Techcordance

Space Tourist

American billionaire Charles Simonyi lifted off toward the International Space Station (ISS) this morning on a Russian rocket, after paying the Russian Federal Space Agency $35 million through Space Adventures.
The trip is Simonyi’s second — he previously flew to the ISS in 2007 — but could be the firm’s last for a couple years.
“I’m actually optimistic, but it’s too early to tell,” Anderson said. “Even with a [space station] crew of six people it’s conceivable that there might be a couple of seats for commercial purposes for 2010 or 2011.”
However, NASA didn’t sound so sure.

“Today the plan is to fly one more — it’s not a tourist, it’s a Kazakh-trained crewmember that’s been with them for a while,” NASA ISS program manager Mike Suffredini said earlier this month. “We’d consider him a crewmember actually, given his experience and the time he’s been in training. That’s to occur this fall, and we’ve been informed that will be the last, at least from a planning perspective, that is the last of the tourists to fly.

Censored

Attorneys for a high school valedictorian whose microphone was turned off when she began sharing her Christian faith say they’ll appeal her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Rutherford Institute is representing Brittany McComb, whose lawsuit against school officials was dismissed Friday by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court stated that “by preventing her from making a proselytizing graduation speech,” McComb’s free speech and free exercise rights were not violated, nor was her right to equal protection.
n June 2006, McComb strayed from her school-approved script to tell how faith in Jesus had filled a void in her life. Her microphone was shut off in mid-sentence as she said, “God’s love is so great that he gave up — gave up his only Son…” The audience responded with boos and shouts to turn it back on, and responded similarly when school officials attempted to introduce the next valedictorian speaker, saying “she deserves this chance to speak.”

Recession

Some broadband users are considering going back to dial-up as the tough economic climate forces them to cut their household budgets, according to a story published Friday in the Chicago Tribune.

While it’s unlikely Americans will ditch broadband for dial-up en masse, there are likely to be some people who find the $20 to $50 monthly fees for DSL or cable modem broadband service to be too high, when dial-up providers such as NetZero are offering new $9.95 service plans.

CBNnews

WICHITA, Kan. – Jurors have acquitted one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers of violating Kansas law requiring an independent second opinion for the procedure.
But moments after the verdict was announced Friday, the state’s medical board made public a complaint against Dr. George Tiller on similar allegations.
Tiller was found not guilty of 19 misdemeanor charges stemming from abortions he performed at his Wichita clinic in 2003. Prosecutors had alleged that a doctor he used for second opinions was essentially an employee of his and not independent as state law requires.

$300 Computer

The last time Georgia Santos went computer shopping, she steered clear of the hulking desktops and barely glanced at the dizzying array of laptops.

Instead, the 23-year-old New York student made a beeline for the newest and cheapest species to emerge from the computing industry: the netbook.

She said she has an aging laptop at home, but instead of swapping it for a similar model, she wants to replace it with a sub-$300 Hewlett-Packard Mini netbook.

AIG Scandal

On the surface, it sounds like a healthy company was rewarding its best and brightest. Over 400 employees recently received bonuses. Three-fourths of the company received more than $100,000. Fifty-one employees received $1 to $2 million; fifteen received more that $2 million, and six received $4 million. The highest bonus stood at $6.4 million. Bonuses.

That’s on top of a salary we can assume is decent to begin with, given the size of the company. But, hey, this is capitalism. And you reward people for raising the bottom line, making stockholders richer, offering services — in this case, insurance — that betters the lives of your customers and society.

Except for the fact that these bonuses were handed out to executives of a company on the verge of collapse, one that has lost more money in three months — $62 billion in the last quarter alone —

Cloud Computing?

This is a guest post from Dana Gardner of TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet. You can follow Dana on his ZDNet blog BriefingsDirect, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Cloud computing seems to be trapped between the rock of great expectations and the hard place of low confidence. While most enterprise and IT decision makers view cloud as a way to lower capital and operational costs, the way to more aggressive cloud adoption is blocked by concerns about security and control.
This is the finding of a recent survey commissioned by IT consultancy Avanade, Inc., Seattle, Wash., and conducted by Kelton Research, Culver City, CA.

Montana Court

HELENA (AP) — A federal appeals court says a Montana election law was unconstitutionally applied to an East Helena church that supported a 2004 ballot initiative to define marriage.
Wednesday’s ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals chided the state for its “petty bureaucratic harassment†of the Canyon Ferry Road Baptist Church.
There was no immediate reply to a request for comment from Montana’s attorney general.
The appeals court ruled the state violated the church’s First Amendment rights when Montana’s commissioner of political practices at the time, Gordon Higgins, ruled the church became an “incidental campaign committee,†that must report its expenditures to the state, because the church supported a 2004 constitutional initiative defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Cnet news

President Obama’s decision to allow federal tax dollars to be used with embryonic stem cell research does more than reverse his predecessor’s policies and fulfill a long-standing campaign promise. It also reopens the debate about how well science and politics can, or should, mix.

On Monday, Obama signed an executive order allowing research on more stem cell lines than the Bush administration had permitted in its political compromise eight years ago.