Robert W. Rose

Beastie Boys speak out against the war

Way to go B-Boys!

Unfortunately The Slate had a much less positive reaction, calling it a “meek protest song.” The Slate and MSNBC has been really pro-war lately (actually that goes for basically all American news sources), I despised their comments they made about the Pope earlier this week, I thought it was totally innappropriate. I’m not surprised they took this opportunity to take a small stab at the Beastie Boys.

It made me happy to hear their song. Their last two tracks they’ve published (“Alive”, and now this song), both have mellow super-positive lyrics. I’ve always been a B-Boys fan, so I can appreciate their progression to where they’re at now, musically speaking. Dip dip dive; so socialize; open up your ears and clean out your eyes; if you learn to love you’re in for a surprise; it can be nice to be alive.

Peephole viewing a PDA screen

This is the same thing that X11 can do: You set the screen resolution to particular size, say 640×480, but then your desktop larger, say 1024×768, and then use the mouse to move around the display, giving you a “peephole” view of your desktop. This article proposes a technique for implementing this on a PDA, except without the mouse…. 🙂

US INS sitting on 700,000 change-of-address forms backlog

Thanks Ashcroft, for enforcing laws we don’t have the resources to enforce…

Hey! Maybe Total Information Awareness won’t be so bad if we just don’t fund the program… ;-p

US firms fight over post-war Iraq-reconstruction contracts

The American government is on the verge of awarding construction contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild Iraq once Saddam Hussein is deposed.

Halliburton, one of the companies in the running for the deals, was headed by the US vice-president Dick Cheney between 1995 and 2000. Halliburton has already been awarded a lucrative contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to resurrect the Iraqi oilfields if there is a war.

Heading in the wrong direction

IN 1962 the apartheid regime in South Africa, no respecter of civil liberties, picked up a suspected terrorist leader who had just returned from training in bomb-making and guerrilla warfare in Ethiopia. It marked the start of 27 years in jail, but Nelson Mandela was given access to lawyers and his prosecutors had to follow rules of due process. Last year, the world’s foremost democracy, the United States, detained one of its own citizens, Jose Padilla…

If you accept, as most do, that the war on terrorism justifies wider powers of surveillance and detention, then two principles still need to be applied. First, the government’s new powers should, where possible, be enacted in clearly-worded terrorism laws, passed by Congress. Second, wider powers should be balanced by wider review. Spies, now less constrained, should be more answerable for their actions; suspects, deprived of their lawyers for longer periods, should eventually have more opportunity to present their case to a judge and, where possible, a jury; and the whole process should be subject to political and judicial review.

I just finished writing my first MacOS X app! It’s a simple little X11-style load grapher that sits in your dock I like to call dockload. Check it out! 🙂

Macintosh Open Firmware (OFW) boot password

Neat article from O’Reilly about hacking the Mac’s OFW to support a boot password, and other ways to secure your Mac. (Not like I would ever actually use any of these techniques, I hate dealing with security… you can always pull out the CMOS battery to reset the NVRAM).

When a tree falls in the forest and it’s the Fourth Amendment, does it make a sound?

Advanced pr0n website advertising techniques?

I just noticed the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my web server logs: 3 of my top 30 site referrers were porn sites. Over 500 web visitors passed in their HTTP headers that the previous site they were visiting was a porn site. Guys, guys, please settle down before you visit my website ;-p

(don’t worry–the link above just goes to my web statistics page)…

DoD briefing: Oil as a weapon for terror

I’m surprised this came from the Department of Defense. You could use this slide deck to support war with Iraq or argue against it. It says quite clearly that our military intellegence sources state that if we attack Iraq Saddam may destroy the nation’s oil sources, costing the Iraqi people (ahem, American oil companies), upwards of $20 billion dollars. I read this slide deck to say: attack Saddam, lose oil, don’t attack, don’t lose oil.

This explains the military buildup in Turkey and not Kuwait. We’re going to first secure the oil fields, then go after Saddam.

Here’s my suggestion to President Bush (“Robert Rose: aka Jr. Foreign Relations Officer”): Lift all of our trade embargos on Iraq TODAY. Let Iraq toy with this idea of complete and totally free trade. Let them repair their broken oil industry on their own terms. Saddam will figure it out on his own.

This war is about oil. It’s not about terrorism; it’s not about “freeing” the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime; it’s not about human rights; it’s not about political stability in the Middle East. Anyone who thinks otherwise is horribly misinformed.