Online uproar in China as drunken official grabs girl

"The girl's father challenged a drunken Lin, who offered to pay him off.

'Yes I did it, so what? How much do you want, just tell me. I'll give you the money,' Lin said according to footage shown on the sina.com website.

'Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transport,' he goes on to tell the father, according to the website.

Lin, who was only identified after appearing on the Internet, lost his job and is now the target of a police investigation."

Obama's '$4 Billion for Exxon' Myth

"In the U.S today, the combined federal and state tax on corporate profits averages 40%, which is increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. The average corporate tax rate dropped to 25.9% in 2008 from 37.7% in 1996 among 97 countries surveyed by KPMG, and to 23.2% from 38% in the European Union. Corporate tax revenues typically increased as a share of GDP after tax rates were reduced. Countries with corporate tax rates from 12.5% to 25%, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark, routinely collect more corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP than the anemic 2.1% figure the Congressional Budget Office projects for the U.S."

Keep Virginia Red? (Cato-at-liberty)

"It was very clever of the TV networks back in 2000 to insist on red for Republicans and blue for Democrats; it had often been the reverse in earlier elections. David Brinkley spoke of Ronald Reagan’s “sea of blue” in 1980, and Time wrote in 1984, “On NBC’s national map, a spreading sea of blue represented Reagan’s triumph, and little islands of red symbolized Mondale’s meager winnings; on ABC and CBS maps, the color symbolism was reversed.” NBC that year — like other networks in previous years — was in keeping with the worldwide use of political colors, where typically red represents communism, socialism, and social democracy and blue is associated with conservative parties. But when the dominant U.S. media all decided to paint the Democrats blue and Republicans red, they got rid of that pesky, lingering association of red with socialism."

'My Heart and My Values Didn't Change'

'Would he like to be more popular?' Fleischer added. 'Of course he would. Of course it bugs him. But it doesn't guide him or drive him.'

There is little outward sign of irritation from Bush, who has maintained a sense of good cheer in many of his less-formal public appearances this year. During a celebration honoring Theodore Roosevelt's 150th birthday last week, Bush joked: 'People ask me, 'Do you ever see any of the ghosts of your predecessors here in the White House?' I said, 'No, I quit drinking.'

Casualty List

Discontinued Product	Status	Transition Plan	User reaction
AOL Journals	Dead	User allowed to automatically transfer content to Google Blogger	What users?
MSN Groups	February 2009	Point users to Multiply	Lynch Mob
AOL Pictures	December 31, 2008	American Greetings® PhotoWorks®	What users?
Yahoo Live (whatever that is)	December 3, 2008	Everyone go home and mope	We hardly knew ye!
AOL XDrive	January 9, 2009	Screw You	???
Google's Lively	December 31, 2008	What 3D technology?	???

Official Google Docs Blog: Online petition for an organic farm at the White House

If things go as predicted there will be no shortage of fertilizer.

Search Google Profiles

Google recently published a Sitemap file containing the URLs of public Google Account profiles. Now, they've also started to offer a special profile search.

The next thing that needs to happen is for more people to be comfortable actually being found on the Internet using their real name (as I am not).

The more you connect these things up the more likely it is at some point that you reveal everything about yourself by one slip of a setting somewhere.

Is there a guru at Google making sure that by posting my blog or photos under a pen name I don't in some way make available my medical records, even if I think I've isolated the two things?

I have yet to see evidence that someone at Google is minding a barrier of privacy between what I am willing (and should be willing) to share and that which I am not willing (or should not be willing) to share.

It looks muddled to me, and of course it isn't only Google making it so.

The question isn't one of intent (are they evil?) the question is one of competence, and in this arena they need to be almost infinitely competent. Passwords having gotten out can be changed. Much less easy to change your home address and impossible to change your medical status or criminal record. What possible upside can compensate for all the possible downsides? And I say all this as a longtime supporter of Google. I just don't see evidence that they are paying attention to where these things could go.

USA.gov Redux - Reimagined as under the Obama Administration

Worth a visit. (Before Tuesday)

Design View / Andy Rutledge - The Design of (the wrong sort of) Dissent

"Based on the unsolicited yet copious response to my design dissent effort last month, the clearest lesson I learned was that the vast majority of designers have no respect for political dissent; only for Leftist political dissent. Further, the vast majority of designers respect criticism only when we’re all criticizing the same thing in the same way. In other words, hypocrisy and jingoism are far more fundamental design values of our “community” than intellectual honesty or individual objective evaluation. Apparently, designers are required to either run with the pack or get run over by the pack."

Microsoft bribes again? | Computerworld Blogs

"But, if as appears may be the case Microsoft is letting people have Dell XPS M1330 laptops with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 3GBs of RAM on 'indefinite loans (wink, wink) then it's a bribe in my book. What do you think? If you knew someone had been given a PC with a list price of $1,956 and then wrote nice things about the operating system that came with it would you be inclined to think that they might be just a wee bit influenced by the almost two grand worth of computer?"

How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever - O'Reilly Broadcast

At first glance, I have a USB data acquisition driver in the kernel that originally some company in Germany created and they wanted to get it in and we realized that about four different companies' drivers all do the same thing, so we all merged into one. Now none of those companies have to maintain it; they all get their support for free. Users benefit in the fact that they all have one tinier code base and so the original German company is very happy about it, so they're ecstatic. They don't have to worry about it anymore and it just works for them. Actually there's another company here in Portland that uses that same driver and they're very happy about it too, so it makes people realize over time that the Linux development model has benefits but it's really hard to convince them until they've gone through that.

Hidden Audio: Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry | NewsBusters.org

"Imagine if John McCain had whispered somewhere that he was willing to bankrupt a major industry? Would this declaration not immediately be front page news? Well, Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview. The result? Nothing. This audio interview has been hidden from the public...until now. Here is the transcript of Obama's statement about bankrupting the coal industry..."

OpenMarket.org » Archive » Top Obama Adviser Blames America for 9/11, Says America Is Racist

"Top Obama adviser Charles Ogletree says that America is to blame for 9/11 and that Americans are stupid. He also says that America is a racist country, and that Americans will only vote for Obama because he is half-white."

DE: Foreign ministry: 'Cost of Open Source desktop maintenance is by far the lowest' — Open Source Observatory

The Foreign Ministry in 2001 began migrating its back-end IT systems to Open Source in order to provide all embassies and consulates with Internet access and email. 'Our strategy was to use as far as possible Open Standards and Open Source. Reduction of costs was the main reason for this decision.' Upon completion of this project, the ministry decided in 2004 to also migrate the desktops.

The biggest hurdle proved to be to convince the two hundred IT workers a the ministry. 'Their issues were not technical. They just did not know anything about Linux and Open Source and we had to change their views. We took all of them on a crash course of using Linux servers and configuring Apache. There they discovered that it works.'

The Columbus Dispatch : State employee says she was ordered to check out Joe the Plumber

About 3 p.m. on Oct. 16, Niekamp said Carrie Brown, assistant deputy director for child support, asked her to run Wurzelbacher through the computer. Citing privacy laws, Niekamp would not say what, if anything, was found on "Joe."

On Oct. 23, Niekamp said Doug Thompson, deputy director for child support, told her she had checked on "Joe the Plumber." Thompson "literally demanded" that she write an e-mail to the agency's chief privacy officer stating she checked the case for child-support purposes, she said.

Thompson told her that Jones-Kelley said Wurzelbacher might buy a plumbing business and could owe support. Thompson said he replied that he "would check him out."

Niekamp, 38, a senior child-support manager, said she never heard any discussion of politics amid what her supervisors told her about the checks on Wurzelbacher.