… They get quotes from a number of employees who say the reasoning behind the move is security-related and specifically a result of the recent Chinese hacking incident..
“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,”
“Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,”
“Particularly since the China scare, a lot of people here are using Macs for security,” …
At a time when President Obama’s relationship with the military is already on shaky ground, his decision to take a vacation with his family in Chicago rather than pay his Memorial Day respects at Arlington National Cemetery further proves his apathy toward our armed forces, according to some veterans. …
This should be no surprise. Democrats in general don’t like or respect the military so it is natural for Obama to value a vacation above honoring the vets. One might keep that in mind come November.
The Israeli Navy first reported sighting the pro-Palestinian, so-called “Freedom Flotilla” bound for the Gaza Strip late Sunday night. Israeli Navy vessels spotted and made radio contact with the Gaza aid ships approx. 200 km off the Palestinian enclave’s coast, according to The Jerusalem Post. The convoy were asked to follow the navy boats to dock at Ashdod port near Tel Aviv, or else the Israeli Navy would board the activists’ ships, said the report.
Upon attempting to board the six ships -who ignored repeated warnings to steer to an Israeli port- the sailors were met with pre-planned violence including exchanges of gunfire from the ships, according to the Israeli Navy. The Jerusalem Post now reports this foolish act of aggression resulted in 15 activists dead and dozens injured in the ensuing battle… five Israeli sailors were injured by the well-orchestrated ambush. It’s hard to fathom just what the occupants of this Turkish-sponsored ship were thinking attacking Israeli commandos with small arms and truncheons, and thus the one-sided result.
The Gaza aid ships set sail on Sunday from the Mediterranean international waters near Cyprus and headed to the besieged territory amid tension due to Israel’s threats to block the convoy. The six-vessel, pro-palestinianflotilla, as much a publicity stunt as an aid shipment, carried more than 10,000 tons of aid, stationery, medical supplies and construction materials as well as hundreds of peace activists from 40+ countries.
Israel imposes a tight blockade on the coastal enclave since the Islamic Hamas movement forcibly seized the territory in 2007 after routing rival Fatah party, now in charge of the West Bank territory.
“In 2009, $60 billion worth of items were sold on eBay, meaning ‘extra’ money for many sellers, whose activities may provide them with taxable income. Now the Washington Post reports that beginning next year, a new law will require ‘the gross amount of payment card and third-party network transactions to be reported annually to participating merchants and the IRS.’ Also, for 2011 tax returns, ‘taxpayers who annually sell more than $20,000 worth of goods and have more than 200 electronic transactions’ will receive a new IRS form, known as 1099-K, for reporting the proceeds. The new tax issues shouldn’t be a concern for people who sell just a few small items online for less than they paid for them, because as the IRS points out, income from auctions that resemble a garage or yard sale ‘generally’ isn’t required to be reported. But if an online garage sale turns into a business with recurring sales and purchases of items for resale, it may be considered an online auction business. ‘Generally, transactions resulting in a gain are reportable, regardless of whether the taxpayer is conducting a business,’ says Gil Charney, principal tax researcher at The Tax Institute at H&R Block. The real reason behind the law is simple: Research shows taxpayers do a much better job of reporting taxable income when they know the IRS is receiving information about their transactions.”
“‘Sticky,’ in the social sciences and particularly economics, describes a situation in which a variable is resistant to change. For websites or products it usually means that visitors or customers keep coming back for more. Now Fortune Magazine reports on an analysis by Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore on what makes the (iTunes-based) iPhone-iPod-iPad platform so sticky and why it’s going to get harder, not easier, for Apple users to switch, no matter what Google and the rest of Apple’s competitors have up their sleeves. Whitmore says the investment Apple’s customers have made in content for those devices in terms of apps, videos, and music purchased at the iTunes Store creates Apple’s ’stickiness.’ Apple has an installed base today of about 150 million iTunes-dependent devices that could grow to more than 200 million by the end of 2011. Whitmore comes up with a cumulative investment in those devices of about $15 billion today, growing to $25 billion by the end of next year. ‘This averages to ~$100 of content for each installed device,’ Whitmore writes, ’suggesting switching costs are relatively high (not to mention the time required to port). When Apple’s best-in-class user experience is combined with these growing switching costs, the resulting customer loyalty is unparalleled.’”
MONTGOMERY COUNTY has just completed a nightmarish budget year. Stressed, squabbling and besieged elected officials savaged services and programs and jacked up taxes to eliminate an eye-popping deficit of almost $1 billion in a $4.3 billion spending plan. Meanwhile, across the Potomac River in Fairfax County, all was sweetness and light by comparison. With a budget roughly equal to Montgomery’s, Fairfax officials erased a deficit a quarter as large with relative ease and far less drama.
The picture isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Montgomery, having already pruned the low-, medium- and some high-hanging budgetary fruit, is facing annual deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars as far as the eye can see. Fairfax, though facing tough choices and further cuts in an economy clouded by recession, has a brighter future. …
A real eye opener and a harbinger to our national problem.
Where was the White House plan, and why has it been so slow to make decisions?
By KARL ROVE
As President Obama prepares to return to the Gulf Coast Friday, he is receiving increasing criticism for his handling of the oil spill. For good reason: Since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, a lethargic Team Obama has delayed or blown off key decisions requested by state and local governments and left British Petroleum in charge of developing a plan to cap the massive leak.
Now the slow-moving oil spill threatens Mr. Obama’s reputation, along with 40% of America’s sensitive wetlands. Critics include some of his most ardent cheerleaders, who understand that 38 days without an administration solution is unacceptable. …
All watch and no dog. This is also the failure of the main stream media who are supposed to be the watchdogs of all politicians. But instead they only criticize reps and just watch Obama and the dems. They have fallen down on their job and instead just wag their tails and watch, like the democrats lapdogs they are.
“German firm Medien Patent Verwaltung claims that in 2003, it revealed a new kind of anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros. that marks films with specific codes so pirated copies can be traced back to their theaters of origin. But like a great, hilariously-ironic DRM Ouroborus, the company claims that Warner began using the system throughout Europe in 2004 but hasn’t actually paid a dime for it.”
“In an unexpected development for the depressed market for mathematical logicians, Wall Street has begun quietly and aggressively recruiting proof theorists and recursion theorists for their expertise in applying ordinal notations and ordinal collapsing functions to high-frequency algorithmic trading. Ordinal notations, which specify sequences of ordinal numbers of ever increasing complexity, are being used by elite trading operations to parameterize families of trading strategies of breathtaking sophistication. The monetary advantage of the current strategy is rapidly exhausted after a lifetime of approximately four seconds–an eternity for a machine, but barely enough time for a human to begin to comprehend what happened. The algorithm then switches to another trading strategy of higher ordinal rank, and uses this for a few seconds on one or more electronic exchanges, and so on, while opponent algorithms attempt the same maneuvers, risking billions of dollars in the process.”
This weekend, I had a conversation with someone non-crazy who thinks there is a not-insignificant chance that the Supreme Court will overturn health care reform, or at least the individual mandate (it’s not clear what happens to the rest of the law if the mandate goes down; there’s some possibility that this would invalidate the entire law). Mind you, this person was not suggesting that the chances were, say, 85%; more like 25%.
But in a case like this, 25% is a big chance. So we spent a bit of time speculating about what would happen next. …
2 out of 3 people would breath a sigh of relief… and that’s just dems running for office in November.
Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to become the world’s most valuable technology company.
In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.
The only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $282 billion. …
Now the pundits and Apple haters will have a field day.
Arizona’s law that attempts to enforce existing immigration statutes was premised largely on the fact that the federal government, which has constitutional responsibility for border control, has essentially abdicated–not just failing, but actually refusing to carry out its constitutional responsibility, as a matter of policy. President Obama, other members of his administration, and many more on the left responded with vicious attacks on the people of Arizona, accusing them of racism, irresponsibility, and so on.
But the American people didn’t agree, and the White House has been reading the polls. So now Obama has announced that he is sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwestern border and will increase funding for federal immigration law enforcement.
So is Obama now prepared to admit that Arizona was right all along? That its complaints about lax federal enforcement were legitimate, and not motivated by racism or hysteria? And that if National Guardsmen can enforce immigration laws without resort to unwarranted racial profiling, so can Arizona law enforcement personnel?
Of course not. Obama is just trying to get out from under one more bad decision that has caused him to take a thumping in the polls. It would be nice, though, if he learned a lesson about slandering his fellow Americans.
Walmart has revealed that it will begin selling the 16GB iPhone 3GS for $97 this week, more than $100 off of Apple’s $199 suggested retail price.
This means the 3G is canceled, the 3GS now becomes the low end iPhone and the new iPhone to be announced on June 7th will be sold at what the 3GS used to sell for, $199. 100% predictable Apple performance.
Oy, Macro - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:
Krugman reflects on fiscal policy. Gives me a headache just hearing that. Do any of these people really know what they are talking about or just faking it. Reminds me of the advice reportedly by Harry Truman during a time when people were investing heavily in the stock market and he worried they would lose their money. His advice, loosely quoted, “Only buy blue chip stocks, buy when the price is low and sell it when the price goes up. If the price doesn’t go up, don’t buy it.” That makes as much sense as what, “the experts” say today doesn’t it.
… People who own Nexuses (Nexii?) with Android 2.1 are already getting the 2.2 update.
Old-school phone makers and carriers just can’t keep up with that, which is why the Sprint EVO 4G phones which were distributed to I|O attendees–which, like the Nexus One, were manufactured by HTC–were running Android 2.1. The EVO’s hardware is impressive, but its software will feel a bit like day-old bread until it gets the 2.2 update. (HTC says that should happen at some unspecified time in the second half of this year.) …
… So it’s [Google] not going to mimic Apple’s yearly upgrade schedule–it’ll get new features in the marketplace just as fast as it can. …
This is a challenge for phone buyers like myself. I have an original iPhone (2G)and am thinking of upgrading to something new. The new iPhone is due in a few weeks so I’ve been looking at other options and comparing things. I like Apple’s position of everyone getting software upgrades at the same time and I would be aggravated to know an upgrade was out there but my vendor hadn’t gotten around to upgrading his phone (mine) and it would be, “the second half of this year” which could be December. Hell, by then another version would be out and god knows when they would have that available. There is a huge advantage to one company producing both the hardware and software and this is one of them. I love the fact that Google is doing Android because that pushes Apple to be better but so far I’m not seeing anything Android offers that’ll make me want to switch. Plus my old iPhone is running the current version of the software and doing just as well as when it was new. The new iPhone will offer features and speed mine doesn’t have but heck, mine is three year old tech, ancient by tech standards and yet it’s still current by today’s other phones. It’s only drawback for me is it’s slower than the new ones. I’ll wait to see what Job’s offers on June 7th.
… “I would like to force all the BP executives, the secretaries and the shareholders out to the shore to mop up oil and wash the birds.” Reagan De Leon of Hawaii called for a boycott of “everything BP has their hands in.”
What De Leon didn’t know was that the Nature Conservancy lists BP as one of its business partners. The Conservancy also has given BP a seat on its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years.
“Oh, wow,” De Leon said when told of the depth of the relationship between the nonprofit group she loves and the company she hates. “That’s kind of disturbing.” …
