Latest posts

A class act: the ol’ Shoot ‘n Blame

scaredpoet

Typical White House behavior: if you’re caught with the smoking gun, blame the other guy:

WASHINGTON – The White House blamed the 78-year-old man whom Vice President Dick Cheney shot during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas for the incident, as officials struggled Monday to explain why they waited nearly 24 hours before making the news public.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan tried to absolve Cheney of blame for shooting wealthy Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, saying that hunting “protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington when it came to notifying others that he was there. And so, you know, unfortunately, these types of hunting accidents happen from time to time.”

Several hunting experts were skeptical of McClellan’s explanation. They said Cheney might have violated a cardinal rule of hunting: Know your surroundings before you pull the trigger.

Unfortunately for the White House, the guy’s not dead yet and may actually recover. You’d think they’d wait until the body was cold at least before the put blame on someone who can’t speak for themselves, as the Bush Administration loves to do.

“Brotha, can you lend a bigot a way outta ‘dis mess?”

scaredpoet

niggah poster

Yup. The picture above pretty much says it all.

This idiot teacher in a Kentucky high school called a student the “N” word and, stupidly, was surprised that people got a little offended by the epithet. The teacher was suspended for 10 days, and ultimately moved to “non-instructional duty” (read: as close to “fired” as the school could legally take him). But not before he gave this gem of an interview to a local TV station:

File: “Teacher Calls Student the ‘N’ word”
Format: Windows Media File, 7.6MB

A glowing example of how NOT to dig yourself out of this kind of mess.

And remember folks: when saying the N word, emphasize the “ah” at the end… “…gaaaaaahhhh…“

Sprint Nextel set to acquire a third carrier, and a third incompatible network

scaredpoet

RIM 5790

A little-noticed news item recently came to light that should probably be raising some eyebrows. Yet another acquisition has recently been proposed by Sprint Nextel, the corporation that came together from the marriage of two former companies whose networks to this day remain incompatible, and will continue to be so until at least 2010.

So who is the acquisition target this time? Velocita Wireless, a small wireless data company based in Woodbridge, NJ that was formerly known as Cingular Interactive. Cingular’s reasons for spinning off the company were clear: they run a very old, slow and dead-end cellular data network known as Mobitex that used to power the Palm VII as well as the first-generation Blackberry devices (and surprisingly, continues to serve the remaining 400,000 or so of that first wave that still survive). And now, the New Sprint seems to think that purchasing a third incompatible network is a smart thing to do.

To be sure, the merger announcement indicates that Sprint’s real reason for acquiring Velocita is to “utilize a portion of Velocita’s spectrum assets to supplement Sprint Nextel’s coverage for customers on its iDEN® national network.” However, in the same paragraph, Sprint makes an open-ended committment to continue serving the existing customers on the old Mobitex network.

So if this deal closes, Sprint will then have the infrastructures of three former companies to maintain, and a smattering of wireless frequencies in disparate, non-contiguous areas. And through it all, no definitive plan for consolidation. Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t synergy supposed to be an important ingredient in mergers and acuisitions?

Is NO Push e-mail safe?

scaredpoet

Just as Good technology, a push e-mail solution provider competing with RIM, was gloating about how customers could flock to them if in fact the NTP lawsuit forces a Blacbkerry shutdown, they too have now gotten a taste of bad patent medicine:

Visto Corporation, a leading global provider of secure push email services, announced today that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Good Technology in a suit which alleges that Good’s products and services infringe on multiple patents held by Visto, was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.

Great, so now the backup plan for most Blackberry addicts is also at risk.

So uhh, what’s next? Windows Mobile devices then? Not if Visto has a say: they’re suing Microsoft for patent infringement, too.

Interestingly, it’s been noted that Visto has licensed quite a bit of technology from our good ol’ friends at NTP. This leaves them with the only current push e-mail soluion that hasn’t been directly challenged for patent infrigement… in fact, NTP stands to get nice royalties from Visto, considering that as part of the agreement, NTP has a direct equity stake in the company.

And with the ink barely dry on that agreement, Visto filed a brief with the US District court in Virgina, asserting that in the event of a Blackberry service shutdown, Visto alone could “quickly absorb all U.S. BlackBerry users.”

Could they both be in cahoots to corner the push e-mail market? While NTP’s corporate structure consists entirely of lawyers whose job appears to be to find potential infrigement and sue away, Visto has a working push e-mail solution, of which royalties get funneled to NTP coffers and is pretty much the only solution that isn’t getting sued.

Nah, there can’t be any collusion there!