Did CNN turn up the “boos” on Michael Moore’s Academy Awards speech?
It wouldn’t surpise me. 🙂
Man page -> text file
Ah, finally.. I figured this out: groff -m man -Tascii manpagefile.1 | col -bx | less
Loved ones of soldiers fighting in Iraq register their soldier’s names at local gas station
I wonder if they’re aware of the irony…
I’ve heard rumors that some soldiers, in a silent protest against the war, are afixing the logos of oil companies on their uniforms and bombers. I also heard that the military is nicknaming the Iraqi drilling sites they are protecting after gas stations, like “Chevron station,” “Exxon station,” etc. I heard that this news came from NPR, but I can’t find a source. If anyone has a source I’d love to have it… please email me.
Man, was I wrong.
Back on March 19th I blogged a thought about the cost of war: According to past articles I’ve read about what this war is going to cost, both in military terms and oil infrastructure rebuilding terms, I can’t figure how this war is going to cost us any less than $10B.
As you may know, Bush announced his “war budget” proposal last week, which totalled just under $75B. Rumsfeld also stated in the last week that the current “war operations” cost that we have already incurred is in the neighborhood of $30B. I had no idea when I wrote $10B that I would be off by an entire order of magnitude.
Will Iraq’s Halliburton-enhanced oil production systems pump enough oil into our SUV’s to justify the cost of the war? Read this BBC article from last January. Is my math correct on this? Iraq’s high-end estimate of oil production is 6Mbbl/day. At $30/bbl, that’s about $174M/day minus transportation and recovery costs, so let’s estimate $40M/day in pure profit (that sounds like a healthy estimate–almost a 25% margin). Damn. If the war costs $100B, then the war will pay for itself in 6.8 years. And after the “war debt” is paid off, we’ll continue to crank out millions of dollars a day until the oil runs out. Maybe the economics do make sense. Or does it make sense? Can you put a price on people’s lives and international ill-will towards our country?
Although the cost of the war is a drop in the bucket compared to the nation’s GDP, what many are still trying to grapple is what the cost of the war, fallout from oil prices, and reconstruction/peace-keeping costs will truely end up being. Here’s a neat discussion of the topic on Yahoo! Finance: If you multiply the Bush Administration direct cost estimate by 10, however, it would still be less than 15% of (2002) GDP, which was the size of the Korean War’s direct costs in relation to extant GDP. In the case of the war with Iraq, however, direct conflict costs could be dwarfed by macroeconomic effects from higher oil prices and the costs of occupation and peacekeeping.
Interview with Theivery Corporation about The Richest Man in Babylon
Listening to the new Thievery Corporation CD tonight it hit me that this is a very political album. I did a quick Google for “thievery corporation political statement,” to see if anyone else had reached the same conclusion as I had, and sure enough, one person who interviewed them came to the same conclusion last November. Above is the link.
“Music is just in the pleasure,” Eric explains. “One can’t help saying what’s on the mind. Our name and the title of the album are overtly political, but in no way are we making political statements. What is on our minds is on our minds and that is what we have to create from. We’re just two guys in a room, pleasing ourselves first and foremost enjoying the music for it’s own merit then thinking about sharing it with our audience.”
While thinking about the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq I also did some quick searches for pictures from the area and found this short photo gallery from one person’s trip there back in 1996. I especially like the “George Bush is a criminal” mosaic. 🙂
Intel CPU detection in MacOS X
Don’t ask me what I was doing when I found this… 🙂 I just noticed that when you do a ‘strings’ on the MacOS X login application, loginwindow.app, it does some CPU detection, and in part of that CPU detection it’s looking for Intel CPUs.
[TiMonkie:loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS] rose% pwd
/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS
[TiMonkie:loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS] rose% strings loginwindow | grep Intel
Intel 486
Intel x86
[TiMonkie:loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS] rose% strings loginwindow | grep Pentium
Pentium
Pentium Pro
Pentium II
The Aqua/Quartz foundation that MacOS X is built on comes from OpenStep, which once ran on x86. I wonder if this is legacy, or if Apple is really planning something… (just feeding the rumor mill) ;-p
From BBC World Service… This conflict has seen a new breed of hacktivist, in the shape of pro-peace campaigners who have been joining pro-Islamic hackers and pro-American groups in expressing their grievances online.
From The Economist… While the war may help al-Qaeda’s recruiting drive, it may not lead to any more of the terror network’s trademark spectacular attacks any time soon. These, it seems, tend to require long-term planning: the September 11th attacks, after all, were years in the making. Suicide bombers, or lone fanatics who disagree with America’s policies, are more of a worry. As Tom Ridge, America’s homeland-security chief, has said, the threat can be reduced, but it cannot be eliminated.
If you spot terrorism, blow your anti-terrorism whistle. If you are Vin Diesel, yell really loud.
The US government has a new website, http://www.ready.gov/. It’s another attempt at scare mongering in the style of the old “duck and cover” advice after WWII.