Posted on by lhl

Last night at the hotel room, I caught a bit of Crossfire on CNN and my literally hit the floor. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, but apparently, from flipping the channels this seems to be par for the course. What the hell is all this crap on TV? Does this really represent the average American? This feels like the fall of the Weimar Republic. Transcript:

BEGALA: One of the issues the president has raised repeatedly and I think sensibly is the credibility of the United Nations. Let me suggest that perhaps one of the reasons we’re not doing very well there is the credibility of the president himself.

Case in post point: “The Washington Post” reported the other day and I’m reading from the “Post”: “A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations chief nuclear inspector said yesterday, in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq’s secret nuclear ambitions. Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed not authentic after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts.

Why are we offering evidence that’s fabricated?

TANCREDO: Well, first of all, I’ll tell you there is — if you can condense it — I know that we have a very short time to talk about a very important topic, but there’s really only one word that I can describe or use to describe the U.N.; It is, in fact, irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that this information has been deemed to be fabricated or anything else because the U.N. doesn’t matter. It is nothing but a debating society that has really taken now its lead in kicking the heck out of the United States. That’s its main focus.

But in terms of what really happens in this world or whether or not we should care one way or the other about how it votes, that is ridiculous.

BEGALA: But surely you’re not saying…

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: Surely you’re not saying that because you don’t like the U.N. it’s OK to say false things.

If this is really representative of US today (and not just more disinfo), then it’s a betrayal of all that we formerly stood for. This is insane.

Related: Americans Turn to Brits for News. Brits???

Posted on by lhl

Why Browser Innovation Matters (/.)

The release of Safari has generated some discussion of Gecko’s complexity and performance which bear addressing. Gecko is large and complex. We would like Gecko to be smaller and simpler and we’re working on it. Elegance, like speed, is sexy. But simple and elegant must be weighed against the need to cope with web content as it exists today. And web content today is not simple, not elegant and not standards compliant. Today’s web requires a rendering engine to do gymnastics to understand the wildly varying ways in which websites operate. Gecko performs these gymnastics with exceptional precision.

Related:

Posted on by lhl

Matt was telling me about the Martian NetDrive Wireless, which is a pnp wifi file server. At $400 t looks pretty reasonably priced, made out of mini-itx parts (looks like a Morex case).

While looking on mini-itx.com’s hardware page, I spotted Traverse Technology’s MicroServer systems, which look pretty cool (but alas, no room for a serial lcd display). Bang per buck, I’d say the Hacom OpenBricks probably beat either of those out though. (and for overall cool/useful factor, the soekris units win hands down.