Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

So Computer Reseller News [sic!] has a particularly concerning case of cover discourses. This is, kids, where a discourse with which one can't reasonably disagree is linked to an action which, in content, does not necessarily link up exactly as its advertised. It's, in a word, presumptuous. In another phrase, it's a syllogistic fallacy. Say we see that folks are too fat, myself included, so we decide to burn all the corn fields in the US. I mean, come on, it's the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) making us fat and giving us diabetes, after all, and the HFCS is made from... (you guessed it) CORN!!!

This is a much more serious case, however. From CRN: Proposed Child Pornography Laws Raise Data Retention Concerns:

[Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)] are working together to tighten the law against child pornography by forcing Internet service providers to retain Internet usage records.
...
The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 is covered in the House version by Smith as H.R. 1076 and in the Senate version by Cornyn as S.436.

Can we stop child porn by recording everyone's illicit online affairs? Apparently so.

The cover discourse is child porn. The active discourse (the one calling for a specific action) is one of surveillance and control. Everyone wants to stop child porn, except for those sick enough to enjoy it. We can't argue against the motivation for stopping child porn, can we? The problem is that the action is absolute overkill. Because every packet, from Quake's UDP to a kid hitting pbskids.org could be child porn, and we won't know until we check, we have to save it all until someone is suspected. Then we can blast through, find the "paper" trail, and bust the pervert.

I'm all for busting the child porn pervs. But Alex Rodriguez might have something to tell us about the way the government collects information that wasn't supposed to be recorded or saved, and tends to cast wider rather than narrower nets in a manner that shows, practically speaking, the practical has more immediate effects for citizens than the theoretical.

The Internet and binary media in general offers the potential for measurement and recording in a way we've never been able to do before. Why? Because there's no play on the net. Everything done from the interface to the network must be first translated to digits that can then be accurately recorded and precisely reproduced. Watch five people walk down the sidewalk, and each's feet will take a different path. But, give or take, and enough give to be practically accurate, everyone reading a relatively static web page will see the same thing. More importantly, get someone to retrace their steps on the sidewalk and, even if you measured down to an accuracy of nano-inches, there were still be room for play. On the net, again give or take, there is *none*; the system requests and nearly always creates a situation in which there is no play. I can exactly reproduce not just the steps, but everyone else's steps at a certain moment in the virtual w/World of Warcraft. Exactly. Each choice breaks down to a digital (as in numeric) decision. Every movement is reduced to a number. Every decision. Everything is reduced to real numbers. Not just numbers, but digits. Easily represented digits. Everything measurable. Everything reproducible exactly. EXACTLY. EVERYTHING. Capiche?

It's a seductive power whose proverbial siren song asks us to keep precise ties on what happens just in case. Each measurement is already being taken and it's a trivial addition to record it all. If we could know a priori what Internet traffic -- what numbers, what digits, what zeroes and ones -- were illegal, we, providing the laws are just (as I believe these discussed in CRN much more than likely are), should record them to help make the actions stop. But right now we don't know the difference between child exploitation numbers and the numbers of mailing pictures of grandkids to grandma before the fact. Which is more evil, 3 or 4? Tell me now which number should be disallowed (ignoring for now John Muckelbauer's theory that open 4's are more likely to catch on fire than any other number). We might know a subset of numbers (and a very useful subset -- wasn't this Carnivore?) for which we could filter and which could and arguably should automatically trigger recording, but we don't know them all. The cover discourse certainly doesn't argue well for our collecting every digit. Because there's a long, long spectrum between grandkids and child porn within which there's a number of activities that are not a threat to society, there are numbers that should, in this approximation of a free country, be allowed to stay private.

The link between child porn and Internet traffic records might be onto, but it sure ain't one-to-one (do I have that backwards?). Laziness and technical naivety is no excuse for us to trade in our freedoms, maxim or no.

Labels: control, digital

I got my Peek earlier this week, and it's an okay device. I like that it doesn't allow me to surf the net [sic], as that tends to keep me on task instead of thumb-typing like a madman. As is, I just went through the battery about twice as quickly as they advertised. I'm going to write that off to emailing and checking email too much, and perhaps working too hard in low-signal areas. (Hint to Peek: When my Peek's locked, you don't have to maintain a constant signal. Go into some sort of sleep mode, and check email much less frequently.) I'd already taken to emailing myself notes about things I want to be able to access everywhere, and the Peek helps out there nicely.

The "material" (as opposed to virtual) keyboard is a giant step up from the iPhone, by the way. I hate that iPhone/touch keyboard. The type assist function on the iPhone is great, but I'd rather get the word right by myself.

It's not all great -- The original version (v1.04) of the Peek software was, well, lacking, and I've mailed it to NYC to get upgraded (for free). I was also disappointed to find that there's no search whatsoever, not even server side, and that it started pulling emails once I signed up, ignoring everything that came earlier. I'll probably review it later, but that's enough complaining for now. Overall, a useful device. I'd complain it isn't worth $20 a month, but unlimited email and text on my Sprint phone costs more, and then I'd be stuck typing on a 9 digit keypad. Not cool.

Now Apple is again rumored to be seeing the wisdom in providing less than 24/7, unlimited data plans. From AppleInsider:

The analyst believes Apple will follow a strategy similar to what the company did with the iPod, expanding the market with more choices. Citing sources, Wu predicts several iPhone models with differing feature sets, adding the possibility of a low-cost voice, e-mail, messaging-only plan with no Internet on what he referred to as an 'iPod phone'.

I doubt an iPhone would be released without Safari, but I could see a less than always-on, unlimited data plan, especially if that restriction is somehow tied to a different piece of hardware. The first hit of heroin is always heavily discounted, after all. For every person like me, who is happy not to have his or her complete digital life available at the click of a few buttons, there are hundreds or thousands who will try a Peek or stripped down iPhone and decide they need to move up to a Blackberry or iPhone as we know it now.

Labels: iphone, peek

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, February 26, 2009
Music firms leave money on the table out of laziness From AppleInsider's "Eminem takes record label to court over iTunes royalties": Busch then posed the question of whether service providers like Apple also pay the labels a fee for the digital files they eventually turn around and sell to consumers over services like iTunes, to which the Universal witness responded by saying, 'We asked them to pay a service charge for that, but we didn’t always manage to collect it…' posted by ruffin at 2/26/2009 02:39:00 PM

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
No, CNET, Javascript is faster, not rendering From Matt Asay on Safari 4 at CNET: I found page rendering to be delayed on my Mac... That's nice. It's not about rendering. It's about Javascript. Compare reader.google.com on Saf 3 vs. Saf 4. There is a nice improvement. More interesting is Asay's comment about Safari needing an API, essentially. I kinda like seeing what closed source gives us. Vive la difference, et cetera. posted by ruffin at 2/25/2009 11:10:00 AM

Note to self: HDCP example I suppose it's the same for all Blu-Ray players, but here we go. Wonder if VLC knows a way around this. Guessing no, and that without the drive's help, playback is a pain. shrug Need to read up on this. Price Watch: PC Blu-ray drive, $79.99 shipped \| The Cheapskate - CNET News: You'll also need a video card and monitor that support HDCP; otherwise, Blu-ray's copy protection will prevent movies from playing. posted by ruffin at 2/25/2009 08:53:00 AM

Note to self: HDCP example I suppose it's the same for all Blu-Ray players, but here we go. Wonder if VLC knows a way around this. Guessing no, and that without the drive's help, playback is a pain. shrug Need to read up on this. Price Watch: PC Blu-ray drive, $79.99 shipped \| The Cheapskate - CNET News: You'll also need a video card and monitor that support HDCP; otherwise, Blu-ray's copy protection will prevent movies from playing. posted by ruffin at 2/25/2009 08:53:00 AM

Sunday, February 22, 2009
Please, $55k family of four and you're eating food bank goods? Newly Poor Swell Lines at Food Banks - NYTimes.com: Here in Morris County, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, the Interfaith pantry opened for an extra night last week to accommodate the growing crowds. Among the first-time visitors were Cindy Dreeszen and her husband, who both have steady jobs — his at a movie theater and hers at a government office — with a combined annual income of about $55,000. ... “I didn’t think we’d even be allowed to come here,” said Ms. Dreeszen, 41, glancing around at the shelves of fruit, whole-wheat pasta and baby food. “This is totally something that I never expected to happen, to have to resort to this.” Admittedly $55k in NY must disappear -- in housing, I assume -- more quickly than in my poor side of the country, but come on. Seriously? $55k and you're in a food bank? Might be time to downsize the house, bad market or no. I need more information to feel justified in doing so, but this story burns. me. up. Every dollar box of pasta they take is one some family who really needs it is missing. If you take handouts and are eating ANYTHING better than those handouts at any time between stops, STOP ROBBING THE HUNGRY NOW. I eat pasta. Sure I'd prefer to get pasta and kid food for free. But I should give up, oh, say the Chips Ahoy! before I rob the hungry. stew & burn Man, I'm in a pissy mood today, eh? posted by ruffin at 2/22/2009 10:59:00 PM

Today's lesson in discourse So Computer Reseller News [sic!] has a particularly concerning case of cover discourses. This is, kids, where a discourse with which one can't reasonably disagree is linked to an action which, in content, does not necessarily link up exactly as its advertised. It's, in a word, presumptuous. In another phrase, it's a syllogistic fallacy. Say we see that folks are too fat, myself included, so we decide to burn all the corn fields in the US. I mean, come on, it's the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) making us fat and giving us diabetes, after all, and the HFCS is made from... (you guessed it) CORN!!! This is a much more serious case, however. From CRN: Proposed Child Pornography Laws Raise Data Retention Concerns: [Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)] are working together to tighten the law against child pornography by forcing Internet service providers to retain Internet usage records. ... The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 is covered in the House version by Smith as H.R. 1076 and in the Senate version by Cornyn as S.436. Can we stop child porn by recording everyone's illicit online affairs? Apparently so. The cover discourse is child porn. The active discourse (the one calling for a specific action) is one of surveillance and control. Everyone wants to stop child porn, except for those sick enough to enjoy it. We can't argue against the motivation for stopping child porn, can we? The problem is that the action is absolute overkill. Because every packet, from Quake's UDP to a kid hitting pbskids.org could be child porn, and we won't know until we check, we have to save it all until someone is suspected. Then we can blast through, find the "paper" trail, and bust the pervert. I'm all for busting the child porn pervs. But Alex Rodriguez might have something to tell us about the way the government collects information that wasn't supposed to be recorded or saved, and tends to cast wider rather than narrower nets in a manner that shows, practically speaking, the practical has more immediate effects for citizens than the theoretical. The Internet and binary media in general offers the potential for measurement and recording in a way we've never been able to do before. Why? Because there's no play on the net. Everything done from the interface to the network must be first translated to digits that can then be accurately recorded and precisely reproduced. Watch five people walk down the sidewalk, and each's feet will take a different path. But, give or take, and enough give to be practically accurate, everyone reading a relatively static web page will see the same thing. More importantly, get someone to retrace their steps on the sidewalk and, even if you measured down to an accuracy of nano-inches, there were still be room for play. On the net, again give or take, there is none; the system requests and nearly always creates a situation in which there is no play. I can exactly reproduce not just the steps, but everyone else's steps at a certain moment in the virtual w/World of Warcraft. Exactly. Each choice breaks down to a digital (as in numeric) decision. Every movement is reduced to a number. Every decision. Everything is reduced to real numbers. Not just numbers, but digits. Easily represented digits. Everything measurable. Everything reproducible exactly. EXACTLY. EVERYTHING. Capiche? It's a seductive power whose proverbial siren song asks us to keep precise ties on what happens just in case. Each measurement is already being taken and it's a trivial addition to record it all. If we could know a priori what Internet traffic -- what numbers, what digits, what zeroes and ones -- were illegal, we, providing the laws are just (as I believe these discussed in CRN much more than likely are), should record them to help make the actions stop. But right now we don't know the difference between child exploitation numbers and the numbers of mailing pictures of grandkids to grandma before the fact. Which is more evil, 3 or 4? Tell me now which number should be disallowed (ignoring for now John Muckelbauer's theory that open 4's are more likely to catch on fire than any other number). We might know a subset of numbers (and a very useful subset -- wasn't this Carnivore?) for which we could filter and which could and arguably should automatically trigger recording, but we don't know them all. The cover discourse certainly doesn't argue well for our collecting every digit. Because there's a long, long spectrum between grandkids and child porn within which there's a number of activities that are not a threat to society, there are numbers that should, in this approximation of a free country, be allowed to stay private. The link between child porn and Internet traffic records might be onto, but it sure ain't one-to-one (do I have that backwards?). Laziness and technical naivety is no excuse for us to trade in our freedoms, maxim or no. Labels: control, digital posted by ruffin at 2/22/2009 01:27:00 PM

It's PowerPC all over again From AppleInsider's "How Intel's battle with NVIDIA over Core i7 impacts Apple": If Apple is forced to go back to Intel platform chipsets in order to use Intel's latest CPUs, it will end up with two separate GPU architectures to support, just as it had prior to last fall: NVIDIA standalone GPUs in its higher-end Pro models, and Intel integrated graphics on the lower end consumer models. Intel's integrated graphics (where the GPU is integrated into the controller chipset) are significantly behind NVIDIA's in performance and do not support OpenCL. Our recent Jobsian history of Apple says that Apple left Motorola and IBM's PowerPC architecture in large part because they couldn't deliver the goods reliably and, as was the case with the G5, iirc, created product delays. Now we see that the x86 world has its own issues. These are the dangers of sourcing components from different mfgrs, I suppose. Too many competitive chefs in the kitchen, it would appear. I wonder how much grease it'll take to get the palms moving on this one. posted by ruffin at 2/22/2009 12:07:00 PM

Thursday, February 19, 2009
NBA Trade Update John Hollinger: Trade grades - ESPN: This is pretty much a non-event in Blazerland -- Diogu didn't play and neither will Ruffin, a physical banger who is one of the most inept offensive players in recent NBA history The name is cursed. Well, at least there's a coincidental similarity on our two very different ability levels. posted by ruffin at 2/19/2009 07:42:00 PM

WWW4MAIL at SZS.NET WWW4MAIL at SZS.NET: "www4mail is an email browser for people who have an email address, but no access to the World-Wide Web (WWW) or to FTP." posted by ruffin at 2/19/2009 05:51:00 PM

It's alive, but it's not reproducing Well, AppleInsider has a "photo of next-gen Apple Mac mini in the wild", but ends their story with this... However, with no official announcement from Apple, and two photos of the same unreleased system making the rounds in as many months, there's an outside chance the company may have recently changed its course for the next-gen Mac mini. It does make you wonder why, if the Mini's been around for so long, it hasn't hit the streets. My best guess is that the Mini is waiting on OS X, but my confidence's shaking a bit. posted by ruffin at 2/19/2009 04:52:00 PM

Monday, February 16, 2009
The failing of DTV Crystal Clear TV, Unless You Live Too Far Away \| Center for Rural Affairs: Digital signals drop off abruptly at the end of their range, whereas analog signals fade out gradually. Well said. posted by ruffin at 2/16/2009 01:38:00 PM

Sunday, February 15, 2009
Consumerist democracy From Living Liberally: He ended with the rousing declaration that we are 'not consumers of democracy, we are its proprietors.' I'm learning to dislike this site. Interesting topics, poorly addressed. Here, if we're going dialectic on consumerist democracy's arse, we're right to resist being placed in the deprivileged position. Wouldn't it be better to leave the metaphor entirely rather than simply assume the privileged position, however? Currently, there's more cache in finding ways to resist from within the traditionally deprivileged position, however, making it a position of strength. Cf. Hardt & Negri, etc. posted by ruffin at 2/15/2009 04:45:00 PM

Saturday, February 14, 2009
Nicely ask a pirate to register, get 10% sales? From Daring Fireball: They got better results with the more personal messages — about 10 percent of would be bootleggers presented with those dialogs clicked the button and immediately bought a legitimate license for the app. But even the staid, impersonal message had a 5 percent sell-through rate — far higher than Panic expected. posted by ruffin at 2/14/2009 11:24:00 PM

iPhone sharing Peek's strategy? I got my Peek earlier this week, and it's an okay device. I like that it doesn't allow me to surf the net [sic], as that tends to keep me on task instead of thumb-typing like a madman. As is, I just went through the battery about twice as quickly as they advertised. I'm going to write that off to emailing and checking email too much, and perhaps working too hard in low-signal areas. (Hint to Peek: When my Peek's locked, you don't have to maintain a constant signal. Go into some sort of sleep mode, and check email much less frequently.) I'd already taken to emailing myself notes about things I want to be able to access everywhere, and the Peek helps out there nicely. The "material" (as opposed to virtual) keyboard is a giant step up from the iPhone, by the way. I hate that iPhone/touch keyboard. The type assist function on the iPhone is great, but I'd rather get the word right by myself. It's not all great -- The original version (v1.04) of the Peek software was, well, lacking, and I've mailed it to NYC to get upgraded (for free). I was also disappointed to find that there's no search whatsoever, not even server side, and that it started pulling emails once I signed up, ignoring everything that came earlier. I'll probably review it later, but that's enough complaining for now. Overall, a useful device. I'd complain it isn't worth $20 a month, but unlimited email and text on my Sprint phone costs more, and then I'd be stuck typing on a 9 digit keypad. Not cool. Now Apple is again rumored to be seeing the wisdom in providing less than 24/7, unlimited data plans. From AppleInsider: The analyst believes Apple will follow a strategy similar to what the company did with the iPod, expanding the market with more choices. Citing sources, Wu predicts several iPhone models with differing feature sets, adding the possibility of a low-cost voice, e-mail, messaging-only plan with no Internet on what he referred to as an 'iPod phone'. I doubt an iPhone would be released without Safari, but I could see a less than always-on, unlimited data plan, especially if that restriction is somehow tied to a different piece of hardware. The first hit of heroin is always heavily discounted, after all. For every person like me, who is happy not to have his or her complete digital life available at the click of a few buttons, there are hundreds or thousands who will try a Peek or stripped down iPhone and decide they need to move up to a Blackberry or iPhone as we know it now. Labels: iphone, peek posted by ruffin at 2/14/2009 08:19:00 AM

Friday, February 13, 2009
Plant 95 acres an hour! Just what you needed! The "World’s Largest Planter: John Deere’s DB120" (from cornAndSoybeanDigest.com): Depending on field conditions, the DB120 should plant 90-100 acres/hour at the recommended 5-5.5 mph, according to Rippchen. Wow. I mean, I knew people had megafarms, but wow. Can you imagine how many acres you'd have to plant to make the capital outlay worthwhile? Some of the additional features boggle my mind. SeedStar 2 monitoring and variable-rate seed drives, pneumatic down force and RowCommand as standard equipment. ... The DB120’s new design eliminates marker arms and instead relies on GPS guidance for planting accuracy. Yours next year for a scant $345,000, tractor not included. Labels: food, Other Stuff posted by ruffin at 2/13/2009 07:28:00 PM

Monday, February 09, 2009
Kindle speaks! Hopefully not as big a let-down as when Blue of Blue's Clues started speaking, Amazon recently added speech to the Kindle (from appleinsider.com): If you want, Kindle 2 will even read to you -- something new we added that a book could never do. That's a better feature than many might think. I've been listening to a number of articles read by my Macintosh using its Speech feature, a feature that hasn't improved much since System, what, 8? Yet the speech quality still turns driving time into relatively productive time. If Kindle can improve on the Mac voices, they'll have something there. The Mac, for instance, stumbles over some difficult words... like the English spelling for "labour". If you took the things that were tough to say and put in carefully honed replacements for those exceptions -- Apple's Speech just plows through every word with generic pronunciation -- I wouldn't buy, but I'd be envious. There's a lot of room around the so far non-existent steno pad sized iPod touch for other apps. I recently eBayed a new Peek myself, precisely because I'd rather limit what I can do away from a traditional computer before I pour my life into the digital garbage more than I already do. (The price is pretty close to right too, even if every Peek review says otherwise.) Update: Ouch. The voice in the movie is not an improvement. Hard code certain words, dang it! Update again: Hrm, now it has a web browser? At $359, still way too much to pay, but getting cooler, even in 16 colors o' grey. Labels: amazon posted by ruffin at 2/09/2009 04:39:00 PM

Saturday, February 07, 2009
Got your DTV converter box? Here's step 2. This blog entry, titled "How to build a HDTV Antenna....CHEAP!" -- if it isn't a hoax -- may be the most important URL on the net for US residents making the switch from OTA analog to digital. I've complained a bit about how bad DTV was with my old rabbit ears that did just fine with analog, and how buying a $40 antenna make me stop complaining (well, largely stop complaining). Let's just say that this... ... looks a lot like this (which is my antenna with twice the receivers)... ... but it's a lot cheaper. Don't get me wrong. I'm still annoyed at how the move to DTV obsoletes so much hardware -- your remote (can't change the converter box's channels), your VCR (have to watch what you're taping, and can no longer preset timed recordings), your portable televisions (hard to add a converter box to your hand-held TV), rabbit ears (discussed already), even to some degree your television (whose tuner is worthless and whose aspect ratio is largely antiquated). Still, if this blog's antenna works, that's a big bonus for those who'd rather than waste $40 on an antenna. Labels: DTV posted by ruffin at 2/07/2009 08:19:00 PM

Kindle undercutting kindle? From AppleInsider: 'We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,' Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener tells the New York Times. 'We are working on that now.' I'm not sure how opening the format helps Amazon. Seems they're trying to follow iTunes' model but missing a step: huge customer momentum bred from an initial period of lock-in. If Kindle hits iPod touch and friends now and Apple makes a slightly larger touch, well, goodbye slight initial Amazon advantage. The slow move to interoperability and open formats is the right one, but it's waaaaaaay too soon for Kindle to do it. Labels: amazon, apple, ipod, iTunes posted by ruffin at 2/07/2009 08:39:00 AM

Thursday, February 05, 2009
How criminal is tainted food? How criminal is it to distribute tainted food? If you're in China and the food is infant formula, it's pretty damn serious (from the Times): Chinese courts sentenced two men to death on Thursday for endangering public safety in a tainted-milk scandal that killed at least six children, according to state-run news media. Three other defendants, including a top dairy company executive, were sentenced to life in prison. Another defendant received a suspended death sentence, and 15 others were given prison terms from 2 to 15 years. LivingLiberally.org connects this with the recent peanut butter recall issue in the US. It's serious, we all know that, but I haven't heard of anyone so much as losing their job yet. The Peanut Corp of America still has their website up, and just yesterday posted another classic rhetoric-only release that included this gem: PCA is second to nobody in its desire to know all the facts, and our team is working day and night to recall affected products and to complete its investigation. That doesn't sound like a company preparing to go under. They might anyhow, but they don't seem to be planning on it. Why is nobody preparing for a criminal trial? Why is nobody facing life in prison for poisoning the nation for a few more bucks? LivingLiberally.org (not that I'm holding them up as a bastion of journalistic integrity) suggests that if they'd so much as ridded their factory of rats, we wouldn't have had this issue. My hyperbolic conclusion, as I'm against killing anybody here (though if you'd killed babies with tainted formula, all bets are off), follows. If cleanliness is next to godliness, the folks responsible at Peanut Corp of America should be headed to hell. posted by ruffin at 2/05/2009 09:05:00 AM

Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Faux public domain Much of what's been posted to archive.org is not in the public domain. And anything that gets pasted into Wikipedia often gets repeated like wildfire with the assumption that Wikipedia contents have also been, give or take, donated for anyone to use. Of course there's very little prevent anyone from pasting copyrighted text in there, at least until someone else bothers to do the very human work of identifying and removing it. (Aside: Does Wikipedia spider through its contents searching for known copyrighted work?) The exploitation of open use hosting sites seems to be a place where [very] petty [marginal] criminals [unwittingly at times?] are laundering copyrighted work. Labels: copyright, online distribution, public domain posted by ruffin at 2/04/2009 12:34:00 PM

Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Flaky connection mode is tooootally lame. You are currently working in Flaky Connection Mode Adding attachments while in Offline or Flaky mode is currently not supported. We know this is tooootally lame. But don't forget, Gmail didn't have basic stuff like drafts when it launched. We'll keep working on it. Funny. I'll give them funny. Labels: gmail posted by ruffin at 2/03/2009 05:05:00 PM

Monday, February 02, 2009
A Cock Crows in Portland - The Atlantic A Cock Crows in Portland - The Atlantic (December 2008): This left Fizzle’s owner, Jennifer Scott, in a bind (“Our neighbors love us dearly,” she said, “but not that much”). It also placed Fizzle firmly in an emerging urban underclass: the homeless rooster." ... “I’ve had grown men in tears because they raised them as babies and they live in the city and can’t have a rooster,” Rushing says from behind the feed-store counter, where a dry-erase board keeps a running tally of Critter Korner’s population, and an orange cat named Mr. Dunn naps amid the day’s paperwork. My first impulse is that these men probably should not own chickens of any sex. ;^) Labels: Other Stuff posted by ruffin at 2/02/2009 07:52:00 PM

Jobs will be missed, leikaiysed AppleInsider \| Heated Christmas call from Jobs secured iTunes changes: 'According to a person briefed on the telephone call, Mr. Schmidt-Holtz and Mr. Jobs had a heated exchange by phone on Christmas Eve,' the Times reported. 'Eventually, Sony gave in and agreed to a longer waiting period.' QED. ;^) PS -- Jobs/Apple is against DRM mainly because its enforcement jeopardizes its bottom line, or at least the predictability of the bottom line, correct? Labels: apple, iTunes, Jobs posted by ruffin at 2/02/2009 03:20:00 PM

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