News: Microsoft backs off on music player contracts. Microsoft Corp. quickly backed off on a demand to portable music player manufacturers that if they chose to include Windows Media Player in software packages, only that program could be included, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reported Thursday in its update on the company’s compliance with its antitrust settlement. [Macworld]
The DOJ fights against the evil empire. What worked for PCs will not work for music players.
Fitzgerald Launches Web Site . Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has just launched his own brand-new Web site. By washingtonpost.com. [washingtonpost.com - White House Briefing]
Bookmark the site. You know people will be checking it regularly over the next week.
Our pillows are dangerous for our health.
Researchers at the University of Manchester have studied the fungal contamination of our pillows for the first time in seventy years and discovered that they were hot beds of fungal spores, with some species able to cause diseases and even death.
Links: short version, long version
Scary. Or not. More research needed I guess. But if you are immuno-compromised, it might be a good idea to put your pillow inside plastic cases, just in case.
I saw this one up at Agitprop and couldn’t resist. Blogenfreude’s post is on this unbelievable dolt from the Midwest that tossed away almost a quarter of a million bucks at an “adult establishment” getting lap dances and who knows what else.
Sometimes I miss living in New York. When it comes to tabloid coverage of essential insanity like this, no one does it better than the Post and the Daily News. This tongue-wagger is from the NYDN:
A married business executive who dropped $241,000 during one wild night at Scores was an insatiable customer who hired a virtual harem of lap dancers, a strip club source told the Daily News yesterday.Robert McCormick, 40, an Internet company CEO and Midwestern father of three girls, took over the exclusive President’s Club when he showed up with some cronies the night of Oct. 22, 2003, the source said.
In the mirrored room, popular with high rollers and celebrities, the stripper enthusiast demanded 10 dancers lavish him with attention at the eye-popping cost of $4,000 an hour.
[Pandagon]
QUite an interesting case. I imagine that the company is not too happy about this but, then, it has been going on for 2 years, so they does not appear to have been any ramifications for the CEO. But using a company credit card!!
NBA Dress Code – Response to reader comments.
I wanted to address some of the comments. I just think its necessary.
First. There is no question, that even at the minimum salary, NBA rookies and 1st year players are blessed to
be earning that much money. However, realize that about 55 pct comes off the top for taxes (they have to pay taxes in
ever state we play in), agent and union dues, and NBA Escrow. But more importantly, we bang on them to save, save save.
For most of the NBA minimum Free Agents in their first or 2nd year, these will be the ONLY years they play in the
NBA.Its a darwinian business. Chances are this is their only year or two in the NBA. If they are cut, they probably
go play in the minor leagues, or possibly in Europe, but in either case, there is a 95pct chance that they arent going
to be in this business, the one they have dreamed of and prepared for their entire lives for more than 4 years.Which in turn means they have to find a new profession. Thats not cheap, thats not easy.
So while it may seem like a rookie free agent has plenty of money to buy custom tailored suits or
sport coats for up to 2 grand a pop, its a big investment that could impact their future. In the big picture,
that rookie and everyone who knows this business, knows thats money that should be saved for the future and its a
huge hit for them.2nd. Issue. The “Thug” Issue.
If you look at NBA players. White, black, brown, yellow, whatever color or nationality, regardless of how they dress,
and think thug. You are an idiot. I have said it before, and I will say it again. I have run companies with a
predominantly young work force. My personnel issues were far worse in those companies than anything at the Mavs, or
what I have seen across the NBA. Young kids makes stupid mistakes. Thats what 21 year olds do.If I had cameras following me when I was in my 20s……Or go to any hot nightclub and watch 20 somethings partying.
Then ask them where they work.Im willing to bet that you could take the workforce of any major corporation, segment out all their employees 35 and
under and without question, you would find far more problems and issues in their workforce on, in absolute numbers or
on a percentage basis than you would in the NBA.I bet that any person over the age of 25 reading this post knows more screwups personally than there are playing in
the NBA.The reality for the NBA however is that we have let the media coverage of our game be personality based. The NFL has
someone on trial or in jail every single week. Sure hasnt affected their ratings at all. Why ? Because media coverage
is of the team, game strategy and in game matchups. Most of us couldnt identify 90 pct of the players on our favorite
football team in a lineup. You might know their name and number, but you have no idea what they look like.Randy Moss gets high. No one says they wont watch the NFL because of it. So and so gets accused of beating such and
such. Its reported. Its documented. No one turns off the NFL as a result. We arent talking about the NFL having an
image problem, we talk about how the price for Super Bowl ads continue to go up. How many advertisers walk away from
the NFL and claim its because of the NFL image ? Heck, the NFL turns away ads for a movie about sports gambling. Talk
about hypocritical…No one cares.Watch the pregame of NFL games. They have talked to coaches about plays. They talk about plays. They talk about
defensive strategy. They talk about what will be run in which situations. Fans do the same. It makes
watching the games a lot more fun.What do we talk about before an NBA game ? Sure we talk about individual matchups. We might even talk about
individual skills. But how many in the media even know that there is a play run and a defense called , with options,
bailouts and audibles on almost every single possession ? And how many write or talk about them ?Instead we get stupid ramblings like “so and so has got to step up and earn his money”. “This is where so and so has
got to prove he is worth the money”. Watching the ESPN crew with Stephen A, Greg Anthony and Tim Legler is
painful. They are a cliche a second. Same soundbites every single game, just the player names are changed. TNT
isnt much better. At least Barkley is entertaining at saying nothing.I was watching the Mavs vs Detroit preseason game last night. Cliche after Cliche. Not a single bit of new
information. They spent half the game talking about a dunk that Darko had. Not to pick on these guys, its the same for
every team, including from our guys.Has anyone ever heard after a basket; ” I expect the Mavs to run a thumbs down or horns side in this
situation. Detroit is probably expecting them to push the ball, so watch for the Pistons to use a send 4 to the
Offensive boards and everyone else gets back when the ball goes up into a man to man, gold on the post, come on first
dribble on an entry pass”.Or the Pistons always seem to run a 42 in out of bounds situations. They have run it 64 pct of their inbounds
possessions under their own basket. Here is how it works …Never. Instead we get mindless drivel about players. I know the game is fast and doesnt have the breaks that
football has, but there is still time to discuss these things during stoppages and free throwsIm just as guilty of letting it happen at the Mavs in our media. Its something I have to find a way to cure.
I said it in the previous post, the Dress Code is a response to symptoms of bigger problems. The simplistic views
people have of our players, is in response to our own stupidity in how we cover and report our games. On a macro
level.On an individual level. If you think NBA players, or any professional athlete that you never have had
any interaction with is a thug. Then the problem is yours. You are an idiot.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.
MArk Cuban. Always a good read. And just about my most favorite professional sports team owner. And he helps himself by having a blog.
Extra punishment for gays ended in Kansas
We need to stop this at any cost
Kansas Law on Gay Sex by Teenagers Is Overturned
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 22, 2005
Matthew R. Limon had just turned 18 when he had consensual oral sex with a boy just shy of 15 at a Kansas school in 2000. He was convicted of criminal sodomy and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Had the sex been heterosexual, the maximum penalty would have been 15 months.
Yesterday, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the starkly different penalties violated the federal Constitution’s equal protection clause. It said the state’s “Romeo and Juliet” statute, which limits the punishment that can be imposed on older teenagers who have sex with younger ones, but only if they are of the opposite sex, must also apply to teenagers who engage in homosexual sex.
Mr. Limon will soon be released, his lawyer, James D. Esseks, said. “He’s spent an extra four years and five months in jail only because he’s gay,” said Mr. Esseks, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.
………………….
One judge, Henry W. Green Jr., said the Kansas law promoted “traditional sexual mores,” “the traditional sexual development of children,” marriage, procreation and parental responsibility. Judge Green added that the law helped protect minors from sexually transmitted diseases, which he said were more generally associated with homosexual than with heterosexual activity.
A second appeals court judge, Tom Malone, endorsed only the final rationale, though he called it tenuous. A dissenting judge, G. Joseph Pierron Jr., wrote that “this blatantly discriminatory sentencing provision does not live up to American standards of equal justice.”
In its decision yesterday, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the Lawrence case required reversal of the lower-court decision in Kansas. The State Supreme Court rejected all justifications offered by the appeals court. “The moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate state interest,” Justice Marla J. Luckert wrote for the unanimous court.
………………
The fit between the law and the rationales offered for it is so poor, she concluded, that it violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
……………………
Of course, this is what many conservatives want. 17 years for a ‘crime’ that would have been 15 months otherwise. Reading the original judges’ decision sounded like something from Plessy vs Ferguson. While separate there is nothing equal here. How in the world is society protected by putting this many away for 17 YEARS? But then, this is where the current leaders of conservatism in the US want to take us. Of course, it never applies to them. Corruption sees to that.
All they do is profane
LGF staff meetingMICHELLE MALKIN WADES INTO THE GUTTER: The blog world is certainly not for the political faint of heart. Personal attacks, harsh language, and hyperbole are routine. But in this post, Michelle Malkin sheds every last vestige of decency: “THE GHOULS OF THE LEFT – They support the troops…by partying over their deaths.” Her post links to a Little Green Footballs entry that makes the same odious argument, namely that this group is throwing “parties” on the day that we cross 2000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq.Here’s how the actual events are described: “Events to mark the 2,000th reported U.S. military death will range from candlelight vigils to public actions that illustrate the size of the death toll.” Surely, these aren’t “parties.” I spent years in Beirut, I lived and breathed war, I watched friends get blown to pieces, I’ve seen horrors I hope Malkin never has to see. Those who are fighting to stop this war deserve the utmost respect, whether or not you agree with their politics. Prominent bloggers like Malkin should know better than to soil our public discourse with this kind of garbage…
.. Rant over
The American Friends Service Committee, otherwise known as the Quakers, are planning to hold memorials for the 2000 dead Americans in Iraq.
Only Little Green Fucktards would accuse the Quakers of celebrating death.
Peter, who is a nice guy, doesn’t get it. These guys can only slander and distort because they are cowardly scum. Malkin slanders the 442nd RCT freely, by implying that internment was necessary. I say 21 Medals of Honor and a Presidential Unit Citation says differently, but why let facts get in the way. Johnson is a raving bigot.
All these people can do is soil the public discourse. They can’t participate, they can only shriek and attack. [The News Blog]
Malkin is getting to be almost as bad as Coulter. They are trying to pread the meme that those who oppose the war are HAPPY that there are so many dead, that we take joy in it. Just as we HATE busg. I do not hate him. I hate his policies. I feel quite comfortable with where his place in history will be. But I want his abhorrent policies to be stopped as soon as possible. Is there a single major political appointment he has made that has actual been good, much less exceptional? We get disgusted with the cronyism of Miers but it is only the latest example of the paucity of excellence of this Administration.
Reading Maggie Gallagher on how gay marriage will bring an end to marriage as an institution for procreation and Leon Kass on how the Pill has ruined courtship, you can see the usual story of a vanished golden age. For Kass, it’s the turn of the 2Oth century when “our grandfathers came a-calling and a-wooing at the homes of our grandmothers, under conditions set by the woman, operating from strength on her own turf”. For Gallagher, it seems to be the 1950s.
The assumption is that turning the clock back a century (or half a century) will be enough to restore the golden age. In fact, the turn of the 2Oth century was a period of moral panic cast in terms very similar to those of Kass and Gallagher. As effective family planning became possible for the first time, the birth rate plummeted, falling from 5.1 births per married woman to 2.6 in the space of only forty years for the cohorts born between 1860 and 1900. My mother wrote the book on this. It’s loaded with quoted denunciations of selfish females pursuing pleasure at the expense of their duty to the race.
As for the 1950s, it’s worth noting that the causality relation between procreation and marriage was mixed, to say the least. About 25 per cent of brides were pregnant in this period. Chasing this statistic down, I found a fascinating study by another ANU demographer, Peter McDonald. He argues that the rise of family planning contributed both to the boom in early marriage in the 1950s and to the rise of pre-marital sexual activity. The argument is that “the knowledge that early marriage did not now imply vast numbers of children” made young people unwilling to delay sexual activities, even though access to contraception was largely confined to those who were already married. I think it’s important to add in the influence of the short-lived Golden Age of full employment, starting during World War II and ending in the early 1970s. McDonald is fairly negative about all this, saying that “as high as 60 per cent of teenage marriages in Australia are likely to have ended in divorce.”
Lots of social conservatives want to go back to the 50s. But if we take Kass and Gallagher’s arguments seriously, they lead us back to the 1850s, not the 1950s.
Neamderthals. There was no Golden Age. or rather, there is ALWAYS a Golden Age if you are incredibly wealthy. Otherwise you are just fluff between their toes.
A Sad Aftermath of Katrina: Death in streets took a back seat to dinner.
A Chronicle of FEMA’s Internal Interactions on the Evening of Aug. 31, 2005 (2 days Post-Katrina)
Marty Bahamonde, the New England FEMA regional director and FEMA’s only body in the Superdown, e-mailed Michael Brown, then-FEMA director and point person in Baton Rouge, to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that “estimates are many will die within hours.” He continues, “Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical…The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out.”
Micheal Brown’s press secretary, Sharon Worthy, e-mailed her colleagues:
“He [Michael Brown] needs much more than 20 or 30 minutes [to eat dinner]. Restaurants are getting busy. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choice, followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.”
Bahamonde messaged a co-worker:
“OH MY GOD!!!!!!! I just ate an MRE [military rations] and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants.”
This chronicle demonstrates why my disgust cannot be put into the appropriate words. I can only support the sentiment expressed by Bahamonde in an e-mail on September 3rd. “The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch. … I am horrified at some of the cluelessness and self concern that persists.”
Why Brownie should be fired. And why emails are actually a good thing on balance. Because they reveal the idiots so much faster.
You’re still paying Mike Brown’s salary..
“Andrews confirmed that Brown is still on FEMA’s payroll as a consultant. She said he works from home, where he is ‘pulling all the documentation together’ to aid in the investigations into the government’s response to Katrina. His original 30-day contract was recently extended for another 30 days, she said.” (Via War & Piece)
See. Nomatter how incompetent you are, this Administration will not fire you. Disgraceful.
DeLay Flies Corporate Jet to Arraignment.
Tom DeLay has been criminally indicted for facilitating the illegal use of corporate funds in Texas campaigns. How did he arrive at his arraignment?:
DeLay’s staff disclosed that he flew to Houston on Thursday morning on a corporate jet owned by R.J. Reynolds, a longtime contributor that has flown him to Puerto Rico and other destinations.
When he landed, DeLay held a press conference and called allegations that he allowed corporate dollars to improperly influence the political process ‰¥þcontrived and baseless.‰¥ÿ
Why am I not surprised. No shame in the corruption business.
On the origin of (pasta) species
Thanks to reader Nils for pointing out important work by researcher Thomas Schneider, Ph.D., on the
Origin of Noodleous doubleous
:
Penne Rigate will spontaneously insert itself into Rigatoni (order pasta) under liquid to gas transition conditions of H2O to create the previously unobserved species Noodleous doubleous. The estimated probability of this spontaneous generation event is too low to be explained by thermodynamics and therefore apparently represents intelligent design.
At last, the
missing link
between the tubular pastas and the wheel pastas.
This is clearly a result of the hybridization of Rigate and Rigatoni with subsequent bindings. The subsequent connections do not require any special explanation, but the initial hybridization requires not only intelligent design, but
intelligent pushers
. As we all know, the conditions under which this hybrid ö “Noodleous doubleous” ö formed are highly entropic. Imagine that a Boeing 747 assembled itself when you tossed it into a pot of boiling water. It’s clearly impossible, and intelligent processes must be at work.
How could one noodle appear inside a second? Either it passed through the solid outer wall, or some force pushed it through the narrow opening. Those of us with experience in such things know it requires a fair bit of dexterity and intelligence to achieve such a pairing.
At last, scientific proof of supernatural intelligent pushers. The probability that these pushers were pushing down is very low, so the Newtonist fools have no explanation. We in the Intelligent Falling movement know better.
Now we wait for the massive grant from the Discovery Institute to roll in.– Josh Rosenau [Thoughts from Kansas]
I knew Tom when I was a post-doc at Colorado. He worked in the same lab my wife did. Nice to see some real mathamatics and bioinformatics being applied to this problem.
For your car. It had to happen:… [Skeptico]
The Flying Spaghetti Monster rides again.
[link]
SO WITH THE BOOK NOT QUITE DONE, BUT UNDER CONTROL, I took the afternoon off and went out to take pictures — not far, just up around Coalfield, Oliver Springs, and Petros. I haven’t had time to work with the pictures much, but I liked this sign advertising cheese stix of an unusual variety.
I also finally got around to watching one of the Firefly episodes on DVD. I can see why the series fans are so rabid. Serenity did okay, but not great, in spite of the blogosphere boost the first week. I’m surprised, but then again, it’s kind of like the series — better than the size of its audience would suggest. Too bad.
Sorry bloggging’s been a bit light, and email response worse than usual, these past few weeks. I’ve been bumping up against my limits. Things should get back to normal over the next little while.
Firefly cuts across political divides. Perhaps Mal and the others can help bring us back together.
