First of all… No, I don’t own one. While I’m a techie, I try very hard to limit my gadget addiction. I try to make sure that when I’m buying a gadget, I’m buying something I’ll actually use, instead of something I’ll use for a few weeks and then let gather dust. For me, I [...]

Yesterday, President Obama announced a new plan that supposedly announced new drilling off the nation’s East Coast, Alaskan Coast, and Gulf of Mexico. State run media proclaimed it as Obama moving to the center and striking a balance between environmentalists and the “drill, baby, drill” crowd. However, once you look at Obama’s actual proposal the [...]

For the first time today, TASER international has acknowledged that the use of their electro-compliance device has a higher risk to the health of the restrainee than they have advertised Taser: Don’t shoot stun gun at chest First time company has suggested there is any risk from its stun guns AP – updated 8:23 a.m. [...]

CSI, Forensic Files, The First 48 and other television programs of this genre are among my favorites. Investigators study a crime scene and learn all sorts of valuable information from blood spatter, shoe prints, tire marks, hair fibers, ballistics, and trace evidence. We are to believe that “the evidence doesn’t lie” and that these noble [...]

Shortly after I graduated high school in 1980 (yep, I’m an old man, just ask my kids), I responded to two computer programming job ads.  One company wanted a detailed resume of my education and work experience.  The other company was trying to get people to come in and take a test. The test was [...]

Hey Cougars? Want to flash those pearly whites and shiny disposition when that mid-20′s waiter flatters you by asking for your ID at the bar? Well, good luck in Virginia… Smiling is forbidden: Few places in Virginia are as draining to the soul and as numbing to the buttocks as the branch offices of the [...]

Because if I can’t trust the machines, I’m going to have to count the C2H5OH molecules myself! Minnesota may be forced to drop thousands of driving-while-impaired cases and change the way it prosecutes others in the wake of a state Supreme Court ruling Thursday, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed. The state’s highest court ruled that [...]

Despite all of the hullabaloo over #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), there seems to a be a bit of a scrap brewing between TCOT co-founders Rob Neppell and Michael Patrick Leahy.  To date, the argument sounds more like a quarrel between gay lovers than one between some of the God-fearing, pro-torture fag-bashing Republicans who frequently [...]

Yesterday morning I was sent an article written by Michigan House Representative Paul Opsommer regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s push to implement Enhanced Drivers’ Licenses: The Department of Homeland Security is coming to Detroit to push their new “Enhanced Drivers License” (EDL) program on Tuesday as a way to make Michigan licenses compliant with [...]

News came out this week of a deeply troubling new bill from Sens. Jay Rockerfeller (D – WV) and Olympia Snowe (R – ME): The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to [...]

Here’s a copy of the RFP the Republican National Committee just released for a redesign of their website. It’s obvious to this political web developer that GOP leadership still has absolutely no clue about this newfangled thang called the Internets. Dale Franks writes: Surely this is all some sort of elaborate joke. Perhaps on Monday [...]

Here’s a chilling interview of former NSA analyst Russell Tice conducted by Keith Olbermann. While I’m not the biggest Olbermann fan in the world, he asked some important questions about how far the NSA went during the Bush administration. It’s a chilling interview. Hopefully restraining the NSA to 4th Amendment boundaries will be a priority [...]

On my way to work today, my XM radio blared the ever-familiar “This is only a test” emergency alert system. As I tried to switch to a station other than Rawdog Comedy (where a good comedy bit was playing), I realized that this discordant tone was across the entire spectrum. And I was annoyed. Is [...]

There’s no secret that most of the Obama Administration agenda is at odds with the Lockean rights of life, liberty, and property at almost every turn. Obama’s views on freedom are more along the lines of FDR’s so-called “Four Freedoms”. As disturbing as this agenda is, I thought it would be important to identify policies [...]

Oh, this is rich: West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced legislation that would postpone the digital transition by almost four months. “I firmly believe that our nation is not yet ready to make this transition,” Mr. Rockefeller said in a statement. Congress began seriously considering delaying the [...]

Back in the day, antitrust regulators decided that including a browser with an operating system was an unfair competitive measure. But to this day, they’ve only ever enforced this against Microsoft, and the EU is still pushing: European antitrust regulators have told Microsoft Corp. that the company’s practice of including its Internet browser with its [...]

Over at Reason: Hit & Run, Nick Gillespie on the regulation of the internet: One trend that’s making a comeback with the Obama ascendancy is the need for smart folks not to regulate the Net per se, but to, you know, come up with better rules that will help make sure that everything that’s so [...]

Oregon is trying to devise a system to tax all those shifty, tax-evading environmentalists they have up there: Oregon is among a growing number of states exploring ways to tax drivers based on the number of miles they drive instead of how much gas they use, even going so far as to install GPS monitoring [...]

This is somewhat off-topic, but as I know many bloggers and blog-readers are technophiles, I wanted to get advice from the best place I could. The time has come for us to replace my wife’s laptop. It’s about as old and decrepit as a laptop can be and still run Windows, and is a constant [...]

Which provision of the Constitution, propertly construed, authorized the Federal Government to do this: WASHINGTON — Congress has passed legislation that will require the government to keep closer tabs on who has access to the Internet and who does not. Supporters hope the Broadband Data Improvement Act will help policymakers better identify areas of the [...]