"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench informally called "Dodo-Goldilocks" when Phoenix's Robotic Arm enlarged that trench on June 15, during the 20th Martian day, or sol, since landing. Several were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench early today, on Sol 24. [University of Arizona Mars Phoenix Mission]

LAist: Water Ice Found on Mars

It is pitiful to see how little faith the leaders of European Union countries have in themselves and in the great human, political, economic and social experiment that outrageous fortune has put in their care. European integration is in danger, but not because of the Irish rejection of the diluted reform treaty that aimed to make the Union a more coherent and functional political body. It’s in danger because of the tactical incompetence and lack of inspired leadership on the part of the people who govern the member-states’ governments as well as those charged with running the EU.

yes

see my remarks here

Nikos Konstandaras at PostGlobal: Defend Europe Now - PostGlobal at washingtonpost.com

Europeans have spent a lot of time in recent years asking Americans how they could be dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in electing George W. Bush. But when it comes to sheer electoral crassness, it’s hard to beat what the Irish have just done.

absolutely
too many of my fellow Europeans don't have a clue about how important European union is for prosperity and for having influence in a global environment
nobody sells the advantages -- a good friend of mine who works in IT, an intelligent chap and I've never noticed that he's a raving nationalist, just an ordinary well educated and reasonably well paid bloke, just the sort of person who should understand the benefits of European integration and be trying to convince tabloid readers (fed a diet of Euro-sceptic misinformation for nearly 20-30 years) but no his status on Facebook was that he wished he had £10 million so he could buy everyone in Ireland a drink for voting no to the treaty

the Irish No vote was a victory for lies, bigotry, small minded nationalism, provincialism, insularity and anti-imigration and supported by intelligent decent people and I'm sure that a significant number of those who voted no are intelligent decent people -- it just seems that the contary case makes all the noise and drowns out and frightens those who should be making the case for being cosmopolitan, tolerant, open and richer (it's bizare that although Europe clearly makes us as Europeans more proserous as a whole that simple point gets lost -- the one point that should be easiest to sell, even to the more bigoted members of society) -- it all seems in the end to come down to the fact that it's easier to sell nationalism that cosmopolitanism -- I'm reminded of what Obama said about small towns and god, guns etc although I don't think it's all to do with economic hardship but rather people like to cling to certain traditional identities and when threatened; economically, by larger different cosmopolitan identities, threatened by the new and to them the strange (the outsider, the gay, the black, the garlic eater, the muslim), they retreat into tradional identities and sometimes those identies become even narrower. And if that process becomes too magnified demagogues arise.

The EU is politically flawed, it needs to be more democratic and more participatory. But the idea is good and the people who support the project have to be less afraid of making the case. Openness, tolerance, prosperity. Economic openness, social openness, embrace and adapt to change.

Op-Ed Columnist - Roger Cohen - The Muck of the Irish - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

The A.P. doesn't get to make it's own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it's clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don't exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

So here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them. They're banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

Good.

Here's Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They're Banned - washingtonpost.com

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

About a quarter-century ago, I was in West Beirut at the Commodore Hotel, once described as a functioning telex machine surrounded by 500 broken toilets. You lined up to use the telex. There was a war on in a divided city. There was also plenty of Black Label.

Op-Ed Columnist - In Praise of Being Cut Off - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Schawinksi and his colleagues detected the ultraviolet signal of a hefty star on the verge of explosion, which they detail in the June 13 issue of the journal Science.

Usually, when astronomers see a supernova, the star has already been destroyed. It s very hard to tell much about precisely the kind of star that actually died there, Schawinski told SPACE.com. The really cool thing about our observations is this light traveling ahead of the shock wave traveled through the star before it was destroyed.

He added, It s telling us about the properties, the conditions, of the star at the moment it died, but before the shock wave actually disrupted it.

SPACE.com -- Cosmic Grim Reaper Seen For First Time

Esbjorn Svensson (April 16, 1964 - June 14, 2008) was a jazz pianist and founder of the jazz band Esbj�rn Svensson Trio, commonly known as E.S.T.

RIP to a great musician who I had the privilege of seeing play in concert and made me cry at the beauty of the performance -- a great loss

Esbj�rn Svensson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The political classes don t like this sort of thing. There s too much raw emotion involved. Like nervous prefects, they dismissed Davis as vain, egotistical, narcissistic and irresponsible. He was, said one commentator of my acquaintance, suffering from a mid-life crisis and probably knew he didn t have the brains to be Home Secretary, which is why he had bailed out.

That very much captures what is wrong with the Westminster village, which is so consumed with the talk of power, the jockeying for power, the acquisition and loss of it, that there is very little space left in the minds of journalists and politicians for principles and ideas. Yet that was what so much of last week in the House of Commons was about. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister won 42 days pre-charge detention by buying votes from nine hard-faced men from Northern Ireland, while 36 members of his own party stood up for the fundamental freedoms of our country. This was a moral defeat, not for Labour, but for Gordon Brown.
...
But when you think of the magnificence of the gesture - in Cyrano's word, the panache - the wonderful departure from the norms of Westminster and the fatalistic reductions of the political classes, your support flies to him. Here was a man who threw dignity and prospects to the wind in order to defend 'the relentless erosion of fundamental freedoms'. After all, he said, what are MPs there for if not to protect Magna Carta?

Coincidentally, as he was saying this, Senator Barack Obama issued a statement welcoming the Supreme Court's rejection of the legal black hole at Guantanámo 'as re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus'.

Davis is right for the same reasons as Obama is, and many on the Labour benches who voted for the measure will eventually realise that.

Henry Porter: A magnificent gesture that we must support | Politics | The Observer

Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs:

hahaha

Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector - HotHardware