On-line Opinion Magazine…OK, it's a blog

Gentleman at Leisure

What, hmmm …

[Editor: Sox lazing on my bathrobe in the chair shows a couple of the problems I need to address with the camera. The room light is yellow as it is all indirect and coming off of beige paint, and his pupils are so expanded that you can't see the eye color. I may need a spotlight to get the colors right, but the camera works in low light.

Friday Ark

January 27, 1967

Virgil “Gus” Ivan Grissom, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Edward Higgins White, II, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Roger Bruce Chaffee, Lieutenant Commander, USN

CNNMoney has a background piece on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement [ACTA], Meet SOPA’s evil twin, ACTA.

The ABC notes the reaction in one country getting ready to sign ACTA: Poles protest against anti-piracy pact.

Note that the government of Poland had meetings with the media conglomerates, but not talk to Internet communities or the general public, just like the SOPA/PIPA debacle. The Senate may have dropped PIPA for the moment, but ACTA could pop up at any time for ratification.

The BBC on the latest corporate failure:

Symantec initially said there was no risk to users as the stolen code was six years old, advising simply to make sure the most recent version of the products had been downloaded.

But the updated advice said the stolen material had included blueprints for Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security, Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack) and pcAnywhere.

Of those products, only pcAnywhere is said to be at “increased risk”, and users of the other software packages should not be concerned.

Ah, yes, don’t worry, be happy … until they update their advice again.

This is a company that sells security products, and their system was hacked. They stored source code on a machine that was reached by the hackers. This is not good practice.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister of Australia would have no luck at all.

The ABC headline reads: Riot police rescue Gillard, Abbott from protesters, but Gillard didn’t need rescuing.

She was at an Australia Day ceremony awarding medals to first responders, when the building was surrounded by protestors. In the rush to evacuate her, she lost a shoe, stumbled, and was caught on film clutching a security officer to regain her footing.

The thing is, the protest had nothing to do with her, or anything she had done.

The leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, had made an unbelievably stupid [well, stupid for anyone who wasn't Abbott. for Abbott it was SOP] about the ‘tent embassy’, an Aboriginal protest that has occurred for over a half century on what many Aboriginals call ‘Invasion Day’. The protestors were mad at Abbott, who was in the same building.

Security should have hauled Abbott out [or just handed him over to the protestors ] and Ms Gillard could have gone about whatever she does as PM. Most of the photos of the incident are cropped so you don’t see Abbott who was just behind Gillard when she stumbled [or was tripped ... no, he's not that talented].

It’s not that there is no reason to protest the actions of Ms Gillard’s government, there are plenty, but this wasn’t one of them.

The anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip at Port Jackson in New South Wales on January 26^th, 1788.

Here’s the official site, and more information at Wikipedia.

It is going to be a very soggy celebration in New South Wales and Queensland – another heavy rain and flooding pattern has set in.

Celebrates the establishment of the Republic of India on January 26^th, 1950 when its new Constitution took effect.

The parade at New Delhi is, bar none, the most colorful military parade in the world.

Here’s the official site, and, as the Wikipedia entry is really pathetic, here is a tourist site with more information.

According to the state there are over 4 million registered Republicans, and normally about half of them would show up for the Presidential primary, so 2 million is the number to watch to gauge the interest in this process.

Florida has blocs of yahoos, like South Carolina, the Cubans, business Republicans, and more moderate types who retired down here, so it provides a cross-section of the GOP. If you look at where the votes are coming from, you can judge the interest level among those blocs.

At the moment, I would guess that the yahoos aren’t very enthused based on the lack of signs. The Cubans are not a group I’m familiar enough with to even guess about, but the business and moderate blocs are probably trending towards Romney.

If the Grinch can fire up the yahoos he has a real shot at this with the latest poll showing a tie between him and Romney. Romney will probably have a decent return from the absentees, as they went out before the South Carolina vote, but early voting doesn’t seem to be very active, especially with the changes that were made to the system.

Another factor to be aware of is that a huge chunk of the yahoos live in the Central Time Zone on the Panhandle, so their votes will be showing up at the end of the count.

Lambert at Corrente used this post to complain about Tom Friedman, who is, was, and always will be clueless, but Friedman did find ‘an acorn’. The problem is that he couldn’t understand what he had discovered.

There was a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on last Friday that reported that two out of three US voters would consider voting for a third-party candidate, and 48% definitely wanted a third-party in the race. This means that almost half of the people in the sample aren’t happy with what the two parties are offering, and want something different.

I’ve been in that 48% for some time, but if you still don’t understand why, the State of the Union speech and response should clear things up for you. I don’t listen to them, because I would rather see what, if anything, is actually in the text, than to be a theater critic rating the performances.

Here’s the text of Zero’s speech and the text of Mitch Daniels’s response.

Mr. Daniels is the Governor of Indiana and an Austerian, who looks like he should be a local mortician. If you were casting a zombie movie, he would be worth a call. It is hard to believe that people were trying to get him to run for President, well, except for the reality of who is running for the Republican nomination.

Romney decided to show up for the latest of the millions of debates in the Republican primaries, probably as a result of the Grinch’s win in South Carolina.

No major Florida Republican is endorsing anyone in the primary. I think the candidates each sent a note asking our governor not to endorse them [if you saw his approval rating you would understand why], but they were all hoping that JEB and, especially, Marco Rubio would give their seal of approval. No one is making endorsements.

This primary is strictly a Republican primary. There are no amendments or other issues on the ballot, so registered Republicans are the only ones who can vote. The results are going to be determined by turn-out. Ron Paul’s cadre will show up, but there are no real indicators of who else will make the effort. So far there isn’t a lot of early voting.

There are no signs along the roads, none of the usual indicators that an election is taking place. You get the feeling that everyone assumed that Romney would have things sewed up and the campaign would be on cruise control. I don’t think any of the candidates, other than Ron Paul, has a real organization in the state.

At this point the problem for the Republicans is going to be getting people to make the effort to vote. It is anyone’s guess who those who do vote will actually select.

Year of the Black Water Dragon – Xuanlong

Chinese New Year
[Spring Festival]

‘Cloud Computing’ may become a victim of the War on Internet Piracy™.

Over at Naked Capitalism ‘George Washington’ asks Did the Feds just kill the cloud storage model?

It explores the viability of cloud storage and the entire ‘everything on the ‘Net model, when the PATRIOT Act, and the media moguls piracy obsession means that the US government can rummage through your stuff almost at will, and seize it without notifying you or justifying their actions.

Imagine what you would think if you had put all of your furniture in a mini-storage unit until you found a new apartment, and when it came time to pick it up, there was nothing there but a fence and a sign saying that the entire location had been taken by the DoJ as part of an investigation involving what someone put in another of the hundred units at the business.

If you want it back you’ll have to wait until the case is over, and then sue the government in Federal court – something in the 5 to 10 year range. There is no insurance coverage for this sort of occurrence, so you need to start over from scratch.

Megaupload was an on-line storage location. There is no way of knowing how much of the stuff stored there was illegal, so everything was seized and the site shut down. Customers have no way of accessing their stuff. For all intents and purposes it is gone.

The Internet can give you the ability to access your stuff from anywhere … well, as long as you can connect to the ‘Net, and the site where it is stored hasn’t crashed, and the Feds haven’t seized it, but a lot of the time you can get to it. So, welcome to ‘Cloud Computing’ where all of your stuff can go up in smoke…

While in the car I heard a discussion on All Things Considered concerning the ‘Net shutdown in response to SOPA/PIPA with James Fallows of The Atlantic.

Fallows almost understands the reaction of the technology sector, as he points out that Google is so concerned with its intellectual property rights that it refuses to send any source code to China. He then opines that technology companies don’t view movies and music in the same way.

Actually, we are well aware of the status of movies and music as intellectual property, but we have no intention of having additional costs and aggravation placed on us, when the owners to the rights of the movies and music do stupid things, like shipping them to China for reproduction.

The Chinese are new to the ‘free market’ and they view it as being truly free, in the libertarian sense. They don’t have any history of ‘intellectual property laws’, so it is a totally foreign concept. In their view if they know how to do something, and people will pay them to do it, they should do it. If, after they fulfill a contract for copies of a DVD for a media company, someone else offers them money for copies of the same DVD, they sell them – ‘free market’.

Technology companies learned this the hard way, which is why the best have strict controls on what is sent to China.

As South Carolina is a winner-take-all state, Newt “Efting” Gingrinch’s win means that he leads in the delegate count with 23 of the 1144 needed for the nomination.

Romney, after Santorum was declared the real winner in Iowa, has 19, Santorum 12, Ron Paul 3, and Jon Huntsman has 2 delegates [according to reporting that seems to have originated with AP]

Florida is next, which is why the SuperPAC that isn’t controlled by Mitt Romney [no, sir, no way, we are independent] has been airing anti-Newt ads for over a week.

About the only thing that would be worse than tonight for Willard, would be if Ron Paul beats him in Virginia, as they are the only two candidates on that ballot.

The way things are going, the networks are going to partnering with bail-bondsmen to hold the thousands of debates they seem to want to run. [Debates are even cheaper to fill up time than reality shows.]