April 2001 Archives
Chuck (who doesn't seem to have permanent links — for shame!) talks about pepper sauces, and links sources for certain sauces I've been trying to find at the local gourmet shop. Maybe I'll finally be able to get my hands on that Melinda's barbecue sauce I've been wanting to try. Melinda's is my heat source of choice. Most popular hot sauces taste too vinegary to me; I much prefer the lime juice that Melinda's uses, and would rather use a few drops of their XXXX Reserve than a larger amount of other sauces. I also love their Habanero Steak Sauce (not particularly hot, despite the choice of pepper) and their Chipotle Sauce (a nice mix of chipotle smokiness and habanero heat, though I may need to investigate Chuck's Tabasco Chipotle suggestion).
Another pepper addiction of mine is Tabasco Soy Sauce, which adds a nice touch of heat to Chinese dishes and the like. Try-Me Dragon Sauce is another pepper-soy sauce which has its uses (I like to add it to Teriyaki marinade), but is too thick (and too vinegary) to pour on take-out.
I should have paid more attention. I saw some vague remarks about this Windows bug in the last day or two, but I assumed they were referring to the "Hide extensions of known file types" feature of Explorer, rather than reading more closely. Silly me; this is a different problem entirely, and one I'd definitely consider a misfeature. There is a way to add a special extension to a Windows file that will identify it to the system as an executable, and which Explorer will not display. [via Q]
Speaking of features, I love one of the features of the version of the jargon file that I linked above. The individual lexicon entries appear in a frameset, which is normally a nuisance to link. In this implementation, however, each entry has a "Sync URL" link which will refresh the top frame to a revised link which will always bring up that entry in the frameset. Nice, and kind of like the permanent link on many weblogs ("P-Link" in my case) that will take you to the linkably archived entry.
The only solution that seems to be off the table when it comes to California's energy problems, gas prices, etc. is using less. This has to change.There is a real energy crisis, and there is a phony energy crisis. The people who created the phony energy crisis are using the real energy crisis to confuse you and to scare you. They are doing this so that you will spend more money. They are doing this so you will discount the statements of people who care about the environment.
The real energy crisis can be found wrapped in the words "nonrenewable energy sources." There's only so much oil. The scarcer it gets, the more expensive it will become. Now there is phony scarcity; eventually there will be real scarcity.
Keep the box thin, literally. Make sure it fits in a 1U shelf if it needs to, but make it still look good if all you do is put it on, or next to, a desk. Put video, FireWire, USB, 10/100 Ethernet, and 802.11 on the motherboard, and -- this is important, so pay attention hardware designers! -- provide a single, full-size, unpopulated PCI slot for expansion. One hard drive bay with a UDMA-100 interface would suffice, though having two bays would be extra useful. Make it quiet and as low-power as possible. No full-time fan, and laptop-grade power saving features. Tell your hard drive vendors that you care about power consumption and they will quite happily add the same power saving features to desktop drives that they already have in their laptop drive controllers.I've been meaning to put together a personal communications server (mail and web servers, firewall, etc.) for a while, and I've been thinking about my dream media server at least since I got my TiVo. My idea is for a TiVo-like device that would record to a networked (and easily expandable) storage device, which could serve recorded programs to multiple TV's, recorders, etc. The same storage device would be a central MP3 repository to play to any set of speakers. Throw in DVD and CD jukeboxes while you're at it, and maybe include some telephony features. Unfortunately, the recording industries are (as Somyogi says) likely to be the biggest obstacles.
By allowing a counter of Stuart's caliber to play, Harrah's would be struggling to stay perched on a tenuous middle ground -- somewhere between conservative blackjack rules that would decrease Stuart's edge on the tables and liberal rules that would keep normal patrons, the SWAGers, content; somewhere between rules that would statistically prevent Stuart from making regular killings and rules that would prevent the casino from maximizing profits with its time-and-volume formula. "The casinos created the game; they've got a game, they've got rules to the game; people come and play by the rules," Conrad continues. "I think all the arguments the casinos have around the card-counting issue are camouflaged by the fact that they don't want to change the game and deal with it. That's all they really need to do, change the game into something else. But now they're afraid that by changing the game, they're gonna run off all the other players that they've created who aren't expert players, that won't like the rule changes. So they're caught in the middle, so they gotta come up with these bogus arguments about providing a service and economic drain. It's real simple: If they don't want a game that doesn't have opportunity for a player to beat them, don't provide it."
Mind you, there is context if you wish to ruin the comment's pure simplicity.Expectations? "I'm doing everything I can to keep 'em low," the president said with a chuckle.
Entertainment Weekly also has a gallery of spiffy Planet of the Apes photos.But clothes alone don't make the monkey: All the actors playing simians were required to attend a six week course in ape behavior. (Incidentally, Bonham Carter initially flunked: Her ape breathing needed work.) Even so, the five month shoot was not entirely without incident. During filming at the Pinnacles — where Roth's ape army clashes with Wahlberg's human legion — more than a few clubs and spears went awry, with on-set medics periodically rushing to attend to the injured. Burton himself busted a rib demonstrating how he wanted some extras to roll down a hill.
Where is the difference? The computer is a physical object that can only be possessed by one person at a time. Gillmor's words can be easily duplicated without denying the original owner their use. There (probably) needs to be some legal framework to give the creator of intellectual property some degree of control over the use of his creation, but this framework need not necessarily place the same limits on such use that physical laws place upon material objects. Unfortunately, that seems to be what current copyright law tries to accomplish, and content owners (not necessarily creators) seem to be trying to push things further in that direction, at the expense of other parties.You have no right to borrow my computer without my consent. You have every right to borrow some of these words — I hope you'll give them attribution — to create works of your own. You have the right, if you read this in the newspaper or download it, to make a personal copy for your own use or even send it to a friend. This is called "fair use," and it's at the heart of scholarship and innovation, and individual rights.
The author seems to echo my mixed anticipation and dread of this release; I look forward to future installments.From Microsoft's point of view drivers are part of a virtuous circle. The hardware manufacturers have to support Windows if they want to sell in any volumes at all, and if that means having to produce drivers on Microsoft's terms, and jump when Microsoft says jump, so be it. This results in a lot of out-of-box hardware support in Microsoft operating systems, gives Microsoft's developers the necessary tools that make the installation procedure more bulletproof and joyous and - oh yes - does have something to do with all of those arguments about monopolies (there, I told you I'd get back to the baby strangling).
Hugh Grant has not signed to star in a planned movie version of cult television series "Doctor Who" despite persistent reports to the contrary, a spokeswoman for the film's makers has said.
The North American Free Trade Agreement's Chapter 11 appears to represent a major shift in power away from national governments — which have some responsibility to all their citizens — in favor of international corporations, responsible only to their shareholders.Chapter 11 of NAFTA should become a defining issue for FTAA negotiations. Many, including Clarke, vice chairman of the Council of Canadians, believe corporate governance was and is the FTAA's intent. "There is a conquering spirit at the heart of all this," he says, adding that the corporations' attitude is: "We have to get into every nook and cranny of the world and make it ours."
Chapter 11 provides a model of how this might be accomplished. The operative principle is that foreign capital investing in Canada, Mexico and the United States may demand compensation if the profit-making potential of their ventures has been injured by government decisions--"tantamount to expropriation." Thus, foreign-based companies are given more rights than domestic businesses operating in their home country.
Years ago, on a late-night talk show, Shatner told a story about taking his kids trick-or-treating. Naturally, he dressed in costume, donning not one but two Kirk masks. "They'd open the door, and there I was," Shatner said. "I'd take off the first mask, and it was Captain Kirk! And I'd take off the second mask - and it was Captain Kirk!" Somewhere within this joke lies the meaning of Shatner.
My favorite SUV name is the Nissan Xterra. As a transive verb, X means to make your mark, or to cancel or delete with a mark. Terra, of course, refers to the Earth. Seems pretty obvious to me.Yukon. Sierra. Explorer. Ranger. Range Rover. 4Runner. Cherokee. Grand Cherokee. Pioneer. Ram. Yukon. All these names redolent of the American West, of cowboys and raging rivers and range wars. You know how housing developments are named after the things they had to destroy to build them — River Oaks, Sunny Hills, Apple Creek? The naming of SUVs follows a similar principle. It's nostalgia for a time far away, when a vehicle that size might actually have had some use.
I miss being able to multitask as well as I could, say, ten years ago. Naturally, some scientists seem to be Deeply Concerned, but I'm susprised (OK, not really) at how many of them have best-selling books about What's Wrong With Our Children. [via World New York]But now that more than half of American households have computers, the younger generation has steadily been sharpening its skills. While many adults are perfectly adept at, say, toggling between e-mail and a spreadsheet, perhaps with a phone conversation or two thrown into the mix, teenagers can multitask many of their elders under the table, juggling a half-dozen activities without missing a beat.
"With more simultaneous input coming in, people are learning to multitask more efficiently," said Dr. Todd E. Feinberg, chief of the Yarmon Neurobehavior and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. "The demands upon the human brain right now are certainly increasing. For all we know, we're selecting for the capacity to multitask."
I'd love for schools to offer some sort of media-awareness classes to teach students how business tries to manipulate them, but as long as those businesses are providing enough funding and material to exert this kind of influence, there's no chance of that happening. [via Rebecca]Klein said Grade 3 and 4 students at Vancouver’s Sir Wilfred Laurier Annex were recently used to design two new product lines for the restaurant chain, White Spot.
Students spent months in class developing the concept and packaging for the "zippy pizza burger," a product now on the menu at White Spot. The next year's class had to develop a concept for White Spot’s birthday parties, including sample commercials, menu items and cake design. "It was really hard," said one nine-year-old student, according to Klein.
I've been giving more and more thought lately to the possibility of cutting up a number of my credit cards, and tucking others away for emergency use only. This becomes especially tempting with the rise of other instruments that can serve those purposes for which a card is absolutely necessary, such as debit cards and American Express's new prepaid internet shopping cards.Of course the corporatizing of trust has had some unintended effects on us cardholders, as well. Before credit cards we were pretty well limited to taking out loans and buying on credit in places where we were known. That may be part of the reason we stayed put more back then, living in the same towns for longer periods of time. It was important to build a reputation for paying your bills on time. Bankruptcy was the ultimate disgrace, because you were not only ruining your credit forever, you were stiffing people you knew, ratting out on bills from people who had personally trusted you.
Once we had the magic pieces of plastic, though, it was less necessary for us to be known and respected, easier for us to move on, from job to job, town to town. Our trustworthiness was now solely between us and our card issuers, who didn't even care whether we could pay in full, as long as we sent in the minimum payment every month. Whether our unpaid balances were $50 or $50,000, our credit ratings remained excellent as long as we kept meeting that minimum payment.
There is somewhat of an anti-GM slant to the series, but it does appear to be very clear on the scientific issues it mentions.Within a cell, genes are carried in chromosomes, and each gene has a specific place in a chromosome. In general, conventional breeding does not move genes from one place to another in a chromosome. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, inserts genes that were not in the original chromosome of the target organism. These genes may be inserted in unpredictable locations in the chromosome, producing unforeseeable changes in the plant.
What he's asking for is exactly what I want from digital distribution.Rather than seeing the Net as a mortal threat, the industry "ought to see it as the most powerful distribution medium in history," he said. The best defense against Napster and other file-sharing technologies is for the music companies to create their own sites, cross-license with each other and then make the music available to customers at fees attractive enough to win their business, he said.
"Most people understand that nothing is free," Boucher said. "Most people are willing to pay a reasonable price." But they need a way to do it that's convenient and indisputably legal -- and which lets them use the music and other material in ways that don't eliminate their ability to make personal copies to play on other devices, make backup copies or rearrange songs in the order they prefer.
Early technological attempts to match listeners to new music weren't very successful, but a new generation of taste-matching tools combine a variety of techniques to find bands to match your tastes. At the very least, I'll have to check out MediaUnbound when my home machine is stable enough to stay online for any length of time.The music industry forces fans into neatly-packaged "genres" -- you're a "pop fan" or a "country fan" or a follower of alternative rock. This, in turn, is how our music is packaged: Turn on the radio and you'll find a "rock station" that regurgitates the same tunes you'll find on any other "rock station" anywhere in America. And if you're a "rock fan," this station is supposed to satisfy all your musical needs, sending you running to stores to purchase, lemming-like, the albums fed to you by some program director paid off by record labels to promote their albums.
...while Media Unbound uses collaborative filtering at its base, the system also relies heavily on the opinions of critics. Not only does the software use statistical models and mathematics, but Media Unbound's staff of musical experts pick out the best music and build extensive maps with "distance metrics" that correlate how close to each other various genres, bands, sounds and songs are. These critics would, for example, recognize that R.E.M. had several different "periods" and that songs from specific eras appeal to different tastes; if you don't like "Shiny Happy People," you might still like "Exhuming McCarthy."
[via BBspot]Washington firefighters piled aboard a special train with their equipment and were rushed to Baltimore less than two hours later. Crowds cheered their arrival. But when the District firemen tried to attach their hoses to Baltimore's hydrants, they found that couplings didn't match.
More firemen soon arrived from Philadelphia, New York, Wilmington and Annapolis. None of their couplings matched Baltimore's hydrants. Thirty hours later, after 1,500 buildings over 70 blocks -- including much of the old city -- had burned down, the fire was out.
When dino-rocker Don Henley has more of a Clue on modern media distribution than MPAA head Jack Valenti, you know something's way out of whack."Napster has changed everything," Henley said. "Napster and other 'locker' type systems have flourished because the record industry....has made it extremely difficult for legitimate companies to license rights on an arm's-length basis."
The reason, of course, is broad-based stonewalling. "The record industry fiddled on the sidelines while the digital revolution went on without them," he added, and said further that the major labels "should have spent their time negotiating and implementing a comprehensive licensing system -- one that addresses the interests of all parties."
- Movies
- Music
- Microcode
- High-speed Pizza Delivery
At least, that's his attempted rationale for making copyright even more restrictive at the expense of the consumer. I guess this means that Fair Use is now an even greater threat to Democracy than Free Software.The industry is "an economic engine of growth that is the envy of the known world." Its "creative material is "joyously received" and "hospitably patronized on every continent," he crooned.
And this is why, unique among all American enterprises, the entertainment industry alone must be made exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act, must be allowed to control not only the means of production but the means of distribution as well -- must be permitted to operate as a monopoly.
I've been feeling kind of strange lately, and maybe this is the kind of sentiment I need right now. Mine doesn't look like the one in the link; I'll try to get a picture up sooner or later.The koru, represents the unfolding of new life, that everything is reborn and continues. It represents renewal and hope for the future.
Unbelievable. I'm still undecided on some of the questions surrounding GM crops; after all, does direct genetic engineering really differ from selective breeding in any way other than degree? However, in situation like this, the biotech companies seem to be gaining far too much control over even those farmer who have chosen not to use their products.Percy Schmeiser did not buy Monsanto's patented seed, nor did he obtain the seed illegally. Pollen from genetically engineered canola seeds blew onto his land from neighboring farms. (Percy Schmeiser's neighbors and an estimated 40 percent of farmers in Western Canada grow GM canola). Monsanto's GM canola genes invaded Schmeiser's farm without his consent. Shortly thereafter, Monsanto's "gene police" invaded his farm and took seed samples without his permission. Percy Schmeiser was a victim of genetic pollution from GM crops -- but the court says he must now pay Monsanto $10,000 for licensing fees and up to $75,000 in profits from his 1998 crop. It's like saying that Monsanto's technology is spreading a sexually transmitted disease but everyone else has to wear a condom.
A lot of people have blasted Bush for rejecting environmental policies in order to pay back his oil-industry supporters. This may be true, but I believe a bigger problem is a fundamental lack of vision; Bush is so deeply immersed in an oilman's view of the world that he can't imagine anything other than an absolute dependence upon oil.Americans are also world leaders in creating the technology that will use energy more efficiently and cleanly, enabling growth at home and the export abroad of products that will improve the lives of millions.
The United States need not endorse the Kyoto treaty in all its details. Obligations of developing countries remain to be negotiated; so do technical matters such as the trading of emissions credits and mitigation measures such as planting trees.
But instead of offering an alternative, Bush has so far simply asserted the necessity of further economic development in this most developed of all countries.
Alienate your customers, alienate your artists, alienate your sales channels... I look forward to seeing record company executives begging for change in the street.Retail merchants and online distribution companies will claim that major labels have used the threat of piracy as a reason to withhold content from legitimate companies, while the recording industry developed business models of its own.
"Napster proves that if you don't put a lot of rules on people, they will download music," Kearby said. "If there were more content available, and if that content were available in a hassle-free way, consumers would consume it.
I'm not fully convinced of this writer's view of things, but I do believe it poses some interesting questions for those who see the "free market" as the one-size-fits-all solution to any problem, without defining what's supposed to be so free about it.A "free market" is COMPLETELY OPPOSITE TO a "competitive market."
A FREE market facilitates -- encourages! -- monopolies, trusts, cartels, big fish devouring little fish, and those with great power purchasing government for themselves. Perhaps most importantly, a "free market" demolishes jobs for the sake of profits, and encourages sky-rocketing prices on essentials, in ways that are possible ONLY when the powerful are "free" to do so.
A COMPETITIVE market -- that aggressively PROHIBITS "free market" trusts, cartels and monopolistic practices -- facilitates real and *continuing* competition, and that encourages productive innovation. Real, ongoing competition provides reasonable profits, minimizes consumer costs and limits inflation-for-profit.
At this rate, it's only a matter of time before someone starts blaming school shootings on Napster.Over in Paris, however, Sharon Golec-Keniger has allegedly been saying: "The counterfeit software trade is flourishing - and so are the nefarious activities of these criminals, such as drug running and terrorism, that counterfeiting is helping to fund." The way it happens, apparently, is that counterfeiters can use the Internet to distribute small quantities of software to consumers under the cloak of anonymity, then use the money to support global criminals and terrorist gangs.
