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Saturday, December 7, 2002 |
Wolf in sheep's clothing. Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz was in San Francisco to indict Saddam Hussein. But despite growing impatience, he provided no evidence. [Salon.com]
9:29:05 PM 
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Bush shakes up economic team. "Firing its economic team is an overdue admission by the Bush administration that its economic policies have failed," said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. "However, the fundamental problem is that this administration has no comprehensive plan to get the economy back on track." [Salon.com]
9:27:32 PM
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Is This the America I Love?. I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them. I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution. In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice. I loved America for what it stood for. [kuro5hin.org]
3:32:12 PM
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Falling arches. McDonald's is under fire all over the world -- with Thursday's bombing only the most recent. Can the fast-food conglomerate withstand the heat of global anti-Americanism? [Salon.com]
So here's a moral question, posed in the form of a math problem. If I hate terrorism, and I hate McDonalds, then what's the formula for how I should hate terrorists blowing up McDonalds? Is it
(hate terrorism) * (hate McDonalds), or
(hate terrorism) - (hate McDonalds), or
(hate terrorism) / (hate McDonalds) ...?
3:20:19 PM
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Lance Knobel isn't surprised at today's economic shakeup in the Bush cabinet. "After the smarts of the Rubin and Summers tenures in the '90s, O'Neill's two years of bumbling has been a particular let down. Lindsay has inspired as much confidence as O'Neill." [Scripting News]
3:12:32 PM
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Karl Auerbach Speaks Out on ICANN. In this interview, Auerbach makes a number of strong criticisms of ICANN, beyond the issue of public access: ICANN uses its domain name dispute resolution process to expand the rights of trademark holders, routinely taking away domains from people with legitimate rights to them; ICANN unnecessarily maintains the domain name system as a centralized database, making it vulnerable to attack; ICANN staff takes actions without consulting the board, withholds information from the board, and misleads board members; and ICANN is guilty of corporate malfeasance. [O'Reilly Network]
3:11:34 PM
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SBC's Information Sharing Trickery The San Francisco Chronicle's excellent business columnist, David Lazarus, has gone after some slippery behavior by SBC and its Pacific Bell phone unit. In a November 27 column he nailed SBC for trying to sneak by its customers the company's wish to "share" their calling information and other data with other companies. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
3:04:54 PM
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Squawk Radio A number of callers took issue with the correct labeling of most right-wing war-hawks as 'Chicken Hawks' -- and this allowed Rush to obscure the issue by claiming that he'd merely not served, rather than dodged the draft with a bogus 4-F status. [Daypop Top 40]
12:47:44 PM
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Robber Barons Could Dominate The Internet Due To Deregulation And Bad Policy Bad metaphors make bad policy. Everyone talks about the "information highway." But in economic terms the telecommunications network resembles not a highway but the railroad industry of the robber-baron era [~] that is, before it faced effective competition from trucking. And railroads eventually faced tough regulation, for good reason: they had a lot of market power, and often abused it. [Daypop Top 40]
12:41:22 PM
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"With runners and whispers, al Qaeda outfoxes US forces " United States forces have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq: they are finding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qa'ida network because Bin Laden's men have resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut individual members of al-Qa'ida off from all information. [Daypop Top 40]
12:38:45 PM
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Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool. Speaking at an 802.11 conference, experts who participated in government-sponsored working groups to examine Wi-Fi's security holes say the message is clear: Secure your wireless networks or face federal meddling. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]
12:05:09 PM
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Shocker: Despicable Conduct From Disney. Phil Lelyveld, a Vice President for Disney, has written to the FCC to tell them to ignore Digital Consumer's comments on the Broadcast Flag issue. [Slashdot]
This is because Disney doesn't think consumers should get a vote in how these products should be delivered to market. Got news for you Phil: even if you win this battle, we'll still vote with our wallets, and you'll still lose the war.
12:00:03 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.
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