Editors say they forbid undercover operations:
“It is important that sources be aware that they are dealing with journalists,” said Tim Franklin, editor of The Sun in Baltimore. “It is not something that I feel comfortable with. This is a form of undercover journalism that, thankfully, went out of vogue in the early 1980’s.”
Presumably, the “early 1980s” represent some sort of ancient period in journalism wherein it didn’t almost universally suck.
The famed security expert explains why REAL ID is a complete waste of time. Of course, it’s also almost certain to become law.
But then again, it would be imposible to have such a list of Things That Don’t Exist.
The State Department is responding to requests for information regarding John Bolton only if they come from Republicans.
One of the popular memes on the far right today is the notion that Christians are somehow persecuted in this country — which, frankly, doesn’t even pass what my friend Lloyd used to call the “risibility test.” Fred Clark over at Slacktivist had a grand post about this a couple weeks ago, and follows with this one that includes a truly spectacular bit of satire (which he’s quoting from Merlin Missy). Pick up on it.
There is a story about this — Google stumbled — but mostly we just wanted to use the headline.
JWZ points out this little gem of a headline: Chlamydia Outbreak Kills a Dozen Penguins.
There’s a joke here about retired, pedophile priests finding work in animal husbandry, but we’re not touching it.
So to speak.
BoingBoing points out that there are now iPod vending machines.
We miss Hunter.
We were saying just Thursday that the “corporate thinktank analysts are devoid of credibility,” and then we see this:
A recent Gartner report gives new meaning to the old saw about “lies, damn lies and statistics.” Trumpeting the “fact” that RIM is the leading PDA vendor, the report gives the BlackBerry-maker a 20% market share, vs. 18% for PalmOne. The problem is, the report doesn’t include smartphones (something that’s mentioned in a footnote), which means that PalmOne’s hot-selling Treo 650 (pictured) isn’t included in that company’s rankings. Confused? It gets even stranger. According to an analysis of the study by Personal Tech Pipeline, Gartner included seven BlackBerry products that include cellphone capabilities. Additionally, the Nokia 9300 and 9500 — which certainly look like smartphones to us — are also included, allowing Nokia to be listed as the fourth-largest PDA vendor, behind RIM, PalmOne and HP. So who really has the largest market share? While we agree with PTP’s Mike Elgan that “the stand-alone PDA market is on its way to irrelevance,” we’d still like to know where each of these players really ranks. But it looks like we’re not going to find out from Gartner.
Was the check from RIM big, Gartner?
The band Self has covered What A Fool Believes using only toy instruments. FanTAStic.
The so-called “Broadcast Flag” has been struck down by a 3-0 decision. BoingBoing, Wired News and Godwin’s Law (yes, that Godwin) have more.
How ’bout this timeline clock?
Don’t you need one of these?
Enjoy the De-Animator.
Atrios points out that Stephen Colbert is getting his own show, which will run after TDS.
From our hometown paper: Rick James on the issues.
Spacetaker now has a gallery up of pictures from Infernal Bridegroom’s Medea.
From here:
Media On the Run:
Sweet merciful motherfucker, the Rude Pundit is so fuckin’ glad that there’s no more war in Iraq and the soldiers have returned home, the Social Security debate is over, the terrorists are on the run, Tom DeLay’s crawlin’ under a porch lookin’ for termites, the public education system’s been fixed, North Korea’s handed over all its nuclear technology and opened itself up to inspections, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are tryin’ to figure out who’s gonna be the top in their shared prison cell (the smart money’s on Cheney), and more, more, so much more, so that we could waste, waste, fuckin’ waste hours upon hours of television news time on a crazy goddamned bug-eyed bride-not-to-be who lied about being kidnapped. Because otherwise, it’d be pretty fuckin’ stupid, wouldn’t it? This time it’s worse – it’s worse than Michael Jackson, Laci Peterson, Robert Blake, and Chandra Levy because it ain’t about jack motherfuckin’ shit, not even a crime, not even a celebrity, not even a politician – it’s about the committing of a misdemeanor by an idiot in order to fool other idiots, but its massive, overwhelming coverage only reveals who the real idiots are. At one point, Sunday morning, all three “news” networks were doing long pieces on who-the-fuck-cares-what-her-name-is, interviewing “experts” about why someone wouldn’t want to get married, why would someone claim they were kidnapped and, no, really, truly, who the fuck cares. Do you think Wolf Blitzer can look at himself in the mirror anymore? Do you think he wants to hock a loogie at his own reflection because he knows, he fuckin’ knows that that’s what he deserves from the rest of us? Do you think he knows how much harm he does or does the bell ring and he just obeys?
Real quick-like, ’cause then we gots to go buy Tiger and some shoes.
Enjoy.
You thought the Ralph Reed bullshit was significant? Try this bit on for size, where Chairman Bill outright lies to NPR about Redmond’s flip-flop on the Washington gay rights initiative. Fuckers.
While it’s laudable that BBEdit has only crashed a very few times for me, it is absolutely unacceptable BBEdit possesses no autosave/autobackup/working-copy-recovery feature to preserve unsaved work in the event of such a crash. Deeply immersed in a problem, I hadn’t hit the magic save key in about 45 minutes — and then BB went away, and so did all my work.
BBEdit has famously used the “It doesn’t suck” tagline for years (it’s a registered trademark for them, even). Having now been bitten by this jackassery, I realize that such boasts are in fact false advertising. Every other serious editor of which I’m aware either has an autosave feature (of which some are justifiably wary, since it implies overwriting the previous version automatically) or some kind of working copy file from which one may recover from a crash. BBEdit appears to have neither, and this earns it a spot on my Shit List.
Update: In email back from support, their answer turns out to be “Yeah, we don’t do autosave. We might add that someday. Our advice is to save a lot.” Um, right. How about I just use an editor that doesn’t think it’s 1985, and that is FREE besides?
That’s the title of Al Gore’s piece in Salon (from a speech on Wednesday). It should be required reading for all those who think the “nuclear option” — as the GOP termed eliminating judicial filibusters — is a good idea. Hell, everybody ought to read it.
In our experience, John Gruber over at DaringFireball is occasionally too much a Mac partisan to be taken seriously, but more often than not he’s spot on. This time, though, he completely nails just exactly what is fucked up about the Adobe-Macromedia merger: it’s more evidence that the sales guys have taken over. Simply put, this invariably means more marketing bullshit and less technical excellence, or as he puts it:
Now that it’s run by a sales guy [Bruce Chizen, who took over from the founders], it has turned into a company that seems more interested in the sales and marketing of its products than in the products themselves.
Word. Gruber concludes with:
Like most sales guys, Chizen seems like the sort of person who believes that what matters most is not the quality of the product itself, but merely the marketing in which you package it. Marketing does matter, and so does salesmanship. But the main reason Adobe Systems has been a success is that they created and developed terrific, innovative software. Engineering talent isn’t enough; you need passion for innovative products at the top of a company. If that spirit continues to wither, Adobe will continue its slide into mediocrity, and will become just another software company. But if it becomes a bigger company while doing so, I suspect that will suit Bruce Chizen just fine.
Meanwhile, I suspect more and more folks will opt for the Gimp.
Apparently, a certain Dell flatscreen monitor and the Apple 20″ Cinema Display use exactly the same LCD (a Phillips model). It sort of begs for a head-to-head, doesn’t it?
Fortunately, Engadget can point us directly to one. The verdict? No material difference, except in price. The Dell? Sometimes as low as $350. The Apple? A cool grand.
It’s apparently now available.
Must. Restrain. Self. We do, however, wonder if Mrs Heathen To Be thinks this would make a fine addition to the Registry.
Ol Triple-F points us to the Ten Worst Album Covers of All Time, or at least what Pork Tornado considers them to be.
We’ve given it thought, and have a hard time arguing with his selections. Particularly No. 7.
See this play. My friends at IBP have staged the best goddamn Medea you’ll ever see, as God is my witness. I’ve seen it twice already, and I’ll see it at least twice more. It’s fucking AWESOME; it may be the best thing they’ve ever done, and we’re talking about a group over a decade old with a cover of American Theater to their credit already.
See. This. Play.
They’ve been using Ralph Reed’s lobbying company.
There now exist bras designed for unaugmented women to give the distinct impression to observers that they have in fact joined the silicon masses.
The Evolution bra is aimed at “women who lust after the look of cosmetic breast implants,” according to Brastraps Inc., a Florida-based company that introduced the new bra on Friday. The Evolution features a sculpted, graduated cup “specially designed to mimic the appearance of cosmetic breast implants.”
In other words, they produce ersatz fake breasts.
Via Boing Boing:
It amounts to a kind of cultural censorship. Call me paranoid, but given all the manipulative tricks the Republicans have gotten up to recently, I am prepared to believe that this has less to do with Homeland security and more to do with keeping the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration. An ill-informed, isolated, ignorant populace is a populace easily manipulated. Fed a diet of reality shows coupled with faith-based reasoning (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and you have a perfect recipe for a country in which the government that can do more or less whatever it wants. [Emph. added] Democracy becomes a farce without access to information. David Byrne
Mao sounds like an interesting game.
Amazon is selling the Canon Digital Elph S410 for $249, which is (notionally) about $200 off. This is a 4 megapixel camera just shy of the top-end for its year. It’s also accessory-compatible with the prior Elph generations (batteries, memory cards, etc.).
Presumably, Canon is trying to clear the channel for the new SD500/400/300 Elph line, which are nicer — bigger LCDs, higher resolution — the SD500 is a SEVEN megapixel point-and-shoot) — but which also use the (more expensive) Secure Digital storage medium, so we’re happy to take last year’s model on the cheap.
Apparently somehow threatened with the frequency with which our native state embarrasses us, our adopted state of Texas has elected to step up the bigotry. Lovely.
“Seaside is a framework for developing sophisticated web applications in
Rhino: an implementation of Javascript written entirely in Java for embedding in Java apps.
Um.
This guy put together a video clip of the original Psycho shower scene and Van Sant’s 1998 shot for shot remake superimposed. Cool. (Local copy here; via jwz.)
“Police in Ariz. Seek Monkey for SWAT Team“
(Thanks, Triple-F!)
