I’ve been wondering how Hotmail was going to counter Gmail’s 1 Gig free storage and Yahoo mail’s 100 MG of storage. Hotmail is going to one-up Yahoo mail and offer 250 MB of free storage. It’s good to see that Hotmail is going to start treating it’s subscribers right after only giving this 2 MBs of storage.

By the way, if you want a Gmail account, buy an invitation to open a Gmail account one on eBay. It should only cost you $1.

I admit that I have been in awe of SpaceShip One making it to space. I pray that private companies can figure out some way to make space travel profitable. Then, hopefully, I’ll get to go to outer space in my lifetime.

Then again, maybe this post was an excuse to link to this picture.

Becuase I can’t improve on this post, I’m block quoting it:

I agree with this story that

This is great planning from the party that believes that character doesn’t count:

The opening night of next month’s Demo cratic convention in Boston is set to feature an emotional party tribute to hometown hero Ted Kennedy, who has served in office longer than every other senator but one.

Guess no one at the Democratic National Committee took a close look at the calendar: That July 26 salute to Teddy just happens to coincide with . . . the 35th anniversary of Chappaquiddick.

It was on July 25, 1969, that the senator appeared before a Massachusetts district court judge and, in a proceeding that lasted all of seven minutes, pleaded guilty to one count of failing to report the accident that resulted in the death of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.

Linkage via Baseball Crank.

An article in the LA Times about a push in Congress to allow DVDs to be “sanitized” from their original version begins:

Which should prevail, artistic freedom or a tool that could be used to protect children from foul language, nudity and violence in movies?

Over Hollywood’s long-standing objections, some members of Congress are endorsing legislation that would allow DVDs to be “sanitized”

Here’s one more reason the Press has a liberal bias. From the Telegraph:

To the anti-war lobby, it was cause for jubilation. “No Qa’eda-Iraq tie” crowed The New York Times. “White House misled the world over Saddam” exulted our own Independent. And presidential candidate Senator John Kerry claimed that the Bush administration had “misled America over the need for war”.

The excitement was over a preliminary assessment of evidence about al-Qa’eda by the US commission investigating September 11. The only problem was that the press coverage was untrue. The report does not rule out links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’eda. On the contrary, as the commission’s chairman, Thomas Kean, confirmed: “There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there.”

As so often in the coverage of Iraq, those who make the (illogical) claim that there was no such contact and therefore no cause for war saw in this report only what they wanted to see.

Upon arriving at the scene in Baghdad, dozens of people gathered around two of the vehicles targeted in the blast, jumping up and down on their roofs, hammering them with bits of debris and chanting: “There is no God but Allah. America is the enemy of Allah.” I don’t get it, that isn’t an American injured in the pictures, but then again, I don’t believe in their God.

According to an article in the WSJ:

Before 1973 — the year OPEC seized oil market power — the growth of U.S. energy use was matched by similar growth in domestic production of energy. But total fossil-fuel production has never exceeded the 1970 level, and the only major net addition to domestic U.S. energy output has been due to nuclear energy. The reasons for such an outcome are in part self-imposed. From 1971 to 1980, energy price controls simultaneously stimulated energy consumption and curtailed energy production (while indirectly subsidizing OPEC). Since U.S. producers received far less than the world price, energy production moved abroad. Our policy of severely restricting the production of most forms of energy has magnified OPEC’s ability to raise the world price of crude oil. While the decline in rates of discovery and production of oil and gas in North America and elsewhere may be long term, incentives could mitigate the trend, not to mention the promise of clean coal and nuclear power.

Read the rest of the article. I don’t agree with all of its policy prescriptions, but it has some interesting information about nuclear power, and the cost of fossil fuels.

From an article in Bicycling Magazine:

Tour de France titan Lance Armstrong just can’t seem to shake the suspicion of doping. Since winning his first Tour in 1999, he has been dogged with various and sundry allegations and investigations, and now, only a few weeks before the start of this year’s Tour, a new book, “L.A. Confidential,” is being released which makes for further allegations.

The book, written by award winning reporter David Walsh (four time-Irish sportswriter of the year and three-time British sportswriter of the year) and Pierre Ballester (winner of the Antoin Blondin prize for best Tour de France story in 1993), is the fruit of three years of research. Already in 2001, Walsh chronicled Armstrong’s involvement with Dr. Michele Ferrari, cycling’s doctor most suspected of doping athletes, but in “L.A. Confidential” they rely heavily on other sources.

In excerpts published on Sunday in the French weekly news magazine L’Express, “L.A. Confidential” cites heavily Armstrong’s ex-seigneur, Emma O’Reilly, as well as ex-teammate Steve Swart and Kathy LeMond, wife to three time Tour winner Greg LeMond.

According to O’Reilly, after the 1998 Tour of Holland Armstrong gave her a sack of empty syringes. “Look Emma, I didn’t throw these out. Can you throw them in the trash?”

Nearly a year later, just prior to the medical checkup before the start of the 1999 Tour she said, “Armstrong asked me if I had something in my make-up bag that could be used to cover up scars from syringe injections into his upper arm, so that doctors in the control would not be suspicious.”

Seven years ago, I drove to Montana with some friends. While trying to find something to listen as we drove at night, we scanned the AM dial and stumbled upon a bizarre radio talk show. Due to whatever weird atmospheric conditions occur with AM radio, we found that we could listen to a radio show on KFI 640 from LA. The caller on the radio show was a guy named Vernon Dozer. Vernon was a completely self-absorbed whack-job. He couldn’t stop talking about how buff he was and how it was beneath him to wipe his sweat off of exercise machines. In fact, he told others that they had to “pay their Dozer dues” and “mop his sweat up.” When he went to the gym he wore his Raiders “Commitment to Excellence” shirt because he said that that described what he was all about. He also tried to get the host, Phil Hendrie to “lift with him