Category: music

Atrios on the news that car traffic is down while transit ridership is up.

End of a Trend?:

There’s very little that can be realistically done to improve the urban highway infrastructure in [your city here], and plenty that could be done to improve mass transit both within the city and between the city and the burbs.

Technorati Tags: city life, transportation

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are: Boycott the RIAA in March – Gizmodo:

So come on, make next month one to remember. Let’s stand together and let the RIAA know that yes, we are paying attention and no, we aren’t going to put up with their unethical practices any longer.

and how to tell if an artist is linked to the RIAA cartel?

RIAA Radar: Home:

What is RIAA Radar?

The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Cenk Uygur: 2001 Days Since 9/11 — And Still No Osama:

It’s been 2001 days since September 11, 2001. I don’t see Osama. Do you see Osama? After all this time, why have we still not caught the man who ordered the attacks against our country and killed nearly 3,000 Americans?

We found Saddam Hussein in a hole in the ground in Iraq. Why? We were trying!

2001 days and still no Osama. Why? You tell me.

To the Bush administration, I would like to ask a question originally posed by Darryl Worley: Have You Forgotten?

The Young Turks

• over the ‘ill, beyond ‘idden valley, it’s-a comin’ from over there
  Spencer Ackerman is going to Baghdad for a month. Watch his space for updates.
  (tags: iraq journalism)
• A faster way to speed up Mail.app
  easy and it seems to work.
  (tags: howto software Apple mail.app)

John Robb noted earlier that attacks were growing more sophisticated. What to make of this?

A Growing Military Credibility Gap? | TPMCafe:

At the very moment we are surging troops into Baghdad, who will be scattered in small outposts throughout the city and will have to rely on Iraqi soldiers to protect them, we learn belatedly that someone in Iraq is dressing up in US military uniforms, carrying US weapons, and speaking English like a gringo. You know what this means? U.S. soldiers who were already skeptical about the trustworthiness of their Iraqi counterparts will now also have to question whether the U.S. soldier coming towards them is really a U.S. soldier.

The planning evident in this operation is sophisticated and points clearly to the uncomfortable fact that someone within the Iraqi military, who was knowledgeable about the meeting, tipped off the bad guys. It could have been Iranians retaliating for the earlier U.S. attacks on Iranian diplomats inside Iraq or maybe it was someone with a militia group with a grudge to settle. Regardless, it is bad news all around.

Equally disturbing is the fact that someone in the U.S. military chain of command lied about what happened and put out false information to the press and the American people.

Until people start telling the truth, nothing will change. How many young men and women will die before that happens?

After a lot of reading and searching, I found it is possible to fix a crippled RAZR V3c (thanks, Verizon) so OBEX can be used. There is a lot of conflicting information out there and I’m not sure I can retrace my steps: even if I could, the files you need are not supported or provided by Verizon or Motorola (meaning they are provided by the modern equivalent of Blackbeard and Long John Silver — yarr!). And they may not be in the same places, for obvious reasons.

But as a crib sheet, you can search for a V3c flash file that enables OBEX, should be numbered 04 (02 is the version that worked initially, 03 is the crippled version, and 04 restores OBEX with other fixes). You also need software to flash the phone: a tool called RSD Lite, in versions 3 or better, seems to work. And a cable to hook up the phone, though this may be the last time you need it (yay!). You will have better luck looking at torrent sites to find these items. And sadly, the software is Windows only. It may work in Parallels/VPC, but since it requires a good grip on the hardware/USB, I don’t know and can’t speculate. Let me know if you get it work and I’ll add it to this entry.

I found that I had to run the flash process twice, as it failed the first time. The phone seemed hung, but when I power-cycled it and did the flash again, it worked. And I just used it to browse and retrieve files. So it may just require it to be started right before you do this (perhaps memory is an issue).

Now, by submitting this, I don’t want to be seen as encouraging piracy or theft of anyone’s intellectual property. But since the software feature you want came with the phone but was disabled to support the telco’s business model, rather than to empower you, do what you feel is right. The only company who has a beef here would be Motorola since the flash tool is an item they sell (but not to us mortals). But since we’re all fans of their hardware — seeking it out, despite their partners’ best efforts to weaken it — they shouldn’t be too upset.

Good luck.

Technorati Tags: bluetooth, freedom to tinker, verizon

As seen on BTCNews, you can compare different municipalities for things like crime rates/types. In response to a column in the NYTimes by tenured bloviator Glenn Reynolds on the benefits of mandatory gun ownership, we learn — to our great surprise — that Reynolds trotted out a widely-held but bogus ‘truth’ and found a way to sell it. The Houston Chronicle has more.

I guess they don’t require law professors to understand statistics, but I should leave the beatdowns to others who are better at it.

I think this is an interesting tool for these kinds of ‘debates’ (debate defined as some monkey flinging his work product at the keepers): the cited comparison — between Kennesaw, GA, and Schererville, IN — makes Kennesaw look pretty damn violent.

What’s with the huge disparity in assaults? And burglaries — Reynolds’ main point — certainly don’t prove anything about gun ownership being a factor.