Nearly 30 DOJ Officials Threatened To Quit After Ashcroft Hospital Visit

Appalled by the White House's heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign.



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The real reason behind poor CD sales: hint, it's not piracy

Does anyone really think that consumers could buy 800 million more DVDs, worth $10 billion or more, without cutting back on some other entertainment spending?



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Time to start again.

I've got four weeks till my next triathlon. Time to start kicking the training up a notch. I'm not as diligent about posting my work outs as Melanie is, but I'll try my best. So far for the weekend, I did a 5k run on Saturday, and a 7 mile bike followed by a 3 mile run on Sunday. Nothing but a dog wash for today. Tomorrow will be either a bike/run or possibly a swim.

All hail the king | Salon.com

Loyalty has always been the alpha and omega of George W. Bush's presidency. But all the forms of allegiance that have bound together his administration -- political, ideological and personal -- are being shredded, leaving only blind loyalty. Bush has surrounded himself with loyalists, who fervently



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Open Letter to Gonzales, From the ENTIRE Harvard Law class of 1982

This ad ran in the Washington Post today, it is from ALL of his classmates from the Harvard Law class of 1982. It chastises his reckless disregard for the constitution for the wire tapping, suspension of habeas corpus, and the recent politically motivated firings. Seriously, how can this guy still have a job? And how can American's sit by and not call for his removal. Ashcroft gave me the willies (come on you are really going to cover up a STATUE?!) but Gonzales seems only eager to please the White House. Having the Judaical branch this cozy with the White House is just begging for major improprieties to take place, and as if this White House needed any more abuse of power.



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Google Reader

I found a cool new tool to play around with when I was exploring some of the newer (to me) features of gmail. One such tool is Google Reader, a rss aggregate to goes out and fetches any new posts to sites you subscribe to. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and there are quite a few sites that have added it over the past several months. What you look for is the orange button on the left side of many address bars, or if you find the blue RSS button embedded on the sight. In a nutshell, RSS allows for sends out titles and or brief descriptions of any new posts or articles. Someone who has subscribed to a RSS feed from a sight can pull it up like a bookmark to quickly scan for any new post (often they will be highlighted or flagged) and serve has hot links.
The other cool thing is with google reader, I can mark articles that I thought were cool over in my new widget (Scott's shared stories). So keep an eye on that right side of the page.

Our Triathlon results.

I thought it would be fun to break down the results from our first ever triathlon. For the full spread you can take a look at the official results over here.

I'll start by breaking down the 5 sections of the race. There are only 3 legs to the race, but they provide time splits for the transition from one leg to the next. How this works is you have a microchip around your ankle, and there are timing pads you run across as you move from one leg into the next. Those pads will record your split time so you can see how you did in each individual event. The transition area is a centralized area where your bike and running gear is stored. When you finish the swim, you jump out of the pool, run down the sidewalk, over the timing pad (ending your swim time, and starting T1), and into the transition area. You then throw on you shoes and shirt, and grab you helmet and bike. You have to leave the transition area before you can jump on the bike and start the next leg. On the way out of the area, you cross the second timing pad (ending T1, and starting your bike). Once the bike section is complete, you run over the same pad from when you exited the area (end of bike, and start of T2) and bring your bike back to the same area as before. Then its off to the run, as you exit the the zone you cross the third pad (end of T2, start of the run). The final pad is crossed at the finish line.

Now that I have that all cleared up (clear as mud right?) I'll post our times in the following format:

• Event: (time) place in age group / place overall

Scott - Total in Age Group: 32 Total Overall: 267

• Swim: (6:01) 19th/146th
• T1: (2:30) 21st/193rd
• Bike: (47:33) 29th/237th
• T2: (0:58) 4th/28th
• Run: (30:16) 21st/184th
• Finish: (1:27:17) 26th/209th

Melanie - Total in Age Group: 13 Total Overall: 168

• Swim: (6:11) 8th/66th
• T1: (2:22) 7th/78th
• Bike: (51:02) 8th/118th
• T2: (1:22) 2nd/65th
• Run: (32:77) 5th/70th
• Finish: (1:33:26) 8th/88th

And then there was our friend Shana.

Shana -

• Swim: (4:12) 2nd
• T1: (1:20) 3rd
• Bike: (36:29) 3rd
• T2: (1:10) 21st
• Run: (25:17) 10th
• Finish: (1:08:27) 3rd

As for the reason I didn't specify Age group/Overall for Shana, that's because she got 3rd overall. It was very impressive. As for the future, well I can safely say this was a good benchmark for us, but by no means will this be the final results. Mel has already signed up for her next triathlon in two weeks, and I am scoping out the next triathlon that I can do. We meet our first goals, now its time to improve on them!

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Digg won't go down without a fight. Thanks Kev for changing your mind and amplifying the voices of many! Let freedom ring, or at least go out with a bang!



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The death of Digg?

As a firestorm rages, Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, responds. Faced with a cease and desist letter, the site admins pulled a story off the site. In response to this action, many in the Digg comunity have revolted, and have flooded the site with the very key that caused the letter to land on Digg's doorstep. Here is Kevin's post:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin

To the staff of Digg, I can only hope those who demanded your heads will turn that energy towards the bigger potential threat on the horizon. They said "give me liberty or give me death", the later part may be something folks will have to deal with. There is a reason people have to pay attention to letters like that, just ask Napster, Kazza, and countless torrent sites. Bravo Kevin, for stepping up to the plate and offering to take one for the team. Its just hope and pray Digg.com doesn't become a sacrificial lamb.

DIGG: What's Happening with HD-DVD Stories?

"I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked."Holy flying moonbat monkey shit! This is the biggest snafu I have ever seen occuring real time online. Here is a bit of the background:Digg.com: a user driven solical content news site. Meaning, its a depository of stories submitted by its users, and promoted by its users. How it works - anybody can submit a story to the site, the population of digg is then able to vote on the story as cool/interesting or borring/already submitted/spam ect. As more and more people vote on a story, the site promotes it to the front page. Its kind of a grassroots approach to the buzz on the net.What happened: Recently, the code to unlocking the HD-DVD format from its encription was leaked to the net. With this code a person would be able to defeat the copy-protection, and have access the best quality images available to consumers to do what they wish. On the dark side of the coin, they could make copies of the disks, sell them, pirate them, make the unencripted files available online, ect ect. On the oposite side, the user could just be backing up a copy of their new disk to protect the content from scratches ect ect. That is the quick and skinny of it all. But the real interesting thing is what happened to the story that was submitted to digg.com with the code.The administrators removed the story, and banned the user (I have not had a chance to verify this). You see this story put digg in a tough spot. The culture of digg has always been about the user base, relying on them to drive the site. But once their users start posting intellectual material (as was the case with the code) they will be targeted by the angy IP holder. (See MPAA v. Napster). The backlash against the action the administrators took has been swift and furrious, as the digg users are submitting a deluge of stories with the same code.Since the site is near real time with its story promotion algarythms its been possible to witness the event online. I've never seen anything quite like it. I should be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Will the actions of its users draw digg into the crosshairs of an angry IP holder? Or will the actions of the administrators, in their action to protect the site, drive off its own lifeblood?I should also state that why this is such a big deal is that digg plays a large part on the promotion and buzz of stories across the entire web. Once something hits digg, a large number of people become aware of it, seeing as digg celebrated its 1 millionth user registration only a short time ago. -Crazy!



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