were committed by men, 8.7 percent by women." Unique idea.

"She decided to use her time to talk about Jesus. School officials didn’t like the breaking of rules. They told her she had to apologize before she could get her diploma (a fairly light punishment, I think)." The district court ruled that she broke the school rules on having her speech pre-approved not that it was religious in nature.

"Scott Roeder, 51, was charged with the first-degree murder of Dr George Tiller, who was shot dead on Sunday at a church in Wichita. Mr Roeder is also charged with aggravated assault against two people who tried to intervene in the attack."

"So, is TheFoxNation.com simply the seedy underbelly of Fox News parent company chairman Rupert Murdoch's evil, right-wing media empire?" They're just asking.

"Scientists have located 38 emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica by using satellites to look for stains from the animals' droppings. It is impossible to track the penguins themselves using standard satellite imaging because they are too small. However, penguins cluster for up to eight months on sea ice; as their guano builds up it leaves a reddish-brown mark on sea ice that is easier to spot." Okay that's cool.

Some sobering statistics on this issue.

"India's parliament is to have its first woman Speaker after a sweeping win for the Congress party in recent elections." Good job India.

"Google has obviously chosen XMPP for its application layer data exchange because it’s open, extensible, or maybe that’s just where the dart landed when they discussed their options. But let’s face facts: HTTP is the de facto application layer transport protocol of the Internet and it’s highly unlikely that a company that’s built its fortunes upon that fact is suddenly going to turn around and abandon it. HTTP is the only almost-surefire method of traversing firewalls in any kind of bi-directional communication exchange between clients and servers, and routinely carries on its back any number of “layer 7+” protocols such as SOAP, JSON, and XML." Pretty much says it all.

"Last week, the Massachusets Supreme Court threw out the search warrant" Thank goodness, this was such a bs search warrant, the logic behind it was fundamentally flawed as pointed out in the ruling.

"President Obama announced on Tuesday that he would nominate Representative John M. McHugh of upstate New York, the senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, to be the next secretary of the Army."

"A federal court in Alabama ordered that a real estate agent and the owner of rental units the agent managed in Montgomery, Alabama, must pay damages to a low-income renter for sexual harassment. The agent had repeatedly tried to coerce the renter into having sex with him and then raised her rent and attempted to evict her when she refused." Can you say messed up.

"Chinese scientists have given cells from adult pigs the ability to turn into any tissue in the body, just like embryonic stem cells."

"The World Health Organization said Tuesday that it was moving closer to declaring swine flu a worldwide pandemic. The disease has reached 64 countries, and there have been dozens or hundreds of cases in several nations outside North America, including Britain, Spain, Japan, Chile and Australia. The Southern Hemisphere countries are now of chief interest because their winter flu season is just beginning and another strain of the H1N1 virus, widespread last winter, was resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu." Not good news.

"American bloggers have reacted angrily to proposals for a new law that could potentially make it illegal to criticise or make fun of somebody online. Linda Sanchez, a Democratic congresswoman for California, is leading a bill intended to combat cyberbullying – but opponents say the law's limits are vague and threaten freedom of speech." Stupid politicians.

"The Justice Department has begun an investigation into whether the recruiting practices of some of the largest technology companies violated antitrust laws, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation. The investigation targets some of Silicon Valley’s best known companies, including Google, Yahoo, Apple and several others, these people said. The exact focus of the inquiry is unclear, but the people familiar with it said Justice Department lawyers appeared to be looking into whether the companies involved agreed to not actively recruit employees from each other." Wow.

"Thirty-four members of the Organization of American States gathered here Tuesday to argue over whether to readmit Cuba. By evening, an isolated United States was still struggling to fend off a vote to lift the ban on Havana. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged from talks with the foreign ministers of nine North and South American countries having failed to hash out a compromise that would give Cuba a path to membership, provided its government accepted democratic principles."

"Bill O'Reilly claimed of his previous references to George Tiller as "the baby killer": "I reported what groups were calling him. I reported accurately." In fact, O'Reilly himself has repeatedly referred to Tiller as "the baby killer.""

"Unemployment in the 16 countries using the euro increased in April to its highest level in nearly ten years, official data has shown."

"However today Chinese authorities have come down like a tonne of bricks on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blogger and a number of other sites."

".dp50 {width:50%; float:left; display: inline; *margin-right:-1px; }" That's the entire framework.

"A UN report says hunger in South Asia has reached its highest level in 40 years because of food and fuel price rises and the global economic downturn. The report by the UN children's fund, Unicef, says that 100 million more people in the region are going hungry compared with two years ago."

"Its sales of 155,954 vehicles in May were down 24% from the same month last year, but up 20% from April." Good job Ford.

"Electronic Arts (EA) on Tuesday announced the simultaneous worldwide release of The Sims 3 for Mac and Windows. A version developed to run on the iPhone and iPod touch is also available."

"The algorithm that Ola Ågren has developed ranks pages, instead, on the basis of each relevant starting page, and includes pages that are directly or indirectly linked to by the starting page. Then a normalised mean value of the relevance of the various pages is calculated. A page that has links to it from several different pages is therefore assigned a higher value than those that are found only once. In this way it is faster to find pages of interest. For ordinary standard algorithms it takes more than seven days to go through and rank Web pages in a certain database. Using his algorithm, Ola Ågren has managed to do this in 158 seconds."

"Today we're releasing the newest version of our solution, the Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA), which has the capacity to search billions of documents. So whether you own a small business with a few thousand docs or belong to a huge organization with a billion, the GSA can search them all." Google throughly owns in the search arena.

"It goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway: If the sight of an old man with balloons in a confined space, alone with a little boy doesn't raise every anointed hair on your Godly neck, then you need to check yourself into a Baptist Mental Hospital! It doesn't matter if a man-balloon-boy combo is presented in a book, in a movie, or in real life – as True Christians™, what might seem innocent to the untrained (unsaved) eye, when seen through the Eyes of Christ, calls forth images that could only be described as a potpourri of pedophilia! This sexually explicit and perverted combination of an old man, balloons, and a little boy is the subject of Disney PIXAR's lewd little new film, Up. And yes, Christian friends, we are living in the Last Days. So, it shouldn't shock you to hear that Up is rated G and is marketed to your children." This is insane. (Edit: almost certainly a sarcastic website – I am not taking this seriously.)

"A message attributed to the deputy leader of al-Qaeda has denounced Barack Obama as a "criminal" on the eve of the US president's Middle East trip." I'm shocked.

"After Xbox 360's Project Natal, Sony is also adding their own motion controller to the PS3, aptly named The PlayStation Motion Controller. It's the best motion control demo that we have ever seen, but it may be arriving a little too late." Cool.

"US President Barack Obama is heading to the Middle East on a visit aimed at increasing US engagement with the Islamic world. Mr Obama travels first to Saudi Arabia and then to Egypt, where he will make a keynote speech on ties with the region."

"UK consumers now believe broadband is becoming as essential a utility as electricity or water, according to a panel of government advisers." I have to agree, broadband is easily a vital utility for me.

"As a co-inventor of sIFR, I’ve been getting a lot of emails this week asking what I think of this new effort. In evaluating its promise, it’s important to examine the following characteristics, in order of importance: compatibility, functionality, legality, ease of use, and hackiness. Typekit is likely the best thing to happen to web design since the re-emergence of browser competitiveness." That's a nice endorsement for an unreleased product.

Happy Birthday.

"A robotic sub called Nereus has reached the deepest-known part of the ocean. The dive to 10,902m (6.8 miles) took place on 31 May, at the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean. This makes Nereus the deepest-diving vehicle currently in service and the first vehicle to explore the Marianas Trench since 1998."

"Later today, you'll be able to do just that, thanks to a new dashboard feature we're launching in the Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps."

"Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday its new Windows 7 operating system will be generally available on October 22, well ahead of its original schedule and in time for the holiday shopping season."

"Debris spotted by planes in waters 650km (400 miles) off Brazil's coast belongs to a missing French airliner, the Brazilian government has confirmed."

"General Motors is to sell its Hummer brand to China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery for an undisclosed amount." Hmmm.

Good news for easily one of the more popular desktop programming languages.

How good are you at dismissing your employees?

"The new version, called the PSP Go, is scheduled to be introduced in the United States and Europe in October and cost $249. The unit is smaller, lighter and more expensive than the current version, the PSP-3000, which costs $169."