Alex Valentine's Weblog
The ABC News “Debate” seemed more like a poorly executed hitjob against Obama.
Since when is a politician required to wear a flag lapel pin? For the record, anyone who wears a flag lapel pin is a douchebag. Its such a phony act of patriotism. You can love your country without dressing up like Toby Keith.
The ABC news comment section for the debate coverage is closing in on 10,000 negative comments.
This analysis of Fox News is absolutely brilliant.
Saddam Hussein did not have WMD’s, but lets assume for a minute he did, the war would still be completely unnecessary. Even if the war turned out to be a complete cakewalk (which it was not), it would still be unnecessary. Iraq was never a grave security threat to the United States.
Even with his reckless judgment concerning the Iraq war, I think John McCain is still the best Republican candidate. Bottom line, I will never trust the judgment of any politician who supported the Iraq war. As a former McCain supporter/donor, I will never vote for him.
Barack Obama was against the war from the beginning(like me); its one of the many reasons why I’m supporting Obama in 2008.
As a WSJ subscriber, I will definitely cancel my subscription if Murdoch gets his hands on the paper. The Nytimes and the WSJ are the only two papers I read daily. I guess I would have to find another second main source of news. There is simply no way the content of the paper could improve with Murdoch at the helm, regardless of what editorial controls are put in place to prevent Murdoch from using the WSJ as yet another cog in his propaganda matrix. There is not a single asset in Murdoch’s empire that improved in content quality after Murdoch’s acquisition.
I’m not a Michael Moore fan, but I went and saw Sicko over the weekend, and I was pretty impressed. I’ve held the opinion for a long time that our health care system is completely broken, and we need to look across the pond to Europe for ways to fix it.
In the video below, Michael Moore does a great job sticking it to Wolf Blitzer. I haven’t watched cable news regularly for about five years, but its amazing how bad TV news has become. Its hard to believe, but a decade ago CNN had a lot of credibility. Today, CNN is no better than Fox News.
While reading the WSJ yesterday morning, I noticed a technology article promoting a proprietary platform specific hack, that allows you to send big e-mail attachments by routing them through a third pary site called Pando. This plugin only works when each user has Pando installed on their computer. The Pando application interprets a small attachment that comes through the e-mail system to connect to the Pando site.
I thought it was irresponsible for Walt to promote third party proprietary extensions to the e-mail system. An e-mail system that works so well today because of interoperability and open standards. I remember the pre-Internet commercialization “online service” days when AOL, Compuserve, and Deplhi’s e-mail systems were not compatible.
From: Alex Valentine
To: MossbergSolution@wsj.com
Subject: re: An Easier Way to Send Large E-mail attachments
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 11:53:46 -0400
Server Size limits on e-mail messages are in place, because e-mail was never designed to be file transfer mechanism. Large attachments place a heavy burden on network bandwidth and mail server resources.
E-mail attachments were designed to be a quick a fix for small files such as documents. Instead of promoting a proprietary hack for an open e-mail system that is what it is today because of the open standards, wouldn't you be better off promoting technologies designed for file sharing?
--
Alex Valentine
Here is Walt’s thoughtful response:
From: Walt Mossberg
To: Alex Valentine
Subject: Re: An Easier Way to Send Large E-mail attachments
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:22:12 -0400
Absolutely not. I disagree with your very premise.
Walt
======================
Walt Mossberg
Personal Technology Columnist
The Wall Street Journal
http://ptech.wsj.com
I never got a response, but here was my reply to his one-liner:
From: Alex Valentine
To: Walt Mossberg
Subject: Re: An Easier Way to Send Large E-mail attachments
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:15:41 -0400
So you cannot understand why I think it is not wise to promote a third party proprietary extension to e-mail? One of the main reasons why E-mail is such a success story today is because of the fact that e-mail is an open standard.
Surely you remember what life was like when most users had proprietary e-mail systems back in the early 90's? Lets turn the clock back to 1992. Lets say your a Prodigy User, and I'm a CompuServe user. Would we having this conversation? No, We would not be able to communicate because our e-mail systems were not interoperable.
Pando is not a new e-mail system, but its a closed add-on on to an open e-mail system. If it were to become popular, it would force people to download an extension and use a third party site to view e-mail attachments. How are users of other operating systems such as Linux suppose to view Pando attachments?
E-mail was built around an open standard. Promoting a third party plugin that breaks interoperability of e-mail is simply a bad idea.