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New York Times – August 16, 2009:
The name AOL, apart from conjuring echoes of the most disastrous merger in business history, redounds with the archaic sound of a phone-driven modem screeching as it connects with some fusty computers sequestered in Dulles, Va., the former headquarters of the company.
But AOL, often derided as the original gated community, is now manufacturing a broad array of digital media that is free for the grabbing. There are 300 working content producers in its New York headquarters, backed by hundreds of other freelancers and programmers in Bangalore, Dublin and Dulles, cranking out copy and editing photos for more than 80 Web sites. Ten are ranked in Technorati’s top 100. Politics Daily, which began in April, already has 3.6 million unique users a month, while Politico, a much more established name, has 1.1 million, according to comScore, a digital audience measurement company. In the aggregate, the media properties at AOL have about 76 million unique visitors.
Visitors to sites like Engadget and FanHouse may not know that those sites emanate from a company that used to confine most of its communication to telling them they’ve got mail. Which is sort of the idea.
Finally, perhaps tired of all the zigzagging from a declining asset, Time Warner announced plans to spin the enterprise out on its own by the end of this year.
And wouldn’t it be funny if about the time that Time Warner forced AOL to stand on its own two feet, it actually was able to?
This will be good news to those who wish to frame someone for a crime, DAs who want to win a case without worrying about having the right person, governments who want to…
[knock knock knock]
Yes? What? Wait… Wait! Arresting me? For what? It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it! I’m innocent, I tell you! Innooooceeeeent!!!
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.
When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from “Batman” began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image? Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago.
Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe’s Photoshop software.
But he wasn’t who printed the pictures and posted them all over LA.
[…] still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word “socialism” and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines.
Talking Points Memo – August 17, 2009:
Talk about a political draft. In an interview with World Net Daily, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was asked whether she would ever run for President — and she replied that she would do it if God calls her to it:
“If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it,” she answered. “When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That’s really my standard.
“If I am called to serve in that realm I would serve,” she concluded, “but if I am not called, I wouldn’t do it.”
How about the Bachmann/Palin dream team?!
- Hacker steals 130,000,000 credit cards. Gets busted.
- Dell’s iPhone clone to roll-out big in China.
- IBM has new DNA technique to make chips faster and smaller.
- iPhone deals hurting carriers. They are losing out they say.
- Apple worried about London Times story.
- Gmail takes third place over AOL.
- US DOJ takes side of RIAA.
- Tiny Laser is the key to optical computing.
- Twitter tries to shut down uSocial.
- Show brought to you by AVIS at www.avis.com/tech5 where a discount is waiting.
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
On Sunday, the American Chemical Society, a nonprofit scientific society chartered by Congress, released a study claiming that up to 90 percent of U.S. paper money contains traces of cocaine.
Of the 5 countries studied, The U.S. and Canada had the highest levels tested, with China and Japan ranking lowest, from 12 to 20 percent contamination levels.
Scientists are reporting that cocaine is present in up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, particularly in large cities such as Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit. The scientists found traces of cocaine in 95 percent of the banknotes analyzed from Washington, D.C., alone.
95% in D.C., huh, what could that mean?
Dade City judge and University of Florida grad Pat Siracusa is such a big Gators football fan that he sometimes wears a replica Tim Tebow jersey under his black robe on Fridays in the fall.
His profile picture on his Facebook page is a photo he took with his phone from the stands at last January’s national championship game.
It’s a good memory.
But the Southeastern Conference might use a different word to describe that image: illegal.
The SEC, one of college sports’ biggest, richest, most prominent conferences, earlier this month sent to its 12 schools an eye-opening new media policy. It places increasingly stringent limits on reporters and how much audio, video and “real-time” blogging they can do at games, practices and news conferences.
But even more interesting is that the policy also includes rules for fans in the stands. No updating Twitter feeds. No taking photos with phones and posting them on Facebook or Flickr. No taking videos and putting them on YouTube.
A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and CBS — which are paying the SEC $3 billion for the broadcast rights to the conference’s games over the next 15 years — and also on the SEC Digital Network — the conference’s own entity that’s scheduled to debut on SECSports.com later this month.
The incident is just one among the hundreds of reports of UFO close encounters, from aliens with lemon-shaped heads to laser beams being shot to earth, contained in the files.
Other episodes include when two “sober” Glastonbury festival goers saw a flying saucer hover overhead and dozens of sightings which turned out to be a Virgin Airship and two boys who claimed an alien told them: “We want you, come with us”.
You can see the files here.
Intelligent life beyond Earth might not be as dim a hope as many scientists think, according to a new study challenging a widely held anti-ET argument.
Many skeptics tout an idea called the anthropic argument that claims extraterrestrial intelligence must be very rare because the time it takes for intelligent life to evolve is, on the average, much longer than the portion of a star’s existence that is conducive to such life.
But now astrobiologist Milan M. Cirkovic and colleagues say they’ve found a flaw in that reasoning.
The anthropic argument, proposed by astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, following on his pioneering work on anthropic principles in 1970s, is built on the assumption that the two timescales – the lifecycle of a star and the time required for evolution of living and intelligent creatures – are completely independent. If this is true, Carter argued, it’s extremely unlikely that these two windows of possibility would last roughly the same amount of time, and would occur at the same time.
But that mode of thinking is outdated, Cirkovic claims. In fact, he says the relevant timescales are not independent; they are deeply entwined.
[…]
“The speed of evolution is very variable,” Cirkovic said. “There is no reason to think that life on Earth has only one single origin. It is quite possible that there were several beginnings of life on Earth.”Cirkovic also notes that the evolution of intelligent life could occur slower or faster in different settings, and need not follow the astrobiological history of the Milky Way.
This provides more ammunition against the anti-evolutionists.
Ya know, I believe it’s cheaper to purchase a car without seats. And who really needs brakes if you drive slow enough and keep your foot out the door on the ground. And speaking of doors…
Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the nation’s largest private buyer of new cars and seller of used ones, chose to “delete” a standard safety feature from thousands of Chevrolet Impala fleet vehicles, saving millions of dollars.
After the company rented out those 2006-08 model vehicles, Enterprise and countless dealers nationwide offered them for sale on the open market &mash; minus the side-curtain air bags that have been shown to dramatically reduce highway deaths.
What’s more, a Kansas City Star investigation found that hundreds of Impalas already sold were incorrectly advertised on Enterprise’s Web site as having the very head-protecting feature that the rental company opted to exclude on General Motors’ factory floor.
“I’ve never seen a standard safety feature removed from a vehicle,” said Sean Kane, who heads Safety Research & Strategies Inc. in Rehoboth, Mass. “That’s what’s so unique about this. I’ve been doing this work for 17 years and, until now, had yet to see this happen.”
 It’s not as if it is mind-blowing hot looking. |
Bentley shows $300,000 ‘difficult business case,’ the Mulsanne – Automotive News — You must assume that these geniuses had this thing in the works long before the collapse of the economy. Why it wasn’t simply scrubbed and the prototypes sold off is a mystery.
Recession or not, British luxury icon Bentley Motors Ltd. pulled the wraps off of a new flagship sedan here Sunday that will retail for close to $300,000.The Mulsanne, replaces the soon-to-be discontinued Arnage as Bentley’s global halo car in what the Volkswagen AG unit calls “the pinnacle of the ultra-luxury segment.””There’s a very difficult business case for this car,” admitted Franz-Josef Paefgen, Bentley’s CEO. “The hope here is not to create volume, but to create a flagship.”
Bentley has suffered along with the rest of the auto industry over the past year. The brand swung to operating loss of 114 million euros $163 million at current exchange rates in the first half from a 85 million euro operating profit the year before.The company will likely sell about 5,000 vehicles in 2009, down from its peak of approximately 10,000 two years ago
Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. We are now adding stock tips and things to look for. This chat is presented as-is for anyone who wants to listen in. Among other things, this week we talk about Consumer Confidence going in the tank.
click ► to listen:
This week’s episode brought to you by Squarespace.com use the codeword TECH for a discount. Click here for details
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