Monday, July 07, 2008

In light of the Obama birth certificate controversy...


Now, I've been doing my level best to try to debunk the Obama birth certificate "scandal".


I analyzed the high-resolution Kos scan, for instance, and was able to tease out what appears to be a faint seal and signature block.

That said, some (and I apologize, but I honestly can't remember who it was) reminded me of this little story:

Passport files of candidates breached

State Department employees snooped through the passport files of three presidential candidates — Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain — and the department's inspector general is investigating... The incidents raise questions as to whether the information was accessed for political purposes and why two contractors involved in the Obama search were dismissed before investigators had a chance to interview them...

And this one:

Two Fired for Viewing Obama Passport File

Two State Department employees were fired and a third has been disciplined for improperly accessing Sen. Barack Obama's passport file, the State Department announced last night... Senior department officials said they learned of the incidents only when a reporter made an inquiry yesterday afternoon. They said an initial investigation indicated that the employees -- all of whom worked on contract -- were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."

...Bill Burton, spokesman for Obama's presidential campaign, called the incidents "an outrageous breach of security and privacy." He said this is "a serious matter that merits a complete investigation," adding that the campaign will "demand to know who looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach."

Hillary's agents are diabolical, aren't they?

They knew about this burgeoning scandal months ago. Heh!

Sunday, July 06, 2008

The state senator who couldn't keep his constituents from the cold


"Senator Obama does not remember having conversations with Tony Rezko about properties that he owned" — Obama’s campaign staff, April 2007 (Chicago Sun-Times)

For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago's South Side... It was just four years after the landlords -- Antoin "Tony'' Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru -- had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.

How cold was it?

During January and early February, temperatures routinely dipped to around ten degrees below zero.

But Rezko and his partner couldn't rustle up enough money to get the Englewood building's heat turned back on.

Their company, Rezmar Corp., did manage to find $1,000, which it promptly gave to the campaign fund of State Senator Barack Obama. The young politican had recently been elected the representative for the district that included the Englewood apartment complex.

The South Sangamon apartment building finally had its heat turned on in February 1997, but only after the city of Chicago sued, eventually collecting a $100 fine from Rezmar. There appears to be no evidence that the young state senator had anything to do with the city's numerous lawsuits against Rezko's companies, even though the city was attempting to protect Obama's constituents.

The tenants there had no heat from Dec. 27, 1996, until at least Feb. 3, 1997, when the city of Chicago sued. It was during this exact period that the district's new state senator -- Barack Obama -- received a $1,000 donation from Rezmar. The date was Jan. 14, 1997.

The South Sangamon building was one of 30 low-income projects—containing a total of 1,025 apartments—that Rezko took on between 1989 and 1998. In all, Rezmar Corp. collected more than $100 million by arranging “public-private partnerships” with the city, the state and federal governments, and in bank loans to rehab South Side buildings intended as low-income housing. Neither Rezko nor his partner had any construction experience when they created Rezmar, but they became experts at working Chicago’s political system to acquire taxpayer subsidies for their redevelopment schemes...

...Not surprisingly, every one of the projects ran into financial difficulties within six years.

Eleven of Rezko's buildings were in Obama's district (and all were in close proximity to the district). The results of Rezko's housing experiment?

• Seventeen buildings -- many beset with code violations, including a lack of heat -- ended up in foreclosure.
• Six buildings are currently boarded up.
• Hundreds of the apartments are vacant, in need of major repairs.
• Taxpayers have been stuck with millions in unpaid loans.
• At least a dozen times, the city of Chicago sued Rezmar for failure to heat buildings.

Did State Senator Obama ever complain to anyone -- government officials, Rezmar or Rezko -- about the conditions of Rezmar's buildings? There is apparently no documented evidence that Obama stood up for his constituents.

Even Obama's campaign has implicitly confirmed this fact. In April of 2007, it released the statement: "Senator Obama does not remember having conversations with Tony Rezko about properties that he owned."

Staffers were obviously thinking about combating various money-for-favors implications. But they neglected to consider the other side of this statement. It demonstrates Obama never stood up for his constituents who were shivering in the cold or fighting off mice in their Rezko-rehabbed properties.

But Obama did find time to write letters for Rezko; these requests were only recently discovered.

For example, Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting Rezko's bid for $14 million in taxpayers' money for an elder-care facility.

The letters appear to contradict a statement last December from Obama, who told the Chicago Tribune that, in all the years he's known Rezko, "I've never done any favors for him.''

On Tuesday, Bill Burton, press secretary for Obama's presidential campaign, said the letters Obama wrote in support of the development weren't intended as a favor to Rezko or [partner Allison] Davis.

Not very believable, in my estimation.

Obama was able to assist Davis and Rezko in other ways:

Cullen Davis is the son of Allison Davis, who was Senator Obama's boss, when the former community activist got out of community activating and got a Harvard Law Degree and worked for the civil rights firm Davis [owns].

"In 2000 Davis asked the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago for a $1 million investment in a new development partnership, Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners. Obama, a member of the board, voted in favor, helping Davis secure the investment... The following year, Davis assembled another partnership to create New Evergreen/Sedgwick, a $10.7 million renovation of five walk-up buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood. The project, a model of small-scale, mixed-income development, was subsidized by almost $6 million in state loans and federal tax credits."

Which the Boston Globe then goes on to describe the multiple levels of failure of the project, from both the financial angle and the viewpoint of the residents...

You may remember the Woods Fund. Obama served as a member of its board, along with unrepentant terrorists/Communists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Thus, Obama seemingly used every lever available to him to assist his patrons -- including convicted felon Tony Rezko and Allison Davis -- in their quest to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers and his constituents.

And, according to the Huffington Post in March of this year, the Obama campaign was forced to admit that it received significantly more money from Rezko than it had previously disclosed.

Rezko helped raise up to $250,000 for his various political races, Obama's campaign said. The campaign had previously put the figure at $150,000 but now says that amount was only for his 2004 Senate race...

And in interviews with two Chicago newspapers, the Democrat again said it was a mistake to involve Rezko in his purchase of a new home _ not just because Rezko was under federal investigation but because he was a contributor and political activist... Still, Obama said he did nothing unethical...

..."He never once asked me for any favors, or ever did any favors for me," the Illinois senator said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. "He never gave me any gifts or gave me any indication he was setting me up to ask for any favors in the future."

Obama's staff admitted that Rezko raised:

• About $160,000 for Obama's successful run for U.S. Senate in 2004
• Between $60,000 to $90,000 for his state Senate campaigns and a failed bid for Congress in 2000

* * *

Put in the simplest terms possible, state senator Obama couldn't even keep his constituents warm during the winter, presumably because he was too busy assisting his developer buddies with their various moneymaking schemes.

And, as both a "community organizer" and then a state senator, Obama couldn't even keep federally subsidized housing complexes like Grove Parc habitable.

You know, habitable is a pretty freaking low bar to set; and Obama couldn't even meet it for the downtrodden residents in his district.

Now: this is Obama's experience that ostensibly qualifies him for the presidency?

If it weren't so deadly serious, I'd think it was someone's idea of a sick joke.


Hat tip: Larwyn

New York City officials propagate unfounded politics of fear!


A New York City undercover operative, testifying under the alias Kamil Pasha, discovered "potential terrorists in our midst."

A young undercover city detective spent four years in the shadowy world of terrorist wanna-bes - taking part in jihadist discussions and training in parks in the dead of night - to get a handle on the homegrown threat... At great personal risk, he participated in everything from prayers at a mosque to martial arts training under cover of darkness to watching jihadist videos, with many of the activities laced with talk of killing, according to a source familiar with the undercover's investigations.

His experiences paint a vivid portrait of the potential for local terror. While the picture is in no way indicative of the city's Muslim population as a whole, it provides insight into its most radical element... The detective spent his time interacting with informal groups of youths and men who shared extremist views - and his experiences illustrate what police say is the potential for radicalization of some elements in the community.

He reported that after prayers at a neighborhood mosque, there were often private classes that included discussions about bombing different areas... [they] discussed violent jihad in bookstores, private houses and on buses en route to paintball and shooting-range events... [and] ideological justifications for killing Westerners.

...The detective reported that some youths became extremists after they traveled to their home countries; others went on the hajj - the pilgrimage to Mecca - and came back fired up by imams who encouraged violence as a religious obligation... Others, after visiting relatives abroad, became enraged at their family's living conditions and blamed the U.S. for supporting nondemocratic governments.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was blunt in his assessment.

"We're still very much learning about our enemy... [While the homegrown threat is real] ...An attack from afar by Al Qaeda is always a possibility... We have our ear to the ground... We are aware of the possibility of a threat to this city developing very close to home."

Will someone please tell Kelly and New York City's largely Democratic leadership that they are engaging in the dreaded politics of fear?

Especially for: Progressive Gary, who continually accuses Republicans of engaging in the "politics of fear"

Google releases its open-source RatProxy web app scanner


Last week, Google open-sourced one of its web development tools -- RatProxy. The company describes it as:

A semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool, optimized for an accurate and sensitive detection, and automatic annotation, of potential problems and security-relevant design patterns based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments.

Detects and prioritizes broad classes of security problems, such as dynamic cross-site trust model considerations, script inclusion issues, content serving problems, insufficient XSRF and XSS ([Ed: cross-site request forgery and cross-site scripting, respectively]) defenses, and much more.

But what's it really do?

At heart, it's designed specifically for web 2.0 applications (as opposed to full-blown security proxies like WebScarab and ProxMon, which are more general purpose in nature). WebScarab, for instance, supports automated parameter fuzzing in order to detect SQL injection and XSS, but also supports a zillion other features.

Conversely, RatProxy is designed specifically for assessment of cross-site vulnerabilities with little effort. As opposed to more active scanning tools, it also can run against production systems without fear of DOSsing (denial-of-service) them. RatProxy hones in on five specific types of weaknesses:

• MIME type mismatches: does the reported MIME type match the actual content?
• How do apps behave when cookie-based authentication data is removed from requests?
• Are security tokens sufficiently strong (e.g., can they be guessed) and will they resist replay attacks?
• Are parameters of a request echoed back in the response such that XSS is possible?
• MIME type mismatches: does the reported MIME type match the actual content?
• Can boundary conditions be exploited such that trust mechanisms are spoofable or information disclosure is possible?

The doc is pretty good reading and covers more of the details.

RatProxy should run under most Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, and Windows (via Cygwin) configurations.

An underreported story from July 4th


Gateway Pundit highlighted an underreported story on July 4th.

But... But... They're broken and worn out.

Didn't they listen to Barack?... There's no military solution!
This can't be happening.
They're just depressed. They're medicated.
They're too stupid and ended up in Iraq. And, now they're too stupid to know they're fighting a lost war.
Don't they know it's a failure?

The stress has made them cold-blooded killers .

Today 1,200 US troops reenlisted in Iraq- at a former Saddam Hussein palace


This was one for the record books... More than 1,200 US troops serving in Iraq signed up for extended service in the military to mark America's Independence day on Friday.

General David Petraeus led the airmen, Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers in their oath to defend their country against all enemies both foreign and domestic.

Democrats were wrong.

Well, they were wrong about Communism; wrong about welfare reform; wrong about how to fight terrorism; wrong about charter schools; wrong about trial lawyers; wrong about energy policy; wrong about global warming "climate change" (noticed those rising sea levels Al Gore promised?), to name but a few.

So this doesn't exactly come as a surprise.

Oh, and Harry Reid could not be reached for comment.

The video is here, courtesy Bob Krumm.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

AP: Your life is a disease. Barack Obama is the cure.


Could the AP -- and pro journalist Pauline Arrillago -- be any more obvious?

Happy birthday, America? This year, we're not so sure.

The nation's psyche is battered and bruised, the sense of pessimism palpable. Young or old, Republican or Democrat, economically stable or struggling, Americans are questioning where they are and where they are going. And they wonder who or what might ride to their rescue...

They use words such as "terrified," "disgusted" and "scary" to describe what one calls "this mess" we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

Drill down to paragraph 16, however, and the little land we like to call reality disrupts Arrillago's theme.

In 2008, using history as a yardstick, life actually is better and richer and fuller, with more opportunities than ever before.

"Objectively things are going real well," says author Gregg Easterbrook, who discusses the disconnect in his book "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse."

He ticks off supporting statistics: A relatively low unemployment rate, 5.5 percent in June. (Employers did, indeed, cut payrolls last month by 62,000 jobs, but consider the 10.1 rate of June 1983 or the 7.8 rate of June 1992.) Declining rates of violent crimes, property crimes and big-city murders. Declining rates of disease. Higher standards of living for the middle class and the working poor. And incomes that, for many, are rising above the rate of inflation.

But most newspapers would have truncated the article by then.

As for the primary reason behind the slowing economy? The AP omits one crucial fact: our entire economy runs on oil. And Democrats have blocked its own citizens from tapping tens of billions of gallons of petroleum and natural gas for more than a decade.

If the AP's agenda were any more transparent, a faux Obama presidential seal would have watermarked the article.

Hat tip: LGF. Linked by: Protein Wisdom. Thanks!

Lest we forget they support the troops.



Now rewind to 1943.


What do you think American citizens would have done to the likes of the Kos Kidz during World War II?

I agree: it wouldn't have been pretty.

Che-Che-Change we can believe in (part deux)


Idea: Reliapundit

The (semi-) mysterious case of Obama's birth certificate


As regular readers know, I have followed the case of the missing Obama birth certificate story closely.

In fact, several days ago, I pointed to evidence of the legitimacy of scanned images released by the Daily Kos site and the Obama campaign.

Jay McKinnon and the Daily Kos "Forgeries"


But over the last two days, several new developments have countered my assertion. First, the newspaper Israel Insider (II) highlighted an implication that blogger Jay McKinnon created the Obama birth certificate from whole cloth.

Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of fake Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same Daily Kos blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears.

But why does this matter?

Without a valid birth certificate, the primary record of US birth, Obama cannot prove that he fulfills the "natural born citizen" requirement of the Constitution, throwing into doubt his eligibility to run for President and throwing the race into turmoil. His presumed Kenyan-born father was foreign-born, and his mother was too young at the time of birth to confer natural born status by virtue of her American citizenship. Thus his citizenship comes down to proving he was born in the USA, and his campaign has staked its credibility on the authenticity of the Daily Kos-derived birth certificate image. (These aspects of the case are covered extensively in the previous article in this series.)

A prior conversation on the Daily Kos site involving "opendna" (McKinnon, according to II) was captured by staffers and implicates the entire set of scans as possible forgeries.

A possible answer for some of these anomalies is provided in banter between opendna and other commenters in the discussion thread of the blog post.

At 12:41pm, a prior request for a "font expert" is answered by opendna: "How about a certified DHS [Department of Homeland Security] document expert?" And by 1:35pm opendna comes up with a suggestion: "Why don't you just print one up for him? Here's a blank template.

And sure enough, there in the comments stream, he provides the "almost blank" Hawaii birth certificate image that appears on his Photobucket account, with just the information for the island and hour of birth.

And this blank template appears to precisely match (including time of birth) the Obama scan.

But there's one problem: I analyzed the blank scan with the Obama scan for artifacts on the reverse side of the "certificates".

The Obama scan has subtle imprints of what appear to be a seal and a signature block.

Under the same set of analysis procedures, the blank scans allegedly produced by McKinnon come up dry. No imprints are visible (just a note: the reasons for the differences in the appearance of the processed images relate to the original sizes and resolutions that I received).

If II wants to make the case that the provenance of the Obama scan is similar to that of McKinnon's blank certificate, it must explain the (missing) seal and signature block.

Techdude's analysis


Yesterday, Larwyn alerted me to a post on the Atlas site by one of the commenters.

As a real forensic computer investigator (board certified, investigated thousands of cases, access to a full forensic computer lab, yadda yadda...) I decided to jump into the fray over the fake vs real discussion a week ago when a friend of mine challenged me to see what I could find (since according to him, the document was clearly a real one). He is what one would call a slightly rabid Obama supporter – he even has the tattoo to prove it...

...Before I became a forensic geek I worked for [a herein nameless publicly traded company] that designed counterfeit detection hardware and software for the banking and retail industry. The company was very high profile and we received training from [a certain herein nameless department of the Federal government that knows a thing or two about counterfeiting] - but I do not claim to be an all around expert in Questioned Documents but after several years of working with them I do know what to look for to spot an obvious fake...

...I caught a glimpse of what I and apparently everyone else had simply not noticed. The security borders do not match. Literally. They are not even close to identical... (Ed: image on the left is from the Obama scan; image on the right in the Decosta certificate).

...I am unable to explain the differences between the security diamond sizes and counts and the un-centered portions (meaning the diamond pattern ends on an odd pattern instead of even where it meets the edges of the header and footer boxes). Looking closer at the KOS certificate (magnified to 400%) clearly shows inconsistencies in the security border such as cut and paste marks and overlaying of the side borders where they meet the top and bottom. This effect is not observed in the Decosta certificate at any magnification. Another point of interest, removing the background security pattern did not remove the background area from underneath the security border on the KOS certificate. The color and hue values of the background pattern located and viewable through the security border are also not a match to the rest of the certificate background. I can not explain these discrepancies. I then noticed there were some indications that the background pattern had been duplicated and placed in various locations to clean up the document. Now at some point I just started to laugh and went out for a smoke and gave up looking for more...

...I am convinced that the certificate is a fake (and not really a very good one) and I went into this with a completely open mind (something the Obamanationalists seem to have lost). I also have to say that everyone who has been looking into this federal crime (and it is a federal crime even if the certificates were never meant to be used for identification) have done a stupendous job and I wish they all worked for my lab. Talk about a winning team.

Put simply, Techdude has identified the certificate's borders as suspect. And, I agree, it looks cheap and lousy. But can we really say that Hawaii hasn't changed the border since the DeCosta certificate was released?

But until Hawaiian officials comment on Obama's birth certificate issue, I think we are all grasping at straws.

Doubters on the Kos site


That said, some DailyKos commenters are none too pleased.

Birth Certificate is an Obvious Fake

Sorry to disabuse you folks, but this birth certificate on dailykos is an obvious fake... The fake "birth certificate" just appeared Thursday morning on dailykos without any reference as to who released it or where it came from... There is a link from the fightthesmears website to "the truth" posting on mybarackobama.com to it without any reference. (i.e. there is no "this is Barack Obama's birth certificate
provided to dailykos by person xxx of the Obama campaign")

There is no provenance explaining where the "birth certificate" came from. In Hawaii, birth certificates aren't publicly available and reporters' requests for one have been ignored for months... There is no explanation as to whom vouches for its origins or its authenticity... The certificate number is blacked out. Why?

There are image artifacts consistent with forgeries and image processing. It's not a real, unprocessed scan of a birth certificate... It's not certified. Hawaii state code provides that certificates issued by the department of health be certified... Doe the Obama campaign have a statement on this uncertified "birth certificate"?

Isn't this Obama's "birth certificate" issue getting to be kind of strange by now?

How can a man run for President without disclosing his birth certificate?

Why does an anonymous, no-provenance, obviously fake scan of an uncertified birth certificate appear on dailykos, a fanatically pro-Obama blog?

Why won't the Obamas or the Obama campaign just formally and transparently release a certified copy of Barack Obama's birth certificate?

by AsperGirl on Fri Jun 13, 2008 at 08:05:30 AM PDT

This is NOT a Birth Certificate. It is, instead, a proof of birth that may be issued by the state for use in obtaining passports, etc. if the original has been lost, or is unavailable as in the case of adoption where the original is sealed by the court. Hawaii's rules may be different than other states', but the information on this one is scanty. One question that should be asked here is why the father's race is given as "African". African is not a race. I'm not saying this proof of birth is inauthentic, but there are a few other questions it raises. Why not have them answered and put the issue to rest, especially when the Office of President legally requires a natural born citizen?

by miriam on Fri Jun 13, 2008 at 01:23:23 PM PDT

Indeed. Why not have them answered?

Beware the trap or dead-end


I had written a few days ago, having found what appears to be a seal and a signature block, that the issue might be resolved.

But, as experts have ably pointed out, it may not be.

But... I would still caution all who jump on the Obama-slash-bogus birth certificate bandwagon that this may yet turn out to be a trap or dead-end. Obama's campaign could produce a real birth certificate and blame the scan on another "ill-informed staffer"... who is then thrown under the bus.*

Let's not forget to keep attacking Obama's policy differences, his amazing verbal contortions (some would call them outright lies), and coaster-sized resume. For that is how he will be defeated in November.

* Joining Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, William Ayers, and countless other problematic "staffers".

Linked by: Memeorandum, The National Review, Tigerhawk, and AJ Strata. Thanks!

Friday, July 04, 2008

Those who cannot remember the past...


Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905
US (Spanish-born) philosopher (1863 - 1952)

I'm patiently waiting for the day that this embarrassing sentence will disappear down the memory hole.

Diplomacy: Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions. Now is the time to pressure Iran directly to change their troubling behavior. Obama would offer the Iranian regime a choice. If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization, economic investments, and a move toward normal diplomatic relations. If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation. Seeking this kind of comprehensive settlement with Iran is our best way to make progress.

Whoa. Ahmadinejad must be terrified. Barry Rubin reminds us that the law enforcement approach to extremism works.

Each day we're told that radical Islamists, terrorists, and assorted extremists are going to moderate, so why not negotiate with them, appease them, defuse their grievances, have dialogue, and then everything will be okay.

...And yet what can you say when confronted with this New York Times headline of December 21, 1924:

"Hitler Tamed By Prison; Released on Parole, He Is Expected to Return to Austria."

[This is not a satire. See for yourself at: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70A17F73F5B12738DDDA80A94DA415B848EF1D3&scp=1&sq=Hitler+tamed+by+prison+article&st=p]

...Prison, the article [explains], seems to have moderated him. The authorities were convinced that he presented no further danger to the existing society. In fact, it was expected that he would abandon public life and return to his native land, Austria.

Well, that problem was certainly solved easily.

And also the Times learned its lesson, hasn't it?

As the newspaper explained in a June 30 editorial:

"Few countries can afford the luxury of limiting their diplomacy to friendly countries and peace-loving parties. National security often requires negotiating with dangerous enemies."

Right. And believing their protestations of moderation, making concessions to them, ending sanctions, blaming ourselves for problems, and never using force is the actual content of such negotiations.

Then the leaders of Hamas, Hizballah, Syria, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhoods, al-Qaida, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Sudan, etc., will no doubt be tamed, abandon public
life, and go back to their homes.

Photo o' the Day: Why we're there


Spotted at Bronze Blog.

U.S. Army Task Force Regulators 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment Staff Sgt. Fred Hampton, of Lexington, Ky., kneels on a knee to talk with a young Iraqi boy at the future site of Regular 6 Park in the Thawra 1 section of the Sadr City District of Baghdad on June 20. Photo: Tech Sgt. Cohen Young, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.


I love this photo.

How Google Maps determines your location


These guys at Google are S-M-A-R-T-T.

Wireless phones can make and receive calls because they are connected over the air to a nearby cell tower. The phone knows the ID of the cell tower that it's currently using...

...If the phone has GPS, the Maps application on the phone sends the GPS coordinates along with the cell ID to the Google location server...

...Over millions of such updates, across multiple phones, carriers, and times, the server clusters the GPS updates corresponding to a particular cell ID to find their rough center. So when a phone without GPS needs its own location, the application on the phone queries the Google location server with the cell tower ID to translate that into a geographic location, i.e., lat/long coordinates. Nifty, huh? We think so.

Very, very slick. GPS-equipped phones send a data pair (GPS location as well as cell tower ID) to Google. That data is saved in a database. When non-GPS-equipped phones send their cell tower ID, Google then utilizes the database to compute GPS location.

Consider it crowd-sourcing for location.

The reconstituted Ma Bell (let's just call them AT&V and wave a thanks to the FCC) isn't real pleased.

The telephone carriers' monthly charge for GPS services -- yes, a monthly charge for receiving signals from government-owned satellites! -- isn't nearly as compelling these days.

So, give thanks to Google. They even modified their logo to celebrate Independence Day.

Che-Che-Change we can believe in



Idea: Reliapundit

People who need to stop writing software


From Camen Design. My favorites:

ISPs - I pay you to put a cable in my house, and let me send things up and down it; no more. I don’t want your useless Anti-Virus products. I don’t want your “Desktop Help” applications. I don’t want your tray icons. I don’t want your proprietary browsers. I don’t want an email address with you. I don’t want your website as my home page (including a Google Search that only shows adverts).

Norton - Somewhere along the line, you decided to protect people from their own computer, rather than protect the computer itself. You have never once written a piece of software that didn't slow a machine down to a painful crawl. Every machine I have come across that has had Norton on it, has had a virus and multiple spywares still there. Your product is so bad, its own uninstaller does not work. You sell a false sense of security, nothing more.

Nokia, and other phone manufacturers - You seem to be under the impression that you are the only piece of software on the computer. You’re happy to rear your ugly face at every boot. You make a simple thing like syncing seem like surgery.Your software is so unweildy, it’d be easier to take up oragami.

nVidia and ATI - A graphics card driver drives the screen. It does not include a tray icon, that handily reminds you that you don’t have a SLI configuration everytime you boot. Your configuration options shouldn’t be so complex that I have to choose between a Basic and Advanced mode, both of which are as equally useless as each other.

Apple's Quicktime didn't make the list, but deserves to. Apple: I just want to play a video on a webpage somewhere. It happens to require Quicktime. I do not want a system tray icon (what in the name of Jerry Wozniak would I do with it anyhow?). I do not want free Quicktime offers. I do not want all of my preferences overwritten. I do not want a desktop icon. I just want to watch the freaking video!

Whew. That was cathartic.

Happy Fourth of July!


Thomas Sowell asks "How relevant is patriotism?"

Update: Pookie points us to a couple of great images.




Linked by: Gateway Pundit. Thanks!

Thursday, July 03, 2008

What would Limbaugh do?


The New York Times discovered Rush Limbaugh's Platform:

A Limbaugh administration would seek to:

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling.

Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.

3. Privatize Social Security.

4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.

5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.

6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

No. 5 was a joke.

I think.

Who can blame him for being jovial? A $400 million contract tends to raise the spirits a bit.

In related news, Al Franken just re-upped with Air America for two snow tires and a bottle of A-1 Steak Sauce.

The Illustrated Results of Obama's "Community Organizing"


If I didn't know better, I'd think this was Beirut in the nineteen seventies. But, in reality, it's the current state of the housing for which Barack Obama claims responsibility as a "community organizer." It turns out the developers enriched by his government-funded subsidies did a heck of a lot better than the folks who once lived here.

I say "once", because the Boston Globe ("Grim Proving Ground for Obama's Housing Policy") calls many of the units "uninhabitable".

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

Progressive blogger River Daughter put it succinctly:

In terms of concrete accomplishments, Obama and “hundreds of other organizers” were not able to transform the South Side neighborhoods or bring in new industries to provide jobs...

Obama’s most commonly cited achievement was in forcing the city to begin testing for asbestos in all city apartments.

Regarding Obama's asbestos assertions, the L.A. Times alludes to the real story:

...critics claim Obama, now 46, exaggerates his accomplishments, particularly in spearheading asbestos cleanup at a low-income housing project. He omits from his account of that fight a longtime community activist who many people say played a significant role.

And for all his emphasis on the value of grassroots organizing, Obama eventually decided he also needed a law degree to enact lasting change, attending Harvard University... Further blurring the picture are his descriptions of community organizing in his youthful memoir, "Dreams From My Father," in which he admits he disguises names, creates composite characters, switches some chronologies and uses "approximations" of dialogue.

I can see why.

Look at this beautiful playground, with all of children frolicking; they're so care-free and so delighted that Barack Obama's community-organizing has helped them at the expense of his developer friends.

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered...

As a community organizer, Obama's a hell of a public speaker.

The poor people living here have gotten the shaft from Obama and his developer buddies. And the mainstream media couldn't care less.

I think a video tour of the area would make one heck of a campaign commercial for the GOP.

Update: Ace nails it:

Kaus calls this "Obama's Katrina," explaining that if Obama is running on his record as a community activist and advocate, it's a pretty big deal a housing project he had his hand in is an almost-unlivable slum... Perhaps Obama had good intentions here. Trouble is, he has a decidedly thin resume, and one of the biggest bullet points on it reads Miserable Failure.


Linked by: LGF, Jammie Wearing Fool, Dust My Broom and Noblesse Oblige. Thanks! Hat tips: Marathon Pundit and Larwyn.