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We the People Wisconsin sponsored Friday evening’s debate between challenger Tim Michels and incumbent US Senator Russ Feingold. Click on a photo above to view additional images from Friday’s event.
13MB MP3 Perfect for your iPod.
Quicktime Video [110MB]
Thanks to everyone at We the People for organizing this (and other events), especially Tom and Deborah Still.
I’ve posted campaign links and fund raising information here for this US Senate race.
12 stranded hikers found safe; common sense and prayers, the hikers used their heads — and kept the faith. John M. Hubbell, Meredith May and Ulysses Torassa:
It could have been disaster. Death in the utterly quiet wilderness, two miles above sea level. With nobody around to know you’re gone.
But it turned out differently for three groups of hikers that were imprisoned by weekend snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada high country. All of them were rescued Thursday, and the real tale of their ordeal is that in many ways it wasn’t an ordeal. They were pretty experienced in the outdoors, they had good equipment and, most important in the eyes of professional rescue workers, they stayed together.
On Thursday, as they were brought to safety and the hugs and kisses of their loved ones, they told their stories.
Nova Safo on the recent resignation of Deborah Gribbon’s, Director of the Getty Museum in LA. I shot two panoramas at the Getty on a gorgeous clear day a few years ago.
New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual’s name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.
The State Department hopes the addition of the chips, which employ radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology, will make passports more secure and harder to forge, according to spokeswoman Kelly Shannon.
The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure,” Shannon said. “It’s yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally.”
But civil libertarians and some technologists say the chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person’s biographical information and photo from several feet away.
Go…. see the Madison Rep’s production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. We very much enjoyed Thursday’s performance which was the Rep’s first show at the new Overture Center. Nancy noted that the lighting and set were very well done. The rep has a page on the people behind the set construction.
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Anchor Banker Brian Zimdars (give them a call) read my post and passed along his recollections from that day (Brian lived and worked in the Bay Area at the time:
I read your story about the earthquakes that hit SF fifteen years ago. It brought back memories. Linda and I were also living in CA at the time, I was working in Palo Alto and Linda was in San Mateo. We lived down in the Almaden Valley in San Jose. I remember my drive home lasting close to three hours, there were massive buckles in the road on 280 which really slowed down traffic. As I made my way down to San Jose it was eerie, all of the power was out in San Jose. What an amazing sight, seeing (or not seeing) more than one million people without power. We did not have any damage to our home. Seeing the devastation to 880 up in Oakland, the damage to the Bay Bridge (I traveled these roads frequently during business trips) and downed housing with fires in San Francisco was amazing. I felt lucky to be in the office that day and not out on the road conducting business. Thanks for the story.
The Wisconsin State Journal Editorial Page on Alder Zach Brandon’s view of the Mayor’s proposed 3.6% spending increase:
It’s the spirit that counts: Madison Ald. Zach Brandon wants his City Council colleagues to break with their time-honored tradition of soaking the taxpayers for a few dollars more.
Brandon is developing a list of spending items that could be cut from the Madison city budget, saving taxpayers more than $2 million. But what he proposes isn’t as important as the underlying goal: Reversing the council’s longstandin g profligacy.
Brandon, who pushed a package of cuts last year along with a spending cap that went nowhere, this time believes he can strong-arm council members with a political pledge to put a lid on city spending. He has dropped his red “tax cap” baseball- hat publicity gimmick for a modest pledge he’s circulating to council members. Brandon, of the Southwest Side’s 7th District, wants each council member to promise not to increase city spending beyond the $192.5 million that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has already proposed. If they want to add a few dollars for a pet project, they need to subtract the money from another item in the budget.
Walking quickly on a brisk Saturday morning Farmer’s Market (cold wind) last week, we stopped to make a purchase. I asked the vendor how he was holding up in the cold? “If I didn’t do this, I’d have to get a real job”. “I’m great!”
Facing a budget crisis, California’s Silicon Valley school district has resorted to cutting salaries of teachers and other employees by 5 percent.
This is one of the problems that can arise when districts become too dependent on rising property taxes (Silicon Valley has a number of empty office buildings, due to the dot com crash).
More than one-third of the cost of GM’s automobiles now involves software and electronic components, and the amount of software loaded into a typical automobile is skyrocketing, Scott said. Cars had approximately 1 million lines of software code in 1990, but this number will jump to 100 million by 2010, he predicted.
The emergence of the automobile as a platform for software developers will mean that a much broader range of software will be used in tomorrow’s cars. Remote diagnostics software, media players, even database software all will run on automobiles at some point, he said. “I can’t think of software ? that isn’t going to run on the vehicle.”
I think we’re already north of 100 million lines of code. BMW and others have baked Windows CE into their cars. This ill advised move has introduced a legion of bugs and challenges to our once reliable cars. I believe the automakers are better off creating very simple, purpose built software, rather than extending Windows….
