Desaparecidos
The US has been asked to reveal the location of 39 people believed to have been kidnapped and held in secret CIA prisons.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/06/08/10130941.html
The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question. But seizing men, women and children and placing them in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards certainly is.
At the last count, the U.S. Congress estimated that 14,000 individuals were in some kind of U.S. detention around the world…
iPhone for you
Here’s a link to reasonably decent appraisal of the iPhone, by Walt Mossberg. It’s lengthy, and appears to cover many of the idiosyncracies.
Edited to reflect the fact that the article was actually written by Katie Boehret.
Alice in wonderland*
*With apologies to Lewis Carroll
The Greatest Country In The World® will be allowing the rabble to demonstrate in favor of the restoration of habeas corpus and the rule of law today in Washington, D.C. Citizens have been without those rights since September of last year, when Congress — incapable of reading anything put before it — abrogated the Constitution.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, there are some who believe that the Constitution has been in doubt since King George took the throne after he was anointed by the Supreme Court. More have taken it upon themselves to declare that it has been that way only since September 11, 2001. Others might agree that the PATRIOT Act is anything but.
Whatever the case, I wonder how Jose Padilla and others feel about their new-found suporters? I wonder how many of the demonstrators are aware of the length of Mr. Padilla’s incarceration, his lack of access to counsel and the degree to which he has been tortured by the Greatest Country In The World®?
It will be interesting to see if all the King’s men — otherwise known as Batons For Freedom And ReligionTM — will be capable of restraining themselves on live television and not further their cause by pummeling the citizenry into agreeing that what King and Cheney God hath wrought, no mere man shall be allowed to tear asunder.
Throwing stones
Oh look — someone is slagging WordPress because of security problems. He goes so far as to recommend a competitor, in this case, Moveable Type, which he promotes on his web site.
Should one take the time to read down to the last paragraph, one will discover that in order to have a secure Moveable Type (MT) installation, one must disable comments. His link to Moveable Type security notes mentions several additional security precautions one should take with Moveable Type to remain secure:
If you can turn off comments and search then you can effectively hide all traces of your Movable Type installation from the public eye and just use it as a convenient tool for generating static but easily-updateable pages. Most people won’t even know you’re running Movable Type. By putting your install in an out-of-the-way location, you can use security through obscurity (not always a bad thing) to protect you from any flaws that might be in the product. I use this technique on my personal weblog…
So then, in order to have a more secure blogging product, we do the following:
- convert to another platform, specifically MT;
- turn off MT comments;
- and while you’re at it, turn off your MT search function;
- don’t advertise the location of your MT install;
- move your MT install location to a more unintelligible URL.
I really don’t have any problem with it all, I just thought it was amusing that in order to recommend overcoming the security lapses of one product, one must use another product with its own security problems.
Yawn.
(Thanks to Photo Matt for the post. He’s the founding developer of WordPress.)
Seamless WordPress 2.2.1 upgrade yet again
Once more, thanks to the Instant Upgrade plugin, version 0.2 from Zirona. I’ve used it for the last two upgrades, and it has worked quickly and flawlessly. Of course, I also do my daily backups of the database and program modules in the event of any kind of failure. Call me astute paranoid one more time.
The 2.2.1 upgrade provides some required security fixes as well as some bug fixes.
I’ve noticed that some are complaining about the recent frequency of upgrades, as well as the trashing of plugins by those same upgrades. To them, I say, why not try Instant Upgrade?
It won’t solve the plugin problem, but it certainly makes for a smooth, fast, trouble-free update: no searching for a site with the required files; no messing with manually moving files; no worrying about whether one has moved the correct files to the appropriate directories.
Thanks again, Zirona and Alex Günsche.
Places to eat - Swift Current, Saskatchewan
Carol’s Diner, 914 Central Avenue North, Swift Current, Saskatchewan
Take the Central Avenue exit.
A daily lunch special featuring home cooking. Or, try the Belgian waffles.
One wonders - revisited
Canada now has seven wonders Seven Wonders? Who could have known? All Seven thanks to a recent oh-so-typical Canadian effort, ignoring the vote of the wildly unfocused masses who inhabit the country, and instead relying on the vagaries of a pop singer, a scribe who so obviously wants to hawk his recent work and a woman who appears to want Canada to accommodate every minority’s right to be recognized and served in its own language.
Good luck with all that.
After much ballyhooing, bullshit and bravado, a poll, which was subsequently ignored in its entirety, inviting ordinary Canadians — whatever the hell they are — to vote in favor of their own piece of ordinary Canada, a myopic panel composed of those three judges ignored the popular vote and decided on the following:
- Niagara Falls
- Canoe
- Igloo
- Old Quebec City
- Pier 21 in Halifax
- Prairie Sky
- The Rockies
The canoe? What the hell? If you’re looking for tourists, don’t hype a canoe as a wonder. You can see one in any outdoor store. Although, were I a judge with a fiction novel named Canoe Lake, and a more recent effort aimed at explaining Canada to Canadians, I’m not surprised by that outcome.
An igloo? Don’t these melt every spring? Where are you going to travel to see one during the summer, when the ignorant masses are out and about, gobbling up gas and sunshine? I suppose one could go here. The bottom third sort of looks like an igloo.
Prairie sky? Who the hell knows what a prairie sky is, unless you’re Canadian? How about calling it “the sky between Alberta and Ontario, through which you have to drive for days to get somewhere relevant?” Actually, there’s prairie sky in America, Russia, China and many other countries around the world. It’s not unique, it just goes by a different name. This picture appears to be of prairie sky, but it’s actually taken in Montana, so it’s Montana sky.
The Rockies? Well, all right. I’ll grant you that, they’re a natural wonder, like Niagara Falls, and they’re pretty spectacular. The Alps are kind of nice too. So are the mountains in Patagonia.
Christ, no wonder Canadians are so boring.
Unfortunately, the expressions of wrath by the ordinary Canadian in response to the fiasco have been removed from the web site, most likely because their responses were so outspoken (that’s outspoken, not obscene) in their utter and total comtempt for the judges and their choices, so I can’t provide a link.
How’s that war on drugs working out?
In 2000, Plan Colombia’s cost of 7.5 billion dollars was going to end civil war, revive Colombia’s economy and put drug cultivators and traffickers out of business:
…to restructure and modernize the armed forces and the police, so that they will be able to restore the rule of law and provide security throughout the country, to combat organized crime and armed groups and to protect and promote human rights and international humanitarian law.
And, among other things,
A counter-narcotics strategy, in partnership with other countries involved in some or all of the links of the drug-chain: production, distribution, sale, consumption, asset laundering, precursor chemicals and arms dealing. And, at the national level, to stop the flow of drug-money the fuel of violence — to the insurgent and other armed organizations.
To date, the effort doesn’t look good. Colombia has produced more coca — almost 30 per cent more — than in 1999. All is not lost, though, in the eyes of the White House and its drug czar. (What the hell? I thought Pablo Escobar was a drug czar.) In scenes reminiscent of Viet Nam, planes have decimated an area more than twice that of Rhode Island.
“…the good news, which is almost universally overlooked, is that these fields, which are regularly sprayed, pruned back, and otherwise brutalized, are far less productive that they traditionally have been.”
Production is up, but the plots aren’t as fertile.
I’m heartened by the good news.
Ignorance is bliss
Someone, it would seem, has linked to a proposal by the Green Party of Canada to implement a further tax of $C 0.12 cent per liter on gasoline to help combat greenhouse gas emissions. I’d like to take this opportunity to point out to said moron that someone that the Green Party is not the governing party in Canada, nor is there a snowball’s chance in hell of that ever happening.
Notwithstanding the ignorance of the foregoing, and more to the point, here’s a fact for the remaining morons of the world — of which there are many in North America: Canada contributes approximately two per cent of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions. For a graphic example of how the elimination of Canadaâ’s supposed portion of greenhouse emissions will affect the rest of the world, read on:
Here, take a dollar. Yes, $ 1.00 — it’s free. Take it!
Just for fun, let’s make it an American dollar. (Canadians have lots of those. Just ask the largest real estate investor in Manhattan.)
Now then, take two cents ($ 0.02) of that dollar and go out and buy something. Let me know when you’re back with something in your pocket.
Right. I thought so.
Oh, and 20 years from now, I’ll still be waiting for you to get back and show me the results of your wonderful purchase.
Contact form blues
Updated below
I was having trouble with Beast-Blog.com’s contact form on my site, so I scrapped it entirely in favor of another I found here at The Marketing Technology Blog. He calls it the WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection.
It’s configurable, it fits nicely on a page, and by the look of it, it will prevent email spamming. More importantly, it took a minimum of fiddling to get it set up — which is all I really care about at this point in my life.
I have no time for fiddling.
I’d rather be riding.
Update: The most recent version of this plugin (v3.1.2) is broken and doesn’t display properly in FireFox. IE isn’t so great either. Sigh. I’m off to find another one that does work.
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