Posts Tagged ‘original-reporting’
States seek to copy Arizona immigration law
This co-production was reported with Vanessa Hauc of Telemundo and cross-posted from msnbc.com. Read the original in context, with a state-by-state box.
Arizona’s hot-button immigration law is on hold, pending court appeals, but its effects are rippling across the country as state legislatures reconfigured by the November elections begin their new sessions.
The disputed Arizona law would allow law enforcement officers to demand proof of legal immigration status from anyone they stop.
In July, a U.S. district judge granted the Obama administration’s request for an injunction blocking parts of the trailblazing law, which raised many legal questions, including whether local officials can legally enforce federal immigration law and whether such local enforcement could lead to unconstitutional racial profiling.
Live-blogging Egypt
I’m live-blogging the protests in Egypt today for msnbc.com’s World Blog. Here’s a roundup to get you started.
Right: Egyptian soldiers and civilians gather Monday in Al Tahrir Square in central Cairo. (Felipe Trueba /EPA) Full slideshow.
‘This is about social networks that are beyond the reach of Mubarak’
Cross-posted from Technolog: read in context
Large parts of the Internet essentially went dark about midnight Egypt time after the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of Washington, ordered service providers and cell phone companies to shut down.
While it looks like Egypt has been cut off — attempts to get to pretty much any Web site in Egypt are unsuccessful, and Twitter.com is unavailable inside the country — protesters and sympathizers have been able to get their message out through a variety of means because “what the government does is very effective for stopping the most basic users, meaning average users, the folks who probably aren’t Twitter users,” says Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington and author of “The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.”
“Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.”
Here’s the text of our full conversation with Howard:
State of the Union: Obama urges cooperation and innovation
Declaring that the nation faces big decisions like those it confronted at the dawn of the space race, President Barack Obama called for sweeping bipartisan “investments” in science, education and infrastructure in his State of the Union address Tuesday night — all without increasing government spending.
In a 61-minute address from the House chamber, Obama pleaded for a cooling of political tensions to help him reach that goal, saying America faced a crossroads that demanded a cooperative effort “bigger than party and bigger than politics.”
At “our generation’s Sputnik moment … we will move forward together or not at all,” the president said, recalling the massive U.S. mobilization of money and resources to catch the Soviet Union after it launched the world’s first satellite into space in 1957.
At the same time, Obama acknowledged that he must accommodate conservatives’ demands for restrictions on overall government spending and taxes, proposing a freeze on “annual domestic spending for the next five years.”
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Fractured Android leaves orphans behind
If tablets are the stars at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, then the headliner is Google, whose Android mobile operating system runs most of the devices getting so much attention this week in Las Vegas.
The iPad is still the king, but Apple isn’t here — as usual. This gives Google’s little green robot command of the spotlight almost by default. Nearly every major computer maker already has an Android tablet or is debuting one (or more) at CES; by the end of the year, Android will have grabbed a third of the tablet market to go along with half the smartphone market, analysts Piper-Jaffray projected this week.
But by mid-year, consumers will have to wade through a half-dozen different Android operating systems on tablets. Those on earlier releases will essentially be stranded — Google orphans left to rely on the cleverness of an already-thriving community of hackers who fill in the holes in Android on their own. Meanwhile, developers must weigh whether it’s worth the resources to bring out yet another version of their applications for yet another version of Android.
Hardware is back
The iPad, right, changed the game for manufacturers of mobile technology. Its simplicity helped create devices defined by what their hardware will — and won’t — let you do. Google’s Chrome notebook, left, has no obvious file system or desktop. The eLocity A7, center, is just one of dozens of Android-powered tablets that try to mimic the iPad’s intuitive look and feel. (John Brecher/msnbc.com)
When was the last time you referred to your computer as a “486-DX66”? When was the last time that you even thought about what microprocessor was beating at the heart of your PC/laptop/phone/game?
Computer processing has leaped so far so fast that sometime in the past decade it became commodified. Consumers no longer pay attention to what’s inside their devices because just about any computer they can buy is guaranteed to be far more powerful than they probably need for everyday browsing, storage and media.
This is odd if you stop to consider it. Think of it in terms of cars: Sure, there are gearheads who obsess over things like fuel injectors and cubic capacity, but normal humans just pick a general category and trust that whatever they buy has the appropriate engine for their needs and it will get them from Point A to Point B with the greatest efficiency.
What determines buying decisions are the personal choices drivers make that are peripheral to actual driving. You might be raising a family in the suburbs, so you buy an SUV with a DVD system to keep the kids occupied. Or maybe you’re single and looking, so a sporty convertible is more your speed, or you want to save the world, so you seek out a hybrid or even an electric car with no air-conditioning. If you’re like most people, you’re not interested in a turbocharged racing car to get you to the grocery story.
It doesn’t work that way with computers, which mostly come in two racing classes that all look alike, like Formula 1 (desktops) and NASCAR (mobile computers). The odds are you’re computing on the equivalent of a Ferrari when all you really need is a nicely detailed Honda.
Why your child’s school bus has no seat belts
Video: Federal crash test video may look violent, but safety officials say much of the impact is absorbed by the foam padding on the seat in front. A lap or shoulder belt could cause significant neck and abdominal injuries.
If cars have seat belts, why aren’t they generally required in school buses? Because modern school buses are already remarkably safe, and because seat belts don’t work the same way in buses as they do cars, research shows.
Designers of modern school buses don’t trust squirmy children to use seat belts properly. Instead, they use a passive system called compartmentalization. Bus seats aren’t packed so closely together just to maximize capacity (although that’s one reason); they’re spaced tightly and covered with 4-inch-thick foam to form a protective bubble.
About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. About 800 children, by contrast, die every year walking, biking or being driven to school in cars or other passenger vehicles.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Biden vs. Biden?
Did somebody get to Joe Biden?
In an interview Thursday on msnbc TV, the vice president essentially pooh-poohed the WikiLeaks dump of classified State Department cables, saying that at worst, they were “embarrassing”:
“I don’t think there’s any damage,” Biden said. “I don’t think there’s any substantive damage.”
WikiLeaks paints more nuanced picture of Iran
The life of a reporter: I’m posting this late because I was on vacation when it actually ran on msnbc.com (in fact, I finished writing it on the plane to Georgia) and it slipped my mind.
Classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks paint a picture of an Iran with few friends in the Mideast, even among nations that speak more accommodatingly in public for political reasons. The documents show that the Iranian leadership is not united behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that the United States and its European allies must lean heavily on the government of Turkey for its limited insight into the affairs of Tehran, despite what they see as the erratic unreliability of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
WikiLeaks attacks getting more sophisticated
Over at Technolog, I’m analyzing the newest DDoS attack on WikiLeaks. This one is 50 times the size of the Anonymous attack on Scientology in 2008.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 