the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Congress has passed and President Bush has vetoed H.R. 1591, the Iraq Surrender Act of 2007.
Or as we in the reality-based community call it, H.R. 1591 Conference Report; U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007
What part of it does the “clap louder” crowd object to? Troop readiness? Veterans’ care? Katrina recovery? Couldn’t be Iraq Accountability, could it?
I went to an employment audition at my local Apple Store for a Genius Bar position.
7 AM on a Sunday? Yikes! Now we wait and see.
Hilzoy on the invocation of Reagan by Giuliaini.
[I]s the Reagan we want to Iranians to remember the one who was willing to negotiate for hostages?
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63 – Google Search:
906,000 results so far.
The author sent me a note about his just published book:
During the summer of 2004, a small group of Iraqi insurgents blew up a southern section of the Iraqi oil pipeline infrastructure. This attack cost an estimated $2,000 to produce, and no attackers were caught, while the explosion cost Iraq $500 million in lost oil exports—a rate of return 250,000 times the cost of the attack.
In Brave New War, the controversial terrorism expert John Robb argues that the shift from state-against-state conflicts to wars against small, ad hoc bands of like-minded insurgents will lead to a world with as many tiny armies as there are causes to fight for. Our new enemies are looking for gaps in vital systems where a small, cheap action—blowing up an oil pipeline or knocking out a power grid—will generate a huge return.
It’s this kind of asymmetrical/disproportional warfare that huge standing armies won’t be able to fight and that a network of imperial forts around the world will only make worse.
On my library list. More from him here.
Given my luck with disk drives lately (in the past 18 months, I have lost two drives in this laptop, as well as an 80GB and 120Gb desktop drive, two of which were replaced under warranty), I am always fretting about backups. I have been using a combination of local drives as repositories, using rsync, and using strongspace as an offsite backup. My local backups have been what I have relied on most: I have yet to pull anything back from strongspace, but it has been comforting to have it there.
Then I (well, someone told me about it) discovered Mozy, a service that provides both a backup client and an offsite repository for your backups. Up to 2 Gb is free and after that, it’s unlimited for $4.95/month.
I have run some backups and pulled a couple of restores and I like it so far. The client is unobtrusive, once you get that initial dump of a backup done. Mac users are especially well taken care of, since the restore files accessible via the web come as dmg files, with the path information preserved. So they can be dropped into place. I could see a disk image, a la Norton’s Ghost, being handled with this, with all the the user files preserved just as they were.
So what am I backing up? My whole home directory (sad that it fits in 2 Gb, but I am still piecing things together from my last disk replacement), except my iTunes music. I’m content to mirror that locally, for now (it’s 30 Gb!).
Give it a try, if you live in fear of data loss as I do.
