Stop Digging

Or: Brit Hume comes back for more.

You’d think he’d try to walk back his earlier call for Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity such that he might be saved. Instead, Hume doubles down when Bill O’Reilly asks:

“Was that proselytizing?”

“I don’t think so,” Hume said, before reiterating his comments from Sunday that Woods should convert to Christianity.

Hume said that given Woods problems, he “needs something that Christianity, especially, provides and gives and offers.” That includes, he said, the chance for “redemption and forgiveness.” Later in the segment, Hume said: “I think that Jesus Christ offers Tiger Woods something that Tiger Woods badly needs.”

Here we have the prime anchor of a “news” organization who is basically operating the 700 Club whenever he’s on the air. And but that the rest of the Washington Media villagers assiduously defend FOXnews as a news organization. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the network’s non-editorial content. Assuming we can find any, that is.

On the Nexus One, only 190 megabytes of its total 4.5 gigabytes of memory is allowed for storing apps. On the $199 iPhone, nearly all of the 16 gigabytes of memory can be used for apps.

Walt Mossberg pointing out an astonishing fact. Seriously, how does this product ship with a limitation like this? Reminds me of the way Windows maps RAM here in 2010…I’ve got about 2.5x that storage limit on my 3GS, and I’m pretty parsimonious on the apps front. I put at least a modicum of effort into keeping the app count low, things I really use/need. Throw a few games in on top of my absolute must-have five or six apps and you’re most definitely done. Unbelievable.

Oh yes.

In which Marco admits to stalking me:

[The entirely theoretical Apple tablet] can be the computer that we buy our parents or grandparents without worrying that we’re signing ourselves up for years of painful tech support calls as they “lose” documents by saving them in the wrong folder, think they can’t save any more files because the desktop is full of icons, delete their browsers’ icons and tell us the internet is gone, keep five different antivirus products half-installed, and fill their RAM with programs they never Quit because they just close every window instead and don’t notice the tiny “running” dot in the Dock or know what it indicates.

He’s right though. Somewhere between the real points Marco makes, along with Siracusa’s take, and what Gruber talks about lies the truth of the Tablet. But I think the biggest thing to come out of the whole tablet introduction will ultimately be the beginning of real convergence between the various compartments of the Apple product line. Right now, Apple has the iPhoneOS and MacOS; presumably, these are about to be joined by TabletOS (which is likely sort of an iPhoneOS+). All of these, of course ride atop some version of OS X. With the introduction of the Tablet, I suspect we’ll begin to see how they all fit together. My prediction extends Gruber’s gist: not only will iPhone apps work as widgets on the Tablet, they’ll work as widgets on MacOS (under its next revision). And not on the Dashboard (though Apple could presumably choose to put them in there too), but on the desktop.

Doing this allows for a whole new class of applications. You’d still have essentially single-purpose iPhone apps: do one small thing and do it very well. Add to that more powerful, tablet and desktop aimed apps: more pixels, more computing power. Bundling this together as a unitary application bundle allows you to implant an iPhone app inside the desktop version; thus you can offer multi-platform sync. Sure, I can’t actually edit X-app documents on the phone, but I can view them easily and do these other, more minor edits on them. Bento offers a paleo-version of this setup today; you can create databases and various data-structures on the phone or the desktop and they sync data and the underlying table designs back and forth…certain features, though, only work on the desktop version.
It makes much more sense going forward for Apple to abstract away the “I’m ready to sync” part of the current equation; you buy the app, it comes with an iPhone app, they are linked and automatically exchange info. Changes then sync next time you dock the phone or tablet or, presumably, automatically over the air if you so desire. All the fiddly bits with saving, file structure, and whatnot are totally abstracted away.  THIS is why the tablet will matter. THIS is “what it does” that compels people to buy one.

What this means for the broader Macintosh platform as this more abstracted take on the file system gradually metastasizes up the product chain is left as an exercise for the student.

I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say, evolution is hooey. […] The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation, but we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principals. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.

Don McLeroy, one of the conservatives rewriting history and science textbooks in Texas. Which, because Texas is a powerful market force, means your textbooks too. Reasoning and critical thinking are doomed in this country. It will already take 100 years to correct the damage these fucktards are doing to the country, and they respond by accelerating the descent.

But it’s also odd that Limbaugh would cite his experience in Hawaii as evidence that the U.S. health care system is “fine” seeing that Hawaii has already passed reform measures similar to those that Congress is currently considering as part of comprehensive reform — measures that Limbaugh has constantly been attacking.

Citing Experience In Hawaii, Limbaugh Says U.S. Health Care System Is ‘Just Dandy’ (via ryking).

So true. My recent voyage to Texas resulted in a similar experience: was asked how I expected I’d feel living under a mandate. Uh, we’ve had a mandate for TWO YEARS in Massachusetts. The information-free zone of FOXnews and talk radio is as poisonous as it is pervasive. Empirical reality: utterly beside the point.

MPERUPIT

  • If terrorists successfully attack during a Democratic president’s first year in office (first attack on World Trade Center), it’s the Democrats’ fault, and the attack is good news for Republicans.
  • If terrorists unsuccessfully attack during a Democratic president’s second term, it’s the Democrats’ fault the terrorists even tried, and the attack is good news for Republicans.
  • If terrorists successfully attack during a Republican president’s first year in office (9/11), it’s the Democrats’ fault, and the attack is good news for Republicans.
  • If terrorists unsuccessfully attack during a Republican president’s second term, it’s only because the Republican is “taking the fight to the enemy,” and the attack is good news for Republicans.
  • If terrorists unsuccessfully attack during a Democratic president’s first year in office, it’s the Democrats’ fault the terrorists even tried, and the attack is good news for Republicans.

This helpful guide brought to you by Steve Benen and the Washington Monthly. Clip and save.

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith; he is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world’.

Brit Hume, broadcasting on FOXnews, and not kidding. Sooner or later one hopes that even most Christians will get tired of this shit.

19 suicide bombers

The WSJ editorial section hits on one of the most pervasive yet utterly unsupported myths of 9/11/01:

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn’t happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn’t have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks.

I’ve seen this false supposition treated as plain fact again and again. It’s one of the most pervasive media and governmental frames there is: that all 19 members of the “team” on 9/11/01 were 100% in on the plan and had committed themselves to fly planes into buildings. Clearly, the optimal way to plan this mission given the obvious (and ongoing) limit re: reliable, willing, and able suicide bombers (in this case “suicide pilots”) is to tell most of each team that you’re just going to pull the old “seize the plane, fly somewhere, and then make some demands.” Exactly what the passengers thought was going to happen, too. Only one or two members of each team need know the true mission on the day and the remaining three or four are merely muscle, and, ultimately also a kind of unwitting victim of the very attacks they helped carry out. In fact, the fewer “in on it” the better, in that under this analysis you only require one suicidal zealot (and this is always going to be the rarest resource, really) per plane. Thus you potentially had only four “suicide bombers” for 9/11. Not 19. It’s at least conceivable that some of that muscle, also finally realizing what was really going on contemporaneously with the other passengers, were in on the struggle that ultimately ended in the crash in Pennsylvania. Unlikely, but possible. Fundamentally, though, if al Qaeda had 19 suicide bombers they could use to carry out the attacks the WSJ theorizes above: they would have done it. There is no reason at all to believe they did not wish to carry out the most spectacular attack possible with the resources at hand. An unremitting series of attacks spreading over weeks would have fit that bill to a T. That they chose another, extremely spectacular but vastly more concentrated style implies strongly that the resources simply weren’t there for the WSJ-style attack. Period. Not on 9/11, not today.

The economics of suicide bombing and the number of willing participants is, was, and will always be a primary limitation on its use so long as the target nation remains a relatively comfortable place to live. Give people a reason to stick around, minuscule as it may be, mostly they will choose to live. This is the underlying logic of the shoe- and underpants-bomber failures: these guys just aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world…but they’re what’s available that has any reasonable chance of getting the job done. You’ll note that they weren’t planted here prior to attempting their attacks; they weren’t deemed sufficiently reliable for a long-term, slow developing infiltration style plan, apparently.

Worth noting that the Israeli government is still working this terrorism opportunity cost issue out as well. With even modest improvements to the daily lives of Palestinians, most of the quasi-daily attacks would begin to melt away, and without further recourse to walls or super-high security. Even a tiny bit of hope is a powerful incentive to the potential suicide bomber to continue living. And the Israelis will continue to fail to understand it so long as they receive billions in untethered, unregulated support from us. The old Sinclair saw applies [with a minor addition]:

“It is difficult to get a man [or a government] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Index Israel’s support to GDP of the Palestinian territory going forward. Things would change rapidly. Suddenly, their salary would depend on it.