I was listening to a sales pitch for a robot.
The salesman was pitching the ease of programming the device, and the ease of porting programs between different models.
He then said that if needed, a “webinar” could be arranged to train our people for training.
Webinar???? What the hell is a Webinar????
He clear meant a teleconference with a shared desktop (Webex®), but why do people have to do this to the English language
I’m proud of the term, and I’m proud that I am a liberal.
“Progressive” is a weasel word, taken up when the repulsive bigots of the right wing managed to conflate the term “liberal” with “n*gg*r lover”.
Senator John Vitter (R-LA) on DC Madame’s Phone List.
Schadenfreude, It’s not just for breakfast any more.
In what I can only describe as a case of a someone being hoist on their own petard, an Irish book maker, paddypower.com has had to pay off on Albert Gore III’s DWI arrest.
They had to pay out $13,600 on 14-1 odds on the oddball bet that Al Gore would be the next celebrity arrested.
Former vice president, Albert Gore, Jr. has not been arrested, but his son, Albert Gore III was recently.
You play with the bull, you get the horns.
North Koreawill be fielding modern solid propellant missiles.
This is a natural development. Missiles and missile technology are their only real exports, and, absent a nuclear capability (which we don’t want them to have) it is their only credible deterrent.
Furthermore, these weapons are legal.
Of course, you have a former Bush administration official *cough* corrupt incompetent *cough* and a US Army general *cough* Bush Toady *cough* acting as if the sky is falling.
The North Korean has a very real fear of a sneak attack from the US. As long as Cheney is anywhere near the levers of power, this fear is justified.
Even if the fear were not justified, the best course of action is to attempt to reduce that fear, rather than stoking it with bellicose and jingoistic rhetoric.
The Register has an article, ISPs face down Tories on file sharing, where the ISPs basically told Conservative Party Leader David Cameron to go pound sand after a speech that he gave to record distributors.
The ISPA’s response was blunt:
A spokesman for ISPA said: “The Internet Watch Foundation is very focused in what it does and has taken a long time to get there working with the police. Unlike distributing images of child abuse, copyright infringement can be a civil offence.
“Any kind of blocking has to be the preserve of the courts.”
People who use music online understand the dynamics. They understand that record distributors cheat artists as an integral part of their business model. They understand that these companies want to make people pay multiple times that these people OWN, in order to put it on a walkman, or in their cars.
For the Tories to be sucking up to these folks confirms the worst suspicions of every British voter.
Facing South has a a good analysis of how our real earnings compare to those of Europe:
Going back to the previous example of combined employer and employee income and “social security” taxes, here’s the same example with only the employee’s portion, i.e. take-home pay after payroll deductions:
Take-home pay, $50,000 income (USD) US France UK Payroll Tax $3750 $4500 $4352 Income Tax $6945 $7915 $8156 Take-home $39,305 $37,585 $37,492 So the British and the French take home a little less and pay a little more in VAT, but their health care is fully covered (the French employee is still paying the 8% for 100% coverage). The American employee still has to pay for health insurance (anywhere from $600 to $3000 per year in payroll deductions depending on the type of policy and company size), and most also pay additional state and local income taxes (for example, approx. $2500 in Georgia, $3000 in North Carolina, or $3900 in NYC).
Not only is he missing the whole safety net, but also the fact that a car is a luxury in places like the UK and France, where a good mass transit system exists, but a necessity in the US.
Additionally, you have far fewer worker protections here.
We spend more, but that’s because we are in debt up to our eyeballs.
I’m a strictly amateur blogger. I support my family as an engineer. I don’t need your money, but there are a lot of talented and highly educated people who live on the hairy edge of poverty blogging.
Phoenix Woman, who I’ve known since our Table Talk days, gives a good reason as to why:
The reason that there are so many great bloggers is that there are so many highly-educated, highly-talented throwaways. People who for reasons of cost, or health, or because their conscience was better than their management’s have been stripped of their jobs, replaced by foreigners, sent into humiliated exile in their own land. And, again, this is by plan. The H1-B (and other visas) have been used to drive down American wages and working conditions. The oversupply of scientists, engineers, and other highly-skilled people is deliberate, bipartisan, and planned at the highest levels of government.
The conventional wisdom for the past 25 years has been cheap labor economics, and the subsistance level bloggers are just one symptom of people who have done what the conventional wisdom says to do, and have been shafted as a result.
While free trade is a good thing in the abstract, a bad free trade deal is worse than no free trade deal.
Check out the NY Times article, Sensing a Shift, Reid Will Press for an Iraq Exit, Harry Reid is saying that they haven’t done enough, and I think that he means it.
I think that the so-called moderate Vichy wing of the Democratic party got one chance, and they lost. After seeing the poll numbers plummet, the Democrats now realize the equation:
The country favors impeaching Cheney, and is close to favoring this with Bush.
Additionally, every time the Republicans senators vote for the war, they lose votes, and 2008 is already figuring to be a bad year for the Repuiblican senators who will be standing for re-election then.
Here’s a surprise, Mr. Spittle is a slime ball.
Special Report:
The Conflict of Interest Between Matthews and Coulter…
But there is something else happening here, something that finally reveals why Matthews keeps going to the mat for Coulter. And that something is a direct conflict of interest that MSNBC – and especially Chris Matthews – should not only be ashamed of, but held to account for not informing viewers.
Ann Coulter’s Godless is published by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, which is part of Random House. Who is Chris Matthews’ publisher for his upcoming book Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success? You guessed it – Random House.
But wait, there’s more.
Coulter showed up on Hardball this past Tuesday to promote the new paperback edition of Godless, which just happened to be released on the same day of her appearance. (Matthews also fails to point this out to his viewers.) And while this hour-long Coulterfest was nothing more than a deftly marketed, nationally televised promo book party posing as news, it only begins to touch on the disturbing synergy between the two. A little more digging reveals that Coulter’s forthcoming book If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans: Ann Coulter at Her Best, Funniest, and Most Outrageous, published by the same Random House company, is scheduled for an October 2, 2007 release. And the release date for Matthews’ Random House publication Life’s a Campaign (his first, incidentally, with Random House)? Whaddya know: October 2, 2007.
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Make no doubt about it. This was an attempt by the school administrators to punish both girls for being gay, and not only should they never be allowed to set foot in a school again, those responsible should be put in jail.
Grrrr…..
Girl caught kissing says school misused cameras
11:23 AM PDT on Monday, April 30, 2007By LINDA BRILL / KING 5 News
GIG HARBOR, Wash. — A girl caught kissing her girlfriend on a school security camera says the videotape should have never been shown to her friend’s parents.Seventeen-year-old Jenna Johnson and her mother say Gig Harbor High School invaded Jenna’s privacy.
“I think it was really misinterpreted because it was just a little kiss, and they brought religion into it and it shouldn’t have happened this way,” Jenna said.
Her mother, Deborah Johnson, said she thinks it never would have happened if it was a video of a boy and a girl.
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George W. Bush won’t get as positive an obituary.
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.
When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
Von Bismarck’s university career ended in catastrophe in June 1986, when his friend Olivia Channon was found dead on his bed, the victim of a drink and drugs overdose. Von Bismarck admitted that his role in the affair had brought disgrace on the family name; five years later he told friends that there were still people who would not speak to his parents on account of it, and who told his mother that she had “a rotten son”.
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One of the ideas about patents is that the idea should be non obvious.
I saw this sort of display guidance 15 years ago on video games.
TomTom files patent for camera sat nav
By James Sherwood
Published Wednesday 4th July 2007 12:20 GMTTomTom is attempting to move up a gear in the in-car sat nav biz. It recently filed a patent for a GPS device that incorporates a camera to show the driver exactly where to turn off the road ahead.
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Here is the picture of their device:
Does anyone remember the specific video game that had these sorts of arrows?
Coming, once again from The Register, we have, “Durex seeks hardened condom testers.
The story is how Durex is looking for young men to test their condoms out in the field.
If I were a cynic, I might think that some stories in The Register were chosen for the amusement value of the headlines.
Dell is done. It is on its way down, and will never be a top tier computer manufacturer again. It will end up where Gateway is today.
First, it started selling its computers through WalMart (Google walmart vlasic), and now it has repeatedly delayed its filings.
The death spiral started when they decided to go cheap with their tech support, and people jumped to HP.
Dell delays filing fiscal reports…again
By Kelly Fiveash
Published Friday 6th July 2007 10:36 GMTDell will once again hold back filing its 2007 financial statements to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) because it is yet to complete an internal investigation into its accounting practices.
The direct computer giant, which earlier this week confirmed that the SEC had set a mid-July deadline for it to file its fiscal reports, has been looking into accounting errors as well as evidence of misconduct at the firm.
The SEC warned Dell that failure to file reports by 16 July could lead to a delisting on the Nasdaq exchange.
I think that a delisting is unlikely, for now, but things are going to get very bad, very fast.
Note: I do not own Dell stock directly, though they may be a tiny part of my index funds (Vanguard’s S&P 500 fund, etc.)
The first serious Republican candidate to to say “Out of Iraq” sweeps the table in the primaries.
That is what the message is here.
Well, that, and the fact that McCain is a sick old man who has sold whatever integrity he ever had to the Bush white house.
Ron Paul Tops McCain in Cash on Hand
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos Reports: Though often regarded as a longshot candidate for president, Republican Ron Paul tells ABC News that he has an impressive $2.4 million in cash on hand after raising an equal amount during the second quarter, putting him ahead of one-time Republican frontrunner John McCain, who reported this week he has only $2 million in the bank.
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“I think some of the candidates are on the down-slope, and we’re on the up-slope,” said Paul.
Paul’s cash on hand puts him in third place in the Republican field in that important metric, although he is well behind leader Rudy Giuliani, who has $18 million in the bank, and Mitt Romney, with $12 million.
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Markets do not react in linear ways. They are vehicles for mob psychology, so people hold on past where the top should be, and then panic, and head for the door.
This is panic time.
Future shock: Central Florida markets will fall
A short-sale expert says he can predict market slumps by client traffic. Next stop: The Sunshine State.
By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com staff writer
July 6 2007: 12:55 PM EDTNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A tidal wave of foreclosures may be heading toward Florida, if you judge by the number of homeowners looking to get rid of their homes as fast as they can.
Duane LeGate, president of House Buyer Network, arranges quick sales for home owners in distress. He claims he can predict where markets will go bad by looking at the traffic on his Web site.
“We can tell you what’s going to happen nine months from now,” he said. His most endangered market right now is Orange County, Florida, home of Disney World.
“Orlando has blown up. There’s been a 700 percent increase in traffic of people filling out our forms,” he said. “I could put a bull’s-eye on Orlando and write the headline for what will be going on in January and February.”
What will be going on could include a large increase in foreclosures as well as lower prices, longer inventories and a slower sales pace.
Here’s how the House Buyer Network works: A homeowner wants a quick sale and signs up. The network connects the homeowner with a real estate agent who gets an appraisal for, say, $200,000. The agent markets the home at $195,000. If it fails to sell within the time stipulated in the contract, the agent will buy the house at a prearranged, discounted price of perhaps $180,000.
LeGate estimates the discount from what sellers would get if they didn’t need to sell quickly is 5 percent to 8 percent, once all the costs and fees are figured in.
LeGate’s forecast runs ahead of the latest home price statistics. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), Orlando prices for the first quarter rose 2.5 percent compared with a year ago, which would point to a weak – but more stable – market. Nevertheless, LeGate trusts his indicators.
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If not in economics, then in something else. This guy has been speaking the truth for a LONG time.
Sacrifice Is for Suckers
By Paul Krugman
The New York TimesOn this Fourth of July, President Bush compared the Iraq war to the Revolutionary War, and called for “more patience, more courage and more sacrifice.” Unfortunately, it seems that nobody asked the obvious question: “What sacrifices have you and your friends made, Mr. President?”
On second thought, there would be no point in asking that question. In Mr. Bush’s world, only the little people make sacrifices.
You see, the Iraq war, although Mr. Bush insists that it’s part of a Global War on Terror™, a fight to the death between good and evil, isn’t like America’s other great wars — wars in which the wealthy shared the financial burden through higher taxes and many members of the elite fought for their country.
This time around, Mr. Bush celebrated Mission Accomplished by cutting tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while handing out huge no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations. And in the four years since, as the insurgency Mr. Bush initially taunted with the cry of “Bring them on” has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and left thousands more grievously wounded, the children of the elite — especially the Republican elite — have been conspicuously absent from the battlefield.
The Bushies, it seems, like starting fights, but they don’t believe in paying any of the cost of those fights or bearing any of the risks. Above all, they don’t believe that they or their friends should face any personal or professional penalties for trivial sins like distorting intelligence to get America into an unnecessary war, or totally botching that war’s execution.
The Web site Think Progress has a summary of what happened to the men behind the war after we didn’t find W.M.D., and weren’t welcomed as liberators: “The architects of war: Where are they now?” To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system. Even Paul Wolfowitz, who managed the rare feat of messing up not one but two high-level jobs, has found refuge at the American Enterprise Institute.
Which brings us to the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr.
The hysteria of the neocons over the prospect that Mr. Libby might actually do time for committing perjury was a sight to behold. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Fallen Soldier,” Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University cited the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” He went on to declare that “Scooter Libby was a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.”
Ah, yes. Shuffling papers in an air-conditioned Washington office is exactly like putting your life on the line in Anbar or Baghdad. Spending 30 months in a minimum-security prison, with a comfortable think-tank job waiting at the other end, is exactly like having half your face or both your legs blown off by an I.E.D.
What lay behind the hysteria, of course, was the prospect that for the very first time one of the people who tricked America into war, then endangered national security yet again in the effort to cover their tracks, might pay some price. But Mr. Ajami needn’t have worried.
Back when the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity began, Mr. Bush insisted that if anyone in his administration had violated the law, “that person will be taken care of.” Now we know what he meant. Mr. Bush hasn’t challenged the verdict in the Libby case, and other people convicted of similar offenses have spent substantial periods of time in prison. But Mr. Libby goes free.
Oh, and don’t fret about the fact that Mr. Libby still had to pay a fine. Does anyone doubt that his friends will find a way to pick up the tab?
Mr. Bush says that Mr. Libby’s punishment remains “harsh” because his reputation is “forever damaged.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bush employs, as a deputy national security adviser, none other than Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Abrams was one of six Iran-contra defendants pardoned by Mr. Bush’s father, who was himself a subject of the special prosecutor’s investigation of the scandal.
In other words, obstruction of justice when it gets too close to home is a family tradition. And being a loyal Bushie means never having to say you’re sorry.
Here are some links about the possible takeover of Dow Jones (including the Wall Street Journal) by Rupert Murdoch’s news corp.
The bottom line is this: It would be impossible for the Wall Street Journal editorial page to get any worse. It has been dutifully publishing lies, frequently lies that are directly contradicted by the front page stories.
The issue is whether or not it will make the news in the WSJ worse, and the answer is that over the long term, it almost certainly will.
The real question is whether this is a bad thing. Any number of people buy the Journal in spite of its editorial page, and to the degree that the WSJ becomes less “essential” it means that fewer people will be exposed to this, and and it will become less of a spring board for pundits to do the shows.
All in all, the loss of a source of legitimacy to the insane right wingers might be a net plus.