Web Development Live

A roommate-finding site cannot require users to disclose their
sexual orientation, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday, in the
latest skirmish over whether anti-discrimination rules apply to the
web.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Roommates.com, which
obliges users to list their sexual orientation, was different than
Internet sites where people can volunteer or withhold personal
information.
To inquire electronically about sexual orientation would not be
different from asking people in person or by telephone if they were
black or Jewish before conducting business, the panel said in an
8-3 ruling that partly overturns a lower federal court
decision.
“If such screening is prohibited when practiced in person or by
telephone, we see no reason why Congress would have wanted to make
it lawful to profit from it online,” 9th Circuit chief judge Alex
Kozinski wrote. “Not only does Roommate ask these questions,
Roommate makes answering the discriminatory questions a condition
of doing business.”
Roommates.com says it offers more than 100,000 rental listings
on its site across the United States and is owned by Roommate.com
LLC.
The court contrasted such requests for information with online
search engines such as Google, which could allow people to search
for terms such as “white roommate.”
‘CLOSE CASES’
“Websites are complicated enterprises, and there will always be
close cases where a clever lawyer could argue that something the
Web site operator did encouraged the illegality,” Kozinski wrote.
“Such close cases, we believe, must be resolved in favour of
immunity.”
“Where it is very clear that the website directly participates
in developing the alleged illegality - as it is clear here with
respect to Roommate’s questions, answers and the resulting profile
pages - immunity will be lost.”
A Roommates.com section allowing users to add additional
comments of their choosing is immune from liability as outlined in
the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the San Francisco-based court
found.
Congress “didn’t intend to prevent the enforcement of all laws
online,” the court said. “Rather, it sought to encourage
interactive computer services that provide users neutral tools to
post content online to police that content without fear that …
they would become liable for every single message posted by third
parties on their Web site,” it said.
Three judges dissented, saying the court was creating a
dangerous precedent and future confusion for Internet firms.
“The majority’s unprecedented expansion of liability for
internet service providers threatens to chill the robust
development of the Internet that Congress envisioned,” Judge
Margaret McKeown wrote.
Roommates.com “should be afforded no less protection than
Google, Yahoo, or other search engines.”
The Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley and the Fair
Housing Council of San Diego filed suit against the website,
claiming it violated the Fair Housing Act and various state
laws.
Reuters

The internet giant Yahoo has announced the launch of a new research lab in Haifa, Israel. The Yahoo Research Israel Lab, Yahoo first in the region, will be led by Dr. Ronny Lempel, an information organisation and retrieval expert who will report directly to Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, vice president of Yahoo Research. This will focus on boiling down complex technology problems into simple solutions to change the game in Web search, says the company. Yahoo recently opened Yahoo Labs - Bangalore and appointed eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi to head the new India lab. “Search is still in its infancy,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “At Yahoo, we are working on the hard core science that can lead to search experiences that are significantly beyond the current art.” He added that Ronny Lempel was a great addition to the Yahoo! team that they have assembled to develop a new approach to Web search. Lempel previously worked at the Information Retrieval Group at IBM’s Haifa Research Lab, focusing on research and development for enterprise search systems. “Israel is fertile ground for incredibly talented technologists, researchers and engineers” Lempel said. “I look forward to building the Haifa team with the best talent this region has to offer.”

WASHINGTON It’s a Herculean task: revamping a financial regulatory system dating back to the Civil War to deal with 21st century crises imperiling the country.Under an ambitious Bush administration plan, the Federal Reserve would take on the unwieldy role of uber cop in charge of financial market stability. Other regulatory agencies could see their influence diminished.The proposal won’t fix the host of economic and financial problems that threatens to plunge the United States into a deep recession, but it might help guard against future troubles. It would take years and a lot of political wrangling - in Congress, on Wall Street, in statehouses and elsewhere - to implement all the changes envisioned.Yet, the initiative, formally announced Monday, casts a fresh spotlight on the best way to protect the country from financial catastrophes in an intricate web of complex, often-changing financial products and the wide array of financial players using them in the United States and beyond. That debate probably will take center stage in the next president’s administration.—Stocks gain on last day of quarterNEW YORK (AP) - Wall Street managed a moderate gain in the final session of a dismal first quarter Monday, but stock prices and the major indexes still ended the first three months of 2007 with massive losses, the casualties of the still continuing credit crisis. The Standard %26 Poor’s 500 index, the benchmark for many widely held investments such as mutual funds, suffered a loss for the quarter of nearly 10 percent.The blip upward came from a better than expected reading in the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, which is considered a precursor to the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey on Tuesday. The index rose to 48.2 in March from 44.5 a month earlier; economists had been expecting a reading of 47.3, according to Dow Jones Newswires. Though the number topped forecasts, a figure below 50 nonetheless indicates a contraction in manufacturing activity.The market’s reaction, however, was likely not as enthusiastic as it might seem from Monday’s gains by the major indexes. Price movements tend to be skewed when volume is as light as it was Monday.It was a difficult quarter on Wall Street, with financial companies’ ongoing credit market losses and the flagging economy wiping out many investors’ appetite for stocks. While the market saw a number of up days during the quarter, the overall trend was sharply lower, with reports of asset write-downs and shaky financial companies pummeling the market - in particular, the near-collapse of Bear Stearns %26 Cos. in mid-March.—Pernod Ricard buys maker of AbsolutSTOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Spirits group Pernod Ricard SA is adding Swedish flavor to a liquor cabinet stacked with Scotch whisky, French champagne and Cuban rum with its $8.34 billion purchase of the state-owned maker of Absolut vodka.The company said Monday it was delighted to add the premium vodka brand to its assortment of drinks, after the Swedish government accepted its bid for Absolut’s parent company, Vin %26 Sprit.The Swedish government celebrated the higher-than-expected price tag for Vin %26 Sprit, but investors were less exuberant, sending shares in France-based Pernod Ricard down 4.3 percent to $103.03 in Paris.Sweden said it selected the Pernod Ricard bid on Sunday over three other offers, by U.S.-based Fortune Brands Inc., Bermuda-based Bacardi Ltd. and an investment group controlled by Sweden’s Wallenberg family.—Less corn could mean higher food pricesWASHINGTON (AP) - From chicken nuggets to corn flakes, food prices at grocery stores and dinner tables could be headed even higher as farmers cut back on the land they’re planting in corn this spring.Corn prices already are high, and a drop in supply should keep them rising. Combine that with the huge demand for corn-based ethanol fuel - and higher energy costs for transporting food - and consumers are likely to see their food bills going up and up.Farmers are now expected to plant 86 million acres of corn this year, the Department of Agriculture predicted Monday, down 8 percent from last year, which was the highest since World War II.Corn is almost everywhere you look in the U.S. food supply. Poultry, beef and pork companies use it to feed their animals. High fructose corn syrup is used in soft drinks and many other foods, including lunch meats and salad dressings. Corn is often an ingredient in breads, peanut butter, oatmeal and potato chips.—Merck, Schering-Plough sink on VytorinNEW YORK (AP) - Shares of Merck %26 Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. fell to record lows Monday, as analysts warned new clinical data would cause sales of their blockbuster cholesterol drug Vytorin to fall further.The companies market Vytorin through a joint venture, but earlier this year, partial results from a clinical study showed that it was no more effective at limiting plaque buildup than Merck’s Zocor, a drug that is already available in generic form. Full results of that study were released Sunday.Vytorin is a combination of Zocor and Schering-Plough’s drug Zetia.Schering-Plough shares plunged as low as $14, touching their lowest levels since August 1996. Merck shares fell as low as $36.82, their lowest since June 2006.Leading physicians are now recommending the use of older drugs called statins before putting patients on Vytorin. Many physicians had prescribed Vytorin in lieu of higher doses of statins because of what some said was an undue fear of side effects.— HUD chief resigns amid criminal probeWASHINGTON (AP) - HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, his tenure tarnished by allegations of political favoritism and a criminal investigation, announced his resignation Monday amid the wreckage of the national housing crisis.He leaves behind a trail of unanswered questions about whether he tilted the Department of Housing and Urban Development toward Republican contractors and cronies.The move comes at a shaky time for the economy when soaring mortgage foreclosures imperil the nation’s credit markets.Some Congressional Democrats had pushed for Jackson to leave.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said HUD will be called on to work with Congress on assisting refinancing for borrowers faced with imminent foreclosure.—Oil prices slide, retail gas hits recordNEW YORK (AP) - Prices surged at the gas pump, hitting a new record Monday even as crude oil accelerated its slide amid a broad-based commodities sell-off.The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded rose to $3.287, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices were highest in Hawaii and California, where the average price topped $3.60 a gallon.Gasoline prices are expected to keep rising as the summer driving season brings with it greater demand for the fuel. Last year, prices peaked in May before backtracking; with gasoline already at a record it will like only continue its advance.If crude oil prices, which set records of their own during March continue their advance, that will also add to the cost of gasoline at the pump.On Monday, however, light, sweet crude for May delivery dropped $4.04 to settle at $101.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to a decline of nearly $2 a barrel on Friday. Even so, prices finished the first three months of the year 5.8 percent higher than where they started; crude set a record of $111.80 in March before giving up ground.—Citi splits consumer banking, card unitsNEW YORK (AP) - Citigroup named a veteran retail banker Monday to head its North American consumer banking unit, splitting it off from its credit-card business as Citi struggles to become profitable again after suffering its biggest quarterly loss in its 196-year history.The latest move is the biggest sign yet that CEO Vikram Pandit, appointed in December, wants to fix Citi’s major parts rather than sell them off to raise cash - at least for now.It also shows what steps Pandit would take to attract more consumers to Citi’s retail banking unit.Citi’s worst problems are in its investment banking segment, which made huge losing bets on the mortgage industry. But its bread-and-butter business of lending to and collecting deposits from average people has also been underwhelming shareholders.Citi is ubiquitous throughout the United States, but in recent years has lost customers to rival banks such as JPMorgan Chase %26 Co. and Wachovia Corp.—Major indexes rise, commodities slip as quarter endsOn the last day of the quarter, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 46.49, or 0.38 percent, to 12,262.89.Broader stock indicators also rose. The S%26P 500 index advanced 7.48, or 0.57 percent, to 1,322.70, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 17.92, or 0.79 percent, to 2,279.10.Light, sweet crude for May delivery dropped $4.04 to settle at $101.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to a decline of nearly $2 a barrel on Friday. Even so, prices finished the first three months of the year 5.8 percent higher than where they started; crude set a record of $111.80 in March before giving up ground.In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 5.58 cents to settle at $3.0492 a gallon, while gasoline futures sank 10.07 cents to settle at $2.6163 a gallon. Brent crude futures fell $3.47 to settle at $100.30 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

F5 Networks, a provider of Application Delivery Networking, recently announced that it has extended its Application Ready Network (ARN) for Microsoft to include Windows Server 2008. Building on the previously announced solutions for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office Communications Server 2007, F5 is the only Application Delivery Networking vendor to offer validated, application-specific solutions to optimize end-to-end performance, availability, and scalability for key Microsoft applications, claimed the company.According to F5 Networks, the F5 ARN for Windows Server 2008 will help enterprises achieve powerful deployment advantages including support for the updated versions of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Terminal Services, as well as Microsoft technologies such as Windows PowerShell and SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol).With ARNs, F5 delivers application-specific products, tools, templates, and deployment guides to reduce the costs associated with application deployment, management, and operation. F5 ARNs offer step-by-step procedures with thorough deployment and application guides to help facilitate cooperation across organizations application and networking groups, reducing the risk of missed deployment deadlines, over-budget projects, and failed or poorly adopted application deployments. F5 long-standing relationship with Microsoft has resulted in several key achievements on the development side, yielding significant features that differentiate F5: New Terminal Services Engine Ensures enterprise-class user persistence on both IPv4 and IPv6 networks, shielding users from the consequences of unanticipated network drops; Unique IIS acceleration technologies Enables the F5 solution to deliver more content faster to users. This is accomplished through the BIG-IP product intelligent browser level caching, compression, and HTTP/TCP optimizations; New flexible Windows PowerShell tools Provides customers with a much wider variety of useful options to maintain and configure their F5 devices. For example, customers can integrate their BIG-IP system configurations with third-party applications for seamless management.

Look closely. Just above the signature on your Idaho driver’s license, you’ll see a faint image of an old-style barn surrounded by rolling hills. That barn, a real place and part of a working farm on Blacks Creek Road west of Boise, is also in the running to become one of Ada County’s six “County Treasures” for 2008.If you have favorite historic sites in Ada County, particularly in unincorporated areas of the county, there’s still time to submit your nominations to the county’s Historic Preservation Council. Nominations are due by Monday. The council, made up of volunteers appointed by the county commissioners, includes experts in archaeology and preservation. Each year since 2003, the group has named six “treasures” - sites significant to Ada County’s rural past, or to the history of county government or even to the county’s physical infrastructure. The list in the past has included structures like the New York Canal’s Callopy Gates near Kuna. Council member and history fan Al Bolin said the gates, named after a worker on the Oregon Shortline Railroad that used to run nearby, haven’t been used in decades. Once, they protected the area from floods by diverting water into Indian Creek for natural drainage. Leslie Toombs, a planner in the county’s development services department, said that so far this year, submissions are sparse. Sometimes, to compile its list of six sites, council members refer to a county survey taken in the late 1990s, when architectural historians traveled through the entire county, street-by-street, acre-by-acre, to identify important structures. “The idea was to document what is there because the county is changing so quickly,” Toombs said. “Sometimes we go out now to see the structures listed on the survey but find they’ve been torn down, or altered, and have lost their historic features.” Being designated a “county treasure” carries no legal weight when it comes to protecting historic buildings. “The county has no means of objecting to changes, or destruction,” Bolin said. “But the program recognizes surviving structures’ historic significance and the people who have been responsible for preserving them.” The winning properties share a special metal sign during the year and get immortalized on the county’s Web site. Bolin’s own favorite “treasures” were among last year’s winners - four structures that make up the once thriving village of Ustick around Ustick Road and Mumbarto Avenue: The former mercantile, bank, car repair/sugar beet processing plant and school building. The old Ustick School on Mumbarto Avenue, now apartments, still has its original coal furnace in the basement. “With Ustick, we were able to do kind of a theme,” Bolin said. “And given that Ustick Road is being widened to four lanes (between Cole and Five Mile roads, just west of the old Ustick townsite), this seemed like a good time to bring attention to the historic parts of the area.” Anna Webb: 377-6431

WASHINGTON What do former patients think about the care they received at your local hospitals? The government wants to make it easier for you to find out.Federal health officials in recent years have made strides to improve transparency in health care. But measuring how well hospitals do their job can be technical. New patient satisfaction scores, which went online Friday, cover basic premises that just about every hospital patient and their family members can understand.For example:-Did doctors treat patients with courtesy and respect?-How often were the room and bathroom cleaned?-Was the area around the room quiet?-Did the patient get immediate help after pressing a call button?Those questions were included in a survey used to evaluate more than 2,500 hospitals around the country.”You don’t have to be a technical expert to understand this information and its implications,” said Joyce Dubow, senior adviser at the AARP, the senior advocacy group. “If you ask somebody whether they were cared for with respect, they get that.”Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said consumers - and the Medicare program - pay for care whether it’s good or not. Informing consumers about how well a hospital performs a particular task or how much it charges for a particular service will serve as incentives for health care providers to do better.”The current sector is all about volume,” Leavitt said. “The future is about value.”The government’s Web site, http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, lets consumers compare up to three hospitals. Users will be able to see the scores for such things as how often nurses communicated well with their patients; hospitals nationwide averaged 73 percent on that particular question. Consumers will also be able to see how well the average hospital in their state fared on each question.The data was collected by hospitals from a random sample of patients from October 2006 and June 2007. The government led development of the survey, which was administered 48 hours to six weeks after the patients were discharged.Federal officials said they recognize that patients needing emergency care won’t use the comparison Web site, nor should they. However, more than 60 percent of all patients go to a hospital for elective procedures.The site will also help hospitals focus improvements where patients feel it is most needed, said Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association.”Ultimately, this tool benefits everyone,” Umbdenstock said.Overall, federal officials said rural hospitals seemed to fare better than urban ones when it came several measures of patient satisfaction.”I think that has to do with rural hospitals being more of a fabric of the community,” said Herb Kuhn, acting deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Officials acknowledge that few consumers compare quality information about insurance plans, hospitals and other providers to make decisions about their care. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey estimated that fewer than one in five patients did. However, that’s an increase from 12 percent in 2000.Leavitt acknowledged that the government’s efforts to evaluate the quality of health care are lacking. He likened the current situation to the earliest of video games, a table tennis game called Pong.”We’re not very good at this, but we’re making a lot of progress,” he said.

Intel Corp. unveiled new features for its line of low-cost laptops for schools Wednesday, adding bigger screens and more data storage capacity as the chip maker ratchets up its rivalry with the One Laptop per Child organization, which sells a competing machine.
Intel’s new Classmate PCs _ slated to go on sale in April for between $300 and $500 _ reflect the company’s growing efforts to sell computers equipped with its own chips to schools in developing countries, a battleground for technology companies because of the millions of people there just coming online.
But the target market has expanded to include kids in the U.S. as potential users of cheaper, stripped-down machines.
Classmate PCs also are part of Intel’s push to generate interest in a new class of mobile devices the company is calling “netbooks,” which are smaller and have fewer functions than standard laptops but also use far less power and are easier to carry around.
Other tweaks to the Classmate that Intel announced Wednesday from its developer forum in Shanghai include the availability of both 7-inch and 9-inch screens, a 30 gigabyte hard disk drive and an integrated Web camera.
At the developer forum, Intel executives also rolled out five new processors under the “Atom” brand name. The chips are designed for pocket-size Internet devices. The chips come in speeds up to 1.86 gigahertz while using less than 3 watts of power.
Intel said its Classmate PCs will eventually use Atom processors.
Classmates are based on Intel’s design and include its processors, but they are built by other manufacturers and sold under a variety of brand names. The first generation went on sale in March 2007 with the 7-inch screen and fewer functions. Intel said it has sold “tens of thousands” of the machines but declined to provide more specific data.
Intel and OLPC have feuded furiously over their competing products.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit OLPC says it has sold hundreds of thousands of its $188 machines.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff’s low-cost XO laptop includes a microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the world’s No. 2 microprocessor maker behind Intel.
A short-lived truce between Intel and OLPC ended earlier this year when Intel suddenly pulled out from OLPC’s board of directors.
Intel claimed it couldn’t continue cooperating with OLPC when founder Nicholas Negroponte demanded Intel stop selling Classmates overseas. Negroponte said the dispute stemmed from Intel sales reps disparaging OLPC products while pushing Intel’s own machines.

Convergin, provider of service interaction and mediation solutions, has released version 2.0 of SCIM (Service Capability Interaction Management). SCIM 2.0 is based on Convergins Accolade WCS platform and uses a Java EE SIP Server environment, based on JSR116/289 compliant service delivery platforms for operators to interact with Web services to provide service capabilities to orchestration processing of the business logic of the SOA-service bus. Accolade allows service providers to expand service delivery platforms on IP multimedia networks for their legacy networks. It coordinates and unifies the orchestration and interaction of the various services of application servers.With SCIM 2.0, the Accolade WCS is now expanded to service orchestration to incorporate telecommunications Web services and business logic in the service Composition process. By adding native and service independent support for SS7/SIGTRAN, based on TCAP and IN interfaces, application Server Service Logic Execution Environment (SLEE), the operator can open standards for the SIP application development with servlets.

Sprint Nextel Corp.’s new ultrafast cellular data network is getting some support from Nokia Corp., which said Tuesday it is going to launch a Web-browsing “tablet” for the WiMax network as it goes live this summer.
The Web tablet, which features a 4.1-inch (10.4-centimeter) touch screen and a slide-out keyboard, is likely to join a tiny laptop from ASUSTek Computer as the first gadgets that can use the network, in addition to laptop cards and desktop modems.
Finland-based Nokia previously announced its intention to make a WiMax tablet, but provided specifics for the first time on Tuesday. The tablet will be a modified version of Nokia’s N810 model, with a slight bulge on the back for the WiMax antenna. Nokia President Mark Louison said the price would be similar to the N810, which sells for $439 (euro280) on Nokia’s Web site.
Contrary to usual practices in the U.S. wireless industry, Nokia will be selling the devices, rather than the carrier. Activation for Sprint’s network will happen in much the same way people buy access to commercial Wi-Fi hotspots. If WiMax becomes available in the area, the tablet will notify the owner that it has picked up a signal.
Connecting to the network will take the user to a Sprint Web page where a credit card number can be entered. Access prices have not been announced for the network, which Sprint will be marketing under the Xohm brand.
Nokia is involved in Xohm in another way: Its joint venture with Siemens AG is one of the suppliers of network hardware.
WiMax will enable downloads of 2 to 4 megabits per second, peaking at speeds of up to 10 mbps, according to Nokia. By comparison, current third-generation broadband networks peak out at 1.4 mbps, though speeds are increasing.
In January, Asus announced that a model of its small portable computer, the eeePC, will come with a built-in WiMax chip. It also plans to make regular laptops with the chips later in the year. Intel Corp. is a major backer of the technology, making it likely that chips will show up in laptops from other manufacturers as well.
Sprint is in talks with Intel, Google Inc. and cable operators Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Bright House Networks for an infusion of capital to help build the network. Clearwire Corp., which already operates a pre-WiMax network in smaller cities across the country, would collaborate in building the network.

WASHINGTON The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday it is investigating a possible link between Merck’s best-selling Singulair and suicide.FDA said it is reviewing a handful of reports involving mood changes, suicidal behavior and suicide in patients who have taken the popular allergy and asthma drug.Merck has updated the drug’s labeling four times in the past year to include information on a range of reported side effects: tremors, anxiousness, depression and suicidal behavior.FDA said it asked the Whitehouse, N.J.-based company to dig deeper into its data on Singulair for evidence of possible links to suicide. The agency said it has not established a “causal relationship” between Merck’s drug and suicidal behavior. An agency spokeswoman said the review was prompted by three to four suicide reports it received since last October.It could take up to nine months before agency scientists can draw any conclusions, FDA said in a posting to its Web site.The agency recently began notifying the public earlier about possible safety issues. The policy change came after the FDA was criticized for acting too slowly on information about the risks of Merck’s painkiller Vioxx and, GlaxoSmithKline plc’s diabetes pill Avandia.Merck officials stressed that the FDA’s inquiry is based on reports, not clinical studies - which are the standard tool for evaluating drug safety. The company said none of the 11,000 patients enrolled in 40 Singulair trials has committed suicide.”We have no indication that anything about the mechanism of Singulair is consistent with these events,” said George Philip, director of research and product development. “But because suicide is a life-threatening event we thought it was important to provide this information in the product label.”Merck said it recently added reports of suicide to Singulair’s label, which already listed suicidal thinking and behavior as reported side effects.In clinical trials of asthma patients, the most common side effects were headache, flu, abdominal pain and cough.With sales of $4.3 billion last year, Singulair is used by millions of patients in the U.S, according to Merck. First approved in 1998, it’s part of a class of asthma and allergy drugs that includes AstraZeneca’s Accolate and Critical Therapeutics’s Zyflo.FDA said it is also reviewing reports of side effects with those drugs. Their labeling does not contain language about suicide.”Patients should not stop taking Singulair before talking to their doctor,” FDA said in its statement, adding that doctors should monitor patients for suicidal behavior and mood changes.Shares of Merck %26 Co. Inc. rose 8 cents to close at $44.78.