The House of Representatives rejected President Obama’s plan to delay the mandatory conversion to digital television. The delay had been approved earlier by the Senate and would have extended the deadline until June of this year. Congress originally authorized the distribution of an additional broadcast channel to each broadcast TV station so that they could…
Category: Technology
Luddites Win; Senate Votes to Delay Digital TV
At the urging of the new Obama administration, the U.S. Senate has voted to delay the nation’s transition to digital television for 4 months. The reason? “The Nielsen Co. estimates that more than 6.5 million U.S. households that rely on analog television sets to pick up over-the-air broadcast signals could see their TV sets go…
Sued, eHarmony Must Couple Gays
In 2005, eHarmony, a leading on-line matchmaking service, began to fight a discrimination lawsuit filed by a gay man in New Jersey. In 2007, the state’s attorney general found probable cause that eHarmony had violated N.J.’s Law Against Discrimination. Today the company gave in to legal pressure and agreed to pair homosexual couples. By strong-arming…
The Ultimate Programmer
Here’s the best programming joke from a recent StackOverflow list of good ones: Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and…
CyberPunks, an Apt Name
Mattathias Schwartz’s article in the NY Times magazine serves as a brief peek into the anarchic world of Internet trolls and hackers, people who are generally considered the enemy by business computing professionals like myself. There’s a freedom, or the perception of it, on the Net that doesn’t exist anywhere else in quite the same…
Telecom Immunity a Fact of Life
PBS says: The Senate approved a bill Wednesday overhauling the rules on government eavesdropping and granting immunity to telecom companies that assist with government-ordered communications monitoring. The Senate approved the bill by a vote of 69-28. And the NY Times says that until now: …more than 40 lawsuits continued churning through federal courts, charging AT&T,…
Liberals Who Simply Can’t Let Well Enough Alone
Unhappy with the deal reached between the parties about the legal fate of telecom companies who helped the feds in the aftermath of 9/11, two of the looniest of the left are banding together in an attempt to filibuster the bill in the Senate: "If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response…
The Internet->Stupidity Connection
Nick Carr says that the Internet is making us a stupid society incapable of – or unwilling to – focusing on the internalization of large bodies of information. He blames the web and its many instantaneous answers to questions we have. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at…
FISA Immunity
In what must be a blow for folks like Glenn Greenwald, Democrats and Republicans have come to the logical, inevitable conclusion that telecom firms who aided the Bush administration by compromising records of Americans’ telephony activities shall be immune from prosecution if asked to do so by the government. Dan Froomkin hates the "compromise", which…
A Small Example of What Science is For
Following on to Claudia’s piece about the importance of scientific R&D, this article, while admittedly monkey business, illustrates the point: Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and…