2012 archive
Geek Alert: Linux Questions Interviews Pat Volkerding 0
Pat is the benevolent dictator of Slackware, the oldest named Linux distribution still actively maintained (it’s older than Red Hat and Debian by a matter of months). It was also my first and remains my preferred Linux distro.
In the course of the interview, Pat manages to quote both Einstein and Lao Tsu. Read it now.
QOTD 0
William Butler Yeats, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
Meta: Adventures in phpMyAdmin 0
My two or three longtime readers will remember that this site started out self-hosted with dynamic DNS from no-ip.com (whose service was excellent and whom I recommend unconditionally). The free domain name from no-ip was frankwbell.no-ip.info.
About two years in, I got the current domain name.
I finally went back through the SQL tables and changed all the references to “frankwbell.no-ip.info” to “pineviewfarm.net.” I did it the hard way, with phpMyAdmin search, because I didn’t have the energy to work out an SQL query to do it all in one swell foop.
Now, in the first two years or so of posts, the pictures should display and the internal links should work once more.
Only five years behind schedule.
I think this is my favorite set of now-resurrected pictures.
Torturous Logic 0
From Thoreau: it’s too short to quote, too true to miss.
Vagina Demagogues 0
Republicans want to control them.
But they can’t bring themselves to say that word.
The pervy old white men of the Republican Party would have given Freud Krafft-Ebing material for several more volumes.
Open Season 0
Gun nut fantasies: Every city Dodge City, Every hill Boot Hill:
From the description:
According to a new study from Texas A&M University – the ALEC and Wal-Mart backed “stand your ground, shoot first” laws across the country do not deter crime like proponents say they do – but in fact cause more of it. The study’s authors argue that “stand your ground, shoot first” laws increase the chances of murder or manslaughter “by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force.”
Droning On 0
PoliticalProf is carrying on an excellent discussion about drones and policy over at his place. The crux of his argument is that drones are not ipso facto the issue; they are the symptom.
The discussion starts here. Read it then follow the discussion in subsequent posts. (He’s behind Tumblr’s garden wall, so forget about a “comments section” as we know it.)
Facebook Frolics, Buy High, Sell Low Dept. 0
The idea behind an IPO is that an enterprise is worth investment in the expectation of monetary return. In the case of online services, the commercial value is based on whether someone is willing to pay for the service (Netflix, Hulu) or whether the service can bamboozle persons in to buying stuff they don’t need for prices they can’t afford (Facebook, Huffington Post).
By either yardstick the verdict on Facebook would seem to be, “errr, no, not really, uh-uh.”
Considering this, Donna Flagg, blogging at Psychology Today, wonders how to value Facebook.
(snip)
Still, many experts believe the real value lies in the money that can be made off the swelling number of eyeballs rapt by the stream of information and trivia updating newsfeeds by the nanosecond. Maybe, in theory, this is true. But not if those eyeballs are more interested in themselves and what their friends are doing than they are in the pesky, persistent ads that aren’t distinguishable enough to stand out and ultimately blend into the rest of the background.
QOTD 0
Edgar Cayce:
Afterthought:
The truth does come out eventually. But sometimes eventually is a long, long time.
The Privatization Racket(eers) 0
The Republican Party has become a political corporate raider.
It takes over governments, sells off bits and pieces, such as schools, public resources, prisons, and highways, to enrich its corporate masters, and leaves behind the ashes for the citizenry.
In Republican World, there is no such thing as the common good.
There is only the “For Sale” sign.
Wars: Is One Enough? Is Three Too Many? 1
Remember the old children’s laxative commercial which started “Prunes: Is one enough? Are three too many?”
Congress is singing a similar tune about wars. Asia Times reports:
With its earlier decision to pass a bill that effectively sought to ban any negotiations between the United States and Iran, a huge bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
(snip)
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, noted how “this resolution reads like the same sheet of music that got us into the Iraq war, and could be the precursor for a war with Iran. It’s effectively a thinly-disguised effort to bless war.”
One more time: The old lie. The young die.
Image via Balloon Juice.
Cashing in on the Kill 0
Noz wonders whether taking out such a policy could be prima facie evidence of premeditation.
Noz has a point, methinks.
These folks dream that every city is Dodge City, every hill is Boot Hill, and each one of them is Marshall Killin’; they are willing to pay for the dream.
Pride of Baltimore II 0
DSM GOP 0
Barry X. Kuhle sticks his tongue firmly in his cheek and attempts a diagnosis:
1) Denial: humans did not evolve; Obama is not a native-born American Christian
2) Delusion: climate is not changing
3) Hallucination: God ordained me to be President
4) Disordered Thinking: being for small government that’s huge in the bedroom; being anti-contraception and anti-abortion
5) Anger: Newt Gingrich’s perpetual scowl
6) Anti-social Behavior: toward women, gays, minorities, anyone without an umbilical cord or trust fund
7) Sexual Preoccupation: a fervent compulsion to control when we can mate, with whom we can mate, and precisely how we are allowed to mate (which I lampoon in Why Do Politicians Want to Police Dick and Jane’s Private Parts?)
8) Grandiosity: even Rick Santorum recognizes Gingrich’s “over the moon” grandiosity
9) General Oddness: Ron Paul
10) Paranoia: pretty much all of them, all of the time
The Fiscally Impossible 0
Steve Chapman’s column today seems rather muddled.
He seems to start off intending to counter claims that President Obama’s administration has, by and large, pursued responsible budgetary policies (“Yes, Virginia, there was a spending binge”).
Unfortunately for that thesis, Chapman finds this line derailed by some of those pesky “facts” for which he seems to have an unusual respect (which is one reason I read his columns).
He winds up admitting that the legacy of Bushonomics makes reducing (or even restraining) the national debt, at least in the short term, a fiscally impossible endeavor (emphasis added).
Maybe so, but he couldn’t have done it without the GOP. Under Bush, the budget surplus — yes, we once had a federal budget surplus — vanished, giving way to repeated deficits running into the hundreds of billions.
Under Bush, the publicly held federal debt more than doubled. One reason Obama has run deficits is that he has to cover the interest payments for all the borrowing done before he took over.
Bush, it’s worth noting, didn’t launch his spending spree in his final fiscal year. He did it in his first. From 2001 to 2008, federal spending rose by 31 percent, after adjustment for inflation, and went from 18.2 percent of GDP to 20.8 percent of GDP — a 14 percent increase. Oh, and then there was the 2009 deluge of red ink, most of which came from Bush’s inkwell.
Republicans: watch what they do, not what they say.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
and not much change:
(snip useless drivel and about “economists predicted”)
The unemployment insurance report showed the four-week moving average of claims, a less-volatile measure, climbed to 382,000, the highest since April 28, from 378,500.
The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits decreased by 33,000 in the week ended June 2 to 3.28 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of workers receiving extended benefits under federal programs.