I have just made an important discovery.
In Opera, F8 takes you to the address field and highlights it for editing. (This is *extremely* helpful since F2 opens up a new window/tab and Ctrl-L and Alt-L do not seem to work.)
or, A Tale of Two Operating Systems
...in which Peter faces software droppings from the Beast of Redmond and reflects on how much easier things are on his Mac...
Read full entry...If you've read the news at all in the last two weeks, you've undoubtedly come across the story of the Alabama Supreme Court's Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore, also known as the "Ten Commandments Judge," has created a bit of a stir by having a 2-ton granite monument to the Ten Commandments erected in the state Supreme Court's rotunda and refusing to remove it despite a federal court order to do so. Moore's actions reveal a simplistic understanding, not only of constitutional law, but also of the very scriptural tradition he claims to be defending.
Read full entry...John Carmack is always interesting to read. Here is a nice little interview with him. Great quote: "Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up."
Wow. Considering how quickly my photo album picture of Fuertes bubbled to the top of Google's search results for "Fuertes", I'm not surprised that this sort of thing can happen so quickly.
As I fouled the air at Collegetown Bagels yesterday, I realized that there are a number of spells that J. K. omits from her books, but which must surely exist. Let's put on our Snigglets hats, shall we?
On September 5, 7, and 9th, Cornell Cinema will be showing Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, a film about TMBG. I am planning on attending the showing on Sunday the 7th in Willard Straight - w00t!
MSNBC has an article about canned tuna (e.g. Starkist) and its potentially hazardous amounts of mercury.
Mercury enters the environment naturally and through industrial pollution. Nearly all fish contain trace amounts of methylmercury but longer-lived, larger predator fish like shark or swordfish accumulate the highest amounts of methylmercury and pose the largest threat to people who eat them regularly.
Environmentalists say the agency bowed to pressure from fishing and packing interests when it left tuna off its do-not-eat list in 2001, but one group said it was somewhat happy with the panel?s recommendation.
?We think it?s a step forward,? said Caroline Smith DeWaal, a food-safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest that believes pregnant women should avoid fresh tuna steaks and children under 5 should eat no more than one or two servings of canned tuna per month.
An article amusingly entitled Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House, Greg Palast examines the efforts at deregulation:
Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.
But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats.
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California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nader which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of legislators to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when San Diegans in the first California city to go "lawless" looked at their bills, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges.
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According to Dr. Anjali Sheffrin, economist with the California state Independent System Operator which directed power movements, between May and November 2000, three power giants physically or "economically" withheld power from the state and concocted enough false bids to cost the California customers over $6.2 billion in excess charges.
While I am all for free enterprise and free markets, I am also against violatiing contracts - including the very fundamental contract of basic ethics, such as no fraud, no lying about costs, etc. It seems the energy lobby should use the term "anarchization" instead of "deregulation". Hey, the Wild West was pretty darn deregulated, and we know that was a model capitalist economy.
This article provides a very depressing perspecive on the state of our occupation of Iraq. Hopefully our fearless leader will find some new distraction so we can forget about it like we've forgetten about Afghanistan.
The resistance missions are opportunity-driven. Local fighters are assigned to keep up low-level attacks in their areas, maybe three or four a week. Then new cells are dispatched to areas for ambushes at a rate of three and four a day.
Ahmed claims his cells are responsible for the death of at least a dozen Americans, but there is no way to confirm this.
He declares: "The Americans say they are still looking for weapons of mass destruction. But they have found them. We are their WMD!"
CNN has a through-provoking op-ed in which the writer examines the drift towards more fundamentalist, mystical interpretations of Christianity and warns of its polarizing effects:
The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.
Some liberals wear T-shirts declaring, "So Many Right-Wing Christians . . . So Few Lions." On the other side, there are attitudes like those on a Web site, dutyisours.com/gwbush.htm, explaining the 2000 election this way:
"God defeated armies of Philistines and others with confusion. Dimpled and hanging chads may also be because of God's intervention on those who were voting incorrectly. Why is GW Bush our president? It was God's choice."
A Pentagon insider writes about his disillusionment with the way the current administration handles intelligence and matters of war: link
Groupthink. Defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view," groupthink was, and probably remains, the predominant characteristic of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted "fact," and uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view.
The result of groupthink has been extensively studied in the history of American foreign policy, and it will have a prominent role when the history of the Bush administration is written. Groupthink, in this most recent case leading to invasion and occupation of Iraq, will be found, I believe, to have caused a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.
on Ain't-It-Cool-News: link
He is one crazy cat:
MB: The Bush family history is terrifying. They've been in business with Hitler, Saddam, Osama… [George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, had his stocks in Nazi steel manufacturing removed by Congress in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.]
HST: And they're Jesus freaks on top of it. Carter was one and I loved Jimmy Carter—we're still good friends—but this is a stupid Jesus freak. Carter deserved the Nobel Prize.
MB: Do you believe the end of the world is coming?
HST: Yeah, it is the end of the world. What, do you think it's going to come on a TV show, right on schedule? Shit. They've been digging this for a long time. Read the fucking Book of Revelations… The end of the world is not just coming; it's here. Until Bush came in it was still possible to be successful, happy. That was two years ago, but now the wheel is turning and I don't think what we're in now will possibly get any better.
The situation in Iraq is degenerating rapidly into anarchy.
Senior Islamic clerics have condemned the campaign of direct action - but at the same time they speak well of its impact, claiming that all vice offends the deeply held principles of Islam.
There were some limitations in Saddam's Iraq - alcohol could only be sold warm and by Christians, and be drunk at home; cinemas could not show pornography. But for all that it remained a broadly secular society.
Now the clerics are endorsing the setting up of mosque committees, the brief of which appears to have been directly lifted from Saudi Arabia's and the Taliban's ministries for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice.
Women have also been told to return to wearing the traditional hejab head dress.
In tonight's segment about the California governor race, a clip is shown of G. W. Bush commenting on the election:
Bush (smiling): "I am a follower of American politics..."
Stewart: "Funny... and all this time I thought the president of the United States would be a leader of American politics."
Ah, Robert Cringely does it again: a wonderful, insightful essay about the nature of tech companies and their management structures. Great quote:
It is not that moving jobs to India is so bad, though I hate the weasel behavior behind some of it. It is simply pointless. What is needed, instead, is a new approach that diminishes the role of headcount in corporate power.
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Just as an example, there are programmers who are a hundred or a thousand times more productive than their coworkers, and every Silicon Valley startup is constantly on the lookout for that kind of genius. Those people work in big companies, too, but their impact is muted. What manager at any big company would trade 100 workers for one, no matter how smart the one? No manager would do that, and yet they should. Power and efficiency are in conflict here.
... in which Peter drives on the Autostrada for the first time and shows the Venetians the Boston school of automotive thought.
Read full entry......in which we experience Italian drivers first-hand and Amy leaves a souvenir at the Campanile.
Read full entry......in which Peter sights Flo (uberchienne from the Amazing Race), sees Caeser's cremation mound, and discovers that large-denomination Euro coins are magnetic.
Read full entry......in which Peter sees the Sistine Chapel and almost offends God with his bared knees...
Read full entry...8/1 1:02AM EST, 7:02AM Rome time
My first sight of Europe was sunrise over the Pyrennes. Its jagged peaks split the red dawn light into slivers that disappeared into the clouds and fog in its valleys. I have flown over the Rockies and I have flown over the Appalachian Mountains, but I have never seen mountains like these.
Read full entry...