I LOVE Doonesbury's "Say What?" feature!

"I saw my father march with Martin Luther King."
--Mitt Romney

"He was speaking figuratively, not literally."
-- Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, responding to questions raised by the Detroit Free Press


As it happens, Russet's father DID march with Martin Luther King. How can you speak figuratively about a purported fact? Is "figuratively" now the polite term for a lie?

David Byrne (Talking Heads) on the Music Biz

An interview with Thome Yorke about Radiohead and the music biz, Yorke says that the album they released online made them more money than all their previous albums combined. Of course, they were established before they did this.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke?currentPage=all


Byrne talking about survival strategies for emerging artists.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=all

An interesting fight is brewing between the Nat'l Assoc of Broadcasters and the RIAA

The RIAA wants to make terrestrial broadcasters "pay to play", the thing that's destroying internet radio. Currently terrestrial broadcasters pay royalties to SONG WRITERS, not to the band doing the playing. So the NAB is countering by asking Congress to investigate modern recording contracts!

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/20/1316235

The Grand Conjunction!

Cool! Which means that it will probably be snowing at the observatory when I'm there Monday and we won't see a thing!

This coming Sunday and Monday, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Mercury, the Sun and the Galactic Center will all be lined up! There will also be a full moon and an unusual Pluto-Sun conjunction on the Solstice.

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2007/12/behold-the-gran.html

Apparently the Brits are fond of torching speeding cameras!

One of the favored tactics, because the camera is sort of besides its post as it sticks out on an arm, is to lob a tire over the arm, fill it with petrol, and torch it. I'd like to know how much the town councils or whoever is paying for this are paying to replace them versus the revenue they generate.

http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm

And a manifesto from "Captain Gatso" here!

http://www.speedcam.co.uk/index2.htm

Diebold election records released in Arizona

Very interesting ruling. The judge ruled that the database is not a program. Well, I'm a professional database administrator. I'd say it is a very fine point, but I agree with the judge overall. The database really doesn't do anything, per se. It's information that's just sitting there. It's like saying your Word document is a program. The database ENGINE, such as SQL Server, does things as people view, enter, edit, or delete information. Even if you're running a program like DTS that moves data in and out of your database, it's the database engine that's executing the DTS package. Very interesting.

Here's the Slashdot caption describing (very briefly) the thread:

"A judge in the case covering the nature of the database used in Diebold Gems software during Pima County, Arizona elections has ruled the DB is not a computer program (pdf). The result is that the Arizona Democratic party will have the chance to review previous elections for transparency and accuracy. ''The Pima County Democratic Party sued the county this year for the electronic databases from past elections. The party requested the databases and passwords be released according to Arizona public-records law. Pima County denied that part of the request, while turning over other records the party asked for. In closing arguments of the four-day trial that began Dec. 4, Pima County argued the databases meet the definition of a computer program, which is protected by state law, said Deputy County Attorney Thomas Denker."

The general definition of a computer program is something that takes input, does something with it (processing), and produces output. A "Hello, World" program takes nothing as input (maybe clicking the icon or typing in the program name could be considered input), builds a string containing the phrase "Hello, World" and passes it to whatever DLLs display it on the monitor. But a database only responds to specific requests, and only when the database engine is running. If I turn off the database service, the files will just sit there and do nothing.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/21/1340259

There should be some fun arguments in this Slashdot thread!

Let the countdown begin!

Someone compiled clips from 100 movies where people say the numbers from one to 100. I recognized a lot of the films, but far from all.

A lot of you may have already seen this, I'm slowly catching up on my LJ flist back log.

Thanks, Denise!

Watch on YouTube