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Long after the bombs fall, when the fallout is thick and the sun hides behind clouds of ash and ruin, the Egg People will roam the earth inside their protective egg-shaped RVs. More »

William F. Lee, A.B. ’72, a Boston-based intellectual property expert and former Harvard Overseer who leads one of the nation’s most prominent law firms, has been elected to become the newest member of the Harvard Corporation, the University announced today (April 11).

Co-managing partner of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, and recently the Eli Goldston Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Lee will assume his role as a Fellow of Harvard College on July 1, 2010, when James R. Houghton, A.B. ’58, M.B.A. ’62, steps down from the Corporation after fifteen years of distinguished service.

“Bill Lee will be an outstanding addition to the Corporation,” said Houghton, the Corporation’s senior fellow since 2002.  “He’s wise, he understands complex organizations and academic culture, he’s immensely thoughtful and engaging, and he knows and cares a great deal about Harvard.”

“Bill is just an extraordinarily able, energetic, smart, and dedicated person, someone all of us on the search committee considered a natural choice,” said Robert D. Reischauer, A.B. ’63, who chaired the search committee and will succeed Houghton as senior fellow. “He has interests and experience that range from law and education and public service to science and technology and medicine.  And he’s stayed closely involved with Harvard across the years — as an Overseer, a visiting instructor, a parent, an admired local alumnus, and someone people turn to for good judgment and advice.”

“I’ve considered it a privilege to come to know Bill Lee the past few years, and I look forward to his joining the Corporation,” said President Drew Faust.  “His wisdom and experience, his intellectual curiosity, his feel for people and situations, his deep sense of how institutions can adapt to changing times — those qualities and more have made him an exceptionally valuable member of our community, and will make him an excellent member of the Corporation.”

“No institution means more to me than Harvard, and no institution has greater potential to transform people’s lives,” said Lee.  “I’m grateful to have seen and served Harvard from many different perspectives, and I’m looking forward to coming to know the University and its many people and parts even better.  I feel honored and humbled by the opportunity to serve Harvard in this new way, especially at so consequential a time of change, and I will do all I can to serve well.”

Lee began his legal career at the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr in 1976, rising to become senior partner in 1984 and managing partner of the firm in 2000.  He played a central role in the firm’s 2004 merger with the Washington-based firm Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and has served since then as the co-managing partner of the combined firm, familiarly known as WilmerHale.

Beyond his experience in managing a firm with some 1,000 lawyers and twelve offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia, he has risen to the front ranks of intellectual property practitioners nationwide and regularly appears on lists of America’s best lawyers in his field.  In 2009, the publication Managing IP named him as U.S. Intellectual Property Practitioner of the Year.  His numerous trials in the federal courts have focused on such diverse matters as laser optics, video compression, cellular communications, remote data storage, secure Internet communications, pharmaceutical products, high-speed chromatography, medical devices, and genetically engineered food.

Both before and after his service as a Harvard Overseer, Lee has taught at Harvard Law School, where his courses have included intellectual property litigation and the innovative problem-solving workshop introduced in January 2010.  (For more on the workshop.)  Active in public service, he has served on advisory committees to various United States courts, as well as the nominating committee for Massachusetts state judges.  He went to Washington in 1987-89 as associate counsel to the independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation, and also led an investigation of alleged incidents of racial bias in the state courts at the request of the Massachusetts Attorney General.

As an elected member of the University’s Board of Overseers from 2002 to 2008, Lee chaired the board’s committee on finance, administration, and management for three years and was vice chair of the executive committee in 2007-08; he was also an active member of the committee on natural and applied sciences.  He was one of the three Overseers on the 2006-07 presidential search committee, and he served throughout his six-year Overseer term on the joint committee on inspection, the University’s audit committee.

Lee has been a member of the visiting committees to both the Law School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and he served on the committee convened in 2008-09 to consider the relations of the Harvard University Police Department with the broader University community.  He was vice chair of the Boston area gift committee for his 30th Harvard College reunion and served on the Boston committee for the most recent Harvard Law School campaign.  In addition, in recent years he has seen Harvard through the eyes of a parent and uncle:  One of his daughters has attended the College, the Kennedy School, and the Business School, another has attended the Law School, and four of his nieces have attended the College.

Beyond his roles within Harvard and his service within the legal profession, Lee has served on the boards of a range of other scientific, medical, and educational organizations.  He was invited to be one of the founding members of the board of the Broad Institute, a collaboration focused on genomics and medicine that brings together researchers from Harvard, MIT, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and the Whitehead Institute.  He has previously served as vice chair of the board of University Hospital (a Boston University affiliate), a trustee of the Boston Medical Center, an overseer of the Museum of Science in Boston, and a member of the Cornell Law School visiting committee.  He has also chaired the board of trustees of the Tenacre Country Day School, an elementary school in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

In his student days at Harvard College, Lee was active with Phillips Brooks House and served as a student representative to the joint faculty and student committee on undergraduate life.  After graduating magna cum laude in 1972, he studied at Cornell, where he received his J.D., magna cum laude, and his M.B.A., with distinction, in 1976.  He and his wife, Leslie, live in Wellesley and have three grown children.

The seven-member Harvard Corporation, formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, is Harvard’s executive governing board and the smaller of Harvard’s two boards, the other being the Board of Overseers.  In addition to President Faust, the current Corporation members include Houghton, chairman emeritus of Corning Incorporated; Nannerl Keohane, L.L.D. (hon.) ’93, Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton and past president of Duke University and Wellesley College; Patricia King, J.D. ’69, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics, and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center; Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and past director of the Congressional Budget Office; James Rothenberg, A.B. ’68, M.B.A. ’70, chairman, principal executive officer, and director of Capital Research and Management Company and treasurer of Harvard University; and Robert Rubin, A.B. ’60, L.L.D. (hon.) ’01, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

In accordance with Harvard’s charter, the Corporation on Sunday (April 11) elected Lee as a Fellow of Harvard College, with the consent of the Board of Overseers.

North Korea’s International Friendship Exhibition Hall

A bizarre collection of gifts to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il from the despots of the world

If you are a iron-fisted despot, or terrorist organization, what do you get another tyrannical dictator as a gift? It would seem, judging from North Korea’s “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” that going with a dead animal is always a safe bet.
Located in the UN recognized biosphere reserve of Mount Myohyang, North Korea’s “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” is an exercise in contradictions. First off, for North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, having an “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” itself is a bit of a contradiction. In essence it amounts to an enormous collection of gifts given to Kim Il Sung, and his son Kim Jung Il by various other communist, terrorist, and despotic regimes.
Among the over 100,000 items gifted to the Kim’s are: Green railway cars from Mao and Stalin, a bronze tank from the USSR headquarters in East Germany, a gold cigarette case from Yugoslavia’s Tito,a 25-watt boombox from the People’s Republic of China Communist Party which seems kind of cheap, considering, a gem-encrusted silver sword and reproduction of a Moslem mosque from Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat, and an antique gramophone from China’s first premier Zhou Enlai.
This isn’t to say the US has never given anything. Yet another of the contradictions of the “International Friendship Exhibition Hall” is that gifts have indeed been given by the democratic western world, albeit only a few, and are proudly displayed. The circumstances of the gifts form the US are unknown and probably date to Kim Sung’s era, but include a book, vase and mirror, three pewter and silver pieces, and two homemade art objects. One can’t help but wonder who made these “art objects” and what they could possibly be. Among the other gifts from the west is a basketball signed by Micheal Jordan, and given (for what reason it is unclear) by Madeleine Albright.
One of the more bizarre gifts are perfect copies of the black limousine cruisers seen in “The Untouchables from Soviet leaders Georgy Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganina. Obviously less concerned with impressing North Korea, Gorbachev sent only a Glass vase with the Communist star on it. Mongolia sent silver chopsticks, while the Chairman of the Journalist Association of Kuwait sent a pen set.
From various Industrialists trying to woo Kim Jung Il: a robot drink server, wooden mace, astronaut’s suit, Sony Walkman, Casio keyboard, Yamaha organ, football signed by Pele, and an old Apple computer — which seems like someone might have just been getting rid of their trash — and once again with a somewhat unimpressive display, a tiny rubber ashtray from the Hwabei Tire Factory in China.
But by far the most popular theme for gifts given by one dictator to another is taxidermy. Fidel Castro gave a crocodile-skin briefcase, and Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator who was overthrown and killed by his own people, gave a bear head mounted on a red satin pillow. Lebanon gave Water buffalo-horn handles and the president of Tanzania gave an ivory lion. The National Black United Front gave Kim a small butterfly collection, at some point Canada gave Norht Korea a polar bear skin, and someone gave a tiger claw positioned as to be tearing through an American map.
Of course, the most creative and unusual of the gifts, belongs not a dictator or even a head of state, but naturally, a revolutionary. The Sandanistas of Nicaragua donated an upright grinning alligator, holding out a wooden tray of cocktail glasses. It comes with a matching ashtray.
While to an outsider the museum represents a bizare collection, with a remarkable amount of kitsch, ashtrays, and uninteresting consumer goods, it is not outsiders that are the intended audience. North Koreans have almost no contact with the outside world, and this is one place in which they are allowed to see many of the goods from around the world. The aim is to convince them that their leaders are universally admired and lavished with gifts.
One of the halls gaurds is noted as having noted the basketball signed by Micheal Jordan and saying “When the general plays with that ball, it proves that he controls the whole world in his hands.” For that North Korean Guard, Kim Jung Il really does hold the whole world in his hands.

Read more about North Korea’s International Friendship Exhibition Hall on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Museums and Collections, Unique Collections, Hunting and Taxidermy, Cultures and Civilizations , Rites and Rituals, Follies and Grottoes
Location:
Edited by: Dylan

The Southwest Minnesota Broadband Group found out that they received ARRA funding in February, but they’re still waiting for the check to arrive. At least that what it sounds like from the Jackson County Pilot (April 1, 2010 – Fiber: Coming to a Farm Near You; not currently online but kindly sent to me by John Shepard) and Cottonwood County Citizen Online.

The Cottonwood County Citizen Online reports that according to Windomnet Manager Dan Olsen parts of the project are in a holding pattern but some parts progress; specifically they have finalized the joint powers agreement and started some preliminary engineering.

So it’s kind of a bummer for the communities that are waiting. I suppose Minnesota hadn’t had such a beautiful March they might be in a holding pattern waiting for the ground to thaw. Hopefully the check will arrive soon. Waiting seems to be a recurring theme with the entire ARRA broadband funding initiative.

Microsoft’s going to reveal a bunch of Project Pink social networking-centric phones at an event tomorrow. We’ll be covering it, but you can watch along at home with this handy live webcast. So social of them! More »

In the Ghostbusters movie, there’s a scene where Ray (played by Dan Aykroyd) tells Gozer to get off an apartment building. He then makes a critical mistake:

Gozer: [after Ray orders her to re-locate] Are you a God?
[Ray looks at Peter, who nods]
Dr. Ray Stantz: No.
Gozer: Then… DIE!
[Lightning flies from her fingers, driving the Ghostbusters to the edge of the roof and almost off; people below scream]
Winston Zeddemore: Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say “YES”!

(I’ve yet to have anyone ask me if I’m a god, but I’ve definitely got my answer prepared.)

Ray’s focus on the immediate truth is an error given his larger purpose, which, if I recall correctly from hazy memories, has something to do with closing inter-dimensional portals that let the ghost world or hell or something like that open into our world. Bear in mind I probably haven’t seen Ghostbusters since childhood, but I did see it about 75 times. Before the Ghostbusters can close the portal, the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man arrives and is about 20 stories tall, causing a great deal of screaming and running on the part of New Yorkers, who get their own opportunity to flee from the equivalent of Godzilla.

Anyway, the important thing isn’t just the trip down memory lane, but Ray’s key mistake: thinking that he should give a factual answer, rather than a practical answer. The grant writing world has a similar divide, only we deal with the “real world” and the “proposal world.” The real world roughly corresponds to what a funded applicant will actually do if they’re funded by operating the program. The proposal world refers to what the RFP requires that the applicant say she’ll do, along with a stew of conventional wisdom, kabuki theater, prejudice flattering, impractical ideas nicely stated, exuberant promises, and more.

Astute readers will have noticed that we keep referring to the proposal world in various posts. A few examples:

• From What Exactly Is the Point of Collaboration in Grant Proposals?: “In the proposal world where Seliger + Associates lives, collaborations are omnipresent in our drafts, and we spin elaborate tales of strategic planning and intensive involvement in development of project concepts, most of which are woven out of whole cloth to match the collaborative mythology that funders expect […]“
• From Bratwurst and Grant Project Sustainability: A Beautiful Dream Wrapped in a Bun: “In many if not most human services RFPs, you’ll find an unintentionally hilarious section that neatly illustrates the difference between the proposal world and the real world: demanding to know how the project will be sustained beyond the end of the grant period.”
• From Studying Programs is Hard to Do: Why It’s Difficult to Write a Compelling Evaluation: “In the proposal world, the grant writer states that data will be carefully tracked and maintained, participants followed long after the project ends, and continuous improvements made to ensure midcourse corrections in programs when necessary […] In the real world of grants implementation, evaluations, if they are done at all, usually bear little resemblance to the evaluation section of the proposal, leading to vague outcome analysis.”
• From Know Your Charettes!: “Once again, I’m sure more nonprofits write about PACs than actually run them, but the proposal world is not always identical to the real world, which is one reason I was so surprised to read about the design charrette I linked to in the first paragraph.”

In all these examples, the proposal world entails telling the funder what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear doesn’t correspond all that well to reality.

Funders want to imagine that programs will continue when funding ends, but if a funding stream disappears, it’s not easy to replace; as Isaac said last week, “[…] it is vastly easier to form new nonprofits than it is to find millionaires and corporations to set up foundations to fund the avalanche of new nonprofits.” There are more nonprofits chasing millionaires to keep programs going than there are millionaires to fund those programs.

Evaluations that really matter demand lots of advanced math training and scrupulous adherence to procedures that most nonprofits just don’t have in them (don’t believe me? Read William Easterly’s What Works in Development?: Thinking Big and Thinking Small). The extensive community planning that most RFPs demand is too time and cost intensive to actually undergo. Besides, who is going to be opposed to another after school or job training program? The answer, of course, is no one.

In the proposal world, elaborate outreach efforts are necessary to make the community aware of the proposed project. In the real world, almost every provider of services is so overwhelmed with people who want those services that, even with additional funding, the provider still won’t be able to accept everyone who might be helped.

In the proposal world, everyone in the community gets a voice and a chance to sit on the Participant Advisory Council (PAC). In the real world, even if someone is sitting on the council and espouses a radical new idea, the constraints of the proposal requirements (“you must serve a minimum of 200 youth with three hours of academic and life skills training per year, using one of the approved curricula…”) means that idea will probably languish. Also, the PAC is likely to meet a few times every year instead of every month to provide “mid-course corrections,” as promised in the proposal.

If you’re a grant writer or an applicant who has hired a grant writer, your job is to get the money, and getting the money means being able to distinguish between the proposal world and the real world and present the former as it should be presented. This doesn’t mean that you should be stealing the money in the real world (hint: a Ferrari is probably not necessary for client transport and Executive Director use) or wildly misusing it (hint: skip claiming the Cancun Spring Break extravaganza as “research”), but it does mean that there’s a certain amount of assumed latitude between what’s claimed and what is actually done.

Many grant novices fail to understand this or experience cognitive dissonance when they read an RFP that makes wildly implausible demands. Once you realize that the RFP makes those demands because it’s dealing with the proposal world, as imagined by RFP writers, rather than the real world, as experienced by nonprofit and public agencies, you’ll be much happier and much better able to play the proposal world game.

When someone from the proposal world asks, “Are you a god?” the answer is always “yes,” even if you’re actually just a guy with a silly contraption strapped to your back who is desperately trying to save the world.

WebKit, the open-source engine behind browsers like Apple Safari and Google Chrome has recently announced that it will bring a new API layer to itself creating a WebKit2. This will let web content and the application to run in two different processes.

This model is already in implementation in many browsers like Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Google Chrome has gained some great success in launching tabs as separate processes.

Though, the addition of the feature to the Webkit engine itself means, other browsers using this engine need not develop their own. This feature is exactly what Mozilla has been working on for a while now. This change will make it much easier and faster for Mozilla to implement this feature.

The name WebKit2 has been chosen because it is the next version but it does not feature any major changes apart from this.

As soon as the change arrives, browsers based on WebKit will directly see this. It includes the iPhone OS browser, the Google Android and the Symbian s60 browser. This will make them much more stable on mobile devices.

WebKit2 will release a C API to make use of this new implementation model. This will facilitate development of browsers using this new feature.

(Via: WebKit-Dev)

Don’t miss these Related Posts:

• Reality of Microsoft’s Browser Ballot Screen, Adblock Plus: Best Add-on, Geolocation in Chrome [Browser Saturday]
• JaegerMonkey, Opera 10.5 Beta, Mozilla Ubiquity And 3 New Chrome Extensions [Browser Saturday]
• Google Chrome – The Last Browser Standing
• Browser Saturday: Browser Security Woes, Firefox Account Manager, Opera Mini for Android and More
• Browser Saturday: Firefox In Technology of the Decade, Arora is Alive, Chrome Flash Extension and MS Browser Ballot

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Start your engines, ethicists: Can oysters feel pain? If they can’t, does that mean vegans can go ahead and chow down on the slippery bivalves? Since they have no central nervous system, like other animals vegans don’t eat, Slate writer Christopher Cox, a self-proclaimed vegan who eats oysters, says its open season on the tasty delights.

In an effort to keep strict vegans off his back, he does admit he’s given up the “vegan badge of honor” because of his hankering for eating farmed oysters, while also laying out his reasons why it’s okay to indulge “by the boatload.”

His argument is basically this: Because they can be farmed without causing a lot of damage to the environment, pose little threat of collateral damage to other animals when harvested and, most importantly, probably don’t feel pain, oysters should be allowed in a vegan diet.

Cox writes:

No forests are cleared for oysters, no fertilizer is needed, and no grain goes to waste to feed them—they have a diet of plankton, which is about as close to the bottom of the food chain as you can get.

He also cites ethicist Peter Singer, who originally gave the stamp of approval to oyster ingestion in his book Animal Liberation, before reversing it for later editions. Contacted by email, Singer tells Cox he really does think it’s kopacetic to dine on bivalves, writing that the doubt is so slight that oysters feel pain, “that there is no good reason for avoiding eating sustainably produced oysters.”

And if oysters still aren’t your thing, might we suggest a Vegan Double Down?

Consider the Oyster [Slate Magazine]

[JURIST] Human Rights Watch (HRW) Sunday accused both Israel and Hamas of failing to conduct meaningful, credible investigations into accusations of war crimes during the January 2009 Gaza conflict. In a 62-page report HRW described the alleged law of war violations committed during the combat, along with the deficient responses from both sides:More than one year after the conflict, neither side has taken adequate measures to investigate serious violations or to punish the perpetrators of war crimes, leaving civilian victims without redress. Israel’s investigations have fallen far short of international standards for investigations, while Hamas has conducted no credible investigations at all.
States responsible for violations of the laws of war are required to make reparations, which includes providing fair and adequate compensation to victims and their relatives, and establishing the truth about what happened. … States also have an obligation to investigate war crimes allegedly committed by their armed forces, and if appropriate, to prosecute those responsible. The report also called on the UN and members of the international community to pressure both Israel and Hamas to conduct “thorough and impartial investigations” into the war crimes allegations.In February, HRW criticized Israel for failing to demonstrate that it would conduct a thorough and impartial investigation of the alleged war crimes. Just prior to that, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said that it was unclear whether Israel and Palestine have fully met UN demands to set up a commission to investigate war crimes that may occurred during the conflict. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution last November giving Israel and Palestine three months to complete an investigation into war crimes allegations.

Despite a wrenching economy, the Music Center hasn’t abandoned an
ambitious renovation plan centering on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
and also involving the large outdoor plaza between the Chandler
Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum, according to a financial analysis
issued Wednesday by Moody’s Investors Service.

The reported cost, "upwards of $250 million," more than doubles the
previous, 3-year-old estimate of more than $100 million, which included
only the Chandler Pavilion.

The Moody’s report says the new estimate covers "various large-scale
construction and renovation of buildings, performance spaces, the
outdoor plaza and office space," to be incurred "over the next several
years."

To finance those improvements, the report says, "management
notes that the Music Center may take on up to $100 million to $150
million of additional debt," with donations and county funds to cover
the rest of the upfront costs.

Read the full story here.

–Mike Boehm

Photo: L.A. Times file

Remember Jason Vuic’s book about the rise and fall of Yugo? Apparently, the inspiration for it came from the fact that an artist was able to buy 39 Yugos for $92 each. Those Yugos were given to students at The School of Visual Arts in New York and they were told to make something useful out of them.

And that’s how you get the Yugo accordion from the book, the Yogofone (pictured above), and a Yugo grand piano with a plate reading “89 KEYS.” This Yugobilia was displayed in New York’s Grand Central Station and on a U.S. tour – probably the best things to happen to any Yugo anywhere. Ever.

BMW probably doesn’t need to be worried about its art car franchise just yet, but the Bavarians might take some notes, just to be safe. Check out a few of the pieces in the gallery below, or click the link to check out another two dozen works of Yugo art.

[Source: Motobullet]

Yugos: Awful cars, serviceable art originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve had a long-standing love for the original Datsun Z cars, and finding this example on Bring a Trailer makes me wish I had the spare coin to give it a good home. The original 240z cars, sold in the U.S. from 1971 to 1973, were probably the purest sports cars of the Z car line; the lineage began to evolve from sports car to luxury GT car with the introduction of the 260z in 1974.

This very clean example features coil overs with new Koni race shocks, new Eibach springs, welded camber plates, ducted cooling for the front brakes, new paint, three sets of wheels, newish Nitto tires and a motor built to SCCA ITS specs. Inside, it’s got a full roll cage with NASCAR bars in the driver’s door, driver / passenger race seats and full AutoMeter instrumentation. The wipers and lights are functional, and the car comes with most of the original interior pieces. Need a trailer to tow it home? The seller has a wooden deck car hauler up for grabs as well.

At $9,950.00, this could be the race car bargain of the year. Although the car is currently run in SCCA Solo 2 competition, it sounds like it would be eligible for the ITS class just in case you felt the need to trade paint. It would work well for track days, and it’s old enough for vintage racing and vintage tours.

Want to park this in your garage? You’ll find it here.

It’s become obvious over the past year that location-based services are the new black, to the point where some are speculating that Yahoo might acquire market leader Foursquare for as much as $100 million, and explorers are racing to the North Pole to be the first to win a special badge. Although it’s still not clear whether location-based services will go mainstream or not, the theory is that if companies can tie location to something tangible — advertising messages or marketing offers, direct sales, etc. — they could drive significant revenue, and that’s going to appeal to everyone from Yahoo and Microsoft to Facebook and Google.

Angel investor and startup advisor Dave McClure, however, says that all the talk about badges and game mechanics is nonsense, and that location-based services need to come up with ways to tie their behavior to cash incentives before anyone is going to care about them. Check-ins are “a classic case of early-adopter lust for shiny objects,” he says, and don’t have anything to do with “long-term sustainable mainstream consumer behavior.” McClure argues that no one normal is ever going to consider doing it “until you give them $5 off their next beer or 5-dollar foot long.”

His other main point is that accomplishing this — going mainstream with enough scale to make it worthwhile — is going to require huge sums of money, and that only a few players have that kind of heft and resources, including: Microsoft, Apple, Google and possibly Facebook. McClure says he believes that Facebook will win. With 400 million users and an active user base, as well as users’ familiarity with connecting through Facebook Connect, “they are the easy pick front-runner.”

Bijan Sabet disagrees. The Spark Capital partner, who has invested in both Twitter and Tumblr, says that there are “tons of non-geeks using Foursquare right now,” including his wife and other friends, and that badges and the utility of being able to see where friends are is enough to get people using the service, even without payments. Sabet also disagrees with the “Facebook can offer this and kill everyone” argument, and says that the ‘focused startup’ has many advantages over “the big, broad based established players.”

So who has the edge in this debate? I think McClure does. The reality is that location-based services don’t have an obvious utility for “normal” people (i.e., non-geeks). In fact, many people I know think that telling people your location all the time is madness, and the creation of Please Rob Me probably didn’t help that impression (even Om is skeptical of their appeal). So how do you convince people to check in somewhere? You reward them. And badges probably aren’t going to be enough for the vast majority of people — in other words, your service either remains FGO (for geeks only), or you broaden it by adding real incentives like discounts on merchandise.

As for Facebook taking over as the king of location-based services, I think there is a good chance it will. Without seeing what kinds of features the social network has planned, it’s difficult to say whether they will dominate, or whether they will federate (i.e., make it easy for Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. to work within Facebook). But the most important point — as Om noted in a post earlier this year — is that location doesn’t feel like a service all by itself — instead, it feels like a feature that belongs inside something else, such as a mobile app or platform, or as part of a web service or network. Regardless of whether users are paid in some way, that feels like the ultimate end-game.

Why The Location Wars Are a Dead End

Anyone who’s run afoul of Facebook’s, um, fluid rules for user behaviour can tell you it’s like a Kafka novel. (Remember the one where nobody would friend the giant cockroach? Shudder.)

Here’s one of the latest lucky contestants: Social Media Today, a Web venture with an active presence on Facebook, was posting URLs twice a day, until one day they discovered they’d run afoul of the site’s rules and had their ability to post links blocked.

Sponsor

So how often is too often? Facebook won’t say. How infrequently would they have to post to stay safe? Facebook won’t say.

Look, I get that Facebook’s a private company and if I don’t like it I can just move somewhere else – although when you’re dealing with a platform that has 400 million users, half of whom log on in any given day, that’s a little like saying you can always go find yourself another human civilization.

But there’s something wrong if we’re expected to treat Facebook like Dinsdale Piranha – forgiving them for nailing our heads to the floor because we’d transgressed the unwritten law. (Which law? “Er… Well he never told me that. But he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy.”)

More Noise to Signal.

Discuss

The classic SNES controller, often imitated but never duplicated, is borrowing motion controls from its Wii brethren courtesy this DIY hack over at Hackaday. More »

The world of Windows Mobile is known for connecting to things that normal Smartphone’s cannot, example Toshiba and an ultra sound, well now we can control our Windows 7 media player from our devices. This comes from XDA where they have figured out to use their Windows phones to connect to their PC and use it as the controller.

Here is some details:

DESCRIPTION:
This software connects to Windows Media Center on your PC via VMC Controller software.
Allows for full control of basic functions:
-menu navigation
-play/pause, next/previous
-volume control
-playback position seek
Displays currently playing media info on screen. (see screenshots)

CHANGELOG:
0.4 Beta – 31/03/10
-fixed problem where addresses were resolved to ipv6
-only works with ipv4 addresses, hostname not working correctly yet
-minor performance fixes

0.3.2 Alpha – 08/03/10
-fixed loading error
-minor fixes

0.3.1 Alpha – 07/03/10
-fixed config file bug

0.3 Alpha – 07/03/10
-added haptic feedback with touchscreen
-added d-pad mode switch using camera focus button
-added automatic connection on launching the program
-more stable when connection dropped
-controller window now minimizes properly

0.2 Alpha – 18/01/10
-added track length and track number to display
-optimized code, runs slightly quicker
-removed ‘now playing’ option in menu

0.1 Alpha – 14/01/10
-initial release

TO DO IN FUTURE RELEASES:
-improve graphics
-add support for handsets without d-pad
-map keyboard keys
-fix ui bug when started in landscape mode

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
-Windows Vista or 7 – editions with Windows Media Center.
-VMC Controller.
-Wifi, Bluetooth/USB activesync connection.
-Windows Mobile 6.x Pro, [may work on older versions]
-480×800 screen res, [designed mainly for the X1, may work on other similar handsets]

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. – Download and install VMC Controller (see links below)
2. – Download and unzip folder to phone or sd card (see files below) – (remove previous versions first!)
3. – Connect phone to PC using Wifi, or activesync connection.
4. – Run Windows Media Center.
5. – Launch the downloaded application WMCMR.exe on the handset.
6. – Hit the ‘connect’ button and enter the IP address of you PC. – [hostname MIGHT work]
7. – Save settings.
8. – Start controlling!

You can download this from XDA

By Doug Bandow

Resisting encroachments from the federal government is never easy.  Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is one of the state attorneys general who is suing the federal government to block ObamaCare.  

He explains his efforts:

There are very good reasons that the federal government has never, in the last 221 years, used the Commerce Clause of the Constitution as a vehicle for requiring citizens to purchase goods or services from other citizens.

The first is textual. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution provides that “the Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several States.” Although there have been disputes about just how far this should reach into commerce that is entirely intrastate, until now, it has been recognized that this constitutional provision deals with regulation of commerce – that is, with the use of law to impose reason and order on the voluntary commercial actions of citizens, as well as on activities that substantially affect commerce. An individual mandate to purchase health insurance is not regulation in that sense.

Another good reason this has not been done before is that it turns the Commerce Clause into an alternative, off-books funding mechanism. According to the “findings” section of the law itself, the mandate achieves economies of scale, but in reality, it achieves income redistribution. The law caps the amount that insurance companies can charge based on age, and forbids them to exclude those with pre-existing conditions. As such, the young and healthy people the law forces to buy insurance are overcharged for the purpose of subsidizing the old and those with pre-existing conditions.

Virginians who believe in individual liberty should back AG Cuccinelli’s efforts and send him a warm congratulations for standing up for the Constitution and limited government