barack obama

Obama opposes Silicon Valley firms on immigration reform

President Obama opposes an immigration reform bill backed by companies including Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe that would let U.S.-educated computer programmers and engineers remain in the country, the White House said today.

The surprise announcement comes in advance of a House of Representatives vote scheduled for Friday on the Republican-backed STEM Jobs Act of 2012, which would make up to 55,000 visas available to foreigners who earned a master's or doctoral degree in certain science or technology area from a U.S. university. Those visas would only be available if immigration authorities certify that no American … Read more

Obama turns to Facebook to decide which turkey to pardon

If Facebook had been around when "The West Wing" was still on NBC, this would be straight out of an episode of the long-running Aaron Sorkin hit.

Instead, this is for real: As is an annual White House tradition, President Barack Obama is getting ready to pardon a turkey. But he's got two to choose from, and if you're on Facebook, you can help the president decide which one gets the nod.

On Wednesday, Obama will pardon the 2012 National Thanksgiving Turkey and this year, for the first time ever, the American public will get its … Read more

GOP flip-flops over supporting digital copyright reforms

In an bizarre policy flip-flop, a group of more than 160 House Republicans appeared to endorse extensive digital copyright reform on Friday, then disavowed its position the next day.

The House Republican Study Committee, an influential collection of conservatives that tends to pull the House leadership to the right, published a set of recommendations that could have been penned by Larry Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation: expanded fair use rights, lower penalties for "willful" infringement, and dramatically abbreviated copyright terms.

That seemed to be more evidence that Republicans had become copyright skeptics, especially since most of the … Read more

Should the White House have a 'made in the USA' hi-fi?

America may not design world-class cars anymore. We don't build TVs, phones, tablets, cameras, or all that much consumer technology, but we're still at the top of the heap in high-end audio! That's why the White House should have an American engineered and built hi-fi system for use by the president and his invited guests.

I'll volunteer my services to coordinate and help assemble such a system (presumably donated by the manufacturers). On a leap of faith, I'm assuming the president still plays LPs, so I'd recommend the Spiral Groove turntable and tonearm from … Read more

Among the top election quants, Nate Silver reigns supreme

While there's already been whole swimming pools of ink devoted to the Election Day prediction performance of polling aggregators like FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver, CNET is ready to hand out one more round of kudos to the king of the quants.

By now, anyone following the presidential election knows that Silver successfully predicted the winner in the race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in all 50 states. That performance was one for the ages, earning him worldwide admiration and validating a polling aggregation model that had drawn mockery and ire from many pundits.

But … Read more

Instagram users upload 250,000 election-related photos

Instagram users showed off their voting activities on Election Day, uploading more than 250,000 election-related photos and immediately posting a slew of photos after hearing of the president's victory, the photo-sharing network posted today.

In the U.S., users tagged more than 100,000 photos with #IVoted and 150,000 photos with #election2012, Instagram reported, with the largest surge of photos coming in right after news outlets projected President Barack Obama's win. At that moment, the number of Instagram photos uploaded each second was at 2.1 times the normal rate.

Clearly, these Americans are not shy … Read more

Obama faces piracy, privacy tests in his second term

The most controversial technology topics in President Obama's second term are likely to be two political flashpoints: piracy and privacy.

When Internet activists allied with an hastily assembled coalition of Silicon Valley companies blocked votes on a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills early this year, they didn't end efforts to slap stiffer anti-piracy sanctions on the Internet. They merely postponed the fight.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are dead, of course. Those names have become radioactive on Capitol Hill, thanks to a broad public outcry that involved millions of Internet users and actually … Read more

Obama's win a big vindication for Nate Silver, king of the quants

In the end, big data won.

Not the presidential election -- although there's no doubt that President Obama's victory tonight was aided by a sophisticated understanding of the American electorate born of years of analysis of voting trends and demographic shifts.

No, big data -- and its patron saint, Nate Silver -- won the battle to predict the outcome of the contest between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Where breathless pundits brandishing equivocating polls shouted from the rooftops over the last few weeks that the race for the White House was a "tossup," or &… Read more

Bing's Election 2012 page can filter news by political bias

As election results roll in with Barack Obama taking Vermont and Mitt Romney winning Kentucky and West Virginia, Bing lets users tailor the political news they're getting.

In it's Election 2012 page, Microsoft's search engine has what you'd normally see, a map with color-coded states, numbers showing how many states each candidate has won, up-to-the-minute news, and results from the Senate and House races. But, there's one additional feature that's a bit more unusual -- a political bias slider.

In the upper right corner of the page, users can slide the bar to the … Read more