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New month, new stuff - 01 May 2007
May. 2nd, 2007 12:27 amGot my first rejection letter today. Well, more of an e-mail, but the position was already filled. I didn’t even get to the interview phase on that one. Oh, well. They can’t all be winners. Just have to keep going.
For those celebrating, it was May Day, the fourth Anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, and Loyalty Day. Happy America, everyone?
Regarding the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion, the Washington Post wonders whether the Catholicism of the five judges who made the majority was a deciding factor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg read a summary of the dissent before the court, where she accused the court of not following precedent and deluding itself into believing that their decision protects women and babies. As Disgusted Beyond Belief notes, it's not just women who have to make decisions about abortions. Everyone gets affected by those kinds of decisions. If that’s not your thing, though, read a very anti-abortion praise of the decision and its reasoning and decide on how much of it you agree with.
In more encouraging news, the Post reports that an arrest has been made in the case of the bomb planted outside a clinic in Austin.
The “D.C. Madam”, whose service one official has already resigned over, released her client list to ABC News to have them find witnesses for her defence, considering the assets she would have used to pay for legal defence have been seized by the government. She’d also love to know why none of the clients have been charged under the laws, or anyone else, for that matter. Because the government would not be selective in its prosecutions, would it?
Welcome... to Hell. But a very special kind of hell... Hello Kitty Hell, home of the Hello Kitty Banana Cover and the Hello Kitty Brief Underwear, among other things.
An on-line market research firm’s survey concludes 72 percent of the American populace is unaware that plastics are petroleum-based. And 40 percent believe that plastics will biodegrade (in a short amount of time, I suspect. Everything eventually degrades, I would say, just as the chemical bonds are eventually broken.) This seems to be another part in a kick to get people away from the use of plastics, especially in packaging or as grocery bags. I know of some groceries that are going to outlaw the plastic bags, and I think there are some that already have... in the U.K., if not in the U.S. Of course, the rest of that is about a new type of biodegradable plastic from the company sponsoring the poll.
IBM has speculated five new technologies that will change our world in the next five years - the "Next Five in Five" includes such things as adapting cellular phones, a three-dimensional Internet, and real-time speech translation. As always, they may be spotting new tech, but the purposes to which the tech could be put to could be of utopian or dystopian value. Of much interest to the Linux community (or perhaps dread - if more people stop using ALTIMIT, then perhaps there will be more exploits and malicious code written for alternate operating systems...) Dell Computers is partnering with Canonical and offering the latest Ubunutu, 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn") as an option to be installed on their computers.
Following on the tech line, a sequence of numbers is apparently rather important to certain industries, much like a certain other segment of code that caused a gigantic flap (and has since been reproduced on T-shirts around the country.) Digg explains why stories with that sequence of numbers are disappearing from their site. They have a difficult position - they want to avoid being found in violation of the DMCA. At the same time, the user base wants to show, either deliberately or otherwise, how useless that law is, and perhaps to show that a sequence of numbers should not be protectable under copyright law. A program that made use of those numbers might be found in violation of applicable law, but the numbers themselves have no meaning without that context. Can they still be successfully marked or defended as intellectual property?
Ah-ha! The Entertron may be one step closer to reality! It’ll give you a full night’s sleep in a vastly-reduced amount of time. But it’ll still leave you hungry.
Politically speaking, there’s a lot of opinions being slung about. A leader of Al-Qaeda may have been killed in Iraq, The Democrats are not going to hold the President's feet to the fire on the spending bill, especially after the President made good on his promise and vetoed it. Townhall lines up several to say regardless of whether entering Iraq was a mistake, leaving it would be a bigger mistake, the Democrats are exploiting tiny things into bigger ones, sometimes reversing themselves from when they had eagerly gone along with the Administration (a claim that is probably at least somewhat true), and defending the intelligence behind statements put into public speeches about yellowcake and Niger (although on the same site Rich Lowry takes the CIA director involved to task for trying to avoid or shirk embarrassment or negative portrayals), and that for as much as everyone beats on America, the countries talking should do something about the planks in their own eyes.
Getting out of the bog of opinions, Military.com offers the story of how an operation in Iraq can work - with the assistance of the local leaders. The commander in the area enlisted the local power in helping, put the recruits into defending their homeland areas, and managed to make it work. Now, perhaps, if other commanders and areas could find similar successes, then maybe they could convince others that the occupation was actually producing results. And that might be enough to make people live with it, rather than call for its end.
Two last bits on violence, and then we’re done. Supposedly, much like the 11 September attacks, the attackers involved in the 7 July London Underground bombings met and were filmed by MI5. They appeared not to be a threat. Which is sort of the difficulty in trying to use any system to detect people who will commit large acts of violence. Some act spontaneously, others plan but hide things well. Only the people who make a mistake are noticed and captured. Makes it tough to root out the people still hiding well. Last for this segment is the State Department identifying Iran as the world's leader in state-sponsored terrorism, a claim that coincides neatly with the current wonder as to whether the United States will attempt to topple Iran’s government as well.
Going away from politics, then, this is what stock photos tell us about the world. Several rather creepy, but otherwise relatively true things. Or something. Because I’ve also seen more stock-type photos like that... and now they’re starting to creep me out.
Going to bed, then. If you need me, I’ll be hiding in my reading nook, trying to figure out the new password policy.
For those celebrating, it was May Day, the fourth Anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, and Loyalty Day. Happy America, everyone?
Regarding the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion, the Washington Post wonders whether the Catholicism of the five judges who made the majority was a deciding factor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg read a summary of the dissent before the court, where she accused the court of not following precedent and deluding itself into believing that their decision protects women and babies. As Disgusted Beyond Belief notes, it's not just women who have to make decisions about abortions. Everyone gets affected by those kinds of decisions. If that’s not your thing, though, read a very anti-abortion praise of the decision and its reasoning and decide on how much of it you agree with.
In more encouraging news, the Post reports that an arrest has been made in the case of the bomb planted outside a clinic in Austin.
The “D.C. Madam”, whose service one official has already resigned over, released her client list to ABC News to have them find witnesses for her defence, considering the assets she would have used to pay for legal defence have been seized by the government. She’d also love to know why none of the clients have been charged under the laws, or anyone else, for that matter. Because the government would not be selective in its prosecutions, would it?
Welcome... to Hell. But a very special kind of hell... Hello Kitty Hell, home of the Hello Kitty Banana Cover and the Hello Kitty Brief Underwear, among other things.
An on-line market research firm’s survey concludes 72 percent of the American populace is unaware that plastics are petroleum-based. And 40 percent believe that plastics will biodegrade (in a short amount of time, I suspect. Everything eventually degrades, I would say, just as the chemical bonds are eventually broken.) This seems to be another part in a kick to get people away from the use of plastics, especially in packaging or as grocery bags. I know of some groceries that are going to outlaw the plastic bags, and I think there are some that already have... in the U.K., if not in the U.S. Of course, the rest of that is about a new type of biodegradable plastic from the company sponsoring the poll.
IBM has speculated five new technologies that will change our world in the next five years - the "Next Five in Five" includes such things as adapting cellular phones, a three-dimensional Internet, and real-time speech translation. As always, they may be spotting new tech, but the purposes to which the tech could be put to could be of utopian or dystopian value. Of much interest to the Linux community (or perhaps dread - if more people stop using ALTIMIT, then perhaps there will be more exploits and malicious code written for alternate operating systems...) Dell Computers is partnering with Canonical and offering the latest Ubunutu, 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn") as an option to be installed on their computers.
Following on the tech line, a sequence of numbers is apparently rather important to certain industries, much like a certain other segment of code that caused a gigantic flap (and has since been reproduced on T-shirts around the country.) Digg explains why stories with that sequence of numbers are disappearing from their site. They have a difficult position - they want to avoid being found in violation of the DMCA. At the same time, the user base wants to show, either deliberately or otherwise, how useless that law is, and perhaps to show that a sequence of numbers should not be protectable under copyright law. A program that made use of those numbers might be found in violation of applicable law, but the numbers themselves have no meaning without that context. Can they still be successfully marked or defended as intellectual property?
Ah-ha! The Entertron may be one step closer to reality! It’ll give you a full night’s sleep in a vastly-reduced amount of time. But it’ll still leave you hungry.
Politically speaking, there’s a lot of opinions being slung about. A leader of Al-Qaeda may have been killed in Iraq, The Democrats are not going to hold the President's feet to the fire on the spending bill, especially after the President made good on his promise and vetoed it. Townhall lines up several to say regardless of whether entering Iraq was a mistake, leaving it would be a bigger mistake, the Democrats are exploiting tiny things into bigger ones, sometimes reversing themselves from when they had eagerly gone along with the Administration (a claim that is probably at least somewhat true), and defending the intelligence behind statements put into public speeches about yellowcake and Niger (although on the same site Rich Lowry takes the CIA director involved to task for trying to avoid or shirk embarrassment or negative portrayals), and that for as much as everyone beats on America, the countries talking should do something about the planks in their own eyes.
Getting out of the bog of opinions, Military.com offers the story of how an operation in Iraq can work - with the assistance of the local leaders. The commander in the area enlisted the local power in helping, put the recruits into defending their homeland areas, and managed to make it work. Now, perhaps, if other commanders and areas could find similar successes, then maybe they could convince others that the occupation was actually producing results. And that might be enough to make people live with it, rather than call for its end.
Two last bits on violence, and then we’re done. Supposedly, much like the 11 September attacks, the attackers involved in the 7 July London Underground bombings met and were filmed by MI5. They appeared not to be a threat. Which is sort of the difficulty in trying to use any system to detect people who will commit large acts of violence. Some act spontaneously, others plan but hide things well. Only the people who make a mistake are noticed and captured. Makes it tough to root out the people still hiding well. Last for this segment is the State Department identifying Iran as the world's leader in state-sponsored terrorism, a claim that coincides neatly with the current wonder as to whether the United States will attempt to topple Iran’s government as well.
Going away from politics, then, this is what stock photos tell us about the world. Several rather creepy, but otherwise relatively true things. Or something. Because I’ve also seen more stock-type photos like that... and now they’re starting to creep me out.
Going to bed, then. If you need me, I’ll be hiding in my reading nook, trying to figure out the new password policy.
