[Quote]:

For developers, the weakness in Microsoft’s DRM for Windows Phone 7 applications has been well known for quite some time, and there have been calls for Microsoft to address these concerns.

Since then, a "white hat" developer has provided WPCentral with a proof-of-concept program that can successfully pull any application from the Marketplace, remove the security and deploy to an unlocked Windows Phone with literally a push of a button. Alternatively, you could just save the cracked XAP file to your hard drive. Neither the app nor the methodology is public, and it will NOT be released (please don’t ask).

That’s kind of selfish, why should the only other owner of a Windows Phone 7 have to pay for their apps?

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For millions of Americans the economic recovery can’t get here soon enough. In 2010 a record 40.3 million Americans received food stamps. That’s a 20 percent jump from 2009.

[..]

This Oklahoma family of five saw no choice but to apply for food stamps. Their $500 benefit lasts two to three weeks but hardly four.

Just before midnight on the last day of every month, Sheri and her husband make a trip to the grocery store to beat the midnight rush.

“We get excited,” says Sheri. “Like, ‘Oh, we’re going to go shopping tonight!’”

On the first of the month food stamp debit cards are automatically refilled with benefit money from the government. On an average night between midnight and 3 a.m., a store could bring in about $3000. On the first of the month that number is 10 times as much with almost everyone using food stamps.

[Quote]:

Hard times can be good times — for the aggressively avaricious. Where others see pain, they see opportunity. In desperation, they delight. The grimmer the economic outlook, the more ghastly their grabbing.

And who grabbed the most outrageously in 2010? We offer below our annual take on America’s ten greediest of the year.

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“Microfinance was supposed to empower women,” he says. “Microfinance guys reversed the social and economic progress, and these women ended up becoming slaves.”

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The Queen is "delighted" with the birth of her first great-grandchild, Buckingham Palace has said.

The baby girl, the first child for the Queen’s eldest grandson Peter Phillips and his wife, Autumn, weighed 8lbs 8oz.

The newborn, who is 12th in line to the throne, was born in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital on Wednesday. Her name has not yet been confirmed.

First great grandchild, right? All the earlier ones were assholes, apparently…

[Quote]:

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.

And now we are.

[Quote]:

Amazon.com has been awarded a patent for an online system that would give users the ability to exchange unwanted gifts before receiving them.

The technology could prevent the shipment of thousands of superfluous ties to fathers, ugly sweaters to grandchildren and various other lackluster presents that are currently being bought and shipped through the online retail giant.

Officials at Amazon were unavailable Wednesday to comment on how far along in development the gift exchange system is, or if and when its users could expect the technology to be available for use.

Amazon extends its tradition of unselling you books by additionally making sure things never arrive in the first place. Amazon, retailer and anti-retailer; the Amazon giveth and the Amazon taketh away.

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A mother decided to pray over her sick son instead of bringing him to the doctor and now she faces criminal charges, police said.

The mother, Susan Grady, is a member of The Church of the First Born, a religious group that often practiced faith-based healing methods rather than relying on medicine.

The group’s website said, “If any be sick, call for the elders of the Church. Let them pray over him.”

[..]

Officers said they are now trying to find Susan Grady’s whereabouts to serve her arrest warrant. Reports said she has already left Broken Arrow.

Why didn’t she just pray that she would not be arrested?