I was glad to see the 72 Canadian miners were rescued. I do think, however, that ABC News got a bit carried away in its headlines (click to enlarge):

It’s called “Digital Content Protection Act would be consumer disaster.” Check it out.

An excerpt:

[T]his bill is designed to crush innovation, because the entertainment industry is unable to handle it. Its content and revenue model is stuck in the 1990s, and the people running it don’t have the business sense to keep up with the digital times. They need to beg Congress to pass laws protecting their business model.

Last I checked, that ain’t how capitalism worked.

I was reading an article today about the perceived quality of GM and Ford cars compared to Japanese brands. According to the piece, American cars aren’t as bad as their reputations would have.

It used, as proof, information from JD Power and Assoc. — you’ve probably seen its ratings used in ads for various things. According to JD Power, after Lexus comes Porsche, then Lincoln, Buick, and Cadillac. Three American cars in the top five.

Then it presents “Another view” — that of Consumer Reports, which found most American cars to be average or below in quality, although a lot better than they used to be.

Fine. This sounds like two slightly opposing views on the subject. except for one thing: JD Power makes its money by selling the right to use its ratings. If you see GM, for example, say that such-and-such a car “Ranked #1 in a JD Power and Associates survey” you should also know that GM paid for the right to say that.

In other words, at least part of JD Powers revenue model requires that companies want to post its survey results. Bad rankings mean fewer sales.

In contrast, Consumer Reports accepts no advertising, and has no vested interest in who wins or loses. Its reputation depends on being as close to above reproach as possible.

I’m not saying that JD Power is on the take. But it’s a fact that it does get money from the companies it rates, and that it gets less money if it rates them poorly.

I was doing a story on a local congressman who brings in a lot of federal money for his district. I wanted to see how he ranked on one of those tax-watchdog group’s “pork” lists. I found Citizens Against Government Waste, which had a done of detailed information. Turns out they rank him pretty high as a ‘porker.’

But then I looked a little deeper into the organization’s methods. I took its list of every congressperson and their rankings, and sorted them in Excel. Turns out that with a very few exceptions the organization finds Democrats to be high on pork and Republicans not to be.

Hmm. In some ways conventional wisdom would say that’s the case. But these days GOP congressmen are spending like there’s no tomorrow just as much as Dems. The $230 million “bridge to nowhere” planned for Alaska was from a Republican, and certainly pork.

Ah, but there was the rub. It turns out that CAGW’s definition of “pork” is pretty specific. It has to do not with what the project is, but how the money was appropriated. If a project goes through “established budgetary procedures” then it’s not pork.

That results in a lot of GOP projects, which are just as porky as those of the Dems, not counting against them. For example, just about anything having to do with defense spending — those things are mostly part of the defense appropriations bills. If $1 billion goes to a useless piece of defense hardware that happens to be produced in the district of a key lawmaker, that’s not pork. But if $50,000 is spent providing adoption counseling in a rural Nebraska town, that is.

It’s all about objectivity, and how easy it is to make something sound objective without actually being so.

Of course, it works the other way, too.

When I worked at PC Magazine — known for its extensive and objective product reviews — we got mail all the time accusing us of favoring our advertisers’ products. We didn’t, and we even published out test methodologies to prove it. But people assumed we did. Consumer Reports, obviously, gets around that criticism.

(Only once when I was there did the wall get crossed. We were doing a story on network products — this was in the days when Netware ruled — and Microsoft’s LAN Manager didn’t make the cut. But then we heard from the editor, Michael Miller: Get Microsoft in. It didn’t have to get a good review, but it had to be in the story.)

Even here at the Roanoke Times I occasionally hear it. One person wrote in about a story I did to accuse me of using advertisers as experts. Never mind that no one I quoted in the story worked for an advertiser. (One was from PBS, the other from a local ISP; I had worked with both of them which is why I talked to them.)

What’s it all mean? I dunno. If nothing else, though, I hope it means that people who hear “objective” commentary take a moment to question the commentator, but that doesn’t mean assuming the worst — it means being a bit skeptical before accepting the “truth.”

I was playing around with my camera, teaching myself how to work with RAW images. It was late and everyone was asleep, so I set up some of my son’s toys and used a close-up lens to shoot them.

After learning what I needed to learn, I realized I had some cool images for wallpaper. I’m picky about that kind of thing. I don’t like fancy, busy wallpaper; to me, it should be clean and simple, with space for icons. And those icons shouldn’t disappear in the background.

Anyway, here are the thumbnails of what I came up with. The links are to 1024×768 BMP files — perfect for Windows wallpaper. (Warning: These are big images!)

Yes, yes, people flying over Chicago — or using Google Maps — will see your company logo. But don’t you think this is just asking for trouble?

Way to care about your employees. A Dominos Pizza driver here was robbed Sunday night while making a delivery. The next day, the company fired her (she had worked there six years) for — get this — making Dominos drivers look like a target.

Story here.

Blogging’s been light lately because I’m working on, like, eight stories at work, and home time is spent either with the boy, writing my column, or puttering with my photos.

Tech topics to return in earnest pretty soon.

An entry on the American Thinker blog would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.

It seems the blogger is so desperate to show how just gosh-darn awful the mainstream media is — especially The New York Times — that he bends over backwards, exaggerates, and brings in all the earthmoving equipment he has to build a mountain from a molehill.

Here’s the “scoop”:

On Jan. 14, the Times ran an image from the AFP wire service (Agence France-Presse) of a boy and an old man in the ruins of their home in Pakistan with a caption, “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.”

It turns out the caption was in error. The people are not standing with the remains of a missile; it’s actually an unexploded artillery shell, and whoever was on the Times’s copy desk at the time didn’t know the difference. Okey doke, that kind of stuff happens; papers will run the caption provided by the wire service, and sometimes they’re wrong, or copy editors will screw up.

But far be it for some bloggers to say, “Whoops.” Instead, they’ve decided they’ve found a vast conspiracy!

In an entry titled, “Photo fakery at the New York Times,” Thomas Lifson (he’s both the editor and publisher of the American Thinker) writes:

It appears that the Times, once-upon-a-time regarded as the last word in reliability when it comes to checking before publishing (which makes them so much better than blogs, of course), has run a fake photo on the home page of its website. The photo has since been removed from the home page, but still can be seen here.

It’s not an error, you see. It’s a fake. “Fake,” implying of course, that it was staged with actors, or somehow misrepresents what happened. (For example, the video of Iraqis taking down the statue of Saddam — that was faked to appear as if hordes of people were there cheering, when in fact it was a handful doing the job, in an area cordoned-off by the US military. But I digress.)

In the real world, it was an incorrect caption. A dumb mistake, but a real photo mislabeled.

But Lifson is not to be deterred. He never explains why it’s a “fake,” as opposed to simply poorly captioned, Instead, paragraph after paragraph, he quotes military experts or aficionados explaining in detail why the image is not that of a missile. Writes one:

At a glance, it’s hard to tell the exact caliber — 152mm or 155mm (they’re so close) but the Soviets tended to favor 152 (going back to WW-II) while we and the Brits, the French and most of the rest of the non-Soviet world (including, oddly, the PRC) preferred the 155. For all intents and purposes, they were functionally identical (but were not interchangeable).

And on and on. And on and on and on, all to prove — mercy me! — that the caption was wrong.

See, if you go into excruciating, unnecessary detail about why this isn’t a missile, it takes attention away from the small size of the problem — an error in the caption. But Lifson doesn’t seem to care; he’s more interested in assuming malice, rather than using Occam’s Razor to realize that it’s an error in a caption.

I can imagine this conversation with him:

Me: Tom, I’m going to the deli on 5th. Want anything?
Lifson: There’s no deli on 5th. It’s on 6th.

Me: Oh, yeah, you’re right.
Lifson: Why did you lie to me? Were you trying to steal my money?
Me: Huh? No. I forgot which street it was on.
Lifson: See, 5th has the laundry, then the architects’ firm, then the Mexican place.
Me: I know. I said I made a mistake.
Lifson: No, you lied. Here, here’s a map. The deli’s on 6th because it’s across from the Post Office.

Me: OK, OK. I made a mistake.
Lifson: No, you lied to steal my money. Let me ask some other people where the deli is…

You get the picture. Not once does he explain how it’s a “fake,” or why he used such a loaded term. Of course not.

So Lifson and his kin will jump up and down, pat one another on the back and crow about how they unearthed a vast, left-wing conspiracy by the AFP and Getty Images (and later the Times) to foist on an unsuspecting public a mislabeled image.

Tomorrow, I suppose, they’ll find unAmerican activities lurking in a spelling error.

More: Oh, this gets better. On page two of his earth-shattering report, Lifson goes completely off the deep end and into the realm of wild speculation.

No, the Times didn’t just mislabel a caption, it was covering up a villager’s secret supply of bombs that might be used to lob sarin gas at US troops! He quotes his “security affairs correspondent,” Doug Hanson:

Not only did the NYT get caught in another lie, but they may have unintentionally revealed the village’s cache of IED ordnance. During the Intifada against Israel that started in September of 2000, terrorists in Gaza used unexploded artillery projectiles wired as command detonated landmines. Even the heaviest Merkava main battle tanks could be taken out with these devices. Of course, command detonated artillery projectiles are one of the preferred types of IEDs used in Iraq by enemy forces. And, in 2004, troopers from the US 1st Cavalry Division encountered an IED made with a binary Sarin nerve agent 155mm artillery chemical round.

When presented with the liklihood that it’s a NATO practice round (and thus not terribly dangerous), Lifson is not to be deterred by the facts. See, it could be French and thus chock-full of high explosive:

Mr. Krulac notes that the blue color generally notes a training practice round, and it may very well be an inert projectile. But NATO markings do not apply to many other makers of 155mm ammunition including the French, who have been known to paint high explosive rounds of some of their ordnance blue.

[sigh] Maybe he needs a better aluminum foil hat.

More more: More commentary on this at the Mahablog.

An entry on the American Thinker blog would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.

It seems the blogger is so desperate to show how just gosh-darn awful the mainstream media is — especially The New York Times — that he bends over backwards, exaggerates, and brings in all the earthmoving equipment he has to build a mountain from a molehill.

Here’s the “scoop”:

On Jan. 14, the Times ran an image from the AFP wire service (Agence France-Presse) of a boy and an old man in the ruins of their home in Pakistan with a caption, “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.”

It turns out the caption was in error. The people are not standing with the remains of a missile; it’s actually an unexploded artillery shell, and whoever was on the Times’s copy desk at the time didn’t know the difference. Okey doke, that kind of stuff happens; papers will run the caption provided by the wire service, and sometimes they’re wrong, or copy editors will screw up.

But far be it for some bloggers to say, “Whoops.” Instead, they’ve decided they’ve found a vast conspiracy!

In an entry titled, “Photo fakery at the New York Times,” Thomas Lifson (he’s both the editor and publisher of the American Thinker) writes:

It appears that the Times, once-upon-a-time regarded as the last word in reliability when it comes to checking before publishing (which makes them so much better than blogs, of course), has run a fake photo on the home page of its website. The photo has since been removed from the home page, but still can be seen here.

It’s not an error, you see. It’s a fake. “Fake,” implying of course, that it was staged with actors, or somehow misrepresents what happened. (For example, the video of Iraqis taking down the statue of Saddam — that was faked to appear as if hordes of people were there cheering, when in fact it was a handful doing the job, in an area cordoned-off by the US military. But I digress.)

In the real world, it was an incorrect caption. A dumb mistake, but a real photo mislabeled.

But Lifson is not to be deterred. He never explains why it’s a “fake,” as opposed to simply poorly captioned, Instead, paragraph after paragraph, he quotes military experts or aficionados explaining in detail why the image is not that of a missile. Writes one:

At a glance, it’s hard to tell the exact caliber — 152mm or 155mm (they’re so close) but the Soviets tended to favor 152 (going back to WW-II) while we and the Brits, the French and most of the rest of the non-Soviet world (including, oddly, the PRC) preferred the 155. For all intents and purposes, they were functionally identical (but were not interchangeable).

And on and on. And on and on and on, all to prove — mercy me! — that the caption was wrong.

See, if you go into excruciating, unnecessary detail about why this isn’t a missile, it takes attention away from the small size of the problem — an error in the caption. But Lifson doesn’t seem to care; he’s more interested in assuming malice, rather than using Occam’s Razor to realize that it’s an error in a caption.

I can imagine this conversation with him:

Me: Tom, I’m going to the deli on 5th. Want anything?
Lifson: There’s no deli on 5th. It’s on 6th.
Me: Oh, yeah, you’re right.
Lifson: Why did you lie to me? Were you trying to steal my money?
Me: Huh? No. I forgot which street it was on.
Lifson: See, 5th has the laundry, then the architects’ firm, then the Mexican place.
Me: I know. I said I made a mistake.
Lifson: No, you lied. Here, here’s a map. The deli’s on 6th because it’s across from the Post Office.
Me: OK, OK. I made a mistake.
Lifson: No, you lied to steal my money. Let me ask some other people where the deli is…

You get the picture. Not once does he explain how it’s a “fake,” or why he used such a loaded term. Of course not.

So Lifson and his kin will jump up and down, pat one another on the back and crow about how they unearthed a vast, left-wing conspiracy by the AFP and Getty Images (and later the Times) to foist on an unsuspecting public a mislabeled image.

Tomorrow, I suppose, they’ll find unAmerican activities lurking in a spelling error.

More: Oh, this gets better. On page two of his earth-shattering report, Lifson goes completely off the deep end and into the realm of wild speculation.

No, the Times didn’t just mislabel a caption, it was covering up a villager’s secret supply of bombs that might be used to lob sarin gas at US troops! He quotes his “security affairs correspondent,” Doug Hanson:

Not only did the NYT get caught in another lie, but they may have unintentionally revealed the village’s cache of IED ordnance. During the Intifada against Israel that started in September of 2000, terrorists in Gaza used unexploded artillery projectiles wired as command detonated landmines. Even the heaviest Merkava main battle tanks could be taken out with these devices. Of course, command detonated artillery projectiles are one of the preferred types of IEDs used in Iraq by enemy forces. And, in 2004, troopers from the US 1st Cavalry Division encountered an IED made with a binary Sarin nerve agent 155mm artillery chemical round.

When presented with the liklihood that it’s a NATO practice round (and thus not terribly dangerous), Lifson is not to be deterred by the facts. See, it could be French and thus chock-full of high explosive:

Mr. Krulac notes that the blue color generally notes a training practice round, and it may very well be an inert projectile. But NATO markings do not apply to many other makers of 155mm ammunition including the French, who have been known to paint high explosive rounds of some of their ordnance blue.

[sigh] Maybe he needs a better aluminum foil hat.

More more: More commentary on this at the Mahablog.

http://www.24eyes.com

Except for it’s extremely high-end (F6), and extremely low-end 35-mm cameras, Nikon has announced that it will no longer make or sell film cameras.

Via Craigslist:

Subject: (writing gigs) Are you good at writing? (Boston)

Well, want to hire someone to write about me in a creative way. You must meet for coffee and learn about me. The writing should cover my histroy, present and personalty. I will give you $100 at the end of your work.

A new security hole has had folks in the IT industry scrambling lately — it’s a flaw in the way Windows handles a particular kind of image called a Windows Metafile, or WMF. Unlike JPEG images, which are used for detailed images such as photos (they’re called bitmap or raster graphics files), the WMF format is typically used for simpler images (it’s called a vector format).

Whatever. That’s not the point.

Apparently, if you even view an infected WMF file in, say, your e-mail or Web browser, your computer can be hit. Nasty.

And that reminded me of several wonderful stories by David Langford about “Basilisk” images. In short, these are images that, when viewed, overload the human mind to the point of killing a person.

The stories include “Blit,” “Different Kinds of Darkness,” “What Happened at Cambridge IV,” and — not exactly a story — the COMP.BASILISK FAQ.

They’re terrific reading. As you can see by the linked text above, “Blit” and the COMP. BASILISK FAQ are available free online. “Different Kinds of Darkness” was once as well; I’ll try to find a link.

*Neal Stephenson took the idea in a slightly different direction in Snow Crash, in which computer hackers’ minds were destroyed by viewing a particular piece of software.)

So Sony unveiled its Reader at the Consumer Electronics Show — a slightly-larger-than-a-paperback device that displays electronic books using a much better display technology than, say, a typical PDA. The $300-$400 device can hold about 80 books, and one charge will let you read about 7500 pages.

This is a very cool thing. I’ve said for a long time that the right display technology could finally get e-books, -magazines, -manuals, and other media to take off. My money is (was?) on electronic ink, but organic LEDs might do the trick.

But here’s my prediction: This Sony product will flop. It’ll use proprietary technology and/or a proprietary format — something Sony always does. The market will, instead, go to the companies that support a common, open format, perhaps PDF or a derivative. You heard it here first.

I keep seeing comments about how the people who are upset about ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover being blown are apparently not upset about the leak of information about the NSA’s wiretapping. That, say these people, is hypocricy!

But there is a fundamental difference between the person who “outed” Plame, and the person or people who leaked the information about the President and the NSA and the wiretapping of Americans. Trying to lump them together as “whistleblowers” doesn’t work.

What Plame was doing was legal. What the NSA was doing was probably not legal. It’s troubling that someone would reveal classified information about a perfectly legal operation (or in this case, operative). It’s much less troubling that someone would blow the whistle on government activities that could be illegal, unconstitutional, or both.

A while ago I put together a progression of Michael Jackson images. Now, thanks to a Fark Photoshop contest (”Lots of work, pitiful results”) we have this gem from “Whoopti Dew”:

From MSN. No, I haven’t tried them, but I’m in a trusting mood. (There are actually 18, but these are my faves.)

1. If your throat tickles, scratch your ear.

When you were 9, playing your armpit was a cool trick. Now, as an adult, you can still appreciate a good body-based feat, but you’re more discriminating. Take that tickle in your throat; it’s not worth gagging over. Here’s a better way to scratch your itch: “When the nerves in the ear are stimulated, it creates a reflex in the throat that can cause a muscle spasm,” says Scott Schaffer, M.D., president of an ear, nose and throat specialty center in Gibbsboro, New Jersey. “This spasm relieves the tickle.”

5. Clear your stuffed nose!

Forget Sudafed. An easier, quicker, and cheaper way to relieve sinus pressure is by alternately thrusting your tongue against the roof of your mouth, then pressing between your eyebrows with one finger. This causes the vomer bone, which runs through the nasal passages to the mouth, to rock back and forth, says Lisa DeStefano, D.O., an assistant professor at the Michigan State University college of osteopathic medicine. The motion loosens congestion; after 20 seconds, you’ll feel your sinuses start to drain.

13. Thaw your brain!

Too much Chipwich too fast will freeze the brains of lesser men. As for you, press your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, covering as much as you can. “Since the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, your body thinks your brain is freezing, too,” says Abo. “In compensating, it overheats, causing an ice-cream headache.” The more pressure you apply to the roof of your mouth, the faster your headache will subside.

15. Wake the dead!

If your hand falls asleep while you’re driving or sitting in an odd position, rock your head from side to side. It’ll painlessly banish your pins and needles in less than a minute, says Dr. DeStefano. A tingly hand or arm is often the result of compression in the bundle of nerves in your neck; loosening your neck muscles releases the pressure. Compressed nerves lower in the body govern the feet, so don’t let your sleeping dogs lie. Stand up and walk around.