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I went to bed last night at 1:00 AM, well after the Electoral vote count was called for Obama (yay) and with a slim Popular vote count for Obama (keep it up), and well after making sure that the worst of the worst Florida amendment ballots had crashed and burned to defeat. And so this morning I know I got a lot of things to write about.
I want to start off by thanking the people who stopped off to view the blog during these final months of the election. Especially everyone who came by looking for the blog entry reviewing the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. The pageviews for that got into 1,000+ hits within the month, becoming the second-most viewed entry on this blog.
It's a bit amazing what I get from the page count stats on this blog. It's showing me what search terms were used, showing me where the searches are coming from (Japan? The second-most views are from Japan? ...I mean, I'm thrilled I'm getting readers that far overseas... But now I feel the need to send a gift basket or something to the local consulate...). It's been a thrill watching the daily pageview counts go from 7 per day to 100 to 200.
It's a pity I can't get more of you to post a comment though. Is it really that hard to use one of the account options that Blogger allows? I'm seeing it allowing Yahoo Open ID, Google, I think Facebook logins... Do me a favor, someone. Let me know what you're seeing for Login options for Comments, I will read your Anonymous submission and post it as long as it's clean and on-topic.
My next posts are going to be covering observations about how the 2012 Election went last night (messier than it ought to be: forget voter fraud, the TRUE scandal of voting is how effed up is this system), and a deeper comment about the Florida Amendment votes and what it should mean for Rick "Ass Kicked" Scott.
Big smiles, Obama people. Big smiles!
10 Kasım 2012 Cumartesi
The Rump Parliament of Media
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In the aftermath of this 2012 election, one of the most obvious results of last night was how the conservative columnists and media darlings sitting at the head of the American political commentary were so utterly and completely wrong about how the election was going to play out.
To quote Conor:
Each of those talking heads/columnists have been publicly exposed for putting personal viewpoints ahead of the facts and sticking to fantasy of their narrative - they are more invested in a close horse-race in order to keep ratings high - rather than doing the hard work of actual journalism - which would have involved research, genuine analysis, and more than likely direct interviewing of key people which in this case would have been a decent sampling of Honest-to-God voters.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that these media types - isolated in their offices, traveling in hermetically-sealed limos, chatting with each other in closed studios - are truly in a bubble of their own making. They can't perceive the world outside that bubble and think that Real America - some idealized majority among us 300 million - is just like them: pining for the era when America saved everyone during the Cold War, our Dollar was golden and Reagan their God. Just look at Peggy Noonan's insistence that she could see the Real America, simply because she saw so many yard signs for Romney as she rode down the streets of Florida... without realizing that a low-staffed Romney ground game had little else to do BUT put yard signs everywhere they could. Or that Obama yard signs kept getting stolen by spiteful Romney supporters.
This shouldn't be too surprising when the Republican leadership during the Bush the Lesser years embraced the idea that their belief, and acting on that belief, would force the Real World to bend to their will. Again to Conor:
Each of the people named by Friedersdorf - including Rush Limbaugh, who wasn't named but is part of the same problem - are now conservative columnists and radio hosts who came of age in the shadow of Reagan. None of them seem to grasp that it's not 1985 anymore. It's been 30 years since the heyday of Saint Ronnie's regime and yet the likes of George Will and Noonan and seem to think that most of America's problems can be solved the same way (unlikely: the problems we have now stem from what happened in 1985...) and with the same leadership (a solid conservative manly, religious, and devoted to deregulated economics). These columnists and permanent guests on the talk show circuits have a problem accepting the slight possibility that a non-Republican could lead this nation: these are the same people who had problems accepting Bill Clinton, focusing more on his flaws than his skills, and it's only 10 years after he left that they're finally grokking why a majority of Americans still think well of Clinton and his presidency.
Their failure this weekend to stick to the facts, the whole-hearted way they gleefully predicted a Romney landslide as though he would be yet another Return to Reagan-ism, brings to the fore just how out-of-touch these self-appointed judges of Real America really are. This is the breaking point of "Epistemic Closure", the groupthink of people who haven't the need to think for more than 30 years...
I'm with Ta-Nehisi here: time to fire the pundits. We don't need a term limit for elected officials, we can just vote them out if needed. No, it's time to retire some of these self-indulgent out-of-touch media elites who have sat too long in the television studios (here now to James Fallows):
They should be fired. They should resign if they have any true perspective on the world around them. But ah, the temptations of those six-figure speaking fees and seven-figure book deals...
You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! - Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament
In the aftermath of this 2012 election, one of the most obvious results of last night was how the conservative columnists and media darlings sitting at the head of the American political commentary were so utterly and completely wrong about how the election was going to play out.
To quote Conor:
Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.
Those audiences were misinformed...
Each of those talking heads/columnists have been publicly exposed for putting personal viewpoints ahead of the facts and sticking to fantasy of their narrative - they are more invested in a close horse-race in order to keep ratings high - rather than doing the hard work of actual journalism - which would have involved research, genuine analysis, and more than likely direct interviewing of key people which in this case would have been a decent sampling of Honest-to-God voters.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that these media types - isolated in their offices, traveling in hermetically-sealed limos, chatting with each other in closed studios - are truly in a bubble of their own making. They can't perceive the world outside that bubble and think that Real America - some idealized majority among us 300 million - is just like them: pining for the era when America saved everyone during the Cold War, our Dollar was golden and Reagan their God. Just look at Peggy Noonan's insistence that she could see the Real America, simply because she saw so many yard signs for Romney as she rode down the streets of Florida... without realizing that a low-staffed Romney ground game had little else to do BUT put yard signs everywhere they could. Or that Obama yard signs kept getting stolen by spiteful Romney supporters.
This shouldn't be too surprising when the Republican leadership during the Bush the Lesser years embraced the idea that their belief, and acting on that belief, would force the Real World to bend to their will. Again to Conor:
In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.
Each of the people named by Friedersdorf - including Rush Limbaugh, who wasn't named but is part of the same problem - are now conservative columnists and radio hosts who came of age in the shadow of Reagan. None of them seem to grasp that it's not 1985 anymore. It's been 30 years since the heyday of Saint Ronnie's regime and yet the likes of George Will and Noonan and seem to think that most of America's problems can be solved the same way (unlikely: the problems we have now stem from what happened in 1985...) and with the same leadership (a solid conservative manly, religious, and devoted to deregulated economics). These columnists and permanent guests on the talk show circuits have a problem accepting the slight possibility that a non-Republican could lead this nation: these are the same people who had problems accepting Bill Clinton, focusing more on his flaws than his skills, and it's only 10 years after he left that they're finally grokking why a majority of Americans still think well of Clinton and his presidency.
Their failure this weekend to stick to the facts, the whole-hearted way they gleefully predicted a Romney landslide as though he would be yet another Return to Reagan-ism, brings to the fore just how out-of-touch these self-appointed judges of Real America really are. This is the breaking point of "Epistemic Closure", the groupthink of people who haven't the need to think for more than 30 years...
I'm with Ta-Nehisi here: time to fire the pundits. We don't need a term limit for elected officials, we can just vote them out if needed. No, it's time to retire some of these self-indulgent out-of-touch media elites who have sat too long in the television studios (here now to James Fallows):
Remember, these people's claim to fame -- especially in the case of (in their respective primes) Barone, Morris, and Rove -- is that they know something special about politics. If they are putting their names behind these predictions, presumably they would like us to take them seriously. We'll see what happens in the next day or two: If they are right, all appropriate credit. But if they are not, this should be remembered, rather than just blown off. And similarly, if the "quants" who are unanimously predictable a sizable Obama win prove to be wrong, they should be made to explain.
They should be fired. They should resign if they have any true perspective on the world around them. But ah, the temptations of those six-figure speaking fees and seven-figure book deals...
It's Cheap, It's Easy, It's Winners And Losers the 2012 Elections Edition
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What can I say? I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
Losers: Rick Scott. Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then. Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus). Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott.
In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
Did I miss anyone?
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
 |
| Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears. |
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
Did I miss anyone?
Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH
To contact us Click HERE
Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH |
| Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH Posted: 09 Sep 2012 03:03 AM PDT Web vid spec has Microsoft on board, but Apple's still hanging backNow that the web vid spec MPEG DASH has been published and interoperability testing is well underway, vendors are starting to put their cards on the table with serious deployments. One of the first to build DASH into products is Thomson Video Networks, which is now supporting it in its ViBE VS7000 multi-screen video platform, with the help of multi-media software company VisualOn. The DASH support is built into VisualOn's multi-media player that Thomson now incorporates into ViBE for cross-platform audio and video playback on target devices.… |
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GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back
To contact us Click HERE
GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back |
- GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back
- Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal
- Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets
- Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces
- Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash
- iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection
- Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control
- Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy
- Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists
- UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report
- Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks
- Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review
- Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently
- Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout
- Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed
- There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button
- Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth
- Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart
- Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn
- Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit
- Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear
- Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016'
- Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe
- Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment
- Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami
- More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip
- What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set
- So many devices, so little policy
- Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys
- Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy
- Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us
- Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm
- Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time
- WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week
- Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning
- Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android
- Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab'
- Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review
- Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant
- Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL
- iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority
- UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward
- AMD previews Piledriver, Ivy Bridge SeaMicro microservers
- McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search
- Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen
- Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles
- Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to'
- Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty
- NZ software giants join patent bill protest
- E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours'
| GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:13 PM PDT 'There is no single simple issue to fix'Open source bigwigs like Alan Cox, Miguel De Icaza, and Linus Torvalds can bicker all they want, says GNOME hacker Michael Meeks, but changing developer culture won't do a thing to attract more consumers to the Linux desktop.… |
| Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:46 PM PDT Court rules $9,250 per track is constitutionally fairNearly five years after being found guilty of file-sharing in the media industry's first jury trial on the issue, Minnesotan mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset is back where she started after the appeals court upheld the original verdict.… |
| Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:49 PM PDT Can't beat 'em, join 'emIDF 2012 Intel wants to turn laptops and even desktops into tablets in order to reverse the decline in the personal computer market. To that end, it unwrapped two form-factors it will be promoting to get tablet-hungry consumers back buying PCs.… |
| Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:25 PM PDT Offers a million bucks for the best 'perceptual computing' ideaIDF 2012 Intel wants computers to be as smart as humans in how they understand voices and gestures – and it's offering $1m to the best idea that can help achieve that goal.… |
| Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:18 PM PDT Chip giant to keep Win8 touch bandwagon rollingIDF 2012 Intel has been pumping money into the touchscreen component business in order to encourage the production of panels of 13in and up to make sure there are enough of them for vendors to build all the touch-enabled Windows 8 notebooks Intel hopes World+Dog will want.… |
| iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:07 PM PDT America to get rich selling Foxconn gizmos to itself!Strange, terrible, yet curiously inevitable news today - the day before iPhone 5 day. Analysis based on figures from hefty Wall Street brains appears to show that the Jesus Phone is set to account for a large chunk - perhaps the majority - of US economic activity within a matter of decades.… |
| Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control Posted: 11 Sep 2012 11:33 AM PDT SP1 beta increases InTune integrationRedmond's been talking about how System Center will be at the heart of its reboot of the Windows franchise for months now, and now it has released the beta of its first service pack.… |
| Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:53 AM PDT Just a little router trouble, that's allDomain registrar GoDaddy has commented on the daylong DNS outage that downed many of its customers' websites on Monday, saying that not only was a hacker not responsible, but that the service interruption wasn't the result of a DDoS attack at all.… |
| Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:24 AM PDT More breaking news on the conflict in SyriaPro-Syrian government hacktivists have cracked the mobile update service of al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news network.… |
| UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:24 AM PDT Not good enough for government work. CuttingJapanese IT group Fujitsu is among several companies that have been "blacklisted" by the UK Government, claims the Financial Times.… |
| Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:02 AM PDT Warg hauled back to Sweden for copyright cooler stintGottfrid Svartholm Warg, a co-founder of download haven The Pirate Bay, is back in Sweden - and now faces allegations of playing a role in an attack on the country's taxmen and IT consultancy biz Logica.… |
| Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:28 AM PDT Passes the Google test and then someFirst look There was birthday cake aplenty at Viewsonic's 25th anniversary event in London today that also saw the introduction of three new products covering an innovative range of display options.… |
| Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:06 AM PDT No, not Nokia engineers. Well, not this timeMicrosoft has pledged software and expertise in a battle to save the world's most endangered species - and we don't mean Nokia engineers.… |
| Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:42 AM PDT Bury command server deep in the onionSecurity researchers have discovered a botnet that uses the Tor anonymiser network to hide its command nodes.… |
| Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:18 AM PDT Fondling fandroids say slab needs hard resetReports are filtering in that some Google Nexus 7 tablets slow to a crawl once the memory starts filling up, and require a hard reset to bring them back to the admirable speed expected of Google's flagship hardware.… |
| There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:01 AM PDT Keep calm and download these handy toolsComment The disappearance of the Start button in Microsoft's new Windows has proved unsettling for users. "I want Start. Start I say," said an early tester in a post entitled "Worst 60 minutes in my entire life".… |
| Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:29 AM PDT Govt-backed bank may pump bioscience, tech sectorsBlighty's Business Secretary Vince Cable pulled back the curtains on his new biz investment bank this morning.… |
| Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:00 AM PDT Linux moneybags funds Um Bongo's cloudy file systemBillionaire Linux kingpin Mark Shuttleworth has injected $1m into storage startup Inktank to bring the team's distributed file system Ceph to cloud computing.… |
| Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:42 AM PDT Now, Brits, tell us everything about your motorsGoogle is now offering to compare car insurance prices for Brits following the company's acquisition of BeatThatQuote.… |
| Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:24 AM PDT Stuffs wallet with Sony and BlackBerry cashPrivately owned music services pioneer Omnifone boasted its first ever annual profit this morning. The company provides a platform for streaming services including that of Sony (Music Unlimited) and RIM (BBM Music) and operates in 28 markets. Omnifone was founded in 2003 and launched its first service, MusicStation, in 2007. It has notched up several firsts, including the first cloud streaming service and the first licensed scan-and-match service.… |
| Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:01 AM PDT Tiled phone, not PC, could put Redmond on topOpen ... and Shut Windows Phone 8 might spell the beginning of a climb to relevance for a desktop vendor breaking out its latest PC operating system at almost the same time.… |
| Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016' Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:44 AM PDT Public-facing services to coin it, predicts IDCSome $100bn will be slurped up by public IT cloud services by 2016, according to the crystal-ball gazers at IDC.… |
| Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:26 AM PDT Operation Elveden nets another suspectA 31-year-old prison officer was arrested at his home in Northampton this morning as part of Scotland Yard's investigation into alleged bungs to cops. The probe is related to the Met's ongoing phone-hacking inquiry.… |
| Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:17 AM PDT Would destroy the economy, thoughWindy professors in the States have produced research in which they say that massive use of wind power would not, as had been thought, damage the planet's atmosphere and cause undesirable climate changes. They also argue that it would be "practical" to obtain half the energy required by the human race using wind turbines.… |
| Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:02 AM PDT EE rises to promise 16 cities next-gen mobe broadbandEverything Everywhere is no more: long live EE and 4G. The mobile operator now gets to watch its children, Orange and T-Mobile, starve to death as they're denied access to the 4G feast.… |
| More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:43 AM PDT Rumour mill in overdrive for 7in tabletRumours that Apple will launch an "iPad mini" at its unveiling event tomorrow intensified today after more pictures of cases leaked online and retailers started advertising screen protectors for a 7in slab.… |
| What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:14 AM PDT Bletchley Park flogs custom board in honour of code-breakerHe may not have made it onto the £10 banknote, but the face of WWII code-breaking hero Alan Turing now adorns the back of the silly money that's boxed into a new custom Monopoly set.… |
| So many devices, so little policy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:45 AM PDT So what are you waiting for?Live event Every one of your users has a computer at home, maybe a laptop, definitely a phone, and likes to log in from someone else's computer from time to time. They're carrying your data around, but often not your security policy.… |
| Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:44 AM PDT From little seeds giant |
| Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:28 AM PDT Amateur ballooning rivals meet for head-to-head showdownPics The friendly rivalry between Brit and Oz amateur High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) enthusiasts hit new heights over the weekend when the two nations went head-to-head in a stratospheric clash of high-altitude titans.… |
| Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:58 AM PDT Hybrid racker needs VC cashHybrid flash and disk drive array start-up Nimble Storage has been given $40.7m in venture capital funding to boost sales, marketing and engineering.… |
| Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:42 AM PDT Increased use of council ICT services putting the squeeze on managersA report from the public sector IT directors' group Socitm has identified four ongoing priorities for ICT managers in the wake of continuing austerity.… |
| Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:19 AM PDT 'Dear ICO, sue us ... We're sick of you and this ridiculous cookie law'UK businesses should actively involve themselves in the debate over changes to EU law if they want to avoid problems stemming from the way those laws are drafted, an expert has advised.… |
| WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:02 AM PDT Thinner, 'extreme' capacities promisedWestern Digital will face investors on Thursday and tell them what the world's new number-one disk drive supplier is going to do to stay at the top.… |
| Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:33 AM PDT Windows passwords exposure confusionAuthenTec, the security firm that's the target of an $356m acquisition by Apple, has denied reports that possible cryptographic weaknesses in its fingerprint scanner software pose a risk to the security of laptops.… |
| Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:30 AM PDT There's only one way to settle this...FIGHT!Not content with dominating the massive Chinese e-commerce market, local hero Alibaba now wants to chase Android into the sea by making its cloud-based Aliyun mobile operating system China's preferred smartphone OS.… |
| Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab' Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:11 AM PDT Give the people what they want - ASAPMicrosoft has urged developers to "lead the land grab" by developing Windows 8 apps ASAP.… |
| Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:00 AM PDT Magnetic keyblet combo, anyone?Archos has built a decent business making budget Android tablets, so I suspect the word 'merde' echoed loudly around the Igny HQ when Google pulled the rug asunder with its low Nexus 7 pricing. Archos hasn't given up though and has now released a new device pitched as a budget alternative to the Asus Transformer Pad.… |
| Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:47 PM PDT Electronics giant's woes continue as CLW turns the knifeSouth Korean electronics behemoth Samsung has been hit by fresh allegations of impropriety at one of its manufacturing plants in China, this time involving purported sexual discrimination in its hiring policy.… |
| Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:05 PM PDT Regulator insists ad placements can misled and deceiveAustralia's High Court, from which no appeal is possible, will this week hear a case in which Google stands accused of intentionally deceiving and misleading consumers by automatically placing ads according to advertisers' requested keywords.… |
| iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority Posted: 10 Sep 2012 09:28 PM PDT American Airlines allowed to use in-cockpit fondleslabs "in all phases of flight"Being asked to switch off your electronic devices during the takeoff and landing phases of a flight now looks even more anachronistic, after American Airlines announced it has been given permission to let its pilots use iPads in the cockpit "in all phases of flight".… |
| UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward Posted: 10 Sep 2012 08:50 PM PDT There's a good boy...The UK economy is set to get a much needed boost on Tuesday when Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei announces an expected £1.2bn investment including hundreds of jobs.… |
| AMD previews Piledriver, Ivy Bridge SeaMicro microservers Posted: 10 Sep 2012 06:56 PM PDT Stretches Freedom interconnect fabric out to storageSeaMicro is not longer an independent company, but you would not have guessed that if you were dropped in from outer space to attend the launch of the new SM15000 microserver in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Advanced Micro Devices may own SeaMicro, but the company went out of its way to support the latest "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3-1200 v2 processor from rival Intel as well as its own forthcoming "Piledriver" Opteron processor as new compute nodes in a new SeaMicro chassis.… |
| McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:50 PM PDT Malwaria activissimaIn McAfee's latest survey of the celebrity searches most likely to lead to malware infection, Emma Watson – perhaps best known as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films – has taken the top spot, knocking off model Heidi Klum from last year's most-likely-to-infect honors.… |
| Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:34 PM PDT DIY instructions await the brave or foolishA hacker named Gef has rigged up his Raspberry Pi to use a Kindle e-reader as its monitor.… |
| Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:22 PM PDT Experimental builds for phones with ARMv6 chipsThe Mozilla Foundation would like to see its Firefox browser running on more mobile phones. But since almost no handsets ship with Firefox pre-installed, that means getting the software onto more of the phones that are already out there – even if they use older hardware.… |
| Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to' Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:38 PM PDT Knows when its best to call, text, or just leave her aloneIDF 2012 Intel Labs is working on a technology that uses what it calls "contextual awareness" to advise you of the best method to use when contacting others.… |
| Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:16 PM PDT What would Heisenberg's position be?A group of Canadian PhD researchers claim to have obtained information beyond the "Heisenberg limit" using a technique called "weak measurement".… |
| NZ software giants join patent bill protest Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:45 PM PDT Petitioning against patent trollsUpdated: govt says "no" New Zealand's largest software exporters, Jade and Orion Healthcare, have lined up with the NZ Open Source Society, InternetNZ, and local industry lobby NZRise to ask the government to revise its proposed patent laws.… |
| E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours' Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:14 PM PDT BlueToad clears FBI of device data collectionIt seems both Apple and the FBI were telling the truth: the Apple UDIDs published last week didn't come from either organization, with an American e-publisher posting a statement that the data was stolen from its systems.… |
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9 Kasım 2012 Cuma
It's Cheap, It's Easy, It's Winners And Losers the 2012 Elections Edition
To contact us Click HERE
What can I say? I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
Losers: Rick Scott. Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then. Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus). Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott.
In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
Did I miss anyone?
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
|
| Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears. |
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
Did I miss anyone?
Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH
To contact us Click HERE
Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH |
| Thomson joins vid-streamers' rush for MPEG-DASH Posted: 09 Sep 2012 03:03 AM PDT Web vid spec has Microsoft on board, but Apple's still hanging backNow that the web vid spec MPEG DASH has been published and interoperability testing is well underway, vendors are starting to put their cards on the table with serious deployments. One of the first to build DASH into products is Thomson Video Networks, which is now supporting it in its ViBE VS7000 multi-screen video platform, with the help of multi-media software company VisualOn. The DASH support is built into VisualOn's multi-media player that Thomson now incorporates into ViBE for cross-platform audio and video playback on target devices.… |
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