Everyone knows women can be bitches sometimes, right? Unless they’re cougars, that is, on the prowl — or if they’re a bit younger, they’re more like vixens, kinda foxy. They henpeck when married and go wet and wild when single. They can take out their claws out or put them away. (Who doesn’t love a good catfight?)

Less dangerous are the girls and the young women, softer and fuzzier, who are more like bunnies, or, as the English say, like birds. Either way, diminutive and harmless. Girls like these are more like pets. Chicks or kittens.

Everyone does it, using language that renders women as animals;the list is endless. This culturally ingrained misogyny, as reflected in acceptable language that dehumanizes half the world’s population, is not limited to any one country or religion, or followers of one or another ideology.

But in U.S. politics, a particular trend has emerged among a certain set of conservatives: that of equating a woman with a farm animal. When, last week, Safeway Senior Vice President General Counsel Bob Gordon stood before a shareholders’ meeting telling a quot;jokequot; that portrayed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as being worth less than a pair of hogs,he clearly had no reservations about publicly making this joke and obviously thought it was funny. After all, he was only elaborating on a meme that’s been evolving among right-wing Republican politicians in state legislatures.

Dear ICO. On behalf of web developers everywhere, what the frolicking duck?

As the body responsible for policing the infamous Cookie Law in the UK, you don’t exactly have a popular job, to be fair.

A year ago you graciously granted us an extra year to comply with the law, announcing your decision just 24 hours before the law came into effect. Last week, 24 hours before the really-we-mean-it-this-time law took hold, you changed it completely.

Any web developer who actually tried to comply with the law in either case has been royally and totally screwed, for no reason other than your blithering incompetence. Thanks for that.

Curiously – and don’t think we haven’t noticed – a lot of big sites, like the BBC, Guardian, BT, Channel 4 etc. all revealed solutions which comply with your revised guidelines just prior to you announcing it. We assume you’ve enjoyed long and comfortable consultation periods with all of them, which you decided to share with us one sunny Friday morning a day before it becomes law. You know – the same lazy day everyone is making their solutions live.

Now you might say you’ve already spoken out publicly about what a light touch you’ve been aiming for, which is true. However anyone who’s been following the law for the past year can agree on one thing – no one had a bloody clue what they were meant to do. Not the Wall St Journal, or The Guardian, or WebTrends, or Adobe, or half-a-bazillion web devs. We’re been floundering in a wind of ignorance while the one body with the responsibly to clarify anything sat on their collective asses and changed their mind last minute.

Apple’s filing doesn’t try to defend the five publishers the DOJ has accused of colluding to fix prices. In fact, it basically throws them under the bus, pointing out that if there was a price-fixing conspiracy among its co-defendants — as alleged — they kept it secret from Apple.

Meanwhile, the government’s lawyers are going to have a hard time proving that Apple violated antitrust laws because the company’s market share in the e-book business before the launch of the iPad was essentially zero.

They can’t make a case against Apple for collusion because whatever the publishers may have said to one another, there’s no evidence that Apple conspired with its competitors.

They can’t even use as evidence the blunt quotes taken from the Steve Jobs biography because they are hearsay.

The one element of the government’s case that seemed to give Apple’s lawyers a hard time was the charge that the most-favored-nation provision Steve Jobs added at the last minute was “designed to protect Apple from having to compete on price at all, while still maintaining Apple’s 30% margin.”

In its response, Apple’s legal team can’t even bring itself to name the provision, referring to it repeatedly as MFN. But they manage to shoot some holes in the government’s argument, pointing out, among other things, that the 30% cut Apple takes is hardly pure profit margin. It costs money to run the iBookstore, and while Apple doesn’t claim to lose money on e-book sales, that’s not where it gets the big bucks.

You can get the gist of Apple’s filing in those first six introductory paragraphs. The rest is an item-by-item refutation of the government’s case and a summary of Apple defenses, should it come to that.

Many of the people over at BarCamp are working on/struggling with the transition from programmer to entrepreneur. While I was never a truly “hard core” programmer (meaning lock me in the basement with Mountain Dew for a week and I’ll come out with 100,000 lines of code) I did have to make this transition. Also, doing the entrepreneur thing for the last few years with HelpSpot has really given me some insights into why many people fail at this transition. So here’s a few observations:

For Java, the question of whether there’s a FRAND licensing obligation under antitrust law is a non-issue: FRAND licenses for clean-room implementations are already available.

The Java example shows that FRAND is different from a fair use exception in some ways. While fair use denies that a creator is entitled to a payment, FRAND licenses are typically royalty-bearing. And it’s no less important to consider that FRAND licenses are often made available only to those who create a fully compliant implementation of a standard (whether a near-compliant implementation qualifies for FRAND under antitrust law is a separate question).

If Google made Android fully Java-compatible, it would be entitled to a FRAND license. In light of that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Judge Alsup to depart from the standard for copyrightability (by a factor of 1,000 or more) or to invoke “fair use” when there actually is a FRAND option.

FRAND also has an advantage to implementers. For example, FRAND licenses relating to a standard typically cover all categories of intellectual property — including patents that are essential (i.e., they are inevitably infringed by a reasonable implementation of a standard). Patent law doesn’t have a “fair use” exception, and if you want to talk to a patent office about the public policy considerations Google puts front and center in the Android/Java case, good luck: patents are granted based on strictly technical criteria, and public interest exceptions only come into play under exceptional circumstances (such as in the event of an epidemia or national security concerns).

Antitrust law can’t impose a FRAND licensing obligation in connection with every API, but it doesn’t have to. If there are viable alternatives to an API, there may not be a FRAND obligation, but in that case, market dynamics will give the more available and affordable API a competitive advantage. But in those cases in which the market can’t take care of itself, competition law can come to the rescue.

Just to be clear: I don’t categorically reject competition-related arguments as far as intellectual property law itself is concerned. As far as my personal position is concerned, I’d like patent examiners to have to justify the grant of a patent in light of the fact that a patent is a (time-limited) monopoly. But we have to make a proper distinction between the way we’d like the law to be shaped and the way in which it can be reasonably applied today.

Google’s position on competition and IP is contradictory in itself. On the one hand, Google endorses and now directs Motorola’s abuse of standard-essential patents. On the other hand, Google wants free-of-charge and unrestricted access to certain Java-related IP and twists and turns the case law, suggesting that fair use cases established an actually non-existent conflict between copyrightability and compatibility and advocating that copyright holders should become victims of their own success. Right in the middle between those two extremes there’s a balanced solution called FRAND.

In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.

An analysis of the state-wide list by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted” as ineligible by the list. Conversely, “whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

Late last year, Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not access to reliable citizenship data. So election officials attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file. That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable and refused to release. Browning resigned in February and Scott pressed forward with the purge.

The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their license information was collected.

Yet Mr. Christie has been adamant that New Jersey is on the way back, and that this makes room for, you guessed it, tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall. How did the governor respond?

First, by attacking the messenger. According to Mr. Christie, Mr. Rosen — a veteran public servant whose office usually makes more accurate budget forecasts than the state’s governor — is “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” Civility! By the way, even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big. And the two big credit-rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, have recently issued warnings about New Jersey’s budget situation, which S.& P. called “structurally unbalanced” because of the governor’s optimistic revenue assumptions.

New Jersey, then, is still in dire fiscal shape. So is our tough-talking governor willing to reconsider his pet tax cut? Fuhgeddaboudit. Instead, he wants to fill the hole with one-shot budget gimmicks, including reneging on a promise to reduce borrowing for transportation investment and diverting funds from clean-energy programs. So much for fiscal responsibility.

Will Mr. Christie’s budget temper tantrum end speculation that he might become Mr. Romney’s running mate? I have no idea. But it really doesn’t matter: whoever Mr. Romney picks, he or she will cheerfully go along with the budget-busting, reverse Robin Hood policies that you know are coming if the former governor wins.

For the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps. And as for Mr. Christie, well, he’s just another fiscal phony, distinguished only by his fondness for invective.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour - equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity - through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.

Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs.

“Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,” Allnoch told Reuters. “Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.”

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources.

Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone. It aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

To oversimplify for a moment, here’s Penney’s problem. They told the world that retailers only offer their best prices during crazy sales, and Penney stores would no longer host them. Sensible consumers apparently took that information to heart and decided to simply wait for such sales at other stores. As an added benefit, Penney lowered consumers’ search costs, because they now knew they didn’t need to bother driving to a Penney’s store anymore.

That’s probably not what new Penney CEO Ron Johnson had in mind when he decided to spend his marketing budget on those witty DeGeneres ads. A former Apple Inc. executive who took the Penney’s job in November, he thought he was lifting the store out of the brutal commodity clothing market. He may ultimately succeed at that. But he won’t do it by telling customers the firm’s pricing is fairer than at other stores, Gabaix believes.

“It will be a very, very uphill battle,” Gabaix said. “So, sorry for them.”

There have been a few other celebrated efforts by companies to educate consumers that their higher prices are really lower prices after hidden fees. During the last decade, Intercontinental Hotels experimented with up-front pricing that included all fees on its website. Executives at the firm told the New York Times that customers left in droves, choosing competitors with lowball prices.

More recently, Southwest Airlines has undertaken the most aggressive anti-shrouding campaign to date, picking on other airlines’ baggage fees. The profitable carrier is holding its own with its “Bags Fly Free” campaign, but there are indications that the firm won’t be able to resist all that free money forever. In what may be a sign of things to come, Southwest elected to leave AirTran’s baggage fee structure in place after it acquired the competitor last year.

Shrouding isn’t the only reason Penney’s pricing plan is flawed. The firm is also leaving a lot of money on the table by rejecting a phenomenon known as “price discrimination.” Some people have more money than time, and some have more time than money. Some shoppers don’t mind spending hours to save $20; others would gladly give a store $20 to escape quickly. Smart retailers get money from both. By killing couponing, Penney has eliminated its ability to satisfy price discriminators.

And as others have pointed out, markdowns serve the age-old retailing trick of “anchoring.” For some reason, even very smart consumers feel better paying $60 for something if you initially tell them it costs $100, and then reduce the price.

But the real problem is Penney’s ill-fated attempt to cast itself as the only fair poker player in a game of cheats. Shoppers just aren’t buying it. However unsophisticated consumers are, very few of them believe a pair of shoes bought at Penney’s everyday low price will be cheaper than a pair of shoes bought at Macy’s on clearance with a 25 percent off coupon.

Like it or not, hidden fees – and secret discounts – are here to stay.

*Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook.
*Follow Bob Sullivan on Twitter.

At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

Don’t like that answer? Try focusing on earnings rather than sales, and you get only a marginally different result. Assuming its profit margin stays constant (instead of falling as it could very well do as it grows), assuming its P/E ratio in five years will be just as high as Google’s is today, and assuming that its stock will produce a five-year return of 11% annualized, Facebook’s stock today should be just $16.66.

How can Facebook investors wriggle out from underneath the awful picture these calculations paint? By assuming that its revenue and profitability will grow faster than the average IPO between 1996 and 2010 — and not just by a little bit, either, but a whole lot faster.

Of course, it’s always possible that Facebook will be able to pull that off.

But, as Professor Ritter pointed out to me earlier this week, “the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to maintain percentage growth.” And Facebook is already huge — larger, in fact, than all but 47 other publicly traded companies in the U.S., by market capitalization.

So my back-of-the-envelope calculations for this column could very well be too optimistic rather than too pessimistic.

Given all this, Ritter said that a market cap “of $63 billion … five years from now seems like a very reasonable scenario.”

Governor Perry’s office and anti-choice lawmakers in the state have rallied behind the claim that “There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state,” downplaying the significant role Planned Parenthood plays in bringing WHP access to low-income women. What Perry’s office doesn’t mention is that most of those providers are small clinics and individual doctors that aren’t currently equipped to take on the tens of thousands of women who will have to leave Planned Parenthood should the courts rule in favor of the State of Texas.

I set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.

In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?

A search for providers within 30 miles of 78702 turned up 137 doctors and clinics–initially, a very promising number. But once the duplicates were weeded out there were just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When I called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, I was understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.

Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, said they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.

The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising, but they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients. Neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.

Ultimately, I found nine providers within a 30-mile radius of the selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on underserved populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.

But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.

And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck to find nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood. From the study:

In FY 2010, PPFA clinics accounted for approximately 49 percent of all WHP-financed care, furnishing services to 51,953 WHP clients out of 105,998 WHP clients served. Of the 1,469 providers that billed the WGP in FY 2010, 908 (62 percent) served 10 or fewer patients, while 368 (25 percent) served only one patient. The authors conclude that the WHP program lacks any reasonable access alternative.

Multiply just one caller looking for care by 51,953, and it’s easy to imagine that a morning of phone calls to doctor after doctor—again, if a woman working and managing a family had the time to dedicate to it—might turn up no available appointments, or appointments that could only be made months in advance.

It’s also important to remember that an imagined Austin-based client lives in a major metropolitan area with public transportation and multiple hospitals and women’s health centers. WHP clients in other areas of Texas, especially those in rural towns, will have even fewer options.

I asked a Texas Planned Parenthood representative what area of Texas the group thought would suffer most if it could no longer participate in the WHP. The results were dismal: based on their research, nearly 80 percent of WHP clients get their care from family planning clinics, and they turned over a list of 25 cities that have no family planning clinics other than Planned Parenthood that serve WHP clients. The top four results–Edinburg, McAllen, San Juan and Weslaco, Texas—are all located near the Texas-Mexico border, an area that has been hit especially hard by clinics closing.

And if women in South Texas can’t see their Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses for WHP care, the Texas WHP website won’t be much help either: A search for doctors within the McAllen zip code on the WHP site turned up anesthesiologists, pediatricians and a night clinic in their top results–plus one provider that did not take WHP clients.

If the State of Texas wants to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, they’re going to need to go beyond technical support for their website to invest huge sums of money increasing access to care throughout the state, replicating the system they are seeking to eliminate.

But at the high-quality end of the Internet’s curve — how do you sort and rank the very best information? What if the information returned by two sites — Google Places and Yelp, for example — is nearly identical? Those decisions are judgment calls, coded into Google’s algorithm by humans. Not neutral, not the unbiased calculations of a machine, no matter how it works in a given instance. Volokh’s paper rests on this idea (he uses the word judgment 34 times) that in exercising judgment, Google’s engineers are essentially acting as editors, curators, or, even, parade organizers — all of whom the First Amendment protects in their decisions to include or exclude content, even when they themselves are not the creators of that content.

There’s a lot of support for Volokh’s argument including two lower court decisions (2003 and 2007), and, as First Amendment and technology law expert Marvin Ammori argues, other courts — and even the Court — would likely agree. The result would be greater protection for Google and its preference for its own products — something we may not like. But the First Amendment has never been interested in curating society to our liking — quite the opposite in fact. The results of a strong First Amendment are often distasteful in varying degrees, with hateful speech at the extreme end. But the converse is much worse — would we really want the government to have a say in the content of Google’s returns? Could you imagine what it would like to do with something like this?

The law is always under revision as new technologies emerge and challenge the old categories we had created. Is Google like a publication — such as the New York Times — or a utility like the gas company that merely conveys information “neutrally”? Which set of laws should we apply? These comparisons never work perfectly, and refining their raggedy edges is the work of the courts and the participants in their adversarial process. In the case of Google, its search results do seem more like the handiwork of a newspaper editor or a parade organizer than an electrical utility. But the impact of its choices — judgment, if you will — are so much greater, so much more central to our civic life that it can be scary to give it such free reign. But that free reign is at the core of our grand experiment with free speech and a free press, an experiment you just have to hold your breath and hope for, because the alternative is much, much worse.

A German court has ruled that Motorola Mobility infringed a Microsoft patent which allows long text messages to be divided into parts and then reassembled by receiving handsets.

It marks the first patent ruling against Google since it completed its takeover of Motorola.

Microsoft can now demand a German sales ban of Motorola products, although it signalled it would prefer a licence fee.

Google said it may appeal.

Google’s chief executive had previously said that his firm bought Motorola and its patents “to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.

I’m not sure whether I’d dub this the perfect storm, but Facebook is currently on track to be the biggest IPO flop in recent memory, with all three CEOs taking the blame.

If the Facebook IPO has taught us anything, it’s that not all social-media companies are automatic buys. Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA ) shareholders, for instance, have learned that the hard way. With more than 90% of its revenue tied to Facebook, Zynga shares are now well below their IPO price.

Facebook, we really do need a “dislike” button for last week’s fiasco.

This week 43 Catholic institutions, including the Archdioceses of New York and Washington DC as well as Notre Dame University, sued the Obama administration over its mandate requiring employers to provide contraception in their health insurance plans.

The move not only escalated an unusual fight between church and state but also threatened to cause splits within the Catholic Church itself.

The Catholic Bishop of Stockton, California, Stephen Blaire, told America magazine that he was concerned the campaign against the mandate was becoming too political.

He said he was worried his fellow bishops were being co-opted by political conservatives.

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

The suits against Dish are a response to the “Hopper” DVR and its “Auto Hop” feature, which automatically skips over commercials. According to the networks’ complaints, the Hopper automatically records eight days’ worth of prime time programming on the four major networks that subscribers can play back on request. Beginning a few hours after the broadcast, viewers can choose to watch a program sans ads.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican, is likely to survive a recall election on June 5, according to recent nonpartisan polls of the state.

Mr. Walker leads his Democratic opponent, Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, by an average of six percentage points in those polls and has not trailed in any poll since February.

Some polls issued by Democratic-affiliated groups have shown a somewhat tighter race, with Mr. Barrett trailing by about three percentage points instead. Partisan-affiliated polls have a long track record of somewhat exaggerating their candidate’s standing, however, and it may be telling that even these polls do not show Mr. Barrett ahead.

In a typical November election, a 6-point lead with two weeks to go would translate into a high probability of winning — roughly on the order of 90 percent, based on the historical accuracy of polls of governors’ races.

The dynamics of a recall election may be slightly more uncertain. But with high turnout expected, which tends to make polling more reliable, Mr. Barrett would most likely need a last-minute change in momentum to have much of a chance of prevailing.

Mr. Walker’s approval rating was poor at this time last year, after he stripped collective bargaining rights from most of the state’s public workers. In May 2011, his job approval rating averaged 42 percent across different polls, versus an average disapproval rating of 55 percent.

In an average of polls conducted so far this May, however, Mr. Walker’s approval rating averages 50 percent, with 46 percent disapproving.

You’d think Montgomery County, Texas, would’ve learned its lesson. In 2011, when its Sheriff’s Office was preparing to become the first police agency in America to order a drone that could carry weapons, Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel said, “I’m tickled to death,” adding, “It’s so simple in its design and the objectives, you just wonder why anyone would choose not to have it.” That was before the day of the most famous drone test in Texas. It seemed like a perfect photo-op. They’d get out the BearCat armored vehicle they own, which looks like a small military tank, and fly a bad-ass $300,000 drone above it. The problem came when the drone operator lost control of the unmanned aircraft, which plummeted earthward, hitting the BearCat on the way down.
The accident got them ridiculed on the Internet. But they never wavered in their commitment to drones. And now, apparently still tickled to death, Chief Deputy McDaniel has been quoted telling the press that tear gas and rubber bullets might be added to the unmanned aerial vehicle. CBS News quotes him explaining that “those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system.” That’s rather vague, but there’s no getting around one thing: the situations would all involve police deliberately shooting rubber bullets or tear gas clouds at civilians from an unmanned drone.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the banks leading its flotation are being sued by disgruntled shareholders.

A writ, filed in a Manhattan court, alleges that Facebook’s revised growth figures were not disclosed to all investors.

US financial regulators have already said the Morgan Stanley may have questions to answer over the disclosure of information ahead of Friday’s float.

The bank, lead underwriter to Facebook, said it fully complied with the rules.

The lawsuit claims that defendants concealed from investors during the flotation marketing process “a severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue growth forecasts.

It is the latest problem to dog one of the most anticipated stock market listings of recent times.

The flotation was disrupted on Friday by technical glitches on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The share price has since slumped amid worries that the company was over-valued by advisers marketing the float.

On Tuesday, the leading financial regulator in Massachusetts issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley as part of an investigation into whether its analysts selectively disclosed revised revenue forecasts for Facebook.

Now, a group of investors has issued a class-action lawsuit alleging that Facebook revenues were revised down because of a surge in the number people using mobile devices for apps and connection to websites.

Morgan Stanley has not yet commented on the latest lawsuit.

But he doesn’t seem that enamored with Mitt Romney either.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Wednesday morning, Mr. Powell, a Republican who did endorse Mr. Obama in 2008, despite having worked under President George W. Bush, chided Mr. Romney for listening to conservative foreign policy advisers.

Mr. Powell noted that Mr. Romney recently said that Russia was the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States.

“Well, c’mon Mitt, think. It isn’t the case,” Mr. Powell said. “I don’t know whether Mitt really feels that.”

Asked whether he thought Mr. Romney’s advisers told him to say that, Mr. Powell said: “I don’t know. You ask him.”

Mr. Powell said Mr. Romney’s comment had been “catching a lot of heck from the regular G.O.P. foreign affairs community.”

“We’re kind of taken aback by it,” he said. “Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.”

Earlier in the interview, Mr. Powell described Mr. Romney’s foreign policy advisers as “quite far to the right.’

“Sometimes, they, I think, might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” Mr. Powell said.

House Minority Leader, responding to an expected acceleration of John Boehner’s timeline on the Bush tax cuts, fired off a letter to the Speaker asking for immediate consideration of an extension of just the “low end” tax cuts – which include the Bush-era marginal rates for households making up to $1 million. This represents a shift in the dividing line for the Bush tax cuts, which has traditionally been at $250,000.

The Bush tax cuts at every level up to $1 million in annual income, in other words, are now framed as “middle-income tax cuts.” She says it right here in the letter:

Without further delay, the Majority Leadership should schedule a vote on extension of the middle-income tax cuts, as early as next week, to increase certainty for millions of American taxpayers and for the economy. We should not delay passing this legislation that will help afford all Americans the opportunity to reach their goals and realize the promise of the American Dream.

We must ask the very wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit.

First of all, if you make the dividing line at $1 million a year in annual income, there simply won’t be all that many revenues generated to pay down that deficit. When the dividing line was $250,000 a year, the revenue was around $800 billion over a ten-year period. I don’t have a strong grasp of what the numbers would be at $1 million, but my guess would be half that, if not more. So from a deficit reduction standpoint, this makes pretty much no sense.

Second of all, because of our marginal tax rate system, high-income earners at the $1 million
level would still benefit from all the tax cuts on the first $1 million of their income, which are substantial. In fact, you’d be giving hundreds of billions of dollars – whatever the difference is between letting the tax cuts expire at the $250,000 level and the $1 million level – entirely to well-off people.

Google did not infringe patents owned by software developer Oracle, a jury in a California court found on Wednesday.

The Silicon Valley giants had fought over whether Google used Oracle’s Java programming language in its Android mobile operating system.

Two weeks ago the same jury ruled that Google infringed Oracle’s copyright, but could not agree whether Google’s actions constituted “fair use”.

The internet search giant maintains Android was built “from scratch”.

Oracle sued Google in August 2010, saying Android infringed its intellectual property rights.

Google said it does not violate Oracle’s patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, which is an “open-source”, or publicly available, software language.

Without a finding against Google on the “fair use” issue, Oracle cannot recover the up to $1bn (£637m) in damages it was seeking.

The case focused not on using the Java programming language itself, but rather the use of 37 application programming interfaces (APIs) which help developers create software on the platform.

With internet innovation moving fast, it is common for software writers to adapt APIs that mini-programs use to “talk” to one another.

The jury concluded that Google infringed on 37 copyrighted APIs but it also agreed that Google demonstrated that it was led to believe it did not need a license for using Java.

Democrats have enjoyed trying to keep Republicans on the defensive about women’s issues, and on Tuesday, they tried to keep the debate going by reintroducing a wage gap measure that failed in the Senate in 2010.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, with other female senators and a number of advocacy groups, planned a news conference on Wednesday urging Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The legislation, which builds on the Equal Pay Act of 1963, is designed to help close the wage gap between women and men working equivalent jobs.

Ms. Mikulski made the preliminary announcement with a stream of Twitter posts on Tuesday, calling the measure a “down-payment” for ending the pay gap. “It’s outrageous that 49 yrs after Equal Pay Act, women still earn 77 cents to every $1 men make,” she wrote. “Wage gap is real – costing women & families thousands over their career. Women deserve #EqualPay 4 equal work.”

In 2010, when the Paycheck Fairness Act came up for a procedural vote in the Senate, no Republican supported it.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would require employers to demonstrate that wage gaps between men and women doing the same work have a business justification, and it would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who shared salary information with their co-workers. The measure would also create a competitive grant program to provide training in negotiation for girls and women.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, is expected to file a motion on Thursday that would end debate on the bill and bring it up for a vote.

CHICAGO — President Obama and the leaders of America’s NATO allies on Monday agreed to end their guiding role in the decade-long war in Afghanistan next summer, saying it is time for the Afghan people to take responsibility for their own security and for the United States-led international troops to go home.

Declaring that “our forces broke the Taliban’s momentum,” Mr. Obama used the summit meeting of NATO leaders here in his adopted hometown to begin an exit from a conflict he embraced during his first campaign for president as America’s good war.

“We’re now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference after the meeting. He called the decision a “major step” toward the end of the war.

But Mr. Obama acknowledged that “real challenges” remained in dealing with the problems across the border in Pakistan, and that the conference had not resolved the impasse over reopening supply lines or the other tensions about the fight against insurgents operating from safe havens there.

“We think that Pakistan has to be part of the solution in Afghanistan,” he said. “Neither country is going to have the kind of security, stability and prosperity that it needs unless they can resolve some of these outstanding issues.”

Pakistan closed supply lines to Afghanistan after an American airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani solders. Mr. Obama has refused to apologize for the strike, as Pakistan has demanded in negotiations with the Americans, and he pointedly exchanged only a few words with the country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, during the two-day summit meeting — “very brief, as we were walking into the summit,” he said. The two men also stood and spoke briefly with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, before all three joined the other leaders for a group photograph.

The plans to withdraw from Afghanistan are “irreversible,” Mr. Obama and the world leaders said in their communiqué, a deliberate word choice that underscored the political reality in America and in Europe. After 10 years of war and with the global economy reeling, the nations of the West no longer want to pay, either in treasure or in lives, the costs of their efforts in a place that for centuries has resisted foreign attempts to tame it.

Mr. Powell, a retired four-star general and Republican former secretary of state, praises Mr. Obama for having “stabilized the financial system.”

And Mr. Powell is supportive of the president’s Afghanistan policy.

Nearly four years after lending his military stature and his political prowess to Mr. Obama with a critical endorsement, Mr. Powell sounds happy with the result. And yet, he is not quite ready to endorse the president again.

“I don’t want to throw my weight behind somebody,” Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s “Today Show” on Tuesday morning. “I feel as I private citizen I ought to listen to what the president says and what the president’s been doing. But I also have to listen to what the other fellow says. I’ve known Mitt Romney for many years, good man.”

The decision by Mr. Powell could just be a gracious delay from a man who served President George W. Bush during wartime. He said on NBC that he does “owe the Republican Party some consideration.”

And if Mr. Powell decides to endorse Mr. Obama again, he might want to time the announcement to have more impact that it might in late May.

For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact.

At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Instead of having to go to CNN for your audience, a generic CNN-like audience can be assembled outside CNN’s walls and without the CNN-brand markup. This has resulted in the now famous and cruelly accurate formulation that $10 of offline advertising becomes $1 online.

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits. But at a forward profit-to-earnings ratio of 56 (as of the close of trading on May 21), these innovations will have to be something like alchemy to make the company worth its sticker price. For comparison, Google trades at a forward P/E ratio of 12. (To gauge how much faith investors have that Google, Facebook, and other Web companies will extract value from their users, see our recent chart.)

In the year since President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, tax payers are partly-funding Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigation into whether or not the president was truly born in the United States.

The Arizona Republic and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser report that two men identifying themselves as Michael Zullo and Brian Mackiewcz arrived at the Hawaii Department of Health on Monday and requested verification of Obama’s birth. They left after a Hawaii deputy attorney provided them information on the legal requirements for obtaining that documentation. Zullo is a volunteer in Arpaio’s inquiry, but Mackiewcz provided a business card identifying him as a public employee who works in the Threats Management Unit of the sheriff’s office.

Arpaio, who has previously claimed that the investigation was being funded through private donations, dismissed concerns about tax dollars funding the conspiracy quest and said “he hopes the agency will be paid back through private donations”:

Sometimes, even the science and studies can be wrong. Not because of an error, but because you didn’t dig deep enough.

About a dozen years ago we had some discussions at Apple about the placement of the logo on the back of Apple’s laptops. As you can see in this Sex and the City scene, the Apple logo is upside down when the lid is opened.

Apple has an internal system called Can We Talk? where any employee can raise questions on most any subject. So we asked, ”Why is the Apple logo upside down on laptops when the lid is open?”

We were told by the Apple design group, which takes human interface issues very seriously, that they had studied the placement of the logo and discovered a problem. If the Apple logo was placed such that it was right side up when the lid was opened then it ended up being upside down when the lid was closed, from the point of view of the user. (If you’re currently using an Apple laptop made in the past eight years, then close the lid and you’ll see that the Apple logo will be upside down from your point of view, but right side up when opened) Why was upside down from the user’s perspective an issue? Because the design group noticed that users constantly tried to open the laptop from the wrong end. Steve Jobs always focuses on providing the best possible user experience and believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the onlooker. Obviously, after a few years, Steve reversed his decision.

Opening a laptop from the wrong end is a self-correcting problem that only lasts for a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely. Posted by Joe Moreno (@JoeMoreno) at 1:41 PM Arkadiusz Dymalski said…

Reuters' Alistair Barr is reporting that Facebook's lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley (MS), JP Morgan (JPM), and Goldman Sachs (GS) all cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow.

This by itself is highly unusual (I've never seen it during 20 years in and around the tech IPO business).

But, just as important, news of the estimate cut was passed on only to a handful of big investor clients, not everyone else who was considering an investment in Facebook.

This is a huge problem, for one big reason:

Selective dissemination. Earnings forecasts are material information, especially when they are prepared by analysts who have had privileged access to company management. As lead underwriters on the IPO, these analysts would have had much better information about the company than anyone else. So the fact that these analysts suddenly all cut their earnings forecasts at the same time, during the roadshow, and then this information was not passed on to the broader public, is a huge problem.
Any investor considering an investment in Facebook would consider an estimate cut from the underwriters' analysts "material information."

What's more, it's likely that news of these estimate cuts dampened interest in the IPO among those who heard about them. (Reuters reported exactly this--that some institutions were "freaked out" by the estimate cuts, as anyone would have been.)

In other words, during the marketing of the Facebook IPO, investors who did not hear about these underwriter estimate cuts were placed at a meaningful and unfair information disadvantage. They did not know what a lot of other investors knew, and they suffered for it.

Selective dissemination of this sort could be a direct violation of securities laws. Irrespective of its legality, it is also grossly unfair. The SEC should investigate this immediately.

May 22 (Reuters) - ATLANTA - When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich’s campaign fund. A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches’ net worth.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private space capsule called Dragon soared into the predawn sky Tuesday, riding a pillar of flame like its beastly namesake on a history-making trip to the International Space Station.

The unmanned capsule, built by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), is the first non-governmental spacecraft to launch to the space station, ushering in a new era of partnership between the public and private spaceflight programs.

“I think this is an example of American entrepreneurship at its best,” said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, in a briefing before the launch. About 100 VIP guests were on hand to witness the launch, NASA officials said.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX launched its Dragon capsule at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) today (May 22) from a pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It blasted off atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, a 157-foot (48-meter) booster powered by nine Merlin rocket engines. The space station was flying 249 miles above the North Atlantic Ocean as the rocket lifted off, NASA officials said. [Launch Photos: SpaceX’s Dragon Blasts Off for Space Station]

The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge: there has been a huge increase in polarization, and it’s because Republicans have moved right, not because Democrats have moved left. (You want to look at the Northern Democrat line; the southern Democrats disappeared or became Republicans).

As I said, this is obvious; yet people who try to say this get frozen out of the discourse, even when — like Mann and Ornstein — they have heretofore been pundits in good standing. Instead, you’re supposed to wring your hands over partisanship in the abstract.

And when the attempt to turn this hand-wringing into actual political effort flops, you blame it on the false equivalency police!

The facts have a well-known anti-centrist bias.

Apple had previously set the sandboxing deadline for March 1st. By that time, developers that wished to continue selling their apps in the Mac App Store would need to abide by new rules that severely limited the areas of a computer that an app had access to. It later extended it out to June 1st.

Many developers, like Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut, have recently expressed their dissatisfaction with the limited entitlements offered by sandboxing on the Mac.

Both Reece and Jalkut expressed their feelings that the current freedoms that developers have to access OS X are too limited and its not enough to have faith that Apple will make changes. “We can only make decisions based on what entitlements and APIs are there today,” said Reece “And today it’s not enough.”

Apple clearly wants the Mac App Store to be the primary way that people download apps on their Mac, but it also wants sandboxing to be the foundation of a more secure OS X.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lead Facebook Inc (FB.O: Quote) underwriter Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote) took a bet earlier this week when it increased the size of the social networking firm’s $16 billion initial public offering and it boosted the price.

Thanks to massive hype surrounding Facebook’s historic public offering, the wager looked safe. But a rocky first day of trading has raised questions about whether it paid off.

After a delayed start to trading, Facebook’s shares spent much of the day struggling to stay above the $38 IPO price - and ended with just a 23-cent gain.

As a result, Morgan Stanley may have spent billions of dollars to support the stock price by buying shares in the market. Some market participants said that the underwriters had to absorb mountains of stock to defend the $38 level and keep the market from dipping below it.

The firm did this by tapping into a 63 million share over-allotment option, or greenshoe, according to sources familiar with the deal.

As an indication of the cost, had Morgan Stanley bought all of the shares traded around $38 in the final 20 minutes of the day, it would have spent nearly $2 billion. Underwriters are not obligated to prop up a stock on debut, but typically do.

Remember: Facebook’s underwriters wouldn’t let its share price fall below $38 a share today. That’s what underwriters do. They take a company public in return for a guarantee to buy at the IPO price. So if traders thought that the IPO price was overvalued, they might have taken it out on the next best thing. Which was bad news for Zynga. That’s why the news didn’t get any better for the FarmVille creator even after its stock stopped flash crashing.
It’s always possible to tell ourselves a story that makes sense of the day’s stock moves after the fact. But it’s hard to tell ourselves a story that makes today’s stock moves look efficient. These kind of wild swings shouldn’t happen, but do.
Just look out on Monday. The underwriters won’t be there with their safety net.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a main provision of the Voting Rights Act on Friday, rejecting an Alabama county’s challenge to the landmark civil rights law. The provision requires governments with a history of discrimination to obtain approval from the Justice Department or from a federal court in Washington for changes in election procedures. It applies to all or parts of 16 states. The court said that Congress developed extensive evidence of continuing racial discrimination when it reauthorized the provision six years ago.

The United States on Thursday announced the imposition of antidumping tariffs of more than 31 percent on solar panels from China.

The move by the Commerce Department is certain to infuriate Chinese officials already upset after recent bilateral frictions over China’s human rights policies and its increasingly confrontational approach toward American allies like the Philippines and Japan.

The antidumping decision is among the biggest in American history, covering one of the largest and fastest-growing categories of imports from China, the world’s largest exporter.

The department said the United States bought $3.1 billion worth of Chinese solar cells last year, giving China more than half the American market for the devices.

Many solar panel installers in the United States have opposed tariffs on Chinese panels, contending that inexpensive imports have helped spur many homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their rooftops. The new tariffs are likely to mean a substantial increase in the price of solar panels here.

Chinese officials have been indignant at American criticism of their solar power industry, pointing out that the United States has urged China for years to embrace renewable energy as a way to reduce air pollution, combat climate change and limit the need for oil imports from politically volatile countries in the Mideast.

Government support for solar energy is an important feature of China’s current Five-Year Plan, which runs through 2015, although Premier Wen Jiabao publicly cautioned in March that he was becoming concerned about overcapacity in the sector.

Shooting photos or video of police officers is a Constitutionally-protected right, says the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a win for technology, citizen journalism, and our Constitutional rights, the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a letter to the Baltimore City Police Department reconfirming that photographing, video- and audio-recording on-duty police officers is a Constitutional right protected by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

“Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations,” reads the DoJ’s letter (pdf). “More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant. In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights. Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.”

The letter, which was brought to our attention via photojournalist Carlos Miller of PixIQ (who says in his bio that he’s been arrested three times for recording police), comes in response to a lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Christopher Sharp, against the BPD, whose officers confiscated Sharp’s cellphone and deleted a video of police arresting his friend at the 2010 Preakness Stakes horse race.

After the DoJ first took interest in the lawsuit earlier this year, the BPD issued a seven-page General Order to officers stating that citizens have the “absolute right” to record police doing their duties, provided the recording does not violate any other laws, like obstruction of justice. Rather than stick to these principles, however, BPD simply adopted a broader interpretation of the law, which led to further crackdowns on recording. The DoJ’s most recent letter, issued on May 14, says that the BPD’s order does not go far enough to protect the rights of citizens.

The DoJ’s letter, written by Jonathan Smith, chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, also reconfirms that members of the press and other private citizens share the same right to record police, and that displaying press credentials should not be a prerequisite for recording police officers.

Newt Gingrich closed down his campaign early this month with at least $4.8 million in debt, according to campaign records filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday.

Among the biggest debts Mr. Gingrich accumulated were $181,977 for public relations consulting, $165,000 for Web advertising, $1 million to Moby Dick Airways, a charter company, and over $466,370 for security services. Mr. Gingrich also owes himself $580,134 in travel expenses.

His campaign reported $100,000 in debts to Crimson Hexagon, a Massachusetts firm, for software licenses, but a notation indicates that the campaign is disputing those bills.

During April, with his campaign effectively over, Mr. Gingrich raised just $786,782. He ended the month with $806,950 in cash on hand.

Mr. Gingrich’s debt is significant against the roughly $23 million he raised over the course of a tumultuous Republican primary.

The leaders of the G8 group of the world’s most powerful economies say they want debt-stricken Greece to remain in the eurozone.

In their summit communique, G8 leaders also committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility.

However, the leaders acknowledged “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone was high on the agenda, following inconclusive elections there.

The leaders of France, Germany, the US, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia have been meeting at Camp David in the US state of Maryland.

WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.

Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.

The purchase shows the enduring power of earmarks, even though several scandals have prompted efforts in Congress to rein them in. And at a time when the Pentagon is facing billions of dollars in cutbacks — which include shrinking the Army, trimming back purchases of fighter jets and retiring warships — the eye-catching price tag for a small part has provoked sharp criticism.

The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.

The company’s owners are political contributors to the congressman, who has been called the “Prince of Pork” by The Lexington Herald-Leader for his history of delivering federal contracts to donors and others back home.

Military officials have said the pans work well, and Mr. Rogers defended them.

“It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement. “These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals.”

But Bob Skillen, the chief engineer at a small manufacturer called VX Aerospace, which has a plant in North Carolina, said he was shocked to see what the Army was spending for the Black Hawk drip pans. He designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.

Labor Department figures indicate that the percentage of workers over the traditional retirement age of 65 is at a record high. But, the figures show, job totals fell sharply for men under 55 during the recession and have only started to recover, while the proportion of women ages 25 to 54 with jobs also slid and is close to the lowest level of the last two decades.

“The fact of the matter is that this aging-but-not-yet-aged segment of the baby boomer class can’t afford to retire,” said David A. Rosenberg, the chief economist of Gluskin Sheff, a Canadian firm, noting that overall household net worth was 15 percent lower than at the prerecession peak. “Dreams of the 5,000-square-foot McMansion being a viable retirement asset have morphed into nightmares of a deflationary ball and chain.”

The accompanying charts show the percentage of various age groups with jobs since the end of 2006, when the overall percentage of people with jobs hit its cyclical peak. Each of the charts has a different range, but the same spread between the top and the bottom, so that a move of a given size represents the same gain or loss in percentage points.

For the first time since the government began keeping track of the numbers in 1981 — and probably the first time ever — one in nine American men over the age of 75 was working in April. About one in 20 women over that age have jobs.

Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng - who was at the centre of a diplomatic crisis with Washington - is on his way to the United States.

The blind activist and his family boarded a flight to Newark, near New York, after being taken from a Beijing hospital to the capital’s airport.

Mr Chen recently spent six days in the US embassy in Beijing after escaping house arrest in north-east China.

He has been offered a fellowship at New York university.

Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught lawyer who campaigned against forced abortions under China’s one-child policy, was jailed for four years in 2006 for disrupting traffic and damaging property, and placed under house arrest after his release in 2010.

The board of the N.A.A.C.P voted to endorse same-sex marriage on Saturday, putting the weight of the country’s most prominent civil rights group behind a cause that has long divided some quarters of the black community.

The largely symbolic move, made at the group’s quarterly board meeting in Miami, puts the N.A.A.C.P in line with President Obama, who endorsed gay marriage a little over a week ago. Given the timing, it is likely to be viewed as both a statement of principle as well as support for the president’s position in the middle of a closely contested presidential campaign.

All but two of the organization’s board members, who include many religious leaders, backed a resolution supporting same-sex marriage, according to people told of the decision.

Borrowing a term used by gay right’s advocates, the resolution stated: “We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

In a statement, Roslyn M. Brock, chairwoman of the board, said that “we have and will oppose efforts to codify discrimination into law.”

A spokesman for the group declined to discuss a breakdown of how the board members voted.

The practical implication’s of the the N.A.A.C.P.’s decision is unclear. Several of its leaders have already expressed support for same-sex marriage, and local branches have repeatedly opposed measures
to ban such unions, most recently in North Carolina, where voters just passed a referendum against weddings and civil unions for gay people.

Children from racial and ethnic minorities now account for more than half the births in the US, according to estimates of the latest US census data.

Black, Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race births made up 50.4% of new arrivals in the year ending in July 2011.

It puts non-Hispanic white births in the minority for the first time.

Sociologists believe the ongoing economic slowdown has contributed to a greater decline in birth rates among white people.

The US Census Bureau recorded 2.02m babies born to minorities in the year to July 2011, just over half of all births, compared with 37% in 1990.

‘Important landmark’
US birth rates have been declining, but the drop has been larger for white people.

The number of white births has fallen by 11.4% since 2008, compared with 3.2% for minorities, according to Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire.

William Frey, head of demographics at the Brookings Institution, described the data as a “tipping point” that would present a new set of challenges to the US in years to come.

Senator John McCain, who refused to make President Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright an issue during his 2008 presidential campaign, repudiated a proposal by Republican strategists to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do” — open an incendiary, racially tinged attack on the president.

Mr. McCain also shrugged off the slights against him in a proposal for the political ad campaign, which was brought to light by The New York Times.

“I don’t know whether to be offended or not,” Mr. McCain said with a smile. “It is what it is. Look, my life has moved on.”

He added that such third-party attacks are “a way for political operatives to continue to make money.”

The authors of the ad campaign, timed to rock the Democratic National Convention in September, asserted that “if the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominees chosen by President Obama for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, overcoming Republican objections and bringing the seven-member board to full strength for the first time since 2006, before the economic crisis.

But I wanted to make another point. If you scan through all the media attention Romney’s speech received, you are hard-pressed to find any news accounts that tell readers the following rather relevant points:

1) Nonpartisan experts believe Romney’s plans would increase the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

2) George W. Bush’s policies arguably are more responsible for increasing the deficit than Obama’s are.

Oh, sure, many of the news accounts contain the Obama campaign’s response to Romney’s speech; the Obama campaign put out a widely-reprinted statement arguing that Romney’s plans would increase the deficit and that he’d return to policies that created it in the first place.

But this shouldn’t be a matter of partisan opinion. On the first point, independent experts think an actual set of facts exists that can be used to determine what the impact of Romney’s policies on the deficit would be. And according to those experts, based on what we know now, Romney’s policies would explode the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has taken a close look at this question. It has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes, his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit.

By contrast, Obama’s plans would not increase the deficit by anything close to that amount. Relative to current policy, the Tax Policy Center has found, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by approximately $2 trillion over the next decade. Now, under Obama, the deficit would still increase. That’s because current policy means we’re forgoing the $4.5 trillion in revenues we’d gain if we let all the Bush tax cuts expire. But neither candidate is going to do that. Obama, however, would end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and bring in revenues through a variety of other tax increases. Bottom line: relative to current policy, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by bringing in $180 billion or more in revenues a year, or approximately $2 trillion over 10 years; Romeny’s plan would increase the deficit by nearly $500 billion a year — $5 trillion over ten years.

RT @hackernewsbot: Flotr2 : a library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs...

There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.

Last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a decision that a woman from Kansas could be sent to jail if she refused to testify against the man she accused of sexual assault.

The 24-year-old woman initially filed charges in August 2012 against a 63-year-old Nebraska man for sexually assaulting her when she was 7 years old. Last year, however, she refused to testify in court because she felt it would bring further shame and humiliation to her family. In response, Lancaster County District Judge Paul Merritt threatened her with a contempt charge and ninety days of jail time, saying that the case hinged on her testimony.

Unfortunately, this case is not unique but part of growing trend of criminalizing rape survivors in order to guarantee their testimonies at trial.

In April, law enforcement officials in Sacramento, California, detained a 17-year-old girl for twice failing to appear in court against the man accused of raping her. Prosecutors argued that her testimony was crucial because the defendant, Fran William Rackley, was accused of sexually assaulting another victim and therefore posed a clear and present danger to the larger society.

For many victim rights advocates, the detention was seen as a violation of California Marsy’s Law, a state constitutional amendment that protects and expands the legal rights of victims. Thanks to the diligent efforts of her lawyer, Lisa Franco, and advocates, the judge ordered an ankle-monitoring bracelet as an alternative to more jail time after she already had been detained for more than a week.

In both cases, the judges recognized that threatening or detaining the victims might not be the best way to address the victim’s reluctance to take the stand. And yet, ultimately the rights of the victims were seen as secondary to public good.

The US state of Texas is likely to have executed an innocent man due to careless handling of the case, a report by US law students claims.

Carlos de Luna was killed by lethal injection in 1989 for the brutal murder of a single mother six years earlier.

Right up until his execution, de Luna maintained a fellow Hispanic called Carlos Hernandez was the real culprit.

The Columbia University report backs his claim. It says “shoddy police work” probably led to the wrong man dying.

Under the supervision of Professor James Liebman, 12 students spent five years painstakingly dissecting the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez in the Texan city of Corpus Christi. The petrol station clerk was stabbed in the chest with a lock-blade buck knife.

The students combed through endless police files and crime scene footage, and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, including detectives who had worked on the case.

Former President George W. Bush jumped back into presidential politics this week, endorsing presumptive 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. He also, according to the New York Times, plans to release a book in two months that will lay out his advice on boosting economic growth:

Gingerly, the 43rd president is beginning to add his voice back into the national dialogue. A month ago, he spoke publicly in favor of one of his defining domestic legacies, the tax cuts that still divide the country. Two months from now, he plans to publish a book outlining strategies for economic growth. And on Tuesday, he made a rare return to Washington to promote freedom overseas.

That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

As this chart shows, the only economic indicator on which Bush exceeded the average is corporate profits:

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton announced today that she will not be given the opportunity to testify during a congressional hearing on a bill that would prohibit abortions in D.C. after 20 weeks.

This Thursday the House Subcommittee on the Constitution will consider the bill introduced by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) in January. (A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee.) Last week Norton requested the right to speak—which could have been granted by Franks, who is also the committee’s chair—as she has for other hearings in which legislation directly targeting D.C. is considered. Her request was denied.

“The post-20-week D.C. abortion ban bill targets an entire group of individuals, women who live in the District of Columbia, and their constitutional rights. Using the women of one congressional district to reach for extreme encroachments on women’s reproductive rights has become a pattern of the House Republican majority, but also reflected nationwide. We will vigorously fight the bullying tactics of the Republican majority against the District’s women, and in standing up for ourselves, we recognize that we are also in the larger fight to protect the reproductive rights of women everywhere,” said Norton in a statement.

Norton announced that she would participate in a press conference before the hearing with Mayor Vince Gray and Christy Zink, a professor at the George Washington University who had an abortion after 20 weeks due to the malformation of the fetus. Zink will be testifying against the bill.

In response to Franks’ bill, DC Vote is encouraging D.C. residents to bring their constituent problems to “Mayor” Franks’ D.C. Constituent Services Day on May 23. In March a small group of pro-choice and pro-D.C. activists protested outside Franks’ district office in Glendale, Arizona against the bill.

The Virginia legislature considered a similar restriction this year and rejected it. The 20-week restrictions have been passed in Alabama, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas.

A German man who alleges he was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Khaled al-Masri claims he was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured.

He wants Macedonia to recognise its part in the alleged kidnap.

Mr Masri has already brought several cases against the US and German authorities, without success.

An attempt to sue the 13 CIA agents in the US courts failed, and a later approach to the German authorities to request their extradition was dropped.

His case is still pending at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Lebanese-born Mr Masri claims he was abducted in Skopje, capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and detained for five months in Afghanistan.

He says four of those months were spent in a secret prison outside Kabul, nicknamed the “salt pit”.

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The Federal Reserve is worried about the impact on the US economy if government spending is cut sharply.

“The possibility of a sharp fiscal tightening in the United States was also considered a sizable risk,” the US central bank said in the minutes of its April meeting.

Automatic budget cuts that will slash $1.2bn (£754m) will happen at the end of this year if a budget deal is not reached.

The Fed held rates at a record low.

“If agreement is not reached on a plan for the federal budget, a sharp fiscal tightening could occur at the start of 2013,” the minutes said.

“Uncertainty about the trajectory of future fiscal policy could lead businesses to defer hiring and investment.”

After a fierce political debate that saw budget talks go to the wire, Republican and Democratic leaders reached an agreement in August 2011 on raising the US debt limit and avoiding a first default.

Under the the agreement, the US deficit will be reduced by at least $2.1tn over 10 years.

The House of Representatives Republican leader, John Boehner, has indicated he is again prepared to battle President Barack Obama over the budget.

The Fed has vowed to keep rates at “exceptionally low levels” all the way to late 2014.

“Several members” of the Fed also said, the minutes showed, that additional support could be needed if the economic recovery lost momentum.

Congress also bears substantial responsibility for the anti-scientific, anti-empirical aspects of American drug policy. If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are able to define the terms of the upcoming presidential election, this issue won’t come up. But voters have consistently shown interest in the subject when permitted to directly question politicians, and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee, is eager to challenge Obama and Romney on this issue given the chance. When opportunities for these challenges arise, the classification of marijuana is one of the most vulnerable parts of the status quo to attack.12 states have pending medical marijuana legislation.

When you decide to work with a given’s service API, please tell them you want their API to become a protocol, something for which you are a stake holder, that you can help improve. Also, if there is any open protocol or any schema that does what this API aims at doing, please convince them that it’s way to go, that this will make the web better and that will make your code more useful to more people :)

In any other rich country, Nikki probably would have been fine, notes T. R. Reid in his important and powerful new book, “The Healing of America.” Some 80 percent of lupus patients in the United States live a normal life span. Under a doctor’s care, lupus should be manageable. Indeed, if Nikki had been a felon, the problem could have been averted, because courts have ruled that prisoners are entitled to medical care.

As Mr. Reid recounts, Nikki tried everything to get medical care, but no insurance company would accept someone with her pre-existing condition. She spent months painfully writing letters to anyone she thought might be able to help. She fought tenaciously for her life.

Finally, Nikki collapsed at her home in Tennessee and was rushed to a hospital emergency room, which was then required to treat her without payment until her condition stabilized. Since money was no longer an issue, the hospital performed 25 emergency surgeries on Nikki, and she spent six months in critical care.

“When Nikki showed up at the emergency room, she received the best of care, and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, told me. “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

“She fell through the cracks,” Nikki’s mother, Gail Deal, told me grimly. “When you bury a child, it’s the worst thing in the world. You never recover.”

We now have a chance to reform this cruel and capricious system. If we let that chance slip away, there will be another Nikki dying every half-hour.

That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.

Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

In a budget proposed this week, California joined more than a dozen states that want to help close gaping shortfalls using money paid by the nation’s biggest banks and earmarked for foreclosure prevention, investigations of financial fraud and blunting the ill effects of the housing crisis. California was awarded more than $400 million from the banks, and Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed using the bulk of that sum to pay the state’s debts.

The money was part of a national settlement valued at $25 billion and negotiated with five big banks over abuses in their mortgage and foreclosure processes.

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. But critics complained that this was the only cash the banks were required to pay — the rest comes in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other activities. Even that relatively small amount has proved too great a temptation for lawmakers.

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

In Texas, $125 million went straight to the general fund. Missouri will use its $40 million to soften cuts to higher education. Indiana is spending more than half its allotment to pay energy bills for low-income families, while Virginia will use most of its $67 million to help revenue-starved local governments.

Like California, some other states with outsize problems from the housing bust are spending the money for something other than homeowner relief. Georgia, where home prices are still falling, will use its $99 million to lure companies to the state.

Over-the-counter HIV tests that would allow people to check in the privacy of their homes if they have the virus have moved a step closer in the US.

A panel of experts said the OraQuick In-Home HIV Test was safe and effective and its potential to prevent infections outweighed the risk of false results.

The Food and Drug Administration will decide this year whether to approve it.

The 20-minute test is 93% accurate for positive results and 99.8% for negative, the manufacturer said.

HIV affects nearly 1.2m people in the US, with 50,000 new cases each year.

My guess is that online education is more of a complement than a substitute for offline experiences. To be sure, watch something like Michael Sandel’s online course, Justice, and there is no need to attend Harvard for the same thing. But that is because a huge amount of effort went into its design and production. And it is also one where the lecture experience translates online. For courses like Game Theory, the lecture experience is limiting and bringing it online only demonstrates that more starkly.

So let’s say Flickr finally gets it together. Let’s say it fixes its app, reinvigorates the community, and finally gets back on path. The question is: Is it too late?

It’s under attack not just from Facebook and Instagram and, hell, TwitPic and Imgur (Imgur for fuck’s sake!) but also the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, and Box.net. Not to mention Apple’s iCloud and PhotoStream, Google’s Picasa, and yes even Google+, which does automatic photo uploads from Android handsets in glorious full resolution complete with geotags and EXIF data.

A comeback doesn’t seem likely.

Flickr is still very valuable. It has a massive database of geotagged, Creative Commons- and Getty-licensed, subject-tagged photos. But sadly, Yahoo’s steady march of incompetence doesn’t bode well for making use of these valuable properties. If the Internet really were a series of tubes, Yahoo would be the leaking sewage pipe, covering everything it comes in contact with in watered-down shit.

Flickr’s last best hope is that Yahoo realizes its value and decides to spin it off for a few bucks before both drop down into a final death spiral. But even if that happens, Flickr has a long road ahead of it to relevance. People don’t tend to come back to homes they’ve already abandoned.

Flickr is still pretty wonderful. But it’s lovely in the same way a box of old photos you’ve stashed under the bed is. It’s an archive of nostalgia that you love dearly, on the rare occasion you stumble across it. You pull them out, and hold them up to the light, and remember a time when you were younger, and the Web was a more optimistic place, and it really was almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

And then you close the box.

And you click over to Facebook, to see what’s new.

He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

Even “all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them,” and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is “emblematic” of legal system failure.

DeLuna, 27, was put to death after “a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure,” Liebman said.

Choice 3 is probably the rarest among growing technology companies today, but is, as I mentioned, increasingly common. In Fully Distributed teams, there is no real “headquarters” or “central office”. All communication is digital-preferred, which means employees can work from anywhere and not be fearful about out-of-band communication. Typically, employees will set up home offices or work out of coworking spaces in their home area. Occasionally, the team will still have a “headquarters” office, though this office will often be reserved for things like management, sales, marketing, business development, or other operational roles that do not need to be scaled as heavily.

Choice 3 tends to work extremely well for technology-heavy teams due to a few factors:

Tools for doing distributed collaboration on software projects are very mature thanks to the open source community, which has been doing this at scale for years. To give just a few examples: source code control is web-based, hosted, and distributed (e.g. Github); all good project management or bug tracking tools are web-based; production systems can be effectively managed using SSH; team knowledge bases can be built effectively using wiki technology/conventions perfected by projects like Wikipedia; many web-based tools are available for all other forms of typical “office” collaboration such as document editing, file sharing, and instant messaging.
Software engineering requires long periods of uninterrupted focus, aka Flow. Working in an office environment tends to involve lots of interruptions and meetings; working from home, by contrast, (assuming a separate home office) guarantees a high comfort level and long periods of concentrated work in private.
Great software engineers have eccentric work habits and quirky computer setups. Many software engineers report getting their best work done between 10pm and 2am or between 7am and 9am. Many intensely dislike commutes and rigid work schedules. Most have heavily customized their personal development workstation to be greased for productivity. Many report getting some of their best ideas in the shower or after a nap. Working from home in a Fully Distributed model offers more opportunities to leverage their established (and optimized) work style which would be socially unpalatable in an office environment.
The best software teams are merit-based. That is to say, success on a great software team is measured by working software, not by the number of hours the engineer has planted his or her butt in an office chair. Success is definitely not measured by the number of meetings you have held or the quantity of your communication. Fully Distributed technology teams make working software the only reasonable deliverable a team member can provide. Thus, these teams naturally self-organize around its most productive members and shine a spotlight on poor performers.

Netflix clocked close to 42 billion API requests per day in January, according to the company’s director of engineering Daniel Jacobson, who revealed the number as part of a presentation he recently gave to the Paypal engineering team. In his slides, Jacobson pointed out that the number of API requests has grown 70-fold in just two years, from 600 million in January of 2010 to 41.7 billion in January of 2012.

FORT WORTH - The U.S. government didn’t offer a reward for the capture of Houston grandmother Elisa Castillo, nor did it accuse her of touching drugs, ordering killings, or getting rich off crime.

But three years after a jury convicted her in a conspiracy to smuggle at least a ton of cocaine on tour buses from Mexico to Houston, the 56-year-old first-time offender is locked up for life - without parole.

“It is ridiculous,” said Castillo, who is a generation older than her cell mates, and is known as “grandma” at the prison here. “I am no one.”

Convicted of being a manager in the conspiracy, she is serving a longer sentence than some of the hemisphere’s most notorious crime bosses - men who had multimillion-dollar prices on their heads before their capture.

The drug capos had something to trade: the secrets of criminal organizations. The biggest drug lords have pleaded guilty in exchange for more lenient sentences.

Castillo said she has nothing to offer in a system rife with inconsistencies and behind-the-scenes scrambling that amounts to a judicial game of Let’s Make A Deal.

“Our criminal justice system is broke; it needs to be completely revamped,” declared Terry Nelson, who was a federal agent for over 30 years and is on the executive board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “They have the power, and if you don’t play the game, they’ll throw the book at you.”

Castillo maintains her innocence, saying she was tricked into unknowingly helping transport drugs and money for a big trafficker in Mexico. But she refused to plead guilty and went to trial.

In 2010, of 1,766 defendants prosecuted for federal drug offenses in the Southern District of Texas - a region that reaches from Houston to the border - 93.2 percent pleaded guilty rather than face trial, according to the U.S. government. Of the defendants who didn’t plead not guilty, 10 defendants were acquitted at trial. Also, 82 saw their cases dismissed.

The statistics are similar nationwide.

The latest case in point came this week with the negotiated surrender of a Colombian drug boss Javier Calle Serna, whom the United States accuses of shipping at least 30 tons of cocaine.

While how much time Calle will face is not known publicly, he likely studied other former players, including former Gulf Cartel lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

Cardenas once led one of Mexico’s most powerful syndicates and created the Zetas gang. He pleaded guilty in Houston and is to be released by 2025. He’ll be 57.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress. They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. “All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%,” the study notes. Most participants were surprised by the level of America’s defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar results—support for defence cuts—when participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year’s budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average. So it may seem odd that America’s politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions. Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue that America would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

An interesting side note is that in 2007, the world average was 9.4 million Internet users per root server site. In 2012 it is, as you can see in the chart above, 7.6 million. That is definitely an improvement.

Asia on the other hand has gone from 16.7 million Internet users per root server site in 2007 to 20.3 million in 2012.

In other words, the world as whole is getting a better ratio between the number of Internet users and root servers, while Asia is getting a worse ratio.

In the past 5 years the world Internet population has doubled, and more than half of the new Internet users have come from Asia. It’s clearly a region that is becoming increasingly underserved in terms of DNS infrastructure.

The US says it will seek an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s by 2025, as it faces an ageing population and spiralling health costs.

Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the goal as part of the first National Alzheimer’s Plan.

An additional $50m will be added to research funding during 2012.

About 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or related dementias, a number expected to reach 16 million by 2050, at a cost of $1tn (£625m).

President Barack Obama has earmarked an additional $80m in his 2013 budget plan for Alzheimer’s research in what was described as an effort to “jumpstart” efforts to reach the 2025 goal.

In addition, the plan calls for better training of doctors in a bid to better recognise the symptoms of the disease, increased support for care-givers and public awareness of the disease, as well as better data tracking.

Just days before Facebook’s historic stock offering, General Motors said it plans to stop advertising on the social media site, concluding that its paid ads don’t have a big impact on consumers.

GM spends about $40 million a year on Facebook marketing, according to the Wall Street Journal, about $10 million of which is for paid advertisements. It will continue to post relevant content about the company and its brands on GM’s Facebook pages.

GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick told the Journal that GM “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.”

In a statement, GM said: “We regularly review our overall media spend and make adjustments as needed. This happens as a regular course of business and it’s not unusual for us to move our spending around various media outlets – especially with the growth of multiple social and digital media outlets.

“In terms of Facebook specifically, while we currently do not plan to continue with advertising, we remain committed to an aggressive content strategy through all of our products and brands, as it continues to be a very effective tool for engaging with our customers.”

GM has been re-evaluating much of its advertising strategy over the past year, consolidating its global advertising and media-buying agencies in a bid to cut $2 billion from its marketing budget while improving the efficiency of its advertising.

As it stands, the iPad is amazing. I use it every single day for writing, browsing the news, sketching ideas, and reading though email or tech riders and I love every minute of it. It f complements my daily life and on days when I don’t need to get any real work done, I leave my laptop at home. But when it comes to honest creative work I can not help but find the iPad as little more than a sidekick. I can say with certainty though, that this is far from the last word on this. I can clearly see a future where touch screen devices such as the iPad become more and more viable for the kind of things I have discussed here today. It is still new territory being explored and I for one can not wait to see where it takes us.

But the statistics suggest the country has not lost its way due to laziness. If you look at the average annual hours worked by each worker, the Greeks seem very hard-working.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that the average Greek worker toils away for 2,017 hours per year which is more than any other European country.

Out of the 34 members of the OECD, that is just two places behind the board leaders, South Korea.

On the other hand, the average German worker - normally thought of as the very epitome of industriousness - only manages 1,408 hours a year. Germany is 33rd out of 34 on the OECD list (or 24th out of 25 looking at the European countries alone).

New York City police officers stopped and questioned more than 200,000 people in the just the first three months of 2012, setting up a record pace for much criticized tactic. The “Stop, Question, Frisk” policy has been a major initiative for the NYPD, which credits the tactic as a key contributor to a years-long drop in street crimes. However, numerous studies have shown that the stops overwhelmingly target black and Latino males. A recent study by the ALCU released last week showed that were 168,000 stops of young black men last year, which exceeds the actual population of young black men living in the city.

Police have been given the authority ”stop and frisk” anyone on “reasonable suspicion” of being involved in a crime — a much lower standard than probable cause — yet more that 90 percent of those stopped are never charged with anything. Despite such criticisms, the department continue tout the policy as an important factor in keeping the peace. On they same day they released the street stop numbers, they NYPD also announced that there have been just 129 murders through the first 132 days of the year, putting the city on pace for fewest number of homicides since reliable statistics have been tracked. The 471 homicides in 2009 is the lowest total on record.

AirPlay, a software tool included with Apple’s iPads and iPhones, is widely viewed as being potentially disruptive to the cable industry, because it makes it easy for people to view a broad variety of Internet content on a television. Time Warner Cable’s leader, however, hasn’t heard of it.

Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is,” he said, though he noted that he was an enthusiastic Apple customer. “Today we want to be on every screen. Today it’s a little bit clunky to get programming from the Internet onto the TV — not so hard to get it on your iPad. What’s hard is the plumbing, what wires do you connect, what device do you use. So the current Apple TV, the little thing, the hockey puck, really doesn’t do anything to help enable you to get Internet material on your TV.”

Apple pitches AirPlay as a way to make it easy to get Internet video from an iPad or iPhone onto a television, among other uses. A user can press a button while watching video to stream it wirelessly to an Apple TV box connected to a TV set.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of private citizens to record the actions of police while they are performing their duties in public places. The decision resulted from a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois against the state’s unusually broad eavesdropping statute. It criminalizes all audio recordings made without the consent of the parties involved, even of public officials in public places.

“The act of making an audio or audiovisual recording is necessarily included within the First Amendment’s guarantee of speech and press rights as a corollary of the right to disseminate the resulting recording,” wrote the two-judge majority in a Tuesday decision. The Illinois statute “interferes with the gathering and dissemination of information about government officials performing their duties in public. Any way you look at it, the eavesdropping statute burdens speech and press rights and is subject to heightened First Amendment scrutiny.”

But Judge Richard Posner disagreed with his colleagues. Posner is the judge who raised concerns in oral arguments that striking down the statute would lead to more “snooping around by reporters and bloggers.”

The majority’s ruling “casts a shadow over electronic privacy statutes of other states,” Posner wrote in his dissent. He worried that crime victims would be hesistant to report crimes to police officers in public out of fear that the conversation might be recorded by a third party’s cell phone and posted to the Internet.

In short: We know you’re using your role as governor to endorse belief in god and you can’t do that.

The FFRF litigants wanted previous Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations declared unconstitutional and they want to prevent further proclamations from being issued. Initially, a judge said FFRF had the right to sue on behalf of Colorado taxpayers but the governor wasn’t doing anything illegal.

FFRF didn’t like that ruling and wanted to challenge it. The Governor didn’t like that FFRF had a right to sue. So they took the case to a state Appeals court.

There, the judges said FFRF still has the right to sue.

The Governor’s people didn’t want to address the Constitutionality of the proclamations — they just said it was a part of state history. But the court said that was a lie:

There [was] no indication in the record that, at the time of Colorado’s founding or at any time before 2004, Colorado’s governors had an annual tradition of proclaiming, separately from Thanksgiving, a Colorado Day of Prayer.

Furthermore, they said, it’s not a secularized day, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It’s “avowedly religious.” The court then said “we conclude that the six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations have predominantly religious content.”