Goodbye Mozy, Hello Carbonite?

Got an email from Mozy today, excerpted here:

[We’re raising prices even though nobody else is and] replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)
You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

Carbonite still has a flat rate. If they stick with it, I’ll be a Carbonite customer in May.

Congratulations to Speaker Straus

Congratulations to Texas Representative Joe Straus: he got reelected Texas House speaker! I’m glad; he’s who I wanted all along.

I don’t understand the campaign against him. Straus has good conservative and Republican credentials. The charges against him were flimsy or outright distortion.

The two groups who opposed him most were the evangelical theocrats and Tea Partiers. I think both groups got too big for their britches. They apparently don’t “get” that they are part of, not the, Republican Party.

The Texas Eagle Forum (TEF), in particular, acted stupidly.

First, the TEF bought into the anti-Straus hyperbole. Either their leadership is IQ-short, or they have little principle, pandering for cheap political points. Or both?

Second, the TEF rates all House members after each session. For this session, half their rating is based on each House members’s vote for speaker. So if you vote for Straus, the highest rating you’ll get is 50%. Gee, that’s smart–88% of the House is crippled with only a 50% rating since 132 voted for Straus. Such a useful rating. Most importantly, this shows the irrelevance of the TEF: defeat after all its blustering.

Petty tyrants.

Texas wanted a conservative House speaker, and it has one! Congratulations again to Texas House Speaker Joe Straus.

birthornot.com: Domain name suggests hoax

At birthornot.com, Peter and Alisha Arnold, a Apple Valley, MN couple, asks the public whether they should kill their unborn child.

I think it’s a hoax.

Minneapolis/St. Paul’s Star Tribune reports the baby is at 17 weeks.

Today (Nov. 19) is week 46 of the year 2010. 46 minus 17 means the child was conceived no earlier than week 29 of 2010, which starts with July 18.

Here’s the problem: The birthornot.com domain name was purchased on May 17, 2010. That’s week 20 of 2010. They purchased the domain name more than two months before conception!

That doesn’t make sense. I really hope it’s a hoax; the alternative is sick, that they planned a media circus around conception.

I guess there’s a shot of this being just good timing, or someone else just happened to purchase the domain name and donated it, but either fails Occam’s razor.

What do you think?

“Soliciting Sodomy” offenses in Dallas

For my doctoral research, I asked several cities for their traffic citation data. Some cities gave me all their violations, traffic or otherwise.

Dallas gave me all data. One offense is “6460 -SOLICIT SODOMY”. Um, what? After the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court case that shot down Texas’s sodomy law, why is this enforced?

Was I wrong! Here’s Dallas’s enforcement of that offense:

These are all the sodomy citations in the dataset I have from Dallas. (2009 is an incomplete year–data was requested in mid-2009.)

There’s a chance that “the system” says offense 6460 is “SOLICIT SODOMY”, but in fact it’s a different crime. That wouldn’t surprise me because Dallas courts still use an archaic mainframe system. But who knows?