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Comment Re:Buying Windows does some good in the world! (Score 1) 451

by AutoReg (#40630281) Attached to: Melinda Gates Pledges $560 Million For Contraception
If you call someone 'grotesquely wrong" then you should have some support for your position. You don't. Try these, they only took 30 seconds to find. Let me know if you need more. http://democrats.financialservices.house.gov/FinancialSvcsDemMedia/file/key_issues/Predatory_Subprime_Mortgage_Lending/GSE_Subprime_timelineSHORT_091510.pdf http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/09/AR2008060902626.html http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/30/real_estate/congress_subprime.fortune/ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212948811465427.html

Comment Re:Buying Windows does some good in the world! (Score 1) 451

by AutoReg (#40629405) Attached to: Melinda Gates Pledges $560 Million For Contraception
"Capitalism" did not tank anything. I think you know that the US Government had a major role in creating and deepening the sub-prime mortgage crisis. HUD had for years prior been directing the GSEs to back sub-prime mortgages. Without this push there wouldn't have been nearly as many such loans made. The outcome of this policy is typical of central planning--start with a noble idea, in this case increasing home ownership, add bad planning and terrible execution and we're left with a horrible result.
Power

Submission + - DARPA targets computing's Achilles Heel: Power (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The power required to increase computing performance, especially in embedded or sensor systems has become a serious constraint and is restricting the potential of future systems.

Technologists from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking for an ambitious answer to the problem and will next month detail a new program it expects will develop power technologies that could bolster system power output from today's 1 GFLOPS/watt to 75 GFLOPS/watt."

Feed Engadget: Additional Automotive X-Prize details revealed (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Transportation

For a competition that still hasn't officially launched, the Automotive X-Prize has certainly been doing a pretty good job of making itself known, and we've now got yet more details on it courtesy of the folks at CNET. First up, it seems that the X-Prize Foundation will finally get official with the competition "sometime next year," although likely not before the New York Auto Show in the spring. Before that, however, the Foundation will be showing off some or all of the 43 contenders currently signed up at the Detroit Auto Show in January including, among others, Aptera's 300 mile-per-gallon car pictured above. What's more, given that the competition only seeks to find a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon, it would seem that Aptera would have a considerable advantage -- assuming it can actually back up its claims, that is. Hit up the read link below for a peek at some of the other competitors.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Techdirt: YouTube Suspends Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
YouTube is catching a lot of flack for suspending the account of an Egyptian activist who had captured evidence of police brutality on video and uploaded it to the site. YouTube's "community guidelines" state that "graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed" on YouTube. Apparently, that includes graphic or gratuitous violence perpetrated by governments against innocent civilians. I have to say I don't understand why YouTube goes to so much trouble to censor "objectionable" content. If the goal is to keep such materials away from children, there are effective ways to do that without censoring the material altogether. Flickr, for example, permits pornographic photographs to be uploaded to its site, but it restricts access to them in various ways that helps prevent children from inadvertently stumbling across them. YouTube should be able to implement a similar system. Instead of deleting objectionable content, it should flag it as objectionable. Objectionable content might not show up on the home page or in the default search results. It might also require clicking through a warning page before viewing it. But it's hard to see what purpose is served by deleting the content entirely. The content will be posted somewhere else, where someone else will derive advertising revenue from it. And in the process, YouTube is inadvertently giving the impression that it is helping oppressive governments squelch criticism of their regimes.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.



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Government

Submission + - Swiss DMCA quietly adopted (boingboing.net)

Submitted by roady
roady writes: We have seen a lot of talk about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers, not even the Swiss people. The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50'000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law can be read here.

Feed Engadget: Patent Office upholds Tivo's "time warp" patent, EchoStar not so happy (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Home Entertainment

The long-running dispute between Tivo and EchoStar inched a little closer to resolution today, with the United States Patent Office issuing a non-appealable ruling saying that Tivo's DVR-enabling "time warp" patent is valid. You might remember that Tivo sued EchoStar for violating that patent in Dish Network DVRs at the beginning of 2006, and won a $90M judgment and an injunction requiring EchoStar to turn off existing DVR functionality and stop selling DVRs in the future. That injunction was then stayed pending EchoStar's appeals before the Patent Office and the Federal Court of Appeals, so sadly, this ruling doesn't mean the case is over yet -- now it's the Court of Appeals' turn to try and sort this out.

[Thanks, Dennis]

Disclaimer: Although this post was written by an attorney, it is not to constitute legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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