August 2001 Archives
I'll be looking out for the volume of collected strips to be published in October.MAD editor Meglin says he originally intended to publish only a few strips -- but Prohias kept producing plot lines that were "so ingenious, I'd say, 'Okay, maybe a couple more. And maybe a couple more.'
"And 40 years later, maybe a couple more."
A group of scientists have mapped the amount of artificial brightness — sometimes known to stargazers as "light pollution" — around the world. I'll try and find a link to the actual map.Thanks to the most recent generation of astronomical tools, many of them orbiting Earth, humans can see farther into the universe - into the history of the universe - than could even be conceived a very short lifetime ago. And yet we have lost, or are near to losing, what should be the simple, every-night awareness of the stars overhead. There is no cataloguing their meanings, but at the very least they remind us how tinily we loom in existence.
I think this is the mentioned Toledo Blade editorial, but I'm not sure. (Attribution, dammit!) Still, I was afraid that was the case. I suggest tucking away your refund somewhere safe; you may need it next year.The edit, as have many others, points out that the check that some taxpayers are getting isn't really a rebate at all.
Rather, it's an advance on the refund you expect after filing next year.
And, as the Blade points out, if you normally end up paying at filing time in April, you could owe an extra $300 to $600 in 2002.
Is anybody out there using Internet Explorer 6.0?
If so, can anybody tell me how to make this FPOS leave the frickin' toolbars where I put them?
The latest appointments to President Bush's special commission on henhouse security."Captive agencies" are a constant problem in government. They are agencies supposedly in charge of regulating an industry or group, which then acquires undue influence over or even control of the agency. In Texas, the most spectacular example is the state's equivalent of an environmental protection agency, to which then-Gov. Bush appointed three commissioners who literally represent major groups of polluters. Texas is, of course, Number One in toxic pollution. The pattern continues in Washington.
A look at the original Saint Louis, for which the city is named."He became a saint while fulfilling his position as a king," said the Rev. John Padberg, historian and director for the Institute for Jesuit Sources at St. Louis University. "He was a good ruler who took care of the poor and others who were least able to care for themselves, including supporting hospitals."
Which sign of the apocalypse are we up to? I've long since lost track.The adaptation will feature a 17-year-old Tarzan who is sent to live with his aunt in New York after being injured by poachers in the African jungle. In the big city, he becomes the "protector of the ultimate urban jungle," the studio says.
Once again, Microsoft is astroturfing — creating an artificial show of "grassroots" support. This time, they appear to have brought in some political consultants from Chicago for their expertise in voting the graveyard.Dead people are flocking to Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate banner, and bombarding States attorneys general with letters demanding they lay off the much misunderstood Beast, according to a story in today's Seattle Times. Well, not exactly, but theTimes details how Utah's attorney general got suspicious when two of the people who wrote him turned out to be dead, and many of the letters he was getting seemed to have various phrases in common.
Good grief, was that not one of the most hideous, obnoxious, insulting cheats of a season finale, ever?
It's not like I was emotionally invested in the show, but I couldn't believe the writers would do that to whatever fans the show might have. At least it was a waste of only an hour of my life, plus the few minutes' spare change here and there I'd seen while I was surfing channels.One of the problems of keeping a weblog like this is that many links expire. Personal sites come and go, companies crash and burn, news sites only maintain archives for a short period. And sometimes a webmaster removes web pages because they turn out to be too much of an embarassment.
Such is the case with a page on the Coca-Cola website that I linked a few weeks ago. The page in question described a "success story" of sugar-water marketing at the Olive Garden chain of restaurants. In a program with the ludicrous name of "H2NO", the restaurants were training their servers to pressure customers into ordering Coca-Cola products (probably one of the highest-margin items on the menu) instead of free tapwater. The page in question was a masterpiece of marketspeak, like "Olive Garden's goal was to influence customers to abandon their default choice of tap water and experience other beverage choices to improve their dining experience." Aside from the principle that human beings don't talk like that, the tone of the piece was contemptuous of the poor fools who drink water because they just don't know any better. The story spread through the weblog world like wildfire, but the company deleted the pages in question within days of the word getting out.
Now the New York Times (free registration required) has jumped on the bandwagon, acknowledging the role weblogs played in propagating the story, and pointing to screenshots of the offending pages. [via Looka!] This story was just the kick I needed to swear off soft drinks; if the Coca-Cola corporation has decided to declare war on H2O, I know which side I'm on, and where my handy bottle of cool, refreshing water is.
Via The Register, which presents a brief introduction to alternative news websites. A couple of these are already among my regular reads, and I suspect a few more will find their way into my bookmarks.Campaigners have now become so frustrated with the media that many are treating reporters as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. Standing outside the locked doors of the media corporation, Joanna, an environmentalist, said, "The repetitive trend in broadcasting the 'violent anarchist' scare stories churned out by the police has only alienated us." Combined with reports of editors handing over their photographs and video images of protests to the police, it is hardly surprising that activists are now refusing to talk to the media.
One of the things that disappointed me most about The Sims was the lack of a "third place"; characters could only spend time at home (their own or a neighbor's), or at work (an off-screen abstraction). Hot Date will allow sims to go "downtown" for a different type of social life.Aside from the building of Downtown itself, the new expansion will involve the social interaction between two Sims. In the regular game, you get to directly control the members of your household. If people are hungry, you make them eat. If they need sleep, you make them sleep. But in Hot Date, you control only one Sim, the one who initiates the date. That Sim follows your commands, and you can control him or her throughout Downtown. Although you'll have a companion on your date, you won't have direct control over that person. He or she can leave at any time if he or she is bored. If he's hungry, and you don't feed him, he can just get up and walk out on the date. The challenge of the game comes in keeping the date interested in you and indirectly controlling how he or she acts. So if that date is hungry, you'll need to bring her to a restaurant where she can order food. If she's bored, you might bring her to a dance club. Hot Date's style of gameplay is different from that of the Sims. Now, instead of controlling people directly, you can nudge them along only by picking up on their motivations and then using your controllable Sim to lead them to interaction spots where they can meet those needs.
I can't help but wonder how many new ideas we've already lost, from potential developers who look at examples like Stac, who were essentially put out of business when MS started building disk compression into the OS. I'm definitely adopting a "wait and see" attitude towards Windows XP, and will be looking long and hard at the final form of Product Activation.The built-in applications from Microsoft are not always the best ones, but for most users they are good enough. At the extreme, this is going to put a big dent into smaller development houses who come up with the tools and shareware that do the little things people need, like browsing image files. XP would dampen any developers enthusiasm for penetrating the Windows universe, knowing that what they do might eventually end up in the OS.
[via hbwt] Of course, in Bill's own vision of the future, MS might as well stand for "More of the Same".Bill Gates has been barricaded for the last two years in a vast subterranean bunker, along with a core group of true believers from the old Microsoft Corp.
The only reason we know they're still alive down there is the frequent issuing of news releases, such as the one yesterday declaring that Microsoft takes security very seriously. In recent weeks, the releases have sometimes taken on a more plaintive tone, offering bug fixes for Windows Uber Grande users in exchange for a case of Malomars.
I don't know whether it's a relief or a disappointment to see a professional pundit break down the party along the same lines that I would.Keeping all the factions focused on fighting the enemy - that is, the other party - rather than each other is a standard problem for any American political party. That is not what we should worry about. What should upset most American citizens is the fact that under cover of all of this contention, members of the corporate wing, those with the least legitimate claim to be true conservatives, are winning the war these days, even if libertarians or social conservatives hold the upper hand in any given battle.
Well, I was going to rip into the Moose in more detail for slagging HTML/CSS dinosaurs, but as it turns out, he beat me to it (scroll down). I think he's still far enough off base to deserve some further remarks on the subject, but I need a little time to really organize my thoughts properly before I do comment on the subject.
I know that HTML/CSS isn't true programming, but there are a lot of parallels to be drawn. The main one I was thinking of in my all-too-brief earlier post had to do with the evolution of tools. As I said, lots of programs and technologies have been created over the years with the intent of eliminating the need for programmers once and for all. Most fell by the wayside, but the best developed into useful tools — for the very programmers they were intended to displace. Visual Basic (which looks to be on the verge of becomming a real programming language, by the way) was one such, if I remember correctly. It's the same thing for web designers. The tools intended to let anybody do their own web design have either failed, or were most effective in the hands of someone with a full understanding of the underlying technology. Of course web technology is changing; it always has been, ever since TBL posted his first page, and the successful tools and designers are those that have adapted along with it.
Anyway, now that the Talking Moose has a new job, maybe it can find something more entertaining to do than bagging on webfolks.
Indeed."It is indifferent and sometimes downright insulting, and it has the weirdest sense of humor you could find," Kusterer said. "But you can't be mad at it, for as annoying as it is, it has this depressed tone to its words."
I just watched the premiere of Samurai Jack.
Brilliant.
SJ is the newest cartoon creation of Genndy Tartakovsky, the creator of Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. I don't think I've ever seen a cartoon like this, with such a compelling hero, fantastic art, or relentless action. IGN has a good preview of the series and interview with the creator, but if you enjoy animation, you have to see this show for yourself.In a lot of ways, this still looks like a Good Idea from a technical point of view (though the article's concerns about the reliability of distributed storage are well taken), but Microsoft has behaved so poorly in the past that fears of unmutual behavior remain. Also, it occurs to me that this type of file system could have far too many vendor controls built in, allowing for truly draconian Digital Rights Management systems.Jeremy Allison of the SAMBA team recently expressed concern that future versions of Windows would contain proprietary technology. Making NTFS essentially a device driver layer add-on drives Windows compatibility into a whole new ballpark. It doesn't have to - but it could.
The highlight of last night's coverage of Bush's stem cell speech was the admission that TV might not be up to covering complex issues. Of course, even some of the print media probably won't be up to the task, but he did say "better newspapers". [via Media News][Dan Rather] told viewers that the issues involved in embryonic research were very complicated and then, with astonishing candor, continued: "It's the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with, because it requires such depth into the complexities of it." His syntax was a trifle ragged at that point.
"So we can, with, I think, impunity, recommend that if you're really interested in this," Rather said, "you'll want to read, in detail, one of the better newspapers tomorrow." Yipe! Has any network anchor ever made that kind of admission and recommendation before?
How did it happen? One of Microsoft's biggest internal security problems is smart-arse techies who decide to make their lives easier by ignoring and/or shorting out all the rules, thus leaving the company vulnerable to, say, employees' infected home machines. But not this time - somebody simply brought an infected, hibernated laptop in, connected it to the corporate network and bang, Code Red was inside the perimeter chomping away.
[via wood s lot]Don't tell anyone: There's a virus you can help spread on the Web, a virus promising real information, free expression and political debate. You can get into the act by joining the "bloggertariat," the growing number of people who want interaction instead of propaganda.
- Mozilla 0.9.3 — The word is that this version has finally achieved the needed stability for serious use.
- Ad-aware — spyware and intrusive advertising are getting out of control.
The Onion A.V. Club interviews Samuel R. Delany.That's one of the things I had actually noticed, that I think a lot of racial tension, especially in the '60s... a lot of it was more talk than actual tension. One of the things I remember was, I got married fairly young, and my wife, Marilyn Hacker, was a young Jewish girl from the Bronx. I was 19, she was 18. People spent a solid year telling us all the problems we were going to have as an interracial couple. And all the problems we had as an interracial couple were people telling us all the problems we'd have as an interracial couple. We just didn't have any. That became kind of, I guess, the template for the way a lot of that was going.
Creeper, meet Reaper. Naturally, this solution brings up a number of ethical, legal, and technological issues of its own, some of which are discussed in the original post. The latest Risks Digest also has some good posts on the insecurity of wireless networks and the assumption that programming is a criminal act.One simple fix is a passive worm that sits on a target machine and when a Code Red attack arrives, infects the attacker using the same technique that Code-Red uses (by definition, an attacking machine must be vulnerable to the attack). The passive worm could disinfect the attacker, and then sit waiting for further attacks on the original machine plus on the newly disinfected attacker. The rate of spread of the passive worm would be directly proportional to the spread of Code-Red. The passive worm cannot spread at all unless Code-Red is operating.
As cynical as I am about 'advances' from Microsoft, I think that their plan to bring a variety of data storage and access technologies under one roof is actually a good idea. I still have the usual worries about MS using tighter integration between their own technologies to block out ideas from other sources, though.At this point, Microsoft turns the whole NTFS/SQL Server model on its head. Instead of SQL Server using storage file space provided by NTFS, SQL Server itself becomes the base storage engine, and NTFS becomes an API-compatible driver into the store – just like Drive M: today. In other words, the machine boots SQL Server and NTFS is an old compatibility API for those applications that still need to manipulate files through a filing system API.
Joshua Micah Marshall looks at the Social Security system in more general — and seemingly more honest — terms than most of the current debate.Social Security isn't just a particularly poorly managed 401(k) plan; it's a vast social program in which we share risk, or to put it more immediately, in which we collectively look out for each other.
Perhaps that was the intention, but the logistics didn't work out that way. After weeks of memos on cleanup procedures and dress codes to prepare for the Impending Visit by our New Owner, there seems to have been a serious breakdown in communications on the day that Mr. Buffett did show up. We'd been expecting him to tour the offices (hence the massive cleanup), but instead, I believe he simply held court in a mostly-unused area of the Steel Division on the first floor. (Most of our offices, mine included, are on the third.) Apparently, there was a time when anybody and everybody could have gone downstairs to meet the Great Man, but I (and many others) didn't find out about it until far too late to do any good. The noblest of intentions, I'm sure, but all things considered, I wish I hadn't put off a dental appointment to be in the office all day.Investment guru Warren Buffett signed copies of "The Essays of Warren Buffett" and shook hands with every one of the 135 employees at MiTek Inc.'s Chesterfield headquarters July 31...
At least this time around, Microsoft is being open about certain popular programs not working under the latest version, and may have somewhat valid reasons, but one is reminded of the old "We're not done if Lotus runs" days."If Microsoft got into the business of deciding which programs you may run on your system, that's a pretty scary thing. Most companies don't have the time or resources to go through the 'Microsoft certification' program," writes one concerned reader.
More later.There is a way to approach IP, and other important social issues, from a perspective other than that of rights. It's harder and more complicated, but in the end it's more productive. Instead of talking about rights--the rights of authors vs. the rights of consumers vs. the rights of publishers vs. the rights of investors--we should instead talk about structures--how they look, how they function, what they include and what they leave out, who they benefit and who they don't.
