AT&T to throttle unlimited data users starting October 1

What began as a rumor yesterday has been officially confirmed: AT&T will begin throttling mobile broadband speeds later this year. In an announcement today, the carrier said it is taking steps to cope with the exploding demand for mobile data and the resulting network congestion. At least a part of that plan will include the reduction of data throughput for the remaining subscribers of the companies unlimited data plan -- at least those who exceed a certain monthly bandwidth threshold, anyway.

AT&T explained that the change will only affect 5% of unlimited subscribers who consume "extraordinary" levels of data. Such users account for much of the company's traffic, using 12 times more data than the average of all other smartphone customers. AT&T didn't say how much data the its heaviest users consume, but if it's any consolation, the company said you could receive thousands of emails, visit thousands of sites and stream hours of video each month without making the top 5%.

"Typically what puts someone in the top 5 percent is streaming very large amounts of video and music daily over the wireless network, not Wi-Fi. Streaming video apps, remote web camera apps, sending large data files (like video) and some online gaming are examples of applications that can use data quickly," the carrier explained. As you undoubtedly realize, Wi-Fi usage doesn't count against your mobile data consumption, and that includes the 26,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots AT&T offers.

It's unclear how much you'll be allowed to use before having your speeds reduced, nor has AT&T mentioned precisely how much they'll throttle data hogs. The change will go in effect starting October 1 and we assume the company will offer more details by then. It should be noted that customers on AT&T's tiered plans won't be affected. Subscribers of the company's $15 200MB DataPlus, $25 2GB DataPro or $45 4GB DataPro plans, you should still be able to pay for unthrottled overages.

This is yet another nail in the coffin of all-you-can-eat data plans. Besides Sprint, most major US carriers have implemented metered bandwidth of some form. AT&T introduced its tiered plans last summer and Verizon followed suit this month with capped plans and $10/GB overages. T-Mobile still offers unlimited consumption, but it does throttle speeds.

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Senate Blocks Reid?s Debt Ceiling Plan; Talks Continue

But without a compromise in hand, the divided Senate could not break a filibuster and went wearily into recess while the leaders resumed their search for something that could pass.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, had convened the Senate at noon, then moved to a procedural vote on his own proposal for raising the debt ceiling. Senate Republicans had been filibustering that plan, which House Republicans rejected on Saturday, and the vote on breaking the filibuster fell 10 votes short of the 60 votes needed under Senate rules. Even so, Mr. Reid said before the cloture vote that he was ?cautiously optimistic? that an agreement could be reached today that would make it possible for the Senate to amend his bill and gain bipartisan approval in both chambers.

But Mr. Reid said that ?there are a number of issues that must be resolved.?

?Our optimism in days past has been really stomped on,? he said.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said Sunday that he was ?very close? to recommending to his members that they sign on to a debt deal with President Obama and the Democrats.

Speaking on the CNN program ?State of the Union,? Mr. McConnell said the emerging deal included as much as $3 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years, with much of that to be decided later this year by the joint Congressional committee. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a top Democratic leader, also sounded optimistic in an appearance on the same news program, but he had some reservations.

?I feel a lot better today about the ability to avoid default than I did even yesterday morning,? he said. ?And default would have such disastrous consequences for our nation for decades to come,? he continued. ?The fact that our leaders are talking, though hardly anyone agrees with everything that?s come up, is a good thing.?

The first indication that the hard lines were softening came Saturday afternoon, when the two leading Congressional Republicans announced that they had reopened fiscal talks with the White House and expected their last-ditch drive to produce a compromise. Following the House?s sharp rejection of Mr. Reid?s proposal, Mr. McConnell said he and Speaker John A. Boehner were ?now fully engaged? in efforts with the White House to find a resolution that would tie an increase in the debt limit to spending cuts and other conditions.

?I?m confident and optimistic that we?re going to get an agreement in the very near future and resolve this crisis in the best interests of the American people,? said Mr. McConnell, who noted that he was personally talking to both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a favorite partner in past negotiations.

Mr. Boehner, who would have to steer a compromise through the House, said he based his confidence on the sense that ?we?re dealing with reasonable, responsible people who want this crisis to end as quickly as possible.?

A Democratic official with knowledge of the talks said that Mr. McConnell called Mr. Biden early Saturday afternoon, the first conversation between the two men since Wednesday. The official said they talked at least four more times on Saturday as they tried to work out an agreement.

The deal they were discussing, this person said, resembled the bill that Mr. Boehner pushed through the House the House on Friday more than it did the one that Mr. Reid had proposed.

It would immediately raise the debt ceiling by about $1 trillion, accompanied by a similar range of spending cuts, and set up a bipartisan committee that would work to find deeper reductions in the deficit in exchange for a second debt limit increase that would extend through the 2012 elections.

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Weekend Open Forum: Your favorite music and streaming sources

Music is among the most primitive forms of entertainment and self-expression, with the oldest confirmed musical instrument -- a bone flute -- dating back at least 35,000 years, and it's believed the human voice, hand clapping and other bodily-derived noises were used to produce rhythmic melodies long before then. Fast forward to the present day and we have instant access to millions of songs spanning thousands of genres and sub-genres containing everything from blue dudes wailing on PVC pipes to CGI pop stars (for better or for worse).

With the advent of smartphones and streaming services like Spotify and YouTube it's never been easier to drown out a boring conference with your preferred tunes. With that, we want to ask: what's your favorite music and how do you access it? Feel free to share your favorite genres, artists and songs (links must be legal). I can't say I have a particularly favorite genre, though I tend to favor music without vocals -- anything from classical to electronic. That said, I've probably listened to Pink Floyd's "Animals" album more than anything else in my collection.

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Is There Still a Need for Water-Cooling?

For me, water-cooling began out of necessity. I water-cooled my first PC nearly ten years ago, when, living in a house with a flat roof, my bedroom got incredibly hot in the summer months. I was already hooked on overclocking at the time and strove to save money by buying cheap, but very overclockable hardware. Unfortunately, the combination of the house's architecture and high system temperatures meant that my PC was intolerably noisy and unstable.

Infuriated, I made the move to water-cooling - not a particularly easy one as there were few guides and even fewer off-the-shelf components back then, which resulted in regular trips to the local DIY store to search for parts. I initially water-cooled my CPU, and my overheating and noise issues were solved instantly - my PC went from a hot, noisy box to a cool and quiet machine of wonder. I had more overclocking headroom than before too.

Every one of my main rigs since then has also seen me spend entire weekends building and leak-testing. In fact, the last three PCs I've built have had a water-cooled CPU and GPU, as well as the various hotspots on the motherboard too. However, a lot of today's hardware simply doesn't need water-cooling as urgently as its equivalent back in the day. People still want water-cooling, but it seems to be a desire that's separate from the need to actually cool the hardware.

Even as far back as the release Intel's first mainstream quad-core CPUs, such as the Core 2 Quad Q6600, air coolers were quickly becoming potent enough for newcomers to question the significant outlay involved with water-cooling. The new heatpipe-clad tower coolers were becoming more efficient at every step, and there's usually an air cooler that will enable you to push all but the hottest running CPUs to the max, albeit with additional noise.

However, with Intel's LGA1155 CPUs, we've seen time and time again that air coolers such as Thermaltake's Frio and BeQuiet Dark Rock Advanced are more than able to provide just as much overclocking headroom as a decent water-cooling kit, and with similar noise levels too. Our current LGA1155 thermal test kit is a case in question - we've overclocked our Core i7-2600K to a lofty 4.6GHz, and both the aforementioned coolers handled this overclock admirably.


Graphics cards are a slightly different matter, however, as we've found just as much reason to water-cool the current graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 590 3GB as any previous generation. In fact, even mid-range graphics cards such as the GTX 560 Ti 1GB get quite warm and noisy under load, and many third party coolers haven't been able to tame them significantly.

Motherboards are a bit of mixed bag, though. I'd go as far as saying that I've had far fewer failures and stability issues since I've been water-cooling the motherboard in my PCs - the hot-running chipset on LGA1366 motherboards, for example, is almost certainly the reason for quite a few dead systems in our lab, as well as other problems I've read about in various forums.


However, water-cooling your motherboard is an expensive business - full cover blocks can retail for over £100, and most LGA1155 motherboards simply don't require shedloads of voltage either. With Intel and AMD's next-generation high-end CPUs on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how future families of motherboards fare on a day to day basis - will LGA2011 be another hot-running LGA1366 for example?

Aside from noise reduction, where water-cooling still has the edge in a few key areas, there is one other reason to invest in water-cooling. It looks fantastic. There's a reason why we award points to cases that look good, and why modding projects are so popular. Lots of us want to have a cool-looking PC and are willing to spend money achieving that goal. Thankfully, the water-cooling industry has taken notice and strived to meet the demand for a diverse and flexible range of hardware.

You only have to look at websites such as Aquatuning, Chilled PC and FrozenCPU to see the huge the range of components on offer these days, which makes it very easy to make a unique water-cooled PC. In addition, the huge range of gear is appealing to those who want to go one step further than just bolting a load of off-the-shelf parts together, and instead want to either mod their PC or even build it from scratch.

Even if the next generation of hardware doesn't notably benefit from water-cooling, there's always a small gap between air cooling and extreme cooling, and there will still be a huge market for it, for the simple reason that it's cool.

What do you think the future has in store for water-cooling? Have you been put off for any reason, or do you swear by it? Let us know in the forums.

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How musicians are making money by returning to their roots

I remember being a kid and hearing about how recording songs from the radio onto a casette tape was killing music. It was happening all over the world, most prominently in the UK where the ?Home Taping is Killing Music? campaign was apparently everywhere to be found. I never really bought into the hype, as a young kid whose mom was far more into Lionel Richie than my own tastes for Van Halen and Yes.

Fast forward a few years and I?m in college. A bit later that most. mind you. I was 21 and had gone into the military first. Napster was alive and well and there was a wonderful world of music to be found. I remember being frustrated with people who only had parts of albums or who had every song except the one that I wanted. Eventually it led to me going out and buying the album anyway (paid digital downloads were still pretty foreign, mind you) and it was then that I realized that the industry as a whole absolutely had to change.

Some 12 years after Napster?s first days, artists are still finding ways to make money and labels are still blaming digital for killing music. As our definition of ownership has changed (physical media became digital files became streaming licenses) so too have the ways in which the tenacious musician has found a way to pay the bills while doing what they love.

I?ve spent this week talking to music labels (three, to be exact, none of which would allow attribution for anything that they said), previously-huge artists and those who one day will be. My  goal was to find out how artists were finding ways to make money in an era where digital piracy is rampant. As many people as you?ll talk to, that?s how many different stories that you?ll find. But some of the people who would allow themselves to be quoted had some great insight and we?ll talk about that here.

A History Lesson

If we look at the golden era of the corporate music industry, it had to run from around the late 1960?s to the birth of Napster in the late 1990?s. For 30 years studios got more extravagant, music became less about creativity and more about the quick buck. In order to pay for the overhead of time spent in those studios, labels were loaning out huge amounts of money to artists. Mind you, I said loaning. These advances went to pay for albums being recorded and for tours being set up, but it was all money that had to be paid back on the success of the album.

Not all of this opulence was bad. There were some brilliant studio albums recorded during these days. But as time went on, the churning factory of the music label started to become more apparent. It also became more apparent that a fancy studio wouldn?t necessarily be what made a second or third album better than the ones that came before it.

A Geography Lesson

In all of the people that I?ve talked to this week, only one has provided me with insight as to how geography can reflect on the career of an artist. Steve Lawson is a unique breed of musician. He plays music solely on a bass guitar, making sounds that most people would never know could be made with the instrument.

He?s been an independent musician for many years, using a number of different methods to sell his songs (more on those methods later). Based in London, Lawson says that there?s a defining difference in how artists in the rest of the world compare to those in the US.

?The most enormous thing hanging over the head of a US musician is worries about healthcare. You could fall ill and be half a million in debt without even trying. Here it?s much safter to do part time work and make music part time because the National Health Service has us covered.?

Lawson does say, however, that there are disadvantages to being in a smaller geographic location.

?UK bands have always had to be more imaginative in the studio. They just don?t have the training ground of playing 300 shows before they get into the studio. Gigging constantly has never been an option in the UK for an originals band. Whereas in the US you can play 300 shows a year and never repeat the same town, here if you do 30 shows you?re pretty much done with the UK for the year.?

So while UK artists don?t have the opportunity to perfect a song before going into the studio to record it, US artists are faced with trying to live up to a live performance when recording a record. Lawson points to the success fo Dave Matthews, who played to ?thousands of people a night before he had a deal?. Because of these geographic limitations, both sides feel pressure to do well in the studio, but for completely different reasons.

A Finance Lesson

Powerful computers and easily-accessible software have leveled the playing field, somewhat, between what studios could offer and what artists could do on their own. At the same time, as the industry on the whole has faded, studios are feeling the pinch and they?re more willing than ever to offer recording time at bargain prices versus having the studios go empty.

As more artists are finding, with the power in their own hands, there is very little need to have studio time in order to produce a track or an album. It could arguably be said that the only time a recording studio is required is when a band wants to be in the same place at the same time and even then only if the drums being played are acoustic. A setup like this requires more room than most of us have in our homes and studios still provide that option.

The other side of this lesson in finance is in how artists are taking the routes available to them and monetizing with them. Sites such as Bandcamp have helped millions of artists find not only an outlet for sales but also a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Bandcamp allows artists to upload music, keep fans abreast of happenings and sell their tracks without the limitations of pre-determined pricing.

While there are other great options available ? iTunes, Amazon MP3 and other, more niche-oriented sites such as Beatport and Track It Down ? Bandcamp has stood head and shoulders above the rest. But there?s a catch ? no label support means that artists have to have their own accounts.

That fact brings us to one more lesson.

An Entrepreneurship Lesson

The state of the industry as a whole is one of disarray. Labels and executives are still trying to figure out how to squeeze every possible dollar, creativity be damned. Meanwhile, artists are finding themselves in a unique position. It used to be that a music star was rich beyond dreams and never had a care. Now, in order to even start to see the spoils, it requires more work than it ever has before.

Oh sure, there are still labels paying out handsome sums of cash for over-churned, tasteless drivel but more often than not, we?re seeing artists turn toward self-publishing and name-your-own-price methods. Even some hugely popular artists (notably Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead) have taken the plunge, asking fans to pay what the album is worth to them, leaving labels scratching their collective heads.

The lesson to be learned here is one of David versus Goliath. Instead of taking an approach where the industry had to be the status quo, musicians who do their craft for the love of the craft are finding new avenues to pay the bills. Limited-run vinyl pressings, digital packages including lyrics and wallpapers are among many methods that artists have found, and they continue to push forward in search of more.

Interestingly, there are many parallels between what has caused the failure in the music industry and what causes failures in technology companies. Neither of these paths should be get rich quick schemes and yet they?ve both been farmed out to be so. Massive amounts of money are thrown at artists and entrepreneurs, all with the hope of a quick success and then a slow fade. If music has the 27 club then technology has the 3 club. Three year old companies, filled with talent and money, going out in a blaze of glory with ashes in their wake. It?s something that we see daily in technology. Fortunately we see it less so in the lives of musicians.

So where is the cash? Lawson posits that it?s still readily available to those who are willing to think differently about how they make it.

?What am I doing? I?m making music and inviting people to listen to it. I?m asking those who are listening to tell their friends. I still send out some info to magazines and radio, but I rarely bother.?

Instead of relying solely on the sale of singles, Lawson and his US-born wife also sell memory sticks with a discography of all of their work. They?re marketing via Bandcamp customers, since every Bandcamp sale gives them the email address of the buyer. In short, they?re focusing on the craft of the music business, instead of the cookie-cutter platforms that have proven to be unsustainable.

The entirety of grass-roots success in today?s music world relies on shifting the way that we think about distribution. With sites such as Virb, SoundCloud and Bandcamp (to name only three of literally hundreds) there is an opportunity to reach a drastically wider audience than artists have been able to have in the past. We have to look away from music sharing as only a way of taking money out of the pockets of the artists and more toward the idea of it being a discovery system.

?The problem is that few people seem to acknowledge that we?re escaping from an utterly broken business model, not ruining one that has worked for musicians. The recording industry was, historically, a sweatshop. I pretty much see no downside to where things are heading, unless you?re trying to hold onto the old way of doing things. If you think that music should be macro-industrial, with third-party distribution and the trappings of fame, you?re basically screwed.?

As streaming services such as Rdio, Spotify and the like become more ubiquitous, smart artists are leveraging them but not relying solely upon them. Artists are returning to their roots, but doing so with a modern-day spin. They no longer have to go stand on street corners and hope for coins in a guitar case. Now they can be on every street in the world, with a tip jar as big as their banks can hold. The A&R mentality of ?only the hits? is dead. Now if we could get more entrepreneurs to think the same way.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/07/30/how-musicians-are-making-money-by-returning-to-their-roots/

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Rightward Tilt Leaves Obama With Party Rift

Entering a campaign that is shaping up as an epic clash over the parties? divergent views on the size and role of the federal government, Republicans have changed the terms of the national debate. Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans? language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

?The activist liberal base will support Obama because they?re terrified of the right wing,? said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign for America?s Future.

But he said, ?I believe that the voting base of the Democratic Party ? young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos ? are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.?

While Mr. Obama and Republicans have been unable to agree on a debt reduction plan for spending cuts and revenue increases to cut $4 trillion in the first decade, on Saturday they were negotiating a deal with fewer spending cuts that would ensure the government?s debt ceiling would be increased into 2013 to avoid another deadlock in the heat of campaign season.

No matter how the immediate issue is resolved, Mr. Obama, in his failed effort for greater deficit reduction, has put on the table far more in reductions for future years? spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, than he did in new revenue from the wealthy and corporations. He proposed fewer cuts in military spending and more in health care than a bipartisan Senate group that includes one of the chamber?s most conservative Republicans.

To win approval of the essential increase in the nation?s $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling, Mr. Obama sought more in deficit reduction than Republicans did, and with fewer changes to the entitlement programs, because he was willing to raise additional revenue starting in 2013 and they were not. And despite unemployment lingering at its highest level in decades, Mr. Obama has not fought this year for a big jobs program with billions of dollars for public-works projects, which liberals in his party have clamored for. Instead, he wants to extend a temporary payroll tax cut for everyone, since Republicans will support tax cuts, despite studies showing that spending programs are generally the more effective stimulus.

Even before last November?s election gave the Republicans control of the House, Mr. Obama had said he would pivot to deficit reduction after two years of stimulus measures intended first to rescue the economy and then to spur a recovery from the near collapse of the financial system. With Republicans? gains in the midterm elections, that pivot became a lurch. Yet Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama seeks a debt limit increase as ?a blank check? to keep spending.

?The Republicans won, and they don?t know how to accept victory,? said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

In his budget proposal in January, Mr. Obama declined to suggest a plan along the lines proposed by a majority of his bipartisan fiscal commission, which in December recommended $4 trillion in savings over 10 years through cuts in military and domestic programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and a tax code overhaul to lower rates while also raising more revenue.

Even though Mr. Obama was widely criticized, administration officials said at the time that to have embraced that approach then would have put him too far to the right ? where he ultimately wanted to end up in any compromise with Republicans, not where he wanted to start.

But by this month, in ultimately unsuccessful talks with Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama tentatively agreed to a plan that was farther to the right than that of the majority of the fiscal commission and a bipartisan group of senators, the so-called Gang of Six. It also included a slow rise in the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65, and, after 2015, a change in the formula for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments long sought by economists.

?He?s accommodated himself to the new reality in Washington,? said Tom Davis, a former House Republican leader from Virginia. ?That?s what leaders do.?

But Congressional Democrats and liberal groups objected.

?The president?s proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare has the potential to sap the energy of the Democratic base ? among older voters because of Medicare and Medicaid and younger voters because of the lack of jobs,? said Damon A. Silvers, policy director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. ?And second, all these fiscal austerity proposals on the table will make the economy worse.?

Mr. Obama?s situation has parallels with the mid-1990s, when President Bill Clinton shifted to the center after Republicans took Congress and battled them on deficit reduction and a welfare overhaul. Many Democrats were angered by his concessions, by a sense of being left out of negotiations and by a fear of alienating Democratic voters. Mr. Clinton was re-elected in 1996.

But Mr. Obama is likely to face the voters with a weaker economy and higher unemployment than during Mr. Clinton?s era. Still, his advisers express confidence that voters will reward Mr. Obama either for winning a bipartisan deal, if that were to happen, or for at least having a more balanced approach that does not remake Medicare and Medicaid and asks for more revenue from the wealthy. And they suggest another potential parallel with the Clinton years of divided government: that Republicans risk a voter backlash with their uncompromising stands.

?Democrats created Social Security and Medicare, and we have fought for decades against Republican attempts to end these programs,? said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama?s communications director. ?And President Obama believes that now is the time for Democrats to be the ones to step up and save Social Security and Medicare.?

Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, said polling data showed that at this point in his term, Mr. Obama, compared with past Democratic presidents, was doing as well or better with Democratic voters. ?Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they?re absolutely certain of ? they?re going to hate these Republican candidates,? Mr. Mellman said. ?So I?m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.?

Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting.

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Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis

After a tense day of Congressional floor fights and angry exchanges, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, called off a planned showdown vote set for after midnight, but said he would convene the Senate at noon on Sunday for a vote an hour later. He said he wanted to give the new negotiations a chance to produce a plan to raise the federal debt limit in exchange for spending cuts and the creation of a new Congressional committee that would try to assemble a long-range deficit-cutting proposal.

?There are many elements to be finalized and there is still a distance to go before an arrangement can be completed,? said Mr. Reid, who just a few hours earlier had played down talk of any agreement. ?But I believe we should give everyone as much room as possible to do their work.?

Mr. Reid?s announcement set off an almost audible sigh of relief on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers and their aides had been bracing for an overnight clash over the debt following a day that had seen a heated House vote and lawmakers trudging from office to office in search of an answer to the impasse.

The first indication off a softening of the hard lines that have marked weeks of partisan wrangling over the debt limit came in the afternoon when the two leading Congressional Republicans announced that they had reopened fiscal talks with the White House and expected their last-ditch drive to produce a compromise.

Following the House?s sharp rejection of a proposal by Mr. Reid to raise the debt limit and cut spending, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a linchpin in efforts to reach a deal, said he and Speaker John A. Boehner were ?now fully engaged? in efforts with the White House to find a resolution that would tie an increase in the debt limit to spending cuts and other conditions.

?I?m confident and optimistic that we?re going to get an agreement in the very near future and resolve this crisis in the best interests of the American people,? said Mr. McConnell, who noted he was personally talking to both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a favorite partner in past negotiations.

Mr. Boehner, who would have to steer a compromise through the House, said he based his confidence on the prospect of an agreement on the sense that ?we?re dealing with reasonable, responsible people who want this crisis to end as quickly as possible.?

A Democratic official with knowledge of the talks said that Mr. McConnell called Mr. Biden early Saturday afternoon, the first conversation between the two men since Wednesday. The official said they talked at least four more times on Saturday as they tried to work out an agreement.

The deal they were discussing, this person said, resembled the bill that Mr. Boehner won approval for in the House on Friday more than it did the one that Mr. Reid had proposed.

It would immediately raise the debt ceiling by about $1 trillion, accompanied by a similar range of spending cuts, and set up a new bipartisan committee that would work to find deeper cuts in exchange for a second debt limit increase that would extend through the 2012 election.

A failure of the new committee to win enactment of its proposal could then set off automatic spending cuts across the board, including to entitlement programs. Other ideas were swirling around the Capitol as lawmakers searched for a way to avoid default. One of Mr. Reid?s top lieutenants said he saw at least a glimmer of hope.

?We are a long way from any sort of negotiated agreement,? said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, ?but there is certainly a more positive feeling about reaching an agreement than I?ve felt in a long time.?

The flurry of activity came as anxiety built up in many corners, including among Wall Street investors worried about the effects on the markets and active-duty soldiers worried about their paychecks.

After Mr. McConnell sounded a hopeful note, Mr. Reid called members of the Senate to the floor to hear him dispute the claims by his Republican counterpart and accuse Republicans of failing to enter into serious negotiations even as the Treasury risked running out of money to pay all its bills after Tuesday.

Reporting was contributed by Jackie Calmes, Helene Cooper, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Pear from Washington, and Thom Shanker from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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PhoneGap is a Swiss Army knife for mobile app developers

When developers have the ability to craft applications for multiple platforms with little to no barrier, amazing things can happen. 6Wunderkinder is a prime example of this, as it managed to deliver its popular Wunderlist productivity app to additional platforms in short order thanks to a partnership with Appcelerator. But not every developer has the time (or resources) to forge such a relationship, and thanks to Friday?s release of Nitobi?s PhoneGap 1.0, they don?t have to.

PhoneGap is an HTML5 platform that allows developers to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create native mobile applications. Now developers can write their app once and deploy it to six major mobile platforms and app stores, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Bada and Symbian. With the open source code receiving contributions from a dedicated community of developers, PhoneGap has increased in both stability and durability ? which has played a large part in the project averaging approximately 40,000 downloads per month at the time of writing.

While PhoneGap 1.0 was officially released by Nitobi at PhoneGap Day in Portland, Oregon on Friday, the company is based in Vancouver, BC. In fact, The Next Web Canada covered PhoneGap?s initial launch late last year. But the building of PhoneGap has been an effort that goes well beyond the team at Nitobi, a fact that is not lost on company CEO Andre Charland.

?The community built up around PhoneGap is its greatest asset,? says Charland. ?The PhoneGap community identifies common pain points and works together to overcome them.?

A team of senior software engineers at IBM have also been involved in the development of PhoneGap, and the assistance has been a major benefit to the community.

According to Nitobi, today?s major release puts the focus on accessing native device APIs, which is new ground for the web. Other improvements include overall API stability and ?pluggable? architecture, W3C DAP API compatibility, contacts API and remote debugging tools. Moreover, a new unifying bridge interface was added that makes adding platforms and platform extensions simpler, along with simplification of the plugin development process.

?Most of these new enhancements come from our community,? said Brian LeRoux, Senior Software Engineer at Nitobi and PhoneGap evangelist. ?For instance, PhoneGap developers were calling for a consistent way to make plugins that would run on all major smartphone platforms and this release does that.?

To learn more about what PhoneGap has to offer, check out the introductory video below.

With over 600,000 downloads of the PhoneGap code to date and thousands of apps built using PhoneGap available in mobile app stores and directories, the arrival of version 1.0 may just keep those numbers growing ? and spur further growth for the company behind the project as well.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/2011/07/30/phonegap-is-a-swiss-army-knife-for-mobile-app-developers/

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Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees

Mr. Andrews, 24, thanked her for her thoughts, then checked to see how long her wait time had been. ?Oh, it?s actually down to 30 minutes,? he said, cheered that it was not an hour and a half. Quickly, he returned to work, where the rest of an astonishing deluge ? 15,000 voice mail messages and 30,000 e-mails a day ? cried out for his attention.

If the rest of the country thinks Washington has gone mad this summer, that is pretty much the view in this bewildered capital, too, even in Mr. Boehner?s overwhelmed call center.

Among the bar patrons at the Old Ebbitt Grill worried about stock portfolios, the tourists anxious about disability checks and the current and former policy makers stunned by Washington paralysis, the mood was described variously as one of doom, disgust and disbelief.

Washington is talking of little else.

?I never saw anything like this, and I never thought I would see anything like this,? said Laurence H. Meyer, a former Federal Reserve governor who has been fielding calls to his Washington research firm, Macroeconomic Advisers, from worried hedge fund clients. ?I never appreciated how dysfunctional our political system is.?

Tourists who have come from around the world to see messy American democracy in action are watching far more mess than they ever expected.

?You guys are nuts,? said Joseph Eastwood, 44, a Toronto accountant who was waiting in the Capitol Visitor Center for a tour last week. ?Instead of building the country, you?re destroying it.?

A German tourist standing nearby was more tactful but was perplexed as he tried to teach his two teenage children about the scale of United States debt. ?They are not quite understanding the sum of money borrowed,? said Peter Radewahn, 54, the director of a Bonn lobbying group. (The United States has about $14 trillion in debt, which is 99.5 percent of its yearly economic output. Germany has $2.85 trillion in debt, or 80 percent of its output.)

Mr. Radewahn said he did not want to say more because he was a guest in America and wished to be diplomatic.

At the Washington National Zoo on Saturday, Dean Thompson, 53, a Republican and a mechanical engineer visiting from Augusta, Ga., was filled with disdain for lawmakers of both parties on Capitol Hill. ?They?re playing with people?s savings is what they?re doing,? he said. ?It?s like a game to them.?

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, fumed on Friday that although Mr. Boehner was throwing ?piece after piece of red meat to his right-wing lions? ? that is, Tea Party-allied Republicans who are steadfastly opposed to raising the debt limit ? they were never sated.

Of course, few could match the scorn last week of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who, quoting an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, derided the ?Tea Party Hobbits.? (Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party-allied Republican, later retorted, ?I?d rather be a hobbit than a troll.?)

Beyond the sniping of opposing lawmakers, this legislative crisis has reached deeper into the layers of Washington, perhaps even more than the protracted debate over health care did.

Much of what is occurring in Congress may be incomprehensible, but the basic issue ? that the United States needs to increase the limit on its credit card or not be able to pay its bills ? is understood.

?I get people stopping me around the Capitol more, asking what?s going to happen,? said Kelly O?Donnell, the Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC, who said she was averaging about four hours of sleep a night. ?A lot of kids ask, which is interesting.?

One such visitor, Luke Stancil, 13, the chairman of the Teenage Republicans of Johnston County, N.C., had many questions and thoughts about the debt crisis during a trip to Washington last week.

While waiting to see Mr. Paul with a group of other teenage Republicans in the Cannon House Office Building on Thursday, Luke said that although he liked conservatives affiliated with the Tea Party, he felt that in the interest of the country they should support Mr. Boehner?s bill to raise the debt ceiling.

?That?s all they have now,? he said soberly. (Mr. Boehner ended up postponing the vote because of a lack of conservative support, but a modified bill was passed on Friday before it was killed later that day in the Senate.)

Meanwhile, weighing in from Chicago was its newly elected mayor, Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama?s incendiary former White House chief of staff, who, had he been in his old job, would have been engaged in hand-to-hand combat on Capitol Hill.

?I just passed four bills today, so I?m very happy,? Mr. Emanuel reported. Well, what did he make of what was going on in Washington? ?My basic point is, look, your country requires you to take responsibility and understand what an honest compromise is,? he said. He declined to answer a question about whether he missed the capital.

At the Old Ebbitt Grill, across the street from the Treasury Department, Cory Carlson, a 27-year-old account executive for the EMC Corporation, a technology giant, was at the bar on Thursday with friends. Asked about the chaos on Capitol Hill, Mr. Carlson said that the health of the economy depended on Congress raising the debt limit and that he was worried about his investments. ?Don?t get me started,? he said.

In front of the Treasury building on Friday, Margaret McCoy, a 64-year-old Democrat visiting from Pembroke, N.C., said she was worried, too ? about her government disability checks.

?I?m fed up with it, just fed up with it,? she said, referring to the battle in Congress. ?If their checks were cut like they said ours might be cut, I wonder how they would feel.?

She looked toward the White House and saw a knot of demonstrators. Were they protesting the debt crisis, she wondered, a note of hope in her voice.

Actually, no. The demonstrators were celebrating a White House visit by President Alpha Condé</a>, considered Guinea?s first democratically elected leader. (A separate Guinean group was also protesting the visit. The street outside the White House is a busy place.)

The Guineans in the pro-Condé group said they were astonished by the debt crisis and the chaos on Capitol Hill. ?It?s crazy, it?s just crazy,? said Noumouke Cisse, 57, a taxi driver from New Haven. ?They are the world leaders, you know? We are very surprised they continue to fight each other.?

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=867cd1fe81f47ac94b0205fc14fc1110

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