3971919
submission
ruphus13 writes:
The EC took a decidedly harder stance against Microsoft and its anti-competitive practices in the browser wars. Those restrictions seem to have yielded results. Firefox, for the first time, has the largest market share amongst browsers. From the post, "StatCounter is now reporting that Firefox 3.0 is the most popular browser in Europe--for the first time. Number one in Europe? That's a milestone, and a sign of very healthy browser competition in Europe. If the European Commission's recent efforts to force Microsoft to offer more browser choice in Windows succeed, Firefox may well stay number one." It is also interesting to note that Firefox has 100% market share on 1 continent — Antarctica! The article states, "I'm guessing the data comes from one user — and he's using Firefox."
3958339
submission
Isabel writes:
In their SEC filing for their IPO in 2004, Google committed to 1% of their equity and profits to the foundation. In 2009, departing Foundation head Larry Brilliant reasserted the company's commitment "to devote 1% of Google's equity and profits to philanthropy". But they haven't. A detailed analysis by Tom Munneke points out that keeping that promise would amount to charitable giving of over $1B in equity and $141M in profits. But he demonstrates that they've only put in $90M in equity and $60M in profits.
Google is dramatically in arrears on their IPO promise and nobody seems to have called them on it until now. It's time to draw attention to the situation.
247647
submission
jmeuser21 writes:
'The ISO 26300 is the international standard XML format for office documents, also known as the Open Document Format or ODF. The newly released iWork '08 supports the Open Office XML (OOXML) document format, which is still not an ISO-approved standard. It would be beneficial to all if the iWork suite of applications support Open Document Format.' Petition Here.
241557
submission
ntmokey writes:
The nation's infrastructure is aging, heavily used, and dangerous, according to Stephen Flynn, a national security expert who wrote an op-ed piece for Popular Mechanics. Flynn believes incidents like the collapse of Minnesota's I-35 bridge and the recent explosion of a steam pipe in New York City are wake-up calls to our nation's leaders that we need to invest more in the structures we rely on (sometimes without even knowing it) every day. Our ports, roadways, railroads, air traffic control and electricity systems are were all top-notch when they were installed by previous generations — but we've come to take them for granted and we're starting to feel the sting of neglect. Flynn's not just waving red flags in light of recent events either, he wrote a book about the pending crisis that was published in February.
241555
submission
ScrappyLaptop writes:
In 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been "accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to preserve them — it was crucial evidence which would have revealed whether the election was stolen. From http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/ :
Under federal and Ohio law, all ballots and election records from federal races must be preserved for 22 months after Election Day, which fell on Sept. 2, 2006. While election integrity activists and reporters from a Columbus website, FreePress.org, had sought the ballots and other election records soon after the presidential election, Blackwell would not allow county boards to release the ballots, citing court challenges to the 2004 results and a 2005 suit from the League of Women Voters alleging the state was not following the newest federal election law, the Help America Vote Act.
On Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election boards "to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this Court."
Somehow, the counties never got the message:
"Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner's) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions," wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. "Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill."
"The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots," wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. "To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of '06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system."
"No one could remember the disposition of said ballots," wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County's Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the "unvoted" or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.
In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert — which they later retracted — ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner's office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election.
"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."
"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side."
