Court reaffirms: Sex much worse than violence - Sex News, Sex Talk - Salon.com

Court reaffirms: Sex much worse than violence - Sex News, Sex Talk - Salon.com: Developmental psychologist James W. Prescott, formally of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, argues that there is a "preference for sexual violence over sexual pleasure in the United States." He says, "This is reflected in our acceptance of sexually explicit films that involve violence and rape, and our rejection of sexually explicit films for pleasure only (pornography)," he says. "Apparently, sex with pleasure is immoral and unacceptable, but sex with violence and pain is moral and acceptable."

'Upgrade' to a Nook, get 30 free e-books

'Upgrade' to a Nook, get 30 free e-books: Barnes & Noble is allowing anyone who currently owns an e-reader to simply show the device and buy a Nook to replace it to receive the free titles.

Diet Sodas May Contribute to Weight Gain and Diabetes Risk, Data Suggest - - TIME Healthland

Diet Sodas May Contribute to Weight Gain and Diabetes Risk, Data Suggest - - TIME Healthland: More bad news, diet soda drinkers: data presented recently at the American Diabetes Association's (ADA) Scientific Sessions suggest that diet drinks may actually contribute to weight gain and that the artificial sweeteners in them could potentially contribute Type 2 diabetes.

Books | Comics: Neal Adams overview illustrates his lasting impact | Seattle Times Newspaper

Books | Comics: Neal Adams overview illustrates his lasting impact | Seattle Times Newspaper: But those artists, while terrific, were basically cartoonists with excellent individual styles. Adams was something altogether different. He came from advertising, and was a master of the "photorealism" school. His characters had weight and texture. Instead of "spotting blacks" where convenient, his people and objects threw shadows as you'd see in real life. And all his superheroes were anatomically accurate, bursting with the kind of power you see in professional weightlifters.

Hands on with the HP TouchPad | Tablets | Macworld

Hands on with the HP TouchPad | Tablets | Macworld: I spent half an hour in a meeting, using HP’s new TouchPad tablet, before someone realized I wasn’t using an iPad. That says a lot about this product—due to be released Friday—and not just in superficial ways.

Symantec: Apple iOS offers ‘full protection,’ Google Android ‘little protection’ vs. malware attacks

Symantec: Apple iOS offers ‘full protection,’ Google Android ‘little protection’ vs. malware attacks: iOS, the mobile operating system that powers Apple's popular iPhone and iPad devices, offers better security than Android...

Mac 911: Last call for AppleWorks users

Mac 911: Last call for AppleWorks users: If you're still using AppleWorks (or know someone who is), it's time for an intervention. Here's how to convert your files to a more forward-looking form.

Pope Benedict uses his Apple iPad 2 for first tweet to launch new Vatican website (with video) – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Pope Benedict uses his Apple iPad 2 for first tweet to launch new Vatican website (with video) – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: In a new video, Pope Benedict XVI uses his Apple iPad 2 to visit a new Vatican website. To launch the Vatican’s new news portal, news.va, Pope Benedict XVI sent his first tweet, “Dear Friends, I just launched News.va Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI.”

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon": An American summer-movie masterwork

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon": An American summer-movie masterwork: "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is too much in every direction -- too much action, too much plot, too much noise, too much destruction -- which is exactly what makes it the Wagnerian fulfillment of the American summer-movie tradition. It's a great and terrible film, in identical proportions and in all possible meanings of those words. It's got battling giant robots and hidden secrets of the American and Soviet space programs and feeble domestic comedy and random scenery-chewing shtick from an A-list supporting cast and an extreme close-up of a hot chick's bikini-clad bottom as she climbs the stairs. In 3-D! It's so massively and excessively vulgar that it doesn't just flirt with self-parody, but chews it up and spits it out, and I'm not even sure that's unintentional. In food terms, "Dark of the Moon" is like going to TGI Friday's and ordering everything on the menu and then going to Krispy Kreme and doing it again. It's not worth doing, it'll definitely make you sick and a lot of it will taste bad, but as a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

The iPad Could Revolutionize the Comic Book Biz—or Destroy It | Magazine

The iPad Could Revolutionize the Comic Book Biz—or Destroy It | Magazine: American comic book fans live for Wednesdays. That’s the day the new issues arrive. Every major American comic book publisher uses a single distributor, Diamond, to ship boxes of their latest releases to roughly 2,200 comics retail stores across the country. The shop owners—or their minions—put that week’s crop of Batman or X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the shelves, and then the fans arrive. A lot of them go to the same store every week, where they have a “pull list” on file, books they’ve asked to be set aside so they’ll never miss a single pulse-pounding issue. It’s a tradition.

To be more specific, it’s a dying tradition. The Wednesday crowd is the old-school audience, collectors who are willing to shell out $3 or $4 for a stapled-together pamphlet that they’ll put in a plastic bag with acid-free cardboard and store in a long white box. Those customers have been trickling away for years.

None of this would matter much at the mega-corporate level if comics were just a few hundred thousand readers and a few thousand retail stores. But North American comics have effectively become the R&D department for a whole lot of higher-stakes media, from movies and television shows to videogames and Broadway musicals. Without periodical comic books, there’s no The Walking Dead, no Thor, no The Dark Knight Rises, no Wonder Woman T-shirts or Spider-Man lunch boxes or Smallville soundtracks. The February issue of Green Lantern sold a mere 70,000 or so copies—but the franchise has also spawned a $150 million movie.

From app to meetup: A new kind of running route

From app to meetup: A new kind of running route: RunKeeper is taking a note from these other communities, but it's expanding the boundaries into the real world. The company recently launched meetups, which allow users to identify other RunKeeper runners in their communities and gather for group runs.

Arts & Letters Daily (28 Jun 2011)

Arts & Letters Daily (28 Jun 2011): Eco-ignorance. Up to 95 percent of organisms in the soil are unknown to science, and by the end of the century, one-quarter of them will wriggle off this mortal coil into oblivion... more

60GHz tech promises wireless docking, USB, HDMI | Deep Tech - CNET News

60GHz tech promises wireless docking, USB, HDMI | Deep Tech - CNET News: The technology, which uses the 60GHz band of radio spectrum and is designed to transfer as much as 7 gigabits of data per second, matches what many wired connections provide, either inside a computer chassis or through the profusion of ports that perforate laptop sides.

Rootkit Infection Requires Windows Reinstall, Says Microsoft | PCWorld

Rootkit Infection Requires Windows Reinstall, Says Microsoft | PCWorld: Malware like Popureb overwrites the hard drive's master boot record (MBR), the first sector -- sector 0 -- where code is stored to bootstrap the operating system after the computer's BIOS does its start-up checks. Because it hides on the MBR, the rootkit is effectively invisible to both the operating system and security software.

VIDEO Asteroid 2011 MD Narrowly Misses Earth - Irish Weather Online

VIDEO Asteroid 2011 MD Narrowly Misses Earth - Irish Weather Online: One of the earth’s closest encounters with an asteroid in recent years took place Monday afternoon.  But as NASA indicated in the days ahead of the ‘cosmic close call’, the encounter was so close that Earth’s gravity sharply altered the asteroid’s trajectory and prevented the space rock from impacting the planet.

2011MD, a newly discovered asteroid passed within 12,000 kilometres (7,500 miles) of Earth.   The asteroid was only sighted for the first time last Wednesday by a robotic telescope in New Mexico, USA. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts, USA, put out an alert Thursday.

Roseburg City Council gets iPads | The News-Review - NRtoday.com

Roseburg City Council gets iPads | The News-Review - NRtoday.com: Roseburg city councilors have a new tool. Instead of flipping through 100-page packets at council meetings, they can pull out their iPads.

“We were trying to get away from the mail packets and sending out all that paper,” Councilor Tom Ryan said. “It will probably save money in the long run.”

After two councilors, Mike Baker and Ken Averett, recently tested the Apple tablet computers for two months and came back with glowing reviews, the city spent about $400 each to outfit seven councilors and the mayor with iPads, City Manager Eric Swanson said.

Four short links: 27 June 2011

Four short links: 27 June 2011: Nonetheless, Facebook has become the new millennium's AOL: keywords, grandparents, and a zealous devotion to advertising. At least Facebook doesn't send me #&#^%*ing CDs.

Self-propelled gut camera swims in your colon

Self-propelled gut camera swims in your colon: The Mermaid is a remote-controlled, self-propelled camera that can swim inside your guts to help doctors check for abnormalities.

NATO investigating possible data breach

NATO investigating possible data breach: Incident with NATO's e-Bookstore occurs after the global organization clashed publicly with online group Anonymous over the rising threat of "hacktivism."

The Beer Archaeologist | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

The Beer Archaeologist | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine: “For the pyramids, each worker got a daily ration of four to five liters,” he says loudly, perhaps for Calagione’s benefit. “It was a source of nutrition, refreshment and reward for all the hard work. It was beer for pay. You would have had a rebellion on your hands if they’d run out. The pyramids might not have been built if there hadn’t been enough beer.”

"X-Men: First Class": Slick, dumb big-screen candy - Andrew O'Hehir, Movie Critic - Salon.com

"X-Men: First Class": Slick, dumb big-screen candy - Andrew O'Hehir, Movie Critic - Salon.com: While the whole film is professionally executed and goes down smoothly enough, the underlying stupidity of its subject matter can't help but show through in the end.

Review: Mr. Brooks's Miracle Elixir | The National Interest

Review: Mr. Brooks's Miracle Elixir | The National Interest: No longer the most successful economy—Germany’s boom shows how a quite different version of market capitalism has adapted better to globalization, while China’s experiment in turbocharged state capitalism has produced over thirty years of fast growth—Americans cannot claim to enjoy the highest living standards. Worse, U.S. decline is not only relative but also absolute. Stagnant for decades, the incomes of the American majority are now falling, or else are maintained only by taking on multiple jobs in a depressed and insecure labor market. Worse yet, there is no prospect of this process ending anytime soon.

Freud never imagined that his research into the unconscious mind would open the way to happiness. Instead, it could be used to fortify the mind against unhappiness, which the founder of psychoanalysis accepted as the normal human experience.

In stark opposition to Freud, Brooks thinks he has found in the unconscious something like a technology of human fulfillment. “The central humanistic truth,” he writes, “is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.”

Here as elsewhere the illusion of novelty is kept alive by a loss of memory. No one who had read and digested Adam Smith or Edmund Burke—or indeed John Maynard Keynes—could possibly imagine that the life of man would ever be carried on by unaided reason, or believe that humans were anything other than quintessentially social. Only those who have forgotten most of the Western tradition could find Brooks’s propositions arresting or in any way instructive.

For Harris, the moral quandaries of the past were the result of ignorance; now that science has revealed the “moral facts” of human nature there is little room for doubt in ethics, since knowledge can replace faith and intuition in settling disputes about the essence of human well-being.

Even now, when global markets are falling apart under the strains of sovereign bankruptcy, currency wars and resource conflicts, our rulers continue to insist that there is no alternative. Rather than making the effort—intellectual as much as political—of deciding what can be entrusted to the market and what cannot, they look for gimmicks that will serve as proxies for new thinking.

Brooks’s readers can then turn their minds from the discomforting shifts that are under way—such as the palpable erosion of public infrastructure, which leaves the United States looking more and more like the third-world countries of a few decades ago—and seek refuge in an American pastoral.

The reality has long been a succession of dodges, slogans and ephemeral “initiatives” which serve to conceal the government’s inability to control—or for that matter understand—history as it happens.

The Social Animal is an exemplar of political discourse as we know it today; the chief function is to distract attention from intractable realities, which governments and those they govern prefer not to think about.

Johann Hari: How to survive the age of distraction - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Johann Hari: How to survive the age of distraction - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent: It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

We have now reached that point. And here's the function that the book – the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: "Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise."

TS Eliot called books "the still point of the turning world". He was right. It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband, we need dead trees to have fully living minds.

Apple's videogame future | Games | Game Room | Macworld

Apple's videogame future | Games | Game Room | Macworld: With the iPad 2 (), Apple certainly has the hardware to make such a daring move. The iPad 2's technological prowess is nothing short of incredible when you consider its svelte frame; already impressive iOS titles like Infinity Blade () are given an additional layer of detail that approaches the sort of lavish imagery we're accustomed to seeing on our Xbox 360s and PS3. With the current generation of iOS gaming arguably giving the Nintendo Wii a run for its money in graphical terms, an all-new Apple "console" based on the Apple A5 ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU—which powers the iPad 2 and is expected to make its way into the next iPhone model—could easily be up to PS3/360 standard...or possibly even beyond.

Peter Falk, TV's rumpled Columbo, has died

Peter Falk, TV's rumpled Columbo, has died: Peter Falk, the stage and movie actor who became identified as the squinty, rumpled detective in "Columbo," which spanned 30 years in primetime television and established one of the most iconic characters in police work, has died. He was 83.

Nation & World | Man urinates in water, city flushes 8 million gallons | Seattle Times Newspaper

Nation & World | Man urinates in water, city flushes 8 million gallons | Seattle Times Newspaper: PORTLAND, Ore. —
Call it the big flush.

Because a 21-year-old man was caught on a security camera urinating into a city reservoir, Oregon's biggest city is sending 8 million gallons of treated drinking water down the drain.

Gene Colan Dead at the Age of 84

Gene Colan Dead at the Age of 84: A comics industry legend has passed away. Gene Colan, known best for his work on Daredevil and co-creating the character Blade, has died at the age of 84.

The world's richest are richer than before the crisis

The world's richest are richer than before the crisis: Some people have managed to recoup the losses suffered in the 2008 financial crisis -- the world's wealthiest. According to a new report, millionaires are now richer than before the meltdown.

Obama's smart oil move

Obama's smart oil move: The International Energy Agency announced Thursday that a coalition of 28 IEA member countries would "release" 60 million barrels of oil from stockpiles over the next month. The United States will do the bulk of work, contributing 30 billion barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Humans Guided Evolution of Dog Barks

Humans Guided Evolution of Dog Barks: It's a question that tends to arise when a neighborhood mutt sees a cat at 3 a.m., or if you live in an apartment above someone who leaves their small, yapping dog alone all day: Why do dogs bark so much? Perhaps because humans designed them that way.

Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison to be inducted into Hall of Fame - CNN.com

Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison to be inducted into Hall of Fame - CNN.com: The award, coming 55 years after Ellison began his writing career, celebrates the achievements of a writer who has nearly done it all; collecting 10 Hugo awards, three Nebula awards, 18 Locus Poll awards, the Bradbury award, six Bram Stoker awards, the Edgar Allan Poe award and two George Melies film awards.

Ellison, 77, won't be at the ceremony and has asked author Neil Gaiman to accept the award on his behalf. Editor Gardner Dozois and artists Vincent Di Fate and Jean "Moebius" Giraud will also be honored at the weekend-long event.

Ellison, who had been extremely ill for several months, said in a telephone interview that he's in the "last stages of something."
"And I don't have a cold," he sarcastically noted.

brands-disappear-2012-247: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

brands-disappear-2012-247: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance: Brands that have stood the test of time for decades are falling by the wayside at an alarming rate. For instance, Pontiac, a major car brand since 1926, is gone, shut down by a struggling GM. Blockbuster is in the process of dismantling, after it once controlled the VHS and DVD markets. House & Garden folded after 106 years. It succumbed to the advertising downturn, a lot of competition, and the cost of paper and postage. Its demise echoed the 1972 shutdown of what is probably the most famous magazines in history — Life. That was a long time ago but serves to demonstrate that no brand is too big to fail if it is overwhelmed by competition, new inventions, costs, or poor management.

5. Sears

The parent of Sears and Kmart — Sears Holdings — is in a lot of trouble. Total revenue dropped $341 million to $9.7 billion for the quarter which closed April 30, 2011. The company had a net loss of $170 million. Sears Holdings was created by a merger of the parents of the two chains on March 24, 2005. The operation has been a disaster ever since. The path D'Ambrosio is likely to take is to consolidate two brand into one — keeping the better performing Kmart and shuttering Sears.

7. Kellogg's Corn Pops

How can that be?! I just bought five boxes! 'Round here, we gotta have our pops.

8. MySpace

MySpace, once the world's largest social network, died a long time ago. It will get buried soon.

Barney Frank and Ron Paul team up to legalize marijuana

Barney Frank and Ron Paul team up to legalize marijuana:

Ron Paul and Barney Frank have teamed up again (after their successful joint HuffPo editorial of 2010) to introduce legislation legalizing marijuana. Not decriminalizing it, but actually totally legalizing it. Wouldn't that be wild?

Kevin Kelly’s 6 Words for the Modern Internet | Epicenter | Wired.com

Kevin Kelly’s 6 Words for the Modern Internet | Epicenter | Wired.com: 2. Interacting
All of these screens are no longer just static objects to stare at – they demand our entire bodies, including our voices. Kelly retells how he watched an toddler try to interact with a photograph, obviously confused by how the image wasn’t getting bigger or smaller with a pinch of his fingers.

These days, “if it’s not interacting, it doesn’t work,” Kelly said.

Guernica / The Story of the <i>Story of O</i>

Guernica / The Story of the Story of O: Later she described her feverish writing process as “writing the way you speak in the dark to the person you love when you’ve held back the words of love for too long and they flow at last … without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting, discarding … the way one breathes, the way one dreams.”

How it went so wrong in America

How it went so wrong in America: Finally, some data from the International Monetary Fund that proves, once and for all, that red-white-and-blue-bleeding patriotic conservatives are right: America truly is an exceptional nation. From 2007-2009, the percentage increase in U.S. unemployment was more than double that of most other advanced industrial nations. In a global recession, the abysmal performance of U.S. labor markets reigned supreme.

Should filming the police get you arrested?

Should filming the police get you arrested?: Last month, I wrote a column on how police departments across the country are simultaneously employing ever-more sophisticated surveillance techniques while trying to criminalize the act of recording police officers in public spaces. This latter effort comes -- not coincidentally -- at a time when police forces are facing potential federal investigations into police brutality.

Barnes & Noble: Ebooks outsell physical books three to one

Barnes & Noble: Ebooks outsell physical books three to one: Barnes & Noble on Tuesday said it sold three times as many digital books through its website compared to physical books during the fourth fiscal quarter.

Profiting off of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 - War Room - Salon.com

Profiting off of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 - War Room - Salon.com: Let the 9/11 anniversary merchandising begin!

As the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks nears, a prominent Tea Party group is promoting a plan to sell commemorative 9/11 pins for $13-a-pop.

The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama is a political action committee with the same Sacramento-based parent organization as the influential group Tea Party Express. It recently sent out a mass email encouraging supporters to help another conservative group "distribute 1 MILLION 9/11 Commemorative Pins to ensure that Americans never, ever forget those who lost their lives on 9/11 and what this country endured."

I see. So Americans are in danger of forgetting 9/11 - but these pins will save the day! Yay!

Some Mobile Programmers Skeptical About Adobe’s Flash Utopia | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Some Mobile Programmers Skeptical About Adobe’s Flash Utopia | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: Another issue: Adobe may not be able to keep up with continuous feature updates from the different mobile platforms. Android, for instance, currently maintains a six-month release cycle, on average. Just like hardware manufacturers struggling to keep up with the platform developers, Adobe may not be able to keep its tools updated at the same pace.

That’s a non-issue for native coders. “If you go right to the source you’ll always have the option to be cutting edge,” says Group.me’s Mike Novak.

Developer James Eberhardt echoes this sentiment.

“It doesn’t matter how good the technology is,” he says. “If it doesn’t support some of these important features, it’s dead in the water.”

Today in Endless War

Today in Endless War: As usual, there are multiple events from just the last 24 hours vividly highlighting the nature of America's ongoing -- and escalating -- posture of Endless War:

Whining May Be World's Most Annoying Sound

Whining May Be World's Most Annoying Sound: Nails on a blackboard, sirens and heavy drilling: none come close to whining for being the most annoying sound, a study has suggested.

How and why to search Twitter

How and why to search Twitter: Need to monitor tweets about a major event? Want to know when customers are griping about you? Learn how to search Twitter and you can.

First Look: Final Cut Pro X

First Look: Final Cut Pro X: With the release of the hotly anticipated Final Cut Pro X video editing app, Apple has broken new ground in interface and infrastructure, redefining the whole concept of what it means to be a working professional video editor. Gary Adcock takes us through the major features of Apple's brand new non-linear video editor.

FCC to fight 'mystery fees' on phone bills

FCC to fight 'mystery fees' on phone bills: The addition of unauthorized fees to consumers' bills--a practice known as "cramming"--affects 15 million to 20 million U.S. households a year, according to a survey cited by the FCC.

The Supreme Court's get-out-of-jail-free card for Wall Street

The Supreme Court's get-out-of-jail-free card for Wall Street: Let's hope that the current Supreme Court is remembered by posterity as the absolute peak high point in judicial willingness to kowtow to corporate interests. Because if gets any worse than now, it's hard to see any way forward for such antiquated concepts as democracy or level playing fields or simple justice.

David S. Goyer to Adapt "100 Bullets" for Showtime

David S. Goyer to Adapt "100 Bullets" for Showtime: David S. Goyer is attached to write and executive produce Showtime's adaptation of "100 Bullets," the acclaimed Vertigo crime series by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso. SPINOFF has details.

From iCloud to Dropbox: 5 Cloud Services Compared

From iCloud to Dropbox: 5 Cloud Services Compared: "Cloud" services vary among companies so much that the buzzword can get awfully confusing. What exactly do you get? Is it just online storage? Or is it streaming media? Both? In this comprehensive chart, we give a side-by-side comparison of five major cloud services.

As regards Father's Day...

I am not a father, nor is it likely that I ever will be.

It is as if Mother Nature has handed me a pink slip, saying that my genetic material has been deemed unnecessary for the future continued survival of the human race. Sorry, but you just not good enough, we just don't need you.

FT.com / FT Magazine - Invasion of the body hackers

FT.com / FT Magazine - Invasion of the body hackers: The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of “self-quantifiers”. Moving in the technology circles of New York and Silicon Valley, engineers and entrepreneurs have begun applying a tenet of the computer business to their personal health: “One cannot change or control that which one cannot measure.”

Much as an engineer will analyse data and tweak specifications in order to optimise a software program, people are collecting and correlating data on the “inputs and outputs” of their bodies to optimise physical and mental performance.

“We like to hack hardware and software, why not hack our bodies?” says Tim Chang, a self-quantifier and Silicon Valley investor who is backing the development of several self-tracking gadgets.

Indeed, why not give yourself an “upgrade”, says Dave Asprey, a “bio-hacker” who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation. He claims to have shaved 20 years off his biochemistry and increased his IQ by as much as 40 points through “smart pills”, diet and biology-enhancing gadgets.

“I’ve rewired my brain,” he says.

A field guide to bullshit - opinion - 13 June 2011 - New Scientist

A field guide to bullshit - opinion - 13 June 2011 - New Scientist: Intellectual black holes are belief systems that draw people in and hold them captive so they become willing slaves of claptrap. Belief in homeopathy, psychic powers, alien abductions - these are examples of intellectual black holes. As you approach them, you need to be on your guard because if you get sucked in, it can be extremely difficult to think your way clear again.

When someone is cornered in an argument, they may decide to get sceptical about reason. They might say: "Ah, but reason is just another faith position." I call this "going nuclear" because it lays waste to every position. It brings every belief - that milk can make you fly or that George Bush was Elvis Presley in disguise - down to the same level so they all appear equally "reasonable" or "unreasonable". Of course, you can be sure that the moment this person has left the room, they will continue to use reason to support their case if they can, and will even trust their life to reason: trusting that the brakes on their car will work or that a particular drug is going to cure them.

Why You (Probably) Can't Exercise Too Much

Why You (Probably) Can't Exercise Too Much: Is too much exercise bad for you? Researchers in Spain say that pushing your body to its physical limits may actually lead to a longer, healthier life.

Party Politics: How Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality - TIME

Party Politics: How Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality - TIME: Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past.

We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"

Study: Psilocybin, the Drug in 'Magic Mushrooms,' Lifts Mood and Increases Compassion Over the Long Term - - TIME Healthland

Study: Psilocybin, the Drug in 'Magic Mushrooms,' Lifts Mood and Increases Compassion Over the Long Term - - TIME Healthland: because psychedelics often produce a feeling of going beyond life and death, they are thought to be especially likely to help those facing the end of life. Griffiths is also studying whether psilocybin can help smokers quit.

Apple and a web-free cloud

Apple and a web-free cloud: The nature of Apple's new iCloud service, announced at WWDC, is perhaps more interesting than it seems. It hints very firmly at the company's longer-term strategy; a strategy that doesn't involve the web.

So in the future don't be too surprised to see Apple integrate iCloud even more tightly with both iOS and OS X. For the same strategic reasons, don't be shocked to see more custom chips appear — I expect to see the arrival of ARM-based MacBooks and the transition away from Intel for Apple's laptops. That's because for Apple, It's all about the platform.

Cars set on fire in Vancouver after hockey defeat

Cars set on fire in Vancouver after hockey defeat: Angry, drunken fans ran wild Wednesday night after the Vancouver Canucks' 4-0 loss to Boston in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, setting cars and garbage cans ablaze, smashing windows, showering giant TV screens with beer bottles and dancing atop overturned vehicles.

"We have a small number of hooligans on the streets of Vancouver causing problems," Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson said. "It's absolutely disgraceful and shameful and by no means represents the city of Vancouver. ... We have had an extraordinary run in the playoff, great celebration. What's happened tonight is despicable."

USB Turntable Puts a Digital Spin on Your Vinyl Collection

USB Turntable Puts a Digital Spin on Your Vinyl Collection: Audio-Technica's USB-equipped, direct-drive turntable bridges the analog-digital gap by plugging directly into your computer.

Voyager 1 encounters the unexpected at edge of the solar system - CSMonitor.com

Voyager 1 encounters the unexpected at edge of the solar system - CSMonitor.com: On its journey to the stars, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has hit an unexpected, knife's-edge region at the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space.

These cures are no longer science fiction - The Globe and Mail

These cures are no longer science fiction - The Globe and Mail: Stem cells are unspecialized cells that can renew themselves indefinitely. This means they can generate specialized cells, such as muscle cells and heart cells. So if stem cells in a lab can be coaxed into producing different specialized cells, they can provide a virtually unlimited source of cells to repair or replace damaged or diseased cells and tissues. Some of their possible uses include creating fully functional heart tissue ready for grafting on to a damaged heart; repairing spinal cord injuries using nerve stem cells; restoring vision lost through diabetes and macular degeneration; stimulating stem cells in the brain to reduce the effects of stroke and “curing” diabetes with pancreatic stem cells that produce insulin.

This all sounds exactly like what is done by the Voltairian cellogists of L. Ron Hubbards masterful "Mission: Earth."

Boston Bruins win Stanley Cup; Vancouver fans riot - CNN.com

Boston Bruins win Stanley Cup; Vancouver fans riot - CNN.com: (CNN) -- The Boston Bruins won their first Stanley Cup in 39 years, defeating the Vancouver Canucks 4-0 Wednesday night in the seventh and deciding game of the National Hockey League's annual championship.

The loss didn't go over well with hundreds of mostly young Canuck fans, who took to the streets and set several overturned vehicles afire a few blocks from Rogers Arena where the game was played.

Some fans stopped to pose in front of the flames. Others danced on top of another overturned vehicle. A dull cloud of gray smoke choked some areas of downtown.

Aerial footage showed Vancouver police wading into the unruly crowd that continually taunted and threw things at the officers. Members of the crowd leaped over one street fire, and officers wrestled several fans to the ground.

How the "South Park" guys became an American institution

How the "South Park" guys became an American institution:

As I watched Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of Comedy Central's "South Park," collect armloads of Tony awards for their satirical musical "The Book of Mormon" Sunday night, a disquieting and thrilling realization popped into my head: These potty-mouthed clowns might very well be America's greatest and most consistently inventive humorists.

27-Inch iMac Core i7 With SSD Is Fastest Mac Ever

27-Inch iMac Core i7 With SSD Is Fastest Mac Ever: Apple's latest edition of the iMac is finally shipping with the build-to-order 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 and 256GB Solid State Drive option installed. As with any new Apple product, benchmarks and speedtests are beginning to trickle out, and the conclusion is that this is the fastest Mac that has ever shipped.

Flying A Century-Old Design For The First Time | Autopia | Wired.com

Flying A Century-Old Design For The First Time | Autopia | Wired.com: In 1909 a young French aviator completed one of the most daring flights that had ever been attempted. In an airplane of his own design, powered by a 28 horsepower engine, Louis Bleriot became the first pilot to cross a major body of water when he flew across the English Channel.

A new Bleriot XI recently took to the skies, though this time it was a short hop down a grass runway in Wisconsin. The reproduction is the result of thousands of hours of effort by a team of volunteers and the Experimental Aviation Association. The group created a replica so faithful to the original that it even included an original three cylinder Anzani engine that had not flown in more than 100 years.

Not all first flights of an aircraft are at the cutting edge of technology. Still, even the first flight of a 102-year-old design was a challenge. Beyond the unwieldy flying characteristics of the wooden airplane, the pilot had to endure a constant spray of castor oil and smoke typical of many early aviation engines.

As for performance, crew member Sean Elliot sums up the design with words most pilots do not want to hear.

“The aircraft is exceptionally underpowered,” he says.

Lunar Eclipse: Watch It Live on YouTube

Lunar Eclipse: Watch It Live on YouTube: At 11:20 a.m. PT Wednesday, a total, 100-minute-long lunar eclipse will be visible in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

If you’re not from those parts, Google and Slooh have prepared a myriad of options that let you enjoy the lunar eclipse from the relative safety of your couch.

Perhaps the simplest way to watch the lunar eclipse is to tune into the live streaming video on Google’s official YouTube channel.

Article | First Things

Article | First Things:

Ayn Rand and her idiotic “Objectivism” are enjoying a—well, I won’t call it a renaissance, so let’s say a recrudescence. Suddenly she is everywhere. In the stock television footage of Tea Party rallies, there she always is on at least one upraised poster, her grim gray features looming over the crowd like the granitic countenance of some cruel heathen deity glutted on human blood.

And Ayn Rand always provokes a rather extravagant reaction from me, and probably for purely ideological reasons. For instance, I like the Sermon on the Mount. She regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness.

For what really puts both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are. I know one shouldn’t expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare. Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy.

Taken solely as a storyteller, she had many of the skills of the proficient pulp writer. Her overwrought plots, her comically patent villains, her panting, fiery, fierce yet quiescent heroines—all of that would be quite at home in lushly bad romance fiction. Had she not mistaken herself for a deep thinker, she might have done well enough, producing books that filled out that vital niche between Forever Amber and Valley of the Dolls.

And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is “rational” or “objective” or “real.” Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an “-ism.” Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like “existence is identity” and “consciousness is identification,” all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error. She was simply unaware that there were any genuine philosophical problems that could not be summarily solved by flatly proclaiming that this is objectivity, this is rational, this is scientific, in the peremptory tones of an Obersturmführer drilling his commandoes.

Arts & Letters Daily (15 Jun 2011)

Arts & Letters Daily (15 Jun 2011): In defense of drudgery. Whatever you call it - acedia, horror, taedium vitae, melancholia - boredom is a blessing ... more

Hard to say what's more ridiculous: reading Ayn Rand or sitting through a three-part film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. Pick your poison... more

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate 6/14/11 9:00 PM

Claim: Sunspots to Disappear, Global Cooling May Ensue - Techland - TIME.com

Claim: Sunspots to Disappear, Global Cooling May Ensue - Techland - TIME.com: Three studies presented by scientists at a conference in Las Cruces, New Mexico yesterday predict that sunspots are set to temporarily and unexpectedly vanish in coming years as part of a solar "hibernation" period that could last for decades.

Oregon teens win national auto skills contest

Oregon teens win national auto skills contest:

Two recent high school graduates from Oregon were the quickest to identify what was wrong with a 2012 Ford F-150 Pickup, correct the problems and get the truck running.

'I buy them for what I can afford, I have to sell them very quickly'

'I buy them for what I can afford, I have to sell them very quickly':

When a student was told by UCC that he couldn't buy textbooks from students on campus, several people contacted KPIC News to find out why. UCC says it is a violation of their vendor contract.

Google announces host of search improvements | The Digital Home - CNET News

Google announces host of search improvements | The Digital Home - CNET News: To do so, it unveiled voice search. Users will find a microphone icon when accessing Google search from their Chrome browser, allowing them to speak a query. The service was previously only available in the company's mobile search.

Google has also added a new Search By Image feature to its Images search that delivers results based on a photo. Users can drag-and-drop an image into the search box, or instead choose to upload it or copy and paste it into the field. Chrome extensions are also available to help users search by an image.

Dubbed Instant Pages, the offering instantly renders a destination page. According to Google, users currently need to wait 5 seconds to get to a destination page from its search service. With Instant Pages in place, they won't need to wait at all. In one example, Google said that The Washington Post's homepage loaded in 3.2 seconds without help from Instant Pages, and took 0.0 seconds to load with the new feature's help.

Like Google's other Web search improvements, Instant Pages will only be available to Chrome users for now. The company will be making the new feature available this week in Chrome beta.

Mac troubleshooting FAQ: start-up woes | Operating Systems | Working Mac | Macworld

Mac troubleshooting FAQ: start-up woes | Operating Systems | Working Mac | Macworld: Without a doubt, the issues that cause the greatest consternation to Mac users are those that keep the computer from starting up or, if the computer deigns to boot, that prevent the Mac from operating as it should once it eventually makes its way to the Finder. Here are common startup issues and their solutions.

Apple Now Selling Unlocked iPhone 4 in U.S.

Apple Now Selling Unlocked iPhone 4 in U.S.: As we had predicted, Apple has started selling unlocked (GSM) iPhone 4 devices in the U.S. early this morning.

If you don�t want a multiyear service contract or if you prefer to use a local carrier when traveling abroad, the unlocked iPhone 4 is the best choice. It arrives without a micro-SIM card, so you'll need an active micro-SIM card from any supported GSM carrier worldwide.
Pricing starts at $649 for a 16GB model and $749 for 32GB model. Both White and Black models are offered.

The main advantage of buying an unlocked iPhone is for international travel. The U.S. only has one network (AT&T) which fully supports all the features of an unlocked GSM iPhone. T-Mobile is compatible with voice calls, but the 3G network is not compatible. The higher price of the iPhones reflect no-contract pricing as well as the unlocked status of the device.

The Book of Mormon musical | Deseret News

The Book of Mormon musical | Deseret News: I happened to tune in to the Tony Awards Sunday just in time to see one of the producers of "The Book of Mormon" musical offer a flippant tip-of-the-hat to Joseph Smith, as he pointed heavenward and exclaimed, "You did it, Joseph! You won the Tony!"

This show which, "Newsweek" magazine says may be the most obscene show ever brought to a Broadway stage and which reviewers describe as full of doctrinal distortions in the name of satire, deeply saddens me. I have seen and enjoyed light-hearted satires of our Mormon beliefs which have been done in good taste and have laughed at the good humor.

But a show that contains 49 "f-word" references and 27 other obscenities and then salutes Joseph Smith definitely crosses the line for me. My comfort is in knowing that "no unhallowed hand" can stop the work Joseph set in motion, and ultimately such distortions from the world turn to the good of the church.

Janice K. Perry
Provo

Adium 1.4.2 - Popular instant messenger client, supports multiple services.. (Free)

Adium 1.4.2 - Popular instant messenger client, supports multiple services.. (Free): Adium is a fast and free instant messaging client which supports AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Yahoo! Japan, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, QQ, Novell Groupwise, SIP/SIMPLE (Text), and Lotus Sametime. Adium supports beautiful WebKit message display, tabbed messaging, encrypted chat, file transfer, and more. Give it a try; you won't look back.

That's true: it's what I use.

50% of iPhones Brought to Genius Bar Have Never Been Synced

50% of iPhones Brought to Genius Bar Have Never Been Synced: Fifty percent of iPhone owners who have iPhones swapped at the Genius Bar have never plugged them into a computer to backup or sync. That's according to a "little birdie" that former Macworld Associate Editor David Chartier (now at AgileBits) knows. It also suggests iCloud will save a lot of headaches and lost data.

Create a sports highlight in iMovie '11 | Video | Creative Notes | Macworld

Create a sports highlight in iMovie '11 | Video | Creative Notes | Macworld: Baseball season is here in the United States, and in addition to the professionals, little league teams and community leagues are also swinging for the fences. If you capture the action using a video camera, iMovie ’11 includes a little-known feature that lets you build a database of team members (of any sport) for creating highlight videos.

The first step is to build a team in iMovie's Sports Team Editor. Choose Window -> Sports Team Editor to open the editor. A sample team appears in the Teams list (the Leopards), but you'll want to create your own.

Why Microsoft Has Made Developers Horrified of Coding for Windows 8 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Why Microsoft Has Made Developers Horrified of Coding for Windows 8 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: When Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 8 a week ago, the reaction from most circles was positive. The new Windows 8 user interface looks clean, attractive, and thoughtful, and in a first for a Microsoft desktop operating system, it’s finger friendly. But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8.

Windows developers have invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the platform. Over the years, they’ve learned Win32, COM, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight, WPF. All of these technologies were, at one time or another, instrumental in creating desktop applications on Windows. With the exception of Visual Basic 6, all of them are still more or less supported on Windows today, and none of them can do it all; all except Visual Basic 6 and WinForms have a role to play in modern Windows development.

Hearing that Windows 8 would use HTML5 and JavaScript for its new immersive applications was, therefore, more than a little disturbing to Windows developers. Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise of Windows development—and countless hours spent learning Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest technology—and perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools.

Tony Awards: Video highlights - Morning Clip - Salon.com

Tony Awards: Video highlights - Morning Clip - Salon.com: In case you missed last night's Tony Awards, here are clips of five of the highlights -- from Neil Patrick Harris's "Spider-Man" joke extravaganza to Mark Rylance's poetic but baffling acceptance speech. For the full list of winners, click here.

'Living Laser' Engineered From Human Cells

'Living Laser' Engineered From Human Cells: Medical researchers have created the first "living laser," a biological cell that's been genetically engineered to produce a visible laser beam.

Windows 8 and anxiety over HTML5

Windows 8 and anxiety over HTML5: Ars Technica says Microsoft's apparent shift of focus toward HTML5 and JavaScript for Windows 8 coding has got Windows developers in an uproar.

Arts & Letters Daily (13 Jun 2011)

Arts & Letters Daily (13 Jun 2011): In the market for a new philosophy? Rebecca Goldstein has a tip: Postmodernists are out; rationalists are in; short-sell Heidegger because the smart money is on Spinoza... more

The hidden power of typography - Imprint - Salon.com

The hidden power of typography - Imprint - Salon.com: Favorites come and go, but there's always some good old trusty and reliable ones we can fall back on. Baskerville is a classic that we use for our own communications and we prefer the Monotype cutting. Futura is perhaps a more modern classic we use extensively. It has a great variety of weights, and provides typographic 'colour' or distinctive tonal variation on the page. Currently, we seem to be using Neutraface quite a bit.

Feds say they won't allow sale of pot anywhere in state

Feds say they won't allow sale of pot anywhere in state:

The U.S. district attorney for Oregon has served notice on all medical marijuana growers, saying the federal government will not allow the sale of pot anywhere in Oregon.

TVShows 2.0b8 - Automatically downloads torrents of your favorite shows (Beta).. (Free)

TVShows 2.0b8 - Automatically downloads torrents of your favorite shows (Beta).. (Free): TVShows is a Mac OS X application that automatically downloads torrents of your favourite shows. You no longer need to manually download torrent files, or find a working RSS feed for each show you wish to subscribe to. TVShows does that for you. Simply select your subscriptions and set your preferences from within the TVShows application and we'll take care of the rest. TVShows uses a lightweight background process which automatically launches at a regular interval (chosen by you) to check for new episodes.

TV drama is the new literature, says Salman Rushdie - Telegraph

TV drama is the new literature, says Salman Rushdie - Telegraph: Hailing the writing quality in hit US series such as The Wire, The Sopranos and The West Wing, he described television as “the best of both worlds” giving writers the kind of control over plot and characterisation previously enjoyed only by novelists.

“In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee,” he told The Observer.

“In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

“[My agents] said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality – or the writing quality – of movies has gone down the plughole.

"If you want to make a $300 million special effects movie from a comic book, then fine.

"But if you want to make a more serious movie… I mean you have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight's Children."

Philip Hensher, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist and literary critic, said that the range of characters in some long-running US dramas is comparable to that seen in some of Dickens’ greatest works.

Arts & Letters Daily (11 Jun 2011)

Arts & Letters Daily (11 Jun 2011): Last requests. In death, John Ross wanted his ashes mixed with pot, rolled into a joint, and smoked at his funeral... more

Patt Morrison Asks: - latimes.com

Patt Morrison Asks: STAN LEE - latimes.com: Stan Lee — "The one superpower I would really like is luck. If you're lucky, everything goes your way, right? In real life that would be the power I'd want. If I were lucky, this interview would go very well and when you wrote it, I'd say this is the greatest thing I ever saw."

NBC’s ‘Smash’ Is Absolutely Nothing Like ‘Glee’ | Music News, Reviews, and Gossip on Idolator.com

NBC’s ‘Smash’ Is Absolutely Nothing Like ‘Glee’ | Music News, Reviews, and Gossip on Idolator.com: For a show that will no doubt be referred to as a wannabe Glee, we see absolutely nothing Glee-like about the new NBC musical dramedy Smash, starring American Idol Season 5 runner-up Katherine McPhee. Jump below to watch a preview and see for yourself.

Les Paul Google Doodle Gets Standalone Site | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Les Paul Google Doodle Gets Standalone Site | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: Music fans, rejoice! The popularity of the playable Les Paul Google doodle has prompted the search engine to create a standalone site where users can play to their hearts' content.

"With all the great tunes you've created, we had to give the #LesPaul doodle a permanent home. Keep on rockin!" Google tweeted Friday night.

You can find the site at google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html. Play the logo just as you did on the Google.com homepage; U.S. users can record and share their masterpieces.

Hands On: Stunning, Gorgeous <cite>El Shaddai<cite> Is Action-Gamer Bliss

Hands On: Stunning, Gorgeous El Shaddai Is Action-Gamer Bliss: The upcoming Japanese action game is an impressive, surrealist take on the Book of Enoch.

In El Shaddai’s interpretation of the Biblical story, seven angels have abandoned Heaven and are cavorting with mortals on Earth. God isn’t a big fan of angel/human fanfiction, so he sends a guy named Enoch to stop them. That would be you.

The game takes place in the legendary Tower of Babel, where each of the seven angels has taken over a floor and turned it into his own personal paradise. One floor, for example, is all about nature — you’ll hop among flowers and clouds of petals as you smash through the angel Ezekiel’s cherubic minions. Another floor contains Mario-esque platforming, while the sixth level takes you on a wild motorcycle romp that’s reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII’s iconic Midgar escape sequence.

How Steve Jobs' Pixar experience helped lead to Apple's iCloud - CNN.com

How Steve Jobs' Pixar experience helped lead to Apple's iCloud - CNN.com: In that interview eight years ago, Jobs described the vast divide between technology and entertainment executives, and he talked about how he bridged it.

"One of the things I learned at Pixar is the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other," he said. "In Silicon Valley and at most technology companies, I swear that most people still think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s, sitting on a couch, drinking beer and thinking of jokes. No, they really do. That's how television is made, they think; that's how movies are made."

America's increasingly oblivious energy policy - David Sirota - Salon.com

America's increasingly oblivious energy policy - David Sirota - Salon.com: By contrast, in the days after the Fukushima disaster, the Obama administration not only reaffirmed its commitment to expanding nuclear power, but, according to ProPublica, also continued the policy of "routinely waiving fire rule violations at nearly half the nation's 104 commercial reactors, even though fire presents one of the chief hazards at nuclear plants."

Additionally, the Associated Press reports that two congressional lawmakers are now pushing the government to "back a new generation of miniature nuclear reactors" that would be sited throughout the country.

Incredibly, these moves come even as a nuclear reactor in Washington state just experienced a fire scare and even as a new study of U.S. Geological Survey data shows many of the nation's reactors sit near active fault lines.

Why 3-D Sports Could Be the Future of Television | Playbook

Why 3-D Sports Could Be the Future of Television | Playbook: ESPN has had to single-handedly bear the pressure (and considerable expense) of ushering in a completely unique network that may decide the viability of original 3-D content on TV.

Groupon Was “The Single Worst Decision I Have Ever Made As A Business Owner”

Groupon Was “The Single Worst Decision I Have Ever Made As A Business Owner”: I already knew how the story ended. Jessie had posted about her experience running a Groupon for Posies Cafe on her blog. She calls running a Groupon “the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner thus far.” You can read the story in Jessie’s own words.

Duh, Bor-ing « Commentary Magazine

Duh, Bor-ing « Commentary Magazine: Boredom can also apparently be aided by overstimulation, or so we are all learning through the current generation of children, who, despite their vast arsenal of electronic toys, their many hours spent before screens of one kind or another, more often than any previous generation register cries of boredom. Rare is the contemporary parent or grandparent who has not heard these kids, when presented with a project for relief of their boredom—go outside, read a book—reply, with a heavy accent on each syllable, “Bor-ing.”

“I have discovered that all evil comes from this,” wrote Pascal, “man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”

An exception is the actor George Sanders, who in 1972, at the age of 65, checked into a hotel near Barcelona and was found dead two days later, having taken five bottles of Nembutal. He left behind a suicide note that read:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

George Santayana, travelling on a student fellowship from Harvard, made the discovery that the Germans had no conception of boredom whatsoever, which explains their tolerance for the Ring cycle.

For another, “boredom intensifies self-perception,” by which I gather he means that it allows time for introspection of a kind not available to those who live in a state of continuous agitation and excitation.

Boredom, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s at a much higher level of seriousness, is a disease with no known cure, but Professor Toohey feels the need to supply possible ameliorations, or palliatives, for it. Among these are aerobic exercise (good, some say, for the restoration of brain cells), music (Mozart, it has been discovered, calms agitated elephants in captivity), and social activity (along with crossword puzzles, a recipe for aging well from Toohey’s Aunt Madge). Even Toohey has to admit that these sound “corny,” which they do. Worse, they sound boring. He does not dwell on those more expensive and dangerous palliatives for boredom: alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery, divorce, skydiving, bungee-jumping, and psychotherapy.

Isaac Bashevis Singer once told an interviewer that the purpose of art was to eliminate boredom, at least temporarily, for he held that boredom was the natural condition of men and women. Not artists alone but vast industries have long been at work to eliminate boredom permanently. Think of 24-hour-a-day cable television. Think of Steve Jobs, one of the current heroes of contemporary culture, who may be a genius, and just possibly an evil genius. With his ever more sophisticated iPhones and iPads, he is aiding people to distract themselves from boredom and allowing them to live nearly full-time in a world of games and information and communication with no time out for thought.

Evading boredom, he pointed out, is a full-time job, entailing endless change—of jobs, geography, wives and lovers, interests—and in the end a self-defeating one. Brodksy therefore advises: “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.”

Can wireless networks support the promise of the 'cloud'? | Signal Strength - CNET News

Can wireless networks support the promise of the 'cloud'? | Signal Strength - CNET News: AT&T, which used to be the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, has said publicly that the company's data traffic on its network has increased 8,000 percent over the past four years.

Network equipment maker Cisco Systems said recently in a report that worldwide data traffic in 2010 just on mobile devices was three times all global Internet traffic in 2000.

HP's TouchPad Launches July 1 For $499 -- InformationWeek

HP's TouchPad Launches July 1 For $499 -- InformationWeek: "What makes HP TouchPad a compelling alternative to competing products is webOS," said HP's Jon Rubinstein, in a statement. "The platform's unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use. This is only the beginning of what HP's scale can do with webOS."

Why Apple's Lion Meows Instead of Roars

Commentary by David Handy

Apple's story about Mac OSX Lion is that it takes things it's learned from iOS and brings them to Mac OS.

But it doesn't go far enough.

Why is there no Notification Center in Mac OS? I'd like to a have one central location where I can see all my new Reminders, Calendars, Mail, Messages, etc.

Why is there no Book Reader in Mac OS? I can buy Books in iTunes, but I can't read them on my Mac.

Why is there no iMessage in Mac OS? Instead, I've got iChat and Facetime, and neither does everything iMessage does.

Why is there no Newsstand in Mac OS? I can't even buy magazines on my Mac, but I'd sure like to be able to read them on my Mac.

Why are there no location-based Reminders in Mac OS? Most Macs sold today are portable devices, just like iOS devices, so it just makes senses that Mac apps should be as location-aware as iOS apps.

Why is there no Twitter integration in Mac OS? I'd like to be able to tweet a photo directly out of iPhoto, or a picture straight out of my Pictures folder, or a bit of text from Safari.

Why is there no Airplay Mirroring in Mac OS? I want to wirelessly mirror my Mac's display to my AppleTV/HDTV. That would be so cool.

Why, for that matter, can't I run any and all iOS apps in Mac OS? I buy and store iOS apps in iTunes, but then I can't do anything with them.

And, again, for that matter, why am I buying Books in iTunes when I can't read them in iTunes?

And there are way too many different Stores in too many different places now.

Where is the Shopping Mall app that integrates all these storefronts?

With a Shopping Mall, I can do something like this: While I'm shopping for Books I can duck next door to the Newstand and pick up some magazines, then zip over the the Music store and check out the new releases, then nip into the Video store and pick up a few movies and tv shows, before finally heading to the App store for some new software.

As it is now, if I want to go shopping, I have to launch app after app after app. And it makes no sense to be buying Apps and Books in iTunes, especially since, once you've bought them, unlike everything else in iTunes, you can't do anything with them if you don't have an iOS device.

It is for all these reasons that "I tot I taw a puddy-tat" rather than hearing the lion roar.

How to burn an OS X Lion boot disc – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

How to burn an OS X Lion boot disc – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: 2. Right click on “Mac OS X Lion” installer and choose the option to “Show Package Contents.”
3. Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside the SharedSupport folder you will find the “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion boot disc image we have all been waiting for.
4. Copy “InstallESD.dmg” to another folder like the Desktop.
5. Launch Disk Utility and click the burn button.

Apple’s iCloud vs. Google’s cloud – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Apple’s iCloud vs. Google’s cloud – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: For Google, the Web is the center of the universe. For Apple, your device is the center of the universe.

The Earth Is Full - NYTimes.com

The Earth Is Full - NYTimes.com: We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less.

Twitter Cofounder Takes On the Credit Card Biz | Magazine

Twitter Cofounder Takes On the Credit Card Biz | Magazine: Speaking of Twitter, it started as a way for people to tell one another what bar they were going to. Now it’s a mass communications network.

But offline merchants, who still account for 94 percent of commerce in the world, have no real way to capture that kind of data. Square can tell merchants how many cappuccinos they sold for the day. And then they can start mining that data. Like what percentage of people that bought cappuccino also bought biscotti? What happens when it rains? What are my busiest hours? That is critical data that most small businesses just don’t have.

The secrets of Node's success

The secrets of Node's success: The other big player is HP. Shortly after HP acquired Palm, Palm's webOS mobile operating system added Node. This was a smart move for HP, and was very well received by the webOS community:

If you think about it, Node delivers a services platform for the cloud, so is there a way that we could work together? We got together with Ryan Dahl of Node to try this out, and it turns out that Node works fantastically well on a mobile device! Major kudos should go to the V8 team for creating a great VM and to Ryan for writing efficient code that scaled down from the cloud to the device. -- Dion Almaer

Putting Node on a mobile device turns the idea of Server Side JavaScript on its head, but why not? With Node the JavaScript engine is small enough, the code is portable enough, and the programming model is light and asynchronous - a perfect combination a mobile device. It's possible that this, rather than a Rails-like MVC framework or a content management system, will be what propels Node into ubiquity.

Steve Jobs Pitches Cupertino on Stunning New Apple Campus

Steve Jobs Pitches Cupertino on Stunning New Apple Campus: Late last year it was revealed that Apple purchased a 98-acre campus from Hewlett Packard, just up I-280 in Cupertino. Last night, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained Apple's plans for the space to the Cupertino City Council. As Steve describes it: It's a pretty amazing building. It's a little like a spaceship landed.

In praise of boredom, at the movies and in life - Andrew O'Hehir, Movie Critic - Salon.com

In praise of boredom, at the movies and in life - Andrew O'Hehir, Movie Critic - Salon.com: What we have instead is the meta-boredom of a pop culture that's all bells and whistles all the time, and can't be switched off.

Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won't have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is.

(Late in her life, Kael famously said that she might not have defended trash culture so avidly had she known it would become the only culture.)

Cringley: Apple iCloud’s real purpose is to kill Microsoft’s Windows – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Cringley: Apple iCloud’s real purpose is to kill Microsoft’s Windows – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home: “Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft,” Bob Cringley writes for I, Cringley.

“The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped,” Cringley writes. “But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.”

Cringley writes, “What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.”

Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com

Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: The Wii successor’s touchscreen controller can display anything: exactly what’s on the TV screen, the same action but with a different camera view, or something else entirely. Since the controller also employs motion sensors, you can change the viewing angle or your aim on the touchscreen by moving your hands or your whole body. You can use the touchscreen as a controller, but since the device also boasts the same full range of buttons and joysticks as a standard gamepad, you don’t have to.

As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link’s health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television.

Two other barely interactive demos showed how the system provides what one of the Nintendo representatives called “a window into a game world that wraps around you.” On the television screen, we saw a hummingbird flying between blossoming cherry trees, swooping down into a lake beneath a massive Japanese temple. The same real-time demo was shown on the controller screen, but by moving the controller around we could get any view we liked of the hot hummingbird action.

Another demo, called Panorama View, showed footage from a panoramic camera driving down the streets of Tokyo. The television displayed a standard view from inside the car facing front, but by pointing the controller around the room we could watch the buildings and people go by from any angle we liked.

FretPet 1.2.7 - Guitar-oriented music composition tool.. (Shareware)

FretPet 1.2.7 - Guitar-oriented music composition tool.. (Shareware): FretPet is a unique and powerful guitar-oriented music composition tool with an amazing variety of applications. FretPet plays through the built-in Quicktime synthesizer and provides a MIDI source for programs like GarageBand, Absynth, FM7, Reason, MIDIPipe, etc. FretPet has been completely re-written to take full advantage of the amazing musical powers of Mac OS X.

Ode to a Four-Letter Word

Ode to a Four-Letter Word: Among the countless pleasures of profanity is versatility. Noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, four-letter vulgarities are indispensable.

Wherever it originated (the jury is out), the F-word has flourished in our adolescent American soil. And pace Bryson, its grammatical versatility cannot be topped: You can use it as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, or interjection, not to mention in any mood whatsoever, from exultation to rage.

Jobs to PC: ‘You’re Busted!’ And Other Notes From The OS Wars | Epicenter | Wired.com

Jobs to PC: ‘You’re Busted!’ And Other Notes From The OS Wars | Epicenter | Wired.com: The most telling feature in this transformation is the revelation (greeted with huge applause from the developers in the crowd) that Apple was untethering the iOS devices from the PC. In my Wired article, I had joked that Apple envisioned the day when the main use for your PC is syncing with your iPad. But now Jobs has topped that. Beginning with iOS 5 users won’t need a PC to set up, synch, or update their iPads or iPhones. Jobs even said that he was “demoting” the PC to “just another device.” Talk about a comedown. It’s like busting Jack Welch to a middle manager!

Chapter three is the new iCloud. In this initial rev, iCloud is focused less on full-scale “cloud computing” (moving the performance of the apps themselves to the Web) than on synching a number of devices with one’s personal corpus of data — which resides in Apple’s data center. Apple, he claimed, would achieve success in this model where others have failed. (The most striking example is Microsoft’s Live Mesh system, which you probably never heard of. In that light, a lot of iCloud’s concepts look straight outta Redmond.) Why will Apple triumph? Because, says Mr. Jobs, “it just works.”

How RunKeeper Could Become the Facebook of Fitness | Playbook

How RunKeeper Could Become the Facebook of Fitness | Playbook: Now RunKeeper, the company behind one of the original health and fitness apps for the iPhone, has revealed an ambitious new plan that it hopes will make it the Facebook of fitness, a one-stop location for all of your important health information. Imagine having data on your blood pressure, cholesterol, diet, cycling output, heart rate, REM sleep and BMI, all continuously updated from a slew of third-party gadgets and services.

Apple's Epic 117-Minute Keynote in Just 8 Minutes - Gizmodo

Apple's Epic 117-Minute Keynote in Just 8 Minutes - Gizmodo: Matt Buchanan — The Apple keynote was truly jam-packed, from beginning to end. It's worth watching. But it was nearly 2 hours long. If you don't have 117 minutes, this is the best stuff. The moments that matter. Everything you need to see.

Three key things about Apple's iCloud | Web | Macworld

Three key things about Apple's iCloud | Web | Macworld: “With the trifecta of iCloud, Mac OS X Lion, and iOS 5, Apple takes the lead in personal cloud implementation and vision, with the broadest support across a user’s Macs, Windows PCs, iPhones, and iPads, and deep support for third-party developer integration into iCloud,” writes Gillett. “Google is worth watching as a number two player, but will struggle to match Apple as it tries to move the world’s apps into the Chrome browser. Microsoft, with no articulated vision for personal cloud and Windows 8 expected sometime in 2012, lags significantly. So Apple has lots of time to keep building momentum for its ecosystem of devices and cloud services.”

Apple’s iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background | Epicenter | Wired.com

Apple’s iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background | Epicenter | Wired.com: To be sure, iCloud doesn’t invent a single thing — except a new price point of zero (almost, more on that later) instead of the $100 a year for Apple’s current iteration of cloud storage called MobileMe. Music lovers will be disappointed: iCloud isn’t a repository to stream your music, and doesn’t one-up Music Beta by Google, Amazon Cloud Drive by much. And — no real surprise here — it’s only for Apple devices.

Sorting Through Apple's Many Announcements - NYTimes.com

Sorting Through Apple's Many Announcements - NYTimes.com: The announcements and demonstrations covered three gigantic hunks of software: the next version of Mac OS X (“Lion”), the next version of the iPhone/iPad/Touch software (“iOS 5”), and a new online syncing service called iCloud.

Let’s address these one by one.

Apple's iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background

Apple's iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background: The long, strange trip that has been Apple's implementation of cloud computing seems to have finally hit the road Monday with a full-throttled embrace of a paradigm one might not expect from a hardware manufacturer: Your computing life is merely enabled by the devices you own, and should not be defined by them.

When conservative rhetoric sounds like Newspeak - David Sirota - Salon.com

When conservative rhetoric sounds like Newspeak - David Sirota - Salon.com: Orwell long ago warned of a political system that would insist with a straight face that "war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength." But my guess is that he never envisioned one of the leaders of a major political party claiming that curing cancer is actually cancer -- and my guess is that he certainly never envisioned one of the world's leading newspapers printing that allegation without at least questioning it's logic.

Summary: Lion, iOS 5, iCloud highlight WWDC keynote | Computers | Macworld

Summary: Lion, iOS 5, iCloud highlight WWDC keynote | Computers | Macworld: Apple executives showed off an operating system update planned for next month, teased a mobile OS update slated for the fall, and unveiled a cloud-based service for backing up and syncing documents, photos, and music. The previews came as part of the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, delivered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, which kicked off the week-long meeting of iOS and Mac developers in San Francisco.

iTunes Match: $24.99/Year, Matches Ripped Tunes, Offers Them In The Cloud

iTunes Match: $24.99/Year, Matches Ripped Tunes, Offers Them In The Cloud: As far as ripped music, iTunes has 18 million songs in the music store and Apple will use a feature called iTunes Match to give users the same benefits on ripped songs matched to iTunes songs, as with purchased tracks. A user's library is scanned and matched and any songs that remain unmatched can be uploaded for syncing. Songs that are matched are upgraded to 256KBps, AAC, DRM-free, with all the benefits above, including push syncing and all the rest.

iTunes Match is priced at a flat rate of $24.99 per year, even for "20,000 songs."

How we came to misunderstand dogs

How we came to misunderstand dogs:

It's news that should shock and delight dog owners, scolded for decades by trainers and dog whisperers that they must relentlessly assert their dominance over their dogs: Yes, it's perfectly acceptable to let Fido sleep in your bed.

TV, movie industries futilely fighting future | Networked Players | Playlist - Page 1 | Macworld

TV, movie industries futilely fighting future | Networked Players | Playlist - Page 1 | Macworld: In making their content hard to acquire through legitimate means, the movie and television studios are falling prey to the same classic blunder as the music industry—trying to enforce scarcity. After all, if people can only get your content from your prescribed sources, then you can enforce whatever price and terms you deem fit. It’s kind of the digital content equivalent of security through obscurity.

But over time, the industry has become entrenched in its comfortable, lucrative position. You can see it in the paltry attempt it makes to embrace digital media; every few years it seems like the content producers concoct another new scheme. But they all have the same fatal flaw: They focus first and foremost on how to protect the content rather than how to consume it. By doing so, the content providers have shown they have the wrong people's best interests at heart and proved that they're far less interested in creating a product that consumers want to buy than they are in creating one that consumers are forced to buy.

Ten Goofiest Moments of the First Ten Issues of "X-Men!"

Ten Goofiest Moments of the First Ten Issues of "X-Men!": With "X-Men: First Class" debuting this weekend, check out the goofiest moments of the actual first class of X-Men with this look at the goofier side of the first ten issues of the X-Men!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fights to save "The Last Mountain"

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fights to save "The Last Mountain": Before we get to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and coal mining in West Virginia and the documentary "The Last Mountain," let me take a minute to congratulate my generation for having been sanctimonious about the environment for 20 years or so while allowing the whole situation to get a lot worse all across the board. Great work, everybody! Let's give ourselves a hand.

So what if romance novels are porn? - Sex News, Sex Talk - Salon.com

So what if romance novels are porn? - Sex News, Sex Talk - Salon.com: In Pornland, women have operatic orgasms easily, quickly and repeatedly; their greatest turn-on is fulfilling male desires. In Romanceland, unapologetic rakes are reformed when they meet the protagonist; she tames the beast, domesticates him.

A Good Night’s Sleep Isn’t a Luxury - It’s a Necessity - NYTimes.com

A Good Night’s Sleep Isn’t a Luxury - It’s a Necessity - NYTimes.com: My husband called our nights at the ballet and theater “Jane’s most expensive naps.”

Kevin Fox expects Apple to unveil huge changes at WWDC – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home

Kevin Fox expects Apple to unveil huge changes at WWDC – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home:

• Seamless remote access to any data kept in your Documents folder, and synchronization across machines.

• Universal login using your Apple account: Walk up to any Mac, sign in as a guest using your Apple account credentials and you’ll be brought to the same desktop you get on your personal machine.

• iOS runtime within Mac OS to allow iPhone apps to run as Dashboard widgets and iPad apps as first-class desktop apps.

• Your canonical music library exists in the cloud. Your Mac, Windows, or iOS device can sync with all or part of it in the same way that your iOS devices sync with your computer’s iTunes library today.

• Unification of the App Store to encompass Mac, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV and iPad apps.

• Stripping out the App Store from iTunes. iTunes will be the media storefront and the App Store will be the resource storefront.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Social Darwinism

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Social Darwinism: It turns out that brain scans reveal that most decisions in fact have their origins in the amygdalae (the part of the limbic system that processes emotion), only afterward migrating to the neocortex, which does a disturbingly seamless job of rationalizing gut responses.

5 YouTube tips you should be using | Crave - CNET

5 YouTube tips you should be using | Crave - CNET: 2. Discover new music. You can find YouTube's answer to Pandora at YouTube.com/Disco. Enter the name of an artist or song title and a playlist featuring songs similar to what you entered will be created and put on autoplay. There are also options to shuffle, repeat, and save the playlist. 

Heavy Honeybee Losses Reported Over Winter : Discovery News

Heavy Honeybee Losses Reported Over Winter : Discovery News: The loss was actually lower than for the previous winter, 2009-10, which saw a 34 percent drop in honeybee populations. A 29 percent drop in 2008-9, a 36 percent loss in 2007-8, and a 32 percent decline in 2006-7 preceded the new data.

Real Wages Haven't Grown for a Decade | Politeia | Big Think

Real Wages Haven't Grown for a Decade | Politeia | Big Think: It has been a bad 10 years for the economy. As I’ve written before, the last decade was, economically, a lost decade. As this graph from Ezra Klein shows, there has been essentially no job growth for ten years, net household worth actually fell, and the economy as a whole grew less than 18%—compared to 35% or more for every other decade since the Great Depression. In fact, in many ways, the last 10 years has been as bad as the Great Depression. That's why Paul Krugman called the decade "the Big Zero.”

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet | Epicenter | Wired.com

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet | Epicenter | Wired.com: Let’s put this into some context first. Amazon sparked the e-reader revolution with the first Kindle a mere 2-1/2 years ago, and it now already sells more e-books that all print books combined.

Windows 8: What You Need to Know | PCWorld

Windows 8: What You Need to Know | PCWorld: If this revelation is making you weak in the knees, worry not. Here's a handy FAQ on the early Windows 8 build that Microsoft demonstrated:

But underneath that touchy layer is plain old Windows, with a task bar, file manager, app icons--everything.

This allows users to view two apps at the same time--something that no existing tablet OS can do.

But, doesn't Windows do that already?

According to All Things Digital, classic Windows apps will use "fuzzy hit targeting" to aid finger taps, but they won't be optimized for the touch screen like Windows 8's HTML5/Javascript concoctions. Legacy apps can, however, run side by side with the new Windows 8 apps.

So, all the millions of existing Windows apps have been denigrated with the pejorative "Legacy apps"...? like they're now some kind of red-headed step-child...

Expect at least four versions of Windows for ARM processors, and that none of these versions would be compatible with apps from Windows XP, Vista or 7.

So much for their claim that this is the "One Windows to rule them all", running equally on Intel, Atom, ARM, servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, phones, tablets...

Panel: Global drug war has utterly failed - War Room - Salon.com

Panel: Global drug war has utterly failed - War Room - Salon.com: It's pretty much impossible to imagine a panel that is more distinguished and establishment-friendly than the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which is today releasing a report describing the multi-decade "war on drugs" by governments around the world as a disastrous failure.

The commission includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, and the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.

The 19-member group, after studying the issue, came to an unambiguous conclusion.

"The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world," the executive summary of the panel's report begins. "Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed."

Windows 8 Tablet OS Is Just Windows 7 With a New Skin | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Windows 8 Tablet OS Is Just Windows 7 With a New Skin | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: The tile-based touch interface makes the iPad look old and dusty. The live info that can be seen at a glance, and the fast switching between apps is very slick. So is the split view, which lets you drag a second app in from the side and — after a pause — the existing app shifts over and makes space. Thus you can run two apps concurrently, which is enough to get most multitasking tasks done.

I’m also impressed by the thumb keyboard, an option which splits the QWERTY keyboard into two parts and shrinks them into the corners of the screen. I wish for this every time I use my iPad while standing up.

Drug War Has Failed And Governments Should Explore Legalizing Marijuana, Says Report

Drug War Has Failed And Governments Should Explore Legalizing Marijuana, Says Report: The 19-member commission includes former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former U.S. official George P. Schultz, who held cabinet posts under U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Others include former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, U.K. business mogul Richard Branson and the current prime minister of Greece.