Limited edition PlayStation 3 controller goes 'skeleton style' for Japan, others might call it see-through

While Sony's third home console has seen transparent controllers before, this is the first time that they've also packed a rumble. Announced a day late for Halloween and headed to Japan only for now, the press release suggests that being able to see the inner workings makes it the first 'skeleton style' (translated from the Japanese) controller. The not-even-slighty-spooky DualShock 3 will go on limited sale December 19th priced at 5,500 yen (about $56). It's not cheap, but then limited edition gaming merch never have been.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/01/see-through-ps3-controller/?ncid=rss_truncated
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Montana, feds to seek damages from Exxon spill

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — After two years of review, Montana and federal officials notified Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday that they intend to seek damages for injuries to birds, fish and other natural resources from a major crude oil spill into the Yellowstone River.

The Texas company's 12-inch Silvertip pipeline broke near Laurel during flooding in July 2011, releasing 63,000 gallons of oil that washed up along an 85-mile stretch of the scenic river.

The move puts Exxon on notice that Montana and the Department of Interior expect the company to make up for harm done to wildlife and their habitat. The company also is being asked to pay for long-term environmental studies and for lost opportunities for fishing and recreation during and since the cleanup.

Separate fines totaling $3.4 million for safety and water pollution violations already have been resolved or are pending before state and federal agencies.

Exxon has told regulators it spent $135 million on the cleanup and related repair work intended to prevent a repeat of the spill, which came on a line installed just a few feet beneath the riverbed.

State officials said some of the damage is ongoing and will take years to fully understand and quantify.

That includes harm done to the river and its banks during the cleanup itself, when Exxon brought in 1,000 workers who removed hundreds of oil-stained wood piles along the river.

"You picked up the oil, but you picked up the stuff that makes the habitat work, as well," said Bob Gibson, a spokesman for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "We know there's damage out there that has not been mitigated, cleaned up or compensated for. We need to decide what further can be done."

Representatives of Exxon said they were preparing a response to Thursday's notice.

The break spurred Congress to demand a Department of Transportation review of oil and other hazardous liquid pipelines that cross beneath major rivers and other waterways across the U.S. The agency last year said there were more than 2,800 such locations.

The Transportation Department recently revised its estimate to 18,136 hazardous pipeline crossings, including 5,110 locations where the body of water has a width of 100 feet or greater.

Federal officials have said they will return to Congress in early 2014 with a determination on whether rules such as a 4-foot depth requirement for pipeline crossings are sufficient.

The Yellowstone spill also prompted oil companies including Exxon to rebury pipelines at other water crossings where the lines were considered at risk of failure due to erosion. In the case of Silvertip, the company installed new sections of line dozens of feet beneath the surface at the Laurel site and two other crossings.

Negotiations with Exxon are ongoing but no agreement has been reached, said Robert Collins, the state's lead attorney in the case.

If the company resists paying for the upcoming studies or for compensation, Collins said the state and federal government could take legal action. It's uncertain how long it will take to gauge the extent of damages. For other spills the process has taken many years.

"We're anticipating we could go to court, but we want to give (negotiations) a try before we take that step because that would string things out even further," Collins said.

• Nature & Environment
• Environment

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/montana-feds-seek-damages-exxon-spill-153410442--finance.html
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Sweet Dreams: Film Review

The Bottom Line

This uplifting documentary delivers a compelling human interest story from a still traumatized Rwanda.

Directors

Lisa Fruchtman, Rob Fruchtman

There are not one but two compelling human interest stories on display in Sweet Dreams, the new documentary by the sibling filmmaking team of Lisa Fruchtman and Rob Fruchtman. Both involve the indomitable Rwandan woman Kiki Katese, who ten years after the horrendous 1994 genocide founded the country’s first all-female drumming troupe. Several years later, she embarked on another seemingly quixotic venture, to open Rwanda’s first ice cream shop.

The drumming troupe, Ingoma Nshya, is composed of both Tutsis and Hutus. Its members, like so many of the country’s inhabitants, are still traumatized by the brutality they either witnessed or experienced first-hand. Their athletic pounding of their congas, as illustrated in numerous performance segments, can be seen as a cathartic expression of the joy that’s still possible to be found amidst the harshest of circumstances.

But that achievement wasn’t enough for Tatese, who decided that the troupe needed to be cooperatively involved in their own business. While an ice cream parlor seems an incongruous notion, she nonetheless devised a plan for its inception, enlisting aid and advice from two American women proprietors of the Brooklyn-based Blue Marble ice cream shop.

The film chronicles the enterprise’s ensuing difficulties, including the raising of the necessary capital; the African women having to learn both English and the ways of capitalism; and the complicated procurement of an ice cream machine from South Africa which was severely damaged in transit. Manned by select members of the drum troupe, the shop, whose name provides the film its title, did eventually open. But even then things didn’t always proceed smoothly, as one employee is fired for “a bad work attitude and petty theft.”

Despite these and other inevitable glitches, the story ends happily. Sweet Dreams delivers a rare uplifting story from a country that has seen more than its share of brutality and heartache.

Opens Nov. 1 (International Film Circuit)

Production: Liro Films

Directors/producers/editors: Lisa Fruchtman, Rob Fruchtman

Executive producers: Russell Long, Tiffany Schauer

Directors of photography: Rob Fruchtman, Lex Fletcher

Not rated, 89 min.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/reviews/film/~3/J2ZGT-YMhD8/sweet-dreams-film-review-652287
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Is the Constitution Written Like the Da Vinci Code?

Bond v. United States is testing whether Congress can use treaty laws to punish domestic criminal behavior.

Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

It’s the Supreme Court case that sounds like a Lifetime movie: When Carol Bond found out that her husband was having an affair with her best friend, Myrlinda Haynes—and that Haynes was pregnant—Bond, a microbiologist who lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, put toxic chemicals on Haynes’ mailbox and her car. She got caught—and was indicted under a federal statute that makes it illegal to use toxic chemicals to harm other people. Congress had passed that statute to implement the U.S. government’s obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, the same treaty that Syria was recently forced to sign.

Next Tuesday, Bond’s lawyers will try to persuade the Supreme Court that Congress can’t use the chemical weapons treaty as an excuse for punishing run-of-the-mill criminal behavior. This superficially appealing argument is beloved by libertarians, who have dashed to Bond’s aid, but it depends on a bizarre and tendentious reading of the Constitution that honors neither the founders’ intentions nor the practicalities of governance.

The Constitution gives Congress limited (“enumerated”) powers, which are thought mostly to exclude the ordinary stuff of criminal law like the dispute Bond was involved in. Normally, we think that if we need a law that prohibits people from attacking each other with toxic chemicals, the states, not the national government, should pass it.

And it’s true that the law that nailed Bond derives its authority circuitously. Congress enjoys the power under the Constitution’s catchall Necessary and Proper Clause to enact laws that are needed to advance other powers in the Constitution. One of those other powers is the president’s power to enter treaties with the consent of two-thirds of the Senate. Thus, the government argues, the federal law that criminalizes the harmful use of chemical weapons, privately as well as by governments and terrorists, was necessary and proper to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Bond’s argument is that the president and the Senate cannot, by entering a treaty, give Congress a power that it otherwise does not have. Such a reading of the Constitution crowds out the states’ police powers and gives too much sway to Congress.

This case is a strange vehicle for examining this constitutional question. True, the feds took over the case from state authorities, but that was because Constable Dogberry of the local police thought that the toxic chemical Bond smeared on Haynes’ car was cocaine and advised her to get it washed, not because Pennsylvania law allows people to assault each other with toxic chemicals. The federal law enabled the federal government to step in—the U.S. Postal Service did surveillance and caught Bond—and to punish Bond for acts that were illegal under Pennsylvania law as well.

But libertarian critics of national government power, like the Cato Institute, which submitted an amicus brief, worry that if Bond loses this case, the United States could enter a treaty with Suriname or Lesotho to abolish the death penalty or home schooling. Then Congress could pass an implementing statute that shreds state laws on the death penalty and home schooling, which (according to the libertarians) Congress is otherwise not allowed to do.

You might wonder why Suriname or Lesotho, or the United States, would enter such a treaty. And it is most doubtful that they would. Bond v. United States has become an ideological dispute, based, as such disputes so often are, on the merely theoretical possibility that the government will abuse its powers.

Cato’s brief is rooted in a literal-minded reading of the text of the Constitution. The Treaty Clause says that the president has the power to make treaties with the consent of the Senate. The necessary and proper clause says that Congress has the power to pass laws that are necessary and proper to the exercise of other powers in the Constitution. Cato concludes that therefore Congress has the power to pass laws that are necessary and proper to the making of treaties. But it doesn’t have the power to pass laws that are necessary and proper to the implementing of the treaties, because there is no separately enumerated constitutional power for implementing. And so, according to Cato, Congress can pass laws to implement treaties only if it can rely on a source of power rooted elsewhere in the Constitution. It has no such power to criminalize the domestic use of chemicals as weapons.

One can respond to this argument by observing that Congress can rely on its old broadly interpreted friend, the power to regulate interstate commerce. But libertarians object to the broad interpretation of Congress’ powers here as well. And in the Bond case, the government didn’t make this argument in the lower courts. One can also respond by arguing that “make” has a broader meaning than Cato claims, as another amicus brief gamely does.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/10/bond_v_united_states_the_ridiculous_libertarian_argument_in_the_supreme.html
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Google Wallet 'tap and pay' can work on any Android 4.4 device, but still requires a U.S. SIM

Giving hope for the future of NFC payments rather than notably changing the way anything works today

Changes in Android 4.4 KitKat are going to open up the possibilities of using NFC payments through Google Wallet, but it may not go as far as we would hope. Although the Google Wallet app itself has been opened to install on any device, the ability to use it for NFC payments (aka "tap and pay") at physical stores has been dramatically limited by carriers and manufacturers. Responding to a post by Michael Bond on Google+, the official Google Wallet account gave us a bit of info today on the status as of Android 4.4:

If you have a Nexus 5 device, you can now use Google Wallet to tap and pay in stores with any carrier. We look forward to bringing NFC tap and pay functionality to more Android phones soon.

Now that doesn't exactly mean every device running Android 4.4 — it specifically refers to the Nexus 5. And in that respect, nothing has really changed just yet. The Google Wallet support page, which has been updated to reflect the Nexus 5 and Android 4.4 announcement, currently lists every device that is able to use Google Wallet tap and pay and the caveats associated.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/fWfI-_PayW4/story01.htm
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Report: Obamacare got six enrollees on Day 1

Six.

That's how many people signed up for Obamacare on Day 1, according to CBS News, and no that's not a misprint.

The Obama administration has kept the number of enrollments close to the vest. Its touted the number of visitors to the troubled HealthCare.gov website – 4.7 million – but hasn't released the actual number of enrollments.

But according to CBS News, notes from a "war room" meeting the day after the Affordable Care Act launched on Oct. 1 say "six enrollments have occurred so far." By the end of Day 2, enrollments totaled 248 nationwide.

The White House predicted 500,000 would sign up by the end of the month, according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press, and that was considered a "modest start" for the market.

CBS notes that in order to meet the goal of seven million enrollments by March 1, the exchanges need to enroll an average of 39,000 a day.

During Wednesday's Congressional hearing, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius was asked several times for the number of enrollments. She explained that the data was unreliable and would not be available until mid-November.

"We do not have any reliable data around enrollment, which is why we haven’t given it to date," she said.

The Obama administration has enlisted the services of computer engineers from tech companies such as Google and Oracle to help fix the troubled healthcare website, which has been plagued with issues from the start. As Sebelius testified Wednesday that the site "has never crashed," users trying to access it found a message that read, "The system is down at the moment."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/day-1-of-obamacare-yielded-six-enrollees-233817649.html
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Rebecca Romijn: Why the Twins Have Never Had a Birthday Party

"We can't even get them to open presents on their birthday. They're like, 'We're still sick of presents from Christmas,'" says Romijn.Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/dIQsGwEcCpU/
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