Why do I get the feeling that this is complete diplo-fluff? Does anyone really believe that we can (or would want to) simply agree to stop hacking?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/13/us-china-us-cyber-idUSBRE93C05T20130413

U.S., China agree to work together on cyber security

China and the United States will set up a working group on cyber-security, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday, as the two sides moved to ease months of tensions and mutual accusations of hacking and Internet theft.

… Earlier, China's official Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Minister Wang Yi as telling Kerry in their meeting that China and the United States should make joint efforts to safeguard cyberspace.

… "It's important to have a dialogue on this, but it's also important that the dialogue be a means to an end, and the end is really ending these practices," Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Robert Hormats, who spoke at the forum, told Reuters in an interview.

Could 'police and other agencies' avoid this type of legislation if they developed an appropriate policy for using drones, or is that impossible?

Idaho restricts drone use by police agencies amid privacy concerns

Laura Zuckerman of Reuters reports:

Idaho’s Republican governor signed a law on Thursday that restricts use of drone aircraft by police and other public agencies as the use of pilotless aircraft inside U.S. borders is increasing. The measure aims to protect privacy rights.

In approving the law, which requires law enforcement to obtain warrants to collect evidence using drones in most cases, Idaho becomes the second U.S. state after Virginia to restrict uses of pilotless aircraft over privacy concerns.

Read more on Chicago Tribune.

(Related) Sounds a bit strange. Surely he doesn't think the only possibility is military drones falling into the wrong hands? (Perhaps he should Goolgle “drones.”) “Government good, citizen bad” makes him sound like an uber-liberal.

Google chief urges action to regulate mini-drones

From the BBC:

The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns.

Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones.

Read more on BBC. Strangely, I can’t find the report from The Guardian on their web site, although the Daily Mail also refers to it. Anyone have a link to the original?

In the meantime: pot, meet kettle.

If true, this could be really interesting. Someone (anyone interested in investing?) should make a similar service for music not under license to the big (RIAA) companies.

Apple Near Deal For Radio Service

"TechCrunch and The Verge are reporting that Apple is near a deal with Universal Music to provide a streaming 'iRadio' music service. 'Apple is expected to launch a web radio service similar to Pandora's later this year, provided that executives there can strike an agreement with Sony Music Entertainment as well as music publishers. Talks with Sony, which operates the third label, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony / ATV, the music publishing company jointly run with the estate of the late singer Michael Jackson, are said to not be as far along towards reaching a deal. ... As for the financial terms, Apple will not receive the steep discounts it had sought for the labels' music.' Apple's 400 million active iTunes accounts could give even Pandora, with its 200 million users, something to worry about. 'For startups and streaming music companies, this means looking closely at the competitive advantages offered by their own platforms and decided how best to position their own services. A key advantage, and one that will likely get emphasized by virtually everyone challenged by an iRadio, is cross-platform compatibility. Apple will likely be able to offer something along those lines through iTunes on Windows, but for the most part it'll be a strictly iOS/Mac affair. That, combined with personalization and recommendation engines, along with other value add features, will be the way to combat an iTunes streaming service, but no matter what, an Apple product will change the face of this market.'"

Perspective

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/033127.html

April 13, 2013

How Other Companies Manage Social Media (Infographic)

Entrepreneur: "We asked 2,714 communicators how their companies use social media in our Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey, and Go-Gulf.com highlighted some of the findings in an infographic."

Global Warming! Global Warming! So, this will not occur again for at least two hundred years, or it will and this “report” is nonsense.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/report-global-warming-big-us-drought-18935451

Warming Didn't Cause Big US Drought

Last year's huge drought was a freak of nature that wasn't caused by man-made global warming, a new federal science study finds.

Scientists say the lack of moisture usually pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico was the main reason for the drought in the nation's midsection.

Thursday's report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn't see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn't have been forecast.

"This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years," said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event."

… Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded university-run research center, said the report didn't take into account the lack of snowfall in the Rockies the previous winter and how that affected overall moisture in the air. Nor did the study look at the how global warming exacerbated the high pressure system that kept the jet stream north and the rainfall away, he said.

(Related) Wow! Al Gore's math was wrong?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/twenty-year-hiatus-in-rising-temperatures-has-climate-scientists-puzzled/story-e6frg6z6-1226609140980

Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled

DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream.

In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity - the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels - would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded.

Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the lower than expected temperature rise between 2000 and the present could be explained by increased emissions from burning coal. [So, burning coal is good? Bob]

… But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted. [This was pointed out by a Statistics Professor when Al Gore showed that hockystick graphic in his “Inconvient Truth” talk. Al's people ignored him. Bob]

… But it also points to an increasing body of research that suggests it may be that climate is responding to higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.