The “Break it Down” Blog
Tag Archive | "politics"
White House Ordered to Disclose Tel-Com Ties
It seems under the Freedom of Information Act, a judge has ordered that the Bush Administration reveal it’s relationship with the tel-com industry and lobbyists. There is also mention that the White House agreed to release the information on December 31st, which is naturally after it would have voted and passed the FISA bill. Who wants to [...]
Continue reading...NASA Scientists Refuse Giving Up Privacy
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Interesting story on Slashdot about how NASA JPL scientists have been “asked” to sign a privacy agreement to relinquish all privacy from their employer and allow investigation into their personal lives “without limit”. Apparently 28 senior level scientists refused to sign the document by the deadline and are blogging about the progress in real time as [...]
Continue reading...Copyright Law Reform
Monday, November 26, 2007
Bruce Schneier linked to a paper written by John Tehranian titled: “Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap“. The most interesting part of the paper is more or less captured on Bruce’s blog where John takes copyright law and applies it literally to a very normal scenario for some John Doe author that ends [...]
Continue reading...Google Refuses to Run Impeachment Ad
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Laurence Hartje just sent in news of a story Daily Kos is running on an Ad that Google refused to run in their AdSense network. The ad is as follows: Help Impeach Cheney NOW Nonpartisan, the time is here. House JC 202-225-3951 Demand ACTION YaliesorImpeachment.org Google’s response as to why it wouldn’t run the ad was as follows: “At this time, Google [...]
Continue reading...2/3 of NYU Would Sell Right to Vote for Scholarship
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The full quote is they would give up their right to vote in the next election for a scholarship. I wonder if that stat is that surprising? Two reasons I can think of this not being that surprising is: A lot of people felt the last 2 elections were bullshit with all the shenanigans that ensued [...]
Continue reading...Comcast Sued over Traffic Blocking
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Ohhhh FACE! Comcast is finally getting slapped with a lawsuit pertaining to their secret manipulation of BitTorrent and other P2P traffic using the traffic shaping software from Sandvine. A lot of folks originally thought the traffic blocking (technically called “traffic shaping” but it’s more like “traffic ub3r-p0wn4g-ing”) just applied to BitTorrent traffic (because the RIAA and [...]
Continue reading...Google Trumps Sun’s Mobile Java Play
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Greg Amerson sent along two very interesting reads (One, Two) about what the Google Android platform means to Sun and the OpenJDK. At first glance Android looks like a harmlessly cool, Java-based mobile platform… so what’s the big deal? At closer glance it appears that Google has invented their own Java VM, the Dalvik VM to [...]
Continue reading...What can $611 billion buy?
Monday, November 12, 2007
Boston.com put together a very cool slide show of what $611 billion, the cost of the US’s war in Iraq, could buy. Some of the more interesting points were: Billed as the most expensive high school ever build, Newton North High could be built 4000 more times around the US at the cost of the Iraq [...]
Continue reading...Private Security Immunity from Law in Iraq to End
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Raw Story has the scoop on a law the Iraq interior ministry is set to ratify that would remove immunity for all the private security agencies currently serving in Iraq. The argument from the private military side is that if the law passes, private military forces will pull out of Iraq. Private military companies question [...]
Continue reading...Pelosi and Reid Kill Renewable Energy Funding
Saturday, November 10, 2007
This is an interesting story from Toby Barlow’s blog. Vote Solar describes the issue as: Thursday morning, Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi decided to drop the renewable energy standard out of the energy bill and drop the tax title. No tax title means no extension of the investment tax credit for solar, and no extention of [...]
Continue reading...2008 Presidential Quick Reference Guide
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Handy for the upcoming elections, this is a grid of all the candidates for the 2008 Presidential Election along with their stances on all the major issues including energy, Patriot Act, Iraq War, gay marriage and so on. The grid is quick and easy to navigate. You can click the image above for a bigger version [...]
Continue reading...Requests Wanting off Terror Watch List Surge
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
That’s weird… people DON’T want to be a randomly compiled list of terrorists so their travel plans get delayed or completely cancelled? I don’t get it… Looks like the department of Homeland Security is fielding thousands of requests a month to get taken off the terror watch list as the algorithm used to put people on [...]
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Thursday, November 29, 2007
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