links for 2009-07-21

"More plans to build homes, higher stock prices and fewer people filing first-time claims for jobless aid sent a private-sector forecast of American economic activity higher than expected in June. It was the third consecutive monthly increase for the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators, and another sign pointing toward the recession ending later this year." Good news all around.

"Fox News' Alisyn Camerota falsely claimed that White House chief economic adviser Larry Summers recently cited Google searches, but not GDP, as evidence that the economy is improving. In fact, Summers cited both, as well as several other economic indicators." Facts what are those?

"Cambodia’s courts have been busy in recent weeks with cases of defamation, disinformation and incitement brought by the government in what critics say is part of a broad assault on civil liberties. But she and other analysts say the targets seem carefully chosen to send a chill through the free press, independent judiciary, political opposition and civic organizations that were introduced by the United Nations in the early 1990s." Oh fun.

"As Mrs. Clinton conjured up a soaring vision of friendship between the two countries in a speech to a university audience here, the Obama administration signed off on a nuts-and-bolts technical agreement that will open the door to lucrative military sales by the United States to India. In addition, India said it had designated two sites where American companies would build nuclear power plants."

"An Egyptian court has overturned a three-year jail sentence given to a poet for insulting the president. The court accepted the argument of Moneer Said Hanna's lawyer that he had been investigated and put on trial without having had access to a lawyer. Relatives of the amateur poet told the BBC he was delighted and would not be writing poems of this kind again." So a half win, no real freedom of speech still.

"With a high-speed camera, Dr Villermaux and his colleagues filmed a single falling drop of water – about six millimetres in diameter. They recorded how air resistance caused it to deform and eventually break up."

FriendFeed has a new api. On the list to play around with.

"With a large bankroll, a staff at the outset of about eight journalists and the cachet of Evan Smith, the Texas Monthly editor, the new venture, called the Texas Tribune, hopes to be an immediate force on the state’s political landscape, much as Politico was two years ago in national politics." Cool.

"In an announcement on Monday, Barnes & Noble said that it would offer more than 700,000 books that could be read on a wide range of devices, including Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry and various laptop or desktop computers. When Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise in March, that online retailer had about 60,000 books in its catalog."

"Born in supernovae, pulsars are spinning neutron stars, collapsed stellar cores left from the death explosions of massive stars. Traditionally identified and studied by observing their regular radio pulsations, two dozen pulsars have now been detected at extreme gamma-ray energies by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The detections include 16 pulsars identified by their pulsed gamma-ray emission alone. This gamma-ray all-sky map, aligned with the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, shows the pulsar positions, with the 16 new Fermi pulsars circled in yellow (8 previously known radio pulsars are in magenta). Bizarre stellar corpses, the Vela, Crab, and Geminga pulsars on the right are the brightest ones in the gamma-ray sky. Pulsars Taz, Eel, and Rabbit are named for the nebulae they are now known to power. The Gamma Cygni and CTA 1 pulsars at the left also reside within expanding supernova remnants of the same name."

"A new way of making cancer cells die has been discovered by UK scientists, raising hopes of potent new treatments. The use of antibodies to target cancer has already had great success, and the latest discovery promises to make the approach even more effective."

"While most of the software features I describe below work on any iPhone running the iPhone OS 3.0, the 3GS model has one significant advantage that enables all of its owners to experience enterprise-class security. The iPhone 3GS includes a hardware encryption chip that uses the industry-standard AES 256 protocol (that's the Advanced Encryption Standard, with a key length of 256 bits)."

Well IE8 is better than 7, now how about IE6 start disappearing.

"Troubled US bank CIT has approved a $3bn (£1.8bn) loan from shareholders to keep it out of bankruptcy, reports say."

Anger management is not appropriate here or is it?

"The tiny Pacific island state of Tuvalu has said it wants all its energy to come from renewable sources by 2020."

"India's Supreme Court has refused to put on hold a landmark court judgement decriminalising gay sex in the country."

"The police are failing to use CCTV to catch as many criminals as they could, a senior officer has told the BBC."

"This is Amazon choosing its "content partners" over its customers. There is nothing about copyright law that required these deletions — if Amazon didn't have the rights to sell the e-books in the first place, the infringement happened when the books were sold. Remote deletion doesn't change that, and it's not an infringement for the Kindle owner simply to read the book. Can you imagine a brick-and-mortar bookstore chasing you home, entering your house, and pulling a book from your shelf after you paid good money for it?" EFF again taking on Amazon.

"The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become "as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million apps in 2020, a leading online store says. However, GetJar say, the developer community will decline drastically as each developer makes less money. According to the Symbian Foundation, newly in the developer market, apps will become more personal and practical as their numbers grow." I'm not totally set in this idea. It has the potental but there are drawbacks.

"Two Bosnian Serb commanders have been found guilty of war crimes, including burning women and children alive, during the Bosnian civil war. Cousins Milan and Sredoje Lukic were members of a paramilitary group called the White Eagles, or the Avengers. They were accused of murder, persecution, extermination and other inhumane acts against Bosnian Muslims near Visegrad between 1992 and 1994."

"According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days. (That's half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing its biggest product launch of the year, Bing.)" Does it matter if Twitter can't get people using and staying with the product.

"The European Union has suspended more than $90m (63m euros; £54m) in aid to Honduras in the wake of a coup there."

"Fox News aired an anti-choice graphic sourced to the American Life League featuring a fetus and the words, "Abortion: growing … growing … gone," during a segment asking if "health care reform" will result in federally funded abortions." Fox News apparently doesn't have any graphics people on staff.

"Sri Lanka has agreed a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) loan accord from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the help it weather the global economic crisis."

"And there you have it. It is hard to have these conversations and feel that somehow we have failed. The current generation believe what is true, that such space travel is as much as a dream as it was prior to the 1960s. I know that some will say that was all well and good given the cost. But the cost of the entire space program over that time, in today's dollars, was $176 billion. And yes, that, in retrospect was too costly. Not because of the resources it took but because the expense surely had value in knowledge created that would built up and lead to greater things. To not have reinvested on the back of that achievement was to erode the capital value of the initial expense. Almost impossible to conceive at the time, the moon landings were a short-term policy and not a serious commitment to the future. It will leave us and the next generation wondering what could have been."

":A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers. In the term of the moment this is called cloud computing, and the cloud consists of the data — including e-mail and Web-based documents and calendars — stored on numerous servers." I totally want to play around with this software.

"The total exposure of the US government to the financial crisis could hit $23.7 trillion (£14.3tn), according to a watchdog report. Neil Barofsky, overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Tarp), made the estimate in prepared remarks to a House of Representatives committee. The worst-case estimate represents the maximum exposure if all parties offered support requested maximum assistance."

YouTube busts some myths, attempting to reach advertisers and producers?

"The US Army will "temporarily" increase its size by 22,000 soldiers for the next three years, Defence Secretary Robert Gates has announced. The additional troops are intended to ease the strain of the US's deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Gates said. The extra manpower will raise the total number of active US soldiers from 547,000 to 569,000."

"Still, surrogate pregnancy is illegal in some states, including New York, and it remains fraught with controversy despite the fact that thousands of American couples — most of them not celebrities or especially wealthy — are happily bringing up children they could not produce on their own." Fairly light article on the subject.

"The image was taken by the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. This IR image is at 1.65 microns, about twice the wavelength of what the human eye can see. What this shows is the bright impact site and to its upper left particulate matter — debris — thrown up by the impact and lit by the Sun. So. Wow. Jupiter got hit by something big. More observations will be coming in soon, and maybe we’ll learn more about what happened."

Can you saw awesome.

"Speaking in London, the Nato secretary-general said failure would give free run to al-Qaeda." Uh no duh.

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and California's legislative leaders have agreed on a plan to close the state's $26 billion budget shortfall. The plan will include billions of dollars in cuts. The rest of the deficit will be made up by a combination of borrowing, shifting money from other government accounts and accelerating the collection of certain taxes. Schwarzenegger and Republican lawmakers refused to raise taxes any further, limiting lawmakers' options."

"The square, in the town of Suarez some 40km from the capital Montevideo, has gone over to solar energy and LED technology. The aim is to reduce electricity costs and at the same time light more streets. If it works, the plan could serve as a model for other towns across the country. In the current economic crisis and upward pressure on electricity prices, it should be a way of reducing energy costs." Cool.

"A key report on the detention of terrorism suspects ordered by US President Barack Obama will be delayed by six months, officials have said. Although expected, the delay raises doubts about his ability to meet the deadline, correspondents say. Another report on the interrogation of suspects and their transfer to other countries would be delayed by two months, administration officials said."

"Internet Explorer 8 will no longer replace the default browser when a user selects the 'Use express settings' option during installation." About time, stupid Microsoft.

"In a display of weakness unbecoming a head of state, President Barack Obama concluded remarks to his nation Tuesday by asking a pretend man who lives in the clouds to watch over and guide the United States. "Thank you, and may God bless America," said the clearly insecure president, who, by seeking the aid of an imaginary being who is neither his ancestor nor someone with whom he shares a tangible harmonious relationship, freely admitted that he has little faith in himself and his inept team of jester advisers." Lol.

"An Italian newspaper has released audio recordings and transcripts of what it says was a night Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi spent with an escort." Sex and scandal our politicians are practically boring.

"Gates said he turned over his driver's license and Harvard ID — both with his photos — and repeatedly asked for the name and badge number of the officer, who refused. He said he then followed the officer as he left his house onto his front porch, where he was handcuffed in front of other officers, Gates said in a statement released by his attorney, fellow Harvard scholar Charles Ogletree, on a Web site Gates oversees, TheRoot.com." This seems really odd on the surface.

"Indeed, with unemployment approaching 20 percent, the highest in Europe, and the overall economy expected to shrink by 4.2 percent this year, bank robberies in 2009 are running 20 percent ahead of 2007’s pace, according to the Spanish Banking Association."

"Maybe so. I’m a helpful guy. Really. So I’ve provided this handy flow chart for all web designers and marketing people to consult before they put a Flash intro in place. Use this and no matter what your product, no matter who your target audience, you will always reach the right decision:" The chart is always no, lol.

"Learning to move a computer cursor or robotic arm with nothing but thoughts can be no different from learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle, according to a new study of how brains and machines interact. In the new experiments, monkeys learned how to move a computer cursor with their thoughts using just one set of instructions and an unusually small number of brain cells that deliver instructions for performing movements the same way each day." Oh New York Times for misleading headlines.

The Wrath of Khan goes debugging.

"The three Apollo 11 astronauts appeared at the White House today, and just as he had at a speech at the National Academy of Sciences in April, President Obama spoke in glowing platitudes of NASA’s past and said almost nothing of NASA’s future." Bahhh.

"Scientists in California have set up a unique experiment to track the life histories of some of the world's oldest and tallest trees. The project is designed to follow up research, in the Yosemite National Park, which suggests that giant trees are perishing as a result of climate change. An analysis of data collected over 60 years has led scientists from the University of Washington and the Yosemite Field Station of the US Geological Survey, to conclude that the density of large diameter trees fell by 24% between the 1930s and 1990s."

Give your servers a physical every now and then.

"To commemorate this event the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project." So cool.

"This single statement, apparently written by some sub-contractor they had outsourced admin interface programming to, cost them millions of NOK in lost sales." Sucks to be that vendor.

"Some MySpacers are speculating on the site’s forums that the hack is tied to phishing links in status updates, which seems to be in line with the reports we’ve seen of literally hundreds of identical spam status updates to certain band profiles (see the screenshot below).
Update: We’ve learned that this is in fact the case — MySpace users are falling prey to a phishing attack through links in status updates that invite them to renter their login information, which is then used to spam their accounts. MySpace expects to have a fix for this out later today that will remove all of these links." Go figure.

"Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso is due to dissolve the lower house of parliament ahead of polls on 30 August, after gaining official cabinet backing. Mr Aso called the elections early after his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost control of Tokyo's municipal assembly. Opinion polls suggest that the LDP could lose heavily to the opposition Democratic Party in the upcoming vote. A win for the Democratic Party would end five decades of almost uninterrupted rule by the LDP."

"Cash machines offer an ever-growing menu of services beyond merely dispensing money. For tampering criminals, this now includes a squirt of pepper spray in the face. The technology uses cameras to detect people tampering with the card slots. Another machine then ejects pepper spray to stun the culprit while police response teams race to the scene. But the mechanism backfired in one incident last week when pepper spray was inadvertently inhaled by three technicians who required treatment from paramedics."