Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Despite a massive   Twitter   campaign and a   blog post   that claims “Go Daddy no longer supports SOPA legislation” the company and their CEO have   dodged questions   about opposing the bill. In essence, they are taking a lesser role by not showing support for the bill. They have not opposed it. This week, they   lost around   72,000 domain registrations. At a yearly discounted rate of $6.99 (most registrations are higher), that’s over half a million dollars per year. It is apparently not enough for them to speak out against the bill. How many domains is the company willing to lose before they oppose this abomination of legislation? Do they believe that when they “step back and let others take leadership roles” that we are going to see it as something other than a “duck and cover” public relations move to try to get out of the spotlight and hope someone else takes the brunt of the attacks while they quietly support the bill? Is 72,354 domains enough? Not even close. It’s a drop i

Will also end its 14-year run of keynotes with Ballmer's Jan. 9 turn By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld December 21, 2011 04:35 PM ET Microsoft today announced that next month's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will its last as an exhibitor. "We have decided that this coming January will be our last keynote presentation and booth at CES," said Frank Shaw, the head of Microsoft's corporate communications, in a blog post Wednesday. As Shaw noted, January's CES will also be the last time that a Microsoft executive gives the gigantic trade show's opening keynote. Former CEO and current chairman Bill Gates delivered his first keynote in 1994 and ended with the 2008 CES. Current chief executive Steve Ballmer, who has taken the stage the last two years, will do so for the final time Monday night, Jan. 9. "We won't have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don't align with the show's January timing,&q

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt   December 19, 2011: 5:46 PM ET Not the knockout blow Steve Jobs sought; Google has until April to find a workaround Apple (AAPL) has won a partial victory in an intellectual property case that Steve Jobs had famously vowed to fight to his "last dying breath." The U.S. International Trade commission ruled Monday that the software in some of HTC's Android smartphones violated one provision of an Apple patent and that those phones would no longer be allowed into the U.S. But the ruling is not as broad as Apple had hoped, and the import ban doesn't take effect until April, giving HTC -- and Google (GOOG), whose software the phones were running -- time to fashion a workaround. The announcement was made after the close of markets: "Notice is hereby given that the U.S. International Trade Commission has found a violation of section 337 in this investigation and has issued a limited exclusion order prohibiting importation of infringing pe

By Stephen DeMaura and David Segal Special to Roll Call During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page. The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the "Fair Use Doctrine," the videos were pulled down. Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees - not just the original content provider - to pull

POSTED BY ALLAHPUNDIT     Righties on Twitter are crowing that this means Reid's bill is DOA, but I'm not so sure. Don't forget, The One has been known to stand behind programs that even his own cabinet says are surefire disasters in the making. If he and Reid let little things like unworkable math or Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares stop them from passing legislation, we wouldn't have ObamaCare, now would we? Pete Isberg, president of the [nonprofit National Payroll Reporting Consortium] today wrote to the key leaders of the relevant committees of the House and Senate, telling them that "insufficient lead time" to implement the complicated change mandated by the legislation means the two-month payroll tax holiday "could create substantial problems, confusion and costs affecting a significant percentage of U.S. employers and employees.". The two-month payroll tax holiday, which the president has said should be extended throughout 2012, will me