I was just talking with my wife about this at breakfast. Scott Rosenberg at Salon nails it:
On the one hand, Bush argues that the destruction of human embryos (microscopic organisms made up of a few cells) is a kind of killing. His press spokesman, Tony Snow, adopting the supercharged cant of anti-abortion activists, referred to it recently as "murder." In order to stop such "murder," Bush agreed in 2001 to limit all federal funding of stem cell research to a handful of pre-existing "lines" of cells -- cells that had been created specifically for research. His argument was, let's not use tax dollars to pay for the destruction of more embryos for the sake of research.
Here is why Bush's position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded.
...
If Bush believes destroying embryos is murder, let him take a real stand against it. If he doesn't, he shouldn't make it harder for the thousands of embryos that are being discarded anyway to be used for a valuable purpose that could improve real lives.
(via bb)
I love Ze Frank's The Show. Ze's face fills the screen like he's talking RIGHT INTO YOUR BRAIN, and he talks about the day's news, his various projects (including the Earth Sandwich and the I Knows Me Some Ugly MySpace contest), and lots of other hilarious crap. He is also very smart, and has some great observations about the Web and participatory media, of which his show is a fine champion. This here is a representative sample:
the show with zefrank
Recorded every weekday, evidently. Check it out, sports racers.
A nice top 50 list from the Observer. Lists like this should be very opinionated and should be in order of preference or importance, as this one is. This lists ranks albums in terms of their influence, and lists "without this, there'd be no..." for each album. Worth a detailed read. (via mefi)
We steeled ourselves and watched Frontline's The Dark Side, about the conflict between the intelligence and defense camps over the run-up to and prosecution of the war on terror. I always shudder inside when I see Frontline episodes among the recorded items on the TiVo. It's a great show, but at 10:00 at night, I usually want something to distract me from how horrible everything is, but Frontline insists on covering stories about the prostitution trade, the AIDS epidemic, and the War on Terror, and by the end of the day I am not up to it.
The Dark Side focuses on Cheney and Rumsfeld. It traces their careers back to when they met in the seventies, and follows their influence through the Ford administration and up to their current positions in the Bush Administration. I had heard most of the facts of this chronology before; what I found striking about this show is the illustration of the personalities involved, and how the editors stitched everything together and showed how one episode led into another.
It also reinforced what I have come to believe about the whole saga, from the invasion of Afghanistan to today. All the things that have gone wrong are not missteps, or failures of the system, or inability to read and react to circumstances "on the ground." Cheney and Rumsfeld simply wanted to do this. They wanted to control the Middle East, and they are doing it. And the WMD intelligence, the co-opting of Tenet, the change of focus from al Qaeda to Iraq, are all part of this drive.
Anyway, it's a great show and a good site besides.
I have been very surprised to see what started as yet another conversation between nerds about operating systems turn into, well, a much larger conversation between all the best-known nerds, about operating systems. Here is Mark Pilgrim's initial post about leaving Apple, and here is his follow-up, which goes into some detail about how Pilgrim had been locked into Apple apps and subsequently screwed by them. John Gruber at Daring Fireball responded with this thoughtful post, which concluded by wondering if Pilgrim wasn't overreacting a bit, and Pilgrim responded in kind with a very detailed rebuttal about why the switch was the best move for him. These are both thoughtful writers, and both their blogs are worth reading regularly.
Of particular interest to me, as will become clear in a moment, was Pilgrim's Freedom 0 post from 2004, in which he describes the problems of closed, non-free software, and his decision to move from the newly-prohibitively-expensive Movable Type to the free WordPress.
I am what would probably be described in current political terms as a liberal. I want more freedom for me and everyone else. I define "freedom" to mean, in part, being left alone to do what I want. That doesn't cover it, by a long shot, but I have a thread I'm trying to pursue here.
I am a Web site developer and consultant. and I work primarily on Macs. I recently worked on a site that at one point involved browser testing, and since I didn't have a PC, I had to ride over to the library and use one of theirs to do the testing. This is kind of a pain in the ass. So, I decided to buy a Windows PC. I was reluctant to buy a crappy $299 Dell, and I heard from my friend that the eMachines you can buy at Best Buy were poorly made, so I decided to build my own.
I checked out a number of Web sites for this, and also checked out a book from the library, but the most useful resource by far was this article (part 1, part 2. I poked around on NewEgg and put together a nice shopping list of parts for around $420.
But you know what the most expensive part was? Windows XP. Win XP Pro, new, is $299! Even the used version I bought from a teenager through craigslist was $75, more expensive than the motherboard or the CPU. I had to do all that just to get a machine I could run Internet Explorer on. (And yes, I know all about Virtual PC. My last experience with it was that it was too slow to be usable; I was tearing my hair out.)
So, I followed Pilgrim's advice, and his indispensible essential software list, and installed Ubuntu. I should point out his doesn't help my browser-testing problem in the slightest; I am geeky and tweaky by nature, and it didn't take much to get me started on this build-your-own-Windows-and-Linux-box project.
The articles were very useful, and I was pleasantly surprised to have the box work the first time out. I installed XP (which took several hours, several Windows Update cycles, and no small amount of convincing Windows that my copy was a legitimate licensed one (it is).
The next day I installed Ubuntu. While I am not sure if it is good enough to make me switch from my Mac--which still and always Just Works, and is elegant and a pleasure to work with--Ubuntu is damn good. The system menus are straightforward and the preferences and options are easy to find, and software is easy to install and uninstall. Plus, it looks nice. The GNOME window manager is simple and consistent, and while it lacks the Lexus-like tightness and polish of OS X, it doesn't much get in your way. It's no harder to learn than Windows, and a good deal easier to set up. I haven't gotten too far into the music and photo apps that I downloaded, but they seem all right so far.
Will I switch from my Mac? Not yet. I understand Pilgrim's gripes with Mac OS X, and I am locked into some of its programs just as he did not want to be. (Why did Apple Mail stop saving its messages as mbox?) But for me, for now, the ease of using a Mac, and the way it lets me get past its computer-ness and actually do things, is worth more than having my data in totally open, free formats. Apple is open enough, free enough.
But judging from the exchange above, and how Kottke, BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow, and Tim O'Reilly have picked up the thread, it's something people are thinking about. And as people start to try to migrate their iTunes Music Store song collections to other devices, as people start to build libraries of iTunes TV shows, as people start to have more and more important things in their computers, "free enough" may not be free enough. Ubuntu Linux is free software. It may not be as good as Apple's, but the fact that it is good enough to criticize, despite the fact that it was developed in the wild by volunteers while Apple's was designed with tons of money by the best UI designers in the world, is an important development.
Ubuntu is not free enough; it is simply free, and it always will be. Apple software is not free, and never will be. And if the price of Apple, and all the hardware and DRM that Apple comprises, become as onerous to the public as buying Windows XP was for me, then people won't switch to Apple anymore, or any other competitor. They'll switch right out of the marketplace.
