Cuz We Said So

Preparing for the Summer

No, this has nothing to do with dropping a few pounds (though I should) or working on my tan (I'll skip the melanoma, if it's all the same with you). No, this is about movies. Specifically, the blockbusters I know I simply must see. Here's the list. It's gonna be a busy few months.

2-May -- Iron Man
9-May -- Speed Racer
22-May -- Indiana Jones the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
13-Jun -- The Happening
13-Jun -- The Incredible Hulk
20-Jun -- Get Smart
2-Jul -- Hancock
11-Jul -- Hellboy II: The Golden Army
18-Jul -- The Dark Knight
25-Jul -- The X-Files: I Want to Believe
1-Aug -- The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
15-Aug -- Tropic Thunder

So, what are we looking at here?

Four comic book movies
Six sequels
Three films based on TV shows
Two Brat Packers (Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall)
Average age of the leads: 42.8
Average age of the leads if you toss out Emile Hirsch: 44.6
Average age of the leads if you toss out Harrison Ford: 40.7
Film most likely to be actually pretty good but still a disappointment: Indiana Jones
Film most likely to be better than it has any right to be: Hellboy II
Film most likely to divide its audience into lovers and haters: The Happening
Film most likely to give me a hernia from laughter: Tropic Thunder

Two days and counting...

Is Al Qaeda Glad We're In Iraq? And Does that Matter?

Russell wondered a few weeks back whether global terrorist organizations are glad that we're in Iraq.  While the question may be new to Russell, it's been an article of faith on the activist left since at least 2006 that they are indeed glad, as seen, for example, in this release by Senator Russ Feingold.  The truth is, we can speculate about all manner of crazy things.  The real question is whether there is enough credible evidence to conclude that the premise is true.

Here’s some data on the matter that appears to come from Al-Qaeda itself, via quotes from documents released by the US military in February:

…”The Islamic State of Iraq [al-Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al-Qaeda’s expulsion from Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight.

That doesn't sound like gladness to me, but maybe the author is just a glass-is-half-empty sort of person.  He is a terrorist, after all.  How is the recruiting going?

“The morale of the fighters went down and they wanted to be transferred to administrative positions rather than be fighters. There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organization.”

So at least recruiting for the mail room is up.  Here’s a different document:

“There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the tribes changed course 360 degrees . . . Many of our fighters quit and some of them joined the deserters . . . As a result of that the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less.”

“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers who used to be part of the Jihadi movement, therefore we must not have mercy on those traitors until they come back to the right side or get eliminated completely.”

This last, by the way, is a quote from an al-Qaeda leader’s diary recovered by the 101^st Airborne Division on the occasion of my 40th birthday.  What a thoughtful gift.

To judge from these documents, it appears that as of the middle of last year, there are some elements within al Qaeda very much not glad we're in Iraq.  But let's assume, for the sake or argument, that these documents are an anomaly.  Suppose global terrorist organizations are glad that we’re in Iraq.  What does that tell us?  Only that our enemy believes our being in Iraq benefits them.  Does that mean we shouldn't be in Iraq?  Of course not.  For one thing, the enemy could be wrong.  They could be glad we're in Iraq because they believe it benefits them, when on balance it does not.  It wouldn’t be the first time Al-Qaeda miscalculated the outcome of a gambit on the battlefield.  They doubtless believed their brutality in Anbar would benefit them as well, yet the evidence suggests that it harmed them greatly, turning the population against them, and toward us.

On balance, I'd rather see us concentrate on what is real, rather than on what the terrorists think is real, and pursue our objectives in Iraq on those terms.

The Good News Is That Your Next Commercial Flight...

….is not likely to plunge from the sky due to lack of fuel, accordingly to Patrick Smith.  Of course, “Airlines Carrying Ample Fuel, No Need for Concern” wouldn’t be a very catchy headline.

Free Health Care

From: Stuff White People Like (edits mine):

Though their passion for national health care runs deep, it is important to remember that white people Democrats are most in favor of it when they are healthy. They love the idea of everyone have equal access to the resources that will keep them alive, that is until they have to wait in line for an MRI.

This is very similar to the way that white people Democrats express their support for public schools when they don’t have children.

Precisely.

Psystar: White Dwarf or Black Hole?

Psystar announced it's $399 Mac clone "OpenMac" Monday, April 14.  Within minutes their website was taken down, reasons unknown.

Today the website came back up, and the name of the product has changed to "Open Computer".  It's still the same package, though: you get a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 Processor, 2GB of DDR2 667 memory, Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics, a 20x DVD+/-R SATA drive that is Lightscribe-capable, and four rear USB Ports.  More importantly, you get a licensed copy of Mac OSX 10.5 "Leopard".  Psystar claims the $400 machine is roughly equivalent to a $2000 Mac.

At issue is Psystar's ability to resell Leopard for use on its clones.  The Leopard EULA specifies that Leopard is for use only on Apple-branded machines.  Psystar asserts that the EULA is anticompetitive.

Surely Psystar is aware that they face an immediate legal battle from Apple.  So the question is: are they prepared to fight it, and do they have a plan to win?  It seems like they might have a case, but Apple will probably be able to get a temporary cease-and-desist order, which may keep the thing locked up for years.  And odds are Apple will eventually win out.

Though the odds are small, however, this could spell the end of Apple's monopoly on Mac hardware, which would change the landscape irrevocably.

Harry Potter and the Golden Turd

Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling testified today in her lawsuit against Steven Vander Ark for his unpublished book, Harry Potter Lexicon.  Rowling claims that the book, which is based on the popular website of the same name, "constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work."

Hardly. Vander Ark has clearly put in a significant amount of work on his part, including creating a timeline of all the events in the Potter universe.  When his work was just a website, Rowling was tremendously supportive, saying

This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an internet café while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing). A website for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home.

However, now that the work is to appear in print (read: for profit), Rowling is out for blood.  Shame on her.  It ought to be obvious that Vander Ark's work in no way compromises sales of her (absurdly lucrative) Potter franchise.  On the contrary, it probably complements sales well, in much the same way that companion books support Tolkien's sales.  Surely she cannot in any way claim that the sale of a copy of Lexicon equates to a loss of sale of any of her material.

I liked the summary offered by Vander Ark's defense group:

In support of her position Ms Rowling appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides, and other non-academic research, relating to her own fiction. This is a right no court has ever recognized. It has little to recommend it. If accepted, it would dramatically extend the reach of copyright protection, and eliminate an entire genre of literary supplements: third party reference guides to fiction, which for centuries have helped readers better access, understand and enjoy literary works.

Indeed.  Cliff's Notes beware!

Moreover, Ms Rowling appears to be a sniveling, whiny muggle when she claims

I don’t want to cry, because I’m British, but the [Harry Potter books] meant setting aside my children.

Snork.  Well, thank you, Ms Rowling, for unselfishly setting aside your family obligations to devote your time to the betterment of humanity through fantasy fiction.  What a philanthropist.

She also stated

Should my fans be flooded with a surfeit of substandard books — so called lexicons — I’m not sure I’d have the will or heart to continue.

Oh, please, Ms Rowling.  Your fans have already been flooded with a surfeit of substandard books: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to name a couple.  Perhaps you should sue yourself.

Besides the fact that she simply has no case, I want Rowling to lose the suit because she is so unimaginably petty.

Martian Headsets

A must-read from Joel Spolsky on the travails of conforming to "standards".  Here's an excerpt, in which Joel is discussing Microsoft's recent decision to make IE8 conform strictly to W3C standards:

I looked at my watch.

Tick, tick, tick.

Within a matter of seconds, you started to see people on the forums showing up like this one:

I have downloaded IE 8 and with it some bugs. Some of my websites like “HP” are very difficult to read as the whole page is very very small… The speed of my Internet has also been reduced on some occasions. Whe I use Google Maps, there are overlays everywhere, enough so it makes it ackward to use!

Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing.

Entertaining and interesting.  Go read it.

Google Notebook

If you aren't already familiar with Google Notebook, you probably ought to be.

Combined with a very nifty extension for Firefox, Google Notebook allows you to very easily collect and organize content from all kinds of web sources:

• Right-click on a page or selected text to immediately capture the text or URL to the page, or add your own text directly into the notebook
• Drag and drop content into different notebooks with sections, and add labels to categorize by topic
• Invite collaborators to allow several people to work together
• Use search to find information in your notebook

Like most things Googly, it is curiously elegant and powerful.  For example, if the information you're collecting is location-based (say, hypothetically, you're finding disparate activities you might want to do in Barcelona, and collecting the clippings into a notebook) you can choose to view all notes on a Google map.  It will place pins for each clipping onto the map.

Betting on the Racetrack

IBM is promising a new breakthrough in storage using new "racetrack" memory based on spintronics.  The technology will enable a potentially order-of-magnitude increase in memory storage.

Ultimately, the researchers expect spintronics to move into the third dimension, with 3D racetrack memory devices that will be even faster and cheaper, since they won't be dependent on the miniaturization dictates of Moore's Law.

What I found more personally interesting about the story, however, is the inscrutability of the technology.  Now, I basically understand the technology underlying ICs, conventional memory, hard drives, and the like.  Of course, I couldn't detail the engineering or physics, but I'm comfortable that there really isn't anything about a modern computer that I find technologically out of reach.  This, however, is over my head:

"Recent developments in the controlled movement of domain walls in magnetic nanowires by short pulses of spin-polarized current give promise of a nonvolatile memory device with the high performance and reliability of conventional solid-state memory but at the low cost of conventional magnetic disk drive storage," according to the abstract for the article in Science.

Huh?

Sweet, Sweet Irony

Beautiful.

Idaho Senator John Goedde sponsored a bill to increase fines for speeding in school zones.

Then, on the day his bill was to be debated, he received a ticket for doing 32 MPH in a school zone.

Mwwahahahahaha!!