Year: 2006

Bicycle Bomb Sticker- Todays Reality

Yes, in this administration they want us to believe that Bush’s warrant less NSA electronic surveillance on Americans is legal; his judicial choices will keep terrorists in their place, by curtailing our civil liberties we are safer, and that the renewal of the Patriot Act will protect us.I celebrate my birthday with this sad but humorous reflection on the effects of our administrations fear tactics and reality in our world today.

An Athens, Ohio police officer, after seeing a ‘This Bike is a Pipe Bomb’ sticker on a bicycle chained outside a restaurant on the Ohio University campus, created quite a disturbance when he called it in as a bomb threat. Believable in this age of fear and paranoia he was just doing his duty. A Google search shows bike bombs are more prevalent than one would think. The bicycle no longer an innocuous item.

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The bomb experts hit the bike with a high-pressure spray of water, pried it apart with a hydraulic device normally used to rescue accident victims trapped in cars. Once the poor bicycle was destroyed, they saw there was no bomb. The sticker was a promo for a punk band of the same name. The student is now facing a possible penalty of six months in jail for “inducing panic.
More at CNN

Why do I Blog? Why do You Blog? Why Blog?

At the time I started blogging maintaining my personal web site had become a bore. A friend wanted to start a blog and asked for my assistance. Therefore, I started a blog to learn the mechanics of blogging. This friend has since decided it was not to their liking and chose not blog. Another friend has just started a blog. Why I kept blogging is a question that I have no honest answer to. I like reading other peoples blogs and enjoy the hunt to verify anything that is put out as “fact” without references to back it up. I do confess, one of the bloggers here has caught me “over stating”. I decided that if I took the time to research and verify, I might as well post my findings. Some days I am in the mood for political subjects, and, some days, I just want share a picture of my dog.

Craig at Donkey Path posted an interesting piece in reference to another blog’s article. Here is the line in Craigs post that I felt expressed an ideal worthy mention “… people who notice useful things need to get that information out more and they need to help each other do so.” It seems that I am not the only blogger around considering the questions of why people blog and their expectations. He also did a nice survey of the blogs listed on Technorati.

A slice of why the writers of some of the blogs I visit – blog (in no particular order):

A lot of us got involved on message boards long before we started commenting on blogs and then starting our own blogs; one of the primary motives is that tens of thousands of us felt the Bush Administration wasn’t being straight with us and the press didn’t seem to be doing its job. So people were scouring the Internet for news sources in the United States as well as all over the world.

Craig at Donkey Path

The reason was my disappointment of what I used to read about what and how the Middle East is represented to the world online. It was (and maybe still) an image drawn with black painting on a black background. I felt that I have a duty to do. At least try to erase one line from that dark painting and replace it with a white one that represent some of the unknown shiny facts about this part of the world. That’s when I decided to focus my own blog on Mideast. Slowly the blog topics encouraged healthy discussions, which encouraged me to write more on political, cultural, religious and life of Arabs.

Haitham Sabbah at Sabbah’s Blog

I got interested in weblogs a couple of months before the war when I accidently stumbled on Where is Raed by Salam Pax. I was impressed, then I discovered other blogs and got hooked to this new medium of interaction with the world. After the war other Iraqis joined the scene such as Riverbend which had quite an impact on me. I had become frustrated with the negative media coverage from Iraq so I decided to start a blog myself to present the positive side which was not getting enough attention.

Zeyad at Healing Iraq

it occurred to us that there are too many fine blogs getting overlooked outside the top-rated sites. So I intend to browse the blogosphere at my own idiosyncratic pace and catch some of the better blogs and posts I find

Poechewe at Cold Flute

I spent an hour surfing looking for reasons people blog. Of all the reasons I found, for some reason, this one stood out:

Back in Jun of 2002, my friend Wu Hao told me a story about the monk and the well. It was about two monks living in the same mountain. Both of the two monks go to river far away to get water. One year later, one monk did have to go to the river while the other had to go. The reason is, the smarter monk used the year to dig a well by himself everyday, while the other one did nothing. It reveals the importance of accumulation

Jian Shuo Wang’s Blog

Here is a blog that I visit everyday. I have no idea why I do. I have no idea why Eugene started blogging. I never know what the topic will be or where he is going but it is another view in the blogoshere. Eugene if you read this I will try and remember to close my tab in Firefox when done reading. Eugene wants readers – lets us give him a few – why not?

Eugene Weixel at Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The City

My friend impeachinator has started a blog Smell Test. I hope you take the time to drop by. She is a very intelligent woman and with the help of other blogger’s I hope she will master the blogoshere and get her voice heard.

Now the question is…why do I blog? . … . .If you have an idea why I blog please give me a clue.

Patriot Act Renewed

Not that this is a shock but hope springs eternal . . . but yes the Senate has renewed the Patriot Act. With 16 provisions of the act set to expire next week, the bill would make 14 of them permanent and extend two others by four years. … on the way to the Presidents desk.

Net Neutrality and the Blogoshere In Danger

Blogs and their cooperative identity known as the “blogosphere” have become an extraordinary method for global information sharing. Moreover, no matter what topics they discuss or what political inclination they advocate they are threatened.

The threat involves the issue of “net neutrality”. Net neutrality is an idea that information networks ought to be as neutral as possible between competing content, applications and services and not discriminate as to who uses them.

Major cable and telecommunications companies lobbying Congress want to abolish net neutrality and set up the virtual equivalent of toll fees on the Internet. The idea would be to set up separate tiers of Internet access. If you want to access the superhighway, you would have to pay extra fees – a virtual toll for that access. Great if you can afford the high-speed but if you cannot then you are stuck with low band thus limiting poorer users access to multimedia content.

AT&T’s Ed Whitacre wants consumers and content providers to pay for use of his network. “”Now they might pass it on to their customers who are looking at a movie, for example. But that ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn’t get on [the network] and expect a free ride.” I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network- obviously not the piece from the customer to the network,which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees- but for accessng the so-called Internet cloud” Financial Times

BellSouth’s William Smith told reporters that he would like to turn the Internet into a “pay-for-performance marketplace” where his company could charge for the “right” to have certain services load faster than others. Washington Post

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says that Web applications need to “share the cost” of the broadband services already paid for by consumers. “We need to pay for the pipe.” Tech Web

Here is the problem for bloggers and other alternative and independent media producers who distribute media via the Internet: Those who cannot afford that privileged access will far outnumber those who can. This may discourage online postings of up and coming musicians, poets, writers, and it will strike a blow to the blogoshere’s diversity and variety. Limited upload speeds make it difficult for a young person in an impoverished area to post a picture to demonstrate a point.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, is introducing new legislation today that would stop Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content or to consumers.

What do you think?