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In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

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Toronto’s Classical Theatre Project has discovered that Shakespeare is a little too bawdy for some parents in the city of Nashville, Tenn.

The company, which has performed productions of Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Oedipus Rex to more than 100,000 Ontario high school students, is in the country music capital this week to perform Romeo and Juliet.

Artistic director David Galpern says he was astonished by the reaction of some teachers and parents who saw the production Sunday night, when it was in dress rehearsal.

“They came to us with what appeared to be a list of objectionable moments that they wanted us to tone down before the students came on Monday,” he told CBC News on Tuesday.

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While Doctors without Borders was struggling to get anesthetics for amputations into Haiti, an Albuquerque group queued up aid of their own sort: 600 solar powered talking Bibles. Even now, food, water, and medicine are having trouble reaching Haitians because of damaged transportation facilities and supply lines, but the missionary group says some of their Bibles are “on the way.”

Like many others, I read about the solar Bible effort with a sense of revulsion. But as a former Evangelical believer, I also read about it with some sympathy for the people packing the boxes. There is no doubt in my mind that they think what they are doing is kind and good. I would bet my psychology license that their behavior is driven by genuine concern for the people of Haiti. I simply believe also that the Evangelical mindset has tremendous power to co-opt and redirect a believer’s moral priorities and sense of compassion.

One of the most pernicious attributes of ideology, whether secular or religious is its power to disconnect true believers from moral emotions like empathy, shame, and guilt. In fact, what often happens is that the ideology repurposes both these emotions and the rest of a believer’s moral machinery in the service of the ideology itself.

Some say his skin has the texture of a dolphin’s, and that wherever you are in the world if you tune your radio to 88.4 you can actually hear his thoughts…

All we know is, he’s called the Stig

Next time you hear somebody complain that people walking out on their mortgage (via “jingle mail”) are immoral and should just take a few extra jobs to make ends meet, ask them why Speyer and BlackRock aren’t picking up extra jobs to make ends meet.

Oh, right. It’s just business.

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Pope Benedict XVI decried Monday what he called “growing aversion” to the Christian faith in the world.

[..]

‘”In a world marked by religious indifference and even by a growing aversion toward the Christian faith, a new, intense activity of evangelization is necessary,” the pope said.

He urged Christians to overcome their differences through dialogue so that they can unite their efforts to influence debates in society on ethical issues like abortion, euthanasia and the limits of science and technology.

Good to see him worried. And how typical: when an ideology is in decline people suddenly decide that factional differences of previous generations are not so important after all.

Try it, I’m going for yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, no, no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes.

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A video I made to show how the Shuttle may look if it was destroyed in space. Filmed from the ISS or maybe another Shuttle. All made with real photo’s of the Shuttle then I used Photoshop to make it look damaged and in pieces. Then I put it in space using After Effects.

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After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across “oral sex” in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster’s 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week.

School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. The dictionaries were initially purchased a few years ago for fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms districtwide, according to a memo to the superintendent.

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

And don’t think I don’t know about that… that… THESAURUS you have hiding under your mattress.

Oral sex n. Twenty bucks, same as in town.

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“It’s all right, Mr. Feynman; we’ll get someone to help you read them.”

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Check out the line that’s forming outside our store in San Francisco as of this morning.

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Microsoft has confirmed that the upgrade path from Office 2003 to its upcoming Office 2010 suite won’t necessarily be an easy one for customers to follow.

The software maker said on Friday that PCs capable of running Office 2007 would be able play nice with Office 2010.

However, punters still using Office 2003 won’t have quite such an easy ride, as Microsoft cannot guarantee they’ll automatically be able to run Office 2010 on the same hardware.

[..]

“One of the pieces of feedback we’ve received from customers is that they really, really hate having to buy new hardware every time a new version of Office is released. With that in mind, one of our goals for the Office 2010 was to make sure that the minimum hardware requirement would not increase from Office 2007,” he said.

So, change the default file format to ‘force’ people to upgrade from 2003 to 2007, and use the bloat in office 2010 to get people to upgrade to windows 7.

And all the time you’re claiming to do everything you can to keep people on older hardware happy. Well, happy is relative, if you define happy as “it works, so stop complaining, and if you feel it’s too slow for you, it will you your decision to upgrade, we didn’t force you”

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South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, has compared giving people government assistance to “feeding stray animals.” “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said.

Just like Jesus said. Don’t help the poor or they’ll breed like rabbits.

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Using Flurry Analytics, the company identified approximately 50 devices that match the characteristics of Apple’s rumored tablet device. Because Flurry could reliably “place” these devices geographically on Apple’s Cupertino campus, we have a fair level of confidence that we are observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing. Testing of this device increased dramatically in January, with observed signs of life as early as October of last year. Apple appears to be going through its cycle of testing and polish, which is expected from any hardware or software company as it nears launch.

So it’s suddenly safe to predict the new tablet will have an iTunes app store, and existing iPhone apps will require little modification to run on it.

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To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.

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A 2003 BBC story cast doubt on claims that Iraq could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes. UN weapons inspector David Kelly, revealed as the source, died mysteriously shortly thereafter. It seemed that if foul play was involved, it was the extensive public hounding that led to his apparent suicide. By imposing a 70 year gag on evidence relating to his death, however, the British government perhaps reveals more than a state secret could ever hide.

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Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…

* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.

* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.

And 100% more likely to be pissed of by the record companies cherry picking polls to blame them for the decline in physical sales.

Certain people should not have one of these.

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The Augusta Chronicle reported on Tuesday that the All-American Basketball Alliance plans to kick off its inaugural season in June and hopes that Augusta will be one of 12 cities to host teams.

But here’s the kicker: According to a press release the newspaper and other Augusta media outlets received from the new league, “only players that are natural-born United State citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league.”

That’s right. Lewis, who calls himself the commissioner of the AABA, will exclude blacks and all foreigners from his new league, which the newspaper said will be based in Atlanta.

According to the Chronicle, Lewis said he wants to emphasize “fundamental basketball” instead of “street ball” played by “people of color.”

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” Lewis told the paper. “I don’t hate anyone of color.”

Let me guess… some of your best friends are people of color, right?

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As punishment for bad grades, a Georgia mother forced her 12-year-old son to kill his pet hamster with a hammer, police said.
Meriwether County Sheriff’s Offi Lynn Geter, 38, is accused of forcing her 12-year-old son to kill his pet hamster for earning a bad grade, according to Steve Whitlock, Meriwether County sheriff.

The day after he was forced to kill his pet, the child told his teacher, Meriwether County Sheriff Steve Whitlock told the AJC Thursday evening.

The teacher reported the incident to DFCS authorities, who contacted police, Whitlock said. The pet’s death allegedly took place at the family’s Warm Springs home.

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Foreign businesses might be the real winners in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, the landmark case that allows corporations and unions to spend limitless amounts of money on presidential and congressional political campaigns. A majority of large businesses are now owned by foreign entities, and this means international corporations could pour tons of money into the United States political scene, potentially swaying the political climate.

So if you’re a foreign company, you’re a person and allowed to influence US politics. If you’re a foreign national, you’re an enemy combatant, and you will never be a person.

Glad we got that cleared up then.

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Use your mouse to click and drag around the video to change the view. You can also zoom in and out. Pause and explore at any time by pressing the play/pause button under the video to stop and look around. The video below was shot on Monday, January 18, at 9:52 a.m. EST in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Click the link, there are three video’s…

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It’s been 18 months since O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its ebooks. In the intervening time, O’Reilly’s ebook sales have increased by 104 percent. Now, when you talk about ebooks and DRM, there’s always someone who’ll say, “But what about [textbooks|technical books|RPG manuals]? Their target audience is so wired and online, why wouldn’t they just copy the books without paying? They’ve all got the technical know-how.”

So much for that theory.

Instead, expect to hear DRM apologists (either DRM vendors or technologically naive people in publishing who believe what DRM vendors tell them) now saying, “Oh sure, it works for O’Reilly, but those are tech books. Regular trade books can’t possibly work the same way!”