Author: paul

the “serious left” gets its knickers in a knot — again

You’re under no obligation to moderate comments, so why invite people to speak their piece and then toss it in the Memory Hole? That said, this is entertaining, to see the humorless and uptight “serious left” get their tightie whities in a bunch about a satirical magazine cover.

The serious lefties over at the Washington Monthly think this cover will read like scripture to most people.

Blog_New_Yorker_Obama.jpg

[From The Washington Monthly]

And they’re moderating comments, so I have enclosed mine below.

Dear Moderators,

ya know, it really bollixes things up when you remove comments that other people have responded to. You’re under no obligation to moderate comments, so why invite people to speak their piece and then toss it in the Memory Hole?

That said, this is entertaining, to see the humorless and uptight “serious left” get their tightie whities in a bunch about a satirical magazine cover. For those of who say the art in question is not satire, it might help to refamiliarize yourself with the word and its meanings:
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

And confidential to Albert Champion, the New Yorker does indeed have a masthead and many ways to contact them. Look harder. Also, Condé Nast left us in 1942, so I doubt any boycott of his magazines will matter much to him.

file under: counter-intuitive

So Apple releases the 2nd generation iPhone, sells a million in the opening weekend, 10 million applications (granted none of this was known while the graphed trades were being made)…. Yes, it’s only a few dollars but the direction seems puzzling, though consistent with how the market reacts to Apple’s performance.

So Apple releases the 2nd generation iPhone, sells a million in the opening weekend, 10 million applications (granted none of this was known while the graphed trades were being made). But look at the drunkard’s walk, from the night before the release. Yes, it’s only a few dollars but the direction seems puzzling, though consistent with how the market reacts to Apple’s performance.

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again with MoDo on the attack?

did she choose those words — finicky , abstemious — or was it the web editor or copy editor? I’d have to read the column to know and I’d rather not.

did she choose those words — finicky, abstemious — or was it the web editor or copy editor? I’d have to read the column to know and I’d rather not. I’m happy at the moment and don’t want to change that.

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TiVo and DTV

TiVo Series 2 DVR Customers If you rely on a free over-the-air television signal received through a roof-top antenna, or “rabbit ears”, you will need to purchase an analog-to-digital converter box using a government coupon…. TiVo is currently working on a free software update scheduled for release in the Summer of 2008 which will enable most Series2 DVRs* to function with the new converter boxes.

Apparently, I should be able to make the jump to digital without undue expense . . .

TiVo Series 2 DVR Customers

If you rely on a free over-the-air television signal received through a roof-top antenna, or “rabbit ears”, you will need to purchase an analog-to-digital converter box using a government coupon. See https://www.dtv2009.gov for details. TiVo is currently working on a free software update scheduled for release in the Summer of 2008 which will enable most Series2 DVRs* to function with the new converter boxes.

[From Digital antenna support – TiVo]

Or I could buy a new digital TiVo for a mere 7 bones:

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Yeah, right. I’ll limp with my government cheese translator boxes for awhile yet.

obvious, when you think about it

A 52-home community in Canada is heated entirely with solar energy : Solar heating is a more exciting prospect than solar generation of electricity because heating is a much larger percentage of a home’s total energy use (60% for space heating, 20% for water heating, and 20% for appliances, lights, and other electrical loads).

…In many of the cold parts of the world, they get a lot of winter sunshine that could be collected and stored as heat, with no need for electricity (except perhaps to turn a pump to move the heat around: easily handled with a low voltage one powered by the same sunlight).

A 52-home community in Canada is heated entirely with solar energy:

Solar heating is a more exciting prospect than solar generation of electricity because heating is a much larger percentage of a home’s total energy use (60% for space heating, 20% for water heating, and 20% for appliances, lights, and other electrical loads).

[From Big Contrarian → Damn Canadians.]

Think about it. How much energy is used just to heat stuff up (water, mainly, but your living space as well in some parts of the world)? If you could capture the heat (insert Rub Goldberg-ian system of fresnel lenses, solar collector dishes, coils of pipe filled with solution that is used to store and transfer the heat) and tap into it as needed, how much electricity would we save? In many of the cold parts of the world, they get a lot of winter sunshine that could be collected and stored as heat, with no need for electricity (except perhaps to turn a pump to move the heat around: easily handled with a low voltage one powered by the same sunlight).

found needed: a collective noun

What do you call a group of vultures?… A Malkin of vultures?

What do you call a group of vultures?

A clutch? A gaggle? A Malkin of vultures?

[From Sadly, No! » Présenté Sans Commentaire]

A venue (or kettle) of vultures

One logically assumes that vultures would have a similarly uncomplimentary term, but they are known as a venue of vultures, or when the birds are circling on thermals, a kettle of vultures because they resemble the rising bubbles of a boiling pot of water. However, the ravens, as the crows’ cousins, share the assignment of a gloomy although less sinister term – an unkindness of ravens.

[From Catalyst Magazine – Animals Animals: A Murder of Crows]

MSFT is using my bandwidth as a proxy?!

Someone in MSFT’s networking group has put a cached list of sites participating in Distributed Boing Boing , meaning that requests for some users over there use my bandwidth to pull BB’s pages…. 65.55.110.117 – – [02/Jul/2008:19:45:20 -0700] “GET /dbb.php?http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/13/bionic-limbs.html HTTP/1.0” 200 23576 “http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=boing&form=QBHP” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)” I talked with the author of DBB this week and he took the list down once the folks at SmartFilter figured it out, but evidently some people made copies of the list of sites.

Excellent. Someone in MSFT’s networking group has put a cached list of sites participating in Distributed Boing Boing in their live.com results, meaning that requests for some users over there use my bandwidth to pull BB’s pages. And I seem to be on that list: requests for pages at BB.net that originate at MSFT go through me first.

65.55.110.117 - - [02/Jul/2008:19:45:20 -0700] "GET /dbb.php?http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/13/bionic-limbs.html HTTP/1.0" 200 23576 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=boing&form=QBHP" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
# whois 65.55.110
OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US
NetRange: 65.52.0.0 – 65.55.255.255

I talked with the author of DBB this week and he took the list down once the folks at SmartFilter figured it out, but evidently some people made copies of the list of sites. Bad network engineer, no biscuit.

Time to pull the plug on this, in a more comprehensive way than URL rewrites or redirects.

That ought to do it . . .

< ?php
header("Location: http://boingboing.net/\n\n");
exit;
?>

annals of things I don’t understand

boy (age 8 or 9) inspects a watermelon his mother has put in their cart and remarks that there is dirt on it and wants to know why…. young woman putting packages of instant oatmeal in her cart, and then carefully adding their price to her total with a calculator.

  1. boy (age 8 or 9) inspects a watermelon his mother has put in their cart and remarks that there is dirt on it and wants to know why. she doesn’t explain where watermelons come from.
  2. young woman putting packages of instant oatmeal in her cart, and then carefully adding their price to her total with a calculator. perhaps she is a researcher, but if she is just a frugal shopper, why is she buying that stuff?