housing

Greening up the neighborhood--residence to get highest LEED rating

A Cambridge, Mass. home is expected to get the highest rating from the Green Building Council at what appears to be market prices.

The two-unit building, which I took pictures of while it was being built, has got many of the green features you could think of: bamboo flooring, air-tight insulation, and a combined solar electric and hot water roof.

The developer and designers of the house--Sustainable Living and PowerHouse Enterprises--said on Friday that they expect the house to get Platinum certification, joining only about a dozen other residences with that rating.

And the price for this two-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse … Read more

Ban on Net access taxes extended to 2014

Updated at 11:13 a.m. PDT: America's Internet access subscribers can breathe a sigh of relief: Congress isn't planning to allow taxes on your connection for another seven years.

With little debate, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 402-0 to pass an extension of an existing ban on Internet access taxes until 2014. The same proposal received unanimous approval in the Senate late last week.

The move comes just in the nick of time, as current law generally prohibiting state and local governments from levying the taxes was scheduled to expire Thursday.

The bill'… Read more

House Democrats back away from wiretap reform plan

In the face of a presidential veto threat, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives pushed off a scheduled vote Wednesday on legislation designed to limit warrantless wiretapping.

The Democratic acquiescence was a victory for President Bush, who said last week that the proposal was unacceptable to him.

Opposition had come from both sides. Republicans had savaged the proposal as harmful to national security. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said on Wednesday that the delay was "bad news for Osama bin Laden and other terrorists," thereby illustrating McCullagh's Law in action. Meanwhile, privacy advocates, including the American … Read more

White House says blocking Iraq Web documents was 'mistake'

The Bush administration says that blocking search engines from indexing key Iraq-related documents on its White House Web site was a simple mistake.

Until Thursday, the White House was using a robots.txt file that instructed search engines not to visit publicly accessible Iraq files on Whitehouse.gov, including a January strategy report (PDF) and a July benchmark report (PDF).

In response to phone conversations I had with them pointing out the problem, they've since revised their robots.txt file--meaning the progress report on Iraq due next week should be visible through Google, MSN and so on.

"It … Read more

Secrecy over lost White House e-mails continues?

Remember the mystery surrounding the potentially millions of "missing" e-mails exchanged by top White House aides like Karl Rove?

Apparently the White House would prefer that it remain that way--or at least that's the inference one might draw from a letter sent on Thursday to Fred Fielding (PDF), the president's chief lawyer, by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform.

As reported last week by the Associated Press, the Bush administration has taken what Waxman deemed the "unusual position" of declaring the White House Office of Administration immune … Read more

Rentometer: Find out if you're getting hosed on rent

Rentometer is a useful mashup, one that's part scientific, and another pure speculation. The idea is simple: just plug in your ZIP code, the size of your dwelling, and how much you're paying, and Rentometer will cross-check your price with local property listings pulled in from parent company iiProperty. Results show up on two screens, one that's a little bit like a speedometer, and another that's simply a Google Map with nearby property listings.

This is a great service if you're apartment hunting, since you can see if the price is higher or lower than … Read more

Bush signs off on billions for science, tech

President Bush on Thursday signed into law the America Competes Act, which authorizes $33.6 billion from federal coffers for government-sponsored research, education and teacher-training programs in the science and tech arena over the next few years.

The move promptly drew an avalanche of accolades from high-tech companies, who cheered the action as a way of helping the United States stay competitive in science, technology and engineering. But it may not be time to pop the corks yet.

After all, it's still up to the respective congressional appropriations committees to go through the formal process of doling out funding, … Read more

Federal shield law clears committee in House

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee approved an amended version of the Free Flow of Information Act. If passed, the act would shield reporters from having to testify about information they obtained through their journalistic activities. This significant step toward passing a shield law comes one year from the day I was escorted out of a Federal court room and held in civil contempt for asserting a journalist privilege.

As CNET reports, In response to concerns raised by the Bush administration and other politicians, the revised bill attempts to exclude the "casual blogger" from reaping those benefits by stipulating the protections apply only to those who derive "financial gain or livelihood" from the journalistic activity, Boucher said Wednesday. That broad rule could, however, include part-time writers who receive even a trickle of revenue from Google Ads or Blogads.com.

While the revised form of the law is not perfect, it does appear to offer a level of protection against Justice Department inquiries that doesn't currently exist. Although 33 states have some form of shield law, these protections do not apply in a federal context and several U.S. journalists have found themselves imprisoned in recent years as a result.… Read more

Congress OKs new direction for privacy panel

A White House panel charged with flagging privacy and civil liberties foibles in the government's electronic eavesdropping programs may soon be gaining a little more freedom.

Both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have approved a 567-page conference report that would change the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from a panel within the Executive Office of the President to an "independent agency" within the executive branch.

Just last week, the current vice chairman of the panel, a former Reagan White House attorney, told a congressional committee that the panel was fine as-is. But Lanny … Read more