Puerto Rico Governor Pleads Not Guilty

Puerto Rico Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila pleaded not guilty today to 12 counts of corruption today. He is the first sitting governor of Puerto Rico to be changed with corruption since Puerto Rico became a US commonwealth in 1952. He is charged with illegally raising $500,000 to pay off debt from his campaigns. He was greeted by hundreds of flag waving supporters at the courthouse, where he came to be fingerprinted and get a mug shot taken. He claims that the prosecutors are filing this case out of desire to keep him from being re-elected; he is up for re-election next year. “While I will vigorously defend my actions, my family and my honor, I will never let a politically motivated process distract me from the job I do for you,” he said. The nonvoting US congressman from Puerto Rico Luis Fortuno said, the governor “does not have the moral standing to govern the people and resolve this mess that he has gotten us into,”

 

 

Source: CNN

Are Big Newspapers No Longer Needed?

For years traditional media outlets have been smashing online news sites, they claim that they have no credibility and that they will constantly get the information wrong. No we see major papers laying off workers and being bought by offshore companies. Why is this happening? Because more and more Americans are getting their news from the internet, for free, so they don’t see a need to pay for the paper anymore. This is a trend that will continue, there is just more information on the internet than in you local paper. If you want a large variety of news you probably turn to Google, not to the NY Times. Although this has been a triumph for bloggers and all online news outlets, it is sad to see reputable papers such as WSJ, being bought out because they can’t compete. Sometimes the online news outlets do get stories wrong, but so do traditional news outlets. It is time for the two sides to come together and create the ultimate reporting force.

Amazon Gets Into The Print On Demand Book Market

Amazon has announced that they will start selling print on demand books, but they will only do it through their print on demand company, BookSurge. Print on demand books have been flourishing over the past few years. Printing books on demand allows stores to keep fewer books in stock; they also don’t have to truck books all over the world. Book stores are never left with to many or to few books on hand.  Unfortunately right now BookSurge’s prices are higher than other print on demand services, and even higher than some normal books, we will have to wait to see the prices some down.

Source: TechCrunch

California Lowers Emissions Plan

California has been the leader in clean emissions in the US for some time now, today they made a fairly large announcement about there goal for zero emissions cars. They were going to require that the top 6 auto makers sell hundreds of thousands of zero emissions cars in California by 2014. Zero emissions cars, are either electric or hydrogen fuel cell, this would help make a cleaner fleet. Today they announced that they were dropping that number to only 60,000 by 2014, their reason is that they wanted car makers to make zero emissions cars, but they also wanted them to work on getting the price of them down so they would become more mainstream. This not only effects California, but the 12 others states in the country that have adopted California’s emissions plan. This announcement was seen by environmentalists as California backing down under pressure from the car makers.

Source: CBS

Netbook vs. Notebook

The Netbooks, which are small ultra light ultra cheap laptops, have been a huge success around the world. Although they were first introduced as education tools for third world countries, demand in the US and Europe has been strong. Families like them as a cheap computer for the kids. The Netbooks are in direct competition with low end laptops, and they seem to be outpacing them. You can buy a Compaq with with a 15.4-inch LCD screen, a 1-GHz AMD Athlon 64 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB HD, for 500$ at Bestbuy, these have had alright sales but not very impressive. Or you could buy the Asus EEE PC with 800-MHz Celeron processor, 7-inch screen, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB SSD for 400$, although its stats are worse ASUS has had a hard time keeping them in stock. Another Netbook to keep your eyes out for is the Intel 2go it will reportedly have  Celeron M processor, 512MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a 9-inch screen, it can run Windows or Linux and it will be 400$. Major PC makers are now worried, will the Netbook unseat the Notebook?

Source: PCMag

MPAA Says Pirates Shouldn’t Have Internet Access

The MPAA has been pushing for years to get ISP’s to block offshore websites that host ’stolen’ goods. They have now started a push for ISP’s to analyze their customers packets, and shut them down if they can prove that they are pirating. I’m not sure how they would prove that they were pirating and not using bittorrent for legal downloads, but non the less this is bad. Of course the ISP’s haven’t blocked any offshore sites so they probably won’t do this either. Jim Williams, a top exec at the MPAA said: “Much of the Internet is being clogged up with stolen goods,” “Basically you have a bunch of free riders who are hogging the bandwidth (and taking) it away from legitimate consumers.” He argues that people who are pirating are slowing down the entire internet and that is unfair to those users who are just using the internet for legal uses.

Source: CNET

Online Stock Market Game

If you are looking for a grownup game to play online, here is an interesting one. Inspectd.com allows you to play a stock market game, the site shows you a chart of a company and it gives you 100,000$ in fake money to invest in the company, but you don’t have to invest it. You can chose whether to buy, sell or skip, all this based on stock price alone. When you are done, it will tell you the name of the stock you were looking at and what it actually did over the next 20 days, it then adjusts your account accordingly. To most this is probably pretty boring, but I like the stock market so it’s kinda fun.

Source: TechCrunch

Firefox Says Apple’s Safari Auto Update is “wrong”

Firefox has responded to the news that Apple is “giving” everyone who uses the auto updater with iTunes, their browser Safari, without asking their permission. The CEO of Firefox wrote this on his blog:

“Apple has made it incredibly easy–the default, even–for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices.

It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the Web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice and should stop.”

Overall, I think this has been blown out of proportion, Apple obviously wants their browser used by as many people as possible. If you don’t want it you can un-check it from the auto updater, or you can uninstall it. Safari still has a small enough presence in the browser war that they are not really a threat to Firefox or IE.

Source: CNET

Sony Pisses Off More Customers

You know all the crap that computer manufacturers put on your computer when you buy it? Well, now Sony is allowing you to get a tool to remove it, for a fee, you will pay “$49.99 for ‘Fresh Start’ on top of the required $100.00 Vista Business upgrade. You can get about $25.00 of that cost back if you select all available ‘no-software’ options which are only available after selecting the $149.99 ‘upgrade’.” Late reports out today claim that Sony has taken so much heat for this stupid fee, that they have actually dropped it. If that is not the case, there are several free removal tools out there, they are built specifically for cleaning the pre-installed crap off of new computers. They can be found with a simple Google search.

Source: Slashdot

CBC Plans to BitTorrent Some Of Their Own Shows

The CBC has announced that they will be putting some of there own shows on BitTorrent right after they air. These shows will be DRM free, they will be DVD quality or higher and they will be hosted on the CBC, servers so they will have seeders. I don’t know if the CBC has any good shows, but this is a good first step. You will be able to BitTorrent the shows and burn them to your hearts content. They will start by offering episodes from Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister and if they deem that to be a success they will branch out into other shows. This is a good solution for TV piracy, people will download their version which will have ads. Why will they download it? They will be guaranteed fast download times, and they will be guaranteed a clean, good quality, legal, DRM free show.

Source: Techdirt