Happy New Year!

Whatever 2011 brings, I suspect it won’t be boring!

iPhone Alarm Clockgate for 2011

The solution is to set a repeating alarm or else the alarm might not go off at all.

Skype banned in China

That’s because it’s an illegal Internet provider rather than one of the Big Three Chinese providers that the state has a piece of and off which top level government officials no doubt make a handsome living through salaries, kickbacks, and bribes. Am I cynical? I think not.

Happy-faced IndependentVoting.org really ‘pressure group working to limit choices on the ballot’

Reprinted in full, with permission, from Ballot Access News, the newsletter of highly respected ballot access expert Richard Winger.

Government-printed ballots in the United States were first created in 1888, and almost from the start, opponents of new and minor political parties started manipulating the ballot access laws to keep certain parties off the ballot.  The [...]

Tax dodges not enough, big business wants tax holiday on $1 trillion

Cartoon by Martin Rowson for the British political zine, Tribune via casadelogo.typepad.com

At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.

Executives including John T. Chambers [...]

Polizeros Radio #5 – 2010 Retrospective (and yet more Wikileaks!)

2010 Retrospective: Top stories from the past year and what we might expect from the year ahead. Plus, we still haven’t heard the last word on Wikileaks. What’s happened to the media discourse? Has there been collateral damage in Zimbabwe? With Steve Hynd of Newshoggers, and Josh Mull of Firedoglake & Rethink Afghanistan. (I [...]

College students and loans they can not pay

Now our economy is facing the biggest student loan debt bubble in the history of the world, and when our new college graduates enter the “real world” they are finding out that the good jobs they were promised are very few and far between.

Then they discover they are tens of thousands of dollars [...]

Hydrogen from concentrated solar

A new technique creates hydrogen at much high efficiency from concentrated solar. The hydrogen can then be used to power fuel cells and create energy.

The researchers involved specifically designed the hardware to be easy to manufacture in bulk and incorporate into a industrial-size facility, so it seems to be a serious attempt at getting [...]

Commercial satellite for the world’s poor

Communications satellite

Ahumanright.org is bidding on a commercial satellite that it wants to use to beam cheap bandwidth to the poor and disenfranchised of the planet.

Their founder says

Ahumanright is charged with promoting Internet access as a human right. The organization also promotes endeavors that can ensure everyone has a chance to [...]

LED light fixtures replace wi-fi

The municipal offices of St. Cloud, Minnesota are the first in the country to install a visible light communication system in place of Wi-Fi. The system, which uses LED fixtures to connect office computers to the internet, is saving lots of energy, and the city of St. Cloud lots of money on energy bills.

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