Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• GigaOM

  • By the end of next year, there could be nearly four times as many devices sold running on Google Android than on Microsoft Windows. That’s a staggering figure from research firm Gartner, which forecast device sales on Thursday. The company expects that of the 2.6 billion computers, tablets, and mobile phones sold in 2015, 1.3 billion of them will run Android.
  • Quickly doing the math, that means for every one Microsoft Windows device sold, 3.6 Android devices are purchased.

• AFP: Russian officials dump iPads over spy fears

  • Russian government officials have swapped their iPads for Samsung tablets to ensure tighter security, the telecoms minister told news agencies on Wednesday.
  • American special services... will significantly increase the volume of information they intercept (which) of course causes serious concern to many governmental clients."

• Democrats' great green hope? Americans only want to vote for marijuana. - The Week

  • While 82 percent of respondents disapprove of Congress — with both parties "universally despised," according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake — 73 percent support medical marijuana in their states, 53 percent back decriminalizing pot, and most importantly, 68 percent said they are more likely to go to the polls if marijuana is on the ballot.

• Pew: White majority over, next generation over 50% non-white | WashingtonExaminer.com

  • For the first time in American history, non-whites will make up half or more of the next generation, likely pushing Washington toward a bigger government

  • Their tendency is more liberal, their tendency is bigger government,” he said of so-called “millennials” born between 1979 and 1995. They will likely set the trend for the still-unnamed next generation.

     

    “This is a generation that is 41 percent non-white; the generation behind it is likely to be close to 50 if not more than 50 percent non-white, and the anti-government kind of tone is one that really doesn’t resonate with that non-white sector in particular,

• Is There Any Hope For The Middle Class? | Market Daily News

  • At this point, our economy has stabilized at a much lower level than it was at before.  For example, 32 million Americans were on food stamps when Barack Obama took office, and subsequently that number shot up to about 47 million.  Fortunately, that number has been relatively stable for the last couple of years, but there has been no recovery.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Teslas in California Help Bring Dirty Rain to China - Bloomberg

  • The link is graphite, a vital component in batteries used in Tesla’s Model S, Toyota’s plug-in Prius and other electric cars, as well as in electronic gadgets including iPhones. It’s mostly mined and processed in China where graphite pollution has fouled air and water, damaged crops and raised health concerns. Now, in response, Chinese authorities are closing dozens of graphite mines and processors in a bid for cleaner air even as global demand for the commodity is surging.

            

    “There’s little question that the Chinese are between a rock and a hard place environmentally,” said Josh Landess, an advanced transportation analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “There’s an obvious irony that the disruption it’s causing is within the clean vehicle and transportation industry.”

          

    The graphite outcry is the latest among environmental flashpoints in China that have ranged from lead poisoning to acid spills and “unbearable smog” in big cities. And while the clampdown may help improve the quality of China’s environment, it could also affect as much as a third of worldwide production

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Alec Baldwin: Good-bye, Public Life -- Vulture

  • I think America’s more fucked up now than it’s ever been. People are angry that in the game of musical chairs that is the U.S. economy, there are less seats at the table when the music stops. And at every recession, the music is stopping.

• Obama advisers want to "crowdsource" patents, call again for new law | Ars Technica

  • what has happened in the arena of patent policy since then and announced new initiatives going forward—including one to "crowdsource" the review of patents
  • The Innovation Act, which includes fee-shifting and customer protection measures for patent lawsuits, has passed the House and is being debated in the Senate.

• Tech's New Feeding Frenzy - NYTimes.com

  • by valuing the number of users above revenue, Facebook is inflating another dot-com bubble.
  • In WhatsApp, Facebook sees not a trove of patents or a lucrative advertising model but the future of communications — mobile, cross-platform, cheap and international. I

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.