scottsimpson.net

No, it isn’t fake

Yeah, I got that in my email.

First off, Christian Debt Removal? Do I stand in front of a silly man on TV and have him yell DEBTS BEGONE! at me as he pushes me backwards? What if I have pagan or atheist or Buddhist debts? On the other hand, I suppose some catholics might appreciate an opportunity to lessen their Christian Debt...

Second, how about no more huge images in my email as ads? I miss plain-text email. And you should too. No one ever died because the background image in their HTML email didn't show up right.

Just felt like sharing.

mrow … i’m feeling catty

An extremist environmental group has claimed responsibility for a $1.5 million lumber yard fire in Utah, officials said Wednesday. (read more)

Mmmkay. We've known for some time that the eco-extremists aren't exactly the brightest torches in the crowd, but it's really interesting to me when they do something that seem so against their purpose. I can see the anger of a group that looks at lumber and says 'well, those are trees that had a right to life' (sorta). If I opposed lumber, I'd write to people and implore them to use steel (GO STEEL!) However, these clever folk decided it would be better to burn the wood. Never mind the volumes of carcinogenic, green-house-gas-containing, atmosphere-killing smoke that was released or the fact that now the lumber company will just cut more wood to replace what was destroyed. Aside from being dangerously close to fitting the definition of a terrorist group, the members of such organizations (namely ELF and ALF) really ought to consider whether what they do actually promotes their cause. Burning structures brings further construction, the practice of which has a much greater ecological footprint than just leaving a building alone. Maybe instead of burning stuff they could canvas a building with LEED Certification posters or 'Flip the Switch -- Waste's a Bitch' stickers or something. It's so funny to me that the people that promote stuff (ELF, radical christians, radical islamists, car salesmen) tend to have the effect of driving off their intended audience. Aristotle told us that moderation was the path to virtue (so I paraphrased, get over it...) and I really wouldn't mind seeing an ELF conference where speakers presented facts and rational calls for conservation or the like took place. If I had a little extra cash I might even don my unbleached clothes, spiff up my dreads, and bike on over. I'm socially responsible, I buy Fair Trade Blend sometimes...

But yeah... ELF, get over yourselves, no one likes you because you do stupid stuff. Try something constructive (or at least non-destructive) and watch as the ranks of your adherents swell. I'm all for the earth being liberated or whatever the logical extention of that is (so long as it doesn't run off and leave me randomly floating in space) but I gotta live too. And so do other people. Some folks might need to drop by the Board of Being Allowed to Live, but it's a surprisingly small number that wouldn't walk out of that building.

In other, more positive, non-righteous-bitching news, it looks like the EU has agreed to a constitution, which is cool, providing they don't go to war over choosing a president.

And back on this side of the Atlantic,

"There is no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice," Bush said.

Yeah, there is. It's right under the White House. I hear Cheney is getting a DSL line installed there soon.

a personal view

"Life is a creation of God, not a commodity to be exploited by man."
? President Bush reaffirms his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research. (wired.com)

If you disagree with my religious views, you're advised to sit this one out. Be warned.

I need to get Mr. Bush in a room and have a chat with him. God is a creation of man. This is proven by the historical record and the fact that Christianity is an offshoot of a radical Jewish sect. Unless you can tell me why the Christian god sat it out for the first few billion years of Earth's existence. Listen, Christians, the Jews came first, and before them existed a number of other religions, and before them were the mystics and before them were a bunch of people that were so busy dealing with staying alive that they didn't have time to dream up deity-stories to make themselves feel special.

And Mr. Bush, when we're talking about commodities that shouldn't be exploited by man, how about trust and faith? Contrary to your worldview, not all Americans are Protestants, and for you to base national policy on your minority religious view is an abuse of trust and faith. Especially when it comes to a technology that can save countless lives and improve the quality of life for many others. Will it be used for evil? Sure, everything can be, in the right (wrong?) hands. Just take a look at the Crusades. Peaceful religion my [foot].

I'll be sure to post my address in Jail when CARNIVORE gets hold of this one...

thursday thursday thursday

In 1998, record companies and Hollywood lauded the DMCA as a way to stop piracy, which they said had accelerated because of digital copying technology. But the DMCA has since evoked buyer's remorse in many lawmakers, who fear they handed copyright holders far more control than intended while eroding Americans' fair use rights. They also worry that the law has criminalized otherwise innocent activities, such as making a personal copy of a purchased CD, or trying to get a DVD to play on a Linux computer. (read more)

Ya think? Let me break it down here -- Movie prices aren't rising because of piracy... piracy rose because of movie prices. In places it's edging toward $12 to watch a damn movie ... I might as well just wait for the DVD if I want to take someone with me to see a film. But instead, the prospect of downloading a film gives me an opportunity to see if I want to purchase a DVD (sorry, m0vi3z people... the quality still doesn't compare to DVD, and neither does the storage commitment) because after all, isn't it rather irresponsible to charge someone to use a product for the first time? Almost every form of software has a trial period before purchase, now music does too with amazon.com and itunes and such. I can even flip through a book in the bookstore before I buy it. And don't tell me that the movie previews are in any way similar... they're edited beyond recognition. They made Matrix Revolutions look good and Gigli look interesting. They even made Chronicles of Riddick look like it had some sort of substance. It would be like advertising a book with the following:

"Jesus ... had ... vast wealth ... and ... was ... a ... stud" - an editing that makes the plot of the bible seem a little different than it is.

Hollywood producers need to get over themselves. Yes, actors should be paid. Yes, writers should be paid. Maybe the production companies should even get some ungodly proportion of the profits... but let me demo the movie first. Let me watch the first 15 minutes and then pause it and charge me or let me leave if it's stupid. Or allow me to get a substantial refund within 30 minutes of ticket purchase/movie start time.

Microsoft's brand-new version of Office for Mac OS X has been highly praised in reviews, but for many users it can't hold a candle to the 13-year-old Word 5.1. (read more)

And people are surprised? What has Microsoft done to their software since then other than add handfuls of useless features (why is hiding the bottom and top margin between pages useful?) and that insipid Clippy avatar with the secretarial awareness of a five year old ("It looks like you're writing a letter. Do you want help?" No, you dolt, I'm obviously on the right track, aren't I?) Oh, and I forgot the pricing. It's another one of those movie-ticket-price things... No one in their right mind would pay $479.99 for Office ... I'll use TextPad or whatever it's called that comes with MacOSX if I have to. The price didn't go up because of piracy ... piracy grew because of the price. It's worth almost $500 to exactly no one to type stuff. Think of the alternatives -- StarOffice (free, if a tad slow), Notepad, Wordpad, SimpleText, TextPad... And what are you paying for? Built-in spell-check in Traditional Korean and Azerbaijani. Hey, Microsoft? Offer the product in English, Spanish and French only, and then have free downloadable add-ons for other languages. Don't jam up my hard drive with logic to check ninety languages. Don't commandeer my clusters with code that passes for Clippy's (or F1 or Mother Earth's) brain. And finally, if you have to have hundreds of megabytes of help files, it's time to make the software easier to use.

Mike Nash, chief of Microsoft's security business unit, told reporters that Microsoft is developing software to protect personal computers running Windows against malicious software, the worms and viruses that have plagued users with data loss, shutdowns and disruptions in Web traffic in recent years. (read more)

Microsoft ain't anemic-y, because it's got irony to spare. Let's put it in generic terms: A company makes a product that ships with holes in it (think 'boat'). For a largely unknown reason, 90% of the market seems drawn to this product. The company sells a product that closes the holes in their other product (think band-aids for boats) at an additional fee (think: extortion) Oh, wait, extortion? Pay us (for protection) or something you value (your data, your communication ability, your legal innocence) will be taken away from you through a means we control ('Windows')? It's like the heyday of the Mafia ... protection rackets and extortion and all. The rational mind wonders whether Microsoft should not just, you know, *not put holes in their product*... not like it's hard to write decent code... tens of thousands of UNIX, Linux, Apple, BSD, AIX, IRIX, TI, and other programmers have been doing it for decades. And Microsoft, what the living hell is Remote Scripting for? Why did you build in the ability to have your computer controlled remotely by just about anyone into the operating system? Why does your email client automatically run whatever it's sent? Why does the user operate as a very powerful user when no other operating system allows such deep and powerful access to core files by normal people? I sincerely hope these issues will be addressed in the next version of Windows. I'm a Mac-evangelist for a reason. And it only has a little bit to do with the pretty cases they come in.

Elsewhere in the world, other stupid people are pushing DVD's that expire hours after you open them... talk about insulting your consumers. What if General Motors made a car that only lasted for 10,000 miles? What if your computer worked for 30 days before you had to purchase a new one? What if your shoes were only good for five thousand steps? What if a door only opened a hundred times before sealing itself shut? These things are all the same in the intellectual property arena... things I have purchased that I expect to be able to use. I haven't paid to consume these things, as I would a hamburger or a coffee drink. I've paid for the use of them, and I expect to be able to continue using them or I have a right to a refund when they cease to function. And what's to keep young (and older) folk from cracking open the DVD case, ripping the data off with any computer on the market today, letting the DVD expire, and having a non-expiring version of the data? Seems as though it would promote piracy to me. It's also terribly environmentally irresponsible. Sure, it's recyclable, but that doesn't mean people will recycle it (pay for something that breaks, it breaks, and then go out of my way to dispose of it the way Grand Arbiter of Morals tells me to? No way.) Irresponsible disposal will bring higher production (likely from cheaper materials) which will increase demand of petrochemicals (yes, DVD's are made of plastic just like everything else) which will cut into our (declining?) global oil supply. Think of it -- the media will raise your gas prices. The upside to expiring DVDs? A lifetime supply of cheap coasters. Just think about it -- no one else would propose a product that expires like this. ("Hey, check out my new ten-day shirt!" [hissing and smoke ensue] "Oh, it must have passed its expiration date... it's cold out here...")

blah blah blah

The panel investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks found that there was "no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," according to a staff report issued on Wednesday. (read more)

Perhaps we should be more clear, people. How about saying that the government of Iraq didn't engage in action with al-Qaeda? Surely the panel can't have concluded that no citizen of Iraq ever cooperated with al-Qaeda... that would make Iraq one pretty damn unified nation. Even Americans have cooperated with a-Q. (It's hard to type, ok?) And it still amazes me how many people think that Hussein and bin Laden are close personal friends or something. It's true in some cases that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but that gets overridden to a large extent when there's religious fundamentalism/fanatacism on one side and secular dictatorship on the other.

"It tells you they're very cautious and careful and an enemy we cannot underestimate. They're entrepreneurial and we've just got to be ready for whatever they have in mind," Kean said.

I'm 99% pacifist, but I will hit the next person that claims that a-Q is somehow disorganized or random. Get out of your box, people, we're not being attacked at random by little anklebiter groups ... a-Q is very organized and sophisticated (thanks in large part to the information structure given to them by ... the western world and able to attack using technologies and devices created by ... the western world... does that sound disorganized? it's about as efficient as you can get.)

A hacker attack on Internet services company Akamai Technologies Inc. disrupted access to large Web sites including those run by Yahoo Inc., Google, and Microsoft for up to two hours early Tuesday, according to Web tracker Keynote Systems Inc. (read more)

Planes hitting stuff and bombs blowing up are bad. But what I think we need to be more vigilant about is attacks on our information structure. A plane can take out a building... that's been done (and I suspect it won't be done again) but a concerted attack on the structure of the internet is not only easy, but destructive. Imagine if America's communication and banking were disrupted... it would affect nearly every person here. Business could be stopped. Banking could be stopped. If you got fancy enough, the national and international phone trunks could be stopped. There are specifications for beefing up the internet, but so far they haven't been adopted for two reasons: cost (which is marginally acceptable as a reason... if a provider goes broke, it doesn't matter how secure the powered-down switches are) and compatibility (Apple and Linux machines have no problems, guess what the culprit is... you got it, it's Windows)

The owner of farms housing thousands of hogs must pay damages to 11 neighbors who said the stench forced them indoors, the state Court of Appeals said Tuesday. (read more)

OK, first question, what's the difference between a 'hog' and a 'pig'? Second question, were the people or the pigs there first? If the people were there first, the pig-farmers owe them some cash. If the pigs were there first, the people shouldn't have moved there. Third, why is anyone raising pigs? I mean, after all, they smell bad.

A 5.2-magnitude earthquake centered in Baja California shook downtown San Diego on Tuesday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injury. (read more)

My friend Mike says he's never felt an earthquake, and he says he missed this one too. I suppose he could have jumped into the air for thirty seconds right when it was taking place... but still.

Wired.com reports that junk faxes might increase in coming months. Who uses fax machines anymore? I mean, seriously, what does it do? It scans a thing, digitizes it, and sends that digitized data to a printer. Sounds a whole lot like e-mail to me. And you can store e-mail. And junk e-mail doesn't use up paper and toner. Kill your FAX machine.

Irresponsible hasty generalizations:
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web as we know it, created a system to facilitate communication over large distances, which is used by a-Q to coordinate attacks. Therefore, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for the advent of terrorism.

Microsoft provides operating system software that runs on over 90% of the world's computers. Many people with Windows machines know how to do little else than play Solitaire on them. Therefore they don't upgrade to newer technologies. Older versions of Microsoft Windows are not 'IPv6' compatible (new addressing system that can be more secure and help foil internet attacks). Therefore, Microsoft is responsible for the ability to bring down US communication infrastructure. (Some people won't argue with this...)

more of my kvetching

Dr. Paul Handel of Houston told participants, "The obesity epidemic is not the fault of Krispy Kreme or McDonald's. Unless we rekindle some sense of personal responsibility ... 20 years from now we will still be struggling to treat" the problem. (read more)

See, stupid-lawsuit-people? Doctors don't agree with you. Quit eating Big Macs and quit whining about being fat. I take full responsibility for my daily Starbucks scone, I'm not arguing that Starbucks is making me fat. Though the scones seem to get smaller every day... I think the Starbucks bakery gnomes are trying to cheat me.

T-Boz of the female R&B group TLC has filed for divorce from her husband, rapper Mack 10, saying he committed adultery and threatened to kill her. (read more)

...and we're surprised? Some gems from Mr. 10's repertoire:

S**t I represent the killas
Them niggas that bang slang
...
I still got them niggas that I wanna
take my pistol and stick it to they f*****' grill.
...
I know more hoes that specialise in oral (Open up!)
I like that, sleep good on the flight back (uhh), spread the word

So I'm wondering if Ms. -Boz listened to her husband's songs before marrying him. Or maybe it was one of those magical naive "he'll change when he marries me" things. Either way, if you're saddened because your rapper husband has tendencies toward violence and infidelity, tough cookies... look for a classical pianist or something instead.

Beginning Tuesday, all of Yahoo's free e-mail accounts will be upgraded to 100 megabytes, a move spurred by Google's plans to offer 1,000 megabytes of free storage through its Gmail service, which has remained in a test phase since early April. (read more)

Talk about a compeititive offer... a highly-sought email address with a gig of space or an address everyone has with 100MB. That's a comparable product. Maybe I'm just smug because I already have a Gmail account (Thanks Bryan). Though the extra 96MB on my Yahoo! account will be nice so I won't have to clean out the spam as many times per day. Yahoo! claims to be dealing with a spam problem, but here's the catch -- I've never given my Yahoo! email address to an online business but I still *mysteriously* get email addressed to my name (as typed into Yahoo!... which a random mailer wouldn't be able to guess) which can only mean that Yahoo! sold my address to advertisers. And we wonder why their spam filters are ineffective.

ESPN and other Web sites, eyeing the successes search engines have had with ads based on keywords, are exploring a new form of targeting that's tied to their visitors' online habits.

Though some privacy advocates find the practice creepy, Web sites say the technology lets them deliver ads that readers find more relevant. (read more)

Creepy, yes, but better than what we have now. It brings to mind the scene from the movie Minority Report where the guy is walking down the street and he gets these ads that address him by name as he walks by them. I'm still not clicking on targeted ads (and they probably wouldn't work for those of us that practice self-defensive lying on demographic forms -- I'm a 90 year old retired scientist wherever possible) But anyway, it's worth a shot as long as it can be turned off. Maybe it'll spread to email and I'll stop getting ads to enlarge my breasts.

Most college students doubt that voting in presidential elections will make major changes in American society, according to a nationwide survey. (read more)

Yeah, because the electoral college is designed to keep our votes from counting -- young citizens that aren't landowners were all but blocked from being counted in a vote since the inception of our system. Plus the majority of college students are women. Another reason students votes don't count is because they simply don't -- an appalingly low number of students vote. There are enough students nationwide to seriously influence a vote. But people don't believe their vote counts. Catch what? Catch-22, that's what.

Newdow had declared that his daughter would be singled out if she chose not to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and would be coerced to participate.

"Imagine you're a third-grader in a class of 30 kids. That's enormous pressure to put on a child," he said. "Government needs to stay out of the religion business altogether."

Yeah, and a third-grader in a class of 30 kids wouldn't be singled out if her father-who-was-in-the-midst-of-a-custody-dispute got rid of the pledge of allegiance altogether. I just skip the little 'god' part when I say it... difference of opinion, whatever. I know people that skip all kinds of parts, notably the 'liberty and justice for all' part. What I find hilarious is that the same people defending this pseudo-prayer in school (who doesn't implore some higher power for help before a test, regardless of faith?) are the same people who scoff at nationalism in the Arab world and profess that the United States should rule the globe. But, as Michael Korda says, an ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug. (read more)

Yeah, the bug in the software is that it's a custom platform. How's about this:
1) Voter walks up to kind old lady at voting place
2) Voter swipes ID, (unix) notebook computer runs name*, creates unwieldy national-security-strength crypto-key** on a little keychain thing
3) Voter takes keychain thing, plugs it into voting machine
4) Voter votes
5) Voter gets little printout of votes, and activity is recorded in a timestamped log with the person's crypto key
6) If the crypto key matches something in the database, the vote is nullified

* running the name against the database of eligible voters only, and then removing that name from the list (just like the nice old lady crossing you off)
** 4096-bit or something ridiculous, using something useless and non-traceable like the middle three letters of the last name plut the last digit of the ZIP code plus the alphabetic inverse of the hair color as a cryptographic seed

Given a month or so, I could write something that does that in C or Java, and I'm not even a programmer. Well, fine, I could pseudo-code it in BASIC... I'd be better off finding someone thats a real programmer. What is these people's problem? There are open-source tools available to do everything they need to do. Grumble.

But...yeah.

I like Sumatra better than Breakfast Blend at Starbucks. Just thought I'd share.

isn’t it ironic … dont’cha think?

Hm, you give up the freedom of anonymity to read about a guy that kept the web free. Here is a link to a site that respects anonymity.

my mountain home, &c.

So this weekend I went up to Wolfeboro for the first time this summer. I miss it. It's such a great place -- the mixture of the acid tang of pine air and the craziness of the people that all seem to congregate there each summer makes it magical. It's so weird being there as a spectator -- changing where I sleep and not being deeply involved in the process of running it. The first night, I stayed in the same tent as Theo, my tent-mate from last summer. The next night, I slept on the hard, cold platform of another tent because Theo's tentmate came back. But it was still fun. I plan to go back up in July perhaps; I'd like to go back more often.

Can you hear me now?

"I feel terrible for her being here," Teresa Lewis said. "She knew about it before it happened. Oh, what a mess! I didn't think about the consequences it would bring. I hate myself."

Teresa Lewis said she met would-be triggermen Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller, both in their 20s, while waiting in the customer service line at a Wal-Mart store. She and Shallenberger became lovers and concocted the scheme to murder Julian Lewis [her husband at the time], who she said was an abusive alcoholic. (read more)

And she thinks that her death sentence is unfair. I'm sorry, but I still have yet to hear a decent reason to not keep the death penalty (in severe cases). I'm not saying we should do people in for jaywalking or piracy (K.W. Jeter's Noir notwithstanding) I'm starting to get tired of this reformist system. Some people can't be fixed.

Anti-globalization activists view the G8 -- the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia -- as a cabal that favors multinational corporations and the rich at the expense of the poor.

"This was a low turnout [of protesters in Georgia for the G8 conference] in terms of the recent history of these events," said Robert Randall, a Brunswick-based peace activist. "That speaks to the reality of how the authorities have terrorized people." (read more)

Yeah, guy. Mhm. Sure. Or maybe people just have other, more constructive things to do than sit and bitch at people that can't hear them. If you have issues with globalism, that's fine. It's even good -- no one should accept sweeping change without at least questioning its merit. But standing miles away from a meeting where the most prominent things on the agenda are rebuilding Iraq and tackling HIV/AIDS just really doesn't get much done. If you have a message, share it in a coherent manner. Don't smash stuff -- they'll just replace what you broke with cheaper foreign goods. Try a TV show -- you'll get more viewers. Run columns in newspapers. Get interviewed on TV. Getting arrested worked in the Civil Rights era but now it just fills up our overcrowded prisons even faster. And, all y'all protester-people -- you know what the best way to oppose globalization is? Don't buy foreign goods. Don't go to Starbucks. Stay out of the GAP, Banana Republic, Target, Pier One and the like. Better not use a barbecue, eat sushi, drink coffee, tea, beer or wine, use paper, use a computer, listen to the radio or hum the National Anthem -- these things were all contributed to our society by 'foreigners'. Interestingly, television was invented right here in America, and we've been sitting in front of it ever since.

Military vehicles rumbled through the streets and helicopters hovered in the skies in a show of force reminiscent of that seen in the United States after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The heavy military presence, however, looked somewhat unnecessary by the end of the summit.

Well, yeah there was a big military presence -- many of the most powerful people in the world are at the G8 summit, and it's kind of like Western-Power-In-A-Room. And quit it with the September 11th thing... it was years ago. It was a bad thing, yes .. but there's so much more to the whole issue. I'm sick of September 11th this and that. You know what it was? A prologue. It was the beginning of an opus discordiam that the western world is trying to bring to a close before the climax. Let's focus on the whole book, not just page one.

At least six researchers may have been exposed to deadly anthrax after a shipping foul up led them to believe they were working with dead rather than live bacteria, officials said Thursday. (read more)

Well, they're not very good researchers if they can't tell if something's alive or dead, are they? And what was anthrax doing in the Children's Hospital? Research on virulent things like that should be taking place in highly secured areas, not urban Children's Hospitals.

In other words, unless technologists modify the underlying architecture of the Internet to prevent zombie attacks, political activists have at their disposal a perfect megaphone, one that can't be turned off. (read more)

Yeah, and let's get on that, shall we? Who cares if it makes some peoples' old computers obsolete? If you've had a computer for more than five years, it's time to upgrade anyway. The changes to the systems that handle email seem like a decent idea -- in essence, a digital signature (that can be verified against a server somewhere) and whats called a reverse lookup (which queries an ISP to make sure the address that a message is sent from actually exists). It's better than taxing email (talk about unenforceable) and it's much more responsible than continuing to use the venerable but outdated protocols that drive email today.

From the wired.com sidebar:
UR GLTY
A tale of sex, murder and religion is topping the headlines in Sweden this month as a Pentecostal pastor is tried for murder. A 27-year-old nanny who was having an affair with the pastor has confessed to killing the pastor's wife and trying to kill the man who lived next door to him. She said Helge Wassmo, the 32-year-old pastor, told her the only way she could please God was to kill them. Prosecutors say Wassmo wanted the two dead so that he could marry the next-door neighbor's wife. The nanny also said she received several SMS messages from God, urging her to kill. The messages were traced to Wassmo, who claimed they were simply meant to provide religious guidance.
-- Debra Jones

Text messages from God, eh? He must have one huuuuge wireless bill... Imagine the roaming charges in heaven.

stupid people are funny

A woman who was seriously injured by a foul ball at Fenway Park has no grounds to sue because she assumed a risk by attending the baseball game, a state appeals court ruled...The three-member [court] panel said that even someone with scant knowledge of baseball should realize that "a central feature of the game is that batters will forcefully hit balls that may go astray from their intended direction." ()