Category: News

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Yesterday, I asked Betanews readers: “Should the police have been allowed to raid [Jason] Chen’s home and confiscate his computers?” How did you answer? I’ve randomly picked some of the responses — hoping to filter out some of the noise for better readability (There are more than 135 comments as I write this post).

But first a quick recap of what happened and some of the broader reaction: Yesterday, Gizmodo revealed that on Friday evening, police searched and seized computers from Chen’s home. Chen is a Gizmodo editor and writer of the first story about Apple’s so-called “next iPhone,” which the tech blog paid $5,000 to obtain. Gizmodo has since returned the prototype to Apple.

There has been huge debate over the last 24 hours about whether the search and seizure was legal. Some folks say certainly yes, because the police are investigating a crime. Others contend that journalist shield laws should have protected Chen. Here’s where I stand: As I blogged last week, somebody almost certainly broke the law, either as defined by California Penal Code or Uniform Trade Secrets Act. The lost phone could be considered stolen when the finder sold the phone after making no reasonable attempt to return the device to Apple.

However, I don’t agree with the search and seizure, because it violates federal and state journalist shield laws. These shield laws are designed to protect journalists’ sources by way of protecting the journalists from being forced to divulge confidential sources or have documents, computers or other information removed by law enforcement. By taking all Chen’s computers, police have access to confidential sources — the majority of whom have nothing to do with the stolen iPhone prototype. I would react differently had the police only taken information pertaining to the one source and specifically to the phone.

No surprise, Apple apologist John Gruber sides with law enforcement:

Journalist shield laws are about journalists being able to protect sources who may have committed crimes. They’re not a license for journalists to commit crimes themselves. Gawker is making an argument that is beside the point. They’re arguing, ‘Hey, bloggers are journalists.’ The state of California is arguing ‘Hey, you committed a felony.’

Today, at All Things Digital Peter Kafka writes:

Does the San Mateo District Attorney’s office believe that Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen committed a crime by buying a prototype iPhone for $5,000? If they do, then the California shield law Chen’s bosses at Gawker Media are citing won’t do them much good. Because the law doesn’t give journalists the ability to commit crimes.

But if authorities are really pursuing the guy who sold Chen the phone, then the shield law should protect Chen and his employers. Because keeping the cops from busting down your door so they can uncover your sources is one of the things the shield law is supposed to do.

I should point out that Gawker CEO Nick Denton already has admitted that his organization paid $5,000 for the iPhone prototype, which story of lost and found Gizmodo told last week. If there was a crime, there already is admission of guilt. But there are no charges, just search and seizure from Chen’s home.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a clinical, legal analysis asserting numerous problems with the warrant and its execution. Simply put: “Under California and federal law, this warrant should never have issued.” It’s a long analysis; do read it.

What Do You Say?

So here’s the reader response portion of today’s program. I’m skipping the “Joe is an idiot” comments; you can delight in those privately.

mcg1969:

Joe, I agree with your analysis of the purpose of the shield law — to protect sources. But it does not give a journalist a blanket pass to commit felonies…Moving forward, what this means for sources is that they need to choose journalists who are reputable and honest. Obviously there is a small risk that they will get busted for something unrelated. But Gizmodo has a demonstrated track record of unprofessional behavior.

godofbiscuits: “Joe, It’s GAWKER. It’s Nick Denton. Only journalists vet things. Nick’s said plainly he’s not a journalist. He’s an anti-journalist, if anything. D-E-N-T-O-N. You might want to google that.”

Harry Taint:

Gizmodo, Chen and the thief who failed to return the ‘lost’ iphone to the bar are sh!$%ing in their pants right now. Shield law does not prevent the DA from prosecuting felonies relating to selling/receiving stolen goods. ‘No officer, I can buy this missing Picasso because I hyperventilate about art online!’ Anyone using that logic is seriously mentally challenged. It may take months until the case is more clear, but as an attorney this much is clear to me, Gizmodo cannot afford the legal defense that it is going to need. They are going to be thrown under the bus, and no matter what the ACLU and other groups claim as ‘Freedom of the press.’

devstar:

It’s not so straightforward. Remember that in many cases the protecting of a source would be a crime if the the protector was not a journalist. The question is, is receiving stolen goods a crime for a journalist? I’d argue that if the journalist did not commission it, then it is not.

For example, if NBC gets a hold of a memo that an Obama senior staffer dropped on the ground. This memo details how Bin Laden had been captured and they were going to reveal this in the coming weeks. Should NBC refuse this memo, or is it fair game? I’d argue that it is fair game, although technically the memo is stolen. As long as the journalist is publishing a legit newsstory based on the information, it should be fine. And clearly, at least based on page hits, Giz’s story was legit.

aduffbrew: “Seems the San Mateo DA’s office is confirming the investigation is being put on hold as they review the potential application of shield laws to the seizure of Chen’s equipment. How this all proceeds will prove interesting.”

raback:
“Free information and trade secrets. Each one is trying to pull the blanket on its side. Do we really need/deserve a such small blanket?”

OneToOne:

Gizmodo is not bound to guard Apple’s trade secrets by any agreement or law. It is not their business to be Apple’s nanny and keep their secrets away from the public — in fact, if they find any item, they can do whatever they please, including publishing photos, internal details, and so on. And Apple cannot do a single thing about it, because there is no law that says a third party must protect Apple’s trade secrets. It is Apple’s fault for losing the item, and on one else’s.

FalKirk:

The purpose of the raid was to preserve evidence — to keep the computers from being wiped — and while the identity of the person who sold the phone to Gizmodo might have been one of the targets of the investigation, I think that the police are primarily interested in gathering evidence that can be used against the real culprit — Gizmodo.

ACMESalesRep:

If this is about ‘naming sources,’ why wasn’t Engadget also raided? They published photos of the phone, obtained from the same person that sold it to Gizmodo, but refused to deal with him/her because of legal concerns. Presumably they’d have just as much contact information as Chen does. This isn’t about finding who sold the phone; it’s about building a felony case against Chen himself (and possibly his superiors at Gizmodo) for buying something that he could have reasonably assumed to be stolen.

tommydokc: “So this gives cops a right to break down your door over a g**d*** phone? I think not. what is this, Germany pre wwII?”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Filed under: SUV, Government/Legal, Recalls, Safety, Toyota

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into an accident involving a Toyota Highlander that claimed the lives of four motorists last year. Stephen Lagakos was driving with his wife and mother in New Hampshire when the vehicle sped up, passed a number of other vehicles on the shoulder and then crossed traffic. The Highlander struck a Chevrolet Malibu in the oncoming lane driven by Stephen Krause. No one survived.

The NHTSA is investigating the possibility that the crash was caused by unintended acceleration. Witnesses reported that Lagakos had been following the other drivers on the road for miles, giving proper following distance the entire time. When the Toyota sped past, the driver had both hands on the wheels and looked as if he was trying to avoid an accident.

So far, there’s no indication as to whether or not the Lagakos vehicle had been serviced under Toyota’s expansive recall. The 2008-2010 Highlander fell under the same January recall that brought in models like the Corolla, Venza, Matrix and Pontiac Vibe.

According to The Boston Globe, Toyota has expressed its sympathy for the families of the victims of the accident, and underscored its commitment to making all of its products safe to drive.

[Source: The Boston Globe]

Report: NHTSA investigating NH Toyota Highlander crash that killed four originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This morning at WES 2010, RIM finally took the wraps off of their upcoming BlackBerry 6 operating system, introducing it with the video you see above. While it’s easy to be captivated by the dancers, when you focus on the actual screen activity being teased here, you see that this is all focused on touchscreen gestures, but we are sure that RIM won’t be throwing away that true QWERTY keyboard anytime soon. Also, interestingly enough, the web browser got almost no play at all in the video. Maybe they’ve still got some work to do on that one. Still, it’s nice to see the company progressing and aiming to bring BlackBerry devices a bunch of new hotness in the near future.

Tags:
bb 6,
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blackberry 6 os,
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Article Tags: [email protected], Ronald D. Voisin

Image source

Did you ever wonder where those clockwork CO2 spikes come from? After all, they accompany every interglacial.

See: Physorg.com -Even soil feels the heat: Soils release more carbon dioxide as globe warms for a helpful hint – 99.5% comes from natural sources.

In the above referenced web-article, these scientists have bumped their estimated current microbial contribution to atmospheric CO2 from 85 to 98 petagrams. Our anthropogenic contribution is less than a tenth of that at ~6-7 petagrams. The total of all natural emissions is estimated at some 2,000 – 2,200 petagrams. Now in this article they seem to suggest that our 6-7 petagram (sub 0.5%) contribution has unfortunately and deleteriously triggered this microbial increase of 13 petagrams (from 85 to 98). In fact, most all studies regarding Soil Respiration engage the very same broken blame-game.

However, if we humans were never here at all, the consequently expanded microbial contribution can be roughly estimated to become 127 petagrams. Microbes would have geometrically filled our void for an increase of ~42 petagrams. And expanded proliferations of insects and mammalia would have contributed to a yet much larger delta. So what would these Theologians suggest this far greater contribution would have “unfortunately and deleteriously triggered?”

Read in full with comments »   

Se ha hablado mucho del Renault Fluence Z.E. En Frankfurt 2009 fue presentado, pero todavía se desconocían la mayoría de detalles técnicos del sucesor del Mégane Sedán. Ahora ya tenemos esos detalles técnicos, además de saber que se trata del primer vehículo del segmento C que se venderá en serie.

La versión eléctrica del Fluence es algo más grande que su hermano con propulsor tradicional y presenta 4,75 metros de longitud. Esto se debe a que era necesario poder acoplar las baterías detrás de los asientos traseros. Aún así, el diseño ha sido revisado para que no se perdiera la esencia del original.

Se había especulado mucho acerca de la motorización que finalmente será de tipo síncrono con rotor bobinado. Su potencia máxima de 70 kW (95 CV) se obtiene al régimen de 11.000 r.p.m. y su par máximo alcanza los 226 Nm. La buena noticia es que el par motor se obtiene muy pronto.

La batería es algo interesante, ya que presentará una batería de Ión-Litio con una capacidad energética de 22 kW/h. Además contará con un sistema de recuperación de energía en caso de desaceleración. Por cierto, podrá recargarse en la red doméstica sin ningún problema en unas 6 u 8 horas.

Vía | Coches.Net

by Mark Hertsgaard

.series-head{background:url(http://www.grist.org/i/assets/climate_desk/header.gif) no-repeat; height:68px; text-indent:-9999px;} h3.subscribe-head{padding-left:5px;background-color:black;color:#ff8400;} dl.series-nav{margin-top:-15px;}

John Williams has been making wine in California’s
Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his
peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will
affect Napa’s world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted.
“You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we
need to keep this issue in perspective,” he told me. “When I hear about
global warming in the news, I hear that it’s going to melt the Arctic,
inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people,
spread tropical diseases and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I
get calls from wine writers and all they want to know is, ‘How is the
character of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?’ I
worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity scale,
not the vineyard scale.”

Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap, one of the most ecologically
minded wineries in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for
the operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot
vines; the heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal system that
taps into the earth’s heat. The vineyards are 100 percent organic
and-most radical of all, considering Napa’s dry summers-there is no
irrigation.

Yet despite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions
about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have
no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that
affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to
be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his
voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least
slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”

Williams has a point about keeping things in perspective. At a time
when climate change is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh
to find enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what
might happen to premium wines. But there is much more to the question of
wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine
grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry
amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops—and
all industries—will confront as global warming intensifies. In vino
veritas, the Romans said: In wine there is truth. The
truth now is that the earth’s climate is changing much faster than the
wine business, and virtually every other business on earth, is preparing
for.

All crops need favorable climates, but few are as vulnerable to
temperature and other extremes as wine grapes. “There is a fifteenfold
difference in the price of cabernet sauvignon grapes that are grown in
Napa Valley and cabernet sauvignon grapes grown in Fresno” in
California’s hot Central Valley, says Kim Cahill, a consultant to the
Napa Valley Vintners’ Association. “Cab grapes grown in Napa sold [in
2006] for $4,100 a ton. In Fresno the price was $260 a ton. The
difference in average temperature between Napa and Fresno was 5 degrees
Fahrenheit.”

Numbers like that help explain why climate change is poised to
clobber the global wine industry, a multibillion-dollar business whose
decline would also damage the much larger industries of food,
restaurants, and tourism. Every business
on earth will feel the effects of global warming, but only the ski
industry—which appears doomed in its current form—is more visibly
targeted by the hot, erratic weather that lies in store over the next 50
years. In France, the rise in temperatures may render the Champagne
region too hot to produce fine champagne. The same is true for the
legendary reds of Châteauneuf du Pape, where the stony white soil’s
ability to retain heat, once considered a virtue, may now become a
curse. The world’s other major wine-producing regions—California, Italy,
Spain, Australia—are also at risk.

If current trends continue, the “premium wine grape production area
[in the United States] … could decline by up to 81 percent by the late
21st century,” a team of scientists wrote in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences in 2006. The culprit was not so much the rise in average temperatures but an increased frequency of extremely hot days, defined
as above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). If no adaptation
measures were taken, these increased heat spikes would “eliminate wine
grape production in many areas of the United States,” the scientists
wrote.

In theory, winemakers can defuse the threat by simply shifting
production to more congenial locations. Indeed, champagne grapes have
already been planted in England and some respectable vintages harvested.
But there are limits to this strategy. After all, temperature is not
the sole determinant of a wine’s taste. What the French call terroir—a
term that refers to the soil of a given region but also includes the
cultural knowledge of the people who grow and process grapes—is crucial.
“Wine is tied to place more than any other form of agriculture, in the
sense that the names of the place are on the bottle,” says David Graves,
the co-founder of the Saintsbury wine company in the Napa Valley. “If
traditional sugar-beet growing regions in eastern Colorado had to move
north, nobody would care. But if wine grapes can’t grow in the Napa
Valley anymore—which is an extreme statement, but let’s say so for the
sake of argument—suddenly you have a global warming poster child right
up there with the polar bears.”

A handful of climate-savvy winemakers such as Graves are trying to
rouse their colleagues to action before it is too late, but to little
avail. Indeed, some winemakers are actually rejoicing in the higher
temperatures of recent years. “Some of the most expensive wines in Spain
come from the Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa regions,” Pancho Campo, the
founder and president of the Wine Academy of Spain, says. “They are
getting almost perfect ripeness every year now for Tempranillo. This
makes the winemakers say, ‘Who cares about climate change? We are
getting perfect vintages.’ The same thing has happened in Bordeaux. It
is very difficult to tell someone, ‘This is only going to be the case
for another few years.’”

The irony is, the wine business is better situated than most to adapt
to global warming. Many of the people in the industry followed in their
parents’ footsteps and hope to pass the business on to their kids and
grandkids someday. This should lead them to think farther
ahead than the average corporation, with its obsessive focus on this
quarter’s financial results. But I found little evidence this is
happening.

The exception: Alois Lageder, a man whose family has
made wine in Alto Adige, the northernmost province in Italy, since
1855. The setting, at the foot of the Alps, is majestic. Looming over
the vines are massive outcroppings of black and gray granite
interspersed with flower-strewn meadows and wooded hills that inevitably
call to mind The
Sound of Music. Locals admire Lageder for having led Alto
Adige’s evolution from producing jug wine to boasting some of the best
whites in Italy. In October 2005, Lageder hosted the world’s first conference
on the future of wine under climate change. “We must recognize that
climate change is not a problem of the future,” Lageder told his
colleagues. “It is here today and we must adapt now.”

As it happens, Alto Adige is the location of one of the most dramatic
expressions of modern global warming: the discovery of the so-called Iceman—the
frozen remains of a herder who lived in the region 5,300 years ago. The
corpse was found in 1991 in a mountain gully, almost perfectly
preserved-even the skin was intact—because it had lain beneath mounds of
snow and ice since shortly after his death (a murder, forensic
investigators later concluded from studying the trajectory of an
arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder). He would not have been found
were it not for global warming, says Hans Glauber, the director of the
Alto Adige Ecological Institute: “Temperatures have been rising in the
Alps about twice as fast as in the rest of the world,” he notes.

Lageder heard about global warming in the early 1990s and felt
compelled to take action. It wasn’t easy—“I had incredible fights with
my architect about wanting good insulation,” he says—but by 1996 he had
installed the first completely privately financed solar energy system in
Italy. He added a geothermal energy system as well. Care was taken to
integrate these cutting-edge technologies into the existing site; during
a tour, I emerged from a dark fermentation cellar with its own wind
turbine into the bright sunlight of a gorgeous courtyard dating to the
15th century. Going green did make the renovation cost 30 percent more,
Lageder says, “but that just means there is a slightly longer
amortization period. In fact, we made up the cost difference through
increased revenue, because when people heard about what we were doing,
they came to see it and they ended up buying our wines.”

The record summer
heat that struck Italy and the rest of Europe in 2003, killing tens
of thousands, made Lageder even more alarmed. “When I was a kid, the
harvest was always after November 1, which was a cardinal date,” he told
me. “Nowadays, we start between the 5th and 10th of September and
finish in October.” Excess heat raises the sugar level of grapes to
potentially ruinous levels. Too much sugar can result in wine that is
unbalanced and too alcoholic—wine known as “cooked” or “jammy.” Higher
temperatures may also increase the risk of pests and parasites, because
fewer will die off during the winter. White wines, whose skins are less
tolerant of heat, face particular difficulties as global warming
intensifies. “In 2003, we ended up with wines that had between 14 and 16
percent alcohol,” Lageder recalled, “whereas normally they are between
12 and 14 percent. The character of our wine was changing.”

A 2 percent increase in alcohol may sound like a tiny difference, but
the effect on a wine’s character and potency is considerable. “In
California, your style of wine is bigger, with alcohol levels of 14 and
15, even 16 percent,” Lageder continued. “I like some of those wines a
lot. But the alcohol level is so high that you have one glass and
then”—he slashed his hand across his throat—“you’re done; any more and
you will be drunk. In Europe, we prefer to drink wine throughout the
evening, so we favor wines with less alcohol. Very hot weather makes
that harder to achieve.”

There are tricks grape growers and winemakers can use to lower
alcohol levels. The leaves surrounding the grapes can be allowed to grow
bushier, providing more shade. Vines can be replaced with different
clones or rootstocks. Growing grapes at higher altitudes, where the air
is cooler, is another option. So is changing the type of grapes being
grown.

But laws and cultural traditions currently stand in the way of such
adaptations. So-called AOC laws (Appellation d’Origine Côntrollée)
govern wine-grape production throughout France, and in parts of Italy,
and Spain as well. As temperatures rise further, these AOC laws and
kindred regulations are certain to face increased challenge. “I was just
in Burgundy,” Pancho Campo told me in March 2008, “and producers there
are very concerned, because they know that chardonnay and pinot noir are
cool-weather wines, and climate change is bringing totally the
contrary. Some of the producers were even considering starting to study
Syrah and other varieties. At the moment, they are not allowed to plant
other grapes, but these are questions people are asking.”

The greatest resistance, however, may come from the industry itself.
“Some of my colleagues may admire my views on this subject, but few have
done much,” says Lageder. “People are trying to push the problem away,
saying, ‘Let’s do our job today and wait and see in the future if
climate change becomes a real problem.’ But by then it will be too late
to save ourselves.”

If the wine industry does not adapt to climate
change, life will go on—with less conviviality and pleasure, perhaps,
but it will go on. Fine wine will still be produced, most likely by
early adapters such as Lageder, but there will be less of it. By the law
of supply and demand, that suggests the best wines of tomorrow will
cost even more than the ridiculous amounts they fetch today. White wine
may well disappear from some regions. Climate-sensitive reds such as
pinot noir are also in trouble. It’s not too late for winemakers to save
themselves through adaptation. But it’s disconcerting to see so much
dawdling in an industry with so much incentive to act. If winemakers
aren’t motivated to adapt to climate change, what businesses will be?

The answer seems to be very few. Even in the Britain, where the
government is vigorously championing adaptation, the private sector lags
in understanding the adaptation imperative, much less implementing it.
“I bet if I rang up a hundred small businesses in the U.K. and mentioned
adaptation, 90 of them wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” says
Gareth Williams, who works with the organization Business in the
Community, helping firms in northeast England prepare for the storms and
other extreme weather events that scientists project for the region.
“When I started this job, I gave a presentation to heads of businesses,”
said Williams, who spent most of his career in the private sector. “I
presented the case for adaptation, and in the question-and-answer
period, one executive said, ‘We’re doing quite a lot on adaptation
already.’ I said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ He said, ‘We’re recycling, and
we’re looking at improving our energy efficiency.’ I thought to myself,
‘Oh, my, he really didn’t get it at all. This is going to be a
struggle.’”

“Most of us are not very good at recognizing our risks until we are
hit by them,” explains Chris West, the director of the U.K. government’s
Climate Impact Program. “People who run companies are no different.”
Before joining UKCIP in 1999, West had spent most of his career working
to protect endangered species. Now, the species he is trying to save is
his own, and the insights of a zoologist turn out to be quite useful.
Adapting to changing circumstances is, after all, the essence of
evolution—and of success in the modern economic marketplace. West is
fond of quoting Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that
survives … nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is
the most adaptable to change.”

Related Links:

EPA scientist warns Atlantic seaboard will be swallowed by rising seas

Interview with ‘Growing Green’ water steward Mike Benziger

Cuba’s urban-ag revival offers limited lessons

What have we here? It seems as if HTC has just filed a new phone with FCC for testing. The test setup photos from A Test Lab Techno Corp. (ATL) show that HTC is in fact working on another horizontal slider style device, and from the looks of the hardware, the device will run Android (it sports a home key rather than the generic Windows home key).

The device, model number PC70110, looks to have an optical trackpad similar to that on the upcoming Desire but more oval than circular.  Tests indicate that this device will support 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and it appears to be heading to AT&T and possibly some Canadian carriers based on its support for 3G bands II and V.  A letter from HTC to FCC included in the filing states that the device will not support VoIP and that the it has not been rated for hearing aid compatibility with respect to the Wi-Fi capability.

I have to say, the device is looking pretty good despite the color scheme. I’ve never been a big fan of bright colors on my phone, but throw some different colors on this device, make alternate designs for different demographics, and this device could spell success.  With a lot of HTC fans are soon looking to replace their G1, this very well may be the full QWERTY horizontal slider they’ve all been waiting for.

No word could be found on whether the device has been passed just yet or not, but we will keep you posted as we get more information on it.

A special thanks goes out to our very own Ari Robbins for uncovering this little gold mine!

FCC Information

[JURIST] A French judge ruled Tuesday that former Panamanian military leader Manuel Noriega must remain in custody until his trial on money laundering charges. Noriega arrived in France Tuesday morning after being extradited from the US, where he had served a 17-year sentence on drug charges. Noriega appeared Tuesday before French prosecutors to hear the charges against him, which stem from allegedly laundering $3 million in drug profits by purchasing property in Paris. He then appeared before a judge to request that he be sent back to Panama immediately. His lawyers argued that he is immune from prosecution as a former head of state and that the statute of limitations has expired. The judge rejected those arguments, remanding Noriega into custody.
Noriega fought extradition from the US since 2007. Last month, the US Supreme Court declined to reconsider Noriega’s petition to stop the extradition process. His lawyers filed the petition in February after the Supreme Court denied certiorari on the case in January. Noriega, who has been declared a prisoner of war, sought to enforce a provision of the Geneva Convention that requires repatriation at the end of confinement. Noriega and his wife were sentenced in absentia to 10 years in jail by a French court in 1999, but France agreed to hold a new trial if he was extradited.

The Obama Administration has not been lax in patroling the US-Mexico border, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano insisted to the Senate Judiciary Committee today.

Napolitano, also a former governor of Arizona, said, “I know that border i think as well as anyone. It is as secure now as it has ever been.”

The Secretary is trying to deflect the argument that a porous border forced Arizona to pass a controversial immigration law last week.

But Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer, who signed the law last week that will make it a crime under state law to be in the US illegally, says the administration is not doing enough to stop the influx of illegal immigrants and drugs.

Brewer says she has sent 5 letters to President Obama, and spoken to him personally about the deteriorating border situation.  She says her entreaties have “been met with complete, total  disrespect to the people of Arizona. I mean, we don’t even get an answer back in regards to securing our border. So, given that, i think that it was time that Arizonans did step up.”

The White House said today that President Obama wants to take a “hard long look” at the law, and has directed the Justice Department to examine its options.

Attorney General Eric Holder said, “We are considering all possibilities including the possibility of a court challenge.”

But Republicans say a majority of Arizonans want this law.

“It has a 70-percent approval in Arizona,” according to House Minority Leader John Boehner, who continued, “I think that we ought to respect the people of Arizona and their right to make their own decisions.”

The law is set to go into effect in mid-summer.

Over four months after President Obama missed his self-imposed deadline to shutter the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, approximately 180 detainees remain behind the wire and within the walls of the seven camps that comprise Camp Delta. All have been there for years on end: The most recent detainee arrived in 2007. Most have never been charged with any crime or wartime offense. One of the few who has, Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who has spent his teenage years and early 20s in Guantanamo since 2002, will dispatch his lawyers tomorrow morning for a pre-trial hearing seeking to ban what they contend is coerced testimony from his military commission for murder and material support for terrorism. Some detainees have even been cleared for release: Fewer than ten Uighur detainees (the military does not disclose the specific number) remain in a facility called Camp Iguana, where they are considered “residents” and not detainees, as their release has been ordered by U.S. courts but no country has agreed to take them in.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

It’s unclear when the Obama administration will actually close the facility. There’s a possibility it could still carry out the closure before the end of the year: The Defense Department has asked Congress for $350 million for all aspects of closing the Guantanamo detention facility and purchasing a new Illinois prison to house the residual population that has yet to be tried or repatriated (as well as about 48 detainees the administration seeks to hold in indefinite detention). It has placed the money in the politically potent request for funding operations in the Afghanistan war. That choice itself reflects the bipartisan resistance in Congress to actually closing the facility, despite both party’s presidential candidates in 2008 running on a pledge to end an international symbol of infamy.

Accordingly, a group of reporters toured a few of Camp Delta’s nine facilities today to get a highly constrained glimpse of residual life in Guantanamo Bay. The military command has reviewed every photograph presented here to prevent inadvertent disclosures of classified information; seven photographs I took were deleted.

A rare glimpse between two outer layers of security surrounding Camp 5 and Camp 6, two facilities modeled on prisons in Indiana and Michigan. Recently-relaxed rules for restricting photography now allow some visual representation of the shoreline. We did not get to see Camp 7, a facility containing high value detainees. “We do acknowledge there’s a Camp 7,” said Lt. Col. Andrew McManus, the deputy commander of the Joint Detention Group, which oversees detention operations. “That’s all we say about it.” When I asked if the 14 detainees at Guantanamo Bay who arrived in September 2006 from undisclosed prisons run by the CIA — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 co-conspirators — lived in communal housing or are held in individual cells, McManus replied, “I know nothing about that whatsoever.”

A detainee jogs around the central recreation yard in Camp 4, a communal-housing facility for detainees who comply with guards’ orders. When he saw a group of reporters taking pictures of the area, he yelled out in English, “Put me beside bin Laden!” The consensus of the press corps was he was joking.

Two contrasting images from an area in Camp 4 used for holding educational classes. With the exception of the prayer mat, the recreational materials on this table — the Soduko book, the art supplies and the magazines — are comfort items provided to help “compliant” detainees at Camp 4 while away the time. In the makeshift classroom, detainees watch DVDs — some are said to be partial to Jackie Chan movies and the Alaskan fishing show “Deadliest Catch” — as well as attending art and language and “life skill” courses. But across the floor in the classroom are small metal eyebolts used to shackle detainees to their seats during the classes. “For the safety of the instructor, the detainees are shackled,” McManus explained.

Camp 6, modeled on a Michigan prison, is a $37 million facility consisting of eight blocks of 22 cells. It’s a communal-living facility, meaning detainees live with each other, although there are several cells that aren’t big enough for more than a single occupant. Here, a detainee — a slight man, maybe about 5 foot 5 — ambles over from a common area to speak amiably with a guard, who’s separated from the detainee by a schoolyard-fence style barrier. I was allowed to publish these photographs because I blurred the detainee’s faces.

This is the ceiling of a single-occupancy detainee’s cell in H Block in Camp 6, just above the toilet. I laid down on the concrete platform set up for a detainee’s bed to get a sense of what might be the last thing he sees before going to sleep at night.

Another shot from the recreation yard at Camp 4. The only towers we’re allowed to photograph are those with guards manning them, and only then if the guard’s face isn’t able to be determined. Similarly, the crouching detainee below pulled the collar of his shirt above his nose, obscuring his face enough so that a photograph of the scene could clear a security review.

We weren’t allowed inside this Camp 4 facility. While there’s no indication this behavior persists at Guantanamo, early in the detention facility’s existence, behavioral-science teams were involved in abusive interrogation and detention operations, as a Senate Armed Services Committee report in 2008 meticulously documented. There haven’t been accounts of behaviorally-enhanced interrogations for years. “We have visitors here every day of the week,” McManus said, including the International Committee of the Red Cross.

A view of the American flag through the perimeter fences around Camp 4 and Camp 5. A Toronto Star journalist remarked that it was probably the single most photographed American flag around. Then she snapped some pictures.

Look, bullying is obviously a serious issue, but the idea of a video game that targets bullying sounds pretty absurd. It’ll just give more fuel to bullies! “What did you play last night, GTA4?” “No, an anti-bullying game.” More »

Finviz’s map of the futures market is super helpful on a day like today.

We see three green spots on this map. What are they?

Yen, dollars, and gold. It doesn’t get more flight-to-safety than that.

Join the conversation about this story »

Congratulations to Archos 5 users on finally getting the full Android Market!

The Archos 5 has slowly and steadily been building into a nice tablet experience, but with so many bigger and better tablets on the horizon this news is most exciting as a bellwether for Android tablets to come.

The limited number of Android tablets that we have seen released to date have offered either no access to the Android Market or access that was limited to free apps. As those Android users in countries that still don’t have access to the paid Market will tell you this can be quite frustrating.

We know that Android tablets coming in the second half of this year will compete favorably with and in many cases surpass the iPad where hardware specifications are concerned, but that is really only half the battle. As we saw in the early days of the Android Market, developers are not likely to flock to a platform that only allows them to hock their wares for free and users balk at devices that doesn’t offer quality content (I’m not suggesting free content can’t be of high quality, but there is a perception issue there).

With the knowledge that Google is at work on their own Android tablet we can rest assured that the underlying OS will be optimized for the larger form factor devices and it stood to reason that they would bring the full Android Market along for the ride, but it is good to see this rolling out now with time to work out the kinks before Android tablets start to become more mainstream.

The addition of the Android Market is a good step, but it is not the most user friendly experience at the moment and with the meteoric growth of the Market, along with this new category of device assuredly bringing more and different apps along with it, Google might finally be forced to take a more direct hand in cleaning it up.

What steps do you think Google should be taking to improve the Market as it pertains to accessibility in general and to handle the inevitable addition of apps that are geared more specifically to tablet devices?

Related Posts

• Canadians like to buy Android apps. Will they be able to sell them soon?
• Welcome to the wonderful world of paid apps Canada!
• Dell roadmap leaks part 2: Netbook and tablet edition
• New Android Market appears in 2.2 firmware
• Dell Looking Glass tablet features Tegra 2

From Green Right Now Reports

Climate deniers will just have to grit their teeth over the latest report from the EPA showing that climate change is having a current, measurable effect on the Earth.

While this has been news for a while, the EPA’s Climate Change Indicators report, released Tuesday, gathers up the latest stats on heat waves, storms, sea level measurements and glacier melts.  All point to a planet under duress.

The Greenhouse Effect (Image: EPA)

The agency tracks 24 climate change indicators, and these show that “climate change is a very real problem with impacts already being seen,” said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.

Some of the report’s findings:

• Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are increasing and rose by about 14 percent in the U.S. between 1990 and 2008.

• Average temperatures are rising, with seven of the top 10 warmest years on record in the continental United States occurring since 1990.

• Tropical cyclone intensity has increased in recent decades with six of the 10 most active hurricane seasons have occurred since the mid-1990s.

• Sea levels are rising, and have risen twice as fast as the long term trend since 1993 to 2008.

• Glaciers are melting and the volume of glaciers appears to be diminishing faster over the last decade. (This makes sense, given the warmer temperature trends and the actual disappearance of glaciers, such as two that have gone extinct in Glacier National Park. That national park could become a microcosm of the environmental downward spiral that can be initiated by such changes.).

• The frequency of heat waves has risen steadily since the 1960s.

Those who want to know more should check out the slide show detailing the highlights of the report, supported with graphs and photography. This non-geek, quickie review of climate change in action hits the salient points without getting into an IPCC-level discussion.

For instance, it notes that arctic sea ice is being lost because the oceans and surface air is warming. And as the oceans warm, the ice melt accelerates. The summer arctic melts become more severe, which contributes to rising oceans and a loss of the snow cap that helps reflect the sun’s rays. See the circular problem? This is one of the “feed backs” that scientists refer to when they discuss the tipping points and urgency of dealing with climate change now. The EPA slide show doesn’t get into all that, but does note that the “extent” or reach of sea ice was 24 percent below the average for the 1980s and 1990s. The picture really says it all:

The EPA’s slide show, aimed at a general audience, makes several other concepts understandable without the scientific jargon. It’s slide show on rising temperatures shows that the thermometer isn’t rising uniformly, but in a pattern designed by Mother Nature.

U.S. temperatures (Image: EPA)

But that doesn’t mean that climate change has been engineered by natural events. It’s clearly the result of human activities, which have pushed the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to heat-trapping levels never before experienced in human history. That’s covered in the slide show also.

Greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise. (Photo: EPA)

See more info from the EPA about climate change on the agency’s website.

Building webscale or cloud applications is hampered by figuring out ways to spread tasks out over thousands of computers without slowing things down, or requiring too many people to keep things running. Virtualization and faster storage helps, as do new databases (GigaOM Pro sub req’d) and caching techniques, but right now folks are trying to adapt how they program computers to reflect that one has now become many.

Bloom, a programming language created at the University of California, Berkeley by a group led by Joseph Hellerstein is one such effort. Bloom was profiled this week as one of the top 10 emerging technologies by MIT’s Technology Review, because it could help cloud computing continue to scale. Here’s how, according to Technology Review:

The challenge is that these languages process data in static batches. They can’t process data that is constantly changing, such as readings from a network of sensors. The solution, ­Hellerstein explains, is to build into the language the notion that data can be dynamic, changing as it’s being processed. This sense of time enables a program to make provisions for data that might be arriving later — or never.

Hellerstein also gave an extensive interview to HPC in the Cloud this week about what Bloom is and the problem it’s trying to solve. From that interview:

To put it simply, our what our work is trying to do is start with the data itself and get people to talk about what should happen to the data step-by-step through a program without ever having them specify at all how many machines are involved. So, when you ask a query of a database you describe what data you want—not how to get it.

The interview lays out how this programming effort  came about (building network protocols) and who might care most about using Bloom (Amazon, Google or anyone with big data needs), but for me the best part of the interview was how Hellerstein underscored that the ability to harness a hell of a lot of servers and treat them as a single computer is the next big shift in information technology.

We can call it cloud computing, webscale applications or merely bigger data centers, but the key element here is that the hardware has gone social in ways that require many-to-many ways of communication and delivering instructions to the processors — inside the servers, between the servers, and soon, between data centers. The exciting aspect of this shift is that while larger companies like Google, Yahoo and Amazon are innovating, there is plenty of room for startups with a new appliance, server, networking technology or a chunk of code to make waves — and hopefully money.

For more on the effort, please check out the FAQ’s Hellerstein has posted on his blog.

Image courtesy of Flickr user tibchris

The best apps for any Google platform—like say, Android—are almost inevitably written by Google. Now Google’s bought a little app company called LabPixies, that makes widgets and games for Android and iGoogle, so expect more. [Google via Cnet] More »

by Jonathan Hiskes

They’re trying a dome
because the robots didn’t work. No, really. Damage control for the oil-rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is sounding like a bad
science-fiction movie:

Engineers are crafting a giant underwater dome to help to
contain an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after attempts to shut off the leak
using robotic submarines failed.

… While the robots continued their efforts one mile down
and a new rig arrived to drill into the leaking well and plug it in an
operation that could take months, BP said that its dome should trap the
escaping oil and funnel it to tanks on the surface.

The 11 workers missing
after the oil-rig explosion are presumed dead, and the leaking oil is expected to reach the Louisiana
coast as early as Saturday. The spill is 48 miles at its widest, 39 miles at
its longest and has a circumference of 600 miles, according to reports.

And:

Louisiana is one month away from opening its inshore
shrimping season, its crab season is just starting and oyster beds could be
closed if the oil gets into coastal estuaries.

As The Wall Street Journal reports,
this sort of casts a pall over BP’s fantastic quarterly earnings report, which beat
analysts’ forecasts by 18 percent.

At the G20 meeting in
Pittsburgh last fall, President Obama promised to scale back government subsidies to the fossil-fuel industries: “I will work
with my colleagues at the G20 to phase out fossil-fuel subsidies so that we can
better address our climate challenge.”

The continuing Louisiana
disaster provides a favorable political climate to make good on that pledge.

Related Links:

Senate Dem leader vows action on both climate and immigration

14 buildings compete to be the Biggest Loser (of energy waste)

Kerry says climate bill is not dead

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

First announced just two weeks after Windows Embedded Standard 2009 was released, Windows Embedded Standard 7 has at last been released to manufacturers, Microsoft announced today. The company says that new devices built on the platform should be arriving soon, and that we should expect to see some “exciting developments” in Windows 7 consumer devices at Computex in June.

Though Windows Embedded Standard 7 can be used in dozens of different environments such as digital signage, thin clients, and industrial control systems, Microsoft has emphasized the value of this version to connected set-top boxes, TVs, and media players.

“The addition of the Windows Media Center feature in Windows Embedded Standard 7 is driving the set-top box, connected media device and TV markets by providing OEMs with opportunities to develop uniquely branded experiences and service providers with capabilities to explore additional revenue streams with unique content through a centralized media hub in the home,” Kevin Dallas, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business Unit at Microsoft said in a statement today.

While the video shown above does present a compelling user experience, Microsoft’s list of Windows Embedded Standard 7 partners today included: AOpen Inc., C-nario, DT Research Inc., Micro Industries Inc. and YCD Multimedia (for digital signage) HP and Wyse Technology (for thin clients) and Heber Ltd. for industrial control systems. There were no home entertainment product partners even mentioned today. Microsoft’s Embedded Group lists 28 different companies as OEM partners for set-top box production.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

The US Chamber of Commerce (which many people mistakenly think is a government organization — it’s not) has a long history of getting the facts wrong about intellectual property. The folks at the Chamber of Commerce have one basic mission, which is to protect the big businesses that fund it. And what better way to do that then to have the government help give them monopoly rights and then enforce those rights. The latest is that it has released a report which it falsely claims proves that stricter IP enforcement would boost the economy. But that’s not what the report actually says. The Chamber of Commerce hired NPD Group to write this report, and you can read the results yourself (pdf). It’s significantly weaker than even the most ridiculous studies we’ve seen in the past.

Basically, what the report does is talk about “IP-intensive industries,” noting that they have created a lot of jobs. Then it picks twelve random “non-IP-intensive industries” and notes that they spend less on R&D and have lost jobs. That’s it. But the conclusions it comes to are not supported by the facts. It takes several logical leaps as follows:

• Because an industry is considered “IP-intensive” it is only successful because of intellectual property laws. That’s simply not true. In fact, a study by CCIA showed that exceptions to intellectual property law contribute more to the economy in those industries than the IP law itself. The problem here is falsely assuming that any kind of “IP-intensive industry” is only possible or only successful because of intellectual property. And yet, the actual research suggests that the vast majority of that economic activity, while perhaps in “IP-intensive” industries has little, if anything, to do with intellectual property law or its enforcement.
• Second, it assumes, but does nothing to support, the idea that stronger enforcement increases output in “IP-intensive” industries. In fact, actual research has shown the opposite to be true — and that in cases where weaker enforcement occurs, output and economic activity increase.
• It assumes that because the industries it picked contributed more jobs to the economy, that’s because of intellectual property law. Yet, there’s little evidence to support this basic claim. In fact, history has shown that increasing IP strictness often decreases jobs by limiting competition.
• Finally, the report also assumes that IP-intensive industries are on the rise because of intellectual property law, not other massive shifts in the global market. Of course knowledge industries are growing in the US as agricultural and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. But that’s not because of intellectual property law. It’s because of the natural progression of the economy. That the “non-IP intensive industries” it randomly chose to include (things like wood, textile, and paper) are on the decline is not due to intellectual property law at all. Claiming it does, as the report implies, is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

The report is a joke, based on a series of faulty assumptions. Tragically, the US Chamber of Commerce still gets attention, despite the fact that its claims pushing for stronger IP laws would do a lot more harm than good for most US business and innovation.

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We don’t normally put expletives in our headlines, but when a Senator says the word nearly a dozen times in an open hearing, who are we to argue? And, we have to admit, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) certainly makes a compelling case when he reads back Goldman Sachs internal emails and concludes that the company’s “top priority was selling that shitty deal.”

The deal in question involved a fund called Timberwolf, which was called “shitty” in internal company emails, and which lost 80% of its value within months of being issued. Despite the apparently accurate characterization of the fund, Goldman told its sales force that pitching Timberwolf to clients was a “top priority.”

In hearings before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Levin pushed Daniel Sparks, the former head of Goldman Sachs’ Mortgage Department, to admit that the company knowingly sold low-quality investments to its clients.

“You knew it was a shitty deal and that’s what your e-mails show. How much of this shitty deal did you continue to sell to your clients?” Sparks declined to answer, and did his best to avoid repeating the term.

In addition to Sparks, today’s hearings included testimony by trader Fabrice Tourre, who vowed to defend himself against the “false claim” that he defrauded investors, and CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Most denied any wrongdoing, echoing Sparks’ claim that the company made some “poor business decisions,” but didn’t do anything wrong. “Regret to me means something that you feel that you did wrong, and I don’t have that,” he said. As Levin might say, “Shitty.”

Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: The Role of Investment Banks [Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations]