.: LarsonsWorld :.
just another persons waste of time
.: The Written Word Archive :.

23 June 2008
.: watercooler :.
Nice Guys Finish Last: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind? - Slate
Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but in the past few days I feel I've
been overwhelmed by a tsunami of commentary, all of which purports to
prove the fundamental nastiness of Barack Obama or, alternatively, the
deep unlikability of John McCain. You thought our presidential
candidates were nice guys, regular guys, guys who you'd like to sit down
and have a beer with? Guess what, lots of people are now telling me:
They aren't!
more ...
Nation's Spies: Climate Change Could Spark War - Wired
Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate
change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even
spark whole new conflicts. Now, the nation's spies are saying pretty
much the same thing.
more ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 6:50 PM MDT | Updated: 23 June 2008 7:21 PM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
| | Permalink

21 May 2008
.: losing perspective :.
We are
becoming a nation of narrow thinkers, thanks to the Internet,
newspapers, and schools.
by John C. Dvorak
These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web,
with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism, and the
rest of it. Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in
general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of
newspapers and magazines.
By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge. When you pick up
The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general
perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see
all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you
were merely surfing the Net for news.
Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a
reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is
doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are
more tuned in.
This is going away.
more ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 8:34 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

01 May 2008
.: the future of energy :.
Our New Energy Crisis - Mother Jones
Almost four years ago, when oil was trading at around $40 a barrel, Paul
Roberts wrote a story for Mother Jones on a bleak scenario gaining
currency among energy insiders, but not yet in the mainstream
consciousness: peak oil, basically the notion that the world's petroleum
resources are nearing exhaustion. If the theory held true, Roberts
warned, oil prices could soon leap to "perhaps as high as $100 per
barrel - a disaster if we don't have a cost-effective alternative fuel
or technology in place."
Welcome to the disaster: $100-a-barrel oil is in the rearview mirror,
and no cost-effective (or even cost-prohibitive) alternative has
emerged. The most dire consequences of this failing - hurricanes,
drought, extinction - are occurring far more rapidly than even Slideshow
Al could have predicted four years ago. And then there's the war.
It's easy enough to blame Dick Cheney, Big Oil, Detroit - all of whom
have done their part in obstructing progress. But their chicanery
distracts us from the far greater problem, one that, unfortunately,
comes down to Organic Chemistry 101. Every technological advance of the
last 150 years has been powered by a unique, extremely energy-dense, but
finite - and, as it turns out, planet-killing - source of fuel.
Switching away from fossil energy requires an economic and social
transformation at least as great as the Industrial Revolution. And we
have to build this new economy on the fumes of the old, hoping that we
don't run out of gas, or ice caps, before we get there. As Roberts
points out in this special issue on energy, if we sit on our hands or
let the process be hijacked by vested interests, "there may not be
enough crude left in the ground to fuel a second try."
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 6:39 AM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
| | Permalink

14 April 2008
.: self pity :.
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop
frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D. H. Lawrence
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 10:29 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

02 April 2008
.: is the bush administration ingoring the supreme court? :.
Ignoring
the Supreme Court - Washington Post
The Bush administration punts
on greenhouse emissions
The Bush administration never had any intention of doing what the
Supreme Court commanded it to do a year ago today: regulate greenhouse
gas emissions. We infer this because, even though President Bush ordered
his agencies last May to work together to meet the court's directive,
and even though the Environmental Protection Agency delivered to the
White House last December its finding that those pollutants endanger
public welfare, a prerequisite for regulation, EPA Administrator Stephen
L. Johnson announced last week a plan to seek public input starting in
the spring on how best to limit the emissions. Translation: punt to the
next administration. This giant step backward is the starkest example
yet of the chasm between the words and deeds of Mr. Bush on climate
change.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 8:28 PM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
| | Permalink

16 March 2008
.: watercooler :.
FCC living in the dark ages; a threat to net neutrality aims - Ars Technica
The Government and Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that the
Federal Communications Commission does nothing with about four out of
every five consumer complaints that it puts into a database and
investigates. Even worse, the GAO could not discern from its survey of
the FCC's complaint process why the FCC takes no enforcement action with
83 percent of the complaints it looked into from 2003 through 2006.
"Without key management tools, FCC may have difficulty assuring Congress
and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission," the
GAO report warns. That's putting it mildly. If the FCC does set up some
serious net neutrality guidelines for ISPs like Comcast, how can P2P
application users and other consumers know that the agency will take
their comments seriously?
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 2:44 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

18 February 2008
.: the invasion of america :.
The
invasion of America: Creeping intrusions against our privacy rights are
an assault on the Constitution.
By Andrew P. Napolitano
When President Nixon was in his pre-Watergate heyday, he ordered the FBI
and the CIA to electronically monitor the private behavior of his
domestic political adversaries. Shortly after Nixon resigned,
investigators discovered hundreds of reports of break-ins and secret
electronic surveillance. None of it was authorized by warrants, and thus
all of it was illegal. But it had been conducted pursuant to the
president's orders. Nixon's defense was, "When the president does it,
that means that it is not illegal."
He made that infamous statement in a TV interview years after he left
office, but the attitude espoused was obviously one he embraced while in
the White House. He, like his present-day successor, rejected the truism
that the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the
government from conducting electronic surveillance of anyone without a
search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of a crime,
restrains the president.
In response to the abuses during the Nixon administration, Congress
enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 1978. The
law provides that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the
government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than
in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the
U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.
Read on ...
Andrew P. Napolitano, a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is "A Nation of Sheep."
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 9:53 PM MST
Tags: Civil Liberties The Written Word
| | Permalink

29 January 2008
.: watercooler :.
Let's do away with the legislative fiction of the terrorist alarm clock. - Slate
The cliche holds that we are always fighting the last war. I disagree.
For the last seven years, congressional Democrats have been fighting the
next one: the war perennially set to erupt if they don't deliver
whatever the president asks of them immediately. Time and again, they've
been rendered so terrified by White House threats about imminent
terrorist attacks that they have caved on issues ranging from detainee
rights to secret surveillance to torture. And every time they've caved,
it's under the threat that if they withhold from the president extra
powers (ones that he's often already seized in secret), terrorists will
mass against us instantaneously, and they will be blamed.
A political speech the West needs to hear - High Country News
"One of our most urgent projects is to develop a national energy policy.
The United States is the only major industrial country without a
comprehensive, long-range energy policy. Our program will emphasize
conservation ... solar energy and other renewable energy sources. ... We
must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no
way we can solve it quickly. But if we all cooperate and make modest
sacrifices ... we can find ways to adjust." - Imagine those words spoken
by the next president shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, 2009,
continuing a theme originally established on the campaign trail.
In What City Did You Honeymoon? And other monstrously stupid bank security questions. - Slate
Verizon wants to know my favorite ice cream flavor, Google's got designs
on my library card number, and Wachovia needs my favorite all-time
entertainer. Yahoo! is asking where I met my spouse, and Bank of America
wants the details of the honeymoon. Like those squiggly pictures of
letters and numbers, weird personal questions have become ubiquitous
totems of online security. If you tell the bank your favorite
grade-school teacher or cartoon character, the thinking goes, it'll be
easy to confirm your identify when you misplace your account number.
This thinking is dumb.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 5:22 PM MST | Updated: 29 January 2008 5:42 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

24 January 2008
.: yo, richie rich :.
Dear Rich People ... All you
wealthy Americans, stop complaining and save the economy!
By
Daniel Gross
To: The Filthy Rich
CC: The Stinking Rich; the Pretty-Darned Rich
From:
America
Look, you've had a pretty good deal these past few years. We gave you
everything you wanted. Massive reductions in the top income-tax rates?
Happy to oblige. Cuts on dividends and capital gains taxes, which
overwhelmingly benefit you? No problem. Going after the estate
tax—excuse me, the death tax? You got it. We've even agreed to overlook
the fact that you private-equity and hedge-fund managers pay only a 15
percent tax rate.
Because we like you, we've pretended not to notice your gauche taste and
rude manners. (You know you're benefiting from the greatest
concentration of wealth since the 1920s, right? The share of national
income taken down by the wealthiest 1 percent rose from 14.6 percent in
2003 to 17.4 percent in 2005, according to Emmanuel Saez of the
University of California-Berkeley.) We have sat patiently on JetBlue and
Southwest as your private jets clog runways. We continue to bust our
butts, defend the borders, and uphold the rule of law in order to
protect your fortunes and property.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 7:17 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

22 January 2008
.: watercooler :.
A Berlitz guide to Washington English - The Atlantic
Just as modern French-speakers who travel to Quebec often find the
dialect of French Canadians to be archaic and quaint, English-speakers
who visit Washington, D.C., are frequently bemused by the language
spoken there. Though the Potomac dialect shares the alphabet and grammar
of English, it has a vocabulary all its own.:
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 12:13 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

09 January 2008
.: tomgram: if the gwot were gone ... :.
The
$100 Barrel of Oil vs. the Global War on Terror
The Bush Legacy
(Take Two)
By Tom Engelhardt
Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC
News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of
oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5%, the stock market had the
worst three-day start since the Great Depression, and the word
"recession" was in the headlines and in the air. So when ABC debate
moderator Charlie Gibson announced that the first fifteen-minute segment
would be taken up with "what is generally agreed to be... the greatest
threat to the United States today," what did you expect?
As it happened, he was referring to "nuclear terrorism," specifically "a
nuclear attack on an American city" by al-Qaeda (as well as how the
future president would "retaliate"). In other words, Gibson launched his
version of a national debate by focusing on a fictional, futuristic
scenario, at this point farfetched, in which a Pakistani loose nuke
would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, be transported to the United
States, perhaps picked up by well-trained al-Qaedan minions off the
docks of Newark, and set off in the Big Apple. In this, though he was
surely channeling Rudy Giuliani, he managed to catch the essence of what
may be George W. Bush's major legacy to this country.
The Planet as a GWOT Free-Fire Zone
On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation,
George W. Bush was already using the phrase, "the war on terror." On
September 13th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced
that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out
those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about
"removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states
who sponsor terrorism." We were, Bush told Americans that day, in a
state of "war"; in fact, we were already in "the first war of the
twenty-first century."
That same day, R.W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times reported that
senior officials had "cast aside diplomatic niceties" and that "the Bush
administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand
with us against terrorism... or face the certain prospect of death and
destruction." Stand with us against terrorism (or else) -- that would be
the measure by which everything was assessed in the years to come. That
very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the U.S. would
"rip [the bin Laden] network up" and "when we're through with that
network, we will continue with a global assault on terrorism."
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 10:18 AM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

02 January 2008
.: watercooler :.
A sled, a cow, the future - Mountain Gazette
Few people may believe that at age 57, I recently T-boned, so to speak,
a pregnant, 1,000-pound cow while riding my Flexible Flyer sled down the
steepest county road in western Montana. To rural sledders, this is
plausible, but perhaps not to adults of my generation. The mean age for
the 55,000 sledders injured badly enough last winter to need an ER visit
is 9.9, a dismal statistic that reveals a paucity of Baby Boomers still
willing to have fun hurtling down mountains with a minimum of control.
Sledding down icy back roads is a pure and noble calling that offers
countless opportunities for high-speed rides on metal-runners that are
only somewhat steerable. Obstacles to doing so abound, from so-called
common sense, to cows, like the one I collided with.
Foolproof Online Dating Tips for Desperate Guys - Wired
There are a lot of guys out there on the internet who desperately want
to find a woman to share their life with, and who don't want to have to
go outside to do it. If you're one of them, you may find yourself
wondering why the women you meet in chat rooms, discussion groups and
online games have so far failed to love you.
California Sues EPA; Says State Law Greener, Cleaner Than Feds - Wired
California today sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency today
for preventing the state from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its
cars.
Big Brother gets bigger, says global privacy study - C|Net
According to a new international privacy report, governments around the
world are increasingly invading the privacy of citizens with
surveillance, identification systems, and archiving of private data.
US Near Bottom of Global Privacy Index - AP/Wired
Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments
continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures,
according to an international rights group.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 3:12 PM MST | Updated: 02 January 2008 4:25 PM MST
Tags: Civil Liberties Environment News The Written Word
| | Permalink
.: how we ended up on the dark side :.
Journey to the Dark Side: The Bush Legacy (Take One) - TomDispatch
If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are
worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Osk Arnardottir
Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for
Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue
of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends,
first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas
spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it,
"look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an
earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by
three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the
following year without incident.
This time - with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing -
she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned
about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as
she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep...
without food and drink and... confined to a place without anyone knowing
my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I
have ever been subjected."
By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude
questions - "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with
megalomania" - confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched
through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for
another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being
prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24
hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her
tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it,
"because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 10:53 AM MST
Tags: Civil Liberties The Written Word
| | Permalink

31 December 2007
.: watercooler :.
50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2008 - U.S. News and World Report
Flame Wars: Why We Can't Resist Hot Blogger-on-Blogger Action - LinuxInsider
You can't help but think that Thomas Jefferson himself would be pleased
to know that out there in the awesome equalizing social force that is
the Internet, people armed with the power of free-flowing ideas are busy
pummeling the crap out of each other. More than that, they're doing it
in public, with an often-participatory audience. Blog fights are verbal
steel-cage smackdowns with a revolving door.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 2:02 PM MST | Updated: 31 December 2007 2:11 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink
.: on 2007 :.
Ten Best Technologies and Trends of 2007 - Extremetech.com
Ten Worst Technologies and Trends of 2007 - Extremetech.com
Five desktop Linux highlights of 2007 - DesktopLinux.com
2007: The Miserable Year in Review - John C. Dvorak
The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 - Wired
THREAT LEVEL's Year in Review - 2007 - Wired
The Year in Oversight:The yeas and nays of Congress' efforts to gavel the Bush administration into order in 2007 - MotherJones
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 1:56 PM MST | Updated: 02 January 2008 10:15 AM MST
Tags: Computing Ect... Linux News The Written Word
| | Permalink

23 December 2007
.: vista returns and compusa :.
Interesting comment from CompUSA - Very Grumpy Rabbit
I don't know if you've heard or not, but CompUSA is going out of
business. ...
... I asked one of the employees off the record if he could comment at
all on the impact of Vista sales on the end of CompUSA's business,
expecting no comment. Afterall, most such retail chains don't want local
employees speaking out for the company.
That... isn't what I got. With a glaring look he responded I'd be better
off asking about the returns. Returns? Well, the employee asked me to
follow him to the back, and he pulled out a cardboard box opening it up
to reveal it was packed full of copies of Vista.
Returns.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 10:37 AM MST
Tags: Computing News The Written Word
| | Permalink

16 December 2007
.: perspecitves :.
Fabric of America
is Fraying
By David Wann
By certain measurements, the U.S. economy has been quite successful in
the last several decades, but the fundamental question remains:
Successfully what?
We may lead the world in categories like gross domestic product, average
house size, and ownership of color TVs, but we also "lead" the
industrial nations in debt per capita, the child poverty rate, overall
poverty rate, ratio of people in prison, rate of traffic fatalities,
murder rate, carbon dioxide emissions per capita, and the per capita
consumption of energy and water.
These are hardly distinctions we can be proud of. Clearly, we're not
taking care of what really matters.
On the upside, increased awareness of where we stand can guide a
reordering of national and local priorities, resulting in a healthier
and more satisfying American lifestyle ...
The
New Entitlement
By George F. Will
She who would be president excoriates, as Democratic presidential
candidates must, the current president and almost all his works. But she
and he largely agree regarding the subprime mortgage problem. Granted,
she greeted his response to it with the cri de coeur without which
Democrats would be speechless: "More!" She upped his ante by proposing a
moratorium, for 90 days, on foreclosures. But the crux of her proposal
is the crux of his -- a selective five-year freeze on the rates of
subprime adjustable-rate mortgages ...
A
Gates-Style Thaw
By Jim Hoagland
"We are going to do something terrible to you," one Kremlin insider
frequently told Americans in the 1980s as the Soviet Union was crumbling
before the unbelieving eyes of U.S. intelligence. "We are going to
deprive you of an enemy."
He turned out to be more prophetic than he realized. Today -- to my
slack-jawed astonishment -- a senior U.S. official is pursuing a similar
approach toward a newly hostile Kremlin by making subtle overtures on
ballistic missile defense and other contentious security issues and then
wooing world opinion.
Big deal. Diplomats get paid to do that, right? But this is the
astonishing part. The official is Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The
same Robert Gates who under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush helped
shape hard-line intelligence judgments -- which he later admitted were
behind the curve -- and cultivated an image as a leading CIA hawk in the
Washington political aviary.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 8:08 AM MST | Updated: 16 December 2007 12:54 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

09 December 2007
.: perspective :.
No hope now - San Francisco Chronicle Editorial
President Bush announced his HOPE NOW program to ease the nation's
mortgage crisis last Thursday. The plan is neither "hope" nor "now," nor
will it ease the nation's mortgage crisis.
It's baffling why an administration that believes in the free market as
much as this one does would attempt to intrude on an inevitable economic
correction. There are two possibilities, both of them desperate: 1) 2008
is coming up, and both parties need to look like they're doing something
for Americans who are losing their homes, and 2) The administration is
panicked about what might happen should those who invested in mortgage
debt start calling off their deals with the banks that sold them.
Desperation rarely leads to good policy. (To be fair, the Democratic
counters to the Bush plan are equally irresponsible.) Regarding the two
scenarios, the problems of the second are dealt with at length in the
article on the front page of this section. As for the first, the main
problem is that while politicians may gain a few points for "helping"
struggling home buyers stay in houses they can't afford, their bailout
policies aren't helping either home buyers - past, current, or future -
or the economy.
Read On ...
~
The
Spies Strike Back - Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
The Fourth of July came on Dec. 3 this year for the U.S. intelligence
community.
The nation's espionage agencies delivered their own declaration of
independence from the war aims and rhetoric of President Bush and Vice
President Cheney in a National Intelligence Estimate that was ostensibly
about Iran's nuclear program.
But the CIA, DIA and 14 other agencies grouped under the director of
national intelligence also delivered a riveting if implicit X-ray of the
changing nature of leadership in Washington, where the White House's
once-commanding authority over government has been smashed but not
replaced by any other power center.
The Bush-Cheney obsession with restoring presidential authority has
provoked new challenges to powers the White House can legitimately
claim. It is as if this administration has developed its own political
version of Jimmy Carter's aborted project for a neutron bomb, which was
intended to destroy people while sparing buildings. Bush consistently
manages to destroy or damage goals he proclaims and friends who support
him, while foes escapes harm.
Read on ...
~
The United States
of debt - Christine Tatum
The Denver Post
As the nation's comptroller general, David M. Walker is essentially
licensed to be one of the world's most boring people.
But then he opens his mouth, and it becomes clear that the country's top
auditor is ready to bust some chops and to say things a whole lot of
people don't want to hear.
The federal budget is crumbling, he says. The nation continues to borrow
at an alarming rate and to saddle today's toddlers with exorbitant debt
they may not ever be able to repay. The country can't afford the
Medicare and Social Security benefits it has promised.
And politicians seemingly refuse to level with Americans about how much
financial trouble the country faces if it sticks with the status quo
much longer.
Read On ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 8:06 AM MST | Updated: 09 December 2007 8:51 AM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

02 December 2007
.: perspectives :.
Cult
Watch 2007: Who's Drinking the Kool-Aid?
Mike Elgan
As we wind down another year in technology, it's a good time to check in
on the cults and see how they’re doing.
For companies who inspire them, user cults are nice because they
motivate customers to overlook strategic blunders, exaggerate product
successes and -- most importantly -- walk the earth “virally” marketing
products without pay.
Cult members themselves get an enhanced feeling of self-worth through
group association. "I'm better than you! I have an iPhone!" Consumers
can become one of the "chosen people" for $399, plus a two-year contract.
Let's have a look at the major tech cults, and see how they're doing.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 6:28 AM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

22 November 2007
.: never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment :.
Going
Green? Easy Doesn't Do It
By Michael Maniates - Washington Post
Thanksgiving nicely focuses our attention on things of lasting
importance: family, friends, community, a rich harvest. None of these
blessings come without cost or sacrifice. Today, then, we might consider
what we must give of ourselves to preserve such abundance in the face of
increasing climatic instability.
One needn't ponder this question in a vacuum. Several best-sellers offer
advice about what we must ask of ourselves and one another. Their titles
suggest that we needn't break much of a sweat: "It's Easy Being Green,"
"The Lazy Environmentalist," or even "The Green Book: The Everyday Guide
to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time."
Although each offers familiar advice ("reuse scrap paper before
recycling" or "take shorter showers"), it's what's left unsaid by these
books that's intriguing. Three assertions permeate the pages: (1) We
should look for easy, cost-effective things to do in our private lives
as consumers, since that's where we have the most power and control;
these are the best things to do because (2) if we all do them the
cumulative effect of these individual choices will be a safe planet;
which is fortunate indeed because (3) we, by nature, aren't terribly
interested in doing anything that isn't private, individualistic,
cost-effective and, above all, easy.
This glorification of easy isn't limited to the newest environmental
self-help books. The Web sites of the big U.S. environmental groups, the
Environmental Protection Agency and even the American Association for
the Advancement of Science offer markedly similar lists of actions that
tell us we can change the world through our consumer choices, choices
that are economic, simple, even stylish. Al Gore himself isn't immune.
His recent Live Earth concert featured a who's-who lineup of celebrities
who said that if we all do our little bit to recycle and conserve -- the
simple things, mind you, because that's all we'll need (translation:
that's all they think we'll go for) -- we can together rescue the world
for our children and grandchildren.
Read on ...
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail ...
David Horsey - 21 November 2007
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 6:58 AM MST | Updated: 22 November 2007 7:04 AM MST
Tags: Editorial Cartoons - David Horsey Environment The Written Word
| | Permalink

20 November 2007
.: bon hiver :.
Beautiful Snow by J.W. Watson
Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below,
Over
the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of people you meet.
Dancing,
flirting, skimming along,
Beautiful snow! It can do no wrong;
lying to kiss a fair lady’s cheek,
Clinging
to lips in frolicksome freak;
Beautiful snow from heaven above,
Pure
as an angel, gentle as love!
Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow,
How the flakes gather and laugh as
they go
Whirling about in maddening fun:
Chasing, laughing,
hurrying by,
It lights on the face and it sparkles the eye;
And the dogs with a
bark and a bound
Snap at the crystals as they eddy around;
The
town is alive, and its heart is aglow,
To welcome the coming of
beautiful snow!
Read the complete poem and more info here.
I originally hear this poem quoted by Chris Stevens on Northern Exposure.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 9:44 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

11 November 2007
.: perspectives :.
The Coup
at Home
Frank Rich - November 11, 2007
As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights
activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its
own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats
from America's two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up
to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.
So what if America's chief law enforcement official won't say that
waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency.
You're either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next
ticking bomb, or you're with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were
cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf's
crackdown in Islamabad.
In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally
condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the
epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that's not
exactly news. It's been apparent for years that America was suicidal to
go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass
destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where
terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con
man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.
General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still
does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White
House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr.
Bush's "freedom agenda" and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country
harboring terrorists will be "regarded by the United States as a hostile
regime."
Read on ...
~
Curveball,
Swing and A Miss
George F. Will - November 11, 2007
In late 2002, two strong-willed CIA officers, identified only as Beth
and Margaret, were at daggers drawn. They had diametrically opposing
views about the veracity of an Iraqi defector's reports concerning
Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programs, especially the notorious
but never-seen mobile weapons labs.
"Look," said Beth defiantly, "we can validate a lot of what this guy
says." Margaret, angry and incredulous: "Where did you validate it?"
Beth: "On the Internet." Margaret: "Exactly, it's on the Internet.
That's where he got it, too!"
Margaret was right in that episode, recounted in the new book
"Curveball" by Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times. Curveball was the
code name of the Iraqi defector in Germany on whose reports the Bush
administration relied heavily in its argument that Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction justified a preventive war.
In 1999, Curveball defected to Germany, which has a significant portion
of the Iraqi diaspora. Seeking the good life -- a prestigious job, a
Mercedes -- he jumped to the head of the line of asylum-seekers and got
the attention of Germany's intelligence agency with the word
"Biowaffen," or germ weapons. He claimed to have been deeply involved in
Hussein's sophisticated and deadly science, particularly those notorious
mobile labs. Notorious and, we now know, nonexistent.
Read on ...
~
Off
Target in the War on Cancer
Devra Davis - November 4, 2007
We've been fighting the war on cancer for almost four decades now, since
President Richard M. Nixon officially launched it in 1971. It's time to
admit that our efforts have often targeted the wrong enemies and used
the wrong weapons.
Throughout the industrial world, the war on cancer remains focused on
commercially fueled efforts to develop drugs and technologies that can
find and treat the disease -- to the tune of more than $100 billion a
year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, the struggle basically
ignores most of the things known to cause cancer, such as tobacco,
radiation, sunlight, benzene, asbestos, solvents, and some drugs and
hormones. Even now, modern cancer-causing agents such as gasoline
exhaust, pesticides and other air pollutants are simply deemed the
inevitable price of progress.
They're not. Scientists understand that most cancer is not born but
made. Although identical twins start life with amazingly similar genetic
material, as adults they do not develop the same cancers. As with most
of us, where they live and work and the habits that they develop do more
to determine their health than their genes do. Americans in their 20s
today carry around in their bodies levels of some chemicals that can
impair their ability to produce healthy children -- and increase the
chances that those children will develop cancer.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 12:16 PM MST | Updated: 11 November 2007 7:05 PM MST
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

29 October 2007
.: one hitchhiker's oral history :.
The Last Ride - High Country News
I don't even remember my first ride. When I was a young teenager,
growing up in southern Oregon, my dad and I used to hitchhike back to
our car after we’d boated down the Klamath, or the Rogue, or the Umpqua.
Hitchhiking wasn’t a very large part of my life until I graduated from
college, and became an idealist.
I decided to try to go places, go long distances. I liked the
environmental aspect of hitchhiking, that it used less gas, and I liked
that it was cheap. It also felt like a grand adventure, like a cool
thing to do.
So I took a lot of trips. I went from Arizona to Montana to Colorado and
back to Arizona, and I went from Colorado to Oregon and back to
Colorado. I hitchhiked around Germany, France, Luxembourg and Holland.
I've probably gotten four or five hundred rides in the last 20 years. I
think I did get better at hitchhiking as the years went by. But I also
kept thinking I was finding the trick of it, and all of a sudden I would
be standing on the highway for six hours with nobody picking me up,
thinking I wasn't so smart after all.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 2:13 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

24 October 2007
.: wtf ?!? :.
I Was Wrong: Microsoft Won - open dot dot dot
I could feel it in my bones: the great victory of the EU over MS is a
sham. Here's why.
Ex-steely Neelie - to be renamed wheeler-dealer
Neelie - said as follows:
I told Microsoft that it should give
legal security to programmers who help to develop open source software
and confine its patent disputes to commercial software distributors and
end users. Microsoft will now pledge to do so.
And naively, I
thought that meant what it said. Silly me. Reference to the rather
low-profile EU FAQ clarifies:
Can open source software
developers implement patented interoperability information?
Open
source software developers use various “open source” licences to
distribute their software. Some of these licences are incompatible with
the patent licence offered by Microsoft. It is up to the commercial open
source distributors to ensure that their software products do not
infringe upon Microsoft’s patents. If they consider that one or more of
Microsoft’s patents would apply to their software product, they can
either design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a
patent licence from Microsoft.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 5:54 PM MDT
Tags: Computing Linux The Written Word
| | Permalink

23 October 2007
.: the battle over privacy rights in communications :.
What's at Stake in the Surveillance Debate in Congress - Wired Commentary
Over the next few weeks and months, civil libertarians and consumer
advocates will wage a battle against the telecommunications companies
and the Bush administration to preserve some semblance of privacy rights
in Americans' communications.
Congress will be considering several versions of bills that will, one
way or another, expand government access to phone calls and e-mails.
These legislative proposals are complex and in flux, but there are two
main issues at the center of the debate that citizens can focus on. One
is whether eavesdropping on millions of Americans simultaneously is
acceptable. The second is whether communications companies should get a
free pass for breaking the law by allowing illegal warrantless
surveillance of all Americans' communications.
In the 1960s and '70s, several Supreme Court cases held that citizens
can reasonably expect that the government will not eavesdrop on their
personal communications without first demonstrating to a court the need
for this privacy invasion. Congress passed the Wiretap Act of 1968 to
regulate eavesdropping for law enforcement purposes, and added the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to establish
procedures for the president to follow when conducting surveillance for
national-security purposes. FISA established a "secret court" -- the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC -- to review
applications for national-security warrants. These could be obtained
merely by showing that the target was an agent of a foreign power.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 6:18 PM MDT
Tags: Civil Liberties The Written Word
| | Permalink

16 October 2007
.: outside 30th anniversary special: shambhala :.
The Kingdom of the Lotus - Patrick Symmes
A not-always-mythic
journey to Shambhala, over sky-high mountains and across vicious
deserts, requiring boldness of heart, purity of vision, the recitation
of 99 million mantras, and $45 worth of Snickers bars, party balloons,
Diamox, and dehydrated soup.
I'm not telling you where it is. But in order to reach Shambhala, you
need a mixture of merit and dumb luck, and at first the dumb part seemed
to be working. When I wrestled my luggage, packed with clothes for three
climates and obscure tracts from four religions, onto the night train
out of New Delhi, there was something auspicious in my bunk assignment.
It was a sleeping carriage, the start of a run east. Tomorrow I would
cross the border to Nepal on foot. Then on to Kathmandu. Then Lhasa.
Then over Tibet and onward, sometimes west and always north, to places
unknown. Tonight the train was jostling, hot, full of brilliant Indian
colors and smells, the famous synesthesia of the subcontinent, too much
of everything. The cabin had four bunks. The pair on the right were
occupied by a Brahmin couple, having their feet kissed in farewell by
their adult children. And on the bunk below mine, what had to be perfect
luck: a Buddhist monk, his elegant robes dark mustard, his disposition
affable.
One is enjoined to seek, on the road to the hidden kingdom, the blessing
and advice of wise monks, and around midnight, after rubbing menthol all
over himself, this learned man listened to my plan. I was setting out on
the ancient pilgrimage route to Shambhala, I told him, to seek the king
and paradise here on earth. I was afraid, I said. Did he have any
advice? No. Any teaching? No. Any blessing? No. Shambhala was "lama
nonsense," he said. A Thai, he didn't believe in the stories, carefully
curated over the centuries by Tibetan Buddhists, that Shambhala was a
real place, a city that could be found. Shambhala, the monk told me, was
a destination for an inner journey. I should meditate more, he
suggested, and travel less.
"Don't go," he said, and went to sleep.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 6:23 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

10 October 2007
.: 1 in 4 mammals, 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 3 amphibians, ... are at risk of extinction :.
Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth's Vanishing Biodiversity - Julia Whitty MotherJones
It is a fact widely accepted by biologists but little known by the
population at large. By the end of the century, half of all species on
Earth may be extinct due to global warming and other causes. Who will
survive the world's dwindling biodiversity, and why?
We awake in our tents in the moonlight to what sounds like a dance
troupe in wooden clogs practicing on rock under stunted juniper trees.
It's a half-dozen Carmen mountain white-tailed deer, scraping at the
ground with bootlike hooves, bending gracile necks to chew on wet soil
and lick it dry. They're harvesting the minerals and moisture from our
urine soaked into the parched earth of the high desert, the herd toiling
through the night and into the morning in a pursuit tenacious enough to
enlighten us to the wastefulness of our own bodies. Clearly, the three
of us have squandered most of what we drank hiking to 7,400 feet on the
south rim of Texas' Chisos Mountains. From the deer's point of view, our
arrival here is the next best thing to rain.
Come morning, we pack camp and loiter on the precipice, staring across
wracked ranges and sunburnt country to the Rio Grande thousands of feet
below, and to the even higher country of Mexico's Sierra Madre. Here, in
Big Bend National Park, one of America's truly wild places, there's
barely a sign of human impact, and not a sound of it—not planes, cars,
or human voices. The silence is so thick that our ears feel congested,
and we jump when the quiet is pierced by the whistle of a peregrine
falcon on its glide path through thin air.
We spend a couple of hours here with binoculars, map, and compass,
scanning 100-mile visibility, scrutinizing the area below the rim and
trying to find a trail we might travel another day. Although we don't
know it, we're peering down into the place where a lost hiker is
desperately trying to find the same trail and a freshwater spring midway
along it. At this point he has been without water for three days. We
don't see him stumbling through cholla and nopales cactus and writing
farewell notes to loved ones—though he is likely staring up at the
mirage of us silhouetted against the sky.
Ironically, this corner of the Chihuahuan Desert is lush at the moment,
watered by rains two months ago that are still working their way through
soils and roots and cells, so that many plants are blooming and an
explosion of butterflies jams the breezes. The cacti are swollen with
hoarded water. The Chisos oaks are dropping so many acorns that park
rangers have closed trails where black bears are fattening on them.
Countless millions of walking-stick insects are coupled in such dense
mating congregations in the canopies of mesquites that entire trees
appear to be walking through the sky. Everything is haloed in the golds,
yellows, and greens of desert grasses, some taller than us, all bowed
under heavy seed heads destined to feed and water kangaroo rats.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 3:19 PM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
| | Permalink

09 October 2007
.: copyright wrongs :.
Colleges shouldn't have to police illegal downloading - Rocky Mountain News Editorial
Congress is in the process of renewing the Higher Education Act of 1965,
the federal law that established a major role for Washington in
providing aid to low- and middle-income college students.
As with most legislation that has large sums of taxpayer funding
attached, lawmakers are finding the temptation to lard it up with
regulations impossible to resist.
Beltway-based micromanagement of colleges and universities is rarely
wise, but it's really offensive when the hammer of federal law is
wielded at the behest of a narrow interest group.
In this case, the powerful interest is the entertainment industry, which
wants to sic U.S. Department of Education officials on schools where
students use campus Internet networks to illegally download music and
video files.
It's odd that Congress would entangle the Education Department in an
otherwise unrelated law-enforcement issue; that's usually the bailiwick
of the Justice Department.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 3:18 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

07 October 2007
.: edgar allen poe dies 1849 :.
Edgar Allen Poe dies on this date in 1849, four days after being found in a Baltimore gutter.
(He) was an American poet, short story writer, editor, literary critic,
and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for
his tales of mystery and of the macabre, Poe was one of the early
American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective
fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the
emergent science fiction genre.
- Wikipedia
The Raven
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over
many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore --
While I nodded,
nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently
rapping, rapping at my chamber door --
"'Tis some visiter," I
muttered, "tapping at my chamber door --
Only this
and nothing more."
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each
separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I
wished the morrow; -- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books
surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and
radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Nameless
here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So
that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis
some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door --
Some late
visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; --
This it
is and nothing more."
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir,"
said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the
fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly
you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure
I heard you " -- here I opened wide the door; ----
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the
silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only
word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I
whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" --
Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon
again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said
I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see,
then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore --
Let my heart be
still a moment and this mystery explore;--
'Tis the wind
and nothing more!"
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the
least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with
mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door --
Perched upon a
bust of Pallas just above my chamber door --
Perched, and
sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the
grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest
be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore --
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore;
For we
cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed
with seeing bird above his chamber door --
Bird or beast upon the
sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as
"Nevermore."
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one
word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further
then he uttered -- not a feather then he fluttered --
Till I scarcely
more than muttered "Other friends have flown before --
On the
morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said "Nevermore."
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and
followed faster till his songs one burden bore --
Till the dirges of
his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never --
nevermore'."
But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
Straight I
wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then,
upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy,
thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
What this grim, ungainly,
ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking
"Nevermore."
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the
fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more
I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's
velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet
violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath
sent thee
Respite -- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of
Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost
Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird or devil! --
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate
yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted --
On this home by
Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore --
Is there -- is there
balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil -- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore --
Tell
this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall
clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare
and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."
"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked,
upstarting --
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's
Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul
hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my
door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my
door!"
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have
all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light
o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from
out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be
lifted -- nevermore!
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 4:03 PM MDT | Updated: 07 October 2007 4:14 PM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

03 October 2007
.: plastics: how bad are they? :.
Practical Values: Hard to Break - MotherJones
As the scary studies about plastic's health effects pile up, should we
kick the habit?
My moment of plastic panic came a few months ago. As a science writer,
I've spent the past several years following the steady stream of
research into the disturbing effects of the chemicals that leach into
our bodies from everyday plastic objects. I'd managed to stay pretty
calm about these unsettling discoveries, but then I went to yet another
presentation where renowned scientists described new, peer-reviewed
findings on how plastic's ingredients may cause reproductive
abnormalities and obesity. Afterward, I huddled with the other
journalists present, brimming with uneasy questions: Does this mean we
should ditch our refillable plastic water bottles? Is it safe for our
kids to chew on plastic toys? Should we try to go completely plastic
free?
It's one thing to use cloth shopping bags in the name of ecofriendliness
or to forswear plastic cutlery in the pursuit of style; it's another to
eschew plastics because they might be a health risk. But are you about
to give up your computer or cell phone? What about your bike helmet or
your child's car seat? Your contact lenses? Your toothbrush? Probably
not.
Then what to do about the alarming fact that plastic's chemical
constituents are percolating throughout our bodies, apparently
interfering with our metabolism, our sex organs, and our children's
neurological and reproductive development? The Centers for Disease
Control has found two compounds—phthalates, used in polyvinyl chloride
(pvc) plastic, and bisphenol A, a building block of polycarbonate
plastics—in the urine of a majority of Americans tested. Both chemicals
are short-lived once they enter the environment, but they're being
scrutinized for their potential to mimic and disrupt our hormones—even
before we're born.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 1:05 PM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
| | Permalink

26 September 2007
.: compromising google search results :.
Sabotaging Google - John C. Dvorak
A reader, Courtney Cox (no relation to the actress), recently pointed
out to me that the top results of recent complex Google searches turned
out to be inane Chinese sites that were not even parking sites, just an
assortment of keywords that somehow got indexed and brought to the top
of the results list. After seeing a few of these sites, I have to wonder
what's going on. Is it sabotage?
Let's start by showing you a typical site:
http://vmk.wtoxd.cn/xmijotb.html (there's some annoying Active X here.
So visit at your own risk). This site was the top result listed when the
search term "reset mp3 player m240d" was entered. And here are the full
search results, in which nine of the top ten results are these weird
Chinese sites.
Courtney sent me numerous examples of this phenomenon, and it's obvious
that the more specific and detailed the search request, the more likely
Google is to list these Chinese sites. The issue has apparently been
reported to Google, but if the basic algorithms allow this sort of
result, even banning the specific sites will not stop this sort of abuse.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 9:31 AM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

18 September 2007
.: of ethics and anarchy in the new media world :.
The Road from Media Ethics to Information Anarchy - John C. Dvorak
The definition of "media" has undergone some major changes over the past
few years. Many of the changes—and confusion—can be attributed to the
immediate nature of information, thanks to new media and the arrival of
bloggers and vloggers.
Is a blogger a journalist? The answer is evolving to "Yes, if he/she
wants to be." The fact is that in this country, anyone can be a
journalist, as there is largely a protected right to a free press. And a
free press does not mean that you have to be owned by the Times-Mirror,
or anyone else for that matter.
Newsletter writers are journalists just as much as New York Times
reporters are (albeit without the NYT structure and all of its ethical
and other rules). The subject of ethics always enters the "journalist"
debate because it gets attention. What we consider ethical journalistic
behavior, for the most part, is dictated by the corporate policies
designed for specific news organizations. The big news organizations
usually preach that their ethical standards are the best and that
everyone should use them. This is a form of marketing and nothing more.
Unfortunately, it's a trick that tends to confuse the small fries who
often no longer define themselves as "true" media.
Old media ethics bugaboo. Much of what is deemed ethical by The New York
Times is simply impractical for a low-budget online publication. Here's
the example I often use to prove this point: A small-time publication is
given the opportunity to cover an event in a faraway place, and the
sponsoring corporation offers to pay for the trip. The Times would
insist on picking up the tab itself. But the small-timer may not have
the budget to do so. If it doesn't accept the sponsor's offer, it
doesn't get the story, and the Times does. How is that fair to the
readers? In fact, if the small-time publication adopts the same ethical
code as the Times, it loses out. It's as if the small-timer was tricked
into submission.
Read on ...
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 9:47 AM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
| | Permalink

15 August 2007
.: the problem of drm - "trusted computing" :.
DRM, Vista and Your Rights - polishlinux.org
In the US, France and a few other countries it is already forbidden
to play legally purchased music or videos using GNU/Linux media players
. Sounds like sci-fi? Unfortunately not. And it won’t end up on multimedia
only. Welcome to the the new era of DRM!
In this article I would like to explain the problem of Digital Rights
(or restrictions) Management, especially in the version promoted by
Microsoft with the new Windows Vista release. Not everyone is familiar
with the dangers of the new “standard” for the whole computer industry.
Yes, the whole industry — because it goes way beyond the software
produced by the giant from Redmond and its affiliates.
A similar (but a bit more specialized) term to DRM is Trusted Computing.
The term is intentionally misleading. It does not try to improve the security
of the user, but rather wants to ensure that the user can be “trusted”.
Obviously it’s not about the trust, it’s about the money. The companies that
deliver content (specially multimedia, but it’s not restricted to media
only) to the client want to be able to control the way it is used. For
example, they want the content to be displayed on approved media only,
banning all the “illegal” applications (illegal does not mean that it
violates the law, but rather the agreement between the client and the
company that sells the media). More on Trusted Computing can be found
(as always) in Wikipedia.
Read on ...
It's from January, but still a good read if you are unfamiliar with what DRM really is.
~ ~ ~
Posted by: dimbulb - 7:03 PM MDT
Tags: Computing The Written Word
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13 August 2007
.: the new commune ecovillage :.
Just Don't Call Them Communes - U.S. News and World Report
It's the luxury edition of the American exurb: hilltop scenery,
new-money mansions, horses galloping behind split-rail fences. About 25
miles west of Washington, D.C., Loudoun County boasts a median household
income of $98,483, twice the national rate. It's the kind of place
beloved by D.C. power brokers, whose sprawling estates serve as
monuments to the American dream. These days, however, Loudoun County is
also at the forefront of a very different if no less American vision:
the commune.
The idea that like-minded individuals should forge a community is on
something of a comeback tour. An online directory of "intentional
communities" has more than doubled in the past two years to 1,295 in
North America, and 20 new listings are added each month.
Past imperfect. But forget the term commune. Try "ecovillage," where
residents live in Earth-friendly homes on communal land, or "cohousing,"
where a common house serves as a gathering place. Driven by a green
ethos and discontent with impersonal suburbs, residents frequently dine
together, share possessions, and baby-sit one another's children. But
shared income is a thing of the past, and private homes are essential.
Still, the old stereotypes of socialism, drugs, and rebellion dog these
communities. "We've fought this for years," says Joani Blank, a
cohousing advocate who lives in a divvied-up former market in Oakland,
Calif. "Our ideology is about neighborhoods more than anything else."
Poverty and disillusionment drove many older communes to extinction, but
the idea was reincarnated, particularly in Europe, in the post-Cold War
era. By 1995, Danish activists Hildur and Ross Jackson had created the
Global Ecovillage Network to promote sustainable living around the
world. Even some of the most archetypal communes, such as the 1960s
socialist experiment, the Farm in Tennessee, have reshaped themselves.
In New York, the 175-acre EcoVillage at Ithaca boasts two 30-home
neighborhoods, office space, and working farms.
Read on ...
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Posted by: dimbulb - 11:56 AM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
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.: surging past the gates of hell :.
Iraq by the Numbers - TomDispatch.com
Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.
This January, President Bush announced his "surge" plan for Iraq, which he called his "new way forward." It was, when you think about it, all about numbers. Since then, 28,500 new American troops have surged into that country, mostly in and around Baghdad; and, according to the Washington Post, there has also been a hidden surge of private armed contractors -- hired guns, if you will -- who free up troops by taking over many mundane military positions from guarding convoys to guarding envoys. In the meantime, other telltale numbers in Iraq have surged as well.
Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to "report" to Congress in September on the "progress" of the President's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report -- "Iraq by the numbers" -- can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the "September Report."
Read on ...
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Posted by: dimbulb - 7:51 AM MDT
Tags: The Written Word
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30 July 2007
.: trendy green - will it help :.
Can 'green chic' save the planet? - CSMonitor
Ecofriendly buying choices alone can't sustain America's lifestyle,
experts warn – unless 'looking green' becomes 'voting green.'
Green, it seems, has gone mainstream. Magazines like Elle, Fortune, and
Vanity Fair have published "green issues" in the past year, and the
Academy Awards were carbon neutral. The Vatican recently announced plans
to offset its 2007 emissions, while Costa Rica pledged to arrive at "net
zero" by 2021.
Green has also gone trendy. Last week, Whole Foods Market released a
limited edition, $15 cotton bag with "I'm not a plastic bag" emblazoned
on its side. When the bag went on sale at outlets in Taiwan, a stampede
followed. In Hong Kong, throngs shut down a shopping mall. In New York
City last week, lines formed at dawn. Later that day, bags were offered
on Craigslist for between $200 and $500. "These bags are walking
billboards," says Isabel Spearman, a spokeswoman for the bag's designer,
Anya Hindmarch. "You do have to make something trendy, and it becomes a
habit. That's the whole point."
Savvy marketers have clearly tapped into something. But the green craze
has many asking how, if at all, it addresses what many characterize as
an impending climate catastrophe.
Read on ...
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Posted by: dimbulb - 10:53 AM MDT
Tags: Environment The Written Word
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20 July 2007
.: an interesting read :.
The
Digital Imprimatur - How big brother and big media can put the
Internet genie back in the bottle.
November 4th, 2003
Over the last two years I have become deeply and increasingly
pessimistic about the futu