] We got to listen to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
] computer and hacker legend speak today with his HOPE
] keynote.

This speech has something I had never seen in countless shows about Woz or Apple. It talks about *why* he did and thought the way he did, as well as how he taught kids in school.

Steve Wozniak HOPE Keynote for download

Acidus wrote:

] "Fuck you and your adjectives" -Rattle

You forgot a couple of mine...

"Is this the 'bad part' of town?"

"Nick, you realise that if you were a politician your career would now be over."

RE: Quotes From HOPE 5

] The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer
] Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week
] when it recommended for security reasons using browsers
] other than Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

Ouch!

DHS/CERT: Don't use IE

] To use the "Wiki It!" bookmarklet, simply highlight the
] word or words you wish to look up, and click the
] bookmarklet. A separate, minimalist window will open with
] the Wikipedia entry for it.

] Just drag the Wiki It! link onto your personal toolbar.
] It has been tested on Mozilla 1.5 on Linux and Windows
] systems, as well as Firefox 0.7, and Internet Explorer 6.
]

Most Significant Bit :: Wikipedia Bookmarklet

] Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he
] may have used the phrase "take that to the bank" but that
] no final decision had been made to go to war.
]
] "To my knowledge, a decision had not been taken by the
] president to go to war at that meeting," Rumsfeld said.
] "There was certainly nothing I said that should have
] suggested that, and any suggestion to the contrary would
] not be accurate."

Thats fucking classic. Congradulations dumbass, you are no longer credible.

Pentagon Deleted Rumsfeld Comment (washingtonpost.com)

] Asked about the 2.6 million jobs forecast, McClellan
] said, "The president is interested in actual jobs being
] created rather than economic modeling."
]
] He quoted Bush as saying, "I'm not a statistician. I'm
] not a predictor."

I almost memed this. How long has it been since that interview? Thats fairly fast turn around time for a backpedal! I wonder if he blurted out the wrong number and they are running damage control.

CNN.com - White House downplays job predictions - Feb. 18, 2004

There is much to comment on in this interview. Too much, perhaps.

Its clear he is really spinning hard on this intel commission out of the gate.

I wouldn't be pissed off about his comment about not testifying. Its a matter of fact. Same rules applied to Clinton.

The war issue is something I've already discussed. Iraq was a threat. Iraq was not an imminent threat. Thats what they sold. They were wrong. Now they have to explain it. This doesn't mean that going into Iraq was a bad idea. He explains clearly what the benefits were. He is being honest there. The primary problem that I have with it was related to the international law issue. Not what we did but how. Bush misrepresents what he did when we talks about going to the international community. They drove the international community away, and they did so intentionally. They set a poor precedent for international relations. But I have a hard time saying they were wrong about the war per say. Its hard to say for certain. The world is clearly a safer place without Saddam Hussein, but there have been costs.

I greatly appreciate his careful respect for the armed services, and for the families connected to them. This guy is calling families every day. You can tell it has effected him.

I think he is playing the wrong card when he talks about jobs. The unemployment rate is not a good indicator of the health of the jobs situation in the country. If I were running for president I would promise to create new data points which more accurately include the number of people who are underemployed or who have left the job market.

I am also skeptical of what he has done for small business, and innovation. He isn't specific. Tax cuts on dividends coupled with expensing stock options have clearly cost the innovators. I look forward to hearing what the hell he is talking about.

As far as the deficit is concerned, this is DIRECTLY connected to the issues of international law I raise above. You don't have the sort of economic assistance from allied powers that you had with the Gulf War. Possibly Bush is attempting to avoid his father's fate? Bush Sr. said "no new taxes" and then ended up having to raise them because of the Gulf, and lost an election because of it. Bush Jr. is really juggling to pull this off. The reality is, raise or lower taxes, he's pretty much fucked either way. The fiscal conservatives listed (SIC, Cato is not a "conservative" group!) are wrong in the sense that Bush has proposed DEEP cuts in regular spending. Moreso then anyone in recent memory. This is a complex fish to fry and Bush deserves credit and blame alike. You show me a candidate with Bush's general fiscal responsibility along with Clinton's diplomacy and I'll show you America's first libertarian president.

Bush is not responsible for the country becoming more partisan. Bin Lauden is responsible. The interviewer really nails him in the end with the polling, but conspiracy theories about skull and bones is a little silly for MSNBC. Its a public service organization. Get a fucking grip. You sound like Robert Anton Wilson!

In the final analysis, I have mixed opinions about Bush, but he has a clearer message then John Kerry.

I too have a question I would have asked that was glaringly missing. I wonder if mine is the same as Jeremy's. I can sum it up in one word, which I piped to md5sum and posted here:

fa599b3d72699e176dec80a2739e5115

NBC -- Meet the Press with GWB

Shipping work overseas saves money that drops to the bottom line as profit.  Stock prices are today keyed to earnings-per-share as is, to a certain extent, executive compensation.  Now look at the average time that an institutional investor actually holds a given stock.  This can be measured in months, sometimes in weeks, but hardly ever in years.  So the investor timeline is short and the CEO timeline -- with average tenancies in those positions at less than five years -- is not much longer.  So offshoring works great for these two groups.  The stock goes up and along with it, the CEO's bonus and stock options.  By the time the long-term effects of this policy are felt, both the investors and the CEO are long gone.  And even if the CEO is still around, it is with a golden parachute negotiated long before that often pays him more to go away than he might have got to stay.

PBS Cringely on IT Outsourcing

] Anyway, for this we also needed something moving or
] changing very fast, so we decided to build a bolt gun. Of
] course, bolt guns aren't very fun unless you can see, in
] great detail, the object they are hitting explode, so
] these two projects seemed like a match made in nerd
] heaven. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we
] simply had no choice but to build a flash timing
] mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action.

The tale of what evils can occur when 3 nerds from MIT are bored over winter break. They build a bolt gun power by a BASIC stamp, that takes cool bolt-traveling-through-fruit-at high-velocity photos

Fruit Killing bolt gun powered by BASIC!