Josh's Weblog: August 2007 Archives

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Google Earth Adds Stars

Google Earth now shows you the stars in the sky.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Technology” Thursday, Aug 23 2007 10:48 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks

Paramount, Dreamworks, Universal Drop Blu-Ray, Gather Payola

Paramount Pictures, Universal, and Dreamworks, who had previously announced they would support both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, have announced they will exclusively release movies on HD-DVD. In related news, the HD-DVD consortium has paid those studios 150 million dollars for “promotional consideration.”

I've been firmly in the Blu-Ray camp ever since the Playstation 3, especially since the latest patches to its firmware have made it the DVD player of choice in the household. However, with New Line Cinema (Lord of the Rings, Paramount (Star Trek), Dreamworks (Shrek) and Universal (Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) things are a little rough on a geek.

What's holding me back? I feel that Blu-Ray makes better use of its bandwidth, and does not live under the thumb of the standards-flouting Microsoft. Hopefully these movie houses will see the light and come back to Blu-Ray soon.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Technology” Tuesday, Aug 21 2007 06:43 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks

Terrorism and Immigration Can Be Related?

Whether or not you agree with the current policy of letting only a few people a year visit the country or move here permanently, investigating US employees that help members of known terror groups get into the country would seem to be the highest priority of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. However, as the Washington Times reports, most reports of such incidents are not investigated “due to a lack of resources.”

Reported problems include the following:

Employees are sharing detailed information on internal security measures with people outside the agency.

A Lebanese citizen bribed an immigration officer with airline tickets for visa benefits.

A USCIS officer in Harlington, Texas, sold immigration documents for $10,000 to as many as 20 people.

USCIS does seem to be trying to build an organization to investigate such reports, but it has been slow in coming.

Scary stuff, but it does seem to be a case of broken priorities. There already exists a $2B organization to handle immigration, and incidents like the above should be far more important for it to deal with than other items.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Politics, Terrorism” Wednesday, Aug 15 2007 01:35 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks