Author: Serkadis

I’ll confess, I’ve always been more of a summer-salad person than a winter-salad person. But this year I’ve resolved to set aside my leafy-green biases and change all that. The first step: browsing through our archives for inspiring winter salad recipes. Not surprisingly, there were a number of tantalizing choices featuring a gamut of ingredients, from cauliflower and celeriac to peanuts and persimmons.

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Second Amendment ensures individual right

In his recent letter, [“Gun control,” NW Voices, Jan. 9] Bob Ackerman is right that the Second Amendment means what it says but he is quite wrong about what it means.

The amendment, as written, is indeed an unfettered right. The fist 13 words of the amendment do not nullify or qualify the second 14 words, rather they provide a reason for it.

It is even more implausible that any government — let alone our visionary Founding Fathers — would write a law guaranteeing itself the right to arms. The operating clause “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” cannot be misinterpreted. If the “people” here does not mean individuals, then what does the “people” refer to in the First, Fourth and Ninth Amendments?

If anyone is still not convinced that the Second Amendment is an individual right, they need to look no further than the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. Additional insight can be gained by reading what some of the Founding Fathers had to say about firearms and why the amendment was written.

— John O’Brien, DuPont

Israeli startup Siano, which makes tiny digital TV receiver chips for mobile devices, announced a $24 fourth round of funding from Siano’s existing investors: JVP, DFJ-Tamir-Fishman, Star Ventures, Walden Israel, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The same investors had participated in a $17.5 million round in August 2008.

The new round brings Siano’s total fundraising to around $76 million.

Siano chairman Erel Margalit said in a prepared statement that “Coming out of the global financial crisis around mid 2009, it was clear that the mobile DTV market has shifted gear.” Demand for mobile TV, he added, has been strong in the emerging BRIC market — Brazil, Russian, India and China.

Siano, founded in 2004, provides TV chips to Samsung (pictured: the Samsung YP-CM3,) Motorola, ZTE, Huawei, Mio, Garmin, and Dell among others. Siano’s website — siano-ms.com — has a gallery of Siano-powered gadgets. The company keeps an office in Austin, Texas, and more offices in Korea, mainland China, and Taiwan.

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If you recall all the way back to last week — yes, it’s a bit of a blur to us, too — Intel CEO Paul Otellini brought to his keynote an Atom-powered home monitor system, demonstrated by him and his rockstar compadre Craig. It was actually quite impressive, and thankfully Intel’s gone ahead and launched an educational page for the Intelligent Home Energy Management Proof of Concept. The specs break down as follows: a gorgeous 11.5-inch capacitive OLED touch screen, Z530 processor, motion sensor and video camera support, stereo audio, WiFi, and Zigbee integration. Throw in an open API and we’re pretty sold on this — assuming it was real, of course, and at this point it’s nothing more than a teaser of things to come. Hit up the source link and expect a notable uptick in your longing for the future.

Intel’s Atom-powered home energy dashboard concept gets itself a website, no closer to retail reality originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Audi e-tron was unveiled in Frankfurt.

The Audi e-tron that was unveiled at the Detroit auto show on Monday. It is the second concept Audi has revealed with the e-tron name

Wheels:

“Detroit Auto Show: Audi’s Second Electric e-tron

We had the idea a long time ago, so it’s pretty awesome to see some serious passive aggression being displayed in Wi-Fi network names. Seriously, grindcore at 3am? That sounds annoying. [Passive Aggressive Notes]

Well it isn’t the lowest we’ve ever seen, but at $209.99 the price for no-restrictions HDTV isn’t bad.  Plus sightings of the Hauppauge HD-PVR for sale has been pretty sparse these past few months as Hauppauge works to get more in stock.

Why Have the Hauppauge HD-PVRs been so Sparse?

According to Hauppauge this has been due to an especially strong demand created by a Hauppauge/Amazon promotion for Black Friday week.  They report that they’ve been sold out continuously since the end of November but should be caught up by next month.  If you want one anytime in the next month or so, you might want to get the ones available at Amazon.

More about the Hauppauge HD-PVR

Worried about losing your analog channels or more of your QAM channels?  If you would like to be able to record (and watch LiveTV) on all of your TV channels including the encrypted ones on your HTPC you’ll want to check out the Hauppauge HD-PVR 1212.  You can read more about the HD-PVR Recorder here.

Amazon.com (affiliate) has the Hauppauge 1212 HD-PVR High Definition Personal Video Recorder for $209.99 with free shipping(regular price is $250)

Short Version: The Sprint Overdrive is a small, compact portable 3G/4G cellular data network to WiFi dongle designed for use by up to five people simultaneously. The best part is the ease of use and the worst part is the dearth of 4G networking outside of a few major cities.

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First Oprah, now Simon! Sharp-tongued British mogul Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol – marking the end of an era for throngs of TV talent show fans. But none more than Idol newcomer Ellen DeGeneres. The Emmy-winning daytime host-turned-A.I. -judge began filming scenes for American Idol Monday — the same day Simon announced he’s leaving the show!

“He announced he’s leaving on my first day. I’m trying not to take it personally. But seriously, I am going to be very, very sad to see him go, because I think he’s made the show what it is,” DeGeneres told her studio audience on The Ellen DeGeneres Show today. “He’s a huge part of that show but he wanted a change. I wish him all the luck in the world hosting ‘The Tonight Show,’” she joked.

Shrugging off his company’s long bouts with privacy concerns, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the weekend that sharing information online is the new “social norm.”

“When we first started Facebook in my dorm room in Harvard [in 2004], people asked me why would I want to have any information at all on the Internet,” the 25-year-old Zuckerberg said at the annual Crunchies awards ceremony sponsored by TechCrunch. “But the social norm has evolved over time.”

Clad in jeans, sneakers and a hooded sweatshirt, Zuckerberg told TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington that “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people … We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

Push Back Against Critics

The comments raised some eyebrows, given substantial indications of concerns lately about privacy and Facebook.

“I’m not sure I understand where that comment came from,” said Interpret Vice President Michael Gartenberg. “In particular, it seems that Facebook users are taking privacy as an issue and given the response to updated privacy settings recently, it would seem consumers do care quite a bit what they share and who they share it with.”

Zuckerberg’s comments come just a month after the latest user information flap for the social-network giant, which says it has 350 million users. Last month the company responded to concerns that information — such as friend lists, geography, networks and fan pages — could be easily accessed via searches. Users may now make them private.

In 2008, the company settled a class-action lawsuit alleging that its Beacon program, integrating the web site with those of retailers like Blockbuster, Overstock.com, Fandango and Zappos, made users’ activity outside Facebook public without adequately warning…

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Gigantic TVs aren’t really my area of expertise, but this one was so big and beautiful that I couldn’t help snapping a few shots as I drifted by it on my way to who knows where. This thing, if production is even planned, will likely cost somewhere around… oh, your first-born child. It might be worth it, too.

Click for full size, and here’s the little boast that was displayed alongside it. I’ll get more info if I can find it.

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BusinessWire – Plunkett Research, Ltd. has released their newest market research and competitive analysis report, Plunkett’s Renewable, Alternative & Hydrogen Energy Industry Almanac, 2010 edition. This carefully-researched book is a complete …

Let’s get this out of the way right now: Darksiders could be the most derivative game I’ve played in years. There’s a fine line between inspiration and grand theft game design, and developer Vigil Games’ debut comes dangerously close to stepping over it. What starts off as a simple action romp in the vein of Devil May Cry quickly morphs into a sprawling, Zelda-style dungeon crawl, featuring gameplay nods to everything from Dark Sector to Prince of Persia — there’s even a fairly blatant homage to Portal.

I’m not going to put the developers on trial or anything, because a) that’s not my job, b) this isn’t the appropriate venue for that, and c) everyone in this industry borrows ideas from one another at some point. Besides, I actually enjoyed the game quite a bit. While Darksiders might tread familiar territory a little too often, it more than makes up for any lack of originality with a lengthy, well-paced adventure and fun combat.

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The ancient and lovely mango just got a big public relations boost. The fruit has been found to prevent or stop certain breast cancer and colon cancer cells in the lab.

Texas AgriLife Research food scientists studied five varieties of mangoes that are more common in the US: Kent, Francine, Ataulfo, Tommy/Atkins and Haden. Dr. Susanne Talcott and her husband, Dr. Steve Talcott, conducted the study, one of several commissioned by the National Mango Board to better determine the fruit’s nutritional value.

The Talcotts studied the effect of mango polyphenol extracts (natural substances in plants that promote better health) in vitro on colon, breast, lung, leukemia and prostate cancers.

While the mango doesn’t have as much antioxidant power the blueberry or pomegranate, it’s still a contender. “It [the mango] has about four to five times less antioxidant capacity than an average wine grape, and it still holds up fairly well in anticancer activity. If you look at it from the physiological and nutritional standpoint … it would be a high-ranking super food,” Dr. Susanne Talcott said.

In the lab, mangoes revealed fighting power against lung, leukemia and prostate cancers, but they were found to be the most effective on the most common breast and colon cancers.

The Talcotts also found that the mango wasn’t harmful to normal cells when a reasonable concentration was used, but it still acted as an anti-cancer agent against some cancer cells. They hope perform a small clinical trial with people at risk for certain cancers, and perhaps move forward with a larger trial in the future to see if the mango holds clinical relevance. Meanwhile, the mango may indeed have earned the right to be called a super fruit!

(USDA-Agriculture Research Service photo by Wilhelmina Wasik)

Post from: Blisstree

Mighty Mango Prevents Breast Cancer in Lab

It’s official — Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol. The judge has confirmed this will be his final season on Idol.

Simon announced the news himself at FOX’s Television Critics Association panel in Pasadena, California, on Monday afternoon. The acid-tongued Brit reached a deal early Monday afternoon to bring The X Factor, the British reality competition which launched the career of Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke, to FOX.

Simon signed an agreement on stage, which will not only bring the show to the State, but will also see Simon executive produce and judge the program, according to AOL TV.

“I’m thrilled that we have put a date on the launch of the U.S. version of ‘The X Factor,’ and delighted to be continuing to work with FOX,” Simon said in a statement. “We have a fantastic relationship, a great team and are all very excited about this.”

The X Factor will debut in America in the Fall of 2011. The new season of American Idol begins Tuesday on FOX.

Will you watch Idol once Simon is gone?

Shane Chambers was the first of a few of you to send in this fantastic Slashdot comment by someone going by the name girlintraining, that encapsulates very clearly the nature of the copyright “wars” today and why the industry wants to keep ACTA quiet. The whole thing is worth a read, but to get you into it, here’s the beginning:

I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it’s baloney. They can’t explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists’ rights or any of that. All they really understand is there are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it’s intuitively obvious that it can’t possibly be worth that.

An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn’t matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn’t really change people’s attitudes. It won’t matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they’ve already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don’t make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods — you don’t exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for “sale” on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.

Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants — it’s the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don’t really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.

But, still, they will try, and the way they try to do it is in backrooms and convincing governments that they must be right, and increased protectionism really is better for everyone — even though it’s really only better for a select group of middlemen.

Later on, she discusses how we’ve reached a “copyright bubble”:

Copyright won’t end anytime soon, but I’m suggesting we look at the fundamentals here: it is an artificial construct within the digital environment. It’s something we built extraneous to it, and in fact, is antagonistic to it. The exchange of information is fundamental to the existence of the internet. Copyright is not. Copyright is an institution, like marriage, the church, the government, etc. Like those things, it has a maintenance cost. It is a coping mechanism. That’s not a judgment on its sustainability nor its justification for existence (or lack thereof).

Copyright is an institution and like all social institutions remain in existence only for as long as its members continue to support it. There is a substantial and growing number of digital identities (people, organizations, projects, etc.) that exist outside of that institution. Why? Because information is very, very cheap to replicate. Production of that information however can vary in cost. Everybody agrees that there must be some compensatory mechanism, however artificial, to reimburse people for the effort invested in the production of the goods and services that copyright protects. If there is no protection at all, many staples of modern life cease to exist. This is the loci of why copyright exists.

The cost to society now outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble. Large corporations and governments alike have bought into it and driven up its cost. Like any market-driven force however, it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble, and the housing bubble, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going on right now — we lost billions when that one burst. We stand to lose trillions when this one does. And, ironically, it will be burst by the very forces that businesses are embracing right now — labor capital in the third world.

Well-written and thought-provoking. While not all that different than similar pieces we’ve discussed in the past, it does present it in a very clear manner that makes it worth reading in its entirety.

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Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, GM, Humor

“… a lot of stuff happened.”

– Mark Reuss, General Motors’ new North American president, on 2009

[Image by Bill Pugliano/Getty]

Detroit 2010: Quote of the day originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The American auto-industry is certainly not beyond a little bit of self-deprecating humor, as made evident by the blends of coffee made available in the press room. ‘Bailout Blend’ was among the coffee choices offered to the press today at the 2010 North American International Auto Show hosted in none other than the Motor City itself. We thought it prudent to share this little bit of satire with our readers, as we found it quite entertaining.

-By: Stephen Calogera