Blackmoor Vituperative

It looks like the NSA is actually doing something useful for a change, rather than just spying on American citizens.

The T-Mobile G1 will receive a number of minor software improvements in January 2009, according to http://www.googleandblog.com.

(And no, the apostrophe is not a typo.)

Strange days ahead for NASA. They announced a while back that they were going to start relying more on the private sector, and now the Obama collective seem intent on dismantling the agency altogether.

President-elect Obama seems intent on burning down the house of cards that is NASA, presumably to replace it with an agency that can actually design worthwhile missions without wholesale wasting of taxpayer dollars. First, we learned that the transition team has been circling around NASA’s Constellation program.

Now, today I read that Obama is basically going to outsource a good bit of NASA engineering to the Defense Department. Bloomberg reports that Obama may force NASA to use DOD rockets, which will be cheaper and ready sooner than NASA’s planned Ares (right), which isn’t slated until 2015.

And this is all in the context of China’s rapidly advancing space program, which definitely has Pentagon eyebrows raised.

China’s military carried out a spacewalk in 2008, plans to land a robot on the moon in 2012 and a man on the moon thereafter. Meanwhile, the US will be hitching rides with Russia between 2010 when the shuttle is scrapped and 2015 (at the soonest) when Orion is to be launched.

It’s no secret Obama’s team wants to scrap NASA’s Ares rocket. The Pentagon’s Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are “basically developed,” says John Logsdon of the National Air and Space Museum. “You don’t have to build them from scratch.”

(from NASA craft may ride on Pentagon rockets, ZDNet)

Remember Worlds.com? The 3D pioneer is still around and they’re ready to sue. In fact on Christmas Eve, the company sued NCSoft, for violating patent ‘690, a system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.

NCSoft’s games, such as Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars and Lineage, are all said to violate the patent. And NCSoft is just the start. World.com’s IP lawyers feel that they have a “very robust patent,” reports Virtual Worlds News.

(from Worlds.com patent litigation could ripple through virtual worlds, ZDnet)

Even if patents on software were not inherently absurd (and they are), this is a patent on something which had been widely implemented and had even appeared in movies decades before Worlds.com applied for their patent in 2000. Even EverQuest was using virtual avatars for a year prior to Worlds.com’s patent application. Surely the USPTO had heard of EverQuest? How clueless could they possibly be? What technologically illiterate boob signed off on this?

In what may be the most backward suggestion I have heard from Microsoft, they are suggesting making computers more like cell phones — and not in a good way.

You may have noticed that competition and increasing sophistication on the part of consumers is steadily pushing cell phone companies away from the “lock in” model and toward a model where the service and the telephone are entirely separate. This is universally hailed by a good thing by everyone that matters. You might be old enough to remember the bad old days before the AT&T breakup, when the phone company owned your phone, and told you what you could do with it. This is more or less the position cell phone companies are in today, although the pressure to compete is slowly killing off this absurd business model.

Well, Microsoft thinks we should go back to those bad old days when some company could tell you what you could do with your property and when. Remember back in the 1990s, when AOL would give you a $200 rebate on a computer, if you signed up for a year or two of AOL? Microsoft’s idea is just like that, except you wouldn’t be able to use the computer for anything other than AOL — not without paying extra.

Remember back in the 1990s, when Circuit City hatched the Divx scheme, which was an attempt to make it so that every time you watched a DVD, that you would have to pay for it? After all, why pay for something once, when you can pay for it over and over again? Microsoft’s idea is just like that, except rather than losing access to Battlefield Earth if you decide not to pay the rental fee, Microsoft would have you lose your tax records, your business correspondence, and the photos of your grandchildren.

I have a hard time believing that even the dolts at Microsoft are stupid enough to think that this would be a good idea. I think it is more likely that this is a preemptive application to prevent a competitor from patenting the idea, a tactic that only makes sense because of how utterly borked our patent system is.

I have a follow-up on my migration from from Outlook to Thunderbird. I had selected GCALDaemon to keep our Thunderbird calendars in sync with each other, but in use this had a few problems. For one thing, every time GCALDaemon synced, it would freeze Thunderbird. This was annoying. Further, there was some kind of permission problem regarding new calendar events: once created, we couldn’t modify them. This was really the deal-breaker, and why I started looking for an alternative.

So I have uninstalled GCALDaemon and replaced it with the Provider add-on for Thunderbird. This has its advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, it is considerably easier to install than GCALDaemon, although the instructions provided by bfish.xaedalus.net help make it even simpler. On the other hand, it has one drawback which GCALDaemon does not: it has no offline cache. This means that when we don’t have an active Internet connection, we won’t have access to our calendars. However, this is rarely the case, so it’s a drawback I am willing to accept.

So far, everything has gone really well.

Consider visual literacy and grow better media communication. No, Media Nipple isn’t porn, nor is it graphic violence. The Google warning you will see is simply a symptom of how utterly borked our priorities are in the USA.

DefectiveByDesign.org brings us another reason to avoid Apple:

Starting this Black Friday and over the next 35 days leading up to the end of 2008, we want your help in promoting a consumer boycott of Digital Restrictions Management. […] For today, we’ve chosen the first product to be avoided this holiday season — Apple’s MacBook computer. Apple have pushed their DRM agenda even further, with the release of the latest revision of their MacBook laptop computers. The new MacBooks contain a hardware chip that prevents certain types of display being used, in an effort to plug the analog hole.

I am so sick of the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons depicting ordinary consumers as “pirates“. A college student who buys a CD and then shares it with her friends is not a pirate. A single mother who earns $15,000 a year who uses an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop to eke out a living is not a pirate. A gamer who pays good money for Bioshock and then hacks it so that it won’t install a rootkit on his computer is not a pirate. Have they violated a license? Maybe, maybe not — but they are definitely not pirates.

• Pirates hijack ships at gunpoint
• Pirates kill people
• Pirates hold multimillion dollar cargos for ransom

Enough of this “pirate” bullshit. Enough.

I have wanted to get away from Outlook for a number of years now — ever since I dumped Microsoft Office for OpenOffice. So why haven’t I? For the first few years, it was simple expediency: there really was no functional alternative to Outlook. Then, it was convenience: between myself and my spouse, we keep the calendars and address books of three or four desktop machines synchronized by hotsyncing them through my Palm. For the last few years, this task was not feasible with Thunderbird.

However, I recently got a T-Mobile G1, and with its ties to Google, I thought surely that I would find some way of replacing Outlook while still keeping our contacts and calendars all in sync. As it turns out, I did, thanks to some very clever programmers.

Contacts

First off, I installed Thunderbird, Lightning, Enigmail, and gContactSync, and set up Enigmail to use my GPG keys (I won’t go into all of that here, but the Enigmail folks are very helpful getting that up and running).

I then needed to import our contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird. That was fairly simple. I set up gContactSync to synchronize our contacts with Google, and that was that — for the contacts, anyway.

Calendar

Setting up our calendars was a little more complicated. First, I needed to get to get our calendars into Google Calendar. I exported the calendar to a PST file, and then attempted to upload that file to Google. Every time I attempted this, it failed about mid-way through. I kept having to delete the items from the Google Calendar and start over. What finally worked was exporting specific date ranges. I did it year by year, and then individually imported each of those PST files to Google Calendar. This worked perfectly.

Next, I needed to synchronize Thunderbird (actually Lightning) with Google. The way I chose was to use GCALDaemon. GCALDaemon is a cross-platform application that keeps a local iCal repository on your computer, and then periodically syncs that with your Google Calendar. Then, you point Thunderbird at the local iCal file, and there you have it: synchronized calendars.

Once I had my laptop set up, it was very easy to set up our other computers the same way, as well as setting up the G1 to connect to the same Google account (I do not use Gmail for email, but that does not prevent using a Gmail account’s address book).

At last, after far too many years, I have eliminated Outlook from our desktops. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.