Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?

Another enty from PR Watch‘s Spin of the Day:

Tuesday, September 3, 2002
“Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?”
George Hesselberg, columnist with the Wisconsin State Journal, is fed up with all the government and media hype for war on Iraq. He excoriates the ignorance of US citizens as reflected in recent surveys but asks, “What do you expect in a country where … the media seem to spend more money printing fast-fading flags and producing flag-waving promotions than on researching and reporting the actual degradation of rights, even the dissolution of rights, among citizens. … Isn’t it odd that government leadership is so rabidly intent on invading Iraq that it appears more attention is being paid to overthrowing a nation’s psyche (our own) by zealous public relations than accumulating any solid evidence such an invasion is necessary? … We wait and wait for someone in charge to ask: Invade Iraq? Are you nuts? We wait and wait for the media to stop showing deference and start showing some defiance. … Is it a measure of cynicism if we think that this is an attempt to take everyone’s attention away from endemic regulator-ignored corporate criminality? Or to keep people from noticing that a human-rights-stomping religious fanatic may be running the Justice Department?” Source: Wisconsin State Journal, September 3, 2002

In last nights news, I saw Tony Blair arguing that the allies should be supporting the United States in their actions against Iraq. I wonder what it took to buy him off; the UK was against the invasion, weren’t they?

I don’t believe that Iraq has any more weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, or biological) than Canada does. I guess the United States will be invading us next.

Seriously, Iraq has been under severe sanctions, and a microscope, for over a decade. I’d be far more nervous about the goings on in other parts of the world that we aren’t paying attention to. What would the world be like if the Russian Mafia had smallpox?

posted at 11:23 am on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 in General | Comments Off on Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?

I’ll trackback yours if you trackback mine…

I’m writing about -What She Really Thinks-, +Perverse Access Memory+, because she’s testing trackbacks (and I’m feeling playful).

MovableType, and now others, have implemented Trackbacks, a method of keeping track of references to a blog entry, and thus keeping track of a conversation across multiple separate sites. Pretty Cool.

posted at 10:01 pm on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 in General | Comments (2)
  1. Trackback Test
    The Blog of Harald Other people are having trouble with my trackbacks, so this is a test entry…

  2. Pay It Forward
    The Harald helped me test Trackback, so I’m returning the favor. Thanks, Harald (and Kieran and Brad).

Niggardly!

andersja’s blog: American Political Correctness & the word “Niggardly”

A wonderful essay on language, and ignorance, and political correctness, and the wrongs that result. I couldn’t have said it better myself (so I won’t).

posted at 9:15 pm on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 in General | Comments (4)
  1. andersja says:

    Hi Harald, and thanks for your positive feedback :-) I’m sure the follow-up will interest you as well.

    Please note it seems something is wonky with your Movable Type installation; the TrackBack pings are not registered (maybe your MT install doesn’t reply properly? I don’t know) so other people pinging you send the ping over and over (I see it has happened before to you as well). Try to write a test-article and ping yourself to see if you experience similar problems; then head over to the MT support-forum at movabletype.org :-)

  2. Harald says:

    It turns out that my webserver is too slow. It takes ~25 seconds for my site to process a trackback ping; the MT timeout is set to only 10 seconds. So I receive the ping and process it (eventually), but you don’t get the reply fast enough, and so retry.

    10 seconds is way to short, IMHO. Network delays and heavily loaded servers could easily add that much delay.

  3. Emptying the Dictionary
    Our dictionarys are about to become empty! Every day a new word is tagged as being politically incorrect, rendering them useless and effectively putting a ban on them. Main Entry: political correctness Function: noun Date: 1990 : conformity to a belief…

  4. Mixed reactions on my “niggardly”-posting
    After I wrote the posting about the controversial word ”niggardly” last night, I must admit I expected at least some mild flaming… So far, four people have voiced their opinions (and diverging they are as well :-)

Too Many Programmers?

The IT rust belt

Apparently there are too many programmers in the world; thanks to globalisation and the Internet, we North Americans are now competing for jobs with Pacific Rim programmers who work harder for less. Similar things happened to US factory workers 20 years ago.

Yikes!

posted at 10:20 am on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 in General | Comments Off on Too Many Programmers?

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World

Quoted from the Spin of the Day at PRWatch:

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World

“The next time an overly friendly blond sidles up in a crowded bar and asks you to order her a brand-name martini, or a cheery tourist couple wonder whether you can take their picture with their sleek new camera-in-a-cell phone, you might want to think twice,” warns Daniel Eisenberg. “There’s a decent chance that these strangers are pitchmen in disguise, paid to oh-so-subtly pique your interest in their product.” Eisenberg examines the growing use of “stealth marketing” — covert product placements. No longer content to place their products on TV shows and movies, marketers are planting shills in bars, restaurants and other places, blurring the line between advertising and real life. Source: Time magazine, September 2, 2002

I find it hard to believe that this could be cost-effective…

posted at 9:42 am on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 in General | Comments (1)
  1. Anita Kilgour says:

    You’d be surprised – it will work with the single *best* method of advertising known to man – word of mouth.

    I suspect the bubbly blonde can cause more WoM advertising than an ad for much less.

Initial impressions of Netscape 7.0

Here are my initial impressions:

  • It’s a memory pig, like most modern software. My 128Mb laptop has trouble keeping other processes in memory while I’m browsing.
  • I like tab browsing. Unfortunately, a key configuration option from Mozilla, that forces target=”_blank” windows into a new tab instead of a new window, is missing. So is the option that disabled unrequested pop-ups; I doubt that’s a coincidence. Maybe AOL likes pop-up ads :-)
  • The jury’s out on the sidebar. On the one hand, it’s nice to have a bunch of stuff available there (like my blogroll). On the other hand, the interface seems clunky to me, and I can’t find any keyboard shortcuts.
  • The UI takes up too much screen real-estate. I could probably fix that with a skin, but it would be nice to have it available in the base install.
  • ICQ in the browser is cool (especially since it’s ad-free ICQ), but the ICQ UI sucks like a hoover.
  • The new cookie handling is pretty good, but I have an even better application called CookieWall for IE, so no major new feature there.

In short, I think I’ll stick with IE on windows for now, security holes and all. (I’ll probably stick with Mozilla on Linux).

posted at 11:26 am on Monday, September 02, 2002 in General | Comments Off on Initial impressions of Netscape 7.0

SPAM

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the amount of hacker activity, open-relay attempts, and SPAM activity have gone up drastically since I registered a new domain for my wife’s consulting company.

Are the spammers really polling the registries that aggressively, or are the rumours about Verisign true? One wonders….

posted at 11:14 am on Monday, September 02, 2002 in General | Comments Off on SPAM

Thermochrons are fun!

I received my DS1921L in the mail on Friday (I ordered it at the beginning of the summer, but oh well).

In a nutshell, this is a device the size of five dimes stacked on top of each other. It has an onboard clock and temperature sensor and enough memory to store up to 2048 temperature samples, with a sampling interval of between 1 and 255 minutes. (I can’t believe something so small can do this :-)

We’ve been having trouble with our vegtables freezing, so I stuck the ibutton in there for a day with one-minute sampling and got an interesting graph. It’s not our imagination, something really is wrong with our fridge.

The manufacturer has basic temperature sensors in both iButton and standard packages. The standard ones are great for putting computer monitored temperature sensors all over the place…

posted at 6:44 pm on Sunday, September 01, 2002 in General | Comments Off on Thermochrons are fun!

Netscape 7.0 Released

Netscape 7.0 has been released by AOL. Is it a revolution in the browser space, or too little, too late?

AOL is bundling it with the rest of AOL software, which might increase their browser ‘share’ a little bit.

I’ll download and try it, but it took a lot of convincing for me to move from Netscape to IE a few years ago, so it’ll probably take a lot of convincing for me to move back.

posted at 6:11 pm on Sunday, September 01, 2002 in General | Comments Off on Netscape 7.0 Released
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