Month: September 2004

loving America? hating America? or loving $$$$ first and foremost?

Grover Norquist wants to drown the federal government in a bathtub, and is rubbing his hands with glee as the generation that saved America from the real Axis of Evil dies.

Grover the Top

Now it’s no secret that Grover’s one of those people who not only wants to win elections against Democrats, but would just as soon see us all dead. But it’s uncharacteristic of him to rely on Demographic Destiny to kill off the Greatest Generation and destroy the Democratic Party base. I figure Grover wants to be the angry executioner, not just the cheerful pallbearer.

Bush grandpére was doing business with Hitler’s financiers and corporate supporters, while his son was fighting their allies in the Pacific . . .
How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
[ . . . ]
But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

And if truth is stranger than fiction, what could top this?

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With his latest masterful novel, Philip Roth has written a very personal story about his pre-WWII childhood in Newark, NJ. The twist is that the world he paints is significantly different from what was then reality. Charles Lindbergh, dashing American hero for piloting the first transatlantic flight a dozen years earlier, has defeated FDR in his bid for a third term in 1940 to become the 33rd President of the U.S. The Republicans are in charge, and Lindbergh’s sole charter is to keep the U.S. out of WWII. An isolationist in real life, Lindbergh was known for his anti-Semitic sentiments, and Roth creates a revisionist history by building his case for an America that turns against its Jewish citizens. He has meticulously assembled archival materials, such as Lindbergh’s actual radio address in which he accused the British and the Jews of trying to force America into a foreign war.

Why MSFT’s EULA disclaims Windows’ suitability for “mission-critical” uses

Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up

The radio system shutdown, which lasted more than three hours, left 800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control, and led to at least five cases where planes came too close to one another, according to comments by the Federal Aviation Administration reported in the LA Times and The New York Times. Air traffic controllers were reduced to using personal mobile phones to pass on warnings to controllers at other facilities, and watched close calls without being able to alert pilots, according to the LA Times report.
[ . . . ]

The [Windows] servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said.

The Windows systems were an “upgrade” to the original UNIX servers used at deployment, but evidently the testing or design didn’t include a 50+ day duty cycle[1].

So the moral of our story is: if you want something done, do it yourself. Is there a purer definition of Open Source?

Continue reading “Why MSFT’s EULA disclaims Windows’ suitability for “mission-critical” uses”

protest music comes back

I have to wonder if Cat Stevens’s recent troubles with the US government (or “How to alienate moderate muslims in one easy step”) will lead to a resurgence in popularity for hits like Peace Train [iTMS].

. . . . just now driving home I had a revelation: perfectly ordinary station, perfectly ordinary night, and the next song was Cat Stevens singing “Peace Train”. I laughed aloud at the thought that the unintended consequence of this particular bit of nonsense is that the Department of Homeland Security has now created the anthem of the opposition movement. Nobody will be able to hear that song, and especially not Stevens singing it, without thinking of it in a new way. Will this make us more secure or less?

I see Keb’ Mo’ has a collection of 60s-era protest standards [iTMS] as well. Where will it all lead?

the terrorists may not be winning, but are we?

If a watchlist was useful, why after three years hasn’t it succeeded in catching any
actual terrorists? One can argue that it would be more effective with more data gathering, but zero times any increased factor of effectiveness is still zero. Maybe I’ve missed hearing about some actual terrorists
being caught this way; if so, somebody please point out such cases.

Rudy Giuliano’s cleanup of NYC used a similar tactic, collaring people at subway turnstiles who went through without paying their fare. Many people wanted for other, sometimes much more serious, crimes were
caught.

The difference is: going through a turnstile without paying was a crime. Last I heard, getting on an airplane after paying the airfare isn’t a crime.

If you have been to or through an airport lately and experienced the delays and general disruption as a result of the TSA’s presence, just remember that we’re safer with Cat Stevens removed from our shores.

a variation on the old “no comment”

DHS secretary Tom Ridge has investments in many of the companies that do business with DHS and hope to do more: conflict of interest?

In response to a late afternoon telephone inquiry, DHS spokesman Brian Roehrkasse first said the department did not have enough time to answer questions about the disclosure form. Pressed further, he shouted an expletive to a reporter and hung up.

Later, in a second telephone conversation, Roehrkasse said, “I don’t know where we are in the process. I don’t know . . . I can’t validate any information you’ve got,” and repeated a string of expletives.

Spokesmen are more plain-spoken these days, it seems.

Now playing:Spine by They Might Be Giants from the album “The Spine” | Buy it

by the numbers

The inimitable John Gruber shares his traffic numbers, as background to why he dropped Google Adsense and now sells his own sponsored placements.

He does 6,000 page views per day, and finds that his Google AdSense numbers match his server log numbers pretty closely. Google has historically counted mine a bit low, for reasons I’ve not understood (about 7:1 low). My daily average page views since Jan 1 are 2,736, while Google puts them at 391. The graph below tells the tale: other than that weird spike August, things have been reasonably steady but declining, especially after I switched to WordPress. Oddly, traffic volumes increased since then.

impressions.tiff

I expect part of the problem is the large amount of robot/search engine crawler traffic I see. Obviously, they’ll count as page views but will not call up any ads to be served. But that doesn’t explain the decline since WordPress was implemented . . . . there’s something about dynamic versus static pages that seems to be a problem. I don’t know what difference it could make, unless GoogleBot doesn’t grok query strings in it’s indexes (I find that hard to believe, though).

Continue reading “by the numbers”