Does This Sound Familiar?
"Anyone who examines the record can see that this president has lied his way into this war."
(show) The rest of the above paragraph.
More at Transterrestrial Musings.
H/T Dean's World
"Anyone who examines the record can see that this president has lied his way into this war."
More at Transterrestrial Musings.
H/T Dean's World
Christopher Hitchens Calls Galloway's Bluff
WaPo's Attempt To Rehabilitate Joseph Wilson
It seems rather amusing that reporters like WAPo's Walter Pincus hate the administration enough that they would try to rehabilitate Joseph Wilson's credibility after being duped into writing Wilson's earlier proven frabrications. Especially after Wilson accused Pincus of sloppy reporting to cover up his own misrepresentations.
Stephen Hayes at the The Daily Standard fisks WaPo's feeble attempt by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus to put life back Wilson's credability.
Update: The American Thinker reports:
Being on the payroll of the French intelligence, I suppose the French won't be too pleased about Martino being exposed.
Stephen Hayes at the The Daily Standard fisks WaPo's feeble attempt by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus to put life back Wilson's credability.
Update: The American Thinker reports:
Russo Martino, the man behind the forged documents indicating Saddam had purchased uranium from Niger, which Joseph A. Wilson falsely claimed he had seen and warned the Administration about, has come forward and admitted that he did this in the pay of France to undermine the British and American justification for the war in Iraq.
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that – by commissioning “Giacomo” to procure and circulate documents – France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade “yellowcake” uranium from Niger, France was trying to “set up” Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.
Being on the payroll of the French intelligence, I suppose the French won't be too pleased about Martino being exposed.
Want to Flock Around With a New Browser?
The Flock preBeta version (0.4.9) is available for download on the Flock Developer page.
It's a neat browser that I have only been playing with since last night, but it has a lot of neat features.
Click to enlarge
Favorites: Flock favorites are stored online (shared or not shared) by just clicking a star in the URL bar. No more herding your favorites into folders. You can have multiple Favorite toolbars or switch between them. Favorites automatically contain any site feeds and that feed is cached and updated every hour as they are sored online.
History: Extensive History Search that starts searching as you type. Keeps track of which web pages you visit most frequently as well as the most recent. Indexes all the content of the pages you vist making retracing your steps a lot easier.
Blogging: Set up your blog account(s) from the Preferences. You can highlight text in a webpage, and one click to bring up the blog editor with that text inserted to publish (or drag and drop from the menu). You can also drag and drop picutes with the Flickr topbar. So far the Blogging only works with WordPress, Movable Type and Typepad but more should be added later. I'm tempted to try it anyway with PowerBlogs, but a bit leary as this is a preBeta version of Flock.
The Shelf: Or you can use The Shelf, which is just a scrapbook for stuff that you might want to blog about later. Shelf snippets are from web content only (you can't paste from your computer), and are already formatted as Blockquotes.
Well there is a lot more but as I have only played with Flock for a few hours, I have much yet to learn and figure out. It is smooth and has a real nice feel, and only crashed once which isn't bad for a prebeta. You can find out more on Welcome to Flock Developer Preview.
Update: Now that I have had a couple of days to play with Flock I have mixed feelings. Basically it's sort of like Mozilla or Firefox without the "Bookmarks," as it uses "del.is.icio.us" online bookmark manager. There are extra goodies though to make it worth a test drive. Oh there are rudimentary bookmarks there, but it is like having to go to "Manage Bookmarks" in Firefox to use them. The del.is.icio.us online probably works alot better if I can ever figure it out.
Before downloading Flock I didn't have a del.is.icio.us account so I imediately signed up for one. The problem is that I can't get any pages or tags permanently into it.
Using the proper procedure for adding tags works out just fine, but they do not show up in my del.is.icio.us account online. Not only that going back to check the tag on one I added shows no tags. WTF!
Well I've decided that it must be because when I first set it up it asked me if I wanted to share my URLs... Well hell no of course I don't want to share them, and maybe thats why del.is.icio.us is called a "social bookmarks manager." Gods nightshirt, the advertising companies must be having a fielday with this feature.
Other than that Flock is a great browser. The blog features are nice though a bit thin, but future updates will likely improve them. I especially like "Flickr Topbar" where you can drag photos right into the blog editor, but so far I can't get the "Blog Topbar" to work (error detecting your blog setting) no matter what URL I use.
So for now I've gone back to using Firefox until I can find decent documentation, or somehow get past this TAGing favorites block, and actually find some sanity in managing my URLs.
It's a neat browser that I have only been playing with since last night, but it has a lot of neat features.
Click to enlarge
Favorites: Flock favorites are stored online (shared or not shared) by just clicking a star in the URL bar. No more herding your favorites into folders. You can have multiple Favorite toolbars or switch between them. Favorites automatically contain any site feeds and that feed is cached and updated every hour as they are sored online.
History: Extensive History Search that starts searching as you type. Keeps track of which web pages you visit most frequently as well as the most recent. Indexes all the content of the pages you vist making retracing your steps a lot easier.
Blogging: Set up your blog account(s) from the Preferences. You can highlight text in a webpage, and one click to bring up the blog editor with that text inserted to publish (or drag and drop from the menu). You can also drag and drop picutes with the Flickr topbar. So far the Blogging only works with WordPress, Movable Type and Typepad but more should be added later. I'm tempted to try it anyway with PowerBlogs, but a bit leary as this is a preBeta version of Flock.
The Shelf: Or you can use The Shelf, which is just a scrapbook for stuff that you might want to blog about later. Shelf snippets are from web content only (you can't paste from your computer), and are already formatted as Blockquotes.
Well there is a lot more but as I have only played with Flock for a few hours, I have much yet to learn and figure out. It is smooth and has a real nice feel, and only crashed once which isn't bad for a prebeta. You can find out more on Welcome to Flock Developer Preview.
Update: Now that I have had a couple of days to play with Flock I have mixed feelings. Basically it's sort of like Mozilla or Firefox without the "Bookmarks," as it uses "del.is.icio.us" online bookmark manager. There are extra goodies though to make it worth a test drive. Oh there are rudimentary bookmarks there, but it is like having to go to "Manage Bookmarks" in Firefox to use them. The del.is.icio.us online probably works alot better if I can ever figure it out.
Before downloading Flock I didn't have a del.is.icio.us account so I imediately signed up for one. The problem is that I can't get any pages or tags permanently into it.
Using the proper procedure for adding tags works out just fine, but they do not show up in my del.is.icio.us account online. Not only that going back to check the tag on one I added shows no tags. WTF!
Well I've decided that it must be because when I first set it up it asked me if I wanted to share my URLs... Well hell no of course I don't want to share them, and maybe thats why del.is.icio.us is called a "social bookmarks manager." Gods nightshirt, the advertising companies must be having a fielday with this feature.
Other than that Flock is a great browser. The blog features are nice though a bit thin, but future updates will likely improve them. I especially like "Flickr Topbar" where you can drag photos right into the blog editor, but so far I can't get the "Blog Topbar" to work (error detecting your blog setting) no matter what URL I use.
So for now I've gone back to using Firefox until I can find decent documentation, or somehow get past this TAGing favorites block, and actually find some sanity in managing my URLs.
The Camels Nose Is Under The Tent
Post source via The Boston Globe By Hiawatha Bray
Or maybe the camel is more in the tent than out. I'm not one to be paranoid and I'll be the first to scoff at the conspiracy theories floating around the forums I haunt. But... planners for RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) are already letting their imaginations run wild. Soon without strong controls it will be getting out of hand.
"Why are you blocking the road?" the driver asks. ''Because you're going the wrong way," replies the cheerful Help Desk lady. "Your cargo told me so." It seems the cartons inside the truck contained IBM technology that alerted the company when the driver made a wrong turn.
It's clever, all right -- and creepy. Because the technology needn't be applied only to cases of beer. The trackers could be attached to every can of beer in the case, and allow marketers to track the boozing habits of the purchasers. Or if the cargo is clothing, those little trackers could have been stitched inside every last sweater. Then some high-tech busybody could keep those wearing them under surveillance.
It's clever, all right -- and creepy. Because the technology needn't be applied only to cases of beer. The trackers could be attached to every can of beer in the case, and allow marketers to track the boozing habits of the purchasers. Or if the cargo is clothing, those little trackers could have been stitched inside every last sweater. Then some high-tech busybody could keep those wearing them under surveillance.
The Hi-Tech companies and the government say that they don't intend to use them for tracking and big brother surveillance, but they are also balking at putting those principles into law.
If this sounds paranoid, take it up with IBM. The company filed a patent application in 2001 which contemplates using this wireless snooping technology to track people as they roam through ''shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, rest rooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc." An IBM spokeswoman insisted the company isn't really prepared to go this far. Patent applications are routinely written to include every possible use of a technology, even some the company doesn't intend to pursue. Still, it's clear somebody at IBM has a pretty creepy imagination.
EPC Global that sets standards for the spychips has a code of ethics requiring customer notificaton of the presence of RFID tags and recognition of the customers right to deactivate them. When Jack Grasso, EPC Global spokesman was asked about about putting these principles into law said, "We believe it is far too early." Because the RFID industry is so young, any regulation "would have a chilling effect that would put us back years." Chilling indeed, I would hope so!
Why is this so scary? Because so many of us pay for our purchases with credit or debit cards, which contain our names, addresses, and other sensitive information. Now imagine a store with RFID chips embedded in every product. At checkout time, the digital code in each item is associated with our credit card data. From now on, that particular pair of shoes or carton of cigarettes is associated with you. Even if you throw them away, the RFID chips will survive. Indeed, Albrecht and McIntyre learned that the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns of individual consumers...
Then there are the RFID pajamas from a California maker of children's clothing. It's a clever way to prevent kidnapping: Just put RFID readers in your home, to alert you if Junior's taking an unauthorized trip. It's easy to imagine parents buying into this idea, but they'll now have to install RFID readers in their homes. ''There's the nose in the camel's tent," said Albrecht. At first, companies will just scan your kids' jammies. But later they'll ask permission to scan the tags on your groceries and your clothes. The consulting company Accenture has patented a design that builds an RFID reader into a household medicine cabinet, to make sure you're taking all your medications.
Then there are the RFID pajamas from a California maker of children's clothing. It's a clever way to prevent kidnapping: Just put RFID readers in your home, to alert you if Junior's taking an unauthorized trip. It's easy to imagine parents buying into this idea, but they'll now have to install RFID readers in their homes. ''There's the nose in the camel's tent," said Albrecht. At first, companies will just scan your kids' jammies. But later they'll ask permission to scan the tags on your groceries and your clothes. The consulting company Accenture has patented a design that builds an RFID reader into a household medicine cabinet, to make sure you're taking all your medications.
Imagine your boss calling and yelling because you across town when your supposed to be home sick. The company for the corn flakes you bought the kids calling and pestering you to buy another product. Your HMO calling because you bought a pack of cigarettes. Or the motor vehicle department calling because your engine emmisions are above standards. Etc etc.
No I'm not paranoid——yet, but strong legislation needs to be put in place to keep this kind of hightech activity on a tight leash before gets too widespread. The problem is that this is the sort of thing that creeps in first disguised as useful everyday conveniences, time and work savers and comforts for life, then before we know it we wonder where our privacy went.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Researchers warn over RFID credit cards
- Hitachi Introduces Worlds Smallest RFID Chip
- The Camels Nose Is Under The Tent
How Much is Your Blog Worth?
H/T Dean's World.
Heh, any takers? Click the link and see what your blog is worth.
How about ten cents on the dollar? (cash)
Heh, any takers? Click the link and see what your blog is worth.
How about ten cents on the dollar? (cash)
Should We Have a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, Or Not?
That is the question Frank Lasee asked in his newsletter yesterday.
In his most recent column, JJ Blonien does just this. It’s not the first time – JJ endorsed Senate Joint Resolution 76 (the Gard-Panzer bill) last year.
SJR 76 was a false product. Window dressing. SJR 76 would have allowed the state to exempt huge blocks of spending from the limits, while leaving the Legislature to spend that money without asking. It would have allowed the state to eliminate shared revenues and school aids, and allow local governments to raise property taxes to make up the difference. It didn’t require referendums for bonding.
These points and others made SJR 76 meaningless. Bad law. It did not protect the taxpayer.
Now JJ is endorsing a TABOR with the same flaws. His proposals sound simple, straightforward, and commonsense, but it ignores the simple fact that government will exploit any loophole. And like SJR 76, his proposal leaves loopholes. It doesn’t protect the taxpayer.
For example, under JJ’s proposal, the state will rob Peter to pay Paul: shift spending onto local governments, and reduce or eliminate shared revenue. Because there are no limits on tax rates, locals will raise taxes to make up for the shared revenue they lost.
Or our governments will raise the tax rates simply to generate excess revenue, then ask for permission to spend it, since they already have it.
The taxpayer will not be protected.
The majority of voters want a TABOR that works. Our Wisconsin legislators don't want to turn spending power over to them, but they are willing to pass more feel-good do-nothing piece of legislation so as to look good for the constituency.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Should We Have a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, Or Not?
- There is no Universality in Universal
