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"What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time." -- JFK
 
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licentious radio
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
[10:37:55 PM]     
"If you do it to the least of mine, you do it to me." -- Somebody other than George Bush.

[9:07:17 PM]     
Update: Don't worry, I'm still fancy-free and free for anything fancy. This was just intended to be funny:

"Hey, look at me! I'm a Senior Web eGuru Architecture Evangelist. My new job is promoting that people use our company's architecture for web-based artificial Gurus -- *way* better than old-fashioned artificial intelligence, because our eGurus have wisdom, personality, humor, and can whup your patootie at Pong. The only problem is I need a double-wide business card."

Sorry for the shock.

[9:04:43 PM]     
A specific case for server-side browser sniffing.

In general, it's difficult to get sniffing right, and you have to tweak the process over time. Most web teams aren't set up to do this well enough.

But here's a case where it would be handy. Say your company buys 500 PocketPC mobile phones, perhaps to give salespeople easy 24x7 access to a browser-based sales support system. Cool. But it comes with the handheld version of IE.

The handheld version of IE that came with my iPaq a year ago didn't do stylesheets, and it didn't even put a blank line between paragraphs. Targeting that browser, it would be useful if you could add some "non-breaking" spaces to the start of every paragraph, to indicate the break. Further, it's only choice for making table-based pages fit on the screen was to shrink *everything* so the entire width of the html page fit onto the three-inch screen. Not helpful. Neither is the alternative: scrolling right and left to read each line of text. So if your website normally uses tables for page layout, you gotta lose the tables before you send the page to the handheld. (Someday, we'll all use float for page layout, maybe, but not until we can have a footer go all the way across the bottom of the page.)

This kind of scenario will crop up repeatedly. A group uses some funky hardware, for which only a funky browser is available, and so you go ahead and make some usability fixes.

Once you're set up to do that for internal users, why not use the same technology for your customers. Why shouldn't a customer with a handheld get a version of the site that strips most of the page junk, and makes it easier to find/access/process particular information they might need immediately.

[8:35:37 PM]     
Googlicide: linking to a Google-censored page, thereby black-holing your blog at Google until the link scrolls off the main page?

[8:18:23 PM]     
"Hello, Cafe Borrone? I'd like 44 double non-fat lattes and 44 of those double-chocolate cookies delivered to the US Senate Chamber, please. Thanks!"

[8:13:28 PM]     
Don't you wish this could be like on Dallas? We'd wake up one morning to find Kennedy had voted to count the votes, that the votes had been counted, and Gore has been in the White House all this time.

He had immediately re-doubled Clinton's anti-terrorism efforts, and Bin Laden is in prison awaiting trial, Pakistan cut off it's life support of the Taliban, and now the UN is getting Afghanistan on track.

Gore insisted Israel make a clean peace deal, and now Palestine is receiving administrative help from the UN, and anti-terrorist police support from the US. The Israeli economy turned around and is growing at 6 percent per year. Syria ended it's support for Hamas and other terror organizations in exchange for a clean deal on the Golan Heights.

A carefully targeted tax cut and a firm commitment to fiscal responsibility were all it took to get over the economic dip caused by Greenspan's repeated interest rate hikes.

FERC stepped in immediately to stop the energy raketeering by Bush campaign contributors Enron, El Paso, and so on. Taking Greenspan's advice not to pay down the debt too rapidly, the US instituted a single-payer plan for health care, and stepped up its assistance to less developed countries around the world. A spate of financial scandals among Republican-run corporations were met with sweeping reforms to make sure investors could trust the information put out by corporations, and the stock market has risen steadily in the last two years. Worries about inflation turned out to be needless, because of the dramatic rise in productivity.

Cities and states around the country are using their tax surpluses to provide better services, such as child care, education, and job training, and give tax credits to reduce pollution and reduce energy consumption. Even with cautious spending increases, forecasts are for surpluses all through the next ten years, and many states send out tax rebate checks.

What a difference one vote can make.

[7:47:26 PM]     
People say France and Russia are holding out for better terms in post-war Iraq. They already *have* the oil contracts that American and British companies want. The claim is that they want Bush to guarantee that French and Russian companies get to keep some of what they have now. Maybe.

But maybe France and Russia think they can *block* the war. Then they would get to keep *all* of their oil contracts. And if they can lean on Saddam to disarm, they can expand oil production and make all that money that Bush is hoping to give to Chevron. (Poppy got Kuwait to go with Chevron after Gulf War I. Chevron paid >$500,000 to install Junior in the White House. Chevron named a freaking oil tanker after Condi Rice.)

I don't know. What do you think? Is Chirac holding out to get 5% instead of 0%, or is he hoping to keep the 50% he already has, and pump up the volume? If you were Chirac, which would you be playing for?

Or maybe he just thinks war is a bad idea....

[7:28:23 PM]     
Maybe Powell has just given up on his reputation, and now he's acting as a fifth column. Certainly his case to the UN was pathetic. He got through it with a straight face, but that's all you can say about it. Then he shows up today waiving this Bin Laden transcript around as if it's a smoking gun. In fact the transcript is more like "We hate that stinky-dog Saddam, but Bush is killing Arabs today, so we should all fight back, even though Saddam is just one nose-hair less bad than Bush."

So maybe Powell is purposefully just passing along whatever insanely *stupid* material the White House bozos hand him. He stops arguing for sane policies, stops insisting on plausible evidence and arguments. Why should Powell help Bush make a reasonable case for something Powell doesn't want to do anyway?

Could be. It's an awfully optimistic view of Powell, but it's an easy explanation of his sudden conversion to incompetent warmongering.

[7:08:47 PM]     
Menlo Park (licentious) -- A gaggle of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists bared all in the latest protest craze sweeping the nation: spelling out your message with naked bodies. A handful of bystanders watched as the old, bald, fat men stripped down and then spelled out: "TAX RELIEF", before heading off to an exclusive golf club for lunch.

One local wag clapped sarcastically, while another opined that this might not create much sympathy.

Ringleader Jerry Smith said they had asked their trophy wives to do the stripping, but all had refused. "I'm writing this one into my next pre-nup," he continued.

While dressing, Smith explained that poor people should pay more taxes to support government services, because they're the ones who get all the welfare. "Rich people suffer too much. When you're talking about 40% of $15 million, that's just a huge burden. That's why we need tax relief. I've got two ex-wives, four mortgages, and payments on six cars and a yacht. I can barely get by on my after-tax. Poor people need to do their fair share, damn-it."

Asked about future plans, Smith said they would start a website to solicit funds via PayPal for TV ads to get their message out.

[2:16:19 PM]     
Yesterday, the talk was all that France and Russia are just after a bigger piece of the action in post-war Iraq.

Today, the talk is that the French are weenies. The propaganda plays well because Americans are vastly ignorant. What percentage of the American population would survive a knife-fight in Marseilles?

And we're supposed to think Bush is a tough-guy. Would anyone wager our country on a knife-fight between El Stupido and Saddam? We guess the old, sick Saddam would carve Dim Son into bits, keeping him alive to enjoy the screams and begging. Kind of a sick thought, but Saddam is kind of a sick man. *Way* sicker than Bush-the-feeble. Let's stop pretending Americans are any tougher than anybody else.

[12:57:07 PM]     
By remarkable coincidence... just before the largest anti-war demonstrations in the history of the world, Bush puts America on Orange Alert, and now England has called out the army -- 450 soldiers with tanks at Heathrow.

Unlike Bush, the British claim to be responding to a specific threat. Let's assume that's true; fine, protect us. But for goodness sake, let's not think of this as reason to attack Iraq. The terrorists want us to attack Iraq even more than Bush wants it.

[12:40:01 PM]     
The stunning bit about Bin Laden's (supposed) statement and Powell's use of it, is that Bin Laden goes to *great* lengths not to cozy up to Saddam. Then Powell holds it up as if it's the smoking gun. More propaganda -- you say the opposite of what's obviously true, but you have to say it *first*, and you have to say it *loudest*, and you have to repeat it *constantly*. Eventually it's the hatred in your voice that comes through, and people (some of the people, some of the time) get blinded to the actual words of the statement. Colin had to break the story himself, before even Al Jazeera. And they "Rush-ed" it over to Fox "News" for 24x7 propagandizing.

This is an example of the desperation of the Bush team. They need the US citizens, true, but they also need the Europeans. This may work as propaganda fodder for Republican-owned Media Conglomerates, but it exposes the essential lie to the rest of the world. Every bit Powell does to propagandize Americans, loses European support. And if the propaganda fails, the argument is exposed even in the US as a warmongering lie. With a million people about to hit the streets this weekend, the risk is very high that the propaganda will fail.

[12:29:07 PM]     
Apparently the filibuster is on *now*. Cool! Good work Tom Daschle. Just follow through.

Where should we send care packages of coffee and cookies for our Senators?

[11:38:47 AM]     
Crumbling House of Bush?

The 48-hour deadline for Saddam to leave disappeared after Belgium, Russia, and China joined in with Germany and France against Bush's war. France and Russia are both hinting at a veto of any UN resolution. The Democrats are mumbling about filibustering Estrada. Congress is whacking the Total Information Awareness project, and Bush's choice of Poindexter was part of the reason. Even Greenspan admitted the Bush's tax cuts are completely insane. Daschle actually used the phrase "dead in the water" for Bush's economic suicide proposals. Bush's agenda is so horrible that it would have no chance without his supposed "mandate" and "war-time popularity".

Now, what if people on the US east coast wake up Saturday to find that a *million* people have marched in London against Bush's war? What if people in San Francisco wake up Sunday to find that a million Americans marched on Saturday?

What if we start next week clear that only the profiteers and the propaganda victims still support the war?

Without the war to push his domestic agenda through, Bush's only remaining hope would be a huge Al Qaeda attack in the US. And yet -- when they're allowed to -- our FBI and such are pretty effective at stopping attacks. They stopped plenty under Clinton. They only missed September 11 because Bush/Cheney ordered them not to investigate Saudis. (Remember it was *Saudis* who funded the attacks, and *Saudis* who were on the planes. No Iraqi money. No Iraqi terrorists.)

With Bush's whole domestic agenda hanging by a single thread, what exciting times we'll be in for. If the attacks don't come soon enough, the entire Bush agenda may just be dead in the water, and not recoverable.

Bush's only real hope in this regard is that the "Homeland Security" reorganization will leave holes wide open for attacks. (We're *not* saying Bush wants an attack, but that he would benefit from an attack, like he benefited from the 9-11 attacks.) Everybody involved should be extra careful during the transition.

[11:05:10 AM]     
New York Times editorial: "The White House argued that the tape, if it really was Osama bin Laden, simply demonstrated that Iraq and terrorism were indeed somehow linked. But we couldn't help wondering if the expression of solidarity with Iraq might have been a canny way of luring the United States into an attack on Baghdad that would rally the Muslim world against the West, producing new converts to Al Qaeda."

Duh. Expect Bin Laden to up the ante if Dumb George can't get his war on soon. The next tape will probably taunt Bush for being weak, and praise Saddam for aiding his fellow Arabs against the West.

And how 'bout these headlines about hundreds of people in the US associated with Al Qaeda? Sounds scary, until you read the next-to-the-last paragraph that they are "associated" by way of raising money for Arab charities, and the FBI only thinks a few of them *might* be here to do violence someday. These are the charities that Bush/Cheney prevented the FBI from investigating, because they're mostly run by Saudis with business ties to the Bushes. Including some Bin Ladens, who were shoveling money to their bro'.

[9:23:03 AM]     
All this web stuff is just too hard. Today Zeldman's ranting about a Javascript bug in Mozilla. I don't see the behavior in Mozilla 1.1 or Mozilla 0.8 on Linux or 1.1 on OS X -- unless I turn Javascript off, and that seems fair. Then he rants a little about Bugzilla, which I can also understand. I think you just have to leave Bugzilla for the people who use it constantly.

We're making progress, though. The positioned background image in the alternate stylesheet is *way* sexy. People should do more of that.



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Last update: 3/1/03; 10:36:55 AM.