Kelson writes “Google’s Mountain View headquarters has fields that need to be kept clear of fire hazards. This year instead of mowing them, they took a low-carbon approach: they hired a herd of goats to eat the grass for a week. ‘It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers,’ wrote Dan Hoffman.”
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 CBC.ca |
Pork producers contend with swine flu fallout
CBC.ca Canadian pork producers contend that thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are at stake because of the swine flu. Ten countries have banned Canadian pork products since the virus was found on a central Alberta pig farm. China bans Alberta pork Vancouver Sun CFIA wants names of staff who may have been exposed to swine flu The Canadian Press Edmonton Journal – Financial Post – 660 News – Globe and Mail all 720 news articles Langue : Français |
 CBC.ca |
June election over EI reform unlikely: pollster
National Post – David Ljunggren Andy Clark/ReutersLiberal leader Michael Ignatieff and his wife Zsuzsanna Zsohar (R) walk to a news conference with staff at the Federal Liberal Party Biennial Convention in Vancouver on Sunday. Are the Liberals getting ready to pull the plug? CBC.ca Ignatieff preps Liberals for election Toronto Sun 680 News – Winnipeg Sun – Orillia Today – Toronto Star all 801 news articles |
 FOXNews |
Changing Corporate Tax Rules
BusinessWeek – Phil Mintz, Jane Sasseen By Phil Mintz and Jane Sasseen It appears that a level playing field depends on where your seats are. The Obama Administration on May 4 fleshed out its proposals for raising approximately 0 billion over 10 years by curbing what it says are corporate … Obama Calls for New Curbs on Offshore Tax Havens New York Times Business groups critical of Obama's tax proposals Reuters Los Angeles Times – U.S. News & World Report – Financial Times – New York Daily News all 1,089 news articles |
Exposed: the great password scandal How some sites are taking a cavalier attitude to your security : TechRadar UK
Go ahead and grab the salt shaker, ’cause this one’s nowhere near carved in stone… or is it? A breaking report from The New York Times has it that Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle e-reader “as early as this week,” one that’s tailored for “displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.”
I certainly hope the next generation of internet search requires less work on my behalf (ala Google).
The UK government is considering proposals that could hit Google and other search engines with an online advertising tax to help boost revenue for the BBC. While these proposals are still in their infancy, some are already attacking the idea of taxing a growth industry in the middle of a recession. “Sources say the proposed taxes have been discussed by officials at the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They would also have to be approved by the Treasury before they could be introduced. The chair of the culture, media and sport committee, Conservative MP John Whittingdale, dismissed what he called a ‘windfall tax’ on search engines.”
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Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times reports that several companies plan to introduce digital newspaper readers by the end of the year with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper to present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web, while allowing publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure from the loss of readers and advertising. “We are looking at this with a great deal of interest,” said John Ridding, the chief executive of the 121-year-old British newspaper The Financial Times. “The severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.” The new tablets will start with some serious shortcomings: the screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. But many think the E-ink readers are simply too little, too late and have not appeared in time to save the troubled realm of print media. “If these devices had been ready for the general consumer market five years ago, we probably could have taken advantage of them quickly,” said Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “Now the earliest we might see large-scale consumer adoption is next year, and unlike the iPod it’s going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device.””
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The BBC reports that Norway is experimenting with a system that would let secondary school students take their school exams on laptop computers. According to the article, using computers for exams isn’t new there, but it’s been on fixed machines rather than personal computers that the students can take with them and use for other purposes throughout the school day. Having suffered through three years of exams taken on the awful SoftTest (inflexible, single-platform, ugly, buggy), I hope they do a better job — this is something that is all too easy to get wrong.
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