Good News About America

I have a backlog of things I want to write about, but they’re all going to have to wait because of my personal good news: I’m getting married today!

Posting to resume after the honeymoon.

The commerce department reported today that new home sales increased 23.6% in June, although they still trailed sales from a year earlier; there were 20,000 more home sales than economists were expecting.

Housing sales are expected to remain low for several months, after people rushed to complete home purchases before the April 30th deadline for the homebuyers tax credit.

The encouraging news on housing, along with better than expected earnings from FedEx,  pushed the Dow Jones up 72 points.

One of the big stories today, of course, is how BP finally stopped the oil leak; I previously talked about it here and here.

The good news is that supposedly the well is completely sealed off, with no oil leaking. It remains to be seen whether the pressure inside the well will remain steady; a steady pressure would indicate that oil is not leaking around the cap. Meanwhile, one of the relief wells is 150 feet away from intersecting the leaking well; after the test is complete, drilling will resume so the leaky well can be finally killed.

The other major piece of good news is that the financial reform bill finally passed the Senate, as three republicans  - Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts – joined with democrats to break the GOP filibuster.  (Democrat Russ Feingold voted against the bill on the grounds that it isn’t strong enough). The republican leadership, of course, immediately called for repeal.

Public interest groups praised the legislation, which has been languishing in the Senate since the House passed it in June. The law attempts to avoid the need for another wall street bailout by setting up an advance warning system for banks that are deemed too big to fail, setting new limits on speculation by banks, and regulating the derivatives market. It also launches a new customer protection agency.

Many regulations called for by the law still need to be drafted over the next two years; it is expected that those opposed to reform will be donating heavily to republicans in order to water them down as much as possible.

I’ve been following with interest the progress of Spaceport America, out in New Mexico; even though I know I’ll probably never get to go into space myself, it’s cool to know that we’re actually on the verge of commercial space travel! (Granted, Russia has been selling trips into space for a while now, but if you have to be a billionaire it doesn’t really count).

Spaceport America is a great example of where innovation can depend on government investment; can you imagine this thing being built without government involvement?  The Spaceport, which is expected to cost about $200 million altogether, is about sixty percent complete and has so far created over 600 jobs. Just this month, they finished a 10,000 foot runway and are looking for contractors to actually run the facility. If I was in New Mexico, I’d want to get in on one of those hard hat tours they offer.

Remember when SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X-prize a few years back?  Its successor, SpaceShipTwo (yes, they’re very creative) first launched on March 22 of this year; the ship is currently being tested at Scaled Composite’s home base in Mojave, California, but will then be moved to Spaceport America for commercial flights.

Image credit: Spaceport America

Now, if I was a  multi-billionaire, I’d be tempted by the company that plans to send tourists to the moon, even if it does cost $100 million a pop..

Last October, the While House website migrated to the Drupal open source web platform.

The manager of whitehouse.gov has now announced that they will be releasing four custom-built modules back into the Drupal community.  These consist of:*

The Node Embed module improves screen-reading support

The Gov-Delivery module improves dynamic email

The Context HTTP module improves caching decisions

The Akami module allows integration with the Akami CMS.

This is cool as it shows this administration recognizes the importance of the principles of open source software; these improvements, done with tax dollars for government purposes, will now be available for anyone to use, free of charge. Isn’t that good news?

* Hat tip to Linux Pro Magazine for information used in this article

Well, good news fans, I have a small backlog of things to write about, so expect to see several articles coming up next week! I’ve decided to just post a couple times a week rather than every day, so I’d suggest subscribing to the RSS feed to be notified of new posts.

During the year-long debate over health care reform, one of the biggest problems was a lack of information; people were constantly attacking the bill over things that weren’t even in it, for allowing things it specifically prohibited, etc. While much of that was deliberate misinformation put out by Fox News and the republican party, there wasn’t really a good place to see all the relevant information collected in one spot, either.

This week, as required under HCR, the Department of Health and Human Services launched HealthCare.gov, with the purpose of helping people understand their options and rights under the new law. I clicked around the site a bit and found it informative and easy to use. Even the HTML code seems nice and clean, so I’m going to have to say “good job!” to whoever was responsible for building it.

Want to know how the law affects you this year? This site seems like a good place to start.