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If the GOP wins control of the House next week, senior congressional Republicans plan to launch a blistering attack on the Obama administration’s environmental policies, as well as on scientists who link air pollution to climate change.

The GOP’s fire will be concentrated especially on the administration’s efforts to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over air pollution to tighten emissions controls on coal, oil and other carbon fuels that scientists say contribute to global warming.

The attack, according to senior Republicans, will seek to portray the EPA as abusing its authority and damaging the economy with needless government regulations.

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The main cause of OS cancer is backwards compatibility, the need to stay compatible with existing application software. OS designers are caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Customers want the benefit of the future, new features, hardware and software, but without having to jettison their investment in the past, in their applications.

OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning—and in the market—the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.

Enter the iPhone.

[..]

Last week, the other Steve, Ballmer, was on stage at the Gartner Symposium. There, he was asked about Microsoft’s “biggest gamble”. Without missing a beat, as this forceful public speaker never does, he answered: “The next revision of Windows.” Not Windows Phone 7, not the Kinect game device, all near and dear to his heart, but Windows 8.

– Jean-Louis Gassée

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Facebook Questions will empower over 500 million people around the world to solicit personalized, detailed answers to their questions from friends and knowledgeable experts. As Community Manager, you are responsible for cultivating a smart, enthusiastic and articulate community to kickstart our next major product initiative.

So, what’s the thinking within Facebook about what a community really is?

Let’s look at the responsibilities listed:

* Devise creative ways to attract high-quality contributors, e.g. through the use of contests, corporate acquisitions, targeted advertising, incentive programs or anything else you dream up.
* Work side by side with the engineering/product team to design user interfaces that attract high-quality contributions.
* Manage a team of thousands of moderators and develop tools to empower them to do their jobs more effectively

Yep – thousands of “moderators”, and their idea of a “high-quality contributors” is a company that does targeted advertising.

I get it: you want to attract a swarm of 17-year-old malcontents who will min-max your site’s reward system, and in doing so, create a staggering amount of utterly worthless content. But you want to dress it up in a way that maximizes page views and advertising impressions, because your product is not the people generating or viewing this content, but is rather the advertisers paying 30 cents for every hundred viewers who see their poorly-spelled ads for ring tones.

I guess I won’t be sending in my resume.

FOX News: Terrorists threaten to bomb McDonalds. News at 11.
Glen Beck: I’m not saying that McDonalds is a terrorist organization. But you can spell McDonalds in “Muslim”. Coincidence?

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Employees at an Ohio McDonald’s franchise received a nice letter along with their paychecks the other week, just reminding them that elections are coming. And, oh, that if they want to keep getting raises and benefits, they should vote Republican.

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Washington Post political correspondent David Broder has kind words for President Barack Obama in in his opinion columnSunday, arguing that it isn’t the president’s fault the economy is stuck in reverse.

But the four-decade-plus veteran of Washington politics offers a startling solution to the president’s political and economic woes: March off to war with Iran.

‘Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.’