Out of the blue I see an announcement on the homepage of Television Without Pity telling me not to fear, because TWoP is sticking around. Huh? I mean, I know they were in dire financial shape in the past, but I thought this year they were doing well! These announcements always come during the off-season, which makes me wonder if maybe they’re doing something dumb like paying their recappers at a time when there is no money for them to be making…

TWoP is here to stay, but in what form? Subscriptions? Even more evil ads? What? I wonder if I need to actually propegate my backup plan with the scripts I made a year ago when TWoP’s future existance was less assured…

I’ve talked about Salam Pax, he’s encouraged a few more people to start blogging from Iraq, here is a post from one from late July:

When you think thoroughly about it you find it logical & reasonable ,during the past regime there were safety &work chances(money) BUT, THERE IS NO FREEDOM, naw there is freedom without safety or public services with very very mini work opportunities , so normally they prefer the past time of saddam. They just want to live their life that’s all, they even start wishing if they were born in very poor country which doesn’t draw anybody’s attention. Naw we keep hearing news about incidents of Americans being missing or killed in different parts of Baghdad or other provinces ,also the Iraqi popular resistance movement have called other liberation movements abroad to come and work together for Iraq’s liberation , sparks ,sparks, of big fire , why all that should happen ? All you have to do is forming a decent real government! Is that hard to be done ? or is it been postponed for some hidden reasons which we cant realized naw but maybe later on we can, only God knows.

Daniel Schorr believes the Washington Post reports that Colin Powell won’t re-up, and he explains why he hasn’t resiged before now. While many news organizations state that there isn’t any political disagreement between Powell and the rest of the administration, that is just frankly not true. Powell, a moderate military man, has had venemous disagreements with Rumsfeld and other hawks. “What the hell are these guys thinking about? Can’t you get these guys back in the box?” Powell was reported to tell General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Lessig links to this MSNBC piece that mentions him. It is about the comic book The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen and its movie spin-off, and how copyright has affected both:

One of the film’s problems, and the comic book’s strengths, is enormously relevant in an age of rampant online file-sharing and courtroom wars over extension of the copyright term. In the comic book, Moore shows the benefit of having a rich public domain. He plucks old characters from obscurity, brings them together and makes them dance. The public domain works the way it’s supposed to. New creators enliven old works and send interested readers scurrying back to the original texts.

At the same time, the film illustrates how modern copyrights restrict the use of established cultural texts that should be in the public domain. For American audiences, Tom Sawyer is added to the mix, but evidently Fox couldn’t clear his film rights, so he’s referred to only as “agent Sawyer.� A friend of mine walked out of the movie having no idea Mark Twain’s rambunctious kid was all grown up and inexplicably sneaking about London with a shotgun.

The author mentions that it isn’t necessarily even that the copyright still exists, but the threat of litigation that stops people from making wonderful new works.

Here’s a pop quiz for you? Does anyone know how long a copyright remains locked up? Give up? The lifetime of the creator plus seventy years if it is owned by a person, or 90 years if it is owned by a corporation. Ninety years! Universal made a film version of the Invisible Man back in the 1930s and that precludes H.G. Well’s classic character from appearing in a movie published in 2003. And, of course, every time copyrights on “important” works like Mickey Mouse are about to expire, the content companies step in and “persuade” Congress to extend the terms of copyright. The result is a perpetual creative purgatory, as valuable art and culture is locked away in corporate vaults, never given back to the people who so deserve it.

I don’t think we’re done talking about the ideas in Prime Intellect just yet. Vernor Vinge told us in 1993 that “[w]ithin thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” I guess it’s time to read his paper. And eventually I’m gonna be able to get together all the thoughs that have been swirling through my mind for the last week about Vinge’s amazing novel A Deepness In the Sky. I’ve just finished it, and started it again, and it has caused me no end of mental anguish. Now, to get all that into words, it will be no mean feat.

The Singularity is a seperate issue, but hey, science fiction isn’t something I’ve been doing enough thinking about recently, so it’s all a bit of a jumble at the moment.

This quiz is pretty good. It takes about 15 seconds to complete and I think that the results make a good bit of sense. Many view politics as one-dimensional. Some push it into two dimensions, like this quiz does, with economic beliefs on one axis and social beliefs on another. I’ve seen more complicated layouts, but none that I’ve found extremely satisfying, at least not yet.

What does my analysis mean? I wrote up a few paragraphs trying to explain it, but in an attempt to be as fair as possible to all sides I found it very hard to say anything that wasn’t a broad generalization. Let me just quote what the site says, and try to explain myself later.

Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality.

Libertarians are self-governors in both personal and economic matters. They believe government’s only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and tolerate economic and social diversity.

Take the quiz yourself!

Went to Irvine Park today. You may remember that the last park I visited had a damn built by the Army Corps of Engineers some time ago. Well, this one was much more exciting. I washed my hands at a sink that bore a plaque on which was written, “Improved by the Work Progress Administration 1935-36”. Now that is cool. Other coolness: the smell of the trees, the squirrels that ran across my path as I biked along, the bird that flew beside me for a few seconds as I sped along the path, and the peacock whose parking space I stole. That was a nice, nice way to spend a morning.

This thread on The Straight Dope discusses how much one should be tipping. Go down a dozen or so posts and read a few of the long comments from waiters. None of them make over $3.00 an hour. The system completely sucks, but tipping the waiter poorly solves nothing, especially since they are taxed on x% regardless of what they get, and they need to tip out the rest of the staff with their puny earnings. What a crappy job.

They are still afraid of the dishwasher, says the New York Times, but that will change:

Mr. Edow dreams of owning an auto-repair shop someday. He wants to shed his old life, just as snakes shed their skins. But at night, he still returns, in his dreams, to the violence in Somalia. Like Mr. Yarrow, he saw his father executed. The killer, he said, used a hammer and nails. He buries his head in his hands at the memory.

“We want to move forward,” he said. “We want to forget the past.”

The State Department is offering these Somali refugees a new start, and it is a beautiful example of what America can be. (via Kevin)

The media is reporting what the US Army claims, that after a several-hour firefight, Saddam Hussein’s two eldest sons were killed. Do we have reason to doubt their claims?

I don’t know. What kind of tip caused the Army to raid the building they did? What kind of medical and dental records have they used to identify the bodies? And as for the former Ba’ath party officials who supposedly identified the men, are they Saddam loyalists covering up for dead doubles, or could they possibly not be able to tell?

If these men are dead, that’s probably good for the war effort. It would have been nice to try them, but that would have been very difficult without loss of further American life, which of course we want to avoid. But could this be another of Saddam’s games? It is possible. It’s awfully convenient that a tip would end up with numbers 2 and 3 on the Iraq most wanted list sitting ina building in the middle of Iraq.

I know everyone else is reporting the deaths as fact, but I’m going to continue to have lingering doubts until we get more information on just how we’re so sure these guys are those guys. And no, Fox News, those big bloody pictures on your homepage aren’t helping.

Robert Scheer’s excellent column lauds the BBC for being independent and impartial during times of incredible pressure for patriotism. Unlike the US news networks that just roll over to politicians, the BBC has consistantly broke sensational stories that have proved to be completely true.

Politicians here (and it Britain) frequently call the BBC “biased” for the other side of whatever issue they are on. The BBC isn’t biased, they just aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions. They don’t let politicians get away with saying whatever they want. They fight and yell and won’t take no. They don’t let the “official” version of events get in the way of a real investigation. In short, the BBC is everything American news should be, says it is, but cannot be.

Blair last week told the U.S. Congress that he and Bush were right to invade Iraq even if no weapons of mass destruction are ever found. Left unmentioned is that it was the coalition that chased U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, claiming they weren’t doing their job and that the Iraq threat was growing. Clearly the immediacy of the threat from Hussein was a phony claim that Blair and Bush should have known full well was not backed up by any substantial evidence.

What’s left is the idea that we are in Iraq to build a democracy there by force. Yet the people on both sides of the Atlantic were adamantly opposed to this sort of nation-building, smacking as it does of past disasters, from the collapse of the British Empire to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In essence, we are now told to be happy with a rationale for war that we didn’t find convincing before the war started.

Scheer is right. When they write the histories, it won’t be Bush and Blair that they are lauding, it will be the British Broadcasting Corporation. Go figure.

In the other room two dozen salespeople are spraying, poking, pounding, and extracting carpets. It’s really cool. Each carpet sample has a different stain — gum, blood, various dirts and liquids. And they have a regiment of chemicals of various types and designs that they can use. The trick is to determine the spot, put down the right countagent stuff of the opposite pH value (indicated by the stain changing color), “agitating” the stain (pounding the shit out of it with a brush) so that the product does it’s work, and then applying enzymes and such, followed by drying it all (extracting the liquid). All the various chemical smells tickle the senses. The raw energy in the room is electric, and the competition to see who finishes first is leading to delightful shenanigans. This is a cool training!

The LA City Council reached a compromise yesterday in a somewhat contentious funding dispute. Apparently a very high number, well over 90% of burglar alarms are false alarms. The police already treats such alarms as a low-priority call and take on average an hour to respond. Because of budgetary concerns, the police was asking to be able to ignore all burglar alarms. The council decided on a policy where people are allowed two false alarms and then the police can choose not to respond.

Me: As soon as someone gets killed, they’re gonna rush to repeal this.
Dad: When would people get killed?
Me: There’ll be a home invasion robbery and someone will die and then everyone will get upset.
Dad: It’s a burglar alarm, not a home invasion alarm.

Followed by some bickering and then him telling me to stop arguing and listen to the radio. Well, I didn’t say I liked the idea, just that it’s something I’d expect. As soon as they cut funding for, say, traffic lights, someone gets killed at some corner, and they restore the funding. Unless this policy only applies to business alarms, I can see where in the next few years there will be some incident.

I was also thinking its easier to break into buildings now. Just trip the alarm twice, and your third attempt is free!

Must remember to record Doctor Zhivago…

No matter what I say I’m gonna get in trouble for this one. 😉 I’ve heard the name “Avril Lavigne” a few times, and had Jessica point out to me which songs were hers. (Since I don’t listen to top-40 radio, I’m always somewhat behind on these things). I went to the iTunes Music Store and listened to all the 30-second previews of Let Go and found a few songs I liked and several I immediately loathed. I’m only remarking on this (besides maybe to prove how un-hip I am) because I find this whole music business so fascinating. The Amazon reviews alternate between fangirls screeching in awe and bitter skater punk wannabes savaging the girl for not being albe to write, dance, play an instrument, or sing without the help of a vocoder. Maybe she should join the Party Posse.

I’m afraid to play “Complicated” because apparently to the radio afficinados among us it is so overplayed as to be rage-inducing, and I’d like to keep my head in it’s non-banged-in state…still, it’s a catchy song. Ooh, and Avril is Canadian! Fascinating.

This isn’t any kind of useful comparison, just what I’ve seen. I was using Debian unstable and then I switched to RedHat 9 + Ximian Desktop 2. Here are a few observations.

• It’s hard to get hardware working in Debian. It’s hard to install Debian. Neither of these things are problems in RedHat
• Debian package management rules. RedHat I don’t think has package management… XD2 package management is fine, but not wonderful.
• I like lots of good fonts. It took a while to get fonts right in Debian, and with upgrades sometimes they break again. One RedHat package and I got all my nice fonts working correctly, with good anti-aliasing. I know getting anti-aliasing to work in Debian was a real pain as well.
• I really like the XD2 Industrial theme.
• I like the idea of being able to setup a printer with a GUI, and do things like browse SMB shares easily. And I do those things from time to time. But I can live without that functionality.
• I really like being able to drag a bunch of files into a special window and then click burn and have a CD burn actually work for a change. I can’t yet do that in Debian, but that goes back to point #1: hardware support.

Despite what it may seem like, I’m not overly impressed with XD2. It’s very slick, very consistant, and I really like that, but I can see where it is meant for enterprise use – Evolution is a big ole groupware app, OpenOffice has been prettified and made more MS friendly, and RedCarpet Enterprise makes management easy. But I don’t need any of those things. I like Mozilla Mail better then Evolution, I rarely if ever use OOo, and I like the fine-grained ability to install just the packages I want that I can get in apt, but not RedCarpet. I want the XD2 theme, and I think what I want is a fresh install of Debian, maybe testing instead of unstable, and if it turns out better, if I can customize things right the first time, if I can get my DVD burner to finally burn, then I’d like to stick with that. Apt is just that useful.

The GameSpot review of Real Life is long, detailed, and funny.

Amazing but true, the RIAA has gone completely insane. Not that this was unexpected, that organization basically wrote the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, greased the wheels of Washington to get it passed, and are now using its provisions — which specifically take a judge out of the subpoena process — to file for and receive (with no review or judicial oversight) hundreds of subpoenas, straining the court system and revealing the names and addresses of people sharing as few as three music files. In the name of stamping out digital piracy, the industry continues to use scare tactics and go after it’s own customers instead of providing better alternatives, ceasing its anti-competitive practices, fairly compensating artists, breaking the Top 40 radio stranglehold, and allowing fair rates for webcasting.