Federal Healthcare?

Single-payer system? Thanks, but no thanks!

Obama & The Press, Wake Up!

How is this a racial comment:

“Martin Luther King delivered one of the most profoundly important speeches ever delivered in America … the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. And then he worked with President Johnson to get the civil-rights laws passed because the dream couldn’t be realized until finally it was legally permissible for people of all colors and backgrounds, races and ethnicities to be accepted as citizens,” said Hillary Clinton.

No one person is solely responsible civil-rights reform in America. A lot of events and people brought this change. While most of the credit is due to Martin Luther King, Jr., we should not ignore the contributions of people like John F. Kennedy, Robert Kenndey, and Lyndon B. Johnson. King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. The Kennedy administration in 1960 to 1963 laid the essential groundwork for Civil Rights Act. Much of this was due to Kennedy’s brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s public passion for civil rights in 1962. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination in late November of 1963, Johnson was able to bring the frayed nation together and get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. This was no small feat, as in January of 1963 incoming Alabama governor George Wallace called for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” to popular appeal in his inaugural address. The mid to late 1960’s felt like another civil war in the US with the north and the south widely divided on the issue of civil rights. Johnson used the public shock of the assassination to get much of Kennedy’s legislative initiatives passed as tribute and legacy to the fallen president. King received the Noble Peace Prize that year of 1964. In 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. In 1968 King was assassinated, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by Johnson. This act picked up where some of the act of 1964 left off, prohibiting discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and sex.

It should be noted that in 1957 The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was proposed by Dwight Eisenhower. It was primarily a voting rights bill and was the first civil legislation enacted by Republicans in the US since Reconstruction. After it was proposed to Congress by Eisenhower, Southern senators sustained the longest filibuster in history to keep it from becoming law. It was never passed. The proposed Act of 1957 was the result of many things, with the NAACP’s litigation and lobbying chief among them.

This is a racial comment:

DON IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and—
BERNARD McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos, Tom.
DON IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some—woo.

More info:
African-American Civil Rights Timeline

SynFlux Plan . . .

SynFlux Economic Stimulus / Deficit Reduction Plan

1. Pass a law so that half of a person’s minimum monthly credit card payment would go toward principal.

2. Pass a law putting a cap on credit card interest rates at 19%.

3. Instead of giving a refund check as now proposed, cut federal withholding taxes immediately to put the same amount of money back into employee’s paychecks. (This would be a temporary rollback until the full amount is paid out.)

4. Cut maximum corporate tax rates on businesses that generate less than one half million dollars in sales to 10% on profits, cap tax rates on all corporate profits at 20%

5. For salaried employees, eliminate employee federal tax filing requirements, set the withholding rate to a flat rate of 15% that would cover all federal income taxes, fico, social security, etc. Non-salaried American’s would still have to file yearly federal tax returns, and also pay a flat rate of 15% of income.

6. For salaried employees, eliminate employee state tax filing requirements, set the withholding rate to a flat rate of 5% that would cover all state income taxes. Non-salaried American’s would still have to file yearly state tax returns, and also pay a flat rate of 5% of income.

7. Create a federal sales tax for consumers of 2%.

8. Create a federal sales tax for business-to-business transactions at 5%. This would include any business doing business within the US, regardless of where their headquarters are or where they are incorporated.

9. Cap state sales tax rate at 6%.

10. Eliminate the estate tax.

11. Create a carbon emission credit exchange for industry in the US like in Europe.

12. Raise the minimum wage to $8 an hour.

13. Create some form of universal health care where all US citizens are required to have health care or else face a higher withholding tax rate.

14. Allow all US citizens access to Medicaid regardless of income level.

15. Require all US doctors to accept Medicaid for the first five years in practice.

16. If a corporation does not offer health care benefits, it must set up Medicaid for its employees and automatically withhold the premium payment from the employee’s paycheck and pay the Medicaid system on the employee’s behalf.

17. Require all US corporations to pay taxes quarterly, eliminating yearly filing.

18. Make the first semester of college tuition at a state or community college 100% tax deductible to all US citizens.

19. Eliminate federal and state income taxes for all US military personnel holding the rank of an NCO or lower.

20. Eliminate federal and state income taxes for all US military reserve personal and National Guard personnel while serving active duty in a combat zone.

Something like the above!

FAT32

So you’re running XP Pro SP2 and some nut job gives you a hard drive with media on it that’s formatted HFS+. XP Pro SP2 will not show the drive on the desktop, but you can see it there in Disk Management, without a letter or path. What do you do? Find a Mac. Now you know your NTFS drives will only read and not write on this Mac. So you cannot copy your files on the HFS+ drive to a NTFS drive. So you go get yourself another drive, a blank one, and hook it to the Mac. Format it FAT32. Then hook the HFS+ drive to the Mac and copy its files to the FAT32 drive. Move the FAT32 drive to the XP Pro SP2 machine. Now you can access the files. If you’re feeling super-cool, copy the files to a NTFS drive.

Sidebar: so some nut job gives you a hard drive with P2 card DVCproHD media on it. The drive has multiple P2 card folders, with one CONTENT folder in the root folder. Your Avid only sees this folder during P2 import. What do you do? You know you cannot have two CONTENT folders in the root folder. So . . . you have to go to all the other CONTENT folders elsewhere on the drive and manually move (yep, it sucks) the contents of all audio, video, voice, icon, and proxy files in their corresponding folders to the same-titled respective folders within the CONTENT folder in the root folder of the drive. Be sure to not mix up your audio and video MXF files. Note that the audio files have “00″, “01″, “02″ and “03″ just before the extension. Now you can point the Avid to the CONTENT folder in the root folder on the drive and all your media will now show up in a bin in your project.

Moral: Digital video tape for acquisition is not yet dead! Real time capture is good time to log, plan, and take notes. No technology will eliminate proper planning from the workflow.

Apple TV still sucks!

It still can’t achieve 1080p HD quality, and only achieves 720p HD and 480i SD by skimping on bitrate. It uses MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264), lol! I mean, guys, it’s all about SMPTE 421M (VC-1) these days. And 4 or 5 bucks to download a file with a 24-hour viewing window? No thanks, even if it were HD. $2 gets you Blu-ray at Blockbuster with no late fees. And $20 gets me all the HD-DVDs I’ve got time for in a month via snail mail from NetFlix. Yeah, I was an early adopter of HD-DVD. I don’t care if it dies and I have to buy Blu-ray soon. HD anything is the only way to use my Sony Bravia to full effect. I’ve gotten ever dollar’s worth of all 350 I spent on my Toshiba player. Upscaling SD DVD players look lame. HD-DVD looks amazing. And Blu-ray is just a touch better still when encoded properly. It’s the best image I’ve seen outside of an editing bay or shooting studio. Ever see HDCAM SR with 4:4:4 color space on a 1:1 pixel HD-SDI mointor? Or else an HD-SDI tap straight off the chip block of a RED ONE camera on a JVC DT-V24L1DU lcd monitor? How about a 4k image stream with about five times the image quality of 1080p HD? I’ve seen these things. They make you drool and wet your pants simultaneously. It’s as if the Ziegfeld did IMAX. It makes HD-DVD and Blu-ray look cheap. It’s like watching VHS once you’ve seen Digital Betacam. Hopefully Bayer compression with wavelet transforms will replace DCT one day, once the hardware can keep up and not cost a fortune. It’s DCT versus DWT for now, but DWT is sure to win in the future. Still, HD-DVD is noticeably better than cable or on-demand HD, which has way too much compression applied for my taste. But even cable’s overly compressed HD kicks Apple TV’s ass when it comes to image quality. And neither can promise zero packet loss, so I’m sticking with optical discs instead of wires for now, ’cause Blu-ray and HD-DVD releases have been QC’d up the wazoo. Apple is becoming the greedy big brother it once rebelled against. But with its newspeak TV ads and hip product design, the sheep stay fooled: “cable tv bad, Apple TV good!” Pay more for less. $1 is too much for .mp3, drm or no, btw! Especially when there’s free p2p content at higher bitrates to be had. When are they gonna start pricing media by the byte? Because once that happens, flat-rate per month access is next, imho. Just look at the telecoms and voice calls for an example. That’s why the telecoms are drooling over video delivery: they can return to the per-call pricing model. Apple has always been good at turning cachet into cash. Who knew the hipsters could be fooled by a black mock turtleneck?

It’s not a tumor

It’s not a recession, it’s a slowdown. It’s not negative growth, it’s lower positive growth.

We have to kill again

New season of The Wire is on HBO.  I nearly forgot about it.  So last night I on-demanded the first three episodes and watched them back to back.  Great stuff so far.  I like the Baltimore Sun story thread.  When McNultey said “we have to kill again,” I jumped up off the sofa and laughed like a banshee.  Still waiting to hear Clay Davis deliver is trademark “sheeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittt”.  Prediction: Herc is going to play a key role in bringing down Marlo.

MacBook Air Hot Air?

The Fujitsu Lifebook Q2010 is .8 pounds lighter, .9 inches narrower, .01 inches shorter, has Gigabit Ethernet, a fingerprint reader (good to have on an ultra-portable), and a replaceable battery. It also has an optional media dock that adds a dual-layer DVD burner, four additional USB ports, an Ethernet port, VGA out, and it replicates the headphone and microphone jacks.

Why Apple chose to enter this small market sector is odd. And again Apple insists on locking the battery into the unit, ignoring the fact that battery technology advances. Okay, the unit is wireless. Until the battery dies. Then you’ll have to pull out the power cord and find an ac outlet to connect to, rather than swap a fresh battery for a dead one.  And no FireWire port.  That’s right, no FireWire port, so don’t expect to capture footage off your video camera to post on YouTube.  Also, no ethernet port? Did that really save size, weight, and cost? Now you’ll need a wireless network at home and at work. And while away from either, you’re now forced to rely on unsecured wi-fi hotspots, and purchase a cellular network card with monthly data plan for more remote areas without wi-fi. Plus, $3100 tricked out? I’d buy a Mac Pro and an iTouch for the same money!

Maybe Huckabee is Not Done . . .

Huck takes IA, congrats Huck!