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Friday, June 28, 2002 |
Textbook Publishers Learn to Avoid Messing With Texas
Social activitsts, oil industry lobbyists, corporate mouthpieces in the Lone Star state have more influence over what is said in your kids textbooks than your teachers do. Because Texas is such a big market, that market determines the contents of text books. So: global warming can't be mentioned, evolution has to be papered over, and the female population of the old was was pretty much all prostitutes. Scary stuff; historical and scientific revisionism.
11:05:13 PM Permalink
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Dylan Tweney: Broken trust. The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. [Tomalak's Realm]
9:07:24 PM Permalink
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Philip K Dick Story
How much do you know about Dick?. The Guardian is running a multiple choice quiz to test your knowledge of Philip K. Dick. I only scored 6 out of 10. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!) [bOing bOing]
I got 9 out of 10! Better, really, than I thought I'd do. I'm not sure I agree with at least one answer. I always thought that Kilgore Trout was Theodore Sturgeon, based on the name alone.
12:26:16 PM Permalink
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Eighteen and a half minutes
Fascinating piece in Wired about attempts to recover the portion of the Watergate tape that Richard Nixon (apparently) erased. New technology, and some really talented researchers, may do what Nixon tried to stop us from doing: listen to him hatching a plot to obstruct justice.
But what Nixon said may pale in significance to the way he said it. Perhaps there's a fragment of conversation, even an aside, that's so outrageous that Nixon had to get rid of it. It could be something more incriminating than the so-called smoking gun conversation held three days later, in which Nixon instructs Haldeman to tell FBI investigators, "Don't go any further into this case, period." Or a comment more thuggish than telling John Dean that it wouldn't be a problem coming up with hush money for the Watergate burglars: "You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash." Something even more vile than Nixon ordering Haldeman, "Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. All right. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"
Of course, all those quotes are the real Nixon. Well, at least he wasn't making jokes about 9/11 to help raise money!
11:27:31 AM Permalink
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Cringely on Palladium
Must read Robert X. Cringely on Microsoft's Palladium. He seems right on to me.
Let's understand here that not all Microsoft products are bad and many are very good. Those products serve real customer needs and do so with genuine purpose, not marketing artifice. But Palladium isn't that way at all. This is NOT about making things better for the user. This is about removing the ability for the end user to make decisions about how his or her computer functions. It is an effort by Microsoft to take literal ownership of Internet technology, Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy applied for the Nth time, though on a grander scale than we've ever seen before. While there is some doubt that the PC will survive a decade from now as a product category, nobody is suggesting the Internet will do anything but grow and grow over that time. Palladium assures that whatever hardware is running on the network of 10 years from now, it will be generating revenue for Microsoft. There is nothing wrong with Microsoft having a survival strategy, but plenty wrong with presenting it as some big favor they are doing for us and for the world.
Highly recommended. Is there anything to be done? Probably not. Microsoft is a convicted criminal, but that hasn't changed its behavior. I doubt if the Bush justice department will even look into this, and it's hard to imagine congress doing so. We seem to be such sheep in the marketplace that we'll probably all buy into it.
11:13:25 AM Permalink
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Philip Jose Farmer
posted by GriffX » June 27 7:44 PM | 50 comments. The prolific and inventive Philip Jose Farmer has long been one of my favorite science fiction writers, but he is rarely counted among the Lists of Greats of the 'old school' authors.(Asimov, Clarke, Niven et al). Does anyone else have a favorite SF writer who seems to get less credit than he or she deserves? [MetaFilter]
This is a nice thread, with some good names mentioned, such as John Brunner and Robert Sheckley. There are some terrific Farmer novels; I really enjoyed the World of the Tiers novels when I was a kid. And, believe it or not, Jesus on Mars is a a terrific read. A Feast Unknown is a brutal, nearly pornographic Tarzan pastiche. He wrote a bunch of books I remember well, and pushed some science fiction boundaries. But he's not of the caliber, either in quality or influence of the three novelists mentioned above.
11:04:53 AM Permalink
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Thisis our president
Some "joke:"
“You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.”
According to the article, Dubya has told this 'joke' at least 14 times, mostly at Republican fund-raisers. But not only is it sickening, it's a lie.
Bush never told any audience, or any reporter, in Chicago that he could foresee three conditions under which deficit spending might be necessary. In fact, throughout the entire campaign, Bush had been insistent that budget surpluses would continue.
But I guess this kind of lie doesn't matter, as long as the person who tells it is a good and moral person.
9:06:13 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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