• How to Get Rid of Roaches - wikiHow
  If you live in NYC, this is just a fact of life.
  (tags: home roaches)
• Kevin Rose’s New Startup: Pownce
  This looks intriguing… I can’t wait to see how it pans out…
  (tags: pownce revision3 kevinrose)

From the NY Sun Politics Blog:

I love how people who call Rudy liberal are fawning over this guy.

You have to wonder what the Senate has to hide with this immigration bill. I mean, why in God’s name would anyone object to amendments to a bill being read before they’re voted on? Hell, they can’t even write the bill before it’s voted on!

Just watch this and prepare to lose your lunch.

This is simply disgusting, reprehensible, and wrong.

And Jim DeMint is an obstructionist?

Video courtesy of Slobokan.

Ho.

Lee.

Shit.

• Sprint begins ‘talking points’ campaign against Apple iPhone
  I’m starting to see some desperation here…
  (tags: sprint apple iphone)
• Techdirt: Violent Crimes Keep Dropping As Violent Video Games Get More Popular
  The irony of this is so thick I can taste it.
  (tags: ironic videogames gaming violence crime statistics)

One of my good friend Jeff’s biggest pet peeves in living color…

First the title of the article:

iPod helps you to gear up for the SAT Test

Uh oh…

My parents always blame me for being an iPod-addict and are always on my case to surrender my dearest companion. But now I can give it back to them as its not only all-play-and no-work on iPod these days. More than just playing the videos and music, the 5th generation iPod is equipped to help high school students practice for their college entrance exams - SAT test.

What?

You don’t see the problem?

Maybe I should go to the ATM machine, put in my pin number, take out a few bucks and see if that’ll entice you to pay closer attention. And if you still don’t get it, I’ll go watch the Mets, my favorite MLB Baseball team.

I really don’t understand why people do this…

Details of the deaths of pro wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife and their 7-year-old son may seem “a little bizarre” when released to the public, a prosecutor said.

Authorities were investigating the deaths at a secluded Fayette County home as a murder-suicide and were not seeking any suspects outside the home.

Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The details, when they come out, are going to prove a little bizarre.”

Those details may emerge after the completion of autopsies scheduled for Tuesday.

Investigators believe Benoit, (pronounced ben-WAH,) killed his wife and son over the weekend and then himself sometime Monday. The bodies were found Monday afternoon in three different rooms of the house on Green Meadow Lane, in a subdivision off a gravel road about two miles from Whitewater Country Club.

The autopsies were scheduled to be done at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab in DeKalb County.

Ballard told The Associated Press a gun was not used in any of the deaths. But he declined to say how the three died.

“We’re pretty sure we know, but we want to confirm it with the crime lab,” Ballard said early Tuesday.

Jesus Christ, Chris. If you’re gonna off yourself, do the world a favor and off yourself, but why take your family with you?

It’s going to be interesting to see what the bizarre part of this whole thing is.

Man, I hate stories like this. There’s always some innocent kid in the middle of it.

Technorati Tags: chris benoit

Man, it doesn’t take much to get the New York tabloids to preach from the mountain.

Take for instance this story yesterday.

June 25, 2007 — A Brooklyn mother and father got the shock of their lives when school officials informed them their brilliant 11-year-old girl was denied admission to an elite public school - solely because she’s of Indian descent.

“I feel bad because I would have gotten in if I was white,” Nikita Rau lamented over her failed bid to attend the Mark Twain School, IS 239, in Coney Island, a magnet school for gifted students.

It turns out Mark Twain - unlike all but one other city public school - admits students according to racial quotas established in 1974 by a federal judge who ordered the school’s desegregation.

Under those quotas - which originally were intended to boost minority enrollment - 60 percent of Mark Twain’s student body is set aside for white students, while 40 percent is set aside for minorities.

Oh well. Case closed, right? I mean, the girl certainly isn’t white, and we’re certainly following right along the lines of quotas that were established 33 years ago, so this is certainly not racism. After all, when quotas are called affirmative action and they get black students into the University of Michigan ahead of people with better grades, that’s called increasing diversity!

When Nikita recently applied to Mark Twain, she took an admission test geared toward music students and scored a 79.

In May, the Education Department sent her parents a letter that said Nikita was not accepted - even though white students who scored lower on the same test were admitted.

Officials told the Raus that because Nikita is classified as a minority, she would need to score at least 84.4 to be accepted, while white students needed to score 77 or more.

Her mom, Dr. Kanchan Rau, said that when she discussed the disparate treatment with Schools Regional Enrollment Director Paul Helfman, “he said, ‘I agree with you: It’s not right; it’s not fair - but there’s nothing I can do.’ “

Heh… Powerless to overtake the crushing and demoralizing feeling you get when you get dumped because of a quota. I love it.

Mind you, I’m not in favor of quotas that work in any direction. For years I’ve written here against affirmative action and quotas because I believe that every system that involves competing for anything be it school admissions, job positions, or loans to start a business, should be done on the basis of merit not skin color. For years and years, New York has done things like this, and for years and years, white kids have been rejected from stuck-up “I’m better than you” schools like Mark Twain so some poor black or hispanic kid can get in. After all, if you aren’t white, you’re certainly more entitled to a good education.

Now, after 33 years, people are realizing how ridiculous the system is. Not because anything’s changed, mind you, but because the system that was designed to get Nikita Rau into the school has now kept her out of it.

The true shame here is that the system has always been unbalanced and unfair. What rubs me the wrong way is that it took a minority student being on the wrong side of that system for it to be deemed unfair.

Nothing has changed, people, save for the prism you see the story through.

With a little luck there will be a lawsuit, and the system will be abolished. Then the best, brightest, and most deserving students in the city will get into “I’m better than you” schools like Mark Twain based on their intelligence, their drive, and their skills, rather than their skin color.

Technorati Tags: nikita rau, racism, quotas, affirmative action

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  Wow… Ya know… Some things just seem like a really bad idea…
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• Real Evil: ISP Inserted Advertising
  Any ISP that does this deserves to be out of businesss. Period.
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A Dutch woman who claimed she suffered emotional damages due to not winning the lottery missed the jackpot in court too.

Amsterdam District Court judges Wednesday rejected the claim of Helene de Gier, who said she was traumatized by not winning the country’s National Postcode Lottery, which she didn’t enter, while her neighbors did.

In the lottery, postal codes are chosen at random, and people who live there and enter can win prizes ranging from a few euros (dollars) up to millions. Proceeds go to charity.

De Gier lived on a street in the small southern town of Heusden where seven entrants won €13.9 million (US$18.6 million) each on Jan 1, 2006.

Together with her husband, she filed a suit, arguing that the lottery was an invasion of privacy because she could not escape the media attention surrounding the town’s selection. Afterward, neighbors allegedly rubbed in their victory, including one who ostentatiously displayed a new Porsche in front of his house.

De Gier said she eventually become obsessed with the loss. She said she was constantly confronted with it when writing her postal address.

So you don’t enter, and then you sue ’cause you feel bad when you don’t win? WTF?

The thought of the next lottery draw felt “like a noose around my neck being tightened,” she told television program Nova, wiping away tears.

In addition, she said the lottery uses advertisements that amount to “emotional blackmail,” because they emphasize the regret people who do not participate will feel when their neighbors win.

“In other lotteries you would never know for sure that if you had only participated you would have won,” she said.

Which is why it’s called “chance.”

“I’m not a sore loser. Absolutely not,” she told Nova.

Yeah…

Right…

IHT via Overlawyered

via WaPo

Michelle over on Dell’s blog made a quick little post about how Dell is now offering an option to not have them crapify your new PC with all their useless trialware and other crap that various companies pay money to have shoved onto your desktop.

Regarding Google tools, a quick clarification—Google tools that are pre-installed on Dell systems are a bit different from google.com, and can’t be easily compared. Blog posts like this one express concern about the URL Assistant specifically. The purpose of this utility is to handle a mis-typed URL by responding with a webpage of suggested links that contains both sponsored pages (paid placement) and typical search result links, versus returning an error page with no results or guidance. Some folks prefer the suggested information, some don’t. For folks who are interested, click on the Remove the URL Assistant link in this Knowledge Base article for instructions on how to remove it.

Are you bloody kidding me? That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever read.

The Dell adware garbage doesn’t give you relevant results; it gives you paid crap, relevant or not, way above the actual search results. Check out this screen cap from the OpenDNS blog. It’s what you see when you connect up to a mistyped domain and you have Dell’s crapware installed.

Notice all the sponsored and irrelevant links at the top of the fold, right there for you to see. Now compare that to what OpenDNS does:

Now let’s ponder that. Michelle claims that some people prefer the suggested information and some don’t. What I don’t get is who does prefer that? Secondly, if Dell’s only motivation is giving customer’s relevant information and not milking a few cents with pay-per-click ads, why not do what OpenDNS does?

Calling that adware “guidance” proves just how deeply out of touch Dell really is.

Patches has an adopted sister now
After trying for years to get one cat, the wife caved like a house of cards and let another into our home.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pandora, thusly named because we couldn’t decide whether to name her Panda or Oreo.

Cute, isn’t she?

Ahhh yes, the breathless reporting of a tragedy. Nothing makes a newspaper’s day like the opportunity to report some tragic young senseless death that we can all stop and think about as we go about our insignificant lives.

Tim Garger walked into Garden City High School Saturday wearing a bracelet of blue beads marked with the letters “JRV” — the initials of Jacqueline R. Vincent, 16, who was electrocuted after she tripped on the third rail while crossing the Long Island Rail Road tracks.

For him, the bracelet was a way to remember a free-spirited girl one friend described as “fun-loving … outgoing and loud.” Garger was one of several students who sought grief counseling at the school, where the flag flew at half-staff.

“Everyone knows you shouldn’t cross the tracks but everyone does it,” Garger said, his face melancholy.

That means everyone, including the girl, is fucking stupid. Seriously. Those trains hit top speeds between 60 and 70 mph and they’re quite quiet. If one is bearing down on you, you won’t even know it until the damn thing hits you.

But that’s beside the point because this genius died when she tripped on the third rail. Why was she crossing the train tracks? Well, no one really knows, and it’s never said, but you would think a High School Junior would have enough brains to know that it’s dangerous.

You would think that.

In the end, she tried to cut across dangerous train tracks. She avoided getting killed by a train and instead was killed by the electrified third rail. Something tells me we’re going to see a few things now:

1. A lawsuit that blames the Long Island Railroad for not keeping stupid people from walking on train tracks.

2. An increased “awareness” campaign about the dangers of being an idiot and walking on train tracks.

3. Someone will take this up as a cause celebre and we’ll never hear the end of it.

4. No discussion of the stupidity of the girl who died. God forbid you call a spade a spade.

It’s not that I don’t feel sympathy for stories like this, it’s just that I find it hard to well up. If she was mentally retarded and did this, I’d feel bad, but frankly a high school junior ought to know better.

The ACLU has bent over backwards to justify spending $25,000 worth of public funds on footbaths for Muslims at the University of Michigan in Dearborn. I love how the ACLU can spin the shit out of this stuff with a straight face:

Kary Moss, director of the Detroit branch of the ACLU, said its review concluded the plan is a “reasonable accommodation” to resolve “safety and cleanliness issues” that arose when Muslims used public sinks for foot cleaning before prayers, which often spilled water on bathroom floors.

“We view it as an attempt to deal with a problem, not an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray,” said Moss, who likened the plan to paying for added police during religious events with huge turnouts.

Wow… That’s deep. It really is astonishing how the ACLU can turn the religious outrage switch on and off so easily. I can’t imagine having the same common-sense type attitude about public funding being spent on anything for Christians. The example of “added police” is bullshit. Police function as crowd control officers in many cases. Controlling any crowd for any function is not relevant in this case.

Now on to Barrack Obama. Senator Obama seems to think that Christianity has been hijacked. That’s right. Christianity has been hijacked by bomb-wearing murderous suicidal thugs in pursuit of 72 virgins. Okay, not exactly, but imagine what would’ve happened if, say, Hillary Clinton, had said Islam was hijacked by radicals hell-bent on the annihilation of everyone that they perceive as a kafir? Anyway, here’s what Barry O had to say about Christianity and it being hijacked…

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Illinois senator said.

“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” according to an advance copy of his speech.

Now, I’ve seen this said numerous times about Islam and every time someone says it, they’re immediately rebuked as if they’re uninformed heathens, silenced, and told to get educated about the faith. Why isn’t there an outcry from those same people now that Saint Barrack of Obama is now saying something astonishingly similar?

Oh right… It’s Christianity he’s saying it about, and you can say whatever you want about Christianity in this country. In fact, it’s quite in vogue. Bashing Islam makes you an uninformed and poorly educated bigot while bashing Christianity makes you an educated free thinking smart and informed person.

Hell, it even qualifies you to run for the Presidency.

• Boing Boing: Nepali “Living Goddess” is rather into gadgets
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  (tags: religion boingboing culture hypocrites)
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• Taking ‘Bacon Cheeseburger’ Literally
  How to make a real bacon cheeseburger. I’m so there.
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Yeah I know… I haven’t forgotten all of you… I’ll be back…

Anyway… Have a laugh here. This is what real life would be like if real life were happening in Second Life.

via Valleywag

Technorati Tags: second life

• Marketcircle: iPhoney
  If you want to develop for the iPhone, this is the way to check your work.
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• Ain’t Karma a Bitch?
  He should be given a medal, I think.
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• I CAN HAS BUTTONS?
  I’ve ordered mine. Why haven’t you ordered yours yet?
  (tags: ichc lolcat lolcats lol funny)

• del.icio.us Bookmarks :: Firefox Add-ons
  New and much improved. VERY NICE.
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Holy crap, if I didn’t read this I never would’ve believed it to be true. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet is actually accusing Apple of copying Vista.

No, it’s not satire.

Let’s go point by point.

1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar.

Well, see, it’s not all that terribly different save for a few tweaks from Mac OS X which has been out… What… 6 years already? I guess, if you’re saying they look alike, then Microsoft copied Apple, huh?

2. New Finder: Many of the same capabilities as the integrated “Instant Search” in Vista (the subsystem that Google is trying to get the Department of Justice to rule as being anti-competitive). The new Leopard Coverflow viewing capability looked almost identical to Vista’s Flip 3D to me.

Coverflow was built into iTunes before Vista was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, Mary Jo. As for Instant Search, well, so far from what I’ve heard it isn’t all that instant. Spotlight, on the other hand, again was integrated into Tiger before Vista ever was a concept. Oh well. So much for that.

3. QuickLook: Live file previews — just like the thumbnail preview capability available in Vista.

No it’s not. It’s a lightweight preview viewer. OS X has always had this feature, they’ve just added some oomph to it. Previewing thumbnails is not what Quicklook is, though, and if Mary had bothered to actually watch the videos of the demo, she’d understand that Quicklook is a lot more than representative icons.

4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems.

Obviously spoken from someone who lives in Windows world where something is either or. There is one version of Mac OS. It’s 32 bit and 64 bit simultaneously. As far as 64 bits, it runs stuff faster if you have it, but it’ll run just fine on any Intel Core Duo Mac. It also runs in 32 bit mode on a Power PC G4 and G5. Try running Windows Vista on a chip that’s two generations Old, Mary Jo, and let me know how that goes. This isn’t the Windows world where Microsoft sells two versions of the OS.

5. Core animation: Not sure what the Vista comparison is here. The demo reminded me of Microsoft Max photo-sharing application. The WWDC developers attending the Jobs keynote didn’t seem wowed with this functionality.

You don’t even know what it is, Mary Jo. Core Animation is not an application, it’s a graphics framework for application developers. For God’s sake, if you’re going to write about something, have a clue what it is first. Think OpenGL if you really need something to compare it to.

6. Boot Camp. You can run Vista on your Mac. Apple showed Vista running Solitaire in its WWDC demo. But I bet those downloading the 2.5 million copies of Boot Camp available since last year are running a lot of other Windows business apps and games.

Yeah, and? I mean, I’m sure all the Windows folks would never run OS X. Oh wait… They can’t. Never mind.

7. Spaces: A feature allowing users to group applications into separate spaces. I haven’t seen anything like in in Vista, but the audience didn’t seem overly impressed by it.

Oh right… So that means they didn’t copy it. Cool. Try to stay with your story here, huh? I know Apple didn’t invent virtual desktop technology, but the title of this article relates to Apple copying Vista. I guess this one just slipped in so she could touch on everything.

8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?

Sure… Which is ironic because OS X Tiger has had Widgets since before Vista existed. Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets) has been making Widgets for quite awhile. Sure it’s like it, proving that if anything, Microsoft copied everyone else.

9. iChat gets a bunch of fun add-ons (photo-booth effects, backrops, etc.) to make it a more fully-featured videoconferencing product. The “iChat Theater” capability Jobs showed off reminded me of Vista’s Meeting Space and/or the new Microsoft “Shared View” (code-named “Tahiti”) document-sharing/conferencing subsystems.

And? So are you going to tell me that Microsoft invented IM teleconferencing and screensharing now, too?

10. Time Machine automatic backup. Vista has built-in automatic backup (Volume Shadow Copy). It doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as Time Machine. But it seems to provide a lot of the same functionality.

Ummmmm… Not quite… Again, if she actually watched the demo instead of planning what spin she was going to put on it, she’d understand that it’s not actually the same thing. I found a great piece talking about people who say Time Machine is a rip job:

The critics miss the point by a light year. The innovation here is not automated data backup, which is really the technology we’re talking about here. The innovation is making that technology accessible to people who are not technically inclined. My mom (yes, it’s a mom-test) can understand Time Machine because it provides an experience that capitalizes on familiar metaphors for moving through time, namely backwards and forwards.

How about that…

She closes with this idiocy:

Granted, I am not an Apple user. So I’m sure I’m glossing over some subtleties regarding what’s new and cool in Leopard. But given how often I hear the “Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers” message, I was thinking that Leopard would be light years ahead of Vista.

I’d say that considering you didn’t understand half of what you saw, you wouldn’t know if something was light years ahead anyway.

The bottom line is this. Microsoft and Apple and every flavor of Linux do copy ideas from each other all the time. Calling any one company out for copying the other leaves you open to critics who will destroy you for missing obvious examples in the reverse.

One important thing, though, is that when you’re calling into question who copied whom, you may want to also have some kind of mental timeline about when things happened. Unless Apple used Time Machine to go back and change Tiger after Vista launched, her chronology is so far off, it’s laughable.

Technorati Tags: mary jo foley, apple, mac, os x, vista, windows