Florida has a problem – insurance companies want to take your money, but they don’t want to pay claims. After losing court cases, they are pulling out of the Florida homeowners insurance market. The insurance companies talk about their losses from hurricanes, while posting record profits because they aren’t paying policyholders.

The private companies are trying to shift all of the losses to the Federal flood insurance program.

The Pensacola Beach Blogger has an article, “Smoke and Mirrors” Insurance, with more depth for Floridians, but it’s all part of a trend of public money used to help corporations through “privatization”, except the corporations make the profits while the taxpayers have all of the risk.

If you weren’t paying attention to Microsoft updates, which you should be doing if you run their software, the last major patch to Internet Explorer didn’t play well with others. It sort of broke your computer if you used certain software from little companies like Hewlett Packard who seems to make the majority of printers attached to PCs.

Well, next week Microsoft to fix Windows patch. They are patching the patch to fix the problem they caused.

I’m concerned because Hewlett Packard just issued a patch today that may fix the problem Microsoft created, and the patch Microsoft is sending may break the new software. Too bad Microsoft doesn’t do any quality control or really coordinate anything with their vendors or customers.

The Attorney General, who managed to make it through law school without learning the plain meaning of the Bill of Rights, has another stupid idea to divert attention from the reality that Patrick Fitzgerald is the only one in the Department doing their job: Gonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law.

I would suggest he read The Internet for Dummies, if I thought he could master the long words. He obviously is under the misconception that the US controls the World Wide Web. The “community standards” of the Internet would scandalize most demons [and not a few daemons…sorry, geek joke].

The Platform for Internet Content Selection [PICS] was started back in 1997 by the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] to make it easier for people to filter “offensive material”, but it is totally voluntary, like most things on the Web.

Since ex post facto laws are prohibited by the Constitution, I would assume this proposed law only applies to new web pages and the Department of Justice will be tasked to create some colored stickers, if Homeland Security hasn’t eaten all of the crayons.

I know that they’ll want to treat web site owners exactly the same as the power companies that pump pollutants into the air: you only have to add the sticker if you change more than 20% of a web page, otherwise, this would be another unfunded Federal mandate on the private sector.

It seems to me that this labeling will just make it easier for low-IQ perverts to find porn, but maybe that’s the point.

She’s the only planet we have, if we blow it, we can’t pack up and move.

Wikipedia as a brief Earth Day entry, but links to other sites.