Looks like Leno had a folk-singer type on his show the other night, singing a rather biting tune called "When the President Talks To God".
This link contains video of the performance.

Finally, some more people have found their testicles!

[ Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst) is actually quite well known in indie circles. He's got 5 or 6 albums -- of the two leno showed, I think "I'm wide awake, it's morning" is by far the better, though AllMusic has them both with 2/5 stars. Anyway, he's certainly not afraid to take a stand.

I think his best work is found on a rock record under the name Desaparecidos called "Read Music/Speak Spanish". It's an intense and scathing indictment of urban and suburban homogenization and consumer culture (among other things).

It's great music, but "Shiny Happy People" it is not... when my old friend Jamie used to write a music newsletter in atlanta, "Catch him before he jumps." was the pithy reference used when Bright Eyes came to town. -k]

Political Dissent folk singer on Jay Leno (with lyrics)

With a software company, the first priority of management needs to be creating that abstraction for the programmers.

If a programmer somewhere is worrying about a broken chair, or waiting on hold with Dell to order a new computer, the abstraction has sprung a leak.

Good article by Joel... and I agree.

It's analagous, though at a much higher level, to my argument against Linux. It's not that I don't like Linux, it's just that I spent at least half my time preparing to use Linux. For any task I wanted to do, there was always, ALWAYS, some sequence of events that had to be done first. And unlike on my mac, it wasn't "Download file, drop into Applications folder" it was, "read about font engine, move font files, run font compiler, fail to see fonts, realize that your X-server is one minor generation out of sync with your tools and the semantics have changed, download updated everything, recompile X, realize that the video driver now won't work, download and complile video driver, fiddle with settings, build tools, compile fonts, recompile gimp, and MAYBE now fonts will work. Some of them. Sometimes."

Very similar really... a programmer in the abstracted environment joel describes is like a computer user with a good OS -- all you have to do is sit down and start working.

I'd kill for that. Alas, today I have to start the process of figuring out why my ASP.NET app won't talk to the database server even though every other application talks to the database server and the semantics are the same, and no one seems to know why or to whom I should speak to get this issue resolved. That's instead of writing code, of course.

The Development Abstraction Layer - Joel on Software

PRICING: We will shortly be adding an additional page to go into detail about our pricing structure.

In a nutshell though, it`s like this:

Uploads: Entirely free

Downloads: Totally free from your own account, $20 for 1000Mb worth of files when downloading from other accounts

Bandwidth: No limits

Public Storage: Unlimited space, totally FREE for the lifetime of your account with us!

Private Storage: Storage for files marked `Private` will be charged at $20 per Gb after the first 12 months of storage.

Hope this is clear. To confirm, that`s unlimited storage space, totally free, for the life of the account and free downloading whenever you need your files.

Yet Another Online Storage Pricing Model (and associated startup)

[Interesting, but their site makes me want to commit homicide. Awful. -k]

Swapzies

Biotechnology’s advance could give malefactors the ability to manipulate life processes--and even affect human behavior.

[ A long article and pretty good. Anyone who's been following this meme (that is, the "cheap, easy bioengineering" meme) won't find too many surprises here I guess, but some of the details offered are scarier than usual.

I'll go ahead and ruin the ending for you -- the conclusion ends up being virtually identical to K. Eric Drexler's on the topic of nanotech. It all boils down to, and I'm paraphrasing, "This shit is happening, can't be stopped, and will be both dangerous and profitable, so we better damn well be at the head of the class." That's it. Bio and nano are similar in that discoveries that produce positive benefits (say, universal constructors in nano and viral therapy in bio) can be tweaked just a tiny bit to produce terrifying weapons (universal deconstructors, highly targeted pathogens).

No one's got a good solution, as far as I can tell, so I guess I agree... for now, the only defense is to be the best of the best, and hopefully be capable of responding rapidly to the threats that seem almost inevitable.

p.s. on the subject of ethnically targetted viruses, did anyone else read Frank Herbert's "The White Plague"? It is, sadly, now out of print, but might be available from used sellers online.

Garage Bio Terror - Technology Review

A Very Hilarious Ann Coulter Column


Ann Coulter's latest column is jam-packed with unintentional hilarity. Let's check it out:

[ It's almost too easy to rip Ann Coulter's logic apart. I predict that in 10 years, when she's been mostly forgotten and is living in a nice retirement home in some california beach world she's gonna be like "Haha, my entire life has been satire! My entire purpose was to demonstrate the absurdity of ultraconservatism by being it's most rapid proponent."

Only, really, I think she's going to be a sad, hateful, lying, frothingly insane imbecile, exactly like she is right now. -k]

Sadly, No!: A Very Hilarious Ann Coulter Column

Uhm, what?

Does it come with a free pass to all online porn or something?

PlayStation VP sez PS3 will cost between 499 and 599 euro - Engadget

"Outsourcing" – which has become synonymous with sending American jobs to India or China – could soon mean foreign workers sleeping in ships just a few miles off America's coasts.
In an outrageous affront to U.S. labor laws, a California company plans to anchor a 600-cabin cruise ship just beyond the three-mile limit off the coast of El Segundo, near Los Angeles, and stock it with foreign software programmers.

Hah! I don't expact that loophole to stay open for long.

Foreign Workers Coming to a Cruise Ship Near You

"This is probably about as close as you can get to universal," said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. "It's definitely going to be inspiring to other states about how there was this compromise. They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help."

I'm very interested to see how this goes. On it's face, it appears to be a good compromise, but I'm only going on the limited detail of this article. I'm pleased to see people trying to figure out universal health care, and if this is a feasible plan, then I won't argue.

Of course, it's politically useful as well :

Mr. Romney, who is considering running for president in 2008, said in an interview Tuesday that the bill, passed by a legislature that is 85 percent Democratic, was "95 percent of what I proposed."

He said, "This is really a landmark for our state because this proves at this stage that we can get health insurance for all our citizens without raising taxes and without a government takeover. The old single-payer canard is gone."

I think it's premature for Romney to declare that categorically, but it's ideologically desirable for him to believe so.

Massachusetts Sets Health Plan for Nearly All

This is Dyson at his best -- a silver star, at the very least. I can't believe no one told me about this article before now. If you're not a subscriber, check it out on your local newsstand today.

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever, argues physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson.

Will the domestication of technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers, GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe the answer is yes.

When you were a kid, maybe you had a chemistry lab. Maybe you thought it was cool. Perhaps you also had a family pet -- a cat, maybe, or a dog. Possibly a bird, fish, or hamster.

For tomorrow's kids, the family pet and the chemistry set are become one. This is the new convergence.

And here you thought growing up with cell phones and YouTube was interesting.

[ Flying kittens, here I come! -k]

Make me a hipporoo, by Freeman Dyson | New Scientist

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.

In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

This article is older and much shorter than the essay in New Scientist, but there is overlap between them.

The journal article Dyson mentions was covered here last year.

[ Very interesting, if not surprising. Reminds me that all y'all need to check out Rudy Rucker's book Frek and the Elixir, which is set in a future where biodiversity has been quelled and strictly limited (through patents, as much as anything). It's a good read. -k]

Biotech is for Toddlers, by Freeman Dyson