Eideard

Here in Merced, a city in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and one of the country’s hardest hit by home foreclosures, the downturn in the real estate market has presented an unusual housing opportunity for thousands of college students. Facing a shortage of dorm space, they are moving into hundreds of luxurious homes in overbuilt planned communities…

There are the three-car garages, wall-to-wall carpeting, whirlpool baths, granite kitchen countertops, walk-in closets and inviting gas fireplaces…

The finances of subdivision life are compelling: the university estimates yearly on-campus room and board at $13,720 a year, compared with roughly $7,000 off-campus. Sprawl rats sharing a McMansion — with each getting a bedroom and often a private bath — pay $200 to $350 a month each, depending on the amenities…

A confluence of factors led to the unlikely presence of students in subdivisions, where the collegiate promise of sleeping in on a Saturday morning may be rudely interrupted by neighborhood children selling Girl Scout cookies door to door.

This city of 79,000 is ranked third nationally in metropolitan-area home foreclosures, behind Las Vegas and Vallejo, Calif., said Daren Blomquist, a spokesman for RealtyTrac, a company based in Irvine, Calif., that tracks housing sales. The speculative fever that gripped the region and drew waves of outside investors to this predominantly agricultural area was fueled in part by the promise of the university itself, which opened in 2005 as the first new University of California campus in 40 years.

The crash crashed harder here. “Builders were coming into the area by the bulkload,” said Loren M. Gonella, who owns a real estate company here. “It was, ‘Holy moly, let’s get on this gravy train.’ ”

But visions of an instant Berkeley materializing in the cow pastures were premature. The stylishly designed university planned for a gradual expansion, adding 600 new students a year. That has meant phased dorm construction, which is financed with tax-exempt bonds repaid by student revenue. There is room for only 1,600 students in the campus dorms, but 5,200 are enrolled.

With hundreds of homes standing empty, many of them likely foreclosures, students willing to share houses have been “a blessing,” said Ellie Wooten, a former mayor of Merced and a real estate broker. Five students paying $200 a month each trump families who cannot afford more than $800 a month…

The university’s free transit system, Cat Tracks, stops at student-heavy subdivisions…

RTFA. Some humorous anecdotes. Sour grapes from some of the homeowners still in residence – though they should be glad for the presence of students whose numbers probably deter the incidence of squatters and thieves specializing in everything from copper wiring to posh bathroom fixtures.

Face it. Creative solutions are most often better than sitting back, whining and waiting for a politician to happen along with a useful answer.

WiFi and USB have both become inexpensive and ubiquitous connectivity solutions, so the idea of exploiting them both at the same time a single device makes sense. IOGEAR’s latest take on the theme is its Wireless 4-Port USB Sharing Station, which allows up to four USB peripherals (external storage, camera, printer, etc.) to be shared over a WiFi network and in the process provides a recipe for an uncluttered desktop environment.

While some devices come WiFi-enabled out of the box (printers especially), most of them rely on cords. Resembling an ordinary WiFi router, the IOGEAR Wireless Sharing Station in fact requires a WiFi router to establish a WLAN within the station’s range. After plugging USB gadgets into its four ports, they become accessible to PCs, smartphones, tablets and other devices.

An office environment with shareable multi-function printers, or external hard drives, seems to be the most obvious application of IOGEAR’s device. Another likely application is a simple surveillance system, made up of a USB-powered video recording device accessible via WiFi when plugged into the station. Other USB devices that could be shared include speakers, flash memories, memory card readers, MP3 players, or even USB toys.

I can’t wait to play with one of these. This may replace the gaming switch I use as a wireless hub for my entertainment center.

It pays to live in Sherman County: $590 a year.

“Now you wake up and the wind is blowing and it’s like, yes!” said one Sherman County resident who is making money from wind turbines on her farm.

In this sparsely populated landscape south of the Columbia River Gorge, annual checks for that amount are local residents’ share of a windfall brought by the growing wind energy industry. In an area otherwise dominated by wheat farms, hundreds of 300-foot wind turbines now generate electricity and cash.

“Wind is the only thing that is going to save rural Oregon,” said Judge Gary Thompson of Sherman County Court, “especially since all the timber is gone and the sawmills and all that are closing down. I think what it is is a breath of fresh air.”

The Columbia Gorge has been like an expressway for hard-blowing wind since long before the turbines arrived. Trees here lean to the east from the gusts that rip across the plateau.

Sherman County, which earned $315,000 in property taxes from the first wind farm in 2002, raked in $3 million from wind farms in 2010. The bounty, while mostly flowing to the farmers who lease their land for the turbines, also benefits the public. Taxes, fees and assessments on more than 1,000 megawatts of wind turbine capacity have brought $17.5 million in nine years to a county with just 1,735 residents.

The county’s four towns — Wasco, Moro, Rufus and Grass Valley — are prospering. At Sherman Junior/Senior High School in Moro, wind money paid for new computers, musical instruments, robotics equipment, portions of a greenhouse and a new teacher to instruct the most gifted of its 124 students last year…

Judge Thompson said the payments were intended to reward residents who have made no financial gains from wind energy development, but whose views of Mount Adams and the county’s stunning landscape now include a panorama of turbines. The checks are also intended to soothe any unease about the influx of corporations, occasional turbine noise and the risks posed to bats and birds by turbines.

“It’s modeled after a lot of Alaska compensation,” Judge Thompson said. “There are a lot of people who live in the county who are not necessarily going to benefit from the renewable energy, and we felt we needed to share it with all the county residents.”

The judge is the kind of politician liable to be indicted – or lynched – by the Kool Aid Party and the Oil Addicts they cohabit with in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, it’s just a heckuva nice story about folks who band together and distribute a little bit of their new-found environmental wealth among those who surely can use it. Especially schoolchildren.

Eight years after the American-clergy sex-abuse controversy erupted, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams yesterday lobbed a bombshell into the still-simmering scandal.

Williams announced the grand-jury indictment of one of former Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua’s top aides for allegedly endangering children by shielding pedophile priests from detection and shuffling them into unsuspecting parishes where they could continue the perversions of which they are accused.

It’s believed to be the first time a high-ranking Catholic official has been accused of being criminally accountable for covering up priest abuse.

Monsignor William Lynn, 60, was charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. As Bevilacqua’s secretary for clergy, he was the Archdiocese’s personnel director and responsible for investigating reports of priest sexual abuse from 1992 until 2004.

Grand jurors had aimed even higher, saying that Bevilacqua may have been involved in the coverup.

“We do know that over the years Cardinal Bevilacqua was kept closely advised of Monsignor Lynn’s activities, and personally authorized many of them . . . [but] we cannot conclude that a successful prosecution can be brought against the Cardinal – at least for the moment,” they wrote in their 124-page report…

Lynn, now parish priest at St. Joseph’s, in Downingtown, faces up to 14 years in prison if convicted…

Advocates for abuse victims celebrated the indictments.

RTFA for the history of abuse, priests sharing victims, passing them around through the ranks – and the inevitable coverup.

The worst any of these thugs suffered was being defrocked. A delightful medieval term that matches the out-of-date mindset of the church leaders who feel they and their acolytes are above secular law.

Photo from an earlier visit to Hong Kong

Cold War enemies the United States and Vietnam demonstrated their blossoming military relations Sunday as a US nuclear supercarrier floated in waters off the Southeast Asian nation’s coast.

The USS George Washington’s stop, which comes 35 years after the Vietnam War, is officially billed as a commemoration of last month’s 15th anniversary of normalised diplomatic relations between the former foes. But the timing also reflects Washington’s heightened interest in maintaining security and stability in the Asia-Pacific amid tensions following the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, which killed 46 sailors. North Korea has been blamed for the attack, but has vehemently denied any involvement.

Last month during an Asian security meeting in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also angered China by unexpectedly calling on the Communist powerhouse to resolve territorial claims with neighbouring Southeast Asian countries over islands in the South China Sea.

China claims the entire sea and the disputed Spratly and Paracel islands over which it exercises complete sovereignty. But Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines also have staked claims on all or some of the territory, which straddles vital shipping lanes, important fishing grounds and is believed rich in oil and natural gas reserves. Clinton announced that the US has a national interest in seeing the claims resolved…

Maybe Hillary thinks Lyndon Johnson made the Gulf of Tonkin part of Texas?

The aircraft carrier’s visit is particularly symbolic as it floats off the coast of central Danang, once the site of a bustling U.S. military base during the Vietnam War, which ended April 30, 1975, when northern communist forces seized control of the US-backed capital of South Vietnam, reuniting the country.

Some 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese were killed during the war.

The US is now Vietnam’s top export market and Americans are the country’s No. 1 foreign investor. Two-way trade reached $15.4 billion in 2009.

Of course, if the United States hadn’t been occupied with being the cop of the world – that trade, cooperation and commerce could have started decades ago.

We always forget that VietNam was one of the Asian nations that fought on our side against Japan through World War 2. Even though they were occupied beforehand by France as a colonial “property”.

No – Murdoch’s not feeling sorry for himself, yet
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won’t exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds…”

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.

“Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up.” But then, interestingly, he goes on, “Here’s what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times…”

Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary…

“The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”

RTFA. Interesting, provocative. Having wandered through this cyber-landscape for a larger number of years than either the protagonist or antagonist – I’ve been online since 1983 – I have a passing acquaintance at least with each facet of the discussion.

Like Shirky, I agree with him because I want to. Though that’s an equal part reflection from someone who is a hermit in real life as much as online.

In a big concession to users’ privacy rights, Google launched what it calls Google Dashboard – a tool which gives Google account holders a single view of all of the data associated with their Google accounts.

The Google Dashboard is being touted as a way for users to, at a glance, see information about their Web usage, email usage and more when they are logged into Google services such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Calendar. Google provides an overview of the Dashboard in a video in its main blog. Dashboard will let users delete information as well, a move that could help to address privacy concerns that have been raised surrounding Google’s collection of so much data about its users’ online habits.

On the left-hand side of the screen, Google Dashboard lists items such as Contacts, Docs, and Gmail, while on the right-hand side, users can drill down through functions such as “edit personal information,” “sharing documents,” and “manage chat history.” There is also a “privacy and security help” area…

Indeed, some of Google’s earlier products have bowed to users’ privacy, particularly Piracy Center, an area that educates users about Google’s privacy policies…

At the same time, though, Google has raised the privacy hackles of some users with features such as Social Search, a function which grabs relevant public content from your friends’ and contacts’ blogs and social networking pages, and Google Maps Street View.

I have to chuckle over some of the cowardly lion pretenses that thread most “outrage” about privacy on the Web.

Preserve me from pundits who preach to the converted and don’t practice anything even elemental regarding their own personal privacy on the Web. There ain’t too many of these Freedom Fighters who don’t use Facebook and Twitter to promote their own agenda.

Professional skeptics and pundits should skip this article as it actually deals with science instead of talking about science as if you really read anything.

It’s worth remembering that the currency among professional researchers is in publications – research papers. They are the manifestation of a research group’s work, a reference document, the bar by which a researcher is measured and the stock-in-trade of the knowledge that they produce, use, share, and archive.

The problem has always been that those research papers are on paper…

“The manner in which you become ‘literature aware’ can be slow and is limited in scope to the views and criticisms of your physically immediate peers,” said Ali Salehi-Reyhani, a researcher in single cell proteomics at Imperial College London.

“Web 2.0 throws that open to a global community of experts with tools like f1000 and Twitter.”

F1000 is a tool that highlights high impact papers and allows scientists to subject them to post-publication peer review.

“The viral nature of Twitter allows information to be rapidly and critically spread to an audience thousands to millions wide,” said Mr Salehi-Reyhani. “Tweeting scientists can exploit this to quickly pass on that hot new paper to their peers with minimal effort yet maximum effect.”

The imminent release of Google Wave could also be a boon for the cat-herding exercise of collaborating on a research paper, as each participant in a given conversation – or “wave” – using the service can add, delete, or change a given document, with a live, most-current version of a document in progress visible to everyone in the wave, no matter the time zone.

“Science always builds on what’s gone before and sharing results and data and ideas is a core part of that – it’s just that in the past we haven’t been able to do that as efficiently as we can today.”

RTFA. It’s not so much about the software utilized for the process of collaborative research, writing, editing and discussion. It’s about developing the process with what the Web has to offer 24/7.

To a certain extent, I’m afraid to write this. Though they’ve already seized my computer and copied my hard drive, I have no guarantee they won’t do it again. For the past four years, they’ve been threatening me, making demands for trial, deposing my parents, sisters, friends, and myself twice – the first time for nine hours, the second for seven. I face up to $4.5m in fines and the last case like mine that went to trial had a jury verdict of $1.92m.

When I contemplate this, I have to remind myself what I’m being charged with. Investment fraud? Robbing a casino? A cyber-attack against the federal government? No. I shared music. And refused to cave.

No matter how many people I explain this to, the reaction is always the same: dumbfounded surprise and visceral indignance, both of which are a result of the amazing secrecy the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has operated under. “How did they get you?” I’m asked. I explain that there are 40,000 people like me, being sued for the same thing, and we were picked from a pool of millions who shared music. And that’s when a look appears on the face of whoever I’m talking to, the horrified “it could have been me!” look.

The reason this has remained so silent despite passionate opposition is that nearly all people settle. My story of becoming an exception started four years ago.

In my mind, the RIAA are the ultimate example of incompetent corporate greed – channeled through the sewer of unprincipled lawyers. Shit for brains. Slime for ethics.

RTFA. And you can follow Joel Tenebaum’s trial in the world of digital communications. Wonder – as I do – if Fair Use will be allowed again by an American court?

The trial starts today, 27 Monday July. Regrettably, it won’t be webcast as we requested due to the RIAA’s successful opposition, but we will tweet (with the hashtag #jfb) and blog as much as possible, and there is a website where you can follow us and learn more.

Not really. But, that was the headline for this topic over at Steve Terrell’s blog. And I consider him the guru of music and politics.

In a stunning turn of events, the US music industry has ceased its long-time litigation strategy of suing individual P2P file-swappers. Instead, with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo acting as a broker, the RIAA has signed voluntary “graduated response” agreements with major Internet service providers. Those currently on the receiving end of an RIAA lawsuit, though, will have to see it through to the (very) bitter end.

While the agreement itself comes as a surprise after years of lawsuits that have numbered in the tens of thousands, the contours of the deal remain comfortably familiar. Europe is leading the way in hashing out graduated response programs, and the RIAA plan sounds like a mix of the current British and French approaches to the issues.

As in Britain, the deal is voluntary, has no official government enforcement, and will not have ISPs passing user information on to the RIAA. Instead, the RIAA notifies ISPs about suspected infringement using IP addresses; the ISP then privately looks up its subscriber information and forwards a notice telling the person to stop.

But, as in France, penalties are coming (the voluntary UK scheme is currently “notification only”). They remain undefined at the moment, though the RIAA confirms to Ars that they will include account suspension for users who continue to share files illegally.

The key difference between Europe and the US is the lack of government pressure. New York Attorney General Cuomo did make it clear to the music industry that the lawsuits have been unhelpful and that he hoped to see a different approach, but nothing like the government pressure to cut a deal that we have seen in the UK or France has been mooted here.

Which leads to the obvious question: what do ISPs get out of the deal? They aren’t under any serious pressure to act on this if they don’t believe it to be in the interests of their companies or subscribers, but the RIAA makes clear that several leading ISPs are already on board. But they do get a tremendous goodie bag under the Christmas tree: congestion relief.

Now, who do we talk to about putting out some better music?