CNN says that with gas prices inching perilously close to $4 per gallon, Americans are driving less. Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less — that’s 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT’s Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it "the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history."…
Category: Technology
Blogging Exposed
Emily Gould’s piece about blogging for Gawker last year is a love-lorn letter to the business of blogging and what it can put a person through. A bit fluffy, but personal, entertaining, and worth a read. I particularly liked this bit: "you know, you really shouldn’t read the comments." Good advice – unless you like…
Telco Immunity Deal Coming?
That’s what Jane Hamsher thinks. According to the ACLU, there is rumor of a backroom deal being brokered by Jay Rockefeller on FISA that will include retroactive immunity. I’ve heard from several sources that Steny Hoyer is doing the dirty work on the House side, and some say it will be attached to the new…
Roommates.com: Another Bad Judicial Decision
Evidently we needed another inept ruling from the west coast circuit to remind us that justice is a three-ring circus out that-a-way. The LA Times says: The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday that … a site called Roommates.com may be brought to trial for possibly violating anti-discrimination laws because it requires users…
Censored?
Michael van der Galien, my boss at PoliGazette.com, just emailed and said that the site has been suspended by the hosting provider, one alfahosting.be. Michael had recently posted about Fitna and embedded the video in the post. A rousing discussion followed and now this. Coincidence? I doubt it. True, there are often bandwidth limitations, etc.,…
Wikipedia’s Authority
ValleyWag, the National Enquirer of the tech industry press, outed Jimmy Wales, founder and driving force behind Wikipedia, over the weekend for using his position as head of the online encyclopedia to "encourage" editing of his lover’s profile in the site’s database. There are plenty of details about, no need to dwell on them here. …
A New Kind of Political Media
Dave Winer, who’s well known for his work in the technology field, particularly as a pioneer with the RSS and XML-RPC tools that underlay many current web tools, including blogging software, asks an excellent, pertinent question about political conference calls: I’ve been asking around, where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the…
Microsoft Buyout of Yahoo?
The Washington Post says Yahoo may be acquired by Microsoft: Yahoo was one of the first companies to popularize Web searching, and it still attracts one of the Internet’s largest audiences to its main Web site, an amalgamation of services and content that includes its search engine. However, the company has had trouble translating that…
Climate Change and the Fear Factor
John Tierney has an excellent article in the NY Times science section about global warming and the science and reporting behind the climate change scare. A must read, IMO. A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end,…
Solar Array Feasible
The BBC has a cool article about the relative feasibility of using a low-orbit solar array as a source of renewable energy here. A recent study by the Pentagon concluded that a solar array in space was close to being technologically feasible, and robotics should soon make the building of large structures in space safer…