“Yes we can.” — Barack Obama
“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they _could_, they didn’t stop to think if they *should*.” — Dr. Ian Malcolm
Archive
Archive for October, 2008
All this brouhaha about “truthiness” has me jealous and enraged– so much so that I was compelled to create my *own* cool meme.
Even facts which are chock-full of truthiness pale in comparison to those which are unquestionably *scientificky*.
Sure, the word has been on the Internet since at least 2002, but I didn’t find that out until _after_ I’d thunk it up.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Just when you think businesses had no clue left to lose….
Dell is now selling new computers with Windows XP– _if_ you pay a $99 *downgrade* fee.
Hey, Microsoft– How can it be a *downgrade* if it costs *more*? If people are _paying_ this fee, doesn’t that mean it’s actually an *upgrade*– that Vista isn’t as good as XP?
Hey, Dell– If “downgrades” are $99, why can’t I buy a system, *upgrade* from Vista to Linux, and get $99 *back*?
I’ve always liked Ron Paul, but he didn’t do himself or the country any favors when he declined to run on the same ticket as Libertarian candidate Bob Barr.
Here’s how I had briefly imagined things working out:
- Dr Paul accepts the invitation, or at least counter-offers to run for President with Barr moving to veep. I think Bob would have jumped at the chance.
- Dr Paul’s tremendous grass-roots support energizes an already-healthy Libertarian movement.
- Seeing a viable opportunity for a pair of A rated candidates to win the election, versus the C+ rated Republican candidate, the NRA throws its resources and recommendation to the Libertarian party. That’s six *million* votes, stated conservatively. Suddenly, at public demand, there are _three_ parties in the debates.
- Sensing the fallacy of the two-party argument “Voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away”, millions of disaffected conservatives cast their ballots for Barr and Paul.
- Having now an actual separation between the tenets of the two leading parties, the Democrat platform is forced to withstand the harsh light of fact and reason. Obama is still charismatic and enjoys broad media support, but the contradictions and fallacies in the Democrat wishlist are exposed for all to see.
- Barr and Paul win the election, and by leveraging their broad popular support, work immediately and tirelessly to remove and rebuild our broken tax system, resulting in an unprecedented surge in the economy, billions of dollars in inefficiencies recovered, immigration issues mitigated, and sufficient revenue to fully fund all current Federal entitlement programs and even begin paying down the national debt.
- Most importantly, with Fair Tax in place, they have kicked down the stanchions that had been supporting the two-party system, and removed the ability of self-interested factions to subject American voters to economic blackmail.
Well, anyway, it was a nice dream for the few days it lasted.
I would have been much more impressed with Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment if they’d done a double-blind test wherein the OS represented as “Mojave” was really a similarly badge-stripped, tricked-out version of, say, Ubuntu with KDE 4, or perhaps Linux Mint— _then_ compared Vista’s numbers to the others.
Or if they’d asked the users to try to print to an all-in-one device that hadn’t had the drivers updated yet.
Microsoft’s proposal, that Vista’s shortcomings are due to marketing issues, distracts the company from its real chores of *fixing* the problems before the Windows 7 ship date.
Tonight I ate at a popular national restaurant– never mind which one, but it rhymes with “Fracker Carol”– and in the adjoining store, I noticed that there were Hallowe’en objects mixed in with all of the normal year-round fare.
That was all right, but here we are just getting October well under way, and they’ve already rolled out their Christmas merchandise, and it’s already starting to shoulder its way in among the other seasonal merchandise.
Needless to say, *that* juxtaposition is *not* graceful. Not at all.
I am fraught with the image of the three Wise Men delivering their gifts of gold, myrrh, and Frankenstein.