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Samsung rolls out JI6 update to fix Vibrant GPS issues

It’s a tad later than initially promised , but it looks like Vibrant users frustrated by those serious GPS issues will soon have a fix — Samsung has just announced that it’s begun rolling out the JI6 over-the-air update to remedy the problem and finally bring it in line with the Captivate . No word on what else the update might include and, as with all OTA updates, there’s also no guarantee as to exactly when you’ll get it, with Samsung only saying that it will be distributed randomly over the next “several weeks.” [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Samsung rolls out JI6 update to fix Vibrant GPS issues originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

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Park51, AKA Ground Zero Mosque, Mixes Old And New Green Technology

It’s technically not a mosque, and it’s technically not at Ground Zero, but it is technically interesting. Of course TreeHugger is entirely apolitical and is just interested interested in the green technology, a mix of old and new. Architectural Record interviewed architect Michel Abboud of SOMA about the project, who explains that the facade is really a traditional sunscreen made from ultra-modern materials. Abboud describes it to Alex Padala:… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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T-Mobile myTouch hands-on

That front-facing camera, optical trackpad and Genius button are all in plain sight, but we’re afraid we didn’t get to give them a try — the screen on this T-Mobile myTouch is pitch black because it’s just a hardware prototype. That didn’t keep us from snapping plenty of pictures when we spotted the Froyo-filled HSPA+ handset at the carrier’s booth, though — including a few of the phone side-by-side with its predecessor, the myTouch Slide . First, you’d probably like to hear about the hardware on display, so here’s the executive summary: the device feels fairly solid, it’s got a neat two-tone design with a fancy metal battery cover, and there’s a nice big shutter button. The myTouch also sports a set of three copper contacts on the side almost certainly destined for a landscape dock, though nearby T-Mobile representatives quickly disavowed knowledge of any such product. They did confirm we’ll see the phone by the holidays, though, so we won’t have long to wait. Gallery: T-Mobile myTouch prototype, hands-on Gallery: T-Mobile myTouch vs. myTouch Slide T-Mobile myTouch hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

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Reuters Plops Old Priest Photo Into Obama-Cozy-with-Christians Story

In an op-ed posted on our site CNSNews.com on “Obama’s Clever Use of Catholics,” Judie Brown wrote about how Barack Obama’s being pictured happily engaging with Catholic clergy to undergird his proclamation at an Albuquerque event that he was a “Christian by choice.” But sometimes the media’s willingness to promote Obama themes means the pictures are utterly unrelated to the news event: Reuters , one of the news services covering that particular meeting in Albuquerque, used a stock photo to accompany its report. The photo, which depicted the president with Catholic priest, Father Vien Nguyen, who leads the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in New Orleans, was taken during a reception at the White House earlier this year in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Father Nguyen was also honored for his help within the community after Hurricane Katrina. Father Nguyen is not from New Mexico, but that apparently mattered little to the press at Reuters who found it convenient to use the opportunity to showcase a Catholic priest with Obama. Perhaps it’s no accident that Father Nguyen was honored by Obama since he is described by Politics Daily as a man who “has shown extreme grit and skill as a community organizer.” In yet another attempt to highlight himself with Catholics, Obama traveled to Iowa this past week and met with a Catholic family living in Des Moines so that he could talk about “issues” facing middle-class Americans. During his visit he was joined by Father Michael Amadeo of Holy Trinity Catholic Church and the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Des Moines, Most Reverend Richard E. Pates. The photo of Obama with Bishop Pates presents the sort of chummy, friend-to-friend image that Obama wants to portray to the world, though his actual reasons for using Catholics as public props are perhaps anything but honorable. After all, this is a president who deceived the Catholic bishops on the subject of nationalized health care, employed every tactic in the book to garner support from the Catholic Health Association for his draconian proposal and, to this very day, has never suggested that his anti-life policies and personal convictions on abortion are an affront to every Christian—including Catholics. At the event in Des Moines, Father Amadeo asked Obama about unemployment — a more polite inquiry than asking about abortion.

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Glaring Error: NYT Reports That ‘Retail Jobs Fell 4.9 Percent … From a Year Earlier’

Two New York Times reporters were out to lunch, while the Old Gray Lady’s layers of fact-checkers were apparently asleep at the switch. In an item which contained a number of oddities, Times reporters Stephanie Clifford and Catherine Rampell wrote the following: Over all, full-time work in retail is slightly down. The number of people employed in the retail sector in August fell 4.9 percent, to 14.4 million, from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. My initial reaction was to wonder how a 4.9% drop in employment, which would involve about 700,000 jobs, could be “slight.” But in this case, media bias isn’t the problem (possible examples of bias will come later). A look at the same BLS data the Times pair must have used reveals a likely level of sloppiness that should never gotten online, let alone into print (which it did — on Page B1 in the October 6 paper ): The closest I can get to what Clifford and Rampell may have meant to write is that seasonally adjusted jobs in retail dropped by 4.9 thousand in August 2010 compared to July (14438.7 minus 14433.8). As you can see above, as well as in this table covering the same period’s not seasonally adjusted numbers, there’s no conceivable way you can get to a 4.9% drop in anything during the past year. Drops from August 2009 were actually 0.30% (seasonally adjusted) and 0.24% (not seasonally adjusted). Drops from August 2008 were both a bit above 5%. Beyond that, I’m virtually certain that the table above encompasses all retail workers, not just full-timers. Unless I’m missing something, Clifford’s and Rampell’s effort is really weak, as is the failure to catch the problems in their report. Also weak were the following items: The article’s title as it appears online and in the print edition is appropriately grim: “Dim Outlook for Holiday Jobs.” Oddly, though, the web page’s title bar is a lukewarm “Holiday Hiring by Retailers Not Expected to Rise Much.” Guess which title shows up in Google News searches (search was on “holiday retail sales new york times,” not in quotes; third item in search done at about 10:30 a.m. ET)? The pair’s overall statement about retailers’ hiring plans — that “The recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, forecasts that retailers will add up to 600,000 jobs in October, November and December, compared with a net gain of 501,400 holiday jobs over the same three months in 2009″ — is nice as far as it goes. But it overlooks that fact, as shown here at Challenger Gray’s announcement (scroll to the end), that a 600,000-job fourth-quarter surge would still badly trail every year from 2002 to 2007 except 2003, which came in at 640,000. Only a slight shortfall from Challenger Gray’s prediction will cause this year to trail the 585,000-job performance turned in during the last three months of 2001. The Old Gray Lady should be able to produce better output than this. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com .

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Glowing Green Jellyfish Goo Could Power Medical Devices

Photo via wikipedia Thanks to more acidic oceans , jellyfish populations seem to be flourishing. While they aren’t exactly edible for humans, they might be useful for powering nanodevices. Swedish researcher have been turning thousands of Aequorea victoria, a common North American jellyfish species, into liquid and extracting a green fluorescent protein (GFP) that makes the animals glow in the dark to see if it can also he… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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CBS “Late Show” host David Letterman bashed the Fox News Channel in his Top Ten list Tuesday (partial transcript after the break): Top Ten Signs There’s Trouble at FOX News Top Ten Signs There’s Trouble at FOX News 10.Accidentally said something positive about a Democrat 9.News ticker reads “Bosses crazy, send help” 8.Today’s top story: Is there anything more delicious than bacon? 7.Been criticizing Obama for not doing enough to prevent World War I 6.Bill O’Reilly inviting guests to enter the “No Pants Zone” 5.Crime stories eerily similar to plot of most recent “Hawaii Five-O” 4.Spent five hours today breaking down the Mets playoff chances 3.Thinking about hiring Rick Sanchez 2.Since June, Glenn Beck has been doing this nonstop (VT of Beck barking) 1.They’re thinking of giving the 10pm slot to Leno

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WARNING – VIDEO IS GRAPHIC. Red is the new green , according to a horrific short film put together by global warming alarmists in Britain for 10:10 a ” Global Day of Doing .” Blood red that is. The group 10:10 UK’s “No Pressure” video advertisement that was intended to promote its cause begins with a teacher lecturing her students: “Just before you go there’s a brilliant idea in the air that I’d like to run by you. Now it’s called 10:10 – the idea is that everyone starts cutting their carbon emissions by 10 percent, thus keeping the planet safe for everyone, eventually.” Preaching global warming alarmism to children is nothing shocking, but the next part of the film was. The teacher singles out the two students who are skeptical about participating, presses a red button and BLAM! those children’s bodies explode as blood and guts cover their classmates. Skeptical soccer players, businesspeople and even actress Gillian Anderson all get blown up in the “disturbing” video for not complying with the wishes of the global warming crowd. The violent depiction may be a new low for the environmental movement, but its violent rhetoric has been in use for years. Yet, the response from the liberal news media in the U.S. has been minimal, despite the willingness of the same outlets to portray – without a shred of evidence – conservatives as “incendiary” and violent. Despite the horrific nature of the video and the message that skeptics should be killed, the television news media, with the exception of Fox News , haven’t reported on it as of October 5. The New York Times has run a couple of articles on its website, and James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal wrote a strong condemnation October 5 of the ” green supremacists ” that created the video. But, so far at least, much of the national news media have ignored the controversy. The video was outrageous enough to upset even climate-change extremist Bill McKibben, who called it “the kind of stupidity that hurts our side.” Taranto said that the video had “drawn lots of criticism, much of which to our mind is not strong enough.” Perhaps he had the Time magazine’s blog headline in mind which callously read: ” Blowing Up British Kids: Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea .” But compare the minimal, isolated journalistic condemnation of such a violent and shocking film, to the volume of news stories portraying tea partiers and conservatives violent, without any proof whatsoever. On March 25, NBC’s Ann Curry harangued Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about Republicans “encouraging the violence” against Democrats. Curry specifically cited a map from former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin’s website that had shown weak Democratic districts in crosshairs. She pressed McCain saying ” Do you know, recommend that your party use less incendiary language?” McCain replied that terms like “targeted” and “battleground” are part of the “political lexicon.” Such terms have been long used by both parties and by the news media without concern of actual violence, yet Curry declared “These are very dangerous times.” A few days after that “Today” interview, CNN condemned Palin with an onscreen caption that read: “INCITING VIOLENCE?” as Palin was showing speaking in Nevada. Anchor Don Lemon said on March 28, “Sarah Palin takes on one of the highest ranking Democrats right in his own backyard, all while causing another uproar by urging tea parties to quote ‘reload.’ And the question is, are comments like that inciting violence and name-calling over the health care bill and the like?” The panelists that answered that question agreed that Obama’s political opponents were inciting violence and were motivated by racism. But Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen took the criticism of conservatives to an absurd level on October 5 by arguing that the Tea Party movement is like those responsible for the 1970 Kent State shooting . Cohen claimed a “language of rage” fuels the Tea Party and took shots at Glenn Beck and New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. Violent Video, an Attempt at Humor? After sparking outrage over the violent video, 10:10 pulled the video and issued an apology which read in part: “At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark … Oh well, we live and learn.” The 10:10 UK climate group, which has several corporate sponsors including Sony, Kyocera Mita and O2, along with a number of celebrity supporters, claimed the video was supposed to be humorous. 10:10 said its sponsors did not have prior knowledge of the video and Sony issued a statement condemning the video as ” ill-conceived and tasteless ” and said they were “disassociating” from the group. Kyocera Mita is reconsidering its partnership with 10:10 and said they were “very shocked by the movie.” “We wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh,” said more of 10:10′s apology. But is humor a valid defense for portraying the murder of people who disagree with you? That was the basic defense Jim Edwards of CBS Interactive’s BNet gave for the video. Edwards said, “No one but the most extreme climate change denier believes this is actually what environmentalists want. It’s obviously just a joke outrageous enough to actually get people’s attention.” WSJ’s Taranto wrote that “one may hope that Jim Edwards is right when he denies that ‘this is actually what environmentalists want.’ But it’s bad enough that this is what they fantasize about — and that they manifestly felt no inhibition about airing such a depraved fantasy in public.” Given statements by other warming activists in the past about executing, jailing or trying skeptics or wanting to reduce the world population, the video shouldn’t be funny anymore. Skeptics have many reasons to view the video as a threat since environmental extremists have long sought to punish them for their dissent. “We should have war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg,” David Roberts of the environmentalist Grist Magazine wrote, describing the climate change “denial industry.” NASA’s James Hansen also called for trials for “high crimes against humanity” in 2008. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacked skeptics in 2007, calling it “treason.” In 2009, an article on the liberal Talking Points Memo website attacked skeptics as “greedy bastards” and asked how such people should be punished when they “have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences …” The headline of that anonymous article was chilling: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” Some environmentalists simply want massive population reduction because of the damage they say humans are inflicting on the planet. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant efforts to stop whalers, warned in 2007 that mankind is “acting like a virus.” “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” Watson claimed as he called for the world population to drop below 1 billion . Watson didn’t care about the 5.5 billion people that would need to die in order to meet that goal. 10:10′s video also wasn’t the first environmental ad campaign to use chillingly violent imagery to make its point. TreeHugger.com displays a gallery of ” coolest environmental advertising ” from 2009. The “provocative” ad that “deserves to lead” the slideshow, according to TreeHugger, was an image of a young girl with a noose around her neck standing on a melting iceberg. Last year, a “grassroots group” called Plane Stupid released a grizzly advertisement showing polar bears falling from the sky, being bloodied as they bounce off skyscrapers and ultimately crash to death on the streets of an unidentified city. After that sickening video, the screen goes black and the anti-carbon message is revealed: “An average European flight produces over 400kg of greenhouse gases for every passenger … that’s the weight of an adult polar bear.” The group wants to end see an end to airport expansion, aviation advertising and “sustainable” transport. Media Rationalize or Ignore Ugly Side of Environmentalism, Skeptics Concerned But the liberal news media often downplay or ignore threats of violence and extreme rhetoric from the eco-left. In the case of “No Pressure,” one national newspaper’s environmental blog ignored the controversy even while talking about environmental activism. The Los Angeles Times Greenspace blog wrote about environmental events happening on 10/10/10. But it focused on lefty Bill McKibben of 350.org and his Global Work Party and failed to mention the same event going on in Britain or the violent propaganda advertising it. Since the exploding children video, McKibben has distanced himself from the 10:10 UK group. Andrew Revkin took a different tack on October 4 on The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog. Revkin, senior fellow at Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies, was critical of the video, but managed to dream up a conspiracy theory involving Big Oil. After saying that the environmental campaigners succeeded in shocking people and forcing some people (himself included) to write about the video, Revkin said: ” Then again, it could be a conspiracy. Perhaps the filmmakers were simply highly-paid double agents for big oil and big coal trying to undercut the global effort of the similarly named 10-10-10 campaign kicking off Oct. 10. (The 10:10 group is one of the thousands of participants in the international climate ‘work party’).” It’s unclear whether Revkin was being sarcastic about such a conspiracy, but what is clear is the way he tried to downplay the seriousness of the disturbing video and rationalize it away. He quoted a media professor who called the controversy simply a “generational divide over violent imagery.” He quoted another mocking people upset by the film for not having a sense of humor, and two more people who actually found “No Pressure” to be “funny.” Revkin also quoted Marshall Herskovitz, a past president of the Producers Guild of America who attacked “deniers,” saying: “The deniers will deny until the moment they either stop making money from it, or they truly understand that they are dooming their children … I envy the deniers, really, for they are not yet compelled to see the terrible truth: That there is no time left for us to fail.” Climate Depot’s Marc Morano appeared on Fox News Channel to discuss the video with Megyn Kelly. “Many are still defending it as satire, just humor. The problem Megyn, is this expresses a very deep sentiment in their movement of wanting to get rid of and silence global warming skeptics,” Morano said before citing examples including Grist’s call for Nuremberg-style trials of skeptics. “Let’s hope eco-snuff films are not the future,” Morano concluded. Heartland Institute president Joseph Bast told the Business & Media Institute he is concerned about potential attacks on skeptics – including those within his organization – stemming from this film. “I was shocked when I saw this video, and immediately sent an email to all of Heartland’s staff warning them that it could encourage environmental extremists to physically attack us,” Bast said. “This overt call for violent action against global warming realists has absolutely no place in civilized dialogue on climate change, or any other public policy issue. Calling on others to consider using violence to silence those who disagree with you is itself an act of violence.” Bast also said that the makers of the video are responsible for whatever “eco-terrorist acts” occur in the coming months. “We can only pray that no one gets hurt, and that similar acts of violence do not occur in the future.” Like this article? Then sign up for our newsletter, The Balance Sheet .

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Why Do Fish Near Coal Plants Have Lower Levels of Mercury?

Image credit: thewritingzone /Flickr It makes sense that fish inhabiting waters adjacent to coal-fired power plants would have higher concentrations of bioaccumulating pollutants—most notably, mercury—than those living farther away. Coal plants are the leading source of mercury pollutants in the air —and most of the… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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HTCSense.com goes live, only Desire HD and Desire Z supported at launch

Let’s say you’re a mobile phone maker. Now, what’s the first thing you do after raking in $360 million in a quarter ? We’re guessing that “launching a new backup / remote wipe portal” wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, but that’s precisely what HTC has done. HTCSense.com was officially introduced alongside the Desire HD and Desire Z in London last month, promising to one day allow registered owners to use the web in order to locate a lost handset, remotely wipe a lost handset and maintain a backup of your contacts, texts, customizations, etc. in the cloud. Looks like “one day” is “today,” with the portal finally opening its doors to registrants. Unfortunately, the only two phones supported at the moment are the two it was introduced alongside of (neither of which are publicly available), so it looks like you’ll spend most of your time at the source link ingesting what it can offer you in the future. But hey, who said a little schooling was a bad thing? [Thanks, Marcus] HTCSense.com goes live, only Desire HD and Desire Z supported at launch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

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