By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 30th at 02:00 AM  | 

Amazon’s not kidding one bit about punishing states that attempt to punish it. After Amazon sent a last ditch warning to Associates that all California Associates would be terminated in the event Governor Brown signed the budget with the Amazon Tax in it, the Governor went ahead and did it. So, every Amazon Associate in California just got terminated, including countless small businesses scraping by | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 28th at 02:00 AM  | 

And we truly are back. Friday night was a night off thanks to some maintenance at RedState. It was nice because I could rest on a Friday night… but it’s not so nice now when I have a whopping 20 Firefox windows to sort through tonight. So here we go. With so many big stories going on, it’s hard to pick which one to start | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 23rd at 01:30 AM  | 

Can we just start shooting the hackers? It seems like it’s war on the Internet these days, and the more there is for me to cover, the more work it is churning out Tech at Night! Lulzsec denies the allies are in Baghdad the leader is arrested despite an earlier claim on Twitter that it was true. Anyway, Shame on the Daily Mail for trying | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 20th at 11:45 PM  | 

I’ve been treating Lulzsec, one of the online gangs attacking websites including the CIA’s, as an offshoot of 4chan and Anonymous. So I’m not surprised to find out that Lulzsec and Anonymous are joining up to attack the US Government. It’s like Hamas and Fatah merging; nobody is surprised. But attacking the government? Handcuffs hurt, boys. It’ll be fun when y’all find that out. It’ll | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 16th at 03:00 AM  | 

Even as Mary Bono Mack and Republicans fiddle with the pointless SAFE Data act that won’t actually do anything to prevent or even to deter online crime, the Internet burns with a string of further attacks. The Senate was hit twice, and the CIA was hit as well. I thought we were the party that likes to solve crime by putting the criminals in jail? | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 15th at 05:30 PM  | 

Don’t our elected officials have access to Ballotpedia? If the California Democrats did, they’d know that the Amazon Tax being taken up this afternoon in the legislature is unconstitutional under the state Constitution. And it’s not some old, obscure provision that’s violated either. It’s the brand-new Proposition 26, a constitutional amendment passed in November, that the tax violates. Put simply, Proposition 26 doesn’t let the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 13th at 01:00 PM  | 

State governments are timid beasts. So often the country will refuse to move in a new policy direction unless one state jumps out ahead and acts first. In the past, California was often the dynamic frontrunner. Now, Texas is increasingly the example that other states ought to follow. When it comes to the Amazon Tax, or the plan to change the tax laws in Texas | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 11th at 03:30 AM  | 

Free Press is getting the heat. It’s been exposed through FOIA that the far left front group was secretly coordinating media strategy with people at the FCC, including Commissioner Michael Copps. So when Copps makes a statement about media regulation, Free Press’s pet issue, I have to assume they wrote it for him. Media Reform is their code for nationalization of the press, after all. | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 9th at 03:30 AM  | 

With fourteen articles to run through tonight, a near record, I don’t have time to waste. We’ll start with Joshua Trevino bringing us Bill Peacock on the Texas Amazon Tax. Texas SB 1 contains the tax Governor Perry already vetoed this session, and it needs defeated again. Says Peacock: “Gov. Perry was right to veto the Amazon tax bill, and he’d be right if he | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 4th at 03:30 AM  | 

I am so sick of California. While it’s good that the “privacy” bill didn’t make it out of the Senate, it’s not so good that the Amazon tax is going on to the Senate. Texas: Don’t be like us. Defeat your Amazon tax in SB 1. And the hacks go on: Anonymous attacks.. Iran?, its apparent offshoot lulzsec attacked PBS and Sony, but leaves itself | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 2nd at 03:00 AM  | 

Lots to cover tonight, thanks in part to skipping Monday for Memorial Day. But of course I’ll start with my own post on the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, explaining from the ground up why the George Soros/Sprint arguments contradict themselves. Government should get out of the way, especially state governments like California’s getting too big for their britches. It’ll be better for all of us who buy | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 26th at 03:00 AM  | 

This week I already called upon Rick Perry to veto the Texas Amazon Tax, and now I’m left to hope that California Democrats will be less stupid than Joe Straus. Sigh. Meanwhile the posturing around the AT&T/T-Mobile deal continues. We find from a press conference with COMPTEL CEO Jerry James that the Rural Cellular Alliance is joining with radical left, George Soros/OSI-funded group Public Knowledge | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 24th at 02:00 PM  | 

I like Texas. The state has many great things going for it, including a friendly tax and business climate. However Texas has to keep working to stay on top, so when South Carolina is backing down from its refusal to work with Amazon, and Tennessee has dropped its Amazon tax bill, it’s disappointing and frustrating to see Texas moving forward with punitive taxation against an | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 3rd at 03:30 AM  | 

Curse Firefox. I’m getting to this much later tonight than I would have, thanks to a stinking Firefox 3.6 rendering bug, plus Firefox’s refusal to make it easy to work around Firefox rendering bugs. Microsoft Internet Explorer makes that easy with conditional comments. Firefox has no such feature, pretending it’s always right. Which is fine, except when Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6 render the same | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 30th at 01:30 AM  | 

Good evening. Here’s a bit I’d never expect to read from the San Francisco Chronicle about Sprint’s begging for the FCC to pick winners and losers, instead of just standing aside and letting AT&T and T-Mobile get together: At a time when wireless service is getting cheaper and more innovative, there is no reason for a Depression-era bureaucracy like the FCC to step in and | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 26th at 12:30 AM  | 

California’s Democrats, having refused to get tough with the unions who coincidentally will fund their re-election campaigns, are still determined to raise taxes. So they continue to push for an unconstitutional Amazon Tax on the Internet that just might cost the state more than it brings in, in the long run. They’re playing with “thresholds” to try to focus the bill on specific companies like | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 25th at 11:30 PM  | 

After that flurry of activity online, we seem be having a bit of a slow Friday. It’s no wonder: we have a long fight ahead with respect to the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, a process that Mike Wendy calls Legalized Extortion. And when property rights are made contingent on acceptance of a goverment-dictated consent degree, it’s hard to argue with the thrust of Wendy’s point. Scary thought | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 24th at 03:30 AM  | 

So the top story this week is going to be the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA. There’s a lot being said about it, about unions, about competition, but the story I’m seeing emerging is that this deal is about spectrum. AT&T sees in T-Mobile a way to get the spectrum it needs going forward. In fact, even power grabbing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said to | Read More »