Category: 2004 US Election

what’s in a name?

mercenary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. :

*ADJECTIVE:*

# Motivated solely by a desire for monetary or material gain.
# Hired for service in a foreign army.

There have been a lot of comments about the murders of the US civilians in Iraq, with a disapproving spin, calling the security workers “mercenaries.” I wasn’t sure I remembered the precise definition, but I seemed to recall it described soldiers in the pay of a state or nation other than their own.

Given that there are two definitions, we know the second doesn’t apply. Who wants to make the case these folks just went for the money, that they had no other motives or interests?

I say we call them contractors or hired hands rather than debase their intentions, whatever they may have been.

for those of us who prefer pictures

Portgraph: graphing FreeBSD ports dependencies:

Portgraph is a Python program that produces dot (graphviz) output. The output shows a minimal dependency tree of the selected port, based on information from /usr/ports/INDEX. I suspect this is most useful for decorative purposes, though people trying to figure out load-balancing on build clusters might find it useful as well.

I’m currently wrestling with a b*rked ports installation and found this in some search results. At the very bottom of the two graphic maps are the ports I keep stumbling over: libtool, expat, and gettext.

you go first

Boing Boing: Gates’s vision — and failure thereof:

In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won’t be free — though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it’s because universal free software would be bad for his business, so he can’t bring himself to contemplate the possibility).

I saw something about this earlier today and the irony was overwhelming. This is the kind of business partner I want: “hey, I have an idea, let’s give your stuff away while I keep selling mine. Never mind that yours is actually physical stuff that costs money to make while mine is an increasingly marginalized commodity that has production costs approaching zero.”

Another innovative insight . . . .

It does seem likely that hardware, as we currently conceive of it, will drop in price, but to get to zero or damn near suggests there won’t be any new developments: here’s a few that I think we’ll see. Mr Gates’ vision of tablet devices raises a few ideas that would be required, without even thinking that hard: and he expects them to be free?

* increased portability resulting from
** better power management
** more efficient software design
** fewer moving parts/solid state storage
* ubiquitous networking
** broadband everywhere
** wireless everywhere
** robust IP addressing (IPv6?)
** compelling, useful services, that capture some revenue

When you consider how well the various free operating systems support existing consumer electronics, not just traditional computers — check out NetBSD to see what they’ve already done, to say nothing of the various hardware platforms supported by Linux — it seems likely that new hardware will be supported by free OSes almost as quickly as by proprietary ones. Right now, proprietary OSes drive hardware but that may not be the case forever.

a simple fix for comment spam, if only it worked

Well, I thought of something that *should* work but for reasons I can’t quite make out, won’t.

Since we’re dealing with automated processes here, one easy fix is to rename the comments script so the bots can’t just insert that into the URL and spam you. Works great, except if people want to preview their comments. For some reason, the preview button is hard-coded to call “mt-comments.cgi” no matter what you have in mt.cfg or even in ConfigMgr.pm.

So I have had to re-enable the mt-comments.cgi script and _voila_, I have comment spam again.

lunch as part of the education process

Idle Words:

Food is one of life’s many pleasures, there is an elaborate (of course) intellectual superstructure to its proper preparation and enjoyment, and French children are introduced to the intricacies of good eating from an early age. And as they grow to adulthood, they find themselves in a country where one is expected to eat well, and where there are many opportunities to do so.

Sadly, Maciej doesn’t grok permalinks, so to read the whole post from which the above is excerpted, set your browser on Find and look for “03.16.03”

Anyway, at the height of the “freedom fries” nonsense, everyone’s favorite multilingual Francophile perl hacker took a look at how food is presented and prepared to school-age kids.

The two menus he presents couldn’t be more different: it’s the difference between haute cuisine and fast food, between linen napkins and paper.

I think kids would eat better, if they saw the right behavior modelled for them. But when food is seen as a necessity, with speed and volume more important than texture, flavor, or anything approaching subtlely, what can we expect?

And reading the stuff about how the lunchrooms of this country are supplied with off-quality, over-produced food products gives me the horrors. I see the food at my elementary school: fried, overseasoned, and prepared at some commissary for reheating: it’s more about shelf-life and how well it can travel than how good it will be for the kid eating it.

the first rule of holes

The first rule of holes is that, when you find yourself in one, you stop digging.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall March 26, 2004 09:53 PM (Printable Format):

“I never cease to be amazed at these guys’ ability to outpace my ability to impute bad faith to them.”

Allegations of perjury, denials of meetings that the president is later forced to admit happened, the national security advisor refusing to testify under oath, but agreeable to unsworn testimony, accusations of blood money by profiting from book sales . . . . the wheels seem to be coming off the wagon here.

Clarke could easily derail the profiteering charge by donating his profits to the 9/11 survivors fund: he is the only present or former government official to offer an apology, for which he is accused of “arrogance.”

Very little of this seems believable, at least not in the context of a democracy. A banana republic or strongman regime, perhaps, but not the world’s only remaining superpower.

Nixon had his 18 1/2 minutes: Bush has his 25

I was following a note I saw about that paragon of probity, Rush Limbaugh, claiming some relatives of WTC attack victims were using their grief for political ends. And this quote struck me a poignant enough to look into . . .

Rush Limbaugh Attacks Widows and Children – Maureen Farrell at BuzzFlash.com:

“I saw a picture of the president, I think it was Newsweek or Time, and I read the caption. And the caption said, you know, ‘Andy Card telling the president about the second plane’ And then I read that he proceeded to read for 25 minutes to the 2nd-graders, Breitweiser said. “And I read it again, and I thought it was. . . misreported. And it wasn’t, and I got upset.. . . And I-I am concerned. I want to know why the Secret Service did not whisk him away. I want to know why he is the commander-in-chief of the United States of America, our country was clearly under attack, it was after the second building was hit. I want to know why he sat there [at Emma E. Booker Elementary School] for 25 minutes. . .”

A Google search for Emma E. Booker Elementary School turns up a lot of stuff: the tin foil hat crowd are all over this.
Continue reading “Nixon had his 18 1/2 minutes: Bush has his 25”