• Back to the Future – What Bush would do if he were president
  

  Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They’re all hills we’ve “been given to climb.” It’s as though Bush wasn’t president. As though he didn’t get the tax cuts he wanted. As though he didn’t bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this was “given,” and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the problems some other president left behind.

• Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards – mostly sad, but also some scary statistics
  

  70m Estimated number of Americans who describe themselves as Evangelicals who accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour and who interpret the Bible as the direct word of God.

  23m Number of Evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2000.

  50m Number of voters in total who voted for Bush in 2000.

  (nm, my reading comprehension is low) but see also: Frontline: The Jesus Factor)

• The Words Speakers Use – great NYTimes infographic comparing words used in the RNC/DNC speeches
• Movable Type 3.1 Still a Developer Edition? – Keith has a heck of a time installing 3.1
• Stop Design: Liquid Bleach – Doug continues on his redesign journey

I spent most of last night helping out a friend whose Mac had suddenly stopped booting properly and was instead flashing a ‘not allowed’ symbol (no sign, prohibitory sign, denied, circle slash, ghostbusters). Interestingly enough, in working w/ OS X since it came out, I’d never seen it before.

Held down ‘v’ on boot to see what it was hanging on. It couldn’t find the root device. After trying zapping the PRAM and NVRAM to no avail, I booted the rescue disk and checked the drive utility. It couldn’t see the HD. That would explain things. The drive sounded fine, so my suspicion was on the card or cable, but when I swapped drives it worked. But then, booting it again, it didn’t. Swapped SCSI card/cable and put old drive back in and it worked. I can’t really explain it, must be some bizarre connection problem.

• Mac OS X: “Broken folder” icon, prohibitory sign, or kernel panic when computer starts
• Pismo with Panther won’t start up…weird symbol..
• OS X – (/) symbol replacing Apple at boot
• Recovering from a Blinking "?"
• Booting Mac OS X
• Some Useful and Interesting Terminal Commands for Lab Managers
• Magical Macintosh Key Sequences
• Open Firmware Quick Reference

Ken Layne asks What Conservatives? Mostly about the lack of fiscal (well, any kind) or restraint, but also puts all this RNC talk of strong leadership in perspective:

With the Crystal Methamphetamine Ball I keep for such occasions, I can predict those of you who continue to invent apologies for this government will tell me that logic, responsibility, coherence and competence don’t matter a damned bit & never will again, because 3,000 of the 300,000,000 people living in this country were killed by an elusive enemy three years ago, and that for some mysterious reason the current inept administration should be further rewarded for failing to catch the culprits, failing to make this country safer from either similar or new-fangled attacks, failing to remove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan or Pakistan, failing to win an elective war that had nothing to do with those who launched a war on our shores, and not only failing to make a dent in the Islamic Terrorism movement but in fact creating millions upon millions of ready new converts who now have a massive wrecked state in the center of the Middle East as a home and training base for decades to come, along with a very new and real reason to attack us on every flank that makes Bin Laden’s flowery historical rhetoric seem quaint by comparison.

I just can’t figure out how anyone can look at our post Sept. 11 leadership and see anything but a smoking heap of tragic failure, and yet that seems to be the only thing the Bush loyalists have to offer as a concrete reason to re-elect this administration. Why? Is Losing the new Winning?

Some interesting advances in the art in the past couple of days:

• Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text – scalable, multiline, Flash 6 compatibile version of IFR
• HTML Overlays – adapting XUL overlays for HTML (is this better than other serialization methods?)

Jason has been following up on Josh’s Bikes Against Bush arrest.

Some interesting posts on /.:

• From the article (see also the video):
  

  Kinberg cooperated fully with the officers as he was being handcuffed, only asking, “can I ask what I’m being arrested for?” to which no one provided an answer. As of 11:00 PM Saturday evening, he was still in custody without being charged with anything.

• Supreme court would find no probable cause (Score:5, Informative)
  

  Have you read Houston v. Hill [findlaw.com] Recently. You’re a texas guy.
  
  And GULLIFORD v PIERCE COUNTY [findlaw.com] …Relying, inter alia, on the Supreme Court’s decision in Hill, we ruled in Mackinney v. Nielsen that expressive conduct such as writing with chalk on the sidewalk does not itself create probable cause for arrest …
  
  He should be released ASAP, and the state should pay for his pains, plus reimburse the lost opportunity costs.
  
  (All this said – i believe the first amendment protectes those who disagree with protected speech and their right to “clean up the mess” personally i prefer to collect litter on a stick – and have been arrested for that so – it cuts both ways.
  
  AIK
  

• Re:I would have busted him, too… (Score:5, Informative)
  

  I do so all the time, both on my home sidewalk and formerly on my business sidewalk.

  That’s
  really my only option (that, and I’m not an asshole), because drawing
  on a sidewalk with chalk was declared not to be vandalism 100 years ago.

  That’s why the sidewalk artists work in the medium and chalk explicitly for the purpose is sold throughout NYC.

  It’s perfectly legal to track dirt onto my sidewalk too, because I can just wash it off.

  KFG

• Re:I would have busted him, too… (Score:5, Insightful)
  

  IANAL, but writing stuff all over the sidewalk (over an extended area) – even in chalk – has to be against some local laws.

  Yes, this may be in violation of some local ordinance. What
  concerns me is that the arresting officers and their superiors are not
  sure what ordinance it violates, so they confiscate his property and
  arrest him anyway.

  A free society dies when law enforcement can begin arresting
  people and look for an illegal act later. If proffesionals are no
  longer sure of what is legal, how is an ordinary citizen able to stay
  within the law?

• This is pretty typical. (Score:3, Informative) – this is very true, see r2klegal for lots more legal information
  

  At protests around the U.S. in the last six years, the police
  have been actively employing preemptive arrest tactics, which have
  almost always have resulted in dismissals or “not guilty” decisions.

  Not always of course, but much of the time (comparing numbers arrested against numbers inidicted and then convicted.)

  Americans
  say they’re for freedom of speech, but anytime a large, public act of
  communication takes place (mainly demonstrations for this point, but
  the implications are similar for pirate radio imo), there’s always a
  government entity duly empowered to curb that expression, so that it
  doesn’t have quite so strong the impact its creators put into it. For
  example, the FCC, appointed by the Executive, and the police and FBI,
  appointed by that jurisdiction’s executive, or, in some cases, elected
  by the public (yet still a single human with much power over many.)

  It’s
  the imperfect, political humans controlling those speech-altering
  government entities who have the power, here, not the citizens. Too
  much power in the hands of too few. The U.S. is no longer a good model
  of a participative democracy. Look toward northern Europe for better
  examples of directly-involved citizens.

Instiki – wiki w/ Desktop (OS X menubar) integration. One less thing on the todo list. [via mathowie]

Redacted by the Justice Department:

The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.

Holy Crap, this 18″ Spider-Man figure has 67 points of articulation, which includes 14 in each hand (fully articulated fingers!). Time to trade-in those ol’ hardwood manikins for something way better (and with free webshooters!). Wal-Mart sells this bad boy for $21.68.

• Open Source Project Management Tools in Java (besides, XPlanner, these don’t look too hot)
• Collaborative Groupware Software – a very nice list of projects and of resources.
• Trac Improvements – my list of improvements I’d like in Trac