Category: News

I can’t believe it is 2010 – things have certainly changed so much in the last year and 2010 seems to be the dawn of a new era in technology. Thank you to all of our readers, even those of you who are new and those of you who have been with us for a while – you make this website worth doing. The level of support we receive from our community and Sony is outstanding. I’m so excited for the stories that this new year will bring, but it is also important to reflect back on what made news in 2009. According to Google Analytics, here are some of the biggest stories to hit Sony Insider in the last year –

#10 – Sony’s Media Go Now Available For Download

The free Media Go software, announced at E3 2009, made it easier than ever to take your media with you wherever you go. Transfer music, photos, and videos from your PC to your Sony (PSP) or Sony Ericsson portable device, or import from your device to your PC. File conversion is hassle-free: Media Go automatically converts your media to the appropriate format for your device while maintaining the best possible quality. The latest version of the software is 1.3.

#9 – Sony’s Upcoming ICF-CL75iP Is An Alarm Clock, Digital Frame, And Dock For Your iPod/iPhone

Alarm clocks, digital photo frames, and iPod/iPhone docks are usually bland and simple. Only very recently have we seen style truly grace these products. However, when one of my contacts forwarded me information about the upcoming ICF-CL75iP, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. This is probably the greatest looking fusion of all of the aforementioned devices that I’ve ever seen. This is the most advanced Dream Machine ever produced by Sony to date – it has a crisp 7 inch color WVGA (800 x 480) LCD, 1GB of built-in storage, SD/MS card slots, USB, and a retractable iPod/iPhone dock. It’s so keen I even got one for my Mother for Christmas.

#8 – Contrast – The Flex OLED VAIO Laptop Of Our Dreams?

Sony’s Contrast Flex OLED VAIO laptop is a super-thin laptop product concept. We were able to catch footage of its introduction video at Sony’s exhibit during CES 2009. We believe that Sony is assuming OLED will be the preferable choice of display for future laptop devices instead of what we currently use today. The Contrast Vaio laptop uses a foldable seamless OLED for the display and the keyboard, but as the videos show the keyboard can fade away and the whole thing can display something else. This concept has no restrictions on layout and size, and is extremely durable and shock resistant. Like the other Contrast product concepts, it is made of high performance flexible bioplastic. They also showed off flexible OLED Walkman and Reader concepts.

#7 – Content Transfer Software for Walkman

Content Transfer software provides an easy way to transfer music, video, photos, and podcasts to the Walkman player. Just drag & drop the files to the Content Transfer window and the Content Transfer software automatically sorts the files to the appropriate folders on the player. We covered the 1.1 update in this post, but in the last month the software was recently updated to 1.3.

#6 – Windows 7 Upgrade Information For Sony VAIO Computers

Select Sony VAIO computer models that ship with Windows Vista Home Edition, Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate, purchased on or after June 26th 2009, and until January 31st 2010, qualify for a free upgrade to Windows 7. Certain models that ship with Windows XP Professional and include a Windows Vista Business Certificate of Authenticity (“COA”) also qualify for a free upgrade. The upgrade order will ship after October 22, 2009 and may take 7-10 business days for delivery. Orders will be processed in the order received and the End User will be notified of their order’s status after this date.

#5 – New Sony PRS-300 And PRS-600 Reader Devices Appear In Service Manuals

Out of nowhere, aafuss on our forums pointed out service manuals for the PRS-300 and PRS-600 Sony Reader devices before they were revealed. What was interesting at the time is the PRS-700 was no longer on sale at SonyStyle, signaling these devices were coming very soon. The manuals are fresh from the oven, as the creation date was July 2009 – the same month as our post. The storyline was rather big for Sony Insider, and forced Sony to announce the Readers ahead of schedule.

#4 – Sony’s Gorgeous New A-Series Walkman Features OLED, Up To 64GB Capacity

Sony unveiled the latest update to the A-Series Walkman line with some serious features. The new NW-A840 series, available in black and brown, simply is the most brilliant Walkman offering from Sony to date – it has all of the features people have been asking for in previous Walkmans while shedding what it needed to. In my opinion, this is the most stylish appearance I’ve seen in a personal media player – and it has a jaw-dropping 2.8 inch WQVGA OLED screen. This is also the thinnest Walkman ever created at only 7.2mm. However, it has only been available for sale in Japan, and worldwide release seems hazy at best. We’re not even sure its coming to CES anymore.

#3 – Full Sony Reader PRS-300 and PRS-600 Specifications Emerge

Internet retailer J&R leaked the full specifications and pricing of the Sony Reader PRS-300 and PRS-600. J&R accidentally put up the product pages earlier today, but deleted them soon thereafter hoping no one would catch it. Well, folks over at hi-pda managed to grab the text and we cleaned it up and the rest is history.

#2 – Sony Ericsson “Satio” vs. Apple “iPhone 3G S” Specs Comparison

Sony Ericsson’s phone announcements in 2009 were the strongest they have had in recent memory. The Satio at one point was their most powerful phone ever, and we put it head to head with the iPhone 3G S in a detailed specs comparison. The North American market has been dominated by the iPhone 3G, and it is now even more powerful than before with the updated S version. Both phones have rich application environments – the iPhone with App Store, and the Satio with presumeably PlayNow, as well as millions of Symbian apps.

#1 – Check Out Oprah’s Word A Day Giveaway

Believe it or not, a post about Oprah’s Word a Day summer sweepstakes was the top Sony Insider story of 2009 – it gave us the most traffic this year by a signifigant margin. The post was so attractive because we updated it daily with the word of the day, usually before it would air on television. One of the primary reasons we posted about it was the great number of Sony products included in the contest.

If you’re interested in getting more from meetings than a gaping sinkhole in your schedule—and who isn’t?—these tips from how Google handles meetings can help. Of great importance is focusing on data, not politics and grievances.

Photo by ghindo.

The folks over at Business Week interviewed Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of search products, who is known for running a tight and effective meeting. She shared six great guidelines for holding an effective meeting including one of her long standing rules: “Don’t politic, use data.”

This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea.

Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships.

Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.” This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today’s corporations.

It’s far more effective to look at what the data says than it is to let a meeting turn into a whine-fest where your whole team is taken away from productive work to hear the less-than-happy members complain. Check out the rest of the article at Business Week to see some more of Mayer’s techniques, including holding office hours—a carryover from her days as a professor.

Have a strategy you use in your workplace for increasing the effectiveness of meetings? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

 Economic statistics don’t get enough recognition for all of their hard work. So, I’ve decided to offer an “Economic Statistic of the Decade” Award. The three criteria are simple. First, we want to reward the economic statistic that best reflects the decade (both the good and the bad). Second, we want to recognize the economic statistic that turned in a surprising performance–that is, back in 2000, if someone had shown you a graph of the statistic over the next ten years, you would have said “no way”. Third, we want to reward economic statistics that are reliable and accurate representations of the actual economy.

In the 1990s, for example, the Economic Statistic of the Decade Award would have gone to U.S. productivity growth. The runner-ups would have been Chinese economic growth, followed by global tech spending.

What about this decade?

See Mandel’s top graphs of the decade here –>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Home Sales Surge 44.1% In November Thanks To Tax Credit
• Well, That’s The End Of The Good News On Housing
• Business Hiring Plans Are Still Very Weak

For something I’m working on: we know that China is pursuing a mercantilist policy: keeping the renminbi weak through a combination of capital controls and intervention, leading to trade surpluses and capital exports in a country that might well be a natural capital importer. We also know, or should know, that this amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor policy — or, more accurately, a beggar-everyone but yourself policy — when the world’s major economies are in a liquidity trap.

But how big is the impact? Here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope assessment.

Read Krugman’s analysis here –>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• China’s Multi-Decade Worker Shortage Starts Next Year
• Paul Krugman’s Emergency Jobs Program Will Never Work
• Why Krugman’s "Blame China" Mentality Is Completely Wrong

As we wave goodbye to 2009 it is traditional to have a retrospective. Over the next few hours I will list 10 things which came to Windows Mobile users this year which made this year great.

Number 10 on the list is the death of proprietary ports, with 3.5 mm headphone jacks now becoming almost standard.  We can have pretty high confidence most new handsets will come with standard ports now, meaning their use for media activities is much easier and more likely.

Unfortunately we do not have the music and media services built into our phones yet to take best advantage of this, but this is likely something else we will see coming to us in 2010, and in the mean time side-loading is still possible.

Do you appreciate the rise of standard headphone jacks?  Let us know in the comments below.

Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Interim Final Rule on Standards

… The adopted vocabulary standards for procedures are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (i.e.,ICD-9-CM) or CPT-4. The candidate standards are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (e.g.,ICD-10-CM) or CPT-4…

CPT. Fully owned by the AMA, CPT is a rough collection of work descriptions sometimes loosely related to procedures. It’s not a vocabulary, it’s not a classification, and it has no stable semantics.

It’s New Year’s Eve and you’re stuck in front of a computer. Sorry, bub. You might as well turn your speakers on and zen out to the American Museum of Natural History’s The Known Universe video put to Exogenesis by Muse.

The somewhat boring, but also high-def, original video is after the jump if you want to burn even more of your day.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

This story is not nearly as interesting as I was led to believe. Some guy bought something in the online game Entropia Universe. He bought it with in-game currency—PED3.3 million, to be exact. It just so happens that that amount, PED3.3 million, can be converted at will to real life currency. At current conversion rates that equals approximately US$330,000. So if you want to say that the guy bought an in-game item for US$330,000, well, be my guest.

The item itself, the Crystal Palace Space Station, is some sort of ship or craft or something that other players can buy things from. So the buyer of the thingamajig can use it as an actual source of income.

You should know that the game isn’t merely a game, but a fully registered bank in Sweden, complete with all the protections afforded to other, “real” European Union-based banks.

Embedded is a video of Crystal Palace, which looks an awful lot like that spaceship from Phantasy Star Online.

via Slashdot

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

A year-end thank-you note from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar offered some statistics to show us just how much the nearly three-year-old service has grown.

Sponsor

Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google – which includes YouTube and Google Video – and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.

“Monthly users of Hulu, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year.

Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.

Hulu’s content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year.”

The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like “Lost”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and other prime-time hits to the site.

A live video of Obama’s inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while “Saturday Night Live”, “Family Guy”, “The Office”, “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden” were the most popular shows of the year.

But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called “Motherlover”.

For those of you who still haven’t made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.

Discuss

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

We know that EA and BioWare have a long-term plan for Dragon Age: Origins. Even at launch the developer stated that two years worth of of DLC are in the works, and we’ll be receiving our first major bit of it next week. But a rumor is circulating today that the plans may be even more ambitious than we realized, with a full packaged expansion planned for March.

Big Download Blog reports on a page from Eurogamer.cz, the Czech gaming site. According to the translated text, the expansion is titled “The Awakening,” and will come out on March 19. The suggested price is around 2/3 the price of the original game, which would probably translate to $30-40 U.S. dollars. It’s also said to be a full packaged product that would be found in stores, and while only the PC version is mentioned, we expect BioWare would similarly support the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. The original game is reported to be required, and it will raise the level cap while also creating an entirely new, shorter campaign with a new character. The report states that EA will make the announcement official in early January, so we may see it any day now.

We don’t usually see such specificity in a rumor, so it’s hard not to think Eurogamer is on to something. Origins was always meant to be the start of a lucrative RPG franchise — it’s even present in the title. Still, until we hear official word from EA, we’re going to categorize this strictly as a rumor. We’ll keep you posted when, and if, we get more details.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

[Note: While this post is football-related, it translated to any sport… and I tie the story back to money… I promise]

I’ve always believed there is something we can learn from everyone. This past weekend professional sports organizations may have learned a lot from a 12-year-old young gentleman in the stands football game… and he didn’t have to say a word.

To understand where I’m going with this, let me set the scene a bit. The story starts with one player for the New England Patriots, Randy Moss. While no one has ever really doubted his talent, questions about his work ethic have followed him through his career. Two weeks ago he had one his worst games. A player on the opposing team said Moss “gives up a lot” and that he “laid it down during the game.” The game was so bad that it’s garnered a whole paragraph on his Wikipedia page. Almost every analyst opined on the subject (with a vast majority agreeing that Moss didn’t play hard) until it because one of the biggest stories of the NFL that week.

Moss, as you might expect, probably didn’t take it so well. He didn’t say anything, but instead let his coach and quarterback defend him. Most people ignored their biased testimonies. After all, the coach and quarterback are supposed to support their teammates. And that’s where the story stayed until the next game (last week).

In that game Moss didn’t set the world on fire by getting a lot of huge stats. However, when the Patriots needed him, he scored. After Moss’ third touchdown of the day (an unusually great day for any player in the NFL), the referees reviewed the video to make sure he crossed the goal line. While they were doing that, the Jumbotron caught a 12-year-old, Josiah Shumaker, wearing a Randy Moss mask in the stands. And here is a YouTube video of that interaction.

What you are seeing here is the young man performing Randy Moss’ signature touchdown celebration. He’s doing it so well that the crowd got excited and Randy mocks him with a real version of the celebration. Players on the sideline are laughing and all the talk of the previous week disappeared from everyone’s minds.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a professional sports player interacting with a fan via a Jumbotron before, but the timing was impeccable. While Moss would have been in good spirits with his three touchdown day, anyway this is what really lifted his spirits. He admitted that his last performance “wasn’t too hot” and that having the fans and the stadium behind him meant a lot to him. Sometimes I forget that while these professional athletes are extremely talented, they are people with feelings too.

So now that I’ve got all the sappiness out of the way, let’s get to what you came here for… the tie-in with money. Professional sports is big business. If your Hall of Fame player isn’t performing, there is the potential that millions of dollars will be wasted. Now I’m sure this wasn’t staged (or am I?), but if they wanted to how much would have cost the Patriots to stage it? It could be done for under $100. If you own a sports team and have a struggling star, why not try something like this, right?

Related posts:

1. Finding Value Where Others Don’t I woke up yesterday to some of the best news…
2. Compounding Interest in the NFL Yesterday, I explained how the Patriots trade for Randy Moss…
3. Personal Finance Links (Football is Back Edition) It feels good to have the NFL back in gear….
4. Your Financial Football Team I have mentioned in the past that I’m a huge…
5. Follow the NFL at 30,000 Feet for “Free” A couple of weeks ago, on our trip to The…

A year-end thank-you note from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar offered some statistics to show us just how much the nearly three-year-old service has grown.

Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google – which includes YouTube and Google Video – and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.

Sponsor

“Monthly users of Hulu, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year.

Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.

Hulu’s content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year.”

The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like “Lost”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and other prime-time hits to the site.

A live video of Obama’s inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while “Saturday Night Live”, “Family Guy”, “The Office”, “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden” were the most popular shows of the year.

But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called “Motherlover”.

For those of you who still haven’t made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.

Discuss

Following the lead of Consultancy Accenture, AT&T has terminated its relationship with Tiger Woods.

“We are ending our sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods and wish him well in the future,” said AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook, in an e-mailed statement to CNN.

While ending sponsorships has been the trend since Woods’ marital infidelity was brought to light, several organizations are retaining ties, including Gillette (though advertisements have been temporarily removed from airwaves), Nike, and Gatorade.

Via Gizmodo, CNN Money

It’s no secret that we live in a world of moral panics — where new technologies are feared by those who don’t understand them, often leading to regulations that block their potential. For years now, a number of politicians have sought laws to ban social networks in schools, assuming that they are either bad or simply inappropriate for schools. While those laws have yet to pass, many schools already do ban access to social networks and other sites. I’ve never quite understood how this makes sense. Rather than training students to use those sites properly, now they’re seen as forbidden — which only makes them more attractive to students, while making it even clearer that students won’t be prepared to handle those sites properly. On top of that, as more powerful mobile phones become popular, students will easily bypass the school’s own network and access those sites on their own — and there will be nothing the schools can do about it.

So it’s nice to see a sensible opinion piece in Slate arguing that rather than ban or block social online services like Facebook and YouTube, schools should be embracing them and looking for ways to incorporate them into the learning process. There are a variety of strong arguments for why this makes sense, but two that stick out:

1. Students already like using these sites quite a bit. Using those sites to make other things more relevant and interesting seems like a good way to reach kids in a manner that they understand, and which doesn’t feel quite as much like “education,” but more like something fun that they want to do.
2. Using these kinds of free tools may be cheaper, easier and much more effective than a number of the super expensive e-learning tools out there, which would require a steep learning curve anyway. But incorporating lesson plans and info and assignments into the tools that students already use would be both cheaper and more likely to actually be used.

Of course, some will decry that these sites are automatically bad for kids — or that it makes no sense to waste time on such issues. But the fact is kids are going to use these sites no matter what. Ignoring that doesn’t change that. Banning the sites doesn’t change that. It just makes the activity more underground without any oversight or reasonable lessons. But incorporating the technology into the educational efforts could actually get a lot more attention. Yes, some of the examples in the Slate article seem pretty lame (and would be seen as such by the kids), but if done right, it really could add a lot more value to students’ educations.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors.

Sponsor

Still No Ads

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia properties like Wikiquote or Wikibooks could easily find enough advertisers to finance these sites. In order to remain as independent and impartial as possible, however, the Wikimedia Foundation prefers to rely on donations from users.

It is worth noting, though, that the Wikipedia does have deals with some other companies like France Telecom’s Orange. These businesses license the site’s content and share advertising revenue with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikimedia Foundation has fewer than 35 employees and needs roughly $10 million per year to operate. About 340 million users access Wikipedia per month. According to Wales, this represents “almost a third of the Internet-connected world.”

Discuss

by Glenn Hurowitz

Generations from now, long after the last Twitter follower has unfriended the last Facebook user, this decade will be remembered and felt for its impact on Nature: the species that were saved and those that were lost; the heating of the planet; the forests cut down and those that remain to provide oxygen to our children’s children, and the first halting steps toward a clean energy future.

By those standards, this decade has been one of great beginnings, tragic ends, and the uplifting possibility of a new relationship between man and Nature.

To be sure, these were years of fire and devastation:  

In the last decade, more than 200 million acres of rainforest have been cleared and burned, sending an amount of pollution into the atmosphere equivalent to seven times the United States’ annual emissions. It’s as if all the vegetation in the states of Montana, Colorado, and New York combined had been torched.

The burning of coal, oil, and forests has added more than 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, helping make this decade the hottest on record—with corresponding increases in desertification, drought, and extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina.

To me, however, the saddest symbol of what has happened to Nature during this decade is the fate of the baiji, the white river dolphin found only in China’s Yangtze River. The baiji was a playful animal that dined on the Yangtze’s once plentiful fish and was traditionally venerated by the region’s people. Hunting and overfishing caused a drastic decline in the baiji’s population, and there were only a few hundred survivors at the beginning of the decade.

Then China, in its thirst for energy, completed its notorious Three Gorges Dam, and the fate of the baiji was sealed. The dam caused a build-up of pollution and a further reduction in fish populations that doomed the baiji. The species was declared “functionally extinct” in 2007 when an expedition failed to spot a single living baiji. The baiji became the first whale or dolphin in history to be killed off by human activity. The world will always be a little bereft without it.

But this decade also saw some tentative first steps toward a true balance between Nature and humanity.

The United States government protected more than 50 million acres of old growth forest from logging. It also declared an area the size of Spain off limits to fishing in an effort to preserve the ocean for future generations.

Recognition of the consequences of burning fossil fuels for energy has led to extraordinary growth in clean energy alternatives: more than 15 times the amount of solar energy is generated today than was generated in 2000, with much greater growth projected for the future.

Of course, these flashes of progress are nowhere near enough—yet—to make up for the immense damage being wrought by a growing population with higher and higher consumption levels.

But what can give us hope going into 2010 is the environmental revolution of the mind: the widespread realization that protecting the environment is the path, not the obstacle to prosperity. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, when candidates talked about creating jobs, they more often than not did it against a backdrop of wind turbines.

The culmination of this decade’s green revolution was to have been the passage of energy and climate legislation in the United States and the completion of a binding international agreement in Copenhagen. Both would accomplish something extraordinary: finally tying the universal human quest for a better life to protection of the Earth’s natural resources, not their destruction.

That new way of life hasn’t been realized—yet. But despite the damage done to our planet in these last ten years, the first decade of the 21st century may one day be seen as the wellspring of its salvation.

Related Links:

China powers the global green tech revolution

The melting of America

The world in 2020: China, the U.S., the global South, and the planet

The Illinois legislature is wishing state residents a Happy New Year by enacting 300 new laws for them to follow in 2010

Beginning tomorrow a bevy of new statues will go on the books, and some of them will affect millions of people.

To make life easier, we’ve sorted through the list and plucked the laws that will have the most impact on you:

Bowling alleys are now protected from civil suits if they post signage warning about the dangers of wearing bowling shoes outdoors.

Elementary and High Schools are now required to study Mexican-American History.

The department of transportation can post signs that prohibit truckers from using loud brakes known as “jake brakes.”

“How’s my driving” stickers, complete with area code and phone numbers, will be required for school buses.

September becomes Brain Aneurysm Month.

17-year-olds will be tried in juvenile court for misdemeanors.

Toy makers must place intricate warning labels for children’s toys that contain between 40 and 300 parts per million of lead.

Sending, receiving or reading electronic transmissions on your cell phone while driving is illegal.

Sex offenders are barred from accessing social networking sites while on parole, probation, court supervision or supervised release.

Sex offenders are also prohibited from using computer software to delete info from a computer they’ve used.

All flags flown outside of government buildings must have been made in the USA.

Retailers that sell alcoholic beverages must post a sign advising customers: “If you need assistance for substance abuse, please call the Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse at 1-800-843-6154.”

This news story was originally posted on NBCchicago.com.

I’ll be taking Friday off for the turnover to a new decade, the 2010s. And yes, it is a new decade.
The way I see it, the decade-counting scheme is different from the sometimes-confusing convention for centuries and millennia: If you’re talking about the third millennium or the 21st century, you start with 2001. That’s because the ordinal numbers “third” and “21st” are used in the context of a counting system that started with the year 1, not the year zero. But if you’re talking…(read more)