Posts from — January 2012

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.]

Somewhere there must be an Institute of Big Scary Numbers that provides corporations and wingnuts with the figures that they use to attempt to push through their latest cranial flatulence. These are numbers that often have no basis in any known reality, or would be extremely time and money consuming to derive, but they are always available from IBSN [not associated with anything else known as IBSN].

For example, in his BBC Viewpoint segment Steve Tepp of the US Chamber of Commerce provides the following ‘facts’:

“How big is this problem? Rogue sites garner over 53 billion visits a year.”

“What cannot be done is to do nothing. Indeed, there is broad consensus that something must be done to address online counterfeiting and piracy, which already costs the global economy $650bn (£432bn) annually.”

There is no definition of what constitutes a ‘rogue site’ or how many sites are included, and that’s before you get into the various ways of counting ‘visits’ to web sites. There is also no indication as to why visiting a web site is a ‘problem’.

That $650 billion figure is just created. There’s no way of knowing if it costs the ‘global economy’ anything. It might reduce the profits of some companies, but even that isn’t known for sure. The reality is that few of those who buy knock-offs or counterfeits would ever consider paying for the ‘real thing’. The ‘rogue sites’ might be a plus for the ‘global economy’ as they are generating activity where none existed before. The ‘global economy’ couldn’t care less about laws, it is based on business activity. [A former Florida agriculture commissioner used to annoy the hell out of certain people by including the state’s marijuana crop in estimates of the value of Florida agriculture.]

His claim of ‘broad consensus’ obviously didn’t include major communities on the Internet.

Soaking Up The Rays

Warmth again …

[Editor: This is a better shot of Underhouse in the late afternoon sun. We’ve had frequent cold fronts move through, and Wednesday night’s storm featured a thunderstorm.

Friday Ark

Yesterday’s ‘Net blackout was actually covered by the media, but their articles show that they don’t really understand what the blackout was all about.

Tina at the Agonist featured a USA Today report that had this paragraph as an explanation of the event: “Technology companies staged an online blackout to protest two related bills that would crack down on websites that use copyrighted materials and sell counterfeit goods.”

There are plenty of laws to deal with rogues web sites, but they aren’t apparently enough for the media conglomerates. The basic reason for opposing the laws is that the implementation would cost people a lot of money to break the basic structure of the ‘Net. Technical people tend to oppose doing expensive things that make matters worse.

The BBC had a Viewpoints section with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, Michael O’Leary of the MPAA, and Steve Tepp of the US Chamber of Commerce.

The basic claim from the conglomerates is that they can’t do anything about foreign web sites. That might be more believable if the BBC wasn’t also carrying a story about the Megaupload case. Apparently the US DoJ didn’t have a problem arresting a couple of people in New Zealand and closing a Hong Kong based site, so what is the real purpose of SOPA/PIPA?

If I were of a suspicious mind, I might think it sounds like an opportunity for the media companies to extort money from sites, with a threat to close them down if the money wasn’t forthcoming … but we all know they would never do anything like that ……

In my meager attempt to support the SOPA Strike I won’t be posting anything tomorrow.

The House’s ‘Stop On-line Piracy Act’ won’t stop piracy, and the Senate’s ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act’ won’t protect intellectual property. What both will do is mandate that hosting companies and ISP become censors.

Google can’t possibly function if it is supposed to remove ‘suspected’ violators from the search results.

This is supposed to ‘protect American jobs’, but the six multinationals that control the media in the US couldn’t care less about American jobs, when the animation work all got shipped to Asia, and many of the TV shows are actually filmed in Canada, they care about their bottom line. That was behind their attempt to rip off the writers last year which resulted in a strike.

BlogSpot, WordPress, etc. are not going to be free if they are required to vet every blog post on their systems for ‘suspected’ copyright infringement.

I create intellectual property, I don’t see how either of these bills is going to help me maintain my rights. All is does is provide the six conglomerates with a lot of free labor.

I have a news flash for the US Congress – you can’t enforce US laws in other countries. The Internet is global and it can’t be controlled by the US. If you make the burden of operating from facilities in the United States a PITA, Internet companies will leave.

The BBC has been covering an on-going spat: Rupert Murdoch SOPA attack rebuffed by Google.

Murdoch is asking us to believe that there are thousands of sites created to illegally download Mission Impossible, and Google helps people find them.

I think that mental help professionals should be tracking anyone who wastes their time watching those products of News Corps, and set up a program to see if they can be returned to the human race.

Rupert must think that he has a great deal of credibility, as he has spent the last several months talking under oath before various governmental panels about the multiple crimes committed by his employees.

Here’s a clue – Google uses software ‘bots to search and index the ‘Net. The ‘bots don’t make moral judgments or render legal opinions, they simply copy down words and index them.

If Google does write an algorithm to ignore download sites, Rupert is going to have to set up his own search system to find them. That will be exceedingly expensive, and is easy to defeat.

BTW, the shut down day was switched to this Wednesday, the 18^th. The original day is the Chinese New Year [Tet, Spring Festival]

I’ve seen a number of people trying to lessen the impact of what private equity firms, like Bain Capital, do to the economy by classing them in with venture capitalist, and calling the results of their raids with the job losses as ‘creative destruction’. The two are just about polar opposites.

If you work in the tech industry you probably don’t like venture capitalists, but realistically they are essential to getting new ideas to market. If they are evil, they are a necessary evil.

By the time you have worked on a project and got it in shape for a real launch, you are normally out of money, and so is everyone you know who might lend you some. The last step is expensive, and the banks won’t go near you. This is when you turn to a venture capitalist to get the final money to finish your ‘dream’.

The important thing to remember is that venture capitalists, are real capitalists, i.e. they are going to risk ‘their money’ in hopes of turning a profit, and they need you to succeed to get their money back. It is a high risk/high reward environment, but it is based on a voluntary agreement between the company and venture capitalist. If the project is successful everyone makes money, and if it is a failure everyone loses.

If the new product is a significant improvement over existing products, the companies that make those products may be devastated, and that is the process called ‘creative destruction’. A recent example would be what has happened to the market for cathode ray tubes after flat LED screens dropped in price.

This is not what corporate raiders, like Bain Capital do. They don’t risk their capital, and they don’t share in any losses as a result of their take-overs. They use leveraged hostile take-overs to seize stable older companies who have low or no debt loads and have been making consistent profits for extended periods. The targets are not growing, they are simply maintaining a nice comfortable pace without any major swings in stock price or other indicators beloved by Wall Street analysts. These are companies that are designed to provide stability and a future, not instant returns. They look out for decades, not quarters.

The vulture capitalists seize control with borrowed money, and once in control loot the victim, and then mortgage it to the hilt. Their small investment is recovered almost instantly, with obscene interest, and they squeeze every possible dime out, before leaving the dessicated hulk to face bankruptcy on its own.

The destruction that occurs isn’t ‘creative’, it is simply destruction.

This comes to you via a connection slower than dial-up, if it makes it.

Now it is the DSL that doesn’t want to play.

Absolutely everything is timing out, so I’m only seeing text, even on this site.

SIGH!!!