Ben Slade

From Peter Gutmann's review of content protection in the new Microsoft Windows operating system named "Vista":

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out, and covered in too much tahini. Before long I'll have discarded you on the pavement of life, but until then you're the perfect complement to a perfect evening. Man, 32. Rarely produces winning metaphors.

The title comes from the personals ad:

They call me Naughty Lola. Run of the mill beardy physicist -- male, 46.

In his op-ed, Insult to Injury in Iraq, Frederick W. Kagan blames the U.S. military for the Iraq fiasco, saying that Central Command “never actually made establishing order and security a priority.”

But wasn’t it Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld who threatened to fire anyone who brought up the subject of “post-invasion operations” (also known as nation building) in Iraq? And wasn’t it the Bush administration’s aversion to nation building that limited our postwar options?

Mr. Kagan shouldn’t blame the military for following orders.

I wrote this because nobody in the Washington Post seemed to be making a distinction between the military and the ideologically driven agenda of the Bush administration. More people need to do so.

"Only by revisiting the conservative propaganda in light of history's verdict can we see how delusional the movement had become. And on perhaps no topic were conservatives quite as delusional as on the leadership genius of [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld."

"To be a loyal conservative during the last half-dozen years, you had to convince yourself to accept a series of propositions that ran the gamut from somewhat implausible to completely absurd. As those propositions collapse, one by one, conservatives are reacting much the same way as communists did following the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are the frantic efforts to rescue conservative orthodoxy by defining the party's leaders as apostates who deviated from the true faith."

Click on one of the following links for the video:

QuickTime
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Windows Media
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RealMedia
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Analog and digital photography share one main limitation: They only record intensities and colors of light rays that a simple lens system projects linearly onto the image plane at a single point in time and under a fixed scene illumination. This is still mainly the principle of the camera obscura that has been known since antiquity. Thus, most of the light rays that are propagated through space and time are not recorded.

...computational photography will enable features such as 3D recording, digital refocusing, synthetic re-illumination, improved motion compensation and noise reduction, and much more.

"a huge proportion of the economy’s productivity gains are neither being passed on to consumers through lower prices—which would have the effect of raising real incomes very broadly—nor being distributed to investors as profit, nor even being used to raise the wages of most employees in industries seeing rapid productivity growth. Rather, they’re being diverted to a comparative handful of employees."

"Over thirty-five years, the rise in wages and salaries in the wide middle of the income distribution was 11 percent. The rise in wages and salaries at the top of the income distribution was 617 percent."

This interview covers the fiasco of the Iraq War, from the point of view of someone who knows and respects the military.

"Embrace the Suck" is a term used by the soldiers to describe how they deal with difficult situations. Ie., just put your head down and move forward.

In the book and this interview, Thomas Ricks make so many insightful points that it's difficult to summarize. Basically, the US invasion of Iraq was inexcusebly incompetent, especially the military's lack of understanding of counter-insurgency warfare, ignoring the lessons learned in Vietnam.

He basically makes the point that the modern industrial scale agriculture is using fossil fuels and irrigation to maintain productivitiy and it's not a sustainable solution.

Here are a few interesting excerpts: