] Time to mix things up. Meet iPod shuffle, the
] unpredictable new iPod. What will it play next? Can it
] read your mind? Can it read your moods? Load it up. Put
] it on. See where it takes you. Choose from pocket-size
] 512MB or 1G models starting at $99(1) and surprise
] yourself.

Last night I bought the 1GB version. I really do like it. It's super light, ultra durable, and more important it's an ipod.

What I hate is steve jobs. I hate him. I hate his marketing tactics. I hate the feeling of "completion" I had while I listened to my shiny new shuffle and seeing an ipod poster on the metro wall. What really irked me was the fact that the whole marketing campaign worked on me.

My name is timball and I bow before the temple of Steve Jobs.

Apple - iPod shuffle

] The sauce is named after its score on the chilli heat
] measure, the Scoville Unit.
]
] Reserve scores 16 million units, while a Red Savina, the
] world's spiciest pepper, measures just 570,000.

Chilli sauce is real killer

] Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the
] Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) -- the
] government-funded organization that was designed to
] shield PBS from political pressure -- is aggressively
] pressing PBS to correct what he considers "liberal bias."
]
] This top-down partisan meddling goes against the very
] nature of PBS and the local stations we trust. Let the
] people speak and decide the future of PBS, not secret
] dealings by White House operatives.
]
] Sign this petition to demand that Congress, the CPB and
] PBS station managers remove Tomlinson and support town
] meetings in your community on the future of PBS.

Read more at:
http://mediacitizen.blogspot.com/2005/05/tomlinsons-tone-deafness.html

Sign the petition.

Free Press : Save PBS from partisan operatives

] Stephen Colbert, who plays a phony correspondent on the
] fake-news program "The Daily Show," is getting a real
] promotion.
]
] Comedy Central said yesterday that it was giving Mr.
] Colbert his own show: a half-hour that is expected to
] follow "The Daily Show" on weeknights and will lampoon
] those cable-news shows that are dominated by the
] personality and sensibility of a single host. Think, he
] said, of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews and Sean
] Hannity.
]
] Where "The Daily Show" and its host, Jon Stewart,
] generally spoof the headlines of the day (and the anchors
] and reporters who deliver them), Mr. Colbert's program
] will send up those hosts who have become household names
] doing interviews and offering analyses each night on the
] 24-hour cable news channels. The program, which is
] expected to begin appearing on Comedy Central as soon as
] early fall, is being produced by Mr. Stewart's production
] company, Busboy Productions.

Yeah so think "the talking heads" version of the daily show...

'Daily Show' Personality Gets His Own Platform - New York Times

] Nochee deploys several dozen BlackBerrys on Thursday
] nights so patrons can swap text-based flirtations using
] the devices' built-in keyboards and brightly colored
] screens. Users sport numbered stickers corresponding to
] their gizmos, so spotting and pinging a potential date
] from across the room is straightforward.

KRT Wire | 04/27/2005 | Mobile flirting via BlackBerry

We, the american people, are doomed.

Howard Kurtz gives the best write up about the crap on the Hill. Here in washington it's all about these three issue: The WH thinks it's all about tort reform and SS reform and all other sorts of reform (``REE-four-m'' pronounced like the KKK politician from O'Brother); Congress stuck and mired in congressional rules and procedure, with overtones of -shock- political corruption -awe-; And terri schaivo, the human political football, abused worse than Micheal Dukakis in '88.

But the reality is, now that the election is long over, most americans are back dealing with their own crap. The economy has sorta picked up but everyone still has record credit card debt. Gas prices are on their way up and the population at large is starting to understand that they're never going down. It doesn't take a job on the _Apprentice_ to see how that affects living costs, shipping costs, business costs, effectively a ``tax'' on everything americans hold dear.

So you, me, everyone. Live it up! Live life for the right now. Enjoy it while we still have it. Take a flight to some part of the world you've never been too. Take a road trip across the country. Shoot a buffalo. Take your friends and enjoy the cheap thrills now. We're still americans damnit and, by god, ketchup will still be on the table.

--timball

Media Notes Extra

] ``Thanks for not staring at my adam's apple.''

--timball

I Fucked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard

] Dogs and children have been warned away. The force of the
] explosions is impressive. "It's like hitting a
] slightly rotten orange with a golf iron," one Green
] activist explained yesterday.

They're really fundamentalist toads, but they just haven't figured out that whole suicide bomber thing yet.

Exploding Toads!

] After surviving one of the roughest presidential
] elections in modern times, President George W. Bush
] singled out one member of his team in particular, calling
] Karl Rove the campaign's "architect." But Rove, a
] longtime Bush adviser and confidant, is much more than a
] political guru, he is also the single most powerful --
] and ambitious -- policy adviser in the White House.
] (more) »

Yeah... watch it. The webbroadcast is slightly different from the version tivo got me. But if you don't mind here are some SPOILERS:

1) Karl is passionate about a perminent republican majority.
2) His major tactic is that he targets an opponent's strength rather than chipping away at his weaknesses.
3) He tries to frame issues around so called "Anger Points".
4) When all other tactics aren't working he hangs the word "gay" around his opponent.

The piece is great... probably the best post-election thing I've seen/read/talked about/blah blah blah. I don't think anyone can admire him for his methods, but I sure do envy the results.

--timball

frontline: karl rove -- the architect: watch the full program online | PBS

From the initial question posed by mydoghasworms, to the complete and utter lack of evidence to show acquaintance with the subject matter of the people posting, to the rather horrifying upward moderation of their comments, Slashdot has hit an all-time low with this article.

The fact of the matter is that the Linux Standards Base initially neither provided anything useful in the way of defining the structure and operation of a Linux machine, nor did it provide constructive justifications for the things that it *did* specify. Now in what seems like their nth revision, they *still* haven't gotten a clue, and have strayed even further into uselessness--a uselessness which now apparently incorporates a certification body! (Because there's nothing like bureaucratic overhead to make an operating system function smoothly!)

If you'd like some really stellar examples of the kind of mistakes they were making, the initial standards documents actually contained very little in the way of where files should go, and instead focused heavily on requiring people to use RPM. No joke. Their latest revision has entire sections devoted to what amounts to a re-documentation of the X library APIs. It's all well and good to attempt to freeze APIs--development teams for the various projects that make up the typical Linux machine do it all the time--but for an outside vendor to do this in the absence of any context for facilitating the upward change which makes Linux so attractive to people who actually know what they're doing, well, it just doesn't bloody work! A Linux machine effectively ceases to be a Linux machine once you've metaphorically vivisected it and pinned all it's various organs out on the block and then sealed it in ambergris for all time. It becomes a _dead thing_.

Probably a million times more useful is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard located at http://www.pathname.com/fhs which, in a very straightforward and engineer-like way worries about the filesystem layout first, and trusts that vendors have engineers smart enough to be able to write shell scripts to determine whether or not something is going to work if/when it's installed.

The main difference between these two approaches being that the LSB folks seem to think that installation of software is something between sticking your hand and arm as deep as you can into a nest of sleeping scorpions in total darkness and possibly airlift-delivery of a playground deep into the heart of New York City. They apparently feel that the host operating system should be required to lie there perfectly still and "just take it". The FHS team's approach is one much more like "stuffing" a volkswagen bus. They appear to feel that as long as everything is laid out reasonably, that one can get feedback from the people already inside the bus about whether or not there's room for more people and whether or not they should come in through the door or the back window.

Stupidest Slashdot Topic Ever