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"On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an hour and a half-long press conference which was attended by many members of the world media. The contents of that meeting---in which Putin answered all questions concerning nuclear proliferation, human rights, Kosovo, democracy and the present confrontation with the United States over missile defense in Europe---have been completely censored by the press..." - Mike Whitney
This morning I was lucky enough to attend the WWDC Keynote. Unfortunately, I must say it was rather lackluster. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that Apple is doing amazing things, and before I start complaining about the items Steve covered, lets highlight the items he discussed.
If your a long time OS X user than you know the Finder has needed a overhaul for a long time. However, lacking from Steve's keynote were any mention of multithreading or iDisk improvements. Instead he focused on new gui features when performance should have been the number one concern. While I am excited that a new Finder is shipping, I will have to use it for a bit to see if it fixes the performance problems that persist even in Tiger.
So, can someone tell me why Walter F. Murphy, a constitutional theory and judicial behavior expert at Princeton University, would be placed on the Terrorist Watch list?
Well, if you read the article below, it's clear that anyone who speaks out against the attrocities of the Bush administration is immediately labelled a "terrorist" and removed of any and all privacy rights afforded to American citizens. My favorite passage...
"I have a personal stake here, but so do all Americans who take their political system seriously. Thus I hope you and your colleagues will take some positive action to bring the Administration's conduct to the attention of a far larger, and more influential, audience than I could hope to reach. "
Source: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/04/another-enemy-of-people.html
So people ask me all the time why I don't like the Republican party. Well, perhaps because they lie under oath and waste our tax dollars promoting their party members via a national teleconference in government facilities when they are supposed to be doing their jobs.
Original Article: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/28/122134/409
So people wonder why I am so paranoid... Perhaps because the US Government doesn't care about transparency anymore, and is even willing to tell the courts that it's none of their business when they spy on Americans. Scary stuff. All I can say is to stay far far away from AT&T.
A few days ago Pandora decided to change the way they displayed ads in their mini player. This effectively broke some code in PandoraMan and caused some ads to appear in a seperate browser window. I have added the new ad URL's to PandoraMan's exceptions list and everything should be functioning normally now.
Now, on a related note, I found the following comment on MacUpdate.
When I wrote Pandora.com about the problem of PandoraMan opening browser pages upon almost any action, this is the reply I received:
"PandoraMan is an unauthorized, unsupported program. The only way to use Pandora without seeing our full range of ads-- while staying within our Terms of Use and still helping us keep Pandora a sustainable service-- is to subscribe to Pandora, and continue to visit http://www.pandora.com directly. [What you describe are bugs and glitches within that unsupported program.]"
After I saw this comment I was shocked. First, they accused me of circumventing their ads which I go out of my way to INCLUDE in the product to make sure they still get ad revinue for their service. I even make it so their paid users automatically have the ad's removed just like on the official service to encourage people to pay Pandora.
Everyone saw this happening when the deal with Microsoft and Novell went through. Before jumping onto the idealistic bandwagon and boycotting Novell products when the agreement was reached, I wanted to wait and see what would happen. Well I have finally come to the conclusion that I can't recommend any of Novell's products anymore. I just can't support any vendor that partners with Microsoft and then allows MS to threaten the entire open-source community by saying it was violating MS's IP. It would be different if Microsoft had at least detailed the infringing intellectual property, but at this point it seems like another case of SCO syndrome. Lots of talk, but no concrete facts. Perhaps their approach is to spread FUD and try to undermine the Linux community by threatening people behind the scenes instead of making its own products better and trying to compete in a straightforward and honest fashion... Yep, sounds like Microsoft to me.
While I was scouring the net today I came across an article on CNET about SecLists.org being taken offline by GoDaddy after a complaint from MySpace.com.
Fyodor Vaskovich also posted about the issue and made some very interesting points which illustrate why no one should ever use GoDaddy as a registrar, no matter how cheap their services are.
His points were very simple, and I will sum them up for you.
1. A registrar should not police content, but should merely refer people to their respective nameservers. If any policing of content should be done it should be done by the ISP with a court order.
2. A registrar should not cancel accounts merely because a business entity requests it.
3. At minimum an ISP or registrar should contact the site owner and give adequate time for the content to be removed before suspending an account.
I don't think this is too much to ask, and I must say his arguments are quite reasonable. Not to mention that SecLists.org is a resource that thousands of people use on a daily basis. It was extremely irresponsible of GoDaddy to handle MySpace's complaint by taking the entire domain down.
