Where ya been?

If there are any Geekable readers who plan to vote for Nader, I strongly urge you to read this blogger's post about Nader's record.

(I post this as someone who voted for Nader in 2000, and is voting for Kerry this time around.)

Libertarian problem-solvers

In an article entitled "A Libertarian Visits South America" comes the following bit of good news:

My trip to Brazil ended with a five-hour afternoon hike with Roy and Felipe down a steep subtropical trail (using ropes in one section!) to some beautiful waterfalls. It was amazing — in those five hours, we solved just about every problem facing the world today.

Manual override

The more observant Geekable readers realize that while reporters may occasionally have liberal views, the media owners (who tend to be conservative) have much more influence over media content than the editors or reporters.

If you disagree with that view, then I urge you to read this Texas newspaper's endorsement.

You forgot to block Poland!

According to BBC News,

Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.

The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.

Since then people outside the US trying to browse the site get a message saying they are not authorised to view it.

The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.

I believe I'm convinced

If this article doesn't convince you to vote for Bush, then nothing will.

In conclusion

I can't wrap my head around the last paragraph of this NYT article about Steve Jobs, Pixar, and Apple:

At Pixar, one of Mr. Jobs's masterstrokes has been to emphasize the old-fashioned virtue of compelling storytelling. He wrote to Pixar shareholders in 1997: "It is chiseled in stone at our studio that no amount of technology can ever turn a bad story into a good one." One could add that the same maxim applies to Apple.

Even Bush's supporters don't understand him

I love this chart. It's from a report by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, and it finds that Bush supporters are vastly more uninformed about their candidate's positions than Kerry supporters are about their candidate's positions.

Mac security alert

If this is true, then it's a really big deal -- it could be the first Mac OS X exploit. [Via Macintouch]

A MacInTouch reader sounded an alert about a nasty piece of Mac malware:

There's now a real virus out there for Mac OS X that can do some real damage. It doesn't seem to be too destructive although it does delete some unix commands and modifies prefs for a couple of others. It will gather all password info on your machine. For now, lets call it "Opener."
My system was a responding a bit slowly and a check of my /var/log files showed that they were _all_ empty and had the same mod date. The Activity Monitor showed a process called "john" eating almost an entire processor.
Some further looking showed an unknown startupitem in /Library/StartupItems/ called "opener". The executable file is a well-commented bash program. It scans for passwords for every user, processes the hashed info using your own Mac, turns on file sharing, and puts all this stuff into an invisible folder called .info on each users Public folder.
It does much, much more but it's important that a warning get out quickly.

For several months, I've been scared of entering my passwords on Windows machines. Now I'm afraid to use Macs in public too!

The men behind the images

Two quick political links:

First, here's a recent Rolling Stone interview with John Kerry. It makes me like John Kerry as a candidate a lot more than I did before.

Second, here's a scary little story about Bush's war expectations.

"And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "

[Pat] Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

Sweetest Day present

For all you heartbroken ladies who didn't get a Sweetest Day present, I'm going to make your day. Click here to claim your gift.

The Reality-Based Community grows

Via Talking Points Memo, I see that former Michigan governor William Milliken (a Republican) has endorsed John Kerry.

Welcome to the Reality-Based Community!

You're only as smart as your nation's biggest hick

Mike Doughty wrote a letter to the London Observer. (See the article in question.)

Dick's defense cuts

Blogosphere readers are no doubt familiar with the famous list of Kerry votes compiled by the Republicans.

People who like to blame liberals for everything will point to this and say, "See?! Kerry is weak on defense! If he becomes President, we will be defeated by terrorists!" You should reply, "And Kerry was helped every step of the way by Dick Cheney."

Read the rest of "Dick's defense cuts"

Are you guys typing everything I say?

Karate Explosion!

Applesnark

As The Apple Turns comes up with the best Apple-related snark commentary.

Basically, [Forbes' Arik Hesseldahl's] take on Apple's rosy quarterly results and the subsequent skyrocketing of its stock price is this: "Take the iPod away, and what's left? A company that sold... in its fiscal 2004... less than 2 percent of the 176.5 million computers" that people are expected to buy in 2005.

...

Stay tuned for Arik's next article, which no doubt will contain a scathing analysis of how Microsoft will be going under any day now, because it's nothing without Windows and Office. We can't wait. Here's hoping Apple manages to stay afloat until then.

Sobule revisited

In the interest of fairness, I reprint part of an email regarding a previous entry:

I saw your post re: Jill Sobule. It's a bit unfair, as Robert Lamm is credited as a coauthor of the song and the album's lyric sheet notes the borrowed music and some lyrics from "Saturday in the Park."

Geekable catches the gay

In one of Andrew Sullivan's more lucid moments:

Let me give you an example of the double standards here. I remember once being driven around by a charming woman on a stop on a book tour. We talked about my book, and she averred, after chatting all day, that she had nothing against gay people, she just wished they wouldn't "bring it up" all the time. I responded: "But you've been talking about your heterosexuality ever since I got in the car." She said: "I haven't. I've never once discussed sex." My response: "Within two minutes, you mentioned your children and your husband. You talked about your son's work at high school. You mentioned your husband's line of work. And on and on. You wear your heterosexuality on your sleeve all the time. And that's fine. But if I so much as mention the fact that I'm gay, I'm told it's all I care about, and that I should pipe down. Don't you see the double standard?" Candidates mention their families all the time. An entire question last night was devoted to the relationship between men and their wives and daughters. Mentioning Mary Cheney is no more and no less offensive than that. What is offensive is denying gay couples equal rights in the constitution itself. Why don't conservatives get exercized about that?

Registered voter PSA

As more and more of these types of allegations surface, it becomes more and more important to double-check that you're actually registered to vote.

As I've mentioned before, if you live in Michigan, this site will tell you your voter registration status.

Office for Mac PSA

If you're a Macintosh user who runs either Microsoft Office 2001, Office v.X, or Office 2004, then there is a security update waiting for you.

The Wayne Review, vol. 2, issue 1

Read on for assorted criticisms about the latest issue of the Wayne Review. (NOTE: This post was updated at approximately 8:30pm to include further clarification and hyperlinks.)

Read the rest of "The Wayne Review, vol. 2, issue 1"

Geekable growing pains

As the audience of Geekable.com, you deserve to know the following:

Depending on your interpretation of the phrases "I will play hardball with you" and "Then you will still recieve [sic] a call from my legal team," I might have just been threatened with legal action over the content of Geekable.com. I will not name the parties involved, because I am mature, and I do not want to personally attack them. Needless to say, an agreement was reached which both sides are happy with. The matter is now resolved.

Gotta be mysterious

Lacey wants to know why guys insist on waiting three to five days before calling girls' numbers.

The reason is, because girls keep telling guys to do that! Like, just this week! (I was told by a friend that I have to "play the game" and wait, presumably to cultivate curiosity.)

I agree with Lacey -- I think it's dumb, but who am I to argue? I am a dumb boy.

[Via Life Without a Tiara]

A catalog of errors

I think this is wonderful. (Make sure you click through to all the pages.) Share it with everyone, or send it along as a PDF.

Lie limply on the floor and be counted

Fafblog astutely notes:

I think Dick Cheney made a smart point right now. Ysee American casualties only count for 90% of the casualties if you don't count all the Iraqis wo've gotten killed. See Dick Cheney points out just how many Iraqis have gotten killed since we invaded. A very good point Dick Cheney!

Meet me at the debate

Uh-oh... looks like Atrios and Google are Cheney's kryptonite. Apparently Cheney did meet Edwards before, back in February 2001.

But that was before 9/11, and 9/11 changed everything, so....

UPDATE: Here's the quotation from Cheney I'm referring to from last night's debate:

Cheney: You‘ve got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate.  Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer.  I‘m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they‘re in session.

The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

Let your hair down

I keep seeing the Bailey's "Zero Gravity Bar" ad on television during the Daily Show. I think the special effects were well done in general, but I keep noticing that most of the long hair hangs straight down. I suspect that in a zero-gravity environment, women's long hair would float all about in a big mess, but then again, I do not work for NASA or Paul Allen.

Ashcroft you damned motherfucker

While doing research for a school project I found the following two links. Please see if you can interpret them in such a way that avoids a contradiction, because to me it looks like Ashcroft is a motherfucking liar.

Ashcroft in June 2003

Ashcroft in September 2003

Windows is a losing battle

If Bill Gates can't protect himself against spyware and pop-ups, what makes you think you'll be able to?

A quick BBEdit question

I went out on a limb and purchased BBEdit 8. I like that it can detect and color-code LaTeX markup, but what I'd really like to do is set up a keystroke which surrounds any selected text with \( and \). I have TeXShop's editor hacked to do this, but I'm not as familiar with BBEdit. Can anyone out there help me?

UPDATE: Thanks to John Gruber and Chris Corwin for emailing me the answer. As John Gruber pointed out,

If you create a glossary item with this line:

\(#select#\)

You'll have exactly what you want. You can set a keyboard shortcut for any Glossary item using the Glossary palette, accessible via the Window menu.

Debate #1 according to the blogosphere

• Dan Wood: "I'm glad President Bush wore a blue tie. It complemented his red face."
• Jonah Goldberg from the Corner at National Review, www.nationalreview.com: "My general rule is: the moment a candidate mentions his website he diminishes his stature by 3.7% to 12.6%."
• Yglesias at Tapped: "Bush said that "the A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice." In fact, Khan has been pardoned by the government of Pakistan in exchange for keeping silent about the extent to which other Pakistani officials were complicit in his [nuclear technology] smuggling network."
• John Moltz: "Hey, someone finally told Bush that Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11! Wow, how do you think he'll handle the news?"
• Snarkmarket: "I’ll rewind and transcribe one of his answers as accurately as I can, with pauses, falters, and hesitations. Each ellipsis is a pause of approximately a second, sometimes more....

  umm … uh … f-for uhh …

• Andrew Sullivan: "No president who has presided over Abu Ghraib should ever say he wants to put anyone on a leash."