Obama has released a “refinement” of his position on FISA in response to the outcry among his supporters. Glen Greenwald explains how Obama is still full of crap.
Archive for the 'General' Category
I’m too realistic (or is it cynical) to invest too much hope in any politician, including Barak Obama. Even so, Obama has managed to disappoint me hugely by indicating that he’ll support a version of the FISA intelligence bill that grants immunity from prosecution to the big telecom companies who cooperated with illegal government domestic wiretapping.
That the collusion of major corporations in the establishment of a police state is even an issue is the most disappointing thing of all, but 8 years of George Bush & Dick Cheney are about to come to an end. Obama is part of undoing this sick state of affairs.
Granting immunity is a step in the wrong direction. It doesn’t just perpetuate the current state of affairs, it reinforces it. It makes it harder to prosecute past illegal activity, and removes any incentives to avoid participating it in the future.
Presumably Obama is willing to take this position because he thinks it will make him more electable, but its the sort of compromise that makes me think that he’ll be no champion of the constitution if he is elected, that he’ll be too happy to make unacceptable compromises in terms of some other goal.
I am all for compromise in politics, but I think compromising the constitution is a line that should not be crossed. It makes me question other compromises he must make. Will he help expand the ethanol industry, and squander our top-soil and fresh water in the process? Will he support covert or military action in Iran, thereby insuring more blood, treasure, and credibility will be squandered in the middle instead of applied directly to problems at home?
Yahoo’s troubles and a recent Microsoft acquisition could be bad news for open source software that enables “internet-scale” computing.
Hadoop is a project to build an open source version of the infrastruture that Google uses to process data. It provides a huge filesystem that can be distributed over dozens or even thousands of computers (analogous to GFS), as well as support for processing all that data in parallel in the same way Google does when they build and update their index of the web (using MapReduce). It also provides HBase a distributed database that is built on top of the filesytem in the manner of Google’s BigTable. Hadoop is a spin-off of the Nutch project to build an opensource search engine that could index a significant portion of the web.
Most of the work on Hadoop and HBase has been supported by Yahoo, and a lot of the recent work was supported by a semantic-search startup called Powerset. In fact, a quick look at the personnel on the project shows that it is dominated by people from those two companies.
Given that Yahoo is in turmoil, and has been showing some signs of reconsidering their search business, and given that Powerset was just bought by Microsoft, who likely already has its own infrastructure for these sorts of applications, I have to wonder what will happen with Hadoop.
Another grey summer day in Seattle.
Bleh.
I have to update our Wordpress installs. I’m not looking forward to it.
Upgrading wordpress itself isn’t too bad (though doing it 4-5 times gets a little old), but then I have to gather updated plugins (something I may not have to do much longer, since the latest version of Wordpress seems to have an integrated updater.
The real PITA though is updating my theme. A few years ago I decided to use K2, which was under active development. It’s still under active development, and it seems like each time I update Wordpress, I have to update K2 too. I’ve done some customization (inserting some AdSense code, and integrating code required by a specific plugin, and so I have to propagate my changes to the themes for each blog.
Wish me luck. I think the last time I did this, I only updated a subset of our blogs.
A few months after Netflix launched their “watch instantly” streaming feature I tried to get it running on the computer hooked to our TV. I didn’t get very far though, since it required WinXP, and the computer was (and still is) running windows 2000. In addition, our DSL speed at the time was only 1.5Mbps, which wasn’t enough for their top quality.
I decided to give it another shot though. I haven’t upgraded the TV computer, yet, so I thought I’d try and run it from VMWare Fusion on a Mac laptop I use. The good news is that it works—I thought that DRM restrictions would prevent it from working in a virtual machine.
The bad news is that the quality is truly mediocre, even using our 3Mbit connection, and from what I can tell, a faster connection won’t help.
It’s too bad, because the price is right, unlike the $3.99 rentals on iTunes. I only wish Netflix had the option to queue up a higher quality version to watch later.
