Author: Aaron Weber

On the Plus Side, I Hear Toronto Is Nice in the Spring

Oh, sure, there’s warning signs your kid might be using drugs but what do I do if I love a country that I suspect might be, you know, becoming kind of totalitarian? Is there a checklist of warning signs of totalitarianism? Apparently not so much. Fascism, though, yes. I want to know what people thought in 1939 in Germany. I want to know, at what point do you stop saying “It’s not so bad yet, this can be changed” and start saying “oh shit, it’s way too late.”

I got an email today on the college alumni list about a woman who has been denied re-entry to the US for no apparent reason. Daily Kos has more. Now, the thing is, there might be some legitimate paperwork screwup. She wasn’t bundled off to Gitmo or anything, and maybe in a few weeks this’l all be sorted out. Still, it’s a hell of a way to treat a legal resident who’s just gone home to visit family across the border.

And it really seems to me like the US is going off the deep end with its xenophobia– this, the vigilante border patrols… how can we reverse this trend and make the country what it can be? Is it still possible to reverse? At what point do people start to wonder where it all went wrong?

IT Journalism Watch

The Boston Globe on Windows “Longhorn” notes that it has some new features. It does not note that most of these new features were already available on MacOS and Linux. It does not note that there is any competition for Longhorn. It notes that Windows runs on more than 90% of systems, but fails to note any antitrust concerns. I don’t expect deep discussion of this in a quick note article, but this is little more than a rehashed press release.

The icing on the cake, though, is right at the end:

To keep consumers satisfied in the meantime, Gates said a new version of Windows, called ”Windows XP Professional x64 Edition,” will begin shipping next month that can crunch more information at one time, handling 64 bits of data compared with 32 bits in the previous generation.

Now, do you see anything in that that indicates that this is for a new hardware platform? A hardware platform that’s been available for over a year? That you can’t just run out and put x64 edition on your PC? This product is not a “quick update to keep consumers happy.” It’s long-delayed support for 64-bit processors that will mostly be of interest to business customers, primarily in the server or high-end workstation space. I guess you can blame this on the article being by the Globe Wire Service, but dammit, let’s have some accuracy here.

What gets me is I’m sure that most of the reporting in the world is equally wrong, and I don’t know it because I’m not a subject-matter expert on anything else.

Invitating you to Truthfulness

Sometimes, as we all know, spam approaches art. Sometimes, as in the annual scrapple-carving competition, it is deliberate.

In this case, perhaps it is or perhaps not. It certainly goes on at length about Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam. Anyway, I got a couple copies of this today, and thought you might enjoy it.
Continue reading “Invitating you to Truthfulness”