Why Are the Kennedys Trying To Kill Wind Power?

Senator Edward Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, Jr. are doing everything they can to kill a wind power project being planned offshore from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The wind turbines will hopefully be built in Nantucket Sound about six miles offshore from the Kennedy property in Massachusetts. Evidently, the Kennedys do not want this alternative green power project in their backyard because they believe it will spoil their views, sailing and yachting. And minorities have the nerve to complain about toxic waste sites in their neighborhoods. Don't they understand how the rich are suffering?

AAEA believes this project is so important that we went to Boston to support it at a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hearing. The Cape Wind Project will be the first offshore wind project in America if it is built. If the project is killed it could end such development projects and would be a major blow to windpower development. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, has also called for a ban on all wind turbines within 1.5 nautical miles of shipping and ferry lanes. It is aimed to kill the Cape Wind Project.

Pave the Earth: San Onofre State Beach Threatened

"A toll road agency has approved a six-lane highway through a state park despite opposition from surfers, environmentalists and state officials.

The Transportation Corridor Agencies board voted 12-3 on Thursday to approve the route through San Onofre State Beach, a popular park that President Nixon helped set aside in 1970.

Agency officials say the toll road, which would complete a 65-mile network of such roads in Orange County, is necessary to improve travel between Orange County and San Diego on an increasingly busy corridor.

Opponents, however, say the 16-mile project would ruin the last open-space camping site along a 200-mile stretch of coast ending at the Mexican border. The park is the state's fifth most popular park, with 2.7 million visitors each year."

SF Gate

'Oscar' eat your heart out

With the academy awards just around the corner, everyone's thoughts turn toward the red carpet, designer dresses, never-ending acceptance speeches, and long lists of thank you's to producers, directors, mentors, hair stylists, neighbors... you get the picture.

Today, the Google Search Appliance was awarded the "2006 Best Product: Information Management" in Network Worlds Best Products Issue. Although the Google Search Appliance stylists do deserve much of the credit (come on, you love the swiss cheese look - yellow is the new black), we'd simply like to thank you, our customers and partners for making the appliance the premier enterprise search solution. Since its inception 4 years ago, Google Enterprise appliance customers (now over 3000 strong) have found our products easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to maintain. Most importantly, users have found what they are looking for, and isn't that the ultimate measure of a search product?

Thanks to the folks at Network World for the endorsement, we do appreciate it. And of course, thanks to the whole enterprise team for making this moment possible. Without you, we wouldn't be here... (wait a minute, this is starting to sound like one of those Academy Awards speeches... roll music)

Report: Carfree Development

Carfree City, USA has released a new report on the economic benefits of carfree development.

Download the presentation.

Americans discover transit = better life

This story is two years old, but the trend continues. Americans are sick of being stuck in cars and want their lives back. Here is one solution.

"We hated the commute in D.C. It was awful," says Thacher, 29, a lawyer with PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Now I get on the train and read the paper or do some work. From what I understand, all around here is just a miserable commute."

USA Today

Great Public Spaces - Old Town Alexandria

Old Town Alexandria is a mixed-use, historic neighborhood with a central market square and city hall.

Project for Public Spaces

WCN legal observer Report - NYC Critical Mass 2/24/06

Eight World Carfree Network legal observers were on duty on Feb. 24th 2006. Our team included six Americans, one German and a citizen of Israel. Five observed on foot. Three of us observed from bicycles.

This was the first ride following the February 15th decision by a NY state judge denying the City's request for an injuction against the environmental group Time's Up! The injunction would have made it illegal for Critical Mass riders to gather at Union Square and to ride together without applying for a permit. The judge also said that the City can't make it illegal for Time's Up! to publicize the ride on their web-site.

The decison appears to have had a significant effect on how the ride was policed this month. A major reduction in the number of arrests was observed, and unlike the majority of the 687 riders who have been arrested on Critical Mass rides since August 2004, no riders were charged with "parading without a permit". Three were arrested for "disorderly conduct" and released from jail before 9 pm. 23 people were issued citations traffic code violations.

For more about the 2/24/06 ride visit to the Village Voice Blog Report

Legal observer reports from previous months are here.

The real costs of car ownership

"According to the Dept. of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, car ownership costs are the second largest household expense in the U.S. . In fact, the average household spends almost as much on their cars as they do on food and health care combined for their entire family."

Bikes at Work Inc.

Pedestrian Malls Proposed for North Miami

Sound like a good start.

World Carfree News

If you don't get it already, you will want to sign up for World Carfree News, a monthly summary of interesting items from this worldwide movement.

Carfree? Are you nuts?

The Weekly Standard, a cauldron of American right-wing blather, hates the idea of going car free.

They seem absolutely incensed that anyone in the United States would imagine a world beyond the personal automobile. What we see is a lack of imagination that our cities could ever be organized in a way that does not include the strip-malls and parking lots of today's American landscape.

Here is a sample of their breathless rhetoric...

Families rely on cars for many of the same reasons working class people do. Families have dozens of short errands that require a "trip-chain": that is, a trip to drop off the kids at daycare might also include a trip to the drycleaners, a trip to the bank, and a trip to the grocery store. No transit schedule can accommodate these needs. Nor can carpooling.

We wear this article as a badge of honor. Upsetting the close-minded is the job of visionaries, eh?

What do you think?

Carfree Places

The best list now lives at Wikipedia.

NYC Critical Mass Crackdown Getting Silly

"We're not terrorist splinter cells. I vote Republican sometimes," says Luke Son, a Columbia student and licensed EMT who rushed to the aid of the injured scooter cops at last month's ride. "We have a right to be in the road, and if we back down now, it's like saying we're doing something wrong."

Village Voice

Join the international letter writing campaign to defend the right to ride a bicycle in New York City at the World Carfree Network's activism page.

And by the way, the World Carfree Network, which we are proud to be associated with, is making news.

Travel California Car Free

This is the future of travel!

Arrive without a car (by Amtrak train, plane, bus, boat or bike) or arrive with a car and just spend some car free time around town, and be rewarded with discounts!

Here's how it works: call your choice of one of the hotels below to make a reservation and ask for the Car Free Experience Package discount. You will receive a significant discount off regular room rates through December 31, 2006 (some restrictions apply). Then, upon check-in at your hotel, you will receive a CAR FREE-bies gift envelope with maps and a set of Car Free Luggage Tags good for discounts to local activities and restaurants, as listed below.

Santa Barbara Car Free

The Los Angeles Times thinks this is a great idea.

To the intranet…and beyond!

At trade shows, I used to go on about how much information the Google Search Appliance could discover on an organization's intranet. Turns out, that promise can be about as exciting as telling people how much lint they can find under their couch. For many companies, the official intranet is a relatively tiny set of company-approved web pages containing such gems as the cafeteria menu and company holiday calendar.

I realized that here at Google, we use the term intranet to refer to an entirely different beast – a mash-up of content that includes literally anything that's accessible over our corporate network. Our Google Search Appliance hoovers up employee file shares, product team databases, marketing Wikis and engineering blogs and adds them to our internal search
index. As a result, I can quickly find everything from recent sales presentations to product launch plans right from the search box.

Your organization probably has these content sources and more, but may not refer to them as part of the official intranet. Maybe we just need a new word to get us on the same page. Something like “Enternet,” for Enterprise-network, could work. So next time you're looking for that revised customer proposal or product launch plan, consider taking a wing dip at the intranet and then rocketing over to the Enternet to get the freshest organic content...I like it.

Search Across the Enterprise (Desktop)

There has been some discussion about the new Search Across Computers feature released last week in Google Desktop 3 beta, and we want to chime in. Admittedly we're of two minds on this: on the one hand, we know that our friends on the Desktop team have gone to great lengths to protect users' data and privacy.

On the other hand, we are the Enterprise team, and we understand that a company's data is more precious than gold -- and you don't go passing your gold around. So we should point you to Google Desktop 3 for Enterprise (beta) which can put your security fears to rest. This product has all the features of the consumer version -- and then some. It also includes full administrative control. Administrators can use the standard group policy settings to completely disable product features, such as the Search Across Computer functionality, so users cannot send documents from the work computer to their home PC.

The folks at Gartner have written about this, and we agree with their recommendation: "Enterprises that are not using Google Desktop for Enterprise but are allowing employees to use Google's desktop search application should start using the enterprise edition immediately and restrict its use accordingly."

In addition, Enterprise customers have asked for some features we've now added. These features include the ability to set time-based document retention policies for different content types, and a policy to control the indexing load on your Exchange servers. We think that the Enterprise version only strengthens a solid product. If you're reading this at work, you should consider it.

EPA 2007 Budget Request

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson released President Bush's 2007 budget request for the agency on Feb 6, 2006. AAEA President Norris McDonald attended the announcement at EPA Headquarters. The request is for $7.3 billion. Critics will complain that the figure is down slightly from previous years but we believe EPA can operate sufficiently with that amount of money.

Just think, $7 billion over the last 20 years is $140 billion. That seems like a lot of money to us. And EPA is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. As the first president to regulate Mercury, we hope this administration will continue to propose, implement and fund innovative environmental protection programs.

Marsha Coleman Adebayo & EPA: The Movie

(Photo: President Bush hugs Ms. Adebayo in the Oval Office after signing the bill into law)

What is going on betweeen EPA and Marsha Coleman Adebayo? Adebayo won a $600,000 court judgement against EPA for discrimination during the Clinton Administration. She went on to form the No Fear Coalition and psssed the '1st Civil Rights Legislation of the 21st Century," the NO FEAR Act of 2002.

Now there is a conflict regarding her continued employment and work situation. Ms. Adebayo, who became ill during this conflict, currently works from home and the agency wants her to work at the EPA offices. Ms. Adebayo has high blood pressure and had to be taken away by ambulance the last two times she was ordered back into the office. Although this conflict is currently in litigation, we believe that EPA should just offer Ms. Adebayo a settlement package and end the stalemate. We hope this administration will provide a happy ending to the pending movie about this entire affair.

The script commissioned by actor/activist Danny Glover is complete and the movie is on the fast track to production. It is just ashamed that this entire situation could have been avoided if Clinton administration EPA Administrator Carol Browner had not been totally dismissive of Ms. Adebayo's claims. No Fear: The Movie, coming to theatres soon.

Alaska Oil & Black Folks

Surely you have heard about the ongoing fight over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR), but we bet you aren't aware that the U.S. has been pumping oil out of Alaska as much as possible since 1977. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, operated by The Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, runs 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slople to Valdez at the Gulf of Alaska. We get approximately 17 of our domestic crude oil from the pipeline. Tankers deliver the oil to West Coast refineries.

Although blacks have virtually no equity in any energy projects, Art Mitchell is the Chief Financial Officer at Alyeska. What does Alaskan oil mean to black people? A natural gas pipeline is currently being planned. Why don't blacks own any of America's energy infrastructure? Are there opportunities for ownership of resources in any future development at ANWR? Or do you prefer that ALL of the Alaskan tundra should be preserved for the caribou? PS is pumping station

Practice makes perfect

Just now, BearingPoint announced a search practice based on Google's enterprise products. We've been busy as beavers getting hordes of BearingPoint consultants and engineers up to speed on our technology and we're glad to have them on the extended team.

We're excited about this partnership for lots of reasons. First, the guys and gals at BearingPoint seem to share a common viewpoint with us - that search is the next killer app for business. Second, this is the first time that one of the world's top consulting firms have established a search practice, their way of saying that this is gonna be big. And third, we now have a partner that can help expand and scale our efforts to bring Google-quality search to the Global 2000.

From our perspective, companies should have more than 90 percent of their information accessible quickly and effortlessly through a single search box, and we have a first-class partner to help us achieve that goal!

Searching for Olympic Gold

As millions of people tune into the Olympics over the next two weeks, we'd like to highlight the NBCOlympics website with search powered by (can you guess it) the Google Search Appliance. A search for TV will help you keep track of events throughout the Olympics on 5 different channels. Curious where Michelle Kwan was born? (Michelle’s from Torrance, CA.) Or to learn more about Jeremy Bloom – the freestyle mogul skier (and medal contender) who is expected to be drafted into the NFL in April as a wide receiver - after taking 2 years off football!

To get a bird’s eye view of Torino and some of the Olympic terrain, load up Google Earth which has new high resolution imagery for Torino and the surrounding area. Once you have Google Earth installed, you can click on the following KMZ file, which will load placemarks for all the major venues in the Torino area. And if you want to get pumped for the athletic competition check out this Olympic preview video.

Listen to users, we are...

We often hear from people when describing their corporate search experience that they want simple... they want easy... they want relevant... they want... well Google. Here in Google Enterprise, we believe that simple is better than complicated. We believe that fast is better than slow. And most of all, we believe that corporate search users are people too, and they don't usually pick up a Ph.D in library sciences before coming into work.

But don't take our word for it, in his report on mental models for search, Jakob Nielsen makes the same point loud and clear. Users expectations for search have been set, they want a search box, a button, and a results list (preferably in that order). And they want the best result to be at the top. To that end, I wanted to share with you some things we think about when building an enterprise search solution.

1. Focus on the user, and all else will follow. - Users are just trying to find something, and they've been spoiled by using Google on the Internet. They are used to typing in a word or two and getting back the right answer. So we don't over complicate the experience, and we give administrators full customization control to tailor the experience to the needs of their users.
   
2. Data silos are bad. - Then why, you ask, are there entire segments of the technology industry focused on creating them? We don't know, but our goal is to break down these walls. Our search team is focused on "effortless reach", that is, the ability to easily reach into any source of information and provide search across it. All from one search box.
   
3. Security is good. - When breaking down artificial barriers, you need to ensure you don't break through real ones. Search must sit "on top of" a company's identity management and access control system, and ensure that users only see in search results documents or data they have access to directly. To that end, we inter operate with basic-auth, NTML, SSO, x509 and SAML-based interfaces.
   

So our focus here in Google Enterprise is going to continue to be on providing a fast, fun, and easy-to-use experience to people everywhere, for search across their corporate network and enterprise information stores.

11 Lawyers file same motion nationwide.

From the Phil. Inquirer:

Cheltenham lawyer Thomas Griffin has made the Caribbean nation his cause - in a controversial report and in his practice.
By Gaiutra Bahadur, Inquirer Staff Writer

It was more a PR stunt than a practical legal maneuver.

Attorneys in 11 cities filed the same sermonlike motion on Jan. 19, pleading with U.S. immigration judges to halt deportation of hundreds of Haitians on humanitarian grounds.

Thomas Griffin, the Cheltenham lawyer behind the campaign, knew the gambit was futile. Only the Department of Homeland Security has the power to grant "temporary protected status" to foreigners, and only if a natural disaster, ongoing armed conflict, or other extraordinary crisis has wracked their homelands.

But Griffin stage-managed the filings and emotional news conferences here and in Miami, New York and Boston - hubs for Haitians - for maximum effect in the run-up to elections tomorrow in the Caribbean nation.

(click above for full article)

Rack-o-Mini

From time to time, enthusiastic Mini customers such as De Anza College send us pictures of those involved in purchasing and implementing their Mini. Here we've received a double whammy - a love letter plus more Mini hardware than is legal in most states.

"Last Fall we heard about the Google Mini and decided to give it a shot on one of our sites. Previously we were using an open source search technology that worked 'ok'. Our users found it gave poor search results and conversions were low. Once we got the Google Mini up and running, our complaints all but disappeared. The feedback from our users was overwhelming, so much so that we ordered 7 more.

We rolled the Minis out across several of our sites and noticed an instant increase in our conversion ratios. We contribute that to features like spell check and the over all great results that the Mini returns. As a Webmaster, the thing I love most is 'set it and forget it.' The Mini updates our search index on the schedule we set and there is nothing else we need to do to keep our index fresh. Here are 2 thumbs up for the Google Mini!

Thanks again!"

Mike - DirectEssays.com

The Mini six-pack might not be a bad idea for DirectEssays.com, but our new 200,000 and 300,000 Minis should fit the bill for those of you with New York apartment-style server closets.

The New Environmental Movement

History will write that the new environmental movement came from those working effectively to fight global warming. These 21st Century energy revolutionaries are rising up from the pronuclear power ranks to aggressively promote an off-the-shelf technology that simultaneously provides the electrical power America needs while not producing any greenhouse or smog producing gases. These pronuclear champions are the new generation of environmental activists.

While Laurie David and Leonardo DiCaprio are promoting electric vehicles - - the other half of the solution to stemming climate change - - they are afraid of offending their friends by embracing nuclear power, which is the only viable option for providing power to millions of people without producing air pollution and greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is working to kill the wind industry via his opposition to the Cape Wind Project in Nantucket Sound. And the photovoltaics industry will never take off because a state would have to be covered with panels to produce significant power and they still wouldn't produce power 70% of the time. We love solar and wind at AAEA though for specialty power uses and supplemental electricity.

Fortunately, there is a new sheriff in town and that is the North American Young Generation in Nuclear. Furthermore, these mostly young people are seriously taking their case to the streets. If the world is to be saved from the most serious environmental issue facing us today, global warming, do not look to the traditional environmental groups for serious solutions to this problem because they refuse to free themselves from impractical dogma. So go NAYGN. Show America and the world that nuclear power is the way to go. These new environmentalists rule.