This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.

D&D Romance

Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.

As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.

A week ago Stella asked me, “Daddy, why is China fighting Ukraine?”

I told her, “No, China isn’t fighting Ukraine. Russia is fighting Ukraine.”

She thought for a moment and she asked, “Russia wants to take over Ukraine?”

After I answered in the affirmative she asked, “If Ukraine wins the war, does that mean they get to take over Russia?”

After I let her know that wasn’t the case, I did think about how it certainly seems fair play. If losing means losing your country, shouldn’t winning mean that you win the other’s country? And there have certainly been wars like that in the past, but I don’t think any modern wars have followed that pattern.

It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it.

It was 11 March (I believe) when the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. One of the first things I remember hearing about COVID-19 was the cruise ship that was stuck offshore because President Trump was so afraid of the numbers rising that he couldn’t let the folks off the ship. Turns out that was going to be a foreshadowing the likes of which we couldn’t quite understand at the time. My first inkling that maybe this was starting to become an issue in the US was in late February or early March when we went to visit relatives in New York City and they were against eating out because they were scared of getting sick. At the time, we thought they were just being a bit germaphobic. In fact, at the end of March we went to a restaurant for what we didn’t know at the time would be our last time to go out to eat for a year. (To date we still haven’t eaten out, not even for outdoor dining)

For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.

No problem!

But kill an elk? You are going to get convicted, you monster!

Jurors deliberated for about four hours before convicting Sam Carter on all nine counts he faced, which also included forgery and tampering with evidence.

Carter shot “Big Boy” the bull elk with his buckshot-loaded shotgun as it grazed on fallen crabapples, and then called in a friend and fellow officer to help remove it as horrified neighbors watched Jan. 1, 2013.

I love when newspapers predict things that are hilarious in hindsight:

Read this article about Questlove being stopped repeatedly despite being, well, Questlove!. A few choice quotes:

Questlove said his most recent stop was conducted at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge a few weeks ago following an appearance at the hip venue Brooklyn Bowl. Officers pulled over his driver, shined flashlights into the car and asked him why he was sitting in the back “like a don,” Questlove said. After showing the officers a copy of his new memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove said he was let go.

This is a good first step, but the City has vowed to fight, so it’s not over yet.

Miley’s twerking has been way over-exposed. I didn’t write a post about it because I couldn’t give a crap. She just seemed like she was either pulling an Andy Kaufman on us by looking absolutely ridiculous or she was doing a Bieber and losing her marbles.

However, I came across this p retty awesome post written by an African American woman sociologist on how the performance looked to her. These are the types of posts that make me happy that blogs exist. I learned about an experience I couldn’t begin to fathom since I’m neither racially black nor a woman. I didn’t read all the comments on the post, but there were some disagreements from other black women. I’d say you should probably give her more weight than the average blog, considering her PhD, but also remember that not everyone has the same experience - even people of the same race/sex.

The important thing is that you need to read to the end of the article or it’s just going to seem really weird.

" Ninety percent of Latinos said that they are friends with people of a different race, making them much more likely than the rest of America to reach across racial lines to make friends." The rest of the article goes on to talk about whites and blacks, but I think part of the reason Latinos tend to cross race barriers so easily is that Latino (or Hispanic) is not a race, it’s an ethnicity. Unlike the old world countries, we’re more likely to come from countries in which people are of all races. In other words, I’m less likely to see a Cuban-American as an other no matter their race; they’re part of my tribe. European whites tend not to have that as their countries are pretty much pure white.

I just found out from my brother that Alvarez Guedes died. I have almost the same story as the person who wrote the linked article. I’m not sure if I’ll expound on it in a longer post, but I wanted to pass along the link. He was an awesomely funny dude, my favorite comedian, and the world is less funny with him gone.

I was sad today when I realized I’d already forgotten about the Trayvon Martin case.

[caption id=“attachment_4400” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Laptops might be seized at the UK border[/caption]

Orgzine has an article complaining that in the UK when crossing the border you don’t get the same protections as you do within the borders. This does not surprise me since we have the same issue over here and we tend to have more robust civil liberties than our cousins across the pond. (Hence why libel suits are so often filed in England - their definition of libel is slanted in favor of the company or star while ours is the other way around) Basically, if you’re going to England you better take a burner phone and burner laptop because:

[caption id=“attachment_6659” align=“aligncenter” width=“231”] MLK in a Hoodie (you can buy prints here)[/caption]

I’m breaking my usual schedule because of the Trayvon Martin case. This story over at Gawker has an important point to make about how race played a part. Personally, I think that, like OJ, Zimmerman is free of jail, but may still end up guilty in a wrongful death lawsuit. After all, he did admit to killing Trayvon and he was told by the 911 operator to leave Trayvon alone. He might have not had enough of a burden of proof to go to jail, but he IS guilty of killing a kid. I am against the Nancy Grace crowd and the way she treats cases like this one of Casey Anthony. Look, we have a court system and we have to abide by its rules or we have chaos. Ken White of the law blog Popehat makes a VERY salient point about this that everyone who’s pissed about the Trayvon case needs to read. This case angers me personally because I have been the target of racism. It was only once, but it stung. I have a younger, adopted brother who is half black and lives in Florida. My parents are well off and my brother could definitely find himself in a neighborhood where people don’t think he belongs. I think I would only act more irrationally towards someone killing my wife or daughter than I would for someone killing my brother. It sucks that so many decades after the 60s we still have stuff like this going on. What bugs me more than anything each time I hear about this case is that Trayvon didn’t do anything to instigate violence - he was just walking through a neighborhood. Whatever he may or may not have done once Zimmerman followed him, he didn’t start anything and he still died. Again, we have a system and the system has chosen not to find him guilty in a criminal sense. Hopefully the system can find him guilty in a civil sense.

[caption id=“attachment_6546” align=“aligncenter” width=“444”] The Family by the Willamette in the mid-90s[/caption]

When I was still a young lad, we lived in Oregon for a while; just outside of Portland. I remember my mom making us chew these horrible tasting “vitamins”. I asked my mom what they were and she told me it was because they didn’t fluoridate the water. She didn’t want our teeth to get messed up and so we had to chew the nasty tablets until we moved back to Florida. My mother loved how laid back life was in Oregon when compared to the frenetic pace of Miami. Yeah, you’ll get that when you live with hippies. They also didn’t use reflective paint on the lanes in the road which made them dangerous to drive on when it rained (which was a LOT of the time), especially if it was dark. That reflective paint was bad for the environment and no one came up with any alternatives so I guess they considered it better for people to die.

I came across this story back in May, but things appear to be at a stand-still. Essentially, The New York Times came up with an awesome new way to tell stories on the web and when someone figured out how to duplicate it, they sued. Let me start by saying that one awesome thing about the NYT is that they are incredibly innovative at how they use the web. About 10 or so years ago they had a state of the art photo journalism blog that I frequented and LOVED. They were telling neat new stories and really taking advantage of the web. Snow Fall, the prototype for this new way to tell stories on the web is incredibly beautiful. Go check it out on that link. Back? OK, wasn’t that great? It is the NYT taking what’s awesome about the web - what it can do better than print - and making it beautiful. When I came across this site it made me feel like this is the future of magazine journalism. This is what Time Magazine, Newsweek, etc should look like on the web. Instead of ugly (in comparison) walls of text with a few tiny photos, this website really does everything right. It has animation and video and good margins, great fonts. I know it’s not appropriate for the daily news - at least when it’s a short story. But I am absolutely shocked that Rolling Stone magazine isn’t using it for their 5-6 page stories - I think their legendary photos would work so well with this format and it would provide a great transition to digital that would rival the print version. (And perhaps give a compelling reason to pay for the magazine?) Right now it’s like when you see those awesome prototype cars and then they never come out. It just sucks that someone out there has come up with something that could be a real order of magnitude shift in how we experience journalism and stories on the web and no one seems to be using it. Instead the news website and blogs are just slightly better than paper in that they have hyperlinks.

Over at Popehat they presented an interesting article about the Ideological Turing Test. The regular Turing Test says that a computer passes if you can interact with it and you don’t know you’re interacting with a computer instead of a human. One of the closest things we have right now are the chat bots whose eventual goal is to get you to some website. Well, the Ideological Turing Test tests:

whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.

One of the earliest demands for justice children make is that of fairness. What parent hasn’t heard the complaint “That’s not fair!” uttered by their children? Scarlett isn’t there yet (shoot, she’s barely speaking so far), but I imagine one of the hardest things I’ll have to do in her toddlerhood is to explain to her that life isn’t fair. It must be such a scary moment for children. It’s the first time we realize that the adults in our lives aren’t always going to provide justice. It’s funny because it’s an extremely important life lesson to learn, but it often arises out of frustration when another child won’t cooperate in the fairness regime. And it’s a tough balancing act if you’re sovereign over both children between requiring fairness and teaching that fairness just isn’t in the cards all the times.

There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.

[caption id=“attachment_6176” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] Citi Bank is one of those too big to fail banks[/caption]

Matt Taibbi wrote a story on 1 May about how there is a possibility of the end of banks that are too big to fail. The biggest issue I have with the way the financial crisis has been dealt with is the complete hypocrisy. Now, I’m not so naive as to fail to realize that politicians just say what they will and hope that people don’t look at what their saying either because of party bias or the media doesn’t cover it so they can worry about the latest media tart’s exploits. After all, the biggest retort to every bit of legislation to help the vulnerable (whether that be the environment or the poor) is that the free market should be allowed to work.  Well, in a free market a lot of banks would have gone bust and perhaps we would have learned out lessons. Of course, the big difference this time is the money involved. Money can turn any politician into a hypocrite instantly. So I’m glad to read in this article that some politicians are attempting to pass a law that would require the riskiest of banks to hold more money in reserve. Because I understand why the government has to bail out the banks - we don’t want a global collapse to lead to the end of our awesome first world luxurious life. But rather than need a bail out or financial collapse, what if we just had a system where banks could fail and it wouldn’t destroy the system.  Taibbi goes off on a huge tangent about how the content of a Standard and Poor white paper on this bill means that Wall Street is actually scared of the bill.  It’s a good read if you don’t have blood pressure problems. Unfortunately, the article ends with the prediction that it probably won’t even make it out of committee, but at least someone is trying.

[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]

A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.

The slippery slope rebuttal can be pretty annoying depending on how dumb the person using the argument wants to be.  For example, many people say all the surveillance cameras we have everywhere are a slippery slope towards totalitarian governments.  While I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves before we have to be worried, I give the argument some credibility because in the past one of the greatest tools totalitarian governments had at their hands was to create a snitch society.  When your neighbors (or even your kids) are going to potentially rat you out to the government, it means you really have to watch what they catch you doing.  Even something that is innocent (as far as the government’s rules) can be dangerous if your neighbor misinterprets what you’re doing.  So if you don’t have to worry about neighbors, but have video everywhere - all the worse!

With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls.  There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood.  The fact is that some key figured in Al-Qaeda were active in The Muslim Brotherhood.  Another fact is that Hamas is an off-shoot of The Muslim Brotherhood.  However, at least two guests have mentioned that in the last few decades the organization has sworn off violence. Wikipedia (caveats about Wikipedia reliability apply) claims that bin Laden has denounced the fact that The Muslim Brotherhood has denied violence and is participating peacefully in Egypt’s parliament.

While listening to a recent podcast of This American Life (TAL) it made me realize the troubles that the disabled have to go through in this country.  I don’t mean the way others treat them differently, although that certainly is an issue, but rather the little things we take for granted.  The sad thing is that, from what I’ve heard from friends and family who have lived abroad, the US is one of the top countries in the way we treat those with physical disabilities.  The story on TAL, in case you don’t have time to listen to it, was about how California is the only (or one of very few) state in the USA where the disabled can sue for Americans with Disabilities Act violations and get monetary compensation.

Recently this photo was published by the Associated Press and has been getting a lot of attention on the interwebs.  It shows Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, an American solder in Afghanistan, after being hit by a mortar attack and only hours before death.  A lot of the debate participants seem to feel one way or another depending on how they feel about our war.  But I think the debate deserves to be much more complicated and nuanced because there are actually a lot of issues at play here.

There’s been a lot of news for the past 3-6 months about the new FISA bill and how it provides immunity for the telecommunications companies.  A lot of people including the Electronic Frontier Foundation are opposed to this provision of the bill (if not bill in its entirety) because they say the telcos have acted illegally by assisting the Executive Branch with their warrentless wiretapping of phone calls.  The reason they argue this is illegal is that the original FISA bill, as written in the 1970s (and ammended throughout the years) requires a warrant for all wiretapping of US Persons.  That includes foreigners who are physically in the United States.   As the New York Times revealed in 2005, the Bush Administration started acting against this law in 2001 because of opinions written by some radicals in the Justice Department (such as Yoo).

Someone with a bit of artistic creativity has decided to create an illustrated view of all the big news of the year.  I like it so much, I can’t wait to see his work no Fall 2008 and so on.

Check it out, here.

As you know, unless you’ve been living under a rock, the US Government (USG) wants to give us all rebate checks to spur the economy along.  All you have to do is file your taxes and you’ll get up to $600 if you’re single or $1200 if you’re married.  What hasn’t really been publicized in the mainstream media, however, is the drastic measures the USG is willing to go to make sure you spend your rebate and to help the economy.

I’ve had this rhetorical question in my mind for quite some time now.  There was a time, not too long ago, when the Iraq War dominated the news.  Not only that, but people were protesting.  Remember Cindy Sheehan who was camped outside Bush’s house in Texas and leading all these anti-war rallies.  About four months ago, it all disappeared.  Coincidentally, this is more or less the same time when Britney Spears had her breakdown and the Presidential Primaries started getting interesting.

Ars Technica is reporting that Netflix is promising that they will be working very hard to get Macintoshes supported. Looks like they read my letter and now they have my brother covered. Now they need to work on Linux support. And drop the DRM because I guess they ignored my paragraph on how it’s BS and it’s broken. I’m waiting…

Today they were saying that Imus will be getting a new radio show. They started talking about the incident he had with the basketball team. One person mentioned that his contract specified he should be offensive and stuff like that on the radio. It’s not a new excuse for what he said, but I saw it differently for the first time. Basically, people who use this line of reasoning are saying that his contract excused him from hate speech and racist speech. That’s pretty ridiculous! So any entertainer who has a contract to be offensive should be able to say racist things without penalty? I think it’s interesting that, for the most part, the people making this argument are not African-American.

For a while it seemed as though Debian couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of distros decided to be based on Ubuntu instead of Debian. For months on end people talked about whether Debian was still relevant and whether its long release cycle was to blame. Well, now it seems that perhaps some of those derivative distros were a little quick to jump on the bandwagon! SimplyMepis has decided to be based on Debian again.

The founder said that each time Ubuntu is build from scratch and it was hindering the ability of SimplyMepis to have a sensible upgrade path. I don’t know enough about that side of Linux distros to know how different that is from what most of them do, but apparently Debian does not have that problem.

I found this online and had to include it because this is my favorite scene in The Princess Bride. It concerns the current lawsuit between IBM and SCO. (Click that link to find out more about it).

It appears on slashdot and is written by Titanium Fox:

SCO: So, it is down to you, and it is down to me…if you wish Linux dead, by all means keep moving forward. IBM: Let me explain… SCO: There’s nothing to explain. You’re trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen. IBM: Perhaps an arrangement can be reached? SCO: There will be no arrangements…and you’re killing Linux. IBM: But if there can be no arrangement, then we are at an impasse. SCO: I’m afraid so. I can’t compete with you physically, and you’re no match for my brains. IBM: You’re that smart? SCO: Let me put it this way: Have you ever heard or Kernighan, Ritchie, Torvalds? IBM: Yes. SCO: Morons! IBM: Really! In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits. SCO: For the kernel? To the death? I accept! IBM: Good, then untar the source code. [SCO# tar -xvfz code] Inhale this but do not touch. SCO: [taking a vial from IBM] I smell nothing. IBM: What you do not smell is our patent portfolio. It is odorless, tasteless, and dissolves instantly in source code and is among the more deadly portfolios known to man. SCO: [shrugs with laughter] Hmmm. IBM: [turning his back, and adding the patents to one of the code trees] Alright, where are the patents? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both compile - and find out who is right, and who is dead. SCO: But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine it from what I know of you. Are you the sort of company who would put the patents into his own source code or his enemies? Now, a clever man would put the patents into his own goblet because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool so I can clearly not choose the code in front of you…But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the code in front of me. IBM: You’ve made your decision then? SCO: [happily] Not remotely! Because Linux’s SMP code originally came from England(1). As everyone knows, England is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So, I can clearly not choose the code in front of you. IBM: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect. SCO: Wait ’till I get going!! …where was I? IBM: England. SCO: Yes! AH! And you must have suspected I would have known the source code’s origin,so I can clearly not choose the code in front of me. IBM: You’re just stalling now. SCO: You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you! You’ve beaten my giant, which means you’re exceptionally strong…so you could have put the patents in your own code trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the code in front of you. But, you’ve also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied…and in studying you must have learned that Man is mortal so you would have put the patents as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the code in front of me! IBM: You’re trying to trick me into giving away something. It won’t work. SCO: It has worked! You’ve given everything away! I know where the patents are! IBM: Then make your choice. SCO: I will, and I choose…[pointing behind IBM] What in the world can that be? IBM: [turning around, while SCO switches goblets] What?! Where?! I don’t see anything. SCO: Oh, well, I…I could have sworn I saw something. No matter. [SCO laughs] IBM: What’s so funny? SCO: I…I’ll tell you in a minute. First, lets compile, me from my code and you from yours. [They both compile] IBM: You guessed wrong. SCO: You only think I guessed wrong! That’s what’s so funny! I switched branches when your back was turned! Ha ha, you fool!! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia; and only slightly less well known is this: Never go in against SCO, when intellectual property is on the line!

First of all, Debian has finally turned 4.0! It’s been YEARS in the making and they are 4 months late, but better late than never! Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the prior release cycle! With Ubuntu and Fedora releasing every sixth months now, it’s up to Debian to find a good compromise between releasing often and undoing their reputation as a nice stable distro to base other distros off of and not moving at glacial speed so that distros like Linspire/Freespire move to being based on Ubuntu.

Despite what the MPAA claims, it’s not us consumers who need to be restrained by DRM, but their own people. This website demonstrates how movies are pirated by the movie companies and members of the Oscar committee.

Here are some key quotes:

For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to “leak” their films to Academy members for consideration, but don’t want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. In 2003, the MPAA banned all screeners, causing a massive uproar from directors, actors, critics and indie studios. The plan was eventually scrapped in December 2003

A couple of stories that I found interesting today.

First of all, there’s a new Red Hat Fedora Core-based disto on the block, and it’s called Linux XP. It’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Windows users. The screenshots look VERY nice and it definitely seems like a pretty enticing distro to show your Redmond-loving friends. However, this review found the Linux XP to be lacking in some stability features.

To read an article by someone who’s pretty much been with Linux since the beginning, check out this article.

“…and it’s September Eleven.”

Those were the first words to pop into my consciousness this morning. It’s been a week worth of tributes, speeches, and remembrances. Today’s main thought for me involved pondering if anyone from NYC actually watched any of the 11 Sept movies this year. Personally, I think it’s way too soon and too real for these events to be fictionalized. Even movies “based on a true story” lose their dramatic edge when compared to the real events. My wife told me she’d never see those movies (and neither would her siblings). I wonder how other NYers feel. Personally, I have a hard enough time getting myself to watch tragedies; and that’s with fake characters. To watch an event which left so many widowed and parent-less is just too much for me. We didn’t even watch the names being called out today.

As the British (and even some Americans) begin discussing the possibility of racial profiling after this latest foiled airplane terrorism plot, we should remember that not all terrorists are Arabs or Middle-Eastern-looking. Take, for example, the worst terrorist attack in the US prior to the attacks of 11 Sept 2001 - The Oklahoma City Bombing. The terrorists in that plot, which blew up a federal building and killed many people, were white guys. In fact, although I was young at the time, I remember them saying in the news that they had delayed in capturing the guys and even had given them the chance to get away because they were looking for Arabs instead of white guys. So think about that before you start racial profiling. Also think of the DC Sniper - a black man. There are a lot of people who hate the US government or just like to kill people and they don’t all have “al” or “bin” in their name.

UK Police say they have stopped 21 suspects who were going to blow up a plane from the UK to the US. Effective immediately at Heathrow, people cannot take beverages, hand lotions, or USB thumb drives onto an airplane. What were these suicide bombers going to do? Get drunk, lather up, and throw USB sticks at everyone? More news after work. In the meanwhile check out Google News.

Thought this song was pretty interesting - I had it on my computer, but hadn’t heard it in a long time. Pretty relevant to the current news stories.

lyrics: No tomo te, tomo cafe mi amor Yo como arepa y pabellon Con mi sumbao machuco el English when I talk Im Venezuelan in New York

Me ves pirao por Roosevelt avenue Con mi tabaco y mi baston Siempre me escondo cuando viene imigracion Soy un emigrante ilegal en New York I’m an alien, I’m an illegal alien Emigrante ilegal en New York I’m an alien, I’m an illegal alien Emigrante ilegal en New York

F-Spot is looking really good and sporting a much better looking website. They now support RAW files as well as XMP data. Perhaps some of their programmers can share this with the GIMP people - hint hint!

Fluxbox, one of my favorite window managers, and the one I’m using now, won a 2005 linuxquestions.org Choice award!

Fedora Core 5 release has been pushed back to 20 March.

Search engines have been in the news a lot recently. For example, this BBC News story talks about how Google is refusing to hand over their search results to the Justice Department. This could come back to bite them in the butt when they try to buy some company and the DoJ denies their application. I believe they are probably doing the right thing as we are already giving up too much privacy involuntarily. This week a story broke on all the major news networks that for about $100 I can buy the cell phone records of a complete stranger.

there will be a series of short posts today to make up for a long and substantial one.

SETI at Home is now over! I never thought this phenom would end, but, sadly, it has.

Richard Pryor died yesterday of a heart attack. His comedy set the stage for a whole slew of comedians like Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock who told jokes about the differences between whites and blacks. Although many chastised he and his disciples for their use of profanity and the fact that their jokes hindered racial progress, I feel that, by pointing out our differences and exagerating them, they helped us to realize the frivolity of racism. As a quote from a GRITS track points out, “both whites and blacks who are most interested in bringing about racial equality shy off certain facts that deserve recognition. There are cultural differences, a truth that not only supports integration, but will help bring about honest equality. This is, after all, the ultimate goal of integration.” We shouldn’t ignore our differences or hate each other because of them. We should just realize that we are different and there’s not one thing wrong about it.

Some tidbits I’ve gleaned and where to get more in depth info:

KDE3.5 has been released! Hopefully this means that it will make its way into the Fedora Core 5, due out in Feb 2006. Or, if they’ve completely moved KDE to the extras packages, maybe it will be available even earlier! Lots of info here and screenshots here!

Speaking of Fedore Core 5, there is a review of the latest devel freeze to be found at this O’Reilly site.

With all of the job cuts being announced right before the holidays, I was wondering if it might be time for a new capitalism. Here’s a rhetorical question, what if the board lowered their salaries and the CEO’s salary instead of firing people? A typical CEO for these big companies like Delta makes a few million. He or she doesn’t need millions - no one does! Somewhere around $50k can allow someone to survive in the US. $100k is very comfortable depending on the housing market. Certainly, $500k could be enough to live VERY well, even in New York. Let’s say they are firing white collar workers who each make $50k. If the CEO were to lower his salary by just $500k, he could save 100 jobs! If we’re talking about people who make less money, even more jobs could be saved! So why can’t they do this? Well, obviously, no one would ever lower their own salary. But why isn’t there much of a public outcry? People are losing their jobs right before Christmas and these CEOs are flying around in private jets. I know we have even more ridiculous things like basketball players making millions, but I would assume that people would say stuff. For the first time today, I heard them say something on CNN this morning. Of course, it was 6 AM and no one was listening - it wasn’t repeated all day like their typical stories. I know it’s a bunch of BS, but I had to get this off my chest - it’s really been bothering me.

An update to the story I talked about on 8 Nov - BBC News has revealed that at least three viruses have emerged that take advantage of the malware Sony has installed on user’s machines without their permission. Sony says its sorry, but sorry doesn’t bring back the bits! This is exactly why music CDs should do only one thing - play music! If they want, they can include some music videos, but that should be the extent of the software on the CDs. They don’t need all this Macromedia crap on them that loads when I pop in the CD. That’s part of the reason why I just rip the music to my computer instead of popping in a CD each time. I hope this REALLY backfires on them!

BBC News has reported today that Sony BMG implanted malware into one of their country music CDs to prevent it from playing in certain Windows Media players. Not only that, but the software installs itself into the dark recesses of the computer where only the most technologically savy can find it. This is the kind of crap I expect when installing Kazaa, not when LEGALLY using a STORE BOUGHT CD. I don’t want anything installed on my computer unless I installed it myself purposefully. That’s why I use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer and limit my usage of shady Internet-downloaded software. And, if I decide to do one of these things, I take a calculated risk. How badly do I want a program to, for example, remove region restrictions on dvds? Is it worth possible spyware and malware? But NO ONE thinks of those things when they put a musical CD into their computer. This is a blatant faus pax and Sony is extremely lucky that this story doesn’t seem to have made news in the United States. Again, people escape media wrath because American news organizations are relatively lazy. I advocate making this a huge deal and I hope more bloggers help push this story to the mainstream.

Over at Geek Ramblings they pointed out just one more blow to Microsoft FUD. The article says MS will be deploying tens of thousands of routers around the world which will be running Linux. All the while, MS has be claiming that Linux is a POS. This is almost as great as when I heard that the new Halo movie would be made using Linux computers. Of course, what does a Halo movie mean for the folks over at Rooster Teeth- the Red vs Blue creators

Rosa Parks died yesterday of natural causes. As everyone knows, she was one of the most influential and accidental icons of the United States Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. As she herself has told others, she never meant to actually stand up for civil rights. She had just finished a very long and tiring day of work and simply took a seat near the front of the bus in order to just sit down. As nearly all American school children know, in those days if a white person asked a black person to get out of a seat near the front, they were required to do so. Just like you or I don’t think straight when we’re tired, she actually refused to move on account of being tired. There were, after all, other seats the white person could have taken. The end result? She was arrested and Martin Luther King Jr began the bus strike. Since so many blacks used the busses, their strike was devastating to the bus’ source of income. They caved and eventually blacks and whites could sit anywhere on the bus. Her actions contributed in a large way to the fame of MLK Jr and gave a large boost to the Civil Rights movement.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s a very important mantra to have in the software/hardware world. For example, OpenOffice.org has its own file format, but around 90% of the world uses the Microsoft Office format. Therefore, OO.o must incorporate support these formats. Similarly, a large portion of the Internet servers out there are running Linux and/or open source software. That’s the reason that Microsoft has decided to try and booot compatility with open source. How hard are they trying to make their software work with open source?

I wanted to be able to talk about the news stories I found very interesting without creating an additional post for each story, so here is the first edition of “In the news today”.

This BBC story shows how NASA’s attitude about shuttle accidents has changed since the 2002 shuttle destruction. Previously NASA was more concerned about its PR image. How would it look if NASA was trying to check the shuttle for problems due to foam hitting the wing? For whatever reason, they decided to deny the astronauts the ability to check the condition of the shuttle, costing them their lives. This time around, with a possible heatshield tile missing from the Shuttle Discovery, they are doing a full diagnostic over the entire shuttle to determine the integrity of the protection system against the heat of reentry. I’m glad NASA has finally learned its lesson. I hope that this is one it doesn’t forget.

Today I was reading an article about the perils of blogging about the workplace. This is something I have always avoided. I think it’s ok to say something like, “Man, this guy was a real jerk to me in the cafeteria, I wonder what problems he was facing to feel that way.” It’s not ok to say, “Man, my boss is such an [insert favorite insult]” because that will just cause problems. Don’t think that he/she might not read it. Although I garner a few thousand hits to my website a month, I know that I have a pretty small audience compared to the more famous bloggers and I figured my blog to be relatively obscure. My wife’s neighbor googled me and found all sorts of stuff on my website that we presented as proof that he had researched me. (This is not as weird as it sounds, she grew up with him as a neighbor and he protects her as a niece or maybe even a daughter - and he’s a great guy) So, your boss might end up on your site too. Keep your comments as generic as possible and try not to mention your company by name and you’ll probably be ok. But I’m way off on a tangent from my purpose for writing this post.

First the Racial Profiling:

I mentioned the issue of racial profiling a couple of days ago. Today while eating lunch I was watching Fox News (not because I wanted to, but because we couldn’t change the channel) and again some simpleton was calling for racial profiling. The particular show on at this time (around 1p EST) had a live audience, something I’ve never seen on the news. It seemed more like an episode of Oprah than the news. I guess people are right when they say that the news is more about entertainment than telling the story. Walter Cronkite must be so dissapointed. Every time the fellow being interviewed called for racial profiling the mostly-white audience cheered. Unfortunately, the man put on the show to oppose the racial profiling issue was a bumbling fool who spent more time spinning the issue than answering questions. However, when he said that, “all black people are not alike,” the audience actually booed him. What in the world is that? I think all those people needed to locked in that studio and given some lessons in racism.

Remember that guy they shot in the London Subway. I said, “he’d better be a terrorist or they’re going to have a problem on their hands.” Guess what? He’s NOT a terrorist. I clicked on the reader response link and saw that the guy’s visa was most likely expired and that they were checking visas at subway stations. Additionally, the police were NOT wearing police uniforms so he had no reason to believe that they were cops. Apparently there have been some problems with people pretending to be cops and robbing and murdering people.

editor’s note: This was supposed to appear as a post yesterday, but I was unable to post it on time. ---————————————–

Things have really escalated in London since lunchtime on Thursday (EST) when I first heard of the second round of London bombings. First of all, I think that for a non-Middle Eastern (or any place that has constant violence) country the timing of the second string of attacks is unheard of. Look at the US, it was seven years between attacks on the World Trade Centers.

You may know, because they are relatively famous examples, that in British citizens wishing to enter inner London streets during peak times have to pay a toll. This was enacted based on the economic premise of marginal benefit. In case it’s been a while since you took Econ101, marginal benefit is the amount of money someone is willing to pay for a service. If they pay less then that, they feel they are getting a good deal. If they pay that price, the believe it is fair. They refuse to pay a price above that price. In other words, if your marginal benefit from a bag of chips is $0.50, you will cease to want a bag of chips if they cost $0.60. If you still want it at sixty cents, then that was your real marginal benefit. Therefore, the British government figured that they just had to raise the price high enough that a majority of people wouldn’t use the roads and then congestion would vanish. It has mostly worked out right.

This is not one coherent post, but a post about crazy things that have recently occurred.

Crazy thing number 1: New York City Mayer, Mike Bloomberg, has announced that from now on the building code in NYC will state that for every toilet in a men’s room there must be two toilets in the women’s room. This, he hopes, will ameliorate the age-old problem of women’s bathrooms having ridiculously long lines when compared to a men’s room. He joked that he would no longer need to wait outside the women’s room for his wife.

Today is Good Friday, the day that Christians celebrate the betrayal and death of Jesus the Christ. Jesus was murdered in order to fullfill the prophecies dating back to the days of the Old Testament books of the Bible. According to the doctrine of Original Sin, when Adam and Eve committed the first act of disobedience against God, they caused all of their descendents to also be born into sin. In order to symbolize a washing away of this sin, God commanded the ancient humans (proto-Hebrews) to sacrifice a purely white lamb, sprinkling the blood symbolically onto the sinners, to take away their sins. The lamb, being without defect, was supposed to stand in for the humans who had the “defect” of sin.