Andy Oram has a book report on a book about pirates (the “arr matey” kind) that argues that they were freedom fighters rather than terrorists. All I know is that Sid Meier’s remake of the classic computer game Pirates is scheduled for release in November. I can’t wait.
I just got spam from the “World Hongming Foundation” requesting that I send donations for hurricane Charley relief to their organization at the address supplied. I hope that these scumbags get prosecuted for fraud post haste. Oddly, the foundation has a Web site.
An Iranian judo wrestler, Arash Miresmaeili, failed to make his weight today and thus forfeited his match. Miresmaeili isn’t an also ran, either, he’s the defending world champion, and carried Iran’s flag in the opening ceremony. Unfortunately, he failed to make weight for political reasons – he was supposed to wrestle an Israeli. I’m not opposed to people using the Olympics or sports in general to make political statements, but there’s a good chance that it wasn’t his decision in the first place, and even if it was, it seems to me to be rooted in bigotry rather than justice. The Guardian has more. ...
DVD Jon has cracked the Airport Express, and now anybody can write software that streams music to the device.
Juan Cole has a very informative op-ed in the Washington Post on Iraqi Shiites. Seems to me Juan Cole is the perfect example of how an academic can build their reputation by blogging. Update: you might also be interested in the cemetery where much of the fighting between Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and US and Iraq forces are taking place. Kevin Drum reports that it’s probably the largest cemetary in the world. There are 260,000 people buried at Arlington (which seems beyond huge to me) – it’s estimated that 5 million are buried at Wadi al-Salam. (You can get an idea of its size from this satellite photo.) ...
Julia Child, rest in peace. She was a role model for anyone interested in living well.
Feel good community site craigslist announced today that eBay has bought 25% of the company. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has the details at his weblog. Apparently, he gave equity in the company to someone who later left the company, and that person wanted to sell out, and wound up with eBay as a buyer. After the eBay folks verified that buying the shares would be OK with the craigslist folks, the transaction was completed. ...
Ed Felten reports on Microsoft’s decision to offer a cheaper, crippled version of Windows XP in Asia. So Asian customers can choose to buy pirated copies of Windows XP for next to nothing, use any distribution of Linux they choose without paying a thing, or pay more for a version of Windows that leaves out useful functionality like being able to take advantage of having a decent monitor. What kind of market do you think they’ll find for that? I honestly can’t imagine that anyone will choose the crippled version over stealing the full version. Would you? ...
The domain registrar I use screwed up Cory Doctorow’s DNS. If you’re going to mess up, you should make sure that the victim is an anonymous consumer with no clout. Word of mouth is a killer.
When Bill Clinton was being impeached, he decried the “politics of personal destruction.” At the time, you could easily dismiss that as whining from someone who had royally screwed up, but the truth is that Clinton had political enemies who spent millions of dollars to do everything they could to destroy him, and nearly succeeded. I find it depressing that this tactic now seems to be a mandatory part of the political process in this country. Whether you look at Fahrenheit 9/11 or Dr. Justin Frank’s book, Bush on the Couch, or the smear campaign that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are running against John Kerry, it’s easy to see that a big part of being or running for President is putting up with people who are not satisfied with disagreeing with you, but rather want to destroy you completely. I’m more focused on John Kerry is being mistreated at this point, but honesty compels me to admit that George W Bush gets the same treatment as well. The thing that really gets me about the chorus of people looking to portray John Kerry’s service in Vietnam as marked with cowardice, dishonesty, and bad faith is that they have lots of perfectly legitimate ground upon which to disagree with him. There’s no dispute that Kerry served only four months in combat in Vietnam, or that he returned from the war and joined the antiwar movement, or that he threw his medals over a wall. If you want to criticize him for those things, by all means, that’s your right. But to go on and allege that he was dismissed from Vietnam by his superiors for his incompetence, or that he cheated and lied his way into the medals he was awarded, or that he joined the antiwar movement not out of conscience but because he thought it would confer a political advantage, you’re sleazy. There seems to be plenty of ground for argument in politics just based on political acts by these men that are part of the public record. I guess I don’t see why it’s necessary to turn these politicians into objects of hatred as part of the campaign. We’re trying to decide who will do the best job of leading the country for the next four years, not figure out whether these men deserve eternal damnation. And both of them have plenty of history to suffice for both their opponents and advocates. I don’t understand why anyone would even want to run for President in today’s climate. ...