Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Progressive blogging and the MSM
I agree with Scott. We act more like watchdogs of the MSM, than rivals - pointing out when the MSM slips up. Often the MSMs reporting is right on the money and we direct people to read their story, or, we point to their story to back up a point we are making.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Court order to the Canadian government to bring Omar Khadr home still stands
OTTAWA – The Conservative government has lost its appeal of a court decision ordering it to bring Omar Khadr home to Canada from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Federal Court of Appeal ruled today that the government offered no compelling reasons why it should not comply with an order to request that Khadr, 22, be repatriated to Canada.
"There is no legal or factual foundation upon which this Court can conclude that the decision not to request Mr. Khadr's repatriation is justified," the court ruled.
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Canadian government to be held accountable for its bungling on the Suaad Hagi Mohamud case
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Mohamud’s lawyer, Lucas Naikuni, said outside of court that he plans to sue the Canadian and Kenyan governments, along with KLM Airlines, whose officials stopped Mohamud from boarding a flight home May 21. He called it a “malicious prosecution.” “This is an embarrassment, that a developed country like Canada can do this to a citizen,” he said in an interview with the Star. “We had to go to DNA testing – we had to go that far?”
We’ve heard “whispers” and innuendo in the media from government sources there was more to the story then what the media was reporting (which it must be pointed out, also was the chatter in the Maher Arar case, and led to nothing), so at the very least, if the Canadian government gets sued, and forced to defend itself, it’s going to have to put up or shut up on those “unofficial whispers”. I applaud her lawyer for intending to do this; the only way the Harper Conservative government can be held to account right now apparently is through the court system.
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Better living conditions in other solar systems?
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The Sun does not seem like the perfect star for a system where life might arise. Although it is hard to argue with the Sun's ‘success' as it so far is the only star known to host a planet with life, our studies indicate that the ideal stars to support planets suitable for life for tens of billions of years may be a smaller slower burning ‘orange dwarf' with a longer lifetime than the Sun ― about 20-40 billion years. These stars, also called K stars, are stable stars with a habitable zone that remains in the same place for tens of billions of years. They are 10 times more numerous than the Sun, and may provide the best potential habitat for life in the long run.
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Reasons to see District 9
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Not into science fiction? It’s a satirical drama. Don’t like thoughtful dramas? It’s a science fiction, action flick. Don’t like amazing movies? I can’t help you there. District 9 is so well put together that even people who hate science fiction will most likely walk out of the theater reveling in the overall story while science fiction fans will walk out reveling in the overall story and how awesome the fucking aliens are. And probably arguing about the physics of proton thrusters or something else nerdy like that. (Which, as a nerdy sidenote: my biggest problem with science fiction is when it doesn’t play physically by its own rules. Amazingly, District 9 adheres stringently to the technology its invented, and I love it for that). There are themes and ideas that almost anyone can relate to, and they all play out against the backdrop of an engaging, epic-feeling alternate world where a world government has to deal with an alien race.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Blair Witch 3 - do we need another one?
The Blair Witch Project's creators are chatting about the possibility for another try at reviving the dead franchise. The good news: they ditched the third film's original Crucible-esque premise. The bad news: those zany campers are back.
First the creators mulled around the idea for a 1700s-set prequel. Thank goodness creators Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick had the smarts to ditch that idea. In an interview with BBC the two discussed their Plan B: revealing what happened to the yelly kids from the first film.
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Repo Men? Repo Chick? - Repo Man movies not related to Repo Man ...
Repo Man director Alex Cox will premiere his new movie Repo Chick at the Venice Film Festival in September, say sources — but Repo Chick isn't a sequel. And neither is Universal's new movie Repo Men. Confused yet?
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Legion - B-Movie about an angel war
This looks fun!
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Air conditioning on the cheap and simple
Watch the video, read the instructions.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Apple market share revisited
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Recently this figure was quoted to be as high as ten per cent, meaning that one in ten machines in the world allegedly was a Mac. Linux had one per cent and the Vole had 88 per cent, with OS/2, various BSDs, BeOS and assorted hobbyist lashups presumably making up the other one per cent.
Common sense would have suggested that these figures were impossible, but the estimates have been used to claim that Apple was fast becoming a market leader.
It would have to be a significant market leader too. Macs are mostly a feature of the North American market, its penetration in Europe is nowhere near as big as in the US. Since Macs are not sold in any of the high volume regions such as China, Russia and the rest of the Far East, about a quarter to a half of sales in the US would have to be Macs, which cannot be the case.
No one seems to have worked this out, and I still get emails from fanboys who recite the ten per cent figure as an article of faith and who seem to think that Apple's black shirted buffoons will be goose-stepping their way over Redmond any day now.
Net Applications too must have been wondering, because it started to look at the way it did its sums. Overnight Apple's market share estimate has been slashed by more than 50 percent to well under 5 per cent of the operating system market. Windows has shot up from the high 80s to over 93 per cent of the market. And the Linux market share is now closer to two percent.
When looked at in terms of world supply, Apple's Iphone is a nonstarter too. If you look at the tame Apple press you would think that Apple has control of the smartphone market. No, it doesn't. It has about two per cent of the smartphone market worldwide. The winner by a long chalk is Nokia.
So where does this idea that Apple is important come from? It is partly the tech press in the US that feeds the world a steady diet of positive Apple Mac news... mostly typed on Macs.
There are journalists out there who have never used a PC in their lives and yet their opinion on the latest Mac gadget is taken as gospel by the great unwashed. The news agenda about Apple, particularly in North America, is being set by... Apple. For example, when did you last see an article about Nokia's worldwide success?
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Sunday, August 9, 2009
Earth constantly humming - source of the song found
I wonder how it would sound using a pitchshifter to change the pitch to something audible?
Thursday, August 6, 2009
The Lovely Bones movie trailer
The Lovely Bones is an upcoming film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold, set for release on December 11, 2009. The film was directed by Peter Jackson and stars actress Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, with Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg as her parents, Susan Sarandon as her grandmother and Stanley Tucci (Wickipedia)
The Vampire's Assistant - new vampire movie with an all-star cast
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A fantasy about a teenager who unknowingly breaks a 200-year-old truce between two factions of vampires. Pulled into a fantastic life of misunderstood sideshow freaks and grotesque creatures of the night, one teen will vanish from the safety of a boring existence and fulfill his destiny in a place drawn from nightmares. The cast includes Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, Orlando Jones, and Ken Watanabe.
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This is based on Darren Shan's book series titled "Cirque du Freak". Universal is bringing The Vampire's Assistant to theaters on October 23rd this fall
Sunday, August 2, 2009
All bow down to Oprah!
Conspiracy theory or truth? - Revelations about the close relationship between the Taliban, Bin Laden and the USA
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The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.
It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.
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Corporate censorship of news media in the USA
The New York Times this morning has a remarkable story, and incredibly, the article's author, Brian Stelter, doesn't even acknowledge, let alone examine, what makes the story so significant. In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.
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