It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
3leaf is hiring. I have no idea what they do, but their job listing is enough to make me wish I was a deep Windows geek.
13. Stealth plane are nice. You give one orders, and it disappears. When it reappears, it always says “Mission accomplished. I hit the target”, but sometimes it really hit Lichtenstein’s embassy. You are NOT a stealth plane, you are a big, noisy, C130, that we can hear, see, and talk to for the whole project.
Speaking of privacy violations, Caltrans is expanding the use of Fastrak, their automatic toll collection system. They’re adding antennae along the highways, to collect realtime traffic info. This makes tracking individual drivers that much easier — another step down the slippery slope.
Britain is now calling for the US to allow UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq. The poignant quote from Britain’s UN ambassador: “Even the closest ally cannot answer for the United States.”
They’re joined by the rest of the UN, of course. How much longer can we bear this undue influence in our affairs? Hasn’t Britain learned their lesson? Our friendship is not unconditional.
RFID just succeeded. When Wal-Mart wants manufacturers to use a technology, they will use it — Wal-Mart’s leverage is just that big. The privacy implications are horrendous, but the applications are fairly neat.
Various and sundry Iraq news continues to flow. This is gonna be long.
On WMD: we still haven’t found anything, although Bush said we did. Alas, two trailers that might or might not be WMD factories are not in any way WMD. Sort of in the same way that styrofoam and gas aren’t napalm. On the other hand, various sources are reporting that intelligence analysts felt pressured to find evidence of WMD before the war. Similar reports are coming out of the UK.
Just to forestall one comment: yes, even if Saddam destroyed all his WMD years ago, he failed to accurately account for them. If you’re comfortable invading Iraq due to bad paperwork, more power to you.
Lots of arguments about what might have happened to Saddam’s theoretical arsenal. One popular argument: he gave ‘em to terrorists, in which case it would seem that we’ve at least temporarily increased the threat level. However, Bush tells us that’s not true, in a stirring speech: “But one thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more.” Or maybe he just forgot to say “besides the tons of chemical weapons I told you they had.”
Another current meme: we haven’t found Saddam, so why should we expect to have found WMD? This is an interesting turnaround from the hopeful noises Rumsfeld was making early in the war, when we were expected to believe Saddam was dead in a bunker. Also — and this is a subtle point, that many may have missed — Saddam is a single human being. Bush claimed that there were literally tons of chemical and biological weapons floating around. Saddam is independently mobile and rather small. Tons of chemical and biological weapons are not. I’m reliably informed that you need some sort of motorized device to move that kind of weight. I’m pretty sure you can’t actually extrapolate from one thing to the other.
Blix, God bless him, is still being the voice of sanity. “The lack of finds could be because the items were unilaterally destroyed by the Iraqi authorities or else because they were effectively concealed by them. I trust that in the new environment in Iraq, in which there is full access and cooperation, and in which knowledgeable witnesses should no longer be inhibited to reveal what they know, it should be possible to establish the truth we all want to know.” This is the closest anyone in the UN is coming to the Bush administration line.
Is that all the Iraq news? Heck no. There’s ongoing resistance in Falluja. This is in no way a surprising development, but it was not one that was widely accepted as a cost of the war by the war’s proponents. This surprise may explain the increasing delay in establishing an interim government.
Onward, ever onward. Turkey and the Kurds are not saber-rattling, and — it’s worth remembering this — Saddam is out of power. Which is a relief; don’t forget to read Salam Pax. That’s my good news for the day.
Cory Doctorow just posted an excerpt from an upcoming novel. “An urban fantast/magic-realist thing about community wireless networking.” It’s a fun read; kind of a Charles de Lint vibe filtered through the transfictionalist nerdcore point of view. Hm, or maybe vice versa. Definitely vice versa.
Imagine one of those Charles de Lint scenes where we get to know a somewhat fey stranger, except instead of all the folk music he’s into wireless networking. There you go.
Den Beste notes a $500 million drop in American tourism over in France. Meanwhile, the ITA Office of Travel and Tourism notes a 7.6% drop in visitors to the United States for Q1 2003. This follows a 8.3% drop last year.
Putting that into perspective, a little over 600,000 fewer people visited the US in the first quarter of 2003. If each of those people would have spent an arbitrary $1,000, which is probably low, then the US has lost over $600 million in one quarter. The article on France implies that their drop is $500 million total. Per capita, $500 million represents more for France than $600 million does for the US, of course.
The point being not that we’re suffering more, because right now we aren’t. The point is that economic ties go two ways.
Addendum: what the heck happened to my dollar signs?
I have, on occasion, argued that attempting to control terrorism by controlling the states that sponsor terrorism is futile. It’s too easy for non-state sponsored terrorists to build weapons, and getting easier. As evidence, I offer the home-made cruise missile.
CafePress seems to be a mite closer to launching their book printing arm. I just got an intriguing email offering me the chance to beta it; alas, I don’t have a book all ready to go. C’est la vie. However, the email does have some hints about formats.
They want page sizes of either 4.18 × 6.88 (mass market paperback), 5 × 8, 7.5 × 9.25, 8.5 × 11, or 6.625 × 10.25 (comic books). That’s inches, one assumes. They offer saddlestitch binding for lower page counts and wire-o for full fledged books. Maximum page count is 600 pages.
That’s kind of interesting, since people were expecting perfect bound books. Then again, maybe the perfect bound books work, um, perfectly and they don’t need to beta test those. More to come, I’m sure.