rc3.org: Of Interest

February 28, 2006

HOWTO/Switch To The Mac — Pretty much comprehensive.

Dubai Ports World boycotts Israel — Here's a good reason to question the DPW takeover of operations at US ports -- the company participates in a boycott of Israel.

Ruby on Rails 1.1 — Scott Raymond lists the new features in Rails 1.1. Lots of really great stuff here.

February 27, 2006

Using Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X — Ruby on Rails guru Mike Clark explains how to use Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X and doesn't mention Locomotive at all. Mistake? I think yes.

Sourceforge finally supports Subversion — This is way past due. (Via Digg)

BoingBoing vs censorware — Censorware is absurd

Republicans order IRS audits of political enemies — It doesn't get any slimier than this. A Texas nonprofit that investigated Tom DeLay was audited at the request of DeLay's political allies. (Via TPM)

Google Calendar coming soon? — Paul Stone unearths some evidence in the Gmail source code

James Walcott on V for Vendetta — After reading this non-review, I'm suddently very interested in the movie.

IEEE Spectrum: Re-engineering Iraq — Fascinating article on reconstruction in Iraq, focused on problems with power generation. (Via DefenseTech)

February 26, 2006

The Taliban at Yale — How a former Taliban spokesman came to be a student at Yale. Great story. (Via 3qd)

Pursuing Happiness — New Yorker article on the state of happiness. The first rule of being happy is nobody talks about being happy.

February 25, 2006

Kathryn Cramer on digital watermarks — Ineffective at stopping piracy, effective at stopping new entrants into the content business. (By design?)

February 24, 2006

They'll spin ANYTHING — Not even impending civil war can ruin the mood at Fox News!

More on the UAE port deal — Andrew Leonard, still talking sense.

First Annual Atrocious GM Summit — Side-splittingly hilarious if you're an NBA fan.

Dogs use dog calculus when playing fetch — I'm sure they don't think of it that way.

Google Dashboard Widgets — Search history, Gmail, Blogger -- I like.

ACM: Globalization and Offshoring of Software — The largest study of offshoring of software development yet done. (Via Andrew Leonard.)

How to strike it rich with your blog — Michael Sippey takes a look at how much traffic you'd need to gross $40,000 a year in ad revenue on a blog.

There's been a change of heart — Malcolm Gladwell recants his position in the 6 year old debate over health care that I linked to the other day. (I'm glad he has a blog.)

February 23, 2006

Matt Raible benchmarks his MacBook Pro — Fast, fast, fast.

Google launches Geocities knockoff — Seriously.

February 22, 2006

Eclipse is also very fast on MacBook Pros — I can't get enough MacBook Pro love. (Via Raible Designs)

The MacBook Pro is fast — First hand report on a new MacBook Pro. I am very, very eager to get my hands on the one I have on order.

I'm Running a Port--What Do I Do? — Slate explains what a port operator actually does, in light of the UAE takeover of US ports

Newt Gingrich's entry in the "world's stupidest man" contest — I bet you didn't know that being on Medicaid makes you fat.

Civil war in Iraq heating up? — An attack on an important Shiite mosque in Samarra escalates sectarian violence in Iraq. Depressing.

February 21, 2006

Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell debate health care — The discussion is fascinating and both make good points. I think that the win goes to Malcolm Gladwell, although some of his arguments strike me as out of touch. For one thing, he has no idea how much health insurance costs for a family or how difficult it is to get. (Update: this debate is 6 years old, Gladwell now agrees with Gopnik.)

UAE managing American ports, who cares? — An Andrew Leonard two-fer. He says what I've been thinking when it comes to the "Arabs seizing US ports!" demogoguery.

Is America's refusal to curb carbon emissions an illegal subsidy? — Andrew Leonard argues that the WTO should sue the US for subsidizing businesses by refusing to regulate their carbon emissions

February 20, 2006

The 2005 Slate 60 — The 60 biggest philanthropists of 2005

JavaScript becoming more like Python — JavaScript 2 will offer some Python-like constructs

February 17, 2006

Even conservatives are calling for withdrawal from Iraq — Retired Lt. General William Odom (former director of the NSA under Reagan) and Lawrence Korb (a former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense) join the chorus

NYT food critic Frank Bruni reviews Hooters — This is why blogs were invented

Maher Arar suit dismissed — Innocent Canadian citizen who was sent to Syria to be tortured has had his lawsuit against the government dismissed due to national security concerns (via Body and Soul)

Wired News on Krugle — Krugle is a search engine that indexes open source code

February 16, 2006

More on recent reports on Gitmo — Slate's Dahlia Lithwick discusses the nature of the prisoners we are holding at Gitmo and the moral outrage that it has become.

February 15, 2006

Ikea catalogs in India — People in India pay for Ikea catalogs so that they can pay carpenters to reproduce Ikea designs

Most detainees at Gitmo are probably innocent — Eric Umansky digs up a transcript from one detainee's tribunal, and reports on the overall statistics

February 14, 2006

Real life cargo cults — I never really believed that cargo cults were real, and certainly wouldn't believe they had persisted this long. (via BoingBoing)

What are newspapers for? — Long, philosophical post at Slacktivist. My goal at rc3.org is to take sides for justice, above all else.

February 13, 2006

Thinking outside the blocks: Lego Mindstorms & homeland security — Open is better. (via WorldChanging)

NutraSweet really is bad for you — Eliot Gelwan on a new sutdy that points to aspartame causing cancer

Below the Fold: The Supreme Court's Brief, Now Lost Legacy of Constitutional Liberalism — 3qd post on the Golden Age of the Supreme Court