If you like to decorate your house (indoor and out), trees, garden and dog with holiday lights during the dark months of the year, but are starting to feel a bit guilty about all the CO2 you pump into the atmosphere, these LED holiday lights are for you. They're offered by Holiday LEDS, a startup company co-founded by my Mike O'Connor who belongs to my extended family. Mike is also a Drupal contributor and a former Lullabot trainee (he attended one of our Providence sessions). These LED's are up to 90% more efficient than traditional holiday lighting (and they're quite pretty!)
Mike is running their site on Drupal (of course), and is an early adopter of the Ubercart module. About a year ago, Mike still had his nose in introductory PHP books. Now he's writing modules and launching startups with Drupal. It is this type of accessibility that makes the platform so damn attractive.
Here's the point: if Bush *wants* to attack Iran (and it seems he does), he has the tools to do so. This is like loaning a person your hand so that they can murder someone with it. In the end... your hand commits the murder. When Bush orders an attack on a country, it is American soldiers who do the killing, and it is the American taxpayer who bankrolls it. It is the American voter who elected Bush (supposedly), and it is the lack of effective oversight and the failing of checks and balances that allows these things to happen without proper discussion or consensus. Here's the link.
The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.
So I hate our apartment. Especially right now. Six weeks ago a pipe broke in our wall and our crappy landlord sent some people over to take a look. They ripped the wall open and the holes stayed there for over five weeks until yesterday when someone finally came to slap some new plaster over them. The holes were in our bedroom, right over the headboard of our bed.
Additionally, the two floors under us are being converted from offices to apartments. That's 16 new apartments that get new walls, new doors, new kitchens and new baths. If you can't imagine what that sounds like, I just recorded a sample. This starts at 7:30 every day and goes until 4-5 in the evening. It has been going on for over a month and is nowhere near complete. The consolation prize is, whenever they do get finished, sixteen new tenants will move in and start redecorating (also not an especially quiet activity).
Via Crooks and Liars, we learn about a Forbes article that describes how Americans have been detained and tortured for reporting the illegal sales of arms.
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
All I can say is that I now live in total and utter fear of the United States government. I feel that the country is slipping into being a fascist state so quickly that nobody can fully recognize all of the signs. I don't tend to be a paranoid person. In fact, I tend to be overly optimistic and give everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt.
If you haven't noticed, the United States is preparing for a war in Iran. They've put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list, there are murmurings about reinstating the draft, and unnamed administration officials are beginning to whisper of its inevitability. Many think that the Bush administration will attack Americans themselves and blame Iran, just to get the ball rolling. American troops have already been in Iran collecting targeting data.
So I hope Americans like sending their sons and daughters to Afghanistan and Iraq, because fighting Iran is going to be at least as hard as those two wars put together. The amount of resources (American lives and money) will be staggering. If you could see the price tag for this war, in terms of dollars, deaths, damage to our international standing, loss of support from allies, degraded security at home and abroad, you would revolt. The war with Iran is not something that Americans want to pay for. What benefit we could possibly get for once again invading another Middle East country is not worth the suffering. The pain America has felt in the past six years is minor compared to the pain a war with Iran will bring us, especially since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not finished. George Bush, Dick Cheney, I blame you for making the world a much worse place to live.
SciVee, a site billed as YouTube fore scientists, has launched running Drupal. The site allows scientists to upload research papers and explanatory videos to accompany them.
SciVee is about the free and widespread dissemination and comprehension of science. To learn more about SciVee link to our About Page.
SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Please see our Partners page to learn more about them.
Charles P. Pierce has written a very funny review of the new Creation Museum (the one that says Noah had dinosaurs on his arc).
Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining peacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no penis.
My uncle, Richard Douglass, is working hard to improve health care in Ghana and in the rest of the world. His efforts are moving towards utilizing remote diagnosis to provide expert care to people in remote rural areas. Using satellite connected Internet technologies he would connect villagers who cannot normally receive primary medical care with doctors in remote areas. No word yet on whether they will also be signing up for Facebook accounts.
Douglass proposed using satellite transmission equipment, mounted on trucks, to bring patients and doctors together virtually. Sending teams with this technology to villages on a regular basis would be akin to having a visiting medical team on a predictable schedule. A patient in rural Ghana who's never seen a doctor before could be diagnosed by a physician in Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti or Bloomington, Ind.
Microsoft recently delivered a crippled and crippling operating system called Vista. Peter Gutmann predicts Apple will try to sell us the same crap in OS X in the future. I don't want any of it.
So, when thinking about this issue, we have to ask ourselves: is a company like Microsoft or Apple likely to tell Hollywood to jump off a cliff? No, because both companies know that users will want to play HD DVD or Blu-ray discs on their computers.
Wrong. I value my computing environment more than that. If Apple builds these measures into it's OS, I will not use it. Ubuntu is a perfectly acceptable alternative.
