Archive for July 3rd, 2008
British Government launches data mash-up
The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects. It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.
They’re offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.
To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources…
This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
None of the data will be personal information, the government is keen to stress…
They’ll continue to keep all the juicy personal information for their own data-mining.
White House says we’re in a period of slow growth. Bullshit!
The White House said on Thursday a report showing a sixth straight month of job losses in June was another sign of slower U.S. economic growth…
The Labor Department said on Thursday that 62,000 U.S. nonfarm jobs were lost last month, bringing to 438,000 the number of jobs shed so far this year as persistent housing market woes chilled economic growth. The unemployment rate, which shot up sharply in May, held steady at 5.5 percent.
“It’s caused by a variety of factors including higher energy prices and the fallout from the overbuilding in the housing sector which caused a supply/demand problem and then we also had as a result of that some financial market turbulence,” said Dana Perino.
This is not one of those glass half-empty, half-full situations, folks. This is a fracking government that doesn’t give a damn about working people.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis lays in the lap of unregulated, unlicensed hustlers – outside the boundaries of traditional mortgage loans and the banking industry. Outsourcing – unchecked by unenforced regulations – is just one more facet of a federal government dedicated to corporate profits not the needs of the American people.
The list trundles on down the page – and the candidate of official government and the current thugs in the White House share the same solutions: which includes nothing for the people who built this nation.
Court allows school to ban boy for not being ‘right type of Jew’
A Jewish school’s entry criteria did not racially discriminate against an 11-year-old boy that it refused to admit, the high court has ruled.
The JFS in north-west London rejected the boy, known as M, because his mother was not regarded as “an approved Jew“…
A child’s Jewish identity is inherited through the mother, but the US did not accept that M’s mother was Jewish. She was born a Roman Catholic, but converted to Judaism before her son’s birth, although not to the Orthodox movement.
Isn’t this kind of sectarian crap amazing?
UPDATED: Latest round of court decisions rule against the school, for the boy.
Viacom – and US court – says Google must hand over YouTube logs
Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled. The ruling comes as part of Google’s legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.
Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a “set-back to privacy rights”.
The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address and video clip details.
The EFF said: “The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.
Don’t we all trust Viacom?
The SSD Power Consumption Hoax
Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren’t there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD.
Could Tom’s Hardware be Wrong?
No, our results are definitely correct. We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs. In an effort to determine the actual impact on notebook systems, we took four SSDs that we had available in our test lab, and ran a series of Mobilemark benchmark runs on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. We found runtime differences of up to one hour (!) when using a flash SSD compared to a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5” notebook hard drive.
Will this slow down the hype? Not a chance.
Merrill Analyst Says Buy GM at $40 and Sell It At $11
A Merrill Lynch analyst put out some groundbreaking research on GM claiming that bankruptcy was an option for the auto company. He reversed his prior buy recommendation (issued in February 2007 when the stock was at $40) and cut the stock to an “underperform” now that it is trading below $11. I’m not quite sure what caused the analyst to change his formerly bullish opinion. Perhaps it was based on one of the following reasons?
* GM’s debt is trading and has been trading at distressed levels for some time.
* GM’s credit default swaps are already pricing in a 75% probability that the automaker will default on its debt within the next 5 years.
* Car sales have been in a steep decline and the auto industry just reported a roughly 20% decline in sales for the month of June.
* GMAC, the financing arm still 49% owned by GM, had to completely restructure its financing because its mortgage lending arm ResCap came dangerously close to declaring bankruptcy.
* GM’s stock is down 56% year to date.
* The analyst needed to change his recommendation ASAP so he could tell everyone that he warned them of GM’s bankruptcy, thus justifying his existence.
K10 asks, “Who are the investors that use Merrill Lynch as their sole source of news?”
Good question. I’m very much an amateur investor and I learned 30 years ago that Merrill-Lynch was full of crap. 50 years ago I learned that GM was incompetent and full of crap.
What’s left to discover?
Polish leaders calls pursuit of EU treaty ‘pointless’
Poland cast fresh doubt this week on the accord to build a more united Europe, drawing a sharp response from France, which assumed the six-month leadership of the European Union with some ceremony but dwindling hopes of delivering substance.
France casts itself as the quintessence of post-1945 Europe, one of the 6 founding members of what is now a 27-nation European Union with nearly 500 million citizens and is the world’s largest trading bloc.
The pride and pomp were encapsulated in a nighttime celebration that illuminated the Eiffel Tower with the blue hue and yellow stars of the EU flag.
But the celebration was short-lived. President Lech Kaczynski of Poland, asked by the Diennik daily whether he would sign the new European treaty that the Irish rejected in a referendum last month, replied that the effort was “now pointless.”
“It is difficult to say how this whole thing will end,” he added…
Poland, like most other EU nations, passed the treaty through its legislature; Kaczynski’s signature was the final step needed for Polish ratification.
Since first France and then the Netherlands rejected a European constitution in referendums in 2005, EU leaders have struggled to create a political structure that would begin to match the bloc’s economic strength.
Their latest attempt was the complicated Lisbon Treaty, which the Irish voted down. All 27 nations need to approve for it to take effect.
Pomp and circumstance – signifying nothing!
