April 2004 Archives
For Immediate Release
Friday, Apr 30, 2004
U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) issued the following letter today to Mr. David Smith, President and CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, in response to the preemption of this evening’s Nightline program:I write to strongly protest your decision to instruct Sinclair’s ABC affiliates to preempt this evening’s Nightline program. I find deeply offensive Sinclair’s objection to Nightline’s intention to broadcast the names and photographs of Americans who gave their lives in service to our country in Iraq.
I supported the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq, and remain a strong supporter of that decision. But every American has a responsibility to understand fully the terrible costs of war and the extraordinary sacrifices it requires of those brave men and women who volunteer to defend the rest of us; lest we ever forget or grow insensitive to how grave a decision it is for our government to order Americans into combat. It is a solemn responsibility of elected officials to accept responsibility for our decision and its consequences, and, with those who disseminate the news, to ensure that Americans are fully informed of those consequences.
There is no valid reason for Sinclair to shirk its responsibility in what I assume is a very misguided attempt to prevent your viewers from completely appreciating the extraordinary sacrifices made on their behalf by Americans serving in Iraq. War is an awful, but sometimes necessary business. Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war’s terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves.
- end -
Cory posted a summary of Google's founder's letter done by John Battelle.
11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees;
It's nice to see a large company on the verge of becoming even bigger to recognize that their value comes from their employees. It's like anti-Dilbert thinking and I can only hope that it spreads and that Google holds to their ideals and don't abandon that strategy.
I'll have more on gmail later...
Courtesy of the Pho list we find that Fugazi is selling CDs of their concerts. Kick. Ass. Buy some. Now!
From Reuters:
Bush and Cheney agreed under pressure from victims' families and the commission to answer its questions, but only on condition that they appear together and in private, with no tape recording of the session. They were not under oath.
Come on, even Nixon made tapes in the White House!
Best Case Scenario
One or more of the commissioners bring in tape recorders and whip them out before the questions start. This session is already a farce. A president who can't answer unscripted questions on his own. A vice-president who seems to be corrupt to the core. If they kick out the commission, which they surely would, they simply walk outside to the press and explain the situation.
Q Why did you bring in tape recorders when the deal had been for no tapings?
Gorelick: We felt that this historic event was too important to go unrecorded, no matter what the wishes of the White House are. This commission is for the people of the United States. They deserve answers.
Q Is this a move by the democrats to politicize the commission?
Kean: No. Here is my tape recorder.
Yeah, pipe dream, I know... Pointless indeed.
Update
More from Reuters:
"If we had something to hide we wouldn't have met with them in the first place. We answered all their question. I came away good about the session because I wanted them to know how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats," Bush said.
Which is why it wasn't under oath, taped, or recorded in anyway other than by "note takers." They also clearly have nothing to hide because not only did they oppose the creation of the 9-11 Commission, the fought tooth and nail to not have important administration members testify. What a disgrace.
Not only was he blasted by the President of the uni he gave his "speech" at, but it was defenseless.
You billing system sucks is less than optimal. Your contracts sucks are less than optimal. You GSM coverage sucks is less than optimal.
I will never use your service again and I will recommend to anybody who is foolish enough to ask me for advice about this subject, to not use your service.
Goodbye and good riddance,
Pat
I feel bad for Britton Stein. Really, I do. I also know a dyed in the wool neo-Republican like him doesn't need or want my pity. In fact, he probably despises me and doesn't even know me.
But if this is the future of the Republican Party, Teddy Roosevelt is puking in his grave. Debate. Plurality. What happened? Because if this article paints "the future" and what Utopia looks, like I want off this planet.
Click to enlarge.
Yes, I know that technically a spider isn't really a "bug," but check out the funky markings! You may of course click on the above photo for the full scale image.
Comedy Central put together a list of the Top 100 Comics. As with all lists put together by basic cable channels there are no real criteria and is completely subjective to the writers whims. That being said, the fact that Bill Hicks made the top 20 was nice.
His material is just as relevant today as it was 10 years ago. The man was gifted and was taken from us far too early. Pick up any one of his first 4 comedy CDs: Arizona Bay, Rants in E-minor, Dangerous, or Relentless. Seriously. Now. Go. BUY BILL HICKS!
When I worked at EFF I heard a lot of reports about certain sites being blocked in certain countries. We never knew if the site was really blocked or if their net connection was hosed, or if the site had just been down at that moment. In other words, there were a ton of different reasons that person may not have been able to get to the site and not all of them were because an oppressive government was being all evil and stuff. Now a group in Toronto is trying to hone their net detective skills and find the real reason behind people not being able to get too their favorite site.
"We're attempting to technically confirm reports that we get in various countries that the reason why they can't access certain websites is because the government or the internet service provider is deliberately blocking access to those websites, as opposed to it being some network error or some other reason," he said.
Simply put, the Citizen Lab is trying to find out which websites a particular government or internet provider might be blocking, and how they are blocking it.
Excellent.
Yesterday I started to chastise Ryan for not writing more, and then I remembered that I hadn't been writing much myself. So who was I to talk? Well, personally I think Ryan has much more interesting stories to tell than I do. I'm lucky because I get to work with Ryan and hear them straight from the horses mouth.
You, the internet user? Not so much...
Unfortunately I think a lot of the stories really aren't meant for public consumption. Lots of stories about things on campus that we just can't write about in public. I don't think we're afraid of being fired so much as the feeling that we might be stepping on toes. Maybe that's just the big coward in me coming out and Ryan has a completely different perspective on it. Either way, there is a lot of interesting stuff we can't write about at the current time. But for future reference let me drop a hint, FTE. You probably won't know what that means, and even if you do I have provided no context. But someday I hope to be able to publish my FTE story.
A couple of Saturdays ago I had a nice summation of what had been going on at work and other areas of my life. Not much has changed since then. Life in Chico is really starting to sink in. Things go a little slower here.
Sure I have rambled on about politics here, on Go Back To Sleep America, and the occasional posting at Forwarding Address:OS X. But for the most part I haven't been putting much daily life down in bits. I mentioned to Ryan that it was great too go back and read stuff that you wrote a year ago, two years ago, and so on.
But there is a part of me that has come to despise putting daily life down in bits for google to consume. Sure a few friends drop by to see what incoherent rant I'm off on today, and to those that do I say thank you, but for the most part it's bots reading my pages. Looking at my logs more pages are consumed by bots than by humans. Just take a look at the zeitgeist. I feel bad because I know that most of the people coming to these pages from google or yahoo aren't getting what they were looking for. They wanted information and probably got some lame ass post that I wrote thinking I was clever, funny, or insightful. If they were lucky I at least had a link to what they were really looking for. But I stole a little time from them. Time they will never get back.
I have become a time thief and google is my accomplice. You have just been robbed.
Yes, for real comic fans Transmetropolitan has been over for quite a while. For those that buy the trade paperbacks (me) we will finally get the last chapter of the story of Spider Jerusalem. Like Cory, Transmet is what really got me into comics. Well, the few that I read anyway.
I have a confession to make as well. I downloaded the entire scanned Transmet series. Why? Because I wanted to know how the damn story ended! That's why! The comics weren't being sold new in stores anymore because I came late to the game. So the only way to get them all would be through ebay or some other source of used books. Ellis and the wonderful artists that worked with him get nothing on those transactions. So I wait for the trade paperbacks to come out. And I wait. And I wait. And then I wait some more. Now, finally, they have announced the last one. Of course, it still doesn't ship until June.
I've got a great relationship with a small indy book store here in town now. They'll order anything for me and it shows up as fast or faster than Amazon. So not only will Ellis get a few pennies from my purchase, but local folks will as well.
I still felt bad about downloading the story. I don't know why. I new I was going to buy the last one the day it came out and the only reason they weren't getting my money is because they weren't willing to sell it to me at that time. It must be the Boy Scout in me. Remind me to have that part of my brain erased someday.
The other good comic news is that another Planetary trade, "Leaving the Twentieth Century", is coming out as well.
Big win for Israel's Sharon
CNN.com
April 16, 2004
Two things that don't seem to have much of a connection these days. NPR has been talking to people about it. People who have a clue.
- General Wesley Clark Democratize, trouble, no planning, not enough troops, mistakes, exclude UN, pissed off allies, superb military, not prepared, violence, ultimate success threatened, escalation, rebuilding?, new drummer, we're the best, political aims, strength - more troops, resolve, slow military operations, political dialogue, Chalabi take a hike, internationalize, shut up about Syria, defend ourselves, shooting people will not change their minds, respect, leaders in Iraq, negotiate, Iraqi police, political, political gains lead to security, not much time
- Senator John McCain Courage, horror, astonishment, urban battlefields, miserable business, sacrifice, death, danger, awful, valor, no glory, failure catastrophic, democracy, liberty, more danger, must prevail, courage, love, leaders, nerve, sacrifice.
Many moons ago, when I would drive to San Francisco every Monday night to be in the EFF office during the middle of the week, I would listen to World Affairs Council on KQED during the drive. It's a great show. Anyway, there was talk of Al-Jazeera today and people piled on about it being as bad as Fox News and whatnot. You should really listen to this program before you make any conclusions about them.
You should listen to it.
Lots of Democrats fall all over themselves fawning over McCain. The mere thought of a McCain VP nod with Kerry had some pretty logical people in a seemingly Ecstasy induced stupor. Let it be clear that John McCain is a Republican before anything else. On "NBC News 'Meet The Press'" he said, "I believe that President Bush deserves re-election."
No really, he did. You should pause and ponder that for just a moment.
Sure, he probably personally hates Bush and all of his campaign staff, especially after how they attacked him personally in the 2000 campaign. Sure, he doesn't really agree with Bush on, well, almost anything. But he isn't going to cut and run on his conservative beliefs, even if the president only pays lip service to those very same beliefs.
He says he agrees with the president on national security, when what he really means is that he agrees with what Bush says about national security, and not what he actually does about national security. He may take verbal stabs at Bush, but as he said, "I cherish the ideals and principles of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan."
He had me until that last one. I for one will welcome the return of the Lincoln/Roosevelt Republicans. These pretenders to the throne have worn out their welcome.
(I would trackback to this Daily Kos story, but it seems that trackback is disabled right now.)
"Just once I'd like to hear a followup to the 233 day argument with: How many days defines the cutoff for when the administration needs to accept some responsibility?" -- comment posted by "paul" in a post at Pandagon.
The New York Times has a cool QuickTime™ panorama of Condi being sworn in.
Since everyone says webloggers are in an echo chamber, I'll go ahead and play along. Sisters is Lynne Cheney's hot lesbian sex novel. I wonder if Laura Bush read it? I hear she loves to read.
Hunter on ESPN Page 2
About 13 minutes into the first half, I got so bored and disgusted that I flipped over to watch a George Bush speech about freedom and democracy in Iraq. But that, too, was sickening. I FELT THE FEAR COMING ON. How long, O lord, How long? This blizzard of shame is getting a little old, isn't it? Just how low do we have to fall, before the voters catch on?
Indeed. How many times can a man be robbed -- on the same street, by the same people -- before they call him a man? Bob Dylan said something much like that in a tattered old song called "Blowin' In The Wind." Read it and weep, you poor bastards -- because Dylan was yesterday, and George Bush is now.
That is a morbid observation, at best, and we are all stuck with it. The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today, and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November. Take my word for it. Mahalo.
I wonder the same thing every single day.
I'm not done reading Against All Enemies yes, but it is a very grabbing read. It's hard to put it down, even when I really need sleep. If you have the means, pick it up. The first chapter is a telling of September 11th from Dick Clarke's perspective that everyone should read. Not because it makes anyone look bad, it really doesn't, but because you get to see a very important part of our government working in crisis mode.
So I wanted to post a quick blurb on Forwarding Address: OS X about the new Aqua version of Abiword. I had read about it yesterday and so then I tried to track the reference down. I searched in Bloglines, I manually checked all the links blogs where I usually find tidbits like this. All to no avail though, I couldn't find the reference for the life of me. So I posted it anyway.
Then I just happened to check the site this morning to find out that the reference was on Forwarding Address itself. Paul Bissex posted about it. Needless to say, I felt a little dumb and quietly deleted my entry. Posting something that has already been posted is nothing new, just look at slashdot. But to double post, one right after the other? Yeah...not so much.
So the time had come to get a new printer. Our cheap-ass Xerox hunk-O-junk had run out of ink and of course cartridges cost more than a new printer practically. But I didn't want to go down the cheap road again. No joy was to found on the cheap road. I wanted nice features.
- Laser printing
- Ethernet-ready
- 15 ppm
- PostScript up to the ludicrous level
Color printing was of no concern. The only things I want in color are my photos and I send them out to get real prints. Printers that are ethernet-ready are really expensive, at least compared to what I can afford. PostScript printers aren't that cheap either. So I settled on the HP LaserJet 1012. It got great reviews at Amazon and at Epinions.
So I get it home and set it up on the Windows box. Everything worked out of the box so I moved on the sharing it to the Macs. I installed the drivers on the macs, but the 1012 is a host based printer. I don't really know what that means, but I do know that in the Printer Setup Utility it means that if you select Windows Printing you will not get to pick the driver you just installed. I would say that is LTO.
So after hours of scrounging around on google and every half-baked linux printing site (Linux people have more trouble printing than any other group of people on the planet, besides me. I'm a printing nightmare group of one.) and installed alpha gimp-print drivers and lots of stuff not working I gave up for the night. I was feeling lucky tonight so I tackled the problem again. The solution came quite easy tonight for some reason. The HP LaserJet 1012 can use the CUPS driver for the LaserJet Series 5 printers. I selected Windows Printing, selected the "right" driver and printed.
That wasn't so bad...
So I've been trying to listen in to Air America when I can. I think the best show so far is The Majority Report. They've had Atrios and Markos on so far and they've set up their own bare bones weblog.
ACLU Sues U.S. Government Over 'No-Fly' List
Shuford, the lead lawyer in the case, said the lawsuit aims to force the government to create a way to remove people from the list once they have proven they are innocent. (emphasis mine)
You know, a lot of people say that September 11th changed everything... Did the whole basis for our justice system change when I wasn't looking?
A Heretical View of File Sharing
It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.
"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Funny, this is the kind of thing that EFF has been trying to convince people of for quite a while now. EFF also had the study last week. At least big media is starting to pay attention.
36 years ago today he was shot dead. How much have we learned since then?
From my hidden microphone and cameras inside EFF's SF office I've discovered the following:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet civil liberties nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, is seeking a fulltime technical director to start immediately and work out of EFF's San Francisco (Mission District) office. This person will be responsible for managing four members of EFF's technical staff and their various projects. Technical staff responsibilities include keeping our internal systems running and providing expert support to our attorneys and members. It also includes actively building, and supervising the building of, technologies that advance free speech and privacy. The technical director will be responsible for creating a cogent technology strategy for EFF. The director must be a team player. This person must be a good writer, good speaker and good listener. This person may be called on to be an expert witness, conference speaker, declarant in a court case, or debater against entertainment companies or government attorneys. Comfort with advocating for a position essential.
Project management experience absolutely required. Extensive experience (10 years+) with the Internet and various related technologies also required. Ideally, this person is already well known and respected within the Internet community. The job requires an in-depth understanding of network protocols and security, and experience with software and/or hardware development. Experience with telecom industry and technologies highly desirable. Familiarity with Internet civil liberties issues and EFF's work required. Salary at nonprofit scale and includes benefits package. This is a job for someone who wants to affect positive social change in the world. While the compensation is low and the work is hard, what we're working on is cutting edge, and you couldn't find a better group of people with which to work.
To apply, send a cover letter and your resume with links to some samples of your work to ctojob@eff.org no later than April 15, 2004. We request that you send these materials in a non-proprietary format, such as an ASCII text file. No phone calls please!
It's been rather slow around here lately. I've become consumed by politics. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I consider myself well informed at this point. I haven't given time to a candidate, although I did think about going with Ryan to Iowa to help out Howard Dean. I read up on issues, I watch poll numbers, I read lots of analysis. I'm not afraid to call myself a liberal. I also avoid the evening news like it was a festering plague of frogs with boils eating locusts. No wonder I'm out of touch with this country.
There will be no April Fools Day jokes here. That is all.
