Category: observations

Mark Pilgrim’s list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users:

Cory Doctorow: Mac guru and software developer Mark Pilgrim recently switched to Ubuntu Linux after becoming fed up with proprietary Mac file-formats and the increasing use of DRM technologies in the MacOS.

What I read was more like “I lost a bunch of my own metadata that I didn’t back up.”

Seriously, what better way to gin up a bunch of traffic than to encourage some new fanboy wars?

And Cory’s predictable rants about DRM are tiresome: does he really think Apple likes the DRM arms race? I guess someone has to defend the “death before DRM” position but I find it a little disingenuous to leave the media companies out of these rants: they are the ones behind it.

At the same time, I don’t consider Apple a victim, more a conflicted middleman. They would likely sell more iPods and MacBooks without DRM, as the presence of those technologies forces some buyers elsewhere. Has anyone ever bought a DRM-disabled product because of the DRM component?

I didn’t think so.

Orrin Hatch’s Flag Burning Remix:

The fact that the [flag-burning] proposal was defeated by only one vote (no thanks to California’s often bewildering Democrat Diane Feinstein) is disturbing, however, and it got me thinking of comedian Bill Hicks’ infamous rant about flag burning from years back. Hicks’ words resonate strongly in the current political climate, and for today’s review, I’ve remixed the classic monologue with some strident guitar jams courtesy of the one and only Government Issue, the results of which I humbly offer to you now. [Download MP3]

George Carlin? Mort Saul Sahl? Lenny Bruce? Jon Stewart?

This is a pretty comprehensive HOWTO.

Worth doing — as it saves US$99/year — but pretty far down the list.

Daily Kos: Our Founding Moonbat:

It has been said that his journalism is “unfair” and “vicious” and “takes a back seat to everyone, including Jayson Blair, in terms of ethics”, that it “might well have been the best fiction written in the English language”, that “every dip of his pen stung like a horned snake”, and that he was “loose cannon” whose “ninety-proof prose” incited the “rabble”. His lifelong political enemy called him “the great incendiary” and a “master of the puppets”, deplored his “obstinacy and inflexible disposition”, and also accused him of “defalcation” (a quaint expression for embezzlement). It’s been said that “like most men contending solely for a principle he was distinctly a ‘trouble-maker.'” And finally, the authorities declared that his “offenses are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration but that of condign punishment.”

Some fire-breathing excerpts interwoven within the piece. Bracing stuff . . . and all too apropos.

Anyone have any idea why I have 4200+ requests for this page? No referring URL.

Weird.

Looks like the 6 month moratorium on pets will end early. We’ll be foster parents to a cat starting July 14. The cat and her family live in Kyrgyzstan but will shortly be moving to England. England still has some quarantine regulations in place: since Cadbury will not be coming directly from an approved country (like the US), she has to spend 6 months in quarantine at great expense. For a 2 year old, that’s a big chunk of time. Rather than have her go through that, she’ll come here.

I have never met a person from Kyrgyzstan, let along a domestic companion, so this will be a first. I expect there won’t be any language barrier as long as I can keep in a good stock of salmon and tuna.

I don’t envy her the travel though: that’s a long way.

The new monument to an ancient puissance and splendor: an obelisk with a universally understandable message reading “Look on my works mistakes, ye mighty or humble, and learn from them*. We were warned. We did nothing. Worse, we attacked those who warned us. Worst of all, we condemned millions to death and drowned five millennia of civilization. Learn.”

Sunday Morning Terror:

Someday, I hope we build a monument (on high ground) and chisel the names of every prominent climate-change “skeptic” on it, to shame them for all eternity. But for that plan to work, they would need to have shame in the first place.

In 10,000 years, someone may compare Stonehenge, Chichen Itza, and this new monument and marvel at how cyclical human civilizations are. Perhaps they will recognize the self-deluding, self-destructive tendencies before it’s too late. The original post details some evidence that the effects of climate change are no longer linear, that positive feedback is accelerating the process: the melting of glaciers warms the water at the polar regions which in turn is melting ice sheets that have been frozen for millennia.

Briefly,

Something causes warmer conditions.
As a result, some snow and ice melts.
This lowers the surface albedo.
Lower albedo causes more solar radiation to be absorbed at the surface.
More absorption of solar radiation causes warmer conditions.
Go back to Step 2.

If this is right, then the process rolls along until some external force changes it’s course, as implacable as a river or a landslide.

My, what a cheerful thought for a beautiful Sunday morning.

* Apologies to Shelley.

Discovery Park today. The West Point lighthouse was open for tours, but it proved uninteresting for 7 and 9 year olds. They would rather run through the endless shallows. Good minus tide today, so the beach was huge. 

Took 50+ pictures (mostly digital with some Holga stuff I’ll have to wait to see). This is the only keeper I could find that didn’t include muddy urchins splashing in the surf. 

I’m not getting on with the digital camera very well right now. It seems not to do what I want except on snapshots. I don’t need a super-featureful camera for that. 

Autonomous Rebel? I can live with that.

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Matt goofs on the dates but the idea is right: a less-sophisticated, less populous state was drawn into a war by two belligerents who had not been ready for war but had been actively prosecuting separate ones, yet still managed to contribute mightily to the defeat of both and, more importantly, to decisively win the peace.

Against The Odds | TPMCafe:

Twelve months from now the war will have lasted about as long as American participation in the second world war [A commentor clarifies: Between Pearl Harbor (12/7/1941) and VJ Day (8/15/1945) there were three years, eight months, and a week. The US invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. We’re up to three years, three months, and three days at this point. So, in fact, it’ll be just over five months until we reach the “Can you believe that FDR beat back the Japanese and German Empires in this amount of time and you cannot even win a war in Iraq???” threshold.]. Twelve months after that there will still be six months left in the Bush administration’s lifespan. In January 2009 when a new administration takes office, the war will have been going on for five and a half years, virtually the entire span of time between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the Nazis’ surrender. With the difference being that Andrew [Sullivan] doesn’t believe we’ll actually make any serious amount of progress between now and then.

This gets us toward what is, I think, a fairly fundamental point of political morality — it’s wrong, seriously wrong and seriously irresponsible, to support military action that has no likely prospects of success. It’s one thing to ask young men and women to kill and die for a good cause. It’s another thing entirely to ask them to kill and die as a token of your support for a good cause.

Clearly, my first-choice scenario for the world would be one in which the nominal goals of American Iraq policy — killing terrorists, preventing a civil war, building a stable liberal democracy — are achieved. But I can’t support the war — can’t say it was a good idea to launch it, and can’t say I think it’s a good idea to continue it — precisely because I don’t think the war is accomplishing its goals, don’t think it stands a good chance of accomplishing them, and don’t think it ever did stand a good chance of accomplishing them.

The goals may have been “killing terrorists, preventing a civil war, building a stable liberal democracy” but it seems obvious to anyone that the opposite result has occurred on each one.