For both par­ties: I know what you’re think­ing. “Are the Amer­i­can peo­ple really so stu­pid and blinded by par­ti­san­ship that they won’t real­ize we were mak­ing pre­cisely the oppo­site argu­ments just four years ago?” The answer is: Yes! Yes they are!

Radley Balko

From the VMware Work­sta­tion manual:

Use vir­tual machines or sys­tem images cre­ated with prod­ucts from other com­pa­nies such as Nor­ton, Syman­tec, and StorageCraft.

Some­one isn’t very good at check­ing their facts. I do have to won­der how some­one man­ages to find out that Syman­tec has a sys­tem imag­ing prod­uct with­out know­ing that Nor­ton is a Syman­tec brand name. You’d think the logo on the box or web site would be a clue.

Apple Acquires Siri.

Tim­o­thy Hay:

Apple Inc. has acquired Siri Inc. just a few months after the
start-up’s voice-activated personal-assistant pro­gram launched
in the App Store, an investor in San Jose-based Siri told
VentureWire.

[Dar­ing Fire­ball]

I down­loaded the Siri app on my iPad, and it reminds me a lot of the long-dead “Por­tico” ser­vice from Gen­eral Magic. How­ever, I think an app that runs on a hand­held device is con­sid­er­ably more use­ful than the phone-based Portico.

Peo­ple who make movies and TV shows seem to think that hand­held radios will work through any amount of stone, dirt, or metal, and with no more than min­i­mal inter­fer­ence. You’d think that at some point they’d have noticed that their cell phones don’t work in cer­tain conditions.

India’s copy­right pro­pos­als are un-American (and that’s bad). India has long been one of the few coun­tries on the US Spe­cial 301 “Pri­or­ity Watch List” (PDF) as one of the world’s top offend­ers when it comes to piracy and copy­right infringe­ment. While the inclu­sion of Canada (yes, Canada) on this list has always seem patently bizarre to us, the case for India is more eas­ily made.

Here’s how bad it is: “The piracy rate for music in the online space is esti­mated at 99%… India was among the top 10 coun­tries in the world for ille­gal file­shar­ing (P2P) activ­i­ties… In one case, pam­phlets were being dis­trib­uted with the morn­ing news­pa­per offer­ing pirated soft­ware and refer­ring read­ers to the web­site www.cd75dvd150.20m.com to place orders… It is esti­mated that India’s cable com­pa­nies declare only 20% of their sub­scribers and that the piracy level in this mar­ket is at 80% with sig­nif­i­cant losses… The sale of high-risk trade books at traf­fic junc­tions in New Delhi appears to be a les­son; last year it was at epi­demic pro­por­tions.” [Ars Tech­nica]

Clearly the cul­tural approach to works of art is dif­fer­ent in India than it is in the United States. In the United States, copy­right law exists “to pro­mote the Progress of Sci­ence and use­ful Arts, by secur­ing for lim­ited Times to Authors and Inven­tors the exclu­sive Right to their respec­tive Writ­ings and Dis­cov­er­ies.” What this means in con­crete terms is that US copy­right law is bought and paid for in its entirety by a very large cor­po­ra­tion to ensure that a man who died in 1966 is moti­vated to con­tinue working.

We can tell how suc­cess­ful those US copy­right laws have been at ful­fill­ing their stated pur­pose by the fact that India has been pro­duc­ing more films per year than the US since the 1970s.

From the VMware Work­sta­tion manual:

Work­sta­tion sup­ports vir­tual machines with 64‐bit guest oper­at­ing sys­tems only on host machines that have one of the sup­ported 64‐bit proces­sors. When you power on a vir­tual machine with a 64‐bit guest oper­at­ing sys­tem, Work­sta­tion per­forms an inter­nal check. If the host CPU is not a sup­ported 64‐bit proces­sor, you can­not power on the vir­tual machine.

[snip four lines]

Work­sta­tion sup­ports vir­tual machines with 64‐bit guest oper­at­ing sys­tems only on host machines that have one of the sup­ported 64‐bit proces­sors. When you power on a vir­tual machine with a 64‐bit guest oper­at­ing sys­tem, Work­sta­tion per­forms an inter­nal check. If the host CPU is not a sup­ported 64‐bit proces­sor, you can­not power on the vir­tual machine.

I guess some­body was get­ting paid by the page.

Cold and Cruel in Sonoma County.

The National Cen­ter on Les­bian Rights points to a civil rights suit 77-year-old Clay Greene has filed against Sonoma County, Cal­i­for­nia. Accord­ing to the suit, when Harold, Greene’s part­ner of 20 years, fell ill, the county refused to let Greene visit him in the hos­pi­tal, despite the couple’s metic­u­lous efforts to name one another in their wills, pow­ers of attor­ney, and med­ical direc­tive doc­u­ments. The county then went to court to argue that the local gov­ern­ment should be given con­trol of Harold’s finances, which for 20 years had also been Greene’s. (The county referred to Greene as a “roommate.”)

Despite an unfa­vor­able rul­ing, the county appar­ently auc­tioned off the couple’s assets any­way. Accord­ing to the law­suit, the county then ter­mi­nated the couple’s lease, removed Greene from his home, and con­fined him to a nurs­ing home against his will. Greene’s part­ner died three months later. The two weren’t allowed to meet dur­ing that three months. Greene has since been released from the nurs­ing home, but says he has noth­ing left. The county took every­thing he has.

This of course is only one half of a law­suit. But unless the claims that Greene and his part­ner had all their legal work in order are false—and that seems like some­thing that would be too easy to prove for Greene’s attor­ney to have exaggerated—Sonoma County’s actions here are unspeak­ably cruel.

The county’s treat­ment of Greene and his part­ner is being por­trayed in the blo­gos­phere as anti-gay big­otry, and that may well be true. But it also may be just another exam­ple of gov­ern­ment abus­ing the elderly to get its hands on their stuff.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

I don’t think it’s nec­es­sar­ily one or the other. Anti-gay big­otry may well have helped the gov­ern­ment decide who exactly to attack, in much the same way that cops have his­tor­i­cally pre­ferred to per­se­cute peo­ple with brown skin.

Abuse of Power Gets a Pass, Report­ing It Gets Jail Time.

Here’s Glenn Green­wald on the Obama administration’s pros­e­cu­tion of NSA whistle­blower Thomas Drake, and it’s out­ra­geous tri­umphal­ism after win­ning an indictment.

As Green­wald writes, it’s now clear that Obama’s “Look For­ward, Not Back­ward” phi­los­o­phy applies only to high-ranking Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who abused their power and posi­tion. The peo­ple who risked their careers and free­dom to come for­ward to report on those abuses won’t be get­ting the same con­sid­er­a­tion. Or put another way: If you break the law to expand the power of gov­ern­ment at the expense of the peo­ple, you get a pass. But if you break the law to make gov­ern­ment more trans­par­ent and account­able, expect them to throw the book at you.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

Another exam­ple of how noth­ing has changed, regard­less of who occu­pies the White House.

The Grey­hound Sta­tion Gulag. New Orleans res­i­dent Abdul­rah­man Zeitoun was with three friends in the liv­ing room when the loot­ers came. Like most of the armed crim­i­nal gangs afflict­ing the city in Katrina’s wake, the maraud­ers who con­fronted Mr. Zeitoun wore government-issued costumes.

Before the day’s end, the Syrian-born U.S. cit­i­zen — who had spent days pad­dling through the flooded streets in a canoe, ren­der­ing what aid he could to peo­ple trapped in their ruined homes — would be con­fined in a makeshift deten­tion camp mod­eled after the noto­ri­ous facil­ity in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba.

No for­mal crim­i­nal charges were filed against Zeitoun. When he protested the denial of his due process rights and rudi­men­tary decen­cies of liv­ing, he was told by the guards that he was under the juris­dic­tion of FEMA (the Fed­eral Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency) — which meant that he was some­body else’s problem.

[…]

“Always the pro­ce­dure was the same,” nar­rates Eggers, “a pris­oner would be removed from his cage and dragged to the ground nearby, in full view of the rest of the pris­on­ers. His hands and feet would be tied, and then, some­times with a guard’s knee on his back, he would be sprayed directly in the face” with pep­per spray. “If the pris­oner protested,” con­tin­ues Eggers, “the knee would dig deeper into his back. The spray­ing would con­tinue until his spirit was bro­ken. Then he would be doused with [a] bucket and returned to his cage.”

These rit­ual acts of sadism, Eggers observes, were “born of a com­bi­na­tion of oppor­tu­nity, cru­elty, ambiva­lence, and sport.” They were intended to tor­ment the other pris­on­ers, most of whom — like Zeitoun — were made nau­seous with sup­pressed rage by the spec­ta­cle of help­less men being tortured.

The vic­tims included one dis­turbed man with the intel­lec­tual and emo­tional capac­ity of a child who was “pun­ished” because he dis­played the irre­press­ible symp­toms of men­tal illness.

“Under any nor­mal cir­cum­stances [Zeitoun] would have leapt to the defense of a man vic­tim­ized as that man had been,” observes Eggers. “But that he had to watch, help­less, know­ing how depraved it was — this was pun­ish­ment for the oth­ers, too. It dimin­ished the human­ity of them all.”

[…]

At the slight­est excuse those who pre­sume to rule us will treat us exactly as Abdul­rah­man Zeitoun was treated. Before being kid­napped and impris­oned by the gov­ern­ment, Zeitoun never sus­pected that a poten­tial gulag was lurk­ing inside the local Grey­hound sta­tion. He sees the world much dif­fer­ently now, as should we all. [Pro Lib­er­tate]

Should Kids Be Bribed To Do Well In School?. theodp writes “Har­vard econ­o­mist Roland Fryer Jr. did some­thing edu­ca­tion researchers almost never do: he ran a ran­dom­ized exper­i­ment in hun­dreds of class­rooms in Chicago, Dal­las, Wash­ing­ton and New York to help answer a con­tro­ver­sial ques­tion: Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? He used mostly pri­vate money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 mil­lion and brought in a team of researchers to help him ana­lyze the effects. He got death threats, but he car­ried on. His find­ings? If incen­tives are designed wisely, it appears, pay­ments can indeed boost kids’ per­for­mance as much as or more than many other reforms you’ve heard about before — and for a frac­tion of the cost.“

[Slash­dot]

I should think that it would be obvi­ous that paid employ­ees will always per­form bet­ter than unpaid slave labor­ers. But then, I sup­pose it’s not obvi­ous to peo­ple whose knowl­edge of his­tory comes from the pub­lic schools.