Got stuff to do 2nite, so I’ll have to summarize the news items that grabbed my attention 2day. I’m so rushed, I can’t even properly spell out “tonight” and “today.” :)
(1) A 94-year old British war vet is going to return the five medals he earned to PM Gordon Brown because he was denied a heating assistance subsidy based on a technicality. One of the bigger unmentionable scandals out of England in the past few years is the number of white elderly and retired people who have perished in their cold houses because heating costs have been so high, and that government fuel bill assistance has been hard to get. All the while, the Blair/Brown governments shower non-whites with welfare money galore.
(2) A terrorism official for Scotland Yard is worried about lone wolf right-wing terrorism. While he doesn’t have much to be worried about in that regard, relative to the wonderful Muslims running around London, he is right to say that resources that should be used to chase Muslims are being diverted into the fight to snuff out the next mythical Hitler. What I think he means by that is that Muslims are a Labour Party constituency, so they can’t be arrested. Therefore, to justify their jobs, sinecures and salaries, government anti-terrorism officers have to focus on the rare incidents of terrorism committed by those who don’t vote Labour.
BTW, part of the reason why lone wolfism on the part of the right-wing that’s too extreme even for my tastes has come about in recent years is because they have to go “lone wolf.” If they came up to the surface with any hint of central organization and location, then the UK’s numerous analogues to the Southern Poverty Law Center would sue them out of existence, just like the American SPLC has done in this country. If right-wing terrorism worries you, then better that you should want it easier to find, then sundry hard-to-find “lone wolves.” That was the unintended consequence of SPLC legal activity.
(3) Don’t worry, Miss Barney. As soon as Harrow’s “citizen snoopers” see that most of Harrow’s crime and non-crime ills are caused by racial minorities, that’ll be the end of the citizen snooper program.
(4) Three memorable things about San Francisco’s Cow Palace: (1) Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, (2) Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue, and (3) Gun shows draw big crowds, even in San Francisco.
(5) I’ve had some dealings with people that are associated with “independent media centers,” a.k.a. “indymedia” websites, before. What they really are are “anarchists,” i.e. left-wing extremist neo-Marxist college students who have no problem with committing organized acts of minor and moderate vandalism at the behest of one or more college professors, the goal of their political and other activity being the cheap and easy access to illicit drugs. But even left-wing extremist neo-Marxist college students and the professors that egg them on have free speech rights, and the right not to be snooped upon by busybody Federal agents.
The irony of all this is that “indymedia” would have no problem if the U.S. Justice Department would similarly snoop on right-wingers.
(6) David Coursey, a columnist at PC World, marks the 5-year anniversary of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 by predicting that Firefox won’t be as successful in the next five years. He thinks the main reason will be that Google Chrome OS, mated with the Chrome browser, and Microsoft/Windows/IE will increasingly compete with each other using web-based “cloud” applications, application execution, and storage. He also thinks that the paradigm of the browser as an application platform will help GOOG and MSFT, and squeeze Firefox out. Though Coursey doesn’t mention Opera, he would probably think that Opera would suffer the same fate of irrelevancy as Firefox.
First off, I’ve been hearing this bullshit about browser-as-a-platform ever since 1995, with Netscape. I get the feeling that if it could have been done by now, it would have. That it has not means that it’s a stupid and impractical idea. Browsers are designed to view documents in hypertext markup language, not word processing documents and spreadsheets. There is a reason why desktop applications for those things are doing well. Because they work, and you don’t have to be connected to the outside world to doodle around in Excel or type a memo in Word. That’s the reason why I think the cloud is the same kind of bullshit pie-in-the-sky idea that browser-as-platform was all along: With more and more ISPs putting up monthly bandwidth caps, cloud apps are going to be impossible for some people. What if you have UNT&T’s basic DSL line, which has a piddley 5 GB monthly bandwidth cap? Once you’ve used up your five gigs, then no more internet for the rest of the month. That means if you can’t edit your sales report at home, because the word processing app is in the cloud, and you can’t get online. If you have a desktop application for word processing, then you don’t need to get online. A whole OS, like the upcoming Chrome OS, that is supposedly in the “cloud” means that your computer is a big glowing doorstop while your internet connection is down.
The main problem with the Chrome browser is that it’s still minimalist. There’s not the neat ecosystem for add-ons like there are with Firefox. I have exactly the Firefox extensions that I want/need to accomplish what I want to accomplish. If I had to work with only Chrome, I’d feel naked and useless. IE, by contrast, has Chrome’s problems of very few add-ons, but is also slow and clunky as a tortise. I fail to see how slow ass IE or useless Chrome is somehow going to “squeeze out” Firefox.
(7) Now that Missouri’s Blue Books are going online, Senate Majority Leader Kevin Engler (R-Farmington) wants to end the dead tree and ink BBs, to save a little money. I don’t know what I think about that, but one thing that bugs me about the BBs is that they plaster the names, pix, identities, and worst of all, the home addresses if Missouri’s state level Supreme Court, Appellate Court and Circuit Court judges. It used to publish the home street address of every state employee.
(8) A black Architecture prof at Columbia punched a white woman employee of the U. in the face, in the heat of an argument about white privilege. I predict Professor McIntyre will pioneer the field of architectural white privilege, finding secret, subliminal messages of hate and racism in pre-1950 building designs and engineering. You know how that goes, if you play the record backwards at double speed, you hear Satanic dirges…
