sound and fury, signifying nothing

Attention LJ GooRoos: video capture

2008-05-12T06:41:00Z

I own a 2000-vintage, non-digital 8mm Sony camcorder. We don't use it very often, but I do have a fair amount of footage I'd like to transfer to my computer. How can I do this without resorting to expensive video capture hardware?

I found this device while looking for solutions; would this do the trick? TIA for advice and suggestions.

Weirdest cover ever.

2008-05-11T05:59:05Z

The Red Army Choir joins forces with Finnish rock group Leningrad Cowboys to sing . . . the Alabama national anthem. The only thing that could top this is the nuns from Sister Act dropping "Like a Virgin".

Reason # 534 why I'm an anarchist

2008-05-09T16:58:30Z

It's because states are capable of doing this:

Myanmar's junta seized U.N. aid shipments headed for hungry and homeless survivors of last week's devastating cyclone, prompting the world body to suspend further help on Friday.

The U.N. said the aid included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits and arrived in Myanmar on Friday on two flights from Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates.

"All of the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated," U.N. World Food Program spokesman Paul Risley said. "For the time being, we have no choice but to end further efforts to bring critical needed food aid into Myanmar at this time."

Myanmar's government acknowledged taking control of the shipments and said it plans to distribute the aid "without delay by its own labor to the affected areas."

In a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press, government spokesman Ye Htut said the junta had "clearly stated" what it would do and denied the action amounted to a seizure.

Yeah, anyone actually believe those last two paragraphs? Now I'm hesitant to even donate to relief efforts, because the money may get wasted by the bureaucratic meddling of Myanmar's government. If they truly cared about their people's welfare, they'd let relief workers just do their job. I think the Burmese are a lot more focused on survival than staging an uprising at this point.

How ironic, that bureaucratic inefficiency leads to rather efficient mass murder. And it's happened time and again.

peekcher sale!

2008-05-09T16:37:20Z

My friend karmabreeze is offering a selection of her award-winning (and Times Square-displaying¹) photography in an effort to raise money for a yoga retreat. Go check out her wares and help her out if you can.

http://www.highdesertarts.com/yogasale/

¹ Some of her photos were selected as the Kodak "Picture of the Day" and appeared on their display in Times Square.

in the family way

2008-05-08T22:23:02Z

Eighty-three-year-old French writer Lucie Ceccaldi minces no words in her contempt for fellow countryman and scribe Michel Houellebecq:

So what is Ceccaldi's problem with Houellebecq? Well, for starters, she deems him an "evil, stupid little bastard," a "liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all—above all—a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame." Of Elementary Particles [one of Houellebecq's best-known novels], Ceccaldi says: "That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." And the rest of his ouevre: "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard..."

The punchline:

It should be noted, though, that Ceccaldi is currenly promoting her own memoir, titled L'Innocente, and is obviously trying to gin up interest in the book. And perhaps it should also be noted, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Mme. Ceccaldi is M. Houellebecq's mother.

I bet their family reunions are a hoot.

HT: reason's Hit & Run.

The latest dispatch from the United Police States.

2008-05-07T18:50:25Z

All these stories do is fill me with impotent rage, but I can't stop reading or writing about them:

Interviewing the people in Tracy Ingle's life — his sisters, his foster brother, his friends — you hear one line often enough that it soon becomes a refrain: Tracy is no angel.

Though all express their love and admiration for him — a kind man; a man who can fix anything, they say — they tend to tell you the bad things about him first. A recovering alcoholic, Ingle had a couple of DWIs several years back. When the Arkansas Times spoke to him, he was on house arrest for a 5-year-old failure-to-appear warrant. A car accident in Maryland in 2002 left him with degenerative disk disease in his back and what his sisters said is an addiction to pain killers — though all of his pills are legally prescribed. Up until Christmas 2007, he had several roommates, many of whom had had recent run-ins with the law. Last year, he agreed to fix a stereo in a friend's Mustang — a car that turned out to be hot — and got arrested for receiving stolen merchandise. That case still hasn't shaken out.

No matter what Ingle or those he gave a temporary home to may have done, however, it's hard to imagine he deserved what he got Jan. 7. That night, the North Little Rock SWAT team stormed Ingle's house on a high-risk, “no-knock” search warrant. By the time all was said and done, Ingle had been shot five times — including one bullet that pulverized his femur and left his leg dangling from his body, connected only by a bloody mess of meat, skin and tendon.

According to an evidence list left at Ingle's house after the shooting, no suspected drugs or drug residue were recovered from the residence — only a digital scale, a notebook and a few plastic baggies, all of which Ingle's family members have identified as part of the junk they had collectively stored at the house.

It might seem strange, then, that Ingle currently stands accused of several serious felonies — including two counts of aggravated assault. While the North Little Rock police insist they got a dangerous criminal off the streets, Ingle and his family say the charges are all about appearances — and covering the police.

Here's a guy who is, at most, guilty of poor judgment, and for his trouble he's nearly shot to death, removed from the hospital by the cops (who provide him with substandard medical care, leading to infections in his wounds), and charged with "running a drug enterprise", even though no drugs were found in Ingle's home, and the equipment they seized belonged to his sister, who says she used the scale and baggies for a jewelry-making hobby.

Do these sound like the actions of a government intended to protect rights? Whose rights are they protecting here? Does anyone think for a moment this will somehow make our streets safer, will prevent even one person from obtaining illegal drugs?

Radley Balko has more here. As is becoming typical for these cases, the police have clammed up—and even the judge in the case has slapped a gag order on the prosecutor, Ingle and whatever lawyer he ends up with (he currently can't afford to hire one).

And there's nothing you can do. Spare me the false bravado: we are truly fucked when it comes to dealing with the unjust actions of the police. Submit and you can still face jail time for whatever crimes the cops and DA can come up with, not to mention the damage to your home and trauma to yourself and your family.

But fighting back—to actually defend yourself and your loved ones from these power-mad thugs—will earn you a toe tag or possibly a trip to death row.

When private citizens are unable to defend themselves against the criminal actions of the police, and the cops themselves cannot be held accountable, how can anyone deny that this country has become a de facto police state?

getting schooled

2008-05-04T06:06:00Z

The young lady at the end of this video deserves to be buried in scholarships to the school of her choice. She positively drilled Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers (wife of Michigan Congressman John Conyers) following an embarrassing incident during a City Council meeting in which Conyers referred to President Kenneth Cockrel Jr. as "Shrek". Later she met with some middle-schoolers to explain her behavior and got schooled herself. Watch the whole thing; it's awesome.

HT: reason's Hit & Run.

breakdown, go ahead give it to me

2008-05-04T04:39:40Z

I spent some time yesterday trying to come up with some response to agentsteel53's assertion that horse racing is "cruel and senseless", but nothing persuasive came to mind. Probably because I'm no fan of the sport. The kind of racing I like involves four wheels and an engine that burns methanol or dead dinosaur flesh. All I could think of is that humans have been racing horses almost since they domesticated the beasts, and at least in Western cultures, with horses bred and trained specifically for racing, what you're seeing are the superstar athletes of the equine world. If one doesn't have a problem with watching humans sprint around a track, then I'm not sure why one would object to horses doing the same.

That doesn't make the news that Eight Belles was euthanized following her race in the Kentucky Derby today any easier to swallow, of course. Eight Belles, the only filly in the race, finished second behind favorite Big Brown, then collapsed with both of her front ankles broken. She ran "the race of her life", as her trainer put it. Ain't that a shitter? You finish in the money and get turned into glue. And you have to wonder if it was a wise idea to run Eight Belles against the boys, when there's a race held the day before (Kentucky Oaks) just for the fillies. I don't know enough about the sport to say for sure. All I know is, we saw a horse literally run herself to death.

I still can't say if horse racing is a brutal, inhumane sport, but I sure don't see the point of it, either.

how do you write "douchebag" in binary?

2008-05-02T06:04:35Z

It would be disingenuous of me to say I hate lawyers; I'm married to one after all. But shit like this, involving a class-action suit against Creative Labs over the advertised capacity of their MP3 players, convinces me that some lawyers deserve to be shot in the face:

According to the settlement agreement, the lead plaintiffs, who filed their federal lawsuit in California, alleged that Creative had misled consumers by exaggerating the capacity of its MP3 players. The fraud allegation hinged mainly on two different definitions of gigabyte. According to the decimal definition (the only one I knew until today), a gigabyte is 1 billion (10⁹) bytes. According to the binary definition, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2³⁰) bytes. While Creative used the decimal definition in its advertising, the settlement says, "certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition." On those systems, a 20GB Creative Zen player would register as only 18.6GB or so, about 7 percent less than advertised.

Now it's true that hard drives use the decimal definition for a gigabyte when advertising their capacities. However, it's not "certain computer operating systems" that report hard drive capacity using the binary definition; it's all computer operating systems. Computer data is stored in binary format, so it can't report capacity in gigabytes using any other definition.

The rank stupidity of all this is that, whether you divide a hard drive's capacity by 1,000,000,000 or 1,037,741,824, it's still the same number of bytes. Only the divisor has changed. So Creative didn't exaggerate the capacity of their players at all; they simply failed to account for the fact that computers use the binary definition of a gigabyte. 20GB decimal = ~18.6GB binary. There's nothing misleading about this, except to consumers who are ignorant of how computers and data storage work. And I don't think Creative has an obligation to educate them; it just has to be truthful.

But in the hands of skilled trial lawyers, this inconsequential difference can be represented to a judge (who quite likely is also technologically ignorant) as a case of deceptive advertising, even fraud, and instead of wasting enormous time and money on defending themselves from this nonsense, Creative opted for a settlement. So if you own a Zen or other Creative MP3 player, you're entitled to buy a 1GB MP3 player at half-price, or 20% off any item ordered from Creative's online store.

For striking this courageous blow for consumers, the lawyers pocket $900,000. If it makes you feel better, in binary that would only be $878.9K.

Update: As ilcylic demonstrates in a comment below, an OS (Linux in this case) can report hard drive capacity in decimal format if it so chooses. But given that volatile memory storage will always be reported in binary, I'm not sure that resolves the confusion issue.

the sacrifice of climate change

2008-05-01T21:17:21Z

Even the homeless in America use twice the amount of energy than the global average, according to a new study (PDF) from MIT.

Think about that: you could sleep on the streets, or become a Buddhist monk, and still not be able to reduce your carbon footprint to a level deemed necessary by climate change activists. And as the study points out, reducing energy usage to at or below the global average "is not obtainable for the average American on a voluntary basis". I probably don't have to spell out the policy implications here.

And if we are to meet the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050, as both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have endorsed, the U. S. cannot emit more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. Which the country last did in 1910, when it had less than one-third of its current population and per-capita income (adjusted for inflation) was around $6,000.

A small sacrifice. It may be important to think about the implications of climate change, but it's just as important to think about the human cost—which politicians rarely consider.

Do you want that in twenties?

2008-05-01T17:47:52Z

He's just preparing for the coming hyperinflation:

A man has been accused of attempting to pass a $360 billion check, which he claims was given to him by his girlfriend’s mother to start a record business, Fort Worth police said.

Charles Ray Fuller, 21, of Crowley, was arrested on April 22 on an accusation of forgery, police said.

Police responded to a report of a man attempting to pass the check about 4 p.m. that day at the Chase bank in the 8600 block of South Hulen Street, Fort Worth police Lt. Paul Henderson said.

The personal check was not made out to Mr. Fuller and when the bank contacted the check owner, the woman said she did not write a check for $360 billion.

Mr. Fuller was also accused of unlawful carrying of a weapon and possession of marijuana, Lt. Henderson said. He may also face a theft charge in Crowley.

Lt. Henderson said he did not know if Mr. Fuller and his girlfriend were still together.

If I were the DA, I'd drop the charge. Any guy this stupid isn't long for the world anyway.

If gold doesn't work, maybe this will

2008-04-30T17:21:59Z

How to turn $100 million into scrap metal.

This is a symptom of an overly litigious society, I think. Instead of making a huge insurance claim, Mazda could possibly offset some of the loss by re-selling these cars at a steep discount but without, say, the benefit of a factory warranty. It seems people are always looking for bargains, but the first time the brakes fail because the master cylinder was compromised will lead to a lawsuit that could cost Mazda a lot more than the loss on scrapping the vehicles (what kind of deductible is there on a policy that will pay a $100 million loss?). So the company's risk aversion is probably higher than any potential consumers' anyway.

Still it's a little sad to read about nearly 5,000 new cars being ripped apart before they ever see a dealer's lot. And maybe a bit zen, too:

Next stop: Schnitzer Steel, a salvage yard down on the waterfront that's home to an immense metal grinder. "You turn 7,000-horsepower hammers loose on them, and they're eaten in 10 seconds," says Jamie Wilson, Schnitzer's manager. A bemused smile spreads across his face as another load of Mazdas disappears into its maw.

Moments later, metal shards -- most no bigger than an ashtray -- sprinkle onto a mountain of scrap near Schnitzer's dock. There, a freighter prepares to take the scrap back to Asia where it will get recycled.

Mr. Wilson looks on and concludes: "It'll all probably end up coming back as cars."

So much for the Party of Principle.

2008-04-29T19:28:15Z

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

The Libertarian Party is calling for more cooperation between Federal, state and local law enforcement to battle the scourge of child pornography:

"FBI Chief Robert Mueller was correct when he said we are losing the war on child pornography," says Libertarian Party Executive Director Shane Cory, referring to comments made by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday before a House Judiciary Committee meeting. "We have an obligation to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse, and we can do this by increasing communication between state and federal agencies to help combat this repulsive industry. While privacy rights should always be respected in the pursuit of child pornographers, more needs to be done to track down and prosecute the twisted individuals who exploit innocent children."

Mueller called for "integration" between police agencies and increasing FBI resources to work on child pornography cases, which the LP press release mentions without comment, except to suggest that those resources could be freed up by not prosecuting victimless crimes.

So, yes: child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, is evil and those who engage in it can hang in the courtyard by their genitals for all I care. But what the hell is the LP thinking here? They're not even pretending to support the Constitution, let alone limited government, with this view. The LP is justifying not only the existence of a national police force (which is not authorized by the Constitution), but by implying support for "integrating" police agencies, they're calling for even more Federal intrusion into areas that should by law be the states' domain.

There's only one reason for such an ill-considered and frankly unlibertarian stance from the LP, and it's to further marginalize the radical core of the party. It started with the gutting of the party platform in 2006 and it continues through attacks on Mary Ruwart, an LP candidate for President and a more radical libertarian than the current leaders of the LP are comfortable with.

Even party founder David Nolan expressed his outrage in a comment:

I am appalled at the national HQ staff putting out a press release that implicitly disowns one of our candidates over such a relatively minor issue. First, because that’s not a proper role for paid staffers to assume, and second because several other candidates have taken overtly anti-Libertarian stances on a number of issues, and none of them have been shot at by the national staff for doing so. This whole fiasco just reeks of cronyism and witch-hunting. Our presidential nominee will be chosen by the delegates to the national convention in Denver, and attempts by the LNC or (especially) the office staff at LPHQ to subvert that process are despicable.

Once again, the New LP demonstrates its willingness to sell out its own principles, and even one of its most dedicated party members, in a futile effort to gain some mainstream political credibility. It's just pathetic. If you truly care about the libertarian movement then stop supporting these clowns.

free the Free Tibet flag makers!

2008-04-29T17:14:44Z

Emerging market economy + totalitarian political regime = irony:

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

I r wel red

2008-04-26T23:01:53Z

Book meme from karmabreeze and elsewhere:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (not sure I read all of it. . . .)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (Didn't everyone read this when they were ten and dream of being Jim Hawkins?)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

full tilt

2008-04-26T05:34:14Z

The last pinball factory in the world:

Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.

But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.

I'm surprised even that many are produced. And of those, half are sold to individuals.

I remember just a few other pinball manufacturers—Bally-Midway, Williams, Gottlieb—but all of them disappeared, merged or got out of the pinball business. Of course none of the pinball machines I played held my attention for very long, and I always returned to the video games that slowly took over arcades and bars and even 7-Elevens.

It's a safe bet that more people play pinball on their computers now than the real thing.

Circles of jerks.

2008-04-25T18:59:26Z

I think there's something in the water in the UK. Besides sheep piss, I mean. And it's driven the country's graphic designers absolutely nutters.

First it was the logo for London's 2012 Olympics, on which the organizing committee spent about $800,000, and to my eye, looks like a couple of punky chibi characters engaged in fellatio.

Then the UK's Office of Government Commerce unveiled (and then quickly re-veiled) a new logo which "was intended to signify a bold commitment to the body’s aim of 'improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement'":

Uh-huh. Now tilt your head 90 degrees to the left and see if you agree with an OGC spokesman that "the [logo's] effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend."

If you're still puzzled, look below the cut and you'll see what he means by a "firm grip."

Here's an earlier example of loony logos, taken from a Manchester transit poster. I refuse to believe the irony here isn't deliberate.

they don't want our damn money, either

2008-04-24T21:27:56Z

They hate us for our "freedoms", all right.

Total history fail.

2008-04-23T20:38:42Z

Oh, for the fuckin' love of . . .

Much as I dislike the police, I'm not sure a tasing or seven isn't justified for Public Displays of Felonious Stupidity. As usual, I blame our stellar education system.

"Warning! Crips turf ahead! Turn left, yo!"

2008-04-22T20:55:15Z

Forget traffic jams. Soon you may be able to use your nav system to avoid getting carjacked:

Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. will start a new system this week warning motorists when they are driving close to crime hotspots.

Based on information from the police, drivers will get an alert through Honda's on-board navigation system about areas where cars have been damaged, stolen or broken into in the past, Honda said in a statement.

For now it's only available in Japan, which doesn't strike me a country with a rampant auto-theft problem. But I can also envision motorists in Detroit circling endlessly on the Interstate, trying to find one surface street that doesn't pass through a crime-riddled neighborhood.

The circus will continue until the clowns are dead.

2008-04-22T18:23:03Z

Maybe the prospect of global food shortages doesn't spell catastrophe for everyone:

As prices for bread and rice soar, dictators are tottering.

Oddly, one of them is [Hugo] Chávez, who lost a constitutional referendum in December partly because of the combination of soaring food prices and shortages he has inflicted on Venezuela. Another is Robert Mugabe, who to his surprise lost a presidential election in Zimbabwe three weeks ago, though he has yet to admit it. According to the U.N. World Food Program, the government of North Korea faces another food crisis; bread prices explain in part why Pervez Musharraf lost control of Pakistan's government in February.

It's a painful way to bring down dictatorships, but in the long term it's not nearly as painful as allowing them to continue.

Then again, if your military-backed dictatorship has been placating the masses for decades by providing them with subsidized bread, you might think twice about wanting a free market to develop:

As global prices have soared in the past year, cheap bread has been disappearing from Egyptian shops, and free-market prices have risen 48 percent. The predictable result came on April 6, when workers at the country's largest textile factory, in the city of Mahalla el-Kubra, attempted to strike, only to be blocked by a massive deployment of security forces. Angry crowds took to the streets for two days. Schools and shops were burned, a huge billboard of President Hosni Mubarak was torn down and at least two people were killed when police opened fire.

Mubarak responded to the trouble the way the regime always has. His prime minister and a host of other officials rushed to the smoldering city to purchase peace. The textile workers were promised a month's bonus pay and new health-care facilities for their town. Mubarak ordered the army to begin baking and distributing more bread and lifted tariffs on some food imports. Meanwhile, his prosecutors brought charges against some 150 people blamed for the unrest.

As they say in the circus, the show must go on.

Another consequence of the food crisis: less resistance to biotech crops.

just stating the obvious here

2008-04-22T15:32:26Z

A thought experiment for the gold bugs

2008-04-21T18:27:09Z

OK, here's the scenario:

I took ikilled007's advice and set aside a sizable store of gold. The apocalypse has arrived: the dollar has completely collapsed, the economy has been decimated, and the nation's cities lie in smoldering ruins after months of food riots and looting. I drive out of my heavily fortified bunker, which used to be my basement before my house was flattened by gangs of scavengers searching for scrap metal, in my armored Mercedes-Benz G500 with the laser-guided, turret-mounted .50-cal machine gun, with some gold. I need to restock my food, water, heating oil and diesel for the generator.

As I dodge starving beggars in the street and run over the ones who don't move fast enough, I wonder: where do I go first? IOW, I'm trying to understand how having gold will help me when paper currency has become worthless. Do I need to exchange it first? Exchange it for what? Do I buy in bulk and give the seller a Krugerrand?

Despite the flippant tone, I'm not mocking those of you who recommend gold investments; I'm genuinely curious how having it on hand will help me get through a catastrophic economic collapse. Enlighten me.

OpenHoax?

2008-04-20T16:30:33Z

The adventures of a company called Psystar, which is offering ~~Mac clones~~ computers with Mac OS X preinstalled for $399, continue to heat up the tech blogs. Gizmodo is mostly convinced they're a scam:

Not only does the Miami Chamber of Commerce and BBB not know anything about any company named Psystar (confirmed by reader Travis through his contacts in the chamber), the actual physical address they listed on their website actually changed halfway through the day yesterday.

And it continued to change throughout the week. Then on Wednesday, the Psystar store was knocked offline when they lost their payment processor, who said that Psystar had violated their merchant account agreement for, among other things, failing to use address verification during the order process. They're using PayPal for now.

As of Saturday, Psystar is supposedly shipping orders; as CNET's Tom Krazit reported, his credit card has been charged but he hasn't received a shipping confirmation yet. It would amaze me at this point that Psystar would attempt to scam customers (if that was their intent) with the spotlight turned on them, but I'm also skeptical they can continue to ship computers that obviously violate Apple's licensing agreements, even if they changed the name of the computer from OpenMac to "Open Computer".

This is my first post using Microsoft's new Windows Live Writer. It's a publishing tool designed to work with multiple blogging services. You give it the URL, your username and password, and it configures itself for that blog. You can do all the usual bloggy things you do with other editors: preview entries using the blogs's templates, CSS and so on; upload content; compose offline; etc.

So far I like it except for a couple of things: holding down cursor keys or Backspace (as you might for selecting or deleting text) is a pain in the ass because the program holds the keypresses in a buffer and doesn't execute them until you release the key. So I can't tell what I'm selecting or deleting. This has to be the easiest bug in the world to fix. I could do it if I had access to the source code.

The second annoying problem is tags. So far all I see is an option for inserting a block of text containing tags linked to a specific service. That's not what I want; I want to be able to enter my tags so that they're linked to other entries in the blog. But I don't see any way to simply enter tags that get uploaded along with the entry.

But I've tried it with both my LJ and my other blog, and it seems to work without drama. Its formatting is different from when I use Semagic's HTML mode (or when I use LJ's editor), but it handles blockquoting better than I do by hand. And I like having one tool from which I can post to both blogs; Semagic performs better, but it only works with LJ-based blogs.

the most depressing paragraph I have read today

2008-04-18T22:23:03Z

In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”

More here. This is in our hemisphere, mind you. Stop pretending this shit can only happen somewhere else.