As I was browsing the internet earlier I saw a post about a further expansion of Bush’s “Faith Based Initiatives”. Assuming it was another play by McCain to the right, I figured that I would pass on reading and went along my merry way. Well, a bit later it turned up on Digg under a different headline: “Obama courts conservatives with new faith program.” WHAT? Obama, the supposed Democratic candidate, is carrying on a staple of the Bush administration? This pandering is getting ridiculous!
I was browsing Digg this morning and found a rather interesting story with some random guy (evidently a ‘Matthew Daly’ in the UK) about how he thought his Ubuntu installation was easier to use than OS X. In fact, his exact statement was:
A modern beginner-oriented Linux distribution such as Ubuntu is considerably easier to use than a Mac.
Now, I am a huge Linux guy. I love my T61 Thinkpad running Ubuntu (formerly Gutsy, now Hardy). I’ve had the laptop for almost a year exactly and have had Ubuntu on it ever since the first Ubuntu 7.10 RC releases and couldn’t be happier. It gives me, a very very cranky power user, exactly what I want. That being said, I just don’t agree that it is easier to use for new users than OS X. In fact, I think they both are horrible for new users.
Okay, so, I have to give JC Penney for doing something right. After promising the “biggest sale of the year” on every sale, they now have another advertising campaign to bring people in.
You have to admit–that’s awesome. Also, it’s something I have done more than once (either the timing of the clothes or the ’seize the day’ mentality works). Anyhow, nice work for whoever does JC Penney’s advertising. It’s pretty hilarious, if not overly great at targeting middle age moms who are, I would imagine, their main target. Thanks to digg and dropkickmonkey.com for the link.
Many places are reporting that Sid Meier is bringing a new Civ game to the PC. This time it’s more of a remake than the recent ones have been. He’s bringing back a slightly obscure game called Colonization for me to waste my life on. Now, normally this is a good thing. A new civilization game comes out, I promptly waste 100 hours of my life playing twenty games or so, and then I realize I haven’t showered in a month and I stop playing. Unfortunately, this game may make me go even past that. Why, do you ask?
If I had to guess, I’d say the HUGE WAGONS have something to do with it. I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for wagons. I think it all started with the Oregon Trail, but this game looks like it will also exploit my weakness. Of course, this game doesn’t just feature wagons–it also features the Dutch. I started my love affair with the Dutch colonization and imperialism movement when I started playing Pirates! a few years back. This game should be able to help me with my Dutch addition (provided Sid doesn’t put in another ridiculous Ballroom Dancing minigame).
Overall, I think this should be a pretty interesting game. Civ IV has such a global and epic feel that I’ll be interested in seeing if they can replicate that feeling in a game that takes place on a much smaller scale. Also, since Colonization should be focused on a relatively short period of time (ideally) it shouldn’t fall into the same traps that Civ IV did (You know, like when your 
). Sid Meier has a history of providing interesting sim games and I hope he keeps it up (and I really hope his next project is a Alpha Centauri remake!).
My rant today is on the nice folks at the AP and, along with them, everyone that is abusing the ‘Fair Use‘ clause of the law. If you haven’t been keeping up with the story, here is what happened. The Drudge Report, along with just about every news-based site in the western world, takes multi-line snippets from AP stories when they comment upon the news conveyed in the story. This is, to be sure, a good thing–it allows users to get a feel for what is being conveyed in the story without giving away the entire content of the story. Surely everyone would consider this to be a good thing for both the AP and whatever site links to their story; the AP gets free publicity and the site gets more material to draw from and to comment upon. Unfortunately, the AP has recently gotten trigger happy and has decided that the Drudge Report must take down its snippets of the AP stories.
TechCrunch, in a recent blog, have announced that, in retaliation, they aren’t going to cover anything that the AP reports. This is a great move, to be completely honest. Why bother? If the AP feels the need to shut down pages just for giving them free (and, most likely, positive) advertising, then why give it to them? Screw it. I’m just glad that TechCrunch is leading the way–hopefully more of the larger sites will follow through. It sure would be a good thing.
Hopefully the AP realizes that, by now, its normal business of publishing in local papers is dying out because those same papers are starting to die out. More and more families are ditching their paper to read the stories online and cut down on an unnecessary expense. The AP should be embracing the internet and the free publicity! It’s really much the same problem that the music and video industries are facing recently–if you make your content harder to get to, you’re going to decrease interest in your content. Eventually, people are going to stop caring about your content and then you’re going to be in a weakened position. It surely cannot hurt the AP that much to be linked to–they need to get wise and get with the times!
EDIT: Now even the good folks at Slashdot are talking about this story. Yay and whatnot.
It’s now official–summer is boring. I am so ridiculously un-motivated that it is not good news. Part of the problem is that my summer job is ridiculously overpaying me ($35 for 75 minutes of work? I think I can do that) and the other problem is that I am needing to do some serious coding and I can’t seem to focus on it. Meh. Not only do I have to write a backend that is more fully fledged than everything I have ever done, but I also have to do work that actually matters for my research project and, in the middle of it, learn an entirely new language. I don’t care if Python is great for NASA and for CivIV–it’s a pain in the ass as far as I’m concerned!
CNN brings us this little gem:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has formally ordered the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to conduct an inventory of all U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon-related materials to make sure all items are accounted for, according to a Pentagon memo released Thursday.
What’s that, Secretary Gates? You mean that we have to take care of the most powerful weapons known to mankind? I am absolutely horrified with the casual manner that the United States seems to act with in respect to their nuclear weapons. The know-how to make a nuclear weapon is no longer hard to come by–the nuclear physics is relatively simple and could be figured out by a few graduate students in physics and nuclear engineering. The really hard part of building a nuclear bomb is getting the appropriate nuclear material. Seeing as how we have somewhere near 5000 nuclear warheads (according to Wikipedia) around in the United States alone, I would hope this is a top priority.
I think the most interesting thing from this entire article, however, is the fact that Secretary Gates is giving the US Forces sixty days to locate all of our nuclear warheads and to report back. This brings up two very very interesting questions–First of all, why does it take sixty days to count all of our most powerful weapons? Secondly, if we were in a war situation and needed to launch our nuclear missiles at a country, how long would it take the Air Force/Navy to respond then? If missiles from Russia are supposed to take around twenty minutes to hit the mainland United States, shouldn’t we theoretically be able to do a relatively close count of our nuclear weapons in, say, double that time? The only exceptions, I would assume, would be nuclear subs sleeping out in the ocean, only getting signals every once in a while. Other than those subs, every nuclear weapon depot and Air Force base with nuclear bombs should be able to perform an accurate count in less than a day. I think the sixty days are just a great ‘out’ given by the Defense Department, basically saying “If you can’t find your nukes right now, you better find them in the next 59 days or else you’re going to be in trouble.”
The pessimistic side of me says that I shouldn’t be surprised: that it is the government, and I should let it go. The realistic side of me, however, says that these are nuclear weapons capable of slaughtering millions of people with ease and maybe, just maybe, we should keep track of them.
So, after getting bored with my old blog/non-existent website I figured I would throw this up here so that, if nothing else, I would have a simple way to post whatever content I would need. It was a pretty easy install (especially with Dreamhost) and I have minimal amounts of plugins. It didn’t really need many plugins other than a neat one I found called Page Links To that was really good. I also used the generic anti-spam and wordpress stats plugin. We shall see how it works…
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