Obama: Nancy Pelosi As Speaker Of The House Would Make My Job A Lot Easier

President Barack Obama heaped praise on Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Wednesday during a San Francisco fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, making it clear that he had a strong interest in helping Democrats regain control of the House in order to give Pelosi the speakership again.

"My job is to make sure we move the country forward, and I think we can best do that if Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House once again," Obama said, explaining his belief that she supported a number of broad second-term policy goals that have already been waylaid by partisan division in Congress.

Obama went on to lay out a laundry list of agenda items, from gun control, to early childhood education, to climate change and patching up the nation's cracking infrastructure, conceding that they weren't always politically popular.

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3D Printing Will Make Gun Control Laws Irrelevant, J.D. Tuccille Tells RT America

Yesterday, RT America ran a
report on the impact of 3D printing on the debate over firearms and
gun control laws. RT's Marina Portnaya interviewed me for the
report, and I told her
what I've written

before: 3D printing has the ability to decentralize
manufacturing to the DIY level and thereby render legal
restrictions irrelevant. If prohibited or restricted items can be
created in the privacy of your home or office, the law doesn't
matter. We also discussed chemical printing and CNC machines, but
as is often the case, only a brief bit on 3D printing made it into
the report, There's no
embeddable version available The embedded video is below, or
you can see it
here. My contribution begins at the 3:00 mark.

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Attention Filmmakers: LA Collaboration Challenge Returns

Who wouldn’t want to make a short film in two weeks with
strangers? The Los Angeles Collaboration Film Challenge is back for
a second year. Former Reason TV intern Mark Wagner is an organizer
and passed along an invitation for all interested in
participating:

The CFC is a one-of-a-kind nonprofit film festival in Los
Angeles. Get paired with other filmmakers and make two movies in
two weeks. Are you a writer in search of a cameraman? An editor
looking for a director? Worry not wallflowers, we’ll make the
connection for you!

Who is this challenge for? It’s for anyone! Industry pros,
student filmmakers, amateur enthusiasts—all are welcome. The beauty
of this experience is that you’ll be working alongside many other
people with a similar passion for filmmaking, and anyone can
win.

On May 4th, we screen the best entries in front of a packed
house of industry members— and our esteemed judges, including
Kurt Loder,
Matthew Lillard, and Slamdance president Peter Baxter— and hand out
over $10,000 in cash and prizes. Check out our
site for more info and official rules. Space is limited,
so enter today!

What makes the CFC a unique experience is that it goes beyond
competition. As the name suggests, this challenge is about bringing
filmmakers together to transform one person’s vision into a
masterpiece through powerful creative partnerships.

The deadline to register as a participant is April 8.

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Awkward Family Photos Make Easter Seem Especially Strange

Christmas photos get a bad rap for being awkward, but families in pastel outfits at Easter brunch give those wearing ugly holiday sweaters a run for their money. Plus, as we already know, setting children on a giant bunny's lap is a recipe for picture disaster (or gold, depending on how you look at it). With that in mind, we bring back the annual Easter roundup from the guys at Awkward Family Photos. Enjoy the vintage fun, and have a happy holiday!

For more awkwardness, visit AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com and get the new Awkward Family Photos Frame Kit!

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CHART OF THE DAY: How App Makers Make Money (AAPL, GOOG)

App revenue comes largely from in-app purchases made in free games, according to a new report from Distimo. Right now 76 percent of revenue comes from in-app purchases made in paid and free apps. That's up from 53 percent a year ago. If you're an app-maker, it looks like the best plan for making money is to give away the app, then charge people once they start using it.

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Freedom's Just Another Word for Never Cutting Class

This
week the Mercatus Center
released a report that set out to rank
the 50 states from the most free to the least. The results, which
declared North Dakota the most liberated part of America and New
York the most enslaved, have come in for inevitable
criticisms.

I'm less interested in the study's rankings than in its
customized "Personal Rank" feature, which lets you decide for yourself how to
weigh the laws being measured pick for yourself which
policies affect the outcome (but not, alas, how much each law is
worth). I'm pretty sure that if I were to use that tool to make my
own list, it wouldn't look the same as the one the study's authors
put together. So I'm open to arguments that, say, they shouldn't
have treated
right-to-work laws as a form of economic liberty.

But some of the arguments against the report are just
incoherent. Here is
Matt Yglesias, for instance:

You might think at first that abortion rights are given
zero weight for metaphysical reasons rather than reasons of
cultural politics, but it turns out that permissive homeschooling
laws are given weight as a factor in freedom. Children, in
other words, are considered fully autonomous agents whose rights
the state must safeguard vis-a-vis their own parents from birth
until conception at which point they lose autonomy until
graduation from high school.

I'll assume that the "birth until conception" bit is a glitch,
and that Yglesias isn't actually confused about which one of those
comes first. I won't dwell on his belief that one must think a
fetus is a "fully autonomous agent" to oppose legal abortion. I
won't make a big deal of the fact that he assumes the Mercatus
writers are themselves taking a stance against abortion rights,
though it's clear to me that they're trying to sidestep the issue
entirely.

It's when Yglesias suggests that homeschooled
kids "lose autonomy" that he goes completely off the rails. Under
the restrictions favored by the pro-life crowd, the fetal "rights
the state must safeguard vis-a-vis their own parents" are the
rights not to be deliberately killed or maimed. Needless to say,
those rights don't disappear when a child is born. The only way
Yglesias' argument would make sense is if permissive homeschooling
rules overturned the laws against child abuse. Needless to say,
they do not.

It is also possible, I suppose, that Yglesias thinks compulsory
schooling isn't a restriction on children's liberties. But that
would be even more backward than "birth until conception."

Update: Matt Yglesias replies:

You can click
through and scroll down to see the argument he says he was
trying to make. Judge for yourself how much it resembles the
passage he actually wrote—and, while you're at it, whether it
qualifies as an "argument about homeschooling."

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Self-Healing Circuits Will Make Durable Electronics

New circuits could make our electronics resistant to damage and manufacturing flaws by making them self-healing. They could also make our electronics more energy efficient or faster.

The circuits don't physically heal themselves, but use a second processor to reconfigure the way the circuit performs tasks around the damage.

The chip can tune its own performance on the fly: The second processor analyzes sensor data about temperature, voltage, current, power, and more from the circuit. It then uses a program to optimize the chip based on these parameters. It can be set to prioritize energy savings or to make the computation speedier.

It was published this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

MIT Technology Review says that the circuits could be resilient to manufacturing flaws, could withstand damage caused by high temperatures, or the deterioration that comes with aging.

Those are the issues that plague electronics of all kinds: from military communications equipment to consumer electronics, like our phones, which take a beating as it is.

To test this, the researchers, led by Ali Hajmiri of Caltech, repeatedly blasted the chip with a laser to destroy about half of its 100,000 transistors. After only tens of milliseconds after the laser blasts, the chip had adjusted and was working properly again. Before the damage the chip can work on half the power of a normal circuit because it can reconfigure itself for maximum efficiency.

When extreme conditions occur, for example a circuit overheats, the chip can adjust to make up for this. The rest of the time, when the circuit is performing normally, it can act more efficiently.

"You can design a chip that will run in these worst-case scenarios, but most of the time it’s not the worst case, and you could be running faster or with less power most of the time,” says Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University researcher who was not involved with the work, told Technology Review.

Imagine, a drop-resistant phone! Miracle for clumsy people everywhere.

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STOCKS MAKE BIG COMEBACK: Here's What You Need To Know (DIA, SPY, QQQ)

Markets opened deep in the red with the Dow down by as much as 120 points.  But stocks slowly ground higher.

First the scoreboard:

Dow: 14,526, -33.5 pts, -0.2 percent
S&P 500: 1,562, -0.9 pts, -0.0 percent
NASDAQ: 3,256, +4.0 pts, +0.1 percent

And now the top stories:

• In case you haven't been following, the S&P 500 is just a handful of points away from its all-time high of 1,565.
• The U.S. markets actually began the day deep in the red.  Much of the bad news was coming out of Europe where Italy is in disarray and Cyprus makes plans to reopen its banks tomorrow.
• For the next seven days, Cypriot bank account holders will not be able to cash any checks, however they will be welcome to make deposits. Also, all card transactions will be capped at 5,000 euros.  These capital controls are intended to prevent a run on the banks, which would be devastating for the very financial system that Europe is trying to preserve.
• "The Troika have managed to exponentially increase concerns on how safe retail deposits are in the eurozone," wrote Societe Generale strategist Albert Edwards. "It matters not that the final Cypriot bailout plan did not touch smaller savers unlike the original proposal of a 6¾% tax (haircut) for ALL deposits under 100,000 in ALL banks (including foreign bank subsidiaries). The fact that this plan was originally sanctioned, despite deposit insurance, will have shaken small saver confidence to the bone. It certainly has shaken my confidence."
• In the U.S., pending home sales fell by 0.4 percent in February, which was a bit worse than the 0.3 percent expected by economists.
• Still, the overall trend in the U.S. housing market continues to be as strong as ever.  Anecdotal evidence suggests some local markets may be getting a bit too hot for comfort.  "People are fighting other people," said Jeff Gundlach of the Southern California housing market. "It's almost the same type of environment I remember from the late 1980s."
• Don't Miss: At A Conference In Dubai, David Kotok Gave This Presentation On The Precarious State Of Global Monetary Policy >

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Making People Paranoid Prank By Jack Vale (VIDEO)

Prankster Jack Vale knows how to get under people's skin... let's just hope the guy with the photo of a gun on his t-shirt has a sense of humor. Watch Vale make everyone around him paranoid simply by talking on the phone.

Via Tastefully Offensive

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If You're Running A Startup And You Don't Make A Video Like These, You're Stupid (YHOO)

Two very young startups called Mailbox and Summly recently sold for millions of dollars. Storage company Dropbox acquired Orchestra, the company behind Mailbox, earlier this month for a rumored $100 million in cash and stock — merely&a few weeks after the email app launched.& Just yesterday, Yahoo acquired two-year-old mobile news startup Summly for a little under $30 million, according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, even though the app had generated no revenue. & But what did these early stage startups have in common that made them so attractive to the big players in the industry? Neither had very many users. Mailbox had maybe 1.5 million. Sumly had less than a million. Neither made any money. What&both had was an awesome video with high-production values to show off their products. If you're a startup and you don't make a video like these, you are dumb. Check that box! Here are the videos: