born live love die

As someone who deals with DRM on a daily basis, I found this translation of a letter to Steve Jobs to be very funny.

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’

Friday, 16 February 2007

Source: “Macrovision’s Response to Steve Jobs’s Open Letter”.

I would like to start by thanking Steve Jobs for offering his provocative perspective on the role of digital rights management (DRM) in the electronic content marketplace and for bringing to the forefront an issue of great importance to both the industry and consumers.

Fuck you, Jobs.

Read the whole thing.

A sociopath is someone without conscience, and I think Brit Hume fits the bill.  Think Progress has the video and a transcript of Hume:

HUME: That sound bite from John Murtha suggests that it’s time a few things be said about him. Even the “Washington Post” noted he didn’t seem particularly well informed about what’s going on over there, to say the least. Look, this man has tremendous cache among House Democrats, but he is not — this guy is long past the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world.

Foggiest awareness?  From the chump who is Rove’s bitch?

This wants to make me believe in a God and Final Judgement, just so I could see this chump turn on a spit in hell.

Cuba loves Linux.

Cuba’s communist government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire - Microsoft Corp.  - by joining with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open-source software.

Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft’s proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.

“It’s basically a problem of technological sovereignty, a problem of ideology,” said Hector Rodriguez, who oversees a Cuban university department of 1,000 students dedicated to developing open-source programs.

Other countries have tried similar moves. China, Brazil and Norway have encouraged the development of Linux for a variety of reasons: Microsoft’s near-monopoly over operating systems, the high cost of proprietary software and security problems.

Cuban officials, ever focused on U.S. threats, also see it as a matter of national security.

Read the whole thing.

Neely Tucker writes a fun article about the chemistry of love.

There are two shrimp-size things on either side of your brain called the caudate nuclei. This is the gear that operates bodily movements and the body’s reward system: “the mind’s network for general arousal, sensations of pleasure, and the motivation to acquire rewards,” Fisher writes. And when the test subjects looked at their sweeties, these things started singing “Loosen Up My Buttons” with the Pussycat Dolls!

Read the whole thing.

Dan Froomkin tells the truth.

If you’re a journalist, and a very senior White House official calls you up on the phone, what do you do? Do you try to get the official to address issues of urgent concern so that you can then relate that information to the public?

Not if you’re NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert.

When then-vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby called Russert on July 10, 2003, to complain that his name was being unfairly bandied about by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Russert apparently asked him nothing.

And get this: According to Russert’s testimony yesterday at Libby’s trial, when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.

That’s not reporting, that’s enabling.

Tell it, brother!

Freedom of the press is necessary for informing the polis. But it is used by people like Russert as a means to celebrity.

Feh.

The mainstream media is getting to the point of understanding what many on the fringes of media have known for quite a while, that there is no victory to be won in Iraq and now is the time to start thinking about the legacy that this war has wrought on the people of Iraq and the nature of our democracy.

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Written by William Odom, a retired Lt. General and the head of the National Security Agency under President Reagan, this article makes the points that need to be made.

The American public is deeply ambivalent about capital punishment.  On the one side of the issue are those who think that our social development is linked to giving up capital punishment, i.e., we will not advance as a society until we give it up.  On the other side is the deep seated rationality in all people (I conjecture) that when you maliciously take a human life, you have broken a contract with the rest of us which secures your right to life.

The people with the former position have been trying to win the argument by axiom.  Among the axioms used have been

• it is morally wrong;
• it is impossible to fairly adjudicate;
• it is inhumane.

People with the latter position are left to argue a position of responsibility against a rights position, which is never an easy task.  Part of the problem is that we don’t have the language to describe a position of responsibility except as it relates to securing rights.

Elizabeth Weil seems to support the former argument more than the latter, I think.

On a warm spring day last June in Kansas City, a doctor identified only as John Doe No. 1 sat behind a screen to testify in the case of Michael Anthony Taylor v. Larry Crawford on his practice of executing prisoners by lethal injection for the State of Missouri. To protect the doctor’s identity, only five people were in the room — the judge, one lawyer for each side, the court reporter and John Doe No. 1. The Taylor case, which is still going on, pits a murderer against the director of the Missouri Department of Corrections. That afternoon’s testimony was widely considered to be the end of the legal rope for Michael Taylor, who was awaiting execution for one of Kansas City’s most notorious crimes: he had kidnapped Ann Harrison, a 15-year-old honor student and flutist, from a bus stop at 7 a.m. on March 22, 1989, raped her and stabbed her through the heart, lungs and throat. Nobody was contesting Taylor’s guilt or even the death penalty. On trial was the legality of the way lethal injection is being carried out, on the grounds that it violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

What has been lost from this discussion is that the Eight Amendment was originally designed to limit the things a State could do to its citizens.  It was written in the shadow of the time when the State, acting under the influence of religion, had too readily abused citizens.  The Salem trials had taken place less than a 100 years before the writing of the Constitution.  It was clear to the people then that the State could go too far in punishing people.  Remember that the guillotine was invented as a more humane for of execution in a time when the headsman could miss his mark.  It is now looked down on as barbaric, but that was not how it was intended.

Weil’s article talks about the imperfections of execution methods and the unwillingness of doctors to participate in death by lethal injection.  I think that if queried, she would say that she was writing an article about how problematic it is to institute a system of execution.  I think also that she has a bias and it is revealed in the last paragraph:

Austin Sarat, the Amherst professor who has tracked the history of the death penalty, speculates that states may grow tired of trying to solve the puzzle of a humane execution. “The European path was de facto abolition before de jure abolition,” he told me. “So maybe what happens is we just stop using the death penalty very much, and it gradually withers in ways that make more and more places resemble Pennsylvania — lots of people on death row, very few executions. And at that point, maybe we look around and realize we can live without it.”

We have a responsibility to each other not to take lives maliciously.  When that responsibility is abrogated, it is the responsibility of the rest of us to deal with it.  The problem we now face is one of hypocrisy in that many people who nominally support the death penalty are unwilling to perform it.  I think this issue will be resolved when that hypocrisy is faced.

It didn’t take long for lawmakers to find a way to turn around those dingy lobbyist ways that were threatening to lose that hard won glossy patina.

The 110th Congress opened with the passage of new rules intended to curb the influence of lobbyists by prohibiting them from treating lawmakers to meals, trips, stadium box seats or the discounted use of private jets.

But it did not take long for lawmakers to find ways to keep having lobbyist-financed fun.

In just the last two months, lawmakers invited lobbyists to help pay for a catalog of outings: lavish birthday parties in a lawmaker’s honor ($1,000 a lobbyist), martinis and margaritas at Washington restaurants (at least $1,000), a California wine-tasting tour (all donors welcome), hunting and fishing trips (typically $5,000), weekend golf tournaments ($2,500 and up), a Presidents’ Day weekend at Disney World ($5,000), parties in South Beach in Miami ($5,000), concerts by the Who or Bob Seger ($2,500 for two seats), and even Broadway shows like “Mary Poppins” and “The Drowsy Chaperone” (also $2,500 for two).

Have we been fooled again?

Representatives John R. Kuhl Jr. of New York and Greg Walden of Oregon, both Republicans, each recently invited lobbyists to a rock concert by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. And three Republican lawmakers, Mr. Walden and Representatives Darrell Issa and Mary Bono of California, have invited lobbyists to join them next month at a Who concert in Washington.

“They’re her favorite rock ’n’ roll band,” said Frank Cullen, Ms. Bono’s chief of staff.

Meet the new gloss, same as the old gloss.

The boffins at MIT are hard at it. This time they are trying to fabricate a turbine on silicon. The turbine would have 1 mm features.

After a decade of work, the first millimeter size turbine engine developed by researchers at MIT should become operational by the end of this summer.

The article talks about the history of turbine engines and wraps with this:

Q: What sort of performance should we expect from the engine?

A: The best metric is energy per unit weight, about 120-150 w-hr/kg for current commercial Li-ion rechargeable batteries. We expect that 500-700 whr/kg can be accomplished in the near term, rising to 1200-1500 whr/kg in the longer term (for the engine and its fuel supply).

Coming soon to a cell phone near you - a gas turbine.

Eric Fair tells a story no American should tell.

A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Mr. Fair tells a story about Iraq that we won’t like.  Here is his wrap up:

I am desperate to get on with my life and erase my memories of my experiences in Iraq. But those memories and experiences do not belong to me. They belong to history. If we’re doomed to repeat the history we forget, what will be the consequences of the history we never knew? The citizens and the leadership of this country have an obligation to revisit what took place in the interrogation booths of Iraq, unpleasant as it may be. The story of Abu Ghraib isn’t over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.

The words about blood and lashes from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address come to mind.  We must open the book and set this right.