Net Neutrality Will Increase Government Regulation - WSJ.com

So it turns out that Google's enthusiasm for government-imposed "net neutrality" is qualified. The Internet giant wants cumbersome network management rules applied to everyone—except Google.

Net Neutrality, like "health-care reform" and Global Warming initiatives have become religions. People are for them, without actually knowing what they consist of or what might fall out of them.

Google founders, like all libtards in modern academia have learned to question all that is traditional, while at the same time setting up new traditions that can't be questioned.

To put a positive spin on it, for the companies involved, I'd say that it's all about big companies encouraging new regulation to hold back the upstarts, and that is certainly true, in its effect.

But as religions, which these things have become they represent not competitive advantages, but a modern form of Luddism that simply desires a return to the "god old days" of five, ten, or fifty years ago (depending on your age).

Don't be surprised if Google (and other new companies) regularly act against their own best interest in the name of these modern replacements for religion.

July, August deadliest months of Afghan war for US - Yahoo! News

KABUL – A roadside bomb and gunfire attack killed a U.S. service member in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, a death that pushed August into a tie with July as the deadliest months of the eight-year war.

The death brought to 44 the number of U.S. troops who have died in Afghanistan this month with four days left in August.

NY Daily News adds:

The President has no calls or meetings on his schedule at the moment, presidential spokesman Bill Burton said, but he is staying up-to-date with developments on the economy, health care and foreign policy.

Burton hit back at Republican critics who said Obama should forgo his week-long vacation when many Americans are struggling economically.

"As I recall, the previous President took quite a bit of vacation time himself, and I don't think anyone bemoaned that," Burton told reporters, referring to George W. Bush's month-long summer getaways.

Well, um, I think quite a few people did "bemoan" that, including embedding references in just about every Hollywood movie made at the time.

I guess the theory goes that as long as Obama didn't vote for the war (did he vote to de-fund it?) he can ignore the consequences.

Subtracting out the blacks who voted for him simply because of his color, and the airheads who voted for him simply because Jon Stewart told them to, and the potheads who voted for him because any Democrat is more likly to easy pot laws than any Republican, and so on*... there are still a sizable number of people who voted for him due to their own opposition to the war (both of them, and the war on terror generally). What must those people be thinking now?**

* and don't forget disrespected parents of twenty somethings hoping to get back into the good graces of their drifted-away children (yes, I know some of them).

** not that I agree with them. While the war may have been tactically wrong, it was hard to find anyone in the days after 9/11 that didn't think we needed to do *something*. Meanwhile so many of the objections: "all about oil", "all about Haliburton", "can't impose democracy" seem to have run afoul of reality.

Does Flickr Censor User Content Over Blatantly Fake DMCA Notices? | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Many bloggers and news outlets accused Flickr of censorship and political bias in the removal of what was seen by many as a clear fair use parody image critical of the President. The case made the national press and with an EFF attorney adding that Alkhateeb indeed had a very strong fair use defense. After a substantial amount of critical press over the image, Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ finally came out defending Flickr over the issue saying that Alkhateeb’s image had been removed from Flickr due to a “a complete Notice of Infringement as outlined by the DMCA (Digitial Millenium Copyright Act)” In the same breath Champ accused the press and blogosphere of being “makey uppey.” Shortly afterwards, the thread where Flickr users were complaining about this image deletion was shut down by Flickr staff.

People need to read 1984 and Brave New World again (along with a history of the Soviet Union in the late 20th century).

A state does not need to be all-powerful in order to be oppressive. They simply need to convince enough people to act as spies and censors on their behalf so as to intimidate or throttle dissent.

Knowing Yahoo's history as I do (as a former customer) I am quite willing to chalk this one up to incompetence, coupled with a good dose of political bias. Don't expect the Yahoo's to fess up to either. Their efforts to reinforce the illusion that they have done no wrong, and can do no wrong only adds to my contempt for the company. Eventually everyone will figure out that their ability to deliver falls far short of their promises. My only regret is that the primary beneficiary of Yahoo's demise will likely be Microsoft.

Myth: Dems Like to Cut Military Spending - John Stossel's Take

Take it from a speech Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave last week:

"The last defense budget submitted by President George W. Bush for Fiscal Year 2009 was $515 billion. In that budget the Bush administration proposed – at my recommendation – a Fiscal Year 2010 defense budget of $524 billion. The budget just submitted by President Obama for FY 2010 was $534 billion. Even after factoring inflation, and some of the war costs that were moved from supplemental appropriations, President Obama's defense request represents a modest but real increase over the last Bush budget."

An Inconvenient Frost | The Real Revo

"Does global warming scare you? Has Al Gore made you nervous every time warm winter day? Does the possibility of an increase of one degree Centigrade over the next century keep you up at nights? If yes, you are worrying about the wrong things. One aspect of the AGW hoax is the argument that a little warming is a bad thing. In reality, warming has been a boon to human societies resulting in increases in health and populations throughout history. A little warming is unlikely to be much of a problem.

If you want to be terrified, imagine a hard frost five weeks earlier than normal across the growing regions of North America. Imagine a early September frost two years in a row. We aren’t talking about a new ice age here. Just imagine a few hours below freezing across the farm belt one night early in September. The destruction of crops would be devastating. Two years in a row would cause world wide famine. It is pretty easy to imagine a wide ranging frost a few weeks early. It has happened before. Could it happen again?":

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.

Whitacre Vows to ‘Learn About Cars’ as Chairman of New GM Board - Bloomberg.com

June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Edward E. Whitacre Jr. built AT&T Inc. into the biggest U.S. provider of telephone service over a 43-year-career. By his own admission, he becomes chairman of General Motors Corp. knowing nothing about the auto industry.

Not to criticize his selection (I don't know enough one way or the other), but if you look at the history of AT&T you will see that it was for most of it's history a monopoly until roughly 1984 when it was busted up into several smaller regional monopolies providing local phone service. AT&T then proceeded to flounder around either merging with other companies or spinning off parts of itself in a desperate struggle to survive as a non-monopoly company.

The regional bells, continuing to rake in unearned profits wisely sought to diversify themselves, going into publishing, cable TV, cellular, and even the furniture business. It would be at least very difficult to catalogue where all the monopoly money ended up, except to say that some of it, if not most of it, ended up wasted on dead-end products and projects. In the process all the baby-bells as they cam to be called went on wild rebranding sprees yielding meaningless names such as Verizon, Qwest and SBC (which might have stood for Southwest Bell Corporation at one time but just stands for SBC (nothing ) now).

I certainly don't know what Whitacre's real resume would look like, but he was at least NOT with AT&T during most of this time, but when AT&T re-merged with SBC in 2005 (AT&T as the company being acquired) he was head of SBC, not AT&T.

Someone else can figure out to what extent he was responsible for the success of what was still a mini-monopoly, I'm more interested in the principle than the individual.

The principle being, as someone put it recently, that most of these companies are not too big to fail, they are in fact too big to exist. I personally think that busting the AT&T monopoly was a good thing, particularly as it wasn't just a big company it was almost an extension of the government in its monopoly powers.

Now, in saving GM (and some banking and investment businesses), we are moving in the opposite direction, that of combining more and more businesses into government run monopolies (including offloading of Chrystler to the Italians so that we at Government Motors only have one remaining private company, Ford, to deal with). Of course we are told that all of this is only temporary. Problem with that is that temporary can turn into a very long time.

The two most likely outcomes are that GM will succeed, at the expense of the only other large American car company, ending real choice, or that through gross mismanagement, it will fail, leaving taxpayers with a big bill to pay and also leaving Americans with only one company to chose from.

Very little that is good can come from this, but our die has been cast, and I will not let those around me forget who (which voters that is) are the responsible parties. Before anyone protests, no, the Obama administration didn't cause it all, they have just provided the "punch line" that shifts our course from heading toward simple socialism to something much much more sinister.

For the real punch in the gut, we should all remember that none of these recent course changes can be corrected during most of our lifetimes, assuming we start correcting them in 2010, which is still doubtful considering new high school graduates know almost nothing about this country's history or how its government was designed to work. Congratulations to all of you who "won".

EDITORIAL: Obama's outrageous oversight

"White House Counsel Greg Craig, often seen whispering in the president's ear during question periods, admitted later to Ms. Burlingame that the chief executive was getting the facts of the law wrong during the discussion with the families. Craig asked her if CIPA covers a case in which terrorists defend themselves, noting that 'this is something we hadn't contemplated.' If nothing else, this admission of ignorance is more evidence that the decision to rush ahead with closing Guantanamo and shutting down the military tribunals was ill-conceived, poorly planned, and may ultimately be injurious to our national security. The president may talk a good game about 'swift, certain justice,' but it is becoming clear that justice will not be swift, is highly uncertain, and in the end may not even be just."

Political Punch: Bumps in the Road: Obama's HHS Secretary Nominee Faces Tax Questions Over Car and Driver

"(Mr. Daschle reimbursed the IRS $31,462 in taxes and interest for tax year 2005; $35,546 for 2006; and $34,935, a Daschle spokesperson said, adding that Daschle had asked his accountant to look into the tax implications of the car and driver five months before Mr. Obama won the presidency.)"

Report On Water Quality Withheld - washingtonpost.com

"A report that shows a decline in quality in northern Montgomery County waterways has been held from public release for months by county officials who have delayed the gloomy news while they hunt for new methods to allow more development but keep streams healthy.

The unpublished data on the county's four 'special protection areas' show that water quality in northern Montgomery is worse than in previous years and suggest that much of the decline comes from soil disturbed by rapid development in and around Clarksburg, according to several people familiar with the findings. The data suggest that sediment control systems used by builders and required by the county are not working well enough."

Obama Is “Failure” At Google & “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo

"I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you’ll find President Barack Obama’s page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot. Given a redirect that Obama’s web team has put into place, he should solidify into that number one spot over time. Eventually, Microsoft’s Live Search should reflect that, as well. And over at Google, Obama will likely gain a top page listing for a search on failure.

I know. There are bigger issues Obama has to deal with. But then again, this is supposed to be the tech-savvy presidency. It should be search engine optimization savvy, as well."

I may have linked this before.

But clearly Google deserves some sort of special payback from the new administration.

They now say they have a special utility they can run to fix their database. They have now run the utility so as not to label Obama a miserable failure.

Only they've known about this since 2005, so presumably they simply didn't mind having Bush labeled as such.

It's good to have friends in high places. Things haven't changed and it's not what you know, but who you know that really counts.

TG Daily - Credit Card Processor admits potentially huge data theft

The company has no idea how long the malware was in its system, or how many accounts were compromised, according to a quote Baldwin gave the Washington Post. He said, "The transactional data crossing our platform, in terms of magnitude... is about 100 million transactions a month. At this point, though, we don't know the magnitude of what was grabbed."

Ask.com Says They Don't Want to Become Women's Site

Now, according to Forbes, an Ask.com spokesperson says that “reports of the site becoming oriented towards older women are false and were fueled by an erroneous Associated Press article that has since been changed"*. According to Forbes, “even though the company plans on building on this user base it isn’t going to abandon other users in pursuit of it.”

What a farce!

Official Google Blog: A renewed wish for open document standards

"We join the ODF Alliance and many other experts in our belief that OOXML doesn't meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard. (An overview of our findings and sample technical issues unresolved are posted here.)"

White House discloses details of e-mail backup system

Too little too late it would seem.

Indian River Inlet Bridge Project Flushes Millions Down The Toilet

To remind us that not ALL wastefulness, fraud, deceit and excuse-making happens at the federal level:

According to Cole, the state expects to announce the new bidding process for the project “within a month,” and the contract to be awarded “within a year.” Construction on the new bridge should begin shortly after that. And to answer a question that has been posed on the air a few times, whatever bridge ends up being built should work just fine with the new approaches.

A statement that soon proved to be formed from the atmosphere of interplanetary space.

FEMA Workers Play Role of Reporters

As hard as the previous story is to believe, this may be even worse:

"WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California. The agency—much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago—arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency's deputy director."

Can't we just fire everybody and start over?

TPMmuckraker | Talking Points Memo | D'Oh: House Panel Screw-Up Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses

Link from Slashdot.

This is hilarious.

On Slashdot they are arguing over whether Dems or Reps are more likely to experience such a snafu.

Correct answer: both equally

If the actual error was made by a contractor, there is a good chance someone will lose their job or at least get shuffled to a position where they can do no further harm. Not so with government jobs.

Believe what you will about the motives for each political party, but doesn't this make the case for smaller government?

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".

And then there is this:

Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails.

A committee spokesperson emailed the following statement in response to TPMmuckraker's questions:

The tip line was created to be a confidential method for Justice Department employees to provide the Judiciary Committee with information that might aid the Committee in its ongoing investigation of politicization at the Justice Department. Because of the confidentiality agreement, the Committee will not discuss any emails sent on this tip line. A technological error in a recent communication inadvertently disclosed certain email addresses.

"A technological error"???

Sounds like the inmates of the asylum have nothing to worry about.

Years in the Making, Powerful Yahoo Mail Is Worth the Wait | Personal Technology | Walt Mossberg | AllThingsD

Even though almost every comment submitted for this article disagrees with the favorable treatment given to Yahoo mail, my post must have gone over the line somehow. It got deleted. I hate when that happens, and when it happens I tend to become a bit bitter about it. I don't remember what I wrote now, but basically pointed out that the review was wrong, WRONG, WRONG! and that it read like a sales piece for Yahoo (which I still think it does).

Saying that doesn't make it so (in other words I wasn't accusing them of being on the take, just implying that it read that way) but having my saying that deleted makes me wonder just what the fixation is between ATD and Yahoo. It merits watching. They're independent, yada, yada, yada, but they got to get advertising from somebody. And they've even boasted lately about how frequently they write articles about Yahoo. Let's keep an eye on who wins the big banner ad sweepstakes shall we?

Succinctly:

(1) Only Gmail and AOL/AIM mail (which was not even included in the comparison) allow you to read your e-mail into any generic local POP/IMAP compatible reader without paying a fee (Yahoo and MSN charge for the privilege).

(2) All the e-mail systems under consideration now have more storage than the average person is ever likely to need. Only Gmail offered it first and the rest followed. Sans competition, Yahoo mails storage limits actually went DOWN.

(3) Yahoo's spam filtering is horrible. Again, they make you pay to get better service in this area.

(4) Yahoo is slow. That's in web mode. Comments in the referenced article indicate the POP capability is even slower. I have no reason to doubt that.

(5) Finally, Yahoo ads are obtrusive, annoying, and so bloated they even crash your browser from time to time, not to mention adding even more delays between screens. Gmail ads are text only, take up little real-estate, and because they are targeted, are occasionally handy to have around (for example taking you to pages that allow you to track a package when you get a confirmation from a vendor on something you have ordered).

As I've had to do with other "objective" journals, I'll be mirroring my posts to the WSJ and affiliates right here from now on. Heck, I may even cancel my (paid) subscription. I'm PISSED!

Gates Asks U.S. Senate Panel To Ease Skilled-Worker Visas - WSJ.com

"Mr. Gates said a worker's mother country is helped when that worker sends home some of his or her wages to remaining family members. He also said that countries with health problems would be better served by greater investment in health care and not by trying to prevent their health-care professionals from moving abroad."

Did anyone on the Senate panel have brains enough to challenge this doublespeak from Microsoft's Idiot-in-Chief?

What am I saying, of course not.

Civilization Watch - February 18, 2007 - Evil Fiction - The Ornery American

"Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated.

I didn't hate it because it was badly written -- it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable.

No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil."

WOW!

I've sworn off anything that can be described as "historical fiction", which includes a lot of movies as well as books. Even if I can't detect what the agenda is, and if I can then whether or not I agree with it.

I can't read nearly as much as I would like to any way and this is a convenient way to shorten up my list.