"I just thought I should tell you because the fat man standing behind me at Starbucks today shouted it so loud into his cell phone that I figured he must have wanted all of you to know. He certainly wanted all of Starbucks to know." Rethink talking loud on your cell phone people.

"A gay couple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thursday on Main Street Plaza." What happens when religion is allowed to police the general public?

"This is not one of those stories about old media going all-digital — The Chronicle, owned by the Hearst Corporation, still comes out daily on paper. But it has become the biggest newspaper in the country to outsource all of its printing, to Transcontinental Printing, a Canadian company that produces The Chronicle at a new plant in Fremont, Calif." Hint it won't help.

Creationist Response Dice Game.

Atheism is apparently dangerous, wtf sums it up.

"Mr. Fairey pleaded guilty to three charges of vandalism, including defacing property and wanton destruction of property under $250; 11 other charges were dropped. He was also fined $2,000 to pay for graffiti removal. Mr. Fairey was arrested in Boston in February as he arrived at the Institute of Contemporary Art for the opening-night party for a retrospective of his work."

Thank goodness the first was stupid and not really all that interesting, the second is much of the same.

A fascinating look at the legal battle for a single Senate seat.

Asbestos at Texas Tech.

"Want to cause chaos at an airport? Leave a suitcase in the restroom:"

"There is a communications revolution happening right now. It crosses generations, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of people who benefit from ignorance and the control of information." Wil Wheaton wrote this 2 years ago and he is still right.

"For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign." Makes sense since most (though not all) blogs are adding commentary to news articles.

"Millions of Americans have bought musical ringtones, often clips from favorite popular songs, for their mobile phones. Mobile phone carriers pay royalties to song owners for the right to sell these snippets to their customers. But as part of a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) has told a federal court that each time a phone rings in a public place, the phone user has violated copyright law. Therefore, ASCAP argues, phone carriers must pay additional royalties or face legal liability for contributing to what they claim is cell phone users' copyright infringement." ASCAP are morons.

Stats on Twitter including: "# 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
# 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
# 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
# 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
# 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity"

"Nuclear negotiators from China and South Korea have opened talks in the South Korean capital, Seoul, about how to handle the threat from the North."

"After being scarce for the first couple of weeks following the new iPhone 3.0 software rolling out, apps with Push Notifications are now rolling out at a healthy clip. And that’s great, because the feature is really useful. To a point. The issue I’m noticing now is that if you have too many apps with Push Notifications turned on, the whole system becomes a lot less useful. You see, Push Notifications are basically Apple’s way to get around allowing third-party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. So apps can now send these push messages to your phone to let you know if there’s some kind of message or update that you should open an app for. But if you have a lot of push messages coming in, I’m finding that you either have to pull out your phone every couple minutes, or risk still missing notifications that you probably want to see." A failure of the system.

"The UK must invest more in nuclear and clean coal energy and put less emphasis on wind power if it wants a secure low-carbon future, business leaders say."

"Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, captured slightly more United States searches than Yahoo in the first eight days of June, according to StatCounter Global Stats, a firm that tracks Web use. That is a milestone for Bing, whose share of the search pie has been slowly rising since it was unveiled on June 3."

"The political news Web site Talking Points Memo this weekend completed a round of investment, of $500,000 to $1 million. The move is intended to increase the number of employees, to roughly 20, from the current 11, in the next 10 months."

"But interviews in Alaska and in Washington show that a seemingly relentless string of professional and personal troubles quickly put that goal out of reach. Almost as soon as she returned home, the once-popular governor was isolated from an increasingly critical Legislature. Lawmakers who had supported her signature effort to develop a natural gas pipeline turned into uncooperative critics. Ethics complaints mounted, and legal bills followed. During the campaign, an investigation by the Republican-dominated Legislature found that Ms. Palin had abused her office by leaning on subordinates to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper. She was forced to pay back taxes after it was disclosed that she had billed the state for thousands of dollars in per diem expenses meant to cover travel costs while staying in Wasilla. Still, of the 19 ethics complaints filed against her, most have been dismissed."

"Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jews have clashed with police in Jerusalem for a third consecutive Saturday over a car park which opens on the Sabbath. The row has highlighted tensions between Jerusalem's ultra-orthodox Jews, known as Haredim, and the majority secular population. "

"The Church of England's ruling body, the General Synod, is to debate whether to reduce the number of bishops in a bid to save money. The plan's supporters say the Church could use teams of more junior parish clergy to do the work of bishops. But bishops say their workload is larger than ever and cutting their numbers would be problematic. There are currently 114 bishops in the Church of England, including the 44 most senior who head the country's dioceses. Together with deans and canons of cathedrals and archdeacons they make up a body of senior staff that has remained largely unchanged in number for 50 years. However, in the same period the number of junior clergy has plummeted and forced some parishes to merge."

"You may have heard that California is broke, and is sending out IOU slips instead of checks for income tax refunds. I thought that I would be safe as I usually owe taxes, but due to an amendment of my return, I ended up getting one in the mail as well. Here is a scan for historical preservation"

"Rosetta Stone Inc, a provider of language-learning software, said it filed a lawsuit against Google Inc in a U.S. federal court, alleging trademark infringement." Another lawsuit against Google's practice of allowing competitor's trademarks. Let me put this simply, Google is in the right, you should be able to purchase advertising against your competition even using their trademark.

"There is a strong link in obesity between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons, but not across the gender divide, research suggests. A study of 226 families by Plymouth's Peninsula Medical School found obese mothers were 10 times more likely to have obese daughters. For fathers and sons, there was a six-fold rise. But in both cases children of the opposite sex were not affected." Interesting.

"Matt Aune said he and his partner, Derek Jones, were walking home from a concert nearby on Thursday night, cutting through the plaza near the Salt Lake City Mormon temple. Aune, 28, said he gave Jones, 25, a hug and kiss and that the two were then approached by a security guard, who asked them to leave, telling them they were being inappropriate and that public displays of affection aren't allowed on the property. He said other guards arrived and the men were handcuffed."

"#crunchup why won't Twitter gives it feed to Google or Microsoft? Edo Segal explains it in terms of exit strategy. Risky game. Is this wise?" I don't know, depends what is their exit strategy.

"Check out Stowe Boyd trash talking the White House official Twitter account, which this morning is live tweeting the President's speech in Ghana." I agree with Stowe Boyd.

Ad of a model stripping then being gutted by a fisherman to protest live gutting of fish.

Really GM this is how you are going to start off, selling cars on eBay, one of my most hated shopping experiences even beating out WalMart.

"Does anything strike you about that list? So clearly have they been picked for their mockability that Baron Cohen is left with nothing to prove; a genuinely bold interviewer might find that they did have something to say, but that is beyond his brief. Indeed, the first pastor slightly floors Brüno with a clear, uncontroversial statement of his belief in Jesus, whereupon Brüno takes emergency action in the only way he knows. He talks dirty…" The New Yorker on Bruno.

"Sports site RootZoo has sued Facebook for click fraud, alleging that the social networking site charged for more clicks than actually occurred. The lawsuit comes several weeks after Facebook users began flooding message boards with complaints about overcharging. " The first of many I'm sure.

" The Treasury Department could be undervaluing billions of dollars worth of stock warrants that it received from banks that took out loans through the government’s $700 billion bailout program, a Congressional oversight panel said on Friday. The panel estimated that the government’s approach could cost taxpayers as much as $2.1 billion if it were to be applied to all the banks and Wall Street firms that have borrowed a total of $240 billion since last fall."

"These are based on raw Pew data, reweighted to adjust for voter turnout by state, income, and ethnicity. No modeling of vote on age, education, and ethnicity. I think our future estimates based on the 9-way model will be better, but these are basically OK, I think. All but six of the dots in the graph are based on sample sizes greater than 30."

"Rather than saving Americans from the Real ID legislation that they have rejected in such large numbers, PASS ID would actualrescue the core policies of Real ID at a time when it is about to die of its own misguided impracticality."

"Cutting calories may delay the ageing process and reduce the risk of disease, a long-term study of monkeys suggests. The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period. Over 20 years, monkeys whose diets were not restricted were nearly three times more likely to have died than those whose calories were counted."

"Public figures whose mobile phones were allegedly hacked into by investigators hired by the News of the World are said to be considering suing the newspaper. It follows claims in the Guardian that the tabloid paid £1m to settle legal cases which threatened to expose the use of illegal methods to get stories."

"A state lawmaker who made national headlines by claiming homosexuality is a greater threat to the United States than terrorism was heckled by protesters as she launched a campaign for a morality proclamation that opponents said promotes an atmosphere of hate." WTF?

Oh Bill.

"I have a few friends who work in the comedy business and I've had disturbing conversations as of late about the gender dynamic therein. For example, did you know that there is not one single female writer at The Daily Show? Not one. (Samantha Bee is a correspondent, and does some writing, but is not an official writer. Kristin Schall is only an occasional contributor.) When I think about how many women adore Jon Stewart, myself included, it makes me really sad to know that we're not also pushing him and Comedy Central, more broadly, to hire more women."

"Imprisoned fraudster Bernard Madoff has decided not to appeal against his 150-year sentence, his lawyer has said."

"A report in a Russian military journal claims that half the planes Russia lost in its war with Georgia last year were shot down by friendly fire. The article, in the Moscow Defence Brief magazine, also claims that Russia lost a total of six military aircraft, two more than it is admitting to." Awesome work Russia.

"The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Virginia today demanded that officials at the Rappahannock Regional Jail immediately end their illegal practice of censoring religious material sent to detainees. In a letter sent today to the jail's superintendent, Joseph Higgs, Jr., the ACLU asks for jail officials to guarantee in writing that the jail will no longer censor biblical passages from letters written to detainees and to revise the jail's written inmate mail policy to state that letters will not be censored simply because they contain religious material."

"Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against the federal government yesterday, challenging the legality of the Defense of Marriage ACT (DOMA). Passed in 1996, DOMA defines marriage as between one man and one woman and denies federal recognition of same-sex marriages. The lawsuit, filed by state Attorney General Martha Coakley, claims that the law forces the state to discriminate against its approximately 16,000 same-sex married couples."

"Impressive. But sadly, not enough for Microsoft (MSFT) to make real headway. Because Bing actually ended up losing market share during June, slipping to 5.25 percent from the 5.64 percent it had in May (click on chart below). Meanwhile, Google (GOOG) gained share, rising to 74.04 percent from 73.66 percent in May. And Yahoo (YHOO) gained as well, starting out the month with a 15.55 percent share and ending it with 16.19 percent."

"The Netherlands has returned to Iraqi ownership dozens of ancient artefacts that were stolen from the country after the US-led invasion of 2003. The 69 items were surrendered by Dutch art dealers after Interpol disclosed their illegal origin."

"The Philippines government plans to resume peace talks with communist rebels next month, officials have said. The last round of talks collapsed in 2004 amid communist anger at being included on US and European lists of terrorist groups. "

"The search giant said it was working with many firms on Chrome OS hardware including Acer, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba."

"However, sponsored links on the right attracted more attention on Bing (~42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (~25% of participants per search)." Bing gets those ads.

"A group of 26 AIDS activists chained themselves to each other in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday morning, startling visitors, shutting down the landmark area and prompting their arrest by Capitol Police. Candidate Obama said he would help overturn the ban on needle exchange. President Obama reversed himself and banned federal funding for needle exchanges in his budget this year."

"As it stands, Amazon.com’s $9.99 e-book price is unsustainably low for the company and publishers, said Claudio Aspesi, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst in London, in a June 19 note. Amazon.com will probably raise the price it charges Kindle users to $12.50 and pressure publishers to sell electronic books for less so it can make a profit, he said. "

What happens when Darth Vader falls in Love?

"A US judge has rejected a last minute request by a group of personal injury claimants to delay the sale of the profitable parts of General Motors." The last hurdle is down.

Stupid and a waste of time.

Apple does have a sense of humor.

"I don’t understand why so many outsiders are concerned about this. If Steve Jobs and the other members of Apple’s board think Schmidt’s spot on the board poses a competitive conflict of interest, they’ll ask him to leave. If they don’t, then what’s the problem? Does Tom Krazit really believe he has a better grasp of Apple’s competitive position versus Google than Jobs? Does he think Jobs is too shy or polite to confront Schmidt?" What he said.

"UK internet service provider TalkTalk has pulled the plug on its agreement with online behaviour tracking firm Phorm." Another ISP goes down.

"Andrew Napolitano falsely claimed that in the GM bankruptcy proceedings, "[t]here was no testimony whatsoever in court." In fact, the judge overseeing the case stated that there was in-court testimony. " For being a judge how do you not know how to read a court transcript?

"The Swiss government, vowing to protect its vaunted bank secrecy laws, said on Wednesday that it was prepared to seize UBS client data rather than allow the bank to hand it over to the United States to settle a tax case."

"A court in Saudi Arabia has issued verdicts, prosecutors say, in what is thought to be the first terrorism trial for al-Qaeda militants in the kingdom. Justice ministry officials say 330 had been on trial, but they did not specify how many had been found guilty. One defendant was given a death sentence."

"I've just received notice of a new modeling tool that allows education researchers to play out proposed education scenarios and policies in simulated form to test for those programs with favorable/positive outcomes." Interesting.

"But the panic seems to be subsiding. Rates are still well above their post-Lehman lows, when credit markets were completely frozen and everyone was piling into govt. debt. But they’re low by historical standards, and not giving much ammunition to the worriers these days."

"Today 23andMe has announced that it’s launching a much cheaper $99 version of its product as part of a new Research Revolution, which is meant to help 23andMe initiate research studies on genetic diseases that would otherwise require major logistical hurdles and funding. The effort is part of the company’s 23andWe research arm, which has the goal of building grassroots studies from communities of members who are afflicted by various genetic diseases." Cool idea.

"This wonderful vacuum tube chess set, by maker Paul Fryer, actually has electricity running inside the board so that the tubes can draw power and glow as you move them from square to square. It is called, somewhat appropriately, Chess Set for Tesla, and Paul actually made seven sets last year." This is awesome.

"On Thursday, the companies plan to announce that Best Buy will heavily promote TiVo products in its 1,100 stores in the United States. TiVo will develop a version of its set-top box, to be sold in Best Buy stores, that will let the retailer advertise its products and services to TiVo subscribers on their home televisions."

"Undercover investigators managed to smuggle bomb-making materials into key US government buildings on 10 occasions last year, a congressional report says. The Government Accountability Office said that once inside the buildings, investigators were able to assemble bombs and carry them around freely. The infiltrated buildings included the offices of a senator and a congressman. The report cited instances of guards falling asleep on the job or failing to detect explosives at x-ray scanners." Yeah Homeland Security.

"A drug discovered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the ageing process, research suggests. When US scientists treated old mice with rapamycin it extended their expected lifespan by up to 38%."

"The White House has nominated Stephen Rapp, a well-known figure in international criminal law, to be ambassador at large for war crimes issues."

Kinda like strip poker only with resumes.

"Possession of pornography is now a criminal offense in Ukraine, Lenta.ru reports, after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko signed a law to that effect today. Human rights activists and members of the Ukrainian artistic community had asked the president to veto the law." Stupid.

"So in just three years, this community's use of IE has gone from 63% to 18%, Firefox has gone from 28% to almost 50%, and Safari has tripled from 6% to 18%. So Chrome may be under 10% right now, but in three years, it could easily be the leading browser in this community. Browsers apparently don't command that much loyalty and switching costs are low. That said, I'm not moving to Chrome unless I can take my Firefox extensions with me."

"A pivotal question for regulators is what Apple’s board knew at the time of Jobs’s Jan. 5 announcement that he had a hormone imbalance and a Jan. 14 statement that he was taking a 5 ½-month medical leave, said the person, who declined to be identified because the probe is confidential. Jobs went on to have a liver transplant during his leave. SEC investigators want to be sure that Jobs’s January disclosures didn’t mislead investors, the person said. Bloomberg News reported in January that the SEC had opened the probe. "

"Sean Hannity deceptively cropped President Obama's answer to a question about the Cold War to suggest that Obama did not acknowledge the actions of past U.S. presidents in freeing Eastern Europe." It must be hard for Sean Hannity to listen to more than 10 seconds of anybody.

What exactly is a petabyte.

"It looks like Amazon had dropped the price of the latest generation Kindle 2, the 6-inch reading wireless reading device, from $359 to $299. I’m actually kicking myself right now because I just purchased the same one for the higher price a few days ago."

"Why were so many people in the technology world wrong about Hulu? It was an idea that seemed like a relic of the worst excesses of the dot-com era: a portal for content run by a joint venture of media companies. Could any venture have more going against it?" Hulu does totally work.

Usability is not everything.

"Writing code is trivial. And fun. And something I continue to love doing. But if you really want your code to be successful, you'll stop coding long enough to do all that other, even more trivial stuff around the code that's necessary to make it successful." The code is trivial compared to the user experience.

"Users aren’t giving any money directly to StackOverflow, but Jeff knows he has to build a killer end user experience because that experience pays off in other ways. Your career has the same goals. Even though the developers, project managers and end users may not pay your salary, they do have political capital with your boss. They can make or break your career in an instant."

"Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defended his June re-election as the world's "most free" despite ongoing opposition claims that it was rigged."

"
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."

"Chrome, of course, isn't an operating system, but a quick-booting OS built around a single application like Chrome would be a natural fit for a netbook. With such an OS, Google could obviously make it extra easy for users to access the full range of Google cloud applications through the browser—Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, etc."

"In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google is expected to announce on Wednesday that it is developing an operating system for a personal computer based on its Chrome browser, according to two people briefed on Google’s plans."

"Chinese police have arrested 1,434 people over rioting in Xinjiang province, official state media say."

"US President Barack Obama has urged Russia to turn from the past, emphasising the common goals the US shares with its former Cold War rival."

"The Iraqi government has banned all organised visits to the grave of former leader Saddam Hussein."

"A report into how British police handled April protests against the G-20 summit in London said Tuesday the force's tactics were inadequate and should be reviewed. The report by a government-backed watchdog said police had focused too much on tackling violence and not enough on allowing peaceful protest." You think.

"The American Civil Liberties Union filed a friend-of-the-court brief today urging a federal appeals court to uphold an earlier decision requiring Louisiana to issue a birth certificate with the names of both parents to a boy who was adopted by a gay couple in New York."

"Former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis cited the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, from Rochdale, who was jailed for life for being an al-Qaeda planner. Mr Davis told the House of Commons that intelligence services had allowed Ahmed to go to Pakistan. Once there, they alerted Pakistani authorities who arrested him and tortured him, parliament was told. Mr Davis is calling for a judicial inquiry into at least 15 cases where torture of terrorist suspects has been alleged. Using the legal protection afforded to MPs, he told the Commons there was a chain of evidence of complicity in torture and passive rendition." To use a British phrase "bloody hell".

"No one argues that the staggering deficits run up by the American government in a bid to rescue the economy are desirable, healthy or even sustainable — not if the national debt continues to swell at its current pace. But considerable debate centers on when and how vigorously to start easing off Washington’s borrowing habit, with substantial risks at both extremes." How do we cut down the national debt?

"For the second time in three years, Mike Hutchins, a laid-off automotive engineer, is preparing to enroll in job retraining at a local community college, this time to become a civil engineering technician. But he has no idea if he has chosen the right path." Higher education may not always lead to a job.

"Dion and I both have some corporate IT experience under the belt, and because of that we just couldn’t bring ourselves to write yet another typical table-based database CRUD app; hence, the space theme and gratuitous canvas-based UI. So the Tools Directory is our second canvas-centric web application released this year, but we promise to use the DOM API more for the next one. "

"I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs. ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments." Awesome news for the open source version of C# in Mono.

"Just like it is the law of the land that phone numbers are portable from carrier to carrier, it should be the law of the land that phones should be portable from carrier to carrier. Anything else is anti-competitive."

"Dr. Finkel and Mr. Eastwick write that this does not mean men were just as selective as women. But the scientists suggest that the explanation for the gap lies in social conditioning rather than evolution." Social conditioning could play an important role in dating, crazy though.

"The end result (many visible and invisible changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past. Not just for Gmail, but for all of Google Apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk."

"The level of people falling behind with consumer loans in the US hit a new high in the first three months of 2009, the American Bankers Association said." Ouch.

"Community colleges could become a tool to help economic recovery in the United States and a model for developing countries debating how to improve their education systems, Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a longtime teacher, said Tuesday." Cheaper education leads to a more educated society.

"Now, citizens will have the opportunity to send letters and messages to elected officials directly from Facebook. Bi-partisan Political and digital strategy firm Grassroots Enterprise has launched an technology, called “Actions,” that organizations can use on Facebook to allow supporters and visitors to send messages and letters to elected officials or other targets directly from Facebook." Pretty cool.

"It's more just another indication that voters won't have an infinite amount of patience with Obama on the economy, and if by 2012 the economy still hasn't improved (in which case, we'll be referring to the recession as "GD2"), or has double-dipped, or has improved sluggishly at the cost of a huge run-up in the national debt, Obama is going to be in trouble in Ohio as well as most of the other 49 states." Regarding Obama's weak polling in Ohio.

"Maybe you heard that a new Facebook iPhone application is almost complete. Maybe you’ve also heard that probably the best feature is that it will allow you to upload video right from your iPhone 3GS to the social network. Well you don’t actually have to wait for the new app to do that — there’s one that does it already. And it’s really, really fast." Cool.

Extrapolating is fun.

"trying to evolve! failing miserably!"

"CSS sprites are a huge time sink. They waste my time, they waste your time, and they also waste the time of millions of other front-end developers. It's about time to do something about it." I like this.

"The US has "absolutely not" given Israel a green light to attack Iran over its nuclear programme, President Barack Obama has said. His remarks followed weekend comments by Vice-President Joe Biden that the US would not stand in the way of Israel's response to Iran's nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, US military chief Adm Mike Mullen said Washington should keep military options on the table." Biden please just stop talking.

"Over the past 24 hours we've had a number of readers tell us that there is an OpenSSH exploit in active use. We cannot confirm its existence, other than a DOS exploit for OpenSSH that is on Milw0rm. If you have any concrete evidence of this (not rumors or URLs to blogs where people are discussing that there might be a problem) please let us know via our contact form. Again, no rumors and no links to discussions of rumors please. We need reports of active exploitation or other evidence that this a real issue."

"We’ve still got a ways to go before we start seeing glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available for $9.99."

One of the coolest bits done by Mozilla for web developers. A listing of web development tools.

"Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta." Google is also now really pushing the paid versions of Google Apps.

"When you create an at-home good product, you may have to sacrifice a bit of in-store sizzle. A product that executes on the basics beautifully may not seem as sexy as competitors loaded with bells and whistles. Being great at a few things often doesn’t look all that flashy from afar. That’s ok. You’re aiming for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand." Though I think some companies (Apple) do well at both the in store and in home experience.

"Three months after a jury ruled that Ward L. Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor, was wrongfully terminated for his political views, a judge on Tuesday refused to give him his job back. Chief Judge Larry J. Naves of Denver District Court ruled that the university’s regents were effectively acting as judicial officers when they voted to dismiss Mr. Churchill in 2007 after a faculty committee concluded that he had committed academic fraud. As a result, Judge Naves found, the regents were legally protected from Mr. Churchill’s effort to reverse their ruling." Huh that ruling doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

"Just to follow up on a story from last month, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has now officially dropped his lawsuit against Twitter. La Russa had been suing the service for someone who was pretending to be him and was seeking ““unspecified damages.” He got none of those, nor will he get anything else from the startup." This was a stupid lawsuit.

“I want our site not only to have an up-to-date catalogue of our products available for free, but I think that we could figure out a way to have people order products and pay for them online as well. Think about it: we could be the first sporting-equipment supplier in the world to offer this service.” In 2007.

"Scientists in Newcastle claim to have created human sperm in the laboratory in what they say is a world first. The researchers believe the work could eventually help men with fertility problems to conceive. But other experts say they are not convinced that fully developed sperm have been created."

"For the second time in 8 days, a power outage interrupted service at one of its data centers. And again it was the Dallas center that was effected. This time however, Rackspace was able to get things up and running fairly quickly, and more importantly, communicated well through its blog and Twitter throughout the downtime." Again Rackspace?

"The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora." Essentially no one standard for all browsers.

"New protests have flared in Urumqi, two days after 156 people died and 800 were injured in the western Chinese city. At least 200 Uighurs faced off against police in Urumqi on Tuesday following news that 1,434 people were arrested in connection with Sunday's riots. Trouble also spread outside of Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, with protests on Monday near a mosque in Kashgar. Beijing blames ethnic Muslim Uighurs for the violence, but exiled Uighurs say police fired on students."

"First, the good news. Both Twitter and Flickr deleted our photos within seconds. Direct links to the photos in question broke after a quick hard refresh, so you can be sure that your salacious pictures mistakenly posted to Flickr while inebriated will no longer be accessible to your enemies (assuming they didn't copy them to their hard drives, that is). Facebook and MySpace, however, did not fare so well. As of this writing, both images we used are still available on Facebook and MySpace servers despite having been "deleted" in May. (For embarrassment's sake, here are my two photos that were deleted from Facebook and MySpace; depending on when you read this article, these photos may or may not still be up). " Good job Twitter and Flickr, bad job Facebook and MySpace.

I want a tricked out name tag too.

"It's two very different ways of attacking a problem. The academics attack it to gain new insights, while engineers attack the problem to solve it using currently available knowledge. It should be noted thought that engineers might also gain new insights while solving a problem, Lars Bak has for example 18 patents in VM technology."

"How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site." Better question where are the kids going then? Because I can assure you they aren't going to Twitter.

"On Fox & Friends, Mike Huckabee falsely suggested that Vice President Biden disclaimed responsibility for the economy and that George Bush did not claim to have "inherited" a weakening economy." Oh Huckabee facts are so hard aren't they.

"Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has branded a top US envoy "an idiot" with a condescending attitude. He said that Johnnie Carson, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, wanted to dictate what Zimbabwe could and could not do." Mugabe is nothing if not amusing.

"G.M. appears poised to exit bankruptcy as soon as Thursday, when it is expected to complete the sale of its best assets to a newly formed company that will be smaller and unencumbered by huge debts and liabilities. A federal bankruptcy judge, Robert E. Gerber, paved the way on Sunday for the next phase of the auto giant’s reorganization by approving the sale of assets like Chevrolet and Cadillac to a new, privately held G.M. that will be 60 percent owned by the United States government. G.M. and the Obama administration are hoping to close the sale by Thursday, when a four-day stay ordered by the judge expires." Good luck.

"By not supporting the practical format, Mozilla isn’t making a brave statement or taking a stand: they’re just keeping everyone on Flash and preventing meaningful adoption of HTML 5’s <video> element." Makes a fair amount of sense. I guess my question is how much would Mozilla wind up having to pay to support H.264 and will other open source browsers ever support H.264? While Opera, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari and IE are the largest browsers they aren't the only ones. Mozilla may be thinking about the other smaller open source browsers.

Why should parents be on Facebook and what does it mean for them specifically.

"Facebook will likely be posting billions of dollars in revenue in five years, up from about $500 million this year, according to Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen who sits on Facebook's board. Andreessen told Reuters that the world's most popular online social network could pile up $1 billion in revenue this year if it pushed harder on selling advertising." That's impressive.

"Gallic pride aside, Mr. Devedjian has a point. While he plans to spend 75 percent of France’s stimulus money this year, the White House is giving itself until fall 2010 to lay out that big a share of the American expenditure. And many experts predict that Washington will fall short of that goal."

"Obama's anti-trust cop Christine Varney is dusting off the Sherman Act and reviewing wireless companies' exclusive handset deals–most notably AT&T's monopoly control over Apple's iPhone." That could get fun.

"This might not be right, though. Maybe, had they been more broad and less technical, some of the great physicists of the last few decades would have made dramatic breakthroughs in a field like quantum information or complexity theory, rather than pushing harder at the narrow concerns of particle physics or condensed matter. Easy to speculate, hard to provide much compelling evidence either way." Interesting.

ABC is know on Hulu.

"We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity. To some degree popularity does matter – however it is clearly not the only thing to take into account when choosing a programming language. Most experienced programmers should be able to learn the basics of a new language in a week, and be productive with it in a few more weeks, although it will likely take much longer to truly master it." Normalizing the data the order goes: C, Java, Python, C++, PHP, C#, Haskell, Ruby and so on.

"BT, the most prominent proponent of the concept, has put its plans on hold, The Guardian reports. BT has been working with Phorm, a company that has developed technology it says can track users while at the same time keeping advertisers from knowing their identities. While privacy advocates complained that the system was overly intrusive, the British government did not object." Yes.

"Powell said Sotomayor is a "gifted" and an "accomplished woman" with "a judicial record that seems to be balanced and tries to follow the law." " Good job Powell.

"Modernizr does not add missing functionality to browsers; instead, it detects native availability of features and offers you a way to maintain a fine level of control over your site regardless of a browser’s capabilities." I like it.

"There's no longer any need in PHP to create your own regular expressions to try to validate an email address; simply use filter_var() instead. This is available from PHP 5.2.0." Didn't know this was included, but it's awesome, not having to write your own regex for email addresses is so awesome.

"A group of clerics in Iran has called Iran's presidential vote invalid, contradicting official results. The pro-reform group's statement pits it against the top legislative body, which last week formally endorsed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." That's interesting.

Let's write more secure PHP.

Is your company's app as simple as a Google or Apple product, why not?

Pretty good list of how to identify the bad PHP software.

"Silence Is The Enemy was started in June 2009 to draw more attention to the sexually abused around the globe and to encourage everyone to talk about it and act. We have power and influence in our words, and we're able to speak for those who can not. We’re asking all of you—bloggers, writers, teachers and concerned citizens—to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world."

"And check out her daughter, Piper, playing with her flip flops. She's the same little firecracker who licked her brother's hair down during the Republican National Convention. I love that girl's irrepressible quirks." I totally agree.

"Three weeks after Iran was shaken by its most serious unrest since the 1979 revolution, the dust seems to have settled. Banned and broken up by force, the largely peaceful, massive protest demonstrations have fizzled out. The Guardian Council – the powerful, appointed watchdog body – has formally endorsed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose unexpectedly large declared margin of victory triggered the protests." Has anything changed in Iran since the election.

"Back to the original question: How different will the world be if they actually release this thing? Well, Michael Arrington will have less money and a handful of geeks will have a $300 slate-netbook that they use a few times before it gets tossed in their gadget pile because everything it does is better accomplished with something else." A differing opinion on the Crunchpad.

"The slow query log can be used to find queries that take a long time to execute and are therefore candidates for optimization. However, examining a long slow query log can become a difficult task. To make this easier, you can process the slow query log using the mysqldumpslow command to summarize the queries that appear in the log or explore the slow_log table entries by means of classic phpMyAdmin web interface. There’s also CSV file in the /var/db/mysql/mysql/ directory available for data export and further manipulation." Find those slow queries.

"UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown says new sanctions may be imposed on Burma's regime after it snubbed visiting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon." I'm pretty sure Burma isn't going to care much.

"Exit polls in Bulgaria indicate the centre-right party led by ex-body guard and Mayor of Sofia Boiko Borisov is heading for a significant victory. But the BBC's Europe correspondent says while it will be a remarkable win, it is not enough for GERB to govern alone. Mr Borisov promised to end corruption and tackle the economic downturn. It has been Bulgaria's first election since joining the European Union two years ago. Last year, Bulgaria lost access to some of its EU funds for failing to deal with graft and organised crime."

"Aid agencies and major world bodies are to meet to to seek ways of encouraging trade by emerging nations during the economic downturn. It will examine how aid – which is used to boost trading in poorer states – can be sustained during a global recession."

"Twenty-odd years later, I can totally see why most sane people opt out of the "creative" career option- I can totally see why they stick to something more conventional, even if it isn't really all that interesting to them. It's NOT because they're stupid, lazy or unimaginative. It's because the alternative is really, really hard."

"Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has left the US on a flight bound for Honduras, in a bid to reclaim his post. But the interim government says it will not allow Mr Zelaya's plane to land. There are growing fears of violence in the Central American nation. Mr Zelaya is being accompanied on the plane by UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann and a number of journalists. Interim President Roberto Micheletti, meanwhile, has said troops from neighbouring Nicaragua are moving towards the Honduran border." This should be fun.

"So, there you have it. If you're using XML and are wondering why the results you're getting are not the same as what the specification says you should be getting, the answer is simple. Microsoft write their code to fit people's expectations of what the specification says rather than what it actually says. I was also a little taken aback about their assertion that most people consider attribute ordering to be significant. When I asked around So, a question to you all: do any of you consider XML attribute ordering significant when comparing documents for equality?" Umm no, good job Microsoft.

"Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009." Awesome news for web developers.

"But that’s not what StackOverflow is about. Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they’re interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn’t know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with the database schema—and having had a chance to read through StackOverflow’s source code, I know how little really does. There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation." Awesome attack essentially on developers hubris in their ability to recode something from scratch in "no time".

"This is how @donttrythis and @grantimahara make #Mythbusters (with @voicework, @chris71williams & @evangrimm) " Mythbusters flow chart.

"I used to go on Franken’s radio show, all ready to be jocular — and what he wanted to talk about was the arithmetic of Social Security, or the structure of Medicare Part D. So what will Franken do to the level of Senate discourse? He’ll raise it." I have to agree.

Really cool mosaic photo.

"The purpose of the CrunchPad will be very simple: surfing the Web. Turn it on and up comes a browser. It will not have a hard drive or keyboard, though users can plug it in to a keyboard if they wish. It will cost less than $300, he said. The CrunchPad will be 16 millimeters thick with a screen of at least 12 inches that is flush with the aluminum case, and it will come in different colors. It will run on an Intel Atom chip and support Flash, which the Apple iPhone cannot." Even at $300 I want one.

No idea why you would want to disable resize, but you know if you want to.

"As first reported in Politico, The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home in which officials from Congress and the administration, lobbyists and, yes, the paper’s own reporters could have a quiet, off-the-record dinner, discussions to be led by Marcus Brauchli, the newspaper’s editor. Theoretically, you can’t buy Washington Post reporters, but you can rent them." Oops?

To use the new video tag and support Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari:<video>
<source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video>

"The US space agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has returned its first images since reaching the Moon on 23 June." Awesome.

"Current and former top Central Intelligence Agency officers have appeared before a federal grand jury in Virginia as part of an 18-month investigation into the agency’s destruction of 92 videotapes depicting the brutal interrogations of two Qaeda detainees."

"It was a giant middle finger to iPhone developers. And that’s the closing impression that Apple gave us for WWDC. Clearly, they had absolutely no interest in fielding even a single question from the topic that we have the most questions about." That's sums it up.

"Once emboldened by their ability to dodge the government and spread news about their protests to the world, many in the youth-driven protest movement, they say, are now scared of the consequences of getting caught." Iran's crackdown is having an effect.