| |
 |
Thursday, March 06, 2003 |
NORTH KOREA AND IRAQ:. Michael Kinsley in Slate asks a question that I've often heard asked Why are nuclear weapons in Iraq worth a war but not nuclear weapons in North Korea?The Administration's "failure to answer [this] question," he says, is one of the things that "is central to [most skeptics'] doubts. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
Bush sure didn't give much of an answer at the press conference tonight, no matter how many times he had rehearsed it (and reshearsed it over and over he obviously had). So last week Colin Powell was in South Korea, and the North fired a shot across his bow testing a missile? And that's a regional matter? It's known that North Korea has missiles that could reach Hawaii and California, and that's a regional matter? Yet he's having fits about Iraq's missiles that can only go a couple hundred miles, and calling them a direct threat to the U.S.? No, it's hard not to think there's something more going on here. It really looks to me like we're taking on Iraq because it's 1)weak, and 2)Muslim.
7:21:16 PM Permalink
|
|
XSLT 2.0
Here's an interesting piece on XSLT 2.0. And as I said the other day, it seems like just as I've begun to grok XSLT, along comes a new version. I don't know how deeply I'm going to dive into this one; my immediate need is taken care of, and since 2.0 isn't final yet, it doesn't seem prudent to implement the scripts I just wrote in 2.0. Stay tuned, I may change my mind.
But since I'm on this bugaboo lately, I'll note this usage:
Although XSLT has many evangelists it has its detractors as well. Because of some concepts, such as static variables. XSLT's learning curve can also be a bit steep, particularly for some of the more complex transformations.
7:10:05 PM Permalink
|
|
Steep Learning Curve?
Will firms balk at Microsoft's InfoPath?. ZDNet.com - Microsoft next week will release the first widely available beta of InfoPath, a new application for organizing and sharing data that will be included in Office 11, but analysts say the learning curve will be steep.
Now this is something that bothers me. It seems like a "steep" learning curve is bad, right? Not so. If you graph time along the horizontal X axis and knowledge along the vertical Y axis, then a steep learning curve is one where knowledge increases quickly. So a "steep" learning curve is a a good thing, not a bad one. I've always preferred "short" to mean a good curve (knowledge increases rapidly) and "long" a bad one (knowledge increases slowly).
8:42:34 AM Permalink
|
|
Spamnix for Eudora
The other night over at Mike's, he showed me Spamnix for Eudora, a spam blocker for Eudora. For lots of reasons, I like using Eudora (notably, it seems pretty impervious to viruses that you don't kick off manually). But as most everyone has noticed recently, the amount of spam sent out seems to go up geometrically. I had been thinking of looking into other email readers mostly because of spam, and even of giving up this email address as I know others have done. I like the spam filter in Apple's mail.app, but since my laptop is Windows, that's where I read most of my email.
But this filter seems to work. It creates a spamnix inbox, and on arrival transfers suspected spam into it. If it misses something, you can add it to the spam filters, by mailing address, domain, subject line, etc.
So far, I like the way it works. This morning it put 40 messages into the spamnix mailbox (and that's just since about 11 pm last night). I found 2 items in my inbox that it didn't catch, and no false hits in the spamnix inbox. I'm still using it in the free trial mode, with its annoying dialog, but certainly plan on paying the $29.95 for the full version in the next couple days.
If you use Eudora, and are having any kind of spam problem, this is recommended.
8:15:40 AM Permalink
|
|
Shocked! Shocked!
George Will the Hypcroite. in Findlaw. [Eschaton]
We're all shocked, shocked to have the hypocrisy of George Will exposed. Edward Lazarus writes very well here about it.
The flip-flop is an embarrassment to Will and his reputation. Sadly, it may also be more than that as well. I fear that Will's adventure in hypocrisy is emblematic of what may well be the worst truth in American political discourse: nothing is shameful anymore. And no sense of integrity - an integrity that transcends politics - remains.
But of course George Will is beyond embarrassment, and principle.
It seems especially ironic (or perhaps appropriate) that Will should come to represent this problem. After all, he - and commentators of his ilk - have spent the last decade or two bemoaning the rise of moral relativism in our society. They mourn the death of "shaming" as an instrument of behavior modification for politicians and citizens alike.
In the culture wars, Will and others like him have been the army defending such concepts as objective truth and personal responsibility. They have been the ones saying there is a right thing to do, independent of politics, independent of the times. They have carried the banner of integrity, in short. Now it's plain, though, that Will has torn up that banner even while pretending to uphold it.
There's lots more in this good piece. Recommended reading.
8:01:03 AM Permalink
|
|
Europe has most to fear from a Muslim backlash after America's crusade against Iraq. [Davos Newbies]
The politically correct position on the war against terrorism is "this is not about Islam". Two groups dissent: American fundamentalist Christians and European fundamentalist secularists. Born-again Christians of the American midwest think that the reunification of all the biblical lands of Israel will hasten the Second Coming, in which Rapture they will be forever saved. European fundamentalist secularists think that all religion is blindness and stupidity, a kind of mental affliction, of which Islam is a particularly acute example.
... The leap of imaginative sympathy from Christianity or Judaism to Islam is much smaller than that from evangelical secularism to any of them. That's why America, which has preserved the religious imagination it imported from Europe, may actually be better placed to accept the Islamic other. That's not all. America has a rare combination of religious imagination and an inclusive, civic identity. Europe has a fateful combination of secular imagination and exclusive, ethnic identities.
7:44:45 AM Permalink
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
|
|
|
|
|
