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07 Jun 2011 10:43

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Tech: Sony’s PlayStation Vita: A great opportunity to change the subject

  • Sony just had a rough month, and it continues to be kinda rough. So a console launch like the PlayStation Vita comes as a breath of fresh air for the company, which needs something to take the focus off their security problems and back onto their bread and butter. So, with a brief apology — “I want to apologize both personally and on behalf of my company,” as Sony’s North American head Jack Tretton, put it — it was onto the new console. And what a console it is: An OLED screen, touchpads in the back, and multiple cameras for augmented-reality gaming. Will it be enough to bring gamers back into the fold? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

07 Jun 2011 10:24

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World: Official: Ali Abdullah Saleh’s injuries not minor by any stretch

  • His face was quite charred. The burns are serious; he is not as well as his aides are portraying it.
  • A western official, speaking under condition of anonymity • Describing the condition of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who took a leave of office last week to receive medical care in Saudi Arabia after an attack on his presidential palace. Saleh could still return to power at some point (whether people in Yemen want him to is another story), but based on his current condition, recovery could take a few months. Another possible injury — on top of the burns and the wooden shrapnel that hit close to his heart — might be a punctured lung, which some sources have reported was a side effect of the shrapnel. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 23:21

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World: Dutch Government hatches plot to anger college kids everywhere

In an effort to completely obliterate their tourism industry, Dutch officials want to ban non-residents from visiting weed cafes in the Netherlands. Yeah, we’re as stumped as you are. source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 23:16

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Politics: Yes, Anthony Weiner messed up, but come on!

  • Should Weiner have done this? For an elected public official, it was unwise, inappropriate, stupid. For a human being, it remains well within the bounds of, well, human.
  • Andrew Sullivan • Summing up our feelings on the Anthony Weiner disaster. Look, no one’s saying it was an honorable thing to do, but politicians regularly do much, much worse things than send a picture of their wang to someone online. And they don’t always get called out for it, either. source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 22:37

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U.S.: Four years of high school in one week

  • 8 days to get a high school diploma, and it costs less than an iPad! source
  • » For all the benefits provided by a high-school education, there’s one pesky drawback: it takes four years to get one. InterAmerican Christian Academy in Florida seeks to rectify this injustice by offering a high school diploma to anyone with a free week and four hundred bucks. The school, which is co-run by a convicted felon and located next to a lubricant company, has rigorous curriculum comprised entirely of five short take home tests. But don’t worry; they come with “workbooks” (in case you get stumped), and the place has a “very flexible grading policy.” Supposedly, at least 88 students have used degrees from IACA to gain admission to Miami-Dade College.
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 22:10

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Politics: Obama’s head economics guy is headed out the door

  • Goodbye, Goolsbee: Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s chief economic advisor and the only guy in Washington who spells “Austan” with an “a,” is leaving the White House to resume teaching in Chicago. It’s a coincidence that the administration happened to announce this news today, when it was certain to be drowned out by the torrent of Anthony Weiner stories. I mean, it’s not like the White House is nervous that Goolsbee’s departure might create a perception of uncertainty regarding their grasp of the economy, right? Nah. source
Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 21:29

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Music: Bridging the piracy gap: Apple’s iCloud cleverly inverts Napster 1.0

  • We totally have to give Apple credit: The conceit around the iTunes portion of the iCloud service, while not exactly what we expected (it’s not Lala 2.0, sadly), manages to pull off an interesting trick — it creates a revenue model from a place where only piracy existed before. By upgrading your music’s quality and making it easily accessible from the cloud, it adds value inexpensively, and gets around a major sticking point for the major labels cleverly. And music industry officials see it as a positive. “It allows for revenue to be made off of pirated music in a way that consumers don’t feel that’s what they’re paying for, and that’s what I find fascinating about it,” noted Jeff Price, the CEO of TuneCore Inc., which helps independent artists sell their music online. Our music anywhere for $25 a year? Sure, we’ll pay that. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

06 Jun 2011 20:33

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U.S.: Chris Christie wants to outsource New Jersey’s public broadcasting

  • We need to have robust New Jersey public broadcasting, but we need to have it in a way that is not continuing to cost the taxpayers and can be perceived as truly independent from state government.
  • New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie • Describing his plan to have WNET take over public television coverage in New Jersey, as well as to offer up public radio coverage to stations in Pennsylvania and New York. A deal’s already in place. The decision is controversial to say the least — some New Jersey residents are concerned about losing local programming as a result of the plan, and over 100 people will lose their jobs — though they have the opportunity to reapply for similar jobs with WNET. Though officials reassure that donaations raised for public broadcasting “will stay in New Jersey,” this is kind of a crap move if you ask us. These services cost the state relatively little and their benefits are pretty high. And the state wouldn’t be able to get away with this move at all if they weren’t relatively small and adjacent to states with large public broadcasters already. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 18:07

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World: Bloody day in Iraq for Iraqis, U.S. military

  • five American soldiers killed by a rocket attack on a joint Iraqi-U.S. base today, the single deadliest incident for the U.S. military in two years
  • 18 Iraqis killed today in a series of violent incidents — a car-bombing and suicide bombing feared to be the work of al-Qaeda in Iraq source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Jun 2011 17:31

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Politics: So, when does a scandal force a political resignation?

  • then New York Rep. Chris Lee was caught in a very embarrassing position when it was revealed that he’d sent a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist. Lee immediately resigned, giving way to the recent special election in NY-26.
  • now Anthony Weiner admitted he was lying, and carried out a number of sexy online relationships, sending not just a shirtless photo of himself (jeez, he looks good for 46), but a photo of him in his boxers. He will not be resigning. Chris Lee never knew it was this easy! source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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