Bring me the brains of Baader-Meinhof. They’ve gotta just be misplaced; what would someone do with them? But man, it prompts weird imaginings.
Population: One
The International Children’s Digital Library is a pretty cheering concept. I bet it gets more traffic from adults than children, though. Um, by which I mean adults who want to read the books themselves. Current computer screens are not the best technology for reading books to kids.
Polly Toynbee’s article on Afghanistan one year later is excellent reading, and her writings may be instructive to those who assume that opposition to war on Iraq only comes from dedicated leftist pacifists. It’s clear from her article that the citizens of Afghanistan are really glad that the Taliban is gone, and going in was the right thing. She also reminds us that there’s more to do.
“‘I was walking with my cousin and her husband outside here,’ said another man. ‘The vice and virtue police beat them both with big sticks, beat them to pieces, blood everywhere, because her ankles showed too much under her burka. I stood there, ashamed, but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t go out after that.’ He was a young Pashtun and no friend of this new mainly Tajik government, but he had no doubt that the Americans did the right thing.” That, but also this: “One woman was keen to set up a new charity for sufferers of type 2 diabetes: I suggested she look at the children’s hospital first. There had been no electricity there for two days when I visited: the two generators sent from Japan were unusable without money for the oil to run them.”
She’s four-square against war on Iraq, though. There’s middle ground, no matter how much the fringes would like to deny it.
This is much closer to what I want than Microsoft’s Tablet PC. Not quite there, cause I still want the keyboard, but pretty close. There’s nothing really aweinspiring about the technology; it’s just X Windows for Microsoft. Still pretty sexy.
There’s actually no reason Apple couldn’t do something like this for the Mac, although they’d need to provide remote display capabilities in Aqua. Still, why not? PDF might be a little heavyweight for transmission over WiFi, I suppose.
The real “digital hub” revolution comes when WiFi gets built into the television, DVD player, and so on. However, free-roaming lightweight devices that leave the computing power in various hubs are an important part of that. The DVR talks to the central processor, which runs the portable display, and so on. Gotta be small, gotta be light.
Thinking more on roaming devices, what might be useful is some sort of standard database discovery protocol. You want to be able to tell roaming devices in your vicinity what sort of information you’ve got, and allow them to do queries based on that. Perhaps you do need some intelligence in the device after all.
Would that intelligence be appropriate for home use? Sure; a lot of what you want to do/know with the DVD and the DVR and so on are lookups anyhow. You probably need a discovery process for procedures you can run, as well. The real trick is the higher level UI stuff, that knits it all together into a coherent whole.
“Borders Hub is offering the database Books in Store with the description ‘Books available in the store.’ Subscribe?” Tabs, maybe, to flip between databases. Some standard query interface stuff.
I’m not really a huge Bob Woodward fan, but Bush at War looks kind of interesting based on this piece. I can’t say I find Bush’s attitude to be inherently distasteful, but I am interested in his management style.
“I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
Woodward’s got an agenda, even if it’s only “I want to be the guy who reveals shocking things,” but still. Interesting stuff. It’s not often you get a good view into what a President is thinking, and for whatever reason, Bush seems to have opened up to Woodward.
Saturday was busy; Sunday was pleasantly quiet. Either way it wasn’t a talkative web weekend for me. I woke up at 4:45 AM on Saturday for some network maintenance at work, which went very well indeed; I went to bed around midnight, after the Ring of Honor show. Lotta video games in between. Sunday I just slept and caught up on movies and watched wrestling. You know how it is. (I feel a little like I should belch around here.)
Raiders beat the Patriots last night. The Pats managed to score 20 points with no offensive touchdowns. Tom Brady had best be using this year as a learning experience; he gets a free pass for a year for winning a Super Bowl but god help him if he doesn’t improve next year. The Bledsoe trade may wind up driving Belichick out of New England yet.
Greg Beato takes the time to analyze Glenn Reynolds’ readership claims. My. I’m going to have to visit his weblog more often; he does a better job of skewering Professor Reynolds than I do.
Speaking of which, a friend on LJ asked me why I read this stuff, referring to the rants of Mischa and others. My answer may be found there, but boils down to “I think it’s important that someone goes out and points out the inconsistencies, the hatred, and the poor logic. Criticisms must exist, and they must be discoverable.”
The subway gas scare in London may have been unjustified. London police are saying that there’s no evidence the three men arrested were planning on gassing the Tube, and they did not actually possess any gas. The terrorist materials for which they were arrested were false ID papers.
Winter has come to Boston. I am glad of the winter jacket I bought last week.
There’s been some discussion of a certain controversial painting of late. Interesting topic. James Lileks claims that a hypothetical “Self-Portrait of a Racial Cleanser” wouldn’t get the same treatment on campus. “The painting would be draped in a day.”
How quickly we forget. In 1998, Stephen Hunter trashed Tony Kaye’s American History X in the Washington Post. He called it “rank, repelling hypocrisy.” He accused it of allowing “its fantasy versions of American Nazis to spew their blackest, cruelest vomitus of hatred” while taking “energy and vitality (and ticket-selling notoriety) from the electricity of that hatred.”
These are the same objections Lileks levels at “Self Portrait of a Martyr.” He is simply wrong when he claims that his hypothetical skinhead painting would receive different treatment. We’ve seen that painting, and it drew the same sorts of objection. There’s no double standard here.
I got a cute spam this morning:
From: service@paypal-ebay.com
To: Durrell <durrell@innocence.com>
Subject: Notification of PayPal Limited Account AccessPayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we would like to restore your access as soon as possible.
For more information about the status of your account and for instructions on how to restore full use of your account, please log in using the link below:
http://www.paypal-ebay.com
And so on. Good grammar, smartly constructed. The domain paypal-ebay.com is owned by Justin Young, at 2780 Fairlane Avenue, Columbus OH, 68601. This is in no way similar to either Paypal or Ebay. Naughty little scammer.
There’s also a phone number. So I called it. I got Justin Young’s wife, who either doesn’t know what her husband did or who is a good liar. But she gave me his work number, so I’ll be calling over there later.
How stupid do you have to be to run a Paypal scam and leave your real contact info attached?
Pop quiz!
What’s the difference between attending a rally organized by some pretty unpleasant Communists who support Hussein (a hard core dictator) and supporting the dictatorial Putin?
Apparently, a week or so. You know, Putin cheated in his elections too. Just saying.
Another pop quiz!
What’s the difference between supporting Putin’s right to crush his rebels however he wants and supporting Iranian students threatening an uprising? Just a day, in that case.
Does Putin have more moral ground than Iraq or Iran? Oh, sure. I don’t actually think that the Chechen rebels are precisely as admirable (or despicable) as Iranian students protesting the Iranian regime. But please, let’s make our praise of Putin a little more sophisticated then “Our country, our dead, our solution.” Cause that line of reasoning applies to the dictators you don’t like, too.
I begin to think that “Anti-Idiotarian” is code for “low rent Rush Limbaugh.”
It never ever dies. Senator John Warner, the probable new Armed Services Committee chairman, wants to review the Posse Comitatus.
I’ve written about this before, elsewhere, but since LiveJournal has no search function I’m not gonna track it down. Suffice it to say that military training does not correspond to police training, and that there is no compelling reason to involve the military in law enforcement. “It would be nice” is not a compelling reason. Neither is “it might be handy.”