No, it's hyper-local in the journalistic sense, covering news that individuals will find relevant, but which historically the print media which covered that area would have found too localized to bother spending the money for someone to cover it.

The example in the This American Life episode which originally talked about these guys is a town hall meeting where new articles were up for debate. IIRC, the paper which covers that area is the Chicago Tribune, who normally doesn't have the resources to cover a small-town meeting like that. But the citizens of that town would find it as relevant (if not more so) as downtown folks would find a city hall meeting, which the Tribune would cover.

I think the core idea has merit, but I don't know how you can do it in a manner that assures quality.

An example from my own life that could benefit from a service like this - there's a new very high density housing subdivision going in behind where I live; there's a local meeting about it every few weeks (none of the local folks around here want it of course, but our township folks insist this is the only way they'll be able to pay for new roads - which of course are only needed because the township keeps approving huge new high density housing subdivisions). The township meetings are almost always held at a time which is incompatible with my schedule, so I can't attend these. I rely on my neighbors to tell me about it, but they're all so steamed up that their version of the events is usually vague and inconsistent. Having an actual journalist report on this would be really useful to me. It's too small-potatoes to attract a journalist though.

I'm sure that's true to some extent, but it's 1) better than no environmental certification at all, and 2) Apple pulled out because they now glue their batteries to the chassis, thus making the batteries and chassis non-recyclable. It strikes me that being able to recycle batteries reduces a lot of chemical waste, and being able to recycle aluminum is one of the very best ROI's of any form of recycling (the energy required to refine aluminum from bauxite ore is orders of magnitude more than is required to smelt and refine previously refined aluminum)

It's better if individuals actually learn this difference, because the best grammar checker in the world can't fix this problem reliably. For example, "What did you lose?" -vs- "What did you loose?" Both are perfectly valid sentences. Both require context to know which was meant, and so far only human awareness is up to the task. Even then it might be ambiguous.

Anyway, this isn't a grammar problem, it's a spelling problem. People spell "lose" as "loose" because they are spelling phonetically, and "loose" pronounced phonetically is closer to the pronunciation of "lose" than its correct spelling is. Maybe grammar checkers historically solve this problem, but that's because spelling is context insensitive while grammar is context sensitive, and the difference between two validly spelled words with different pronunciations and meanings can only be determined by examining context.

Yeah, I agree that their actions should be subject to review for any action performed in the course of duty. Automatic public review is probably not a wonderful idea though. Just because the police officer should have no expectation of privacy during their duties doesn't mean that the recipient of those actions have no expectation of privacy. Police officers assist in many confidential matters, not all of which are law enforcement in nature - such as during medical and other crises. If I have a heart attack while taking a shower, and a police officer is first on the scene, my pasty naked body should not be available for all to ogle.

It would be great if helmet cam footage was mandatory, but its release should be conditional on the nature of the footage, and of course there needs to be some observation of the officer's personal non-duty privacy (using the restroom for example).

Unfortunately creating all the rules surrounding how and when an officer does and does not have his camera engaged, and when footage is and is not available for public review would create a legal warren inside of which abuses could continue to be hidden.

This is certainly thuggish behavior, and it's not my intention to excuse it - it's really not excusable. I also believe police should be subject to publicly created record while performing their duties when other conditions do not prohibit the creation of that record (i.e. if they are in a restricted area, the public should not be expected to be granted special access for this purpose).

However, there is a mass education issue at stake here. A number of these police video recordings are misrepresented when released on YouTube / whatever. They show partial truths. We should always demand to see the video before and after the incendiary incident, and we should reserve judgment until we can see all the evidence, not just the cherry-picked clips that look worst.

For example, the UC Davis occupy students who were pepper sprayed by a cop while sitting peacefully. It turns out, those students were no longer protesting Wall Street, they were protesting the arrests those same police officers had previously made of some of their friends - who were arrested not for protesting, but for interfering with police action (removing tents on the quad). On a larger scale, they were blocking police progress, they were encircling the police officers, and were telling the police officers they would not let the police go until their friends were released. A small group of the officers had been separated from the rest of the force and were being detained by the crowd of students. The police were being antagonized and borderline threatened. The police issued multiple warnings that they would soon start using non-lethal force, including directly to that group of students. The officers who did the spraying walked up and down the line which blocked their progress and informed the students that they were going to be subject to increased force, and gave them an opportunity to allow the officers to pass. The students were only sprayed after they continued to refuse to release the officers.

Whether or not you agree that pepper spray was the appropriate response given the fact that the students were creating a very hostile situation by encircling, separating, and detaining police officers for reasons not related to their protest, the fact is that these fairly important facts were not represented in the videos which shot around the Internet in the aftermath. Personally, I think that if you're going to separate, surround, and detain police officers, you're lucky that pepper spray was the only result. That kind of situation could escalate in a dangerous manner very quickly (both for the officers and for the students) if they didn't get control over the situation fairly quickly. It would take only one student to throw a rock at the officers, and mob mentality could take over. The worst of the outcome being some pepper burns is much better than other outcomes that could have precipitated from that scenario.

That's a little (maybe a lot) like saying, "We now know that theory allows for us to create artificial gravity or to block the effects of gravity, so why don't we just build the device that lets us do so without all that annoying intermediary research?" Or maybe like those aborigines on islands in the middle of the Pacific ocean who saw airplanes fly overhead and drop supplies during World War 2. It's like if they decided to go ahead and build an airplane without first understanding aerodynamics, internal combustion engines, or even metal working. Actually, they did, they built some airplanes out of mud and sticks. They were probably more successful in their attempts than we would be trying to create $AWESOME_TOOL exploiting Higgs.

We either need an understanding of how the universe works, or we need a serendipitous accidental discovery, before we can exploit the laws of nature for our advantage. Only studious exploration of the universe guarantees a result; serendipitous discovery by its nature has no guarantees.

Yeah, but when you get a new handset, you renew your contract. You want the latest Android features? Well, you're on contract now, so screw you. Your contract is finishing up? Here's a phone with all the new features, which you're eligible for a few months before your contract ends (to combat jumping carriers) assuming you renew your contract with us.

They can only get contract renewals by binding them together with handset upgrades, so they are very much incentivized to get you to to upgrade your equipment at every possible opportunity. They don't really care all that much whether you stay with them off-contract, they actually report company health by the number of new contracts. Try running for a few months past the end of your phone contract without renewing. They'll try all sorts of things to get you on a new contract. I had to threaten Verizon to leave them if they didn't stop bugging me about it. That didn't stop the calls ("it takes 4 to 6 weeks for that to blah blah blah"). I only got the calls to stop by asking for a manager, telling the manager I didn't care what she had to do, if I got even one more call - no matter what I was doing when it came in - I would do whatever it takes to cancel my service on the spot, and I'd be sure to mention her name, and that I warned her of my plan. I didn't get another call after that.

This is similar to how cable companies report their performance. Try getting a business phone line from Comcast. When they leave, you're going to have an effectively free TV drop too. For us our TV drop is behind the whiteboard in the conference room - we didn't really want another jack in the wall, and they said it didn't qualify if it was in the electronics closet. It also saved us a few percent per month over having *just* phone.

It doesn't seem to any longer at least for Chrome 19.

Flash died because Jobs killed it. Jobs killed it because it competed with his app store, regardless of his words to the contrary.

Love Flash or hate Flash, let's call it what it was: one company with a superior market position strong-arming the technology of another company out of the way because it threatened their profits.

That's been my experience with Apple products all along, and I have owned and do own quite a few. 90% of the time it's 100% of what you need, and very easy to use at that. 10% of the time it's 0% of what you need, and the only way around it is horrible fragile difficult hacks if you're lucky, or if you're not, finding a different device to fill that need all together.

The difference between people who love Apple products and people who hate Apple products is how readily a person is to give up on what they want when they discover it's not normally possible. Mac fanatics change their wants to meet the product. Mac haters refuse to give up their wants and detest that the product can't give it to them.

There are 3 transformer keyboards, one for the original, one for the prime, and one for the transformer pad. The Transformer Infinity is compatible with the Prime's keyboard, it's virtually the same physical specs - being only 0.01 inch thicker.

I'm curious what you think innovation looks like. There's a dozen form factors with focus on various improvements such as better cameras, brighter screens, longer battery life, better performance, lower prices, detachable physical keyboards with their own supplemental battery supply, SD and MicroSD card slots, USB ports, dongle-less micro HDMI ports, and more.

Wait, so "innovation" in your mind is "the same thing only different"? That's not innovation, that's knockoff-ism. And you're not looking very hard if you haven't found an Android tablet that offers similar specs. Transformer Prime is the same price point, with added features, better battery life, better performance, thinner, lighter, and some interesting other bonuses. Also the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is so much the same thing that Apple has been suing Samsung over it.

And they have it several times over, plus other options that try less to be an iPad and do a commendable job of being their own thing, often for a lot cheaper.

I'm not really a gun rights kind of guy (never owned one, and only fired one a handful of times - and never anything too exciting either), but I can point out that there's a dangerous second amendment implication embedded in this line of thinking. Taking away gun rights for gray language terminology such as "careless" has a slippery slope associated with it. Today, careless counts as using your gun in a manner which has a chance of starting a fire. Over time what counts as careless can drift, and can be used to squash the right to own a gun.

Love it or hate it, the two most important things our founders believed were, "You can speak out against your government," and "You can defend yourself against your government." The government should always fear its citizens, and it's always dangerous for the government to be able to castrate any citizen's rights such as by revoking their access to the 2nd amendment - particularly since the 2nd amendment is meant as a way for citizens to enforce the other amendments on the government.

All modern public corporate economics are based on short term gain, not long term gain. Executives ride this year after year, making enormous bonuses for superficially great years, then when the economy takes a downturn, they "restructure," shed this baggage, cut some jobs, take a meager bonus for one or two years, and start all over again.

You're more than right; at this age an occasional and almost accidental "dada" or "mama" is appropriate. It's pretty intriguing that she is able to operate the phone well enough to unlock it and call you. My son is 13 months old, and I go out of my way to make sure he doesn't have access to my phone since at this age, they tend to explore the world with their mouth (not surprising, the tongue is the highest nerve density in your body, you can feel detail with it that you can't with any other part of your body, and you get the added bonus of taste).