feed on feeds - 2013/10/08 - items 0 to 15

Alla behöver tre minuter bonheur SvD Inrikes(cached at October 8, 2013, 11:32 pm)

Nate the greatest writes "Guilford County Schools' headline grabbing tablet program is back in the news again. The program came to an abrupt end last Friday when the school district announced that they were recalling all of the Amplify tablets. GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around two thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There's currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them. This program was the poster child for News Corp.'s entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many years ago I lived in Woodside, in Silicon Valley. It's a very nice neighborhood. I lived large then. I'm still doing pretty well. No complaints. :-)

I remember a march through my home town in Silicon Valley by the employees of one of my neighbors. I was filling up my tank at the town gas station when they stopped and sang a song, to me, and me alone. They offered a leaflet, which I took. It was holiday season, and the owner of the hotel they worked at had laid off a lot of people, the people who were serenading. They weren't happy about what happened. So they exercised their right to go for a walk. Through his neighborhood, which was also my neighborhood.

It's still our right to do that. And we're not stupid, we can see through the crazy bullshit in Washington. The shutdown is just another excuse for the super-rich to take even more money from people who don't have enough. They should be ashamed, but these people for whatever reason appear not to feel shame. But they do care what their neighbors think of them, and that's something people can influence, because some of them have hearts and will understand, if they're approached with respect.

I'm not suggesting an Occupy-style movement, but I do think it's time for polite, nicely dressed, cheerful people who care, to go into the home neighborhoods of the rich and influential people, and have conversations. Especially in districts that elect Tea Party representatives.

Start with the assumption that these are good people who, for whatever reason, live with blinders on. Explain how shoveling even more money into the bank accounts of the super-rich is not a great idea. With a smile. ;-)

I wouldn't waste time on people who want to argue. But do invest time in people who just may not know that people are hurting, and how the current mess is likely to create more hurt, not less. Make it real, even if the people who run TV won't.

PS: Most people who vote Republican are regular decent people. Don't confuse them with the people you see on TV. I lived in northeast Florida for a while. The people there were almost all Republicans. They think I'm wrong and I think they're wrong. But you could have a cocktail and talk about sports or the weather, and it's go fine. I think they're probably pretty freaked out about what's going in Washington, just like we are in NY and California.

It should be easier to write a greater-than-140 character message in Twitter

Sometimes people have an idea that really can't be expressed in 140 characters, but it's still important. There is an opportunity to smooth out the interface between Twitter and tools for writing longer ideas.

I know a bunch of people have tried to do this, but mostly it's too much work.

Have you seen anyone do this really well?

It's a pretty serious bottleneck and it isn't getting addressed for years.

Worth mentioning so we can look for a way to deal with this.

PS: During the 1-week outage at Scripting News, I was using Facebook to write longer messages. They've mostly scrolled off by now. But I haven't forgotten the ideas. ;-)

Åtta huvudprojekt i Norge.

Zothecula writes "The Atacama desert in Chile is so dry that parts of it are utterly devoid of life down to bacteria. That and its sandy, rock-strewn terrain makes it so similar to Mars that it's a perfect spot for ESA to trial its Sample Acquisition Field Experiment with a Rover (SAFER), which this week is carrying out tests related to navigation, remote control and the use of scientific instruments. The agency's goal is the latest in a series of tests to develop technologies and gain practical experience in anticipation of ESA's launch of the ExoMars rover to the Red Planet in 2018."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

En ny skottlossning drabbade Göteborg i kväll vid 19-tiden.

In inflation-adjusted dollars:

2001 - $168.16 Billion Surplus

2002 - $205.2 Billion

2003 - $479.8 Billion

2004 - $511.14 Billion

2005 - $380.84 Billion

2006 - $287.7 Billion

2007 - $181.51 Billion

2008 - $498.37 Billion

2009 - $1539.22 Billion

2010 - $1386.92 Billion

2011 - $1350.31 Billion

2012 - $1120.16 Billion

2013 - $759 Billion

(See A History of Surpluses and Deficits in the United States, which goes back to 1940. Also see the Office of Management and Budget’s Historical Tables. Spreadsheets.)

The obvious thing to note is that the deficit tripled after the 2008 financial meltdown.

The second obvious thing to note is that deficits have fallen every year since. The 2013 deficit is half that of the 2009 deficit.

Stunt Pope writes "This morning, Toronto-based domain registrar easyDNS received a request from the City of London (UK) police demanding that they summarily take down a BitTorrent search site based out of Singapore — or else they would 'refer the matter to ICANN' — suggesting easyDNS could lose its accreditation. The police further directed easyDNS to point all traffic for the domain to an IP address that promoted competing commercial online music services based out of London, UK." easyDNS raises some important questions in the blog post they put up after receiving the request. Quoting: "Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to 'some guy on the internet' sending emails. While that's plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn't fly here."