Most of the planet is up in arms about this invasion of Iraq and the declared intent by Washington to make no part of Baghdad safe (at the inevitable expense of untold numbers of citizens). And this trained killer says lives are "on the line"?
Correction: lives are about to be wasted, made trash, disposed of, terminated. Let's at least be honest about that much.
If you want to see the continued creation of music, you've got to consider how you can fund artists
And:
the long term social cost of killing the creation of future music
Earth to planet Aziraphale: music has flourished for centuries without commercial support. It always will. All that is endangered currently is the profit model of a publishing cabal whose narrow interests routinely serve up programmatic tastes -- crap, it's called.
Less of it or even its unlikely extinction would certainly displease fans of crap, as well as its bankrollers. But that is a problem for those parties (negotiable very simply through alteration of the outmoded profit model). It's neither a social problem nor a musical one.
Now if only they could come up with software to find underlying patterns in our TV, movies, food and politicians, we could get over the plague of originality that is threatening to divide us!
Hope they survive -- in spite of themselves
on
Salon Asks for Help
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· Score: 1
Salon will tell you that the fact it draws ire from right and left means it's doing its job. Maybe so, once upon a time. But in our polarized age when pundits rasp away all day in column, broadcast and blog, drawing ire isn't that hard.
Personally, speaking as someone who fits the Salon demographic, I'm unexcited by the site except for its cartoons. I find its reporting on par with what is given away for free in weekly alternative papers, and its commentary rather unilluminating (not to mention plainly weird: is the idea of paying for Andrew Sullivan supposed to be a joke?). Whoever's getting upset about it has a remarkably short fuse.
Instantly, a half dozen more interesting publications and portal sites on the web spring to mind, first stops for anyone seeking not so much to be "informed" by gobs of news wire data as to try and understand our world:
www.guardian.co.uk -- One of the world's best dailies
www.independent.co.uk -- Superb middle east reporting
www.commondreams.org -- Clearinghouse of progressive opinion updated daily
www.antiwar.com -- Superb international clearinghouse of news and opinion from left, right and center, ideal for keeping tabs on our warmongers
And that's not even taking into account the sites existing for such indispensable print publications as Harper's, The Nation, The Progressive, and The Baffler. There's the NY Times, too, should you crave guidance and instruction from oligarchs.
It's a pity to see Salon in trouble, but they really have blown through a remarkable amount of money -- a caviar-class feat that makes them look rather silly alongside more courageous papers and writers who would have loved to have had such dough, and didn't, yet somehow still survived and continue to be more vital.
G4noise.com demonstrates where you can get if you put a company's feet to the fire publicly and humorously. Thumbs up for them. Thumbs down for Apple for shipping those noise boxes in the first place and then stonewalling owners.
I propose the following language be applied on the forehead or, if more prominent, the buttocks of every politician:
WARNING: Any rhetoric or action originating from this creature is to be taken with a grain of salt. (If a grain of salt is unavailable, insert fingers in each ear and pray for it to be struck by laryngitis or an invitation from a lobbyist to dinner.) Pious, hypocritical, rapacious and unforgivably dull, the bearer of this label is a servant of interests little caring for the habits of democracy and even less for those of freedom. Watch your wallet around it. Do not feed or pet it. When it tells you the weather is clear, carry an umbrella; and when it tells you to cower, stand tall. Above all, be certain to routinely vote it out of office lest it take root there, grow to scraggly untamable heights, attract blackbirds, and block your view of the sun.
Hopefully you will look past any ill will you harbor toward Microsoft or Bill himself and
What an insidious wish.
Quite apart from his habitual crimes, Gates this time is merely following a script honed and perfected in Washington: if you tell the people that their troubles are riches, you will always bear good news.
This cancer on the Constitution is the real problem. And the harm has yet to spread. Wait until the prosecutions start, or private data is leaked to discredit opponents, or blacklisting begins; all this happened half a century ago and can happen again.
Which politician is man or woman enough to lead the fight to undo these un-American powers? We know that in the Senate only Feingold resisted, although colleagues have become braver since. And yet the nation remains enthralled to right wing fantasies, driven hysterical by an irresponsible administration and its cynical Democratic allies who use fear to control the public as ranchers use cattle prods.
The hour demands a Lincoln; all we have is a Bush! Is there no one in office with love great enough for our freedom to save it?
At heart Mac people know that the OS X gui is sensible yet rigid -- its very ease of use depends on the look-alikeness of apps, the reliability of sameness. Opinions about these matters get rather prickly; you can't even discuss tabs on a certain browser without the GUI Police showing up.;-)
Konfab says, "Screw conformity, go nuts." It's a means to expand the Mac desktop decoratively first and foremost, the information being a second consideration (you might even say an excuse). Hence the pile of mostly useless pretty widgets, with virtually none doing something an app or OS X already doesn't -- and hence also the backlash from utilitarian types who see no point.
I like the album cover widget. But since I usually have several apps open and my desktop covered, I don't exactly get to see it very often... I think that points up a certain, er, problem with widgets; if you have time to sit around and appreciate them, we should all have a job like yours.
Everyone is a critic. It's too easy to say, "God that name sucks," and yet not have any suggestions. That's really not very helpful. Really. Not helpful.
But then he moans:
Oh, please, for the love of god, do not suggest any names either in comments on via email.
What is to comment on? The trailer looked like the last big fx-laden comic book movie. Which looked like the one before it.
If Hollywood is nearly incapable today of producing films of distinction, one reason is they are all dipped in the shit of similarity. Gold gets untransmuted. The same noisy blow-em-up surface is smeared all over every product, until the source material is so diminished that this might as well have been plugging an adaptation of The Justice League of America. Only the tights are changed to protect the innocent.
But oh, yes. Connery's shhhhhtil guttttt ittt. May we all be so goddamn manly in our 90s, too. One glance and you can see that in Soviet Russia, Viagra takes him.
"Say Hello To Your New Cellmate: Windows 'Bubba' XP"
"Britney Spears Explains How Microsoft and DRM Help Put Her 'In The Mood' For Responsible Fun!"
"More Than 60,000 Viruses Can't Be Wrong!"
Re:Saving RAM: An argument for tabbed browsing
on
Safari Beta Updated
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· Score: 1
Interesting. I'll often see CPU percentages running between 30 to 50% (on a 700mhz iBook). Which build of Chimera are you using, and do you have its cache enabled?
I think it's fine. But it's not going to replace your desktop.
Maybe not yours. But buying a Mac laptop for travel last summer had an unintended consequence for me: I later ditched my PC desktop. In fact, after years of building them, I've decided the desktop is pretty much irrelevant to me.
Hooked to a monitor when I'm at home, my 14" iBook has replaced my desktop in every meaningful way. I'm cranking out site content, books and articles on it, and running my beloved glQuake. My home office is serenely quiet. I disconnect and head out the door in seconds. So long, desktops!
OK, that's an exaggeration. I've had a little -- about two or three pieces per year -- in my main e-mail box. The reason is obvious. Spam is why God created Hotmail.
I only bring it up because it's the sensible temporary personal solution while public policy continues to fail us. We can't count on Washington, and few can count on state legislatures. An e-mail address, like a pair of aces, is something to hold close to your chest. Use Microsoft's spam trough for public communication.
The optimal solution to spam is simple: thunderously vicious overkill, an art in which the US (thanks to the Drug War) is now well-practiced. But we can't get legislation from our servile lawmakers, who well understand that to even think of hushing the roar of unbridled greed is to sacrifice their usefulness to the Machine, and hence their careers.
The registries are promising, but feature one tremendous drawback and other subtle ones. The main problem is that you don't want to leave these matters open to the vagaries of shifting political control. Here in Minnesota, our state opt-out telemarketing registry will take effect in a matter of weeks -- if the new radical right wing government here deigns to operate it correctly. In an age of fiscal and moral deficits, I'm not holding my breath.
More subtle are the problems of collection and control of information. First, registries place the onus of education and participation upon citizens when properly the onus of desisting should fall upon spammers. Second, registries collect the very data after which spammers lust, and hand it to them. Toothless penalties will only encourage massive abuse, making spamming easier.
What metric are you using for that claim? The GUI? I'd say XP is scarcely less disheveled and idiosyncratic than its predecessors, while the simplicity and elegance of OS X is the critical toast of nearly every major media outlet in the country.
Still, I grant you that's fairly subjective. What about security? Windoze is plagued by viruses and trojans, and the OS must be patched more often than a three-pack a day smoker trying to quit. And how about integration? The many third-party apps that make up the average Windoze installation aren't even remotely integrated in the way that OS X's iApps are. (In fact, last time I had to deal with a PC, it was over some silly issue of one major CD burning program installing an ASPI layer that made competitors' stuff stop working. Disintegration, you might call that.)
Just like the police: If an officer pulls you over and your entire trunk is full of cocaine with a street value of $1,000,000,000.00 (one billion dollars and 00/100), and the officer says, "May I search your trunk," and you say, "No, thank you," then unless the aforementioned officer can produce a search warrant or prove probable cause, he CANNOT look in the friggen trunk.
I challenge you to test this theory. Not with $1 billion in coke (unless you're an ex-Enron executive). No, let us test with the following mundane example -- nothing original, merely run of the mill 21st century U.S. domestic law enforcement.
We shall need a nice BMW with a minority driver, innocent of any crime or criminal intent, who happens to draw attention by cruising through, say, a predominantly white upper middle class neighborhood or, alternatively, a predominantly non-white underclass neighborhood. As TV teaches us, he must be up to something.
Said driver has a malfunctioning tail light (grounds for the stop). Said driver is heard to say "Shit" in angry exasperation as the white cop, just like the last white cop before him, approaches the car (grounds for the "reasonable suspicion" of personal or public danger). Thus the cop, now fearful, orders driver out of car and tells him to submit to a frisk. Driver protests, "Hey! Why are you picking on me?" This triggers heightened suspicion in cop who, later, will state in court that the defendant resisted -- grounds for use of physical force in effecting the frisk and arrest, and subsequently for a search incident to arrest that allows the cop to dig widely through concealed areas and containers in the car. Thus far, we have an arrest, a lot of searching, and probable cause hasn't even entered into it. We're getting by quite nicely on the very flexible "reasonable suspicion" standard without any of the bothersome probable cause tests or a search warrant.
Now the the car's impounded, and what happens? The trunk is opened. It's the precinct's policy to inventory everything. And that search -- again, warrantless and without probable cause -- is constitutionally permissible because the cops aren't specifically looking for criminal evidence; oh, no, they're merely impounding and inventorying the vehicle. Bad luck for our driver if he actually had anything illegal in there...
Within recent memory the U.S. enjoyed a brief period of rich protection under the Fourth Amendment, chiefly due to the wisdom of the Warren Court, between the 1960s and early 1980s. Since that time the Rehnquist Court and other conservative benches have seen to it that the police are able to conduct warrantless searches with wider and wider authority, holding variously that the public interest is served by abrogating personal privacy and increasing investigatory protections and abilities. That has been the theory, anyway; the Drug War has been its practice. Today, your actual freedom against unreasonable search and seizure is a function of many factors, not limited to the exception-riddled case law, your skin color, the attitude of the cop who stops you, your ability to afford effective counsel, and the temper of the court.
Same here. I couldn't care less about what GUI purists think. Tabs are part of how I work now. And they'll continue to be until someone comes up with a better idea. Nothing else thus far allows me to have several pages of research from various sources open in one browser, everything available at a glance.
Not to be too hard on Apple, but the iMac is a painfully underpowered product for the price. Admittedly, OS X's pretty and the digital lifestyle software is easy to use. If that's worth the $700-800 more that an Apple will cost you for a non-upgradeable machine, go for it. In some cases, it will be. I can see my retired parents enjoying this because it's much less complicated than a Windoze box, and the pivoting screen is probably a blessing to the tired-boned elderly.
However, maybe it's better to wait for later this year or early next when Apple's hardware is slated to enter the 21st century.
Well, it is too early to say what went wrong. It's also too early to know if the defunding of NASA -- which has generated warning after warning for years -- is to blame. But it is not to early to observe what is going on in this:
"The same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today," Bush said, his eyes glistening. "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth but we can pray they are safely home."
The president whose people generate a plan to lob 400 cruise missiles per day into civilian Iraq is not someone from whom I will buy such opportunistic sentimentality. You can't deal cheaply with human life and expect people to believe you when a speechwriter sticks a few lines worthy of Rod McKuen in your hand.
That's one of the few computer mods I've ever seen that didn't look like a pathetic attempt to merge the aesthetical sense of vacuum cleaner design with 1970s Chevy Van rehabs.
Since the/. crowd seems to appreciate the exciting combination of amateur chemistry and fearlessness (what is it about intelligence and the desire to blow things up?)...
Wrong metric. If you put chimps in separate cages and don't let them have sex, they want to blow things up, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the planet is up in arms about this invasion of Iraq and the declared intent by Washington to make no part of Baghdad safe (at the inevitable expense of untold numbers of citizens). And this trained killer says lives are "on the line"?
Correction: lives are about to be wasted, made trash, disposed of, terminated. Let's at least be honest about that much.
Less of it or even its unlikely extinction would certainly displease fans of crap, as well as its bankrollers. But that is a problem for those parties (negotiable very simply through alteration of the outmoded profit model). It's neither a social problem nor a musical one.
Now if only they could come up with software to find underlying patterns in our TV, movies, food and politicians, we could get over the plague of originality that is threatening to divide us!
Personally, speaking as someone who fits the Salon demographic, I'm unexcited by the site except for its cartoons. I find its reporting on par with what is given away for free in weekly alternative papers, and its commentary rather unilluminating (not to mention plainly weird: is the idea of paying for Andrew Sullivan supposed to be a joke?). Whoever's getting upset about it has a remarkably short fuse.
Instantly, a half dozen more interesting publications and portal sites on the web spring to mind, first stops for anyone seeking not so much to be "informed" by gobs of news wire data as to try and understand our world:
www.guardian.co.uk -- One of the world's best dailies
www.independent.co.uk -- Superb middle east reporting
news.bbc.co.uk -- Slightly three-piece suit, yet comprehensive internationally
www.zmag.org -- Wide range of progressive writing
www.commondreams.org -- Clearinghouse of progressive opinion updated daily
www.antiwar.com -- Superb international clearinghouse of news and opinion from left, right and center, ideal for keeping tabs on our warmongers
And that's not even taking into account the sites existing for such indispensable print publications as Harper's, The Nation, The Progressive, and The Baffler. There's the NY Times, too, should you crave guidance and instruction from oligarchs.
It's a pity to see Salon in trouble, but they really have blown through a remarkable amount of money -- a caviar-class feat that makes them look rather silly alongside more courageous papers and writers who would have loved to have had such dough, and didn't, yet somehow still survived and continue to be more vital.
G4noise.com demonstrates where you can get if you put a company's feet to the fire publicly and humorously. Thumbs up for them. Thumbs down for Apple for shipping those noise boxes in the first place and then stonewalling owners.
WARNING: Any rhetoric or action originating from this creature is to be taken with a grain of salt. (If a grain of salt is unavailable, insert fingers in each ear and pray for it to be struck by laryngitis or an invitation from a lobbyist to dinner.) Pious, hypocritical, rapacious and unforgivably dull, the bearer of this label is a servant of interests little caring for the habits of democracy and even less for those of freedom. Watch your wallet around it. Do not feed or pet it. When it tells you the weather is clear, carry an umbrella; and when it tells you to cower, stand tall. Above all, be certain to routinely vote it out of office lest it take root there, grow to scraggly untamable heights, attract blackbirds, and block your view of the sun.
Quite apart from his habitual crimes, Gates this time is merely following a script honed and perfected in Washington: if you tell the people that their troubles are riches, you will always bear good news.
The president needs to stay focused at this important hour.
Which politician is man or woman enough to lead the fight to undo these un-American powers? We know that in the Senate only Feingold resisted, although colleagues have become braver since. And yet the nation remains enthralled to right wing fantasies, driven hysterical by an irresponsible administration and its cynical Democratic allies who use fear to control the public as ranchers use cattle prods.
The hour demands a Lincoln; all we have is a Bush! Is there no one in office with love great enough for our freedom to save it?
At heart Mac people know that the OS X gui is sensible yet rigid -- its very ease of use depends on the look-alikeness of apps, the reliability of sameness. Opinions about these matters get rather prickly; you can't even discuss tabs on a certain browser without the GUI Police showing up. ;-)
Konfab says, "Screw conformity, go nuts." It's a means to expand the Mac desktop decoratively first and foremost, the information being a second consideration (you might even say an excuse). Hence the pile of mostly useless pretty widgets, with virtually none doing something an app or OS X already doesn't -- and hence also the backlash from utilitarian types who see no point.
I like the album cover widget. But since I usually have several apps open and my desktop covered, I don't exactly get to see it very often... I think that points up a certain, er, problem with widgets; if you have time to sit around and appreciate them, we should all have a job like yours.
If Hollywood is nearly incapable today of producing films of distinction, one reason is they are all dipped in the shit of similarity. Gold gets untransmuted. The same noisy blow-em-up surface is smeared all over every product, until the source material is so diminished that this might as well have been plugging an adaptation of The Justice League of America. Only the tights are changed to protect the innocent.
But oh, yes. Connery's shhhhhtil guttttt ittt. May we all be so goddamn manly in our 90s, too. One glance and you can see that in Soviet Russia, Viagra takes him.
"Forget Insanely Great -- Here's Greatly Insane!"
"Say Hello To Your New Cellmate: Windows 'Bubba' XP"
"Britney Spears Explains How Microsoft and DRM Help Put Her 'In The Mood' For Responsible Fun!"
"More Than 60,000 Viruses Can't Be Wrong!"
Interesting. I'll often see CPU percentages running between 30 to 50% (on a 700mhz iBook). Which build of Chimera are you using, and do you have its cache enabled?
Fine suggestion and very nice page, too. Let us hope that Apple sees the light: tabs are, well, insanely great.
Hooked to a monitor when I'm at home, my 14" iBook has replaced my desktop in every meaningful way. I'm cranking out site content, books and articles on it, and running my beloved glQuake. My home office is serenely quiet. I disconnect and head out the door in seconds. So long, desktops!
I only bring it up because it's the sensible temporary personal solution while public policy continues to fail us. We can't count on Washington, and few can count on state legislatures. An e-mail address, like a pair of aces, is something to hold close to your chest. Use Microsoft's spam trough for public communication.
The optimal solution to spam is simple: thunderously vicious overkill, an art in which the US (thanks to the Drug War) is now well-practiced. But we can't get legislation from our servile lawmakers, who well understand that to even think of hushing the roar of unbridled greed is to sacrifice their usefulness to the Machine, and hence their careers.
The registries are promising, but feature one tremendous drawback and other subtle ones. The main problem is that you don't want to leave these matters open to the vagaries of shifting political control. Here in Minnesota, our state opt-out telemarketing registry will take effect in a matter of weeks -- if the new radical right wing government here deigns to operate it correctly. In an age of fiscal and moral deficits, I'm not holding my breath.
More subtle are the problems of collection and control of information. First, registries place the onus of education and participation upon citizens when properly the onus of desisting should fall upon spammers. Second, registries collect the very data after which spammers lust, and hand it to them. Toothless penalties will only encourage massive abuse, making spamming easier.
Still, I grant you that's fairly subjective. What about security? Windoze is plagued by viruses and trojans, and the OS must be patched more often than a three-pack a day smoker trying to quit. And how about integration? The many third-party apps that make up the average Windoze installation aren't even remotely integrated in the way that OS X's iApps are. (In fact, last time I had to deal with a PC, it was over some silly issue of one major CD burning program installing an ASPI layer that made competitors' stuff stop working. Disintegration, you might call that.)
We shall need a nice BMW with a minority driver, innocent of any crime or criminal intent, who happens to draw attention by cruising through, say, a predominantly white upper middle class neighborhood or, alternatively, a predominantly non-white underclass neighborhood. As TV teaches us, he must be up to something.
Said driver has a malfunctioning tail light (grounds for the stop). Said driver is heard to say "Shit" in angry exasperation as the white cop, just like the last white cop before him, approaches the car (grounds for the "reasonable suspicion" of personal or public danger). Thus the cop, now fearful, orders driver out of car and tells him to submit to a frisk. Driver protests, "Hey! Why are you picking on me?" This triggers heightened suspicion in cop who, later, will state in court that the defendant resisted -- grounds for use of physical force in effecting the frisk and arrest, and subsequently for a search incident to arrest that allows the cop to dig widely through concealed areas and containers in the car. Thus far, we have an arrest, a lot of searching, and probable cause hasn't even entered into it. We're getting by quite nicely on the very flexible "reasonable suspicion" standard without any of the bothersome probable cause tests or a search warrant.
Now the the car's impounded, and what happens? The trunk is opened. It's the precinct's policy to inventory everything. And that search -- again, warrantless and without probable cause -- is constitutionally permissible because the cops aren't specifically looking for criminal evidence; oh, no, they're merely impounding and inventorying the vehicle. Bad luck for our driver if he actually had anything illegal in there...
Within recent memory the U.S. enjoyed a brief period of rich protection under the Fourth Amendment, chiefly due to the wisdom of the Warren Court, between the 1960s and early 1980s. Since that time the Rehnquist Court and other conservative benches have seen to it that the police are able to conduct warrantless searches with wider and wider authority, holding variously that the public interest is served by abrogating personal privacy and increasing investigatory protections and abilities. That has been the theory, anyway; the Drug War has been its practice. Today, your actual freedom against unreasonable search and seizure is a function of many factors, not limited to the exception-riddled case law, your skin color, the attitude of the cop who stops you, your ability to afford effective counsel, and the temper of the court.
Sending out the invisible mod points for a yuk well done.
Same here. I couldn't care less about what GUI purists think. Tabs are part of how I work now. And they'll continue to be until someone comes up with a better idea. Nothing else thus far allows me to have several pages of research from various sources open in one browser, everything available at a glance.
However, maybe it's better to wait for later this year or early next when Apple's hardware is slated to enter the 21st century.
That's one of the few computer mods I've ever seen that didn't look like a pathetic attempt to merge the aesthetical sense of vacuum cleaner design with 1970s Chevy Van rehabs.