Internet News Record

Internet News Record

07/10/09 - 08/10/09

LibertyNewsprint.com U.S. Edition

Another side of Sarah Palin: financial guru By Tabassum Zakaria (Front Row Washington) Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:13:26 AM

The Financial Times, the salmon -colored authoritative newspaper that is closely read by traders and other financial types around the world, had an eye-opener for readers this morning. It wasn’t the front-page, fourcolumn wide headline, “Obama’s critics pounce on falling dollar as fears grow over currency.” It wasn’t the graphic showing a red downward line over a dollar bill. The jolt comes at the start of the second paragraph in the top story of the day on the dollar, “Sarah Palin….” The newspaper, whose articles can move markets, quoted the former Republican vice presidential candidate and ex-

Alaska governor from her Facebook post on the need for energy independence. Palin links the dependence on foreign oil and large U.S. deficits to declines in the dollar . “We can see the effect of this in the price of gold, which hit a

rabid townhall meetings this summer — that phrase emerged from Palin’s Facebook page. Others quoted in the same Financial Times article offered an opinion about Palin’s opinion. Norm Ornstein, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, was quoted as saying there may be a legitimate debate over the dollar’s reserve status, “but Sarah Palin is not qualified to participate in it.” What do you think of Palin’s financial comments? Is she qualified or not? Is her Facebook record high today in response to platform an effective political fears about the weakened dollar,” tool? Click here for more Reuters Palin wrote. Palin’s power for using her political coverage Photo credit: Reuters/KTUUFacebook page to affect public opinion is not to be taken lightly. T V ( P a l i n a n n o u n c i n g h e r Remember “death panels” which resignation as governor in July, turned the healthcare debate into video frame grab)

Silvio Berlusconi vows to stay in power (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:14:09 AM

Combative Italian prime minister insists he will carry on and accuses Italy's highest court of bias

Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T By Steven Levy (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 10/7/2009 6:28:00 AM

The Kindle goes global on October 19, when Amazon begins shipping a new version of the ereader that can be used to purchase and download books in over 100 countries.

Has stimulus become a dirty word at the White House? By Tabassum Zakaria (Front Row Washington) Submitted at 10/7/2009 12:06:41 PM

If it walks like a stimulus and quacks like a stimulus, is it a stimulus? That’s the question being thrown at White House spokesman Robert Gibbs this

week. And he has so far refused to bite. In yesterday’s White House media briefing, “stimulus” came up five times, but never once uttered by Gibbs. His responses were “recovery plan” and “safety-net policies.” On Monday, a reporter asked about programs included in the

first economic stimulus package that may be considered for

extension such as homebuyer tax credit and jobless benefits. “Why is that not a stealth second stimulus?” a reporter asked. “I appreciate the connotation,” Gibbs replied. What would Gibbs call such extensions then? “Extensions,” he replied. OK then…

Click here for more Reuters political coverage Photo Credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Gibbs at media briefing in September), Reuters/Sebastien Pirlet (duck walks on ice in Antwerp)

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Obama’s world — a peek at White House art By Tabassum Zakaria (Front Row Washington)

Rothko has yet to be placed. Loaned art in the Residence · Josef Albers – Homage to Submitted at 10/7/2009 10:56:26 AM the Square: Elected II – Hirshhorn Anyone who has tried to find Museum just the right art for just that · Josef Albers – Homage to particular spot at home knows the Square: Midday – Hirshhorn how difficult the search can be. Museum So we thought we’d take a look · Josef Albers – Study for at the selections for the White Homage to the Square: Nacre – House home of President Barack Hirshhorn Museum Obama. Of course when you’re · George Catlin – A Crow president you get to decorate with Chief at His Toilette – National art loaned from major museums. Gallery of Art The New York Times online has · George Catlin – a slideshow of some of the Camanchees Lancing a Buffalo presidential art. Bull – National Gallery of Art A dozen of the artworks in the · George Catlin – Grassy White House private quarters are Bluffs – National Gallery of Art by George Catlin, an American · George Catlin – Mired painter whose specialty was Buffalo and Wolves – National portraits of Native Americans in Gallery of Art the Old West, on loan from the · George Catlin – Cheyenne National Gallery of Art. Village – National Gallery of Art The next largest in quantity are · George Catlin – Grizzly four by William H. Johnson, a B e a r s A t t a c k i n g B u f f a l o – 20th century American artist N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y o f A r t known for scenes of African · George Catlin – Game of American daily life, on loan from the Arrow-Mandan – National the Smithsonian American Art Gallery of Art Museum. · George Catlin – A Foot One intriguing selection is War Party in Council-Mandan – Edward Ruscha’s“I think I’ll…” National Gallery of Art is a portrait of indecision with its · George Catlin – Ball-Play words “Maybe… Yes…” and “On D a n c e - C h o c t a w – N a t i o n a l Second Thought” and “Maybe… G a l l e r y o f A r t No.” · George Catlin – Buffalo The New York Times declared Chase, with Accidents – National it a“Bold and Modern” White Gallery of Art House and The Washington Post · George Catlin – Catlin and looked at the politics of the Indian Attacking Buffalo – choices. National Gallery of Art What do you think of the first · George Catlin – couple’s taste in art? K’nisteneux Indians Attacking And click below to see the full Two Grizzly Bears – National list of artwork in the residence Gallery of Art and elsewhere in the White · Edward Corbett – House. One piece by Mark Washington, D.C. November

1963 III – National Gallery of Art · Edgar Degas – Dancer Putting on Stocking – Hirshhorn Museum · Edgar Degas – The Bow – Hirshhorn Museum · Richard Diebenkorn – Berkeley, No. 52 – National Gallery of Art · Nicolas De Stael – Nice – Hirshhorn Museum · Sam Francis – White Line – National Gallery of Art · Winslow Homer – Sunset – National Gallery of Art · Jasper Johns – Numerals, 0 through 9 – National Gallery of Art · William H. Johnson – Booker T. Washington Legend – Smithsonian American Art Museum · William H. Johnson – Children Dance – Smithsonian American Art Museum · William H. Johnson – Flower to Teacher – Smithsonian American Art Museum · William H. Johnson – folk

Family – Smithsonian American Art Museum · Glenn Ligon – Black Like Me #2 – Hirshhorn Museum · Giorgio Morandi – Still Life – National Gallery of Art · Giorgio Morandi – Still Life – National Gallery of Art · Louise Nevelson – Model for “Sky Covenant” – National Gallery of Art · Susan Rothenberg – Butterfly – National Gallery of Art · Mark Rothko – Red Band – National Gallery of Art · Edward Ruscha – I think I’ll . . . – National Gallery of Art · Alma Thomas – Sky Light – Hirshhorn Museum · Leon Polk Smith – Stretch of Black III – National Gallery of Art · Unknown Artist – Chief Jumper of the Seminoles – National Gallery of Art Loaned art in the West Wing · Frank O. Salisbury – President Harry S. Truman –

Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri – Cabinet Room · Lucy M. Lewis (Acoma Pueblo) – Vase – National Museum of the American Indian – Oval Office · Jeri Redcorn (Caddo) – Bottle: Intertwining Scrolls – National Museum of the American Indian – Oval Office · Steve S. (Iroquois) – Jar – National Museum of the American Indian – Oval Office · Maria Poveka Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo) – Jar – National Museum of the American Indian – Oval Office · Samuel F. B. Morse – Telegraph Register patent model – National Museum of American History – Oval Office · John A. Peer – Gear Cutter patent model – National Museum of American History – Oval Office · Henry William’s 1877 steamboat feathering paddlewheel patent model – National Museum of American History – Oval Office Loaned art in the East Wing · Alma Thomas – Watusi (Hard Edge) – Hirshhorn Museum – East Wing Not yet placed · Mark Rothko - No. 17 [or] No. 15 - National Gallery of Art Click here for more Reuters political coverage Photo credit: Reuters/Mike Segar (first lady Michelle Obama cuts ribbon during re-opening ceremony of renovated American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York)

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Civil air surrounds Afghan war strategy debate at White House By David Alexander (Front Row Washington) Submitted at 10/7/2009 4:18:38 PM

To hear spokesman Robert Gibbs describe it, President Barack Obama’s White House is a mighty civil place to work. Even when formulating Afghan war strategy, for instance, the president, his generals and his advisers do not argue. Or apparently even forcefully state their views. This despite their known

differences in position, with Afghan war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal seeking up to 40,000 more troops and Vice President Joe Biden wanting to maintain current troop levels while intensifying attacks on al Qaeda. The president held one of a series of war strategy sessions Wednesday at the White House. Asked beforehand whether the different advisers were likely to argue their specific points of view, spokesman Robert Gibbs

expressed surprise at the suggestion. “You know, this may not be good TV, but there really weren’t any arguments in the last threehour meeting,” he told a briefing. “There was a larger discussion of where we are and what we need to do going forward. So I — I can’t predict who’s going to yell at who…” “I’m not talking about yelling,” the questioner said, but “forcefully stating.” For example, they way McChrystal did when he

spoke publicly in London in favor of troop increases. Gibbs said he expected “firm analysis” rather than any forceful stating. And what was Obama’s role at these sessions? Did he sit quietly acting as a sort of judge and jury while the advisers presented their arguments? “I think you’re thinking of that great movie version of Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Gibbs responded. “But … I don’t quite see the movie setting that

you’ve described.” During the last strategy session, he said, “nobody raised their voice … there was just a sort of calm discussion about where we are.” For more Reuters political news, click here. Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama at a White House event Wednesday)

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The First Draft: $829 billion — and that’s the good news By Deborah Zabarenko (Front Row Washington) Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:41:36 AM

You’ve no doubt heard the old saying about money and Washington: a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. That seems to be the case for fixing U.S. healthcare. President Barack Obama got some good news from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday, which estimated that a healthcare plan by the Senate Finance Committee would cost $829 billion. CBO said this plan would cut the budget deficit by $81 billion over 10 years. There was good news this morning too, as the Labor Department reported new unemployment claims at a ninemonth low. These moves are so recent they haven’t shown up in polls tracking whether Americans approve of how Obama is doing his job. The president’s job approval rating has been wiggling around 52 percent for the last three weeks, according to an

Astronomy Night at the White House average of poll results by RealClearPolitics.com. Disapproval ratings for the same period floated around 42 percent. He’s still doing far better than Congress as a whole, which generally gets dismal poll ratings. It certainly is now, with the RealClearPolitics average approval rating at 25.8 percent, with a 66.5 disapproval rating. Which brings up today’s question: is this kind of minute attention to polls worthwhile?

Does it impede the business of government? Is it interesting to anybody outside the Washington Beltway? Let us know. Click here for more Reuters political coverage Photo credit: REUTERS/Choi Bu-Seok (Hundred dollar bills a headquarters of Korea Exchange Bank, October 8, 2009)

IntuiLab lets you blow things up with your hands. By Jimin Brelsford (CrunchGear)

-touch tables, and kill things just by touching them. The announcement that Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:33:18 AM R.U.S.E. would use IntuiLab’s New games are always a cause IntuiFace Platform came at E3 for excitement. Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. 2009, but this video is the first is a highly anticipated RTS set to evidence of it actually happening. release early 2010. But even This marks the first step in a new cooler is the fact that you can play way of experiencing video games. it on one of IntuiLab’s large multi From the video, it seems that it’s

By JoAnne Allen (Front Row Washington)

might have been a break from the pressing issues of the day, but he was still working on his political Submitted at 10/7/2009 9:54:55 PM agenda. Obama introduced two A cloudless sky made a perfect students — one who discovered a backdrop for a stargazing supernova and another who found party at the White House on a pulsar — and he made a pitch Wednesday night. But instead of for his education plan. parading on a red carpet, VIP “If they can discover something guests made their way around the great, so can any of you other South Lawn where earlier in the students here tonight. All you day astronomers set up telescopes need is a passion for science,” in preparation for the party. Obama said to the youngsters. President Barack Obama hosted “That is why we are working to 150 local middle school students, reinvigorate math and science in teachers and astronomers to scan schools,” he added. the sky. But first, Obama said For more Reuters political news there were a “few other stars out click here. tonight,” introducing former Photo Credit: Reuters/Jim astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Young Ride, and Mae Jemison. For the president, the event

not as responsive as a tried-andtrue keyboard and mouse, so don’t expect these setups at any pro gaming tournaments anytime soon. But this setup is just to cool to look away. Next-step, BMW Brings Back the holograms. via Nowhereelse By Keith Barry (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 10/7/2009 2:50:00 AM

C1, and It's Electric BMW gives its funky scooter a battery pack and a motor, but keeps the weird roll cage.

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Herta Müller wins Nobel literature prize By Alison Flood (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

author with truly fantastic language," he said, "and on the other she has the capacity of really giving you a sense of what Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:08:21 AM it's like to live in a dictatorship, The 2009 Nobel prize has been also what it's like to be part of a awarded to Herta Müller, for minority in another country and depicting the 'landscape of the what it's like to be an exile." dispossessed' with 'the Englund also praised Muller's concentration of poetry and the "extreme precision with words". frankness of prose' "She has been living in a German novelist Herta Müller, dictatorship which constantly who received death threats in her misused and abused language, and native Romania after she refused this has forced a sort of scepticism to become an informant for the in her regarding the use of words, secret police during Ceausescu's the use of language," he said. totalitarian regime, has become "She has a very, very fine-tuned only the 12th woman in 108 years precision in her language." to win the Nobel prize for He advised readers new to literature. Muller to start with her novel Praised by the Nobel judges for Herztier (published in English as depicting the "landscape of the The Land of Green Plums), which d i s p o s s e s s e d " w i t h " t h e he said many considered to be her concentration of poetry and the best novel. Her latest novel, frankness of prose", Müller Atemschaukel (Everything I r e t u r n s c o n s t a n t l y t o t h e Possess I Carry With Me), was oppression, dictatorship and exile "absolutely breathtaking," he of her own life in her novels, added. essays and poems. Born in Romania in 1953, In a statement this afternoon Müller refused to cooperate with Müller said she was "delighted" Ceausescu's Securitate, lost her by the award, and "still couldn't job as a teacher and was the believe it". subject of repeated threats until Worth 10m Swedish kronor she emigrated in 1987. She now (£893,000), the Nobel is awarded lives in Berlin, where she has to "the person who shall have been the recipient of a multitude produced in the field of literature of literary awards, including the most outstanding work in an Germany's most prestigious, the ideal direction", as described in Kleist prize, the Frankz Kafka and Alfred Nobel's will of 1895. the 100,000 euro (£85,000) Impac According to the permanent award for Hertzier. The story of s e c r e t a r y o f t h e S w e d i s h five young Romanians living Academy, Peter Englund, Müller's under Ceausescu's dictatorship, "moral momentum" means she Müller has said that she wrote it fits the criteria for the award "in memory of my Romanian "perfectly". friends who were killed under the "On one hand she's an excellent Ceausescu regime", and that she

"felt it was my duty". The New York Times called it "a novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania". Although Müller left Romania over 20 years ago, she returns constantly to the themes of oppression, exile and dictatorship in her novels and poems, which also include The Appointment, about a young woman during Ceausescu's regime who works in a clothes factory, and sews notes into the suits of men bound for Italy, saying "marry me". Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger, published in English as The Passport, follows the story of a village miller in a Germanspeaking Romanian village, who applies for permission to emigrate to West Germany. Published in August, Atemschaukel follows a 17-year-old boy who is deported to a Ukrainian labour camp. Shortlisted for the German book prize, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called it "phenomenal, moving and humbling novel, perhaps the most memorable read of the autumn". "The most overwhelming experience for me was living under the dictatorial regime in Romania. And simply living in Germany, hundreds of kilometres away, does not erase my past experience," Müller has said. "I packed up my past when I left, and remember that dictatorships are still a current topic in Germany." Pete Ayrton, who has published Müller in translation at Serpent's

Tail, said he was "absolutely thrilled" at the news. "It's terrific and I think it shows the Nobel prize are doing their job to bring the writings of wonderful, neglected writers, who are underappreciated in the Anglo Saxon world, to our attention" he said. "She is from the German minority in Romania and from that experience, she writes extraordinary accounts of being an ethnic minority in a totalitarian regime. But this is not overtly political writing; it's very poetic and elliptical. She's an extraordinary writer." The Nobel prize winner is selected by 18 members of the Swedish Academy, who receive around 200 nominations at the start of the year, whittling this down to a secret shortlist of five and then choosing their winner, who must receive more than half of the votes cast. Müller becomes its 106th winner; last year French novelist JMG Le Clézio won, cited for his "new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy", and for exploring "a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". • Nobel prize for literature • Awards and prizes • Fiction • Poetry • Herta Müller Alison Flood guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

BJ's Wholesale Club (BJ) September sales dip By Brent Archer (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:20:00 PM

Filed under: Bad news, Industry, Costco Wholesale (COST), Options, Technical Analysis BJ's Wholesale Club(NYSE: BJoption chain) stock is trading lower today after the company reported its same-store sales slipped 0.5 percent in September. Analysts were expecting a 1 percent decline, but traders saw competitor, Costco(NASDAQ: COST) post a 1% rise in September same-store sales and wanted more from BJ. If you think this stock won't be rising too far in the coming months, then it could be a good time to look at a bearish hedged play on BJ. This morning, BJ opened at $35.90. So far today the stock has hit a high of $36.13 and a low of $35.90. As of 11:20, BJ is trading at $36.10, down 96 cents (-2.6%). The chart for BJ looks bullish and S&P gives BJ a positive 4 STARS (out of 5) buy ranking. Continue reading BJ's Wholesale Club (BJ) September sales dip BJ's Wholesale Club (BJ) September sales dip originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Taliban claim they pose no threat to west By Jason Burke, James Sturcke (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk) Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:52:29 AM

Statement on known Taliban website may indicate that leaders are retreating from alliance with al-Qaida The Taliban have issued an English-language statement claiming they pose no international threat – a move that will fuel the debate among US and European policymakers over whether the hardline Afghan insurgent group can be split away from the international militants of al-Qaida. The statement came amid reports that Barack Obama's military advisers are shifting the focus of US operations to target al -Qaida in Pakistan while downplaying the threat posed to America by the Taliban. But 36 hours after the statement was released, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a massive suicide bomb targeting the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed at least 17 people. Published yesterday on the eighth anniversary of the first coalition strikes on Afghanistan in 2001, the communique declared the militants' aim to be the "obtainment of independence and establishment of an Islamic system". "We did not have any agenda to harm other countries including Europe nor we have such agenda today," said the statement, which was posted on a known Taliban website. "Still, if you want to turn

the country of the proud and pious Afghans into a colony, then know that we have an unwavering determination and have braced for a prolonged war." The statement's authenticity is yet to be confirmed, but the claim would appear to be evidence at the very least that the Taliban are seeking to influence the strategic argument in the west. The statements may equally be a sign that senior Taliban figures are reassessing the movement's longstanding – but often tense – alliance with al-Qaida. In a recent exchange of emails with the Guardian, a Taliban spokesman avoided questions on the relationship between the Afghan insurgents and Osama bin Laden. The spokesman said the Taliban closely monitored public opinion in western Europe and policy arguments in the US. As Obama continues to reassess the Afghan war strategy, advisers told the New York Times that he had been presented with an approach that might not require the increase in troop numbers in Afghanistan called for by the most senior US and Nato general in the region, General Stanley McChrystal. Obama will today meet the secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, and the vice-president, Joe Biden, who has been arguing for months that Pakistan is a greater priority than Afghanistan. The New York Times said that Clinton and the defence secretary, Robert Gates, had warned that the Taliban in Afghanistan remained linked to al-Qaida and would give its fighters haven again if the

Taliban regained control of all or large parts of Afghanistan. "Clearly, al-Qaida is a threat not only to the US homeland and American interests abroad, but it has a murderous agenda," one senior administration official said. "We want to destroy its leadership, its infrastructure and its capability." The official contrasted that with the Taliban, which the administration has begun to define as an indigenous group that aspires to reclaim territory and rule the country, but does not express ambitions of attacking the US. "When the two [groups] are aligned it's mainly on the tactical front," the official said, adding that al-Qaida had fewer than 100 fighters in Afghanistan. Yesterday, the White House confirmed that Obama received McChrystal's troop reinforcements request a week ago. It is said to include a range of options, from adding as few as 10,000 additional combat troops to McChrystal's strong preference for as many as 40,000. The renewed attention on Pakistan comes amid a recognition that the US can neither win the eight-year-old conflict in Afghanistan nor succeed more broadly against alQaida without help from Islamabad. Obama and some of his key aides are increasingly pointing to recent successes against al-Qaida through targeted missile strikes and raids in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Obama said on Tuesday that al-Qaida had "lost operational capacity" as a result.

Serious doubts about the Afghan government have led some to question whether an effective counterinsurgency mission is possible. McChrystal's recommended approach calls for additional troops in Afghanistan for a counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban, build up the central government and deny alQaida its refuge. McChrystal, whose plan is reminiscent of Bush's troop "surge" in Iraq in 2008, says extra troops are crucial to turn around a war that probably will be won or lost during the next 12 months. At the opposite end of the spectrum, an alternative favoured most prominently by Biden would keep the American force in Afghanistan at around the 68,000 already authorised, including the 21,000 more troops Obama ordered this year, but increase the use of surgical strikes with Predator drones and special forces. • Taliban • Afghanistan • Al-Qaida • Islam • Pakistan • US national security • Global terrorism • Military Jason Burke James Sturcke guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

Wal-Mart to become first-ever retail partner for Nutrisystem By Brian White (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:40:00 PM

Filed under: Deals, Products and services, Wal-Mart (WMT) Nutrisystem Inc.(NASDAQ: NTRI) will soon be coming to your local Wal-Mart Stores Inc.(NYSE: WMT) location in the first partnership between the two companies -- and the first retail exposure for the venerable infomercial nutrition company. Nutrisystem's 14-day "Starter Program" will start hitting WalMart shelves in over 3,200 locations starting now -- and just in time for the holiday rush and also in time to become somewhat entrenched leading up to the 2010 New Year's holiday (and all those resolutions). Like many other brands, though, will this tarnish Nutrisystem's brand? Nah -- or Apple Inc.(NASDAQ: AAPL) would have never allowed its chic and still uber-popular iPhone for sale inside Wal-Mart either. Continue reading Wal-Mart to become first-ever retail partner for Nutrisystem Wal-Mart to become first-ever retail partner for Nutrisystem originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Obama to address gay rights group By Daniel Nasaw (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk) Submitted at 10/8/2009 7:53:53 AM

Gay and lesbian voters grow impatient with the president's failure to act on campaign pledges to end discrimination Barack Obama will address a prominent US gay advocacy group on Saturday, as gay and lesbian voters who backed him for president grow sceptical about his desire to push aggressively to expand their rights and curb discrimination. Obama is the second president to speak at the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner, which Bill Clinton addressed in 1997 during his second term. It will be the first time Obama has appeared as a guest of a gay organisation. Political analysts and activists say gay men and lesbians have grown impatient with Obama's refusal to act on campaign pledges to end discrimination against gay people in the military and the workplace and repeal an anti-gay marriage law, among other issues. "There is a consensus that since he was elected 11 months ago, not much has changed for gay Americans," said Richard

Socarides, a former Clinton White House aide on gay and lesbian issues. The Human Rights Campaign is the US's largest grassroots gay and lesbian advocacy group. The 29-year-old organisation has fought laws curbing gay rights and pushed for policies recognising same-sex couples. It spent $7m (£4m) to mobilise voters in last year's election. Gay, lesbian and transgender groups will hold a march and rally in Washington on Sunday to demand equality, and many are unlikely to be impressed by Obama's appearance at what some perceive as a dinner for wellheeled gay insiders. The president's address comes as a growing number of US states allow same-sex marriage. Six states have passed legislation to recognise it - five in the past year - and the city council of Washington DC is expected to pass legislation soon. Five states effectively allow domestic partnerships with some or all of the benefits of heterosexual marriage. Fifty-three per cent of Americans favour civil unions for same-sex couples, while 35% support full marriage, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Centre.

The federal government is prevented by the 1996 defence of marriage act, signed by Clinton, from recognising same-sex marriages, and thus from extending to gay people tax and other benefits afforded to heterosexual married couples. Obama pledged during the campaign to push for its repeal. He also promised to fight one of the last instances of officially sanctioned discrimination in the US, a law forbidding homosexual people from serving openly in the military. Opponents of the ban say the "don't ask, don't tell" policy hurts military readiness as Obama ramps up the fight in Afghanistan. Obama aides say the president remains committed to these issues but prefers to work with Congress rather than unilaterally. The president is also busy with the healthcare reform debate and a review of the national strategy in Afghanistan, leaving little time and energy to fight for changes that will encounter fierce resistance from Republicans and from conservatives in his own party. Ten months into his first term, Obama has largely shied away from social issues that will inflame conservatives. Seventy per cent of selfidentified gay men and lesbians

backed Obama in the election, and polls show the group, roughly 4% of the US electorate, support his policy goals at a much higher rate than Americans overall. "It's not like gay and lesbian voters are going anywhere," said Patrick Egan, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the gay and lesbian electorate. "They really can't credibly threaten to vote the other way or support other candidates." But if gay men and lesbians think the Obama administration has given them short shrift, they may hesitate to give time and money to back the president in the 2012 election. "If this constituency is disappointed, the next go around it will be very hard to generate the same enthusiasm for him," Richard Socarides said. • Gay rights • Obama administration • Barack Obama • United States Daniel Nasaw guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

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Basic Building Blocks Of Life Patented... But Wins A Nobel Prize By Michael Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:40:19 AM

joseph franklin writes in to point out that this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to some researchers who helped uncover some of the basic building blocks of life, ribosomes. Figuring out how to model these was great, but Franklin's concern is that not only did these researchers get a Nobel Prize for it, they got a patent as well: The patent holders and licensees surely believe that these products will be life-saving, and profitable, and I hate to rain on the Nobel Prize parade. But should research so fundamental to life, such as the ribosome structure, be locked up for commercial gain -- like Dynamite? Should a private institution, such as Yale, have the only say over how ribosomes may be developed into new biomedical technologies? Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

Banks fail to absorb commercial real estate loan losses By Connie Madon (BloggingStocks)

Are we in for a rerun this year or next year? You are probably thinking that Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:40:00 PM such an event could not occur. F i l e d u n d e r : F o r e c a s t s , Well think again. There is a report Management, Industry, Market that says that we may be in for m a t t e r s , F e d e r a l R e s e r v e another crisis. Remember the havoc in the The report was initiated by financial markets when the Federal Reserve analyst, K.C. Conway. Conway is a senior real estate analyst at the Federal residential bubble burst last year?

Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The Federal Reserve has acknowledged the report but said that it is not part of its formal opinion. What does the report say? Continue reading Banks fail to absorb commercial real estate loan losses

Banks fail to absorb commercial real estate loan losses originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Deadly Kabul blast near Indian embassy By Declan Walsh (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

obviously with the aim of targeting the embassy." A witness said street cleaners were among those killed. "A Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:44:39 AM [Toyota] Corolla car was parked Taliban claim responsibility for in front of the Indian embassy. It rush-hour blast in Afghan capital was rush hour, about 10 minutes that killed 17 people and injured after I arrived at the office when dozens we heard an explosion. There A suicide bomb exploded were lots of workers cleaning the outside the Indian embassy in street – most of them have been Kabul this morning, killing 17 killed," Habib Jan told the BBC. people and wounding dozens. A man who gave his name as The force of the rush-hour blast Najibullah said he had just opened flattened walls and rattled his shop when the bomb windows up to a mile away. e x p l o d e d , k n o c k i n g h i m Television news footage showed unconscious. When he came soldiers and passersby pulling a r o u n d , h e s a i d , " d u s t w a s severed leg from a destroyed e v e r y w h e r e . P e o p l e w e r e vehicle. shouting. You couldn't see their The Afghanistan interior faces because there was so much ministry, which is based in the dust." same road as the Indian embassy, In July last year the Indian confirmed that 15 civilians and embassy was the target of the two Afghan police officers were deadliest attack in Kabul since the killed. Officials said at least 76 US-led invasion in 2001. Fiftypeople were wounded. eight people including two senior T h e T a l i b a n c l a i m e d Indian diplomats were killed and responsibility for the explosion 141 injured in the bombing, which and confirmed that the embassy US intelligence officials blamed was the target. on elements of Pakistan's Inter The Indian foreign secretary, Services Intelligence agency. The Nirupama Rao, said: "The suicide ISI denied any role. bomber came up to the outside Rao said today's explosion was perimeter wall of the embassy similar in size to that attack, and with a car loaded with explosives security measures taken in the

interim had protected staff this time. Three Indian paramilitary troops guarding the embassy received minor shrapnel injuries, he said. Barack Obama is considering whether to send an extra 40,000 troops to Afghanistan amid growing western disquiet over the war. Last month a suicide car bomb attack on an Italian military convoy in Kabul killed six Italian soldiers and 10 civilians. Afterwards the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said it would be "best" for the country's troops to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. Today's bombing is thought to be the fourth in Kabul since August. Observers say insurgents are increasingly targeting the capital because of the publicity it attracts. • Afghanistan • Taliban • Global terrorism Declan Walsh guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

Why does Geithner always take calls from the big three bankers? By Connie Madon (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:20:00 PM

Filed under: Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Financial Crisis Who does our Treasury Secretary speak to most of the time? Yup. You guessed it. It's the big three bankers. Who are they? First, we have Lloyd Blankenstein, CEO of Goldman Sachs Group(NYSE GS). Then we have Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Company(NYSE JPM) and then CEO, Vikam Pandt of Citigroup Inc.(NYSE C). You are probably also wondering how do we know this? The Associated Press did a review of Geithner's calendar under the Freedom of Information Act. In his first seven months on the job, Geithner made at least 80 contacts with the "big three." Not only that Geithner jumps to the phone when they call. They are the dominant players on Wall Street who can move markets and even economies. Continue reading Why does

Geithner always take calls from the big three bankers? Why does Geithner always take calls from the big three bankers? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

A trio of technical bets from Bernie Schaeffer By Steven Halpern (BloggingStocks)

Bernie Schaeffer uses fundamental, technical and sentiment metrics to select trades. Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:00:00 PM Here's a trio of ideas from Filed under: Newsletters, Lennar Schaeffer's Investment Research. Corp'A' (LEN), Office Depot "I have initiated a long position (ODP), Stocks to Buy in Office Depot(NYSE: ODP). In his 'Master Trading' portfolio, Price action for ODP has been

strong, with the equity gaining more than 108% year-to-date. "Recently, the equity pulled back to its 20-day moving average. There is heavy out-of-the-money put open interest for ODP. An unwinding of the short positions related to this open interest could

provide a tailwind for the stock. Please see our terms for use of Continue reading A trio of feeds. Permalink| Email this| t e c h n i c a l b e t s f r o m B e r n i e Comments Schaeffer A trio of technical bets from Bernie Schaeffer originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST.

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Iran activist sentenced to death for election protests By Robert Tait (World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk)

including prominent supporters of the defeated reformist candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, both of whom insist the Submitted at 10/8/2009 7:40:26 AM election was stolen. Regime's opponents say forced Ali-Zamani's indictment confession was used to convict accused him of meeting US Mohammad-Reza Ali-Zamani military figures in Iraq on behalf An Iranian man has been of the IMC before returning to sentenced to death on charges of Iran "aiming at causing disruption organising mass protests against during and after the election". Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reProsecutors said he travelled to election as president, according to Iraq and received instructions on reformist websites. Mohammad- how to make chemical weapons. Reza Ali-Zamani, 37, is the first T h e y a l l e g e d h e p a s s e d person understood to be facing information to American military execution over the unrest. officials aimed at helping Ali-Zamani had confessed to assassination plots against Iranian plotting against Iran's Islamic government figures. system and belonging to the He was said to have taken part previously little-known Iran in an operation that involved Monarchy Committee (IMC), passing information on members which the regime regards as a of the pro-government Basij terrorist group. Supporters say he militia to the IMC, which is run was forced into his confession, by Iranians living in exile. which was made at a public trial Iranian officials said he had of prominent political activists in conducted "vast communication August. activities" before being arrested M o w j c a m p , a n I r a n i a n by intelligence officers. opposition website, said a An IMC spokeswoman, revolutionary court in Tehran Dordaneh Fouladvand, confirmed handed down the verdict this that Ali-Zamani had worked with week. There has been no official the organisation but denied he had confirmation. any role in the post-election More than 100 people arrested protests. His activities had been in the upheaval remain in custody, limited to working for its radio

station, Radio Tondar, she said. "We are surprised by the confession he has made in court. He has given it under pressure and we strongly deny all he has said," she told the Guardian. "He had absolutely no links with the Americans and hasn't been involved in any operations inside Iran. His job was simply to pass on news for our radio station and to make propaganda radio programmes." In his confession, Ali-Zamini admitted distributing CDs of "anti -religious and political books" including The Satanic Verses. Since his arrest he is said to have been detained in section 209 of Tehran's Evin prison, which is reserved for political prisoners and run by the intelligence services. • Iran • Capital punishment • Human rights • Protest Robert Tait guardian.co.uk© Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions| More Feeds

Inside the Nobel Prize: How a CCD Works

Airbags Help Airlines Meet New Safety Regs

By Charlie Sorrel (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 10/7/2009 7:57:00 AM

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded, with the inventors of the CCD getting

recognition for the invention which enabled modern digital By Jason Paur (Wired Top photography. It has taken a while: Stories) Whilst the invention took just one Submitted at 10/7/2009 4:00:00 AM hour, the prize took 40 years to arrive. Airlines lift an idea from the auto industry to minimize "unfriendly head-strike surfaces."

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Salesforce.com: Buy on a pullback By Joseph Lazzaro (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:00:00 PM

Filed under: salesforce.com inc (CRM), Stocks to Buy There are stock plays, and then there are s t o c k p l a y s . Salesforce.com(NYSE: CRM) was expected to advance when first recommended on June 18, 2009 at a price of $40.16. Instead, CRM raced ahead, surging 47%. Accordingly, I'm Reiterating my Buy rating, but on a pull-back to $55-57. The larger point concerns the following: is the recent gain in Salesforce.com's shares

telegraphing something about the approaching U.S. economic recovery? Perhaps. Put CRM's share gain in this context: if the share gain holds, it's not a bearish sign for the U.S. economy. Continue reading Salesforce.com: Buy on a pullback Salesforce.com: Buy on a pullback originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

What was the best selling video game system in September? (Hint: Sony makes it.) By Nicholas Deleon (CrunchGear) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:15:08 AM

This probably won’t come as a surprise to any of you, but September was a Very Big month in the life of the PS3. For the first time ever, since its launch in fall, 2006, the PS3 was the best-selling video game system. See what amazing things happen when you price a product at an affordable level? Sony sold some 400,000 PS3s last month, compared to 375,000 Wiis and 370,000 Xbox 360s. Software is another matter entirely, with only one PS3 game cracking the top 10: Batman: Arkham Asylum.

While it’s all well and good to be the top seller for one month out of the past 36, what I’m most looking forward to is seeing how Christmas will turn out. By then the big games ( Modern Warfae 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, New Super Mario Brothers Wii etc.) will be out, and consumers will have some Serious Decisions to make. Flickr

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Light Peak supplier says mass production to start early 2010 By Nilay Patel (Engadget) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:01:00 PM

The more we hear about Intel's Light Peak optical interconnect, the more it seems like Intel was playing it way too cool at IDF -Foci Fiber Optic Communication, which supplied the gear used during that Hackintosh demo, told CNET today that pilot manufacturing runs of Light Peak equipment are scheduled for November, with mass production By Wilson Rothman (Gizmodo) here—anytime you eliminate a break), which drops the AirWired to start in early 2010. That's right light source, you cut way down on By Donald Melanson Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:50:00 AM controller but hangs onto the on track with what we've seen and the juice. No word on when this (Engadget) standard iPod dock and all the been told about Apple and Intel's Ebook readers suffer because will appear on devices, but it's Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:39:00 PM basic clock radio functionality plans for the tech, which forecast they use E-Ink, which isn't in Qualcomm, so you can bet there It may not go to eleven, but you'd expect. No word on a a line of back-to-school Macs color and doesn't refresh fast will at least be some experimental Yamaha's new TSX-W80 iPod release over here just yet, but it featuring Light Peak in the fall of enough to do video. Qualcomm is products before too long. quietly showing off its Mirasol Speaking of experimental dock at least pack some knobs l o o k s l i k e b o t h s h o u l d b e 2010. And, well, let's not get display, now in full color with 30- products, Time's Josh Quittner that you'll no doubt be tempted to a v a i l a b l e i n J a p a n s h o r t l y . ahead of ourselves, but Intel was pretty high on Light Peak for [Via Akihabara News] frame-per-second video. See for points out, on his blog, that turn all the way up, and just the Continue reading Yamaha kicks devices that needed maximum yourself: s e v e r a l o f Q u a l c o m m ' s right blend of retro good looks T h e v i d e o w a s s h o t b y components could go together to and newfangled technology to out TSX-W80, TSX-70 iPod connectivity in the smallest amount of space, like an iPhone -IntoMobile. As they describe it, make a formidable ebook device. stand out in a crowded field. That docks / clock radios F i l e d u n d e r : H o m e or, say, a tablet. Quite a nice little the tech sounds like a massive Besides this screen, they've got includes a so-called AirWired package of rumors, don't you DLP chip—that is, a panel the multi-network mobile chipset cradle that'll let you use your iPod E n t e r t a i n m e n t Yamaha kicks out TSX-W80, think? Okay, we'll calm down covered with tiny reflective (Gobi), a respectable mobile CPU or iPhone as a remote, a dock on mirrors. Each mirror can change (Snapdragon), and a powerful the main unit itself to charge your TSX-70 iPod docks / clock radios now. Filed under: Peripherals color but it's a passive screen, m e d i a d e l i v e r y iPod, and a choice of three originally appeared on Engadget Light Peak supplier says mass with no backlight (like most system(MediaFLO). Forget the different colors (with matching on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:39:00 LCDs) and no self-illumination (a Kindle—who needs Amazon? Oh LED displays) to suit your style. EST. Please see our terms for use production to start early 2010 la OLED). They get lit up by right, books. [ IntoMobile via Those looking for something a bit of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:01:00 more simple and less eye-catching this| Comments whatever light is in the room. Netly] EST. Please see our terms for use can also opt for Yamaha's new Saving energy is the key of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email TSX-70 model (pictured after the this| Comments

Qualcomm's Mirasol Ultra Yamaha kicks out TSXLow Power Display Is W80, TSX-70 iPod docks / Almost Magic [Qualcomm] clock radios

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Toyota to showcase two new electric/hybrid cars this month By Serkan Toto (CrunchGear) Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:43:23 AM

Software firm finds Windows 7 doesn't boot faster than Vista By Donald Melanson (Engadget) Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:11:00 PM

There's no question that Windows 7 promises plenty of improvements over Vista, with one of the biggest being faster boot times. While that's certainly been the experience for some, Iolo Technologies (a maker of PC tune -up software) found some

significantly different results in their long term tests, which they say show that Windows 7 isn't faster than Vista at all in real world use. Specifically, they found that while Windows 7 actually got to the desktop fairly quickly, it took a full minute and 34 seconds to actually become usable, compared to a minute and 6 seconds with Vista. They also unsurprisingly found that things

got worse over time, with a threemonth old Windows 7 install adding a full minute to the boot time, although in that case it did actually fair somewhat better than Vista. Of course, we are talking about complete reboots here, and it's a different story when Windows 7 is simply coming in and out of sleep mode. Details on the tests are otherwise a bit light, but Iolo is promising to release its

complete findings next week. Filed under: Software Software firm finds Windows 7 doesn't boot faster than Vista originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

The world’s No. 1 auto maker Toyota has announced[JP] it will exhibit a four-seat electric car at the 41th Tokyo Motor Show for the first time (the show opens October 24 and will run through November 4). It’s sized at 2,730×1,680×1,490mm. Visitors will also get to see an update of Toyota’s hybrid car Prius at the show. The new completely electric model, the FT-EV II (pictured above and below), can be driven for more than 90km on a single charge and is specifically designed for convenient city driving. Toyota will offer, for example, electric sliding doors. But the FT-EV II isn’t for city driving only, as the top speed exceeds 100km/h. Toyota also plans to show a plug-in version of its Prius hybrid that’s in its third generation. Drivers will be able to use the vehicle with batteries only until they run out. When that happens, the car will switch to hybrid mode automatically. One liter of gas is enough for 55km, up from 38km for the Prius models that are on the market now.

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PayPal Suspends Researcher's Account for Distributing Hacking Tools By Kim Zetter (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 10/7/2009 10:49:00 AM

U.S. Senate: It’s cool to jam cell phones in prisons By Jeremy Kessel (CrunchGear)

lovely prison system. This has in turn created increased security threats, i.e. allowing inmates to Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:45:39 AM conduct crimes from the comfort Oh, U.S. Senate. Just when we of their cell (zing!). thought you had turned your More specifically, SPCA09 collective attention to the plethora allows prisons to petition the FCC of incredibly important issues to to use jamming devices so long as tackle (read: healthcare, 2 wars, they don’t cause interference with global warming, education, etc), l e g i t i m a t e c o m m u n i c a t i o n s . you go and pass the Safe Prisons Luckily for the rest of us, the Act Communications Act of 2009. also requires the FCC to be fairly The Act, or SPCA09 as we like specific about where and how to call it around here, provides signals can be blocked, so law state governors and/or the Federal enforcement officials won’t, in Bureau of Investigation the power theory, be able to overly abuse to have cellular signals blocked this new “power.” Nothing is set (or jammed, as the kids like to in stone yet, well, at least until the say) inside prisons. Why do they bill is ratified by the House and n e e d t h i s a u t h o r i t y ? W e l l , signed by the Pres. apparently smuggled cell phones [via Phone Scoop and WSJ] have become quite an issue in our

A security researcher who disclosed a serious vulnerability in online certificates has been blocked from accessing his PayPal account after someone released a counterfeit PayPal latter continues to pursue graphics certificate he created for a i n t e g r a t i o n w i t h t h e C P U , professional training session. manufacturers are going to be increasingly pushed towards all- Supermassive Black Intel solutions. All this leads us to Hole Stare Down wonder if NVIDIA might decide chipsets in general are more By Betsy Mason (Wired Top t r o u b l e t h a n t h e y ' r e w o r t h , Stories) especially considering Intel's Submitted at 10/7/2009 6:00:00 AM general attitude about them-- and whether ION might be the next on Two galaxies with supermassive the block. black holes at their centers are on Filed under: Desktops, Laptops the verge of colliding. A NVIDIA halting chipset combined optical and x-ray image development after all originally shows the fierceness of the appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 cosmic furor. Oct 2009 13:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

NVIDIA halting chipset development after all By Joseph L. Flatley (Engadget) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:46:00 PM

It's been about two months since NVIDIA called rumors that it was leaving the chipset business"groundless," so perhaps it's no big shock that PC Magazine is now reporting that the company is putting its nForce chipset line "on hiatus." On hiatus, that is, until the company gets a few sticky legal questions out of the way, including whether or not its four-year deal with Intel covers Core i7 processors. Thus we have the delicate line that NVIDIA walks with Intel: for the time being, the two companies need each other, but they don't have to like each other, and as the

Mitsubishi's Modular 155-Inch OLED Screen [Oled] By Danny Allen (Gizmodo) Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:45:00 AM

Remember the advertising-laden skyscrapers from Blade Runner? Mitsubishi's now got the tech to do it: its Diamond Vision screen uses individual 4-inch square OLED panels that can scale to an

unlimited size. Check out the 155incher on show at CEATEC: That's definitely the biggest OLED screen I've heard of. Of course, the individual panels are a bit of a cheat—and mean you only see a red, green and blue matrix until you're at least 2 feet away—but Mitsubishi imagines

the tech being curved around buildings, trains and buses in

Japan. OLED screens are capable of much higher resolutions than regular stadium-style LED displays, but have two fatal flaws. They're super expensive, and OLED degrades. The expected life of an OLED panel is only about 20,000 hours (roughly 2.5

years). Gorgeous as they are, that's why you're not reading this on an OLED screen right now. [ OLED-Display.Net and Network World]

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Dubai's Vertical Village Might Suck Up All Of the Sun's Rays [Architecture] By Sean Fallon (Gizmodo)

commercial structure. Each building is oriented to reduce the heat from sun exposure—quite the Despite grumbling about contrary to a massive bed of solar economic woes taking a toll on collectors on the south side of the Dubai construction projects, it building that automatically adjusts seems that their Vertical Village to the sun's position for maximum is going full steam ahead. The efficiency. The village also question is, after it's built, will features a solar roof that helps to there be any sun for the rest of us? transport energy and break the Designed as a residential, hotel s o l a r f i e l d u p i n t o m o r e and entertainment facility, the m a n a g e a b l e s e g m e n t s . Vertical Village is absolutely It's not enough to have all of the blanketed in solar panels. In fact, really cool buildings on the the building is expected to earn a p l a n e t — n o w t h e y w a n t a LEED Gold certification when it monopoly on the sun. Damn you is completed. That distinction is Dubai. [ Graftlab via Ecofriend difficult enough for a homeowner via Inhabitat] to obtain, much less a gigantic Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:40:00 AM

AT&T's HTC Tilt 2 coming October 18? (updated)

Just In: Jon Gosselin's Arrival Time

By Nilay Patel (Engadget)

Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:48:00 AM

Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:18:00 PM

ET has the latest... ET has been tracking Jon Gosselin's progress and can report that the reality show dad will arrive at his Wernersville, PA home approximately between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. EDT. Keep checking ETonline for the latest on Jon and Kate's birthday face-off!

AT&T's official press materials might coyly say that the HTC Tilt 2 will launch "in the coming weeks," but we just noticed that an official Windows Mobile 6.5 PR blast we got from Microsoft lists Blue's take on the Touch Pro2 as launching October 18. Sounds about right, we'd say -anyone planning to grab one? Update: We were just sent an internal AT&T memo that says the Tilt 2 is actually being stocked and sold to business customers as of today, but that it won't go widely on sale until the 18th. So, our question stands, with an addendum -- anyone planning on pretending to a businessperson today in order to grab one?

Submitted at 10/7/2009 9:01:12 AM

Just writing to say that Scripting

(ETonline - Breaking News)

Filed under: Cellphones AT&T's HTC Tilt 2 coming October 18? (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

Spotify Phone to Stream Music and TV Across Europe [Unconfirmed] By Mark Wilson (Gizmodo) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:00:00 AM

Not only does the US still not have the awesome mediastreaming service Spotify(though it's on the way), now the UK is going to get a Spotify phone. According to TechCrunch, UK company ICQ is developing the full-out Spotify phone for telecommunications provider Telia. And with recent news that

Middle-of-the-week check-in (Scripting News)

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News is on a hiatus this week. Not And thanks to everyone who sure when I'll be writing again. wrote for the kind wishes. But I'm still here, doing the best I can.

Spotify service is expanding to television ( in Sweden), the handset would be a notable multimedia force—even if the

iPhone app makes an easier upsell. So theoretically, if Spotify made its way to the US, and if the Spotify phone made its way to the US, we'd all have Spotify phones. Yes, all. Every single citizen of the United States of America. [ TechCrunch and TechCrunch UK and image]

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The Amazing Multifunction Absolute Outdoor Essentials [Advertising]

HTC HD2 gets itself a promo video and a website By Nilay Patel (Engadget) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:24:00 PM

We might have to wait until next year to score the HTC HD2 Stateside, but that doesn't mean we can't all enjoy this jazzy little promo video showing off the highlights of Sense. But is the music more reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country or Iko Iko by the Belle Stars? We ask the hard-hitting questions here at Engadget. Video after the break, website at the read link.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Continue reading HTC HD2 gets itself a promo video and a website Filed under: Cellphones HTC HD2 gets itself a promo video and a website originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

By Jesus Diaz (Gizmodo) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:20:00 AM

iPhone/ OS 3.1.2 Is Out, Solves Sleep Issue at Last [IPhone] By Jesus Diaz (Gizmodo) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:38:33 AM

At last, Apple has released a much-needed patch: iPhone OS 3.1.2 is out and it solves the sleep issue—in which the iPhone refused to wake up—brought in by the previous version. There are other fixes too: • Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep

Requiescat in pace: Nikon D3, we hardly knew ye By Dave Freeman (CrunchGear) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:00:42 AM

Another bit of Nikon news today, the Nikon D3 has been unofficially discontinued. You might be able to find them used, or in old stock, but for the most buy a D3 when you can buy a part they are gone, making more D3x? The updated electronics room for the D3x. make it a far better camera, if you Honestly, it makes sense. Why

• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart • Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming It weighs 241.7MB. Go get it in iTunes. After the update—which is also available for the iPod Touch—you will be able to update to AT&T Carrier Settings 5.6. [Thanks Mark]

According to the packaging, this outdoor essential product can be used as a ladle, toothbrush, toothpick, pen, shovel, paddle, torch, fishing rod, firewood, weapon, back scratcher, and wrist splint. Totally free! And they got toilet paper that can whistle too! This is one of those genius guerrilla advertising campaign that it's silly, absurd, and absolutely effective, increasing The North Face products sales by 38 percent. Of course, these weren't the products—which apparently many people still wanted to buy. They are actually products used as advertising for their brand, placed in retail racks and shelves. [ Direct Daily]

can get past the crazy high price. Nikon might have made a little misstep there, charging $8000 for Gosselin Update: Jon & Kate's New Court a camera that should have been Date priced at $5,500. There will be an arbitration on So farewell Nikon D3. So far (ETonline - Breaking News) Tuesday, Oct 13. ET has learned this is only a rumor, but the Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:28:00 AM that only Jon, Kate and their majority of the retailers out there As Jon and Kate Gosselin are set attorneys will be present. are out of stock, and have been for to face-off today at their twin The meeting will take place at quite some time. girls' birthday party today, ET has an undisclosed location. details on their next court date.

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Public Enemy Trying To Get A Little Help From Its Friends By Michael Ho (Techdirt)

Reznor, Jill Sobule, Kickstarter and many others, SellaBand also has a system of fan-fundable tiers SellaBand is known for funding for its artists. For Public Enemy, m u s i c i a n s ' a l b u m s w i t h supporters can buy into the c o n t r i b u t i o n s f r o m f a n s - - project in $25 shares in order for contributions that not only help to Public Enemy to reach its ultimate record the music but also entitle quarter million dollar goal. And the paying fans to a share of the the more shares you buy, the more revenues from the album after it's you get. released. Up until now, the artists • 1 Part ($25) = "Believer" Level using SellaBand have not exactly Incentive: Exclusive, numbered been household names, making it CD in Digipak susceptible to Masnick's law • 4 Parts ($100) = "Hype" Level where critics could say SellaBand Incentive: "Believer" Level, plus is only good for small bands. the opportunity to buy 2nd CD at However, Chuck D and Public 50% off, & Name in booklet Enemy are aiming to prove that a • 10 Parts ($250) = "Rebel" big-name act can solicit $250,000 Level Incentive: All of Above from fans to finance their next plus Exclusive Limited Edition album. It's actually not all that Public Enemy T Shirt surprising that Chuck D would go • 20 Parts ($500) = "Posse" t h i s r o u t e . Y o u m a y n o t Level Incentive: All of Above remember, but when Lars Ulrich plus Autographed Copy of CD from Metallica first freaked out signed by Chuck D about Napster, it was Chuck D • 40 Parts ($1,000) = who publicly debated him, and "Terrordome" Level Incentive: said that file sharing was "the new All of Above plus Unlimited radio" and it was time to embrace backstage pass for 3 years it. Chuck D also testified before [Limited to 50] the Senate about how file sharing • 200 Parts ($5,000) = "Bring w a s a g r e a t d i s t r i b u t i o n The Noise" Level Incentive: All mechanism, and the recording of Above plus Executive Producer industry was making a mistake Credit on Album [Limited to 15] trying to stop it. So you had to • 400 Parts ($10,000) = "PE figure he'd be a fan of trying out Number One" Level Incentive: smarter, fan-focused business All of Above plus Studio Visit models. during recording session [Limited Similar to efforts by Trent to 5] Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:56:54 AM

Bill Nye, The Algebra Guy? By Matt Burns (CrunchGear)

the new show, Solving for X, will be televised or on DVD only, but it doesn’t matter. If Bill Nye can Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, make algebra interesting, he is Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill official the man. “T-minus seven seconds” I mean, it’s kind of easy to Bill Nye, the Science Guy. make a science show visually Everyone’s favorite science interesting and stimulating, but teacher is back, but his new show math is something entirely takes on a different subject: different. algebra. It’s not entirely clear if Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:43:14 AM

But unlike Josh Freese, Public Enemy's tiers are missing a certain je ne sais quoi that could connect with fans or give them a compelling reason to buy a 3-year backstage pass for $1,000. These tiers lack some authenticity to me, though I wouldn't consider myself a fan of Public Enemy. But honestly, I can't really tell if Public Enemy came up with these levels -- because they sound so standard (especially if you look at other SellaBand artist tiers). Not to knock Public Enemy too hard, but they really should put a bit more effort into something like this. And SellaBand might also benefit from looking into floundering Kickstarter projects to perhaps get a better grasp of how to promote artists that aren't quite reaching their fund goals. One of the lessons learned is that contributing fans want to see some involvement and interactions -- you can't just set it and forget it -- if you're asking fans to part with a few thousand dollars. But on the other hand, SellaBand doesn't seem to have goal deadlines, so Public Enemy might have the fame and patience to attract 10,000 fans willing to fork over $25 each. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

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8 Awesome Mashups Made Possible by APIs By Barb Dybwad (Mashable!)

new services without requiring complicated licensing protocols and fees or even specific This series is supported by p a r t n e r s h i p s b e t w e e n t h e PayPal X Innovate 2009, PayPal’s c o m p a n i e s . first dedicated developer Without further ado, let’s take a conference. Get 50% off if you l o o k a t s o m e o f t h e g r e a t register with the code ppblog3 or examples of mashup services out join us at $50 if you are a student. there using a number of different We here at Mashable are big APIs in a variety of different fans of mashup services — it’s r e a l m s a n d t o p i c a r e a s . 1 . our name, after all! And at the M a p s K r i e g heart of almost all of these MapsKrieg mashes up Craigslist mashups is a term you’ll see apartment and housing listings frequently thrown around related with Google Maps to make a t o w e b s e r v i c e s : A P I s , o r terribly convenient and visual way a p p l i c a t i o n p r o g r a m m i n g to find your next place to rent. interfaces. HousingMaps is a similar service. In this feature we’ll celebrate 2. Trendsmap some of the great mashups we Another map mashup, know and love that were made Trendsmap mashes up Twitter possible by the existence of APIs. Trending Topics with Google We know there are metric tons Maps as well as with the What the more great mashups out there, so Trend site. The result is an be sure to let us know your impressive real-time map of favorites in the comments too. Twitter trends across the globe. 3. Without getting too far into LivePlasma techno-babble land, APIs Launched way back in 2005 as a basically define a set of ways m u s i c r e l a t i o n s h i p e n g i n e , other third-party programmers can LivePlasma more recently added access the data and some of the movies, directors and actors to its functionality of a web service. It’s visual search engine. If you search a level of abstraction that can be f o r a n a r t i s t / b a n d o r very powerful for allowing movie/director/actor you like, you different applications to share data can get a visual map of related and functionality. items of possible interest to you. Thanks to APIs, new programs Liveplasma makes use of can be built up that take A m a z o n ’ s A P I t o p u l l advantage of one or more services relationships and details about in ways the original creators individual items. Similar visual might not have intended or even recommendation mashups include i m a g i n e d . T h a t a l l o w s t h e TuneGlue and musicmesh, both creativity and ingenuity of the for music. 4. Spell With Flickr developer community at large to This is a simple little tool with a shine by creating highly useful lot of “wow” factor: Spell With Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:35:40 AM

use of the Netflix API to present a film and TV catalogue filtered completely by the “Watch Instantly” dimension. In other words, if you want to browse only Flickr simply takes your input the titles on Netflix that can be string of text and generates a added to your Instant Queue and “ransom note”-style image out of streamed, this is the site for you. letters in various styles and fonts 8. Wheel of Lunch This fun app makes use of the from Flickr. If one of the letters isn’t to your liking, simply click Yahoo Local Search API to on it to generate a different letter. provide an entertaining way to You can get a Javascript badge pick a place to eat. Input your zip or raw HTML version of the code and optionally a type of resulting image to embed on your cuisine into Wheel of Lunch and site, or simply take a screenshot to get a Wheel of Fortune-style g r a b a n i m a g e v e r s i o n . 5 . interactive graphic to help you choose where to eat. TweetMyGaming Let us know about some of the For gamers who Twitter, or gamers who just want to get a other outstanding mashups that sense of what games people are float your boat. Thank you APIs talking about and playing at any and open-minded developer g i v e n m o m e n t , T w e e t M y communities for providing the Gaming is a mashup of the great ecosystem that made this GamerDNA games database and feature possible! Series supported the Twitter API. It pulls in by PayPal X Innovate 2009 PayPal X Innovate 2009 is relevant tweets about games and aggregates them into individual PayPal’s first dedicated developer game pages, plus generates charts conference. Here you’ll have the of what games are most talked absolute inside track on how to about among Twitterers in real- capitalize on all of PayPal’s products. Learn from hands on time. 6. TimeTube A mashup of the YouTube and tutorials about PayPal APIs and timeline app Dipity’s APIs, listen to keynote from industry TimeTube takes a search string l u m i n a r i e s i n c l u d i n g T i m and maps out related YouTube O’Reilly and see showcase of videos on a timeline. This is a cool developers. Get 50% off if great way to visualize certain you register with code ppblog3 or news trends and events that have join us at $50 if you are a student. decent representation on YouTube Reviews: Craigslist, Flickr, (check out the pictured Kanye Google Maps, Mashable, Twitter, West video timeline for a good YouTube, gamerDNA Tags: api, application, example). 7. InstantWatcher The InstantWatcher app makes d e v e l o p e r , L i s t s , m a s h u p

Olympics Tries To Block Olympian Newspaper (From Olympia, Washington) From Trademarking Its Name By Michael Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:02:00 AM

It's no secret that the Olympics can be ridiculously over aggressive with trademark claims, often getting governments to pass special intellectual property rules to allow the Olympics special control over certain names or phrases well outside the contours of existing intellectual property law. The various Olympic committees insist they "need" this to protect their revenue stream, but we didn't realize that gov'ts had any responsibility in helping the Olympics make lots of money. The latest move is that the US Olympic Committee is protesting a trademark application for the name of The Olympian, a newspaper in Olympia, Washington (thanks to Erik for sending that in). It would appear that the Olympian has been operating since 1889. That would be seven years prior to the first modern "Olympics" in 1896. While I am left wondering why the Olympian suddenly decided to try to register the trademark on its name now (leading to the attempt to block the trademark), it does seem pretty ridiculous that the Olympics could suddenly claim that there might be confusion between the two after over a century of the two "brands" living together peacefully. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

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Facebook's mounting customer service crisis By Caroline McCarthy (Webware.com)

accessing their accounts," a statement e-mailed by a Facebook representative explained. "No Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:58:00 AM accounts have been compromised There are some things that are during this process, and access nice to wake up to. The smell of will be restored as soon as bacon, for example. On Thursday possible. We apologize for any morning, however, I woke up to inconvenience." something a little less pleasant: an Reader e-mails indicated quite a in-box full of e-mails from bit of frustration. Facebook members whose "I lost my job back in March and accounts are still inaccessible. have been using this site as a Some were more or less on the networking tool," one reader's everge of, well, panic. mail said. "It's frustrating that it's Earlier this week, we wrote been down for so long." about Facebook's Some were paranoid that their a c k n o w l e d g m e n t t h a t s o m e accounts had been deleted and all members could not access their their contacts lost. And many of accounts for several days, instead t h e e-mails cited r e c e i v i n g a " d o w n f o r unresponsiveness on Facebook's maintenance" error. At the time, a part despite multiple customer F a c e b o o k r e p r e s e n t a t i v e service complaints. Third-party explained that it was a "technical customer service forum Get issue with one of our databases" Satisfaction was filled with and estimated that it would be chatter about Facebook login and resolved within 24 hours. It's access problems, including at unclear how many accounts have least one threat of a class-action been affected. lawsuit. But a resolution of the problem "Accounts are still down as of doesn't seem to have occurred, this Thursday morning," another e judging by the e-mails that were -mail read. "Facebook has been still showing up in my in-box well completely non responsive to its into Thursday morning. I sent users. My account has been down another request to Facebook to with site maintenance issues since find out more. Saturday. I have sent over 20 "We are continuing to work on requests to FB and joined help the extended maintenance issue user groups looking for answers." that is restricting some users from From yet another e-mail: "So far

Facebook has been largely unresponsive to my emails, saying that this issue can't be reported as a security issue. It seems absurd to me that Facebook customers have no way to directly contact Facebook regarding problems." With over 300 million active users around the world, we shouldn't expect Facebook to be able to respond to every inquiry it receives. And Facebook is a free product, so it arguably doesn't have a customer service obligation on par with your cable company or the Web site where you bought your last pair of shoes. But this is still a real problem for the social network, which has become so ingrained in culture and communication that for some people it's replaced the address book, the e-mail client, and the personal Web site. Many of the e-mails I received came from people who say that Facebook is their primary method of communication with far-flung family and friends. Others said it's crucial to how they do business. Here's something else: Facebook doesn't offer a way for members to export their contact information into an address-book format, something that took center stage when blogger Robert Scoble had his Facebook account temporarily banned after testing a

script that would export his contacts' information to Plaxo. Even now that Facebook has launched its Facebook Connect login product, there still is no easy way to access your contacts offline. The current accountaccess snafu indicates that this is a big void. At the very least, Facebook could make some kind of mass message available explaining what exactly the problem is and reassuring people that inaccessible accounts have not been permanently deleted (assuming that's the case)-something easier to find and more detailed than the brief statement now posted to its company "fan page." On a more long-term level, this seems like a big red flag that Facebook needs to streamline its customer service operations somehow so that this sort of hysteria can be prevented. A way to export basic contact information for offline access-phone numbers, e-mail addresses, instant-message screen names-wouldn't be bad either. This post was updated at 10:41 a.m. PT with comment from Facebook. Originally posted at The Social

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Something is clogging the Twitter stream! By Caroline McCarthy (Webware.com) Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:42:00 AM

Something has dammed the Twitter river. I bet it was this guy.(Credit: Creative Commons l i c e n s e d : flickr.com/photos/sherseydc Holy cow. Is nothing on the Internet working these days? Facebook's acknowledged that a number of members have had account maintenance issues, and now Twitter has confirmed that "many" users are experiencing timeline delay problems. Basically, the lowdown is that you can post tweets, and they'll publish, but that your timeline-the stream of updates from the Twitter accounts you follow--isn't bringing up any new tweets. For me, it looks like this started at around 8:00 a.m. PT. Twitter, which has been prone to many an outage in its threeyear history, says it is investigating the problem and will provide an update shortly. (Photo by Flickr user sherseydc, licensed under Creative Commons). Originally posted at The Social

Senegal President Wants Royalty On Tourist Trap He Built By Michael Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:30:00 AM

While some may point out that the bigger issue in this story may be ego, hubris or (perhaps) corruption, the story of Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade, and his $27 million statue has a

ridiculous intellectual property twist, as well. Apparently, Wade had the government spend $27 million on a statue with a "heroic" pose -- this is a country where the per capita yearly income seems to be in the low four figures (CIA Factbook says$1,600). Approximately half of the country

lives in poverty. So, clearly, what they need is a giant expensive statue. But the IP angle is that Wade is claiming, since the statue was his idea, he, personally, should receive 35% of any tourism revenue, as a royalty. So, just to get this straight -- he appears to have used a bunch of

taxpayer money to spend millions on a statue -- and he wants to personally get a huge cut of all tourist revenue. And while this may be driven by corruption, it's the sort of concept that would only occur to someone in a world where such "ownership" and demands for royalties after an

idea is put in place are commonplace. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

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Redux Turns Your Twitter and Facebook Streams Into Pure Entertainment [Invites] By Christina Warren (Mashable!)

when your friends tweet or share a link via Facebook or Twitter, instead of just seeing the short-url, Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:01:16 AM you’ll actually see the item being A couple of months ago, we linked. If it’s a video, you can wrote about Redux, a site that play the video immediately within turns status updates and real-time Redux. If it’s an image (like a feeds into an entertainment T w i t P i c ) , y o u c a n v i e w i t destination. Think of it as a i m m e d i a t e l y w i t h i n R e d u x . FriendFeed/Twitter/YouTube Redux only grabs tweets or mashup. status updates that are linking to Back in July, the big news with other content, so you don’t get Redux — which is currently in bogged down with other status private beta (but we have invites) updates. Your friends don’t have — was its TV Mode. Today, the to be Redux members for their site is announcing support for public streams to show-up and importing your Facebook and you can still give props or Twitter feeds. The result is a time- comment on the content. If you wasters dream and it is awesome. comment on a tweet, for instance, Bring Your Twitter and that comment with a link to the Facebook Streams to Life source is sent out over Twitter if In its last iteration, Redux was you choose. As they like to say, already an extremely solid social “it’s the most efficient way to entertainment engine. Using the waste time on the web.” Prepare site or the handy bookmarklet, to Lose All Productivity (in a users could share photos, videos good way) or links with their friends or in a Redux is totally addictive — specific interest channel. Other and it’s designed to be. I find users could then comment on myself having to tear myself those items, give props and share away, otherwise I’ll never get any those links via Twitter, Facebook work done. That’s not that or MySpace. different from a lot of other social Now, Redux has added the s e r v i c e s , e x c e p t , i n m y ability to import your Twitter and experience, Redux kept me Facebook streams directly into entertained and discovering cool Redux. What this means is that stuff.

the service isn’t hard. The Future The site has grown pretty organically and the Redux team reaches out to the community to get feedback on what’s working, future features, etc. David and Frank told me that they are looking at brinigng the TV Mode of Redux to something like Boxee or set-top boxes in When I talked to Frank Nawabi general — and I think that this and Daivd McIntosh — the co- could be brilliant. I have Boxee running in my founders of Redux — earlier this week, they told me that one of the living room and being able to tune reasons they created the service into to the best web content from was because it was so difficult to either my friends or a certain find good videos and good channel would certainly be a great content on services like Vimeo or way to relax and waste even more time! We’ve Got Invites YouTube. Stop listening to me wax poetic It makes a lot more sense to see what your friends or people who about Redux and try it for share your same interests are yourself. Mashable readers can go sharing or watching, rather than here to sign-up for the beta. Give Redux a try and tell us trying to sift through a pile of v i d e o s — n o m a t t e r h o w what you think! Do you like the “ p o p u l a r ” t h e y m i g h t b e . idea of a visual social web? Frank and David told me that Reviews: BigTweet Bookmarklet, the average user spends over an Boxee, Facebook, Mashable, hour on Redux at a time. I can MySpace, Twitpic, Twitter, b e l i e v e i t ! E s p e c i a l l y w i t h Vimeo, YouTube Tags: facebook, redux, social something like the TV Mode, which just continuously shows sharing, twitter, youtube you videos from your friends, the overall network or from a specific channel, becoming sucked into

iPhone OS 3.1.2 is out By Joachim Bean (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:35:00 PM

Filed under: Software Update, iPhone In just a little under a month after iPhone OS 3.1 was released, Apple has just released an update for the iPhone OS, upgrading it to 3.1.2. This update fixes the widely reported issue where the iPhone would not wake from sleep, and also fixes an issue involving video playback and cellular service. This update is available for the original iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, and the iPod touch. Thanks to everyone who sent this in! TUAW iPhone OS 3.1.2 is out originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

Twitter Is Frozen in Time By Adam Ostrow (Mashable!) Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:23:14 AM

Twitter might be talking to Google and Microsoft about multi -million dollar search deals, but apparently, someone forgot to start the engines on the service

this morning. Many user’s timelines haven’t updated in nearly an hour, and on my account, all of my followers and people I’m following are missing. Yikes! Somewhat ironically, Twitter search still appears to be working

in near real-time, so you can see

other users complaining about their timelines not updating. No word yet from Twitter on what’s up, but we’ll update when we know more. Are you experiencing the Twitter time freeze? Let us know in the comments.

Update: As of 9:20PT, Twitter is“currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed.” Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy Reviews: Twitter, iStockphoto Tags: twitter

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More Problems With The FTC's New Disclosure Rules: Free Speech And Liability Problems By Michael Masnick (Techdirt) Submitted at 10/8/2009 4:35:11 AM

I've already noted my general problems the FTC's new disclosure rules, but as others look into the details, the worse they seem and the more you realize the unintended consequences may be pretty bad. Jeff Jarvis makes some key points concerning how this could be seen as a restriction on free speech. And that's because the FTC seems to be viewing blog posts as if they are media, rather than straightforward communication. As we've pointed out in the past, for many, blogging is often no different than a conversation. It's not journalism. It's not reporting. It's having a discussion with people: Second, the FTC assumes -- as media people do -- that the internet is a medium. It's not. It's a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don't think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they're making media. They're connecting. They're talking. So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media -- as they explicitly do -- is the same as sending a government

goon into Denny's to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed. As such, you could make a case that the new rules are an unconstitutional law hindering First Amendment guarantees on freedom of speech. As I noted originally, it seems like these things get sorted out in the marketplace of ideas -- whereby those who do something so stupid as to sell their "views" on things face the potential of a substantial loss in credibility. But suddenly demanding people reveal the sourcing of some product they mention in blogs leads to all sorts of silly results, amusingly mocked by Mark Cuban in a blog post, where he wonders what sorts of disclosures he'll have to make if he mentions a breakfast at IHOP where the managers comps the breakfast. And while he's mocking the overall situation, it's not so silly. You shouldn't have to confer with your lawyers to figure out how you mention any particular product, just because you got a freebie or a sample somewhere. And, what's really scary? It appears that even the FTC isn't sure what the policy actually

means, and hasn't thought through any of the unintended consequences or fuzzy borders. Separately, Eric Goldman highlights another massive problem with the new guidelines that no one else seems to have picked up on yet: that in some cases it's the company providing the product that will be liable-ridiculously blaming the company if a blogger makes claims about its products that are not true. As Goldman points out, there's no way the FTC would be successful in going after companies for that, as Section 230 clearly would protect the advertiser from bogus statements by someone else. But, even assuming that the FTC never considered the Section 230 issues, why would the FTC ever think it's reasonable to fine an advertiser for statements made by someone else? Despite tons of feedback and discussion when the FTC first proposed these new rules a few months ago, it really feels like no one at the FTC put much time into actually thinking through what these sorts of rules would actually mean in the real world. Permalink| Comments| Email This Story

New Pics: Sasha & Malia Obama Hang with Dad (ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:11:00 AM

President Barack Obama enjoyed some father-daughter

time with his two girls Sasha and Malia. The president took his daughters to star gaze on Thursday with some local middle school students and conduct hands

-on experiments with astronomers -- ET has the pics!

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Judge Tells Gamer That Sony Doesn't Violate His Free Speech Rights By Banning Him By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)

spaces" such as virtual "homes" and a virtual "mall" that are used by a substantial number of users Back in July, we wrote about an (Pl.'s Reply in Supp. of Opp'n. to annoyed videogamer who sued Dismiss 1), these "spaces" serve Sony for banning him from the solely to enrich the entertainment Playstation 3 game "Resistance" s e r v i c e s o n S o n y ' s p r i v a t e for things he said to other players n e t w o r k . I n p r o v i d i n g t h i s in the game. He claimed it was a electronic space that users can violation of his First Amendment voluntarily choose to entertain rights -- though, as we explained themselves with, Sony is merely at the time (and, as anyone providing a robust commercial actually familiar with the First product, and is not "performing Amendment already knows), the the full spectrum of municipal First Amendment only covers powers and [standing] in the actions by the government, not shoes of the State." Hudgens, 424 private corporations. Sony has U.S. at 519 (quoting Lloyd Corp. every right to bring down the v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, 568-69 banhammer if it wants to. It (1972)). should come as no surprise then, Sony does not have a sufficient that the judge wasted little time structural or functional nexus to explaining this to him in the the government. Plaintiff has not process of dismissing the case. suggested that Sony is part of the However, there is one interesting state or federal government. The aspect, as highlighted by Eric Network was not created to Goldman in the link above. The further government objectives. judge rejected the idea that Sony The government retains no might be covered by the First permanent authority to appoint Amendment as a "company any directors of Sony or the town." Goldman points out that Network, or any other private some have suggested this body associated with the argument in the past, and now Network. There is no indication there's at least one ruling that that Sony has assumed functions totally rejects it: Sony's Network traditionally reserved to the is not similar to a company town. g o v e r n m e n t , o r t h a t t h e The Network does not serve a government had any part in s u b s t a n t i a l p o r t i o n o f a encouraging Sony to create the municipality's functions, but Network. Count one of the rather serves solely as a forum for complaint does not state a people to interact subject to plausible First Amendment claim specific contractual terms. Every for relief, and therefore must be regulation Sony applies in the dismissed. Network is confined in scope only Permalink| Comments| Email to those entertainment services This Story that Sony provides. Although the Network does include "virtual Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:21:00 AM

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Twitter while you work: Socialcast makes it good for your career

Ask TUAW: Photoshop alternatives, Windows and Mac file sharing, application switching and more

By Rafe Needleman (Webware.com)

By Chris Ullrich (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

Submitted at 10/8/2009 5:30:00 AM

The enterprise microblogging service Socialcast is getting some interesting analytical functions. Unlike the data you can get from Bitly(the closest most people get to seeing real analytics on microblogging), Socialcast's new Social Business Intelligence feature is designed to help the mucky-mucks in your company "understand the social dynamics or your organization," not just see traffic patterns. If your company uses the Socialcast service for more than just occasional hobbyist microblogging--that is, if whoever hooked up your company with Socialcast also set up the important features the service offers, like integration into CRM, wikis, employee blogs, and other internal systems--then there could be a rich stream of social data coming from the product. Socialcast SBI can tap into this data to identify, in broad strokes,

three main types of people in your company: the information "brokers," the "connectors," and the "peripheral players." Even "active listening" is tracked, by watching posts that users flag with the "like" button. The point is to make sure that your company can leverage the tastemakers among their staff-people you can't identify just by looking at an org chart. Another selling point: SBI helps make sure that when a person is about to leave the company, you know what you're losing in terms of social connections that may be important to keeping particular projects running or clients happy. There's an HR department term for this: "knowledge loss mitigation." SBI also means that someone could be watching what you do on the platform and that this information may play a part in how you are treated by your employer. Yes, it's true: they could end up paying you more if you Twitter or do the equivalent on Socialcast.

Socialcast lets you examine how your employees connect to others.(Credit: Socialcast Socialcast has both a free and paid service, and SBI is an additional fee on top of that: It's $1,500 a year per seat for the people who get to see the analytics. Socialcast CEO Tim Young thinks that most companies, even those with more than the typical 240 users per installation, will buy one to three seats, so they can learn about their employees' social connections. The service doesn't yet pick up connections in e-mail (Exchange servers, for example) or from PBX (phone) systems, but those data streams may be added in the future. So if your company starts using Socialcast, don't dismiss it. Not only is it a useful service ( as I've written previously), but participating in it could help your career. Originally posted at Rafe's Radar

South Park: Dead Celebrities - open thread By Bob Sassone (TV Squad) Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:01:00 PM

You knew that when South Park returned it would work in one of the many celebrity deaths that happened over the past several months. But last night's episode actually had, well, all of them: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, David

Carradine, and all the others. Ike started to see their ghosts and was sent to a psychiatrist for it. Here's

the full episode. Chipotlaway is disgusting but hysterical. What did you think? Filed under: Video, Watercooler Talk, South Park, Reality-Free Permalink| Email this| | Comments

Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:30:00 PM

Filed under: Software, Open Source, Ask TUAW, Snow Leopard Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about Photoshop alternatives, Windows and Mac file sharing, graphics problems in Snow Leopard and quickly switching between applications, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X(we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions. Matt asks: I don't have the money for something like Adobe Photoshop. What's the best, cheaper alternative? For my money, the best Photoshop alternative at the moment, and one I use every day, is Pixelmator. It has many of the same features as Photoshop like layers, masks, level and curve adjustments and a whole lot more. Plus, it's a relatively simple program to use and is written to

take advantage of your Mac's GPU when doing image processing. It also supports most image file formats including Photoshop PSD files and has many useful Automator actions built in. Actually, because Pixelmator is such a good app and takes care of most of my needs, it's pretty rare that I ever open Photoshop anymore. Sadly, Pixelmator is not free, but at US$59.00, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than Photoshop. Some other alternatives include the open source GIMP and its more Photoshop-like cousin GIMPShop. You can also check out Acorn, or if you need very minimal tools like crop and resize, ImageWell. Of course, Apple's built-in Preview.app can handle many of these low-end tasks as well. Continue reading Ask TUAW: Photoshop alternatives, Windows and Mac file sharing, application switching and more TUAW Ask TUAW: Photoshop alternatives, Windows and Mac file sharing, application switching and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Rock Band for iPhone Is Coming, And It Looks Awesome [PICS]

Twitter on the verge of big search deals?

By Jennifer Van Grove (Mashable!)

By Caroline McCarthy (Webware.com)

Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:01:35 AM

For as long as we can remember, Tap Tap Revenge has dominated in Apple’s iTunes App Store, with Tap Tap Revenge 3 currently toping the charts. Its time may have come. EA Games, maker of the popular Rock Band game for consoles, may have previously been hushhush about an official Rock Band iPhone/iPod Touch game, but the silence is over. EA Mobile is making a splash at CTIA today with the announcement of Rock Band for iPhone. The application is no joke. We’ve seen it in action and can confirm that is the real deal, with gameplay almost identical to the console version including the ability to play with up to three additional players via Bluetooth. The Real Deal Don’t be fooled by impostors, Rock Band for iPhone is legit. It may have taken a year to build, but the mobile version matches everything you’ve come to love about the original, right down to the awesome graphics and the

you select “drums,” and so on. Should you sync up with friends and play over Bluetooth, be prepared to be blown away. The real-time gaming experience is incredible, as yours truly can attest to, and even goes so far as to highlight other players’ activities on your device as they happen. Olivier Proulx, Senior Producer ability to hear mistakes. Of course, you’re playing on your at EA Mobile, believes that what iPhone, so you’ll use your fingers the Rock Band app really has to to tap to the rhythms of four offer over competitors is an unmatchable, high-quality music different instruments. The app comes with 15 songs – experience. He also believes the familiar tracks from past and depth of the game is unique, and present – with 5 additional songs that it’s “easy to learn, but that you can unlock as you difficult to master.” The application launch date is complete the World Tour, as well as options to buy more. The game up in the air, as it’s subject to supports single-player game play, Apple’s approval, but EA Mobile m u l t i - p l a y e r m o d e o v e r says it should be available in a Bluetooth, and Facebook Connect few weeks. Also undetermined is integration for inviting friends to the price, but we’re pretty sure you can expect to pay for this bad play. Just as is the case with the boy. More Rock Band for iPhone original, Rock Band for iPhone Photos Reviews: Bluetooth offers four different instruments Tags: iphone application, rock that you can play: vocals, drums, bass, guitar. Each option offers a band game experience that is unique to each instrument, so you’re playing the actual drum part when

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somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, doesn't have a significant revenue stream in Submitted at 10/8/2009 5:22:00 AM place yet. It's slated to launch a Are Microsoft and Google premium-services package later hoping to get into Twitter's this year, but big search-data deals t r e a s u r e t r o v e o f r e a l - t i m e with the likes of Microsoft and information? Yes, says Kara Google could be a significant Swisher of AllThingsD, citing additional source of cash. sources who indicate that the two Something that could be companies are separately in talks complicated for Microsoft, should with Twitter about data licensing i t c h o o s e t o p u r s u e t h i s deals. opportunity with Twitter: It has a This would involve the stake in Facebook, which has exchange of several million been making moves to make its dollars plus a revenue-share to o w n s t a s h o f r e a l - t i m e "compensate Twitter for its huge information--potentially far richer and potentially valuable trove of than Twitter's, with 300 million real-time and content-sharing active users posting links, photos, information, generated from the status messages, and what-havedata stream of billions of tweets you--more searchable and open. of its 54 million monthly users," Facebook has gone a long way Swisher wrote. from keeping all its content What's unclear is whether either behind a log-in wall, but Twitter deal will actually come to fruition. s t i l l w i n s i n t h e o p e n n e s s More concrete is the likelihood c a t e g o r y . that Twitter won't strike any A recent minor product launch exclusive deals, considering the from Facebook, the "Gross company is (according to National Happiness" app, Swisher) "seeking to create a illustrates this by using keywords large open platform, which many in status message content to track could plug into, from search how "happy" the Facebook engines to marketers to publishers population is on a given day. to developers." Originally posted at The Social Twitter, which just raised about $100 million at a valuation

Millionaire goes friendless By Bob Sassone (TV Squad) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:39:00 PM

When you think about, the "Phone-A-Friend" lifeline on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has always been lame. In theory it sounds good: if you

don't know the answer you call a friend to see if they know. You even get to choose a few friends for your list so you can have people with different specialties/knowledge. So why did it fail so often? Friends that contestants called either got the

question wrong, weren't that sure

of the answer at all (forcing the contestant to use another lifeline to narrow it down more, like 50/50), or they couldn't even get their answer out before time ran out and the call was cut off. It always made me nervous. Notice I used the past tense

there."Phone-A-Friend" is being dropped from the show. Continue reading Millionaire goes friendless Filed under: Game Show, Reality-Free Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Twitter’s New Rumored Business: Improving Google and Microsoft’s Search Engines By Adam Ostrow (Mashable!) Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:37:44 AM

There’s been plenty of discussion about how Google, Microsoft, and other players in search are going to address “the Twitter problem” – the service’s ability to unearth breaking news and links far quicker than traditional search engines. In fact, just last week, Google launched a new search option that allows users to filter search results to show only links that are new within the last hour. However, competition might not even be necessary. According to The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, Twitter is talking to both Google and Microsoft about licensing deals that would allow them to integrate Twitter data into their search engines. From the report: “According to sources familiar

with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.” Continuing, All Things Digital says that such deals would be worth “several million dollars” to Twitter and potentially include ongoing revenue sharing. There are of course plenty of

Web of Trust extension comes to Chrome By Stephen Shankland (Webware.com)

lets windows pop up from the bottom of the screen. (The "mole" term originated with the work Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:45:00 AM search engines that already utilize Google's Gmail team on instantTwitter data, and Bing actually Google's browser now has an message windows; closing a already launched one. Twitter extension to use the Web of Trust, number of them is like playing could conceivably provide added a project that lets people rate the Whack-a-Mole.) However, Web value in the form of a truly full trustworthiness of Web sites and o f T r u s t p r o g r a m m e r s a r e feed that includes all tweets see how others have rated them. c o n s i d e r i n g u s i n g a n e w e r (currently, Twitter search only The open-source plug-in extensions possibility called goes several days back). previously worked only with browser actions, which builds an It’s certainly an interesting new Firefox and Internet Explorer, but extension interface into a button twist on the evolving Twitter now a version is available for the that appears along the top of the business model story, that points new developer preview version of Chrome window. towards the company’s desire to Chrome, according to a blog post. "Browser Actions look remain independent and become The Web of Trust extension lets promising though and we're financially viable, as opposed to people rate Web pages. Clicking looking forward to using them in get acquired by someone like an icon in the lower left corner of future," said programmer Sami Google or Microsoft. Now, we’ll C h r o m e p o p s u p t h i s T o l v a n e n i n a m a i l i n g l i s t have to wait and see if this interface.(Credit: Screenshot by announcement. He also offered a actually happens, or gets filed Stephen Shankland/CNET list of suggestions for the Chrome away with the seemingly dozens It's one of a host of relatively extensions interface. of other Twitter business rumors widely used extensions available Separately, Google announced a we’ve seen pop up in recent on other browsers but now on new developer preview version, months. Reviews: Bing, Google, their way to Chrome, whose Chrome 4.0.221.6 for Windows Twitter extensions framework is just and 4.0.221.8 for Mac OS X. In Tags: Google, microsoft, getting off the ground. There also the Windows version is a new Search, search engines, twitter are extensions (called add-ons in browser action feature, pop-up the Firefox realm) for Delicious windows. and Xmarks, for example. Originally posted at Deep Tech The extension takes advantage of the newer "mole" feature that

Sneak peek at Accuterra 3.1 topo app for iPhone By Jessica Dolcourt (Webware.com)

mobile phones gaining ground on decidedly consumer devices. Interactive trail maps like Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:41:15 AM Accuterra for iPhone make a lot The Accuterra topo map will get of sense, especially with cellular a slide-out control panel in reception and baked-in GPS chips version 3.1.(Credit: Screenshot by strong enough in so many local Jessica Dolcourt/CNET hills and national parks that you As a wannabe weekend warrior, can actively record your steps, I'm happy to see topo maps for share photos, and track your stats.

At CTIA Fall 2009 (see all stories), we got a sneak peek at the next version of Accuterra that will hit the iPhone app store. Version 3.1, which is expected in a few weeks, doesn't layer on a ton of features, but there is a new slide-out panel we like that makes the controls much more accessible. With a well-aimed

swipe and a tap, you'll be able to toggle between the Accuterra topo maps and Google's maps. The app will also contain a simpler library organized around a search bar up top and traditional iPhone tab menu buttons below. By the end of the year, you should be able to purchase extra content within the app, such as a

video your of the location or a historical Civil War walking tour. Accuterra costs 99 cents in the App Store; with local maps selling for about $3 each. Originally posted at CTIA Fall show

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Apple's next mouse may be mighty, but probably not a "Mighty Mouse"

MapQuest jumps into navigation pool

By Ken Ray (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

By Mel Martin (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:30:00 AM

Filed under: Peripherals Talk around the water cooler (in particularly geeky offices) is that Apple is on the verge of launching a new, touch sensitive mouse to go along with the computers it hasn't announced and the keyboard it hasn't announced. No doubt the company wants the mouse to be mighty, but it's unlikely the Cupertino-company will call it " Mighty Mouse" this time around. Man & Machine, which specializes in making computer peripherals for the medical industry, has won the trademark on the term "Mighty Mouse" from the United States Patent and Trademark Office as it pertains to tech, though CBS still holds the mark for the cartoon mouse who comes in singing to save the day. In its press release announcing

the win, Man & Machine doesn't mention any other "Mighty Mouse" maker, though it does note, "Others have used the name Mighty Mouse for their computer mice and have sought registration of that trademark, but now the United States government has

spoken." The big question now: what will Apple call their new, touchy-feely pointer and clicker? While I'm partial to " Danger Mouse" (both the musician and the British cartoon), Apple does have friends at another mouse-house. Then again, with the touch sensitivity likely to be touted, shouldn't there be some tie-in with Lenny and George and a mouse you can pet? [via TechCrunch] Engadget's Nilay Patel adds some legal analysis here. TUAW Apple's next mouse may be mighty, but probably not a "Mighty Mouse" originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

(ETonline - Breaking News) Submitted at 10/8/2009 7:09:00 AM

Jennifer Hudson is in her first months of motherhood and she's opening up about the bottlefeedings and lullabies that go with taking care of her baby son David Daniel Jr. "I love being nurturing and caring because I love to see other

people happy," Hudson -- who welcomed first child on Aug. 10 with fiancé, David Otunga-- tells People magazine. "Who better to devote my time to than my own child?" Hudson and Otunga kept her pregnancy secret for as long as possible, saying of the secret, "David and I were the only people who knew for a long time. I

Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:00:00 PM

Filed under: Software, iPhone MapQuest is now offering a GPS navigation system for iPhone users in the U.S. and Canada. MapQuest Navigator[iTunes link] is U.S. $0.99 for a 14 day trial. After than you have to buy it for $3.99 a month, $9.99 for 3 months, or $29.99 a year. According to the company, key features include: • Streamlined 3D Interface: Features voice-guided, turn-byturn navigation that speaks directions and street names. • Regular Data Updates: Search 16+ million points of interest and utilize up-to-date street maps. • Full Route Corridor Download: Quick route re-calculation for missed turns as well provides continued service in areas of no cellular coverage. • Traffic Incident Based Routing: U.S. routes are optimized to avoid traffic incidents that might delay your would forget I was pregnant, it travel. was so easy. I didn’t have any • MapQuest Place Carousel: morning sickness, no cravings Easily displays locations for either. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, hotels, movie theaters, gas we’ll wait until it’ll tell on itself.’ stations, and more with a single I didn’t show until I was seven tap. months so that made it easy right Most of the data for the app there." comes over the internet, so

Baby Talk with New Mom Jennifer Hudson

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MapQuest Navigator has a small 2.9MB footprint. If you'd like to see a video demo of the app, go here. We've asked for a copy so we can put it through our rigorous review trials and compare it to the other systems we've used, so more to come. TUAW MapQuest jumps into navigation pool originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Digital Chocolate to use Doubletwist introduces in-app music OpenFeint for scoreboards, achievements store powered by Amazon By Mike Schramm (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

they've announced a partnership with the Amazon music store to sell music directly from within the app. No TVs or movies -- just Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:30:00 AM music, purchased directly within Filed under: iTS, Software, the app, and then able to be sent Freeware, iTunes, Deals, Music out to any devices or social We posted about Doubletwist networks as usual. earlier this year-- it's a pretty TechCrunch says the store's innovative music app (developed simplicity is actually a selling in part by Jon Lech Johansen, point-- iTunes has ballooned up to otherwise known as DVD Jon) do way more than just sell music, that not only plays you play and in Doubletwist it's much more whatever you like, obviously, but straightforward. Here's the other even lets you share and send bonus for Mac users: while we music off to anyone, even other originally had to wait for an app people who don't have the app release, the music store is i t s e l f . N o w D o u b l e t w i s t i s currently only available on the stepping up even more closely to Mac version of the software. A becoming an iTunes competitor: PC version is coming soon.

It's doubtful Doubletwist will replace iTunes for many people, given all of the various things iTunes does for a Mac user. But then again, if you are using the Amazon MP3 store with any frequency, Doubletwist is probably worth a look: it's a free download on the website. TUAW Doubletwist introduces in-app music store powered by Amazon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

By Mike Schramm (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

doing with it, apparently -- they'll be putting scoreboards and achievements into their games on the App Store. Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:30:00 AM This hardly means the end of Filed under: Gaming, Software, the ongoing battle over social iPhone, App Store, iPod touch networking and app developers on Developer Digital Chocolate the store. But platforms like (who, according to that recent OpenFeint, Plus+, and others slideshow report, is one of the continue to stack up developers most frequent publishers of under their respective umbrellas, content to the App Store) has and it remains to be seen just who announced that they'll be going will prevail. with OpenFeint for their social TUAW Digital Chocolate to use networking features. We've been O p e n F e i n t f o r s c o r e b o a r d s , covering OpenFeint for a while achievements originally appeared here on TUAW (and we've on The Unofficial Apple Weblog interviewed them before as well). (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 The platform is designed to let 11:30:00 EST. Please see our devs add social features and terms for use of feeds. multiplayer to their apps quickly Read| Permalink| Email this| and easily. And that's exactly Comments what Digital Chocolate will be

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Watch NASA’s Exploding Moon Rocket Live on NASA TV By Stan Schroeder (Mashable!) Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:38:48 AM

Remember the LCROSS project, the one in which NASA plans to fire a huge exploding rocket into the moon? The goal is to eject debris from the surface of one of moon’s craters and discovering whether there’s frozen water there. Well, the time to sit back, relax, grab some popcorn and watch the mission as it unfolds is drawing near. Early tomorrow, on October 9, 6:15 a.m. EDT/3:15 a.m. PDT, NASA will start a live TV broadcast that will include live footage from the spacecraft camera, real-time telemetry based animation, expert commentary, and possibly some live footage

Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:44:00 AM

ET has the latest... ET was there as Jon Gosselin left his New York City apartment and commented on Kate's comedy bit Kate's Wednesday night comedy bit on "The Jay Leno Show." "It's messed up, the timing," Jon said of his estranged wife's sketch. Jon also acknowledged that the show taped Kate's bit weeks ago.

Is App Addiction a Real Thing? By Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:04:41 AM

reStart, a Fall City, Washingtonbased Internet-addiction recovery center, warned that users should keep tabs on whether apps are taking over their real lives. So how do you know if it's taking over your life? Cash says that if you spend more than 2 hours per day engaged with your digital equipment for non-work related or homework-related reasons,"then you've got cause for alarm." Wow, if those are the guidelines for addiction then just about every American has television addiction given the 2 hours they sit in front of their TV sets from 8 PM to 10 PM watching primetime programming. Could this Become a Real Problem? That's not to say that people won't get addicted to mobile applications at some point, but let's not start a panic before all the data is in. Most of the selfproclaimed "app addicts" these days are still maintaining a healthy balance between work, life and play and are able to put their phones away when the time is right. Even those who use their mobile phones and related apps regularly aren't necessarily addicts in the true sense of the word. What do you think? Is "app addiction" a real thing? Or will it become a serious problem in the future? Discuss

Do you jokingly refer to yourself as an "app addict?" That is, are you someone so obsessed with your mobile phone applications that you've filled numerous screens full of apps, play with them anytime you have 5 minutes to spare and sleep next to your gambling and online gaming have phone just so it can be the first also fallen under the banner of thing you grab in the morning? "addiction" in cases where the from the 88-inch telescope located While there haven't been any behaviors become uncontrollable on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. studies yet on the impact of by the affected person. Given the psychological You can also follow the mission mobile phone application use and on Twitter and on Facebook, as health, USA Today recently ran component of addiction, it's not well as read the latest info on the an article practically dubbing "app entirely off-base to question official blog. NASA claims the addiction" a real thing. " What is whether becoming addicted to final stage of the mission will be app addiction doing to people's mobile apps is the next big thing “spectacular”, so we’ll set our health?, the article asked. What in technology-related addictions, expectations to “crazy high”. indeed?, we wonder. How about as USA Today is obviously doing. But with no reported cases, no Reviews: Facebook, Twitter nothing at all? research, and no scholarly articles, Tags: facebook, moon, NASA, Sponsor it seems a little bit like jumping twitter Addiction is a Serious Word "Addiction" is a word that's t h e g u n t o c l a i m t h a t a p p often tossed around in fun addiction is becoming a health somewhat haphazardly, with issue. Still, that didn't stop some people claiming they're "addicted" to everything from chocolate to experts from weighing in on the TV to shoes. But real addiction is m a t t e r . M a r i n a P i c c i o t t o , In the comedic routine on no joking matter. An addict is p r o f e s s o r o f p s y c h i a t r y , "Leno," pretend-photogs mob someone with a psychological or neurobiology and pharmacology Kate at her car in a grocery store physical dependence to something at Yale University told the parking lot. "Seriously, I am and are unable to put an end to paper,"there are a few parallels exhausted. Leave me alone," she their behavior despite its negative w e c a n m a k e f r o m o t h e r tells them. "Hey, what did consequences - behavior which, addictions, like compulsive Mommy say? I asked you to stop especially in the case of drug or shopping. The consequences can t a k i n g p i c t u r e s a n d y o u alcohol addiction, can even lead be bad -- credit debt, time lost." continued." She tells one photog to death. In more recent years, A n d H i l a r i e C a s h , a "go to your room," but after he c o m p u l s i v e b e h a v i o r s l i k e psychotherapist and co-founder of complains that they're in a parking lot, she says, "go to your car" and Pink Ribbon Beauty: Ramy Beauty Therapy come out "when you're ready to By ELLE.com (ELLE News —Janna Johnson, Beauty behave." Blog) Assistant net proceeds from Beauty Photo: Kevin Cremens Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:23:21 AM Therapy Melon Rouge Juicy Follow ELLE on Twitter A cancer survivor himself, Ramy Cheeks(which also looks great on Gafni is donating 20 percent of lips!) to CancerCare.

Jon Gosselin Reacts to Kate's 'Jay Leno' Appearance (ETonline - Breaking News)

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Two Reasons Why Twitter May Not Be Worth So Much to Google and Microsoft After All By Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

shared through it each day. Those are heavily biased towards the relatively small number of active Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:41:33 AM content creators on the site and Google and Microsoft are both much of it is spam or republished in talks with Twitter to buy access RSS feeds. to the company's full fire hose of Almost every real-time search messages and shared links, company we've spoken to has according to a report this morning c h o s e n t o s u p p l e m e n t t h e f r o m K a r a S w i s h e r a t indexing power of Twitter with AllThingsD. Could these be o t h e r , l a r g e r d a t a s o u r c e s . blockbuster deals that bring the OneRiot, for example, says it search giants into the world of the collects 4X more links from the real-time web? click-streams that its toolbar users In fact, the Twitter fire hose have opted-in to sharing than it m a y b e l e s s v a l u a b l e t h a n does from Twitter. Faroo and outsiders might think. We've been Wowd both rely on P2P clients to having extensive conversations power indexing far beyond what with a wide variety of real-time they can get from Twitter. web companies in preparation for Implicit behavior offers a lot more the Real-Time Web Summit next data than explicit behavior. week and we're lead to question AllVoices uses a whitelist of the value of Twitter links for two trusted Twitter users to improve reasons. the signal-to-noise ratio and Evri Sponsor watches trends on Twitter to First, there aren't really that trigger the building out of their many links that get passed index of the much larger web through Twitter. The service may outside Twitter. be the most visible example of Evri also does some really real-time communication but interesting semantic parsing of the there's a whole lot more going on contents of those tweets, adding around the web in real time links as pivot points to the news outside of Twitter. Twitter may entities people mention in text. see between 3 and 5 million links Almost all of the companies we

Why else do we question the value of the full fire hose? Business Insider reports today that Twitter is already selling access to startups for up to $3k per month. talked to had to do extensive text It's hard to know how credible analysis of Tweets and the pages that number is but that's a really they linked to. That may not be low price. difficult for Google or Microsoft, We do know that many startups but is quick discovery of a few feel they can get a representative m i l l i o n n e w l i n k s a d a y sample of Twitter activity from challenging enough for them to be the company's free API. Twitter worth a big price tag? may be having a hard time upYou want real-time web links? selling to the full feed if what's There are probably already more already available is good enough blog posts being pushed out in and its crown jewels can't be real time for free consumption proven to be that much better. using Pubsubhubbub and We love Twitter and with some RSSCloud than there are links serious clean-up it may provide s h a r e d o n T w i t t e r . A s w e big search companies a handy discussed in our recent post Ten little bundle of high-interest links Useful Examples of the Real- to advertise against. Is it valuable Time Web in Action, there's a lot enough for Google and Microsoft more going on around the web to pay big money for, though? outside of Twitter. Much as we We're not so sure. love Twitter, most people suspect Come join us and some very its growth is slowing. The rest of smart people from throughout the the real-time web is believed to be diverse real-time web industry to at the beginning of an explosion discuss this and related topics of growth that will take over the next week at the Real-Time Web entire internet - eventually almost Summit. Discuss all information online may be pushed to those who want it, in real time.

Dollhouse needs your help By Bob Sassone (TV Squad) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:28:00 PM

This isn't a big surprise: fans have started a campaign to save FOX's Dollhouse. Other campaigns have popped up on the web over the past few years to save shows. While most of them are unsuccessful, once in a while a network will actually listen. This happened to Jericho after fans of that show sent so many nuts to CBS that the network finally decided that producing another seven episodes of the show would be cheaper than having fans send even more nuts to them and having to get rid of them somehow. [Watch episodes and clips of Dollhouse and other shows at SlashControl.] Filed under: Web, Reality-Free, Dollhouse, Joss Whedon Permalink| Email this| | Comments

Where the Wild Things Are Comes to the iPhone By Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:47:05 AM

The classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are has been turned into a movie due in theaters next week. The promotional iPhone app is

something that your kids may enjoy quite a lot. ( iTunes link) The app lets you listen to the movie's sound track, see photos, watch trailers and best of all interact with an on-screen image of the monster Carol. Carol can be tickled, hit, he'll throw things at night and he'll eat photos of the you, you can put him to sleep at contacts on your phone.

Sponsor It's a fun, free little app and is probably going to be very effective in convincing the kids that try it that the movie is a mustsee. Parents familiar with the book probably didn't need any convincing. Either way, there's something I

think all of us can enjoy about listening to Karen O sing in the background while watching a big cuddly monster eat photos of people we know from our phone. Discuss

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Notable: Closing the Feedback Loop for Web Designers By Frederic Lardinois (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:01:32 AM

ZURB, a well-known Bay Area design and consulting firm that has worked with the likes of Facebook, eBay and Britney Spears, decided to release one of the tools it built internally to annotate web designs to the public a short while ago. Notable is completely web based and works best in Firefox - though the company also released an iPhone app that makes working on iPhone app designs easier as well. In the browser, you simply surf to a site, hit the Notable button, and a little menu will pop up that lets you annotate any part of the web page or see the source code of the page and annotate this as well. Sponsor As Notable's lead marketer Dimitry Dragilev told us earlier this week, the application is meant to be used by a variety of customers, though the focus is clearly on making this tool work for design teams and freelancers who can use it internally or with clients. Mark Up Design and Code

Using the app couldn't be much easier. In the visual part of the app, you can add callouts to any part of the page. Once these are saved to Notable's web service, other team members can see these callouts, add their own, or discuss the design in a comments section underneath the screenshot. The code editor, which is somewhat reminiscent of a simpler version of Firebug, also allows you to quickly annotate any part of a

website's HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code. Once a screenshot is saved and uploaded to the site, it can be shared by email, through a private or public URL, and embedded into any other web page. Users can also download a PDF version of the screenshot and annotations. Of course, users can also continue to add more annotations after the screenshot has been uploaded. While the Firefox plugin

represents the easiest and fastest way to use Notable, you can also simply upload any image (a design mock-up, for example) to the service or use a bookmarklet which also works in IE7 and Safari. iPhone The iPhone version of Notable is limited to uploading screenshots to Notable, but while it doesn't do much more than that, it makes for a good companion

piece to the web service and should come in useful for designers of iPhone apps and mobile websites. Pricing The free version of Notable allows users to create one workspace and collaborate with up to three users and store up to 3GB of data. For $24/month, Notable users can work with up to 5 users and create an unlimited number of workspaces. The service also offers accounts for groups with up to 10, 25 or 50 users. The paid accounts also come with additional security features. Verdict Like many of the best apps we have recently seen, Notable was developed internally because none of the available apps really fulfilled the requirements the ZURB team had. The service works without any hiccups, is easy to use, and clearly focused on giving a specific set of users the right tools to get the job done without being encumbered by lots of extra bells and whistles. Discuss

Go Straight to Your Unread Gmail Messages with a Shortcut [Shortcuts] By Adam Pash (Lifehacker) Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:15:00 AM

You probably already know how to find unread messages in Gmail(just search is:unread in:inbox), but if you want quick, bookmarkable access to only those unread messages in your inbox, CNET has a simple

suggestion. The video above walks through the basic idea. They suggest not just adding a bookmark to the is:unread in:inbox URL (which, if

you're a regular old Gmail user, is http://mail.google.com/mail/?&sh va=1#search/is%3Aunread+in%3 Ainbox), but also setting up a keyword bookmark for that URL

so you can instantly open your unread messages in a couple of keystrokes. I love the last part, but that's not terribly surprising; I think

keyword bookmarking is one of the best features in Firefox. Either way, this simple bookmark could be a useful one if you have trouble keeping your unread messages at "zero". Make a shortcut to your unread Gmail[CNET]

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Use Redux and Bypass Bitly for Better Twitter Discovery By Dana Oshiro (ReadWriteWeb)

design but without the installation.) Redux's ease-of-use coupled Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:00:00 AM with entertaining channels like Often described as "crowd thumbnails, think about all of StandUp Comedy, Trollz and s o u r c e d t e l e v i s i o n " , o n l i n e your friends who use phrases like Japan, make it a great community community site Redux is quickly "this is so awesome" and "LOL" to unwind with after work. And if becoming the most addictive b e f o r e s h a r i n g a l i n k . T h e the entertainment aspects don't entertainment experience on the p r o b l e m w i t h t h e s e v a g u e c o n v i n c e y o u , y o u m a y b e w e b . W i t h t h i s m o r n i n g ' s descriptors is that they don't tell interested in it for security announcement of Twitter and you if you'll enjoy what lies reasons. Earlier this month Facebook integration, it looks like ahead. Those descriptors don't ReadWriteWeb covered the return the community's content is about even tell you if you've already of the Koobface worm to Twitter to increase tenfold. Like many seen this site or whether it's a n d F a c e b o o k . D e s p i t e t h e other sites, users can import their appropriate to view at work. companies' best efforts to filter Twitter and Facebook streams Redux takes the guesswork out of out malicious URLs, users were into their profile feeds; however, the stream and lets us know what fooled into downloading malware. u n l i k e o t h e r s o c i a l f e a t u r e we're in for ahead of time. The Redux might just be the safety integrations, there's a catch. company is currently completing precaution you need. Rather than simply spitting out a a grid-based prototype design. Rather than forcing you to stream of text with bit.ly links, the While Redux currently offers a blindly click bit.ly links, Redux service converts URLS into video D i g g - l i k e l i s t i n t e r f a c e , offers a safer and more efficient thumbnails and site previews. previewing sites may become way to explore the stream. While T h i s c o n v e r s i o n i s s u r e t o even easier. The new Redux the site is currently in private improve Twitter and Facebook- design places emphasis on images b e t a , t h e f i r s t 5 0 0 l u c k y based discovery. to create an entertainment ReadWriteWeb readers can Sponsor dashboard. (Similar to Boxee's register by clicking this link. Before you naysay preview Discuss

Tracking Influenza: Google Flu Trends Now Covers 16 More Countries By Frederic Lardinois (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:53:45 AM

Google just announced a major expansion of its Flu Trends program which monitors searches for Flu-related symptoms on Google's search engine to predict Flu outbreaks. Until now, Google only made the data it gathered from searches in the U.S., Mexico, Australia and New Zealand available, but now, Google has expanded the product to cover 16 more countries, including Russia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Spain. Sponsor Flu Trends launched last November, and a lot of people were skeptical about whether Google's data could really be used to track the spread of the flu. According to Google's own research(PDF), which was published in Nature earlier this

year, Flu Trends had a 0.92 correlation with the official flu data. Now, with the help of data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Google was also able to validate its models for flu-related queries in Europe. The official data is usually a week or two behind, but Google's data is created in real time. Google has been very active in the Flu research community. Just a few weeks ago, the company also announced a partnership with the Public Library of Science, which now uses Google Knol to publish data and papers about influenza research. Discuss

Skip the Flash Unless Your Subject is Moving [Cameras] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker) Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:00:00 AM

Just because they put a flash on your camera doesn't mean you should use it. In fact, our cameraobsessed sibling blog Gizmodo suggests that there are very few occasions to bust out the little eye -reddening light source. Giz not only breaks down the reasons for skipping the flash on a consumer-grade camera, which

only travels about 15 feet and rarely results in great, even lighting, but shows the photographic failures. Their big pet peeve, no doubt bolstered by hundreds of ruined gadget photo leaks, is using a flash on a nonmoving gadget with shiny surfaces. This one may be a bit of a tech blogger pet peeve, but please, turn off the flash before taking pictures of your gear, especially if it has a

screen. Even the brightest, matteest screens act as flash mirrors, as

do all manner of plastic and metal finishes. It's nearly impossible to take a good photo of a gadget with your flash on, and there's rarely a reason to: Gadget[s] generally won't move unless you tell them to, so find a way to stabilize your camera and treat your subject to a nice, loooong exposure. Actually, "unless your subject is moving" is a bit of simplification—but only a little.

John Herrman also recommends shooting with a flash when your subject has daylight shadow problems, or when it's completely dark. In some situations, converting to black and white might help a poorly-lit shot, but in general, it's up to the photographer, not a flash, to get a better shot. Giz Explains: When (Not) To Use Your Camera's Flash[Gizmodo]

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Gadget and Gear Deals of the Day [Dealhacker] By Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:00:00 AM

Netbooks, laptops, WiFi printers and HDTVs are but a few of the things you'll find in today's deal roundup. What's that you say? Give you Spinal Tap or give you death? Fair enough, free Spinal Tap MP3s for all. Computer Gear! • 17" HP G70t Laptop with Dual Core Processor for $469.99 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $599 - use coupon code SV2132) • 13.3" Aluminum MacBook (Previous Generation) for $899.99 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $970 - use this form) • 11.6" HP Mini 311 Netbook with Nvidia Ion for $399.99 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $429) • 8.9" Dell Mini 9 Intel Atom N270 Netbook for $199(Regular Price: $239) • Dell Studio Core2Quad Desktop and 18.5" HD Monitor for $699 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $938) • Lenovo IdeaCentre Dual Core Home Theater PC for $379 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $499 use coupon code USPQ151A) • 24" Hanns-G HH-241HPB Widescreen LCD Monitor for $169.99 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $200) • 2TB Cavalry CAXE3702T0 External Hard Drive for $179.99 + Free Shipping(Regular Price: $247) • Canon PIXMA MP560 All-in-

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Mailbox Find Locates the Nearest Mailbox or Delivery Drop-off [Downloads] By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)

fast, quickly locating you and mailboxes near you in its database. That said, a ton of iPhone only: Mailbox Find uses mailboxes have disappeared near your iPhone's GPS location to my place lately, and Mailbox Find quickly find the nearest mailbox still claims that a few of them are or delivery drop-off point for there. To be fair, I tested a few those times you need to mail previously mentioned web-based something pronto but have no mailbox finders, and neither idea where the nearest mailbox is. appeared completely up-to-date. There's really not much more to (The mailbox locator seemed to it. As soon as you launch the app, have the most accurate results, but it locates you and highlights it doesn't have map integration, mailboxes. If you want to look which is kind of a must for a tool somewhere other than your like this.) FedEx and UPS dropcurrent location, just hit the off locations seem to be on the One Printer with Wifi for $89.99 Navigator for $99.99 + Free Search button and enter an money as far as I can tell, but I'm + Free Shipping(Regular Price: Shipping(Regular Price: $168.48) address. You can also swap much less familiar with all of $139) Free Stuff! between map, satellite, and hybrid those locations in my area. Not Computer Gear! • 2 Compact Fluorescent Bulbs view for maps if that helps you Presumably in a city or town • 4 6 " S h a r p A Q U O S for $0(use this form) locate exactly where the drop-off where mailboxes haven't been LC46LE700UN 1080p 120Hz • Cycle World Subscription for is. The app can also locate post vanishing left and right (damn LED HDTV for $1,295 + Free $0(use this form) offices or UPS and FedEx drop- you, Los Angeles!), you'll have Shipping(Regular Price: $1425) • 5 Issues of Skiing Magazine offs in the settings—which also better luck all around. Mailbox • 42" Philips 42PFL3704D/F7 for $0(use this form) allows you to set a search radius Find will set you back $1 in the 1080p LCD HDTV for $649.99 + • M a r i n e S h a r p s h o o t e r and the number of mailboxes you iTunes App Store, iPhone only. Free Shipping(Regular Price: (iPhone/iPod Touch) for $0 want to see. Mailbox Find[iTunes App Store] $728) • I Love the '80s, Vol. 1 ( 18 80s, So how well does it work? It's • 40" Sony BRAVIA KDL- that is) for $0(download here) 40VE5 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV • Spinal Tap - (Listen to the) f o r $ 8 0 9 . 9 9 + F r e e Flower People for $0(download Shipping(Regular Price: $1079) here) • Polk Audio Monitor 50 Thanks Slickdeals, Fatwallet, Speaker for $89.99 + Free TechDealDigger, TechBargains, Shipping(Regular Price: $138 - C h e a p S t i n g y B a r g a i n s , use coupon code EMCMLLT46) C h e a p C o l l e g e G a m e r s , a n d • Magellan Maestro 4210 4.3" G a m e r H o t l i n e ! Widescreen Portable GPS Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:40:00 AM

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Win a Google Wave Invite with Your Best Use Case [Contest] By Gina Trapani (Lifehacker) Submitted at 10/8/2009 10:30:00 AM

Want an invitation to Google Wave? Tell us what you're going to use Google Wave for, and we'll nominate the folks who describe the best use case. Google was kind enough to give us a few dozen extra Wave nominations, and we want to give them to people who will put Wave through its paces in real-world situations. We're not going to ask you to write a haiku, but we are going to ask you to tell us how you'll use your invite. Here's how this will work. To enter the contest, send an email to wave-invite at lifehacker.com, subject line "How I'll use Google Wave." In the email, answer these three questions: 1.) What does your workgroup do or make? 2.) What software tools does your workgroup currently use to collaborate? 3.) Why would Wave make that collaboration easier? The more detailed you can get without getting too lengthy, the better. We'll pick the entries that illuminate original and worldchanging ways to use Wave. If you'll be saving babies with Wave, we'll pick you. If you just want in to brag to your friends you got past the velvet rope, we won't pick you. Developers, if you have coding skills and ambitious and fantabulous ideas for

Redux Creates Playlists of Links or Videos from Your Friends [Links] By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)

popular stuff other Redux users have been sharing, browse "channels" of like-minded links, You'll never have time to check and generally spiral into a lot of extending Wave, include those in we publish. out all the stuff your friends link time-sucking sites. Then again, your response. T h e m o r e c r e a t i v e a n d and rave about on Facebook and Redux might be just what you By sending us the email, you're interesting your submission is, the Twitter, but Redux aims to offer need to quickly look through giving us permission to publish it more likely we are to pick it. Hint: those links up in smarter, playlist- everything your friends are o r p a r t s o f i t s c o n t e n t o n if you make an awesome video or like fashion. We've got 2000 sharing, pick out the one or two Lifehacker and Smarterware, send us annotated screenshots of invites if that sounds entertaining. that look cool, and get on with where we will feature some of the your current workflow, your Sign into Redux and share your whatever you're actually supposed best Wave use cases we receive. submission will be more likely to Twitter and Facebook networks to be doing. Redux also offers its As such, don't mention full names stand out. with it, and it goes to work own recommendation ("Props") or other private information you We'll take submissions today quickly compiling thumbnails and and in-network sharing tools, wouldn't be comfortable splashing through Tuesday and start sending a wider-screen description of the though they feel a tad extraneous all over the internet. You do need out nominations next week. Keep page links your friends drop into and unnecessary. to enter the contest via email so in mind that nominations take their streams and status updates. Wanna jump into the linkthat we have your email address. some time to turn into invitations, Hit the "TV" link up top, and sorting, video-watching stream? We won't use your address for and Google is currently working you'll get all the video links and Redux's in closed beta at the a n y o t h e r p u r p o s e t h a n t o through a backlog. embeds from your friends framed moment, but we've been given nominate you for a Wave invite. Good luck! Most importantly, into a streaming player, where 2000 invites to dish out at this We will not publish your email get creative and have fun telling you can flip to the next clip with a sign-up link. Didn't make the cutaddress, and we'll only use first us how you'll do great things with single click. off? You can still ask for an names when quoting the use cases Wave! You can limit your "Stream" invite. Redux and "TV" views to just Twitter or Facebook, check out the most Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:30:00 AM

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Hackintoshed: Life With My “MacBook Nano” By Clayton Lai (TheAppleBlog)

purchase. Currently, the netbooks most compatible for running OS X — when every component, After four months of lugging a from Wi-Fi to built-in audio, will Bluetooth keyboard and mouse be recognized by an OS X along with the MacBook Pro — installation — are the following which, at 5.5lb, isn’t exactly light four: to begin with — I decided enough • Dell Mini 9 (everything works) was enough. Since I’ve been • Vostro A90 (the OEM version wanting to ease some load off of of the Dell Mini 9) my shoulder, and I couldn’t quite • HP Mini 1000 (everything bring myself to buy the new 13- works) inch MacBook Pro, the time was • ASUS EeePC 1000H right for me to consider a smaller ( e v e r y t h i n g w o r k s ) and lighter alternative. Close behind those four are the To be more specific, it was time following models, of which OS X to consider a “MacBook Nano.” does not have the necessary kext Opening Pandora’s Box for one particular component in F o u r y e a r s a g o , A p p l e each model. However, each of announced a transition from them can still be considered a powering its Macs with PowerPC suitable candidate for running OS processors to Intel processors X, depending on what you instead. The biggest ramification consider to be non-critical: of such an architecture change • ASUS EeePC 901 (everything was an obvious one: Mac OS X, except sleep) previously written for the • MSI Wind U100 (everything PowerPC platform, could then except audio input, though there’s theoretically run on any Intel x86- been recent development in this based computer. area which may have solved this) In the years after, enthusiasts • Lenovo IdeaPad S10 have made much effort in making (everything except Ethernet) OS X run on generic PCs by You may have noticed that these hacking the various drivers — are all older models. That’s the kernel extension, or kext files — bad news. These models have so that the operating system can already been superseded by newer recognize hardware components m o d e l s , a n d a r e t h e r e f o r e beyond those used in Apple’s increasingly harder to find. But Macs. This has been achieved to the good news is that most varying degrees of success; due to retailers are likely to have slashed the extremely wide range of prices in their bid to clear out configurations PCs ship in, some existing stock precisely because brands and models sporting they are older models. certain hardware components run Picking the Candidate OS X better than others. Do Your Last week, I marched into a Homework First local computer mall and found To ensure you get the smoothest both a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 and a ‘Hackintosh’ experience possible, HP Mini 1000 sitting side-by-side you have to first know which in one store, going for $385 and netbooks are the best ‘hackable’ $415, respectively. Talk about candidates before you make a luck! Design-wise, I had eyes Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:00:21 AM

from an optical drive, I popped the OS X 10.5.4 Install DVD in, booted the S10 up and off went the installation. Upon first boot, I had to replace a kext file for the Wi-Fi in the IdeaPad S10 to work. Once that was up and running, all that was left to do was to replace a couple more kext files for functions such as system sleep, two-finger scrolling, internal audio input, ExpressCard, and display hot keys to work. Once I was sure I had all the components working, I did a only for the IdeaPad S10 and the certainly do the same for the 13- Software Update to 10.5.8. Doing Mini 1000. and 15-inch MacBook Pros. Just so killed the Wi-Fi, keyboard and Its lower price aside, I picked admit already you simply don’t trackpad, but a repeat of replacing the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 in the want to.) kext files restored them to a end, even though I knew the I should note that the one very working state. Ethernet port would not work (I good thing going for the HP Mini Overall Impressions don’t recall having used an 1000 is that it has a 92 percent How does it fare? The Ethernet port in the past year). keyboard (versus the 85 percent ‘Hackintosh’ is more than capable Not only was it cheaper, the keyboard of the IdeaPad S10), an of handling basic functionality IdeaPad S10 was better-spec’ed impressive feat of engineering well on a daily basis. Overall than the Mini 1000 in almost considering the fact that the Mini speed and performance of OS X every aspect: 1000 is of about the same width on the IdeaPad S10, which is • Memory: 2GB versus 1GB as the Lenovo IdeaPad S10. powered by the Intel Atom N270 • Storage: 160GB versus 60GB Installation is an Outpatient Day 1.66Ghz processor, is akin to that • Battery: 6-cell (5.5 hours, 56 Op of an iBook PowerPC G4. There watt-hour) versus 3-cell (3 hours, Installation is a breeze. Enough is Always a “But” 24.4 watt-hour) effort by enthusiasts have been The one glaring caveat to • Memory card reader: 4-in-1 made that installing OS X on a PC running OS X on a netbook is the ( M M C / S D / M e m o r y is a quick weekend exercise. lack of screen real estate. Most Stick/Memory Stick PRO) versus While I will not detail how to netbooks are equipped with either SD only ‘Hackintosh’ a netbook, there are a 9- or 10-inch screen typically The clincher, for me, is that the essentially two ways to do so: by running a resolution of 1024 by I d e a P a d S 1 0 h a s a n obtaining an installation disk 600. But the overall UI design of ExpressCard/34 slot, with which I image already hacked with the OS X is seemingly based on a can use my 3G ExpressCard appropriate drivers (the easiest minimum screen resolution of modem, and also a trackpad of way to go), or by installing from 1280 by 800, which is what the which its buttons are positioned the retail DVD and subsequently lowest-spec’ed Macs run at. This beneath it rather than to the left hacking the drivers (messier and poses some usability issues when and right as it is on that of the not for the novice). it comes to the window size of Mini 1000. Since most netbooks do not certain applications. (Note to Apple: If Lenovo can have optical drives, I had to use System Preferences, for squeeze a 4-in-1 memory card an external DVD drive. After example, opens a window longer reader and an ExpressCard/34 slot making sure the BIOS of the into a tiny sub-notebook, you can netbook has been set to boot first HACKINTOSHED: page 34

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The Never-ending Dilemma: Upgrade Your Old Mac or Get a New System? By Charles Moore (TheAppleBlog)

three year system upgrade intervals, but this Pismo is well outside that envelope, and still my Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:00:47 AM second-most-used computer. MacNewsWorld’s Chris Maxcer Despite being more than a bit addresses the abiding conundrum power challenged, and limited to of whether to upgrade one’s OS X 10.4 Tiger, it’s such a existing system or buy a new likable tool that I’m unmotivated Mac, noting that when you’ve had to move on to using, say, my 17 your Mac long enough, it’s only PowerBook G4 as my number natural to start thinking about two laptop. more speed and more memory. I am somewhat puzzled by So the operative question is Maxcer’s suggestion that, while whether to dig deep and go with a the new MacBook Pro models are full hardware upgrade, or spend fantastic, they don’t seem quite much less to upgrade a few select worth the cost just yet. My parts that will help bring your contention would be the diametric aging ‘Book back closer to contrary — the current low end 13 c o n t e m p o r a r y s t a n d a r d s o f and 15 unibody MacBook Pros performance — is it worth are the most rip-roaring value-forupgrading an existing Apple the-money bargains Apple has notebook with more RAM and a ever produced. new hard drive — or more However, Maxcer says he still sensible to simply buy a new one? likes his black 2.4GHz MacBook, I would say it depends on the notwithstanding its poky Intel individual machine. I’m typing GMA X3100 integrated graphic this post on a nine-year-old Pismo chipset that pales by comparison P o w e r B o o k t h a t ’ s b e e n with the powerful Nvidia 9400M considerably breathed-on, with integrated graphics chipsets in the processor, hard drive, optical new MacBook Pros, but is finding d r i v e , R A M , a n d w i r e l e s s the 250 GB hard drive way to upgrades, and I even have a cramped for his needs, and 2GB FireWire 400 PC Card adapter for of RAM isn’t quite enough either. it. But on the other hand, I have a Good on Chris. I’m all for s i x m o n t h o l d u n i b o d y squeezing every bit of useful PowerBook, with an up-front service life out of a Mac before upgrade to 4GB of RAM, and it’s upgrading to a new system, so many magnitudes superior to the l o n g a s o n e i s n ’ t t e r r i b l y Pismo in objective terms. compromised by performance Maxer says he tends to buy a limitations for things one wants to new PowerBook, iBook, or do. So if I were in Chris’s shoes MacBook every two years or so, with a nice black MacBook that I usually around the 16-month was fond of, I’d buy a bigger hard point. I provisionally shoot for drive and double the RAM —

both easy and relatively inexpensive upgrades for that machine — and hang on to it for a while. The only semi-specialized tool you’ll need for these upgrades is a Torx T8 screwdriver, which can be hard to track down on short notice (I have a nice one I got from Wegener Media) and some very small Philips screwdrivers. I’d love to have a new 13 MacBook Pro with FireWire and a SD Card slot, but my plan is to still go to early 2012 with my current MacBook, although a new inexpensive polycarbonate MacBook, provided it has those features, could test my holdout resolve. Chris decided to proceed with a mid-life upgrade for the old MacBook, going with a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7,200RPM drive, with 16MB of cache, and bumping the RAM spec. with a $54 Kingston 4GB kit, which was considerably cheaper than I paid for a 4GB upgrade kit from Other World Computing (currently $87.99) for my MacBook last spring. The BlackBook would need DDR2 RAM, while my unibody machine uses DDR3, but a 4GB DDR2 kit at OWC is still $78.97. With the great deal he got on the Kingston RAM, Chris’s memory and storage upgrade of the BlackBook came to a pretty digestible $130, which seems like good value to me, although Chris

says performance gains realized are not as dramatic as he’d anticipated, and he thinks if he was doing it over, he’d opt for a 500GB 5,400RPM drive instead, noting that the 7,200RPM Scorpio’s speed causes a minor but annoying vibration. He also says that upgrading the OS to Snow Leopard provided a more substantial performance boost than the new hardware bits did. I also expect he may notice more subtle and welcome improvements down the road. With its stock 2GB of RAM, my MacBook was a decent performer, but it’s even better with 4GB, and while pre-upgrade I had to restart the laptop every two weeks or so to freshen the memory heap, with 4GB I can go for a month or more between restarts. Frankly, with new (or even better, refurbished late model) Mac laptop prices plumbing historical lows, and the extreme desirability of the unibody notebooks in particular, it’s harder to make a compelling argument for upgrading an older Mac rather than applying the cost of that to a new purchase, especially if you can sell your present machine for a respectable price. What do you think? Better to hang on to a spruced-up known quantity, or go new/refurb with a fresh warranty and the latest feature set? It's 3D Week at GigaOM Pro! Read our latest report, " 3DTV Market is Ready for Takeoff."

The Next Iron Chef is sizzling By Allison Waldman (TV Squad) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:26:00 AM

Even though I watch a lot of programming on the Food Network, I have to admit I missed almost all of the The Next Iron Chef in season one. Last Sunday, the second season of The Next Iron Chef blasted off with the best ratings for a series opener in Food Network history. Over two million viewers, a 1.1 rating among adults 25-54. Why the big jump? Well, I think a lot of other people are like me. On Sunday, before I switched over to watch pro football, I clicked on Food Network where they were showing a marathon rerun of the first season of The Next Iron Chef. It only took half an episode for me to kick myself for not having watched the whole first season when it aired. It was terrific. Continue reading The Next Iron Chef is sizzling Filed under: Other Reality Shows, Food/Home/DIY, OpEd, Ratings Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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App Developer Diary Part 6: The 48 Hour App By Olly Farshi (TheAppleBlog)

playable prototype of the game concept using Flash. Focusing on look and feel, they tested a variety Taking you behind-the-scenes of of different visual designs a real iPhone app’s development, alongside taking a closer look at in this installment I attempt to the controls too. make my own iPhone app in one With the prototype working as weekend and learn from Ustwo expected and with the sketches for about how to take an idea to the reference, the app was hastily App Store in just 48 hours. coded up. After a quick round of It’s been a few weeks since my QA — searching for bugs, design last entry in the App Developer and gameplay issues — the team Diary. Markus, the coder based submitted the app for App Store here in Helsinki, has been busy. approval. For Ustwo, the 48 hour This week he unveiled a playable app concept worked. It made prototype of our app, allowing me development fun, it reduced costs to test and refine the main game and it challenged the coders and mechanic. designers to think quickly and In the meantime, Matias coded creatively. up a cute little mini-game over the It’s possible that we’ll be seeing course of one weekend. While he more studios take on the 48 hour worked on the programming, I app challenge. Adobe recently created the sound, music and announced that the forthcoming artwork (above). In one weekend update of Flash, version CS5, will we created a really great little render files in the iTunes App game, almost ready to be released Store format. This is a serious in the App Store. few concepts before coding up Stepping up to the challenge, smaller dots. The gameplay boon for Flash-based artists and We’re not the only developers their app. the Ustwo team produced three mechanic is revealed in the third designers everywhere, putting the who have been working on these Ustwo founder Mills sat down simple sketches. Their hastily sketch. Your dot is shrinking, he tools for app development into the quick-fire app concepts. Mobile with his iPhone development team drawn plan outlined the game’s needs to eat dots to stay alive, hands of even more creatives. In development studio Ustwo also and threw together a development control system, look and feel, and triangles will kill him. the case of Ustwo, they even took an idea from hasty scribble plan. Their app would be cool, gameplay mechanic. In just three images we’ve got a created a fully-functional web to the App Store in just 48 hours. simple and addictive. Most The sketches only cover the clear idea of how a typical game version of .™, using Flash. It’s encouraging to see that their importantly though, it would stake essentials, but that’s really all that will play out. You’ll be tilting and Our own 48 hour app still needs first 48 hour app, simply titled.™, a c l a i m i n t h e A p p S t o r e , the team needed to get coding. twisting the iPhone, sliding a a few final tweaks before being is now selling as a 99 cent showcasing their ability to think The first image covers the game’s shrinking dot around the screen submitted to the App Store. download. f a s t a n d b e c r e a t i v e u n d e r accelerometer-based control and trying to collect other dots Ustwo’s successful 48 hour Have You Seen the Dot? pressure. method, and main character — a while avoiding an onslaught of development, .™, is currently We didn’t do much planning for Mills laid down a fundamental dot — alongside succinctly stating death-dealing triangles. From available from the App Store for our own 48 hour app. Matias ground rule too: the scope of the that the app will have a, “minimal Paper To Flash 99 cents. came up with an idea — a button- project would go no further than aesthetic.” It is 3D Week at GigaOM Pro! After sketching out the game tapping game with a bizarre two days. The app would be Read our latest reports on the The second sketch contains an concept, the team took the musical twist — and built it. submitted to Apple on hour 48 of ultra-refined executive summary concept to the computers. Their f u t u r e o f 3 D T V , m o b i l e , Ustwo, being a little more development. Just the Basics of the game: control dot to select first step was to flesh out a quick c o m p u t i n g a n d m o v i e s . strategic, managed to sketch out a Submitted at 10/7/2009 11:00:21 AM

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e-Textbooks: How Apple Can Dominate the Education Market With the iTablet

ET to Stream As Jon Gosselin Arrives Home

By Alfredo Padilla (TheAppleBlog)

(ETonline - Breaking News)

Submitted at 10/7/2009 1:14:35 PM

Apple tablet rumors are swirling once again, and it looks like we might be able to put our hands on the mythical iTablet sometime early next year. The question that everyone is asking is where the device’s niche will be. Tablets have been around for years, but none of them have been what you would call a “success.” One area of strong speculation is that Apple will position the tablet for the ebook market, which has received a major boost since the release of Amazon’s Kindle device last year. I agree with this analysis, but I think the target market should not just be e-books, but more specifically e- text books. The Kindle is a great device for consuming books, even for those who aren’t tech savvy…just ask my Mom. The Kindle, however, is a very passive device by design. Jeff Bezos himself said he wanted the Kindle to dissapear while you were reading. This works great for a novel, but as Amazon has found with its attempt at e-textbooks, it’s much less effective when you need to interact with the text. Despite introducing the larger Kindle DX to target this market,

early results from pilot programs at universities like Princeton are less than favorable. In particular, students and professors note the difficulty of adding notes, highlighting text and finding content quickly. One student called the Kindle DX “…a poor excuse of an academic tool.” Professors are finding that they have to change their style of teaching because off the difficulties that students are having marking up texts. The absence of real page numbers is also cited as a problem. This should signal a huge opportunity for Apple to enter the e-textbook market with its tablet device. The problem with the Kindle DX is that interacting with the text requires the use of a small joystick and clunky QWERTY keyboard. A touch enabled tablet device, however, offers a much more natural method for interaction. To add a note just tap on a place in the page. To highlight text just drag your finger across it. What’s more, a tablet device from Apple will have the benefit of being a multi-use computing platform. With the Kindle DX you create your annotations and then have to export them to your computer or the web to make use of them elsewhere. By contrast,

textbooks at a significant discount from real textbooks so that students see the value in paying the $700-800 that the iTablet could cost. Finally, Apple will need to create an interactive distribution platform for e-textbooks. Something that is not only a place to purchase and download the books, but also a place to share notes, get homework assignments from professors and communicate about classes. This may be an extension of iTunes U, or a whole with something like the iTablet new platform. None of this is a given, as I’m you could just tap on the screen and automatically have all of your sure that textbook publishers will n o t e s e x p o r t e d t o a n o t h e r approach Apple warily. If Apple program, or have all of your can convince publishers to work highlighted text exported as with them, however, it will citations. The device could instantly have a multi-billion smartly conver the locations of dollar market for its new iTablet. the text to real page numbers. If A recent story indicated that you want to share a piece of text Apple has been working on a with a fellow student or professor tablet for a long time, but Steve you could easily send it via email, Jobs continously asked what it was good for besides reading the instant message or Twitter. The opportnity for Apple is Internet on the toilet. If I were at there, but in order to make it a Apple, the above would have been reality it will need to work closely my answer. I’ll be interested to with textbook manufacturers to see if it’s the answer Apple came create a new format for e- up with as well. It is 3D Week at GigaOM Pro! textbooks that offer these kind of advanced features. It will also Read our latest reports on the need to convince textbook future of 3D TV, mobile, publishers to offer these e- c o m p u t i n g a n d m o v i e s .

Gun-Toting Soccer Mom Shot Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide By Michael David Smith (FanHouse) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:30:00 PM

by Michael David Smith Filed under: Youth Sports

Melanie Hain, a self-professed pistol-packing soccer mom who was praised by gun-rights activists for bringing a gun with her to her children's games, was found dead of a gunshot wound, along with

her husband, in what police say was a murder-suicide. Gun-Toting Soccer Mom Shot Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide originally appeared on Fanhouse Backporch on Thu, 08 Oct 2009

12:30:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:25:00 AM

ET has the latest... Estranged reality couple Jon and Kate Gosselin are set to come face -to-face as they celebrate their twins Cara and Mady's ninth birthday today in Pennsylvania -and ET will be streaming every moment as Jon arrives at their shared home. Will there be fallout from Kate's new custody demands, where she asked for Jon to only be at the house for two hours? "It could be WWIII when I get home," Jon told ET on Wednesday as he went shopping for their birthday presents. "She's trying to change custody but I won't allow that. She's basically saying itt would be too stressful to the kids to have both of us here, like we originally planned."

HACKINTOSHED: continued from page 31 than the screen resolution of the IdeaPad S10 can display. As you can see in the screenshot above, anything beyond the first row of Preference Panes in the ‘Others’ section are obscured. The workaround to this is to click on any Preference Pane, and then click the ‘Reveal All’ buttons to go back. Doing that invokes a scroll bar within System Preferences, which you can then drag to reach the previouslyobscured Panes. The other two issues I have with the IdeaPad S10 are the rightHACKINTOSHED: page 36

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iTunes Alternative DoubleTwist Offers Amazon.com MP3 Store By Darrell Etherington (TheAppleBlog) Submitted at 10/8/2009 9:00:49 AM

We’ve covered doubleTwist in the past, and for a time I even used it as my primary media management solution on my Mac, until iTunes 9 drew my wondering eye back to familiar territory. Now there’s even reason to go back to the iTunes competitor, as doubleTwist has just introduced Amazon MP3 store compatibility. doubleTwist already offers the ability to sync with pretty much any device, instead of just your standard Apple i-devices. And with Amazon support, there’s little reason for many to venture back to iTunes, especially since Amazon’s prices are often better than those found in Apple’s own online store. It wasn’t too long ago that doubleTwist’s “DVD” Jon Johansen was taking flack from BART for buying legit advertising space at a very conspicuous location, and then using it to promote the iTunes competitor. With the introduction of the

Amazon store, we should see that competition heat up even further. The new Music Store looks like a very stripped-down iTunes store, and though it isn’t as fancy as Apple’s, it is clean and functional, and it doesn’t cause the program to occasionally fail, as iTunes has been known to do. It pales in comparison to the iTunes store in terms of navigation options, though, with a search bar and two small Top

Albums and Top Songs lists providing your only means of browsing the Amazon catalog. The main advantage, of course, comes for people who don’t own an iPod or iPhone (some really do exist, honest). Plug in your BlackBerry, PSP, Android phone, and any number of other supported devices, and you can immediately copy over your purchased media. You miss out on Genius playlists and other iTunes

niceties, but if you don’t have an iPod, that probably isn’t an issue anyway. It may be a small step towards making doubleTwist a fullfledged competitor to iTunes, but having a major player like Amazon onboard is nothing to sneeze at. Ideally, the next step for DVD Jon and his open alternative for the i-device deficient would be to form a partnership with major video

media distributors, especially given that doubleTwist automatically converts video when it syncs to most major devices, including the PSP and the Palm Pre. In fact, Palm could do far worse than doubleTwist in an official partnership to provide its users a dedicated software solution for syncing media instead of continuing to play leapfrog with Apple over iTunes. I’m sure something could be arranged, so long as Palm agreed to keep the software open to other devices as well. For now, the Amazon store is only available for the OS X version of doubleTwist, but a Windows version is coming soon. You must have an Amazon.com account with a registered payment method in order to use the service. It is 3D Week at GigaOM Pro! Read our latest reports on the future of 3D TV, mobile, computing and movies.

Alton Brown calls Top Chef a "sous chef kind of show"... then takes it back By Joel Keller (TV Squad) Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:02:00 PM

Given the popularity of the second-season opener of The Next Iron Chef, I figured it was a good time to pull out this interview I did with the show's host, Alton

Brown, at the network's TCA party in July. It was definitely the tastiest party of the tour, as each Iron Chef contestant plied the critics with delectable morsels of their creativity at various stations. In a bit of a surprise, one of the contestants, Amanda Freitag, was being assisted by her friend

Ariane Duarte, one of the more popular contestants from rival program Top Chef's New York season (I was so flabbergasted by the turn of events, I snapped a pic of the two with my cell phone). When I pointed this tidbit out to Brown, his response was very

interesting... Continue reading Alton Brown calls Top Chef a "sous chef kind of show"... then takes it back Filed under: Interviews, TCA Press Tour, Top Chef Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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HACKINTOSHED: continued from page 34 handside Shift key and the tiny trackpad. But these are all small annoyances, really, not showstoppers. While a 1024 by 600 screen resolution means I’d mostly be running one application fullscreen at a time, once I think of this limitation as a way to force me to focus on one task at a time, it’s not so bad. Plus, there’s always Megazoomer; fullscreen is just a Command+Enter keystroke away. And LazyMouse helps mitigate the problem of the tiny trackpad. The Mac Netbook as the Middle Ground I had, from the get-go, meant to use this ‘MacBook Nano’ of mine for only web browsing, email, simple image manipulation and writing. Prior to getting the IdeaPad S10, there were days when I’d go out with only my iPhone 3G, knowing I can do all of the above with it. But there are times when I need to download, review, annotate and

then resend certain types of documents neither iPhone OS nor a third-party iPhone app recognizes. Without a notebook with which to do that, I am pretty much stuck. So, until Apple reinvents the sub-notebook with its fabled tablet, this ‘Hackintosh’ fills the gap between the times when I don’t need to lug around a workhorse like my MacBook Pro and when I need to do more than what my iPhone 3G lets me do.“Mac or No Mac, There is No Try” I’m sure I speak for many diehard Mac users by saying that, being someone who cannot fathom using anything other than Mac OS X, and faced with a pressing need to have a lightweight portable, I’d rather use OS X on a netbook with all of the compromises it entails than to have to use Windows on the same netbook. To me, the Mac experience has always been more about software than hardware.

Small, Light, and It Runs OS X. What’s Not To Like? Having used the S10 every day for a week now, taking it instead of my 15-inch MacBook Pro everywhere, I can say with certainly that my MacBook Pro will be relegated to my desk on most days, and that my preferred portable computer from hereon will be this ‘MacBook Nano’ of mine. I can fish it out in places where opening a 15-inch notebook would be a clumsy thing to do; my tired shoulder has never felt better; I have desktop-class computing power everywhere I go, and can do far more than what I can with the iPhone. It is inexpensive, small, light, and it runs OS X. What’s not to like, really? It is 3D Week at GigaOM Pro! Read our latest reports on the future of 3D TV, mobile, computing and movies.

UFL Optimistic on Verge of Kickoff By Anthony Olivieri (FanHouse) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:31:00 AM

by Anthony Olivieri The UFL, despite the location of its season opener, is trying to get the word out. Its success at doing so has yet to be determined. The inaugural season of the four -team professional football league will kick off Thursday in Las Vegas, where what happens stays -- to paraphrase a famous slogan. The hometown Locomotives and visiting California Redwoods certainly hope the opposite is true, as players, coaches and the fledgling league will be showcased. UFL Kickoff: Fassel Says UFL Has Staying Power| Green the Ultimate

Salesman Mueller Wearing Many Hats This Season UFL Optimistic on Verge of Kickoff originally appeared on Fanhouse Main on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:31:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Pro Tip: Cure iPhone Earbud Entanglement By Olly Farshi (TheAppleBlog) Submitted at 10/8/2009 6:00:16 AM

If you listen to music on the go, chances are you suffer from tangled and knotted wires on your buds. I’ve discovered an effortless solution for keeping my 3GS buds untangled. If you want to learn my secret, watch the video below. A few months back, I purchased a pair of Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket earphones. Unfortunately, they’ve stopped working and, what’s worse, the folks at Skullcandy still haven’t replied to any of my emails. Rather than dwell on the

disappointment of my bad Skullcandy buds, I decided to dig out the free headphones I received from Apple with my iPhone 3GS. My bright white 3GS buds work wonderfully, plus they even feature in-line volume controls and a good quality mic. However the cables, being awkwardly spindly, tend to tangle up at any opportunity. All the usual anti-tangling techniques involve rolling your wire up tightly — less movement means less potential for tangling. A tight roll can also damage the actual wire in your headphones, though.

I’ve happened upon a three-step technique that solves my tangling issues. There’s nothing to learn, there are no special knots, and there’s absolutely no wrapping, rolling or tying of any sort. It’s the perfect technique for lazy listeners. It’s worth noting that you could probably use this method with any headphones, but I’ve only tried it using Apple’s iPhone 3GS buds. It’s made possible because of the little clip that’s attached to one of the wires on the 3GS headphones. Note that I’ve found that one of

the buds can get a little tangled occasionally, though most of the time, this trick works almost perfectly and I rarely encounter knots or tangles. After testing this at home, I searched high and low and haven’t managed to find anyone else sharing this tip online. Please let me know in the comments if it works for you, too. It's 3D Week at GigaOM Pro! Read our latest report, " 3DTV Market is Ready for Takeoff."

What's On Tonight: Survivor, Bones, The Office, Supernatural By Bob Sassone (TV Squad) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:17:00 PM

• At 8, ABC has a new FlashForward, followed by new episodes of Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice. • CBS has a new Survivor at 8, then new episodes of CSI and The Mentalist. WHAT'S page 37

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WHAT'S continued from page 36 • NBC has new episodes of Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and The Jay Leno Show. • FOX has a new Bones at 8, followed by a new Fringe. • There's a new Vampire Diaries on The CW at 8, then a new Supernatural. • Discovery has a new Destroyed in Seconds at 8. • At 9, BBC America has the season finale of Skins. • ESPN has College Football, Nebraska vs. Missouri, at 10. • Travel Channel has a new Extreme Cuisine with Jeff Corwin at 9. • Spike has a new TNA Wrestling at 9. • MTV has a new Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory at 9, followed by new episodes of Bully Beatdown, Nitro Circus, and Pranked. • At 9:45, Disney has a new

Phineas & Ferb. • At 10, Lifetime has a new Project Runway. • FX has a new It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia at 10. • Comedy Central has a new Tosh.0 at 10. • Food Network has a new Ace of Cakes at 10. • Also at 10: Bravo has a new Real Housewives of Atlanta. Check your local TV listings for more. After the jump, the late night talk shows. Continue reading What's On Tonight: Survivor, Bones, The Office, Supernatural Filed under: Late Night, Programming, Celebrities, Talk Show, Reality-Free Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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The Count: How Much Value Does Braylon Edwards Bring to Jets? (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

And so far this year, Edwards’s DVOA stood at -6.6%, 47th in the NFL. After the Jets traded for receiver The Jets already have a better Braylon Edwards, Jets general receiver: Jerricho Cotchery. He manager Mike Tannenbaum said ranked higher than Edwards in at a news conference, “I’m not each of the last three seasons, and into numbers of receptions or this year is having a career touchdowns. I’m into winning season, ranking 12th in the NFL football.” Getty Images Braylon them for touchdowns, for the in DVOA. Edwards’s recent stats with the Cleveland Browns in 2007. In the Football is a team game, and it’s Browns don’t bode well for his 20 games since then, he’s caught possible that switching to a new Jets career. team with different quarterbacks 65 passes for just three TDs. Indeed, Edwards’s basic The advanced stats on Football and offensive linemen will boost numbers like touchdowns and Outsiders, though, say Edwards Edwards’s value. However, receptions dont suggest he is an wasn’t particularly valuable even Cotchery’s recent career shows elite player. in 2007. His Defense-adjusted that wide receivers do have some Nor do more advanced ones that Value Over Average was just control over their fate. While take into account passes thrown to 3.3%, good for 40th in the NFL. playing with four different him but not caught, the situation That can be explained partly by s t a r t i n g q u a r t e r b a c k s , h e ’ s when he caught the passes and his his paltry catch rate of 52%. Last managed to maintain a catch rate overall value compared to an year, his value dropped along with of between 64% and 66% every average receiver. his basic numbers — to -16.8%, year since 2006. First, the basic numbers. which ranked 73rd in the league. Edwards caught 80 passes, 16 of Submitted at 10/7/2009 1:59:43 PM

From Tiger to Barkley, Hank Haney Has Coached Them All By Shane Bacon (FanHouse) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:49:00 PM

by Shane Bacon Filed under: FanHouse Exclusive, Golf Odds and Ends People these days know Hank Haney as the instructor of Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, but Haney is more than that. He's been instructing golfers for 32 years, teaching over 200 touring pros in that span. Haney now owns and operates four

teaching facilities in Dallas, Texas, and is the star of The Golf Channel's The Haney Project, which puts Hank with celebrities that want to improve their game. Along with that, Haney has signed a deal with Charles Schwab that includes a program they've called " Talk to a Pro," which allows Haney to give special tips about the golf world. O'Meara, Tiger Woods and what FanHouse caught up with Hank he would do to evaluate someone right before the Presidents Cup, in a first lesson. Read the and talked to him about Mark

exclusive FanHouse interview below. From Tiger to Barkley, Hank Haney Has Coached Them All originally appeared on Fanhouse Golf Blog on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:49:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

MLB Playoff Diary: Phillies 5, Rockies 1 (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix) Submitted at 10/7/2009 10:00:37 AM

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MLB continued from page 37 The Journal provides minute-byminute analysis of today’s Game 1 of the National League Division Series as the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Colorado Rockies 5-1 at Citizens Bank Park. Guest blogger Nando Di Fino offers commentary on the game and the TBS telecast. Getty Images Trade -deadline acquisition Cliff Lee pitched a complete-game sixhitter in the first postseason appearance of his career. The story surrounding Game 1 of the NLDS may end up being about two guys with Toronto Blue Jays ties who are sitting at home right now: J.P. Ricciardi and Roy Halladay. Not too many of us are privy to these trade negotiations, so its unfair to say the recently fired Ricciardi even did anything wrong (as many would blindly suggest), but if the Phillies had made the trade-deadline deal for Halladay instead of Cliff Lee, things may have gone differently today. Instead, the reigning World Series champions rode Lee to a 51 victory in the first game of the 2009 playoffs, in spite of the fact that many in the Philadelphia media had been calling for Cole Hamels to start this game instead of Lee. The Phillies look to be in championship form, with timely hitting (two possible homers were knocked down by the wind), stellar pitching (the Brad Lidge conundrum will be addressed another day), and baserunning (even the pitcher got a steal). The Rockies, on the other hand, just couldnt seem to find a rhythm after Ubaldo Jimenez started to lose control of his fastball in the fifth inning. Its not like they were lifeless; they just didnt seem to put things together at the right

time. Game 2 will pit Hamels against Aaron Cook on Thursday afternoon at the same bat time and the same bat channel. If the Rockies hope to turn things around, theyll have to find a way to get into a groove and to stop the Phillies pitcher both on the mound and on the basepaths. 5:26: Garrett Atkins is now at 02 with Tulowitzki on second base. Lee throws a ball, then gets Atkins to swing for strike three. Phillies win, 5-1! Revenge is slowly being exacted on the Rockies for their 2007 sweep of the Phils. 5:24: The stadium is up in unison, cheering and waving the white towels as Lee works Tulowitzki to a 0-2 count. Tulowitzki almost goes on a check swing, but the ump gives the didnt swing signal. Lee then throws a wild pitch, which Ruiz blocks, but he has to run towards the mound for the ball. Carlos Gonzalez goes to second ahead of Ruizs throw. Lee throws another ball to bring it to 3-2 before Tulowitzki singles to right center. Gonzalez scores, its 5-1, Phillies. 5:19: Carlos Gonzalez hits what the booth calls a flare over Jimmy Rollins head for a single. It was really more of a bloop-y, soft line drive.Todd Helton hits a fly ball to left that is caught by Ibanez, bringing us to the Rockies final out. 5:17: Dexter Fowler takes Lees first pitch to right field for a fly out. The Rockies have two outs to go here in Game 1. 5:12: Jayson Werth grounds out to Marquis to start the inning, followed by an Ibanez groundout to second. Cool little bit of trivia: Ibanez is from Manhattan, Marquis from Staten Island. Pedro

Feliz follows up this Battle of the Boroughs with a single to shallow left, and Carlos Ruiz ends the inning with a fielder’s choice. Cliff Lee is coming back in to finish this game off, with his Phillies leading, 5-0. 5:10: Fifteen-game winner Jason Marquis, who was an AllStar this year, is in to pitch for the Rockies. Because of a late-season slump, Marquis was bumped from the rotation and relegated to bullpen duty. But heres a cool stat: in his nine seasons, every team Marquis has pitched for has made the playoffs. 5:06: Hawpe groundout, Barmes groundout, Ryan Spilborghs groundout (batting for the pitcher Morales, who grounded out in the showers as a show of solidarity). That is a 1-2-3 inning. We go to the bottom of the 8th with the Phillies up, 5-0. 5:00: TBS is having problems with the broadcast in several parts of the country due to solar activity. So if your TV is fluttering in and out at random points, this is the reason why. Its not the most assuring or explanatory, but thats all we have to go on right now. 4:58: Ryan Howard lines one to first. Helton snags it for the out, then fires across the diamond to Atkins, where Victorino is doubled off third. The seventh inning is over, and the Phillies lead, 5-0. 4:55: Morales checks Victorino a few times at second base and the crowds boos get a little louder every time. Utley finally pops one up to just around the dugout on the third-base side, where Garrett Atkins makes a nice catch, then bumps the railing with his hip, probably just so he could tell people he ran into the rail.

Victorino then steals third, Philadelphias third swipe of the game. Jason Marquis is warming up in the bullpen for Colorado. 4:53: Lefty Franklin Morales is in to pitch for the Rockies. He has slowed the pace of this game noticeably. And thats just through his first three pitches. I hate to say it, but a mini-George Lopez doing backflips across the screen as a promo for his show would actually liven up the game a little bit right now. 4:48: Matt Daley is still pitching for the Rockies. Victorino leads off the inning with a double down the third-base line. Aaaaand Matt Daley is no longer pitching for the Rockies. 4:44: Yorvit Torrealba breaks his bat on a groundout, and its time for the seventh-inning stretch. The Phillies lead, 5-0. 4:40: Another pop-up off the bat of Tulowitzki is caught in foul territory — without much incident — by Ryan Howard. Ruiz is back to the one straight leg crouch behind the plate as Garrett Atkins drives a ball to right field for a double. That hit is the first since the second inning for the Rockies. 4:37: Rollins was probably safe on that play to end the sixth, according to the replay. I think this evens out the questionable calls at two for each team now. Cliff Lee, meanwhile, may have spent more time at the plate than on the mound so far in this game. Todd Helton pops one up to right around third base. Watching Feliz and Rollins dance under the ball was like telling two little kids to just run around like youre crazy. Rollins broke for left, came back to third, and eventually made the basket catch right around the bag. 4:32: Daley walks Carlos Ruiz, bringing up Cliff Lee, who lays

down a nice sacrifice bunt for the second out while advancing the runners to second and third. Daley hasnt shown a ton of control just yet, but he gets Rollins to ground out to secondwhere Barmes fumbles the ball. He recovers, flips to first, and Rollins is out by a hair. 5-0, Phillies, through six innings. 4:27: Matt Daley is in to pitch for the Rockies. He gets Feliz to pop out to shallow left, then picks up one of many trash bags that are dancing around on the field. A high pitch glances off the top of Torrealbas glove, advancing Ibanez to second base. 4:24: Joe Beimel and his trucker mustache are in to pitch. Raul Ibanez promptly singles between first and second, driving in Werth. Phillies lead, 5-0. And goodbye, Joe Beimel. 4:21: Jayson Werth absolutely hammers a ball to left. The wind pushes it down and to the right, to the point where the camera didnt even catch it until the last second (like when a fake handoff fools the camera in football, but the quarterback still has the ball). Dexter Fowler almost makes a leaping grab of the ball at the wall in left-center, but it bounces off the wall and ricochets into centerfield. Howard could have crawled home from second base and scored; Werth almost had an inside-the-park home run, but he pulls up just as hes about to make the turn around third. 4-0, Phillies. Jimenez is out of the game. 4:19: NLDS Game 1: Where Every Fly Ball is an Adventure. 4:17: Utley — who hasnt been caught stealing all year — swipes second base. Ryan Howard blasts one to deep left field. It looks like MLB page 39

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MLB continued from page 38 its gone, but the wind knocks it down and it falls right into the glove of a running and twisting Carlos Gonzalez. Unfortunately, Gonzalez crashes into the wall and drops it. Utley scores, and its 3-0, Phillies. 4:15: Looking forward to the next few innings, lets not forget that the Philadelphia closer situation is less-than-stable. The Phillies should probably try to pick up some insurance runs. Chase Utley probably knows this, and leads off the bottom of the sixth inning with a single. 4:11: Cliff Lees strikeout of Jimenez makes it his 12th straight batter retired. He gets number 13 with a Dexter Fowler groundout to Jimmy Rollins. The booth reminds us of this footnote in Cleveland history: Cliff Lee was left off the postseason roster for the Indians in 2007. In 2008, he won the AL Cy Young Award. Carlos Gonzalez flies out, and the half-inning is over. 2-0, Phillies. 4:08: For those of you who had 35 as your answer to, How many pitches will Ubaldo Jimenez throw in the inning that slows down an otherwise wonderful game, pat yourself on the back! 4:04: I am sorry if my use of brisk has, in any way, caused some greater force to make this game crawl. Victorino pops one to shallow left on a 3-1 count, and we are out of this inning and into the sixth. 2-0, Phillies. 4:00: Lee dribbles one to the pitcher, which could have been an easy force at first, but Jimenez catches Ruiz off second base and they catch him in a rundown. So Lee gets to first on the fielder’s choice, and there are two out for Jimmy Rollins, who has put the protective glasses on, which the booth muses was done because

there is a lot of dirt kicking around. Rollins singles, and there are runners on first and second. 3:58: Pedro Feliz grounds out to second, but advances Ibanez to third. Carlos Ruiz then takes a big swing, fouls off the ball, and sends his bat flying into the stands. Everyone seems to be OK, and a fan may or may not have a souvenir. Nobody seems to be asking for it back just yet. Jimenez has just put the brakes on this game with the sudden loss of control of his fastball, but Ruiz seems to be enjoying his role in this slow-down as well, fouling off every pitch that is within his bats range. He eventually lines it to right, and the ball bounces for a single, then gets by a charging Brad Hawpe. Ruiz goes to second, Ibanez scores, and the postseasons stolen base leader, Cliff Lee, is up. 2-0, Phillies. 3:52:Lopes Watch is now at one, by the way, as TBS mentioned that Davey Lopes is Philadelphias first base coach and pretty much is on control of who steals and when. 3:50: Jimenez is starting to lose a little bit of his control here, falling behind 3-1 on Ibanez before Ibanez strokes one down the first-base line. The ball seems to have just totally disappeared from sight. Werth scores standing up, Ibanez is on second, and its 10, Phillies. 3:45: Jayson Werth works a 3-2 count before drawing the first walk of the game, as the ball bounces off Torrealba and dribbles off the screen. Ernie Johnson breaks into the game from the desk in Atlanta to remind us all that the Yankees are on at 6:00, and this is the reason why our game is flyingthe Yankees control the universe and the

umpires, Rockies, and Phillies were told to get it done by 5:30or else. 3:42: Barmes flies out to left, and its another quick inning of work for Cliff Lee. Jayson Werth will lead off, followed by Ibanez, Feliz, and Ruiz. This might be a tough one to find, but Id be willing to bet that having three batters in a row whose last names end in z is a rather rare occurrence in the NLDS. 3:39: Torrealba lines out to center for the first out of the fifth. The sun is retreating now, and its quickly gone from, a beautiful day for baseball, to, holy smokes, that looks cold and Im glad Im not there, with the help of just one cloud. Overhead shots still show the sun, but the standard TV view is making you fight to find anything thats not shade. Brad Hawpe strikes out swinging, bringing up Clint Barmes. 3:36: Ryan Howard singles to left, bringing up Jayson Werth. Howard, though, tries to channel Cliff Lee and breaks for second. He is thrown out. Not by a lot, but theres no way the umps were going to call him safe after the first two close calls went in Phillys favor. It is 0-0 after four innings. 3:34: Chase Utley strikes out. Heres something interesting: in between pitches, Torrealba is actually turning his back to the wind to avoid dust getting blown into his eyes. 3:31: Victorino leads off the inning with a liner to right that got a nice rise out of the crowd before being caught for the first out.The shadow of the stadiums façade, meanwhile, is starting to creep onto the field; its not quite halfway between the mound and home plate. Also, totally

unscientific poll here, but there are at least three fans behind home plate who arent paying attention to the game and are instead holding a conversation. 3:29: I am going to retire the Lopez Tonight Watch for right now. TBS must have learned something from the Frank TV saturation, because there are no mini-Lopezes walking across the bottom of the screen pointing to the viewers and then uncomfortably standing there, the cameras dont just happen to catch him in the stands next to David Spade, and the spots that Ive seen have been surprisingly funny and unobtrusive. 3:26: Todd Helton grounds out to start the inning, followed by a Troy Tulowitzki pop out. The booth is interviewing Philadelphia pitching coach Rich Dubee, who is just saying some nice things about Cliff Lee and the wind. Nothing earth-shattering, and no pop music in the background for those of you at home hoping for the full ballpark experience. Carlos Ruiz is doing some weird stance behind home plate when Lee pitches. His right leg is flat to the ground, like hes doing a halfsplit. Garrett Atkins strikes out, and we have a very brisk halfinning. 3:21: And it gets better. The Rockies thought they had Cliff Lee picked off second base, but Lee is called safe. It appeared that everyone — including Jimmy Rollins — had moved towards the dugout to prepare for the next inning, but Lee might have — might have — somehow maneuvered his legs around the tag. In other words, the glove went between his legs, his front foot hit the bag, and his back leg was tagged. Thats all I can think

of. Jim Tracy is out arguing, but theres not much he can do, and hes definitely not going to get kicked out of the first game of the NLDS. Rollins strikes out on the next pitch anyway, but there are two very close calls that have gone against Colorado early. Its still 0-0 after three innings. 3:19: Cliff Lee singles to shallow center for Phillys second hit of the game. And on a 0-2 count to Jimmy Rollins, Cliff Lee steals second! Cliff Lee is now your stolen-base leader for the postseason. 3:17: According to the TBS radar gun, Jimenez just threw a 99 mph fastball to Pedro Feliz, who grounds out on the next pitch. Carlos Ruiz then follows with a groundout of his own. To give everyone a little more flavor for the game here, they just did the from the dugout interview with Jim Tracy, and Snaps I Got The Power was playing in the background. So just click here between innings, and its almost like youre there. 3:13: Carlos Gonzalez grounds out to end Colorados half of the third. Feliz, Ruiz, and Lee (insert your own law firm joke here, I respectfully refuse to) are up for the Phillies in the bottom half of the inning. 3:12: Dexter Fowler pops one up to shallow left — the direction the wind is blowing, by the way — and Jimmy Rollins runs it down for a great running catch as he crosses over to foul territory. 3:10: Ubaldo Jimenez, who hit .220 this year — fifth-best among NL pitchers — leads off for the Rockies and strikes out. They then cut to David Aldridge who talks about Ryan Howards work on his MLB page 42

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Today’s Yank Gazillionaires Outpace Prior Yank Gazillionaires (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

dominating win, Adam Peterson comes up with five reasons why the Twins can steal the series at As stacked as Wednesday’s three the blog Twinkie Town. -game MLB playoff slate was Sabathia looked strong on with telling performances, it was, Wednesday, but Philadelphia’s finally, just one day of baseball. Cliff Lee looked downright But while it’s not breaking news, dominant. Lee allowed just one Wednesday’s games did at the run and five hits in a completevery least remind viewers of just game 5-1 win over the Rockies. how good CC Sabathia and Cliff At Fox Sports, Tracy Ringolsby Lee are at pitching. Associated argues that Lee’s “CG” was Press If CC Sabathia pitches five nearly as important as the “W.” more times this month like he did “It was a godsend,” Ringolsby W e d n e s d a y , s u d d e n l y $ 1 6 0 writes. “On a team in which the million almost sort of approaches b u l l p e n h a s i m p l o d e d a n d sounding reasonable. [Manager Charlie] Manuel admits As he has been for most of the his late-inning usage plan consists last two months, Sabathia was of his gut-feeling at the time, Lee very efficient in dispatching the gave the rest of the Phillies exhausted Minnesota Twins by a pitchers a day off.” 7-2 score Wednesday. In the New In contrast to the evening’s first York Times, Tyler Kepner details two games, the Dodgers’ 5-3 the Yankees’ long-held crush on victory over St. Louis was a pain Sabathia, and the change in to watch even for non-Cards fans. a p p r o a c h — f r o m m e r e l y At nearly four hours, it was a spending more to how to spend sloppy, sluggish slog. In the St. more intelligently — that his Louis Post-Dispatch, Bernie signing heralded. “The Yankees Miklasz bemoans the Cardinals’ payroll is always an extraordinary inability to get a big hit. In the advantage, but it matters most Los Angeles Times, T.J. Simers when they spend wisely,” Kepner (kind of) praises the hard-towrites. “Questionable investments watch win as a prime example of l i k e K e v i n B r o w n , K y l e 2009 Dodgers baseball.* * * Farnsworth, Jason Giambi, Kei Wednesday was an especially Igawa, Randy Johnson, Carl interesting day for a pair of Pavano and Jaret Wright have enigmatic-but-talented passbloated the payroll in recent catchers. The Cleveland Browns seasons and produced no dealt ultra-talented, serial championships. By spending for underperformer Braylon Edwards players in their primes like to the New York Jets, and rookie Sabathia, [A.J.] Burnett and holdout Michael Crabtree finally [Mark] Teixeira, while keeping signed a contract with the San less expensive young players just Francisco 49ers. Carl Bialik tapping their potential, the argued in a very special episode Yankees have more hope now.” of The Count that Edwards is not Despite the Yankees’ thoroughly all he’s cracked up to be. And Submitted at 10/8/2009 8:59:27 AM

of ex-rapper MC Hammer in the Crabtree negotiations. Seriously.* ** There’s not a whole lot of actual news value yet to the reports that Rush Limbaugh is a part of a group headed by former Madison Square Garden president Dave Checketts that’s looking to buy Edwards’s throwing of a punch at the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. But a FOLJ (Friend of LeBron James) since Limbaugh is Limbaugh, it a f t e r a r o u n d o f p o s t g a m e has drawn its share of attention. clubbing on Sunday doesn’t say And again, since Limbaugh is much for the receiver’s judgment. Limbaugh, much of the coverage But Edwards is still a big name, has been negative. “I keep scratching my head and and seemingly a big acquisition wondering why so many people for the Jets. In Newsday, Roderick Boone foolishly believe that at some explains why and how Edwards point Limbaugh’s mouth won’t w o r e o u t h i s w e l c o m e i n cause another embarrassing Cleveland. At CBS Sports, the situation for the Rams and the very excellent Ray Ratto spins a league,” the St. Louis Post’s darkish, half-serious conspiracy Bryan Burwell writes. “This isn’t theory behind the deal — that the about conservative politics. If Jets, after being accused of that’s all you could say about him, tampering with Crabtree during it certainly doesn’t disqualify him his holdout, opted for the more to be a potential NFL owner. In proven option in Edwards and fact, that makes him highly thus belatedly sent Crabtree into qualified to join the club. … But the arms of the team that drafted even if he fit in with his politics, him 10th overall. “These two let’s hope he doesn’t fit in with seemingly disparate events h i s p o l a r i z i n g , r a c i s t intertwine at just the right time for d e m a g o g u e r y . ” Beyond Limbaugh’s personal us crafty amateur sleuths, a victory for serendipity that will be worth or lack thereof, there’s the denied by everyone involved,” m o r e p r a c t i c a l q u e s t i o n o f whether NFL players would want Ratto writes. While Ratto is surely not alone to work for someone who once in perceiving the influence of opined as to how the NFL “all too unseen hands on these doings, a often looks like a game between major player in the Crabtree affair the Bloods and the Crips without is better known for having a mind any weapons” and has riffed on to rhyme and two hype feet than the pragmatic benefits of slavery unseen hands. In a blog post of (”the streets were safer after vital national importance, the dark”). If a Washington Post blog Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s post by 12-year NFL veteran Matt Maiocco susses out the role Roman Oben is any indication,

the answer is a resolute no. “I’m not sure what’s lower,” Oben quips, “Rush Limbaugh’s approval rating in the African American community or JaMarcus Russell’s passer rating.” Speaking of Russell, Jeff Pearlman steps up in sarcastic defense of the Raiders’ quarterback, who continues to plumb the depths of awfulness. “I love his size. I love his arm,” Pearlman writes at his blog. “Mostly, I love how absolutely, positively terrible he is.”* * * You may or may not have noticed that the WNBA Finals are going on right now. But Yahoo’s Kelly Dwyer argues that the relentlessly maligned WNBA deserves a second — or first — chance from basketball fans, and a break from sports pundits like Bill Simmons, who lay into it habitually. “While I wasn’t watching, I was cringing every time I heard sportswriters (including a very prominent one that everyone here knows about, no point in mentioning him) taking gratuitous shots at the league, all for the crime of having commercials for their league show up during NBA postseason games, or the odd bit of David Stern-influenced synergy during some contest nobody cares about during All-Star Weekend,” Dwyer writes. “This league did nothing but create needed cash flow, for thousands of people, on the NBA’s dime. And we’re to rip it because … it’s annoying to see a WNBA ad on the scorer’s table during a Conference semifinal? TODAY’S page 42

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Metrodome Lives to See Another Homer Hankie (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

become its lone tenant next year. “That’s the Metrodome,” Joe Posnanski writes at Sports A seven-game lead in September Illustrated. “You think you’ve should be insurmountable. The killed it, but no, it will not die. It Detroit Tigers enjoyed that lofty will keep coming back, again and position before frittering away again, shoving itself into the some of that bulge and carrying a limelight like a frustrated chorus three-game lead with four to play. girl.” That should be doubly Minnesota went on a 16-4 tear insurmountable, as close as you to force game 163. A year ago, can come to a playoff berth in a they lost to the Chicago White l o c k b o x w i t h o u t a c t u a l l y Sox in a play-in game. “These are clinching. Associated Press The the Twins, laughing in the face of Twins celebrate their chance to hit all reason,” Yahoo Sports’s Dan just one more homer off the right- Wetzel writes. “They never field baggie. shouldve gotten to game 163. But that doesn’t take the They played a game with just Metrodome into account. The about every wild baseball play very flawed stadium that has imaginable — pickoffs, diving provided one of the great home- catches, multiple lead changes.” field advantages in North While the Detroit Free Press’s A m e r i c a n s p o r t s h i s t o r y Michael Rosenberg lauds a game thundered alive one more time for that exceeded expectations, CBS the Twins on Tuesday. The result Sports’s Danny Knobler says the was a classic. Twins earned their celebration in Twins pitcher Bobby Keppel one of the greatest games ever. survived a bases-loaded jam with “This should gnaw at the Tigers, one out in the top of the 12th because yet again, they had a inning and Minnesota won 6-5 on chance to finish off the Twins and Alexi Casilla’s single in the avert a crushing late-season bottom of the inning. Just like collapse, and they squandered it,” that, the Tigers’ collapse was Bob Wojnowski writes in the complete and the Twins were Detroit News. “The Tigers had a 3 crowned AL Central champions in -0 lead in the game and were very what otherwise would have good for a while (just like during marked their final Metrodome the season) and couldn’t close it game. out (just like during the season).” Like the Twins, the Metrodome, For an encore to their the scene of two World Series improbable comeback, the Twins titles, contains more baseball life will have to defeat the New York this fall. Hold the eulogies for at Yankees, baseball’s best team in least a few more days on a 2009, in the AL Division Series. multipurpose stadium that, while The mission look impossible: it has generated many classic Minnesota and its tired bullpen memories, few baseball fans will lost all seven games to the miss after the NFL Vikings Yankees this season. But the Submitted at 10/7/2009 7:58:07 AM

Twins still like their chances, John Shipley writes in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune St. Paul Pioneer Press. Baseball has changed a lot since the days when only the NL champ and the AL champ made the playoffs, SI’s Posnanski writes. With the expanded postseason, teams like the ‘69 Miracle Mets become more likely to rise up.* * * Yanks-Twins is one of three series starting Wednesday. In the National League, Colorado faces Philadelphia, the defending World Series champion, and St. Louis plays the Dodgers. The Angels and Red Sox open on Thursday. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Phil Sheridan says the Phillies have a shot to repeat because of Charlie Manuel’s managerial style. In the Denver Post, Troy E. Renck rhapsodizes over Todd Helton, the heart of the Rockies. For the Dodgers, the long playoff wait is finally over for pitcher Randy Wolf, who has 275 major-league starts, Randy Youngman writes in the Orange County Register. The Cardinals, who staggered to their NL Central title, have the pitching to beat L.A., but the St. Louis PostDispatch’s Bernie Miklasz wonders whether their hitters will

deliver. Finally, the Los Angeles Times’s Bill Shaikin pines for a Dodgers-Angels Freeway Series.* ** Once-mighty Florida State is only 2-3 this year, a decade removed from its last national championship, and a trustee has called for legendary coach Bobby Bowden to step down after the season. Bowden is operating under a one-year contract. How the players can stay focused with all the rancor and turmoil will be a challenge. The Orlando Sentinel’s Mike Bianchi says it’s time for Bowden to go. “Throughout the years, Bobby has said that if his program ever fell into a state of disrepair and mediocrity, he would hang it up,” Bianchi writes. “He has said in the past that when his program started going downhill, he would ‘get out and let some young guy do it.’ He said when a ‘pattern of losing’ developed, it would be time for him to step down. After going 8-4 way back in 2001, Bobby cracked that if the Seminoles suffered another such subpar season, ‘It might be time for ol’ Robert to step down.’ That was about six subpar seasons ago and ol’ Robert is still desperately hanging onto his job while Florida State’s dysfunctional football program circles the drain.” While the Ocala Star-Banner’s Dwight Collins writes that Bowden deserves to step down on his terms, the Birmingham News’s Kevin Scarbinsky writes an open letter from the fans urging Bowden to retire.* * * Here’s the task for the U.S.

soccer team in its bid to qualify for the World Cup 2010 in South Africa: Defeat Honduras on Saturday in a hostile stadium and in a country that underwent a coup d’etat in June and has been under a military curfew the past two weeks. If that weren’t enough, Honduras will have its most prolific star on its pitch: David Suazo. The odds will be long for the Americans, Jeff Rusnak writes at South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel. In the San Diego Union-Tribune, Mark Zeigler reports on the political storm the U.S. is flying into.* * * NBA teams are in camp preparing for opening night Oct. 27. For most players, summer is a time to relax, rest and improve. But a small minority of players returned to the classroom to get their college degrees, Jonathan Abrams writes in the New York Times. Chicago and Utah played an exhibition game Tuesday in London, which the Bulls won, 102-101. The Independent’s Richard Rae says the game was as much about the gimmicks as it was about basketball. – Tip of the Fix cap to reader John Falck. Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at [email protected] and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email Garey at [email protected].

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MLB continued from page 39 defense this season. The man who helped him? third-base coach Sam Perlozzo. For Orioles fans reading, there is the answer to your, I wonder what happened to Sam Perlozzo queries. He managed Baltimore from 20052007. 3:05: Raul Ibanez grounds into a 6-4-3 double play, and the second inning is over, still tied, 0-0. 3:03: TBS shows a replay of the double play, but doesnt do the fancy close-up or anything, so theres no in-depth analysis of what Ron Kulpa, the third base umpire, saw. After Ryan Howard strikes out looking, Werth rips a single for Phillys first hit of the game. 3:00: After Hawpe pops out to shallow centerfield, Clint Barmes skies one to Jayson Werth in right for the second out. Yorvit Torrelaba tags up and heads to third, where he is thrown out by Werth. The replay appears to show Torrealba safe, but it looks like he may have lifted up a leg on the slide after beating the ball to the base, and thats what could have gotten him. Stay tuned! 2:56: Yorvit Torrealba hits one down the third-base line, juuuust past the glove of Pedro Feliz, and gets to second base. Its the third hit Cliff Lee has given up so far this game. 2:55: Just for the record, I like George Lopez, but after what TBS did with the constant Frank TV promos a couple years ago, Im going to keep a Lopez Tonight Watch during commercial breaks. We are at: 1 2:53: Jimenez gets Chase Utley out on a called strike three to end the inning. 0-0 with one inning of

TODAY’S continued from page 40 NLDS action behind us. 2:51: Shane Victorino flies one to left, and its caught by Brad Hawpe, but not before he had to battle with three major factors that will be getting him all day long: the sun, the wind, and the loud shouts from Phillies fans in the stands. 2:50: Ubaldo Jimenez gets Jimmy Rollins to quickly ground out to second for the Phillies first out 2:49: Just FYI, the announcing team for this game is Brian Anderson (who usually works Brewers games) and Joe Simpson (a former major-leaguer who works Braves games). David Aldridge, who we all know and love for his NBA work, is doing the Craig Sager role as the reporter. 2:46: Atkins skies one to centerfield. Victorino moves around under it, kind of like when your hand is shaky in a video game and you control the centerfielder, but he makes the catch, and we are done with the top half of the inning. 2:44: Troy Tulowitzki kind of nubs one towards Chase Utley at second. And this is going to be one of these games. Utley cant get to it in time, and Tulowitzki is safe at first. Utley fires a dangerous throw to third to try and catch Gonzalez, and the ball is dropped. Blocked, but still dropped. Runners are on the corners now for Garrett Atkins. 2:42: Helton grounds to Ryan Howard, who steps on first after doing a nervous little shuffle with his feet, then throws to second to try to complete the double play. The ball goes just past Jimmy

Rollins glove, though, and Gonzalez is safe at second. He doesnt advance on the throw. 2:40: Carlos Gonzalez lines one to left for the first hit of the ballgame. In a strange almoststatistic, former power-hitter Todd Helton, up next, had just two more home runs than Gonzalez this season15 to 13. 2:39: If last nights theme was Favre, todays is going to be wind. Theyve already taken a solid minute to do shots of the flags and go over what the wind will mean. Fowlers out carried a bit more than it would have without the wind. 2:37: And we are off. Cliff Lees first pitch on this Winnie the Pooh -esque sunny, blustery day is a fly out to right off the bat of Dexter Fowler. 2:18 p.m. ET: David Aldridge is on the scene in Philly for the TBS crew, and is reporting that theres a wind advisory in the area with gusts up to 40 mph, sustained at 20-25. The flags at the park look like theyre on the moon, just totally stiff in one direction. Ryan Howard told him when the wind picks up like this, a pop up hit to him could end up by Jimmy Rollins. So this should be fun. first pitch in under 20 minutes. Pregame: Now that all the onegame playoff nonsense is over, its time to get down to what really matters: more Lopez Tonight promos. Er, sorry. Its actually time for Philadelphias defense of its World Series title, which begins this afternoon at Citizens Bank Park. Casual fans with no rooting interest in this game will have to

decide which way they want to cheer: On one hand, theres the fun group of Phillies, who smoked a cigarette in the dugout as a tribute to longtime broadcaster Harry Kalas after he passed away in April, starred in an amusing commercial for a sporting-goods chain after winning last years title, and proposed to reality TV contestants in July. The Rockies, on the other hand, had a surge of historic proportions after the firing of manager Clint Hurdlewho led his own surge of historic proportions in 2007in May, they boast a resurgent Jason Giambi on their bench (1.035 OPS, 11 RBI in 19 games since being recalled), and they make it hard to root against them, with the comeback stories of Jim Tracy, Clint Barmes, Mr. Giambi, Huston Street, and Jason Marquis. They are much less hyper-linkable, though. Its boils down to this: PhilliesRockies is basically an Adam Sandler movie versus a Frank Capra film. Which feel-good route do you prefer? Todays game will pit Cliff Lee (7-4 3.39 ERA with Philadelphia), the Phillies prize trade-deadline acquisition, against Ubaldo Jimenez (15-12, 3.47 ERA), a hard-throwing righty who has given up just two runs in his 11 1/3 career innings pitched in the NLDS and NLCS. Which way will you cheer? Which way will the game go? Find out at 2:37 p.m. ET for our coverage of the game and the TBS telecast.

Pathetic, man.” If you were wondering, the Phoenix Mercury beat the Indiana Fever on Wednesday night, 90-77, to tie the series at two games apiece.* * * For all the debate over their relative merit, one of the lesserknown truths about batterypowered cars is that they can be very fast. It’s that get-up-and-go, rather than any broader green consciousness, that led Stephen Pruitt, owner of a team in the American Le Mans Series, to experiment with a 70-pound battery in his 680-horsepower racecar. The early results have been very promising. “The difference in this car — its electrical system — gives it an advantage,” the Journal’s David Biderman writes. “The small but significant boost in power from the battery is continuously released throughout the event, making his car a hair quicker, especially coming out of turns.” — Tip of the Fix cap to fellow Fixer Garey Ris. Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at [email protected] and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at [email protected].

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The Count: How Much Is Home Field Worth in MLB Playoffs? (WSJ.com: The Daily Fix)

blowout and again home field couldn’t have been decisive. By that logic, home field W h e n t h e M a j o r L e a g u e doesn’t matter in most series. If B a s e b a l l p l a y o f f s s t a r t every team has the same chance Wednesday, the Philadelphia of winning each game, you’d Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers expect 38% of best-of-five series and New York Yankees will get to go the distance, and 31% of to follow their usual home-game best-of-seven series to do so. The routine and play in the familiar actual historical percentages, environs of their home fields. according to Sean Forman of Their opponents will be playing Baseball Reference, have been r o a d g a m e s . A n d i f t h e i r 28% and 34%, respectively — divisional series go to a fifth, perhaps because the simplistic deciding game, those three calculation doesn’t account for division champs will again enjoy h o m e f i e l d , a n d b e c a u s e home-field advantage. But just divisional series, which go five how much is that advantage worth games, are more likely to be in a playoff series? Reuters The mismatches. (There were also Yankees celebrated when they four best-of-nine World Series; clinched the AL East, and home none went the distance.) To field in the first round of the simplify, let’s say that roughly playoffs. one in three series go the distance. Merely calculating how often The home team usually has won home teams have won playoff winner-take-all games at about the series would overstate the home- same rate, regardless of series field edge, because the team with length. The home team has won the better record generally gets 54% of decisive fifth games and the home-field advantage (though 53% of seventh games, according not always in the World Series). to Forman. (And the percentage is So it could be that the better team 5 3 % f o r h o m e t e a m s i n would have won regardless. tiebreakers after the Twins won at Here’s one idea for separating the Metrodome on Monday night, the effects of team quality from perhaps aided by crowd noise home-field advantage: Toss out drowning out the sound of ball all games besides winner-take-all h i t t i n g j e r s e y . ) T h a t i s , i f games. If a best-of-seven or -five anything, a surprisingly low rate. series was decided in six games or The overall home-field advantage four games, respectively, then in MLB is about 54%. But that’s each team enjoyed home field the for a typical game between two same number of times, so it e v e n l y m a t c h e d t e a m s . A s probably wasn’t a decisive factor mentioned above, the home team in determining the winner. And if in winner-take-all playoff games the series fell shy of the maximum usually was the better team in the number of possible games by two regular season, though by small games or more, then it was a margins. Submitted at 10/7/2009 11:18:45 AM

its wings in China can cause a hurricane, then changing the venue of a ballgame can easily change the score from 10-0 to 19,” Birnbaum said. Another possible objection: Not every team enjoys equal homefield advantage. This could matter in the Philadelphia-Colorado Let’s honor the home field by series, because the Rockies have applying that 54% edge to had the biggest, most consistent decisive Games 5 and 7. Then the home-field edge in recent seasons, h o m e t e a m g e t s a n e i g h t - while the Phillies won more percentage-point bump in winning games on the road than at home probability compared to the this season, a familiar pattern for alternative of playing Game 7 on them. As noted in a recent post the road. That corresponds, here, those Phillies home woes roughly, to a one-in-12 chance probably aren’t statistically that home field will decide the meaningful, but Colorado’s home game. Since just one of three edge is. How about the Twins, the series get that far, that means that about one in 36 series have a b i g g e s t u n d e r d o g s i n t h e different outcome than they would divisional round but guaranteed at if home field were reversed. Since least one home game in the there are seven series each year, Metrodome, which supposedly that means it matters roughly c o n f e r s t h e b i g g e s t h o m e twice a decade — such as perhaps advantage in baseball (a notion in last year’s ALCS, when the repeated on this blog earlier Rays won a close Game 7 at home today)? Both they and their opponents — the Yankees, against the Red Sox. Keep in mind that this is a very playing their first 81 games in the simple model. Baseball stats new Yankee Stadium — won 11 analyst Phil Birnbaum points out more games at home than on the that a seemingly very small road this year. Over the life of the advantage can translate into much Metrodome, since 1982, the bigger results in baseball. If one Twins have won 54% of their swing, pitch or fielding play games at home, compared to 44% differs because of the venue, and on the road. That’s a 10-point that swing or pitch happens at a edge, compared to a typical crucial moment, it could be team’s eight percentage points. If crucial, even at the start of a the Twins do pull the upset, look lopsided series. (Think of an error for factors other than their home with two outs that extends an dome. innings and paves the way for a big rally.) “If a butterfly flapping

Marcus Giles Arrested On Domestic Battery Charges By Tom Fornelli (FanHouse) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:49:00 AM

by Tom Fornelli Filed under: Braves, Padres, MLB Police Blotter Former Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres second baseman Marcus Giles was arrested early Wednesday morning for domestic battery after his wife called the police. The details of the incident are somewhat sketchy, but the El Cajon police were called by the California Highway Patrol to the scene where the incident allegedly took place. Police arrived on the scene to find the Giles' car parked on the shoulder of the highway, placed Giles under arrest and took him into custody. Marcus Giles Arrested On Domestic Battery Charges originally appeared on Fanhouse MLB Blog on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:49:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

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Alexi Lalas Eager to Bring 'Soccer People Together' at Film Festival

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Is This the Thrashers' Year? By Susan Slusser (FanHouse) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:00:00 PM

by Susan Slusser Filed under: Thrashers, FanHouse Exclusive Before the By Michael Cardillo season starter, Atlanta star Ilya (FanHouse) Kovalchuk brashly proclaimed Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:00:00 PM "This is our year." Crazy? Well, maybe not. by Michael Cardillo Thrashers defenseman Ron Filed under: Soccer Posts, US Hainsey told FanHouse by phone Soccer, U.S. Men's National this week that the team's forwards Team Ever since he burst onto the are so talented the club can worldwide scene at the 1994 contend, despite the fourth-worst World Cup thanks in part to his unmistakable fiery red goatee and New York, he jumped at the finish in the league last year. "We have a team that has no flowing locks, Alexi Lalas has chance to help. And when Greg been one of the Apostles of Lalas decided to host another excuse except under-performance spreading the world on U.S. event next week in Washington, not to be in the playoffs," Hainsey said. "We match up with anyone, soccer. well, Alexi Lalas was going to be In the 15 years since the U.S. there to both help his brother and especially with our skill up front." announced its ambition on the help spread the gospel of soccer. world stage, Lalas has witnessed Alexi Lalas Eager to Bring the gradual steps as soccer 'Soccer People Together' at Film awareness in America has slowly Festival originally appeared on crept from the fringes, edging Fanhouse Soccer Blog on Thu, 08 closer to the mainstream. Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST . Please So when his brother Greg see our terms for use of feeds. decided to host a soccer-themed Permalink| Email this| Linking f i l m f e s t i v a l - - K i c k i n g & Blogs| Comments Screening-- earlier this year in

Is This the Thrashers' Year? originally appeared on Fanhouse NHL Blog on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Linking Blogs| Comments

Left 4 Dead 2 twofer: 'Edited version' approved for Australia; 'Realism mode' revealed By Christopher Grant (Joystiq) Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:29:00 PM

We're going to break this post down into three distinct (and clichéd!) categories: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. First, the Good: The suddenly puritanical Australian government -- by way of The Office of Film and Literature Classification -has seen fit to grant the previously unclassified Left 4 Dead 2 an MA 15+ rating, paving the way for millions of impressionable minds to be programmed into zombiekilling machines.

Uncharted 2 demo stats suggest plundering is addictive By Alexander Sliwinski (Joystiq)

1,217,424 • Total Number of Kills: 92,110,787 Submitted at 10/8/2009 2:00:00 PM • Total Number of Treasures The Uncharted 2: Among Captured: 1,860,645 Thieves multiplayer demo has • Total Amount of Money only been out for a week, but it's Earned: $38,841,367,350 already attracted a large following • Total Time Played: 9,905 days of money-hungry murderers. Evan (or 27+ years!) Wells of developer Naughty Dog It'll be interesting to see these has posted up some compelling f i g u r e s c o m p a r e d t o t h o s e (non- beta) stats: numbers produced by the retail • Total Number of games played: game -- launching next week--

unrealistic. Uncharted 2 demo stats suggest plundering is addictive originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments after its first seven days in service. Uncharted 2 has already become a critical favorite, and soon we'll see if Naughty Dog's

game can convert all that in-game "money earned" into real-world doubloons ... Although,$38 billion in sales does seem a bit

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LEFT continued from page 44 Next, the Bad: The version of Left 4 Dead 2 that the OFLC approved was an "edited version" that "no longer contains depictions of decapitation, dismemberment, wound detail or piles of dead bodies lying about the environment." In other words, it's nothing like the real zombie apocalypse. And when the inevitable human-vs-zombie war reaches Australia's isolated shores, her people will be ill prepared for what they encounter. "Gross, these zombie corpses don't disappear when you kill them! And, what's this? Blood?" Valve and publisher EA are still hoping to launch an unmodified

version, pending the October 22 review by the OFLC board. Lastly, the Ugly: 1UP noticed a "special modifier" in its Scavenge Mode demo last night: "Realism mode." Valve's Doug Lombardi explained that it was for the serious player: "Take Portal for example: We had our best internal players who could blow through that game in about 30 minutes, but within weeks of launching it we had people on YouTube beating [the testers'] times by 10 minutes or more. Realism is for those players." In other words, it's training for the real zombie apocalypse. If our imagination is any indication, expect Realism

mode to feature plenty of realistic pants crapping. Gallery: Left 4 Dead 2 Scavenge Multiplayer Mode Source- "Left 4 Dead 2 Secures Australian Release" [Edge Online] Source- Realism mode detailed [1UP] Left 4 Dead 2 twofer: 'Edited version' approved for Australia; 'Realism mode' revealed originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

EEDAR expects PS3 to be top cuts later, PS3 may finally selling console inprice Sept. hit the top of the hardware sales By Andrew Yoon Three years and $300 worth of

Game Informer confirms Epic Mickey as Wii exclusive By Justin McElroy (Joystiq)

removed from the website, however, it sent the internet into a tizzy of speculation, with some Here's a great example of why assuming the change put the it's tough serving two masters. exclusivity in question. Enter our Game Informer has totally re- good friend, the fact: Game engineered its web site, and one Informer has today reconfirmed of its first big scoops was a teaser that Epic Mickey is only coming image and info on Epic Mickey, to Nintendo's box, a revelation We're impressed with GI's new which was touted as a Wii that it was hoping to save for the site and wish it all the best as it exclusive. magazine. If only the accursed tries for a stronger web presence When that last detail was internet hadn't noticed! Submitted at 10/8/2009 1:35:00 PM

alongside its mag; however, we're equally interested in how the team deals with the growing pains from

aligning the print and online offerings. Game Informer confirms Epic Mickey as Wii exclusive originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

LostWinds sequel to be Europe's 100th WiiWare game this Friday By JC Fletcher (Joystiq)

standout WiiWare launch title, Winter of the Melodias is a good choice for the spot, although we In North America, Bit.Trip: don't discount the possibility that C O R E w a s t h e h u n d r e d t h it just happened to work out that WiiWare release. Today, Frontier way. Developments announced that Winter of the Melodias includes L o s t W i n d s : W i n t e r o f t h e a new cyclone ability and a Melodias will receive that honor m e c h a n i c t h a t a l l o w s m a i n in Europe -- which also happens character Toku to change the to mean the game will be out environment from summer to tomorrow! As the sequel to the winter and back instantly; in turn

Europe's 100th WiiWare game this Friday originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Submitted at 10/8/2009 12:58:00 PM

manipulating bodies of water or even clouds. We hope Frontier and Nintendo don't wait until it's actually winter to give Americans

the chance to play it. Gallery: LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias LostWinds sequel to be

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EEDAR continued from page 45 charts in America. EEDAR's analyst Jesse Divnich predicts 400,000 PS3s were sold in September, edging out both Wii and Xbox 360 sales (375k and 370k units respectively). It's far from a landslide victory for Sony, but it may be the start of a turnaround for the longbeleaguered platform. If the hardware maintains momentum, the next issue Sony will have to tackle is software. While EEDAR's hardware numbers peg PS3 at the top, its software charts

See 'The Flash' superhero game in action -- before it disappeared By Justin McElroy (Joystiq) Submitted at 10/8/2009 11:57:00 AM

We'll be the first to admit that the early gameplay footage for a canned The Flash game -- the one BottleRocket was rumored to be making for Brash-- looks a little rough, as you'll see right after the break. But considering how early the footage is (just six months into development), we can't help but think there's a little something there. We don't know if it's the animation, the sense of speed or maybe just the borrowed Danny

Elfman score, but we're feeling like this canceled rendering of the Scarlet Speedster is a definite missed opportunity. [Via superannuation] Continue reading See 'The Flash' superhero game in action -before it disappeared See 'The Flash' superhero game in action -- before it disappeared originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

only show one PS3 game in the top 10: Batman: Arkham Asylum. With the remainder of the chart dominated by 360 and Wii games, it's clear Sony still has a long way to go in the console wars. EEDAR expects PS3 to be top selling console in Sept. originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

ByThe blogeditor1 (Material most attractive aspect of Interest P o r s c h on e ' s Men.style.com) new four-door

Antonio Marass's Golden Kenzo Collection By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 10/7/2009 3:24:27 PM

Antonio Marass brought to life a vision for the Kenzo collection with a spectacular display of clothes and show production. He was inspired by the desert, and the sun played a central focus, represented by a giant gold circle as the backdrop. Just before the finale, unbelievable amounts of oversize gold foil confetti were shot over the runway and into the audience, showing how blinding the desert sun can be, distorting your vision and creating a mirage. But how did this story play out in the designer's head? "I imagined a woman explorer who stopped in a Bertolucci movie,"

he told me. "And I imagined her in these explorer-like military outfits from the desert, picking up local outfits and mixing them together in their own look. When you think of the desert you think

Street Chic: Paris Fashion Week By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 10/8/2009 4:00:00 AM

Go for structure in a strong-

shouldered top and tailored tweed trousers. Photo: Stylesight Think you are Street Chic? Email us your photo and you could

The most fun you can have in Alabama without a 12-gauge

Daily. Follow ELLE on Twitter. appear in ELLE.com's Street Chic

of sandy colors, like beige and gray, but then there is the brightness of the sun. In these times, I wanted to send a message of vibrancy." That explains why in the middle of the collection, which was mostly khakis and olive greens, there was an absolute about-face of pieces that were nothing like the safari-inspired items before them, and instead were in bright colors with a very African feel in terms of their shapes and headpieces. All the while, the gold foil was spraying all over, driving home the designer's idea of a complete shift in vision. —Rebecca Suhrawardi Austin Follow ELLE on Twitter.

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MOST continued from page 46 Panamera, which we plugged in our Fall Trend Reports, may well be a feature that debuted in the Carrera last fall: the seven-speed marvel of modern engineering called the PDK transmission. A recent opportunity to try out the PDK on a track (though not, sadly, in a Panamera) left me mighty impressed. Thanks to its race-derived double clutch—which basically ensures that the next gear is always spooled up and ready to kick in—shifting was lightning-fast, yet butter-smooth. Also remarkable: the transmission's ability to adapt to your driving habits—say, delaying upshifts when you let off the throttle once it's determined you're a bit of a lead foot. Intrigued, but still a few bucks short of the 100 grand a Panamera will run you? Head to Birmingham, Ala., for a weekend at the Porsche Sport Driving School, which is based next to the hairpin-heavy track where I put the PDK to the test. With luck,

you'll have head instructor Cass Whitehead riding shotgun. Along with 20 years' experience racing cars for a living, the guy's got the patience of a kindergarten teacher and constitution of an astronaut. Despite my giving him ample opportunity to put both traits to good use, Whitehead's calm, authoritative instruction definitely helped make me a better driver, both on the track and—I'd like to think—in the real world (although it bears noting that I'm defining a good driver as someone who's able to execute a proper exit ramp turn-in while doing 60 in an SUV). But wait, there's more. While in 'Bama, be sure to set aside some time to tour the jaw-droppingly cool motorcycle collection that George Barber, who owns the motor sports park, has on display in a gargantuan museum nestled right next to the track. Built in 2003, the cavernous industrialmodern space is pretty much bursting at the seams with lustworthy bikes. While most

collectors tend to focus on a certain era, or maybe a favorite make, Barber's acquisitional philosophy seems to follow a slightly looser set of dictates—namely, if it's got two wheels, he'll take it. I'm told the collection now numbers around 1,500, although fewer than 500 motorcycles are on display at any given time (alongside a worldclass Lotus collection and a bizarrely awesome assortment of vintage outboard motors). If you don't walk out of here dead-set on picking up your own vintage Triumph (or maybe a Moto Guzzi—I haven't yet decided), you may want to have your head checked. Whatever make you settle upon, take Whitehead's advice and stick to the Porsches while you're on the track. At least they've got air bags. Click for a slideshow from the museum > TYLER THORESON Photo: Tyler Thoreson

Collette Dinnigan's Whimsical Beauty Look By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 10/7/2009 3:25:38 PM

Collette Dinnigan's show was inspired by the wonder and whimsy of Alice in Wonderland, and the M.A.C makeup artists backstage tried to emulate the fantasy and innocence of Alice. They returned to old Hollywood techniques where the face was and blended like a paint on a c o m p l e t e l y m a t t e d b e f o r e canvas. contouring created a strong brow The trick to perfectly blended and cheek. The eyes were expertly eyes is not necessarily in the done in shades of green, faded

technique, but in the brush. "You need a really good domed brush that can actually spread the eyeshadow as you put it on," I was told. "Instead of having something really tight and packed at the end, it should have an irregularity to it and a softness. A tightly packed brush will put the color on very strongly and then you can't get it off." —Rebecca Suhrawardi Austin Follow ELLE on Twitter.

A watch that'll give you the moon--plus a couple of beauties that settle for the time By blogeditor1 (Material Interest on Men.style.com)

Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) to a celestial disc charting the sky and the visible Submitted at 10/7/2009 9:57:31 AM stars of the Milky Way. Horology buffs tend to go nuts Fortunately, there are a few more for grand complications, so you recession-friendly offerings should expect to see plenty of available as well. Click for a few paper bags and Epsom salts at of our favorites in that (relatively today's Patrizzi & Co. auction in affordable) category. New York. On offer: a Patek Sale (second session) begins at Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon, 2 p.m. E.S.T. at Patrizzi & Co., the most complicated Patek ever 595 Madison Ave., Suite 605, (pictured above, front and back). NYC, (646) 763-8880; bids can Its estimated sale price: $1.1-$1.3 a l s o b e p l a c e d o n l i n e a t million, for which you get 12 patrizziauction.com MATTHEW complications, from cathedral SCHNEIER Photo: Courtesy of gongs (developed with help from Patrizzi & Co. the metallurgists at the Swiss

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First Impressions of Albert Hammond Jr.'s new line of suits By blogeditor1 (Material Interest on Men.style.com)

The suits are tricked out with details galore (an oversize ticket pocket here, squared-off waistcoat Submitted at 10/7/2009 1:44:39 PM there, suede trim wherever), all of It was a long time coming—the which give the collection a news was announced back in vintage, slightly aristo air. And A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 — b u t A l b e r t while there's a definite rock vibe, Hammond, Jr.'s suit line finally it's far from grungy—more hits the racks at Confederacy gentleman troubadour (think today. Ilaria Urbinati, who co- Bryan Ferry) than woke-upowns the L.A. men's shop and onstage frontman (we're not worked with the sometime Stroke naming names). Clearly, the target on the designs, calls the look "a customer is a guy who wears a good mix of old man, hunter, and suit because he wants to, not Alongside gray and not-quiteseventies rock 'n' roll." It's not because he has to. That's certainly navy are funkier options like hard to see what she's getting at. borne out by the color choices: h u n t e r g r e e n , c r e a m , a n d

burgundy—although Hammond has already claimed one of those for himself. Since they've made only 44 suits in total, all you aspiring rocker-dandies have just 43 chances to do the same. Click here for a slideshow of our favorite looks > Suits, $2,125 to $2,400, and trench, $1,250, available at Confederacy, 4661 Hollywood Blvd., L.A., (323) 913-3040, shopconfederacy.com MATTHEW SCHNEIER Photo: By stylemens (GQ: The Editors) Eric Ray Davidson

Japan's Coolest Mobile Phone Brand Submitted at 10/7/2009 6:00:00 AM

Alexander Wang Gives Us What We Want By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog) Submitted at 10/8/2009 5:21:00 AM

Over the past six seasons, I've spent more time than I care to admit searching eBay for sold-out -everywhere Alexander Wang treasures. First, it was his slouchy

sexy cashmere racer-back dresses, then the python leggings from fall 2008 and, most recently, those perfect tees from his T by Alexander Wang line. In a genius move, Wang is offering exclusive styles and fabrications, and burnout muscle tee, tank, and Timpossible-to-find pieces sold out shirt which are exclusive to the elsewhere on his site. Below, a

site (and all are under $79). Check back in to Shop Darling for up-tothe-minute posts on the hot items hitting Alexanderwang.com. —Violet Moon Gaynor Follow ELLE on Twitter.

Galliano, Best Fashion Show Invitation of the Month By ELLE.com (ELLE News Blog)

and is a fully functioning film clapboard, making it the most creative one I have seen to date. Submitted at 10/7/2009 3:26:52 PM Everyone looks forward to his Galliano's show invitation takes show, which always takes place at the cake for invite of the month. the tail end of the week, as a final, fashion month. We all know The invitation is made of wood fabulous finish to a whirlwind

Galliano's love of theatrics and if this invite is any indicator, it should be an Oscar-worthy performance. —Rebecca Suhrawardi Austin Follow ELLE on Twitter.

JAPAN'S continued from page 48 in October is by Naoto Fukasawa. If Darth Vader rocked a mobile phone in the original Star Wars, he'd be phoning-in the destruction of Alderaan with something like this. The "Ply" phone by Hideo

Kambura. It's sort of a riff on the grains of wood in a 2x4. Notice how each layer represents a different button/function. iida even pays attention to the design of power chargers, what's normally a banal afterthought

even though we have to use them every single day. The floating astronauts (proper name is "Rangers" by Shunsuke Umiyama) are a bit whimsical for my taste, but I like the practical simplicity of the Winding-

Charger by Youta Kakuda. Why aren't all cords retractable at a push of a button?— kevin sintumuang

There's a constant effort among tech companies in the U.S. to make mobile phones more fashionable, luxurious, "lifestyle" objects (whatever that means) by working out co-branding deals with labels like Prada or Giorgio Armani or just offering phones in a variety of garish colors. But what they should really be doing is taking a page from the playbook of KDDI, one of Japan's most design-forward handset manufacturers. Their new subbrand IIDA, whose lineup was on display here at CEATEC, puts an emphasis on what people really want when they're looking for a phone that stands out: smart design from the world's best industrial designers like Naoto Fukasawa—not slapping Swarovski crystals on an otherwise ordinary handset. It would be hard to give up my iPhone, but if I did it would be for one of these. The retro-futuristic "Prismoid" phone which comes out in Japan JAPAN'S page 48