Sprint and Clearwire deliver WiMAX to Los Angeles, Ohio, Miami and Washington DC, promises SF on December 28th
November 29, 2010 No Comment
Seems like Sprint wants to get every last lick of 4G coverage in before Verizon flips the switch on LTE — today, its joint venture with Clearwire is launching WiMAX in the City of Angels a day ahead of schedule . Lest you think Los Angeles is getting special treatment, five other cellular markets can now also get a taste of 5Mbps to 7Mbps download speeds, including Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus and our nation’s capitol, Washington D.C. That brings the total number of regions where you’ll get some mileage out of that $10 surcharge up to 68, in case you’re keeping track. What’s next? If the press release after the break is correct, San Francisco will finally satisfy its need for speed on December 28th. Not that any of these locales haven’t been secretly enjoying 4G already , of course. Continue reading Sprint and Clearwire deliver WiMAX to Los Angeles, Ohio, Miami and Washington DC, promises SF on December 28th Sprint and Clearwire deliver WiMAX to Los Angeles, Ohio, Miami and Washington DC, promises SF on December 28th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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By Mike Luckovich Related Entries November 25, 2010 North Korea Attack: ‘It’s Whatever’ November 24, 2010 Cultural Rebirth in the Old World
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Article by WN.Correspondent Dallas Darling. Even now, as some of Ireland’s leaders and the European Union are imposing harsh austerity measures on their nation, which are being met by tens of thousands of protesters and civil unrest; it is reminiscent of the “Irish Question.” Starting in the 1100′s, the English implemented a millennial age-old conquest against Ireland, taking possession of much of its fertile farmland and denying the Irish of many basic human rights. But Irish political nationalism and economic independence could not be controlled. Even the Great Hunger of the 1800′s, which one visitor described as “…six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled…
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More News The first batch of newly leaked U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday documented that the king of Saudi Arabia, echoed by other Arab leaders, have urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. They also revealed a U.S. State Department instruction to U.S. diplomats to spy on United Nations officials and collect their personal data, and they contained unflattering portraits of a number of world leaders. Further releases in coming days will outline U.S. fears over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear program, U.S. and South Korean discussions of Korean reunification and alleged Chinese cyber-sabotage, according to the five media organizations…
Continue reading …Comcast internet down across parts of the eastern seaboard, fix on the way
November 29, 2010 No Comment
Twitter’s abuzz with angry Comcast customers tonight, as internet service is down in Boston and parts of the eastern United States, a situation the company’s since confirmed at its official Twitter account. Comcast’s calling it an unexpected outage and says that “engineers are finalizing the correction” as we speak, though it’s admittedly been a couple of hours since that tweet. Meanwhile, Twitter at large seems to have figured out it’s a Comcast DNS issue, and have had some luck switching to alternate servers like Google’s at 8.8.4.4. and 8.8.8.8. Let us know if those work in comments after the break! [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Comcast internet down across parts of the eastern seaboard, fix on the way originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 23:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …It’s a strange and troubling news story: on April 8th of this year, an estimated fifteen percent of all web traffic was “hijacked” and routed through China , including military and government domains . A lengthy new congressional report on U.S.-China relations details two major Internet security events that saw Chinese data policies and practices ripple beyond the border to affect users in other countries, including the United States. The more alarming event came in April, when the state-owned China Telecom managed to redirect foreign Internet traffic through Chinese servers. As a result, for a brief period on April 8, about 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, including large portions of government and military transmissions, were “hijacked” and rerouted to Chinese servers, according to the new report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission . “Although the Commission has no way to determine what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data, incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications,” the study’s authors wrote. “This level of access could enable surveillance of specific users or sites.” That’s right, now that they had access, they could be continuing to surveil military and government communications. Great. We worry about the “national security threat” posed by Wikileaks revealing information about things we’ve already done, how about the threats posed by the Chinese knowing what we plan to do in the future? Of course, “experts” are playing down the threat as is the Chinese telecom company involved.
Continue reading …Partisan Inconsistency: In Close Congressional Races, AP Gives Two Paragraphs to GOP Win in IL-08, 14 to Dem in CA-11
November 29, 2010 No CommentI've noted an interesting disparity in how the Associated Press, the so-called Essential Global News Network, has covered Democratic and Republican congressional victories in situations where the counting has gone on well past Election Day. Let's contrast the amount of ink and bandwidth devoted to Republican Joe Walsh's victory over incumbent Democrat Melissa Bean in Illinois compared to the coverage accorded California Democrat Jerry McNerney in his victory over the GOP's David Harmer. First, in Walsh vs. Bean, the following is the only item that comes up in a search on Ms. Bean's name at the AP's main site: read more
Continue reading …McCain attacks ‘inexperienced’ Obama for promising ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal
November 29, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media The military’s controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy which forces gay, lesbian and trans-gender members to hide their personal lives or face expulsion from the service “is working,” according to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain. The Pentagon is expected to release a survey Tuesday that will say most of those serving don’t have strong objections to repealing the policy. In mid-November, McCain said he rejected that study because it didn’t ask service members whether the policy should be repealed. “[T]his study was directed at how to implement the repeal, not whether the repeal should take place or not,” McCain said. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates disagrees that there should be a new survey that amounts to a “referendum.” “I do not believe that military policy decisions — on this or any other subject — should be made through a referendum of Servicemembers,” Gates wrote to McCain in October. “I think he certainly has a point,” McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley Sunday. The Arizona senator belives that by repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Obama administration is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. “I would also certainly say that we should remember where this all started. There was no uprising in the military, no problems in the military with ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” McCain noted. “It’s called ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ If you don’t ask somebody, and they don’t tell,” he said. “The fact is this was a political promise made by an inexperienced president or candidate for presidency of the United States. The military is at its highest point in recruitment and retention and professionalism and capability, so to somehow allege that this policy has been damaging the military is simply false,” McCain continued. “So the fact is that this system is working,” he added.
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Click here to view this media The utter falsity of a statement is no barrier to Republican leaders repeating it. And so it was Sunday, as South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham offered his version of the GOP’s Uber Lie that tax cuts pay for themselves. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Graham defended the Republicans’ demand for another $700 billion windfall for the wealthy by announcing the fiscal equivalent of the sun rising in the west and setting in the east: “When you look historically, when we raise taxes, the economy slows and we don’t get any more revenue. When we cut taxes, the economy grows and we maintain the same amount of revenue.” Not on this planet. In his version of the Republican myth that ” tax cuts pay for themselves ,” President Bush confidently proclaimed, “You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase.” In 2007, Graham’s puppet master John McCain explained, “Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.” As it turned out, not so much. After Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt with his supply-side tax cuts, George W. Bush doubled it again with his own. And in between, the Clinton years saw robust economic growth, balanced budgets along with higher taxes (which, by the way, every single Republican in the House and Senate voted against.) In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure. As another CBPP analysis forecast , over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts if made permanent will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together . Predictably, the Bush tax cuts didn’t come anywhere close to paying for themselves. And as Congressional Budget Office projections revealed in June, making them permanent is the very worst thing the so-called deficit hawks could do to reduce the U.S. debt. Sadly, Lindsay Graham’s fraud is now orthodoxy in Republican circles . Despite the inescapable conclusion of history, theory and empirical evidence to the contrary, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, John Boehner, Tom Coburn, John McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison and other Republican alchemists continue to insist that cutting taxes increases government revenue and thereby reduces the deficit. Of course, even though the tax cut claim is laughably false, conservative ideology requires that it must true. Otherwise, the Republicans have just been giving money to rich people . For more background, charts and data, see ” 10 Epic Failure of the Bush Tax Cuts .”
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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology. When Acer announced a slate of new devices at a New York press conference last week , the overarching message was simple — keyboards are as done as a Thanksgiving turkey. The company introduced an array of tablets, most of which were running Android, with sizes ranging from five- to ten-inches each. That’s almost as broad a lineup as Archos, which has dipped down to what most would consider digital audio player turf with a three-inch tablet (tablette?) and a precursor to what is sure to be a merciless barrage of tablets on the slate for CES. The single manifestation of a physical QWERTY text entry device was a keyboard dock designed for a 10-inch tablet running Windows. But as much as Acer’s tablet lineup seems poised to flounder in the coming sea of similarity, its Iconia laptop stood out, eschewing a keyboard for a second 14-inch touchscreen to match the main display. Unlike the dual 14-inch hinged Kno device discussed in columns prior , this one is clearly designed to be used in a landscape orientation, and unlike the 7-inch Toshiba Libretto , the Iconia is not being positioned as some kind of limited-edition experiment. If anything, Acer signaled that it would be the first in a series of products that would unfold over the next several years. Continue reading Switched On: Acer’s Iconic Keyboard Switched On: Acer’s Iconic Keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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