Category: I am not a lawyer

Matt Mullenweg explains the thinking behind the obscured ads: he sounds a little naïve but that’s not a sin.

Photo Matt >> A Response to the Noise

See for yourself. I just donated $25. I wonder how many people would need to do likewise before there was no need to worry about ads?

Today I celebrate 8 years of fatherhood.

In an earlier entry, I mentioned some simple steps to prevent slow loading ads from blocking page loads. I neglected the one step that makes the others effective. You need to make sure you look up any hosts in the local file you just updated.

So to finish this task, vi /etc/lookupd/hosts and make the file’s contents look like this:

LookupOrder Cache FF NI DNS DS


Feel free to make a backup. What this tells the networking infrastructure is to look in the cache (names we have already looked up), the NetInfo database, the local flat files (like /etc/hosts), our local DNS server(s), and any Directory Servers we have configured. Since you have now equated some adservers with the loopback interface, they’ll never be looked up again.
Continue reading “working around [slow] adservers, updated”

TIME.com: TIME Exclusive: Notes from Saddam in Custody

The official said it may soon be clear how much command and control over the insurgency Saddam actually had while he was in hiding. “We can now determine,” he said, “if he is the mastermind of everything or not.” The official elaborated: “Have we actually cut the head of the snake or is he just an idiot hiding in a hole?”

It seems doubtful a ragged refugee, physically bricked into his hiding place, was in charge of the recurring attacks on US troops, so the capture might not have any effect on things. The folks doing the damage might have already given up on his return, and just be doing their best to destabilize things.

I hope it takes the motivation out of these attacks, all the same.

Gays Respond:

The recent decision by the NY Massachusetts Supreme Court that ruled against any bans on marriage between adults, regardless of gender, may finally make it possible for anyone who wants to get married to do so. Judging by the coverage, I wonder who cares?

The response is hardly monolithic. In interviews with about 20 couples and people who study gay culture, those most interested in marriage had children or pressing concerns about health or mortality. Younger couples, from an era when gays were less closeted, were inclined to consider marriage an entitlement that would erase their perceived second-class status. And couples who came of age in the 1960’s and 1970’s were more likely to see marriage as a heterosexual institution, symbolizing a system that they could not, or would not, want to be part of.

I see this as relating to how one defines marriage. If you strip away all the baggage and look at it as a promise, a commitment, to that other person and extending out to their family (the vows in our wedding were sealed with ‘I will’ not ‘I do’ as a sign that it wasn’t about today, but for all days), perhaps it’s easier to digest. But when I read comments about how people are rejecting marriage as a patriarchal institution or otherwise finding reasons to reject it, I have to wonder at the strength of their commitment. At its core, that’s what marriage is: commitment.

Some couples in the article are described as “not being ready” for it but there’s a tone of superiority, that only they who have been excluded understand the commitment: “it’s not just a slip of paper.” I suppose this refers to the generally brittle state of marriage as an institution in this culture, but at the same time, generalizations are a poor excuse. As for readiness, who can say if they’re really ready? The commitment is not to being ready, but to being willing to make the effort.

The other argument is also used by straight couples who pair off without a ceremony, protesting all the while that they are committed but don’t need the “approval” of the state. The state isn’t approving anything, but acknowledging what some people claim as fact but won’t commit to (that word again). I don’t buy the idea that one can just back into marriage as it were a land claim or squatters rights. Going through the motions for some period of time isn’t the same as openly committing yourself to someone else and a relationship. To hold the relationship — and your commitment to the alleged partner — at arm’s length is bad faith.

And it seems to me that a display of commitment would go long way to defeating the generalizations about promiscuity and anonymous sex as a big part of what the gay community is about. I know there are committed gay relationships: I’ll have an example to dinner tomorrow as my nephew and his partner join us. But articles like the one quoted don’t help.

MP3 Insider: CD price drops coincide with MP3 hardware breakthroughs – CNET reviews

Finally and grudgingly, the labels likely agree with the Forrester analysts who say that CDs are a doomed medium. This might be their last chance to sell shiny discs before consumers move on to pure digital formats. In the future, MP3 players might even be sold much like cell phones are today–as loss leaders for service plans. Perhaps you’ll even get a free iPod in exchange for signing a contract to purchase a certain amount of music from the iTunes Music Store over the next couple of years.

from Jenny the Shifted Librarian

iTunes Music Store Sells Ten Millionth Song

Apple [Sept 8, 2003] announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over ten million songs from the iTunes Music Store since its launch just over four months ago, averaging over 500,000 songs per week.

I’m not sure which is the bigger reality check: that the forever on-its-last-legs Mac just reinvented the RIAA cartel’s business model, making them a few million dollars in the process, or that a paltry 3% of the market can be generate that much revenue in so short a time. Annualized, that’s 26,000,000 purchases. Imagine what happens when the Windows version is released?