For the last couple of years there has been a resurgence in popularity of vinyl records. Largely due to digital downloads rending the portability of compact discs obsolete, people are starting to gravitate to vinyl as the physical format of choice. In this short documentary from Nick Cavalier we get a behind-the-scenes look at the production of vinyl records at Gotta Groove Records, a new vinyl pressing plant in Cleveland, Ohio.
[via Make]
Rosetta Stone, which focuses on teaching languages to tourists and business travelers, is helping the Chitimacha tribe of Louisiana resuscitate its native tongue. The last native speaker passed away in 1940, and the tribe hopes shiny new software will attract youth to the language.
A Democratic senator urged President Obama on Tuesday to include the military budget in his proposed spending freeze.
“Defense represents a significant part of our discretionary spending in this country. The defense establishment needs to be under fiscal discipline, as do all of our agencies.” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told reporters in the Capitol. “I don’t think defense should be exempt. If there are extraordinary things that occur that require us to respond for national security, we always will be prepared to do that. But to exempt the normal military spending just because it’s military, to me, is wrong.”
The Android SDK allows developers to create applications for the Android Market.
The Android SDK also includes a nifty little emulator (based on QEMU, see also Q) but requires a great deal of tweaking.
To make playing around with the Nexus One and Android 2.1 emulation easier on OS X, I have repackaged a copy of the Android SDK with Android 2.1 installed and pre-configured, borrowed a custom Nexus One skin from Tim Hoeck, and whipped up a shell script to launch you straight into the emulator. I pre-loaded the emulated Nexus One with Facebook and Pandora.
Download it here (95MB). Tested only on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Get updated version here. I’ve added Aldiko, Mars Lander, Flixster, MySpace, Qik, and UrbanSpoon. SOMETHING IS BROKEN, WILL HAVE FIX SOON.
Important Notes:
Read more about the Android Emulator at the Android Developers site.
Screenshot:
The latest round of negotiations over the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA — a secret treaty that contains provisions requiring nations to wiretap the Internet, force ISPs to spy on users, search laptops at the border, and disconnect whole households from the net on the basis of mere accusation of copyright infringement) is just kicking off in Mexico, and activists from around Mexico and the world have converged on the meeting to demand transparent, public negotiations of this critical treaty.
The Supreme Court may have changed the landscape of campaign spending today: in issuing its decision on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, it announced that corporations and unions can now spend money directly in support of candidates.
Justice Kennedy, in the majority opinion, reasoned that the government can’t discriminate against speakers based on their corporate identities, and that “all speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.”
This basically eliminates a middleman: before today, corporations and unions had to set up PACs (political action committees), filed separately with the IRS, that would receive donations. And they did. Corporations and unions spend millions of dollars on elections. Now, however, the accounting firewall is gone, and Wal-Mart or the Service Employees International Union, for instance, can spend their corporate money directly on candidates.
Chris Good writing in The Atlantic
Convicted sex workers, many of whom are victims of human trafficking, must now register as sex offenders in Louisiana.
“What’s that mean for them? There’s a stamp printed on their driver’s licenses, labeling them as sex offenders. They can’t get food stamps or public assistance, much less jobs, and if there’s a hurricane they need to go to special shelters reserved for sex offenders. They can’t even dress up for Mardi Gras!” - from TresSugar
Also see: Not for Sale Campaign
The ten largest defense contractors in the nation spent more than $27 million lobbying the federal government in the last quarter of 2009, according to a review of recently-filed lobbying records.
The US justice department is preparing a report which concludes that the FBI repeatedly broke the law by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist to obtain more than 2,000 telephone call records over four years from 2002, including those of journalists on US newspapers, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post.
