Conservative Republicans

Hoho, this is rich. A man who did fuck all of any substance whilst he was leader of the conservatives is now lecturing on what the party must do to make itself electable. Never mind the fact that he was so bland that he actually got asked by the doorman to prove his identity at a Conservative Christmas party, he also seems to have missed the huge surge of Anti-American feeling that Bush has managed to engender across Europe (and particularly in the UK).

He has missed the recent studies showing that the British believe more attention should be paid to strengthening our relations with Europe rather than with America. He's missed the very strong comparability between New Labour and the Republicans. He's also missed the fact that we're a different country that would never elect Bush by virtue of having a much smaller population of ill-informed voters.

Mainly though, what he's missing is that he's a complete and utter fuckwit who's ability to galvanise and inspire a political party is just slightly worse than the average goat's ability to rollerblade.

Google Desktop Search

Bless their little cotton socks... Google have released a beta version of a Desktop Search tool... it indexes your hard-drive in the same way Google indexes the internet. It's fantastic - no more spending ten minutes whiles Microsoft Find churns through your files... instead, you type in your search (after a relatively brief indexing period) and it gives you all the matching documents. Future versions of the tool promise more file formats supported - PDF would be a big hit, I think. I hate Adobe Acrobat with a flaming passion.

In other news, Sid Meier's Pirates! has been released. I loved the original when I was a youngster... my uncle and I spent many hours comparing our progress. This version is - well, it's okay. It's pretty addictive, but I honestly can't tell you why. It suffers from 'subgame syndrome'... there are so many activities that they all have to be pretty shallow, and the whole suffers as a result. There's a turn based strategy game when you attack cities, a real time strategy game when you attack ships, and a DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION game when you go ballroom dancing[1]. I'd advise people to give it a try, but it doesn't have any of the charm of the original.

[1] Yeah, ballroom dancing. What the fuck?

DWP Crash and Burn

Wow... talk about a bad day. A test upgrade on seven computers which manages to cripple another 60,000. Why does something like this never happen to Mastercard?

Dear Linux Nazis

This is why the world hates you.

I mean, talk about a downer... 'here's your Christmas card, plus the operating system that I like using and feel an obsessive need to force onto everyone else... now I can legitimately pester you about buying into my thought-cult in a way that I can't if I rely on you having some actual desire to try out the platform'.

Don't get me wrong... I'd feel the same about someone sending a bible with every christmas card, or a copy of the Koran (although that opens up some fairly interesting internal conflict that could add a delicious hint of irony to the whole thing).

If people want to try out the operating system, they can... it's free[1], after all. Regardless of how you package a personalised Linux distribution, you're still going to come across as an evangelical nutter who Just Doesn't Get It. After all, how much Goodwill do AOL get sent their way on a daily basis? :-P

[1] Insert usual caveat about linux only being free if your time is worthless.

Fastar Intarweb

I don't know why they keep doing it, but my ISP is offering a second speed upgrade to my internet connection... I got a mail this morning pointing me to this.

I'd like to think that it's a trade-off for the phenomenally bad customer support, but it's probably just a cynical ploy to hook me on a super-fast connection before they take it away, leaving me cold and trembling on the streets and giving hand-jobs to syphilitic sailors in exchange for connection costs.

Anyway, good news to start my day. Will it get better or worse from here? I haven't checked the news yet, so the smart money is on 'worse'.

More Ohio News

The allegations keep on coming.

Ooo

I'm a sci-fi geek at heart, and all you need to say to me is space elevator to get me thinking of a glistening future of powerful technologies. The fact that NASA is seriously looking into building a moon elevator is great news.

Sure, it's not as useful as an Earth elevator would be, but that's not really the point. What was the point of going to the moon (except for the new technology it incidentally opened up to us)? The journey to the moon had far more power as a symbol than as a genuine feat of advancement. The fact that NASA has, for decades, been content to deal with only those aspects of space that are nearest to our reach, is a constant frustration. Of course there are 'better' uses for money than funding great voyages of exploration through our solar system... but we as a race become spiritually impoverished if our wings are clipped.

Kennedy said First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth., and that was the starting pistol for a decade of inspiration. People tend to assume that NASA stopped reaching because people lost interest - really though, I suspect the inverse is true... people lost interest because NASA stopped reaching.

Even if it's a fanciful, far-fetched notion... I suspect building a space elevator on the moon would be enough to make people sit up and take notice again.

Pupils scared by asteroid spoof

Now this sounds like a school assembly worth attending:

He had told the year nine students that the asteroid was on a "collision course".

It is also believed that the students were told that they should go home and say "final farewells" to their families.

And then:

Head Mr Hogan said: "Obviously I regret the fact that any student was distressed by the content and delivery of the assembly.

"However, I am confident that the head of year acted appropriately and professionally in dealing with the incident.

Isn't that great? The head of the year tells his students that they're all going to die in a fiery cataclysm, and the headmaster says 'I'm confident that this was appropriate'. The message of the assembly was to 'seize the day'... nothing like an Extinction Level Event to make people glad they're alive. :-P

I'm just curious though that the headmaster felt that this was appropriate. Next step: Sodomising underage boys to teach them the importance of safe sex. An entirely appropriate action considering the endemic spread of STDs in the nation's youth.

UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count

It's Florida next on the Election Questions front. It's great to see though that this time people aren't just going to blindly accept the results when there are genuine causes for concern and questions left unresolved.

Majority of Ohio Provisional Ballots Legitimate

11 counties have reported in with their counting of valid provisional ballots, and it turns out to be pretty bad news for Kerry... assuming that Greg Palast is correct and that the majority of spoiled and provisional votes were going to him, it turns out that with an average validity of 81% Kerry will need around 83.6% of the votes to have been in his favour (I wrote a little 'how lucky do we have to get' program to calculate this for me). That's not insurmountable considering how overwhelming the Kerry trend is in certain demographics, but it's far from the 'slam-dunk guarantee' that would bring light to our otherwise dark and painful futures.

Oh well. Here's hoping.

Band Aid 20

Jesus... talk about a come down. They've remade the classic 'Do They Know It's Christmas Time' with a bunch of manufactured boy/girl band mediocrities. The great thing about the original was that it was genuinely talented individuals coming together for a common cause that brought attention to a human tragedy of epic proportions.

This one just smacks of a cynical cash-in... it's like 'I'm a celebrity, get me out of here'... pointless non-entities trying to embiggen[1] themselves through self-aggrandising opportunism. It's just cheapening the legacy of Live Aid, which was a truly amazing event that resonates deeply in anyone who is old enough to remember it. The thought that this band of talentless nobodies is going to attempt the same thing as the talent that made up the original Band Aid is deeply upsetting. Sure, the original cast had its mediocrities too... but those were the exception. I suppose it's no worse in real terms than Band Aid 2, although even that had Chris Rea and... well, Chris Rea.

[1] It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Ohio Recount

I don't want to get my hopes up (I was hurt so very badly on November 2nd), but it looks like a recount in Ohio is a sure thing. This is great news, because Greg Palast has pointed out some serious election mishandling in the Buckeye state, and the well known pollster organisation Zogby has raised other trouble issues about the integrity of the polling data versus the rather odd distribution of Republican votes..

Dylan the Iconoclast

It's great to know that words written 40 years ago by one of the greatest lyricists of all time still have the power to upset the government. I guess you can't say anything about the Secret Service here - they have an obligation to investigate threats of violence against the president. It's the ones willing to call in the government over students exercising their right to free speech that should go take a giant leap into Clue Canyon.

Iraq Tells Media to Toe the Line

Further evidence that great progress is being made in Iraq. What a shame that the progress is towards a state of absolute chaos with occasional interjections of martial law, brutal counter-offensives against insurgents that are no longer there, and a state aparatus that restricts freedom of the press and turns journalism into little more than a propoganda engine for the US Junta.

Welcome to Democracy, Iraq.

A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio

This is encouraging news... especially when you juxtapose it with Greg Palast's latest article. Kerry himself has sent lawyers down to Ohio to see what's going on with the provisional ballots.

I should say, I would love it if these efforts turned Ohio blue - it probably won't, of course, because the Republicans have an astonishing degree of control over the way these ballots will be assessed. But let's say there's a miracle (and after the horrendous results, I think we're owed one)... in a genuine Democracy, Kerry still shouldn't be president. It strikes me as indicative of an immensely unfair system that the will of 150,000 voters in Ohio should be able to overturn the will of 3 million in other states. Even so, I can't see myself bitching about narrowly avoiding four years of darkness.

It's very amusing that Bush claims that he is bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe you should think about playing the home-town concert before your band hits the road, George.

EA Spouse

This is a pretty interesting article about the way EA Games treats its employees. I can't say it's particularly surprising in the current corporate culture, but considering how EA swallows up all competition like a hyper-inflated Pacman on steroids, it's pretty disturbing that they feel the need to push their staff to such extremes. Where do you go if you don't want to work for the Beast?

Sorry Everybody

This is a great site... but really guys, it's not you we're blaming. You guys rock. It's the gay-hating, reactionary, xenophobic, anti-Islamic, Christian-right warmongers that are the problem.

I think my favourite message is on page 8: 'Dear world: Sorry we shat on your heart. Sincerely, America'.

Arafat

I have mixed feelings about Arafat's death. On the one hand, once a terrorist... and with him out of the way it's possible that the Palestinians may be able to start to move forward without the weight of an Israeli shill[1] around their necks. On the other hand, for all his many flaws he was an internationally recognised figure, and I'm not sure there's anyone else who has the charisma to really hold things together.

It's been a strange time for Israel and Palestine. Sharon's vocal support for the plan to withdraw Settlers from the disputed territories was surprising, but in a less surprising turn of events he has said that he wants to unilaterally strip Palestinians of land they want for their state. Sharon's support for the settler withdrawal seems to have been just a political convenience - a way of showing the US that he's willing to play ball and do what it takes to appear willing to compromise. But in a speech later, Sharon said he was resolved to press ahead with a withdrawal of Jewish settlers from occupied Gaza in 2005, citing a prized U.S. promise to let Israel keep swathes of the West Bank in the process.

It's likely that Arafat's death is going to be a pivotal moment. I just fear that it's going to further distance Palestine from the state that is legally (according to the UN) and morally theirs. The death of a terrorist (even one turned statesman[2]) is not a cause for mourning... but Arafat was more than just a corrupt and nepotistic anachronism. He was a symbol, both national and international, of the Palestinian struggle. He was undoubtedly a poor excuse for a leader, but the Palestinians have lost their most recognisable standard-bearer.

[1] You may already have an inkling, but I'm not so much about the whole 'don't speak ill of the dead' thing.
[2] Terrorist turned statesman... just like Sharon. Although perhaps more correctly in Sharon's case, it is 'terrorist turned statesman (with a sideline in terrorism)'.

American Retribution

Way to win the hearts and minds, America.

Dear Republicans

What the fuck is wrong with you all? Are you fucking stupid? Can you really not see how bad your fucking candidate is?

I know the election hasn't 'officially' been called... but let's not kid ourselves. Kerry got worked, and Bush has won in a landslide. Jesus, what does this guy have to do to convince you that he's dangerous?

Four more years of darkness. Four more years of reactionary warmongering, lies & deceits & half-truths. Four more years of nepotistic war profiteering, of civil liberties being eroded and extreme agendas being pushed without the fear of re-election. Four more years of mishandling the fight against terrorism. Four more years of unilateral meddling in the Middle-East in an attempt to gain a stranglehold on oil resources.

Four more years.

Four more years.