In-flight Wi-Fi on United Airlines by the end of next year! WOOHOO!!!

The Democratic National Committee chairman’s enlightened opinion of the opposition: “The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. They’re a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It’s pretty much a white Christian party.” (You can listen for yourself here.)

Commentary would be superfluous.

I really should start a new blog category called “unbelievably dumb and offensive statements by Howard Dean.” It would be a rich category. (Previous posts here, here, here and here.)

Um, isn’t it, like, completely obvious that Michael Jackson has not been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? I mean, whatever private suspicions we may harbor about his behavior (and I harbor plenty), I can’t see how any reasonable jury could possibly conclude that the prosecution met its burden of proof here. So what’s taking them so long?

If the jury somehow finds Jacko guilty, will the judge throw out the verdict as unsupported by the evidence? It seems to me like he should. Admittedly, I haven’t been following the case closely, but it’s been impossible to avoid hearing tidbits here and there, and from what I’ve heard, it seems like the defense raised plenty of doubt.

Congresswoman Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of the state made famous (and/or infamous) by the 2000 election debacle, is running for Senate.

Hat tip to my junior-year high-school history teacher, Mr. O’Connell, who emailed me to let me know that yesterday, for the second time, I was featured on CNN’s Inside Politics!

Well, technically it was Becky who was featured — her “Supreme Crap” post, to be specific — but I got the credit:

[T]he Supreme Court ruling that federal law trumps state law when it comes to medicinal marijuana [is] getting a lot of attention on the blogs. … Over at the Irish Trojan’s Blog, this is brendanloy.com, he says it’s the most heinous vomit the Supreme Court has yet spewed forth. Very strong opinions.

Apparently CNN’s “blog reporters” missed the “Guest-posted by” label. Oh, well. Congrats to Becky anyway, whose blog posts have now been quoted in the Boston Globe and on CNN!

Since that post wasn’t linked by any other blogs, I guess this means that I’m now on CNN’s bookmarks list! Woohoo! :)

For some unknown reason (not that I’m complaining!), the train-enthusiast website TrainWeb — which has a buried link somewhere to my old cross-country train trip page — decided to post that link prominently on its “What’s New” page over the weekend, under the headline “Revisiting a 2002 trip on the Amtrak Sunset Limited.”

The result: more than 250 hits in the last three days to a page I hadn’t looked at, or thought about, in years. Heck, I’m just glad the page still exists and the links aren’t broken! :)

Anyway, welcome train enthusiasts, to my humble Internet home. Feel free to have a look around!

You- yes, YOU- can decide who will go to the WNBA All-Star game this year and who doesn’t by voting on your favorite players. You can vote once per day until the polls close on June 23rd. So sign on and drop it like it’s hot!

But we’re all lagging behind Buddhist monks. Neuroscientists are still unlocking the ultimate coolness of the meditators’ melons.

Echoing Becky, blogger Megan McArdle has a question about the recent Watergate revelations: “Are the seventies past their expiration date yet?”

Patrick has an interesting post on stem-cell research and embryonic adoption.

For those who still think that my iPhoto bug complaints are overstated — that I shouldn’t expect to be able to edit a JPEG photo 3 or 5 or 10 times without running into problems — check out this example of what a single edit did to a photo:

The “BEFORE” image is a screenshot taken after the photographer had finished his editing, but before he hit the “Done” button; the “AFTER” image is what the photo looked like a few moments later, once iPhoto was done with it. The two images should be completely identical. As you can see, they’re far from it.

Clearly, this is a major, major bug, not to be downplayed by dismissive questions like “Do you seriously edit the same photo 10 times?” On some photos, it takes multiple edits before one notices visible changes; on others, the changes become obvious right away. But on all systems affected by the bug, iPhoto is making unwanted changes every single time you edit a photo, whether they’re immediately visible or not — and that is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.

Equally unacceptable, or at least damn aggravating, is Apple’s prolonged silence on this issue. It’s been about a month since the first complaints started cropping up. Multiple bug reports have been submitted, tons of feedback sent, and many calls to tech support made. Where is the official acknowledgment from Cupertino that this is a real problem, and that a fix is in the works? A little reassurance would go a long way. And a timeline would be nice, too. I’d like to know approximately when I’ll be able to start actually using the software I paid $79 for. Communication is a good thing, Mr. Jobs!

(more…)

Seven months after the voters went to the polls, the Washington gubernatorial election is finally over.

After losing in court today, Republican candidate Dino Rossi — who lost by 129 votes out of 2,810,058 cast (0.0046%, twice as close as Florida 2000) — has, in a surprise development, conceded. But not without a parting shot:

Rossi said because the “political makeup of the Washington Supreme Court” makes it “almost impossible to overturn this ruling, I am ending this election contest.”

Al Gore’s concession was both more timely and more gracious. And that really is the ultimate insult. :)

Amnesty International’s widely publicized statement that Guantanamo Bay is “the gulag of our times” did exactly what I suspect it was intended to do: it gave liberals everywhere a powerful anti-Bush sound byte, backed by the authority of a respected international organization, that they will be able to repeat breathlessly for months and years to come. And because ideologues (on both sides) are generally impervious to inconvenient contradictory facts, that repetition will not be affected at all by the news that the director of Amnesty USA says that the group doesn’t “know for sure” whether its inflammatory allegations are actually, you know, true.

Executive Director William Schultz admitted on Fox News Sunday, “We don’t know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo, and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate.” Now, that’s a very good point, but it hardly justifies comparing Gitmo to brutal Soviet prisons without adequate information to back that statement up.
Moreover, even if Amnesty’s worst (unproven) fears about Gitmo are true, the comparison remains inappropriate, as Schultz himself basically admits:

CHRIS WALLACE: Mr. Schulz, the Soviet gulag was a system of slave labor camps that went on for more than 30 years. More than 1.6 million deaths were documented. Whatever has happened at Guantanamo, do you stand by the comparison to the Soviet gulag?

SCHULZ: Well, Chris, clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy. And the secretary general has acknowledged that. There’s no question. But what in size and in duration, there are not similarities between U.S. detention facilities and the gulag. People are not being starved in those facilities. They’re not being subjected to forced labor. But there are some similarities.

Schultz later says he does not believe the analogy is “irresponsible,” but his own words undercut that claim. “Some similarities” do not a valid analogy make. If you look hard enough, I’m sure you can find “some similarities” between Bush and Hitler… and also “some similarities” between Bush and Jesus. But would it be appropriate to say that Bush is either “the Hitler of our times” or “the Jesus of our times”? I think not.

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Well, the rumors and speculation were true. Starting next year Apple will transition its systems to using Intel chips.

Steve Jobs cited dissatisfaction with the future of IBM’s PowerPC plans as the major reason. This brings to mind shades of the promise by Jobs (based on assurances by Big Blue) that G5’s would reach 3 Ghz last year, a speed they still haven’t attained.

Jobs assured developers that this transition will be the easiest yet, and that a new technology called Rosetta (possbily linked to Transitive’s QuickTransit technology), will allow for dynamic translation of binaries from one architecture to the other, meaning programs built for PPC won’t need to be completely rewritten.

Only time will tell how wise a move this is, but given Job’s track record I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

It is hard for a life long Mac User to get used to the idea of an Intel CPU running my Mac, but so long as the quality of the system lives up to the high standards us Apple fans (fanatics?) have, I can live with it. It’s a little weird, but I can live with it.

But as Dane said to me in an IM conversation:
“so long as they don’t go slapping that lame ass Intel inside logo on mac hardware”

heh

SCOTUS has ruled that the individual use of medical marijuana is unconstitutional. This decision invalidates the laws of 10 states that have decided to allow medicinal marijuana use under a doctor’s supervision.

This decision represents the most heinous vomit the Supreme Court has yet spewed forth. First, and most significantly, the Court has no authority to control the actions of two individuals in CA. These women grow their own personal supply in their own backyard. They adhere to state law. They don’t transport their bud across state lines for profit. Therefore, if anything, SCOTUS should have declared that any Congressional interference with these laws would be unconstitutional.

But alas, in a move that dramatically strengthens the power of the federal government at the expense of states’ rights, the court has decided that the federal statute outlawing marijuana takes precedent over any state declaration. Fabulous. What’s next? If the feds decide that all police officers should cluck like a chicken before mirandizing a criminal, will the states be helpless to say, “hell no!’?

In his majority opinion, Stevens says that Congress could pass legislation permitting the use of medical marijuana. Great. I love Congress and everything, but they have no right to butt in if my cousin wants to grow a marijuana plant or two to stimulate his appetite when it’s been destroyed by the ravages of HIV. Congress should be concerned about issues of national and international importance, not whether my neighbor has a plant and smokes a blunt in his own home every now and then.

Really. I’m disgusted.

Particularly when international medicinal research is slowly uncovering the health benefits of cannabis.

UPDATE Instapundit has more coverage.