The Register reports that the House of Lords debated the ban on carrying liquids onto planes, and thereby demonstrated that British politicians are as stupid and scaremongering as their US counterparts. At times, the debate seemed to verge on the whimsical. “We should not complain too loudly,” said the Baron. “I always celebrate the fact…
Read More Exploding Marmite!Or at any rate, the closest thing to a a complete review that you’re going to find outside a $20 book. We’re talking about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review, by John Siracusa: These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between…
Read More Leopard: the complete reviewFlexcar and Zipcar have just announced that they’re merging. This is excellent news. It means that I’ll be able to rent vehicles as and when I need to in both Seattle and Boston (and San Francisco, come to that). Unfortunately I doubt that they’ll complete the integration of their systems by the time I next…
Read More Flexcar merges with ZipcarAndrew Sullivan has posted a review of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency” by Charles Savage. It looks like an essential, if blood-pressure-raising, read. One thing I’d forgotten, of course, is one central case in which torture did give us actionable intelligence: “Al Qaeda continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of…
Read More "Takeover"A couple of weeks ago, I ((and most of the blogosphere)) linked to a cool optical illusion of a spinning dancer. At the time, I didn’t realize that people were interpreting this as a “left brain vs. right brain” thing, but apparently they were. Now ScienceLine has a nice piece by Jeremy Hsu called Does…
Read More So much for the Spinning DancerBoston seems to be dominating in American sports these days… pretty amazing. I’m hoisting a glass of bubbly in the general direction of the Sox. (Denver or Fenway… it’s all east from here.)
Read More Congratulations Boston Red SoxI picked up a copy of the new Macintosh OS X, Leopard, and installed it last night on my PowerBook. It was rather more troublesome than I expected, and there are definitely a few rough edges. Here are the main points (including a strong warning). Obviously I prepared for this by doing a full backup.…
Read More Upgrading to LeopardKing Kaufman, Salon’s sports correspondent: So I was thinking to myself, “What’s the deal with all this schlocky movie music Fox has been using on its postseason broadcasts?” Wednesday when the Fenway Park public address announcer introduced John Williams, the guy who writes all that schlocky movie music. He was there to conduct a subset…
Read More The straw that breaks the camel's backHere’s Christopher Orr in TNR: Whether he intended to or not, at a town meeting in Iowa last night Rudy Giuliani offered what may be the most honest defense of torture I’ve seen from an American politician. It is also, of course, a deeply immoral one. Asked whether waterboarding constituted torture, he replied: It depends…
Read More "Laws Are for Other People"Quite apart from ignoring their own End User License Agreements, it now appears that Microsoft doesn’t understand the concepts of A/B testing and “phased deployment”. One user reported that: Window Server Update Services forced Windows Desktop Services 3.01 on the fleet of machines even though admins had configured their system to install updates only for…
Read More "Never Attribute To Malice That Which Can Be Adequately Explained By Stupidity."