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Via Marcy Wheeler and Rachel Maddow, this video obtained by Wikileaks shows what the classified information repository Website claims is an “unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers” by a U.S. helicopter in Baghdad in 2007. “Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.” The military claimed it was targeting insurgents, and the U.S. personnel in the video do not seem to be deliberately targeting civilians. Gregg Carlstrom has a judicious and balanced response.

For nearly a decade now, we’ve been questioning the wisdom of punishing a criminal who used the internet as part of their crime, with a ban from internet access. With the internet becoming so integral to everyday activity, it almost seems impossible to ban them from getting on the internet at all. Does it mean they can’t use a smartphone (or even a featurephone)? Can they not use VoIP? It really makes very little sense. Thankfully, it seems like most of these bans get overturned. All the way back in 2002, we wrote about a court overturning such a ban, saying that it was an “unfair encroachment on his liberties.” In 2007, a similar ban was overturned. Earlier this year, another such ban was overturned as being a restriction on the guy’s free speech.

And yet, the courts seem to keep giving out these bans. So, yet again, we have a story of a 30 year computer ban being overturned. And again, the court found that such a ban seems to go way too far. In this case, it was deemed “substantively unreasonable” and “aggressively interferes with the goal of rehabilitation.”

So, at what point do judges stop giving out these kinds of bans in the first place?

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While Sprint webOS users get to play around with Sprint TV, webOS users on other networks aren’t blessed with the same televised goodness. A new free app, SPB TV, aims to change that, by bringing more than one hundred live and on-demand channels to webOS from more than seventeen countries.

Not only do you get all the aforementioned television on your phone, you also get it with an integrated program guide for most channels and picture-in-picture browsing. SPB TV even features quality scaling to adapt to the variable bandwidth of Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Check out the video above for an idea of how it all works.

By Denise J. Deveau, CRM Buyer

As the population ages, financial institutions and other service providers will have to learn to adapt their marketing approaches to appeal to a sector that has high disposable income and substantial spending power. In some cases, they will also have physical limitations that will impede online activities, including vision loss.

Besides the fact that an aging population brings with it a growing number of people with vision loss, the business and legal case for making Web content accessible to the visually impaired is becoming increasingly strong.

There are 3.3 million Americans over the age of 40 who are blind or have low-vision, according to the National Eye Institute. In the next decade, that number is expected to surpass 5 million. In addition, the American Disabilities Act now includes online access for the visually impaired within its accessibility parameters.

“The American Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, obviously before the commercial Internet really grew and definitely before the Web,” noted Paul W. Schroeder, vice president of programs and policy for the American Foundation for the Blind. “There have been extensive discussions around whether the accessibility requirements applied to the Web, including access to statements and to consumer level information,” he told CRM Buyer.

Visually impaired groups are not idle in their demand for accessibility. HSBC Card Services, for example, found itself on the line following a complaint from a blind credit card holder and subsequently announced that it would include a fully accessible Web site among enhancements to its policies and systems. Target, Priceline, Ramada, and AOL have all been under the gun at some point for having inaccessible Web sites.

To aid the accessibility cause, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for technology products. These state that Web sites, software products and electronic documents should be built to work with assistive technologies (AT).

“What organizations need to do is build navigation behind the scenes that will drive screen readers to different pages,” explained Peter Ganza, director of product marketing for Xenos Group. “Visually the site remains the same, but tagging will provide the screen reader with top level navigation, while pushing irrelevant information into the background.”

Financial institutions, retailers, government agencies, and other enterprise-level organizations have, for the most part, made significant progress in their accessibility efforts. The one sticking point that could become a major focus as visually impaired numbers grow is PDF files.

“When these forms are one-offs, you can tag them manually,” Ganza said. “But if you are looking at high volumes per month — such as banking or credit card statements — the economies of scale can be overwhelming.”

By way of example, assume that 1% of a financial institution’s 2.5 million customers have a visual impairment, he explained. “It would therefore have 25,000 users that require accessibility services, and would have to generate almost 1 million accessible documents a year — based on three statements per month per client. The costs of contracting third-party agencies to produce statements in large print or Braille format can be staggering.”

The banking industry has done a “pretty decent job” of improving Web access for managing accounts, Schroeder conceded, “but they are not as clear where they are in terms of statement availability. Those that do enable access to statements online use HTML or XML. Those that rely on PDFs — it’s safe to say it’s all fairly iffy, because they don’t have appropriate tags and other information to enable screen readers to read them.”

Software vendors, for their part, are doing what they can in terms of enabling tools, added Schroeder. “Adobe’s done most of the work that needs to be done with their toolset on the consumer side. What needs to happen is that content developers follow the requirements for document construction and tagging.”

Not all tagging is created equal, however, explained Adam Spencer, an accessibility specialist with Accessibil-IT.

“A site might be compliant for accessibility, but it doesn’t mean that the content is delivered in a usable fashion,” Spencer told CRM Buyer. “Don’t assume that if you run a tag wizard in Adobe, it’s automatically accessible. And it’s certainly not usable. If it’s not coded properly, you can end up with mind-numbing loops that continuously read links. Without giving context and understanding for different things like graphics or charts, a lot of information gets lost.”

Businesses should therefore be extra conscious of how they’re coding their sites for the visually impaired, he added. “Often, they forget to code it when they make a change or add content. I see a lot of that happening with forms where only certain parts are accessible. Essentially, you could be withholding information from a segment of users — and that can be a huge legal problem.”

The PDF/UA Working Group, for one, has been developing appropriate tagging requirements for businesses to follow, including the following:

• Read order – Information such as account numbers, overdue notices and charts can interfere with a reader’s ability to clearly state the contents in an order that is useful to the consumer.
• Language specification – Tags should tie to the screen reader to allow it to revert to the appropriate language.
• Alternate text – A PDF should be tagged to provide alternate text for links, logos and graphics that is useful to the user.
• Tables – Readers typically do not understand how to read and interpret boxes and charts. The right tagging will notify readers that information is presented in rows and columns so it can be properly delivered.

Although PDF is getting its due share of attention, there are still issues that have to be addressed, Ganza added. “Of the three types of PDF documents — unstructured, structured, and tagged — only tagged PDF files are optimized for accessibility. However, few authors are currently creating tagged PDF files, either because this requires additional effort or because of lack of awareness.”

Despite the problems, “there is no reason a site can’t be accessible,” said Spencer. “Yes, it’s an extra step, but a conscious one that needs to be made. In the grand scheme of things, the cost to roll it out is significant, but not something that will break the bank for any large organization. With millions of people experiencing vision loss, that’s a pretty hefty segment of the population to miss.”

Originally published on CRM Buyer

© 2010 BetaNews.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Normal routines gradually returned Monday to the border city of Mexicali, Mexico, hit hard Easter Sunday by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake felt as far away as Los Angeles and Phoenix, Mexican authorities said.

“Little by little, things are coming back to normal,” said Alejandro Contreras, a spokesman for the state government in Mexicali, a sprawling municipality of almost 1 million situated about 125 miles east of San Diego. “People are nervous, of course, but we are calling for calm and working to restore services.”

The quake left two dead and about 230 injured, none seriously, said Jorge Sanchez Rendon, another government spokesman. Most of the injured had scratches and bruises, he said.

The northbound border into Calexico, Calif., from Mexicali, Mexico,
remained closed to automobile traffic Monday morning because of concerns about damage to the
U.S. federal building, but people were allowed to walk through checkpoints into the U.S. as aftershocks rattled the region.

Authorities reported a total of 45 collapsed or partially collapsed buildings in Baja California.

Power and water supply was being restored, authorities said, though much of the city seemed without power early Monday and many traffic lights were not functioning. Authorities said the damaged water supply system was improving, but that pressure was low.

Much of the visible damage downtown was from broken glass. People walked on the streets and cars circulated cautiously.
Officials said electric power had been restored by mid-morning to 75% of users in Mexicali. Half a dozen electrical sub-stations were being evaluated for damage, authorities said.

Thousands of people slept outside Sunday night as aftershocks shook the city, keeping nerves frayed. Authorities were setting up temporary shelters, especially in rural areas where the quake ruptured irrigation canals and led to extensive flooding.

Mexicali is a major farming center, and irrigation is essential to the industry.

“There is a bit of a psychosis, people are scared, especially with all the aftershocks,” Contreras said. “We’re urging everyone not to panic, to know that help is being provided.”

Authorities stressed that reservoirs were safe and amply supplied and there was no danger that Mexicali or the coastal city of Tijuana would run out of water. A major aqueduct was being evaluated for damage but that should not affect water supply, officials said.

Some major roads, including the Mexicali-Tijuana highway, suffered damage but were still functioning, officials said. Officials were examining roads statewide.

Hundreds of motorists and vacationers returning home after Easter break were stranded between Mexicali and Tecate to the west and San Felipe to the south after running out of gasoline. Gas pumps were crippled by the lack of electricity.

Four shelters were set up in Mexicali for people whose homes were destroyed or who were afraid to sleep inside their homes. Thousands of people slept outside Sunday night as dozens of aftershocks continued to shake. University classes scheduled to resume Monday were suspended.

Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan said patients from Mexicali’s damaged hospital were being treated in tents while crews of inspectors were moving through the city to survey damage.

“Little by little the calm is returning,” Osuna said.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon planned to visit the city Monday afternoon to review the damage personally. Osuna said he planned to ask the president to declare the city a disaster area, thus making it eligible for federal aid.

Although cars were prohibited from crossing north from Mexicali into Calexico, Calif., people walked over the border.

Meantime, a steady stream of cars drove south into Mexicali as residents attempted to check on their loved ones. Phones in Mexico were not working.

In Calexico, downtown merchants could be seen sweeping broken glass and fallen plaster away from their storefronts and covering walkways. Many buildings were red-tagged until officials could inspect them further.

Calexico police patrolled the downtown area overnight to watch for looting, but none occurred.

An aftershock hit about 4:12 a.m., causing car alarms to go off all over town, and the cacophony continued for hours.

Traffic was slow Monday morning along westbound Interstate 8 in El
Centro as Caltrans checked for problems on the freeway that may have
been caused by the earthquake.

— Tony Perry in Mexicali, Mexico, Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City and Patrick J. McDonnell in Los Angeles

Photo: Much of the nearly completed four-story parking garage at the Mexicali Civic Center lies in ruins after being shaken apart in the earthquake. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times



More photos: Baja California earthquake



Find the latest L.A. Now earthquake coverage here, and a map of the Baja California earthquake here.

In the quest to secure the raw materials that are required to build next generation automobile batteries and motors, Japan seems to have grasped the importance of locking down supplies now.

A report in the Japanese Nikkei newspaper (subs req’d) says that Japan will loan tens of billions of yen to Bolivia this summer to help them build modern power plants and put solar panels on a hospital. In exchange, Japan will get guaranteed access to Bolivia’s vast supplies of lithium. Sometimes the difference between “bribery” and “help” can be so blurry.

(more…)

SPB Software has announced their first release for Palm’s new platform. SPB TV for webOS brings a mobile optimized IPTV viewer designed for tuning into publicly available digital television channels from all over the world.

SPB TV gives mobile users easy access to over a hundred of international TV channels and the application includes a TV browser with quick channel previews, an instantly accessible TV guide for all offered channels, quick channel switching, adaptive bandwidth control and more.

SPB TV for webOS is compatible with Palm Pre and Palm Pre Plus devices with firmware version 1.4 and above. Pixi support is planned for an upcoming release. The application can be downloaded from Palm’s on-device AppCatalog for free, while the application is ad-supported.

Hey Zune owners, head up—the Zune 4.5 update has just gone live, and it’s ready for you to suck down from Microsoft. As a refresher, here’s what you have to look forward to:

• Smart DJ integration on Zune HD
• Picks on Zune HD (personalized recommendations based on your listening habits)
• Browse the Zune Marketplace on TV when you dock your connected Zune
• Expanded video codec support, reducing need for transcoding

Of course, there are likely a bunch of bug fixes and all that to make things feel mo’ better. In addition to all that, the new 64GB Zune HD will be available in a week!

Tags:

You know what I hate? When my music player is smarter than I am. Sometimes I don’t want my phone to flip cover art, anticipate my musical moods, or group my podcasts by (often incorrect) tags. Sometimes I just want it to play music.

If your music collection is very organized, tagged correctly and completely, and generally consists of well-known artists, there are better music players out there for you. For those of us with more eclectic tastes, and poor organizational skills, there exists MortPlayer. MortPlayer is a free music player that organizes and plays music based on the folder location, not the metadata tags. This can be a godsend for anyone who listens to random podcasts or that mp3 your friend sent you from that great new band his neighbor’s kid is in.

MortPlayer comes in two flavors, and each is a separate download. There is a MortPlayer for music and a MortPlayer for audio books. Both exhibit a basic, no frills layout with all the normal controls one would expect from any music player. MortPlayer for music includes some pretty generic options for shuffling and repeating various files.

MortPlayer for audio books, however, offers some unique features. It auto-saves and auto-restores your position for each individual track, as well as allowing for manual bookmarks in each track, both of which make listening to audio books or long podcasts much easier. This means that it’s possible to stop in the middle of a podcast, listen to a little music, then pick up right where you left off. MortPlayer also offers a set of widgets in still another download that give you basic music controls right on the android desktop.

Pros

• Offers an enjoyable audio book or podcast experience
• Greatly simplified from Windows Mobile versions
• The price is right

Cons

• Music player is boring and offers few unique benefits
• Why do I have to download 3 different apps to get all features???

Special Notes: MortPlayer is still in beta, so expect the occasional bug.

Final Verdict: If you listen to a ton of audio books and long podcasts, or if your metadata tags are in disarray, definitely give MortPlayer a try. Otherwise, there are better options out there.

Note: This review was submitted by Adam Littell as part of our app review contest.

Related Posts

• Gigbox: Find gigs based on your location
• Aldiko: A Sleek & Customizable eBook Reader for Android
• Calorie Counter: Just how bad is that taco?
• Digg: First Android app provides easy access to content, but leaves out too many features
• JuiceDefender: Save power and extend battery life

Maybe Calgary’s residents didn’t like being eclipsed by the Olympics, or maybe there’s just an awfully high number of bored crooks living there. Either way, the city has now reported 11 cases of food tampering, mostly involving shards of metal inserted into food items, in grocery stores across the city since January.

One of the first ones was alleged to have been the work of an angry shoplifter who had been banned from a supermarket, but police think copycat perps are behind the other cases. They say they’re going to stop holding as many news conferences, and will take a lower-profile approach to future incidents in order to avoid giving anyone any ideas.

You can watch Calgary’s police Chief Rick Hanson hold a short press conference–probably his last one on the matter–on the CBC website.

“Food tampering has Calgary shoppers wary” [CBC]
“Mom who shoplifted at supermarket charged with food tampering” [Vancouver Sun]
“Food vandals attention-craving misfits: criminologist” [CNews]

In an op-ed column for the New York Times today, economist Paul Krugman argues that financial reform must be made “fool-resistant” by providing it with less reliance on regulators. In particular, he worries the systemic risk council could be too lax in creating strict enough rules to govern banks. Instead, he thinks the legislation should be more aggressive to create more specific, immutable rules.

Krugman begins by explaining that one of the major reasons for the financial crisis was too much leverage building up in the shadow banking system. He then writes:

The Dodd bill tries to fill this gaping hole in the system by letting federal regulators impose “strict rules for capital, leverage, liquidity, risk management and other requirements as companies grow in size and complexity.” It also gives regulators the power to seize troubled financial firms — and it requires that large, complex firms submit “funeral plans” that make it relatively easy to shut them down.

That’s all good. In effect, it gives shadow banking something like the regulatory regime we already have for conventional banking.

But what will actually be in those “strict rules” for capital, liquidity, and so on? The bill doesn’t say. Instead, everything is left at the discretion of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a sort of interagency task force including the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury secretary, the comptroller of the currency and the heads of five other federal agencies.

He worries that the council simply won’t do the trick. He bases this on the fact that those who would have been on the council in 2005, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Secretary of Treasury John Snow and Comptroller of Currency John Dugan wouldn’t have changed a thing. It’s plausible that he’s right.

So why have a council of regulators responsible for these tasks? Because that’s what regulators are for. Think about the FDA. The “Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990” had some specific requirements in place, but also:

Authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to: (1) require certain information to be highlighted; (2) require additional nutrients to be included in the labeling; or (3) exempt nutrients from the labeling requirement.

What happens if a new medical study provides overwhelming evidence that some common mineral is highly beneficial to health? The regulator has discretionary power to highlight that nutrient on food labels. And the FDA is supposed to be a subject matter expert when it comes to nutrition, so its regulators would be able to use this authority properly.

Congress is the alternative. Krugman wants the House and Senate to legislate more details of financial reform, such as capital and liquidity requirements. This could be problematic for two reasons.

First, regulators have far more flexibility than Congress. Legislation takes time; politics can be difficult. Regulators, on the other hand, can change rules very quickly. In a sector as fast-paced as finance, speed is an important benefit.

Second, regulators understand their industry better than Congress does. If you had an economics question, who would you ask: the Senate Banking Committee or the proposed Financial Stability Oversight Council? I’d rather rely on the latter group, even if it’s imperfect. So when it comes to implementing the specifics of financial reform, I would trust a group of experts to get them right, not a group of politicians.

Of course, Krugman’s particular example does have some merit. It’s definitely possible that the specific group of regulators who would have sat on the Council in 2005 would not have acted. Indeed, they clearly didn’t do so on an individual basis, or we wouldn’t have had as deep a financial crisis on our hands a few years later.

But these regulators also didn’t have the benefit of a systemic risk council in place. Perhaps if they did, the input of other experts would have helped to lead them all to a different conclusion about the state of the financial system. While it’s tempting to believe that regulators would be political partisans blind to any and all logic, that’s a pretty cynical view. And there’s little reason to believe that Congress is any better.

The largest nonprofit health maintenance organization (HMO) in the country is getting into the solar game.  Kaiser Permanente has announced plans to install 15 MW of solar PV arrays on their buildings throughout California, saying “what’s good for the environment is good for our health.”

Hospitals, offices and other buildings will be outfitted with the arrays by next summer by solar company Recurrent Energy.  Recurrent will own and operate the systems with Kaiser agreeing to purchase the power over 20 years.  The solar energy generated by the installations will equal 10 percent of Kaiser’s energy usage at those facilities, getting them closer to their goal of having 25 percent of their energy come from renewable sources by 2020.

Over the course of the 20-year agreement, Kaiser will pay about the same amount for the solar energy as they would for power from the grid, but if energy prices go up, the company could save quite a bit of money during that time, while cutting emissions in the process.

via Green Inc.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It was perhaps one of the most drawn-out, painful launches in Intel’s long history: the introduction last February of Tukwila, the latest generation of its Itanium 64-bit processor architecture. Not everyone in the Itanium Solutions Alliance hung on for the five-year ride, with Unisys having been its most prominent drop-out last year, citing competitor HP’s dominance in the field. Microsoft held on for the entire stretch; but last week, the company announced it would not lend its support to whatever the generation after Tukwila might become.

In a blog post last Friday, Windows Server Senior Technical Product Manager Dan Reger said that his company will continue to support existing Itanium architecture, including Tukwila, for another eight years. But Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of the operating system to support IA-64.

After a delay of officially two years, and unofficially longer, the dual- and quad-core 65 nm Itanium 9300 series was launched last February 8 to somewhat muted fanfare. The newest Itaniums ended up following, not leading, many of Intel’s latest process innovations, with the company’s 32 nm Xeon 5600 series, including a six-core model, premiering just last month. Itanium can no longer claim power savings as a selling factor, with the new Xeons also boasting 130W TDP at clock speeds superior to the new Itaniums’.

Five years ago, the drive toward industry-wide adoption of IA-64 architecture was started by the Itanium Solutions Alliance, steered somewhat by Intel (of course) as well as HP, the architecture’s most prominent vendor. But Microsoft was also a very vocal charter member — at the time, seen as more influential than charter member Red Hat. The reason was that, from 2001 up until 2005, the factor keeping enterprises from investing in Itanium was the lack of a clear migration path. Windows compatibility was perceived as the substance of a bridge.

Here’s how I covered the Itanium Solutions Alliance in a January 2006 article for Tom’s Hardware:

The Alliance’s efforts go to the heart of what had been characterized as Itanium’s chief deficiency: not its architecture, which after a rough start, actually has proven itself very capable. It is an altogether different platform, not because it’s truly 64-bit, but because it would have its developers embrace a concept called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Set (EPIC). It is the industry’s first CISC-based multithreading architecture, based on a simple concept to explain but a difficult one to implement: the idea that when processes fork and parallelism begins, it’s because the code of the program tells it to. It’s this concept which most starkly distinguishes Itanium from x86 (x64) architecture, which actually has no parallelism principles of its own. The ability of multithreaded x86 processors to fork processes into separate cores is based mainly on their ability to ascertain for themselves when such forking is permissible. One of Intel’s most ambitious tests of this capability has been hyperthreading, which is a parallelism technique for single-core processors. But HT is an experiment that will probably come to an end as dual-core and multicore processors become mainstream. As they do, they will undoubtedly bring Intel’s version of 64-bit x86 architecture (EM64T) as well as AMD’s (AMD64) into the mainstream even in high-performance categories.

I was wrong about one thing: Hyperthreading does live on in Intel’s current Core microarchitecture. Nevertheless, the fork in the road we saw in early 2006 has only grown wider today, and three major influences have changed the scenario for Itanium over that period:

• Linux is finding a comfortable home among high-end servers, because it’s lightweight and has lower up-front costs (assuming businesses don’t buy premium support licenses), and Intel is embracing Linux more and more.
• The hyperbolic growth in virtualization means that enterprises don’t have to run Windows Server just to enable their clients to run Windows 7. Exchange, Office Communications Server, and SharePoint remain important, but any more, Windows Server exists to support them rather than the other way around.
• Heterogeneity in server design means businesses that require high-performance computing servers can now purchase Itanium in more limited quantity, leaving Windows Server to handle high-availability segments of the network.

In some ways, many of the factors standing in the way of the Itanium Solutions Alliance’s goals five years ago, have actually been removed through the natural course of the industry’s evolution. But that evolutionary course has not exactly favored Microsoft. So it’s noteworthy that, in announcing its “transition” away from Itanium support last Friday, Microsoft’s Reger (or at least, the blog post from Reger, whose opening had one tone and his closing another) took a parting shot at Itanium, aiming squarely at what the Alliance had touted as one of the architecture’s key features: scalability.

“The natural evolution of the x86 64-bit (x64) architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers which deliver the scalability and reliability needed for today’s ‘mission-critical’ workloads,” Reger wrote. “Just this week, both Intel and AMD have released new high core-count processors, and servers with 8 or more x64 processors have now been announced by a full dozen server manufacturers. Such servers contain 64 to 96 processor cores, with more on the horizon. Windows Server 2008 R2 was designed to support the business-critical capabilities these processors and servers make available. It supports up to 256 logical processors (cores or hyper-threading units), so it’s ready for the ever-increasing number of cores.”

Or to put it another way, six is greater than four. Of course, Reger’s comment (perhaps intentionally) ignores one important element: After Itanium finally included the QuickConnect memory bus (the equivalent of AMD’s DirectConnect architecture, developed years earlier), and with Itanium’s brand of parallelism being implicit (built into the code) rather than explicitly stated as with x64, three dual-core IA-64 processors should bear little performance difference from one six-core processor.

In a May 2005 interview, HP’s representative to the Alliance, Stephen Howard, told me IA-64 architecture was noteworthy for having “very high-RAS features: reliability, availability, scalability. Those hooks are built into the chip architecture itself, and the operating systems can make use of those features, and the individual companies and software vendors can build on the most highly reliable system. So you get up into the mainframe replacement and high-end RISC replacement classes of servers, and anywhere that this kind of equipment is used is going to be an ideal spot for Itanium.”

At present, Microsoft remains a member of the Alliance, and may conceivably continue to do so until the next edition of Windows Server, perhaps in two years’ time. But one of the Alliance’s goals, Howard told me five years ago, was to create a single point of contact for customers wanting to purchase Itanium hardware and software all in one stop. That isn’t exactly what happened, but perhaps Intel’s continued embrace of Linux, along with Red Hat’s continued membership in the Alliance, could actually promote that goal in Microsoft’s absence.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Jesse Benton

Just got the word that Dr. Paul will be on MSNBC with Dylan Ratigan at 4:05 pm ET today. They will be discussing how to stand up to the establishment.

Update:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZLobTqlhes

The day is approaching fast when grad-students-to-be need to be making decisions about where to choose. Probably undergrads, too, although I confess that I have no real idea what the calendar for that looks like.

So, good luck with all that decision-making! Here are links to our previous posts about the topic.

• Unsolicited Advice: Choosing a Grad School
• On Choosing a Grad School: A Dialogue
• Unsolicited Advice: Choosing an Undergraduate School

Not too much to add to the discussion there, but here’s an opportunity to chat about the process. My own strong feeling is that how successful you are in school (grad or undergrad) is much more up to you than up to the institution. Most places have more good opportunities than anyone can hope to take advantage of in a limited period of time. Take the initiative, don’t wait for good things to come to you, and have fun!

Looking for a bit of confidence when you go out into the world? Dressing up like Mega Man will either instill you with that confidence or make you look like a child. Either way, pretty sweet hoodie! [DeviantArt via FashionablyGeek] More »

The U.S. Federal Reserve on Monday said its Board of Governors met to discuss the interest rate it charges banks on emergency loans, but the Fed made no announcement of a discount-rate increase.

The Fed said on its Web site that Chairman Ben Bernanke and governors Kevin Warsh, Elizabeth Duke and Daniel Tarullo had met at 11:15am EDT to review the discount rate.

When the Fed at the end of last week said its board would discuss the discount rate at the regular meeting, some analysts speculated that an increase would be announced Monday. But the meeting likely wasn’t indicative of that, as the Fed holds many routine meetings to formally review the discount rate.

When the Fed last raised the discount rate, by a quarter-point to 0.75% on Feb. 18, it had prepared financial markets for what was coming. That hasn’t happened this time.

In a prepared speech, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Feb. 10 the central bank could soon charge more for backstop loans made directly to banks. Then on Feb. 17, a day before the rate increase was announced, the Fed released the minutes of the Jan. 26-27 meeting of its policy-setting body, which revealed that officials had mulled raising the discount rate.

To be sure, the Fed may yet raise the discount rate to bring the spread with the more broadly important federal-funds rate–or the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans–to a pre-crisis level. But it will have plenty of opportunities to signal any discount-rate moves to markets beforehand, including several this week.

Tuesday, the minutes of the March 16 Federal Open Market Committee meeting will be released, after the usual three-week lag. Also, Bernanke is scheduled to speak in Dallas on Wednesday and in Washington a day later.

But even if the Fed does increase the discount rate in the near future, markets should be cautious about reading too much into it. When the Fed raised the discount rate Feb. 18, it stressed the move was just an unwinding of its emergency lending facilities and not a step toward a broader tightening of credit.

by Todd Woody

Photo via .hello foto of FlickrIn my last
Green State column, I wrote about Agriculture 2.0. The conference, held in
Silicon Valley recently, brought together venture capitalists and
sustainable ag startups in an effort to jump start a market for the regional
distribution of fresh food.

This week I take a closer look at some of the companies that
tried to catch the ear and checkbooks of the high-profile investors who packed
that confab at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto.

One of the more intriguing ideas came from startups thinking
outside the agribusiness box by developing urban farms in a box. Literally.

Take AeroFarms. The
New York company builds aeroponic farms that fit inside containers—soil and sun not required. The containers, which can be
stacked on top of each other in warehouses and old buildings, have the potential to transform blocks of abandoned structures in places like Detroit or Newark
into agri-lofts tended by urban farmers.

“This puts buildings back into play with a technology that
would do something productive and employ people,” Ed Harwood, AeroFarms’
founder and chief executive, told prospective investors at the conference.

Here’s how it works: Leafy greens—say, arugula or lettuce—are planted in a cloth bed and irrigated with a nutrient-infused mist that is
applied directly to the plants. Light is provided by LED lamps, which are more
energy efficient than conventional lighting and can be placed closer to the
beds. The LED lamps also provide pest control, says Harwood, because they can be set to emit certain wavelengths that disrupt insects’
breeding.

(A video of AeroFarms vertical farming system can be found here.)

Harwood said AeroFarms is about to sign its first order—a deal
worth between $1.5 million and $2 million. The startup has raised $500,000 from the
investors 21 Ventures and the Quercus Trust.

Verdant Earth
Technologies, meanwhile, wants to recycle all those shipping containers currently used
by industrial agricultural to ship produce from continent to continent and turn them into seedbeds for a local food production system.

Racks of vegetables or herbs would be stacked inside the shipping
containers. Josh Hottenstein, co-founder and chief executive of the Tucson,
Ariz., startup, says one standard container can grow the equivalent of
an acre’s worth of crops.

“We control the humidity ratio inside the container, the
temperature, the air flow, the wavelength of the light, and alter how the plants
grow,” he told investors at the conference. “We’re capable of increasing the
uniformity of the crop when it comes out and the plants are ready for market.”

A centralized system can control multiple containers.

“The only labor involved is seed and harvest,” said
Hottenstein, whose company, which was spun out of the University of Arizona, is
looking to raise a relatively paltry $750,000 to get its product to market.

San Francisco’s Cityscape
Farms stressed its thrift as well, with chief executive Mike Yohay making a
pitch for $200,000 to build Cityscape’s first two rooftop farms. (That’s on top of
$300,000 that Yohay says the U.S. Department of Agriculture has already granted the
company.)

“We see a lot of under-utilized space in the urban
landscape, such as vacant lots and rooftops,” said Yohay. “Our vision is to
transform cities into net food producers.”

To do that, Cityscape is developing an aquaponics system that
combines aquaculture and hydroponics. Tilapia are raised in fish tanks and the
filtered fish waste provides the fertilizer for growing organic crops in
greenhouses. The water is then cleaned and recycled back into the fish tanks to
complete the loop.

“Over the next two years the plan is to roll out two
quarter-acre greenhouse farms to grow high-value crops—lettuces, herbs,
tomatoes and tilapia, strawberries,” said Yohay. “Our target market includes
100 restaurants and 50 supermarkets committed to local sourcing.”

Cityscape’s business model is to earn revenues from the
crops it grows in the Bay Area as well as from the fees it will charge to franchise rooftop
systems and provide technical support.

Now’s the part of this column where we offer a reality check.
These companies are, to varying degrees, in the early stages of development.
Whether their technology will work as anticipated and whether a market will materialize
remains to be seen. And most importantly, only time will tell if these
technologies can be scaled up to provide a credible challenge to industrial ag.

Courtesy of Cityscape Farms

There are plenty of hurdles to overcome. Cityscape, for instance, faces
a potential bureaucratic nightmare in getting permission to build fish farms
and greenhouses on urban rooftops.  (“It
keeps me up at night,” Yohay said. “The building codes have not kept up with
urban agriculture.”)

And there’s no guarantee that food grown locally will be
consumed locally. (Though that’s a good bet in places like the Bay Area, with
its scores of farmers markets. I can’t imagine Cityscape would have trouble
selling its produce in my home base of Berkeley, with its three organic farmers
markets a week.)

That said, what’s striking is the conceptual breakthrough
the startups represent. These entrepreneurs are not hippies, but they carry a
subversive message when it comes to food production—one that, judging by the interest ofsome of
Silicon Valley’s most prominent VC firms, is resonating with investors.

In closing his pitch, Yohay appealed to the sleek-suited
crowd’s desire to do good by doing well.

“This is about a lot more than earning a return on your
investment,” he said. “It’s about co-creating a model of food production that
really reverses the historical damage agriculture has done to our planet. This
is about feeding our increasing urban population nutritious, accessible food
and connecting them to the source of that food like never before.”

Related Links:

The secret mall gardens of Cleveland

Garden Girl TV: Healthy soil equals healthy plants and people

Garden Girl TV: Raised beds in the city

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Third-party mobile browser Skyfire is regarded by many to be the best way to consume the Web on the go. With its support for all of the major browser plug-ins, and full server-side rendering, it can provide access to more sites than any other mobile browser, and do it quickly.

It was officially released a little less than one year ago on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60, and has seen one major update since that time. It has not, however, managed to be released on any new platforms, there has been a very early version for BlackBerry, but that has not progressed to the release stages.

Last February, Skyfire acquired kolbysoft, the developers of the Steel browser for Android, a browser which borrowed heavily from Opera and Safari.

At the time of the acquisition, Skyfire’s Jeff Guleck said, “Users of the existing version of the Steel browser will still be able to use the current version, but will be offered upgrades to Skyfire Android edition once it is released. We can’t share any timing or more details at this time, but I promise you’ll like it.”

The Skyfire team began admitting testers to the Alpha of the new Android browser last week, and unlike Skyfire for S60 and Windows Mobile, the Android version will reportedly be Webkit-based, and do the page rendering in-device instead of in the cloud. It is unknown how the browser will differ from Steel if this is the case.

The Skyfire team said the response to the alpha program was so overwhelming last week that they had to immediately stop taking email requests from interested parties. Further information about the program has not been supplied.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

For those who still care, right now, champion golfer Tiger Woods — who arrived to the Masters in Augusta, Georgia on Sunday — is taking reporters questions in his first public press conference since the sex scandal and suspicious car crash that rocked his career last winter.

(Yawn…..)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ever since he ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree in the early hours of Nov. 27 — that infamous car accident that sparked incredible revelations of rampant affairs — Woods has kept public comments to a minimum.