Yearly Archives: 2005


Rummy is a war criminal

Don Rumsfeld needs to be fired immediately. Yesterday during a Pentagon briefing he decreed that the press should no longer be referring to the insurgents in Iraq as insurgents. Ever since the end of the invasion in April 2003, the Iraqi’s that have been fighting back against the US occupation have been referred to as insurgents. Now Rumsfeld says:

This is a group of people who don’t merit the word `insurgency,’ I think

According to Dictionary.com an insurgent is defined as:

Rising in revolt against established authority, especially a government.

I suppose that if you consider that neither the current Iraqi government nor the American occupation force might be considered an established authority, then the forces fighting against the American military might not qualify for the term insurgent. Of course by this argument the “Iraqi government” doesn’t qualify for the term either. It seems that the shrub administration thinks it can finally defeat the insurgency by simply redefining them out of existence.

During the same briefing the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Gen. Peter Pace got into a disagreement with Rumsfeld about the mistreatment of prisoners.

A reporter asked Pace what U.S. commanders in Iraq are supposed to do if they find Iraqi forces abusing prisoners. Pace replied that if inhumane treatment is observed it is a service member’s duty to stop it.

“I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it _ it’s to report it,” Rumsfeld said, turning to Pace.

Replied the general: “If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.”

Don Rumsfeld is a total embarassment and disgrace. The attitude of this asshole permeates down through the ranks and has lead to the abuses that have occured at Gauntanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It is good to see Gen. Pace standing up to Rumsfeld and saying what is right. He is setting the right example for the troops. Hopefully the troops will hear these words and know it alright to do the right thing and not follow illegal orders. It is never right to torture and abuse prisoners. It is also counter productive. When your enemies hear about these practises it just hardens them against you. Just look at the situation in Israel and Palestine. The Israeli’s have been torturing Palestinian prisoners for decades and it has not stopped the violence there. US and Iraqi troops have been torturing prisoners for the last three years and the insurgency has only gotten worse over time. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all their cronies need to be removed from office and put on trial for war crimes. America needs to cleansed of this plague.


Storytellers 4

One of my favorite elements fo podcasting is the story telling. There are some amazing story tellers on podcasts. This has become something of a lost art in recent years but clearly they aren’t all gone. Two of the best are Matt from Digital Detroit Radio and P.W. Fenton from Digital Flotsam. Matt’s show is a mix of music and stories. He plays various podsafe music and tells funny stories about the silly and ridiculous thing that he encounters in everyday life. The kind of silly and ridiculous things that happen to all of us. A prime example was on his show 58 when he told a tale of going to supermarket and having to pick up some teen magazines that his wife needed for a presentation. Matt has a great delivery and his stories are almost always very funny. P-Dub has a wonderful way with words and his stories are always really heartfelt and make me smile.

P-Dub is different. Each show has a different theme and he tells a longer form story. The most recent show #28 has a couple of wonderful thanksgiving stories. The shows typically run about 25-30 minutes. He interperses segments of the story with some music. This part unfortunately has caused P-Dub some grief recently. Not all of the music he used in the first 26 episodes was podsafe. Thanks to the incredible stupidity of the executives at the big record companies, he has taken those shows down off of his site. He explains why in episode # 27. I have most of the the older shows archived and if you are interested in hearing any of them, let me know and I will send them to you. Hopefully P-Dub won’t mind. I particularly recomend the brain-dead edition where he explains why all young boys are brain-dead and the follow-up where he tells of the not so young in the Florida legislature who are also brain-dead.

Go give both Matt and P-dub a listen. You won’t regret it.


The 25th Ammendment

Over on AmericaBlog they have an interesting post today on the possibility of removing shrub from office. The 25th amendment to the constitution deals with circumstances of removing or temporarily replacing the the president if the the president dies or becomes incapacitated. It reads as follows:

Twenty-Fifth Amendment – Presidential Vacancy, Disability, and Inability

Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Section 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principle officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

In general, I would love to see shrub yanked for being mentally incompetent. However, at this point in time, the treatment may well be worse than the disease. If the president is removed, the vice-president takes over. And handing the reins to Tricky Dick II is not a thought I can stomach. Now if the big time dick is indicted and is forced to resign, that opens up a whole new ball game. If the democrats in congress can grow some balls and actually have some impact on the selection of a replacment vp, then the 25th amendment might actually be a palatable alternative.


Gadget Stuff

I like to read the gadget sites like Engadget and Gizmodo. Being an engineer and a geek (and proud of it!), I am always fascinated by the stuff that people can come up with. For all of the faults of humanity, and there is definitely no shortage of those, people can be so incredibly creative and resourceful. Of course I often wish that they would direct some of those efforts, toward making the world a better place to live. But I am still amazed by the ingenuity of people. I like gadgets and I have my fair share of them, although there are plenty, that although they are fascinating, I still think are dumb and useless. Over on Engadget they have an item about a treadmill bike. treadmill bike Someone attached a treadmill to a bicycle frame to create a bike that you walk on to move instead of pedalling. Engadget’s caption says it all, “You know, you could also just walk.”

Meanwhile on Gizmodo they have been having a running joke about people’s ipod shrines. Now I love my ipod and take it almost everywhere with me. But I wouldn’t build a shrine to it. It is a device that I use all the time. I love the design and the user interface. I don’t worship it. I have also love legos since I was a kid and my son max loves them too. Having said all that, I still this particular ipod shrine is very funny. leog ipod shrine


Car parts can be profitable

A Detroit Free Press story yesterday proves that auto parts can be profitably manufactured in Michigan. More importantly this is being done while workers are being paid good wages. The interesting thing here is that this is a privately held company. It seems that if the management of a company doesn’t have to worry about showing analysts constant growth every three months, they can invest some money in the company and people and actually grow more and make money. Instead of taking all the money out of the company they put some of it back in. Three cheers for Chuck O’Brien and Ring Screw works!!! We need more people like him to help revive the Michigan and US economies.


Diebold still trying to corrupt the election process! 2

After the fiasco of a major digital voting failure in Carteret County, North Carolina during the 2004 elections, the NC legislature passed a particularly restrictive new law governing electronic voting systems.

The new bill establishes stringent requirements for voting technology selection, requires election officials to use voter verified paper ballots for recounts and audits, mandates random hand-to-eye audits of paper ballots, and establishes the necessity of post-election voting system tests. North Carolina’s new voting machine requirements are unique, and unusually restrictive compared to similar laws found in other states. Under the new law, which received widespread public support, manufacturers must provide the state government with complete access to voting machine source code during the bidding process so that state officials can evaluate the reliability and integrity of the technology.

Diebold, the company that manufactures a particularly notorious voting system, is fighting these new requirements. They don’t want to provide the source code for their system and have gone to court to request a permanent exemption from these new rules. Diebold seems to prefer protecting their code in the courts than they do on their servers. In 2002 a copy of their source code was downloaded from one of their ftp servers that was left wide open. Subsequent analysis showed that it was running on microsoft windows, and used excel as part of the mechanism for tallying the votes. Now anyone who has used a windows based pc in recent years knows, it is a ridiculously insecure operating system and very easy to hack. As it turns out the diebold system was so poorly designed that someone could easily go into the system and change the vote tallies, without anyone being able to trace back or detect that it had even been modified. Internal memo’s and e-mails from diebold have also documented unauthorized changes they have made to software in voting machines. More information on Diebold voting system problems can be found at BlackboxVoting.com. Well now that someone is really trying to crack down on the abuses of Diebold, they are claiming that they can’t reveal the code because it based on windows.

Well this is bullshit! These rules were put in place for the public good. They are not unreasonable. In fact I don’t think they go quite far enough. I personally believe that any software used in voting machines should be open-source. If a company can’t or won’t play by these rules they should just take a hike. They should not be given any exemptions. This goes for not just Diebold but any other company. Governments should use these rules and only purchase systems that follow these rules. Fortunately the Electronic Frontier Foundation has gone to court to try and prevent this exemption and we should all hope they are successful. If they are not and Diebold is allowed to keep there code secret we will never be able to ensure fair and honest elections in this country again. Ars Technica is a really good site and they have a good write-up about this and it is worth reading.


I do buy music 10

For anyone who has been reading my recent rants on sony and drm, I just want to clarify something. I don’t have a problem with paying for music. I think musicians should be compensated for their work. I just don’t believe in supporting overpaid executives and lawyers for big media companies. In fact in recent months (coinciding with listening to podcasts) I have purchased more music than I have in a long time. It’s just that I now get it either directly from artists through their websites or from online stores like emusic.com that sell mp3 files with no drm and give a much bigger share of the proceeds back to the musicians. I have purchased music from Brother Love, Brad Sucks, the Arts and Sciences, the Black Furies, Jukebox Zeros and others. Demonstrate to the world that we don’t need drm. Buy non-drm music and boycott anything that is copy-protected.


Boycott Sony products!!

On top of all the other bullshit and lies from Sony over the past 2 weeks regarding their DRM rootkit (see my previous posts here and a good timeline summary from BoingBoing), it now appears that Sony themselves have violated a copyright. It looks like some of the software sony used is ripped off from the Lame mp3 encoder. Lame is an open source software project published under the GPL, which allows anyone to use it for free, but you have to acknowledge it and return any modifications back to the community for further use under the same license. Well it appears that Sony or one its DRM suppliers used the open-source Lame code and neither acknowledged nor gave back the modifications. For a company that makes so much noise about protecting their intellectual property, they don’t seem to have any qualms about stealing others work.

Sony in general is very consumer unfriendly. Ever since they release the playstation portable last spring they have constantly been releasing firmware updates for the thing. While they have added a couple of new functions most of the updates have done nothing more than disable the hacks that people have done to allow them to create and play their own games on the device. There are people out there creating there own games or emulators to play older games. Sony doesn’t like this because they don’t get a cut like they do when people buy new games from the store. So they play cat and mouse, but each time they do this it is defeated again within a couple of weeks.

I will no longer purchase any Sony products of any kind, including hardware, software, music, anything! I urge anyone reading this to also boycott sony. Clearly this company does not deserve to be in business any more.

Update: Boing-boing is keeping a running log of events in the Sony rootkit drm debacle here