At Gnomedex 6 Dave Winer just read a proclamation from Governor Christine Gregoire declaring June 30-July 1, 2006 as ‘RSS Days.’ Dave was gushing, obviously a proud pappa. You can listen to the live Gnomedex stream here.

Nice to see the governor do this, now if only she wouldn’t have signed that stupid online gambling law.

Also Chris Pirillo announced a daily comic strip lampooning bloggers in the blogosphere called blaugh.

The following explosion and deaths of two men outside an indian casino story, possibly involving fireworks, mixes in a death threat from a blog. The two men were so badly burned that dental records will be required.

You’d think a progressive blue state newspaper would get the terminology right, but nope, above is the screenshot and text from KOMO news below (emphasis mine):

Matheson has claimed he canceled an earlier press conference on the issue after he received a death threat. The threat was purportedly made on a Web blog, but the man who maintains the blog has said no threatening material was posted.

No linkage for the blog/blogger in question which is still too typical fare these days for news articles. The article credits the Associated Press as the source so perhaps it’s them — which might be worse — for the terminology mistake. Call this an advantage for bloggers that we can make mistakes like this, add an update and then fix it when a reader/commenter shows our zipper being undone. But it is no mistake that there isn’t a link, which is the bigger crime here.

Crimes of context.

Perhaps a minor, nitpicking deal in the scheme of things, but with politicians like John Edwards who could be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2008 speaking this morning from 11:45 - 12:30 at a heavily blogger-attended event like Gnomedex, hopefully mainstream media gets their blog-related etiquette polished.

It’s not often that posts here contain an alleged death threat on a blog, explosion with a casino backdrop and a prominent politician speaking at a local conference. Only loosely connected. Sounds like an episode of some campy 80s TV show. TGIF!

If the RIAA doesn’t louse this kind of thing up, this might help spawn a niche for using real footage next to music. Imagine a video blog (vlog) entirely comprised of material like this?

President Bush “singing” U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (video) by stripping out various words he’s said and putting them in as the lyrics to the song.

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web has a blog (subscribed) and has weighed in a couple times on the importance of net neutrality, yesterday writing:

Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.

Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.

Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn’t pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.

If you didn’t/don’t understand the importance of net neutrality based on anything you’ve read to date — here or elsewhere — perhaps the inventor of the web can persuade you to its importance.

On Tuesday I mentioned an ebook that focuses on a $200 billion fraud perpetrated by the telecos on the American people. This book is free for download until Monday and worth mentioning again. It will be selling for $20 USD after that. Even if you have no time right now to read it, at least go download so you can check it out later. One of my friends said he probably wouldn’t have time to read and then started commenting on it to me in IRC when he checked it out.

Net neutrality is an important issue to everybody that uses the internet now or will use it in the future.

Once the law banning online gambling in Washington State went into effect on June 7 of this month, the response to the media was that the state wouldn’t be targeting users. The month isn’t even out and we appear to have our first example of who the state will be going after. Head’s up webmasters in Washington State with online casino advertisements.

The Seattle Times is reporting that a Washington state resident was sent cease-and-desist order over his online casino website (emphasis mine):

Then I heard about Todd Boutte. He’s a former Wal-Mart worker in Bellingham who started a casino review called IntegrityCasinoGuide.com. He worried about the new law but figured he’d be OK because his site has no actual gambling.

Not so, said the state. Writing about online gambling in a way that seems promotional can earn a cease-and-desist order, and potentially, a criminal charge. Boutte learned this when a Bellingham Herald article featured state officials saying his site was illegal. He later shut it down and is trying to sell it out of state.

The text of the article is chilling if this is an early indicator. Have the thought police have arrived in Washington state? Who is/will be deciding what “seems promotional” on websites?

Look before leaping
Before getting too excited I decided to visit the Google and WaybackMachine caches for IntegrityCasinoGuide and see what was going on there. Was the guy actively promoting online casinos in exchange for affiliate revenue like say gambling.com? Check out the screenshots below:

Note the Webmaster’s text: “Specializing in honest online casino reviews, Integrity Casino Guide is the premier resource for all of your internet gambling needs and Online Casino Reviews.”

I’m a little disappointed that The Seattle Times didn’t do a little more poking around as their story somewhat sensationalizes how former Walmart employee is having his site ordered taken down and there isn’t even any gambling going on. And yet look at the guy’s site. It’s promoting online gambling, heavily. You’ve seen these type sites. I’ve seen them. And then look at the bottom of the homepage:

Furthermore, the text at the bottom of the homepage:

INTEGRITY CASINO GUIDE IS A MEMBER OF THE ASSOCIATION OF PROFESSIONAL CASINO WEBMASTERS

This law sucks but seriously, this webmaster honestly didn’t think the new law would include him when he was entrenched enough in the online gambling scene to be a member of the APCW.org? I didn’t realize that there was such an organization but I’m guessing these people aren’t part of the terrestrial casino scene. And I’m guessing they aren’t there to promote gambling in the local indian casinos or via the State lottery. Am I wrong?

Let’s keep it real here. The sole existence of ‘review’ sites like these is to get people to sign up and gamble online. It’s hard to take up for a webmaster and site like this as being the same as the user spending a few bucks in the privacy of his home.

But this is where I can see the POV of the article and start to get very angry, read on where the Times writes:

Gambling officials told me The Seattle Times may be afoul of the law because we print a poker how-to column, “Card Shark,” by gambler Daniel Negreanu. He sometimes tells readers to hone their skills at online casinos … “My suggestion to you is to remove from your paper any advice about online gambling and any links to illegal sites,” Day said … The state’s gone from trying to control gambling, which is legit, to trying to control people speaking about gambling.

This is getting downright creepy. The hairs on my neck are rising. The Times with a column on poker isn’t the same as a online gambling review site. If we start splitting those kind of hairs, then how long before any website running online gambling ads is breaking the law? Are they already?

Can’t the state find a webmaster who is actually running an online casino to target first? This webmaster wasn’t prosecuted, he was merely sent an order to stop and appears he has complied peacefully (his site shows as “suspended”), but it seems to me that there are still much worse offenders to go after in this state. There has to be.

As for why the state might target an online casino review site? Bellingham is near several terrestrial (indian) casinos. Also you can head up to Canada and find several casinos. Could the tribes be tipping off the cops?

The Times article indicates that “the state plans to hire an investigator to enforce the new law.” Cut to scene of excrement hitting fan.

First saw Warner post this disappointing news.

The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it.

What will this mean? That all internet traffic does not have to be treated as equal. Get ready for internet fast lanes. Those in support of Net Neutrality — and I’m one of them — believe without Net Neutrality being maintained and regulated the customer experience will suffer. Those who pay more will get an “enhanced” experience. Those who oppose Net Neutrality, and you can guess where the greed lies there, say it is impeding getting higher speed connectivity deployed. Somebody get a shovel.

The 269-152 vote wasn’t even close with mostly party line voting, instead of common sense. The oh shit moments during the Bush administration continue on. What do we do now?

With Google’s subpar launches over the last year I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been criticizing their experimental services too prematurely? Overzealous expectations, perhaps? Google is at fault for helping to further the meme that beta is launch-worthy, but why can’t they experiment? If this beta as launch-worthy trend continues we may see the day when companies actually start charging for beta software. Some cynics believe companies like Microsoft have been doing this already.

Shrikant Joshi has a detailed post challenging what’s going on at Google with all the product launches and apparent loss of focus on search. Nathan points to an eWeek article that compares Google to 7-11.

7-11? Umm, a bit extreme comparison, don’t you think? I don’t see Google hawking slurpees in exchange for some web service quite yet. Yes, they have shoveled their fair share of dung the last year or so, but 7-11? No.

Playing devil’s advocate somewhat here because I agree with a lot of the criticisms lodged against the Google with one major assumption: Google will make these permanent, serious competitive offerings.

We don’t know for certain what Google’s ultimate plans are for these lab offerings unless they tell us and even once we do, the market gets to decide on how popular these offerings will be. We simply cannot assume that every product launch will be as important and popular as Google search, Adwords/Adsense and Gmail. Don’t anybody tell me services like Froogle and the Google accelerator have hit prime time. Google would like everything they experiment on to be a hit, but the truth is that for every hit, the web is littered with tons of misses. Just look at the many doomed startups.

I’ve already written about the unequal and often undeserved amount of Google attention being attributed to rough and often uninspired product launches: stop the premature eGooglation, but it sure seems like the greater tech media (including blogs) has made every Google launch ‘official’ even when they clearly designate as “limited” such as with their new Spreadsheets. Isn’t a lab supposed to experiment and innovate? If they don’t do anything new then people will criticize them (rightly) for sitting on the money. Getting lazy. Just as Microsoft has been criticized in the past.

As a GOOG investor I want to see a busy, active and experimental labs department. I shouldn’t expect that everything Google does will be worthwhile, useful or even relevant to my business and/or life. Not everything Microsoft does is but that doesn’t mean I’m not a customer and they should stop trying to innovate.

I’ll agree that most Google product launches are substandard these days but they seem to be following the throw it against the wall and see if it sticks rule to launching new products/services. Did you realize that half of their new product launches in the end of 2006 came from their employees 20% time?

Google’s China mess
Maybe I just feel for their situation in China. Seems by Sergey’s backtracking that they regret business decisions made with China. The BBC is reporting that China is blocking Google.com in favor of Google.cn:

In addition to Google, US companies Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco Systems have also been accused of accommodating China’s demands on censorship in return for access to its huge internet market.

It seems like a no-win situation for doing business there. On one hand I understand that if you do business in China you need to follow Chinese laws [see: MSN China blogger smackdown: their country, their ballgame]. Americans may not believe in the way China does things, but it is still their country. From a political perspective, I’m growing weary of America trying to be the supercops of the world, policing and pushing our ways upon other countries. Yeah, we don’t want them getting nukes or committing genocide sure, but I think our government is being as overzealous as many tech journalists and bloggers are over Google new product/service launches.

A major experiment I want to see from Google
I know some are fearful of this and Google has said it’s not happening (not that it won’t ever happen), but I want to see a GoogleOS. Not some web-only piece of crap though, but a Google branded Linux variant that is as painless for non-techies to install as Mac and Windows. Let’s face it, Google is the only company out there with the strength to compete against Microsoft on the client side and I don’t think this would be the bad thing that some think.

Of course a GoogleOS would requires several features to be appealing to me:

- would need to be fully compatible Linux, not some crippled shell
- would need to offer clean install option devoid of extra and unnecessary crapware offerings
- would offer me free, ad-supported options or pay options without Google monitoring. I agree with Steve Ballmer that I don’t want to have ads alongside everything I do on my computer. And I really don’t want Google looking over my shoulder on everything we are doing on our computers. It’s a bit unnerving letting any one entity that much into your private space.
- would not force or limit me to using Google services

If this GoogleOS existed tomorrow — and I remain convinced some variant of this is coming someday — I’d install and start using right away. Would I dump Windows? Probably not, but I’m open to the concept, just as I was open to a competing browser when Firefox came along.

Google can and should experiment. So should we.

The hypocritical stench surrounding the online gambling law forthcoming in Washington state includes campaign donations from none other than Indian casinos for State Senator Margarita Prentice (pictured below, Sen. Prentice homepage). Her term ends January 2009. The bill submitted to the Senate is known as SB 6613 and the history shows that it took from January 17, 2006 when it was discussed until June 7 to be enacted into law. Not even five months. Wow, they can move fast on the things that don’t matter, can’t they?

Curiously enough, the Seattle PI article cited below doesn’t mention these heavily biased campaign donations, but KIRO710 Dori Monson read a list of the terrestrial casino donations during one of his recent talk shows.

Washington residents who play poker or make other types of wagers on the Internet will be committing a Class C felony, equivalent under the law to possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal. Although the head of the state Gambling Commission says it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest, the new law carries stiff penalties: as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

So let me get this right: an adult who dials up an online poker site is going to be comparable to someone possessing kiddy porn? If there are any actual convictions, this is proof most politicians have gone insane.

The bill passed unanimously in the Senate and with just five dissenting votes in the House. It was signed into law by Gov. Christine Gregoire on March 28.

The same Christine Gregoire who referred to herself as “Chris” Gregoire during her election run. I didn’t vote for her and won’t vote for her re-election. At least there are five people in the House with common sense but they were drowned by 95 others who favored imprisoning online gambers in Washington state.

The article focuses on online poker which is a game I’ve never played for real online. Not a game I particularly care for, but regardless I am strongly opposed to laws preventing adults from gambling if they want to do so.

Formerly, online gambling in Washington State was a gross misdeamonr, of which there don’t appear to have been any convictions (?) which KIRO710 Dori Monson also mentioned as being strange. How can we upgrade the punishment for a law which formerly had zero prosecutions? Is this correct or were there some confirmed prosecutions? My research as of the writing of this article could not confirm there were any successful prosecutions. Please update in the comments if you can find differently.

Washington state residents, please write to your local representatives, especially the 95 who voted for this bogus and likely unenforceable law. Complain voiciferously. Even if you don’t gamble, the last thing the state needs is to see is online gamblers being thrown in jail and having Class C felonies on their record. It will be very difficult to get this law repealed now.

Across the 50 states, only two do not have legalized gambling: Utah and Hawaii. Is Washington state about to have the harshest law on the books against online gambling? In a state that is literally teeming with Indian casinos — some of which we like to visit occasionally — and a state run lottery with some utterly craptastic odds (like most state lotteries) this law seems incredibly hypocritical.

And now I somewhat expect to receive a (likely anonymous) fear mongering comment about how terrible gambling is for society. Yeah, prohibition worked too (not). Didn’t work with alcohol. Isn’t working with marijuana. Won’t work with online gambling. Let’s find a way to legalize and regulate online gambling, open up gambling to the non-tribal state businesses, tax it so the indian casinos aren’t reaping all the rewards.

A vote in a recent election shot down non-tribal gambling being legalized. Of course the fear was that we’d have slots in grocery stores and right next to schools. That’s how laws which make sense get sullied by political scare campaigns muddying up common sense. Most casual gamblers, of which I consider my wife and I, wouldn’t want slots next to schools, but it’s that FUD that spreads and causes non-gamblers and casual gamblers to vote down legislation.

I like the guy’s spirit in the article that says he may take his wireless laptop to the capital steps in Olympia and play online poker as a form of protest. I’ll donate to his legal fund to prevent him from sharing a cell with Bubba. You?

Update June 7, 2006: Clarification on penalties from KOMO:

(Editor’s Note: There was some earlier confusion over the law’s penalties. While online betting will be a Class C Felony, which typically carry 5 year prison terms and $10,000 fines, the law’s sponsor says it will be an “unranked” felony. That means it has a maximum sentence of 1 year plus a fine. And if you’re a first time offender, you get no time or up to 90 days, plus a fine.)

Sponsors of the bill say it’s really meant to protect, not punish gamblers. They say online games invite organized crime and money laundering.

When President Bush defended Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld he used the words “I am the Decider.”

In the following spoof/cover of the Beatles “I am the Walrus” by Paul Hipp this classic tune was turned it into “I’m the Decider” (autoload sound, adjust your speakers accordingly) This is very well done (Thanks Feld Thoughts). Bush supporters might not like the lyrics of this song, however.

More than 41 hours of jury deliberations over al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui for the jury to decide that he will not be put to death by lethal injection. At age 37, he’ll have a long time to think about his involvement in the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. For 23 hours a day he’ll be confined to a cell with no other human involvement.

via CNN:

On the witness stand, Moussaoui displayed a complete lack of remorse for the 9/11 deaths, saying he was sorry only that the attacks weren’t more lethal.

“I just wish it could have gone on the 12th, the 13th, the 14th, the 15th, the 16th, the 17th. We can go on and on,” Moussaoui said. “Like they say, no pain, no gain.”

I hope Moussasoui lives until age 130. I’m thinking the jury weighed that death might be too easy for him, but this is bound to raise concerns about if a situation like this doesn’t warrant the death penalty, what does?