• Photographers sue Google for stealing pictures. What crap. Some people cannot figure out the Internet.
  • IPad gets 6500 stories about nothing.
  • FCC freaked about losing power regarding net neutrality.
  • Solar plane flies!
  • AOL in trouble over Beebo.
  • Rehire Steve Case!
  • What does an iPad cost to make? We have the answer.
  • Giant lizard discovered.
  • HP Slate detail released.
  • New element 117 found!
  • Microsoft thinks Pink.

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Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. This week we tell why the market cannot be shorted! Plus a discussion about the implications of the weird situation in Europe, back to Greece, Spain to come. PLUS predictions.

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ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — An Osceola County man thought he’d paid off a parking ticket, so he was surprised to find out Monday that the Orange County Clerk’s office had issued a warrant for his arrest. Luis Gomez owed exactly one cent on a speeding ticket he received one year ago. Gomez tried to call the court to resolve the problem, and then tried to pay online, but had no luck.

“They won’t take a payment of a penny online,” said Gomez.

Gomez works at a school in Orange County and feared he would get arrested on campus in front of his students. Eyewitness News contacted the clerk’s office on Gomez’s behalf and was told nobody would be arrested over a penny. When they were told the paperwork said otherwise, officials in the office said it must have been a mistake.

Gomez drove to the clerk’s office on Monday afternoon to pay and was asked if he needed a payment plan. When he said no, he paid the cent and left with a receipt. The status of Gomez’s warrant was still unclear on Monday night and he was told to follow up with the office on Tuesday. Not only did it cost Orange County more to notify Gomez about the issue than a penny, Gomez had to pay $6 to park when he went in to pay.


Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

“I always keep a spare taste in my hat”

A former U.N envoy to Afghanistan on has questioned the “mental stability” of Hamid Karzai and suggested the Afghan president may be using drugs.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown,” Peter Galbraith described Karzai as “off-balance” and “emotional.” Galbraith also called for President Barack Obama to vastly limit Karzai’s power to appoint officials within the war-torn country until he proves himself a reliable partner to the U.S.

“He’s prone to tirades. He can be very emotional, act impulsively. In fact, some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports,” said Galbraith, in an apparent reference to opium or heroin.

When asked whether he meant Karzai has a substance abuse problem, Galbraith responded: “There are reports to that effect. But whatever the cause is, the reality is that he is — he can be very emotional…”

Galbraith was fired by the United Nations in September as the U.N.’s No. 2 official in Afghanistan after he openly accused his boss, Kai Eide, of concealing election fraud that benefited the campaign of the incumbent president. Eide angrily denied the accusation.

Is the papier mache model we’ve been presented for almost a decade starting to degrade and dissolve?


This is big. It allows ISPs to control how, for how much and potentially if, you can get the content you want from the Interwebitubes. For example, if viewing a movie online on Netflix starts costing more for a customer than having the disk sent because movies use more bandwidth and get charged at a higher rate by your ISP, fewer people will use it. It might not be cost effective for Netflix to offer the service anymore. Many more examples have been floated.

It will be interesting to see how Google’s proposed gigabit Internet fits into this. If they’re successful, the net neutrality issue of tiered pricing may become moot. Of course, then Google will control your bits.

A U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission overstepped when it cited cable-giant Comcast Corp. for slowing some Internet traffic on its network, dealing a blow to big Web commerce companies and other proponents of “net neutrality.”

In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the FCC exceeded its authority when it sanctioned Comcast in 2008 for deliberately preventing some subscribers from using peer-to-peer file-sharing services to download large files.

At stake is how far the FCC can go to dictate the way Internet providers like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. manage traffic on their multibillion-dollar networks. For the past decade or so, the FCC has maintained a mostly hands-off approach to Internet regulation. But that could soon change, likely setting off a prolonged, expensive lobbying battle pitting Web-content providers against Internet-service providers.


Two women who allegedly placed their elderly dead relative in a wheelchair and dressed him in sunglasses insisted he was asleep as they tried to check-in for a flight to Germany.

Gitta Jarant and her step-daughter Anke Anusic had successfully convinced a taxi driver that 91-year-old Curt Willi Jarant was well enough for the 45-minute drive to the airport from their home in Oldham, Greater Manchester.

All they needed to do was to get past security at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport.

However, horrified staff at the airport soon noticed that something was seriously wrong with Mr Jarant.

Andrew Millea, an airport worker who greeted the group with a wheelchair, said Mrs Anusic asked for help lifting her elderly father from the car.

” I did my best to help by carefully lifting the man from his seat,” he said. “To my horror his face fell sideways against mine, it was ice cold.

“I knew straight away that the man was dead, but they reassured me that he ‘always sleeps like that’.

It all sounds like something Eddie and Ritchie from the TV show ‘Bottom’ would do.



On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women.
[…]
What is clear — yet again — is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly “reports” on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact.

Read the rest of the article to see how you’re constantly being lied to. Makes you wonder if you can believe the government on why we’re there at all.

UPDATE: For those people commenting, this article is actually about the media blindly reporting what the government says rather than doing real reporting. Not about the war. That is just the example used. Another example is how the White House reporters don’t ask hard questions so they don’t lose their passes.


From CollateralMurder.com:

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.


I still have my copy of the 1975 issue of Popular Electronics with the Altair on the cover.

H. Edward Roberts died this week at age 68. If you don’t know the story of how Roberts helped launch the personal computing revolution, let us fill you in.
[…]
Even with $250,000 in debt and a collapsing business, Ed. Roberts didn’t waver from his commitment to personal computing. He persevered building the prototype of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, named unofficially after a planet visited in the Star Trek episode Amok Time.

The Altair 8800 saved the company. Ed. Roberts had brokered a deal with Intel to buy Intel 8080 chips in bulk for $75/chip (normally they were $360/chip). The cheap CPUs allowed the Altair 8800 to retail for $439 ($621 assembled) at the time when Intel’s Intellec-8 Microprocessor Development System, another Intel 8080 based system, sold for $10,000.

The cheap Altair 8800 not only proved a mild commercial hit, but it helped launch the world’s biggest electronics company today, Microsoft. In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, students at Harvard at the time read about the Altair. They contacted Ed. Roberts telling him they were developing a programming language interpreter and asking if he was interested in purchasing in it.


Maybe this is why the pros are paid better than the prez.



Washington Monthly – Steve Benen – April 4, 2010:

Dr. Jack Cassell, an Orlando-area urologist and part-time Republican crank, probably couldn’t have imagined what he was getting himself into.

This week, Cassell’s medical office posted a sign for patients and their families: “If you voted for Obama…seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.”

But perhaps the most important coverage was an interview between Cassell and Alan Colmes on the radio Friday night. The host tried to get a better sense of why, exactly, Cassell hates the Affordable Care Act so much.

Cassell struggled to explain himself, saying he’d seen some things “online,” and adding that the information he needs to understand the law “should be available to me.”

Of course, the information is available to him, and has been for months. Cassell chose not to do his homework before driving patients away — patients who, it turns out, may know a lot more than he does about the law he claims to hate.

This is painfully common — some of the loudest, angriest critics of the Affordable Care Act are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere. In this case, Cassell has become a national joke because he’s repulsed by a health care reform plan that he fully admits he doesn’t understand.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.


(Click photo for Super Hi-res.)

Found by Cináedh.



(Click photo to enlarge.)

Found by Cináedh.


For those outside the US, the Yankees are a baseball team who won the World Series last year (again) and are often accused of buying their way into winning via huge salaries to get the best players in the game. Disclaimer: No one here at DU condones putting a hex on baseball teams, their owners or anyone else for that matter. We wouldn’t mind, however, if, just for a season or two, the Yankees somehow didn’t do quite as well as usual. However that might come about.


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