Quotulatiousness

April 21, 2010

Just the thing for Pokémon fans

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Nicholas @ 12:53

It’s a mashup of Pokémon and Cthulhu: Pokéthulhu, the free role-playing game:

Amid the sagging gables of old New England, evil lurks . . . and squirms, and scuttles, and purrs. Grownups are fleeing in terror, hiding behind the Elder Sign.

You’re 10 years old. You’re our last hope. Armed with a Shining Dodecahedron and the elder incantations to make it work, you capture the monsters and train them to use their power . . . But not for evil. For sport.

You’ve thrilled to the popular TV show. Now, you can play the game! Is your Shoplifting score good enough to sneak a page from your opponent’s Pokénomicon? Is your trained Jigglypolyp powerful enough to defeat a devolved Fungal Cluster? This is the world of Pokéthulhu, and now it’s yours to save — or conquer!

When copyright goes bad

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

H/T to Cory Doctorow.

“The biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Andrew Orlowski looks at the overwhelming legislative victory for the music industry in the UK:

Back in January, a senior music business figure explained to me that Clause 17, which gave open-ended powers to the Secretary of State, was unlikely to survive the wash-up. But he didn’t much care; the other sections which compelled the ISPs to take action against infringers were good enough. Anything else was a bonus – possibly even a distraction. Yet to the amazement of the music business, web blocking is now legislation.

I think this is a watershed in internet campaigning. It’s not just a tactical defeat, it’s a full-on charge of the light brigade, and the biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business. I’ve spent time talking to legislators and protagonists, and concluded that it was avoidable. Much of the argument was already lost when the Bill was introduced last November, admittedly, but campaigners’ tactics made a bad situation worse. This explodes the idea — sometimes called the ‘Overton Window’ in the jargon — that by adopting an extreme position, you pull the centre ground your way. The digital rights campaigners forced waverers into the music business camp, and hardened their support for tougher measures against file sharers.

In the end, the BPI wiped the floor with the Open Rights Group.

Is the Tea Party movement racist?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:44

An interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how a charge of “racism” works, even when there’s no actual racist action involved:

Blogger Conor Friedsdorf notes that there is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to the Blow approach [. . .]

Or, for that matter, to any nonpolitical institution that aspires to become more inclusive. Imagine Kelly O’Donnell questioning a black man in a largely white company or university or country club or suburb the way she interrogated Darryl Postell. She would come off as clueless and prejudiced — as, come to think of it, she does. (Kudos to NBC for airing this revealing though embarrassing footage.)

The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party.

[. . .]

These charges of racism are partly based on circular reasoning. Among Blow’s evidence that the tea-party movement is racist is “a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday [that] found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic.” Other polls have put the black proportion as high as 5% (and, as Tom Maguire notes, Blow misreports his own paper’s Hispanic figure, which is actually 3%). But with blacks constituting some 12% of the population, there’s no question that the tea-party movement is whiter than the nation as a whole.

Yet to posit racism as an explanation is to ignore far more obvious and less invidious causes for the disparity.

H/T to LibertyIdeals for the link.

April 20, 2010

Exactly

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:54

Cory Doctorow:

The ubiquitous mobile phone in adolescent hands has meant an enormous increase in adolescent freedom to communicate and to form groups to take action. But it’s also meant an unprecedented (and as yet, largely unfelt) increase in the amount of surveillance data available to parents and authority figures, from social graphs of who talks to whom to logs of movement to actual records of calls and texts.

Will we wake up in 20 years and say, “Christ, how could we have spent all that time talking about how kids were sending each other texts without taking note of the fact that we’d given every teen in America his own prisoner tracking cuff and always-on bug?”

My, what a pretty Panopticon we’ve built ourselves . . .

If this doesn’t anger you, there’s something wrong with you

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Kate Kendell looks at how California’s inhumane and paternalistic Sonoma County government “legally” did horrible things to an elderly gay couple:

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold’s “roommate.” The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling.

These men had been married (legally or not) for twenty years, yet the bureaucratic solons of Sonoma County deliberately separated them, stole their joint property, and effectively incarcerated them both in different nursing homes.

The surviving partner has launched a legal action, and I hope his case is decided properly — and that the county and its employees are properly punished for their actions:

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O’Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O’Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

Update, 22 April: According to Radley Balko, Sonoma County has (finally) responded to the report, claiming that the injuries to Harold Scull were actually a result of domestic abuse:

The county says Scull filed a report to that effect, and that the abuse was documented by hospital workers. But the letter adds that no criminal charges were filed against Greene.

I’m not sure what to make of that. I’m not familiar with California law on the matter, but while a report of domestic abuse may be enough to keep Greene from visiting Scull in the hospital (and for that to be a sensible decision), without criminal charges, I don’t know how it allows the county to forcibly intern Greene in a nursing home and auction off all of his belongings. Then again, if the initial lawsuit neglected to mention the domestic abuse report, it’s possible that it also overstated or misstated the county’s actions with respect to Greene’s property and nursing home stay.

QotD: Food porn and subversive humour

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The KFC Double Down makes me despair. Not because of the “sandwich” itself but because of the predictable reaction; in general, if you didn’t know that the thing was made of chicken, bacon, and processed cheese, you would get the impression that it was lovingly constructed from scorpions and poison. [. . .]

But which side in the war between soulless conglomerates and food puritans has irony on its side? KFC has literally rearranged the same ingredients that go into most every other grab-and-go entrée it serves, and gotten rid of the bread, which, guess what, might not be that good for you anyway. The sinister Elders of Tricon, who were surely lit unflatteringly from above in an austere modernist boardroom when they made the decision to create the Double Down, knew perfectly well that it would create panic and horror for no other reason than its configuration. The Double Down is, explicitly and unapologetically, a piece of food comedy.

And all the horrible people — for it seems virtually impossible to talk about food without being horrible — are reacting exactly as planned. The unapologetically paternalistic healthitarians, the grease-sweating Warcraft-playing fast-food reverse-snobs, the one-idea-in-their-whole-head theorists of food salvation, the paleos and the Pollanites, the narcissistic Nietzscheans who look at cheese as though it was about to go critical any second but will buy whatever’s new on the shelves at the GNC without so much as looking at the label . . . all the people, in short, who routinely insist on adulterating the pleasure of eating, and that includes, most of all, the types who’ve imbibed too much M.F.K. Fisher and who write pornographically about the “pleasure of eating” as if they were zooming a powerful camera in on an open mouth furiously masticating a mouthful of gnocchi.

Colby Cosh, “The Double Down: your move, America”, Macleans, 2010-04-20

No wonder that “sexy librarian” meme got started

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

It’s all there in the 1992 study, recently made available on the web:

A 1992 survey of 5,000 U.S. librarians, long withheld by a professional journal, found one in five respondents had engaged in sexual trysts among the stacks.

Will Manly, who said the New York-based Wilson Library Bulletin withheld the results of his survey in 1992, published results recently on his Web site indicating 51 percent of librarians in the early 90s were willing to pose nude for money and 61 percent of respondents admitting to renting an X-rated film, the New York Daily News reported Monday.

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

Apple officially asks for their missing iPhone back

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

I guess Gizmodo did get their hands on something genuine, as Apple has sent a letter formally asking for the device to be returned to them:

Gizmodo says it has now received a letter from Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel Bruce Sewell:

“It has come to our attention that Gizmodo is currently in possession of a device that belongs to Apple. This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let us know where to pick up the unit.”

Gizmodo says the iPhone 4G/iPhone HD — take your pick — was left in a German beer garden (we like those details) called Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood. Speculate what you will about this: how convenient this kind of intense interest is for Apple, whether this is a fake, the various ways in which infamously secretive Apple might retaliate against the hapless prototype phone-loser Gray Powell — or, as the well-connected John Gruber says, why Gizmodo paid $5,000 for the phone which was stolen from Apple.

Given that almost any device Apple introduces is greeted with hosannas and hallelujahs from the fanboy crowd, it does seem unlikely that this is a deliberate attempt by Apple to create or increase public interest in their next iPhone release.

25 years on, the “Hackers” bestride the globe

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:34

Steven Levy revisits some of the people he profiled in his book Hackers, back in the Pre-Cambrian period of the geek revolution:

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.

I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people.

I must have read Hackers during my first or second semester in college, as I tried to figure out how to get out of the series of dead-end jobs I’d had since leaving school. I found strong echoes of many of the characters Levy portrayed in the people I encountered in my first few “high tech” jobs, although I don’t think any of them have managed to become billionaires yet.

Americans’ eroded right to be free from invasive searches

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

John Perry Barlow shared a link to this Washington Times editorial, which clearly illustrates how the US federal government has managed to undermine Americans’ right to privacy:

Federal security workers are now free to snoop through more than just your undergarments and luggage at the airport. Thanks to a recent series of federal court decisions, the digital belongings of international fliers are now open for inspection. This includes reading the saved e-mails on your laptop, scanning the address book on your iPhone or BlackBerry and closely scrutinizing your digital vacation snapshots.

Unlike the more common confiscations of dangerous Evian bottles and fingernail clippers, these searches are not being done in the name of safety. The digital seizures instead are part of a disturbing trend of federal agencies using legal gimmicks to sidestep Fourth Amendment constitutional protections. This became clear in an April 8 court ruling that found admissible the evidence obtained by officials who had peeped at a passenger’s laptop files at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Didn’t you guys fight a war a couple of hundred years back over the 18th century equivalent of this kind of thing?

April 19, 2010

Gizmodo examines what might be the next iPhone

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:49

A lost iPhone prototype or pre-production model, or a really convincing fake, has fallen into the hands of Gizmodo:

What’s new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×640 display thrown around before — it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

New iPhone on the left, existing iPhone 3GS on the right.

H/T to daveweigel for the link.

Sometimes simple ideas are best

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

A case where super-sizing is a good thing:

The product was inspired by a marine who, while serving in Somalia in 1993, thought it an obvious thing to have large size wipes. But there was no such product on the market. So the ex-marine took the idea to a friend who ran a gym, who then developed the product and found someone to manufacture it. All that took fifteen years, from the time the sweaty marine in Somalia got the idea.

Klenz Showers is a towel sized (2×4 feet/61x122cm) baby wipe. It was designed so that the package containing it fit into the pockets of field uniforms. The Klenz Showers wipe was large enough to clean yourself up, and feel refreshed. There was no scent, but there was aloe, so that the wipe helped heal the usual scrapes troops accumulated out in the bush. To keep the Klenz Showers light, you have to add four ounces (120ml) of water before using.

In the last two years, the Klenz Showers have become a major boost to morale, and cleanliness, for troops in Afghanistan, where many of them are out in the hills for weeks at a time. After ammo, water, batteries and food, the troops want their Klenz Showers packets.

Once you get past the initial “Dude, it’s a baby wipe” reaction, this is actually a really good idea.

April 17, 2010

Busy

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 14:54

In my traditional manner, I’m just starting to do the books for 2009. I doubt there’ll be much blogging for today, as a result.

April 16, 2010

Wargame company accused of “simulat[ing] violent combat”

Filed under: Gaming, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:19

<sarcasm>I know, I know, it’s shocking to discover that a wargaming company produces games that “simulate violent combat“. You’d think they’d realize that nobody is actually interested in violence or combat, and especially not “violent combat”, as this game is alleged to glorify:</sarcasm>

One player racks up points by defeating Native American tribal leaders, the other by snuffing out settlements of English colonists. Capture Boston or Plymouth Colony? Victory is yours.

That’s the gist of “King Philip’s War,” a board game based on a bloody and violent clash of the same name between colonists and Indian tribes in 17th-century New England, and developed by a company partly owned by former major league pitcher Curt Schilling.

The game’s designer says he hopes to educate children and others about a war that cost thousands of lives but receives scant attention in history books. But some Native Americans want the game blocked from release, saying it trivializes the conflict and insensitively perpetuates a stereotype of Indian tribes as bellicose savages.

The people getting all hot and bothered by this are clearly people who’ve never even seen a board wargame.

Given that the game wasn’t going to see publication until MMP got enough orders to justify printing and distributing it, I suspect this will end up being another Streisand Effect in operation.

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