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Whatever the legislative fate of health reform — now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats — the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president's public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president's ambitions.
Author: stevewoda Page 5 of 13
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A high school teacher in New Hampshire is free on $10,000 bail, accused of emailing naked photos of herself to a student.
41-year-old Melinda Dennehy of Hampstead is charged with one felony count of indecent exposure.
Police say she sent four nude pictures of herself to one of her 15-year-old students at Londonderry High School, where she teaches English. -
Recently Google announced that it will upgrade all US users to Android 2.1. Devices are currently shipping with four versions, so moving to one will help, but that may not be enough to save the platform from fragmentation.
The other problem is that there are too many different devices. InfoWorld points out that the Motorola Droid ships with 2.0, but doesn’t support multitouch at the OS level while the HTC Droid Eris does through HTC’s proprietary Sense UI. However, the Eris ships with Android version 1.5. Even if both get upgraded to 2.1, you’ll still have quite a disparity between these two devices. There are dozens of other devices and manufacturers that compound this issue even further.
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TiVo on Wednesday introduced a set-top box that the company says makes it easier to access cable, movies, online video, and music through one remote control.
While an Internet-enabled digital video recorder is not new, TiVo Premiere is an advancement over other set-top boxes in the way it organizes content, according to the company. The product’s search tool, for example, can find programming and movies on cable TV, as well as video for rent or buy on Netflix, Amazon, or Blockbuster. -
Google, PayPal, Equifax, VeriSign, Verizon, CA, and Booz Allen Hamilton on Wednesday at the RSA Conference announced that they have formed a non-profit organization to oversee the exchange of online identity credentials on public and private sector Web sites.
The organization, The Open Identity Exchange (OIX), will serve as a trust framework provider. A trust framework is a certification program that allows organizations and individuals to exchange digital credentials and to trust the identity, security, and privacy assertions associated with those credentials.
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Last August, we wrote about Y Combinator’s latest idea: RFS, or, Requests for Startups. Basically, this allows the incubator to lead entrepreneurs in a certain direction based on trends they think will be hot. Y Combinator then selects the best ideas based around these guidelines to fund. The latest RFS (number 6), throws down a gauntlet, of sorts.”We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer.”Okay, yes, that’s slightly taken out of context ? but it’s still one hell of a way to rile up developers. And to light a fire under some would-be entrepreneur fanboys. Here’s the full statement around the sentence:Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender.
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America’s Founders gave us a system of governance designed to limit government power and maximize liberty. The legislative branch is different from the executive, and the Senate is different from the House. No single branch has all the power. That can be frustrating for those with ambitious agendas, but everyone benefits by respecting those checks and balances even as we fight over policies.
While the House is designed for action, the Senate is designed for deliberation. That is why Senate rules and procedures give a minority of senators the power to slow or even stop legislation. Both parties do it when in the minority, and both find it frustrating when they are in the majority. But such checks are central to the nature of the institution and to the Senate’s place in our constitutional system. These rules temper majority power and generate strong incentives to develop mainstream legislation that commands broad, bipartisan support.
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Today's Venture Capitalists (VCs) have often qualified innovation as a buyer's or a seller's market (in publicly discussing valuation trends) and that communicates so well how they view innovation; as a commodity.
No wonder they fail miserably in generating meaningful alpha (portfolio returns for Limited Partners, or LPs). It is impossible to find and attract outliers of innovation by comparing and compressing valuations. And commodities never outgrow their peers.
Disruptive innovation is never a commodity and is always a seller's market (with the company selling its stock to investors). So, the minute innovation becomes a buyer's market, that innovation has just been "crowned" a sub-prime entity and so have both buyer and seller. -
In the Age of Technology, I think that nothing really "dates" you as much as your tech savvy skills. I can never get over how fast my niece and nephews are with their web expertise, or how much I learn from them. I remember being in middle school when news about email was going around as a rumor! It is fascinating how fast kids make technology their own quite simply because in some form or another, technology is their life. While this has advantages galore, it also puts children in a kind of risk we cannot even imagine. But we have to.
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My folks stayed at my condo in Boulder the last few nights with me so I was inspired this morning to write a quick post in the Letters to my Dad series that I’m writing with my father (he’s calling his posts “Father and Son.”)
In my dad’s last post, Father and Son #3, he wrote about our overthrow of the administrative regime in my high school at the start of my senior year when they botched the AP course schedule because of a “computer glitch.” He calls it a “lesson in leadership and self reliance” and tells a great story of how we (him and I) quickly mobilized about 60 parents and students in 24 hours to get together, proposed a solution to the problem, presented the case the superintendent and principal, and then fixed the problem. We all got to take more than one AP class (even though school was over for me my senior year at lunch time since there were no other classes to take) and I even wore a tux to prom. -
In a gambit to extend beyond SSL certificates, VeriSign introduces the Trust Seal today. The trust mark service seeks to increase confidence, traffic, and transactions for sites that do not require SSL certifications, including sites that outsource shopping cart or payment functions and do not collect sensitive personal information. Though not designed specifically for small and midmarket companies, VeriSign's Fran Rosch, Senior Vice President Authentication, says that SMBs are the most likely customers for the new service. He says, "Based on our market segmentation research, we expect the initial adopters to be smaller companies that use shared payment [services] for their e-commerce, but we also expect interest from non-profit companies, professional services such as legal and medical practices, and franchises."
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School-issued laptops used to spy on kids – Philadelphia Inquirer
Lower Merion School District officials used school-issued laptop computers to illegally spy on students, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.
The suit, filed Tuesday, says unnamed school officials at Harriton High School in Rosemont remotely activated the webcam on a student's computer last year because the district believed he "was engaged in improper behavior in his home."
An assistant principal at Harriton confronted the student for "improper behavior" on Nov. 11 and cited a photograph taken by the webcam as evidence.
Michael E. and Holly S. Robbins, of Penn Valley, filed the suit on behalf of their son, Blake. They are seeking class action status for the suit.
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More than 75,000 computer systems at nearly 2,500 companies in the United States and around the world have been hacked in what appears to be one of the largest and most sophisticated attacks by cyber criminals discovered to date, according to a northern Virginia security firm.
The attack, which began in late 2008 and was discovered last month, targeted proprietary corporate data, e-mails, credit-card transaction data and login credentials at companies in the health and technology industries in 196 countries, according to Herndon-based NetWitness.
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At least several hundred exhibitors are here this week in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress. Each of them seems to be launching either a new app store or a new operating platform. What these inescapable announcements fetch in buzz and inventiveness, they misjudge in audience tolerance. The impact goes beyond mere ennui, of which there is plenty, and touches at the heart of what makes a corporate mobile strategy nearly impossible to birth: There are too many choices.
Make no mistake: The platform wars will rage for years, and the corporate IT manager could suffer the casualties. Not only must IT choose a platform its user base will be happy with, and that it can adequately support and manage (securely), but it must also choose based on the company’s overall mobile strategy. If it ignores the last part, it will miss a major opportunity to increase productivity by extending its applications to those mobile platforms — an easy task when a single platform becomes the corporate standard. -
On a planet with around 6.8 billion people, we’re likely to see 5 billion cell phone subscriptions this year.
Reaching 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, the number of cell phone subscriptions across the globe will hit 5 billion sometime in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The explosion in cell phone use has been driven not only by developed countries, but by developing nations hungry for services like mobile banking and health care.
“Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services,” said ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, “and I am confident that we will continue to see a rapid uptake in mobile cellular services in particular in 2010, with many more people using their phones to access the Internet.”
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Yesterday's resignation by former CEO Owen Van Natta is not totally surprising, given MySpace's continued losses in advertising, search revenues, and traffic. What is shocking, however, is that the senior leadership at NewsCorp and Fox Interactive remains in positions of power despite the significant mishandling of the scandal involving the discovery of more than 90,000 convicted sex offenders on NewsCorp's flagship social networking site.
MySpace could have taken the steps to notify any parents whose children were contacted by convicted sex offenders, including changing terms of service to allow greater disclosure of sex offenders' conduct. That's what a responsible company with responsible management would have done. To my knowledge, they didn't, presumably afraid of the negative publicity. -
Last year, 29,000 Registered Sex Offenders (RSOs) were discovered on MySpace, after initial reports that the number was only 7,000. The number is now 90,000, and reflects only those registering with truthful information. We seek to limit risk to minors that stems from users — particularly RSOs — registering with false information on social network sites (“SNS”). The Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, comprising 50 state Attorneys General, asked the Task Force to find and develop online identity authentication tools primarily for social network sites in the United States. The Attorneys General also asked the Task Force to establish specific and objective criteria that will be utilized to evaluate existing and new technology safety solutions.