Ostergren Prevails In US District Court

Betty Ostergren has prevailed in the US District Court in Richmond. Ostergren sued the Attorney General of Virginia (Robert McDonnell) to block the new Virginia law that had been specifically crafted to prevent her from re-posting social security numbers on her website. She had been doing this to bring attention to the fact that the Virginia government was aiding identity thieves and was burying their head in the sand when the problem was pointed out to them.

I haven't had time to read the opinion (Link to PDF) in its entirety, but it appears the court agreed with her First Amendment argument that the state could not prevent her from republishing "public" information.

Will there be an appeal? Hopefully Virginia will just fix the problem that got us here in the first place: Posting SSNs on government websites.

Obama Picks A Loser. McCain Is Handed A Golden Opportunity

Let's face it, any way you could spin it, Joe Biden is a loser. He represents everything about politics that we all hate. A card carrying member of the old (white) boys club, a career politician with a history of ethics problems. It's hard to imagine a worse pick by Obama.

But now, McCain has been given a golden opportunity to upstage Obama. He could pick a woman VP like Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has strong conservative appeal and, well let's face it, she's a woman.

Unfortunately, while this would be the smart choice, I have little faith that McCain will make the right choice. Instead he'll probably pick a dark horse with a brief history of Klan membership (which will come out right before the election). I guess we'll see soon enough.

"Red State vs. Blue State" Is Designed To Control Your Political Choice

If you haven't figured it out yet, the whole Red vs. Blue concept is a media ploy designed to make you feel that there are only two political choices out there: RED or BLUE.

The truth is, that Red Vs. Blue is the media's own concoction (specifically Tim Russert's) designed to limit the choices they need to cover. They don't have to worry about covering too many political conventions for example, because after all, there's only the Red one and the Blue one.

Resist the media's attempt to dumb down the American political process.

Will Russia Deploy Nuclear Missiles To Cuba?

I think they might after reading this. What would we do in response to that?

"It's 1961 again and we are piggy in the middle
while war is polishing his drum and peace plays second fiddle

Russia and America are at each other's throats
but don't you cry just get on your knees and pray, and while you're
down there, kiss your arse goodbye"

Rolling Stone becomes Tiger Beat

The last issue of Rolling Stone had the Jonas Brothers on the cover (looking very Greenday).

Tiger Beat magazine (which caters to pre-teen/early teenage girls) has also had them on the cover looking very Menudo (and is also running a special Jonas Brothers section on their website).

What does this mean? It means Rolling Stone has finally come clean that they're catering the Disney and Nickelodeon market.

So much for the "Rock & Roll" image they try to project. At least we now know where they stand (or kneel as the case may be).

Google's New Experiment: See How Far We Can Push Our Fans Before They Bail

Sometime last week, Google changed my personal page (www.google.com/ig) to it's new "experimental" system. And guess what? Amazingly it sucks. It's hard to fathom that Google can mess up anything. They seem to have a golden touch when it comes to the web.

But this thing is just awful.

I've been using Google's personal page as my RSS reader for probably two years now, and during that time, it's been virtually unchanged. Seeing that I was 'selected' for the experimental version got me excited. Google's 'experimental' stuff is usually leaps and bounds cooler than the regular stuff. But my excitement faded fast. What makes it worse is that I wasn't given a way to go back to the old one. I am stuck (or I thought I was...see below) with the new version. The problems with the new version:

• It's significantly more difficult to read anything. It's way too noisy. the font is smaller and now, instead of seeing just headlines, I'm seeing the first few lines of the story. That sounds like a good idea, but everything becomes a sea of words...even the headlines fade into the noise.
• I used to be able to move widgets around to other tabs. This no longer works. So one of the primary ways of organizing news articles is now gone.
  

And I'm not alone. Apparently there's something of a mini-revolt going on in the Google forums.

To make matters worse, Google let it be know that the whole thing was a "controlled experiment" and was not giving people the ability to opt out ON PURPOSE!

I also found this gem. If you wan to go back and forth between the version follow the instructions below:

- Show quoted text -
> When you click on the address bar the entire text is selected, so when
> you paste something everything should be replaced with the new
> content.

> After going to iGoogle, paste:
> javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

It works.

Water Is Added To The MMHOD

Or actually, the lack of water.

MMHOD

Prince George's County Police Handle Another Case "Properly"

This one is all over the news (and now on Drudge), but in case you haven't heard, Prince George's County (Maryland) Police basically broke into a town mayor's house, shot his dogs, cuffed his wife and mother-in-law, and then realized they made a mistake. Apparently the 'mistake' was doing this to the mayor and not doing this to some poor inner-city minority. I say that because as the details are coming out, it appears the Police knew the mayor had done nothing wrong (and was a hapless pawn in a drug distribution scheme), but still insisted on bursting through his door, ninja-style just for kicks. Oh, and the warrant they had was not a no-knock warrant, but that's what they did anyway. "Warrant? We don't need no stinkin' warrant"

Don't hold your breath for something like justice to happen either. PG County is notorious for this sort of thing. Apparently killing family pets is part of their Standard Operating Procedures. That's done little to stem the abuse.

DNA Science May Be Flawless, But Lab Workers Are Not

A frightening case from Australia: A man convicted of murdering a mother and then raping and murdering her young daughter in 1984 was exonerated because police realized that a sample of the man's DNA (obtained elsewhere) had been accidentally mixed with DNA from the crime scene. Now Australian police will reexamine over 7,000 convictions where DNA evidence was used to see if there were other errors. What do you want to bet this is not just an Australian problem?

The Problem With Cell Phone Cameras

Cameras are everywhere these days. check out Flickr and you'll soon see that camera phones are one of the most popular cameras out there. The iPhone was responsible for over 17,000 of the pictures uploaded just yesterday. In fact, the top 5 camera phones were used to upload nearly 40,000 picutres yesterday. Video is everywhere as well, as most camera phones have video capability. The police have started to realize that a lot of the time they are on the street, they're being watched and possibly recorded.

So this brings us to the point of this post. Where are all the pictures of the ghosts and monsters? A recent scan of the recent 'ghost' pictures has led me to a sad reality. About 80% of paranormal 'ghost' pictures these days are of the orb variety. Orbs, if you're not aware, are basically photos of dust particles in the air passed off as weird paranormal sightings. I'm not sure when these lame photos began to be passed off as ghosts, but it was a sad day for the hard working paranormal investigator. Another 19% of the pictures are equally lame lens flair pictures which are passed off as 'ectoplasm'. I hope the last 1% is something more interesting, but I really haven't seen it yet. Take a look and let me know if you find anything interesting.

And where are the pictures of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and UFOs???