Category: News

Article Tags: John O'Sullivan

Hi,

I work for climategate.com, a campaign website staffed by dedicated volunteers. We are looking to garner support from you and other like-minded sites in any way you see fit. We seek publicity or other such assistance that you and your readers may be able to give freely to support our latest initiative. We are offering a multi-million dollar legal and financial package as an incentive to whistleblowers from Penn State Uni. who are willing to come forward and give evidence to assist a prosecution of climatologist, Michael Mann.

Please read our story for more details, it is already being run in the British national press (Climategate: Michael Mann’s very unhappy New Year by James Delingpole)

Many thanks,

John O’Sullivan
www.climategate.com

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Headline Story, James Delingpole

As I said yesterday, one of our jobs this year is to wipe the complacent smiles off the smug faces of the lobbyists, “experts”, “scientists”, politicians and activists pushing AGW.

This is why I am so glad to report that Michael Mann – creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal – is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he’ll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.

Under US law, regardless of whether or not a prosecution results, the whistleblower stands to make very large sums of money: it is based on a percentage of the total government funds which have been misused, in this case perhaps as much as $50 million. (Hat tip: John O’Sullivan of the wonderful new campaigning site www.climategate.com)

Here’s that email in full:

Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

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Even if you drop your phone down a hole, or trap it in a locked briefcase, ZOMM promises to be there to connect incoming calls. It’s kind of like a leash for those of us prone to abusing our phones.

Powered by Bluetooth, this hockey puck works as both a wireless speakerphone for inaccessible phones, and as an alarm should you leave your phone somewhere, forget it’s there and start to walk out of range.

Slated for an official CES release, the device has a rumored $80 price point. Kind of expensive and niche, but could be useful in a pinch. [technabob]

Tom Mooney wrote a good column for the Times Leader today. It included suggestions on how to go about locating online data for Northeastern Pennsylvania.

One important bit of information I got from the article is that The Sunday Independent, published in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania from 1906 through 1993, is digitized for the years 1913-1927 and is accessible online at free of charge. The papers may be found and searched at http://www.accesspadr.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/wbsunind. It looks to me like 682 complete papers have been digitized.

I did a search for the surname, Canfield, and got 16 hits. The following illustration shows the first four of those hits. Click on the image to see all 16 – at the site itself.

Clicking on the first example, I got the following obituary (screen shot from within the page).

Go search on the papers for your ancestors.

The ThinkPad brand has long been associated with top-notch business-class notebooks. The famous black notebooks have appeared in conference rooms the world over, and the ThinkPad brand has come to mean fine quality business notebooks. The folks at Lenovo look to bring the ThinkPad into the consumer space, and the ThinkPad Edge is the first effort to get folks to bring the ThinkPad home.

The Edge is available in three sizes, 13, 14, 15 inch screens, and all have a sporty cover that is available in either glossy black or red. Lenovo has attempted to make a consumer notebook that fits into the high-quality mold of the ThinkPad, and the Edge is a good first effort.

I have been fortunate enough to receive a ThinkPad Edge prior to launch, and have been using one for a few weeks. In the video I show the build quality and nice design touches that Lenovo has put in this first consumer ThinkPad. The model in the video is the 13-incher, with a glossy (smudge magnet) black lid. I demonstrate the unique features of the Edge, including the nice chiclet keyboard and the inclusion of both a multitouch trackpad and a ThinkPad trackstick.

I state in the video that the Edge will be available for a starting price of $450, but I have received updated information from Lenovo that corrects that figure. The Edge pricing will start at $549, still a good price for a ThinkPad product. The 13-inch model is available from Lenovo currently, and the 14 and 15-inch models will be available in the second quarter of this year.

With the Lenovo laptop/netbook CES leak still fresh in our minds, let us consider Toshiba and Gateway this afternoon, and the netbooks we now know they’ll be bringing to the show as well:

The netbooks in question here are all based on Intel’s N450 “Pine Trail” chip, reports CNET, and were first spotted at Canadian retailer Future Shop. Both are similar in configuration, but not price, with Gateway weighing in at about $285, and the Toshiba at $438. Both models will come standard with 1.66GHz Atom processors, 160GB or 250GB hard disk drives (Gateway and Toshiba, respectively), 10.1-inch screens, 1GB of memory, and Intel’s GMA 3150 Express graphics chip. [CNET]

Here’s an unboxing of the new Leica S2-p, done by happy new owner Matthew Harrison. Matthew hasn’t just unboxed his new toy, he’s also written a first impression review.

[Thanks to Leica Rumors for the tip]

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Filed under: TUAW Business, Podcasts

TUAWTalkcast this evening at 10pm EST: Best of the year originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a superficially curious, but fundamentally quite important, bit of legal wrangling for you. Reuters is reporting that the District of Columbia has filed suit against AT&T Corp for the recovery of unused balances on calling cards purchased from the telecom giant. Estimated at somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the overall value of the cards, the so-called breakage — leftover credit that customers neglect to use — has typically remained with the carrier as a sort of predictable bonus. The DC Attorney General, however, is seeking to have breakages treated as unclaimed property, which under district law means that after three years they must be returned to the state. Whichever side of the fence you sit on, the decision on this case will set a significant precedent for the future of such prepaid services.

AT&T sued by Washington DC for unused balances on calling cards originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bruce Sterling gives his annual State of the World interview on the Well.

Quick summary: Something of a downer–we aren’t facing groovy teenage problems like a war or a natural disaster, so much as we’re facing middle aged crises of befuddlement and general worn-down-ness. Your best option is to move to Brazil and join some kind of post-post-modern tribe of artisans and disaster recovery experts.

With the new year you might have expected an end to the retaliatory Luke Wilson AT&T versus Verizon coverage map ads. You expect wrong. Here’s a new one, now with revised numbers and a new blazer!

You see, while it is indeed a completely new commercial, the data advertised within experiences a subtle change. One that centers on 3G. Now the AT&T commercial showcases that the 3G network covers 230 million Americans, keyword 3G.

For the before we must go to the video tape:

Just a subtle change, and I only point it out today with the hope that it will inspire someone, somewhere, to parody these commercials, post haste. If they don’t, I fear we may have experience Luke Wilson and his never-ending collection of tweed blazers for all of 2010 as well. Editor’s Note: Clarified the subtle numbers change above. Thanks for the comment. [CNET]

From the imagination of an anonymous musical engineer comes the simultaneously coolest and nerdiest custom electric guitar ever made: Behold, the Koopa Troopa shredder.

This first popped up on Reddit through a post by one of the anonymous Creator’s friends (via Joystiq), and it seems its skyrocketing popularity has spurred said Creator to make a Reddit account of his own, where he’s provided a few more details on how the guitar works.

“Just to clear this up. The guitar is right handed,” he writes. “I play it so the Koopa is on its back (it’s been stomped). When it is on a guitar stand it’s walking about. Just pretend Mario jumped on the Koopa Troopa and chose to hold it for too long so it’s escaping.”

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Filed under: Etc., Government/Legal, Chrysler

So you’re Chrysler, and you hop into the Chapter 11 pool. While you can wash away some of your past sins with a bankruptcy-protection filing, the deal with Chapter 11 is that you’ve got to come up with a way to get out of your financial pickle and return to profitability. Part of the Chrysler plan to keep its head above water was divestiture of 789 dealers, a very unpopular idea with the rejected sales organizations.

When adversity strikes, what else is there to do but unleash legislative changes and legal challenges to and fro like archers’ arrows? Recent changes to dealer laws in Oregon, Maine, North Carolina and Illinois contradict bankruptcy code and are unconstitutional. The laws allow the states to block Chryser granting a new franchise or relocating an existing dealership into a market once belonging to a rejected dealer.

Chrysler has fired off a lawsuit in Manhattan bankruptcy court naming eight parties as defendants, including the Oregon Attorney General, secretaries of state in Maine and Illinois, and other transportation officials. The filing argues that the laws would force Chrysler to give consideration to the dealers for rights that they do not have, and furthermore, the dealer rejections were approved as part of the sale to Fiat.

[Source: The Detroit News]

Detroit News: Chrysler sues multiple states over dealer laws originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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No sé a ustedes, pero a mi me atraen los lugares en donde se venden cosas antiguas y si son coches, o algo que tenga que ver con coches, mucho mejor. De vez en cuando, me encuentro en Internet con ciertas páginas que nos muestran desguaces abandonados, con coches que en otras épocas tuvieron mejor una vida, pero que ahora yacen abandonados a su suerte esperando algún alma caritativa que los rescate.

Muchos de ellos, ya están en fase más que terminal. No hay rescate posible para tonelada y media de herrumbre, literalmente. Es posible encontrar algunos ejemplares en más o menos buen estado, pero siempre hay que pensar que el costo de una restauración va más allá. Los coches antiguos consumen dinero, de la misma manera que consumen aceite, aunque la gran mayoría de ellos posiblemente ni siquiera vean otra vez una carretera.

Los coches abandonados también tienen su “atractivo”. Entre los lugares que visito frecuentemente (virtualmente, claro está) está el sitio de Lost America. Un fotógrafo llamado Troy Paiva, ha retratado mayormente coches y estaciones de servicio abandonadas en el desierto del oeste norteamericano, frecuentemente de noche.

Otro sitio son fotos en Flickr dedicado a coches abandonados en calles de todo el mundo. English Russia nos trae imágenes de un desguace ruso, con algunos modelos en buen estado, mientras que en la mismísima Dubai se sorprendían por la cantidad de coches abandonados en su aeropuerto, unos ¡3.000!

New Year, New Name and a Double Dose of Talkin’

Happy New Year, Folks!  Hope the holidays treated you and your family well.
As we launch into 2010 (pronounced twenty-ten), it’s time for yet another name change for this column.  Feeling that Palm has many things up its sleeve tied to webOS, it seems like the current "Talkin’ Pre (& Pixi)" may be a tad too limiting.

So Talkin’ Palm (& webOS) it will be starting with next week’s column.

And due to a mix-up at PreCentral HQ, you are being treated this time to a double dose of Talkin’ that covers the last two weeks of 2009. So without further ado, let’s get Talkin’!

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