Originally discussed here . My oh my, what a black eye. For starters: -There's a rumor floating around that only 500 were sold . As much as I would have laughs at a phone with that kind of marketing only selling 500 units, that seems a bit low. Maybe in one market they only sold 500, maybe they only sold 500 in the first week, but more jitterbugs have been sold than that. Just in 'walk in, my contract is up, I need a new phone' traffic, Verizon should have been able to sell more than 5...

Via Salon : The latest Steele gaffe, you might have heard by now, involves the war in Afghanistan. In an amateur video posted on YouTube, the RNC chairman calls it "a war of Obama's choosing" and "not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." (Apparently, Steele wasn't paying attention to the news back in, say, October 2001.) He also says that history has shown that "the one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan...

When last I posted of Microsoft , I mentioned a bit about what I thought was their greatest accomplishment: I think that MS's greatest accomplishment in the last decade or so has been the Xbox. They plunged headfirst into one of the most difficult tech markets and not only survived but thrived. Ironically, it had little to do with 'synergy' or marketing gimmicks or because people had a predisposition to buy the Xbox because of the Microsoft name, but because they put out a high quality, kic...

Oh dear. Breitbart: I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse. The American people, at least half of whom are the obj...

An American soldier blows up a HP printer . I guess that's one way to fix it.

I know I do . A bit over two weeks ago, a group of statistic wizards (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman) approached me with a disturbing premise -- they had been poring over the crosstabs of the weekly Research 2000 polling we had been running, and were concerned that the numbers weren't legit. I immediately began cooperating with their investigation, which concluded late last week. Daily Kos furnished the researchers with all available and relevant informat...

NYT : About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody. This began two years ago, when the Supreme Court disregarded the plain words of the ...

The official MS blog spins some numbers : Some are really interesting and tell you something about what MS's numbers are like: <10 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008. [source] 96 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009. [source] ------ 24% Linux Server market share in 2005. [source] 33% Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005). [source] 21.2% Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009. [sou...

LGF : Tea Party wacko Rick Barber, who’s running for Congress in the GOP primary in Alabama’s 2nd District, was last seen at LGF when he posted a video calling for President Obama to be impeached and openly inciting anti-government insurrection. Well, he’s lovingly fondling his Revolutionary War pistol again, ranting about a “tyrannical health care bill,” having psychotic conversations about slavery with an actor playing Abraham Lincoln, and comparing taxe...

One of the most iconic trophies in sports at Chicago's Pride parade. Linky : Recently traded Blackhawk Brent Sopel took part in Sunday's Pride Parade to honor his friend, Toronto GM Brian Burke and Burke's late son, Brendan. 21-year-old Brendan was killed in an auto accident in Indiana on Feb. 5, three months after the Miami (Ohio) university senior and hockey team student manager made news by telling his parents and team members that he was gay. Wingn...

This is pretty typical of deliverables I see every day. Well, it's not always that bad---usually people can at least take the time to do some alignment. But you get the point. Text really isn't great for something like this because you really can't clearly see highs, lows, trends, whatever. It just is. It's a pretty good place to use a chart, but if you're not a chart ninja, odds are your output will be the defaults, which isn't that much better. You'd actually ha...

Well put : The movement scored a big win this week in South Carolina, where state Rep. Nikki Haley romped past a four-term congressman to win the GOP nomination for governor. Still, for all the attention the tea party movement has gotten and all the passion of its followers, a rough accounting at the ballot box shows the movement has just about as many losses as victories. Money has proved an impediment. Organization — or, rather, the lack of it — has become another. &qu...

Carey Roberts is like a 9000 year old man. He totally hates women, especially those uppity feminist bitches . Seriously, this guy is a sick twisted individual . I read Carey Roberts because he reminds me that as the father of a 2 year old girl, I have a parental responsibility to maintain awareness that people like him exist and to mock him mercilessly for being old and deservedly waking up in piles of his own excrement due to having lost control of his bowels sometime during the late 80'...

You may, or may not have heard about the WaPo ditching blogger David Weigel for saying some mean things about some conservatives . I've been sort of ignoring it. I try to at least. Generally, I try to avoid spending much time with a story if it's the media being the news. Helen Thomas is one thing---because she's basically an American institution. Weigel? A twenty something who's fiscally to the left, socially to the right, a penchant for ripping social conservatives and recognize...

Oooooo ourage of outrages ! Here’s the Thomas More Center’s press release, which notes that there was trouble at last year’s Dearborn Arab festival too. Evidently the cops were worried that the presence of Christian lit at a mostly Muslim event might produce some “excitement,” so they solved the problem by punishing the party that tried to peacefully exercise its rights. Note to the defendants: Don’t forget to ask for damages. A lot of damages. The hysteria in the comments is quite ...