Don't Drink and Vote

I found this fall over funny item on The Fox News website.

A Maryland candidate for Senate paid a Baltimore drug-treatment center to drive recovering addicts to a debate last week, where they held up signs supporting his campaign.
A consultant to Democrat Josh Rales campaign paid the I Can't, We Can drug counseling center to transport the 20 patients to the event... where they were supposed to help post signs. But the addicts — who pay about $350 a month for treatment, and some of whom have criminal records — ended up holding the signs themselves.
Rales campaign manager tells the Washington Times that the addicts were recruited without the campaign's knowledge, and the contractor called paying the center for volunteers, "a real error in judgment."

Chips Annoy

I have learned not to eat potato chips anymore.
I had half a bag of chips and felt horrible.
One more on my growing list of thing not to do.

Felling Better All The Time.

I saw my heart doctor recently (last week) and he said I was doing very well and does not need to see me until November.
(I can't wait for November 30th as it marks the end of hurricane season)

I'm still playing Oblivion and the more I play this game the more impressed I am.
I finally bought a house in the game called Arbor Watch. The house is big and lots of places to store stuff.
However I have a few complaints about the game.
Comparing Oblivion to Morrowind there are a few things missing.
First the spells.
The spells of Mark and Recall are gone. These spells let you set a point in the game called a Mark. You then used the spell Recall to be transported instantly (well almost) to that point.
This came in very handy when cleaning out tombs. You could set the Mark in front of a shop then go raid tomb. Once you had all you could carry you use Recall and ZAP you are in front of the store where you can sell your items.
This has been replaced by "Fats Travel" which requires you to be one the surface outside a tomb and ready to travel to where ever you want on the map. It does however take the same amount of game time that normal travel does.
Also you can no longer decorate you house with lights as you could in the old game. In the old game I had candles and lanterns placed on the outside of my house so it would be easy to find from a distance.
They have also removed the ability to place items where you want. In the old game you could place items more or less where you wanted.
In my house I had a shelf full of helmets of bad guys I had killed.
Now you may only drop and move object.
You can move the objects around using telekineses but it extremely difficult to have an item face a certain way.
This is very annoying.
Other than that I give Oblivion a five star review.

A Bridge To Nonsense

Senator Ted Stevens a Republican form Alaska gave his view on Net Neutrality.
Stevens is the man behind the $453 million dollar bridge to no where.
Stevens spoke for ten minutes before congress.
Frankly he should have just sat down and kept quite.
You can hear his speech here: http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/497 .
Steven in an unfocused and rambling diatribe he compared the internet to plumping.
The Senator dose not understand the workings of the net.
Stevens has no understanding of even how Netflicks works.
He also seems to need an explanation of how consumerism and capitalism works.
Stevens, like a lot of people, do not understand or does not care that services who use the Internet like Netflicks, Google, and Ebay do not get a free ride.
They pay their own Internet Service Providers, their pay for the own net security and the pay for server systems that keep them on the net.
The people pushing this are doing so as a money grab. They want to charge services like Google and Ebay extra to use their cable which the customers are already paid for.
They claim the these services will swallow the expenses. No, they will, as with all things pass the expense to the customers.
You will as a result see the prices at Ebay, Netflicks and others go up.
This bill should be watched with great care.

Flags of Ill Advice

Broadcast flag From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A broadcast flag is a set of status bits or "flags" sent in the data stream of a digital television program that indicates
whether or not it can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content. Possible restrictions include
inability to save a digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of
recorded content in order to share or archive, forceful reduction of quality when recording such as reducing high-definition
video to the resolution of standard TVs, and inability to skip over commercials.

In the United States, new television receivers using the ATSC standard were supposed to incorporate this functionality by July 1, 2005, but a federal court struck
down the Federal Communications Commission's rule to this effect on May 6. The stated intention of the broadcast flag was to
prevent copyright infringement, but many have asserted that broadcast flags interfere with the fair use rights of the viewing
public.
The broad rewrite of US telecommunications laws makes it to the Senate floor, it will include the broadcast flag. Despite
objections voiced by Sen. John Sununu (R-NH), the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has left both the
audio and video broadcast flags.
However, individual senators would still be able to offer amendments to the legislation that would remove the controversial
flags. Sen. Sununu has indicated he might do exactly that.
The Commerce Committee will continue reviewing the bill, amendment by amendment, with network neutrality next on the list.
Once they have finished marking up the bill, Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) still has to make the call on whether to send it to
the full Senate for a vote. Right now, he's undecided, as he believes it is doubtful the bill's proponents could muster the
60 votes necessary to stop a possible filibuster.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), is opposing any telecom legislation that does not include a provision safeguarding network neutrality.
"I will do anything I can to block a major telecom rewrite that undermines what makes the Internet special. I will block it.
I will do anything I can to derail it," said Wyden. That may include placing a hold on the bill to further delay attempts at
passage.
The House of Representatives, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings on the net neutrality issue. RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol, EVP Fritz Attaway from the MPAA, and Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association all testified before the comity. They said the flags are essential to the survival of the music and movie industries. The CEA's Shapiro disputed that, telling the Committee that "we have to stop measuring creativity by the financial interests of ten companies."

Net Neutrality

The Senate Commerce Committee approved on Wednesday the telecommunications reform bill with a bi-partisan vote of 15-7.

The bill now named "The Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunity Reform" was initially introduced by Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
The bill addresses a wide range of communications-related issues, including municipal broadband services, video franchise reform and more.

Several senators, consumer advocate groups, and e-commerce corporations have stated they felt the bill did not address Internet Neutrality effectively.

"Internet Neutrality" has been described as being able to transmit any kind of content is important, to the well being of Internet as a whole and to eLearning in particular.

Jeanine Kenny of the Consumers Union said: "Right now under current law, there's nothing to stop the phone and cable companies from striking a deal to offer high-speed access to a company like Google and refusing to provide any deal at all to a different company like Yahoo. There's not even a rule on the books that would prevent them from blocking Web sites."

Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) proposed an amendment to the bill to "ensure fair treatment of all Internet content." The amendment incorporated the following non-discriminatory principle: "to promote broadband deployment, and presence and promote the open and interconnected nature of the Internet, a broadband service provider shall not discriminate Internet traffic based on source, ownership, or destination of such traffic as part of any publicly available Internet offering."

I recommend read THIS article by Cory Doctorow. Mr. Doctorow does a good job of explaining why we should support Internet Neutrality.
But that just my opinion.