Not Much Sympathy for Apple (the iPod vs. the OS 10.1 Update CD)

There’s an interesting story at Slashdot about a debacle involving an OS X update CD. The CD is free and is supposed to let users upgrade their software from OS X to OS X.1. The upgrade CD allows users to do a clean install, but only after the updater does a check to make sure you already have OS X on your Mac.

But some clever users discovered that there is a single file in the installer package which performs this check. Create an image of the upgrade CD, delete that one file, and then burn the image onto a CD, and the result is a free OS X CD.

Apple was not to happy, going so far as to send out a cease and desist order to a web site that posted instructions on how to do it (though the process is so simple, that you could probably train a monkey to do it — there’s no way they’re going to be able to contain this).

On the one hand, Apple was trying to do the right thing by allowing a clean install — upgrade CDs that don’t allow this are a pain in the ass. On the other hand, it’s hard to be sympathetic over Apple’s intellectual property claims considering its half-assed job at providing digital rigts management on the iPod.

When the iPod was first released I was ranting about it having a DRM scheme built in. But the actual system used by the iPod is so blatantly weak, it was clearly intended to placate lawyers who might consider suing Apple while also ensuring that Mac geeks would be able to bypass the DRM “feature” with ease (just like the upgrade CD, a well-trained monkey should be able to bypass the iPod’s DRM).

I really don’t care which approach Apple takes, but its a bit hypocritical of it to release one product that makes it ridiculously easy to pirate music, and then turn around and whine and moan when someone figures out a way to easily pirate its operating system.

Required Reading: USS Clueless

This is how good Steven Den Beste’s USS Clueless weblog is — every morning I turn on CNN to find out the latest news in the war against Afghanistan. Then I bring up Den Beste’s site to find out everything CNN left out or got wrong.

If there is a more comprehensive, insightful look at the events taking place in Afghanistan, I have yet to find it. As far as I’m concerned, USS Clueless is required reading for anyone who wants to closely follow the war on terrorism.

Sometimes, Metafilter Really Frightens Me

No, it’s not as scary as Slashdot, but sometimes Metafilter posters come close. For example, check out this recent thread started by someone who had apparently never heard the saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” before hearing it on a “Babylon 5″ episode — and was subsequently astonished to hear a recent speech George W. Bush in which the president apparently repeated dialogue from a B5 episode.

I think that’s clueless with a capital C.

But Slashdot really took the cake with the hilarious responses to the thread, Writers Who Will Stand the Test of Time?. I like lousy genre fiction as much as the next geek, but come on — 50 years from now, nobody’s going to give a rats ass about Roger Zelazny or Robert Jordan (well, maybe Jordan will have an audience as he continues to promise to bring his Wheel of Time storyline to a close).

I guess this wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t know half a dozen very intelligent people who restrict their reading lists to a combination of comic books and genre novels. Sure I’m looking forward to the Lord of the Rings film, but you know Dante Alighieri wrote a fantastic trilogy that runs rings around Tolkein.

Car Wars, 2001

Okay, I spent way too much time as a teenager playing Steve Jackson Games’ excellent Car Wars — a board game in which the goal is to outfit cars with all sorts of weapons and then blow away your friends (and it is a travesty that there has never been a computer car fighting game as cool as this board game).

Anyway, Steve Jackson Games is getting ready to release an updated, streamlined version of the game and just by coincidence the U.S. Army is working on an SUV that contains most of the elements of the erstwhile fictional game.

They’re calling the behemoth SmarTruck, and this thing is loaded with all the options:

Packed with more gadgets than a Swiss army knife, the vehicle’s Ford F-350 chassis boasts a remote-controlled, laser-sighted machine gun, a grenade launcher, night vision, bulletproof glass, Kevlar armor, a GPS locator, electrified door handles, and blinding lights.

To elude pursuers, the truck can cover the road behind it with an oil slick, a smoke screen or sharp tacks to puncture enemy vehicle’s tires. It can prevent attempts to latch explosive booby traps onto it and clear mine fields.

Even James Bond never had a vehicle that cool.

Difficult Getting Back in the Groove

Over the past few years I’ve become an extreme creature of habit — my wife says that every year I’m becoming more and more like Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man.” So I spent much of last week in the hospital where my daughter was having surgery and then taking care of her after her successful operation, and it’s been very difficult to get back into synch.

And I’ve been completely unmotivated to do anything but watch television. You know you’re in a really bad place when you find yourself watching an hour long biography of Carnie Wilson (of Wilson-Philips “fame.”)

Ugh.

Why Did the WTC Towers Collapse So Quickly?

Via Poliglut come two separate theories about why the WTC Towers collapsed so quickly.

In this corner we have chemistry professor Art Robinson. Robinson told World Net Daily that he believes the towers came down quickly because of New York’s 1971 ban on asbestos.

When the towers were originally designed, the columns were to be coated in a foam spray made from asbestos. Before the towers were completed, however, New York banned asbestos and the upper floors used an alternative insulation. Robinson says that Herbert Levine, who invented the asbetos foam spray that was to be used, said that, “If a fire breaks out above the 64th floor, that building will fall down.”

I’m extremely skeptical of this particular theory. Robinson makes much of Levine’s comment without even bothering to note that it is incredibly self-serving. Also this particular explanation is too reminiscent of the myth that the Space Shuttle disaster was the result of an asbestos ban (asbestos should not have been banned, but lets not try to blame every disaster on the irrational fear of asbestos).

In the other corner is G. Charles Clifton of the New Zealand Heavy Engineering Research Assocation who argues that it was the force exerted by the impact of the planes which ultimately doomed the towers. Clifton argues that the plane that hit the North Tower almost certainly took out the core supporting structures of at least three floors, causing the floors above them to sag. As the fire weakened the supporting columns, this effect would have become more exaggerated until the floors collapsed on top of each other pancake-style.

Clifton’s hypothesis also would explain why the South tower collapsed so much more quickly than did the North tower. Based on the videotape of the collision, Clifton notes that the plane that hit the South tower probably took out all of the core supports for at least 4 and probably 6 floors, as well as severely weakening the southeast corner of the building.

In both cases, Clifton argues that any resulting fire was not, in and of itself, enough to bring down the towers. In fact, he notes that the available evidence is inconsistent with a raging 700 degree fire that has been frequently hypothesized as the cause of the collapse (Clifton argues that if that scenario occurred, the towers wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as they did).

Explanation from Google

The support folks at Google sent me a very nice message today answering my questions about why my web site seemed to periodically disappear from their index.

We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our index we find new sites, lose some sites and sites shift in their ranking. If you happen to enter the same query while we are in the process of posting the index at our various data centers around the country it might seem like you are seeing inconsistent results from Google. What is actually happening is that you are seeing a result from an “old” version of our index one time and a result from a “new” version the next. Due to the size of our index, we can not simultaneously post a new index at all of our data centers, which may result in the behavior for a short period of time.

The Religious Right, the Nutty Left and Everybody In Between

After I posted about that horrific child murder in Chicago, Seth Dillingham noticed that the news story seemed awfully slanted against religion. Seth writes,

So many people crow about the unfair, imbalanced influence that the “religious right” has on the U.S. political system. The “religious right” political bodies bug me too, much of the time, but what really saddens me is this apparent feeling that they shouldn’t be heard at all.

What’s always amazed me about the “religious right” is how if you repackage the exact same ideas in a liberal package, people don’t even seem to notice. So if Jerry Falwell came out and said we need to start censoring movies to save our decadent culture he would be blasted for it and every pundit with a pen (or word processor) would be wringing their hands about the influence of the religious right.

But last year when both Al Gore and Ralph Nader indicated their desire to see the government step in to do something about Hollywood, pretty much no one cared. If Jerry Falwell says that the Teletubbies promote homosexuality, he’s headline news and the laughing stock of the country, but when a liberal group blasts GI Joe and other toys for promoting violence to children the news media generally laps it up.