Virtual, but permanent.
Patient oozes green blood | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
Ok, it’s only one color, but if you’re tired of having red blood, try sumatriptan! It will turn your blood from a visceral red to a verdant green, so that you will feel as healthy as the autotrophs that sustain the food chain.
Putin suggests new missile defence site | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
This is perhaps the final chapter, the climax, the coup de grace of post cold war political evolution. The US has survived by sheer economic power and unchallenged military might, and its rivals have survived by becoming supremely cunning, as demonstrated by Baathists in Iraq, by Iran in Lebanon and Iraq, and today, by Vladimir Putin in Germany.
The Iraqi war displayed America’s military might yet again. The aftermath of the war, however, has showed America’s impotence in the face of clever propaganda perpetrated by Iran and guerrilla warfare being executed to perfection by Baathists that the Coalition Provisional Authority foolishly disenfranchised. By developing incredible cunning, the Baathists, the Taliban and Iran have engineered a spectacular opposition to the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The US did indeed win the battle on the ground, but the opposition has thus far made a spectacular showing in the fight for the hearts and minds of the people in the middle east. We can claim no political victories there. Not in Iraq, not in Iran, not in Afghanistan, not in Syria and not even in Lebanon, who was humiliated by a brazen war started and effectively won by a rogue faction, Hezbollah, i.e., Iran and Syria.
Similarly, just when George W Bush’s White House was thinking that it had succeeded in its campaign to place a “missile defense shield” in Poland and the Czech Republic unilaterally, without soliciting any reaction from Russia, Putin responds with the most cunning, the most devilishly clever of retorts: Russia wants to suckle on America’s teat, too. Coupled with Russia’s posturing of the previous weeks–that it will target its missiles at Europe if this shield is deployed in Eastern Europe–Putin has completely neutralized the American argument, and he has entangled Bush with the absurdity of Bush’s assertions that it is an America at peace with a defeated Russia that desires to protect Europe from “rogue regimes”.
By accepting this proposition on face value, Putin has flipped this argument on its head. First, Putin asserts the US is the victor. Second, he posits the obvious fact that Azerbaijan is a better geographic location from which the US may intercept missiles from Bush’s favorite rogue regimes. Third, the US will be protecting Europe by preventing Russia from targeting European cities. It is the trifecta that the US has been salivating to get, and Russia takes home the purse!
Germany’s influence is expanding at an unbelievable pace. Iran exercises near hegemony in the middle east. Now, Russia is hanging George W Bush with Bush’s own arguments. In the face of such cunning, one must wonder if evolution is favoring the US.
The military is a notoriously conservative and slow beast, but the speed with which it reacted to the information that IED (improvised explosive device) resistant transporters exist is indeed embarrassing.
Nevertheless, it’s good that they plan to replace all humvees.
Wired Magazine: Which ISPs Are Spying on You?
It is reassuring to know that some big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are taking these questions seriously enough to attempt to answer them honestly. It is scary to think that the prospect of these gross invasions of privacy by the government just became routine, and even more frightening to think that many big ISPs don’t respect their clients enough to comment on matters of great import to their clients.
Boy, oh boy, if there were ever a time where the average consumer needed competition in the marketplace, this era is positively it.
Bananas, proof that God exists
Does anyone know if this is serious? I would really like to know.
Vista’s Suicide Bomb: who gets hurt? | The Register
Digital rights management (DRM) is something that Apple, Inc., (formerly Apple Computer, Inc.) had to implement into its iPod/iTunes scheme in order to convince the hopelessly dated Luddites that run the music industry to try the legitimate sale of digital music. The scheme is, of course, costly, cumbersome (though far smoother than any other DRM scheme) and unpopular with customers who are used to being able to copy or digitize (i.e., rip) their own CDs, but now find that they have even less freedom with the digital media that they buy.
It all comes to a head with Microsoft’s Vista operating system, however. According to the above theregister.com article, Vista’s DRM scheme is horribly restrictive. It is embedded at the firmware level in your computer and certain devices. All this means is that it is nearly impossible to use any software scheme to even allow yourself to play your own music on another computer that you own. Furthermore, the scheme propagates itself to mobile players, like Microsoft’s Zune, such that playing your music on more than one player becomes a chore.
The most terrifying aspect of this DRM scheme is that it can apply itself to music Continue reading “DRM, Microsoft Vista and NPR”
After nearly fours years on a Macintosh, working on Micro$osft Windoze XP has become quite a chore. Fortunately, given time and administrator privileges, one can remedy the Windoze GUI doldrums by making the Micro$oft interface pretty.
The process is not for the faint of heart, but it could be made easier if all the right information was in one place. Hopefully, I will achieve that here.
First things first. Microsoft prevents you from installing any themes of which it does not approve. In other words, they insist that you install the drab garbage that survives their pathetic design department. So, the first thing you need to do is remove the Windows XP restrictions on installing third party themes and visual styles. You can do this with Uxtheme Multi-patcher. It does not work with 64-bit Windows, and it is recommended that you be on Windows XP SP-2. (In other words, make sure that your operating system is up to date.) At first, it looks scary, because a lot of strange things happen to your computer when this program does its thing, but just follow the on-screen instructions, and after rebooting, you can go ahead with the next step.
Now, you can download and install the themes and visual styles that you want. I recommend going straight for the visual styles because themes present a pain that is not justified by the payoff. Download the Tiger visual style from devinatart.com, and place the Tiger theme folder inside the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\ folder as shown in the screen capture to the right.
Now, to activate the theme, right-click on your desktop, click “properties”. First, go to the “Themes” tab and make sure that themes are “enabled”. Then, go to the appearance tab, and choose the Tiger theme that you want from the drag-down menus. Lastly, be sure to hit the “effects” button and enable “Clear Type” font smoothing to get the prettiest picture you possibly can.
I assume that you know how to change the desktop background, so add the coup de grace with an Apple wallpaper, navigate to the same Tiger folder, then go inside it and go to the “wallpapers” folder, and choose the wallpaper that turns you on. Strangely enough, I chose one of the standard Windows wallpapers on my computer. I guess not everything that Microsoft provides is crap.
And, that’s it. Now, you have made your ugly Windows XP desktop into this ravishingly beautiful Macintosh OS 10.4 Tiger desktop. Isn’t the Aqua graphical user interface beautiful? Now, you are well on your way to making the final switch to Macintosh. Everybody should. It’s the only way to force Microsoft to be original.
BBC NEWS | Health | Oral sex linked to throat cancer
Our brain trust at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the best American medical school, have managed to condemn the last form of intimacy: kissing. Damned be those ultrasensitive analytical methods and data mining methods that condemn everything from french fries (Chemical & Engineering News) to Ex-Lax.
Of course, the statistical strength of these studies is, in general, beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, the question of whether these measures will effect real and measurable benefits in the longevity and the long-term well-being of the general populace persists. Are the correlations between diseases and these ingredients (like phenolphthalein, and acrylamide) real or chimerical? Will the measured benefits gained from their banishment be real or coincidental?
Statistics is an awfully powerful branch of knowledge, and its immeasurable benefits to everything from clinical medicine to inventory management and marketing are not to be denied, but it stands to reason whether the banning of ingredients that have been in consistent use during a century that saw unprecedented gains in longevity and well-being in the industrialized world will have any measurable long-term effects. One can only hope that the efforts in which we are investing heavily will tell, in due time.
Va. Tells NYC to Stop Gun Stings – washingtonpost.com
Ah, yes, the fractious reality of the Republican Party is beginning to percolate to the surface for everyone to see. Soon people may even remember that the Republican Party as founded by Lincoln and propagated by the likes of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, Romney, Reagan and even Nixon is indeed a socially progressive and fiscally conservative movement. With Giuliani’s vehement defense of his pro-choice stance today, the right fringe’s stranglehold on the Republican Political apparatus may finally be loosening.
Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978
You want to believe that greed was never as intense as it is now, and that the lows to which salesmen of reputable companies stoop in order to make a sale were not always as the lows achieved by modern SPAMmers. Then you encounter articles like the one above, about the first incidence of SPAM email. You assume that it happened in the mid 1990s, just when email use was becoming prevalent. But, no. It was in 1978, very soon after email was born. And, the culprit was not some shady internet character trying to pitch something illicit or unsavory. It was a salesman from 
Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) trying to sell wares to the members of the then internet: mainly defense contractors and academics (who were probably acting as defense contractors).
The link above appeared in this Google history widget. It is amazing that a DEC salesman carried out the deed. After all, DEC was renowned as an engineering powerhouse that made due without any fancy marketing by relying on the strength of its products. (This ultimately led to DEC’s demise in 1998, when it was bought by Compaq, a company too inept to use DEC’s technology to survive.) In this context, it is perhaps sad that this salesman’s efforts were so horribly misplaced temporally. Ten years later, this marketing may have been of some use to DEC. After all, the ultimate irony is that DEC did not have this sort of aggressive marketing when it needed it.
Image from Doug Jones’ Collection of DEC Logos