Category Archives: News

A Brilliant Idea

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I had the privilege working on a project a few years ago. It was an experiment for creating a drug delivery system for targeted cancer cures or MEPS. A lot of people poured their hearts and souls into, but so far not much has happened to forward the idea. Maybe there is hope:

Angela Zhang of Cupertino has an idea:

 … mix cancer medicine in a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles — nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells and show up on an MRI. so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are. Then she thought shat if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the medicine, thus killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.

Angela is only 17 years old.   Angela, Please keep it up and pursue your idea.

 

Caustic Racial Politics

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A new law went in effect for the New Year in Chicago. This time it is Nannyism to protect surfs from caustic chemicals.

The law, which took effect Sunday, requires those who seek to buy caustic or noxious substances, except for batteries, to provide government-issued photo identification that shows their name and date of birth. The cashier then must log the name and address, the date and time of the purchase, the type of product, the brand and even the net weight.

While the new law might be considered a nuisance, it takes on a racial implication with Holders claim that asking for an ID is racial discrimination.

Eric Holder has been on a racialist bender the last few weeks.  Last week, he said his skin color is responsible for the fury of criticism over his Justice Department allowing thousands of guns to flood Mexico.  Friday, he blocked South Carolina from implementing a voter ID law under the Voting Rights Act saying it was racially discriminatory.

Sixteen states, including South Carolina, must submit all election law changes to the United States Justice Department for approval.  States also have the option of bypassing DOJ and going straight to court for approval, an option they should readily choose.  This law, unlike so many federal laws, actually has a legitimate Constitutional basis – the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars racial discrimination in voting.  Passed in 1965, it was designed to prevent states from drifting toward renewed discrimination.  It is now being challenged as unconstitutionally outdated by Arizona and Shelby County (AL) in federal court.

I believe its really racism of convenience.  Leftist prefer to call actions racist only if it suits their political agenda. If something promotes nannyism or big government then PC arguments don’t accept that an action is racist. But removing dead peoples voter rights is racist, because  there are more minority dead voters than dead WASP voters.

The GoDaddy Boycott Busts, Sort of

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Thursday was the scheduled day for the boycott of Go Daddy over SOPA.  Go Daddy has gone from supporting SOPA to pulling support from SOPA  to claiming SOPA and PIPA is a bad idea.  I don’t know how sincere they are but it’s apparrent they were bleeding customers and their trust.

While GoDaddy had previously withdrawn its support for SOPA, until Thursday’s statement, the company had not voiced public disagreement towards the bill,which the House Judiciary Committee had been debating before adjourning for the holiday.

According to Yahoo, about 70,000 domains had already been switched before Thursday’s planned boycott. While these numbers aren’t extremely consequential to a company that hosts 50 million websites worldwide, these withdrawals along with high profile moves from Wikipedia, Cheezburger and image sharing site Imgur seem to have been enough to force GoDaddy’s hand.

Now, I don’t believe for a minute that Go Daddy is genuine in their recant of SOPA, their only regret is that their customer base found out that they have Hollywood’s interest over their customers.  The damage is done, they’ve helped craft the bill and supported it through the committee hearings it really doesn’t matter any more whether they support it or not.   Until we see proof that they will actually fight online censorship.

Go Daddy isn’t the only company that has supported SOPA and PIPA there is News Corp (Foxnews), CBS (C-Net), NBC and Disney. Just about all of the media, We don’t hear much about boycotting them.  Go Daddy struck our ire because we expected them to support their customers and the open internet.

I seriously considered pulling my domain.  I decided to wait. I have 2 domains, and am well paid up until for the next several months. If I were to bail on Go Daddy Thursday, they would still have my money, yet not have to provide any services. This would hardly be punishing them. On the other hand I can’t see renewing my services with them, Later on this summer I will move my sites to Host Gator. I will do so when I have used up my contract, and have the time to ensure that I can move this blog safely.

 

Go Daddy Bites the Hand that Feeds Them

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Passing SOPA would be a web owners worst nightmare. Godaddy’s support of it is a stand against its customers,  SOPA and its sister bill, PROTECT IP Act, in the Senate is a bad idea that promises to censor and restrict the web as we know it,  and threatens the very existance of websites like this that don’t have a staff of lawyers and editors to maintain compliance.   It is understandable that if not to be expected that Godaddy has pissed of its customers base.

There has been a tremendous backlash against GoDaddy.

Talk of a Go Daddy boycott began yesterday on community link-sharing site Reddit, and quickly grew to include several influential business leaders and media personalities. Among them were Y Combinator founderPaul Graham, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh and celebrity/investor Ashton Kutcher. The company’s change-of-heart was announced today around the same time Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Tweeted he would be transferring Wikipedia’s domains from Go Daddy in protest.

Go Daddy initially shrugged off the protests, issuing a nonchalant response to let people know it hasn’t negatively impacted its business — which was the equivalent of shaking the hell out of a giant beehive and not expecting to get stung. Boycott participators responded by publishing step-by-step tutorials for transferring a bulk of domains to a new registrar, complete with recommendations to competitors.

Go Daddy’s response didn’t get to to the heart of it. They basically claimed that SOPA might be poorly written, although they support the basic idea behind it, they are withdrawing support. They didn’t offer to fight it it or withdraw support from the  Senate’s PROTECT IP ACT. It gets worse for Go Daddy.

Hosting and domain registrar company Go Daddy has lost more than 37,000 domains in the past two days due to the company’s wishy-washy stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Talk of a Go Daddy boycott began yesterday on community link-sharing site Reddit, and quickly grew to include several influential business leaders and media personalities. Among them were Y Combinator founderPaul Graham, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh and celebrity/investor Ashton Kutcher. The company’s change-of-heart was announced today around the same time Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Tweeted he would be transferring Wikipedia’s domains from Go Daddy in protest.

Go Daddy initially shrugged off the protests, issuing a nonchalant response to let people know it hasn’t negatively impacted its business — which was the equivalent of shaking the hell out of a giant beehive and not expecting to get stung. Boycott participators responded by publishing step-by-step tutorials for transferring a bulk of domains to a new registrar, complete with recommendations to competitors.

37,000 in two days before Christmas, looks like the beginning of an avalanche of bailouts. Now I’m left with a dillema.  This blog and the domain is hosted by Go Daddy, I’m paid up ahead, and I’ve been pretty happy with their service.  Host Gater is a local Houston Company has a good reputation, and is opposed to Govenment and Hollywood censorship. Their statement opposing SOPA:

Imagine if you were able to genetically combine Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Darth Vader and Barbara Streisand into one horrifically terrifying being. Now imagine that being is actually a piece of proposed legislature — the terrifying creation in your midst would then be the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which is currently being considered by the House.

SOPA, aka H.R. 3261 is a bill right now in the House sponsored by R-TX Lamar Smith. It’s not just any bill though, it’s a bill that would allow the USDOJ, RIAA, MPAA and anyone else who lobbies for the entertainment industry to effectively censor the internet to suit their needs.

So, I’ve got a lot to consider. moving the content and the domain is a scary thing,  a lot of work and some money. Perhaps if Go Daddy took a substantial stand to actually fight this thing my decision would be a little easier. A significant donation to someone like the Electronic Frontier Foundation perhaps?

Thoughts on Requiring an ID

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Eric Holder is blocking South Carolina’s new law which requires that voters provide ID to qualify their right to vote.  The Justice Department claims that requiring an ID is racist.  I’m not sure I understand why requiring folks to provide proper identification is racist. Is requiring travelers to provide an ID racist when at the airport? I wonder if the attorney general will demand that sellers quit insisting that gun purchasers provide an ID.

If someone can please explain to me why requiring an ID to vote is racist, than why shouldn’t the practice be outlawed on the more routine things. Voting is inherently more dangerous than buying a gun or flying    Perhaps it’s only considered racist when states require the ID, and alright when when it is a federal mandate.

A few weeks ago I was at the Toyota Center in Houston.  When I purchased a beer I was asked for an ID.  I’m a bald, greying 60 year old, I thought it was just silly. Now I understand it was racist.

Nightmare on the Interwebs

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Alexandra Petri isn’t the only one having nightmares:

Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and the Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings were on.

It’s exactly as we feared. For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him.

The experts testifying for SOPA and promising that SOPA won’t be disastrous to the internet, admit they don’t know anything about how it works.  The experts on the Web are the folks claiming an end to to the web as we know it.  Who do we believe Spielberg who makes Billions making movies, or the folks who actually built the internet?

There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything. This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this.

When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it. As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.

The problem is the folks with the most influence at the capital aren’t the people with the most knowledge, but the folks willing to spend the moist money for their cause.

A Wiki Boycott

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. is publically considering shutting down Wikipedia in protest of SOPA.

The proposed shutdown has nothing to do with technical problems or money issues, and everything to do with the Stop Online Piracy Act, an anti-piracy bill that has raised the ire of many major technology companies. This past weekend, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales posted a discussion on his Wikipedia user page suggesting that the English-language version of Wikipedia may temporarily go dark to protest the bill, which critics say gives movie studios and other copyright holders unprecedented power to shut down Web sites seen as infringing on their content.

SOPA endangers the very existence of Wikipedia,  and most any other site that relies on links or user input.  SOPA would criminalize links to sites that offer copyright violations, or other things that offend the sensibilities of the Hollywood crowd. On the surface this might sound reasonable bu the penalties kick in with out trial or court orders and site owners have little opportunity to defend themselves. Web owners and maintainers have a difficult time keeping their websites clean as it is. Most of us don’t want this crap on our sites and work hard and dilligently at keeping our sites clean, but it isn’t our job to protect the Hollywood moguls and their revenues.

SOPA is an attempt to shut down the internet, and restrict voices to only the Hollywood approved.  It is an attempt to shutdown search engines like Google or Bing. Google is very worried, and concerned that it will crimminalize every search engine.

An online piracy bill in the House would “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt said the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would punish Web firms, including search engines, that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. He said implementing the bill as written would effectively break the Internet.

 

“By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet,” Schmidt said, calling it a form of censorship.

 

The search giant has been at the forefront of a tech industry backlash against the legislation from House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

“If Congress writes a bad law, we all suffer,” Schmidt said.

He compared the proposal to the Web censorship practiced by repressive foreign governments like China and doubled down on that comparison when speaking with reporters after his remarks at the Economic Club of Washington.

If Wikipedia shuts down in protest of the of SOPA I will pull the plug on my little Wiki , and if I can safely take my blog down for the duration I will take down this blog.  The Wiki is easy, I can literally just pull the plug.

Occupiers are the privileged 1 percent

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Don Surber remarks that the Occupy folks are the real 1 percenters.  They don’t work and have  trashed and stunk up their environment wherever they  show up.  They have feeling of entitlment, but don’t really want to do anything but lay around and maybe beat a few drums.  I mentioned before that they are upset about some of the same things that triggered the beginings of the TEA party that they look down on with so much disdain. The Occupiers are doing more alienating than winning over.  They are destroying parks and behaving badly, and what few solutions they have to offer are outright goofy. As Don points out:

Now let us get a few things straight about who these loony goons are. For the most part they are spoiled rotten brats who took out huge loans to pay for four years of self-indulgence at some over-rated liberal arts college. Somehow, they were able to spend a few months in the fall camping out and protesting against the working class while not working themselves.

They are in that upper 1% who do not have to work.

Now it appears that they are attacking dock workers and commuter, by blocking the ports on the West Coast and blocking traffic in Houston. Once again we observers are wondering “What’s the point?”.  It apears the people they really are going after and trying to hurt is the commuter, truck drivers, and port workers. The typical blue collar worker the left and the unions claim are trying to protect.

The protest in Houston was an attempt to snarl traffic and cause more pollution and working class people losing lost wages.  These idiots aren’t making friends or support for their cause.  The occupiers in Oakland Ca, are even bolder, they blocked all traffic coming and going into the port.  Causing people to miss their shifts and lose their pay.  I doubt if any of the Wall Street moguls noticed or even cared.

The companies that operate the 26 berths at the nation’s fifth-busiest container port told longshore workers not to report for the 7 p.m. evening shift – effectively halting work for the next eight hours and preventing 100 to 200 employees from earning the pay they would have received on a typical shift.

…

“We are ecstatic with the results,” said Milo Avery, 22, of Oakland. “This day is the culmination of a lot of hard work. It’s a historic and momentous step in this movement.”

These aren’t the same longshore workers of years gone by, The Teamsters and longshore workers would have busted some heads, and still have made it to work on time.  I guess we are just more civilized these days. All the same it just seem very prudent for a bunch of near do wells to take on longshoremen in the streets.

Drawing the Line in the Canadian Oil Sand

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As we struggle in a Obaman economy kept repressed buy policies which are intended to give government more control over businesses and peoples lives.  The White House has agreed in principle to  continue the payroll tax reduction, to further sweeten the pot Congress, is considering paving the way for the Keystone XL pipeline.  The pipeline would create jobs in construction provide ethical oil,  create stronger trading with one of our true allies. President Obama is  resistant to this, of course, and would rather see us revert to the greener world of the stone age.  He has threatened a veto if provisions are attached to clear the way for the Keystone pipeline provisions.

Obama warned that he would veto an extension of the payroll-tax cut, his top legislative priority, if House Republicans link it to a measure that would force the administration to greenlight the pipeline project.

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll-tax cut, I will reject,” Obama told reporters Wednesday after meeting at the White House with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

It’s as if he is intentionally trying to keep the economy down.

Electric Vehicles a Household Fire Hazzard.

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Seems like the at home Seimens charging units for the new electric cars may be burning down the owners homes.

After a house fire in Mooresville, NC which started in the home’s garage was traced the the area near a charging station for an electric vehicle,WSOC-TV reported that Duke Energy, which installed the Siemens built charging station, has warned customers to not use similar units while the investigation into the fire proceeds. When fire investigators went through the burned out garage, they found a Chevy Volt plugged into the 240 volt station, the second garage fire reportedly involving a Volt. Since it was not the only electrical appliance plugged in that area of the garage, the charging station may not be at fault. The Iredell County Fire Marshal’s office said, “The charging station was in the known area of origin, but the cause of the fire has not been officially determined.”

Though the brand of car in the garage was not mentioned in the news reports, since General Motors is joining Siemens, Duke Energy and the US Dept. of Transportation in the investigation, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s a Chevy Volt. This apparently the second garage fire that has consumed a Chevy Volt.

Siemens’  seems to be slipping in its reputation a leader in quality electronics and controls. Then again, any company that would sell virus vulnerable controllers to the Iranians so that they may make nuclear weaponry probably isn’t to worried about their reputation.