“I don’t like getting questions about my purchases at lingerie shops. What I wear is my own business.” Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer on Blippy, an online service that allows you to share your recent purchases with a network of friends. Blippy has been at the center of a security breach storm that has angered many Blippy customers.
Frozen Codebase has announced that the video game adaptation of comic book movie Kick-Ass will finally hit PSN this week. Watch the gameplay trailer after the jump.
By Matt Hawes
By a vote of 57-41. Thanks for putting pressure on the Senate for true reform! Let’s keep it up.
Well, this is sweet. It’s a remote-controlled helicopter with a Canon 7D strapped on board, allowing creator Eric Austin to capture some downright-badass pics and video. I want one, badly. [DIY Photography via Make] More »
Filed under: Spy Photos, SUV, Europe, Chrysler, Jeep, Luxury
The 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee has been spotted during testing, and the SUV wasn’t wearing any of the camouflage we’re used to seeing. Even more surprising, engineers weren’t putting the truck through its paces out at Moab. Instead, the eagle-eyed crew over at Piston Spy nabbed a few shots of the Grand Cherokee as it was making laps of the Nurburgring.
Why would Chrysler be interested in flogging the newest Jeep around everyone’s favorite test circuit? That answer may have something to do with the truck’s new adaptive air suspension. Called Quadra-Lift, drivers will be able to choose from a number of settings that will either raise or lower the 2011 Grand Cherokee ride height according to the road conditions. While there will be two settings for blazing your own trail, including one that raises the truck by a hefty 2.6 inches, the system also features an aero setting that lowers the vehicle by around half an inch. Our guess is that’s the setting you see above.
When the much-anticipated 2011 Grand Cherokee finally hits the market, buyers should be able to choose from a number of engines depending on where they call home. Word is a V6 and V8 options will be available here in the states, while buyers in other parts of the world will be able to opt for a diesel.
Gallery: 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee Spy Shots
[Source: Piston Spy]
Spy Shots: 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee gets final tuning on ‘Ring originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
While this might be a blog on Windows Phones, keeping updated is our goal, and this is just something I think you would want to know. This news comes from Gizmodo who is saying their editor Jason Chen’s home was recently searched by California’s REACT computer crimes task force. They had authority from a warrant approved by judge of Superior Court of San Mateo.
This warrant allowed police men to come into this editors home, and acquire four computers, and two servers. While that was being taken, the editor was not home at the time. COO of Gawker Media LLC, Gaby Darbyshire, says the courts should not have allowed this because the warrant was invalid due to the conflict with section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code. Which means they were not allowed to take the computers of a news reporter… and the last time I checked, he is.
Now if you own a blog, you might now how hard it is to keep your news going without your computers. I cannot see what the courts would want with his computers, but maybe they see some evidence might be in there.
This is a little sad, and hard to read. A hard working reporting getting his property taken just because he was trying to keep his readers happy, and have the latest in news. Now do not get me wrong, I do not think his actions were correct or smart, because there are many ways you can leak information but not link it to your self or your site. I hope no charges come against him because that would certainly make not only me as a blogger, but anyone that wants to keep his readers entertained think twice before posting. If only Apple was like Microsoft, I am sure he would not have been in any trouble, but they are in different industry.
Fresh details on Steam for Mac, which is bursting my pants: It’s fully native, using OpenGL—no wrappers—and is Intel only. It requires Leopard, and for Source games, a decent graphics card. No dates yet. =( [MacStories via MacRumors] More »
We’re celebrating a … nevermind what we’re celebrating, it’s not about us. It’s about you!
Thanks for supporting us in all the ways that you do. Thanks to Motorola for giving us a Droid to thank you with. Here’s the deal: Post a comment to this story and you’ll be entered to win. The winner will be picked at 12 pm Pacific Time on Tuesday, May 4 2010. Posting more than once will not increase your chances of winning. And that’s pretty much that.
If email, comments on CP, and some eco-bloggers are to be believed, conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been planning to walk on the climate bill for a long time — perhaps, nefariously, from the very beginning! And I certainly understand where that sentiment is coming from, given that the GOP strategy on health care and financial reform has been to feign interest and then bolt.
In fact, however, that view lacks plausibility, as The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait explained in his Sunday column, “Lindsey Graham Is Right.” Indeed, the WashPost’s Ezra Klein argues today that Graham, “is not only right to be annoyed, but as far I can tell, is actually right.”
I spoke to a Senate staffer today who is familiar with Graham’s multi-month efforts with Kerry and Lieberman and the White House to develop a bill. He said Graham has been “completely genuine.” Long-time readers of this blog know that Graham has made stronger statements than almost anybody on the Democratic side about this bill (reposted below). He could easily have walked away months ago, say, when Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election or when the Dems used the reconciliation process to pass health care.
As Klein writes, “He’s taken a huge risk to be the lone Republican on climate change.” Chait goes further, saying it “seems unfair” to accuse Graham of having “negotiated in bad faith,” pointing out:
Graham has been painstakingly attempting to assemble a political and business coalition for legislation to mitigate climate change. He has also been working on immigration reform, but the Democrats’ weak signals of interest before last week have helped contribute to an atmosphere where nobody expected a bill to advance this year, and thus little headway has been made. There has been no House immigration bill, whereas the House has passed a climate bill already. Graham was set to unveil his bill on Monday when Harry Reid pulled the carpet out from under him by announcing that immigration would come first and climate — which gets harder to do as the elections gets closer — probably never.
As for bad faith, Graham is a Republican Senator from South Carolina. His highest risk of losing his seat, by far, comes from the prospect of a conservative primary challenger. Indeed, I’d say that prospect is far from remote, and Graham is displaying an unusual willingness to risk his political future. He has little incentive to negotiate on these issues except that he believes it’s the right thing to do. So when Democrats put climate change on the backburner to take up immigration, and so so for obviously political reasons, Graham has every right to be angry. He’s risking his political life to address a vital issue, and Harry Reid is looking to save his seat.
If you don’t think Graham can get a serious challenger from his right because of this, one need look no further than his good friend John McCain, who went from being his party’s standardbearer to just another insufficiently-hard-line-ideologue for the Tea Partiers in a matter of months.
And consider Graham’s various statements on this subject. Back in January, he said:
But the idea of not pricing carbon, in my view, means you’re not serious about energy independence. The odd thing is you’ll never have energy independence until you clean up the air, and you’ll never clean up the air until you price carbon.
And he also said:
“Six months ago my biggest worry was that an emissions deal would make American business less competitive compared to China,” said Senator Lindsay Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who has been deeply involved in climate change issues in Congress. “Now my concern is that every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy.”
He added: “China has made a long-term strategic decision and they are going gang-busters.”
This just isn’t the language of somebody who is acting in bad faith, who has been planning to bolt for months. Indeed, I expect we’ll be waiting a long, long time to hear such blunt language about pricing carbon from any significant number of moderate Democrats.
Finally, the fundamental difference between the GOP bad-faith feints on healthcare and what Graham is doing on the climate bill is that, as we saw, the Democrats in the Senate could get 60 votes for a health care bill. They never actually needed the Republicans. It was only (misguided) Democratic desire for bipartisanship that led them to being suckered by Republicans into wasting several months trying to get a single GOP vote. Dems wanted Reps, they didn’t need them.
From the start, however, supporters of climate action needed multiple Republicans, as I pointed out many times. But Olympia Snowe, the most obvious candidate, never was successfully engaged. And Maria Cantwell helped enable Susan Collins to avoid negotiations on a bill that could plausibly pass the Senate. Absent Graham, Dems had no plan B.
In short, if Graham wasn’t doing this because he firmly believed in it, then none of his actions this year actually make any sense. Now it is sometimes [often] the case that politicians repeatedly do things that make no sense. But Graham certainly knew that the Democrats needed him infinitely more than he needed them.
Based on most of what I’ve heard in the past 48 hours, I’m currently expecting that Kerry-Lieberman-Graham will shortly send their bill to EPA to be modeled and Reid will put their bill in play before immigration. At that point, the story can move from being about Lindsey Graham’s alleged bad faith, to the actual bad faith of the anti-science ideologues who are the primary obstacle to passing a serious climate and clean energy jobs bill.
If that doesn’t happen, I think it will be mostly due to the ongoing wishy-washiness of the White House — see Brad Johnson’s latest Wonk Room post: White House: Immigration Is ‘Important’ And Energy Is ‘Critical,’ But Reid ‘Sets The Agenda’, which notes:
When it comes to setting the national agenda and leading the Democratic Party, the buck stops at the President’s desk, not at Harry Reid’s. The real people who need real action on immigration and climate reform need the White House to assert leadership.
GM's Renaissance Center in Google Maps "Earth View"
While Earth Day may have come and gone, the Google Earth and Google Maps team was working hard to bring “Earth View” capability to Google Maps.
“When we first launched Google Earth back in 2005, it revolutionized the world of digital mapping,” Google said in a blog post. “In the years since, Earth has been getting faster and lighter while adding large amounts of imagery, more ambitious features and an ever-expanding roster of platforms, including support for Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android and even the 2011 Audi A8!”
If you already have Google Earth on your laptop, you should be able to see Earth View in Maps right away. Otherwise you can just install the plugin and enjoy Google Maps in a whole different experience with Earth views, 3D buildings, smooth panning and zooming.
We of course visited GM’s Renaissance Center while surfing in Earth View – check out our screenshot.
– By: Omar Rana
Mozilla has released an update to Contacts, its fantastic little contact management add-on for Firefox. The new version includes quite a few nice improvements, most notably added support for Facebook and Yahoo contacts. The Facebook integration works via the new Facebook Graph API, which despite the developer saying it could still be buggy seems to be working fine for me.
An interesting new feature is the“person:” URL, which you can use to look up people in your contacts list — or anybody on the web, for that matter. Firefox will combine information from your the address book on your computer with that found on the web to create a profile page about the person — for example, you could try “person:http://facebook.com/simonmackie/”
The update also adds support for auto-completion of contact names in the Awesome Bar. Just start typing a name and it will suggest possible matches, as the screenshot below shows:
Although Contacts is still classed as “experimental” by Mozilla, it’s an incredibly useful free add-on that I highly recommend installing, particularly if details of your contacts are currently spread across a few different services. You can download it here.
What do you use to manage your contacts?
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution
GUANTANAMO BAY — The first surprise of the first full-blown hearing of the military commissions under President Obama? The presence of David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney from New Mexico purged by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for insufficient political fealty to the Republican Party. Iglesias, a reservist Navy captain, is serving as a legal adviser to the military commissions’ convening authority and a prosecutor here, although he’s not prosecuting the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen whose pre-trial hearing will begin Wednesday morning. “This is my most recent incarnation as a prosecutor,” he told the press corps here.
I asked Iglesias if the absence of a manual instructing officers of the court how to interpret the Military Commissions Act of 2009 — the statute governing this latest version of the commissions — would negatively impact Khadr’s hearing.”We expect the impact to be negligible right now,” Iglesias said, contending that the Act itself provides sufficient guidance for the case to proceed. “That being said,” he continued, “both sides expect there to be rules assigned very, very soon.”
That didn’t satisfy Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher with the American Civil Liberties Union here to observe the proceedings. Federal courts have “years of experience” in interpreting statute and precedent and acting accordingly at trial, she said. The result of years of inventing the commissions, subsequent court challenges, legislative action, court challenges to that legislative action, and finally legislative responses to those challenges is that the officers of the commissions don’t have the same body of law to call upon to guide the proceedings. As Turner put it, “the problem is there are currently no rules for the military commissions.”
Well, not entirely. One rule currently in place is that whoever requests an action of the court has the burden of demonstrating the validity of its case. In Khadr’s case, his attorneys have asked the judge to suppress any statements he made during his post-2002 detention at Bagram and then Guantanamo Bay, contending that those statements describing his actions on the battlefield of Afghanistan’s Khost Provice are the result of torture, degrading treatment and coercion. So since Khadr’s lawyers filed a motion to suppress their client’s statements, “it’s their burden, by a preponderance of the evidence,” admittedly a low standard for demonstrating that Khadr’s treatment in detention represents what lawyers call the “fruit of the poisoned tree,” a legal doctrine stating that initial impropriety in extracting information renders whatever information ultimately results inadmissible in court.
Washington D.C. — The U.S. Army’s Surgeon General, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, responded quickly to accusations in a New York Times article published over the weekend accusing the Army of mistreating soldiers in its warrior care units at Fort Carson, Colorado. “The Times article focused upon a select number of soldiers and families that had encountered problems…it’s wholly unrepresentative of the totality in the context of what we’ve done for warrior care, especially in the last three years,” Schoomaker told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Monday afternoon.
In perhaps the most damning line of Sunday’s front page story, the New York Times described Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Unit as a “warehouse of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers.” Schoomaker responded to that line directly, saying “Of all of the descriptions in there, with the exception perhaps of the suffering that individual soldiers and families have had, that sentence alone is among the most offensive to us.”
Warrior Transition Units were formed in wake of the Walter Reed barracks scandal of 2007. The intent was to comfortably house active duty soldiers suffering from mental and physical wounds from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Patients are meant to feel that they are still part of an Army unit and that they can get full time support from peers, squad leaders and nurses.
Yesterday’s New York Times article quoted one soldier in the Fort Carson Warrior Transition Unit who said, “Being in the W.T.U. is worse than being in Iraq.” It said soldiers at Fort Carson complained doctors prescribed drugs too quickly and too often, turning many soldiers to harder drugs such as heroin. It also pointed out that Fort Carson has the highest suicide rate of all the programs, with 4 deaths since 2007.
Lt. Gen. Schoomaker said a survey taken within the Fort Carson Warrior Transition Unit shows satisfaction is high, “at about 90 percent.” Throughout the country he said WTU satisfaction is at 81 percent. He did, however, acknowledge some problems.
“With 9,300 soldiers in the program, we dont always get it right. To that end, we take every criticism and concern seriously and continuously strive to to improve our program.” And suicides, Schoomaker said, are more frequent in WTUs because it’s a “higher risk population.” As for criticism that the non-commissioned officers are abusive, Schoomaker said that concerns him. “Just as medical professionals, caregivers, can — can encounter problems of burnout and compassion fatigue, these soldiers are — certainly can fall victim to that.”
Schoomaker said the Army is constantly evaluating its own performance and that there is an ongoing inspection by the Army’s Inspector General into warrior care. But no new investigations into abuse from non-commissioned officers, prescription drug abuse, or illegal drug abuse will be conducted as a result of the New York Times story.
The Sirius XM application has been available for the iPhone and iPod touch for about a year. According to Engadget, a Sirius app is on its way to the Android platform, but the press release is littered with “DROID and Nexus One users”. I’m not sure why there would only be support for these two devices, but I’m sure the matter will clear up in the coming weeks as we approach the actual release of the application. Here is part of the press release:
The SIRIUS XM App for DROID and Nexus One will allow users to:
The SIRIUS XM App for DROID and Nexus One will be available as a free download through the Android Market on the handset or by visiting www.siriusxm.com/android. After downloading the free App, users will then be able to register for a 7-day free trial to SIRIUS XM Premium Online on their compatible smartphones.
The full press release for the application can be found here. To subscribe for email notifications on the availability of the application for Android visit www.siriusxm.com/android
I have enough subscriptions as it is, and I love my Pandora radio, but I could definitely see myself jumping ship and signing up for Sirius. Is anyone with me?
Via Engadget
Filed under: Motorsports, Coupe, Performance, Videos, Lamborghini
The Texas Mile sounds like a totally kick ass event. You get one mile on flat, straight airport runway to go as fast as possible, with a half mile to bring your vehicle to a halt. This year’s big winner was Richard Holt; the lucky owner of a fire-breathing, street legal twin turbo Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. The 1,000 horsepower super bull turned in an official time of 250.1 miles per hour, or fast enough to make even the most ardent of speed demons a bit leery. To make matters a bit more interesting, Holt drove his twin-turbo Gallardo for the first time ever during his first run on the track.
Hit the jump to watch Holt’s pavement-scorching run. If you thought the Gallardo Superleggera looks fast standing still, wait to you see it passing the 250 mark. And Holt reportedly managed his Texas Mile record breaking run with the air conditioning on and the radio blasting. We can’t think of a much better Sunday afternoon.
[Source: YouTube via AutoWeek]
Video: Underground Racing Lamborghini Gallardo shatters 250 MPH barrier in Texas Mile originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Oh, my. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, here you go. As Dieter mentions above (you did watch the video first, right?), we’re now giving away TWO T-Mobile Nexus Ones.
And, so, after the break is the fourth batch of entries. And just like the previous three batches, we’ve got five more gems here. Check ’em out after the break. A reminder that you still have the rest of this week to get your entries in. Remember, you are the ones voting. You’ll decide who wins my (and Dieter’s!) Nexus One. Now, on to the vids.
We hear you, folks. The Verizon HTC Droid Incredible that you all pre-ordered over the weekend are shipping now (if you’re not one of the uber-lucky folks who have gotten yours already, that is).
If you haven’t yet ordered yours, or you’re still in mourning after finding out that the Nexus One isn’t coming to Verizon and you’re going to have to slum it with this 8MP monster instead, take heart and take the time to enter one of our two Droid Incredible giveaways. We’re picking winners Wednesday morning, so time’s running out to enter. Details here.
After shutting down countless PCs around the world last Wednesday with a botched update, McAfee has stepped up to offer reimbursement of “reasonable expenses” associated with repair. But that’s not all! More »
If you were anywhere near a techy site on the internet last week, you probably noticed the sensational story of how a prototype of a forthcoming iPhone got left behind in a Silicon Valley bar, and eventually ended up in the hands (and on the pages) of gadget site Gizmodo. Given Apple’s history of cracking down on new product leaks, it wasn’t too surprising to see the company ask for the phone back, nor to hear rumors that police were looking into the matter. However, it was a little surprising to read today that California police have seized computers and other gear from one of Gizmodo’s editors, breaking down his door in the process. The COO of Gizmodo parent Gawker Media alleges that the search was illegal, as the editor is protected under California’s shield law, which protects journalists from revealing their sources. Gawker founder Nick Denton says the case should let us find out if “bloggers count as journalists”, but that’s not completely clear. The shield law exists to protect unnamed sources, not to let journalists commit crimes (such as receiving stolen property) and then cover them up under the guise of their work. So while the case may not settle if bloggers are seen as journalists in the eyes of the law, it should settle once and for all that age-old question of whether or not an iPhone prototype left in a bar by an Apple employee constitutes stolen property.
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For now this is just a rumor but it does kind of make sense. The HTC EVO 4G is rumored to be priced at $199 on contract from Sprint. This price puts the EVO on the same ground as the Incredible and other smart phones that has been recently released.
Darrin Morton from ozcarguide claims a Best Buy representative gave him this information. He apparently went to a Best Buy outlet and asked if they had information on the EVO and that is what they told him. None of this is confirmed by anyone who has real knowledge of the device nor did he get any ninja screenshots of official documents. This does seem like the perfect price point though.
Even if this is untrue, Sprint needs to stick to this price point. This phone is supposed to be the handset that keeps them afloat. Most people don’t really want to spend over that amount for any phone. Cell phones have gotten so powerful and cheap that the $199 is the sweet spot most carriers aim to hit. If this device is $299, there will be a lot of people that will pass on it even though it does have the best specs and features of any phone to date.