numbersix

Cloned baby flies into US. Wondering if she will be travelling on her mother's passport :)

It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for. - Fortune

Norman Mailer on the 'War on terrorism' and Iraq :
Part I
Part II

just discovered a neat feature of the MacOSX terminal - you can drag highlighted text to other applications/windows. you even get a copy of the text under the mouse cursor while you're dragging. still not sure if i prefer this to the x windows highlight / paste, will have to experiment....

excellent article in the Guardian on where North Korea fits into current world politics.

'The more I practice, the luckier I get.' - Jack Nicklaus

interesting article in the Independent about Spain's ID card system.

www.bash.org - glad i found this again, very funny indeed.

"The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd wargamed against" - Lt Gen William Wallace, US ground commander in Iraq.

at last i find themes for OSX - http://www.resexcellence.com/themes/. don't get me wrong, I think Aqua is ok, i just get a little irritated with the notion that Apple knows best and that you should just go along with their ideas of what your desktop should look like, especially if they insist on making everything brushed metal. sorry guys, but when I spend 8+ hours a day staring at it, I would like to have control over what it looks like. that's what i like so much about blackbox on my BSD machine, in fact pretty much any other UNIX wm. sheesh, even windows is customisable from that point of view.

Thought about doing this myself over the last few weeks : http://www.iraqometer.com/. Be sure to read the about section. cheers to Ben for the link.

ABC is reporting that the US troops in Iraq are being asking to pray for George Bush. Sunday's prayer is "Pray that the President and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding". I have to say I agree with the last part.

TheRegister are running a very interesting piece on the problems Al Jazeera are having with their English web site. Again we see double standards at work, the very people who are spouting freedom of speech are doing their utmost to twist that to mean freedom of speech as long as we agree with it. Even if Al Jazeera were peddling lies and untruths (which I do not see is the case), does anyone have the right to stop them doing it?

Attended a very interesting talk by Tim O'Reilly last night. I found it a little rambling, and sometimes hard to follow his train of thought. However he has a lot of interesting ideas, and a sound, balanced view of open source and the Internet, something that seems rare even in the open source community.

Some links that came out of it :

- The Importance of Perl an essay Tim wrote in 1998 explaining how Perl fits into the Internet

- foundation for information policy research, particularly the link to information about the recent proposed European Union Copyright Directive and software patents that threatens bad things.

- Small Pieces Loosely Joined

- The Sole of a New Machine - The story of a group of engineers designing and building a mini computer in the 1970's

George Bush has pledged 200 million dollars to fight famine in Africa. Sounds like a lot until you realise that he will spend 250 million on his re-election campain. Interesting piece about Bush's African roadshow.

How many times have you read the phrase "Small enough to fit into your pocket" when oogling some new fangled gadget? What they don't tell you is that this new one will have to be the size of a pin head if it has any chance of sharing that pocket space with all the other "small enough to fit into your pocket" gadgets you already have.

Only Windows (XP) would have a green reboot button. "Yes this is a good thing, do it often."

A list of senator Bush's accomplishments since he failed to be elected by a majority. Makes for interesting reading. 'spect to father Ben for the heads up.

Dr Robert M. Bowman directed all the "Star Wars" programmes under presidents Ford and Carter, and flew 101 combat missons during the US's war with Vietnam. You would maybe expect his view on world terrorist problems to be in line with the current US government's. I was surprised at what he has to say. The piece was originally written after the attacks on Sep 11.

How to pipe standard output into the OSX copy buffer :

cat foo.txt | pbcopy

And then to grab it again :

pbpaste > bah.txt

Now that is cool! From ./

At last I can play avis under OSX - VideoLAN

"The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership."

And they wonder why they are so unpopular at the moment. A similarly named site has information on who is behind these bizarre, disturbing, messianic ramblings.

Thanks to T for the link.

I find it unbelievable that people aren't making a bigger fuss about British Airways' decision to decommission the Concorde. The sole reason they have come to the decision is that the company is not efficient enough to fly it. There is nothing wrong with the plane itself, given or sold to a better company it still has a good few years flight in it. Virgin Airways' boss Richard Branson has already tried to get hold of the planes before they are broken up or given to museums. This beautiful piece of engineering deserves better. A further example of the pathetic measures BA resorts to in an effort to stay in business. Even the BBC appear to be playing dumb.

This is a frightening account of what happens when you say something on a web site that the powers that be don't like.

"The important task is for America to advance a conception of justice that is acceptable to the large majority of Muslims ... this is more important than dropping bombs on Afghanistan, freezing financial assets, or beefing up security at airports."

James Kurth, Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College

"Make toys at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes, that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles." - this looks really good fun, for instance
Building a simple crystal radio from things commonly found around the house. I'm definately going to have a go at this. Link from Zen Internet's newsletter, my ADSL provider (of all places).

Wired has an interesting article on Australia's recently completed electronic voting system. The system was designed to be open to anyone who wishes to see the internals, and the code has been published on the Internet. What a refreshing change from the news about the American e-voting manufacturers Diebold, who operate a completely closed system, who's chief executive is a major fundraiser for the Republican party, who have been accused of purposely leaving back doors in their system, and who are now being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for trying to silence debate on the subject.

Could you ask for a more perfect example of the power of the open source philosophy? And a more blatant example of why the US should think twice about pointing at themselves as the world's embassadors of democracy.

"On September 7th, 2003, President Bush announced on national television that he was asking the Congress to grant him an additional $87 billion dollars for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1, to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But $87 billion is an impossibly high number for anyone to visualize. Let's have a look...."

Ta Nick for the link.

Great headline in the Independent about that stupid fool doing a PR stunt in the lead up to the elections.

Try putting 'miserable failure' into google and selecting the 'I feel lucky' button. How true.

http://www.getusout.org/

"Imagine being held prisoner in a foreign land and tried in an international court with judges from such countries as Afghanistan, China, or Iraq."

Imagine being captured in your own country, shipped to a foreign land, and held for over 2 years without being told the reason, or being granted any of the rights laid out by the Geneva convention.

"Fact: The United Nations (financed by American taxpayers!) has long been a safe harbor for terrorist and oppressive regimes which target America as the enemy."

Fact : The US owes the UN $1.3 billion in back payments. I hardly call that being funded by the US tax payer.

Utter rubbish.

Very interesting article in the Guardian today about alternative economic models for developing medicine.

Drug companies usually fall back on the 'drugs cost a lot to develop' excuse, but apparently - "Only about 10% of the price of a drug goes to pay for research on new products, and three-quarters of new drugs have no significant therapeutic benefit over existing treatments, implying that perhaps only 2-3% of the money collected from drug sales is spent on developing medicines better than the ones we already have."

"Supporting the existing policy direction for drugs is indefensible, especially after the November 2001 Doha declaration of the WTO that health was more important than intellectual property." - indeed.

Particularly interesting for me is the mention of Open Source software development methods as an example of how things could be done in medecine development.