I hate the tv

I missed this story until Mike Feldman brought it up on his annoying show this week. Apparantly Barb “donated” to katrina victims so they could buy Neils software. From Talking Points:

“Ignite!’s has a unique business model, which works like this. Neil goes around the world finding international statesmen, bigwigs and criminals who want to ‘invest’ in Ignite! as a way to curry favor with the brother in the White House.”

Barb Bush continues to please…she even hates the Simpsons! The enemy of my friend is my enemy.

What is going ON in that family? It’s like a competition who in the Bush family can be the biggest scumbag….

So I was browsing around Google Videos and ran into this, which I’m sure is a GEM: A debate between Bill Kristol, a big wig at the Weekly Standard and bigtime Bush, Cheney, and all things R stroker and Joeseph Wilson, the guy who served as an arms inspector, has repeatedly called the administrations bullshit, who’s wife (Valerie Plame) was outed.

Should be a good one. I’d hope it would be springer-esq. “Jerry! Jerry!”

Here you can see a presentation given by Danny O’Brien and Jason Schultz about the EFF.

” Danny O’Brien
Danny O’Brien is the Activism Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help EFF’s membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public.

Jason Schultz
Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF’s Patent Busting Project. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. Jason maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net.”

Seen here at TSG, this is proof positive that Cheney hates nature.

He gets in a real tiff if he has to wait for his coffee to brew or his lights to be switched on.  Oh and the TVs should be pre-tuned to Faux News.

In a related story, Ion Sancho, the Florida Elections Supervisor who witnesssed the Harri Hurtsi Hack has been threatened with a lawsuit for not meeting the county deadline for getting new voting machines.

“Florida’s secretary of state’s office disparaged Sancho’s finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections.”

I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

UPDATE: Click here to write the state officials in Florida to protest the treatment of Ion Sancho.

Susan Pynchon, a member of Florida Coalition for Fair Elections, has a very powerful piece on CounterPunch.org, where she describes witnessing the Harri Hursti Hack, when he proved to Ion Sancho (The Leon County Supervisor of Elections) that the Diebold machines in use could be hacked.
A snippet:

“It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as “conspiracy theorists” and “technophobes” when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.”

The piece goes through the whole process in detail. The voting system must be open sourced and verified by the security community before it can be used. It is also probable that a paper ballot will always be needed as a check mechanism.

Conspiracy videos are a lot of fun to dig up and watch. From bigfoot documentaries to the masons to the JFK assasination, theres something for all of us.

This video is apparantly about the september 11th attacks in 2001 and the government conspiracy to cover up parts of it. I haven’t watched the thing yet, but I have skimmed and it seems to have some common threads to some of the other 911 conspiracy movies I’ve sat through.

So I was trying to register for blogger, and someone with the same disdain for TV culture has taken my name. Serrendipitously, from what little I’ve read, I happen to agree with him on at least a few things, for example:

“The Democratic Party has a strategy of pleasing voters who don’t care about politics. That makes no sense because those people don’t vote. The Republicans realized long ago to play to their base. Lie to the Christians and make laws for the CEO’s. It works. Democrats should take a lesson from Howard Dean. His campaign started off so well because he said he was a liberal and never apologized. People were thrilled to hear about universal health care and better schools. If John Kerry and his money would have embraced those ideals and shouted them out proudly, the world would be a much better place today.”

Well said Chris!

Joseph DuRocher, a veteran helicopter pilot with the Navy has written a powerful open letter to the president expressing a sentiment that many of us share. He expresses very well the helplessness that many of us feel as our country is caught up in an unjustified war, illegal torture, etc.

A good friend of mine, Scott, is in transit right now to Iraq as a Navy Helicopter Pilot. He believes in this war, and I’d like to as well, but I can’t see how. The situation is deteriorating over there, with the bombings of the Golden Mosque in Samarra upsetting many in the Sunni community. Without a significantly larger US(+whoever) force, we have no chance of effectively controlling the fate of the 50ish million people in that country in the long term.

We won’t commit any more troops to it, and we’ll eventually get our head straight on stop throwing so much of our money away in this grotesque fireworks show over there.

We will pull out, sooner or later, with pretty much the same situation we have today. The question will be: Can civil war and the ensuing genocide can be prevented? Who will come to power, and how do we keep them from being more of a threat to us? Will we see accountability in those who were so eager to sell us this war? Will we have to wait for the memoirs?

Congratulations to the Students at Mount Saint Vincent University, who have got software by Turnitin banned because it allegedly brought about punishment which was too severe, automatically presumed guilt and created a climate of fear.

They also aired fears that the PATRIOT act provisions would cause the papers to be subject to searches under the Patriot Act and students were worried about intellectual property right issues.

As a fan of re-use and collaboration and thereby libraries and open source software, I think it’s easy for professors and administrators to put too much faith in computerized cheating detection. Determining when someone’s use of other material is inappropriate or against the rules is very difficult and should be left to humans with reasoning skills.

While I was a student at UF, the professors in the CISE department would say they ran all of our programs through MOSS and they regularly caught people cheating. Perhaps this type of thing will spread.