"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."
Edmund Burke
"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be
trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a
great fear."
Bertrand Russell
I noticed a package of Rayovac IC3 rechargeable NiMH batteries (and charger) at Orchard Supply Hardware recently, and was intrigued by their claim of 15 minutes to recharge and a 1000-recharges lifetime on the batteries. Somehow, these came out a couple years ago without my noticing. Getting curious about other brands and the claims, I turned to Google. It turned up what appears to be a very good article comparing the NiMH with other rechargeables and discussing a few different brands, including a new "eneloop" model from Sanyo. Between my digital camera and new MP3 player, I think it’s time to get one of these puppies.
John Perry Barlow
The defendant’s checked baggage alarmed as it passed through an explosive detection system. As a result, TSA contract screener _____ conducted a hand search of the luggage to resolve the alarm. During the course of the additional screening of the defendant’s luggage, batteries, wires, and Ibuprofen bottle were discovered. Upon further inspection of the items, marijuana was found in the Ibuprofen bottle.
Back in the early 1960s, I became a fan of The Clancy Brothers. Tom and Paddy Clancy from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Eire, had come to the US in the late 40s and rambled through a variety of jobs before going into theatre. When their younger brother, Liam, and a buddy of his, Tommy Makem joined them, a musical phenomenon was born. Recording first on their own "Tradition" label, and later for Columbia, they delivered quite a series of albums of (mostly) Irish folk music. Over the years the act was manned by a variety of Clancy kin, with and without Tommy Makem. Later, Liam and Tommy did a few albums of their own.
On their "The Makem & Clancy Collection" (Shanachie, #52001, 1990) they included an Eric Bogle song. He called it "No Man’s Land." They called it ‘Willie McBride." The lyrics are available in various versions but this site quotes it pretty much as I hear them singing it.
Willie McBride or No Man’s Land
Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the dead heroes in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?[chorus]
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?…
And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.[chorus]
That site includes some other songs of a military vocation, including another of Eric’s: "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," about the survivors of a WWI battle on the coast of Turkey.
. . .
How well I remember that terrible day
When our blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk he was ready
Oh he primed himself well.
He rained us with bullets,
And he showered us with shell.
And in five minutes flat,
We were all blown to hell
Nearly blew us back home to Australia.
. . .
Today, let us remember all the veterans, of wars declared and merely "authorized."
[Department of deja vu] In USA Today for October 27, 2004, Kevin Maney’s Technology column takes us back….
The highlights:
There was another election season, back in 1952, when a presidential contest seemed too close to call, America worried it was vulnerable to attack, and a single company dominated computing.
…
The Republican candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. The Democrat, Adlai Stevenson. Polls showed them in a dead heat.
…
By 8:30 p.m. ET — long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes — Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93 — a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn’t believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.
…
In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that’s pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.
…
Amy Gahran’s weblog, Contentious, reports at the top of its This Week’s Grab Bag on Oct 10, 2004:
…
TOP OF THIS WEEK’S LIST: Why can’t a newspaper be more like a blog? This is a brilliant and thankfully blunt series published June 2004 in Barry Parr’s excellent blog MediaSavvy. Here is an index to the series, with a brief excerpt from each article:
1. RSS: “Newspapers are treating RSS as a threat to their core business. …”
2. Comments: “Newspapers demand registration and acceptance of advertising email as a condition for reading their news, but none use those registrations to create a community [by allowing comments]. …”
3. Archives with permanent URLs: …
4. Trackback:…
5. Community and karma:…
6. If newspaper Web sites aren’t like blogs, at least they’re not like Fox News:…
7. Conclusion: “News sites have been wringing their hands about whether blogging is journalism and whether newspapers should let their reporters blog. They’re missing the most important point about blogging. Suddenly, millions of their readers now have better-managed web sites that are better integrated with the Web than any online news Web site.”
No wonder Silicon Valley area STC membership took a big drop in recent years.
According to an article by Scott Thurm in the Wall Street Journal of October 8, 2004,
More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and more than 40% experienced declining incomes over that period, according to a study on the impact of the tech bust.
The study, by the Sphere Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Burlingame, Calif., think tank, found that the fate of tech workers during the bust depended largely on whether they stayed employed at a tech firm. Those that did enjoyed rising incomes — up 11% after accounting for inflation. But workers who left tech for other industries saw their wages stagnate or decline. Those who shifted from semiconductor makers to health care, for example, made 31% less in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with the first quarter of 2000, after accounting for inflation.
…Nearly one-third of the tech workers in California in early 2000 weren’t even working in the state in 1995, and an additional quarter were working at nontech firms. Those who weren’t in tech in 1995 were more likely to leave the industry, or the state, after 2000, the study found
The full text of the article is behind the WSJ subscription wall, but was brought to my attention by a mailing list. A fairly simple Google search turned it up here.
I almost missed it! Today is the first annual Software Freedom Day, celebrating FOSS — Free and Open Source Software.
As a committed user of Mozilla Firefox (see link in upper right of the blog) I support FOSS. Note also that the Web Standards Project urges you to Browse Happy and use the more standard-conformant, more secure browser. Thanks to Molly Holzschlag for the link.
According to Government Computer News | GCN.com: The Internet is dead.
Causes of death include: Phishing, Spam, Spyware, Advertising, and URL redirection.
“The Internet is survived by wholly private networks and e-mail systems. ”
No services are planned.