Well my favorite free service for mobile voice command email and texting just jumped the shark and went to a pay plan.  It’ll cost you $3.99 a month to continue using the service (although there seems to be a free introductory trial) now that they are “out of beta”.  Sure hope Google voice adds basic voice to text services soon.

Interesting report on the efforts to reduce moral judgments into code.  Its a fun fun read just to try your hand at the trolley problem.  Are you as moral as a machine?  Or less?

Can Robots Make Ethical Decisions? | LiveScience

The authors of the paper claim that they have been successful in modeling these difficult moral problems in computer logic. They accomplished this feat by resolving the hidden rules that people use in making moral judgments and then modeling them for the computer using prospective logic programs.

Found this via DZone where it was noticed on a Sun corporate blog page.  So this bodes well for MySQL in the near term.   Now what about Netbeans?

Oracle’s ‘Sun’day – NYPOST.com

According to a person with direct knowledge of the talks, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes approved the deal after Oracle agreed to fund the open database software, dubbed MySQL, for the next three years at more than $24 million annually.

At the same time, Oracle will form an advisory group of MySQL customers.

Whew.  Finally.

Thunderbird 3 Officially Released with New Features, Improved Look – Thunderbird – Lifehacker

ven if you don’t plan on using Thunderbird as your main email client, it’s an excellent tool for simply backing up your email—or even for accessing Gmail when it’s down. Thunderbird 3.0 is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Well at last: email distributions for the Enterprise.  Now if they’d only add blogger.

Official Google Blog: Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users.

Extensions not officially supported: YMMV.

How to get Chrome extensions working on a Mac

Thankfully DotSpots founder Matt Mastracci and a blogger over at Grack.com have come to the rescue. Although not officially supported, the duo have come up with a quick and easy way to get Chrome extensions working on a mac.

Coming to your account soon …

Google Aims To Push The Speed Of Light With Realtime Results. Seriously.

When this goes live (update, it is live now), you will see a new “Latest” option in the “Show options” sidebar of Google Search. There is also a way to filter results just to status updates from Twitter and the like.

One of the last independent streaming services left standing, it was acquisition was fated.  But why Apple?  There seems to be a lot of head scratching going on about that.  If Apple were out to start a streaming service (the article points out) it might have done better to buy a service with better streaming licensing already in place.

The best guess is that they were after the intellectual property, probably the engineering team.  And if I had to guess, it may be related to allowing users to stream their iTunes music from home to a web browser version of the iTunes store anywhere from on the internet.  There are third party apps to do that already (pulpTunes, orb) and it makes sense to get those eyeballs onto the iTunes store instead.

Apple buys music streamer Lala, but what’s it getting?

On balance, the purchase appears to give Apple the chance to bring in engineers that will be useful now, and could be even more so if it chooses to enter streaming or subscription services. But, for the moment, there’s nothing about the purchase that seems to provide the company with any key technologies it was missing in terms of diving into markets. Until another company demonstrates that there’s money to be made (or iPods to be sold) through streaming, there’s no reason to think that a move of this sort is immanent.

OK, this is an old article, but I was reminded about this long-ago promise of a FISMA compliant government cloud from Google in a newer article today. 

Google to deliver ‘government cloud’ to feds in 2010

For example, the government cloud service will ensure that data remains in the U.S. and will be operated by technicians with appropriate government security clearances, he said.

Here are two very informative and well written articles from a couple of the most successful of the new media outlets, HuffPo and Salon.  In particular, the article by Arianna is a tour de force.  The insights from Scott Rosenberg are probably unique:  someone who had to install paywalls, and how he managed to live to tell the tale.

Arianna Huffington: Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism

So it’s time for traditional media companies to stop whining and face the fact that far too many of them, lulled by a lack of competition and years of pretax profits of 20 percent or more, put cash flow above journalism and badly misread the web when it arrived on the scene. The focus was on consolidation, cost-cutting, and pleasing Wall Street — not modernization and pleasing their readers.

Memories of a paywall pioneer | Media | guardian.co.uk

But the value of stuff online is usually tied to how deeply it is woven into the network. So locking your stuff away in order to charge for it means that you are usually making it less valuable at the moment that you are asking people to pay for it. And that’s why people so often respond with: “No thanks.”