A second Federal Communications Commission Democrat voted against Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s plan to buy XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., leaving the merger's fate to the sole undecided Republican.

Democrat Jonathan Adelstein, who voted against the $3.5 billion merger today, said in an e-mailed statement that the combination would create ``a monopoly with window dressing.'' Fellow Democrat Michael Copps already voted no.

Two Republican commissioners, Chairman Kevin Martin and Robert McDowell, have backed the merger, leaving the outcome to the agency's fifth member, Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican who has yet to vote. A telephone call to her office wasn't returned. Reuters reported Tate is nearing a ``yes'' vote, without saying where it got the information.

``Commissioner Adelstein would only cast a dissenting vote once it was fairly clear that Commissioner Tate would support the deal,'' Paul Gallant, a former FCC official and Washington- based analyst with Stanford Washington Research Group, said in an interview. He continues to predict approval.

Commissioners, who face no deadline for a decision, vote electronically at the time of their choosing.

Traditional radio companies led by the National Association of Broadcasters oppose the merger, saying it will create a harmful monopoly. Sirius and XM, the only two pay-radio companies, told regulators their union would bring consumers more programming at a lower cost.

``a monopoly with window dressing?'' These are pay services... I don't understand what the squib is all about!

XMrius/SiriXM.... FCC Quibs on Vote..

Apparently alarmed about the ongoing decline in their page views and associated ad revenue, the folks at Tom’s Hardware posted an inflammatory article about The SSD Power Consumption Hoax several days ago. It got picked up just about everywhere in the technosphere; one of the latecomers was good old Robin Harris, who immediately used its faulty conclusions to repeat his and his clients’ related message in Notebooks SSDs are dead.

So lets see, when did "the folks at Tom’s Hardware" become experts at everything?

Read on....

Modern Jackass: SSD Power Consumption (SSD is Dead???)

Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every child with autism as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview on Monday that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter.

Now main stream media as we know likes to speak before they think. And I think this is the case... should he be fired, NO, thats why we have the freedom to speak our minds... but I think the war on stupidity is far from over...

Late Monday afternoon, Aflac, the insurance company, announced it was withdrawing all advertising from Mr. Savage's show. "We understand that radio hosts pick on any number of targets," Laura Kane, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement, before adding that Aflac considered "his recent comments about autistic children to be both inappropriate and insensitive.”

So now he has lost $$$ for his show and I am 100% positive someone else will pick up the slack... But I really think that it is funny that misinformed people get paid to say anything about everything... Kind of makes me want to start a magazine called, "Modern Jackass," and Mr. Savage would be on the August Ed....

:P

Modern Jackass: Savage Stands by Autism Remarks

Full time job has me offline and school starting is a blast...

Nick & Tom give me an update, and let me know when you stop by the 'ville.

Gone, Gone, Gone

If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?

Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.

In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:

“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.

Ariel Waldman’s War on Twitter...

If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?

Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.

In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:

“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.

Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog

The Sixth Annual Music City Brewers Festival will take place on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 from 2pm - 8pm at the scenic Hilton Park, on the lawn of the Hilton Nashville Downtown. Sample beer from over 30 local, regional and national breweries. This one-day event is in celebration of American Beer Month, presented by the Institute for Brewing Studies. Local bands will perform all day, including the San Rafael Band and HoneyBaked. Food from area restaurants will be available as well. And since it'll be nice and toasty in Nashville in July, be sure to bring your camping chairs and shade umbrellas! Admission is $30 in advance or $40 at the door (if there's any left), and includes a souvenir mug and all beer samples.

Music City Brewer's Festival in Nashville, TN (Saturday, June 28th) American Beer Month!

Dash, which makes the very cool Dash Express GPS gizmo for cars review , has opened up an API so developers can build new apps for the unit. On announcement, according to a company press release, several apps will be available: a homes-for-sale app from Coldwell Banker, a calendar app that can read appointments from Outlook, Google and automatically route you to them, a weather app from WeatherBug, a speed trap app from Trapster, and Mediaguide, which can display the songs that just played on local radio stations.

I want the Trapster app. Not only is this the most useful of the apps, I believe, it s also the one that leverages the Dash s two-way capability the best: You can add to the Trapster database when you drive through a speed trap yourself. There may even be a button that says, Yo, I am getting pulled over right now. I haven t tried the service yet; I don t know.

Even cooler would be: Let me connect my Valentine One to the Dash device to update the database automatically.

The Dash API program faces two small problems, though: First, there s the chicken-and-egg issue for a non-market-leading platform. Dash is hardly the best-selling GPS product, even if it is the coolest. Developer interest will wane unless consumers start to get behind this product.

Second: Safety. I don t know how Dash is going to ensure that developers don t build distracting or confusing apps that get their users into trouble when they re driving. Building for the 60-m.p.h. user interface is not something many developers have experience with. Hopefully this will be addressed is Dash s presentation at the Where 2.0 conference Wednesday morning.

Current Dash Express users can go to the MyDash site for apps.

Does TomTom or any other NAV. system have an open API?

Dash Navigator gets open API?

Last week NBC quietly released a learning tool called iCue in conjunction with MIT. See coverage on CNET TV s Loaded. It s been designed as a learning environment using a large collection of news clips taken from NBC s video archives to enable anyone to catch up on news coverage and current events. This archived footage is put into context, as long as viewers are willing to acknowledge that the content is coming only from one source NBC , and for now only with the focus on the U.S. presidential elections.

To get going, users can simply wander around the site, viewing various footage that s been meticulously categorized and DOCUMENTed complete with transcripts . They can also put their knowledge to the test with a smattering of editor-created mini games that require both a contextual understanding of what was going on at the time of the clip, along with whatever other bits of historical insight are found in the one- to two-minute segments. There s a whole lot going on, and I m betting the casual user is going to get lost very easily.

Check it out good idea... Kind of a web oddity ....

Can NBC s iCue teach you anything new?

NNDB, a directory of important people and celebrities the two are not exclusive standing for Notable Names Database, has put together a mapping tool that lets you connect the dots to see how people are intertwined.

One example, featured in this demo video, shows the overlap of board members for large tech companies, including Apple, Intel, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can use the tool to figure out who s worked where, then drill down to their personal histories--both work and play, with very little effort.

The backgrounds of each individual are maintained by the NNDB community and its editors. You can also go in to create your own charts, though you re limited to NNDB s directory of people and companies.

I was going to do one for CBS and CNET, but alas we re not there. You can, however, compare CBS to NBC, ABC, and even Fox Broadcasting. There s not a lot of overlap, but you can easily see people s positions at the company and where else they ve worked.

This reminds me a lot of Cogmap, a service that lets you map out the hierarchy of your workplace. It s got a little more flash, though, and is similar to They Rule, a site outdated about four years that chronicles the ruling class of corporations around the world.

For those who are less corporate-inclined, some of the celebrity maps are pretty amusing, including charts of who s been romantically involved with whom.

NNDB Mapper: Connecting executives/celebs