Gates Skeptical of ?Don?t Ask , Don?t Tell? Repeal This Year

MUSCAT, Oman ? Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates cast doubt Monday that the Senate would vote before the end of the year to allow gay men and women to serve openly in the armed forces.

In comments aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, Mr. Gates said that he was unsure that there would be a repeal of the 17-year-old ?don?t ask, don?t tell? policy that requires gay men and women in the military to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge.

?I?d have to say I?m not particularly optimistic that they?re going to get this done,? he told sailors aboard the Lincoln, although he added, ?I would hope that they would.? Mr. Gates?s remarks were provided by a pool report from a small group of journalists accompanying him on the ship.

Mr. Gates repeated his concern that if Congress did not act on the legislation, the courts might overturn the policy on their own. His greatest fear, he said, is that ?we will be told to implement it without any time for preparation for training.?

The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the law, and there appear to be the votes for the Senate to do the same, but it is unclear if there is enough time before the end of the year to advance the measure. President Obama, Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all called for its repeal.

Mr. Gates spoke aboard the same ship that former President George W. Bush used for his May 2003 speech declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq, with the now infamous ?Mission Accomplished? banner behind him. The United States did not officially end combat operations until the end of August this year, more than seven years later.

Mr. Gates was aboard the ship to meet with sailors and see in part how the United States fights the air war in Afghanistan. Planes that take off from the ship provide close air support and surveillance for forces on the ground.

On North Korea?s recent behavior, including the shelling of a South Korean island and the North?s recent disclosure of a new nuclear facility, Mr. Gates told the sailors that it was part of a succession drama as the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, prepared for his son to take his place.

?These all seem to be designed to show that the son is tough and strong,? Mr. Gates said. ?And the message is to the elites in North Korea, especially the military, that he is strong enough to take leadership.?

Mr. Gates said that it was a ?difficult and potentially dangerous time,? then added: ?The North Koreans have engaged in some very provocative actions. They get everyone upset, then they volunteer to come back to talks, and we basically end up buying the same horse twice.?

Echoing a call throughout the Obama administration for help from China, Mr. Gates said, ?I think we just have to work with the Chinese and with others to see if we can?t bring some greater stability, some greater predictability to the regime in Pyongyang.?

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New Twitter Worm on the loose, don?t click suspicious links. Details here. [TNW Twitter]

Updates at the foot of the post.

There?s a worm spreading rapidly across twitter. It appears to be a tweet with no text but just a URL. A twitter search highlights the extent of the problem.

The URL appears to be identical: http://goo.gl/R7f68 on every tweet but it?s highly likely that it will alter itself at some point.

What we?ve been able to learn is that the worm seems to be either creating or using a number of spam/newer accounts ? that said a few influentials have also tweeted the URL. The results of the search only go back about 6 hours, so it hasn?t been around that long and appears to stem from mobile.twitter.com.

More interesting is this screenshot from a tool that lets you check the full URLs behind short ones. It apparently redirects to http://artcan-developpmement.fr/tw.html. Very odd.

Update: Nils Geylen posted the following in the comments section, highlighting that attackers look to have compromised a legitimate French furniture website and then loaded forwarding scripts to take users to a number of different malicious domains which look to serve malware:

http://artcan-developpement.fr (without the extra m: oppement instead of oppmement) is a regular French site selling design furniture of some sort. The bit after the slash of course redirects to various exe or php files on several other domains (e.g. detecproforyou.us/twit.php or robsearch.info/tre/sena.exe) then results in a 404 for that file. But at the source for that page and it?s empty. Tried this on a secondary Linux machine. Not sure what was supposed to happen.

Update 2: There are a number of tweets showing up in many users? streams that are advertising the service Fllwrs, all links are cloaked using the Goo.gl domain shortener. If you see a tweet in your stream that says the following, its best to stay away from it:

Just found the easiest way to track who follows and unfollows you ? http://goo.gl/kLE5M

At the moment, we are not sure if the two links are related. If you have found yourself to be compromised by this service then you should head to Twitter.com and revoke access for Fllwrs. To do this, head into: Settings -> Connections -> Find Fllwrs and REVOKE ACCESS!

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2010/12/07/new-twitter-worm-on-the-loose-watch-the-links-you-click/

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Tax Deal Suggests New Path for Obama

The deal appeared to resolve the first major standoff since the midterm elections between the White House and newly empowered Republicans on Capitol Hill. But it also highlighted the strains Mr. Obama faces in his own party as he navigates between a desire to get things done and a retreat from his own positions and the principles of many liberals.

Congressional Democrats pointedly noted that they had yet to agree to any deal, even as many Republicans signaled that they would go along.

Mr. Obama said that he did not like some elements of the framework, but that he had agreed to it to avoid having taxes increase for middle class Americans at the end of the year. He said that in return for agreeing to Republican demands that income tax rates not go up on upper-income brackets, he had secured substantial assistance to lower- and middle-income workers as well as the unemployed.

?It?s not perfect, but this compromise is an essential step on the road to recovery,? Mr. Obama said. ?It will stop middle-class taxes from going up. It will spur our private sector to create millions of new jobs, and add momentum that our economy badly needs.?

The package would cost about $900 billion over the next two years, to be financed entirely by adding to the national debt, at a time when both parties are professing a desire to begin addressing long-term fiscal imbalances.

It would reduce the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax on all wage earners by two percentage points for one year, putting more money in the paychecks of workers. For a family earning $50,000 a year, it would amount to a savings of $1,000.

For a worker slated to pay the maximum tax, $6,621.60 on income of $106,800 or more in 2011, the cut would mean a savings of $2,136. That would replace the central tax break for middle- and low-income Americans in last year?s economic stimulus measure, White House officials said.

The deal would also continue a college-tuition tax credit for some families, expand the earned-income tax credit and allow businesses to write off the cost of certain equipment purchases. The top rate of 15 percent on capital gains and dividends would remain in place for two years, and the alternative minimum tax would be adjusted so that as many as 21 million households would not be hit by it.

In addition, the agreement provides for a 13-month extension of jobless aid for the long-term unemployed. Benefits have already started to run out for some people, and as many as seven million people would potentially lose assistance within the next year, officials said.

Congressional Republicans in recent days have blocked efforts by Democrats to extend the jobless aid, saying they would insist on offsetting the $56 billion cost with spending cuts elsewhere. White House officials said they feared a long standoff that would see benefits end for millions of Americans over the holiday season and in the months ahead.

But Mr. Obama made substantial concessions to Republicans. In addition to dropping his opposition to any extension of the current income tax rates on income above $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals, he agreed to a deal on the federal estate tax that infuriated many Democrats. The deal would ultimately set an exemption of $5 million per person and a maximum rate of 35 percent ? a higher exemption and far lower rate than many Democrats wanted.

?The House Democrats have not signed off on any deal,? Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who has been representing House Democrats in formal negotiations on the tax issue, said Monday night. ?We will thoroughly review and discuss the proposed package in the caucus.?

Some senior Democrats said an agreement by Mr. Obama to accede to Republican demands on the estate tax could lead to a revolt among lawmakers. Mr. Obama noted that he, too, still strongly disagreed with the Republican insistence on extending the tax breaks for the highest earners. ?Ever since I started running for this office, I?ve said that we should only extend the tax cuts for the middle class,? he said, acknowledging that he had been thwarted in one of the chief goals of his presidency.

But he said he was determined to prevent a stalemate that would let taxes rise for everyone when the Bush-era rates are set to expire at the end of the month. ?I am not willing to let working families across this country become collateral damage for political warfare here in Washington,? Mr. Obama said. And he said the deal included pieces that would help working-class families and accelerate the economic recovery.

Republican leaders, clearly relishing the upper hand they have held in the tax fight, reacted positively to Mr. Obama?s announcement on Monday night.

A spokesman for the House Republican leader, and soon-to-be speaker, John A. Boehner, called the president?s announcement ?encouraging.? And in a statement, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, praised the administration?s ?openness to preventing tax hikes.?

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

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Rumor: Seagate rejected Western Digital takeover bid

In October, Seagate reportedly rejected a takeover bid from rival Western Digital. If the proposition had gone through, it would have resulted in another huge hardware company. Western Digital was willing to offer as much as 10 to 50 percent more than a competing takeover proposal from TPG Capital, which had already put more than $7.5 billion on the table for Seagate, according to two people with knowledge of the matter cited by Bloomberg.

It appears that the sheer size of the merger was largely responsible for its refusal. A merger would have created a huge amount of product overlap, led to numerous management departures, not to mention the many potential antitrust problems. Seagate has a market value of about $6.9 billion, and while Western Digital has smaller sales, its market value is at a larger $8 billion or so. Unsurprisingly, neither company was willing to comment on the news.

Last week, Seagate ended acquisition talks and started buying back $2 billion of its own shares. Talks collapsed after TPG Capital couldn't find other partners to raise the required amount for the takeover. For now, it looks like Seagate is content with continuing on alone.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41451-rumor-seagate-rejected-western-digital-takeover-bid.html

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Nvidia launches 500-series mobile graphics with rebadged GT 435M

Having shipped its first GeForce GTX 500 series desktop graphics card, Nvidia decided it'd be a good time to extend the name to its mobile product line. The company has kicked off its GeForce 500M family with a "new" mid-range chip, the GT 540M. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to get excited about as Nvidia continues its ongoing practice of rebadging chips.

The latest entry features almost exactly the same specifications as the GeForce GT 435M, including the same 40nm fabrication, 96 CUDA cores, up to 1.5GB of memory with a 128-bit memory bus, and support for DirectX 11. However, thanks to the "maturation of the production process," Nvidia has raised the graphics, processor and memory clocks by a marginal degree.


While the GeForce GT 435M has a core, shader and memory speed of 650MHz, 1,300MHz, and 800MHz, the GT 540M is set at 672MHz, 1,344MHz, and 900Mhz. Despite the 22MHz, 44MHz, and 100MHz increase, power levels remain the same. The updated part is already shipping to Chinese customers in an Acer notebook with global availability expected next month.

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Spenders Become Savers in Race for Key House Post

?Uncle Needs a Diet,? declares the package assembled by Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, one of three candidates in the race for one of the most powerful, and now paradoxical, jobs in government: leading the House Appropriations Committee in the new Congress as the Republican leadership tries to transform the panel from a fountain of federal spending into ground zero for budget cutting.

Selecting a chairman ? a party vote is expected Tuesday ? is the first step in perhaps the most audacious aspect of the plan by Representative John A. Boehner, the incoming Republican speaker, to alter the way the House works. Like Mr. Lewis, the other two leading candidates, Representatives Harold Rogers of Kentucky and Jack Kingston of Georgia, are campaigning to convince their party?s leadership that they can cast aside their own histories as earmarkers and pork-allocators and lead a shift in focus from how to spend it to how to save it.

To make the effort more than a slogan will mean upending one of the most entrenched cultures in Washington, a bipartisan tradition of directing money to favored causes with an eye as much to political gain as to policy outcome. Under both parties, the committee has long been a power unto itself, a secretive realm where subcommittee chairmen hold sway over cabinet secretaries and generals and financing can almost magically materialize or disappear for little-scrutinized local projects even as national priorities are set or dismissed.

Leading the committee toward a belt-tightening mandate would also mean taking on an entire industry that has been built up around the federal trough, a complex of lobbyists, consultants and corporations that feeds off the competition for dollars and with some regularity produces scandals ? and provides a substantial chunk of the campaign contributions that fuel the American political system.

?It has been a favor factory for years, and now it is going to become a slaughterhouse,? said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and longtime antagonist of the Appropriations Committee who on Monday was endorsed by Mr. Boehner to be one of several antispending conservatives to be seated on the panel. ?It is going to get ugly.?

All the candidates for chairman have more than 15 years on the committee and all have hungrily sought earmarks. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, in the last fiscal year, Mr. Lewis won 62 earmarks worth $97.6 million, followed by Mr. Rogers with 59 costing $93.4 million, and Mr. Kingston 40 worth $66.8 million.

Mr. Lewis was chairman of the committee before Democrats took control of the House in 2006 and would need a special exemption to be chairman again because of party-imposed term limits. In campaigning for the job, he has emphasized his past efforts to push spending cuts. Mr. Rogers has promoted his party fund-raising and his willingness to confront the executive branch on spending. Mr. Kingston has the backing of some outside fiscal watchdogs and promises a new openness on the panel.

The team of Republican leaders planning to take over the House on Jan. 5 is exploring a variety of changes intended to break the committee?s spending mind-set, starting with the new majority?s promise to slice $100 billion from President Obama?s budget request for the current fiscal year.

The three longtime committee members who aspire to head the panel have clearly gotten the message.

Like Mr. Lewis, his two rivals for the chairmanship are also committee members who have promised to devote themselves to paring spending, though all have funneled money to scores of projects through earmarks in past bills. The effort to reshape the committee promises to be a stern test of Republicans? rededication to fiscal sobriety after falling off the wagon during the dozen years, through 2006, that their party controlled the House, when government spending rose at rapid rates.

?They have promised things that they have neither delivered in the past nor, in my opinion, are going to be able to deliver on in the future,? said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat and a veteran of the Appropriations Committee himself.

To succeed and satisfy the conservative Tea Party-style voters that propelled them to power, Republicans will have to quickly make significant cuts in government programs and somehow find a way to enact those cuts into law in cooperation with a Democratically controlled Senate and a Democratic president.

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Motorola?s Gingerbread Android tablet demoed by Google?s Andy Rubin at D: Dive Into Mobile conference [TNW Google]

Google has had a busy couple of days. Not only did it announce and release its new eBook service yesterday, the search giant finally pushed out the SDK for Android 2.3 and unveiled the Samsung Nexus S, its next officially supported Android smartphone.

It appears Google didn?t want to stop there either. Whilst demonstrating the Nexus S handset to delegates at the D: Dive into Mobile conference, Google?s Andy Rubin also pulled out a new Motorola Android-powered tablet, all but confirming rumours Google had been working with Motorola to release the first Gingerbread-powered tablet.

Back in August, it was suggested that smartphone manufacturers were in negotiations with Google to secure rights to develop an Gingerbread tablet, at that time Motorola were reportedly Google?s ?priority choice?. Digitimes speculated that Motorola?s tablet would feature Nvidia?s Tegra 2 platform with a 10.1 panel supplied by Sharp and it appears they weren?t far off.

Rubin noted that the tablet was indeed sporting an NVIDIA dual-core 3D processor and from photos, the device looks to be bigger than the 7-inch devices currently on the market, leading us to believe the Motorola tablet is of a similar size to the Apple iPad.

All signs point to this device being the Motorola Stingray but nothing is confirmed just yet. If it does indeed turn out to be said device, the tablet is said to be Verizon bound and might support paid TV services, aiming at Hulu and Netflix in the process.

Thanks to Engadget for the photos:

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Forecasting Flu Pandemics Hinges on Insights into the Virus

Influenza is a crafty opponent. Just when researchers think they might know where it's headed next, it mutates. New strains form constantly, allowing the virus to evade detection by the human immune system, and these new strains can turn into pandemics with little to no warning. In 1918, the H1N1 subtype caused the most serious pandemic to date, killing 50 million people worldwide. That disaster was followed by the H2N2 pandemic in 1957, the H3N2 in 1968, and the resurgence last year of H1N1, now also known as swine flu.

To predict what the next dangerous strain will look like, researchers are trying to develop more sophisticated models of the biology and evolution of the virus. "If I was to make a prediction, I'd say that the H2 strain of the virus could cause the next pandemic," says Klaus Stohr, director of influenza vaccine franchises at Novartis and former head of the World Health Organization's global influenza program. But he admits that predictions like his are just educated guesses. Above all, he says, "we need better models that could genetically predict which subtype will cause the next pandemic?that would be a real breakthrough. That, in my view, could be a Nobel Prize-winning discovery."

In contrast to pandemic flu, seasonal flu occurs with predictable regularity and is largely controllable. Six months before the beginning of the flu season in each hemisphere, the World Health Organization examines circulating strains from the previous year and determines which six are mostly likely to be a problem. Those are the strains that appear in the flu vaccines distributed to physicians' offices each year, and they're usually spot on. But when the virus genome mutates in ways scientists don't anticipate?when it picks up a gene from one of the strains that infect birds or pigs, or when it manages to hop straight from livestock to humans?the result is a type of influenza against which humans have limited immunity. That has the potential to attack hard and spread fast.

A severe flu pandemic could result in as much as a 5.5 percent drop in the U.S. gross domestic product, amounting to a $683 billion loss to the country's economy, according to a report by the Trust for America's Health. And despite the unceasing work of labs around the world?the World Health Organization has more than 100 laboratories participating in its influenza network?there is not yet much that researchers or public health officials can do to predict a pandemic, let alone prevent one. "People are studying the virus and its genome all the time and want to get to those answers," says Martin Meltzer, a health economist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We don't know enough about how the genome of the flu virus interacts with the human genome that it infects."

While developing a model that predicts what the next pandemic virus will look like is proving difficult, "there's been more progress in predicting how it will spread once it has started circulating in the human population," says Cecile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health. "Modeling suggested very early on, for pandemic influenza, that it was not useful to close borders and air traffic, because by the time you detected the virus somewhere it had already spread to other places." Modeling has also proved important for understanding who should be vaccinated, against both seasonal and pandemic strains. "If you vaccinate school kids, you reduce disease transmission in the entire community," Viboud says.

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Lasers Give Scientists Close-Up View of the Skin

Scientists at Harvard University have developed a noninvasive imaging technique that captures images at the molecular level so quickly that they can "watch" red blood cells move through the capillaries of a live mouse. The system uses two laser beams set at different frequencies to excite specific types of molecules in the skin. A custom-designed detector picks up the excited molecular signal and translates it into an image.

Sunney Xie, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard, says the technique could be a noninvasive alternative to often painful and time-consuming skin biopsies.

"To identify a solid tumor, tumor margins, and metastasis requires cutting and slicing tissue, staining it with dye, and looking at it under a microscope in a pathology lab next door?a process that could take 15 to 20 minutes," says Xie. "Here, we don't need a biopsy; we can obtain almost identical images without cutting the tissue."

Currently, systems like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) serve as windows into the molecular world. Clinicians use these tools to identify diseases like cancer. To detect specific molecules or cancerous cells, MRI requires the patient to ingest or inject contrast agents, and PET requires low doses of radioactive substances. However, scientists have found that these compounds, also referred to as "labels," may harm or alter normal cellular processes.

In contrast, Xie's technique is label-free, drawing upon a noninvasive imaging system called Raman spectroscopy. Named after Indian scientist C.V. Raman, the technique takes advantage of the fact that certain molecular bonds vibrate at specific frequencies. When a monochromatic laser illuminates a molecular sample, the molecules scatter the light back in various ways depending on their natural vibrations.

However, Xie says, the signal from Raman spectroscopy is weak, particularly when applied to living tissue, where molecular composition is heterogeneous. A specific molecular signal could be lost amidst other backscattered noise. To improve sensitivity, Xie and graduate students Brian Saar and Christian Freudiger developed a high-speed imaging setup with two lasers instead of the conventional one, exploiting a process known as stimulated Raman spectroscopy. The scientists' goal is to produce label-free images of a wide range of molecules in living animals and humans.

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Gates Skeptical of ?Don?t Ask , Don?t Tell? Repeal This Year

MUSCAT, Oman ? Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates cast doubt Monday that the Senate would vote before the end of the year to allow gay men and women to serve openly in the armed forces.

In comments aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, Mr. Gates said that he was unsure that there would be a repeal of the 17-year-old ?don?t ask, don?t tell? policy that requires gay men and women in the military to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge.

?I?d have to say I?m not particularly optimistic that they?re going to get this done,? he told sailors aboard the Lincoln, although he added, ?I would hope that they would.? Mr. Gates?s remarks were provided by a pool report from a small group of journalists accompanying him on the ship.

Mr. Gates repeated his concern that if Congress did not act on the legislation, the courts might overturn the policy on their own. His greatest fear, he said, is that ?we will be told to implement it without any time for preparation for training.?

The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the law, and there appear to be the votes for the Senate to do the same, but it is unclear if there is enough time before the end of the year to advance the measure. President Obama, Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all called for its repeal.

Mr. Gates spoke aboard the same ship that former President George W. Bush used for his May 2003 speech declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq, with the now infamous ?Mission Accomplished? banner behind him. The United States did not officially end combat operations until the end of August this year, more than seven years later.

Mr. Gates was aboard the ship to meet with sailors and see in part how the United States fights the air war in Afghanistan. Planes that take off from the ship provide close air support and surveillance for forces on the ground.

On North Korea?s recent behavior, including the shelling of a South Korean island and the North?s recent disclosure of a new nuclear facility, Mr. Gates told the sailors that it was part of a succession drama as the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, prepared for his son to take his place.

?These all seem to be designed to show that the son is tough and strong,? Mr. Gates said. ?And the message is to the elites in North Korea, especially the military, that he is strong enough to take leadership.?

Mr. Gates said that it was a ?difficult and potentially dangerous time,? then added: ?The North Koreans have engaged in some very provocative actions. They get everyone upset, then they volunteer to come back to talks, and we basically end up buying the same horse twice.?

Echoing a call throughout the Obama administration for help from China, Mr. Gates said, ?I think we just have to work with the Chinese and with others to see if we can?t bring some greater stability, some greater predictability to the regime in Pyongyang.?

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