When Too Much is Too Much

Instead of sp*mming my friends, I post here what I read. You can subscribe to my feeds or come back often. ;-)

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  • 08:41:30 pm on December 25, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Why Color May Be The Next Twitter

    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_color_may_be_the_next_twitter.php

    Love it or loath it, the smartphone app Color is one of the most innovative Web products to have launched this year. It has a user experience that is as unique and different as Twitter was 5 years ago. This has led to confusion about how to use Color and questions about its value. In this post we look at the early uses of Color and analyze its chances of emulating the success of Twitter.

    Color launched last month in a whirl of hype, mostly due to the eye-opening $41 million prelaunch funding. But since then, the user experience has been the center of focus. Many people have complained that the app is difficult to understand – mainly because the benefits of the app are only clear once you use it amongst a crowd of people and in real-time. The user interface of the app has also been accused of being confusing and inconsistent.

     

  • 12:17:00 pm on December 25, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Pope calls for worshipers to remember ‘essence’ of Christmas

    http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/24/world/europe/vatican-pope-christmas/index.html

    Pope Benedict XVI presided over Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, delivering a homily that focused on the “essence” of the holiday rather than the “commercial celebration” it has become.

    “Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity,” the pope said after recalling the story of Christmas. “Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.”

    The 84-year-old pope, presiding over his seventh mass as pontiff, also conjured up an image of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, explaining that visitors must bend down to enter its low opening, drawing a tie to what followers of Christ must do to find their faith.

    “If we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our ‘enlightened’ reason,” he said. “… In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped.”

     

  • 07:31:48 am on December 25, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark
    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/2011-review-year-secrecy-jumped-shark

    As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy.

    The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:

    • Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
    • Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
    • Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
    • President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.
    • CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News’ Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”
    • The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”
    • Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even the “office’s budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.
    • Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”
    • NSA declassified a 200 year old report which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document “had not met the government’s own standards for classification in the first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification czar.
    • Government finally declassifies the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they appeared on the front page of the New York Times and were published by the House’s Armed Services Committee.
    • Secrecy expert Steve Aftergood concludes after two years “An Obama Administration initiative to curb overclassification of national security information… has produced no known results to date.”
    • President Obama accepts a transparency award…behind closed doors.
    • Government attorneys insist in court they can censor a book which was already published and freely available online.
    • Department of Justice refuses to release its interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act, a public law.
    • U.S. refuses to release its legal justification for killing an American citizen abroad without a trial, despite announcing the killing in a press conference.
    • U.S. won’t declassify legal opinion on 2001’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.
    • National Archive announced it was working on declassifying “a backlog of nearly 400 million pages of material that should have been declassified a long time ago.”
    • The CIA refused to declassify Open Source Works, “which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information” according to Steve Aftergood.
    • The  ACLU sued asking the State Department to declassify 23 cables out of the more than 250,000 released by WikiLeaks. After more than a year, the government withheld 12 in their entirety. You can see the other 11, heavily redacted, next to the unredacted copies on the ACLU website.

    The ACLU said it sued the State Department in part to show the “absurdity of the US secrecy regime.” Mission accomplished.

     

  • 05:44:03 pm on December 23, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    The Post-Truth Campaign

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/krugman-the-post-truth-campaign.html?_r=1

    Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”
    How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.

    But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”

    And in an interview the same day, Mr. Romney declared that the president “is going to put free enterprise on trial.”

    This is every bit as bad as my imaginary Obama statement. Mr. Obama has never said anything suggesting that he holds such views, and, in fact, he goes out of his way to praise free enterprise and say that there’s nothing wrong with getting rich. His actual policy proposals do involve a rise in taxes on high-income Americans, but only back to their levels of the 1990s. And no matter how much the former Massachusetts governor may deny it, the Affordable Care Act established a national health system essentially identical to the one he himself established at a state level in 2006.

     

  • 05:41:18 pm on December 23, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Voters leaving Republican, Democratic parties in droves

    http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2011-12-22/voters-political-parties/52171688/1

    More than 2.5 million voters have left the Democratic and Republican parties since the 2008 elections, while the number of independent voters continues to grow.
    A USA TODAY analysis of state voter registration statistics shows registered Democrats declined in 25 of the 28 states that register voters by party. Republicans dipped in 21 states, while independents increased in 18 states.

    The trend is acute in states that are key to next year’s presidential race. In the eight swing states that register voters by party, Democrats’ registration is down by 800,000 and Republicans’ by 350,000. Independents have gained 325,000.

     

  • 07:20:02 am on December 23, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    TOP TECH TRENDS 2011
    Top Tech Trends of 2011

     

  • 07:15:27 am on December 23, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Mainstream science validates healing properties of plants

    http://www.naturalnews.com/034446_science_plants_medicine.html

    Are plant-based therapies, including potential natural cures for cancer, mostly pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking promoted by “health nuts” and old hippies? Not at all — and the evidence for the validity of the healing power of plants is coming from none other than mainstream science.

    In fact, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has finally accepted the reality and importance of the therapeutic properties in plants and funded a $6 million initiative for an international team of scientists to study how plants produce a rich diversity of chemical compounds, many of which are medicinally important. The results of that research so far, which includes the genetic blueprint of medicinal plants and what beneficial properties are encoded by the genes that have been identified, are now being officially released for the first time to the public.

    “Most people are familiar with the natural products we derive from plants,” Joe Chappell, professor of plant biochemistry at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement to the media. “These include the delightful fragrances that go into perfumes, soaps, household cleaning products and more. Just as the sensory properties of plants interact with and trigger your sense of smell, the natural compounds of plants can target and cause a reaction within your body.”

     

  • 09:55:55 pm on December 22, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Pope Benedict Peace Message Calls For Wealth Redistribution

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/16/pope-benedict-wealth-distribution_n_1154798.html

    VATICAN CITY (RNS) Noting a “rising sense of frustration” at the worldwide economic recession, Pope Benedict XVI said that a more just and peaceful world requires “adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth.”

    The pope’s words appeared in his message for the World Day of Peace 2012, released on Friday (Dec. 16) at the Vatican.

    The message laments that “some currents of modern culture, built upon rationalist and individualist economic principles, have cut off the concept of justice from its transcendent roots, detaching it from charity and solidarity.”

    Authentic education, Benedict writes, teaches the proper use of freedom with “respect for oneself and others, including those whose way of being and living differs greatly from one’s own.”

    Peace-making requires education not only in the values of compassion and solidarity, but in the importance of wealth redistribution, the “promotion of growth, cooperation for development and conflict resolution,” Benedict writes.

    The pope also calls on political leaders to “ensure that no one is ever denied access to education.”

     

  • 09:40:23 pm on December 22, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Stop Starting Companies That Won’t Change the World

    http://bostinno.com/all-series/stop-starting-companies-that-wont-change-the-world/

    Starting a company has become so much cheaper in the last few years that, more and more people are founding companies. In fact so many people are starting companies that a standard pattern seems to have evolved.

    First, founders think up a problem that needs solving. Next, they come up with an innovative solution to that problem. Business plans are generally considered unneeded and an attitude of ‘build something beautiful and the users will come’ is common. They then enter an incubator, may ‘pivot’ numerous times, and finally get round A funding and are off. Paul Graham’s essays often refer to this standard method for starting startups. This essay refers repeatedly to the pattern of founding a company, the pattern of how to make money off a new, well-designed product.

     

  • 09:26:06 pm on December 22, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses

    https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-someone-else-is-pirating-through-out-ip-addresses-111221/

    A few days ago we reported that no less than 6 IP-addresses registered to the RIAA had been busted for downloading copyrighted material. Quite a shocker to everyone – including the music industry group apparently – as they are now using a defense previously attempted by many alleged file-sharers. It wasn’t members of RIAA staff who downloaded these files, the RIAA insists, it was a mysterious third party vendor who unknowingly smeared the group’s good name.

     
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