Dvorak News Blog

“Truth is more controversial than pornography”

By Uncle Dave Thursday September 10, 2009

The ads weren’t far from each other on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown [in Los Angeles].

One, on a billboard, was critical of an automobile and home insurance company. The other, draped across the sprawling face of a tall building, was a vodka promotion that appeared to include an essential part of the female anatomy.

Any guess which one was torn down because of a complaint?

“Truth is more controversial than pornography,” said Harvey Rosenfield, founder of Consumer Watchdog, whose ad was dismantled last week. All the ad said was, “You Can’t Trust Mercury Insurance,” with a referral to Consumer Watchdog’s website, which lays out 10 concerns the organization has with Mercury.

And the other billboard?

“If you drive three to four blocks east of where ours was,” said Rosenfield’s colleague, Jamie Court, “there’s a huge Absolut Mango ad, and it’s really not a mango.”

A large part of the rest of the article discusses the power insurance companies like Mercury have to manipulate the political process. Like in the health care debate.

Video – What Birthers Really Believe

By Gasparrini Thursday September 10, 2009

54 Comments

Short video satire about the conspiracy theories related to the birth of U.S. president Obama.

Top Socialist Says: Obama is not a Socialist!

By SN Thursday September 10, 2009

96 Comments

Politics Daily 9/9/09:

A quick tour of the Web turns up hundreds of socialist-inspired images of Barack Obama– Obama as Che Guevara on “Che Obama Socialist” t-shirts; Obama as a radical Marxist at Obama4Socialism.net. Even the Investor’s Business Daily penned a series of editorials on the Obama agenda called, “The Audacity of Socialism.”

So if the United States has elected a socialist president, the socialists must be pretty excited, right? Claiming just a single U.S. Senator (Vermonter Bernie Sanders) and exactly zero members of the House of Representatives as their own, putting a socialist in the White House would represent the greatest achievement of any socialist alive today.

But there’s just one problem. The socialists won’t claim Obama as their own. They won’t even call him a socialist.

Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization, said Obama is most definitely not one of them. “He’s not any kind of socialist at all,” Llewellyn told me this week. He called the president “a market guy,” which is hardly a compliment coming from a man with serious reservations about market capitalism. “He’s not challenging the power of the corporations,” Llewellyn added.

Lance Ulanoff Takes A Critical Look at The Apple Announcement

By John C Dvorak Wednesday September 9, 2009

22 Comments

Ulanoff, I’m sure of it, could pass for Steve Jobs if he’d wear jeans.

Dvorak Poll: What Did You Think of Obama’s Health Care Speech?

By Uncle Dave Wednesday September 9, 2009

94 Comments

President Obama gave his health care speech to Congress tonight. Did you see it? If not, read it here. What do you think? Agree or disagree with his assessment of the problems? Agree or disagree with his plan? Which side are you on: free government run health care for all or survival of the wealthiest? Discuss!

Nutjob High School Football Coach Baptizes Player Without Mom’s Permission!

By SN Wednesday September 9, 2009

47 Comments

Raw Story – September 8, 2009:

The mother of a Kentucky high school football player is furious over the Christian baptism of her son during what he said was supposed to be a school outing to eat a steak dinner and see a “motivational speaker.”

Instead, Breckinridge County High School football coach Scott Mooney took 20 of his players on a trip to a Baptist revival, where eight or nine of the students underwent the Christian ritual of baptism, according to published reports.

Michelle Ammons, mother of 16-year-old Robert Coffee, said she’s upset that nobody ever asked her consent to take her son to the August 26 religious ceremony. She added that she’s even more upset with the school district superintendent Janet Meeks, who was at the revival and did not object to the coach including his students.

Steve Jobs Shows up!!

By John C Dvorak Wednesday September 9, 2009

11 Comments

Steve Jobs gets standing ovation when he shows up on stage. Apple rolls out everything BUT the Beatles.
Dell rolls out ultra thin laptop.
Palm shows Pixi and stock goes down.
AT&T upgrading 3G networks.
Europe going crazy over Google Books. They hate it.
Microsoft going after Linux with training materials.
FCC gets cop.
Sega does one more Sonic.
MSFT brings out ultra thin keyboard.

Show brought to you by Squarespace at
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How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession

By Jacob Galt Wednesday September 9, 2009

21 Comments

A look at the Fed’s mistakes and the fact that it hires thousands of economists and journal editors.

The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed’s thrall, the economists missed it, too.

Help Yourself

By hhopper Wednesday September 9, 2009

30 Comments

Found by Kristin Bredberg.

We No Longer Have A Consumer Economy — Will It Ever Come Back?

By Uncle Dave Wednesday September 9, 2009

40 Comments

One year after the near collapse of the global financial system, this much is clear: The financial world as we knew it is over, and something new is rising from its ashes. Historians will look to September 2008 as a watershed for the U.S. economy.
[…]
One year later, the easy-money system that financed the boom era from the 1980s until a year ago is smashed. Once-ravenous U.S. consumers are saving money and paying down debt. Banks are building reserves and hoarding cash. And governments are fashioning a new global financial order.

Congress and the Obama administration have lost faith in self-regulated markets. Together, they’re writing the most sweeping new regulations over finance since the Great Depression. And in this ever-more-connected global economy, Washington is working with its partners through the G-20 group of nations to develop worldwide rules to govern finance.
[…]
For much of the past two decades, strong U.S. growth has come largely through expanding credit. The global economy fed off this trend.
[…]
If U.S. consumers no longer drive the global economy, then consumers in big emerging economies such as China and Brazil will have to take up some of the slack. Trade among nations will take on greater importance.
[…]
“The basis of revival of the system along the line of what previously existed doesn’t exist. The foundation that was supposed to be there for the revival (of the economy) . . . got washed away,” Galbraith said.

Want to Browse “Transparent” Gov’t Websites? You must identify yourself first.

By John C Dvorak Wednesday September 9, 2009

19 Comments

Feds to Let Citizens Log In With Yahoo, Google, Paypal Accounts | Wired.com — Apparently all these government websites are going to require ID in the form of your Paypal account or other confirmed ID system. They don’t want you anonymously browsing their information. This is tracking, pure and simple.

The U.S. government pilot program will allow people to interact with various government websites using an OpenID or an Information Card, two of the most popular emerging technologies for web users to manage their identities across multiple websites, the nation’s information technology officer will announce Wednesday.

This author writes about this as if it is some great positive idea.

Found by john Stec.

Don’t Change State Bird Says NRA Lobbyist Who Once Described Scrub Jay Is A Socialist Bird

By Uncle Dave Wednesday September 9, 2009

18 Comments

Who knew birds read Karl Marx?

Whenever someone suggests changing the Florida state bird, the National Rifle Association takes aim at the new critter. Well, not really the NRA, but Marion Hammer, the group’s chief state lobbyist and a definite capital powerhouse.

This time the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission asked schoolchildren to pick a new bird. More than 20,000 voted for the osprey.
[…]
That didn’t impress Hammer, who loves mockingbirds. […] In 1999, more than 10,000 schoolchildren signed a petition to change the state bird to the Florida scrub jay. Supporters boasted about how it will eat peanuts right out of a person’s hand.

Hammer was unmoved. “Begging for food isn’t sweet,” she testified in a committee hearing. “It’s lazy, and it’s a welfare mentality.” Scrub jays had lots of other bad habits that disqualified them to represent Florida, she contended. “They eat the eggs of other birds,” she told lawmakers. “That’s robbery and murder.”

18 Yr Old Invents Cheap Solar Panel That Uses Hair Instead Of Silicon — Yes, Hair!

By Uncle Dave Wednesday September 9, 2009

27 Comments

An 18 year old from a village in Nepal outdoes US companies spending millions on R&D. Too much ‘out of the box’ thinking for us nowadays, I guess. An example of why we have dropped to #2 in competitiveness? At least we have this.

A new type of solar panel using human hair could provide the world with cheap, green electricity, believes its teenage inventor.

Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world’s energy needs.

The young inventor says hair is easy to use as a conductor in solar panels and could revolutionise renewable energy.
[…]
The solar panel, which produces 9 V (18 W) of energy, costs around £23 to make from raw materials. But if they were mass-produced, Milan says they could be sold for less than half that price, which could make them a quarter of the price of those already on the market.

Melanin, a pigment that gives hair its colour, is light sensitive and also acts as a type of conductor. Because hair is far cheaper than silicon the appliance is less costly.

Even ‘Scrubbed’ Data Like Hospital, Netflix, etc. Data Can Be Traced Back To You

By Uncle Dave Wednesday September 9, 2009

12 Comments

The article describes how it’s possible to combine data without any personal identifiers with data from other sources to find out pretty much everything about you and what you do.

For users, the prospect of some secret leaking to the public grows as databases proliferate. Here is Ohm’s nightmare scenario: “For almost every person on earth, there is at least one fact about them stored in a computer database that an adversary could use to blackmail, discriminate against, harass, or steal the identity of him or her. I mean more than mere embarrassment or inconvenience; I mean legally cognizable harm. Perhaps it is a fact about past conduct, health, or family shame. For almost every one of us, then, we can assume a hypothetical ‘database of ruin,’ the one containing this fact but until now splintered across dozens of databases on computers around the world, and thus disconnected from our identity. Reidentification has formed the database of ruin and given access to it to our worst enemies.”

Because most data privacy laws focus on restricting personally identifiable information (PII), most data privacy laws need to be rethought. And there won’t be any magic bullet; the measures that are taken will increase privacy or reduce the utility of data, but there will be no way to guarantee maximal usefulness and maximal privacy at the same time.