Clever’s Newsish Items 10/3/2007
Comments(1)Categorics: Government, Local, Music, Newsish, Orwell, Science, Telecom, Video
Morning.
- Opponents see few benefits in I.C. utility franchises – Need to look into this some more…might have to use Infovision, they have all the council meetings online.
- Violations found at U of I Hospitals – Surprised at this one.
- Study: file-sharing leads to “chart churn,” helps indie acts
- Follow up: AT&T vows to use Terms of Service for good, not censorship
- UK can now demand data decryption on penalty of jail time – this is a pretty important ruling, watch for something similar being discussed in the US.
- Verizon, Copper, Fiber, and the Truth – a slashdot linkfest and discussion on Verizon cutting the copper upon installation of FiOS
- Driverless truck lurches out of lab
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- Pulsejets down under
- A comet loses its tail
- Congress blinds DHS’s space-borne eye of Sauron, postpones domestic spy plan
- Another follow up: Blackwater Hearings Ain’t no Superbad – A Wired correspondent’s take on the hearings yesterday. A good quote:
What I found especially telling, given the consistently weak grasp of the issues, was that multiple representatives opened their remarks by talking about how Blackwater contractors protected them while on visits to Iraq. They often meant this as a compliment to the firm, and also a way of establishing their credentials on the issue. But it usually backfired, revealing a lack of simple curiosity. It showed that they’ve known about the massive use of contractors for years – they just didn’t bother to ask any questions, even when the issue was in their faces.
- All hail Tweety:
I’ll probably find more. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.
from wired,
“the use of private military contractors has never really been about financial cost savings. Rather, it’s been about political cost savings. No one was able to point to a single decision to outsource some function to Blackwater that happened because of a cost differential analysis. Instead, each of these choices was made because a policymaker wanted to try to avoid spending political capital on an otherwise difficult decision, and a contractor was now there to enable this political cost avoidance.”
we seem to be fixated upon certain metrics of the war , such as # of ‘US soldiers’ killed.. (‘why’ is another discussion)
the extensive use of security contractors is one way address that statistic…
the public’ who demand better outcomes, just end up paying 10-fold in cost for troops that operate outside of public opinion – and really outside of the democratic levers of the united states.
last point… with this admin’s ‘privatize everything’ policy, including schools, socail security, medical care, etc… why not the military? (how long did you think it would take for money to translate directly into raw power? bang bang)