FW: [IP] SOUTHWEST AIRLINES LEGISLATIVE ACTION ALERT

Sometimes corporations can be good, and with style:

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Saturday, Jul 16, 2005 6:46 pm
Subject: [IP] SOUTHWEST AIRLINES LEGISLATIVE ACTION ALERT

Begin forwarded message:

Wright Is Wrong! Set Love Free!

I am sending you this ALERT today to ask for your help. By now, you have probably heard about our fight to repeal the Wright Amendment, the 1979 law that makes it illegal to fly or advertise flights from Dallas Love Field to points beyond the four states surrounding Texas, plus Alabama, Mississippi, and Kansas. We need your help to make this happen!

The Wright Amendment has a strong history of stifling competition and creating high fares. Simply put, the Wright Amendment is Wrong! It's time to Set Love Free and repeal this archaic, antiquated law now! Southwest wants to bring you low fares and Legendary Customer Service from Love Field to many of the 60 cities that we currently serve across the nation.

Please join our efforts to Set Love Free by visiting our web site: setlovefree.com to take action now. You can help by:

Contacting Your Elected Officials

Encourage your federal legislators to please support the Right to Fly Act (HR 2646) introduced in the House by Texas Congressmen Jeb Hensarling and Sam Johnson that will immediately remove the Wright Amendment restrictions on Dallas Love Field Airport, or any companion legislation that might be introduced into the Senate. The "Write Congress" feature is on the home page of setlovefree.com.

Thank you for taking action now to repeal the Wright Amendment. We have always been able to count on you, our loyal Customers. Please accept my heartfelt thanks for helping us Set Love Free!

LUV,

Colleen C. Barrett
President, Southwest Airlines

-------------------------------------

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

This is why I push Linux. You can be sure that Apple will support such restrictions in short order as well.

You Bastards.

TECHNOLOGY: Microsoft Pushes Opium: "On the eve of a long-awaited new OS release, codenamed 'Longhorn' by Microsoft, you may need to upgrade your monitor. This is all due to OPM (pronounced 'opium'), a new content creation protection built into the new OS.



In short, almost every single monitor on the market today is going to be obsolete in a few short months. It's not going to render your monitor useless, but what you can see will be limited.

So what will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you’re ‘lucky’, the content will go through a resolution constrictor. The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content to below a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of your monitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is a picture far fuzzier than it need be.



That’s LUCKY?



It sure is — when the alternative is a black screen. If OPM determines that your monitor falls below the security restrictions (i.e. isn’t DVI or HDMI w/HDCP), you could be greeted with a ‘polite message explaining that [your monitor] doesn’t meet security requirements.’



Who determines when you get the restrictor and when you get the black screen? You guessed it: the content owner does.

(Written by: FuzzyDice)

"

(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)

CULTURE: BBC "Greatest Philosopher" Votes Result: "The BBC Radio Four programme In Our Time has been running a 'Who is the greatest philosopher?' vote. The results are in and they are, perhaps, a bit surprising.

• Karl Marx won with 27.93% of the vote
• David Hume, 12.67%
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, 6.80%
• Friedrich Nietzsche, 6.49%
• Plato, 5.65%
• Immanuel Kant, 5.61
• St. Thomas Aquinas, 4.83%
• Socrates, 4.82%
• Aristotle, 4.52%
• Karl Popper, 4.20%

This kind of programming, and the website tie-in, show the BBC at it's best: Challenging programming that allows people with knowledge of a subject the time to talk about that subject, and to discuss opposing points without relying on sound bites or dodgy statistics. It also proves that the licence fee isn't entirely wasted on dumb house makeover programmes.

(Written by: dem_z)

"

(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)

There's a story from the French school system that a roommate long ago regaled me with:

The smartest kids study math. The kids who aren't smart enough to study math study physics.

Extrapolate further...

(though in fairness many of the smartest kids do go to MS...)

The apocryphal history of file system tunnelling: "

One of the file system features you may find yourself
surprised by is tunneling,
wherein the creation timestamp and short/long names of a file
are taken from a file that existed in the directory previously.
In other words,
if you delete some file 'File with long name.txt'
and then create a new file with the same name,
that new file will have the same short name and the same
creation time as the original file.
You can

read this KB article for details on what operations are
sensitive to tunnelling.

Why does tunneling exist at all?

When you use a program to edit an existing file, then save it,
you expect the original creation timestamp
to be preserved, since you're editing a file, not creating a new one.
But internally, many programs save a file by performing a
combination of save, delete, and rename operations
(such as the ones listed in the linked article),
and without tunneling, the creation time of the file
would seem to change even though from the end user's point of view,
no file got created.

As another example of the importance of tunneling,
consider that file 'File with long name.txt',
whose short name is say 'FILEWI~1.TXT'.
You load this file into a program
that is not long-filename-aware and save it.
It deletes the old 'FILEWI~1.TXT'
and creates a new one with the same name.
Without tunnelling,
the associated long name of the file would be lost.
Instead of a friendly long name,
the file name got corrupted into this thing with squiggly marks.
Not good.

But where did the name 'tunneling' come from?

From quantum mechanics.

Consider the following analogy:
You have two holes in the ground, and a particle is in the
first hole (A) and doesn't have enough energy to get out.
It only has enough energy to get as high as the dotted line.

	A		B

You get distracted for a little while,
maybe watch
the Super Bowl
halftime show,
and when you come back, the particle somehow is now
in hole B.
This is impossible in classical mechanics, but
thanks to the wacky world of quantum mechanics,
it is not only possible, but actually happens.
The phenomenon is known as

tunneling,
because it's as if the particle 'dug a tunnel'
between the two holes, thereby allowing it to get from one hole
to another without ever going above the dotted line.

In the case of file system tunneling,
it is information that appears to violate the laws of classical
mechanics.
The information was destroyed (by deleting or renaming the file),
yet somehow managed to reconstruct
itself on the other side of a temporal barrier.

The developer who was responsible for implementing tunneling
on Windows 95 got kind of carried away with the quantum
mechanics analogy:
The fragments of information about recently-deleted or recently-renamed
files are kept in data structures called 'quarks'.
"

(Via The Old New Thing.)

Karma

From a slashdot thread on the premiere of BSG season 2 tonight:

vivid memory of childhood (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 15, @01:46PM (#13075067)
That night in 1978 that Battlestar Glactica premired, they were
showing the movie King Kong on another network. It was a very big
night for tv when I was kid. But then disaster struck:

They interrupted both shows because Isreal and Egypt were signing a
peace agreement. And my mom sent me to bed.

Egypt and Isreal had been fighting for hundreds of years... couldn't
they have waited one more day? Think of the children.

Note that a President Bush has fired a Rove for leaking to Novak before...

Camo

I got confused for a new employee at the Management Consulting firm I was at this morning.

So much for No First Use.

Chinese general warns U.S. over Taiwan-newspaper: "LONDON (Reuters) - A senior Chinese general has warned that
China was ready to use nuclear weapons against the United
States if Washington attacked his country over Taiwan, the
Financial Times newspaper reported on Friday."

(Via Reuters: Top News.)

I'm eagerly awaiting Mr. Garrison's response to this...

CULTURE: Pope Knows Best, Harry Potter Is Evil: "The Pope has officially declared that he is against the Harry Potter books. I guess this means that we're all going to have to stop reading them. I know I will. I mean, he's the Pope for God's sake.

In a letter dated March 7, 2003 Cardinal Ratzinger thanked Kuby for her 'instructive' book Harry Potter - gut oder böse (Harry Potter- good or evil?), in which Kuby says the Potter books corrupt the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God while that relationship is still in its infancy.

It would seem that he believes reading Harry Potter will turn people away from God and towards the Devil,

It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.

(Written by: JeffD)

"

(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)

I suppose Failing him could also have been a performance...

;)

CULTURE: Russian Roulette Artist Speaks: "On November 29, 2004, Joseph Deutch, a graduate student in art at UCLA, created a piece of performance art. He stood in front of a group of his student peers and his teacher, performance artist Ron Athey, held what appeared to be a .357 Magnum to his head, and pulled the trigger, producing a clicking noise but no bullet. Immediately thereafter, Deutch fled the room. The students in the classroom heard a loud bang from the room's adjoining hallway. Then, Deutch returned to the classroom. As it turned out, according to Deutch, who speaks for the first time to the LA Times, the gun was a fake, one he had carved from wood--but, the fallout from his artwork was real. Ultimately, two art professors, Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, suddenly retired after the University refused to suspend Deutch, deeming Deutch's performance art 'domestic terrorism.'

'The thing I hadn't counted on was Chris and Nancy freaking out to the extent they did.'



Deutch said that he did not know Rubins and that he'd had only one substantial conversation with Burden, who oversaw instruction in new genres, the branch of the art department that includes performance art. Burden stopped doing performance art by the 1980s, having made a lasting mark with trailblazing work such as his 1971 piece 'Shoot,' in which an assistant, standing 15 feet away in a Santa Ana gallery, shot him in the upper arm with a .22-caliber rifle.



In 1972, Phyllis Lutjeans, a friend who hosted a cable TV show, invited Burden on the program. Without warning — in a performance he dubbed 'TV Hijack' — he held her at knifepoint for several minutes.



'When Chris put the knife at my throat, I was absolutely terrified,' Lutjeans recalled for The Times 20 years later. 'I thought, 'This guy's psychotic.' '



Deutch said that although he was familiar with the history of performance art and Burden's place in it, his untitled Russian roulette piece was not intended as a response or allusion to the professor's early work.

(Written by: susannah_breslin)

"

(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)

Craziness at Grand Central

So 42nd St between Madison and Vanderbilt is blocked because a suitcase was left out on the street.

The coppers are going through the bag.

Life goes on.

FW: [IP] "Human-Brained" Monkeys

The moment they start singing spirituals...

-----Original Message-----
From: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Date: Thursday, Jul 14, 2005 10:32 am
Subject: [IP] "Human-Brained" Monkeys

-----Original Message-----
From: "Randall"<rvh40@insightbb.com>
Sent: 13/07/05 10:12:46 PM
To: "Dave"<dave@farber.net>
Cc: "JMG"<johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: "Human-Brained" Monkeys

http://tinyurl.com/8ajqt

SCIENTISTS have been warned that their latest experiments may accidently produce monkeys with brains more human than animal.

In cutting-edge experiments, scientists have injected human brain cells into monkey fetuses to study the effects.

Critics argue that if these fetuses are allowed to develop into
self-aware subjects, science will be thrown into an ethical nightmare.

An eminent committee of American scientists will call for restrictions into the research, saying the outcome of such studies cannot be
predicted and may in fact produce subjects with a 'super-animal'
intelligence.

The high-powered committee of animal behaviourists, lawyers,
philosophers, bio-ethicists and neuro-scientists was established four years ago to examine the growing numbers of human/monkey experiments.

These procedures, known as 'human-primate chimeras', involve the
combination of human and monkey cells, tissue and DNA to observe any
effect and examine the possibility that such combination could actually exist.

Chimeras are mythical monsters from Greek literature, which combined various bodyparts from lions, goats nd snakes.

Advertisement:

This team will soon publish its conclusions in leading journal Science. In the report the committee will address such unsettling questions as whether introducing human cells into non-human primate brains could
cause "significant physical or biochemical changes that make the brain more human-like" and how those changes could be detected.

The committee will also examine how detectable differences in the
monkey's brains, for example emotional or behavioural changes, or if the monkeys developed 'self awareness', could be measured - and dealt with.

"What we were trying to do was anticipate - recognising that if science were to take that path there might be some different kinds of moral
challenges." said committee co-chairman Dr Ruth Faden, a professor in biomedical ethics.

--
"We've got the hatemongers who literally hate this president, and that is so wrong. . . . The people who hate George Bush hate him because he's a follower of Jesus Christ, unashamedly says so and applies his faith in his day-to-day operations." -- Rev. Jerry Falwell, on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal"

------------------------------------

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

Aren't there federal laws about transporting pollutants across state lines?

Unborn babies carry pollutants, study finds: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Unborn U.S. babies are soaking in a
stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and
pesticides, according to a report released on Thursday."

(Via Reuters: Top News.)

Hillary announced today that the Smut allegations in GTA should be looked into.

Humor is the antidote to wallowing in cynicism.

days of future past

Yesterday I went to the futur...: "

days of future past



Yesterday I went to the future an it was awesome! I took the moon train to a city on Mars an blew up an evil computer with the power of thinkin an helped Captain Space And His Spacekateers fight off an invasion from Neptunia Queen of the Planet Women an all for under three Quizlats!


Today I go back to the future an somebody's paved over all the bubble cities an the tube transports an the tractor beams an replaced em with a series of planned communities with tastefully homogeneous designs based on a pastiche of local cultures. I figure maybe somebody's sorta moved the future off to the side so I call up information an ask for Robotopolis but all I get is directions to the strip mall. I run into Nebulox the Living Thing That Lives but he's just baggin groceries at a Stop-U-Mart. I ask if he's gonna use his fearsome galactaray to conquer these tater tots but he just wraps em in recycled paper instead.


I start thinkin maybe space future's lookin better than normal future so I go to the rental guy an I go I'd like a moon rocket please an the rental guy goes don't got moon rockets an I go how bout a flyin car an he goes none a them either an I go what about a spaceplane or a blimpwich or a moosemobile an he goes nope nope nope an I go whattayougot an he goes a boat an I go what kinda boat, a space boat or a time boat or a mysterious negaboat or what an he says it's just a boat. So I end up walkin around the future with some moldy ol boat. This isn't the future. This is some fake plastic future. This is a soy-based future substitute.


I spend the rest a the day hangin out in the past. Winston Churchill just smokes up an eats doritos an Abraham Lincoln turns out to be a complex animatronic device operated by freemasons.

"

(Via Fafblog.)

a lovely animation: "

by daw_

(Via jwz.)

dutifully block quoted:

funny picture of cat

So pieds-à-terre means second home.

Why you can't just come out and say second home boggles the mind.

Pretentious wankers.

Is this true?

Women leaving tech jobs in droves: "

In Where have all the women gone? Roy Mark highlights evidence presented in various studies that women are leaving tech jobs en masse.

This is happening at a time when Bill Gates, Craig Barrett and John Chambers, et al., are trooping to Capitol Hill to decry the declining American IT talent pool. They want relaxed immigration rules. They want more tax dollars invested in science and technology. They want outsourcing.

Perhaps they should also call for an equal playing field among the sexes.

The IT industry prides itself as a working model for the new global economy, blind to everything but talent and hard work. Tech, though, is taking a big hike on walking the walk when it comes to women.

'Women don't feel valued by IT. They are forced into being a certain type of person, i.e. a white male model: linear, analytical, 24/7, in-your-face, your-job-is-your life,' says Barbara Annis, author of Same Words, Different Language. 'Women don't see a future for themselves [in IT] as they are.'

And as he points out, it's not about getting 'more women in the feeder pool' -- we're actually doing a pretty good job of educating girls in technology and getting them into their initial tech jobs. What's hard is keeping them there with the work environments being what they are."

(Via misbehaving.net.)

Vin Diesel on location...

Triple Sunset: Planet Discovered in 3-Star System: "The first known world of its kind in a gravitationally challenging setup."

(Via SPACE.com.)

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that the suicide bombers (what's the terminology these days?) were British Muslims of Pakistani origin.

Christopher Hitchens on the distance from Srebenica to Baghdad. As always, he's damn good.

Karl Rove: "

I've been told the same thing as Duncan Black has: Karl Rove did not call Matt Cooper and say, 'I really mean it when I say that you are free of any obligation to me not to testify.' Instead, the loudness of Karl Rove's and his lawyer's claims that he had freed reporters who talked to him of any obligation pushed Cooper beyond the limit:

Eschaton: [The] New York Times article on the Rove case is typically clear as mud, but after reading it several times and consulting with a handful of liberal intellectuals, I've gained new respect for Matt Cooper. Basically, he got fed up with Rove's lawyer lying to the press, and figured that combined with the waiver he'd previously received and the emphasis Luskin placed on it, was enough.

In other words, Rove's lawyer, acting as an agent of Rove, mounted a too extreme PR campaign on behalf of his client, and sufficient deceptive remarks led Cooper to say f*** it. Luskin thought Cooper wouldn't testify no matter what he said, and he was wrong.

Good for Cooper.

"

(Via Semi-Daily Journal.)

"Small, Hairless, Blind, and Dependent on a Larger Rodent for All His Information: "

Snark! Snark! Snark!

Scott McClellan Wanders Off Reservation, Is Shot and Killed:

We would like to apologize for our characterization yesterday of Scott McClellan as a puppy dog. Thanks to the New York Times, we were able to review all of his statements on the Rove-Plame matter and now we feel that a more accurate analogy would be that Scott McClellan is like a hapless baby rodent of some kind. Perhaps a gerbil or a weasel. Small, hairless, blind, and dependent on a larger rodent for all his information. So it's true, McClellan did, in extreme flustered mode, yelp out such regrettable declarations as 'I've made it very clear, [Rove] was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was,' and 'The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved,' and, more brazenly, 'There has been absolutely nothing brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement.'

These statements are all in sharp contrast to the more maturely weasely statements of the President and Rove himself, around which there is enough wiggle room for a fat, bald man to slither through and stay employed for at least three more years. All this proves is that no one tells Scotty anything. It's not really his job to know anything. His job is to say what he's told to say, or, in some extraordinary cases, what he intuits they might say with the power of his mind:

I've known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask Karl, because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct.

Like we said, he doesn't know anything.

Past White House Briefings on C.I.A. Leak Case [NYT]

Earlier: The Rove Show, with Scott McLellan as Old Yeller [Wonkette]

"

(Via Semi-Daily Journal.)

There's a new beta of the Flash 8.0 plugin for the mac, which is supposed to address the serious performance issues with the mac version.

It doesn't play strongbad emails, making it in my mind

Useless.

The idea has come up of declaring the mice terrorists, and thus having a rationale to have the Department of Homeland Security come in for a "cleanup" operation.

1995 was a hell of a year. But calling diaries protoblogging?

Belgrade native Jasmina Tesanovic on 10 years since Srebenica massacre: "Xeni Jardin:

Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, translator, and filmmaker from Belgrade. Here's a link to one of her books, and here are a couple of urls with more about her work. Here was her proto-blog penned during the war, 'A Diary from Belgrade.'

Below, snip from a recent essay she wrote on the massacre in Srebenica, which took place exactly ten years ago today.

In June 1995, I was finishing off my book on refugees from former Yugoslavia, The Suitcase, interviewing women and men of different nationalities, wherever they came from and wherever they had been displaced.

One of them was a young man from Srebrenica: displaced in Vienna. He was a Muslim, very polite and kind to me, a Serb writing for the Americans; he invited me to his flat, offered me dinner and told me how he fled the troubled country through the Red Cross in Belgrade. He considered himself a Yugoslav and loathed the wars, according to him made by politicians, not people.

At the end, he said something I will never forget, a sentence that at the time sounded creepy and muddy: If something happens to my family back there in Srebrenica which is a Muslim enclave protected by UN troops, I swear to God that I will kill with my own hands the first Serb I come across here, my co-worker in Vienna, and I don't care that he is not guilty, I don't care if I go to prison forever...

Link to the complete textfile of 'Srebenica 2005.'

Ms. Tesanovic can be reached via e-mail: [politicalidiot] at [yahoo.com]."

(Via Boing Boing.)

Today is 7/11 - free slurpee day at the same.

Some of you wankers might even have a 7/11 around where you live or work.

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory dark and sinister, says the Beeb.

monster paintings: "

Dylan Sisson

Monster Engine

"

(Via jwz.)

yawn

It is a violent femmes, tylenol, sake and mango juice sort of morning.

(morning defined as the four hours after I get up, which I'm still comfortably in.)