Category: Uncategorized

Too funny. If you do a Google search for ‘Janet’s tit’, this here page shows up in fourth place. This page has had quite a few hits in the past week, ever since my first rant about Janet’s breast, Janet’s tit, Janet’s boob, Janet’s Interesting Nipple Adornments, etc. I was wondering where they were coming from…

The KDE 3.2 release made Yahoo! News:

Available in 42 languages and partially translated into an additional 32, KDE 3.2 is the result of a year-long, global development effort that included processing 2,000 feature requests and 10,000 bug reports into the new version.

KDE counts its global user base in the millions. It is the default user interface for Linux-based operating systems Ark Linux, Conectiva, Knoppix, Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake Linux, SuSE Linux, TurboLinux and Xandros and is available as an option with Debian, Free/Open/NetBSD, Gentoo, Libranet, Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT – news) Linux, Slackware and Solaris.

Now, if only I could get it to work with Fedora…

Thus Spake Forbes:

Firebird is available for a free download from Mozilla and is currently at version 0.7, which means it has not quite reached the point of being a fully stable product. Eventually Firebird will become the default Mozilla browser, although that won’t happen before it reaches version 1.5. But it’s certainly worth a try if you’re finding Explorer getting old. If, in its unfinished state, Firebird is this good, perhaps Microsoft should be worried.

Even the mainstream corporate/capitalist media know Microsoft is in trouble.

Mozilla (Firebird and Thunderbird and Nvu and … get the point? Mozilla is extensible) is going to come out of nowhere and win the browser wars once and for all. It should dominate well into the next decade. It’s growing in usability at an exponential rate; each new release gets better and better. Already it’s better than IE. The final nail in IE’s coffin will come when all of the plugins work seamlessly with it. It should be easy to install, with a standard Fedora or Debian package for all the useful Mozilla plugins. Here’s hoping.

But the victory in the browser wars is just the beginning. I predict a similar fate for OpenOffice.org over MS Office and for desktop Linux in general. It’s a matter of both momentum and the laws governing exponential curves.

This hubbub over Janet’s tit is nothing more than a weapon of mass distraction. And it’s completely consistent with standard procedures used in American politics for many years.

Many of The Powers That Be use these faux-moral issues as smokescreens. If they (in this case, “they” means Michael Powell and others) can focus on this stupid little meaningless event, it means they don’t have to focus on the real issues facing this country. They’re too busy being outraged by Janet’s tit to spend any neuron power on the Bush regime’s lies and destruction, the fact that the global economy has concentrated more wealth to fewer people than ever before, etc. etc.

In an article in this month’s The Progressive magazine, Bernie Sanders writes:

So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about the most important issues facing the American people? That is the central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that they work day and night to divide the American people against each other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is what the Republican Party is all about.

They tell white workers their jobs are being lost not because corporate America is downsizing and moving to China, but because black workers are taking their jobs–because of affirmative action. White against black.

If you turn on talk radio, what you will hear, in an almost compulsive way, is a hatred of women. And they’re telling working class guys, you used to have some power. You used to be the breadwinner. But now there are women running companies, women in politics, women making more money than you. Men against women.

And they’re turning straight people against gay people. The homosexuals are taking over the schools! Gay marriage is destroying the country! Straights against gays.

And if you’re not for a war in Iraq waged on the dubious and illegal doctrine of “preemptive war,” you’re somehow unpatriotic. And those of us who were born in America are supposed to hate immigrants. And those of us who practice religion in one way, or believe in the separation of church and state, are supposed to be anti-religious, and trying to destroy Christianity in America–and we get divided up on that. And on and on it goes.

The Republican leadership does all of this in an incredibly cynical, poll-driven way, because they know when you lay out their program about the most important economic issues facing America, it ends up that they are representing the interests of 2 percent of the population. You can’t win an election with the support of 2 percent. So they divide us, and the result is that tens of millions of working people vote against their own interests.

Sorry for the long quote, but this may be the most salient and succinct commentary on American politics I’ve seen in a long time.

America is still very much a Puritan culture, at least on the surface. How else can one explain the remarkable attention given to a breast, which I remind the reader that each of us has, being shown on television? Furthermore, this faux-Puritanical outrage being expressed over it is nothing more than political manipulation, designed to distract the masses from the real issues.

During the appeals process of the RIAA vs. Morpheus and Grokster case, the judge told the RIAA’s attorneys to “stop using abusive language.” A transcription of his commentary runs thusly:

“Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that’s a very debatable question. You don’t solve it by calling it ‘theft.’ You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That’s your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language.”

This alone is a huge victory for the virtual commons. The Intellectual Property interests — those who would enclose the virtual commons — have been using harsh language to attempt to frame the debate so narrowly that no one could possibly disagree with them. This judge finally called them on it. Groklaw, as usual, is on top of it, with a detailed summary of this story. Check it out. On that page there are transcriptions, as well as mp3 recordings, of the court case.

…between this article and this article. The first one begins thusly:

Many have said that enough is enough taking[sic] about Linux. How Linux is great. Why Linux rulz and Micro$oft sucks, blah blah blah. I will promise you that this article is going to be something different.

And the second one’s title is “The Anything-But-Microsoft Market.”

This reveals one thing to me: that there are a large number of people sick and tired of rah-Linux, fuck-Microsoft rants (I’m guilty of this on many occasions). These people tend to be pragmatists; they just want software that works, and are happy as long as things are running well.

But there are also a lot of people who are utterly fed up with Microsoft. For these people: check out open-source alternatives. I’ve already written about Mozilla here, and I’ve written about OpenOffice in the past. Linux is worthy of attention, too.

The question of “I just want what works” is, in my view, incomplete, now that Free software “just works” in most cases. In other words, there are different options within the set of “what works.” So a choice still needs to be made. In order to embrace freedom, a computer user must be willing to break inertia. This is a commitment on some level. Personal Computing can be done and done well with Free software. It makes little sense to me to give up the freedom included in Free software in order to “go with the flow” and use what “everyone” uses.

(This argument, about what “everyone” uses, reminds me of the Heideggerian “They” — which are everywhere but nowhere; “they” is everyone, but no one in particular — he outlines in Being and Time. I’ll have to think about this connection some more…)

Well, Freakwitch is about to begin recording our first album. Given that the drummer that was playing with us until last week quit, we need to find a way to move forward without waiting for a tight band. We tried, for several months, to wait until we had a tight band, and just as we were on the verge of getting one, the drummer bailed. Ah well. Another factor is that preparing for live shows seemed to suck all the focus we had. If we don’t book any gigs, and focus on recording, we’ll have something with some amount of permanence for our efforts. This is a good thing; although our January gigs were fun and useful, not many people were there, and those that were heard a loose band. But that’s OK. Recording it is.

This means I need to resume the learning curve of drum programming, since I will be the de facto producer for the Freakwitch sessions in our studio. Ah well. Progress will be slow at first as I tackle the learning curve, but it’s good work, work I’ve wanted to master for a long time now. The only remaining question is whether I go for natural-sounding acoustic drums, or some bizarre loops that aren’t trying to emulate a drum kit. I suspect we’ll have some of each.

We (Matt and I) don’t want to wait around for anyone. The further along we can push the project on our own, the more people will be attacted to it when the time comes. Forward momentum!

Another Look at Mozilla reiterates what I posted a couple of days ago. Mozilla is the real deal. The key excerpt from this article:

Internet Explorer users, tired of the “same old browser”, might just start itching for change before Microsoft can deliver the new software. Maybe Mozilla, with its superior speed and standards compliance, will be enough to tempt them to weather the “pain” of download and installation — a sacrifice that can take as little two minutes, especially as more and more people abandon podunk dial-up connectivity for the wonders of cable modems and DSL.

If you are on a broadband connection, you utterly owe it to yourself to try mozilla. Say goodbye to pop-up ads.

The original title of this post was “Breast SuperBowl Ever.” But that post was swallowed by my own incompetence in running my computer. Brain fart, post gone. Buh-bye.

But anyway, I was reading an article on Common Dreams that pointed out an apparent contradiction in CBS’s conception of “morality” and/or “public interest.”

First, one must accept that Janet Jackson showing her tit at the SuperBowl halftime show (with help from Justin Timberlake) was planned. There is simply too much evidence for it not to be (JJ’s pasty, lights going out immediately, video cutting away immediately). CBS — or at least someone at CBS — knew exactly what was going to happen and approved it.

Contrast this with CBS’s decision to censor MoveOn.org’s ad criticizing Bush. CBS is willing to show a tit, but not an ad criticizing Bush. Ummm, OK.

Now don’t get me wrong; in a perfect world, there would be plenty of tits (male and female, in all shapes and sizes) shown on TV, just as there would be plenty of ads criticizing whoever is in power. It just seems strange to me that the female form is considered “offensive” in the knee-jerk reaction to the hubbub.

But note that very few people are talking about the moveon.org/bushin30seconds ads now. We’ve all been distracted by Janet’s tit.

UPDATE: I just saw where Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, had this to say:

“I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt. Our nation’s children, parents and citizens deserve better.”

Yes, our children do deserve better. Like being able to see what their economic future will look like, if our current economic policies continue. The rhetoric around this event grows more and more interesting.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft just said they won’t be updating Internet Explorer any time soon. All this while the Mozilla browser just keeps getting better and better. It is quite possible that “the browser wars” that were supposedly over a few years ago may be rekindling. There is no doubt in my mind that Mozilla is the best browser I’ve ever used, spam filtering, tabbed browsing, no pop-up ads, and 100% compliance with W3C HTML (this means pages render exactly as they are coded–it is common that some pages are coded incorrectly so they display in a sensible way in IE) are key reasons why.

Remember, Mozilla is free software and can be downloaded at no cost. If you spend any time at all on the ‘net (of course you do, or you wouldn’t be reading this), you’d be foolish not to at least try Mozilla.