Several states are adopting laws that aid in a victim’s right to protect himself with deadly force using a firearm should a would-be assailant break into and enter the victim’s home. This story is sure to note that its mostly southern states that have adopted these laws, subtly implying that, ah heck, those crazy southerners are up to no good yet ag’in. Also, the story gives the opinion that these laws are not about common sense, but rather only adopted under horrendous pressure from the NRA.

“The incident made national headlines since it was Baker’s parrot that gave the alarm when it innocently squawked ‘good morning’ at the intruder.”

Read more of “The Raw Story | ‘Shoot first’ laws make it tougher for burglars in the United States”

Labels: Cartoon, Crime

Major ‘bug’ found in Mac app Acquisition

An open letter to Acquisition developer David Watanabe about advertising in paid products

My purchased application for accessing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network, blatantly called Acquisition, presented to me today—peculiarly—an advertisement within it for Apple’s new operating system. I say peculiarly because I don’t expect purchased products, i.e. things I fucking paid for, to contain within them advertisements à la shareware for my viewing. So, I reported the bug to the software’s developer, David Watanabe:

Dear David Watanabe:

Purchased Acquisition now advertises to you.

Acquisition is a terrific program with revolutionary ease of use for users, making it the best program for peer to peer on any platform. No other application comes close to the Mac experience like yours due to your attention to detail. These factors led me to pay for Acquisition with no regrets.

But, I recently opened my application to find a major bug. There was a picture and writing on their that seemed to indicate an advertisement, which—I know—seems ridiculous due to the previously mentioned purchasing of the product. Having given you my money for the program, presumably for private, unfettered use with no nags or advertisements (a kind of standard agreement one expects for purchased products), I wondered why on earth I would see an advertisement in the application I own. These two contradictory notions—a purchased program with no ads, and Acquisition with an ad in it hocking Leopard—lead me to believe that this must be a bug. Otherwise, it screams of being money-grubby and sleazy, which I’m sure is not you.

Please remove it. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Tironius Complex

Update: It’s gone.

Labels: Apple, Best of

The Fixing Broken Windows Theory — a “nip it in the bud” strategy of vandalism and disorder by fixing problems while they are small before the situation escalates to heavier misdeeds. For example, by fixing broken windows, there will be a psychological determent to kids and vandals breaking more windows, and then escalating to squatting, starting fires, and so on.

This is a good argument against graffiti vandalism.

“A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book’s authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.”

Read more of “Fixing Broken Windows - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”

“Nobel laureate Al Gore, we are to believe, has the technical acumen to analyze complex data, assess risks, and identify the right countermeasures.”

Read more of “Gore’s Inconvenient 9/11 Truth”

Al Gore professes to know what’s the best course of action for the future as a scientist would—a scientist, like Batman, I guess—to divert us from global catastrophe. His powers of foresight didn’t help us when he headed the Gore Commission to divert the nation from catastrophe, in 1996, from airplane terrorism. This isn’t to be blamed, he’s only human, but the problem is how so many people can blindly follow his findings on what he thinks is man-made climate change.

IPhone-clubber, and Russky, Dimitriy Babooshka (no seriously) takes his new not-working-but-unlocked iPhone with him wherever he goes, getting envious looks from onlookers of the fairer sex:

“If you want to laugh, then I will tell you how a very fashionable girl who was sitting with her purse-dog stared at my iPhone with envy. … She very quickly lost interest in her dog, and even left him at the table when they walked away. Only five minutes later did they come back to get the dog.”

Read more of “iNightclubbing: Partying in Moscow With The iPhone”

Labels: Apple, Cartoon, On the Town

Knife and gun violence on the rise among blacks in Britain, but targeting them for search “racist.” Keith Jarrett, president of Britain’s National Black Police Association, thinks blacks should be stopped and searched more than ever.

“More people from black communities should be stopped and searched to help tackle knife and gun crime, a leading black police representative says.”

Read more of “BBC NEWS | UK | Call to search more black people”

Labels: Cartoon, Crime, Race

Here is an excerpt of an essay in The New Republic by Steven Fucker—I mean Pinker—on our fencing off certain words into the unspeakables pin. Here he speaks on progressives’ own cursing newords [11. Neword: Neologism of the word neologism.]

“Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that violence and inequality are ‘obscene,’ not sex and excretion. And yet, since the 1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic taboos of their own, such as the stigma surrounding [nigger] and casual allusions to sexual desire or sexual attractiveness. So even people who revile the usual bluenoses can become gravely offended by their own conception of bad language. The question is, why?”

Read more of “TNR Online | What the [Fuck]?”

Labels: Cartoon

In the world of blogs pertaining to Macs, there are a couple that the Macanistas read on a daily basis. The writers of these blogs that come to mind are severe Apple apologists, predictable in their arguments about the company’s policies and practices. One such successful blog links to blogs that link to his, a kind of “keep-it-in-the-family” in-linking. Round and round they go.

Labels: Apple, Blogosphere, Cartoon

Conventional wisdom dictates that only American Republicans worry of the loss of national identity through the infestation of illegal immigration, but these sentiments span the range of political views and nations. [11.Seventy-one percent of republicans and 60% of Democrats.]

”While 73 percent of American respondents fretted about the trend, the sentiment was more pronounced in Britain, France, Germany and Spain. It was more than 90 percent in South Korea and Bangladesh. Concern for loss of tradition, however, was less strident in many Middle Eastern countries, at 51 percent among Palestinians and 53 percent in Jordan.”

Read more of “Immigration, loss of culture worry nations”