Your Liberal Media: “Not Rich” Edition | OurFuture.org

CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo made her mis-observation to the New York Post, who ran it under the headline “Barack’s Bite:”
The income tax is also in for a bump. Bartiromo says, “Right now [it] is 35 percent, Obama wants to take that to 39 percent . . . We’re talking about people who make over $200,000. That’s not rich. So it’s actually going to impact more people than you may think.”

Maybe if you’re a Financial Journalist for CNN.com $200,000 may not seem like much. But earning $200,000 a year puts you in the top three percent of all income earners in the US, the wealthiest nation in th history of the planet. Ratcheting up taxes for the top 3%? Maybe not a bad idea. But I’d rather see a flat tax with no deductions to truly level the playing field. And just as the easiest way to find new energy is to conserve it, I’d rather the government address it’s budget issues by slashing the corporate subsidies and conserving our tax dollars.

God I love the Internet. And all the weirdness you can find while randominly browsing from link to link to link. Please enjoy. via PinkTentacle.com
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/04/video-mononoke-dance/

from CRN.com

They’re frightening, yet strangely beautiful. They spread and infect and replicate and continually wreak havoc. While viruses and malware steal copious amounts of information and compromise an untold number of machines every day, these treacherous security threats are unseen to the naked eye. Until now.
For the first time ever, images have been developed that visualize a wide range of these pernicious, but hidden, threats. Researchers at MessageLabs, the vendor behind the project, disassembled malicious code from a variety of well-known threats to render it inoperative. The researchers then passed the code along to computational artist Alex Dragulescu, who applied specially built application to analyze the code and used its values to create a 3D entity. That entity was then transferred to modeling software, where it was positioned and lit to capture the aesthetics of the model. Dragulescu then used his artistic touch to prepare the final image for its presentation April 7 at the Varnish Fine Art Gallery in San Francisco.

via Associated Press

Federal regulators on Thursday fined Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best Buy Co., and other retailers $3.9 million combined for failing to properly label that analog-only televisions will need to be retrofitted after the switch to digital TV next year.

The Federal Communications Commission also handed down $2.7 million in fines to other companies for violating other digital TV rules that involve shipping analog equipment and blocking technologies such as the V-chip.

An FCC rule, adopted last May, requires retailers to display or affix “consumer alert” labels to analog-only TV equipment — including TVs, DVDs, videocassette recorders and digital video recorders — that says it will not receive signals after the nationwide digital transition without a special converter box.

The rule is to keep consumers from buying TV equipment that will not work after the digital switch by Feb. 17, 2009. After that, if the TV doesn’t get cable or satellite service or isn’t hooked up to the converter box that translates over-the-air digital broadcasts, it won’t work.

The FCC, which conducted numerous inspections last June, said it initially issued warnings to companies, whose stores and Web sites across the country were in violation of the rule. The agency said it gave each company “a reasonable opportunity” to respond.

Google unleashed their Amazon Web Services killer today called Google App Engine. Right now the development kit is limited to Python (and the Django Web Framework built on Python), the Google BigTable database and the GFS file services but this will undoubtedly change the game for Amazon Web Services and the paid providers that have been built around managing AWS. Here are more details from the announcement on TechCrunch.com

Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. {Google is} launching Google App Engine, an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.

At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.

Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.