INTERESTING: Democrats Hide Pet Projects From Voters

Monday, June 4, 2007

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070603/D8PHA8LG0.html

Democrats Hide Pet Projects From Voters
Jun 3, 7:20 AM (ET)
By ANDREW TAYLOR

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WASHINGTON (AP) – After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress’ pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify “earmarks” – lawmakers’ requests for specific projects and contracts for their states.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., says those requests for dams, community grants and research contracts for favored universities or hospitals will be added to spending measures in the fall. That is when House and Senate negotiators assemble final bills.

Such requests total billions of dollars.

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And, this is “news”.

I have no use for either “party”.

(I really can’t decide what the right word to use is. It’s no “party” for The American People who are being robbed at gunpoint to pay for this “party”. Maybe the correct word is “gang of marauding thieves who forgot to leave” or “competitors to the Bloods and Crypts who make the B&C look like pikers” or “horde of human locusts that are eating our progeny’s birthright”. I guess I’ll just use the term “gang” as a giant negative.)

I have no use for the D-Gang or the R-Gang.

But it would be naive for anyone to expect that they will suddenly “get religion” and “change their stripes”.

Maybe we can change their stripes for them? To prison stripes!

Argh!

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Posted by reinkefj

TECH SERVICE: My WSP is less than impressive in alternatives

Monday, June 4, 2007

When the hospital’s free wifi (beggars can’t be choosers) was blocking FTP, I pinged my WSP for help. A day later (Drop Dead While Waiting), I get this useless “help”. Argh!

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From: support @ 1and1
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 12:54 AM
To: reinkefj
Subject: C75194506 – 1&1 Internet Support

Dear Ferdinand Reinke, (Customer ID: 9113251)

Thank you for contacting us.

Unfortunately, FTP is universally using only port 21. We have no alternaltive ports for FTP. You can use the Secure FTP or Secure Shell to upload the files however, this is not supported in your current package. SSH (@port 22) is only available in 1&1 Business Linux and higher packages.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

—
Sincerely,
Neil Parilla
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

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Why bother? I didn’t ask for alternative ports. I ASKED for an alternative PERIOD.

I find their service highly available (I can’t ever remember being “out of service”) and “cheap” (I pay about $250/year and “collected” all my web sites in one place with gobs of space and bandwidth left over).

But they could do a better job answering questions faster and should really have an non-FTP alternative to updating a web site. What happens if this core protocol has a major problem (unlikely, but someone always wins the lotto!) and they have to take down FTP.

Seems like an SPF (Single Point of Failure) to me?

Argh!

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Note: Updating my Alumni News webpage until I got home to my great cable ISP. :-) When everything always works PERFECTLY! :-)

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1 Comment | SERVICE | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj