Our Cubic Zirconia President

Monday 22 June 2009 at 7:40 pm I'm still angry that I didn't get to vote for the man I thought was capable of actually making a difference in our political and economic systems.  Barack Obama is not that man; that man is Dennis Kucinich.  Kucinich is the one man in our Congress who had the balls to stand up and try to start impeachment proceedings against culpable officials of the last administration; he risked his own political career to do it. His own party leadership publicly vowed to oppose his effort. Obama, a member of that same party, has refused to support an investigation.  Meanwhile, Obama has proceeded to cozy-up to the "intellectual property rights-holders" in ways that make even Bush look like an amateur huckster.  I get angrier about this misguided choice with every new week's revelations.

Hoaxed!

Friday 19 June 2009 at 11:53 am

I was suckered-in by an e-mail forward from someone yesterday, which resulted in a blog post that I now regret because the whole thing was a hoax!  Well, not really a hoax so much as terribly obsolete "news": http://www.snopes.com/science/astronomy/brightmars.asp.

I'd like to say it will never happen again, but that's a promise I may not be able to keep.

Run-of-the-Mill Abuse of Power

Friday 19 June 2009 at 11:28 am

This is what common everyday abuse of power - by people who really don't have any - looks like:

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When Birds Attack

Thursday 28 May 2009 at 3:29 pm Well, I wish I had been able to get a video of this:

One of my cats was perched on the sill of my front upstairs window, as he often does. This happens to put him at about the same height as the foliage on a tree no more than 15 feet away. Until this year that tree hasn't had much foliage for three years, thanks to a hatchet job done by an alleged "arborist". Little did my cat know - or perhaps he did - that this year there is a sparrow nest in that tree. One of the doting parents decided he was uncomfortably close to their hidden treehouse, and tried to divebomb him! I heard a combination of a click and loud thump: first the beak and then the rest of the bird, courtesy of inertia, and then my cat leaping down from the window and streaking in under the bed. I ran to the window to see what had spooked him, and there were both the feathered parents, one sitting on the lawn looking dazed, and the other perched on the rod iron fence above the other!

Yep, that would have been one awesome video. Remember, this actually isn't the first time this house has endured a feathered assault: the last time involved a pigeon, a patio door, and a falcon!

The Truest 'Net Neutrality

Tuesday 19 May 2009 at 6:13 pm

Cory Doctorow warns today in The Guardian about the dangers of not enforcing some form of so-called 'Net Neutrality.  His most interesting and compelling argument appears in the final two paragraphs, wherein he reminds both us and the Big Telcos that we charge them nothing for the public access and rights-of-way upon which they depend in order to lay and maintain those precious wires.  This was an excellent observation, but it doesn't appear that he drew what I think is the correct conclusion from it: the Big Telcos shouldn't own the wires in the first place.

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Zombie Ideas

Friday 15 May 2009 at 08:47 am

There seem to be certain enduring zombie-like stupid ideas that just won't die; we can't ever seem to manage to bury them deep enough to keep them buried.  Inevitably some bored marketeer who is at a loss for a truly useful concept will exhume one of these creatures and set it on a renewed course of destruction.

Take Dell, for instance, which has once again decided that women need "different" computing devices from men, and that in order to sell them to women they must take a uniquely illogical approach to it.  The result is a zombified Web site they call Della.com, which has already begun generating indignant reactions.  Someone in tech support should have stopped this errant zombie before it ever left the cemetery.  A computers is a general purpose tool that crosses gender boundaries intact, just like virtually every other bit of consumer electronics I can envision.  Are there televisions specific to women?  Are there distinct toaster models for men and women? Della.com smacks (or did smack) of emotional manipulation and abuse of women specifically; it's one thing when corporations engage in unisex equal-opportunity manipulation and abuse of consumers, and quite another when they single out a specific class for an even bigger dose.  We call that discrimination, don't we?

The very notion of a gender-specific computer sales Web site in this era - regardless of the specifics how it was implemented - is pig-headed and doomed to failure on the face of it. Apple is no doubt breathing a sigh of relief that they now get to learn from Dell's mistake rather than making it first themselves.

Down Time, May 2009

Saturday 09 May 2009 at 12:24 am This blog had an "outage" from May 6th until today, May 9th, because of failed hardware that had to be replaced.  This is what happens when you self-host rather than pay someone else.  There's nobody to rely on - nor blame - but me when the lack of redundancy catches up with me.

Free Market Saves Archaeological Tombs!

Tuesday 05 May 2009 at 1:56 pm I find this extremely amusing: an article published in Archaeology.org, the now routine use of eBay by purveyors of fake archaeological artifacts has had several consequences: the increased competition in fake artifacts has resulted in dramatic drops in the prices of the artifacts, the growing of the fakes segment of the market has led to mass production improvements and better quality fakes, and finally these better and cheaper fakes are making the process of actual grave-robbing less economically appealing, so more graves are being spared violation.

I guess the free market is good for something after all.

Filtering the Web's Insights from the Noise

Saturday 02 May 2009 at 09:50 am

Have you used Google or other search engines to search for meaningful information?  How has that been working out for you?  It requires enormous amounts to time to find what you want, in spite of the alleged speed and ease of the Web, doesn't it?  Perhaps not quite as much as a trip to the library - which they frown upon you doing half naked in the middle of the night - but close enough to make you wish there were a better way, right?

There's one company, at least, Wolfram Alpha, that claims to have created a new kind of search engine that will help you find what you actually want to find, as opposed to what other people want you to find.  I'm skepical of the claim and the intense hype surrounding its upcoming launch; here's why.

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... The More Things Stay the Same

Friday 01 May 2009 at 08:26 am

Some enterprising person managed to exhume this little treasure from the archives of the New York Times:

 

Apparently music piracy isn't quite as new nor as unexpected a phenomenon as the RIAA, IFPI, or ASCAP would have us believe, nor is it quite the threat to the very fabric of our society that they would have us believe.

Does it have to be said again?  Piracy for personal use stifles neither creativity nor innovation; what it does stifle is the unethical profiteering of some very uncreative middlemen who abuse the creativity of others for their own gain.