Thanks to the diligent campaigning, or at least semi-incoherent ramblings of the South Carolina Miss Teen USA Contestant, a new website has been launched to provide maps for US Americans that don't have them, and possibly to help South Africa as well.

Help for the Mapless, or Maps for the Helpless, or umm... something...

Congressman Brian Baird (D-3 Vancouver, Washington) hosted a town hall tonight at Fort Vancouver High School. It was Baird’s first appearance in front of his constituents since reversing his position on the war. ALTHOUGH he’s been an adamant critic of the war—he voted against the war and the surge—he announced last week that he thinks the surge is working and he wants to give it time.

He spoke in a high school auditorium that was packed with at least 500 people who were overwhelmingly vocal in their opposition to Baird’s new stance. There were also protesters outside calling for Baird to resign.

I also talked to several people as they left the auditorium and asked them if they found Baird—who was there to explain his new position—to be persuasive. To a person, everyone shook their head “no way,” including Doris Holmes, active member of the 18th district Democrats, who said, “He lied. He’s toeing the Bush party line. I can’t believe he’s a Democrat.”

You can follow links through to Baird's editorial if you wish. The bottom line is that this sort of thinking simply isn't allowed in the Democratic party. "I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself."

Rep. Baird Gets Blasted for Iraq war views

The Windows Genuine Advantage plan became a genuine disadvantage over the weekend when the server that verified users went down and began to disable operating systems around the world. At least, it disabled the operating systems of computers that checked into the home base to affirm their legitimacy.

Dvorak on the WGA outage over the weekend and by extension, the big problem with "software as a service."

Don't Trust the Servers - Columns by PC Magazine

Vista Multimedia Playback and Network Throughput

In short, they throttled it.

Technical Explaination of Why Vista's Network Throughput Sucks

Okay, the name of the article really bears very little on what the heck the video is about, but...

Basically, some very smart guys figured out a very slick way to decide what parts of an image can be dropped or expanded in order to resize an image without noticeable distortion, and still keep all the components in the image more or less intact.

What this means in a more specific fashion is that if you have a picture of two people, and you resize it to half the original width, instead of getting two very anorexic-looking people in the image, they will simply look like they're standing closer together.

That is just slick.

Absolutely awesome image manipulation technology advance

After months and months of testifying before Congress that basically, he knew less about what was going on in his office than the average nine-year-old girl, Gonzales has finally resigned.

The bad news is that the rumor on the street is that Bush is planning on replacing him with Michael Jerkoff, er... Chertoff. Of course we can count on that suck up to investigate wrongdoings carefully and not sweep anything under the rug. He's golden, don'tchaknow.

Attorney General Gonzales resigns, finally.

xkcd - compiling

Yesterday the new Gerhard Richter glass window was unveiled at the Cologne Cathedral. It looks like a group of pixels and is stunning to look at.

This is neat.

Boing Boing: New Pixelated Glass Window in Cologne Cathedral

A demonstration was held in south-east Afghanistan to protest the gifting Afghani of children with soccer balls decorated with world flags, including the flag of Saudi Arabia.

Apparently the flag of Saudi Arabia includes the name of Allah somewhere on it, which they find offensive when applied to a soccer ball. Approximately 100 people in Khost were apparently offended enough to take to the streets in protest of what most of the rest of the world would simply consider to be a stupid mistake. Throwing a tantrum over a gift given in good faith is not making an effort to get along with one's fellow man.

Fucking grow up, people. If you're going to be this sensitive about the very name of your god, then be choosier about where you write it, which means don't even put it on flags that will stand around exposed to the elements.

Even the Christians know better than to do things like this... A brief reminder about their tenet... "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain." ...for those whose grasp of English thinks this means simply "don't say goddamnit" it is actually an admonition not to use it like a brand identifier or product endorsement, because that would be vanity at work--presuming to know the mind of the Christian god.

More Muslims Whine Like Bitches

Locative art, a melding of global positioning technology to virtual reality, is the new wrinkle in Gibson's matrix.

It's locative art that leads spooks and counterspooks directly to the cash.

...

Gibson: I don't think "Neuromancer" was prescient. It's more like trend-spotting. ... The level I work at is at the juxtaposition, say, of Prada and Santeria. But it's not about Prada or Santeria. It's not about having ideas about either. It's about seeing what happens when the two are put together.

Q&A with William Gibson - The Boston Globe