1994 video Cheney explaining why it’s a bad idea to invade Iraq

Mark Frauenfelder:

A reader says: “Dick Cheney in a 1994 interview explaining, quite correctly, how invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire. He even uses the word quagmire.” Of course, this was before Saddam Hussein personally flew those airliners into our buildings on 9/11/2001. That changed everything. Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

What if FDR had run his war like GWB?

I got tired of right-wingers saying, “If the media had been as hard on FDR as they are on Bush, we’d have lost World War II.” So I started wondering… What if FDR had run his war like GWB?

 

Weather station mistaken for bomb

David Pescovitz:
A bomb-squad recently blew up a “suspicious looking box” mounted to a tree near the Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Roanoke, Virgina. Turned out that the “bomb” was actually an amateur weather station placed there by an employee of the Center. From the Roanoke Times:

An employee had placed a putty-like substance around the box to make it weather proof.

The investigation is concluded and no criminal charges will be filed.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

BBC: W’s grandpappy planned fascist coup of USA

Mark Frauenfelder:Kevin says:

A BBC Radio 4 investigation sheds new light on a major subject that has received little historical attention, the conspiracy on behalf of a group of influential powerbrokers, led by Prescott Bush, to overthrow FDR and implement a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. based around the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler.

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen.

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

From the “Department of Duh”

The driver was “injured but conscious”, and as police attempted to extricate him from his motor, he “clutched his laptop computer and screamed the name of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs”. A fireman later told 3 News “he believed the man had a mental illness”.

No kidding.

Read

 

Wal Mart flip flops cause nasty chemical burn

Mark Frauenfelder:

Kerry bought some flip flops for $2.44 at Wal Mart. After wearing them for a while, she noticed a tingling sensation on her feet. She immediately stopped wearing the flip flops. Soon after, her skin turned red and blistery.

When she took the matter up with Wal Mart, they told her to take it up with the Chinese manufacturer.

Apparently, Wal Mart is still selling the flip flops.

Link (Thanks, Joanna!)

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

News of a Mac OS X Worm Incites Death Threats and Intrigue

A soap opera is playing out on the mailing lists of several security newsgroups this morning, complete with people hiding behind pseudonyms, people “outing” one another and rumors of death threats against the major players. At stake? A possible worm for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.

(Via OSNews.)

 

Simple iTunes sharing with SimplifyMedia

If you’ve ever wanted to listen to your iTunes remotely, or share your library between your friends, now you can. SimplifyMedia is a plugin for iTunes (both PC and Mac) which allows limited sharing and encrypted streaming across several computers.

Adding a friend to share is just as easy as adding a buddy in IM, cool!

(Via Download Squad.)

 

Conversations with neocons on a cruise

Mark Frauenfelder:
Johann Hari of the Independent (UK) paid $1200 to take a cruise with 500 “straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republican” readers of the conservative National Review magazine. His mission: to “find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.”

I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

100kph minus 100kph

 

Gold-farmers beat ad-ban by spelling URL in dead gnomes

Cory Doctorow:

World of Warcraft has banned ads for “gold farmers” who sell virtual gold and artifacts for real money. The farmers have retailiated by slaying gnomes and arranging them on the ground to spell out the URLs of their gold-farms. Check out the video of it, complete with Benny Hill music.

Link

(via Wonderland)

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

For The Ladies: PowerBook Earrings Are Totally Geeky But Totally Classy, Too

What to do with an old PowerBook when you replace it with a shiny new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro? Make jewelry out of the power buttons, of course. While these are of the dangly, girly variety, they would make a pretty killer pair of gauges, too. [Flickr via MAKE]

(Via Gizmodo.)

 

Dell Warns of Vista Ugrade Challenges

Dell has taken the unusual step - for a PC vendor of its size - of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft’s Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them. The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy.

(Via OSNews.)

 

What it takes to bring you Fiji water

Xeni Jardin:

Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com’s Machinist blog says,

There have been lots of stories lately about the inefficiency and environmental damages caused by bottled water, but Charles Fishman has the definitive piece in Fast Company. You’ll never want to drink Fiji again.

The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says “from the islands of Fiji.” Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway.

Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze (…)

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

Wow. Apple Hits 5% of its Annual Sales Goal in Three Days

This past weekend, Apple sold 500 thousand iPhones, or 5% of 1-year sales goal. Assuming peak sales in the eight-week Christmas shopping season, that will match or beat this week, Apple’s going to hit their target early. Very early.

In case you didn’t know, Verizon was offered the iPhone first, but declined. Verizon is so stupid to turn down Apple. That’s 10 million new customers AT&T is going to get (or keep). AT&T must be walking in the clouds right now.

Apple’s competitors are going to have a hard time competing because the primary barrier to entry will still exist: the carrier. Apple was able to tell AT&T “No, we won’t have your crappy browser and ring tone selling software on our phone, and we are going to reduce text messages by pushing email functionality,” and AT&T simply had to accept it. The results speak for themselves: absolutely no AT&T software on the iPhone. But competitors such as Nokia, LG, or other hand held makers are screwed.

Competitors have to ask carriers such as Verizon to give them the same development freedom as Apple in order to compete, but Verizon rejected Apple for exactly that reason in the first place. No other phone in history will sell 500,000 in its first weekend, except perhaps future versions of the iPhone. Verizon had its chance, and it blew it. Verizon will make concessions simply because it doesn’t want to bleed all of its customers to AT&T, but it will be a slow process. They aren’t going to back peddle 180 degrees and suddenly destroy their cash cows such as text and picture messages (iPhones use free email).

It’s going to take months before Verizon realizes what hit them, or even that they got hit at all.

I went to the Apple store this weekend to try out the phone, and I was greeted by a line. A line to get into the store to look around. While it was a brisk wait, the line never failed to fall below 10 people while I was there. Inside, the demo iPhones were plentiful.

My conclusion: Apple has another home run.

After all the hype, the iPhone really lives up to most it. Apple did an incredibly job highlighting its strengths without hiding its weaknesses, thus keeping expectations in check. Its interface is slick, it’s sexy, and its touch response was incredibly precise. After playing with it for a few minutes, the previously slick looking iPods looked dated. This thing is going to hit the MP3 player market like a firebomb on grass huts!

Once the first generation buyers show their friends what they have, it’s only going to generate more interest. I firmly believe it after using the phone myself.

The product sells itself.

(Via Michi Knows - Insights on the IT world by Michi Kono.)

 

Venter: Changing one species into another

Xeni Jardin:

Over at Edge.org, John Brockman says:

In a news cycle dominated by Paris Hilton and the Apple iPhone, Craig Venter has announced the results of his lab’s work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another. This is news, bound to affect everyone on the planet. Below is the press release from Venter’s Institute, along with links to the scientific paper published in Science, and the international press.

The day after the announcement, Edge talked to Venter, who had the following to say about the research underway:

“Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn’t matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn’t know if it would work or not. Now we do.

” This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It’s not a question of ‘if’, or ‘how’, but ‘when’, and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.”

Link to full text, and here is a press release about the discovery from the J. Craig Venter Institute.

Here is one of many dozens of news articles — snip:

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, said the transplantation technique, which leads to the transferred genome taking over the host cell, was “a landmark accomplishment.”

“It represents the complete reprogramming of an organism using only a chemical entity,” Ebright said.

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

IBM triples performance of World’s Fastest Computer and breaks the “Quadrillion” Barrier

June 26, 2007 The world of computing continually throws up feats that are difficult to comprehend. If the world’s fastest car or world’s tallest building were suddenly to be outperformed by a factor of three, we’d be incredulous, yet such quantum leaps have become routine in the world of computing. IBM’s new Blue Gene/P is the second generation of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. Blue Gene/P scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one petaflop (one-quadrillion operations per second) and can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops. The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than a stack of laptop computers 1.5 miles high (don’t try this at home folks). ..

(Via Gizmo Emerging Technology Magazine.)

 

Which countries’ GDPs are comparable to US states’?

Cory Doctorow:

Here’s a map of the USA where the states have been labelled with the names of countries with comparable GDPs — California is the same size as France; Texas, Canada; New York, Brazil, and so on.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

DRM-free EMI music outselling lockware

Cory Doctorow:
The Inquirer reports that in the short time since EMI went DRM-free with its music, its sales have skyrocketed:

Since EMI ditched the DRM on iTunes it has seen sales of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon increase by between 272 and 350 percent…

According to Bloomberg, digital sales for other DRM free music increased by between 17 to 24 per cent. OK Go’s Oh No increased 77 per cent. Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head jumped 115 per cent.

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

FBI must turn over thousands of Patriot Act abuse docs, judge rules

Xeni Jardin:
From Wired News’ Threat Level blog:

Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1,000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency’s use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)