Senate upholds FCC rules on net neutrality

This is a great development on the topic of net neutrality, reported by Free Press:

[T]he Senate rejected a motion to proceed on its "resolution of disapproval" of the Federal Communications Commission’s Net Neutrality rules. The resolution failed by a margin of 52–46. The measure was an effort by Senate Republicans to reverse the FCC’s December 2010 rules intended to prevent Internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against content and applications on the Web.
I had previously published articles urging the rejection of the "resolution of disapproval" at DI (and see here).

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A list of evidence justifying the #Occupy movement

Consider the joy shown by Americans celebrating the Fourth of July. If the Fourth is such a happy time, shouldn’t we now be equally furious that the government has been rigged to ignore the needs and wants of the People? Over the past few years, I've heard dozens of educated middle class Americans admit that Congress has ben bought―federal corruption at the highest levels is now accepted as unquestionable truth. More recently, I’ve run into more than a few people who have become frustrated with the Occupy movement. For instance, last week I heard this from an acquaintance, who was speaking of the protesters:

Acquaintance: “They should get a job.  What the hell are they expecting to accomplish out there?”

Me:  Isn’t it a huge problem that all three branches of our federal government make decisions to accommodate large corporations, often ignoring the needs of ordinary citizens? Isn’t that worth protesting.

Acquaintance: “Still, the protesters are stupid.”

Me: What is your solution?   Ordinary people are barred from participating in a government that is supposedly to be run by ordinary people. Further, the news media is largely under the control of these same interests―they are too often serving as stenographers for the corporations that pull the strings of the federal Government. [Fourth of July flag photo]

Acquaintance: [Silence].

Along the same lines, here’s an excerpt from an email I recently received from a DI reader:

About your note regarding ways to support the Occupy movement... yes, you are right to encourage people to talk about what is going on, but don't you think that it is time for those who are actually doing the "occupying" to go home and do their homework.  It seems pretty apparent that it is mostly the late teen to early 20 year olds that are involved and that they don't seem to have any really intelligent, well thought out ideas or goals.  The media and general public are already bored with the story, and the whole thing will have been an exercise in futility unless they move on in a dignified way.  Their goal should be to have an effect on the 2012 election which is a full year away.  They should go home and get organized and become better informed in order to form a voting block that will further their agenda (that is if they can come to a consensus as to what that agenda is).

In short, this reader wants the Occupiers to return home to do the same thing that millions of people have been doing for the past decade, i.e., doing nothing likely to invoke change. [More . . . ]

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Senate to vote on net neutrality next week

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote next week on one of the most important issues that most folks aren't well tuned into: Net Neutrality. If this vote goes badly, or if Barack Obama fails to veto the result, that will be the end of the Internet as we know it, because the Internet will become much more like cable television, with corporate controlled options regarding permitted websites and acceptable software and devices. Free Press is offering a basic Q & A on net neutrality here.

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Dealing with Microsoft PowersHell

Why, one may wonder, would I be delving into something that ubiquitous Microsoft decides unabashedly to call PowersHell? To start with, and in full disclosure, they capitalize it as PowerShell, a new and improved version of the command line interface that we old timers sometimes still call the DOS prompt. But why would I use this, when the Gooey does so much? It has to do with too many cameras and too many memory chips. You see, I just went on vacation, a two week, 3,550 mile drive to Yellowstone, the Tetons, and many places in between. I brought home over 4,000 snapshots and video clips taken with 4 cameras. Why would anyone need 4 cameras? Well, I have a SuperZoom 12Mp, and a pocket camera (the SD1100 that we've raved about), and my new Droid. That's three? Well, I also got a back-up SD1100, that I've also rigged up with my first to use as a stereo camera. So with three of the four cameras all of the same brand, and so many pictures, eventually the 8 character file names (the first four of which are fixed in 3 cameras at "IMG_") began to overlap. And when I filled up a memory chip, each camera decided to reset to IMG_0001, so I have many overlaps in the lower numbers. Very clumsy. Also it is hard to match up the images from the left and right cameras (each eye stored in its own folder) without looking at each enlarged, and the Windows Photo Viewer doesn't let me look at two files from different folders side-by-side. So I decided to rename all the images to use longer names, and decided to use the picture date and time to rename them. My former XP machine had use a nice re-namer that would do this. But now I have Win7, and the old Win95 app won't run. But I keep in mind that "Every O/S Sucks" So I Googled for a new renamer that could handle the task, and stumbled on to this post: Rename multiple files as “Modified Date/Time” using cmd or Powershell. Yee, I thought, Haw! Why install another utility when the O/S does it for me. But it can't be done with the old command line. One has to figure out how to use the new, powerful, dangerous PowerShell. I could have just used the code snippet in the Super User post linked above. But I wanted to, a) Know how it works, and b) Do it a little differently. So once I returned, I did some reading, and playing. But after a minimum of profanity, I got it working on a test folder, and then ran my new script on all my files. Now I can tell at a glance when each picture was taken, and therefore easily glean the where and why. Just for a laff, here's a bit about the code name Microsoft used while developing this new shell:

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