Katherine Harris really is a peach, isn’t she. Never mind that because of her, an election was overturned and our country subjected to years of a destructively corrupt administration. Read the linked article, and you’ll get a better look at what an appropriately hideous person she is.
I bought an iPod almost three years ago, and usually I use it–but not at home where I have better music playing devices. And since my foot was broken and I was limiting my movements to where I could access these things, I wasn’t using the iPod. The last time I used it was my trip home last December.
After I got off my crutches and later became more mobile, I suddenly found the need to use the iPod. So I looked for it where I was pretty sure I had it. It wasn’t there. I thought back to where I could have last used it. At first I thought I had last used it on the trip home, so I searched my luggage and all the places I’d put stuff after I came home. Not finding it, I searched the apartment a few times over, like I did several times over the following months. No dice. I called the lost and found for the airlines, the bus line I used, even the taxi company; no one had found it. I thought maybe I hadn’t lost it on the trip, and rather that I’d taken it in to school once, so I searched my desk, the classrooms, and asked anyone if they’d found one. Still no iPod. So a few months ago, I resigned myself to having lost a $450 piece of equipment (priced that way when I bought it, anyway).
So now I’m giving the apartment a good cleaning, and am throwing away a lot of stuff that, being the pack rat that I am, I have been hoarding. That includes some plastic shopping bags that I collect but never use. I pick one up, and it is suspiciously heavy. At first I thought, ewww, that’s probably some bad juice from a year ago or something. I reach inside, and there’s the iPod.
That has to be the longest amount of time I have lost an expensive item without really having lost it. On the down side, I was all set to buy myself a new iPod–though I planned to wait for the new true-video iPod, and that’s not likely to come out for another 8 or 9 months. I’ll probably get one of those anyway, but maybe I’ll wait until revision 2 to do so.
Recap: despite obviously fatal legal troubles, vanity and greed made Tom DeLay run for office this year anyway, and won the GOP primary, making him the sole Republican candidate on the ballot. When it became even more clear that he would have to get out of Dodge, he tried a slick trick to evade responsibility: move out of state, invalidating his candidacy–essentially allowing the GOP to hand-pick a candidate, invalidating the choice of the voters (gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?).
The problem? DeLay didn’t sell his Texas home, and on top of that, the “non-inhabitant-on-election-day” trap door was a legal fiction invented by the GOP to illegally subvert a legal election (they love subverting elections, don’t they?). A local Texas judge ruled against him, meaning he would stay on the ballot as the GOP contender for his district. The uber-conservative 5th Circuit upheld the lower court, and now, ultra-uber-conservative Justice Scalia, acting for the Supreme Court out of session, upheld the 5th Circuit.
Now, remember, Tom DeLay engineered the whole extra-census gerrymandering in Texas that led to many seats being yanked out from under Democrats and put into GOP hands.
So how does the GOP react to the current situation? The attorney for the Texas Republican Party Chairman, who is arguing DeLay’s case, put it this way:
Whatever action might be taken, “we’re not going to let the Democrats steal this seat,” Bopp said.
Is that just about the richest thing you’ve ever heard, or what? If the GOP takes seats by arbitrary gerrymandering, it’s legit–but if the GOP can’t illegally weasel out of a mess it created and a Democratic candidate wins in a popular election because the GOP candidate is a crime-breaking scumbag, then the Democrat is “stealing” the seat.
Sometimes the sheer audacity of Republican politicians and lawyers is simply dazzling.
Engadget had the best live coverage, as it turns out–nearly transcribed the event, and included photos.
Amazingly, the lower-level unit (2.6GHz dual) comes with a weak 256MB of RAM. Either Apple is cutting corners hard to reduce the price, or they are commenting on how little minimum RAM you need with the Mac OS–a strong point when comparing to Vista, one has to admit.
Nevertheless, that’s going to be a blazing computer. Love to get one, but I’ll have to do with whatever revision of iMac comes out instead.
Also announced were new XServes, Apple’s server model; these use quad Xeons, 5TB storage, yadda yadda… hey, look it up if you have to know about servers.
They made a point on prices, how the price of these higher-end units is lower (maybe 10% lower) than a Dell–however, one has to assume that they really worked hard to skew the numbers in favor of Apple. I suspect that if you compare Apple with average brands and do some research, it’d be a wash.
Big news: Leopard shipping in “Spring”–so it won’t beat out Vista unless that gets delayed big-time. (That also means I’ll have to wait longer to buy the iMac; last time, I bought Tiger, then a few months later, bought a Powerbook; not doing that again).
Leopard features (Apple’s page is up):
Funny about the Mail feature of the “to do” list–Jobs mentioned that he used to send emails to himself to remind himself to do things, but the new feature in Mail does it better. It’s funny because I did that exact thing, sent myself an email as a “to do” reminder, just minutes before monitoring the keynote…
As for “Spaces,” it’s hard to tell, but from what I can see, it’s not what I hoped. It only switches views for application windows you have open–it does not give you new Desktop real estate for your icons. Very disappointing, because that’s what I would want a lot more than what they did. My Desktop is constantly getting cluttered with icons. What I need is a way to have all the icons clutter a Desktop I don’t often use but can call up anytime I need it, keeping my usual Desktop clear and clean. Yeah, I know, I could put them all in a folder–but it’s not the same thing.
More about iCal is shown on Apple’s web site.
A bit of a shocker, though, is what was not said: Jobs announced that “top secret features” are not being revealed yet, purportedly so that Microsoft can’t copy them as early.
So what are the “top secret” missing features for Leopard? Well, if you thought the speculation would be over today like I did, you were wrong. If anything, I imagine this will ramp up the rumor mills. Probable additions:
But will there be something else big that no one is seeing? After all, many of the items shown today were kept under wraps very effectively, including the major app improvements to Mail, iChat, and Dashboard, not to mention Time Machine. So there is a good chance that there are a few big features left that nobody’s guessed at yet.
The iChat collaborative shared display feature is very cool–effectively it looks like Timbuktu, remote access of someone else’s Mac. That would mean you can troubleshoot someone else’s Mac for them, or show them a process without having to be there.
Another iChat feature, the iChat Theater, allows you to show images, movies, or more importantly, Keynote presentations, with a small image of you on the side. This may not look like much to you, but I can see huge possibilities from a teaching standpoint. Remote teaching suddenly comes to life. What if I’m too ill to go to school and teach, but my voice is OK? I could remote-teach a lesson, given proper preparation. One Mac at school with with the camera pointed at the class, with the screen mirrored to a TV, and presto–instant remote lesson. The Backdrop feature could even hide the hideous mess of a room I didn’t want to clean because I was sick.
That also includes international lessons. My school has “Internet” classes, in which teachers in California lead a class which includes students here in Tokyo. Up till now, the class depended on expensive software to work–but iChat, a free app, could conceivably replace that.
Throw in the shared remote display feature, and you could teach computer classes. Throw in multi-conferencing, with enough joint users, I could teach a whole class that way, too, even more hands-on.
In short, iChat could really lead to some interesting stuff in online classes.
WWDC starts in 90 minutes–just a heads up to those getting this blog via RSS, who are interested in Macs, and who weren’t aware of the timing for the event. If that number of people > zero.
Here’s perhaps the best live-update site for the keynote speech.
Off-topic: I just got back from seeing M:I:III, the late show. (Late show tickets are only $11! Whee!) Yeah, I know, M:I:III, old news, but (a) it opened two months late in Japan, and (b) I waited an extra month so I could be into my vacation and not have to fight the crowds.
I don’t know why that movie didn’t do well at the box office (though I just checked, worldwide it hit $380 million, not incredibly shabby). Yes, it had a weak, predictable ending, but everything except the last five minutes of action was as good as the M:I movies get, and Abrams managed to put in a few fun bits at the end despite the weakness. And before that, almost nothing except blam, blam, blam–loud noises, big explosions, lots of jumping and sneaking around and fighting and other fun stuff. What more could one ask for?
Is James Cameron another closet Christian? He’s coming out with a documentary called “The Exodus Decoded” (gee whiz, any exploitation of The Da Vinci Code ya think?) which purports to explain the miracles in Exodus ‘scientifically’ using “archeological” evidence, up to and including the parting of the Red Sea.
The name Immanuel Velikovsky comes to mind… in addition to this film, which I saw when I was a kid.
I suppose one question will be, will this be presented as a way to explain the exact events of the exodus as written in scripture, or will it treat it as a general historical event from which the legends and stories arose? The difference being, of course, that the former would be simply an attempt to shape conjecture and pretend it is ‘science’ to legitimize a religious belief, while the latter would not be trying so hard to “prove” the Bible to be literal. Orson Scott Card’s fictional telling of the Noah legend in Pastwatch would be a good example of the latter. But Cameron’s work seems to be more of the former type:
The documentary’s website argues that a series of earthquakes may have “destabilised the entire Nile Delta system and resulted in part of the delta sliding off the African continental shelf”. This would have raised the level of land around the Sea of Reeds, believed to have been saltwater swamps around El Balah, the now extinct lake.“In other words, the sea parted,” the website says. “Water would have cascaded from higher ground to lower ground . . . creating dry land on which the Israelites could cross. This event would also have caused an enormous ‘backsplash’ of water, a veritable tsunami. If the waves went a mere seven miles inland they would have engulfed the Egyptian army.”
One has to be instantly skeptical of these claims that have extraordinarily rare, extreme catastrophic geological events timed perfectly to recreate biblical passages; the people making the claims tend to be rather credulous when it comes to accepting whatever information comes down the stream and interpreting it generously to fit their preconceptions.
Strangely, Cameron is not mentioned on the official web site…
I’ve written on this before, and I will again. I’ve said before, that if someone, anyone, tries to mention the words “liberal media” to me as if they refer to anything even resembling non-fiction, I will be all over them with evidence to the contrary. I have made the point that Republicans can get even their basest political smears published favorably nationally, but when the Democrats try to speak up on substantial issues, the media virtually ignores them, unless there’s something juicy a columnist can smack them on–belying the common claim that the Democrats “don’t have any points to make,” that they “aren’t trying to get a message out.”
And now we have yet another example: a thoroughly researched, exhaustively documented report from Democrats in Congress called “The Constitution in Crisis.” Yes, I know, it’s not juicy-sounding, doesn’t look titillating. But the report is rock solid, with 1401 endnotes documenting sources and filling in details. Over 160 pages of accessible writing, the report describes the Bush administration’s actions in two general areas–the Iraq War and illegal surveillance–chronicling events without filler, presenting hundreds of administration errors, lies, and lawbreaking with scrupulous accuracy.
The “liberal” media response after two days? Utter silence. Nothing. Not a single damned article. No coverage whatsoever.
Maybe you can say the report was too ambitious for today’s media. Maybe because it is a well-documented, well-researched report, it’s not what the press of today is looking for. Maybe because it doesn’t plug nicely into the MTV-age sound-bite cookie-cutter reporting paradigm that undoubtedly has Edward R. Murrow spinning in his grave.
But there are two things you cannot by any stretch of the imagination claim: one, that the Democrats are not trying to get the message out, and two, that the news media is liberal and caters to them. Neither of these claims have any reputable shred of evidence to back them up.
Go read the report.
Boy. Laptops seem to be exploding like crazy nowadays. This image from June at a conference in Osaka:
I have to admit that my laptop gets pretty hot (and my old Powerbook used to get hotter), but that’s the CPU–and it’s not the CPU that’s exploding in these reports. It’s the batteries. And the laptop maker at the focus of all this attention, fairly or not, is Dell.
Apparently, Dell has known about this issue for a long time–although CU reported that Dell only knew of three cases in 2005 when the company recalled 22,000 laptop batteries, it is now reported that Dell was aware of dozens of fires. And despite the recall, laptops continue to burn–some quite dramatically:
In all fairness, Dell is not the only laptop maker with these problems. Unfortunately, Powerbooks are blazing away with a fair level of frequency as well.
I wish I could imagine my own ‘book to be immune from this, but I am in fact rather nervous about it going up into flames. On three different occasions over the past year I’ve had it, I’ve experienced what could have been near-meltdowns. After closing the notebook cover and setting the computer to sleep, I come back–sometimes many hours later–and see that (a) the sleep light is no longer on despite the cover being closed, and (b) the fan is howling like a sonuvagun, obviously blowing at its highest level. When I open the cover, the screen stays dark and the computer refuses to respond. A hard-shutdown and restart brings the computer back on right away–thankfully!–but it takes a bit for the thing to cool down. After I saw these meltdown images, I began to wonder how close I had come to suffering the same thing, even though my own laptop is not on the battery recall list.
Looking at the discussion groups at Apple, though, makes me figure that what I’m seeing isn’t a battery issue, but rather a sleep issue. Probably the computer jostles out of sleep mode while closed and for some reason does not go back to sleep. With the cover down, heat dissipation is probably hindered, causing the overheating.
Nevertheless, I’m having the screen replaced in a week or two (under warranty, even though it ran out last month), and I figure I’ll let the people at Apple know about it just in case.
Remember Claude Allen, a top Bush domestic policy advisor who got caught shoplifting from and committing refund fraud at Target? His case came before the court, and he plead guilty in a common kind of deal which, if he behaves under 2 year’s probation, his record could be cleared. I have no problem with that, it’s a common deal for the first offense–assuming that the Washington Post is correct in that it is a common plea.
What’s more questionable is his defense: he shoplifted because of stress (from, among other things, hurricane Katrina) and sleep deprivation. Now I’m not a physician with experience in these areas, but I still have a lot of trouble seeing how stress and sleeplessness drives a top White House official making $161,000 to shoplift from and commit fraud at Target stores on 25 separate occasions. Something tells me that it might go a little deeper than that.
O’Grady’s Powerpage claims to have a detailed preview of some Leopard features on their web site. A few people are already calling it out as fake, but if they are genuine, expect them to be taken down very soon after Apple’s lawyers jump on them. After a brief glance, they certainly do not seem to be complete, if they are real. The information only deals with upgrades to some existing services in OS X (Spotlight and Dashboard mainly, with some details on Safari, and short bullet lists on iChat, Automator, Quicktime, Mail, iCal and Address Book). I say it’s not complete because if that’s all Leopard is, it’ll be a major dud. I’ve got to get ready to leave for my graduation ceremony in about an hour, so I don’t have time to blog on the details right now; just see for yourself. I’ll comment tonight, but by then, I am sure many others will have dissected this thing to a tee.
In the last days before Congress wraps things up before the break, it looks like two major pieces of Republican graft will not pass:
The GOP’s fake minimum-wage political ploy has failed to pass the Senate due to Democratic opposition. In short: the GOP proposed the hike laden with poison pills knowing the Democrats would reject it so they could claim that they were champions of the minimum wage hike and the nasty Democrats blocked benefits for working stiffs. The poison was the GOP’s long-sought estate tax cut, indexing the estate tax to inflation while not doing the same for the minimum wage, and slashing tip earner’s minimum wage in some states (which mostly happen to be blue states).
Meanwhile, Kos has the details on Loony Alaska Senator “It’s Not a Dump Truck” Stevens’ graft-laden Net Neutrality bill: in short, it’s not passing–yet. If you’ll recall, if the bill passes, then the telecoms win and you lose, big time. The telecoms will win the ability to charge even more for select web sites to hog the fastest bandwidth while free sites suffer; in the end, you’ll be paying the bills. The telecoms will win the ability to control what programs you can and cannot use, blocking competitor’s software and controlling your options for home networking. And if they please, the telecoms will have the power to slow down or effectively shut down any site they don’t like–but don’t worry, they’ve promised not to abuse that power. Just like they promised to use the zillions they’ll make from this to give you broadband–a promise they made before and welched on. The benefits to you: none. Zilch. You pay more for worse service while the telecoms make out like bandits and gain control over a huge chunk of the Internet. That’s the essence of the bill.
This latest failure of the bill to pass cloture is not a victory for us, it’s only a setback for them. The bill wasn’t voted down, it just didn’t get the 60 votes to pass filibuster and come up for a vote. But if we let the issue fade out of our consciousness, it will simply resurface in a few months and the telecoms may then have the influence to pass it through while we’re not looking. So be vigilant and let your representatives know that you oppose this!
And by the way, Lieberman is waffling on Net Neutrality, a signal that he’s trying to look Democratic but will again vote Republican. And although he’s made statements before that he’s against the estate tax, he is mum on the issue on his web site, and he curiously missed voting on the issue the other day. Perhaps he’s just trying not to offend Republicans when he may need them in November, but it does show that he values politics over doing the right thing.
Meanwhile, the naysayers claim that scientists “disagree” on the issue, though in truth, only a very small number disagree and the vast majority of scientists consider this a lock. Not that you’ll hear it from the government, where Bush & Co. continue to censor, muzzle, and edit what scientists are trying to say on the issue.
Kevin Drum, as usual, is on the minimum wage/estate tax story, and caught out the Washington Post in what might charitably be called an “error.” A writer for the paper quoted a businessman as saying, “Every closely held business in America today is either affected by the death tax or could be affected by it,” and did not question that “fact.”
Drum points out that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a grand total of 485 small businesses are affected in any meaningful way by the estate tax as it is, and that the planned tax cuts would reduce that number to a total of 94 small businesses. A closer look at the above link in the paragraph shows a chart which demonstrates that with the estate tax as is, a grand total of 138 farmers and 164 family-owned businesses each year would be forced to liquidate because of estate taxes owed. This compared to the millions of American families living below the poverty line due to the minimum wage being what it is.
Drum also points out that while the Republican bill would also index the estate tax to inflation, it would not do the same for the minimum wage.
Update: Worse news still: the Republican bill not only would index estate tax exemptions to inflation while leaving minimum wage earners without such a net, but now it seems that the GOP-authored bill would actually cut the minimum wage for millions of workers nationwide.
There is a different minimum wage for workers who depend on tips. As a way to benefit businesses at the expense of workers, a special lower minimum wage is set for workers who receive gratuities; the current federal law says that tip earners can get paid as low as $2.13 an hour, as opposed to the $5.15 an hour minimum wage (meaning employers can pay workers virtually nothing, even if business is slow and tips are bad). Some states, like California, set a higher minimum wage for tip earners.
But the new GOP bill would, in one stroke, erase all the state laws that set special tip-earner minimum wages and reset them at the federal level. And that’s not an error in the wording of the bill, either–it’s something that the National Restaurant Association has been lobbying the GOP for. As if having to pay their workers close to nothing already isn’t enough.
The impact? A San Francisco waiter now making $6.75 plus tips would see their pay cut immediately to $2.13 plus tips–a pay cut of $4.62 an hour, at the same time that wealthy people get tax cuts in the millions. This pay cut will hit more than 600,000 workers in California alone.
So what’s going to be up with the World Wide Developer Conference starting August 7th, less than a week away? One thing that we know for certain is that Leopard (Mac OS X 1.5) will be revealed, and we’ll know what’s really going to be going on with the new OS that will come out opposite Vista. But what else?
The common knowledge answer is that the new Mac Pros, with the newest and fastest Intel chips, will be released, completing Apple’s switch to Intel. Apart from that, an upgrade for the iPod Nano. However, Robert Scoble suggests that there will be a lot more:
Speaking of Apple, they are readying a dizzying amount of new products. I wish I could camp out at an Apple store during the World Wide Developer Conference on August 7th. I wish I could say more, but that’d get me sued by Steve Jobs and I don’t need that kind of heck right now.
A “dizzying amount of new products”? Well, people have been talking about the iPhone (still considered a long shot–they’ve failed to materialize for years now), and maybe a movie download/rental service. But what the heck else could there be? The full-screen “no-touch” video iPod isn’t expected to come out until early next year. There are rumors of iChat going VoiP a la Skype, but fewer expect that than expect the iPhone.
Could Leopard, the Mac Pros, a small iPod upgrade, movie downloads, and the iPhone be considered “a dizzying amount”? Is more coming than we’ve heard of? I would guess that Scoble is either over-estimating or is too easily impressed.
Possibilities are covered here, a wish list here, and a WWDC Bingo game is offered here.
Update: Engadget has a story on what might be the iPhone, called “iChat Mobile,” with photos. (A subsequent video that got people excited is now shown up to be a fake–a printout of the iPhone mockup on glossy paper cleverly folded to look like a real device in a low-quality video.) Also, here’s another WWDC rumor roundup, and here is perhaps the best.
FWIW, Scoble is also suggesting that Vista might indeed be pushed back again (or at least that it should be pushed back), perhaps by as much as six months. Roger Kay tends to agree, and all these people do as well. The reason is that there are still to many problems, mostly in speed, user interface issues, driver issues, and application compatibility problems. I have my doubts, though–I think that Microsoft would be hurt more by another six-month delay than by releasing a buggy OS. After all, both problems are expected by everyone, but the buggy OS is less apt to damage Microsoft’s image than pushing back the release date, an issue that already has Microsoft in the position of marketplace laughingstock.
…And that makes three. Three years of blogging daily, without a break in that whole time. I started on August 2, 2003, and noted the yearly milestones for year one and year two. I’m also coming up on the two-thousandth-post mark, though not quite so soon–probably I’ll hit that late September or early October. Blog readership is down a bit recently, but that may be more because of the fact that I put trackbacks to rest, and as a result spam, now limited to comment spam and referrer spam, has trickled down to just three or four thousand a week. About 15% of my visitors are returning readers, and according to Google Analytics, several hundred people visit regularly (more than half from the U.S., another quarter from Japan, and the rest from mostly English-speaking countries, naturally).
And so on to year number four…
I’ve been a bit negligent in posting my most recent birdwatching finds. Not much new, but a few okay photos from a recent visit to Oi Wild Bird Park and Kasai Rinkai. Some of these photos were taken the day I got hit by lightning; some are from my birdwatching a week after that.
First, the juvenile Black-crowned Night Heron I saw the last time, except now it’s taking up a new roost–and it turns out there are two of them. I found this out by pointing out one I’d found to a nice couple who were peering through the same blinds as I was. After a minute I discovered that they thought I was pointing to one close by, when actually I was trying to show them the one far away–I hadn’t noticed the close one. This is also the first time I’ve seen an immature Black-crowned roost on the pillars like this–they’d always been in the swampy area across the way, like they were the previous time I’d been there.
Usually, the adults roost there, as in this photo from August last year:
There were many of the usual suspects as well, including a Kingfisher…
Some Black-winged Stilts…
Some Common Sandpipers…
And some Little Terns:
The terns are harder to get shots of, of course, as they tend to be always flying over the water; you can get them only when they hover before diving (note the bird looking down in most of the photos).
It was also a time for juvenile birds; the Heron above was just one example. The Wagtails are young–adults are sharply contrasted with white and black, but the juveniles are greyish in color:
And you can spot young Little Grebes at this time of year as well, easy to spot with their striped heads:
And even a Bull-headed Shrike that I happened upon seemed immature–note the spots on the top of the wings (the larger spot on the middle edge of the wings is one thing that identifies the bird), and the not-so-contrasted head markings–adults are more striking than this young fellow, which I happened upon by pure chance:
One that was probably not young was also not a bird. Right in the middle of the lake, we spotted something–and a look at zoom showed a bump with two more bumps. A bullfrog, apparently–unless the lake has become populated with crocodiles…
And finally, one of the more regular, but also striking birds in the Oi Park at this time of year, the Little Ringed Plover. In the first shot, I caught him with wings raised:
And in these two shots, the little guy was very close up; click on the images for larger versions:
As you may recall, I broke the fifth metatarsal of my right foot last December, and it’s been taking forever to heal. Since it did not heal well by the beginning of June, I started with an ultrasound therapy, and that seems to be doing a much better job. Check out the image below: my foot when I broke it on December 3, again in April (five months later, not very well healed), and then just the other day in mid-July.
The doc told me that the bone is now 80% healed, so with the new therapy, it might be all the way back by the end of August. That ultrasound pulse stuff seems to actually work. In fact, they seem to be finding more uses for it–including growing new teeth. The article, which I noticed a few weeks ago, details the exact same treatment that I’m using for my feet, except instead of SAFHS, it’s called LIPUS, and has a much smaller and automatic pulse generator.
How about that?
I was watching a little segment on YouTube about two guys who pulled a strange and unfunny stunt on a live Fox News program. It was about two brothers who made Internet videos about how easy it is to steal a bike even when chained; as one of them demonstrates by using a portable saw to cut through a heavy chain, the other fakes getting injured, falling to the ground screaming, which supremely pissed off the Fox reporter.
Why mention this? Because I recognized them. They are Casey and Van Neistat, the same clowns who made a big splash two and a half years ago by wildly exaggerating iPod battery deficiencies. In short, they used their iPod almost constantly over one and a half years, and then were outraged when the rechargeable battery lost its ability to maintain a long charge (something that would be obvious to and fully expected by anyone who has used rechargeable batteries before). They claimed that it was impossible to replace the battery, and so started defacing iPod ads all over New York; they became famous when their video of this defacement became popular on the Internet.
When it was demonstrated that the iPod battery could be replaced, they countered by buying the most expensive one and badly botching the replacement job, then claiming that an overpriced $100 replacement was impossible to do anyway–when in fact, replacement kits could be bought for $50 and were easy to perform flawlessly.
None of that seemed to matter as the Neistats launched to fame–for at least a while. Now they’re in the news again after having made videos of themselves stealing bikes from all over New York, and the Fox segment made a bigger splash–not because their badly-performed decapitation prank was funny at all, but because of how the reporter, Jodi Applegate, reacted to the prank.
Frankly, as much as I detest Fox News, I couldn’t find much fault in Applegate’s reaction aside from her rather sophomoric use of language for a network news reporter–“That was totally uncool!” “That was not cool, dude!” “They’re jerks, and we were totally not part of planning that!” I probably would have reacted much the same way, though with slightly more dignified vocabulary. That said, it is still somewhat her own fault for having these two guys on the air without first checking them out; she could have easily figured out that they were nothing but juvenile publicity hounds.
Here are some web sites I regularly visit, but don’t link to on my sidebar, at least not at present. They’re good regular visits:
Cosmic Buddha: Japan blogger with a good sense of humor.
Crooks and Liars: why the heck don’t I have them up on my sidebar yet?
Engadget: a good general tech blog.
FG: a good blog on Japan’s happenings (don’t make me print their full title).
Pharyngula: a good science blog; often takes on the creationists.
SeanPAune: some good stuff here.
The Straight Dope: fun facts for the day.
TUAW: The Unofficial Apple Website, good Apple tech blog.
Most of these will probably get on to the LinkBoard, once I find the time to clean up the blog some. Should be soon–I just taught my last class of the semester, and with just one final exam to give, some grading to do, and the graduation ceremony, there’s not much left before my one-month summer vacation. Ah, the college professor’s life!
Here’s a YouTube post of a segment from The Colbert Report, where Colbert takes the morning news shows to task. Two such shows had bits on Colbert making politicians look bad, and they both asked the question, why would politicians be so stupid as to go on to a show that would ask them questions that could make them look bad?
GOOD MORNING AMERICA’S JAKE TAPPER: But with the reputation-damaging risk associated with an appearance on The Colbert Report, why do politicians keep going on the show?
TODAY SHOW’S MATT LAUER: And yet they keep on coming!
CO-HOST: Why? Why?
LAUER: They think they’re being hip, I don’t know.
Underlying that question is a dark truth about journalism today: no one on television, radio, or in the print media is willing to ask hard questions to politicians for fear of the politicians avoiding them. They are unwilling to ask questions that might stump the politicians or make them look bad, and when the politician is obviously lying or is avoiding answering a question, they let them get away with it. It also shows up the unwillingness of most politicians to face the public in a setting where their hypocrisy or ignorance could be revealed.
Watching Colbert’s segment with the “news” people saying what they said makes this fact evident; they are clearly stumped as to why any politician would appear when the interviewer is not some emasculated softball-thrower. Although Colbert did not mention this aspect of it specifically, the subtext is frighteningly–and comically–clear. And you gotta admit, it’s huge fun to see Colbert get Robert Wexler to say, “I enjoy cocaine because it’s a fun thing to do!” and to see Colbert absolutely destroy Lynn Westmoreland by pointing out that he was pushing legislation requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in the House and Senate–and then asking him to name the Ten Commandments. Westmoreland could only get out three.
Maybe part of the reason the politicians agree to go on the show is that they think they’ll be treated with kid gloves, like with most interviewers. Now, Wexler seems to be pretty hip here–he knew what was going on and easily could have refused or sidestepped Colbert’s request–other politicians have done so. But Westmoreland appears to have had no clue as to what he was getting himself into. And that’s probably why most people, not just politicians, agree to appear in segments on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show: because they simply don’t know what they’re in for. The shows are popular, but not so popular (especially with certain segments of the population) that a lot of people who agree to appear don’t know what they’re agreeing to. That these people tend to be un-hip and often clueless just makes it funnier.
So, Microsoft was trying to to show off one of Vista’s cool new features, speech recognition, by having one of their people give a demo.
DEMO GUY: “Dear mom, comma.”VISTA: “Dear Aunt,”
DEMO GUY: “Fix aunt.”
VISTA: “let’s set”
DEMO GUY: “Delete that. Delete that.”
VISTA: “so”
DEMO GUY: “Delete that. I think it’s picking up a little, I can hear… Delete–select all.”
VISTA: “double the killer delete select all”
At this point, the computer screen reads: “Dear Aunt, so let’s set double the killer delete select all” as the audience has a good laugh.
DEMO GUY: (as he manually selects all the typed text and deletes it) “OK, I’m glad you’re enjoying this.”
Microsoft complained that the software was picking up ambient noise, but that’s not much of an excuse–ambient noise is going to be present in most real-life applications. The story and a video (with a huge, distracting watermark on it) are here Update: here’s a clean version of the video.
This is simply yet another example of Windows getting stuff long after Apple has. Apple has had speech recognition for many years, and Vista’s looks like nothing really new. I sometimes demo the Mac’s speech recognition (though the Mac doesn’t have dictation, it does allow you to give speech commands) for my Computer classes, and sometimes I have the same problem this guy had; it’s a matter of how much background noise is getting to the mic. Though this demo guy must have been wearing a mic headset, ideal for this kind of application, whereas I was speaking into the built-in mic on my Powerbook. So really, I’m not impressed by this. Personal computer speech recognition still has a long way to go before it is really feasible for most users.