Techcordance

Cloud Computing?

This is a guest post from Dana Gardner of TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet. You can follow Dana on his ZDNet blog BriefingsDirect, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Cloud computing seems to be trapped between the rock of great expectations and the hard place of low confidence. While most enterprise and IT decision makers view cloud as a way to lower capital and operational costs, the way to more aggressive cloud adoption is blocked by concerns about security and control.
This is the finding of a recent survey commissioned by IT consultancy Avanade, Inc., Seattle, Wash., and conducted by Kelton Research, Culver City, CA.

Montana Court

HELENA (AP) — A federal appeals court says a Montana election law was unconstitutionally applied to an East Helena church that supported a 2004 ballot initiative to define marriage.
Wednesday’s ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals chided the state for its “petty bureaucratic harassment” of the Canyon Ferry Road Baptist Church.
There was no immediate reply to a request for comment from Montana’s attorney general.
The appeals court ruled the state violated the church’s First Amendment rights when Montana’s commissioner of political practices at the time, Gordon Higgins, ruled the church became an “incidental campaign committee,” that must report its expenditures to the state, because the church supported a 2004 constitutional initiative defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Cnet news

President Obama’s decision to allow federal tax dollars to be used with embryonic stem cell research does more than reverse his predecessor’s policies and fulfill a long-standing campaign promise. It also reopens the debate about how well science and politics can, or should, mix.

On Monday, Obama signed an executive order allowing research on more stem cell lines than the Bush administration had permitted in its political compromise eight years ago.