[Quote]:

When asked about the status of an in-app payment system for Android, Chu noted that it was set to launch last quarter, but it was forced to be delayed. Why was it delayed? “Developers were busy with their Christmas applications,” Chu said. “So we couldn’t get enough feedback,” he continued.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a few piece of prime real estate for sale…

[Quote]:

"We never had sex sex," he says, glancing at the car to make sure that Elliott and Jonathan are asleep. "I bought drugs and a massage from him, and he masturbated me at the end of it. That’s it."

Thanks for clearing that up, Pastor.

“You’ve got to understand, Kevin, people are, at their cores, hateful,” he says, rising to stamp out the fire’s embers and go to bed. “I don’t want to believe that, but the facts have prevailed over my idealism.”

No, people aren’t hateful. You are getting back exactly the kind of vindictive spite you lived before your were exposed. You are hateful, and you are seeing people’s reactions to it.

[Quote]:

Web developers have tried to compensate for this problem by creating IPv6 — a system that recognizes six-digit IP addresses rather than four-digit ones.

Aha! Today I learned there are only 9999 devices on the entire internet! Hooray for smarty-pants web developers who will soon expand it to 999,999 devices! Enough for everyone! Hooray!

[Quote]:

To summarize: 108.616 million people in America are either unemployed, underemployed or "Not in the labor force". This represents 45.5% of working age Americans.

[..]

43.2 million Americans receive foodstamps. That’s 18.1% of all working age Americans. If they all have on average 1.5 dependents, which is probably a reasonable estimate, a full one third of the US population receives at least part of their food through this system.

[Quote]:

Closeup of HUDF WFC3/IR Image Surrounding Object UDFj-39546284 The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deep–field exposure taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object’s color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away. (Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team)

[Quote]:

President Barack Obama announced Monday that he plans to nominate former Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lawyer Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. as solicitor general, a position formerly held by Elena Kagan.

Verrilli currently serves as deputy counsel to the president and previously served as an associate deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice. Prior to serving for the Justice Department, he worked in the private law firm Jenner & Block for over 20 years.

During his private practice, Verrilli had been involved in a number of prominent cases involving online file-sharing and copyright infringement, arguing on behalf of the recording and entertainment industry.

Got Corporatism?

[Quote]:

A leading climate sceptic patronised by the oil billionaire Koch brothers faced a potential investigation today on charges that he misled Congress on the extent of his funding from the oil industry.

[Quote]:

This is serious attention to detail. It’s not something people will show off to each other on the bus, or something that you can put on an advert or trumpet on a feature list.

If you’re visiting the NOT 2011 at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, drop by at the CNV Onderwijs booth.

[Quote]:

Ivory Coast has two governments, one clinging to power while the international community insists that it must go, the other barricaded inside a hotel protected by barbed wire and the blue helmets of a UN peacekeeping force. Laurent Gbagbo’s term in office expired five years ago, and the long-delayed election appeared to have ousted him from power. He has refused to leave. His opponent, Alassane Ouattara, has the support of world leaders, but not of Ivory Coast’s military. And so the election stalemate continues, international sanctions slow the economy, and post-election violence has claimed the lives of over 200 people. Collected here are photographs of the campaign, the vote, post-election violence, and daily life in Ivory Coast, a West African nation of 21 million. (39 photos total)

30
An unexploded grenade lies on a street in the Abobo neighborhood of Abidjan January 11, 2011. Police raided the neighborhood, which is loyal to Alassane Ouattara in the early morning hours leaving at least four dead. (Jane Hahn for the New York Times) #

[Quote]:

(Reuters) – The founder of whistleblower site WikiLeaks attacked Switzerland on Sunday for arresting a Swiss banker on suspicion of breaching banking secrecy instead of investigating the tax evasion he said he had uncovered.

Mr. Elmer is in prison because he has revealed a criminal offshore system of tax evasion in which Swiss banks play a leading role,” Assange was quoted as saying in an interview.

“Instead of investigating these offshore structures and going after the tax evaders, the authorities are going after Mr. Elmer,” he said.

[Quote]:

Belgium’s much-reviled phone company Mobistar was elaborately pranked by a program on VRT Belgium; the pranksters hid themselves in a steel container, which they had dropped directly in front of the gates of a large Mobistar office at 5AM. The container had a prominent customer service number printed on the side of it — a number which rang the pranksters inside the container — that was promptly called by a series of Mobistar employees who wanted to get the container moved off before 2,000 Mobistar employees reported for work and found the parking lot blocked off.

The pranksters proceed to put the Mobistar employees through a high-art comedic phone hell, disconnecting them, subjecting them to terrible hold music (performed live from within the container on a little synthesizer), gradually ratcheting the misery up in a Dante-worthy re-enactment of every terrible, awful mobile phone company experience.

The program was a huge hit in Belgium (be sure to watch it all the way through for the a killer punchline), and has been captioned in English for those of us in the anglosphere to enjoy.

[Quote]:

Last week, a series of flash floods and mudslides struck the Serrana mountain region near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, destroying buildings roads and more. Nearly 14,000 people are now homeless, 759 are reported to have been killed and another 400 remain missing in this, Brazil’s worst-ever natural disaster. As soldiers make their way to remote towns with aid and transportation, Brazil’s government has said it would accelerate efforts to build up a nationwide disaster-prevention and early-warning system. Collected here are photos from the mountainous regions near Rio that were so hard-hit by these landslides. [Editor's note: Just a note to say thank you on this, my last day as editor of the Big Picture. Though I am moving on, this blog will continue to run here on boston.com, edited by the Globe photo department. It's been an amazing journey. -Alan] (41 photos total)

4
The slope on a hill where a landslide occurred in Nova Friburgo, 130 km north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on January 13, 2011. (Shana Reis/AFP/Getty Images) #

[Quote]:

There’s another infamous shooting of a nine-year-old girl that is making headlines this week in Tucson. This time, we wonder if the rest of the media will bother to cover it.

The little girl’s name was Brisenia Flores. She lived near the border with her parents and sister outside the town of Arivaca, Arizona. On May 30 of 2009, a woman named Shawna Forde, who led an offshoot unit of Minutemen who ran armed border patrols for patriotic “fun”. Forde’s gang had decided to go “operational,” which meant they concocted a scheme to raid drug smugglers and take their money and drugs and use it to finance a border race war and “start a revolution against the government”. They targeted the Flores home, which had neither money nor drugs, based on dubious information. They convinced Flores to let them in by claiming to be law-enforcement officers seeking fugitives, then shot him point-blank in the head when he questioned them and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez. And then, while she pleaded for her life, they shot Brisenia in cold blood in the head. (Her sister, fortunately, was sleeping over at a friend’s.)

[Quote]:

The files in question do appear to be test files, some of them were removed, and there’s simply no way of knowing if any of them ended up in a shipping Android handset. But — and this is a big but — that’s just the technical story. From a legal perspective, it seems very likely that these files create increased copyright liability for Google, because the state of our current copyright law doesn’t make exceptions for how source code trees work, or whether or not a script pasted in a different license, or whether these files made it into handsets. The single most relevant legal question is whether or not copying and distributing these files was authorized by Oracle, and the answer clearly appears to be "nope" — even if Oracle licensed the code under the GPL. Why? Because somewhere along the line, Google took Oracle’s code, replaced the GPL language with the incompatible Apache Open Source License, and distributed the code under that license publicly. That’s all it takes — if Google violated the GPL by changing the license, it also infringed Oracle’s underlying copyright. It doesn’t matter if a Google employee, a script, a robot, or Eric Schmidt’s cat made the change — once you’ve created or distributed an unauthorized copy, you’re liable for infringement.*

Why does this matter? Because we’re hearing that Oracle is dead-set on winning this case and eventually extracting a per-handset royalty on every Android handset shipped.

The technical merits of the case may very well be simple – but these kind of copyright cases aren’t always decided on the boring technology bits…

[Quote]:

Erik Prince, whose former company Blackwater Worldwide became synonymous with the use of private U.S. security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has quietly taken on a new role in helping to train troops in lawless Somalia.

Prince is involved in a multimillion-dollar program financed by several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, to mobilize some 2,000 Somali recruits to fight pirates who are terrorizing the African coast, according to a person familiar with the project and an intelligence report seen by The Associated Press.

[Quote]:

We’re not talking “biofuels” – not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no “feedstock,” no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these “inputs,” it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as “artificial photosynthesis.”

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

[Quote]:

The preacher who prompted outrage across the world when he threatened to burn a Koran on the anniversary of September 11th has hit out at his ban from the UK.

Pastor Terry Jones was prevented from coming to the country by the Home Office, in the latest in a string of controversial bans on right-wing American political figures which has led to accusations of censorship against the British government.

"I have no intention of doing anything against British law," Mr Terry told Sky News.

"We feel this is definitely against constitutional rights to travel, freedom of speech. We believe that our visit there could be beneficial.

"I feel this ban is very unfair."

Seriously, are there some Americans that actually believe the world police rhetoric so hard they think that the US constitution applies to Britain?

[Quote]:

The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in a Florida District Court.

The pleadings, in part, read -

The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.

State of Florida, et al. vs. HHS

It turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

The founding fathers obviously were unamerican traitors.

[Quote]:

Beginning in December of last year, a series of ongoing protests in the streets of Tunisia escalated to the point where President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali – who had ruled the country for 23 years – at first declared he would not seek re-election, then fled the country on January 14th. An interim government was assembled, but protesters remain in the streets, demanding removal of all traces of Ben Ali’s old RCD party. Protesters’ frustrations with high unemployment, inflation and corruption drove them to the streets after a pivotal event, when a young Tunisian vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after police confiscated his produce cart. Bouazizi died of his injuries days later. Collected here are images of the turmoil in Tunisia over the past couple of weeks. (40 photos total)

2
A handout picture released by the Tunisian Presidency shows Tunisian president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (2nd from left) looking at Mohamed Al Bouazzizi (right), during his visit at the hospital in Ben Arous near Tunis on December 28, 2010. Mohamed Al Bouazzizi, a 26-year-old university graduate, who was forced to sell fruit and vegetables on the streets, doused himself in petrol and set himself alight on December 17, which left him in a serious condition with severe burns. Days of rioting in Tunisia by mostly jobless and frustrated young people protesting violently against the government has exposed the crippling unemployment problem in the north African country. (TUNISIA PRESIDENCY/AFP/Getty Images) #

[Quote]:

I’m looking forward to a time when I’m not on a secret watch, search, harass, detain, interrogate, delay, annoy and stress list.