Envi­ron­men­tal­ists oppose GM crops, let Africans starve to death? [Politech]

As if it’s not bad enough that “Stalin” Mugabe cre­ated a famine, now his ide­o­log­i­cal broth­ers want to keep the affected peo­ple from receiv­ing food aid. I’m end­lessly dis­gusted by the way col­lec­tivists eagerly pro­mote suf­fer­ing and death as long as their ide­ol­ogy is advanced in doing so.

Earth Sum­mit Bogs Down in Bit­ter Trade Debate. The trade debate spilled onto the streets out­side the tightly guarded con­fer­ence cen­ter in the wealthy sub­urb of Sand­ton, where 200 poor farm­ers and local street traders from nearby shanty town­ships shouted slo­gans demand­ing freer trade.

“We want the free­dom to grow what we want, when we want, with what tech­nol­ogy we want, and with­out trade-distorting sub­si­dies or tar­iffs,” said Barun Mitra, an Indian farm activist lead­ing about 30 farm­ers from his coun­try. [Reuters]

This has been pretty much ignored by the US media–even here it’s only a few para­graphs of a longer story. Still, it’s nice to know that there are some voices of san­ity present, even if they are mostly drowned out by Tranzi propaganda.

Lib­eral dom­i­na­tion on col­lege cam­puses is even worse than you thought. [Opin­ion­Jour­nal]

bq. It’s hard to think of an ideal pro­pounded with more fer­vor on our nation’s cam­puses than that of diver­sity. So it is with more than pass­ing inter­est that we noticed a new study con­firm­ing that when it comes to the polit­i­cal alle­giances of col­lege fac­ul­ties, there is no such animal.

The study looks at party reg­is­tra­tion for fac­ulty mem­bers, and divides them into right and left. I do object to their inclu­sion of Lib­er­tar­i­ans as “right”–the peo­ple who did the study seem to have missed the point a bit there. How­ever, it’s irrel­e­vant to the results of the study, because nearly all fac­ulty mem­bers belong to left parties.

As I men­tioned yes­ter­day, I took part in the sur­vey of New­ton users men­tioned by Wired. Now you can read my responses in the story titled “Apple New­ton Research”.

Brad Pet­tit: “As for Lawrence Lessig’s roman­ti­cized notions of MORE (‘many who share my affec­tion for this clean bit of code’), and for those who think the MORE source should be placed in pub­lic domain, be fore­warned.” [Script­ing News]

He answered the ques­tion of what hap­pened to the MORE source:

By the time Doug left (being the last of the real LVT devs) after ship­ping MORE 3 (The David Whit­ney era), Syman­tec had given up. There was 3.1 that fixed a few bugs, and a fea­ture I added for a spe­cial build sup­pos­edly used by one of the Hub­ble devel­op­ers (ORA, for “their” bug fix). When I left Syman­tec for Apple, while on the Mac ACT! team, I archived the MORE source code and dev envi­ron­ment to a drive and gave it to my man­ager in case it was ever needed. “Just run this script.”

A few years ago, Syman­tec asked me where they could find the code (how f-ing irre­spon­si­ble is that?). I never could quite under­stand because the source for every release, on mul­ti­ple flop­pies, was to have been in some vault some­where. Go fig­ure. Any­way, they were going to show the source to an out­side party, but I don’t know why. They tracked it down when I told them about the drive.

Newton’s Return: A Hit and a Myth. A pair of con­sumer behav­ior­ists is study­ing the New­ton com­mu­nity as a case study of a ‘brand com­mu­nity.’ They are par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the recur­rent rumor of the Newton’s return. By Lean­der Kah­ney. [Wired News]

I took part in that study myself, back in Feb­ru­ary. I still have my answers to their ques­tions some­where, I’ll see about post­ing them here.

Apple’s New­ton Just Won’t Drop. Apple killed the New­ton hand­held com­puter in 1998. It should have gone away, but thou­sands of fans still use it and keep its appli­ca­tions cur­rent. By Lean­der Kah­ney. [Wired News]

This is a thor­ough, well-researched arti­cle with only minor tech­ni­cal errors. The author also wrote about Hyper­Card two weeks ago–he seems to have an inter­est in advanced tech­nol­ogy that was Steved.

A brief response to Larry Lessig’s story about releas­ing the source code of MORE. [Script­ing News]

I’m a lit­tle dubi­ous about what Dave is say­ing. He addresses why, in his opin­ion, Syman­tec killed MORE in the first place when he says this:

Syman­tec made a bet that the team would stay at the com­pany. But that didn’t work out. And with­out the devel­op­ers (key point) the source was worth­less. A lot of non-engineers don’t get this, but that doesn’t change it.

That may or may not be true–and Dave is in a posi­tion to know–but say­ing that nobody but the orig­i­nal team could use the source says, some­thing rather bad about the orig­i­nal team.

In any case, this has noth­ing to do with Symantec’s cur­rent posi­tion on MORE. I’ve worked at Syman­tec for sev­eral years, and I’ve asked around about where the source to MORE is, just because I’m curi­ous about it. Nobody in the Mac group knows–I’m not even sure the com­pany still has it.

I can state with absolute cer­tainty that the com­pany has no inter­est in MORE or any other pro­duc­tiv­ity app. Every time peo­ple talk about what new prod­ucts the Mac group should develop, I always sug­gest that we revive MORE–and peo­ple always laugh at me. In fact, as far as I know I’m the only Syman­tec employee who even uses it. The cur­rent man­age­ment envi­sions Syman­tec as a “secu­rity” com­pany, and MORE does not fit that vision.

It’s pos­si­ble that if the source does exist some­where Syman­tec might be will­ing to sell the prod­uct. That did hap­pen with Act! after all. Some­body has to offer to buy it for that to hap­pen, though. So if any ambi­tious pro­gram­mers out there really want to see MORE devel­oped fur­ther, try putting your money where your mouth is. It can’t hurt to try!

Lib­er­tar­ian Arrested In Ari­zona For Dis­play­ing Protest Sign at Tele­vised Debate. Joe Duarte, a Lib­er­tar­ian can­di­date for U.S. Con­gress, was arrested on Sun­day, August 25, for dis­play­ing a hand-held paper sign protest­ing the League of Women Vot­ers’ unlaw­ful exclu­sion of Lib­er­tar­ian can­di­dates from a tele­vised guber­na­to­r­ial debate at Pima Com­mu­nity Col­lege in Tuc­son. Duarte was advised by police at the event that he must either leave the debate venue or stop dis­play­ing his sign. When he refused, he was hand­cuffed and removed. [Sierra Times]

Larry Lessig thinks the world would be a bet­ter place if the source of MORE was in the pub­lic domain.   [Script­ing News]

He also men­tions Hyper­Card and the New­ton. In the case of prod­ucts which have been delib­er­ately killed by the cor­po­ra­tion that owns them, despite the wishes of their users, there’s some­thing to be said for the idea of set­ting them free after ten years.