Skip to :56. This iPhone is a 4GS, and you still have a Motorola Sidekick. That’s my name. I have this iPhone because Mitch and Murray asked me to have it. If you don’t like it, you can push your little beverage cart right off this plane, because a loser is a loser. Now let me finish my Scrabble game!
Here is the original post:
Exclusive Footage from Alec Baldwin’s American Airlines Flight
Censorship’s the big word right now. The FCC’s under pressure to ban pro sports blackouts, and the Supreme Court may end national profanity rules . However I consider those things small. Few people have access to television broadcasts. Most of us aren’t actually censored by these regulations. We all have access to the Internet though; that’s how a nobody like me is able to shape the debate against well-funded leftist groups . So I’ll freely admit it: It’s a self-serving thing for me to oppose Internet censorship. I don’t want the Obama administration to have the power to collaborate with private leftist groups to steal people’s domains, and force all ISPs to cooperate with that effective creation of a national censorship blacklist. They want to call the little guys “E-PARASITES,” using copyright as cover to censor whatever the heck they want. Because once you let the government start blanking out parts of the Internet, then what’s to stop them from blanking out oversight of that censorship? Nothing. Just ask Australia , which censored the internet “for the children,” but then started banning oversight of the censorship, as well as unrelated content like American anti-abortion websites. The committee vote on SOPA / E-PARASITES is coming , and I’m hearing that the witness list for the bill is stacked 5-1 in favor of the bill. In the Republican House, we’re rigging the hearings in favor of giving the President more regulatory power over the Internet. It boggles the mind. Please consider contacting the Judiciary Committee and asking them to oppose this censorship power grab. If the US Government starts monkeying around with DNS, the world will ignore it, the same way we ignore Chinese attempts to censor the Internet. We will lose our position as world leader of the Internet overnight. The forces of regulation never give up. They constantly press for more government intervention in the media, more control and less freedom. This is the face of media reform, and I hope Republicans defeat SOPA as one aspect of it in the House. The Democrats in the Senate beat us on Net Neutrality, and we now rely on the courts to act to protect private industry against that power grab. I hope we don’t have to do the same for SOPA. We truly can’t wait. I’m especially interested to see whether House Democrats like Maxine Waters dance for their Hollywood (MPAA), Music (RIAA), Banking (MasterCard), Union (AFL-CIO), and Pharmaceutical (Pfizer) corporate masters and back SOPA, as much as I’d like to see Republicans stand up to these guys. Credit to Google: they seem to be learning. Opposing SOPA, making good on its promise and re-opening the sources to Android , and of course Obama fan Eric Schmidt’s novocaine-fueled rant against big government are all great signs that the company really may be once burned, twice shy since the FTC came against them. Was Search Neutrality all it took to get Google to realize regulation hurts it more than it helps, or was Schmidt taking a lesser role with the firm also a factor? I called it, I called it, I called it. Sprint got the iPhone and now Sprint’s phasing out unlimited data , just like the “evil” Verizon and AT&T . Clearly Sprint is benefiting greatly in the marketplace from the iPhone, and that popularity has an impact on its network. Just imagine how much it’s hurting T-Mobile that they can’t offer the phone.
Excerpt from:
Tech at Night: It is urgent that we stop SOPA; Google wising up?
RedState Morning Briefing For October 19, 2011 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. 1. Nostalgia & Decline 2. The CNN Debate: Where Has This Perry Been? 3. Herman Cain, Gilad Shalit, and Emptying GITMO in Exchange for One Captive Soldier 4. Meet #OWS ‘Crisis Creator’ Lisa Fithian: The Radical Extremist Helping To #OccupyAmerica ———————————————————————- 1. Nostalgia & Decline Apple has out a new app in its App Store — Cards. You can take a picture on your phone, design a card, and have it sent via the post office to someone. Think about that for a minute. In an age of digital communications, text messages, emails, and cell phones, Apple has produced a product that harkens back to one of the earliest message transmission methods — snail mail as the kids these days are calling it. Siri, the assistant on the iPhone, kindles fond memories of growing up in the age of Star Trek for the thirty somethings out there. A friend of mine two nights ago showed me an awesome app he works on called Goba . It’s available for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, etc. It lets you plan an offline gathering of friends and manage sending texts and emails and the replies thereto. An app for the phone designed to facilitate a gathering of friends off line and unplugged. My neighborhood is pretty new. Almost every house has a relic of an earlier time — a front porch. My wife, me, and our kids sit on the front porch in rocking chairs or the kids play on the porch. On sites like Etsy, people are getting back to early American crafts — typography, quilts, homemade soaps, arts, etc. Like with Apple’s Cards program, people are trying to reconnect to a past that exists in our dreams. Part is real and part is not real. But we are trying to connect to it. At this time, as so many perceive a decline in the country, there is a profound sense of nostalgia for a past era. Successful technologies from Apple or this Goba program or others are those technologies that actually help us realize, in some way, some part of that past. From getting a card in the mail to meeting friends on a front porch in the evening for a drink, Americans want to turn back to a simpler time or at least a time that they perceive to be simpler. This is why the Republicans will lose next November to Barack Obama. Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. The CNN Debate: Where Has This Perry Been? 1. Where has this Rick Perry been? Finally, the guy showed up with unscripted, from the gut answers. The few scripted answers fell flat (see e.g. Jeffres). The rest were good. He’s not the best debater. But he certainly did not lose that debate. 2. Rick Santorum is too angry to be President and came across as a jerk to everyone. Rick Santorum conveniently forgot to mention he got his butt kicked in Pennsylvania, was not a fiscal conservative, and endorsed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey. 3. This debate hurts Mitt Romney more than anyone else. Why? Because the candidates started piling on him. A lot of polling seemed to indicate that voters were getting ready to settle. This pile on and the Newt-Santorum-Cain-Perry pile on of Romney “lying” will keep voters from settling for him. He got flustered tonight for the first time. Perry got under his skin. I don’t know where so many enthusiastic Romney supporters came from, but though he was cheered on stage by the crowd, he was clearly flustered. 4. As the candidates were piling on Romney for Romneycare, Captain Stubing . . . er . . . Michele Bachmann . . . interjected and totally shut down that line of attack. Was she returning the favor for Mitt’s lifeline at the last debate? 5. Herman Cain continues to shine as the great optimist. He stayed upbeat with a sense of humor. But this debate showed his serious weak point — foreign policy. He is going to have to seriously, seriously beef up by the next CNN debate, which will be a foreign policy debate. 6. Newt Gingrich, hands down, won the debate. He was confrontational, but polite. He was good on faith issues. He really hit every answer out of the park, though nuclear power is his and everyone else’s ethanol. I suspect Perry saved himself tonight. Gingrich will go up a bit, probably drawn from some Cain votes. Romney will stagnate. Santorum and Bachmann will go down. Paul will hold steady. Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. Herman Cain, Gilad Shalit, and Emptying GITMO in Exchange for One Captive Soldier Herman Cain is taking a beating – at least judging by my email inbox – over a line he uttered in the interview below with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The synopses of this I’m seeing are some variation of “Cain said he’d release all Gitmo terrorists in exchange for one American P.O.W.” and “Cain would release all gitmo detainees for one soldier.” However, that’s not what happened at all – and I don’t share the outrage at this point that some of my very good friends and colleagues do over this statement. Here’s why. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. Meet #OWS ‘Crisis Creator’ Lisa Fithian: The Radical Extremist Helping To #OccupyAmerica “When people ask me, ‘What do you do?’ I say I create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible.” — Lisa Fithian To say that Lisa Fithian is just a paid-professional protester would be to undersell her radical accomplishments. True, she’s received compensation from the SEIU and the SEIU’s labor federation Change to Win as a consultant. However, her war on the free market goes well beyond that. Last year, Fithian helped the UAW shut down Bank of America branches and, now, is helping the #OccupyWallSt protesters wage their occupations all across America. Please click here for the rest of the post.
See the rest here:
Morning Briefing for October 19, 2011
Sorry if you missed Tech at Night on Friday. I was under the weather. But I’m back, and with so much to review. How about legislation, good and bad? Well, mostly bad. Senate Democrats continue to push for senseless regulation of 4G Internet speeds , hindering vital new technology to increase high-speed Internet competition in America. Worse, Democrat Anna Eshoo is piling on in the House . Mary Bono Mack continues her push on privacy and security even though I don’t really see a government role in that, at least when it comes to private sector data. High profile cases do not good models make. Joe Barton wants to harass Amazon now , once again proving we did the right thing in not letting him head up Energy and Commerce. Seriously: If you’re allying with a Massachusetts Democrat, reconsider. When government comes preaching fairness, watch out: the push for a nationally-enforced Internet sales tax continues , which of course is just the first step to a joint state-national sales tax akin to the Canadian Harmonized Sales Tax. It’ll start at just one percent, I’m telling you. “One penny, for the children,” or “for seniors,” or even “for the Global War on Terror.” And then it will grow. We’re deeply in debt and running a massive deficit, but it’s time for a new program on “distracted driving”! OK, one piece of good news: Kay Bailey Hutchison is pressing the issue in the budget supercommittee of all places. encouraging voluntary incentive auctions of spectrum is great news no matter what the context, as we need all we can get. Giving the D block, previously proven to be unwanted at auction, over to civil defense is also good news, I believe. We learned that on 9/11. Look, I’d be all for auctioning it… if we hadn’t already tried and failed. In other news: one reason LightSquared is getting flak from FAA, is that the firm’s spectrum deployment will “result in an additional 30 tons of CO2″, per an FAA presentation on July 26, 2011. Yes, we’re supposed to hate LightSquared because of glowball warming. Whee. How about some FCC? Kelly Cobb makes the case for rolling back Net Neutrality , something that needs doing. That’s not the only bad thing the FCC is up to, though. The pigs continue to run to the trough of so-called Universal Service Fund reform, or Julius Genachowski’s grab bag of subsidies and bailouts . Oh yes, and they also join with Eric Holder to be a united Obama Administration front against AT&T and T-Mobile, as a legal bailout of Sprint Nextel. Mergers for me, but not for thee. AT&T isn’t giving up, though . PATENT WARS: Apple fends of HTC – Google’s proxy – for now , Apple beats Samsung in Australia , Samsung challenges Apple in Japan , but in the end, Apple may continue to work with Samsung to make iPhones . Try, just try to tell me we needed more patent lawyering, not less, in this country.
See the rest here:
Tech at Night: Legislation: some good but mostly bad, FCC action: all bad, Patent Wars: getting silly
You don’t need a crystal ball to forecast that next year we’ll see the nastiest, most expensive and exhausting presidential campaign ever. We can take the low comedy and the irrationality. We can even understand why the angry liberal narrative labels those conservatives who are supporting Herman Cain racists. We should welcome the Occupy Wall Streeters’ invention of the Teat Party. They want wealth to be redistributed, from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs. Which has a familiar ring to it and explains why President Obama and Noo Yawk Mayor Mikey Bloomberg are siding with them and against sanitation. We can handle it all because we love full-contact politics. But what we can’t handle is the sense of weirdness that pervades not only our domestic scene, but seemingly grips the whole world. There’s a lot of really strange SGO out there, stretching from the inner sanctums of Tehran to Shenzhen, China. (For those just joining us, “SGO” is the comprehensively useful acronym for “s*** goin’ on” coined by my pal and former SEAL Al “The Heckler” Clark.) According to a report in the UK Daily Telegraph , workers at the Gucci outlet in Shenzhen, China — the Worker’s Paradise — are being oppressed by their managers. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “irony” back to 1388 but until we have an Oxford Mandarin Dictionary, we can’t describe adequately the facts that Gucci has an outlet in a communist country, and that some of its workers are being oppressed on the job. That would require a modern-day Kipling. Kipling’s talents — and his understanding of Afghanistan and Islam — could also have done better than any modern writer to describe the foiled Iranian plot to kill a Saudi ambassador in a ritzy Washington, D.C. restaurant. The plot, by the supposedly elite Qods Force of the IRGC, was interdicted when the Qods goons were detected transferring money to an Iranian in Texas who plotted with some Mexican drug cartel guys to mount the assassination. It was a comic book plot, unworthy of Ian Fleming. Which is both comforting — because it shows that the Qods Force can be as inept as an underwear bomber — and troubling because we are doing nothing about Iran’s escalation of its war against us. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) told Fox News Sunday ‘s Chris Wallace yesterday that though she first doubted its plausibility, the case against the Qods Force is “dead bang.” And, she said, we shouldn’t be going to war over it. The Saudis apparently agree with DiFi. They plan to take the matter to the UN. And may they have as good luck there as we have had with Iran’s nuclear program. What Senator Feinstein — and our political leaders on both sides of the aisle — won’t admit is that Iran has been at war with us since 1979. And no one — not us, not the Europeans, nor anyone else — has ever negotiated a change in the Tehran kakistocracy’s behavior in the 32 years it has been in power. (We’ve tried to keep the peace engagement with Iran, and we’ve been rewarded with a one-sided war. Now it’s time for a grownup — if such a person there be in American politics — to suggest an alternative.) The Occupy Wall Streeters will, if a television camera is offered, chant “give peace a chance.” We’ve tried that for more than three decades, and now it’s time for something else. The Saudis are quite scared of Iran, and they’d like nothing more than for the gringos — or the Israelis — to destroy the Iranian regime for them. The Saudi government has launched warnings against Iranian disruptions to the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca scheduled to reach its peak in the first week of November. Their fear is well-founded. Iran, if it can, will launch everything from protests to suicide bombers in the midst of the religious rite. And if they succeed, the Saudi regime would be weakened enormously. They are the “keepers” of Islam’s holiest sites and if they can’t protect them their standing in the Muslim world will be threatened. The Saudis will act ruthlessly to suppress an eruption of an “Iranian Spring” in Mecca, but their ability to do so is doubtful. In past hajj’s, they’ve failed to prevent riots by Iranian pilgrims and stampedes in which pilgrims trampled each other to death. However inept the IRGC may have been in the planned Washington attack, there’s no way to guarantee it won’t succeed in Mecca. President Obama shouldn’t help the Saudis, and won’t because he’s too busy with his campaign and random military adventures. It’s been almost eight months since he committed U.S. forces to the French-British war in Libya, promising our involvement would be for “weeks, not months.” Having succeeded in needlessly tying up U.S. forces in one war in which there is no American interest whatever, our warrior president has now sent US forces to Uganda. Uganda? The last time Uganda deserved our attention to was on July 4, 1976, when the Israelis conducted a textbook antiterrorist raid at the Entebbe airport that rescued the passengers on a hijacked airliner that Idi Amin’s Ugandan government had given safe harbor. Just as in Obama’s Libya adventure, there is no U.S. interest at stake in Uganda. Nevertheless, Obama has sent about 100 U.S. “advisors” there — probably a few Army Special Forces A-teams — to help train Ugandan forces to defeat something called the “Lord’s Resistance Army.” The Lord’s Resistance Army, a militia commanded by one Joseph Kony, is a terrorist force that has taken many lives in central Africa. Which makes it as unique as a stick of chewing gum. U.S. forces are engaged in Libya, Somalia and Yemen. And Afghanistan and — for the moment — Iraq. If we are to take on every murderous militia in Africa, we’ll need a lot more troops than we’re going to have after Obama’s cuts to defense spending. Those cuts are about to be increased massively by the “super committee” created by the August budget ceiling deal. The “super committee” will deadlock because the Democrats are insisting that Republicans agree to massive tax hikes before they even discuss spending cuts. And when the deadlock happens, it will be up to some grownups among congressional Republicans to prevent destruction of our military if they can. They probably can’t because they agreed to the trigger mechanism already, and Obama is standing by to veto any restoration of essential military and intelligence spending. Our defense cuts haven’t yet reached the stage that Britain’s have, but they may soon. The British reallocation of military spending to other priorities — such as control of global warming — has reached the stage of low comedy. Britain’s Secretary of State for Defense Liam Fox resigned last week over allegations that one of his associates was implicitly acting as if he were a staffer with government status. Fox, a brilliant Scot, shouldn’t have resigned because of this micro-scandal. But he should have resigned before his boss — PM David Cameron — cut the Brit forces to the level they have now sunk. British airmen, operating over Libya, can’t launch from a Royal Navy carrier because there isn’t one. While Brit forces, as skilled and brave as almost any of ours, were fighting in Afghanistan and Libya on a bare-cupboard budget, Ministry of Defence funds were spent on buying carbon allowances in the EUnuchs’ entirely ridiculous “cap and trade” scheme. According to a UK Daily Mail report , ” In February 2010, Gordon Brown’s cash-strapped Government spent £60 million on ‘carbon credits’ for Whitehall and other Government offices in the UK, as well as British NATO bases in Europe. Thus while troops were going short of kit in Afghanistan, the defen s e budget was being raided to buy carbon certificates. ” Brit PM David Cameron can blame that on the Gordon Brown’s Labour Party government, which will carry as much weight as Obama’s never-ending campaign against the economic crisis that began under George W. Bush. There are no grownups in British politics, and if there are some here they have yet to reveal themselves as people who can actually stop the devolution of our economy and our military. One of these people was lost to cancer about a week ago. Steve Jobs knew how to get things done. He reportedly left four years’ of planned product innovations as part of his legacy at Apple. One wag I know said that the newest “app” for the iPhone would be “iHaunt.” Was it a coincidence that the world of BlackBerry fell apart for three days shortly after Jobs’s untimely death? Perhaps.
Here is the original post:
Where Are the Grownups?
