Blackmoor Vituperative

The Free Software Foundation has a new educational campaign, and in a shift from previous efforts, it is more openly negative about the costs and morality (or lack thereof) of closed-source software. This is the Windows 7 Sins campaign, and it looks like the mainstream media might actually be picking up on it (if only to heckle).

Personally, I think this is an interesting effort, and I hope that it achieves positive results. I define “positive results” as an increase in the number of people who convert to Linux (what the FSF stubbornly persists in calling “GNU/Linux”), and a decrease in the number of people who continue to blindly hand Microsoft their money.

If anyone needed a reminder that the Bush years were bad for the United States and bad for what America stands for, Dick Cheney is doing a pretty good job providing it.

I said it before and I will say it again: I think it is refreshing to have an administration that doesn’t consider itself above the law.

In a surprisingly even-handed article, MSNBC writer Mike Stuckey provides an interesting overview of the recent furor over firearms near the president, and how various groups perceive the impact of these events.

It does rather display the open contempt that some people have for our basic civil liberties. For example, a fellow named Jim Kessler (of Third Way, the successor organization to the anti-self-defense group Americans for Gun Safety), is quoted as saying that openly carrying firearms near the town halls is the sort of thing done by “a very tiny faction of the extreme right wing that’s a real paranoid conspiracy theorist group.”

Wow. So, to this fellow, peacefully exercising a basic civil right is evidence that you think The X-Files is a documentary. I confess, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the thought process that produces that kind of assertion. You know, if anything, I would think that paranoid conspiracy theorists would be afraid to go anywhere near the President.

What I like most about this article is the quote from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs:

The White House, hoping to allay fears of a security threat, has said that people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. “Those laws don’t change when the president comes to your state or locality,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

The laws don’t change because the president comes to town? Maybe it makes me an “extreme right wing paranoid conspiracy theorist”, but I think it is refreshing to have an administration that doesn’t consider itself above the law.

According to the site TorrentFreak:

The ISP that supplied much of The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth before cutting them off yesterday, is reporting that it has been sabotaged. Calling in experts and the police, Black Internet says the attack on them is intentional and has caused substantial damage.

This makes me sad. It certainly does not reflect well on those who would see our current cartel-controlled copyright system reformed. Why attack Black Internet? They’re a victim of these thugs just as much as The Pirate Bay.

According to a new report on ZDNet, the SCO group won an appeal in its copyright case. In case you are wondering if this will halt or reverse the inexorable death spiral of SCO, or if it has any repercussions for the Unix/Linux world… it won’t, and doesn’t. All this means is that SCO owes money to Novell, and that SCO should have had a trial before they lost in Utah, rather than a summary judgment.

Bottom line: SCO will waste more of its investors money beating this dead horse. For Novell, it means a few more pennies, and for the rest of the Linux world, it’s a footnote in the history books.

An amusing anecdote from the department head of the Computer Science department of Purdue University, one of the world’s experts on network security:

Bottom line: providing Facebook any access to email addresses at all is like Roach Motel — they go in, but there is no way to get them out. And Facebook’s customer service and interfaces leave a whole lot to be desired. Coupled with other complaints people have had about viruses, spamming, questionable uses of personal images and data, changes to the privacy policy, and the lack of any useful customer service, and I really have to wonder if the organization is run by people with any clue at all.

I certainly won’t be inviting anyone else to join Facebook, and I am now recommending that no one else does, either.

(from More customer disservice—This time, Facebook, CERIAS)

Makes me glad that I do not have a Facebook account.

Wow. This is the most blatant yellow journalism that I personally have ever seen. “There are questions about whether there are racial overtones… white people showing up with guns…” while (apparently) deliberately editing the video to hide the fact that the fellow with the rifle (and it’s just a rifle, there’s nothing special about it) was black.

I have to wonder if the people talking on screen even knew. Certainly the producer of the show did — that’s their job.

This is not Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews or some other “shock jock”… this is the “real” news, at least in theory. I know that what we see on TV is edited, and to some degree even the news is fabricated for ratings… but come on. This is way beyond the pale. Or at least, I hope it is. Maybe I am just naive.

If you would like aliases to work when you use sudo (for example, so that when you type sudo ls, your directory listings are in color, assuming you set up an alias for ls="ls --color=auto"), add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

# Enable aliases when using sudo.
alias sudo='sudo ' # Note the trailing space.

Credit for this goes to Curtis Free. Thanks, Curtis.

I discovered why the tabs in Firefox suddenly started moving themselves to new windows — and I found an addon to disable this annoying new feature.

A letter I sent this morning to the governor and my state representatibes:

It has come to my attention that Hamilton Beach, which is headquartered in Richmond, practices blatant employment discrimination.

In their listing for an opening for IS Windows/Storage Administrator (posted on their web site 2009-08-09), they state:

“We do not consider candidates who use tobacco products.”

I do not use tobacco products myself, but I strongly believe that no employer has the right to ask about an applicant’s off-hours activities or to exclude them from consideration for legal, private, off-hours behavior. We are already subjected to the humiliation of so-called “drug testing” by nearly every potential employer — must we now submit to even more invasions of our privacy for the privilege of earning an honest living?

Please introduce legislation which makes ALL invasions of an applicant’s privacy by a potential employer illegal.

As if “drug testing” applicants was not bad enough…