After McCain finally released a technology policy, Lawrence Lessig takes a comparative look at the two candidates’ policies. Save our intarwebs!
Presidential Technology Policies
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Monthly Archives: August 2008
Chemical Party
Learn the principles of chemistry with the Chemical Party video [hat tip Peter Srinu].
Desktop Refresher
I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look.
In traditional Lifehacker style, I’ll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat and MusicTracker (displays currently playing song in my away message) plugins. I’m using 3 Screenlets: Now Playing (displays currently playing track and album art), Sysmonitor (displays current system information) and Trash. Finally, it shows one of my new favorite productivity applications: Gnome Do. “Do” is a launcher that can be extended by a number of plugins. For example, you type Super(Win)+Space to launch Do and then start typing what you want to do. Start typing an artist’s name, like “beat”, and then pressing “enter” will open all my Beatles songs in Rhythmbox. Typing the first few letters of a friend’s screen name and then “enter” will open a chat with them in Pidgin. Those types of things are useful. Oh, and I got my wallpaper from iunewind.com.
My August 08 Desktop featuring Avant, Pidgin, Now Playing Screenlet, Sysmonitor Screenlet, and Gnome-Do
Is Windows Sleeping?
Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.
Disease-specific Stem Cells
A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson’s easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to come by. This technique was developed for ALS, and it’s been applied to 10 new diseases.
The full list of diseases represented: adenosine deaminase deficiency-related severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome (SBDS), Gaucher disease (GD) type III, Duchenne (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD), Parkinson disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), juvenile-onset, type 1 diabetes mellitus (JDM), Down syndrome (DS)/trisomy 21, and the carrier state of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.
Sound like a list of diseases we studied in class, anyone?
Comment of the Day
A comment on Mark Pilgrim‘s Hello Darkness My Old Friend:
“No one cares about freedoms for the same reason that no one cares about oxygen. As long as they’re there, why bother? Freedom zero is so abstract to most people that no one even thinks about it, let alone care. It’s like the string theory. It’s only when things are taken away that there’s reason to get upset.” -Jesper
For those who are unfamiliar, Freedom 0 is one of four freedoms listed in the Free Software Definition:
“The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.”
Olympic browser blockage
So I went to check out the replay of last night’s phenomenal 4×100 Men’s relay only to find an annoyingly disturbing message: the NBC Olympics vidoes don’t “support” Linux. First of all, what kind of ludicrous claim is that? They’re freakin’ videos. If I’ve got the correct codecs installed, then I’ll be able to watch them. If I don’t, then I won’t. And what is this? 1998? Who still designs a website for only a select few browsers? I know I reported that the FAFSA website does, but at least theirs turned out to be just a warning, and it lets you continue anyways. Shouldn’t something like coverage of the Olympics be accessible to anyone, especially since broadcast coverage seems so locked down? They currently support 4 browsers: IE (Win), Firefox (Win), Safari (Mac), and Firefox (Mac). Sorry Opera fans, you’re not privileged enough to see the Olympics online.
NBC Olympics only allows 4 browsers
Sorry to say NBC, but there are a lot of web browsers out there that are capable of displaying your videos. No one’s asking you to go out of your way to “support” them all, just don’t preemptively block them. Plus, is anyone else concerned that they’ll start doing this to Hulu and other network’s sites? Well I am, and I’m not one bit happy about it!
The Inner Life of a Cell
Harvard made a great video called The Inner Life of a Cell a couple of years ago using some great computer graphics [hat tip Sadie]. It tells a brief story of the mechanism of inflammation being activated in a leukocyte. It was put to some great music by Studio Daily. I highly recommend you check it out.
If you’re wondering what all that stuff is, you can check out one of Harvard’s versions, which contain a play-by-play. I must admit that (having no real idea of what I was looking at) I got a little bit lost in the video, so Harvard’s version definitely helped clear up a few things. But Sadie and I agree that it’s pretty cool that we can watch a video like that and actually mostly understand it. After spending years studying something like bio, you forget how much you know about it that the average Joe has never even considered.
Vista gets pwned
Surprise, Surprise. Vista gets seriously pwned at Blackhat 2008 [via Gizmodo]. The exploit is actually based in a bunch of Java and .NET exploit that takes advantage of Internet Explorer’s ActiveX controls. Giz claims that this has potential to infect many other systems (theoretically because they’re not based on platform specific technologies). Although you can’t count it out, it’s highly unlikely that it would affect my Ubuntu install, even if it did access Java on my machine. It will probably also help that OpenJDK was released and will be the default Java installed in Ubuntu. But even if a Java exploit did access my machine, what’s the most it could do? The most it has access to is my /home directory. It can’t damage my actual system. So I’ll back that up and sleep easy for a while. Good luck, Windows users. Oh, and I can’t speak for Macs, but I’m still waiting for the day for that bubble to burst. Could this be it?
Solar Eclipse
Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet!