Monthly Archives: January 2006


Good For Google

Is there any reason to believe the bush administration could be trusted with this data?

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search engine opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

No, I don’t think they are trustworthy at all and they shouldn’t be in the censorship business anyway.
Some other search companies aren’t quite so sensitive:

The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

If we can find out jwho they are we can make sure not to use their services.
In the meantime let’s help out the bushies:

…government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn. To back that claim, the government has subpoenaed search engines to develop a factual record of how often Web users encounter online porn and how Web searches turn up material they say is “harmful to minors.”

Here is a data point for them: in the last two years of daily performing multiple searches on a wide variety of subjects I have never accidently encountered a porn site. I have, though, on several occasions been in schools or libraries that had filtering systems and found them so effective that I couldn’t even get to this blog.

Update 1/20
: I’ve never liked the fact that the search companies retain history and identifying information but they all do it. So, here is a good reason to not use any of them except Google:

Federal investigators already have obtained potentially billions of Internet search requests made by users of major Web sites run by Microsoft, Yahoo! and America Online, which all complied with the government request, issued in August, a Justice Department official said Thursday.


bush Supports End to Prohibition

Comparing immigration to prohibition is not that farfetched:

It also makes sense to take pressure off the border by giving people a legal means on a temporary basis to come here, so they don’t have to sneak across. Now, some of you all may be old enough to remember the days of Prohibition. I’m not. (Laughter.) But remember, we illegalized whisky, and guess what? People found all kinds of ways to make it, and to run it. NASCAR got started — positive thing that came out of all that. (Laughter.)

The result bush describes is what happens anytime government gets in the way of people freely exchanging goods and services. Now if bush would just open his mind a little bit more and see that the war on drugs also needs to be dismantled.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to evaluate the NASCAR reference.

Via a new Nevada focused marijuana legalization site.


Laughter is Still A Great Medicine

Apparently we should go to more funny movies:

Viewer responses to movies in a humorous vein (such as the 1998 comedy There’s Something About Mary) appear to have a beneficial effect on arterial endothelial function, reported researchers from the University of Maryland Medical Center here.

In contrast, responses to serious films, such as the heart-wrenching opening D-Day sequence in the 1998 drama Saving Private Ryan appear to constrict arterial blood flow, wrote Michael Miller, M.D., and colleagues in a scientific letter published in the February 2006 issue of the journal Heart.

I suppose some will extend this to TV sitcoms but my stress level seems to go up when a typical sitcom is running on our tube…the quality and humor is just so bad.


Ecological Oxymoron

This house was built using the latest ‘green’ construction techniques and I laud the owner, designer and contractor for that effort:
klein_house.jpg
This is also, in case you can’t tell from the picture, a large house:

This hilltop site in Corte Madera was once home to the late rock impresario Bill Graham.
Today it holds what its designer says is probably the largest “green” – ecologically correct – house in America.
Designed by Inverness architect Sim Van der Ryn and under construction for more than five years, the 15,000-square-foot house was built for owner Michael Klein, a passionate environmentalist and board member of the Rain Forest Action Network. It replaces the Graham house, which has been razed.

Exactly why is a passionate environmentalist building a 15,000 square foot house? Yes, he can afford it but surely a wealthy passionate environmentalist would set an example for both commoners and his wealthy peers. He would use green building techniques and also build a home appropriate to a human family in the 21st century. I do not believe a case can be made that all 6,492,046,339 of us (as of 01/18/06 at 00:09 GMT) should be living in homes this size as nuclear familys.
It may be a great show place for green building techniques but unless it is to be the home of 30-40 people there is little about it that is ecologically correct.

Via Knockin’ On The Golden Door via Grateful Dead News.