Back when I was guvnuh, MTV played videos

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Like this one:

Of course, in the Heathen homeland, we didn’t have MTV in 1983; we had to watch Friday Night Videos, which was a weak sister at the time (oh! what we’d give for FNV reruns now!).

This video was one of the ones excitedly discussed in junior high cafeterias that year; Phil Oakey’s gender-bending presentation combined with the baritone was pretty transgressive and weird, and then there were those girls. Their names, like Oakey’s, we didn’t know until today: Susan Ann Gayle and Joanne Catherall, both of whom were apparently underage when they joined the band in 1980. The zoom-in-the-map trick at the head end reminds us now of Google, but back then it was pretty jarring and cool (note how the sidestep some of the special effects — the boy and the ball take on the pinkish red hue when they’re inside the circle, but you never actually see the transition).

In retrospect, we figure the Human League was one of the first examples of what we now know as 80s synth pop that we heard down in Mississippi. (Captain Telescope may have other ideas, which we encourage him to share; certainly we’d probably heard Flock of Seagulls by then, and Devo, but they’re all of a piece.) The whole look is there in the video: very 80s clothing, hair, makeup, and sounds, all of which served to remind us that well, we lived in a backwater, since there was essentially zero local music there at the time. (Not counting these guys, since they came later.)

The earlier iconic Human League video is also on YouTube, of course. Amusingly, collateral Googling for this post revealed that the band is actually still active and touring, 30 years on. Neat.

Our favorite quote this morning

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“Trust me, a little open-bar scotch and any decent imam will overlook the flaws in your color scheme.”

From this breath of fresh air on the whole process of wedding planning. Granted, the author admits they spent a boatload of cash, but the real point of the thing was that they never once went nuts. That’s key.

What Has It Got In Its Pockets?

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There’s a Flickr group concerned entirely with photos of [hat its members carry in their pockets every day; this as opposed to the much larger, and potentially more revealing “What’s In Your Bag?” group that’s been around forever.

We like the pockets version better, especially this one, about Gary, and this one, which includes several options not present in most photos. This guy should probably hook up with him.

Unsurprisingly, Moleskine notebooks and certain telephones are heavily represented.

We did one; we think you should, too.

Pat Tillman Roundup

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This is fucking sick. Evidence is mounting, years later, that makes the DoD’s stonewalling regarding Tillman’s death make a bit more sense. First he was killed in battle. Then he was killed in a tragic misunderstanding, a so-called friendly fire incident. These things happen in wartime, of course.

But it’s looking a lot more like that’s not true, either. He may well have been murdered by American troops, potentially for his antiwar views.

Lovely.

It’s working out so well for George, ol’ Rick thought he’d try it

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Texas governor Rick Perry has joined George in his anti-science crusade and appointed a nutbird looney creationist to CHAIR the State Board of Education. We shit you not.

The appointee, Dr. Don McLeroy, has repeatedly voted to stifle scientific information in textbooks covering evolution. From an Austin American-Statesman editorial:

In 2001, McLeroy and a majority of the board rejected the only Advanced Placement textbook for high school environmental science because its views on global warming and other events didn’t comport with the beliefs of the board majority. The book wasn’t factual and was anti-American and anti-Christian, the majority claimed. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities were using the textbook, including Baylor University, the nation’s largest Baptist college.

You can find out even more “proud to be ignorant” information on McLeroy’s web site, which is chock full of anti-intellectual — he’s a big fan of Conservative anti-Enlightenment author and discredited moralist Paul Johnson — anti-evolution, abstinence-only claptrap. He is, of course, an Aggie, and lives in Bryan.

Dept. of Obvious Realizations That Escaped Us

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Via TechDirt: The RIAA hates webcasters, and doesn’t mind if they die, because webcasters don’t play much RIAA music at all. The RIAA would much rather this distribution channel, containing as it does mostly music created outside its cabal, simply vanish. They have no interest in its continued existence.

Traditional radio, of course, is dominated by a few similarly formated stations that all play RIAA-backed music. 87% of the music you hear on the radio is from an RIAA-member record label. However, when it comes to music on webcasts, the story is quite different. Jon Healy, at the LA Times, points out that only 44% of music on webcasts are from RIAA labels. This, at least, based on the findings of Live365, one of the larger webcasting services out there. So, with more than half the songs coming from non-RIAA labels, no wonder they’re less interested in keeping webcasts alive. And, of course, the situation really is a win-win for the RIAA (in the short-term). It either kills off those webcasters who don’t contribute to the homogenization of music, or it forces them to pay large sums even if they only play non-RIAA music. Of course, this is a strategy guaranteed to backfire in the long run, as it simply pisses off even more music fans who will simply look elsewhere for music.

HOWTO: Slip past your company’s IT drones

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Chances are, if you work for a company or organization big enough to think filtering your net access is a good idea, your local IT people are about as bright as bags of hair. Fortunately, Lifehacker has some advice on how to deal with clueless but powermad local admins. You know the type.

(Don’t start with me if you read this and think I’m casting aspersions on your technical skills; if you read this, you’re almost certainly not an idiot.)

The War on Prescription Drugs

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For some reason, some bureaucrats think they know more about pain management than doctors.

This is a story about a Florida man imprisoned for two years because he possessed pain medication for which he had a prescription. Fortunately, he’s been released:

Tampa’s Mark O’Hara was released from prison this week. He was serving a 25-year sentence for possession of 58 Vicodin tablets. Prosecutors acknowledge he wasn’t selling the drug. They acknowledge that he had a prescription for it. At his trial, two doctors testified they’d been treating O’Hara since the early 1990s for pain related to gout and an automobile accident.

But prosecutors inexplicably brought drug trafficking charges anyway, because as the article explains, “Under the law, simply possessing the quantity of pills he had constitutes trafficking.”

This is simply stunning. The man was sentenced to 25 years for possessing 58 pills for which he had a legal prescription.

Fortunately, the appeals court called the trial “absurd” and tossed the verdict. Now we’ll see what recourse this man has; from the St Pete times:

He sold two condos, his car and his bread business to pay for the appeal. But the state took the proceeds, according to family friend Eric Mastro, to pay toward the $500,000 fine that came with his conviction.

So, the state ruined him on a bullshit charge AND took 2 years of his life because they think his doctor gave him too many Vicodin. Nice. What goatfuckers.

Today’s Medical News

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Because, presumably, the original equipment had long since collapsed into a dried, blackened husk, form which neither blood nor emotion could escape.

Things we’re disappointed about

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Today, the usually-pretty-savvy LifeHacker covered some very dubious services that purport to give you the ability to edit, recall, or even set expiration/self-destruction dates for your email.

The short answer here, dear Heathen, is that absolutely NONE of these will EVER work in a reliable way on the open Internet. It’s possible, within some corporate email systems (Exchange, Notes) to do this, but that’s because those servers and clients all speak the same proprietary language. On the Internet, you have to play by the global standard rules, and most mail servers see no reason to honor the requests of mail senders to edit, remove, expire, or otherwise molest emails — largely because once you hit send and the mail finds its way to our mailbox, we consider it OURS, not YOURS, and our systems aren’t interested in deleting our stuff on your say-so.

This is the right answer. This is the way these things SHOULD work. Anything else is a security nightmare and shady besides.

We took a look at one such system today: BigString. Note their initials; it’s prophetic. They claim to be able to “un-send” a message, delete a message after the fact, set expiration/auto-deletion dates, track how often a message is read, and a myriad of other things that, in all honesty, cannot be done with Internet email. Curious, we signed up to see how it worked.

As expected, they’re doing this by:

  1. Turning your email text into a graphic;
  2. Hosting that graphic on their server;
  3. Sending a mail message that references, but does not enclose, that graphic.

At this point, you’re reading a web page, not an email. This means that non-graphic-friendly email clients (Windows Mobile, perhaps Treos and Blackberries, etc) won’t be able to read the mail at all, and people with sane security settings on their desktops will have to adjust their mail configuration before they can see anything. That’s charming, right? Anyway, while they claim they can keep recipients from saving or printing these messages, we had no trouble at all dragging the graphic to our desktop to save for later, printing the file, or forwarding the graphic to someone else. (Also, they’re treading into the same dodgy territory as DidTheyReadIt and their ilk, covered previously.)

It’s just not possible to control, and here’s why: your computer has to make a copy of the file to show it to you. You’re not reading it off their server. You’re reading it locally, and once you have it locally, it’s beyond their control.

Put not your trust in these foolish things. Be careful what you put in a mail, and forget giving bozos like BS time or money. Email is as it always was, and attempts to make it jump through hoops like this are doomed to failure.

(Oh, another thing about Big String: it took them nearly and hour to deliver my test message to me, and test messages sent to my test account at BS have yet to arrive, more than an hour later. This suggests they may have bigger issues than a snake-oil product.)

Queen’s Brian May is Smarter Than You

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30 years after dropping out of grad school to become a rock and roll star, he’s completing his doctorate in astrophysics at Imperial College London.

LONDON (AP) — Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen.

The 60-year-old guitarist and songwriter said he plans to submit his thesis, ”Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud,” to supervisors at Imperial College London within the next two weeks.

May was an astrophysics student at Imperial College when Queen, which included Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor, was formed in 1970. He dropped his doctorate as the glam rock band became successful.

Queen were one of Britain’s biggest music groups in the 1970s, with hits including ”Bohemian Rhapsody” and ”We Will Rock You.”

After Mercury’s death in 1991, May recorded several solo albums, including 1998’s ”Another World.” But his interest in astronomy continued, and he co-wrote ”Bang! The Complete History of the Universe,” which was published last year.

He was due to finish carrying out astronomical observations at an observatory on the island of La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands, on Tuesday, the observatory said.

May told the British Broadcasting Corp. that he had always wanted to complete his degree.

”It was unfinished business,” he said. ”I didn’t want an honorary Ph.D. I wanted the real thing that I worked for.”

(NYT link, but the full text of the wire story is above.)

Where is the love for Central Time? Or Houston, for that matter?

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So, we’re confused by something.

Just now, we’re installing Fedora on a test box in Heathen Labs, and it wanted to know what zone we were in. ZERO US cities in the Central time zone were listed.

This is closely related to an Apple phenomenon, wherein the largest city in Texas (Houston) isn’t listed in their city-picker for anything — though Dallas and Austin are. WTF, people? Do you not look at population data?

John Yoo: Another Lying, Disingenuous Sack of Shit

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Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald takes note of Yoo’s WSJ editorial insisting Bush’s exercise of Executive Privilege is justified, normal, and Constitutional.

First, n.b. who Yoo is:

Yoo is not only willing — but intensely eager — to defend literally anything George W. Bush does or would want to do, including — literally — torturing people and crushing the testicles of children if the Leader decreed that doing so was necessary to fight Terrorists. Yoo, of course, is a principal author of most of the radical executive power theories which have eroded our constitutional framework over the last six years.

So, clearly, he’s a guy with a lot of credibility, right? Well, it gets better. Turns out, this isn’t the first time he’s written publicly on Executive Privilege. Back in 1998, when Clinton attempted to use it during the Lewinsky matter, Yoo wrote another editorial with the exact opposite thesis.

John Yoo, you’d be today’s Official Heathen Douchebag if it weren’t for Gonzales. Maybe Abu will share his prize with you.

Abu Gonzales Is Lying Sack of Shit

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Don’t take our word for it. Just go look here, where he quite simply refuses to answer questions. His utter contempt for Congressional oversight is absurd and borderline criminal. Josh lays it out:

It really requires stepping back in this case to take stock of this exchange. Testifying before Congress is like being called to testify in court. You have to answer every question. Every question. You can fudge and say you don’t remember something and see how far you get. Or you can invoke various privileges. And it up to the courts to decide if the invocations are valid. But it’s simply not permitted to refuse to answer the question. It is quite literally contempt of Congress. (Emph. added)

It doesn’t stop there. See more here.

More Secrecy Bullshit

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There exist, apparently, buildings you are prohibited from photographing.

The list itself, knowledge of which is a necessary precondition to following the (bullshit) law, is also secret.

We are not making this up.

The bottom line is that McCammon was caught in a classic logical trap. If he had only known the building was off-limits to photographers, he would have avoided it. But he was not allowed to know that fact. “Reasonable, law-abiding people tend to avoid these types of things when it can be helped,” McCammon wrote. “Thus, my request for a list of locations within Arlington County that are unmarked, but at which photography is either prohibited or discouraged according to some (public or private) policy. Of course, such a list does not exist. Catch-22.”

The only antidote to this security mania is sunshine. Only when more and more Americans do as McCammon has done and take the time and effort to chronicle these excesses and insist on answers from authorities will we stand a chance of restoring balance and sanity to the blend of liberty and security that we are madly remixing in these confused times.

Look, people: any time there are secret laws, or secret evidence, or secret trials, you’re fucked. The whole idea of any of those things is blatantly anti-American, anti-freedom, and anti-democracy. Governments MUST exist in an inspect-able, transparent state.

(Via BB.)

Dept. of Excellent Summarizing Metaphors

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This has apparently been around for a long, long time, but it’s new to us. The author, one Jeff Bigler, attempts to explain the sort of weird apparent courtesy mismatch that sometimes happens between nerds and regular people. His theory is that everyone has a tact filter; it’s just that regular people use theirs when they speak, and nerds use theirs when they listen. Here’s the whole text, reproduced in accordance with the copyright notice on his page.

All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most “normal people” have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!”

“Nerds,” on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, “They’re just saying those mean things because they’re jealous. They don’t really mean it.”

When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one’s feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one’s feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people’s feelings often get hurt because the nerds don’t apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can’t do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn’t be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.

(Text copyright © 1996, 2006 Jeff Bigler.)

Your Friday Dose of Surreal Redneckism

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From a discussion on a mailing list regarding the construction of parabolic microphones:

Well first, you gots ta get yerself a parabola. Parabolas mostly come out at night. Mostly. Try putting some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches under the shrubbery and then when you hear them rustling around under there, start beating those bushes real hard with a broom and screamin’ “Hoo Waaaaa! Hoo Waaaa!” The parabola will keel over from fright then you can grab it and wring it’s neck. Don’t wring it too hard, though, cause then you’ll have a hyperbola on your hands, and they ain’t really good for nothing. Then you’re gonna want to take a good knife and carefully peel off the outer layer. Now most people would throw that away, but if you want some real good eating, take it and deep fry it in some hot peanut oil with a few jalapano peppers thrown in. Mmmm, mmmm, that’s good stuff right there. After that, all you have to do is jam a microphone up the parabola’s ass and point it at what you want to listen to. Just last week I turnt mine on and heard my brother and his wife three trailers over doing the weekly deed, if you know what I mean…

This, dear readers, is what happens to smart people in the South. The good ones, anyway. Inshallah.

George, you’re not a king. Get over it.

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From WaPo, as reported in TPM:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

In other words, he’s asserting that he can short-circuit any such investigation on his own say-so, and that, essentially, he and his branch are not answerable to Congress. More:

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

Somebody needs to smack this crap down with a quickness. That just won’t do. Harry Reid, we’re looking at you.

Open Source Runs the World

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Joey makes some great points over at GlobalNerdy. He starts with this Paul Graham quote:

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

It’s still very true. The balance of his post is a rundown of named “Web 2.0” firms, together with their apparent server choices. It is Linux, not Windows, that runs Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Wikipedia, and a long list of others. The only top-tier site surveyed on Windows is MySpace, which explains the site’s legendary instability.

If you’re a geek, you should know all of these

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Global Nerdy summarizes the major Laws of Software Development. Yes, Greg, Brooks is there.

(Brooks, for the nonnerdy among you, is Fred Brooks, who wrote (in 1975!) The Mythical Man Month, one of the seminal texts on software development. In it, he formalized his eponymous law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. It is counterintuitive, disturbing to management, and absolutely true.)