GasPriceWatch is a great idea: harness the power of crowds to identify the cheapest gas station in an area. Help markets be more efficient! Strike back against temporary locational monopoly and impulse purchases! Make the oiloligopolists fight for your dollar!
GasPriceWatch claims 105,690 “Volunteer Price Spotters” who turn in 43,762 prices per weekly, covering 126,860 US Gas Stations.
But none, it seems, near where I live.
When things go wrong with university computing, we don't exactly get full disclosure. More often than not, it's hide the fact, pass the buck, issue turgid self-exonerations later.
Here's how my commercial host deals with issues:
We experienced a brief period of downtime around 4:30pm this afternoon. The problem was caused by a misconfiguration on one of our routers that subsequently required us to reload our main switch as well, and caused some other sporadic outages for approximately the last half hour. While there was intermittent downtime with our private network, access to your websites was largely unaffected with some people seeing more of an effect than others. We're currently in the process of kicking the responsible parties in the butt and working on preventing such problems in the future.
Happy DreamHost NetNotWorking Team!
It's a bit flippant but I'll take it over denial and obfuscation any day.
Cory Doctrow has a marvelous explanation of why 'digital rights management' (building things that don't let you play digital content the way you want to) is bad business for everyone in the digital food chain. (Spotted via Joho the Blog)
I wish I knew how to make a .pdf file that looked this good and had all these cool clickable features. Wow.
UPDATE: After digesting Cory's somewhat gentle persuasiveness, have a look at Joho's own much more pessimistic take on what the pro-DRM people are thinking and doing. Hint:
they're going to win. They own Congress and neither Congress nor the entertainment cartel sees any reason to compromise. Their Lakoffian frame tells them that they're stopping theft, end of story. So they are going to kill the Internet and they don't even know it.
By this metric, I rate .209448819 brooksies. That will do.
[If I google “Michael Froomkin” then I get “about 26,600” hits (“Froomkin” gets much more, but much of that's due to my famous brother). But the MTGoogleRank plugin in the right margin 'only' sees 18,800 hits for the same search. I have no idea why. Perhaps the smaller number excludes multiple pages on the same site?]
Update: Kevin Drum wants “one brooksie” to be a fixed metric of 127,000 google hits, like the meter. But why shouldn't this flucturate like a currency given the rise and inevitable fall of the increasingly lame columnist?
Lots happening.
Television rules the day from here on in, it is about, not the doers, the thinkers the talkers – but the watchers. And in recent days those watchers are breaking hard away from Bush, because his message of “Iraq is alright” is not matching what they see from their own lives. In the next few days the mood of the media will also be important – do they stand by their man? Or do they begin to come over to the idea that kicking Bush can play – and that CBS wasn't wrong, just a little to early in shorting Bush with their memo story?
Bush's reliance on Iraq says he knows that the economy, and even terror are losing messages. Which means he knows he has lost. Kerry pulling back means he knows he is losing.
Who loses this one first? That is, who says something that can be played and replayed by the media as a sign of being “out of touch”. For those that have counseled aggression, instead there will be conservation – avoiding of any word that can be taken out of context. Both candidates will speak like movie reviews – even one word can kill them, so every word will ooze message. If they attack, they will pan, if they pander, they will gop on the praise in globs and blobs.
The serious people have made up their mind about this election, now comes the sideshow version of the campaign, where both candidates become caricatures, not from the media, but by and for the media.
I dreaded the idea of phone banking and only reluctantly signed up but, to my surprise, it ended up being a lot of fun and I really feel like it makes a difference. When I told people about it the next day, I found that most of them had the same reservations and questions that I had going into it so I thought I’d write up a quick FAQ to encourage everyone out there to give it a try.
Don't hold your breath, but apparently in the UK, impeachment, a procedure last used in 1805 remains vital today.
Tony Blair could be impeached before the House of Lords for misleading Parliament over the basis for military action against Iraq, two leading lawyers say in advice published today.
They believe there is a case that the Prime Minister is guilty of a serious breach of constitutional principles.
Rabinder Singh, QC, and Prof Conor Gearty say the ancient procedure, under which MPs initiate criminal proceedings for actions that would otherwise go unprosecuted, can still be used to call ministers to account.
There's no chance that the Commons, controlled by the New Labour Party, would ever convict. But I suppose there's a real non-zero chance that the quirky House of Lords might at least debate the issue of voting a bill of impeachment.
Of course here in the US we only impeach people for lying about sex, not for lying to Congress and the nation about why we are going to war.
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