The proposed rewrite of the web's backbone comes with both benefits and caveats
Faster Internet Google's Chromium group wants to boost your Internet browsing Google
Google has scarcely stopped for a breather since launching its cloud-based Chrome OS as an alternative to PC and Mac operating systems. Now its Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional HTTP web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent.
HTTP currently is the protocol used by all web servers and browsers, hence the "http" in front of web addresses. But, as noted by Ars Technica, HTTP becomes inefficient when transferring many small files on many modern websites.
By contrast, Google's cleverly named SPDY protocol (pronounced SPeeDY, get it?) can compress and handle the individual requests via one connection that's SSL-encrypted. That allows higher-priority files to slip through immediately without becoming backed up behind large files.
SPDY has shown up to 55 percent web page loading when tested under lab conditions, and the Google team has released their source code for public feedback.
But Ars Technica raises some points of caution about the mandatory SSL encryption requiring more processing power from small devices and computers alike. Requiring SSL could also worsen the problem where server operators neglect SSL encryption and unintentionally encourage people to ignore warnings about unsecured websites.
Still Google's team recognizes these problems and has already proposed workaround solutions. An open approach has already proven a smashing success on Google's Android operating system, but redesigning the Internet's architecture will undoubtedly prove trickier in the days to come.
$18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site
July 08, 2009 9:50 PM
ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: For those concerned about stimulus spending, the General Services Administration sends word tonight that $18 million in additional funds are being spent to redesign the Recovery.gov Web site.
The new Web site promises to give taxpayers more information about where their money is going than the current version of the site.
“Recovery.gov 2.0 will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent,” James A. Williams, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says in a press release announcing the contract awarded to Maryland-based Smartronix Inc. “Armed with easy access to this information, taxpayers can make government more accountable for its decisions.”
The contract calls for spending $9.5 million through January, and as much as $18 million through 2014, according to the GSA press release.
“We are pleased that another major milestone has been achieved," Earl E. Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, says in the press release. “We thank the GSA for its assistance and look forward to working with Smartronix."
UPDATE: The RNC has released a new web ad mocking the Obama administration's decision to allocate additional funds to the redesign of the Recovery.gov Web site.
What are those Muslims doing over this Thanksgiving holiday?
This Thanksgiving holiday coincides this year with part of the annual Hajj (Pilgrimage) that Muslims participate in.
The Hajj is the annual pilgrimage that all Muslims are required to perform once in their lifetime, if able. The Hajj is a journey that takes place in Saudi Arabia. The pilgrims performing Hajj go to the city of Mecca and sometimes travel through Medina or Jeddah. The Hajj is performed from the 7th to the 13th days of the month Dhu Al-Hijjah in the Islamic Calendar year. This is the 12th month of this lunar calendar. A series of rituals are performed during the Hajj.
Interestingly this year 2009, one of those rituals, the Day of ‘Arafah, seems to be coinciding with Thanksgiving Day. On the Day of ‘Arafah, the 9th day of the Dhu al-Hijjah, Muslims who are on Hajj spend the day praying on the plain of ‘Arafah. Those who are not able to make the Hajj traditionally spend their day of ‘Arafah fasting. This is not an obligatory fast. The fast for Muslims lasts from the first obligatory prayer of the day (Fajr) to the evening prayer (Mahgrib). This is about an hour and a half before the sunrises to sunset. This fast is done in preparation for the three festive days that follow the Hajj. These days are called ‘Eid al-Adha. These days are most celebratory for the Muslim, like Christmas and Easter would be for the Christian or Yom Kippur for the Jew.
There are many benefits to the Muslim fast on the day of ‘Arafah. "Fasting on the day of 'Arafah absolves the sins for two years: the previous year and the coming year, and fasting on 'ashûra, (the tenth day of Muharram) atones for the sins of previous years." [ Reported by all except al-Bukhârî and Tirmidhî] A prayer traditionally offered on this day is :"‘None has the right to be worshipped except God, alone, without partner. To Him belongs all praise and sovereignty and He is over all things omnipotent.’
While others are spending their day eating and filling their stomachs, many Muslims will be fasting and seeking to purify themselves. So, when you see Muslims fasting on Thanksgiving this year, do not be alarmed, you know why.
Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.
“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection," Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in PasayCity.
In the Philippines, small brothels usually pop up near the coastal areas where many women perform sexual services for transient seafarers. Often, these prostitutes are ferried to bigger ships by their pimps.
Based on the UNFPA report, there are 92 million Filipinos in the country as of 2009 and that number is expected to balloon to more than 146 million in the next 40 years.
Of the 92 million Filipinos, about 60 percent are living in coastal areas and depend on the seas for livelihood, said former Environment secretary Dr. Angel Alcala.
Alcala said that “we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our marine environment."
But as the sea’s resources are depleted due to overpopulation and overfishing, fishermen start losing their livelihood and women are forced to share the traditional role of the man in providing for the family.
Alacala, who also heads the Angelo King Center for Research and Environmental Management in Silliman University, said some women often pick out shellfish by the coastlines, which exposed to storm surges.
Women who can no longer endure this work often go out to find other jobs, while some are tempted to go into prostitution, Alcala added.
In an interview with the Inter Press News Agency, Marita Rodriguez of the Centre for Empowerment and Resource Development, Inc. said women are taking the brunt of climate change.
"Aside from their household chores and participation in fishing activity, they have to find additional sources of income like working as domestic helpers in affluent families," she said.
The UNFPA noted that the temperature in the earth’s surface has risen 0.74 degrees Celsius in the past 100 years. The 10 warmest years globally since 1880 have also been recorded in the last 13 years.
“Slower population growth, for example, would help build social resilience to climate change’s impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse gas-emissions in the future," the UNFPA report said.
The UNFPA suggested five measures to mitigate climate change and overpopulation:
Bring a better understanding of population dynamics, gender and reproductive health to climate change and environmental discussions at all levels;
Fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies within the framework of reproductive health and rights, and assure that low income is no barrier to access;
Prioritize research and date collection to improve the understanding of gender and population dynamics in climate change mitigation and adaptation;
Improve sex-disaggregation of date related to migration flows that are influenced by environmental factors and prepare now for increases in population movements resulting from climate change; and
Integrate gender considerations into global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Why the U.S. decision to rejoin the U.N.
Human Rights Council is self-defeating. By Anne Bayefsky
. This means that the United States
will soon be sitting down with Saudi Arabia,
Cuba, and China to talk
about human rights. Not human rights in Saudi
Arabia, Cuba,
and China,
mind you. But human rights in Israel
and the United States.
The Human Rights Council is the United Nations' lead human rights body.
Created in 2006 by the General Assembly as a "reformed" Human Rights
Commission, the council has taken the worst elements of its predecessor and
magnified them. Former U.S. President George W. Bush decided not to join it
after various U.S.-suggested reforms -- such as minimal standards of respect
for human rights among member states -- were rejected. Now, U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations, Susan Rice, claims that "working from within, we
can make the council a more effective forum." The U.S. State Department
speaks of future reform.
In other words, the United
States is joining a fundamentally flawed
body in order to make it something that it isn't. Disingenuous, to say the
least. The council already is the reform. Its predecessor lasted half a
century, and the same stumbling blocks that prevented fixing of the system in
2006 are still present and more entrenched than ever. The majority of the
members of the U.N. General Assembly are not fully free democracies.
Getting serious about democratic rights and freedoms is not their
priority.
The council itself is controlled by human rights abusers who like it just
the way it is. Membership is determined by distributing seats among five
regional groups, with the African and Asian groups holding the majority. In
turn, member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) hold a
majority in each of the African and Asian groups. This gives the OIC the
balance of power. When the going gets tough, the single U.S. vote, or
the seven votes of the "Western European and Others Group" (WEOG),
amount to a hill of beans. Resolutions are continually watered down for the
sake of artificial consensus or adopted over the objection of every WEOG
member. Just last week, we saw another sorry example of this phenomenon, with
the adoption of a resolution on the "defamation of religions." What
does restricting free speech in the name of "religion" have to do
with protecting individual human rights?
By letting some of the world's worst regimes rub shoulders with its leading
democracy, the United States
becomes an enabler. These governments don't share Western or universal values.
They use the council to: (1) feign interest in human rights, (2) keep the focus
on Israel
and away from themselves, (3) manufacture victim status, (4) encourage liberal
guilt and concomitant financial responsibility, and (5) undermine the universal
application of real human rights standards.
The record is incontrovertible. The council has passed more resolutions and
decisions condemning Israel
than all other 191 U.N. members combined. The council has one (of only
ten) formal agenda items dedicated to criticizing Israel. And one agenda item
to consider the human rights of the remaining 99.9 percent of the world's
population. There have been 10 regular sessions on human rights for all, and
five special sessions to condemn Israel alone. The council excludes
only Israel
from the key negotiating and information-sharing meetings of every regional
group. It has terminated human rights investigations on Belarus, Cuba,
Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
And all investigations of "consistent patterns of gross and reliably
attested violations of all human rights and all fundamental freedoms" in
such states as Iran, Kyrgyzstan, the Maldives,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have
been "discontinued."
Absolutely none of that will change with the United States sitting in the front
row, Obama's rhetorical skills notwithstanding. On the contrary, joining this
farce means accepting the discriminatory agenda and attending WEOG meetings
with a sign reading "no representatives of the Jewish people allowed"
hanging on the door.
The Council's one new device -- the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) -- was
heralded as introducing a careful examination of all UN states without
discrimination. What actually happens is that a series of human-rights abusers
congratulate one another, avoid any serious scrutiny, and then denigrate the
democracies that agreed to the travesty in the first place.
Ironically, in the name of "engagement" the United States
will now repeatedly be drawn into confrontations that could have been avoided.
With Canada leaving the
council, the European Union spineless in the face of OIC opposition, and the
international human rights system now opposed to "naming and
shaming," the United
States will have to rock the boat if it
wants to avoid joining a corrupt consensus. This will mean voting
against OIC-driven resolutions and proposing "controversial"
condemnations of any state other than Israel.
President Obama has waded into quicksand, which will drown both U.S. efforts to
protect human rights and his sought-after reputation as their champion. Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Director of
the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
SEATTLE (AP) Personal computers are changing — and not just
because of the recent launch of Windows 7. Visit an electronics store and you
might also find laptops are missing a familiar component. You could experiment
with new ways of controlling some computers. And you'll see portable PCs slimming down.
Even with all the attention lavished on Apple's iPhone and Amazon.
COM’s Kindle this year; your PC likely is still the center of your digital
universe. Here's a look at what the season's computer trends mean for you.
We're over drives: Computers have come with "optical
drives," slots for CDs or DVDs, for years. They've been useful for
installing new software, watching movies or transferring music libraries into
digital form. But one of the biggest lessons from the craze for netbooks —
inexpensive little laptops designed mainly for browsing the Web — is that
people were so excited about the small, easy-to-carry size that they didn't
miss having a CD or DVD drive.
Apple Inc. got rid of an optical drive two years ago when it
introduced the first sliver-thin MacBook Air. That wasn't seen as a
trendsetting step at the time because the computer, which cost $1,800
(¥162,000) then, wasn't meant for mainstream consumption. But netbooks, which
start at $250 (¥22,500) on BestBuy.com, surely are made for everyone. The wee
laptop's popularity is proof that people are finding it easy enough to download
software, movies and music to portable computers, especially with the
widespread availability of Wi-Fi and cellular Internet service. And plenty of services let you store files
over the Internet, eliminating the need to burn backups to discs.
Taking out the optical drive doesn't significantly lower prices.
But doing so does let PC-makers design much thinner laptops. Companies
including Dell and Hewlett-Packard have pulled DVD drives out of mid-range to
more expensive computers, such as HP's Pavilion dm3z, which starts at $550
(¥50,000), all the way up to the $1,700-and-up (¥153,000) HP Envy and Dell's
$1,500-and-up (¥135,000) Adamo.
You just might want to think twice if you're hooked on
transferring CDs into MP3s — or if you spend a lot of time watching DVDs on
airplanes and don't want to squint at your iPod screen or get a separate
portable video player.
Good enough is plenty: It might sound impressive when a
PC sales pitch mentions multicore processors, state-of-the-art graphics chips,
6 or 8 gigabytes of memory and hard drives with a terabyte — 1,000 gigabytes —
of storage. But another thing netbooks showed is that with a few exceptions —
such as professional video editing, and maybe hardcore video-game playing — having
lots of PC power is overkill.
There's very little software that can take advantage of these
powerful computers, says technology analyst Rob Enderle. That means there's no "killer app,"
the program that's so cool or so useful it persuades everyday PC users to trade
up.
While the microprocessors that act as the brains inside netbooks
are less powerful than even those found in inexpensive full-size laptops, they
are sufficient for most Web browsing, e-mailing and word processing. And these
computers are getting bigger hard drives, which you need for storing digital
photos, music and video. Overall, they're good enough that, to people replacing
three- and four-year-old PCs, netbooks feel downright fast.
Go for more power only if you watch high-definition TV and
films, or edit HD home movies. Those tasks would require beefier machines.
Everything's getting carried away: People want Internet
access all the time, and PC-makers are betting "smart" phones — even
the iPhone — aren't big or ergonomic enough for anything more complex or time-consuming
than a quick e-mail reply.
But already the line between phones and PCs is blurring:
PC-makers are teaming with mobile carriers to sell netbooks that cost as little
as $99 (¥8,900) as long as the buyer subscribes to a wireless data service. A
new buzzword, "smartbooks," is emerging to describe a device that
runs a smart-phone operating system such as Google Inc.'s Android but on bigger
hardware that is more like a PC than a phone.
To get you to carry their laptops to the corner coffee shop, PC
companies are treating their wares as fashion accessories, not just tools. You'll see more colors and
patterns, more design-conscious shapes and upscale materials.
"Thin and light is sort of the new black," says
Forrester Research analyst Paul Jackson.
The next frontier: cutting the cord for longer stretches. New
chips that require less energy are emerging, and advances in battery technology
are expected in the coming years to extend the time people can sit in the
airport watching YouTube.
Hands-on has its place: In 2007, the iPhone made
"multitouch" mainstream. Unlike ATM screens, which recognize one
finger pushing on one spot at a time, the iPhone's screen responds to pinching
and swiping gestures made with multiple fingers. Microsoft Corp.'s coffee-
table-size Surface computer, designed for hotel lobbies and shops and also
released in 2007, responds to similar gestures and can be operated by several
people at once.
Now the PC is in on the action. Windows 7 includes more support
for multitouch applications, making some basic touch commands work even on
programs that weren't designed for it. You'll see more laptops and
"all-in-one" desktops — computers that stash all the technology in
the case behind the screen — with multitouch screens. HP, Dell and others have
designed software intended to make it easy to flip through photos and music or
browse the Web with a fingertip instead of a mouse.
Apple, for its part, has multitouch track pads for laptops and a
multitouch mouse, but says it isn't interested in making a touch-screen Mac.
Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook calls it "a gimmick."
Will multitouch replace the mouse and keyboard? Probably not,
but that doesn't mean it won't become a useful part of the way you work with
your computer. Watching someone who has used a touch-screen computer for
several months is interesting — they'll reach to the screen to scroll down a
Web page just as fluidly as they type and use the mouse.
In the wake of the controversial dismissal of Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, another of the President's men has been attracting negative attention.
The President has chosen teacher and GLBT activist Kevin Jennings for advice and guidance on how best to foster a safe and drug-free environment for America's school children. Much has already been written about Jennings's controversial background, his troubling associations, his questionable ethics, and his obvious lack of qualification and suitability for the job of Safe Schools Czar. Given Obama's need to stay in the public's good graces in order to advance the cause of health care reform, it would hardly be surprising to see Kevin Jennings gently shoved off the President's roster of advisors if this criticism continues.
What the American people are beginning to realize—thanks to appointees like Van Jones and Kevin Jennings—is that the President's vision for the country involves far more than making health care accessible to all or reducing our collective carbon footprint. True to his promise to bring about "change," Mr. Obama is aggressively pursuing a comprehensive policy of social engineering designed to do just that.
And he is using America's schools as an instrument to produce that change.
Ostensibly, Mr. Jennings was selected as Director of the Office for Safe and Drug-Free Schools due to his work in addressing the problem of bullying—a worthy and necessary effort to be sure. Many children feel unsafe at school due to systematic harassment and violence at the hands of their peers. What's revealing, however, is that—despite little evidence to suggest that the bullying of gay kids in particular is a pervasive problem—Mr. Jennings' principal criteria in evaluating the "safety" of a school appears to be the extent to which that school is a supporter and advocate of homosexuality and other alternative sexual orientations.
With Mr. Jones, the President attempted to advance his controversial agenda by appointing an individual of dubious qualifications to head up a noble-sounding effort. "Green jobs" was a pretext for advancing a divisive and partisan "social justice" agenda. With Kevin Jennings, "safe schools" turns out to be a euphemism for the advancement and promotion of the GLBT agenda. Were Mr. Jennings truly concerned with addressing the problem of bullying in school he might focus on developing programs that emphasize the basic precept of the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would wish to be treated. Do not do violence to others for any reason. Be tolerant of others, even those with whom you disagree. Such a program would work to increase the safety and security of all children, including those struggling with GLBT issues.
It appears that the true purpose of the Safe Schools Czar, then, is not to reduce instances of bullying in schools but to normalize alternative sexual identities and practices through a systematic program of indoctrination in the classroom. Recognizing the truth of Abraham Lincoln's observation that "the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next," Mr. Obama knows that the best way to achieve his larger "progressive" vision of eradicating all traces of outmoded moral convention from the American social consciousness is to start with the children.
As far as Mr. Jennings is concerned, the moral validity of homosexuality is self-evident; it is as indisputable as the roundness of the earth or the sum of two and two. The fact that approximately 50% of the American people believe that homosexuality is immoral merely confirms to Jennings the importance of his mission and the necessity of his schoolroom strategy. Just as it's necessary to prohibit Christmas cards and prayer in school in order to preserve the radicals' vision of the separation of Church and State, so too is it necessary to advance the views of homosexuals by ensuring that every American child is educated about the scope and variety of their sexual options in life. It counts for nothing that most parents would object to their children being made unwitting dupes of a social agenda they find morally-objectionable and antagonistic to their religious views and notions of the traditional family. Hijacking the classroom, however, is key to advancing the GLBT agenda.
With each passing day, it's becoming increasingly clear that the change the American people voted for is not the "change" President Obama envisions for our country. It remains to be seen, however, whether the American people are prepared to compromise their children's education in service of Mr. Obama's vision of the future. If the answer is no, then it may well be that Mr. Jennings isn't the only one whose days are numbered.
slimming down.