The producers of Slumdog Millionaire have donated 500,000 pounds to a child development organization that works in the slums of Mumbai to support education and healthcare programs.
I feel obligated to note the good things they’re doing after slamming them a few months ago for not providing for the child actors in the movie.
Turns out that the NSA is abusing even the excessive powers it was granted in last year’s FISA bill, which Barack Obama voted for. Time for real intelligence reform.
Of all of the good decisions Blizzard made when they created World of Warcraft, one of the best was providing a robust API for third party developers to write addons for the game. Installing addons is easy, you just download the addon, unzip it, and put it in the Interface/Addons directory.
The problem is keeping track of addons. The last time I looked, I had over 70 addons installed, and that’s not atypical. A number of addon distribution sites sprung up to give developers a place to list their software and a place for players to keep track of updates to their favorites. Curse.com is one popular example, and WoWInterface is another.
Some other approaches became popular as well. A number of addon collections were created — someone would package a number of useful addons, make sure they all work together, and then distribute them together. Users were then freed from the burden of updating each addon individually, they just had to download updates to the collection when they were released.
The next phase was addon updaters, desktop software packages that keep track of the addons you’ve installed and update the ones that are out of date. The most popular of these is WowMatrix. It’s an ugly piece of adware, but it has a comprehensive directory of addons and makes managing those addons really easy.
Unfortunately, WowMatrix, for all its benefit to players, was leeching from the addon distribution web sites. And yesterday, on the day when World of Warcraft released its huge 3.1 patch, those sites started blocking WowMatrix. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.
Jan Chipchase mentioned the specific etiquette of a skateboard park he visited in San Diego, and it made me think of a conversation I was having recently about the rules of etiquette at basketball courts.
I learned basketball court etiquette when I was in college, playing with people from the dorms and the neighborhood around the school on an outdoor court on campus.
The first and most basic rule is that winners stay. I can’t remember how many points we played to, although I think it was 11, but regardless, the winning team stayed on the court to be challenged by the next group of people who were waiting. You get dibs on leading the team to challenge the winner by saying, “I got next” before anybody else did. The person who “has next” recruits the challengers from the group of people who are also waiting — taking someone from the losing team if there are more than enough people waiting is bad manners. That’s how basketball courts are run everywhere.
In half court games, the additional rule is “make it take it”. In real basketball, the ball changes possession after a team scores, but in pickup half court games, when you score you get the ball back. That keeps games moving quickly so that more players can rotate in.
When there aren’t enough people to play a game, people tend to shoot around while they wait for more people to show up. There’s etiquette for that, too. First of all, it doesn’t matter if you brought a ball, in a shoot around situation everybody gets to play. Getting a rebound entitles you to take a shot. If you make your shot, the person who fields the ball passes it to you. That’s called “change”. If someone else tries to keep the ball after you make a basket, you say, “Gimme my change,” and they are supposed to pass the ball back to you so you can shoot again.
There are a lot of other rules, too, and judging from a street game I was watching the other day, the rules are pretty much the same as they’ve ever been.
What’s interesting to me is that every community or subculture has its own etiquette, whether it’s a message board for fans of a TV show, the regular crowd at a popular restaurant, or an IRC channel. I’m always a little surprised by people who don’t take the time to pick up these rules of etiquette before jumping into a new situation.
One of the biggest reasons I supported Barack Obama was the stand he was willing to take as a candidate against the worst excesses of the Bush administration in prosecuting the war on terror. As such, it is incredibly disappointing to me to see that as President, he is not living up to the principles he espoused before the election.
Glenn Greenwald reports on the Obama administration’s embrace of the Bush administration’s assertion that the prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan is somehow different than Gitmo, and that detainees held there do not have the right to habeas corpus.
What are folks like Marty Lederman up to over there? If the Obama administration persists in these policies, I’d hope to see some very public resignations sooner rather than later.
Bruce Schneier always says that “don’t talk to strangers” is bad advice. Is this proof? On a similar note, read about Casual Car Pools.
Today’s Amazon MP3 store special is Ben Harper’s Diamonds on the Inside. For $1.99, you can download the album in MP3 format with no DRM. Here’s part of a customer review of the album that was written in March 2003:
First of all, this review will not address the actual MUSIC on this disc, which is up to Harper’s usual platinum standard of songwriting and musicianship.
No, this is intended to be a warning that this CD has been laced with copy-protect technology that prevents those who paid for it from making MP3s and whatnot. It also prevents you from even listening to the disc on a computer except by using an extremely low-quality proprietary player that limits the quality to just 48 kbps — about what you’d get from AM radio.
Times change.
Dan Froomkin explains, in simple terms, the State Secrets Privilege today. This is a privilege the government should not be allowed to assert, and the Obama administration is perpetuating all of the Bush administration’s worst abuses of it. There’s no excuse for doing so, and I think it’s incumbent most upon those who supported Obama’s Presidential campaign to express our displeasure on this issue.
Jason Kottke makes some interesting points about quoting and attribution and blogs that you should read. I’d quote the good parts, but when you read the post, you’ll see why I didn’t.
Be sure to read Andy Baio’s post on AllThingsD’s content appropriation for background.
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The torture memos
The Obama administration released the infamous OLC torture memos today in essentially unredacted form. The ACLU has published them online.
If there was ever a day to read Glenn Greenwald’s blog, this is it.
Here’s one notable paragraph, written in 2005 by Steven Bradbury:
That paragraph points to the following footnote:
Update: Worth noting is the fact that Jay Bybee, the author of one of the torture memos released today, now has a lifetime appointment to a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.