EFF has obtained whistleblower evidence [PDF] from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers, and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed, “this isn’t a wiretap, it’s a country-tap.“

NSA Spying | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that people who think a health care law infringes on individual freedom are going to be silent on this issue. Who’s really fighting to protect our rights in this country?

I feel like public radio should address this directly, because I think anybody who listens to our stations understands that what they’re hearing is mainstream media reporting. We have nothing to fear from a discussion of what is the news coverage we’re doing. As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it’s biased news, it’s left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it’s not. And we are not fighting back, we are not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying, and I don’t understand it.

Ira Glass, in an interview, on NPR’s lack of self-defense as it’s systematically attacked by the right

In the description for setPropertiesToFetch, you really need to say “This value is only used if resultType is set to NSDictionaryResultType.” as the header file instructs. I just lost an hour thinking it applied to managed object result types.

From the iOS documentation for setPropertiesToFetch: in NSFetchRequest.

Remember the German economic boom of 2010?

Germany’s economic growth surged in the middle of last year, causing commentators both there and here to proclaim that American stimulus had failed and German austerity had worked. Germany’s announced budget cuts, the commentators said, had given private companies enough confidence in the government to begin spending their own money again.

Well, it turns out the German boom didn’t last long. With its modest stimulus winding down, Germany’s growth slowed sharply late last year, and its economic output still has not recovered to its prerecession peak. Output in the United States — where the stimulus program has been bigger and longer lasting — has recovered. This country would now need to suffer through a double-dip recession for its gross domestic product to be in the same condition as Germany’s.

Yet many members of Congress continue to insist that budget cuts are the path to prosperity. The only question in Washington seems to be how deeply to cut federal spending this year.

In fact viewership of al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.

Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

Hey guys. Want to work for the biggest shithead in New York? Do you like degradation, pain, mental torture, and the possibility of damaging your genitals?

The new MobileMe file-storage and music service could be available as early as June, depending on the progress of licensing talks that are in their preliminary stages, the people familiar with the situation said. Apple had planned for the service to roll out a year earlier.

Apple Works on Line of Less-Expensive iPhones

This in a nutshell is why Apple never pre-announces products.