I ride an old paint

I ride an old paint, I lead an old Dan
I'm goin' to Montana to throw the hoolihan
They feed in the coulees, they water in the draw
Their tails are all matted, their backs are all raw

Ride around little doggies, ride around them slow
For the fiery and snuffy are rarin' to go

Old Bill Jones had a daughter and a son
One went to college, the other went wrong
His wife, she got killed in a poolroom fight
But still he's a-singin' from mornin' till night

Ride around little doggies, ride around them slow
For the fiery and snuffy are rarin' to go

When I die, take my saddle from the wall
Place it on my old pony, lead him out of his stall
Tie my bones to my saddle and turn our faces to the West
And we'll ride the prairie we love the best

Ride around little doggies, ride around them slow
For the fiery and snuffy are rarin' to go


[One of the earliest songs I remember from my mother's nearly constant singing. It's one of those tunes that paints a whole story in your mind...though the landscape has changed in thirty years.]

[More American folk songs]

Beekeeping Ritual

It Was Ever Thus: Politics has always been a gun fight

Or, you can get there from here

Future Ziggurat

Mayan coloring book

Matthew's Wife sees Stela C

Ah, Archeology!

Your pompous, uncertain, demagogic, mysoginism never gets tiresome.


"Stela C

In 1939, archaeologist Matthew Stirling discovered at Tres Zapotes the bottom half of Stela C. This stela was carved from basalt, with one side showing an Olmec-style engraving that has been variously characterized as an abstract were-jaguar or a ruler on a throne.[13] On other side was the oldest Mesoamerican Long Count calendar date yet unearthed. This date, 7.16.6.16.18, correlates in our present-day calendar to September 3, 32 BCE, although there was some controversy over the missing baktun, the first digit, which Marion Stirling, Matthew's wife, had contended was a '7'. Her judgment was validated in 1969 when the top half of the stela was found.

Since 1939, only one older long-count date has been discovered, Stela 2 from Chiapa de Corzo, Chiapas, with a date of 7.16.3.2.13 (36 BCE).

The back of Stela C is engraved with one of the few surviving examples of Epi-Olmec script. Interestingly enough, a 1965 study concluded that Stela C, unlike most other basalt stonework at Tres Zapotes, was similar to the basalt used for La Venta Stela 3 and the basalt columns surrounding La Venta Complex A, which themselves have been traced to Punta Roca Partida, on the Gulf Coast at the northern side of the Los Tuxtlas Mountains.[14]"


[Thanks, Marion!]

Little Dragon: Best band bio

From the city of Gothenburg grew the birth of tiny creature.  Its breath full of fire passion death and dreams.
It lived in a fantasy called the electric forest. This forest was thick  with russtling secrets and  infintite amounts of pinetrees.
On occasional full moons the pine trees would light up in neon auras  of lime and turquoise and the ground would shake  with a steady rumble. The tiny creature grew into a little dragon.  It wrestled with the large wind sometimes. The heat of its breath would weave in with the cool air and make patterns in the sky. Although the creature was a powerful little beast it was light as a feather and would often sleep on the leaf flowing in the breeze.
And there it would dream in a dream. These dreams were without visuals and haunted by sounds.  electric sounds and beats would pump its little  heart and make her sleep walk around the forest like a ghost dancing in the night.
And the aching of this lonely creatures heart would be reflected in bittersweet melodies both haunting and happy.  

Titanically fallible assumptions

Behold, the Next Media Titans: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon

* By Fred Vogelstein Email Author
* October 25, 2010 |
* 2:28 pm |
* Categories: Future Shock, Intellectual Property, Media, Mobile Internet, Silicon Valley
*


Venture capitalist John Doerr is well-known for his hyperbole. Remember his comments about the internet bubble back in the late 1990s? “The largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.” Most forgive Doerr for getting swept up in things, though. His track record for spotting high tech inflection points and betting on the right companies is unparalleled.

But even a wide-eyed optimist like Doerr, who puts billion-dollar net worth where his mouth is, may be underestimating the seismic shifts going on under our feet.
This isn’t just about a software revolution. This is a massive reexamination of how technology, media and communications intersect.

Let’s recap: During the PC era in the 1980s, Doerr and his firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers were early investors in Compaq Computer and Sun Microsystems. During the internet era of the ’90s they helped lead deals in Netscape, Symantec, Amazon, Intuit and Google.

With two new funds, Doerr has raised nearly half a billion dollars to invest in the exploding mobile software and social media businesses. In May he said KPCB was doubling its $100 million mobile software fund because it had already run out of money. Last week he announced a $250 million social media fund and said that thanks to Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, what is happening now in the Valley is nothing short of a “third wave” of computing.

Doerr is hooked on how touchscreens and social networks accelerate use of the internet — and it’s easy to see how he gets there.

We in the United States already spend nearly as much time online as we do watching TV and those lines are merging so fast they are going to cross in a matter of months. Mobile search traffic at Google is up 50 percent in just the first six months of this year. And while a third of Facebook’s 500 million users access their accounts from a mobile device today, expect that number to double in the next two years as smartphone sales double. By 2012, more smartphones will be sold every year than laptop and desktop computers combined, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker.

But for once, I don’t think even Doerr has grasped how big a deal this is. This isn’t just about a new software revolution. There is a massive reexamination underway of how technology, media and communications intersect.

High tech and media have argued about the future for a generation by having the following debate: Are we going to watch TV and movies on our PCs, or are we going to surf the web and answer e-mail from our couch? They called it “convergence,” and it has been the source of so many business failures that few mention it anymore. Indeed, many have come to assume it will never happen.

Now it’s clear what the problem has been: Executives have framed the debate the wrong way. The PC will always be a lousy device to watch TV and movies on. The TV will always be a lousy device for web surfing and e-mail. Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are turning out to be good for all of them.

Watching a movie or a baseball game on a smartphone is obviously not the same as seeing it on a big television set, but its portability more than makes up for those shortcomings. It is the only option on the bus, for example. Last Thursday I watched part of the baseball playoffs on my iPhone while I was cleaning up the kitchen. When I was done, I watched the rest on my TV.

This is hugely disruptive. It means that Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are becoming more than just dominant technology companies. They are well on their way to becoming the news, entertainment and communications networks of the 21st Century. Five years from now they will touch and profit from almost everything we see, hear, read or buy — like giant media conglomerates. They will control most of the distribution and access to the largest audiences.

It’s already happening. Magazine publishers can’t heap enough praise on the iPad, but there is a reason why their readers must buy magazines individually: Apple and the publishers can’t agree on who will control the information from electronic subscriptions.

Count on the traditional media and communications moguls fighting these changes every step of the way. Phone and cable companies will be scrambling to make their bandwidth the choke point even as it becomes more and more of a commodity. Studios, networks and publishers will continue fighting over how best to control access to their content for maximum profits. But these new platforms already control so much of the world’s audience that it’s only a matter of time before that strategy runs aground.

When I have made this point to executives in the Valley and Hollywood, most make sure to point out that none of the big tech companies make or carry movies or television shows in a meaningful way. What I say in return is that they will. In small ways, they already are. Yes, Google is going toe to toe with the TV networks as we speak over whether the company will get access to their content for Google TV. But I can buy movies and TV shows on iTunes and Amazon. And I can log into most of those sites with my Facebook account.

Terry Semel, the former entertainment mogul who tried and failed to lead Yahoo to this new world, reminded me five years ago that whenever new ways to distribute media have been invented, those used to distributing it the old way scream about how it is going to put them out of business and then discover that it makes them more money than ever before.

It happened with movies on television and on video cassette. It happened with movies and TV shows on DVD. It will happen on the new networks of Silicon Valley too. It didn’t happen fast enough for Semel because there wasn’t an iPhone or an iPad then and Facebook — though Semel tried and failed to buy it — was too small to matter as much.

But all those pieces are in place now, and the powerful vortex being created will turn the world upside down much faster than anyone ever could have imagined.

Fred Vogelstein is writing a book about the intersection of media and tech in Silicon Valley. Follow him on Twitter @fvogelstein.


[The problem with all these predictions is that it fails to take into account two things: 1) people are animals, and it takes us generations and generations to adapt to new environments, and 2) things just haven't changed that much.

In conversation with my dad last night, we were talking about a funny instance of 21st century community in action: He and my mom were at a coffee shop and spotted a boy I had a crush on in high school. My mom emailed me about it, I found him on facebook, and by that evening, he and I had exchanged a couple messages catching up on the basics of what we'd missed over the past 15 years. (Not much.)

My dad asked if this had in some way improved my life. The answer was, unequivocally, "not really".

But to me, there's nothing really "new" about Facebook. It's the town square re-envisioned. It's the neighborly gossip repackaged. It's peeking in other people's windows...on a global scale. But it's nothing new.]

Sleeping Beauty by Granny O'Grimm

Public Straddling

Sim City InAction

Sim City With Population of Six Million People - Watch more Game Trailers

Sympathetic, maybe

Today in Fat Hatred
Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, October 26, 2010
[Trigger warning for fat hatred.]

Yesterday, I wrote that a fat woman "requires supernatural strength just to get through every goddamn day." There are people who will read that and think it's hyperbole.

They are people who don't understand the world is filled with bigoted assholes who have absolutely no compunction about unapologetically expressing their seething contempt, naked hostility, and rank hatred for fat people, right out in public.

Yes, it's the people who shout fat-hating epithets at us while we're Being Fat in Public, doing outrageous things like riding our bikes or eating or crossing the street, but it's also people like the writer who questions, without a trace of irony, whether she is being "an insensitive jerk" at the end of a piece in which she writes of fat people:

The other day, my editor asked me [with regard to the television show Mike & Molly], "Think people feel uncomfortable when they see overweight people making out on television?"

My initial response was: Hmm, being overweight is one thing — those people are downright obese! And while I think our country's obsession with physical perfection is unhealthy, I also think it's at least equally crazy, albeit in the other direction, to be implicitly promoting obesity! Yes, anorexia is sick, but at least some slim models are simply naturally skinny. No one who is as fat as Mike and Molly can be healthy. And obesity is costing our country far more in terms of all the related health problems we are paying for, by way of our insurance, than any other health problem, even cancer.

So anyway, yes, I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I'd find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

This is what I face every day: The knowledge that there are people who are "grossed out" just seeing me walk across a room.

This is a fact of my life: All around me are people who are repulsed by my very existence—and many of them make no pretense of it, make not a modicum of effort to conceal their revulsion.

A few months ago, Iain and I were having lunch at Panera Bread; we'd just picked up our food at the counter and I was walking to a table with my tray, which had on it a turkey sandwich, an apple, and a drink. The place was busy, and as I wound my way between tables toward empty seating, I noticed people staring at me. Like, everyone. This is not something that typically happens to me, so I thought I must have something on my face, or on my shirt, or snot hanging out of my nose...something.

I left the table and went to the restroom, where I looked at myself in the mirror. Nothing seemed out of place; my face and shirt were free of anything that didn't belong there, and my hair wasn't in some sort of shocking disarray. I noticed nothing unusual at all. I shrugged, and went back to the table.

Again, the staring.

I was quite genuinely mystified, and feeling really paranoid, until I passed a table and heard a woman not-really-whisper to her companion: "Well, there goes my appetite. Yuck."

I froze. I felt this ping in my gut as the reason for the staring became evident, as the realization washed over me that the thing I'd been missing in the mirror, the horror, was just me. In my entirety. In my enormity.

I wanted to turn to her and do something remarkable, to say something funny, to waggle my fat fingers at her and give her goggle-eyes and chant at her, "Ooga booga!" But I had been rendered numb by her casual cruelty, so unexpected.

I turned and looked at her. I don't know what the look on my face was. Hurt? Shock? Anger? Confusion? She looked momentarily startled, maybe even apologetic, an expression which was quickly replaced with a steely look of disdain. She averted her eyes and threw her napkin onto the table, as if to underline her disgust. How can I be expected to eat in your presence?

I turned back around and sat down to eat my lunch, and swallowed back tears with every bite, trying not to crumble.

There are days when it doesn't get to me and days when it does.

I don't hate myself for being fat, and I don't hate my body, and I don't let my being fat stop me from living a full life, and I am, genuinely, happy.

But I am hated by other people. Openly and brazenly. And I am unhappy about that.

I am especially unhappy about it because there are people with fewer resources, a weaker or nonexistent support system, and/or a crushing self-hatred who are subjected to the same thing. Who never have days when it doesn't get to them. Who have chosen to live their lives behind closed doors, because the world is too difficult, too cruel, to bear.

I could write yet another post about how being fat is not always a choice, about the intersection of fat and disability, about the intersection of fat and surviving sexual assault, about the intersection of fat and poverty, about access to fresh foods, about how there exist plenty of healthful fat people, about the changing parameters of obesity, about the correlation between HFCS subsidies and obesity, etc. etc. etc.

But, ultimately, none of that matters when it comes down to the basic fucking decency of treating fat people with dignity, irrespective of their particular reasons for being fat.

The author of this piece is comprehensively ignorant about granting to fat people the basic dignity and agency that any human being should be granted. That's beyond being "an insensitive jerk." That's being an asshole so thoroughly cloistered in privilege that you can blithely engage in the most vile dehumanization and then wax cluelessly about the possibility you were "insensitive."

Privileged white assholes used to (and sometimes still do) write articles about being disgusted by seeing two people of color (or—horrors!—a white person and a person of color) making out, too. Privileged straight assholes used to (and sometimes still do) write articles about being disgusted by seeing two people of the same sex making out, too. Privileged able-bodied assholes used to (and sometimes still do) write articles about being disgusted by seeing two people with physical and/or mental disabilities making out, too.

That shit isn't just dehumanizing: It's borderline eliminationist. When we acknowledge that ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and body size can be in total or in part inherited traits, to express revulsion at expressions of sexuality is to implicitly express revulsion at the potential for reproduction, and thus the creation of more of "those people."

Add in concern trolling about having to pay for "their" healthcare, and you've got a stinking heap of "the world would be better off without fatties" on your hands.

This is considered acceptable public discourse.

In response, let us recall, to the fact that two fat fictional characters on a television show no one is required to watch, might be depicted showing one another physical affection.

I could write about this all fucking day, but ultimately all I really want to offer in response is this picture of my nonfictional fat self kissing my nonfictional fat husband:


Did the world fucking end? No? Shocking.

I'm sure there are thin bigots barfing all over the world right now, at the site of two fat people (not even) making out. And when they're done, they can kiss my fat ass.

Fat people should not be expected to hide evidence of their humanity, in deference to other people's bigotry.

It's shameful that remains a radical statement.

internet definitions: "manslice"

As inspired by


"Manslice", according to the Urban Dictionary

And by popular demand













Yes please



...not really

Rare glimpse of reality: Bad Girls Club

The Medium
Party and Punishment

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: October 22, 2010


In April, after years of the online tabloids’ pushing photos of Lindsay Lohan looking undone in the back seats of limousines, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the TV addiction specialist, offered his opinion of Lohan to one of those Web sites.
Jirayu Koo

If Lohan “were my daughter,” Pinsky told Radar–Online, the celebrity gossip site, “I would pack her car full with illegal substances, send her on her way, call the police and make sure she was arrested.” Pinsky went on: “I would make sure she was not allowed to get out of jail. I would then go to the judge and make sure she was ordered to a minimum of a three-year sobriety program.”

It’s not clear whether a Pinskian frame-up ever took place. But Lohan, who is 24, has been sent to jail twice since Pinsky spoke to RadarOnline about her. Last summer she served 14 days of a 90-day sentence at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, Calif., for skipping the alcohol-education classes that the court mandated after two arrests in 2007 for drunken driving and drug possession. She was then sent to court-ordered rehab, but she failed a drug test not long after she checked out. She went briefly back to jail. She was released on bail. At the end of September, she checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., reportedly for cocaine addiction.

Lohan’s four mug shots, which can be found on Radar, TMZ, Gawker, Perez Hilton, Pop Crunch and dozens of other gossip sites, are online genre pieces: studies in inky eyeliner, corn-yellow peroxide and precinct-office fluorescence. Chin tilted down, eyes cast up, Lohan expresses glamour — the modern starlet’s answer to grace — under pressure.

Celebrity women may find it easy to get into glamorous character because they’re so often arrested during evenings on the town, dressed to the nines. Celebrity men who are arrested, by contrast, typically get photographed right after a fight and may still have the adrenaline, aggression and injuries that come with trading words or blows.

When Web sites publish images of celebrities in trouble, they also solicit comments on these images. The comments are rarely kind. One report about Lohan in The Los Angeles Times won this response, which is still on the newspaper’s site: “That coke-headed prostitute will never rehabilitate herself . . . she’s forever and truly a MESS!! Let the skank hit rock bottom . . . hard!” Online commenters seem to concur with Drew Pinsky: what these women “need,” beyond punishment for any particular violation of the law, is time in prison to grow up and wipe that smug pout — and pumpkin-colored bronzer — off their faces.

Not long ago, “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” a reality show, chronicled the public humiliation of Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the Virginia couple who managed to make it into a party at the White House without being on the guest list. While Michaele’s cast mates watched members of the House Homeland Security Committee grill and excoriate the Salahis, they whooped with delight. “Go to jail! Make some license plates!” shouted Lynda Erkiletian, a longtime social acquaintance of Ms. Salahi’s.

Over the course of the program, Lynda and the other cast members proposed that Michaele was controlled by her husband. They said she was unstable, a complete phony. They said she was like Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde murdered people.

In all the analysis, no one seems to zero in on what Michaele Salahi plainly is: a pretty lady who wants to dress up and have fun at fancy parties. Even after the story of her party-crashing broke, Salahi still wanted to talk to Bravo’s camera chiefly about her dress and what an impressive figure she had cut in it.

Maybe that’s not very noble. But in itself it’s not against the law. For that matter, alcoholism is not against the law, and neither is sleeping around or lying about how many drinks you’ve had or even seeming very, very skanky. For those who maturely skipped the party phase of life, gaming the guest list (But Russell Simmons said I’d have a plus one! My boyfriend’s right in the door!) is part and parcel of the night-life spirit — and also not in itself a jailable offense.

Right after 9/11, Muslim regimes were depicted as tyrannical in part because they demonized Western fun-loving culture in the name of a misogynistic ideology. Slowly but surely we’ve been doing the same thing with our most visible good-time girls, making villains of women who are dangerous almost exclusively to themselves. We point cameras into their darkened cars and literally up their skirts to find cellulite or evidence of immodesty that wouldn’t exist without the cameras. When they start drinking and doing drugs, just as many celebrities before them have done, we become incensed, agitating for them to go to jail. Pretty soon someone like Pinsky is openly scheming to frame one of them so she can end up behind bars. If these women are bad examples to our daughters, we who take a hang-’em-high attitude to party girls have officially become bad examples to their parents.

Parenthood by Proxy: Or, Why Men Might Like Motherhood

[WOW this sounds so familiar...]

Calling Mr. Mom?
By LISA BELKIN

You could easily compile statistics to make the case that women — at least Western women — are already empowered. In the United States, we are 50 percent of the workplace (and 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs). We receive three college degrees for every two earned by men (along with 60 percent of all master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees and 43 percent of M.B.A.’s). Working wives are coming close to bringing in nearly half the household income. Single, childless urban women under 30 actually earn 8 percent more than their male peers.

But all this evidence isn’t particularly persuasive to the one group that should know: women. After all, you could compile a whole other set of figures that show just how far from empowered we are. Start with the Government Accountability Office study last month, which found that professional women still make 81 cents for every dollar a man makes in a similar job. Then count the women in the corner suites and the highest-paying professions. (It won’t take you long: women currently make up only 3 percent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s.) And women still perform twice the housework and three times the child care that men do, even in homes where women are the primary breadwinners.

Telling women they have reached parity is like telling an unemployed worker the recession is over. It isn’t true until it feels true. That’s because measuring women’s power by looking only at women — and by looking mostly at the workplace — paints a false picture.

Men today are at the turning point women reached several decades ago, when the joint demands of work and home first intensified. In her new book, “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter,” Joan C. Williams describes how men find themselves caught between meeting cultural expectations and a growing dissatisfaction with the constricted roles shaped by those expectations. “You have to ask why, if women are asking men to change, and if men say they want change, it hasn’t happened,” she says. “Either they are all lazy, or they are under tremendous gender pressures of their own.”

The life-work dilemma for women has long been that “the workplace has changed in their favor, but home hasn’t,” she says. Men, however, “have the opposite problem. More is expected of them at home, but expectations have not shifted at work.” Which explains why the percentage of fathers in dual-income households who say they suffer work-family conflict has risen to 59 percent from 35 percent since 1977.

Younger couples say they want and expect parity in their relationships. But many women still carry a chip on their shoulders, chiseled in part by years of keeping all those to-do lists in their heads. And if men can find no relief from the pressures of work, they are not going to be able to fit into the revamped economy of home.

How then to inch toward change? Can we make it “manly” (or even better, “gender neutral”) to spend a day with a child, or earn less money but have more family time, or be the only parent at a parent-teacher conference because your wife has a meeting? “If long hours are really about proving ‘whose is bigger,’ you can have flex policies until the sun sets and men won’t use them,” Williams says.

Indeed, where flex policies are offered, American men don’t use them as much as American women do. In California, one of two states in the country to provide paid parental leave (or “bonding leave”) for both parents, 74 percent of new mothers took the new benefit compared with 26 percent of new fathers. This is, to be sure, an improvement over the 17 percent who took it when the program was first introduced in 2004-2005. (It is also significantly higher than the percentage of French men who take time off. French law allows both parents to take a leave or to work reduced hours until their child is 3, but 97 percent of those who do so are women.) It’s better than it used to be, but it’s far from equal.

There are some practical reasons for these discrepancies. Biology dictates that many women will take pauses during the prime career-building years that men don’t need to take. Similarly, breast-feeding during the first month to year of life means a child necessarily spends more time with the mother. Often, though, what look like causes are really effects — we make assumptions about sex roles and then reinforce them with our behavior. If you challenge those assumptions, it follows that you can change behavior. Which explains what happened in Sweden.

Today the Swedes have one of the world’s most forward-thinking parental leave policies, but it took years of tweaking before men took substantial time off to care for children. Starting in 1974, couples were given six months of paid leave to divide in any way they chose. Women consistently used more of the time than men; in fact, only 4 percent of fathers took any leave at all. In 1995, however, a month of fathers-only leave was introduced, and in 2002, another month of “daddy leave” was added, bringing the total to 480 days. If men don’t take the leave before their child turns 8, they lose the days. Now about 80 percent of Swedish dads take at least some time off.

By steering men toward a particular path, Sweden redefined the nature of choice. Parental leave was transformed from a way to escape the world of work into a way to maximize the benefits available to families; from an emotional decision to a financial one; from something mothers do to something every parent does. Would that same kind of redefinition — of the relationship between work and home, of the roles of men and women — work on this side of the Atlantic? In at least one case, it already has.

Four years ago, the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers wanted a flextime policy but worried about the mommy-track stigma attached. They looked for a way to make flextime gender neutral by giving it a clear business purpose. Workers were asked to participate in a pilot program to create a telecommuting infrastructure in case a terrorist attack or natural disaster crippled its Manhattan headquarters. Men who didn’t stay home to take care of children began to do so when it became a matter of national security.

Empowering American women can no longer focus only on women — on leveling playing fields or offering mothers “on-ramps” and “offramps” or shattering ceilings one at a time. All those efforts must continue, yes. But none will succeed if we don’t change our expectations for men. Or, more accurately, men’s expectations for themselves.

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog.

No limit to my love

James Blake - Limit To Your Love from James Blake on Vimeo.

L'Essence d'Air-Pay-Jay

Apples to Apples

Apple Censorship: Coming Soon to Your Text Messages?
Submitted: October 13, 2010 - 2:15pm
Originally published: October 13, 2010
Last updated: October 13, 2010 - 2:16pm
Source: GigaOm
Author: Darrell Etherington
Location: Apple, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, 95014, United States

A new patent the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just approved was filed in 2008 by Apple and prevents users from sending and receiving "objectionable" text messages.

The patent, officially called "Text-based communication control for personal communication device," essentially prevents what's known as "sexting." If this tech ever makes it way to your smartphone, it could theoretically alert a user, administer, or other designated individual whenever objectionable content appears in a text message. In practice, that could mean a parent gets a text when their teenage son writes something racy, or that your boss gets a notice whenever you swear in an outbound communication.

According to the patent, the iPhone could also offer suggestions with which to replace the offending text, or just delete it outright as soon as you're done typing so that it never gets sent in the first place. In effect, that means it could actually change what you're going to say.

Links to Sources
Apple Censorship: Coming Soon to Your Text Messages?


As the iPhone Goes ...
Submitted: October 14, 2010 - 7:52am
Last updated: October 14, 2010 - 7:54am
Source: New York Times
Author: Editorial staff
Location: Apple, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, 95014, United States

[Commentary] Apple isn't commenting on reports that it will release a new iPhone for use on Verizon Wireless's network next year. We find the prospect of a non-AT&T iPhone tantalizing. Could it mean that wireless service providers will finally have to accept real competition? We hope that the next announcement will be that Apple will offer iPhones not only for use on Verizon but also on T-Mobile, Sprint and, indeed, any wireless provider. That could be the real start of liberation.
Links to Sources
As the iPhone Goes...

Acquired: No Connection, No Order, No Kidding

Hooorah!

12 October 2010 Last updated at 16:24 ET


US ban on openly gay military personnel suspended
Lt Dan Choi, shown chained to the White House fence Iraq veterans including Lt Dan Choi were among those discharged under the policy

A US judge has ordered a nationwide halt to enforcement of the country's ban on openly gay military personnel.

US District Judge Virginia Phillips last month ruled the "don't ask, don't tell" policy unconstitutional.

Under the policy, gay people can serve in the military but face expulsion if they reveal their sexuality.

President Barack Obama and some military leaders have called for it to be overturned. A legislative attempt to do so failed in the Senate last month.

The US Department of Justice has 60 days to appeal but may opt not to do so.

Last month the ban was also ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in Washington state. A judge there ordered the US Air Force to reinstate a nurse sacked under the policy.

Under the policy, established in 1993 under former President Bill Clinton, the US military is forbidden to inquire about service members' sexual orientation, but can expel people discovered to be homosexual.

The lawsuit was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans, a pro-gay Republican group, on behalf of openly gay military personnel who had been discharged under the policy.

Overturning the ban, Judge Phillips cited Mr Obama's contention that it weakened national security by forcing qualified military personnel to "live a lie" or have their careers compromised.

Dear Phoebe

Love,
Mom & Dad