Had some leftovers…

• A 17-year-old Red Panda died today at the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle. The animal – also known as the Lesser Panda – died of an apparent inferiority complex.
• This is bizarre. The DEA, surely in the interest of producing a thorough report on the drug problem, develops what is more or less a how-to on how to grow and process opium.
• Adam Felber has a nice take on the latest Supreme Court ruling, but I find it extremely disturbing for another reason: it seems to me that the decision could further weaken father’s rights. Just because one parent has custody of a child, does that mean that the other is a second-class citizen when it comes to guiding a child’s developing understanding of the world? This is splitting the hair rather thin, I think.
• I was just mentioning this technology for creating a cloak of invisibility to a friend the other day.
• Must come back to the subject of Stanley Milgram, proponent of, among other things, the Six Degrees of Separation theory.
• The open letter to President Bush from a group calling themselves Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change will be released later this week, according to this BBC report. The letter, signed by 53 former diplomats, including a former chair of the joint Chieves of Staves, is part of an ongoing “Revolt of the Professionals.” Read the article for the classically insipid comment at the end.

Stuff you should be reading instead of wasting your time reading this blog…

• With all the news – dare I say “gloating?” – over Mac security holes lately, Apple still maintains one of the most secure OSes on the open market, and now the company is starting to speak up on the topic. Interesting bit of trivia: Senator Edward Kennedy runs the only all-Mac shop in Congress. Rock on, Teddy.
• I responded (twice, by accident!) to this blurb at Reason’s Hit & Run on the declining effectiveness of site registration for news content. Scroll down a bit for my quick take.
• Neato project at Groklaw is the new GrokDoc. The ultimate aim of the site is to make it easier for common folk to switch the Linux OS. An open-source usability study will pave the way for a Wiki-based set of instructions on managing tasks the study finds daunting to newbies.
• By way of Eschaton comes this Bush two-step at the Road to Surfdom. Bits from Bush speeches that condemn torture are listed cheek-by-jowl with excerpts from the so-called “Torture Memo” from the DOJ. Michael Froomkin’s legal analysis of the Torture Memo can be read here.
• The Mars Explorer Rover Spirit has reached the Columbia Hills and will be poking around for a while in what looks like a very promising place to do some science.
• Last, but most certainly not least, mad props to Wired News for keeping us abreast of the latest attempt to shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. HR 3179 and a few other bills pending in Congress seek to “give teeth” to certain provisions laid out in the first two Patriot Act laws. This assault on our rights reminds me of the shock of watching 9/11 unfold. I find it hard to believe that this can happen in my country.

• T”he important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” -Charles Du Bos
• Slashdot asks Are PDAs Simply Finished?. Answer: No. Duh. They’re evolving into smartphones. The ability to have your calendar, addressbook, email, and everything else on hand at all times is tremendously valuable. Real estate agents in Washington and elsewhere now use them to open lock boxes. Doctors find countless uses for the devices. The PalmOne Treo may be the best convergence device to date, a handy little slip of a thing that combines a PDA and web-enabled phone. Honestly, the number of geeks who think laptops are going to get light and small enough to replace PDAs is incredible.
• In another Slashdot post, there’s an interesting discussion of the challenges of being a uniquely bright INTP=. The venom that some people spewed in response to this honest query floors me. Will the people who told this kid to get over himself please get over themselves?
• What is it with cellphones and their attendant sense of entitlement?
• I watched Cassini take off from Cape Canaveral seven years ago, and it’s just approaching Saturn now. I understand ground controllers cut off communication with the probe for a while after the 736,000th time it asked, “Are we there yet?”
• You cannot truly understand the world unless you are willing to devote a few minutes a day to reading Fafblog.
• Also The Poor Man is pretty brilliant.

• Arianna Huffington has a blog. Today she posted this excerpt from the Washington Post which quotes the President trying to answer a simple question from the press corps. You can’t make this stuff up, people.
• Funniest thing lately from The Poor Man is calling the current Pres/Veep combo Pinky & The Brain. Also, he passes us this link which I think I’ll want to come back to in depth.
• The Political Animal points us to this Salon.com article (Day Pass/subscription required) in which Ron Reagan, Jr. rips Dubya a new one (where’s he going to put them all?). Lead line: “My father crapped bigger ones than George Bush,” says the former president’s son, in a flame-throwing conversation about the war and the Bush administration’s efforts to lay claim to the Reagan legacy.
• Atrios has some George Will punting and a Reagan Sanity Check
• Is there anything Bill Gates can’t make more complicated than the tax code? Gadgetopia describes a Corbis Nightmare. The comments have some good ideas for alternate sites, including Getty Images which is located in the beautiful Freemont neighborhood of our fair city.
• BoingBoing blog directs us to three simple steps to virus-proofing your PC. Do it now!

• Brad DeLong passes along this chilling account of a speech given by Sy Hersh that points to some really upsetting fallout from the Iraq war. Juxtapose with this quote by Lois McMaster Bujold: “Any community’s arm of force – military, police, security – needs people in it who can do neccesary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.”
• Ray Charles died. He was 73.
• Slashdot reports that Linus Torvalds is moving to Portland. Wonder if he’ll hang out at Powell’s?

• Chris Bowers explains just how much we don’t know about Iraq
• Josh Marshall notes this story of a soldier who’s been discharged because of a head injury he received during a training exercise at Guantanamo Bay.
• There are 7,000 Saudi princes.
• What is the dynamic at play in law enforcement that causes this kind of overreaction? The story here is about a man who woke up to find his wife dead of a heart attack. The emergency crew who responded to his 9-1-1 call spotted some petri dishes and lab equipment in his house. Next thing he knew, there was an FBI hazmat team at the scene quarantining everything – including his wife’s body. Thing is, the man was an artist who used the materials in his performance art pieces, and the substances found in his home have been confirmed harmless. I understand the need for caution, but isn’t there also room for compassion? Wouldn’t a few discreet inquiries have allayed any fears? Extreme reactions like this don’t make us safer.
• Click on June 8th at The O’Franken Factor Blog for a nice piece of work by Senator Patrick Leahy taking John Ashcroft to task for the miserable failures of his Justice Department.

Best line of the day on Reagan, overheard on the O’Franken Factor (this is not a direct quote, but pretty close)...

Al Franken: Rush Limbaugh once said that this country owes Ronald Reagan a debt we will never be able to repay. For once, I agree with him.

Interesting article at the Daring Fireball: Broken Windows, comparing Mac and Windows security. The author compares Windows to a seedy neighborhood where the residents don’t care about keeping the buildings maintained and the streets free of litter. That tolerance for disrepair, he argues, opens the door for viruses and spyware to flourish. The Mac, on the other hand, exists in a clean neighborhood, where residents absolutely don’t tolerate disorder.

It’s a fine argument, but I must say that if Windows users don’t care about their neighborhood, they also act like cheap whores. I’ve used a fair number of different operating systems in my day, and I currently have a Mac PowerBook, a Windows XP box, and a couple of Linux boxes. My XP box is on 24 hours a day, and – knock on wood – I have had to deal with viruses exceedingly rarely, perhaps once per year or less. I have had to remove spyware on occasion, but for the most part my machine has remained clean. I don’t even run anti-virus software (mostly because Norton completely sucks, but I digress…) though I do have a ZoneAlarm firewall installed. Mostly, though, my defense is to be exceedingly careful about what software I install and what email I open.

One of the major problems in the Windows world is the appalling lack of sophistication among the users, and the even more appalling necessity that Windows demands they be sophisticated to use all the whiz-bang software Redmond keeps saying is good for us. (And if you can parse that sentence without getting a headache, you get a cookie.) Mac shows us that it’s possible to make an operating system that doesn’t take a genius to understand and use while providing excellent security. To keep Windows working properly, however, requires years of experience with its quirks and tendencies, and a tenacious attention to maintenance. Most users assume that they can’t break their computer, and that software should “just work.” Unfortunately for them, they’re only right if they’re working on a Mac.