Ursus Pacificus

The Mojave Experiment is, apparently, Microsoft’s response to the bad press Vista has getten just about continuously since its release. The Economist pulls some of the wool off this “experiment”.

Here’s how it worked, according to The Economist (and what I’ve seen of the result):

1. Find 140 people who’s never used Vista and had heard nothing but bad stuff about it (shouldn’t be too hard)
2. Re-badge “Vista” as “Mojave”
3. Set up 20-something hidden video cameras to capture any positive reactions from every concieveable angle.
4. Give them a 10-minute, one-on-one demo of “Mojave” performed by an experienced Vista user on the dole of the ad agency.
5. Edit tiny snippets of positive reactions to provide the appearance of an overwhelmingly orgasmic response.

I had the pleasure of talking to a Microsoft-paid rep (college kid on summer break) at a computer store recently, and he and the staff at the store were having a little trouble getting the Mojave Experiment videos to play properly on a big screen in the laptop department… on… wait for it… Vista!

The MS rep touted the “features that Joe Average User are interested in”, like the search functionality. OK, most modern Linux distributions also come with file indexing. …and from what I hear the Mac file-indexing functionality is second to none. Ultimately, he admitted he runs a mix of platforms at home (Linux and Windows… can’t afford Mac), and that Vista will really only perform (spread its wings, so to speak) on “new hardware”. This means you need a machine with a dual-core CPU, at least 2GB of system RAM and a video card with at least 512 MB of VRAM. I also was terribly surprised to learn that he (as an individual) advocates “throw[ing] morality out the window” (his words, not mine), when it comes to software licensing… Yeah, go ahead and run cracked/pirated copies of Vista. At the risk of stacking soapboxes upon soapboxes, I told him that one of the reaons I run Linux is moral in nature, but it ties into an economic reality. I have a fleet of machines at home. It would cost me thousands of dollars to legitemately license MS Windows and all the software I use (if it’s even available for Windows)… or I could just run Linux, which is free (as in speech and as in beer), easy to use and super powerful. So the choice is be a criminal (whether or not you’re caught and/or punished) or be a cooperative, good citizen. He chooses to be a criminal, and I choose to be a cooperative good citizen.

Ultimately, MS Windows Vista was, is, and , as far as I can tell, ever will be a pig. No matter how much lipstick you put on it, it’s still a pig. That Microsoft has to resort to this level of deception, just to get its products in front of people is telling … and a little sad and pathetic.

Mostly, tho, I feel bad for the participants in The Mojave Experiment. First of all, the time they spent in that sparsely appointed room is time they’ll never get back. Secondly, some of them may actually run out and pick up an upgrade copy of Vista Home Basic, install it on their three-to-five-year-old hardware, and discover that a good chunk of the fancy features aren’t there, to say nothing of the abyssmal performance ther’yre likely to see.

I suppose if Vista had something genuinely useful to offer beyond bloat (and a further-extended revenue stream from a creaky, old product with flashy new paint) I might be a little more sympathetic.

Well, I just joined up over at Rational Response Squad. Two of the core/founding members of this outfit participated in a televised ABC/Nightline “debate” about the “question” of existence of gods. …they faced off against the formidable master debater (ha-ha) Kirk Cameron, and his evangelical puppet master Ray Comfort

While I haven’t completely plowed through the site, there seems to be a lot of worthwhile content on there, and I’ve offered to participate in writing for the site. We’ll see where THAT goes.

In the mean time, if you have a sec, check it out. It’s pretty bitchin’!

Not that USA Today is exactly the pinnacle of science journalism in the ol’ U. S. of A., but this story kind of points, passive-aggressively in the approximate general direction of a scratch on the surface of a HUGE issue in this country.

The bulk of Americans seem to take the Miles Monroe attitude toward science: “Science is an intellectual dead end, you know? It’s a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants. ”

Cripes!

To make matters worse, USA Today reprinted a “true-false quiz” developed by the National Science Foundation to gauge science knowledge among the general populace. The last two questions cannot be answered “true” or “false”. This does not speak well of the government entity charged with guiding scientific research and education in our country.

What people seem to lose sight of is that science is a practice, not a set of facts.

That Earth orbits the Sun is not science. It is what we call a “fact”. How we came to know that the Earth orbits the Sun is through the employment of science.

That evolution of species occurs is not science. It is also a fact. How we came to understand the mutative and selective processes which drive and direct that evolution is through the employment of science.

Science is the process of identifying a question or problem, forming an educated guess as to the answer or solution (known as an hypothesis), testing the hypothesis, and forming a conclusion based on the results of the tests. Hypotheses which survive rigorous, repeated and ever broader tests, and are capable of allowing reliable predictions to be made based certain key pieces of knowledge are eventually elevated to the status of “theory”.

“Just a theory” is one of the most ridiculous phrases I have ever heard. It’s like saying, “The universe is merely enormous.” The implication is that one of these “little guys in tweed suits” just pulled General Relativity or Evolution through Natural Selection out of his ass one day and said, “Sure, that’s my theory!”

Idiots.

I think the larger problem is not that people can’t regurgitate rote-memorized facts, such as “It takes one year for the Earth to make one complete orbit around the Sun”, nor is it that the average citizen can’t name a single scientist worthy of admiration. The larger problem is that the average citizen does not understand and use the process of science in his or her daily life. That’s what’s sad and depressing. That’s what’s making this country a fourth-rate banana republic.

What’s to blame for this sad state of affairs? How did we get to this point?

Well, I’m fairly confident that the practitioners of science are not directly to blame.

No, I think we can confidently, squarely, and securely rest the blame for this on parents who put more stock in religious faith than in rationality, logic, and the natural world around them.

Again, I point the reader to Mike Judge’s fine film for study materials.

Stars: 5/5

As you may recall, George Carlin died almost 2 months ago. At long last, his final HBO Special has been released as a CD, called “It’s Bad For Ya”.

Well, What can I say? It’s excellent. It is, I think, the best Carlin recording I’ve heard. It combines the youthful wonder and apparent naivete of works like “Class Clown” and “Occupation Foole”, the the sophisticated middle-aged observations and language studies of Carlin On Campus and Playin’ With Your Head, and the shamelessly frank exposes of the human tendency toward delusion and sheeplike behavior that drove Back In Town and Your Are All Diseased. It is a tour through what what those of us who loved Carlin loved about him, without being a nostalgia trip, just rehashing old material.

I really think George peaked on this one. He went out with a bang. He frankly discusses death and religion, getting lots of laughs. He takes merciess swipes at modern American parenting and the soul-crushing structure imposed on kids today. He lays bare the illogic of life after death and “being helped by the dead”. He leads us by the hand to the realization that “swearing on The Bible” and religious rules about when to and when not to don headgear are pointless, foolish, and without any value. Finally, he takes us on a tour of our non-existent rights.

…and he gets laughs. A lot of them.

Carlin was a human being, with flaws and frailties like any of us. Not everything he did was pure gold, but he did manage to produce a voluminous body of mostly excellent work, and “It’s Bad For Ya” is the culmination of his fifty years’ experience in show business, and it is good. It’s like the family matriarch, famous for her Thanksgiving dinners, having recovered from a stroke, gathers up all her best, offers up one last extravaganza, enjoys it with her family and friends, and dies in her sleep that night. Sure, it’s bittersweet. It’s sad he’s gone, but he gave us one last great show before he went, and it’s something to be thankful for. I just hope he knew how much he was appreciated.

Thanks, George. You’re missed.

The Studio is “together” enough for Dummyhead (all 5 of me) to come by and take it for a test drive. Here is the result:

(This Song Is) Way Too Short

..oh, and I posted a crummy little video on youTube relating to this event:

I don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to share something with you that I noticed on the John McCain campaign website. Well… a couple things.

1. The McCain site is a bit busy for my taste. A static image does it no justice.
2. Is that an elephant (symbol of the Republican Party) eating a man on the left? … a faceless “common man”? Oddly appropriate, don’t you think?
3. I’d never seen a picture of Cindy… All I’d heard is she has (had ?) a penchant for plagiarizing dessert recipies from websites. She looks a little “worked on” and creepy… Shades of Stepfordness… kinda like Laura Bush. Eek.
4. Um… Blue? McCain’s a Republican, right?
5. …and the reason I’ve gathered you all here today: John McCain is available in “Home”, “Business” and “Ultimate” editions, just like MS Windows Vista!

Check dis out, yo:

Clik da link for full siyeeeez! Word.

“Select your JohnMcCain.com edition”?!

Sure, politicians have been giving different speeches to the VFW than they would give to a crowd of unionized school teachers… probably forever… but they’d avoid acknowledging that fact in public. Here, McCain (or his handlers… I doubt John knows HTML, himself) decided it’s prudent to inform voters that they’re building their hopes on shifting sands.

I’m no PoliSci major (I’m a college drop-out, actually) but even I can see this is not a winning political strategy.

Well, as is sometimes the case, I had to use my personal recording studio for something work-related. Trouble was, not everything was hooked back up. Compounding the problem is that the room I’m using as my studio is a plaster-walled bedroom with hardwood floors. It’s a very hard room. The ring-time is obscene. So… since I needed to record some voice segments for the phone system at work, I figured I should come up with some sort of sound damping solution for the walls.

I looked at Auralex foam, but at a hundred bucks per 32 sq. ft., I’d be thousands of dollars into damping that room before I had a satisfactory result. I then remembered something a salesman at Caruso’s in New London, CT mentioned to me in passing about ten years ago. He and his bandmates put old mattresses over the windows of his house to restrict sound leakage during band rehearsals. Now, I was not about to go out and buy a bunch of mattresses… but maybe hanging cheap comforters on the wall would do the trick!

Well… I went to a local thrift shop, and found a couple comforters for around $20 a piece… but I had just seen similar-sized units at Target for the same price. I went new. So, I snagged three Full/Queen comforters and tacked the up to the walls. Sure, they’re hiddeous, and don’t match, but they make a huge difference.

Here’s the awful leopard stripe thing behind the desk.

Here’s the other two (one black and one beige) behind the drums (which disappear in front of the black) and the guitar rig.

In other news, for the first time in years, I have pedals hooked up to the Fender amp, and the talk box is ready to rock.

The intimidating talkbox mic

The Fender amp mic’ed, cabled, pedaled and ready to go

…and I finally have a semi-permanent spot for a main vocal mic w/ copy stand! Whee!

I’ll put up some better pics when I have them, but for now, this will have to do.

This Slashdot article raises the issue of these exciting new cameras being used by police in a few metropolitan areas (including Washington, DC) which read license plates, and check them against DMV records to see if the car is properly insured, inspected, et cetera.

Eek.

While I think it’s fairly important to maintain car insurance and keep your car in reasonable condition, this is such an egregious over-stepping of bounds, and an invitation to such a vast array of civil liberties violations that I don’t even know where to begin. Here’s an old post of mine that sort of scratches the surface.

Privacy is essential to liberty. Part of privacy is anonymity. Another part of privacy is securing that which is identifying. It’s bad enough all cars (should) have an identifying plaque that ties the car to its owner (ideally), but it’s horrifying to have a computer collecting those identies (and, no doubt, time and location information), doing who knows what with the information when it’s done.

Part of what’s horrifying to me about this is that it is an implied blanket assumption of guilt cast over anyone with a car. A large class of people, no doubt. I wonder if all neighborhoods will be patrolled evenly. My guess would be no. As a result, I’d imigine that the bulk of arrests and prosecutions arising from this new “tool” will be in areas that already have higher-than-average “crime rates”, “making life safer for the business criminals” [..apologies to the late George Carlin –ed.] In this country we used to joke about how in Eastern Europe and/or the USSR, everyone was asked if they had their “papers”. It’s much more convenient now that that don’t have to stop you to check your “papers”.

Can/do they retain records for all plates scanned? If so, how are they secured? Are these records, if retained, available for subsequent mining for time and place information, like what video stores you frequent, where you meet your extramarital lover, or whether or not you visit the local “cabaret”… will these records be available to potential employers? What about potential landlords? Are there any laws in place to protect individuals from discrimination or persecution based on their driving habits or the places they visit frequently? Funny, I don’t recall hearing anything about that.

Some of the comments attached to this article are particularly insightful.

Ben Franklin is reported to have said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I guess history curricula in this country just kinda skip over that little gem… just like those who profess the rectitude and inerrancy of The Bible skip over the parts that say genocide, slavery and stoning children to death are OK.

I guess we’re supposed to just trust that the police and the government have our best interests at heart all the time. Have fun at Gitmo!

Seriously, it’s already been demonstrated that our government… YOUR government… is perfectly willing to disappear people to off-shore military bases or foreign countries known to be not-so-sqeamish about beating people with fire-hoses and pulling out fingernails to extract “information”. We know that YOUR government is perfectly willing to dispense with Habeas Corpus and the Fourth Amendment to detain “terrorists”. What IS a “terrorist”, anyway?! Anybody got a logically defensible definition of “terrorist” that includes, say, Osama bin Laden, but excludes ,say, George W. Bush? If so, please feel free to post it in a comment.

Posted by me today on http://slashdot.org/ in response to this Slashdot article about the launch of a new search engine, called “Cuil“. Reposted here for your convenience. [ed.]

*crickets*

OK, I will.

My website is http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/

I could find no search results pointing to my website on Cuil. Nor could I find any results indicating any websites out there in the series of tubes link to my site. Tried with quotes and without… Tried lopping off the path. Tried lopping off the protocol spec. Tried lopping off the “www” and the TLD. Nothing. All I got was a bunch of links to dating sites which have apparently scraped my profile from sites I’m actually on. WTF?

Long lost friends have found me by googling me.

I know my website has some visibility by googling myself.

Having cuiled myself, I’m left wondering whether my website is even up at all! …wait… there it is.

And how does one *pronounce* “cuil”, anyway?!

I tend to think it’s homonymous with “soil”

Not surprising, actually. Almost 6 years ago I gave up watching regular television (broadcast, satellite and cable). There were several reasons for this, but the overwhelming reason was that what was on offer between the commercials was mostly crap. This is not a new revelation.

Since giving up television, I’ve been consistently amazed by the reactions of people, to whom I’ve revealed this fact. People are stunned.. floored. Often, the don’t know what to say. People are literally dumbstruck by the news. Yes, I don’t watch television. While it’s true that every once in a while something worth a damn comes up on television. Usually it’ll be available in DVD three to six months later. That’s good enough for me.

Just how bad is television? Well, it’s pretty bad. Back in the 50’s when television was still a novelty, there was concern about the squandered potential of television. In October, 1958, Edward R. Murrow observed, in a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors’ Association:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

I’m guessing Murrow never anticipated a Prime Time lineup like this! Here’s what’s on offer at the “Big 5″ broadcast networks for tonight (Wednesday, July 30, 2008):

ABC:

• Wife Swap
• Supernanny
• Primetime: Crime

NBC:

• America’s Got Talent
• Baby Borrowers
• Law & Order

CBS:

• America’s Greatest Dog
• Criminal Minds
• SCI: NY

FOX:

• So You Think You Can Dance
• So You Think You Can Dance (Yes, a SECOND episode)
• Local Programming

CW

• America’s Next Top Model
• Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious
• Local Programming

Murrow’s “wires and lights in a box” might be a pleasant change. At least that’s benign. Really, what do we have here? Crime. Lots of crime. Crime, crime, crime. Did I mention crime? So, there’s crime. …and vacuous, pointless voyeurism, peppered with something that … looks…. like patriotic exceptionalism… sort of.

Wow.

This is the example we’re to follow? This is what we aspire to? This is how we see ourselves as a nation?

Check, please!