John McCain: “I hate the bloggers.”

Does anyone have a link to the full clip?

On Tuesday, the EU accepted a proposal to consider internet censorship as a trade barrier. The proposer of the policy, Jules Maaten, feels that this would protect online freedom of speech.Justice John Stevens has this to say about internet censorship:

As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.— Justice John Paul Stevens, in Reno v. ACLU, 1997.

Although internet censorship is, in my opinion, valid in certain cases; I don’t think that one can label it as a barrier for trade. Do you agree with this proposal? What do you think would be the consequences on the global economy if such a policy if it were approved?

“With two-thirds of the nation saying the country is on the wrong course, the two parties are offering candidates both of whom played major roles in setting that course. And neither probable nominee has advanced ideas to deal with the crises America faces, nor even shown any great awareness that the country is in crisis.” — Buchanan

more…

So it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here hasn’t it? I’ve been very busy lately and didn’t have time to do any ranting. Anyway, so as most of the world knows, and as the title of this post suggests, I’m going to vent about the Santiago Fire. It turns out the fire was arsen. What crazy illogical person would go around setting fires?! It’s about 10 miles from my house, btw…

Here’s some info on the fires:

• Fire officials now say they expect to be fighting the Santiago fire for between five and 14 more days. – 1:06 p.m.
• Two more houses are buring in Modjeska Canyon, Orange County Fire Authority officials said this afternoon. One double-wide mobile home near Santiago Canyon Road and Modjeska Grade Road has already been destroyed. – 1:01 p.m.
• Fire officials are estimating that the Santiago fire has caused at least $5.5 million in damage since Sunday evening. They expect that figure to increase significantly, in part because they now expect to lose some homes in Modjeska Canyon. – 12:53 p.m.

Google Maps — Highlighted Area of Santiago Fire

Quite interesting: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/15/moore.gupta/index.html

The senator that is pushing for a ban on cellphone use while driving ironically rear-ended a lady while driving and talking on her cell phone. So much for practice what you preach, eh…

Engadget reported a story based on an internal Apple e-mail that was forwarded to them. The e-mail stated the iPhone would be pushed back to October and Leopard would be pushed back to January. Within a matter of 6 minutes, Apple stock dropped from $107.89 to $103.42 wiping out over $4B of Apple’s capitalization.

The e-mail turned out to be a hoax. Apple released the following statement:

This communication is fake and did not come from Apple. Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in October.

According to Threat Level, a Wired blog, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is missing a hard drive containing the social security numbers, birth dates, bank accounts, and payroll info of about 100,000 employees. A TSA press release states “It is unclear at this stage whether the device is still within headquarters or was stolen.”

Looks like their Information Security department isn’t doing a good job.

I was watching the news this morning while eating breakfast and saw a small/quick segment in which they said Apple approached Verizon to feature the iPhone a few years back but Verizon said no because Apple wanted a percentage of the iPhone user’s monthly bill among other things.