A Change We Can Hope For

Well, there you have it. America has elected another Dark Horse to the post of President of The United States (POTUS). As a member of Generation X,who is watching the birth of the Internet Generation, my concerns are not so much financial, but technological.

Had I the chance to speak to Mr. Obama, here are a few questions I might ask:

Concerning the MPAA, would you consider an entity who pays Third-Party Companies to force their way into your computer in order to search for “Copyrighted Materials” without a Warrant or even Due Cause to be a criminal entity? Up until 4 years ago, I really believed I was living in The Land Of the Free and that my property was protected from undue search and seizure according to the Constitution of The United States. Sure, if an individual is suspected of illegal activities, the law provides a due process to investigate these activities, but the last time I checked a Judge had to review the evidence and decided for themselves whether or not to allow your property to be searched. If I were to search the FBI’s database to determine if any agents had posted copyrighted material on any one of the message boards, would that be admissable in court?

I consider you our first YouTube-President (that’s right folks, I coined that!) and am pretty impressed with your ability to see the electronic world around you that some other politicians have ignored. So does this mean that you are willing to help protect sites such as Social Networking sites where the user-generated material actually dwarfs the creator’s material? Should we really be concerned about China taking over YouTube because they have laws against certain material that YouTube users put up?

Of course, there are other questions I might ask, however this is not a political blog and such questions have no merit here. But perhaps a few of our readers might have some questions of their own and may post them in the form of comments to this post. I would just like to point out that these are user-generated content and that neither myself nor the site owner can be held responsible if someone mentions a copyrighted phrase without duly crediting the copyright holder and paying royalties for its use…

openSuSE 11 Released - Update 1

Well, it’s 5:30pm here in Austin and I’ve been home from work about 2 hours.  After checking the mail to discover nothing from CompUSA inside, I decided to check out the tracking information via UPS. Turns out, I transposed my address on CompUSA.com and UPS was holding my new hard drive until they figured out what happened. After talking to a nice lady at UPS (why are all the good customer service people on the phone and all the bad ones behind the service desk???) she told me they would hold the package for me to pickup. Even with today’s horrific gas prices it’s worth it to me to go get it instead of waiting for it arrive tomorrow afternoon. She promised to contact the local office and give them my number to call back.

Sure enough, 30 minutes later the local UPS office called to tell me the package would be held once the driver finished his rounds and that I could pick it up between 7:30pm and 8:00pm. Now that’s a crazy window, right? Anyway, leaving out in a bit to get my hardware, will catch back up with everyone once I get everything going.

openSuSE 11 Released

Wow, I am blown away here folks! It looks as if Novell has released openSuSE 11 today and the list of included software is simply amazing! Keep in mind, this is openSuSE, meaning that all of the software in the release is opensource. No hefty license fees or proprietary file formats to worry about here!

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Clinton vs. Bush

I had a bit of a hard time when I first read this in an email, however the original author was good enough to point to a respectable authority on the subject which could verify their information. Today, most Americans think that their current President is one of the worst in history, while the one before that was the best ever. So, which of our past two Presidents had more of a positive effect on our Nation’s economy? The answer may surprise you. How about a side-by-side comparison:
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Wal-Mart Drops HD DVD

Friday, February 15th 2008 is the day that will live in infamy. Or maybe we’ll have forgotten all about it by this time next week: Wal-Mart announced their decision to stop carrying HD DVD Players. The following has been posted on Wikipedia’s HD-DVD page:

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Rascism In America

Perhaps one of the most volatile subjects in the 20th Century, it appears as if Racism is not dead and is making its comeback in the 21st Century: A recent news article noted that a “white man” threatened to “shoot any and all black persons” who attended a meeting at an old church in Bangor, Maine, “the whitest state”.

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How To Convert Lit to MP3

Disclaimer: The information in this post is meant to be educational only and not to be used to commit a crime, regardless of which country the information is received in.

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NASA’s Big Decision

First off, a warning: This posting is purely editorial in nature and will not contain any new information and is purely my own opinion based on available facts.

NASA has finally grown a pair! After 50 years of ass-kissing and ground-licking, the administrators and engineers have finally stood up the politicians and said, “Wait a second, this isn’t safe so we’re gonna check things out first, so back off and let us do our job!” And I for one am very proud of them. (more…)

IBM’s Latest News… Or Is It?

Okay, I could go ahead and write what would possibly be the 4,732nd article about The Big Blue Teddy Bear’s supercomputing “breakthrough” that seems to be making the rounds, or I could just poke fun at the blogging and newsmaking community as a whole… Let me think about that one for just a minute…
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Microsoft Attacks!

In a move reminiscent of France’s opposition to the Iraqi invasion, and then their subsequent request to help with the rebuilding once all the hard work was pretty much over, Microsoft has attacked the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Organization and demanded that they upgrade their hardware in order to better fit their bloated, memory sucking and overly proprietary operating system XP onto the benevolent laptops. (more…)

China vs. The World

I am sure many of our citizens and military personnel are confused and upset over the recent “misunderstanding” that occurred with the Kitty Hawk. For those of you living in a vacuum, an American battle group lead by the USS Kitty Hawk was recently turned away from a long-scheduled Thanksgiving R&R break in Hong Kong by Chinese officials who gave no explanation. This may not sound like much of a problem, however many of the sailors and soldiers on board had “hundreds” of family members who had flown in from all around the world to Hong Kong to meet them.

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