hard deadlines

Two hawks nesting in Riverside Park on the West Side, not to be confused with Pale Male and Lola on the East Side, celebrate the arrival of triplets.

Techdirt called our attention to an interesting video of patent attorney Stephan Kinsella's presentation on "Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely". It's a long presentation, but well worth the time to watch. There is also an ongoing series of posts discussing intellectual property rights on Techdirt for additional reading.

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An oil official signaled for the first time in months that the oil cartel might increase its output if prices keep rising.

suso writes ""The estimated population of the world will pass 6,666,666,666 today. No doubt an interesting number for people everywhere (not referring to any religion connotations). 5,555,555,555 was passed about 14 years ago. You may not realize that only a 80 years ago, the population of the Earth was only around 2 billion. This shows how the population of the world has increased at an alarming rate in recent times. Although the growth rate is almost half what it was at its peak in 1963, when it was 2.2%. Unrelated but also an interesting coincidence, the estimated number of available IPv4 addresses is getting very close to 666,666,666. It should cross over today as well.""

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Six days after a cyclone, it is clear the damage is great and that little aid has made it to villagers along the sea south of Yangon.

schliz writes to mention that in a recent interview with ITNews researcher John Shalf explained the purpose and some of the technical details of the newly-announced "iPod supercomputer". "Microprocessors from portable electronics like iPods could yield low-cost, low-power supercomputers for specialized scientific applications, according to computer scientist John Shalf. Along with a research team from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Shalf is designing a supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors, which has the sole purpose of improving global climate change predictions."

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The utility asked state regulators to approve a three-year plan that would would raise rates by 4.9 percent a year through March 2012, or a total of $1.67 billion over the three years.

Philadelphia pulls more cops off the street after a videotaped police beating of three suspects that some say had overtones of racism and revenge for the death of an officer.

Health care for many undocumented immigrants is provided by a parallel system of spiritual healers, home remedies and self-medication.

The superdelegate count was one of the few areas where Hillary Rodham Clinton still maintained an advantage.

Kyle Downes of the aptly named "Ultra Awesome" blog built this genius coffee table that's an enormous, working NES controller! It opens to reveal storage space for tons of game-carts . Link (via Wonderland)

The kid-centric online game Club Penguin (acquired by Disney last year) adds 500-1000 words a day to its list of forbidden chat-words in an effort to keep things clean. Wanna bet that kids come up with 2000-4000 new variant spellings a day? Merrifield also thinks that there is an over-reliance on technology that ignores the human element, which is why they've decided to devote two-thirds of the company's staff to positions such as safety moderators and customer service.

"We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody's, especially because of that human element - we're adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.

"And every new pop song that comes out is inevitably going to reference something that was innocent the week before, but isn't so much now," Merrifield said. Link (via Raph Koster)

A reporter in Yangon found little talk among monks of protests in connection with Saturday’s referendum.

There are new developments in the case of the counterfeit Cisco routers, which we have been discussing or some time. The NYTimes updates the story after an FBI PowerPoint presentation made its way onto the Web. It seems that experts at Cisco have examined some of the counterfeit routers in detail and proclaimed that they contain no back doors. Others don't believe we can be so sure. "Last month, [DARPA] began distributing chips with hidden Trojan horse circuitry to military contractors who are participating in the agency's Trusted Integrated Circuits program. The goal is to test forensic techniques for finding hidden electronic trap doors, which can be maddeningly elusive... The threat was demonstrated in April when a team of computer scientists from the University of Illinois presented a paper at a technical conference in San Francisco detailing how they had modified a Sun Microsystems SPARC microprocessor... The researchers were able to create a stealth system that would allow them to automatically log in to a computer and steal passwords."

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Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent comments about electability might be part of an elaborate bargaining package.

Politicians in both parties have been reluctant to discuss the congressman's troubles, but this morning an editorial in The Staten Island Advance called for him to leave office.

Amsterdam has plenty to offer the traveling foodie.

John Donne, circa 1610 (wikipedia.org) and James Gandolfini in his role as Tony Soprano (Associated Press) We’ve all loved and lost. When Tony Soprano’s son is distraught over a break-up, Tony tells him to bear up and helpfully explains that such occasions have, in fact, spawned an entire industry — the music business. Lost love is the [...].

As South Africa’s president arrived for talks, new evidence emerged of government attacks on the opposition.