Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Cute girl + Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5 = Geek Porn! ;)
If all goes well, I should be doing this very thing this weekend. ‘Cept I won’t be nearly as photogenic while doing it. And I don’t think I’d look as good in that dress. Other than that, though, it’ll be exactly the same. Really.
According to ABC News, Howard Dean is on-track to come close to the quarter-million mark in fundraising so far, and has already beat Clinton’s fundraising record.
Dean, raising millions on the Internet, will probably take in \$13 million to \$16 million this quarter, a campaign insider said. That would lift him to at least \$23.5 million for the race so far and probably make him the Democratic money leader for the year.
Democratic strategists say Dean could raise at least double what his party’s other top hopefuls will collect during the three-month fund-raising period. The former Vermont governor has already passed the Democratic record set by President Clinton, who took in \$10.3 million over three months in 1995 for his re-election.
While it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the article, I thought the attached photo was interesting — a shot of Dean receiving a framed picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. from labor leader Dennis Rivera.
Rivera, head of one of New York’s most politically powerful labor unions, Local 1199 of Service Employees International, put his fund-raising muscle behind the former Vermont governor.
While I don’t know whether this was an official endorsement from Local 1199, or whether any other labor unions have officially backed Dean, there has been a fair number of mentions of support and good words from various labor unions concerning Dean. From what I understand, this could be a major, major boost to Dean’s campaign — and blow to Bush’s — if he can pick up endorsements from some of the country’s largest unions. While most of the media talk lately has been about Clark’s entry to the Democratic field, Dean’s momentum certainly hasn’t seemed to slip any. Good to see.
(via Mathew Gross)
Following up on yesterday’s book banning post, today comes news that the books will not be removed from the school curriculum.
In the end, the school board voted unanimously to keep Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land, while giving parents more control over their students’ choices by requiring principals to automatically offer an alternative to a challenged book.
While I’m very glad that this was the final decision, the requirement to offer alternative choices seems a little silly. How is that going to work? Most of the class reads Brave New World, while two or three students read something else? Class discussions are going to be an interesting experience.
(via Go Fish)
George W. Bush is in the worst political trouble of his presidency, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday night. Bush’s approval rating now stands at 49 percent, the lowest point of his tenure.
[…]
In other questions from the poll released Wednesday night, 52 percent disapproved of Bush’s handling of the economy, his highest disapproval rating ever and the first time it has been above 50 percent.
About damn time, too.
(via Kos)
Wil’s request for a WMV-to-Qicktime converter reminded me of something that I’ve had rattling around in my head for a bit.
I’m fairly obvious about having a strong anti-Microsoft bias. However, I do have to admit (and really don’t mind doing so) that the Macintosh team at Microsoft does some truly kick-ass work. Nearly everything that MS has produced for the Mac in the past few years has been fairly impressive. Even with as much as I bash Internet Explorer in all its variations, when IE 5 for Mac OS X was released, it was the best browser on the market. The fact that it’s since been superceded by other browsers and subsequently abandoned by Microsoft isn’t the fault of the Mac team there, I’m sure.
What popped this into my head a couple weeks ago was, of all things, the driver software for the Microsoft Office keyboard, Intellitype Pro. Where the PC version of the software is its own standalone application, the Mac version of the software integrates right into the OS X control panel. More of a standout feature, though, is the fact that on the Mac, you can assign special functions to all the extra special keys on an application-by-application basis — something which I hardly thought about until I tried to do the same thing on my PC and discovered that it wasn’t possible. Score one more for the Mac team.
All that said, though, there is one glaring exception to the rule — and that’s the Mac version of Windows Media Player. Horrid little application, that one. I’m more surprised when I find a .wmv file that it can open, and even then, performace (at least on my 350Mhz G3) is abysmal. At least that’s the only stumbling block I’ve seen from them. I can’t say that I’m too distraught over having limited-to-nonexistant Windows Media functionality on my Mac, anyway.
So, that’s it, really. Kudos to the Microsoft at Mac team. Now, why don’t you all go tell the rest of the company how to write decent software? ;)
(Oh, and incidentally, I was also looking for a WMV-to-Quicktime converter a couple weeks ago, and found diddley.)
There’s a good article on Salon looking at the issues with Diebold’s electronic voting machines, which are being used to replace troublesome punch-card voting machines after the 2000 voting debacle. It doesn’t look like our votes are any safer under the new system.
…according to Bev Harris, a writer who has spent more than a year investigating the shadowy world of the elections equipment industry, the replacement technologies the court cited may be worse — much worse — than the zany punch-card systems it finds so abhorrent. Specifically, Harris’ research into Diebold, one of the largest providers of the new touch-screen systems, ought to give elections officials pause about mandating an all-electronic vote.
Harris has found critical flaws in Diebold’s voting software, and she’s uncovered internal Diebold memos in which employees seem to suggest that the vulnerabilities are no big deal. The memos appear to be authentic — Diebold even sent Harris a notice warning her that by posting the documents on the Web, she was infringing upon the company’s intellectual property. Diebold did not return several calls for comment.
Not only has Diebold refused to comment, they’ve gone so far as to force Bev Harris to take down her site exposing the vulnerabilities.
Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively “Diebold”), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.
Congressman Rush Holt has sponsored a bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail — this measure should definitely be supported.
Has an American president ever delivered such a bafflingly impertinent speech before the General Assembly as the one George W. Bush gave this morning?
During the 2000 campaign, Bush famously spoke of the need for the United States to be a strong but humble nation. In action, his foreign policy has been predicated on being strong and arrogant. The president gives good speeches. Too bad that they can’t be believed.
In his speech today to the U.N. General Assembly, President Bush tried to walk a fine line between defending a war deeply unpopular in much of the world and looking for help from reluctant countries to rebuild Iraq. The result left diplomats and lawmakers puzzled about his ultimate intentions.
(via Atrios and Joe Rospars)
Concerned parents in Texas want to ban Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land.
The board of directors for the South Texas Independent School District is expected to decide tonight whether to ban two books — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — from the high school’s 10th grade English Advanced Placement curriculum.
The books, part of the class’ summer reading list, may lead to “inappropriate sexual arousal of young teens,” parent Julie Wilde wrote in her complaint to the district.
Obviously (to me, at least), this is patently stupid. But I did have one question.
Would Ms. Wilde be so kind as to suggest some alternate reading that provides appropriate sexual arousal for young teens?
Britney Spears’ autobiography, perhaps?
(via Go Fish)
Dad sent me a couple articles over the last few days looking at Mel Gibson’s “The Passion“, lately seeming to be the most controversial religious film that almost no one’s seen since Dogma was in pre-release. Anyway, if you’re at all interested in the film or the controversy around it, both of these are worth a look.
‘You Can’t Whitewash the Events of the Bible’: New Testament scholar Darrell Bock recently spoke with Beliefnet about Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion,” which dramatizes the last hours of Jesus. Critics–including Catholic biblical scholars and the Anti-Defamation League–have raised concerns about the movie’s historicity and its portrayal of Jewish authorities. Bock saw a rough cut of the film in late August.
What Mel Missed: Most of us have yet to see Mel Gibson’s “The Passion,” but we’ve gained one sure impression: it’s bloody. “I wanted to bring you there,” Gibson told Peter J. Boyer in September 15’s New Yorker magazine. “I wanted to be true to the Gospels. That has never been done before.”
Among the top 10 movies downloaded on the Internet in August were the usual blockbusters: Pirates of the Caribbean, The Hulk, Matrix Reloaded … and Shaolin Soccer.
Can’t say as I’m surprised, I’ve been waiting for word of its release since I first saw the trailers. I don’t do the online downloading thing, either, so c’mon, Mirimax — get your act together and release this thing!