| January 2008
In a close contest, Sen. John McCain has won the Florida Republican primary. NPR and other news organizations called the election for McCain in the past few minutes. With more than 60 percent of the polls reporting, McCain has 36 percent of the vote to former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney's 31 percent. The victory is an important one for McCain, who also won the South Carolina and New Hampshire primaries. It puts him in position to win big next week on Super Tuesday when 21 states will hold Republican primaries or caucuses. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in third place with 15 percent, followed closely by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 13. Texas Rep. Ron Paul was a distant fifth with 3 percent. The poor result may end Giuliani's campaign.
Cellphones are an advertiser's gold mine, but will consumers dig it?
This is precisely why I don't have a cell phone. The convenience of reaching people instantaneously does not outweigh the infringement of personal freedom when people - mostly advertizers - want to reach me instantaneously. It's my life, I'LL decide who can talk to me and when. Having a cellphone gives that control to everybody else.
I'm almost ready to lose my land line as well, mostly because of intrusive telemarketing. Yet again, mass media ruins another otherwise useful medium...
And, no I'm not a Luddite - I work in cutting edge IT. Doesn't mean I'm a sucker for iAdvertizing too. It's just about relinquishing personal control. I prefer to use IT to my own advantage, not to the advantage of advertizers who think of every one of us as just a bunch of iSchmucks, ready to mined and pillaged.
IT FTC and DOJ Bring Legal Action Against Do-Not-Call Violators
The FTC brings $7.7 million in DNC list violations against six major companies The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced that it initiated a crackdown on companies who disregard names on the Federal Do Not Call (DNC) list and actions resulting from the crackdown have been brought against six companies by the U.S. Department of Justice. These actions have resulted in six settlements with the FTC with the sum total being $7.7 million in civil penalties. The largest settlement was from Craftmatic, the adjustable bed company, after it used a contest to capture phone numbers of entrants. Consumers who entered the contest weren't told sales calls would be made to the numbers they provided to enter the contest. Craftmatic allegedly placed tens of thousands of calls to the numbers collected in the contest and complaints alleged the company made millions of abandoned calls to consumers.
Your thoughts on Santana to Mets
This doesn't concern me too much, as I would love for the Braves to win the wild card. Just look at what wild card teams have done in the last 10 years. Finally, let me say that Santana is only slightly better than Smoltz. Granted, this will change in three years. Our staff is still just slightly below the Mets. If we could get Bedard (impossible), we would blow the Mets out of the water. I hate the Mets. .
True grits
Restaurants such as Tristan's brought downhome cooking into the fine dining room with bowls of so-called she crab soup emboldened with celeriac root froth, hominy with pomegranate and tender ribs glazed with chocolate barbeque sauce. Up and coming chefs are to be found all over this small town, scouring rival menus and pimping up classic southern dishes. In the local food store, they offer cookery classes in a room off to the side and sell scary looking implements and leather aprons. These people take their cooking seriously. Perhaps it is because so many young chefs have trained at the Art Institute at Charleston, an esteemed culinary school, that an obsessive competitiveness abounds – but they punch above their weight on everything food-related here. "Well now, Georgia has the name for the best peaches, but here in South Carolina the peaches are sweeter, yellower and, why, peachier," I was assured by a fine Charleston lady, Amanda Dew Manning, in her charming drawl.
Henry K. Lee
2:40 p.m. The attorneys have stipulated that on Oct. 10, 2006, an Oakland police officer went to a home on Simson Street in Oakland (belonging to Mark McGothigan, friend of Hans Reiser's mother, Beverly Palmer) to secure the residence. Police saw Reiser in the driveway and arrested him pursuant to an arrest warrant. When he was arrested, he was in possession of two sums of money, $5,790 and $2,018, according to the stipulation. In court today, Reiser had some concerns about whether stipulating to something meant that he automatically agreed with what a witness would have testified to. The judge gave a Law 101 overview of what stipulations were, noting that these witnesses couldn't be cross-examined. Du Bois knew this already; this was all aimed at his client. "Thank you for making my afternoon smoother," Du Bois said as the judge left for the mid-afternoon break without a word.
Russia: The Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Stabilization Fund
In addition, some funds from it have already been allocated to the State Investment Fund, the state's Development Bank, and the state Nanotechnology Corporation. The Stabilization Fund was created at the urging of then-presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, and then-Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref. Since that time, Kudrin's ministry has been in charge of the fund and has doggedly insisted that spending its wealth domestically would spur inflation. As a result, the only significant spending from the fund since its creation has been to pay off some $80 billion in Soviet-era debt, something that has been touted as one of the main achievements of Vladimir Putin's presidency. To be sure, pressure to spend the fund has been building from the start.
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