So, the Administration keeps losing in the courts when it comes to its treatment of detainees and such, right?
Well, now they’ve turned their guns on the law firms doing the pro bono work for the detainees in an attempt to drive corporate clients away and punish them for daring to provide counsel.
That’s just plain evil. Which is, of course, pretty much par for the course with this bunch.
Wil Wheaton points out what John Rogers figured out:
They search for the best way to describe a President who engages in military policy opposed by his Joint Chiefs and contradicted by his own brand-new counterinsurgency policy, who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between goals and strategy, recycles last year’s “Plan for Victory” with more troops, and is apparently hell-bent on starting a war with Iran … a man incapable of calculating risk versus reward, or even understanding that hope is not a plan …
The geeks have it cold. The rest of you just won’t get it, but —
According to Condi Rice, planning ahead is a bad idea. When asked what the Administration would do if its plans failed (AGAIN):
“It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work,” Rice replied.
Jesus wept.
(Found here.)
The new Democratic Congress seems poised to revise Federal stem cell research guidelines, but Bush has vowed to veto any such changes.
Current GOP-backed rules forbid Federal funding of research using embryonic stem cells even if the donor embryos were to be destroyed anyway, as is the case with many from fertility clinics.
Some gases are sufficiently heavier than air that it is possible to trap them in a box and float”lightweight items on them. (Widely linked.)
We forget where we found this, but it’s been open in Firefox all week. We like it. Enjoy.
From an article on choosing a new high-end watch:
“Do not consider scuba diving in your Patek to a madman’s undersea nuclear laboratory.”
Noted.
We’re still pissed off about this. Deal with it.
First, Jobs on the iPhone:
“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”
The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
Actually, Steve, that’s all bullshit, and in fact a small telephone/computing device is exactly what I and others want. And the whole “it won’t work if you put software on it” thing is a damned lie; I don’t recall Treo or Windows Mobile people having this problem.
Mark Pilgrim has more, as does Open the Future; the latter suggests that regardless of how wrongheaded this is, Jobs may be digging in his heels on the “no outside software” point. The Steve isn’t known for backing up when he’s been wrong, so we’re pretty sure this means the iPhone will remain a crippled, useless thing instead of what it could have been.
Great job, Steve. Fuck you.
Geek productivity-porn site 43Folders weighs in on the suckitude of the closed platform:
Yes I’d understand, but I’d feel like Apple was abandoning an opportunity to make this more than a phone, and more that an iPod, and even — let’s be frank about the elephant in the room — much more than a Palm or a Pocket PC. There’s the potential here for some serious George Jetson shit and it would be a pity not to capitalize on that as early as possible.
Exactly. The problem is: every Treo or Windows Mobile device can already do orders of magnitude more things than the iPhone precisely because they’re open platforms.
The last great hope for smartphone geeks was the Sidekick, which T-Mobile foolishly insisted on controlling completely. Like, there was no way to download your own apps, and T-Mobile could delete anything they liked from the phone at any time, over the cell network. It wasn’t and isn’t really yours with that kind of power imbalance. As a consequence, instead of the technorati carrying them, idiots like Paris Hilton carry them.
Apple and Cingular don’t seem to be fucking up quite that much — the iPhone will sync with your desktop, not remote servers, for example — but they’re close. Openness is paramount. It’s Freedom 0. Without it, the iPhone is useless to a significant and influential demographic.
If this behind-the-scenes video is any indication, Walking With Dinosaurs will be a must-see show when it reaches the US.
This is what you get when you combine an aging geek with a penchant for model rocketry and a GI Joe Mercury Capsule re-issue kit.
Hawesome.
Check it out:
Gizmodo is reporting, and we have heard elsewhere as well, that the new Apple iPhone will be a closed system — i.e., like an iPod, not like a proper handheld smart device.
By contrast, all Treos and Windows Mobile machines have the ability to add programs from third party developers. Their usefulness is limited only by developer ingenuity and the phone’s owner. Apple, by contrast, has apparently chosen the opposite plan, where only they can decide what can run on the iPhone.
If this is true — and at this point is seems very much so — Steve was being very disingenuous when he said this thing “runs OS X.”
Laura Lemay put it this way, over on The Well:
From the further info coming out it doesn’t run Mac OSX — it runs something that looks like OSX but is actually a locked down, proprietary system similar to that of the iPod.
When us geeks hear “it runs OSX” we think we’re hearing “It’s unix, we can write apps for it and get a bash prompt.” But when Steve says “it runs OSX” he’s saying “it looks like OSX and has the same icons and interface whizzies you expect from OSX.”
Exactly.
It’s still a very nice phone, if it lives up to the hype, but $500 for a closed machine is more than Heathen will consider no matter who pays the bill. In fact, it’s overpriced by a factor of 5. There’s no chance at all of us adopting such a phone, Apple shiny-ness or no, for more than $100 if we’re limited to what Steve thinks is useful. No thanks, Apple. We’ll take another Treo and wait for someone else to do this properly.
The Straight Dope answers the burning question “When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?”
(Yeah, it’s from 2004. It’s still great.)
So now he’s threatening to beat up Keith Olbermann. This is just fantastic:
Apparently Geraldo was visiting with 104.1 FM’s Monsters just before Christmas, when they asked him about the time he made international headline for disclosing too much information about troops in Iraq. Geraldo claimed the incident was blown out of proportion, largely by NBC — and specifically Olbermann. Geraldo then began mumbling semi-audible names, seemingly meant to describe Olbermann: “midget … punk … slimeball.”
But then, with the Monsters helpful prodding, Geraldo went a step further, leaving no doubt about what he was saying. He called Olbermann a coward — specifically a “[female part of the anatomy] who wouldn’t walk across the street against the red light.”
He then said he was ready to fight him, saying: “I would make a pizza out of him.”
Oh, and before leaving the topic, Geraldo offered an example of a TV talker who’s a “real man” … that would apparently be Montel Williams.
No word yet on whether Olbermann even knows Geraldo called him out. (Maybe we’ll see.)
UPDATE 1/9: Yes, Olbermann does know now. On his MSNBC show last night, he cited this blog and then recounted the story. He said the “midget” remark confused him, claiming: “I’m about 7 inches taller than he is.” And after describing Geraldo’s desire to fight him, he said: “Geraldo, you should not give me a hard time. I can still remember when you were a big deal … back when I was a kid.”
Tonight Florida showed their selection for the title game against supposed No. 1 Ohio State was earned, and in the process made pretty clear what paper tigers the Buckeyes were. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, as at this moment the score has just gone 41-14 on a short punch by Tim Tebow, but with that kind of margin we’re reasonably sure that Ohio State can’t manufacture a win when they’ve been limited to a single offensive touchdown all night.
The final stats on this game will make it clear that it wasn’t as close as the score, even. LSU’s performance in the Sugar Bowl wasn’t this dominant, at least not over the whole game. Florida sacked Ohio State’s Heisman winning QB over and over, once very nearly forcing a safety. The Gator defense was unstoppable, giving up only 7 points and holding the Buckeyes to a pitiful 82 offensive yards. 41 points and 369 total yards tells the tale of the Florida offense, for which Ohio State had no answer at all. (Meyer could have easily tacked another 7, or at least 3, onto the total had he been bloody-minded; we like that he did not.)
Now, for the record:
So, 6 and 3 for the SEC, or one worse than Heathen predicted. Congrats to the Gators, our new national champs, and to the other five bowl-winning teams who made it clear once again that the SEC is the toughest conference in college football.
Update: The rankings are in, and Florida’s championship is official. However, Ohio State managed to hold on to the No. 2 spot — ahead of LSU, which strikes us as iffy at best. We’re pretty sure the Tigers would eat the Buckeyes alive, too.
ESPN also came up with another little fact worth remembering: Ohio State may be all that in the Big 10, but they’re 0 and 8 against the SEC in bowls. In major BCS bowls this year, the SEC is 2-0, with dominating margins (amusingly, 41-14 in both). In major BCS bowls this year, the Big 10 is … 0-2.
ESPN’s Mark Schlabach: “Notre Dame shows it doesn’t belong in BCS bowls“
Against LSU, Notre Dame once again proved it doesn’t deserve to play in BCS bowl games, which have become its birthright because of the school’s national stature and ability to draw high TV ratings.
And by shutting out the Fighting Irish in the second half and erupting for 577 yards of offense in the game, the Tigers again proved Notre Dame is no longer capable of beating teams like LSU. Or Ohio State, Michigan and Southern California, which also handed the Fighting Irish lopsided losses in the past 12 months.
From Our Attorney:
FCC fines NBC a record $250,000 for on-air fellatio of Notre Dame
You thought we were done being pissed off now that the Democrats control Congress and we’ve got football? Think again.
John Gilmore has been pursuing a case against the Feds over the right to fly domestically without identification; it’s been amply demonstrated by folks like Bruce Schneier that the ID requirement has no security implications (and in fact exists to solve an airline business problem, not a security issue; n.b. that it’s now impossible to sell airline tickets to another person) — every one of the 9/11 hijackers, for example, had valid ID. Part of Gilmore’s case is a desire to force the government to disclose the law in question, something they won’t do because they claim the law is classified.
Think on that for a minute. We now have classified, secret laws that are not available for our review, nor are they available when they’re legally challenged, as in this case.
That’s all kinds of fucked up. And yet, the Supremes have decided not to hear the case, rejecting the appeal without comment and letting stand the lower court’s opinion that Gilmore’s right’s aren’t abridged by being forced to show ID. The question of secret law has been effectively shoveled under the rug until the next challenge, but that doesn’t help us today.
More at Slashdot and BoingBoing.
Japanese exercise/language training videos:
Stay with it until the third iteration of the exercise girls. SFW.
Overheard…
NEW YORK (Billboard) – Kelly Clarkson’s next album will boast some punk rock flavor.
The inaugural “American Idol” champ secured the services of bassist Mike Watt, who co-founded ’70s punk band Minutemen, ’80s combo fIREHOSE, and is now working with Iggy Pop and the reunited Stooges.
“I ended up playing on six of the songs. I had no idea what it was going to be like, but it ended up being pretty interesting,” Watt said of the sessions for Clarkson’s third RCA studio album.
Watt said he was a bit skeptical about working on the project, since he knew hardly anything about “American Idol” or Clarkson herself.
“I heard that Kelly won some game show, but I was really impressed how she sang her ass off. It was intense. I’m really glad I had the experience — it was trippy and everyone gave me much respect.”
The album is being produced by David Kahne, who previously worked with the likes of Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett and Stevie Nicks.
“(Kahne) let me try all kinds of stuff like fuzz bass, fills and solos besides just making things fatter,” Watt said.
Watt also found an admirer in Clarkson guitarist/songwriter Jimmy Messer, who “was very enthusiastic and helped me much — he was a skater when he was younger and knew all about my music.”
The Stooges, meanwhile will release “The Weirdness,” March 20 via Virgin. Watt is expected to be on the road with the group in the spring.
(Otherwise known as the “um, duh” category for technical types, natch.)
David Pogue over at the NYTimes has an illustrative bit up today (well, Thursday) about just exactly how insecure traffic is at a public wifi hotspot. Your computer itself may be secure, but the data you send out is pretty much open for perusal by anyone who can get on the network.
While this isn’t news to at least some of you Heathen, we figure it’s a big enough topic that we may as well cover it here. Go read Pogue, or follow along with our summary.
The Intarwub — a series of tubes, of course — is basically insecure. Mail and web traffic move all over the world in completely unencrypted packets. This wasn’t that big of a deal in the years before wireless, since getting access to a network involved plugging in an actual cable; sure, the guy in the cube next to you could read your incoming mail, but he’s probably got better stuff to do, and (furthermore) probably isn’t a nefarious identity thief.
Well, enter Wifi. Now every self-respecting coffeeshop, sandwich place, pizza joint, etc., has a $99 Linksys and a DSL connection, the better to attract customers with. This is great and all, but there’s a downside. All that traffic that was moving over a physical wire is now in the air, unencrypted, and anyone with a smattering of technical know-how can sniff the network and get access to everything you send or receive.
No, really.
This is actually a HUGE deal for business travellers, since lots of biz hotels use wifi instead of wired connections in the rooms — meaning a bad guy could just check into room 105 and leave his laptop running all night, merrily capturing packets for later analysis.
Scary, huh?
Some of you are now wondering “But Mr Heathen! My bank/webmail/dominatrix/catfish purveyor/whatever web site says they’re secure!” This may be true! There’s hope! Web browsers have, since forever, had the ability to negotiate a completely encrypted connection to a given server. This is what that little lock icon means (Firefox goes one better by turning the address bar yellow when the connection is secure). This technology is called “SSL” (for “secure sockets layer”), and it’s pretty robust. A network-sniffing goon could still get at your network packets, but he’d get only gibberish if the traffic was encrypted (and while SSL is breakable, few will go to the trouble when there are plenty of plaintext packets to sniff).
Gmail and, we think, several other webmail providers have an option to encrypt your mail session with SSL. So do most banks as well as any online retailer worth a damn (though they probably won’t offer it until you get to the part where you put in identifying details or credit card info). Also, some kinds of email can be sent over SSL as a matter of course, which is an excellent idea for road warriors (ask your sysadmin).
So, there are a few important takeaways here:
First, secure your home wifi. Use WPA encryption if you can, WEP if you can’t, and consider even applying a MAC filter. This “MAC” has nothing to do with Apple or cosmetics; every network device (wired or wireless) has a unique Media Access Control address; it’s a string of letters and numbers. All modern home routers have the ability to limit their service to a list of known-good MAC addresses (or, conversely, keep known-bad MACs off the network).
When you’re in Starbuck’s or whatever, be careful about how you read your mail and what you do online. Just reading the news? Don’t sweat it. Reading your email? Probably time to think about some countermeasures. Shopping or doing something sensitive for work? Go home, or get secure.
If your email provider offers an encrypted method of getting email, USE IT.
If you must do sensitive things on an open or near-open wireless connection, consider using any of the fine personal Virtual Private Networking tools mentioned in the comments to Pogue’s piece. We don’t use any of ’em, so we can’t tell you which one is better.
(What do we do? Something terribly geeky, but very effective. We use a technology called “SSH tunnels” to manage email and web browsing on the road, which sends all our traffic to our secure server in an encrypted “tunnel” before it goes out to the Internet at large. Sniff our coffeeshop packets all you want; we’re locked up tight. (This is sort of like a primitive VPN solution, but it’s quick and easy if you know what you’re doing, and even then nonsavvy can use it if a savvy type sets it up for them. (HDANCN?)))
In this fantastic bit, they discuss airport security with expert Bruce Schneier:
Inherent in the obsession on liquids and gels, Mr. Schneier said, “is the notion that we can stop the bad guys by focusing on tactics, which is moronic. I pick a defense, you see my defense, and then you, the bad guy, decide what to do. That’s a game we can’t win.”
He added, “Screeners are so busy looking for liquids that they’ve missed decoy bombs in tests. We’ve defined success so weirdly. When T.S.A. takes away some frozen tomato sauce from grandmom because it might become a liquid, they think of it as a success. But that’s a failure. It’s a false alarm.”
(Local copy, since NYT rots links.)
Jamais Cascio has found a LEGO factory that makes LEGO cars, i.e. someone has made a machine to play with LEGO. (There’s video linked from his blog post.)
Nanobots and grey goo cannot be far behind.
From our far-flung Chilean Heathen, Cat in a Bottle.
So, as you have certainly noticed (some of you more verbally than others), Heathen enjoys the college football, especially bowl season. We’re by no means alone, obviously, given the ratings these games get; chief among them are the major BCS bowls: Fiesta, Rose, Orange, and Sugar, plus the championship game.
These games are also, for the most part, the biggest things on TV during bowl season, since most network programs are on holiday hiatus until early to mid January.
However, this year, there was a collision at Chez Heathen. We went upstairs yesterday to start watching the Sugar Bowl only to discover the Tivo already capturing, on another channel, one of the very small number of those network shows enjoyed in our household (Mrs. Heathen, natch). It wasn’t a repeat; it was the first new episode of this program in over a month, scheduled opposite the Sugar Bowl.
This struck us as really dumb, and we’re sure you agree. What makes it cross the line into absolute stupidity is this: the program in question is Friday Night Lights, a show about big-time Texas high school football. Just exactly WTF was NBC thinking?
(For the record, we’re gentlemen here at Heathen; we went to a bar for the first half.)
Now the football is almost over, he’re something to piss you off:
Via signing statements, Bush has now asserted that he can read your mail without a warrant.
Turns out, it wasn’t an accident that Wonder Woman always seemed to have a kinky subtext. I mean, GOLDEN LASSO, for crying out loud.
As predicted, LSU just handed perennially-overrated Notre Dame their 9th consecutive bowl loss[1] in the Sugar Bowl. Final score: LSU 41, Notre Dame 14. LSU quarterback Jamarcus Russell outproduced the much ballyhooed ND golden boy Brady Quinn by better than 2 to 1 — and he’s a junior who could come back and lead the Tigers next year.
Revised bowl rundown, now with final AP/USAT/BCS rankings:
The SEC has played 8 of its 9 bowls, and taken 5 of them. Cross your fingers for the big show next week.
[1. The last time Notre Dame won a bowl, Heathen lived in Tuscaloosa, and most of you people had never heard of the Internet. It was the January 1994 Cotton Bowl, against A&M.]
Nick Saban has accepted the Alabama offer. We figure he’ll be looking for a job again by either November 2007 or November 2008, as the alumni and Mal Moore will no doubt expect miracles and wonders immediately, and will either fire him or run him off before any real progress can be made.
We are alerted to the following by Heathen Agent code-named Light Bulb:
So after running in for the [game-winning] 2 point conversion, Ian Johnson ran over to his girlfriend (one of those little Boise State cheerleaders) and asked her to marry him. I’m telling you, this had to be a script.
Seriously.
Is immolation enough for canonization? Because we really want to make a St. Elmo’s Fire joke.
Someone’s posted the last few plays of the Fiesta Bowl on YouTube. What’s not here: the fact that OU’s tying two-point-conversion play required three iterations, two of them successful. (The first failed, but included a Boise penalty; the second worked, but included an OU foul.)
If you’re keeping count, that’s 22 combined points in the final 86 seconds of regulation football.
“Have you seen Harry Lime?”
We’ll own our SEC predictions, good and bad, but you Sooners are on your own. Zabransky played a damn near perfect game, and it was a hell of a lot more fun to watch than any of the other contests we saw today. Come on: how often do you see a Statue of Liberty work that well, in OT even — especially when smart money would’ve had them kick the PAT and move on to a second OT?
Also, Division I-A Playoff NOW.
We’d have taken Michigan, too.
We we learned today: Never count on Arkansas or Tennessee. At least Auburn came through. Updates in red.
This leaves the Southeastern Conference at 4-3 with two games to go — our strongest pick (LSU) and our weakest (Florida).
(This is why we don’t make our living calling football games, but we’ll note that many actual sports pros agreed with our expectation that Arkansas and Tennessee would win their respective bowls. We have, at least, the consolation of knowing the Fulmer lost.)
Happy New Year.
Remember that fantastic flash thingy from earlier in the week?
Apparently, it’s (a) 4 frames from a Japanese Anime combined with (b) a section of a Finnish folk song performed by a down-on-their-luck Finnish band that (c) turns out to be not actual Finnish, but gibberish with a few Finnish words stuck in it. See for yourself:
The cartoon uses the second half of the fifth stanza (four lines) and the complete sixth stanza (eight lines) from the song. Unlike the rest of the song, these two stanzas have no meaning, consisting mostly of phonetically-inspired gibberish that vary from performance to performance and are usually made up on the spot by the singer.
We love the Internet.
So, it’s Bowl Season, and of the dozen teams in the SEC, 9 got bids.
Let’s pause for a moment and see if any other conferences did as well, shall we?
Ok, that’s out of the way. (No, I don’t think so, but we could be wrong — we can’t be bothered to check.)
Here’s the bowl picture for the SEC:
No big surprises here — the schools in the Heathen Home State have lagged for years (modulo Eli’s tenure at Ole Miss), and Vandy is hampered by actual admissions requirements, but the balance is solid.
Only 4 of the 9 have been played; of those, only one team disappointed (and it was ours, dammit). Coming up, though, we have very good expectations about the final five games:
Wisconsin lost to its only ranked opponent in the regular season, while Arkansas emerged as a surprisingly powerful presence in the SEC this year. We give the edge to the Razorbacks.
Auburn’s still very strong, so we’ll pick them to beat Nebraska — playing in a stronger conference, they still have a better record than the Cornhuskers, who beat only one ranked team in four shots during the season (#24, A&M, back in November).
LSU should be a shoe-in over perennially-overrated ND. They played four top-ten teams on the road, as we previously noted, while ND hasn’t beaten anyone of note all year. The Tigers can disappoint, the ND does have a good guy behind the center, but we’re still wearing purple and gold in our hearts on this one (as much as it pains us).
Penn State’s in a bowl? Why? Expect Fulmer (9-3 in the SEC) to whip Joe Pa (8-4, heavy on the creampuffs — is Youngstown State even Div I-A?), leg or no leg. We can’t bring ourselves to root for Rocky Top, so we’ll have to content ourselves with pulling against Penn State.
That leave the Big Show on January 8. Right now, we still pick Urban Meyer’s Gators over Ohio State, but that’s a closer call. Both had 4 ranked opponents in the regular season, but one of Ohio’s was an on-the-way-out Penn State back in September. Florida dropped one of its ranked games, losing to Auburn in a hell of a game back in October. All we’re really sure about here is that it’s likely to be quite a football game.
We figure we may be wrong about one of these picks, so we estimate the final SEC bowl record at 7-2.
(Oh, one more, designed to bait certain readers: in the Orange Bowl — featuring a shatteringly irrelevant pairing of Wake Forest vs. Louisville — we pick “whatever else is on”.)
