DISQUS

14th? That high?

Then again, Kyoto was far ahead of it. Which suggests both immense ignorance about what Kyoto would actually do, and either immense ignorance about the political possibility of passing the treaty, its popularity, or an immensely quixotic view of their own powers.

The whole top of that list is boggling. Good thing the Netroots aren't powerful - and never will be with policy priorities and policies like that.

Dirk said Inequality is the single biggest problem in our society.

Really? The single biggest problem is income inequality? (Presuming, from context, that that's the form of inequality meant; if you really meant "inequality per se in no specific context", that's really weird.)

How's that, now?

(Plus I'm not at all sure that someone else making more money than me is making me unhappy. I certainly don't feel unhappy because Bill Gates is fantastically wealthy. But that might just be because I'm atypical.

I, at any rate, would be happy with a bit more purchasing power to improve my lot, even if other people gained even more, thus reducing my relative wealth!)

Retief: It's both. It's primarily a result of individuals and their actions (apart from the systemic factors and the occasional inheritance, etc.), but not in such a way that it's easily amenable to anyone's control. (Emergent phenomena, after all, emerge from something; in this case, individual actions. Just like the invisible hand of the market emerges from the actions of individual participants.)

Except the problem doesn't seem to exist on Apple's drivers or Apple's hardware at all, so Apple can't fix anything. (Note that Mogull, in the second link, is more or less on Maynor and Ellch's side, in that he thinks they really did exploit a real bug in real hardware... but he also says they really did exploit it only on third-party hardware and drivers.)

After all, it's no shock at all to find that third party hardware, with third party drivers, can get you an exploit.

Even the "fanboys" (keep scrolling!) are right sometimes, like in this case.

(Plus Ou really doesn't impress me with his "my friend's a legal guy so, uh, somehow that makes my case stronger, and Gruber's mean!")

And who has Apple smeared, exactly, when? Nothing I've seen from Apple (ie Krebs' quotes from their PR person) has made anything that could come close to a "smear" against anyone.

I'm sure various fanboys have said things that might be considered smears, but there's that "Apple and" before "its faithful"... and no good evidence of anything for Apple to fix.)

If it helps, you are mostly liquids, too.

You can thank me later.

Remember, Chad, that QoS that doesn't cost anything is QoS that doesn't exist.

If there's no additional fee, nothing stops people from marking their every tiniest packet as highest-priority, and there's an incentive to do so... and when everything is market highest-priority, the effect is identical to nothing being so-marked.

(If same-day airmail and bulk third class cost the same, would anyone ever use anything but same-day (assuming no restrictions on what could be airmailed, etc)?

If so, why would they?)

Just a quibble - in what way are video and voice "more important" than file transfer (ie, everything else that isn't gaming)?

More interesting to cable and phone companies who want to make money off VOIP or on-demand video, yes.

But "more important" in general? To whom or to what?

Chad: Instapundit has been saying how much he loves his EVDO service for ages now, for one.

That whole "3G" thing, they call it.

I'm too lazy to look up market penetration numbers, but it seems undeniable that it's competition in the broadband world (especially for those very people excluded for from the GAO report for being, say, >2.5mi from their CO, etc.).

Well, it is Cringely you're talking about, so the answer may well be "why, yes, he is high on rock cocaine, why do you ask?".

Though in fairness he's not smoking them rocks nearly as often as Dvorak, who does it intentionally.

How can Cox "fix" the problem, anyway? Cox can't force its customers to upgrade their free firewall. Cox was already offering the upgraded beta version no?

And why, PBC, do you keep pushing at Cox, when the easy solution to the entire problem is for the Craigslist people to fix their broken window size?

You argument seems to take the form that Cox is at fault because they're not Craigslist. (And what "competing service" do they have? I mean, seriously? Nobody, figuratively speaking, has ever even heard of this service, which means it's not competing at all, as the only strength of something like Craigslist is that many people use it.

Hell, their website doesn't even mention such a service. The idea that they're somehow deliberately preventing a fix from going out to bolster their own competitor to Craigslist is... I don't even have words for what that is.)

Why are those first two in that list at all?

“The intelligent design movement belittles God,” he told reporters before the event. “It makes God a designer, an engineer. The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me.”

That's a complete non-sequitur from "god of love" to "did not design me", as if the two are somehow mystically incompatible for unstated (unstatable?) reasons.

I agree that ID is Purest Bunk, but that's a terrible argument against it, theologically or otherwise.

(And theologically, ID is more satisfyingly compatible with Genesis 1:27 than his posited God-guided evolution... at least that's what I'm assuming his alternative is, given that that seems to be the other allowable doctrinal position of the Catholic Church on the matter. I'm not aware of the Church denouncing the idea of God simply creating man directly.

But then, I'm an atheist anyway.)

No.

No, no, no.

No.

Muttonchops; now THERE'S a man's facial hair.

It means flies aren't very smart about plastic bottles?

Or it's not very interested in leaving?

Bill: Those aren't policy linkages (at least not primarily).

It's all well and good to tell people that maybe they shouldn't want to pair-bond with the same person for sexual activity and housemaking, but in practice they're still generally going to want that.

The problems there are more or less inherent, not created by policy - and to the extent they're merely social convention, they're still not amenable to change.

The only thing I can think of in Wilson's favor, is that he did manage to find out that Iraq had probably (in the assessment of the Nigerian official who told him) attempted to buy uranium. (Of course, Wilson then lied about that to the media, but he did tell the CIA, at least.)

On the other hand, I'm confused about your assertion that he was trying to get people to confess to felonies; I suspect neither of us knows anything about the Nigerian criminal code (but I also suspect that nobody in Nigeria would much worry about being prosecuted in Nigeria for telling Joe Wilson something), and I don't think the US pretends its laws about selling stuff to Iraq apply to foreign nationals in other nations.

I've noticed that people who think PNAC has any power whatsoever, let alone controls the Executive (and evidently somehow Congress as well) are without any exceptions so far, complete moonbats.

Useful heuristic.

Of course, to be fair, Bly isn't even close to Portland, being 300 miles away in Klamath county, not exactly a Jihadist-friendly part of Oregon.

The big question for me (which the Court has settled to its satisfaction long ago), is whether the Commerce Clause really allows Congress to say "X is covered by the Clause even to produce and use yourself, because that means you wouldn't be buying it on the market, or because you might sneakily sell it"; I certainly can't convince myself that the authors of the document or the plain reading of the text support that.

I've always had the crazy idea that the Commerce clause properly only let Congress regulate actual trade between states (or states and other countries), not trade or non-trade that somehow affects such trade without actually involving the stuff in question crossing state lines.

But I'm a troglodyte that way, really.

A more interesting scenario to me is examining the possibility that Windows users can switch to the Mac OS on their Intel machines. Is this going to be possible?

Nope; IIRC Apple's said quite clearly that OSX will continue to run only on Apple Macintosh computers, regardless of CPU type.

But then, really, when has John Dvorak ever had any idea what the heck he was talking about?

Apple's real value might be their software (OSX is certainly a first-rate platform), but their computer-industry profit is all from the hardware. (I say computer-industry specifically to disinclude all the iPod profit, which is immense, but unrelated.)

Part of it is also, I think, that they can keep the whole thing much simpler and more coherent at the driver level by only having to support their own hardware at install-time, and whatever third-party things they choose; wheras on an open hardware platform they have to support a much more varied and dubious set of hardware that can have god-knows-what sorts of interactions. (But you know all that already, I'm sure).

The folks at Apple are certainly smarter and better aware of their market than Dvorak is, and I'm betting on them, not him.

Monky: Now, now. Howard Dean isn't the stupidest man on earth, though he may well do an excellent job of aiding the destruction of the Democrat party with his random, costly, and ineffective actions as DNC Chair.

As for the aide quote, yeah, that sure is where it's from. It's amusing, though, that an anonymous aide's quote is taken as Gospel (pun intended) as to the actual beliefs and actions of the Administration.

I guess there's nothing as seductive as being told exactly what you already believe, regardless of any counter-evidence, is there?

I find it difficult to believe that's really Eugene Volokh.

He covered that, er, issue much more in the way I expect him to on his own blog.

I suspect the Huffington people of thinking that is in some way a funny joke.

Monkey: None of that, sadly, is "obvious" to anyone who doesn't already have it in for The Evil Republicans.

(PS. What was Clinton's reason for the Balkan interventions? I'm personally inclined to believe that he, just like Bush, sent in troops because he thought it was the right thing to do.

Are you going to claim he's also in the pocket of the Miltiary Industrial Complex(tm), or are things Different When It's A Democrat? Either one would be interesting to watch you try and rationalise.)

It's perfectly distinguishable from a virus.

It doesn't spread by itself, or install itself without you telling it to.

It's even perfectly distinguishable from a trojan, in that it keeps running when you uninstall because of a bug in the uninstall process, rather than by intent (I'm assuming - certainly the GRC people think ZoneAlarm is good, and they're Very Serious computer security people, and it seems stunningly unlikely that the Zone people would intentionally do something so annoying. It can't help their business plans, after all, to peeve users of their free product.)

What's better, he "judged" the memo to be "authentic", evidently, over the phone, after having been told it was hand-written.

In other words, he thought its tone sounded plausible. He didn't even see the damned thing when he "judged" it. As I understand the war of counterclaims at the moment, it looks like CBS has been thoroughly misrepresenting what he actually said about their memos.

Mike: "Just like every other documentary".

Well. I suppose. If "Triumph of the Will" is a documentary, that is.

(Spinsanity went over this quite some time ago when Moore whined about it in a book. It's still a non-issue, and Moore's still full of it.)