US Observes Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Attack - Voice of America

VOA News 07 December 2010

With the USS Arizona memorial in the background, Pearl Harbor survivor Richard Laubert, of Phoenix, Oregon, attends the 69th anniversary ceremony marking the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 Dec 2010, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Americans across the United States are holding ceremonies Tuesday to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Hundreds of people are estimated to be gathered at Pearl Harbor, where a new visitor's center is to open at the scene of the attack, near the site where the battleship Arizona sank.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the base just before 8 a.m., Hawaii time. The attack killed more than 2,400 Americans, sank five battleships and drew the United States into World War II.

More than 1,100 sailors died on the Arizona, which still lies at the bottom of the harbor. It is a memorial to what then-U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt described as "a date which will live in infamy."

At the same time as the Hawaii ceremony, the National Park Service in Washington held a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War II Memorial on the National Mall.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

07-12-2010

What's happening at Pearl harbor right now?

07-12-2010

Japanese attack on the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii is makeup by the American.

07-12-2010 Deborah Leigh (USA)

Too bad your article didn't list the other ships and their memorials in the harbor. God bless the Arizona and her crew, but the Utah is still resting on the bottom. Tell the whole story. God bless everyone who was at the Harbor that day!

07-12-2010 (United States of America)

REST IN PEACE. THANKS FOR SERVING OUR COUNTRY. MY FAMILY WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER THOSE WHO PAID THE ULTIMATE PRICE. REST IN PEACE. grateful (free) American

07-12-2010 Anthony Seminara (USA)

GOD BLESS ALL OUR FIGHTING MEN PAST AND PRESENT AND MAY ALL THOSE WHO HAVE PASSED ON REST IN PEACE

07-12-2010 Jack Straw (US of A)

A day worth remembering, one the government could have easily avoided by alerting the base of the incoming Japanese fleet. But then again we wouldn't have gotten involved in World War II if Roosevelt hadn't allowed so many men to die without warning

07-12-2010

Don't you wonder if Iraq will have heir own Pearl Harbor like day when the imperialist U. S. invaded their country?

07-12-2010 Tilomai Tui (Hawaii)

I thank you to those who risk there lives, and may they rest in peace with the Love of God.

07-12-2010 Debbie Barr (Tacoma,wa)

My great-uncle George Scott was at pearlharborthat morning. He was able to fire on the Japanese planes. He was from Bremerton,WA.

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Will Verizon Pay to Keep the iPhone Out of Competitor's Hands? - PC World

Rumors suggest that Verizon may pay a premium to keep the hot-selling iPhone away from its competitors T-Mobile and Sprint. In other words, they want to keep it exclusive to themselves and AT&T, and this may have helped Apple to get the terms it wanted from Verizon for the (still-rumored) Verizon iPhone.

"We are hearing that [Verizon] does not want iPhone, the hottest selling smart phone, available on T-Mobile USA and/or Sprint and may be willing to pay for exclusivity to itself and AT&T," Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu wrote Monday in a "report to clients," according to Fortune magazine.

Wu's report, based on information gleaned from "industry and supply channel sources," indicates that not only is Verizon willing to pay extra to keep the iPhone exclusive, but that the deal's economics are "likely to be favorable" to Apple, and "similar to that offered by AT&T."

Wu notes that this is important, because many people have been concerned that "VZ iPhone economics could be less favorable given the strength of Android and higher cost of components, particularly those associated with CDMA.

Wu suggests Apple's hand was strengthened by the 14.1 million iPhones sold last quarter and the market share gains made by AT&T in the last two quarters. What's more, he asserted that Google's Android platform has started to "lose some of its luster" for Verizon.

Sources also told Wu that Verizon may be looking to get its hand in on the iPhone deal, because it does "not have high hopes" for the upcoming BlackBerry 6 OS, according to Apple Insider. Verizon reportedly believes that the release of the new OS will not have a "material impact" on BlackBerry sales.

It's been predicted that a Verizon iPhone would spark a significant migration of AT&T users to Verizon. A Credit Suisse study released in September, for example, forecasted 23 percent of AT&T subscribers would bolt to Verizon if the carrier started offering the iPhone.

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Enlist in the Empire with Star Wars: Imperial Academy - Macworld

Once again, we return to a galaxy far, far away for the latest in Star Wars gaming. This week’s entrant? The ngmoco and THQ Wireless joint venture, Star Wars: Imperial Academy, a title that puts you in the shoes of one of the Empire’s “elite” stormtrooper corps. And by “elite” I mean “can’t hit the broadside of a Star Destroyer.”

As an Imperial, er, academic, you’ll face off against other stormtroopers in a battle to the death, utilizing a variety of weapons at your disposal. Along the way you’ll earn credits that allow you to purchass new weapons, armor, and special unlockable items (for example, allowing you to play as iconic characters such as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Boba Fett).

In order to actually earn those credits, however, you’ll need to compete online against other would-be stormtroopers from around the Internet in deathmatches of 4 players. You can play a global match against strangers, a private match against your friends, or hone your skills offline by fighting clones. The game takes advantage of ngmoco’s Plus+ gamer system to allow you to register your scores on leaderboards, earn achievements, and compare your performance with friends.

Just in case you don’t feel like earning your way up the ladder the hard way, you can also tap into your bank account and buy bundles of key cards that you can turn into power-ups and credits (to buy further equipment). Bundles start at 30 key cards for $5 and go all the way up to 800 keys for $50. Somehow, the idea of paying for upgrades feels very, well, Imperial.

The game scales for a variety of player skill levels, with features like auto-fire, adjustable look and move sensitivity, and direction pads that you can show or hide. Unfortunately, like many touchscreen FPS controls, the performance is somewhat frustrating compared to traditional physical input methods. However, its graphics are fairly impressive, tuned as they are for the iPhone 4 and fourth-generation iPod touch’s Retina displays.

Star Wars: Imperial Academy is a free download and requires an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or later.

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4chan rushes to WikiLeaks' defense, forces Swiss banking site offline - Ars Technica

The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan's hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site's operations.

A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself "Coldblood" has said that any website that's "bowing down to government pressure" is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.

The initial attacks against PayPal were substantially ineffective; the PayPal blog was taken offline, but the main PayPal site wasn't harmed. The attacks against PostFinance, however, have resulted in the bank's website being unavailable for more than 16 hours. It remains unavailable at the time of writing. The latest target is the site of the Swedish prosecutors in Assange's sexual misconduct trial. This too appears to be offline. Twitter has also been named as a future attack target, due to its censorship of the #wikileaks hashtag.

The companies being attacked deny that their behavior is a result of government influence. Rather, they are claiming that WikiLeaks and Assange have failed to adhere to the terms of use of various services. Amazon, which for a time hosted the site, said that WikiLeaks was failing to ensure that it "wasn't putting innocent people in jeopardy." PostFinance said that Assange lied on an application form.

In a case of tit-for-tat, unknown forces have since launched a denial of service attack against Anonymous' own site (one that took it offline shortly after publication), though the IRC channel used for coordination is still operational, and its denial-of-service software, LOIC, is still functioning properly.

WikiLeaks was itself the target of massive denial of service attacks in the wake of its release of thousands of US embassy cables. The source of these attacks remains unknown. In addition to making the main WikiLeaks site hard to access, DoS attacks against DNS provider EveryDNS resulted in the company cutting WikiLeaks off, as it was unwilling to tolerate the excess traffic.

In spite of this, hundreds of mirrors of the site have popped up across the globe, with Anonymous claiming to have created many of them. An "insurance file"—an encrypted torrent of the entire cable dump—has been widely distributed, along with the promise that the decryption key will be published should anything bad happen to WikiLeaks.

Assange himself is currently remanded in custody in the UK. Swedish prosecutors are seeking to have him extradited to face sexual misconduct charges. He surrendered to police in London and was arrested. Bail was refused over fears that he might flee, and also due to some fear that he was at risk from "unstable persons." With widespread calls for his murder, this might not be too far-fetched.

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Google vs. Amazon: Clash of the booksellers - Computerworld

Computerworld - Are you a fan of those 1960s Japanese monster movies like Mothra vs. Godzilla, where two enormous animals battle insanely while the tiny human onlookers scream in horror?

Well, if your favorite film isn't available on Netflix or Hulu, you can still enjoy a clash of the Titans this week, as Google pits its new e-reading application, Google eBooks -- and its new retail venture, the Google eBookstore -- against Amazon.com's huge inventory.

For a while, there has been some speculation that Google was going to come out with its own e-reader device, like Amazon's Kindle or Borders' Kobo. Instead, Google made headlines on Monday with a strictly software-based strategy: a bevy of applications for Android devices, the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod Touch, desktop/laptop Web browsers, and two specific e-book readers, the Nook and the Sony Reader. (Other e-book readers can also access books from Google's eBook collection if they can read either the ePub or PDF formats.)

Amazon, for its part, today announced its own desktop Web e-reader, which has been in beta since September and which, according to Amazon, should be available sometime during the next few months.

Like Microsoft with its Windows Live offerings, Google is using similar (and somewhat confusing) names for its related services. The general Google listing of free and non-free books that are available to browse, sample and review is called Google Books. The library of books that an individual reader collects, whether free or paid, and can then read on any device is called My Google eBooks.

The place where that reader can purchase new books using Google Checkout? That's the Google eBookstore. (None of these have anything to do, by the way, with Google Reader, which is Google's RSS service.) Google account holders can access all of those services by going to Books.Google.com.

I first checked out Google's browser-based e-reader, which works on any browser (unlike Amazon's current desktop e-reader, which is a separate application and must be installed on a Windows PC or a Mac).

You access it from the main Google Books page by clicking on the "My library" link. This brings you to the main page of My Google eBooks, where you can choose which book you want to read.

On the My Google eBooks page, you can choose one of your downloaded books to read.

The e-reader has a plain look that offers very few distractions from the text -- I was quite favorably impressed. Clickable arrows on the left and right let you page forward and back. Discreet gray icons on the upper left side of the page allow you return to the home page and see a table of contents.

You can change settings such as typeface, type size, line height and justification. You can also switch from "flowing text" (in other words, straight computer text) to scanned pages (images of the pages exactly as they appear in the printed book). There are also icons for search, information about the book (such as where to find a hard copy and user reviews) and help.

The reading interface for a Google eBook is clean and easy to adjust.

However, users of Google's Web e-reader may also need to exercise some patience in trying to navigate the huge and varied Google interface. For example, if you search for a book on the main Google Books page and click on the "Add to My Library" link, you will not find the book in "My Google eBooks" when you go back to your main "My library" page. Instead, you will need to scroll down a page that contains several other "bookshelves" with names like "Purchased," "Reviewed," "Recently Viewed" and so on. I finally found the "Reading now" category (which is how I'd classified a new book I'd chosen) just under "Favorites."

If you want the book to be part of your Google eBook collection -- and therefore accessible on all of your devices -- you have to click on the book and then click on the "Get it now" link on the right side of the book's screen.

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