billso.com

USA: Yahoo! News - Wanted: Good Job in Exchange for U.S. Election Vote. Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post about poor job quality. Dodge this, W.

Tech: I wonder how much money Anish Dhingra and Jeffrey Davis contributed to the GOP? The FTC has finally settled with D-Squared and its founders over their marketing practices. D-Squared servers would bombard users with 10 popup windows per second, advertising software that would stop the pop-ups. As part of the settlement, D-Squared will pay no fines and no one will admit any wrongdoing. They just have to take down their web sites and find new crap to sell.

Why did the FTC sue these fine gentlemen in the first place? Because users have always been able to disable the Messenger service in Windows, ever since it was introduced in the late 1980s. D-Squared was practicing extortion, and they got caught. No one ever needed to pay D-Squared for their software.

Black Viper and Steve Gibson both have free solutions available, if you want to fix your system now. Most Windows XP users are running services they don’t need. If you disable some of these services, like the WMI Performance Adapter and Network DDE, you should have more available RAM and your Windows XP computer may run faster.

Ha-ha-Hawai’i: There’s more reportage on the Dobelle setllement in the Star and Advo. The usual shocked reactions from the UH campus and an ex-governor are here and here.

Dobelle won’t teach a single class at UH. He’ll just collect his paycheck for 2 years.

Tech: Jeff Maurone has a long, fawning post on his dinner at Bill Gates’ home. I’m sure Jeff will stay at Microsoft and change the world… after he drinks enough of their Kool-Aid.

Sports: The New York Times - Yankees Propose New Stadium, and Would Pay. “The existing stadium, which opened in 1923 and has been the site of 33 World Series, would not be demolished, at least not most of it. It would be converted, possibly, to a multilevel parking garage with a soccer field on top, while retaining the ball field and the most recognizable elements of the structure.”