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Long Beach police were questioning a man Friday after a 61-year-old man was stabbed to death at a senior living home.

Police arrived at the center in the 1900 block of East 5th Street about 7 a.m. and found the victim with stab wounds, said Officer Jackie Bezart of the Long Beach Police Department. The man was taken to a hospital, where he later died.

News helicopters captured video of a man being taken away from the home in a police car. Long Beach homicide detectives were questioning a man in connection with the stabbing but had not arrested anyone, Bezart said.

— Richard Winton

Map: The location of the stabbing. There have been 52 homicides within two miles of this location since Jan. 1, 2007, according to the Times’ Homicide Report interactive map and database.

Musings on Keith Crain, Ralph Nader, roundabouts, and pickups for politicians.

Once Keith Had a Secret Love…

Automotive News is the bible of the automobile industry. Not only does it make that claim for itself, but it is generally accepted as fact by most of the people in all the far corners of the automotive universe. I once testified to that effect in a court of law, at the invitation of Mr. Keith Crain, owner and ­editor-in-chief, who was suing some snapper-wrapper newspaper that was foolishly using the words “Automotive News” to head a column of car stuff gleaned from press releases and Internet gossip. I am much too modest to suggest that my testimony carried the day for Mr. Crain, but that is the case. He thanked me, gave me a plaque commemorating the event, then went back to cordially disliking me.

Keep Reading: David E. Davis, Jr.: Spring Arrives and all Sorts of Weird Stuff Shows up Along the Roadside – Column

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Next week, the Senate returns from recess to a months-long battle over the extension of expiring programs providing benefits to millions of jobless Americans.

In March, the House passed a $9 billion bill to prevent benefit loss. The Senate rushed to pass the House version before the congressional recess started on March 26, but faced opposition from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who demanded that Democrats find a way to pay for the extension. Senate majority and minority leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) started negotiations on the issue, but failed to reach a compromise before recess.

While senators were in their home states, on April 5, some Americans actually started to lose their benefits – at a rate of 200,000 a week, the National Employment Law Project estimates. Indeed, this month alone, up to 1 million people will lose aid if some extension bill does not pass.

Members of Congress from both parties have stressed that the jobless benefits are not stimulus so much as necessary aid. “We will have to do things like extend unemployment benefits,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told Fox News. “That’s not a job stimulator. … We will do those things to take care of the families that are suffering right now.”

Thus, the pressure is on for Congress to act. According to parliamentary procedure, it will take a bare minimum of four days for the Senate to pass the benefits extension — and likely longer. To provide benefits to those who have lost them since April 5 and to those who will before the bill’s passage, Senate Democrats plan to push through a provision making the extension of benefits retroactive.

Two Senate aides say that Republican senators will offer pay-go and possibly other amendments to the benefits extension. Those amendments will likely delay the passage of the bill — meaning more people will lose benefits, if only temporarily.

If and when the Senate passes this month-long extension, it will need to take the exact same issue up again by May 5 — a point annoying Senate Democrats, a Senate aide says. Therefore, Democratic leadership has placed a long-term jobless benefits extension into the Tax Extender’s Act, currently in the House. But Democrats are scrambling to find additional funding sources for those benefits.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has ordered its contractor to shut down nochildleftinside.org because someone hacked into the web site.

The web site is associated with the state’s No Child Left Inside initiative, which was established to encourage families to enjoy the outdoors, and it is a place where families can register for the Great Park Pursuit program, a seven-week family contest that is part of the initiative.   

Because the Great Park Pursuit program is free, there is no record of financial information or social security numbers on the web site, but information like names, addresses and phone numbers is collected, said DEP Spokesman Dennis Schain. 

Families who signed up for the program were notified of the breach.

The DEP is working with law enforcement officials, other state agencies and the Pita Group, of Rocky Hill, which operates the web site, to determine the extent of the breach, and the site will be shut down during the investigation, Schain said, adding that the DEP also shut down Facebook and Twitter accounts associated with No Child Left Inside.

Registration for the Great Park Pursuit program began March 13. The program is not scheduled to begin until May 8. Schain said DEP is looking at alternative ways to register and communicate with families during the investigation.  

When I first set out to do the iPad Accessories Series I thought it would be easy. The iPad hasn’t been out for a week so I figured there couldn’t be that many accessories to cover. Boy was I wrong! I have been amazed at how many companies are already producing cases and such for the new iPad. At this pace there is going to be a big ecosystem around the iPad, thanks to accessory makers. Today we are looking at chargers for the iPad. There are not that many choices but some good models for the iPad owner. Note the car chargers that will top off your iPad while in the car.

Apple. The Apple Power Adapter can be a second charger for those who want an extra. $29.

Boxwave VersaCharger Pro. The VersaCharger has been out for years, and is a universal international charger good for the traveler. The base charger comes with both a car charger and a wall charger and there’s even an airplane charger option. The base unit is paired with a cable for the iPad that completes the package. There are many cable adapters available for use with other devices. $25.95 base unit, $35.20 with airplane kit, iPad cable $7.95.

Kensington PowerBolt. This charger is very small for a car charger. It is a car charger only. $24.95.

Griffin PowerBlock. The PowerBlock is a tiny adapter good for traveling. $29.95.

Griffin PowerJolt. Griffin produces the PowerJolt as a companion accessory to the PowerBlock. It is a car charger only. $24.95.

Incase Combo Charger. Those in need of a second power adapter and a car charger should give the incase Combo Charger a look. It is a single adapter that works as both chargers. $39.95.

Incase Car Charger. The Incase folks have a car charger too. $24.95.

Scosche USBS3. The car charger from the folks at Scosche has a second USB port for powering additional gadgets. $24.99.

Scosche USBH3. This wall charger has a second USB port (1v) for additional use. $29.99.

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Washington admits there’s no recovery for workers

By Fred Goldstein
Published Apr 7, 2010 2:49 PM

Cheerleaders for capitalism are talking out of both sides of their mouths about the latest job numbers, which showed the creation of 162,000 jobs in March.

President Barack Obama hailed the news as signaling that the economy “is beginning to turn the corner,” but he followed this with the warning that “It will take time to achieve the strong and sustained job growth that we need.” (New York Times, April 3)

Likewise, Christine Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, hailed the numbers but said there will be a “gradual labor market healing” and that “we still have a lot of headwinds.” (msnbc.com, April 2)

Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said: “The trend has turned, but to get back to the surface, we’ve got a long way to go.” (washingtontimes.com, April 4) And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the administration is “very worried” about getting unemployment back to 5 percent. (Associated Press, April 1)

The double talk was captured in a New York Times headline of April 3 that read, “Signaling Jobs Recovery, Payrolls Surged in March.” This was followed by the exuberant opening sentence, “The clouds have parted.”

However, a few lines further down came the bad news: “The economy needs to add more than 100,000 jobs a month just to absorb new entrants into the labor market, let alone provide a livelihood for the 15 million Americans already looking for work. Without constant, robust growth, the unemployment rate won’t budge. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the rate will hover around 10 percent for the rest of the year.”

So the truth is that the working class has little to cheer about from the latest job numbers. The official unemployment rate is still 9.7 percent. Almost one third of the jobs created, amounting to 48,000, are temporary jobs working for the U.S. Census. These jobs last only six to eight weeks. Officially, there are still 15 million unemployed, 9.1 million doing forced part-time work and 2.3 million so-called “marginally attached” workers who have become so discouraged they’ve given up looking for work.

Added together, they are called “total unemployment” by the government. This number actually rose in March — from 16.8 percent to 16.9 percent. This makes for an official total of 26.4 million workers who need full-time jobs. The actual figure, according to an authoritative study by the Pew Research Center, is more than 30 million.

6.5 million long-term unemployed

The crisis of U.S. capitalism, as far as the workers are concerned, is getting more and more severe, big business spin masters notwithstanding. The long-term unemployed — workers out of a job for 27 weeks or more — rose 414,000 in March to 6.5 million, or 44 percent of the official number.

Black unemployment stands at 16.5 percent, with Black men at 19 percent; Latino/a joblessness is at 12.6 percent; and teenage unemployment is at 26 percent.

Right now almost six unemployed workers are looking for each available job. This dim picture for the workers is despite six months of expanded production and profits for the bosses and a steady rise in the stock market’s Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is now nearing 11,000. This is the “jobless recovery” in action.

An analysis released on April 2 of the unemployment statistics by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute shows in stark terms the crisis that the working class is facing in this capitalist economy.

“Since the start of the recession in December 2007,” wrote Shierholz, “the labor market has shed 8.2 million payroll jobs. This number, however, understates the size of the gap in the labor market by failing to take into account the fact that simply to keep up with population growth, the labor market should have added around 2.8 million jobs since December 2007. This means the labor market is now roughly 11 million jobs below what would restore the pre-recession unemployment rate (which was 5.0 percent in December 2007). To get us back to the lower unemployment rate that existed prior to the 2001 recession (4.3 percent in March 2001), the U.S. economy is now nearly 17 million jobs short.

“Furthermore, these calculations understate slack in the labor market by failing to take into account the decline in hours worked for those who have kept their jobs. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the length of the average workweek in the private sector was 34.7 hours. In March, it was 34.0 hours. This may at first seem like a small amount, but when multiplied across the labor market, the effect is nontrivial — the decline in the total number of hours worked in the private sector since the start of the recession that is due to reduced hours alone (i.e., not job loss) is equivalent to 2.2 million jobs.”

The bourgeois policy experts in Washington and in the media have read the same numbers. Thus, it is no surprise that they preach caution alongside every optimistic statement. They dare not raise expectations among the masses. In fact, according to the Washington Post of April 2, “The White House does not expect the rate to return to its healthy-economy level of 5 percent until at least 2017.”

These are the experts who predicted a maximum of 8 percent unemployment by 2010. They cannot see from one quarter to the next, let alone to 2017. But the point is that the government officials themselves are profoundly pessimistic about any genuine recovery for the working class.

Where can jobs come from?

All this speaks to the urgent necessity to organize a working-class campaign for an immediate, sweeping national jobs campaign. The idea is beginning to surface, even among liberals.

Bob Herbert, an African-American columnist for the New York Times, wrote on March 29: “Those who think some kind of robust recovery is hiding around the corner, just waiting to spring a pleasant surprise on us, are deluded.”

Herbert derided the Obama administration’s “jobs program” of $30 billion as “small-bore initiatives” and said that “some new variation of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps should be developed to put economically distressed young people to work. What is happening to young, out-of-work and poorly educated American kids — not just in the big cities, but increasingly in suburban and rural areas, as well — is tragic.”

Along these lines, the Bail Out the People Movement, the May 1st Coalition For Worker and Immigrant Rights, Moratorium Now! Coalition, the San Francisco Labor Council, the Million Worker March Movement, Rev. Tom Smith from Pittsburgh’s Monumental Baptist Church and many others are calling for a national jobs program that would include all workers who need a job to be carried out on a scope comparable to the WPA of the 1930s. Hiring them directly, the WPA put over 8 million workers to work. This demand will be publicized at a demonstration in Washington, D.C., on May 8.

In the midst of this crisis, the bosses are ruthlessly trying to take advantage of workers in every way. There are investigations in many states of corporations that use unpaid interns as free labor.

In 2008 the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 83 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from 9 percent in 1992. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid. (New York Times, April 2)

Making money denying benefits

While workers are suffering, the bosses are using every trick to block them from getting unemployment insurance. This is to reduce employer costs because the more claims after a layoff, the higher the rates the bosses have to pay.

A billion-dollar company called Talx handles more than 30 percent of the nation’s requests for jobless benefits. Pledging to save employers money in part by contesting claims, Talx helps them decide which applications to resist and how to mount effective appeals. This has made Talx a boom business in a bust economy.

Among the companies Talx represents are Wal-Mart, Countrywide, Aetna, AT&T, Best Buy, FedEx, Home Depot, Marriott, McDonald’s and the United States Postal Service. (New York Times, April 3)

In addition, millions more homeowners are expected to lose their homes over the next several years. Workers are forced into homelessness, to double and triple up with their families, or to live in cars or tent cities.

The economic crisis is not making headlines. But for the working class, the communities, students and youth the crisis is spreading, not declining as the government and the apologists for the capitalist profit system would have it.

More people living in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection in March than during any month since the federal personal bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005. A new report attributes this to high unemployment and the housing crash.

Federal courts reported more than 158,000 bankruptcy filings in March, or 6,900 a day, a rise of 35 percent from February, according to a report to be released April 9 by Automated Access to Court Electronic Records.

Capitalism must maximize profits at all costs. This is what drives the economic system. If the bosses have their way, there will be no recovery for the workers at all — only more pressure for those who work and a steady growth in the number of those who cannot get a job.

In a February speech, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen warned what the recovery will look like:

“The recession has forced businesses to reexamine just about everything they do with an eye toward restraining costs and boosting efficiency,” said Yellen. “Strapped by tight credit and plummeting sales, businesses have overhauled the way they manage supply chains, inventory, production practices and staffing.

“My business contacts describe this as a paradigm shift and they believe it’s permanent. This process of implementing new efficiency gains may have only begun and we may be in store for further efficiency improvements and high productivity growth for some time. If so, the rate of job creation will be frustratingly slow.” (Huffington Post, April 4)

The only way to stop job creation from being “frustratingly slow” or actually non-existent is for the working class to mobilize and fight for a national, government-provided jobs program at living wages and conditions. The demonstration May 8 in Washington, D.C., will make that demand.

Goldstein is the author of the book “Low-Wage Capitalism,” a Marxist analysis of globalization and its effects on the U.S. working class. He has also written numerous articles and spoken on the present economic crisis. For further information, visit www.lowwagecapitalism.com.
——————————————————————————–
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: [email protected]
Page printed from:
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/economy_0415/

A municipal water district engineer was arrested on suspicion of animal cruelty after he killed the dog of an Agoura Hills woman he used to date and dumped the small Maltese in a West Hills trash bin, investigators said Friday.

Rommel Marzan, 44, was arrested Tuesday after investigators deemed his story that he had fallen on the small dog as less than credible and a veterinarian determined the animal died from blunt head trauma, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Det. Steve Colitti.

Marzan works for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District.

After the woman went home and found her dog missing, she received a call from Marzan, who told her he had accidentally killed it, Colitti said.

“He told her he had fallen on the dog and then panicked and dumped the dog,” Colitti said.

The woman immediately called sheriff’s deputies, who contacted Marzan. He told deputies the same story — that he had accidentally fallen on the dog and killed it and dumped it in a San Fernando Valley trash bin in a panic, Colitti said. Skeptical deputies “felt he was not being forthcoming,” Colitti said

Marzan later acknowledged that he “may have stepped on the dog,” Colitti said.

The Maltese was retrieved from the dumpster, and a veterinarian determined the dog had died from blunt force trauma to the head.

Marzan was released in lieu of $50,000 bail. A supervisor at the Las Virgenes water district said Marzan has been placed on leave.

— Richard Winton

According to a report by Bloomberg, Toyota knew about its unintended acceleration flaws more than 3 1/2 years before it recalled vehicles to fix the problem. Documents dated March 24 that were submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that Toyota learned that floor mated could entrap accelerator pedals as early as Feb. 7, 2006 and that pedals could stick 5 months later.

Toyota, which admitted to responding to the issue at an untimely manner, recalled about 8 million vehicles worldwide starting late last year to repair the two types of acceleration problems.

The first report of the accelerator being trapped against a floor mat was from a 2005 model year Prius.

Toyota started its recalls for the two pedal-related issues after the Aug. 28 Lexus ES crash that killed a family of four.

Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)

Luke Timmerman wrote:

Cell Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CTIC) apparently has had enough humiliation for one day. The Seattle-based biotech company postponed a special shareholder meeting this morning at its headquarters along Elliott Bay, after announcing that the FDA rejected the application for its only cancer drug with a shot at reaching the U.S. market anytime soon.

About a dozen shareholders showed up at 10 am Seattle time on the third floor of Cell Therapeutics’ stylish headquarters, which features track lighting, pastel wall colors, and sweeping views of Elliott Bay. The meeting, in which shareholders will be asked to authorize the company to sell as many as 1.2 billion shares, has been rescheduled for the same time on May 14. Cell Therapeutics usually has trouble getting a quorum of shareholders to vote on matters like these, because it has a lot of shareholders in Italy who don’t turn in their ballots. So it wouldn’t surprise me if the company failed to get a quorum to vote on that question.

Cell Therapeutics founder and CEO James Bianco didn’t show up to face the shareholders this morning, although company spokesman Dan Eramian told me in the hallway that the company is planning a conference call for 4:30 pm Eastern/1:30 pm Pacific today. We had to chat in the hallway because the company barred me from attending this meeting as a member of the press, saying it was open only to shareholders of record. As many of you who follow me on Twitter know, I offered some pocket change to buy a share so I could attend, but they could not accommodate me on the spot. (TheStreet.com’s columnist Adam Feuerstein cheekily offered to start a pledge drive to help me get in the door, but alas, the meeting adjourned in a just a few minutes.)

Seriously, though, I have a few questions that I couldn’t get answered. Like why shareholders would allow the company to issue as many as 1.2 billion shares, further diluting their existing stakes in a stock that’s already worth less than a buck? Who are the people who invested $20 million in Cell Therapeutics after it was shot down 9-0 by a panel of FDA cancer drug experts last month? Did those people listen to the same brutal critique that I heard? In what way do they think Cell Therapeutics can generate positive returns? Do they think the company can afford the time and expense of another clinical trial to support approval of pixantrone for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma? Or do they think that paclitaxel poliglumex (Opaxio), a drug that already failed three pivotal clinical trials in 2005, will rise from the dead?

I will listen in to today’s conference call (dial-in number is here), but I’m not holding my breath for any substantive answers.

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

By Jack M. Germain, LinuxInsider

---

Download gedit text editor for Linux from Fileforum now.

---

Text editors are becoming more essential in today’s Web-based computing world. Gone are the days when users need hard-copy versions of their documents. Also gone are the days when documents need to be gussied up with fancy fonts and fanciful page formatting.

Now HTML handles the visual tune ups for online document displays converted from text documents. For the bulk of documentation now created with computers, text displays suffice. Content is what matters. When a more formal document requires graphical alure, word processors such as AbiWord and OpenOffice will take a plain text file to the more visual level. The Linux OS probably has more text-writing apps than any other computing platform. For many users, a text editor will meet or exceed writing needs most of the time. Two popular text editors are gedit and Leafpad.

Text editors are not all the same. Some have a basic feature set that makes the app more suitable to a variety of writing tasks. Others are very simple with basic text-entry capability.

Gedit falls into the first category. It is text editor bundled in the Gnome desktop environment. Leafpad is a simple GTK+ text editor that focuses on simplicity. Its lightweight structure makes it a good choice for compact distro configurations.

Gedit is relatively simple to use, but do not dismiss this app as being wimpy. It has all the power typical users need for general purpose text handling.

For instance, gedit has full support for internationalized text (UTF-8) coding. It also supports configurable syntax highlighting for C, C++, Java, HTML, XML, Python, Perl and many other programming languages.

One of gedit’s most useful enhancements is its ability to handle multiple open files. The app uses a tabbed page structure. Clicking on a page tab displaying the file title across the top of the app window lets you move quickly through the list of open files.

While the tabbed navigational structure is essential to my workflow, gedit has a feature set that includes must-have writing tools such as several levels of Undo/Redo and File reverting options.

This text editor also has Print and Print Preview, so I can check on the hard copy results if I need to have more than a digital copy of the document. The Clipboard support is also essential for cut/copy/paste functions.

The Search and replace feature has a nifty option or two I do not see in most other text editors. It has an incremental search command that lets me step through locations in the document containing my search string. Couple this with he Clear Highlight command and gedit is a very convenient app for processing text.

Gedit has settings for auto indentation and text wrapping. It supports line numbering and bracket matching as well the ability to turn on/off the right margin line and set the right margin column number for wrapping. For me, being able to turn off current line highlighting is a big plus. So is the ability to configure fonts and colors.

In fact, it is in the preferences panel that gedit excels. Program options for viewing and editing choices are a check box away. For example, under the Editor tab, I can set the tab width and whether or not to insert spaces instead of tabs. There I can also choose to create a backup copy of files before saving and set the autosave interval.

One of the most powerful features is Plugins, which is built into the preferences panel. This feature really puts gEdit in the high-end class of text editors. For example, it is here that options for changing the case of selected text, turning on document statistics and spell checking, adding a file browser pane, and snippet insertions are controlled — and there’s much more.

Leafpad has a much smaller feature set than text editors typically labeled “high end,” such as gEdit or Kate. However, the Linux OS is filled with not-so-able text editors that do much less than Leafpad. In a Linux world of high-end and low-end text editors, Leafpad claims the middle ground.

Download Leafpad text editor for Linux from Fileforum now.

---

Leafpad lacks the ability to open more than one file at a time, but that is OK if you need a fast and simple app for entering notes or maintaining To-Do lists and such.

This text editor has a tiny footprint on system resources, and it allows multiple instances to run. That makes for an ideal workaround. I open several copies of Leafpad, adjusting the size of the window for the tasks at hand. This lets me refer to several pages of research notes and other reference content simultaneously.

Leafpad’s tiny feature set includes a codeset option (Some OpenI18N registered) and Auto codeset detection (UTF-8 and some codesets). It has an unlimited Undo/Redo feature.

Leafpad taps into the system fonts library so users are not stuck with a single default font. A preview window in the Options tab shows what each font looks like in each of the four accompanying styles — Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. Similarly, point sizes range from 6 to 72.

The bare-bones feature set includes Auto/Multi-line Indent, the option to turn on/off line numbers display and Drag and Drop editing. The only other enhancements are Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete under the Edit menu and Search/Replace options.

The Print Preview option is also useful. Print Previews are not always a close match to the actual printed page an editor app delivers, but that is not the case with Leafpad. What you see in the preview window is pretty much what you get on the printed page.

Gedit and Leafpad are two handy text editors. Rather than choosing one over the other, use both. Having them both available gives you plenty of flexibility.

Gedit is a more full-featured writing app with most of the high-end bells and whistles needed for fast and efficient text handling. Leafpad is much more basic, but it has enough features to raise it from the muck of unambitious typing-only apps.

Originally published on LinuxInsider.

© 2010 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.

© 2010 BetaNews.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

House GOP Leader Lawrence Cafero is calling for a meeting with legislative leadership to clarify the policy regarding flags at the Capitol.

His call comes on the heels of the controversy over the Connecticut Tea Party Patriots’ request to fly the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Capitol police, who oversee flag-flying requests, initially approved it, but yesterday they rescinded permission because the flag-waving ceremony was followed by a political event with Tea Party candidates.

Though the decision to deny permission was made by Acting Capitol Police Chief Walter Lee, it came after House Democrats complained, Cafero said.

Cafero said he objects to “one out of four caucuses having that kind of influence.”  

“Why were we not consulted as legislative leaders?” Cafero asked.

He wants leaders from both parties to meet ASAP to clarify what he calls a “vague policy…so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”

The policy, instituted after a similar uproar at the Captiol over the flying of the Rainbow flag, a universal emblem of gay rights. Following that 1999 controversy, new guidelines were drafted by the Office of Legislative Management. Read them here. 

Nobody’s ever tackled the most important question pertaining to one of history’s most influential thinkers. Until now.

It’s the sort of purely speculative question that only arises under the most particular circumstances—in this case the admixture that results when two years of a Jesuit college education meet a beer bong in an undergrad dorm room. The question: What would Aristotle drive?

Keep Reading: What Would Aristotle Drive? – Feature

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Motorola Cliq owners should be on the lookout for a software update notification on their handset.  After a handful of stutter steps and false starts, the T-Mobile smartphone is finally rolling out the update designed to improved GPS, battery, and Bluetooth among other items.  Below is a list of the 16 changes or improvements found in the v1.4.8 update. Check out the official Motorola support page for the full details and descriptions.

• Relocated “End Call”
• Improved Text Messaging
• Improved Battery Life
• Improved Touch Screen Sensitivity
• Improved Audio Quality for Calls
• Improved MOTOBLUR Set-Up Screen
• Better Audio Routing
• Improved Caller Notification
• Faster GPS
• Support For Additional Windows Media Formats Compatible
• Bluetooth Improvements
• SIM Card Management
• Additional
• The Latest Versions of Google
• Updated Quickoffice

Might We Suggest…

• T-Mobile Begins Rolling Out Cliq and Behold II Updates [Updated]
  

  T-Mobile USA has started pushing out over-the-air (OTA) updates to both their Motorola Cliq and Samsung Behold II handsets.  While neither of them are updates to Android 2.1, they both are steps i…

So you arrived early to that meeting and already updated your Facebook/Twitter account about you’re punctual abilities. Now what? What better way to spend the rest of your time with a puzzle game?

Torect is cpedia Mobile’s only game available for Android and is available for 99¢. Torect is a slide and fit puzzle game that was inspired by Tetris and Phit. The goal is simple, to slide the blocks into a rectangle. It offers 1000 levels to keep you busy for the rest of your life. I know what you’re thinking… 1000 levels? That’s it? This game is actually really challenging. You can easily spend 5-10+ minutes on a puzzle when you get to around level 10+. There have been points in my Torect campaign where I would have to turn my phone sideways just to look at the puzzle in a different angle, because I was stuck. And trust me you will get stuck, frustrated, and possibly even suicidal at times. But that’s OK; Torect has an auto save feature to remember just where you last gave up in a startling rage. There is also a level selector you can back peddle down to earlier stages so you can regain your lost pride.

The only truly frustrating things about the game is having to move the blocks around to make room, and when you accidentally move blocks when you’re trying to insert others into your rectangle.

There is not much else to this game other than a level selector. The developer even offers the solutions to the first 20 levels on their website. If you end up getting stuck past level 20, a fine scholar (with too much time on his hands) also posted the solutions for levels 1-637 on YouTube.

Pros

• Time burner
• Addictive
• Fun

Needs Improvement

• More space on board for block movements
• Make the edges less “sharp” on the blocks so you don’t accidentally push other blocks out of the way

Final verdict: Torect is a devilishly addictive game that I would suggest to all you masochistic puzzle nerds out there. It is definitely worth the price over the other free versions of the same game type available on the market.

Phone and version used: Played on a Sprint HTC Hero (1.5). Torect version 1.0.3

Note: This review was submitted by Christian Dahl as part of our app review contest.

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Two days ago, something crazy happened: after spiraling downward for almost a year, Palm’s stock finally started to climb thanks to a rumor that Lenovo was considering snatching the injured company up. We expected things to level off pretty quickly — and they did, at a growth of right around 20% with a going price of about $4.60 per share.

Today, even more fuel has been thrown on to the fire.

Early this morning, a Chinese economics/investing site threw another name into the mix of possible suitors: HTC. Given HTC’s many recent successes, that was bound to get the investors excited – and it did. Jump forward to right this second, and Palm’s sitting at right around $5.20, or a 33% increase over what they were at before the climb began.

They’re still nowhere near the $17.39 peak they were at earlier this year, but they’re inching closer and closer to the $6.14 mark they were at before they started warning people that their Q3 results weren’t going to be too hot.

What do you think: did the rumor mill light a long lasting fire beneath the butts of Palm investors, or is this just a temporary spike?

Palm’s Stock Ticker on Google Finance

While everybody was talking about the iPhone OS 4 event yesterday, Apple also quietly announced WebKit2, a major contribution to the open source WebKit project that forms the basis of Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers. One of the reasons that Google Chrome doesn’t crash very often is that Google uses a split process model. Every tab in Chrome runs in a different process and a crashing plugin or bug only takes down this tab and not the whole browser. While Google had to develop this code from the ground up for Chrome, Apple is now making this technology a core part of the WebKit2 framework.

Sponsor

Here is how Apple’s engineers Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig describe WebKit2:

WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.

What does this mean for users? First of all, Safari and every other application that uses WebKit, including the popular NetNewsWire RSS reader or the Konqueror browser for KDE, for example, will soon be able to rely on the same kind of crash protection that Google Chrome currently offers. Microsoft’s IE8 already features a similar crash-protection mechanism and as our own Sarah Perez noted earlier today, the latest beta version of Firefox (Lorentz) now also lets some processes (Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight) run in separate instances.

Getting Ready for Multi-Core Browsing

WebKit2 will also implement a number of APIs that will make applications more responsive. These will allow applications to render web content in the background without blocking other processes that the application wants to execute. As Stephen Shankland points out, this technique will also make it easier for developers (including Apple) to take advantage of multi-core chips.

For a more detailed look at the technical side of WebKit2, also have a look a this document from the WebKit2 team.

Discuss

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail’s vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say.

“In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts,” Krish Vitaldevara, Windows Live Hotmail lead program manager, blogged late yesterday. I missed the post because of Apple’s iPhone OS 4 launch (I blogged “Apple shows developers the money” and “Clash of the titans: Apple, Google battle for the mobile Web“). I spotted the announcement first at LiveSide about an hour ago.

Vitaldevara continues: “We decided to temporarily shut off the feature in order to shut down the spam. Of course, we know some of you like and use automatic vacation replies to let people know when you can’t respond to e-mail for a while, and we’ll turn this feature back on as soon as we’ve worked out the best way to prevent it from being misused by spammers.”

I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this kind of problem to surface. For years I’ve recommended against using out-of-office replies because they reveal to spambots valid email addresses. Two best practices for avoiding spam:

• Never use out-of-office replies
• Turn off automatic HTML rendering

I’m amazed that so few people make the connection between out-of-office replies and spam, considering how much of the crap is anonymously sent. Your vacation reply reveals that the email address is valid, and that can open a torrent of additional spam.

Automatically loading images is another sure way to validate an email address. Spammers typically include clear gifs — meaning you can’t see them — in HTML email. These images, also known as Web beacons, call back to a server, letting the spammer know the email address is valid. Outlook and most email applications or Web mail services turn off email image rendering by default. But, of course, people turn on the feature because the mail looks prettier.

Like many other people, my inbox collected porn spam during the late 1990s. Once I disabled automatic image rendering, the porn spam subsided over about six months. I rarely get this kind of spam anymore, and on the rare occasions I do images don’t load anyway. Hey, I’m married and a one-woman guy.

I applaud Microsoft for making the tough but smart decision about vacation replies. I would encourage the company to go further and help people to change their behavior. There are plenty of better ways to inform people when you’re away, such as status messages on Facebook, IM, LinkedIn, Twitter or Windows Live –heck, even location-based services like Foursquare. The only people who really need to know you’re out of the office or away from home are the people you know. Don’t tell the spammers.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Filed under: Truck, Work, Chevrolet, GM, GMC, By the Numbers, Diesel

General Motors has officially announced pricing for the 2011 Chevrolet Silverado HD and the 2011 GMC Sierra HD. Both trucks carry a base MSRP $27,965, though you’ll have to tack on an additional $995 destination charge. If you want the 397 horsepower, 765 lb-ft of torque Duramax diesel engine and unstoppable Allison transmission option, GM will politely as you for an additional $8,395. The good news is that despite the powerplant’s increase in power and fuel economy, the price has remained unchanged from the 2010 model.

For the first time ever, the “Professional Grade” model will be available with a Denali package. Priced at $45,865 including destination fees, the Sierra Denali HD will feature all of the luxury goodies and flashy trim of its less powerful brethren. Buyers who opt for the Denali package will only find the truck available with a four-wheel drive, four-door configuration.

Both the Chevrolet and GMC now feature a 20,000-pound towing capacity, which should be good enough to pull whatever your little black heart desires. Hit the jump for the press release.

[Source: General Motors]

Continue reading GM announces pricing on Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra HD models

GM announces pricing on Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra HD models originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The MLB.tv banner ads that brag, “NO BLACKOUTS!: Blackout and other restrictions apply” may be more accurate than we initially thought. Owen tells Consumerist that he was unable to watch a Cubs/Braves game, even though he was trying to watch well after the game was over, when blackouts should no longer apply.

He writes:

No one seems to have caught this story yet. Not even the 50+ tech blogs I subscribe to. Your article about Roku hinted at this issue, but didn’t cover it completely.

Opening day is an important time in the baseball season. Thousands of people logged in to try and watch their favorite teams and were faced with a message that they are living in a “blackout area.” I found this out because I received the same issue myself and spend almost 2 hours trying to fix it.

It was puzzling when I tried to watch a Cubs/Braves game that took place in Atlanta yesterday. I live in San Francisco, so I shouldn’t be blacked out of anything. Regardless, I was trying to watch the archived game after it had taken place, which should not be blacked out anywhere in the world.

If you check MLB’s support forum, there are more than a hundred comments of outraged customers facing the following issues:
1. Watching an archived game means getting a message that you are unable to because of blackout restrictions
2. If not blacked out, customers open a game and get a black, blank screen.
3. Calling customer service means (reportedly) getting no refund and being told to “keep trying.”
4. Checking the forum leads to a few comments from the moderator, drowned out by hundreds of replies from pissed off customers. The moderator suggestions do not fix the issue.’

Thus, thousands of customers are outraged that they spent $100 or more on a service that simply does not work.

Blackouts apply, to all games, home and away, in a given team’s market. Or any market in which their games might theoretically air. This is right in the service’s fine print. Being unable to access any games at all is not.