End the War on Freedom

So your boss nixes the idea of power-napping on your 15-minute break? Mr. Know-It-All recommends fighting this battle with cold, hard data. And he suggests you re-read that Yelp rant before you hit publish.

There's a device that can detect pretty much any sound or smell you emit. Think about that with your electricity-crackling brain.

Yeah, the clown collar's back. Fritz's ear is fine, but he's got a new sore on his front leg.He's done this before: He gets this nervous thing where he just licks and licks one place on his leg until it's a bleeding mess. This one hasn't gone that far, and I'm hoping to prevent it. I tried a couple of days of shaming him out of it, which oddly enough has worked before. Fritz is almost unique among the dogs in that he actually cares what I want. But this morning it was worse, and since we've worked out a way to keep the clown collar on him it was sadly time for the evil contrivance to come out of retirement. I really enjoyed taking it off him the last time; he's cumbersome enough without it. But his history is too clear: Right now it's just raw skin, but he'll lick it to the bone if I don't stop him. Once it's healed, he'll eventually leave it alone.

brownerthanu writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail', in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Web 2.0 personality Michael Arrington's dream of an inexpensive web tablet called CrunchPad may be dead. Higher-than-expected costs and missed deadlines may have done it in.

The new M3 GTS in three words: We want one. So do you.

A couple of evenings ago, M told me I should check out Oleg Volk's live journal site because he had decorated a couple of already-very-decorative photos with captions I'd identify with.I've spent some time on his regular site - in fact it's got an advert on my sidebar - but only go there when there's an entire afternoon that needs killing. These were a little easier to find on the live journal page.

...doing my bit for the general confusion of initial impressions:

• It is reported that the FBI is saying that there is "no terrorism nexus" in this thing. It strikes me as impossibly early to know that.
• If it is some kind of "terrorist attack", of the sort that everyone might imagine involving Islamist murderers, then it's just about the most foolish thing people like that could possibly plan.
• That...

bonch writes "Contrary to previous reports, Atom chip support is working fine in the latest 10C535 build of OS X 10.6.2. Apple's EULA still states that OS X is licensed to run only on Apple hardware, but it looks like OSX86 hackers can breathe easy ... for now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The TTXGP eGrandPrix makes its first American appearance at Infineon Raceway.

Windows 7 can still acquire eight out of 10 of new viruses, according to a test run by anti-virus company Sophos. This shouldn't be surprising.

Wired.com heads to San Francisco's Exploratorium to see four exhibits that explore the effects of visual illusions and perceptual phenomena.

An anonymous reader writes 'In comparison to the advanced technology in today's smart phones, the standard home phone is painfully backwards. My current setup is a Panasonic system that has 4 cordless phones over one base station. Setting the time on one phone changes the time on all the phones; however, this is not the case for the phone book. Each entry must be manually copied (pushed) to each handset. Is this as far as home phone technology has come? What I would like is a phone system that I could sync to my computer so I could update the phone book over all the units (if not sync with Address Book or Outlook), keep a log of caller IDs, or even forward me new voicemail notifications. Does anyone know if such a system exists?'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides, in Dune. November 5, 2009 Insurgents on the Right Lose BadlyBy Froma HarropThe Tea Party wing of the Republican Party had the perfect strategy for upstate New York's 23rd congressional district:1. Support a candidate who doesn't live in the district -- in this case, Conservative Douglas Hoffman. Savage the local Republican choice, Dede Scozzafava, and hound her into dropping out.2. Condemn the local Republicans who had picked the moderate Scozzafava as being "insiders." And have the finger-pointers be Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson. (Guess no one would ever accuse them of being insiders in upstate New York.)3. Refer to the issues that concern voters in the "North Country" district -- dredging the St. Lawrence River, building a new highway -- as "parochial." Have that term be flung by former Texas Rep. Dick Armey, now a right-wing gadfly -- and in response to distress shown by the Watertown Daily Times editorial board that Hoffman knew nothing of local matters.4. Bring Armey into the editorial board meeting.5. Have Palin make flashy sweeps through upstate New York, spreading voter repellant around this politically moderate district.Put it all together, and you have the perfect strategy for turning a congressional seat that had been in Republican hands for well over a century into a Democratic seat. As recently as last month, polls showed Scozzafava trouncing both the Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Hoffman in the polls. Not an easy race for Republicans to lose, but the Tea Party nihilists showed how.A lesson here for Republicans, and Democrats as well, is that Americans don't live on cable television or talk radio. These media invented the Tea Party movement and egg on its followers, who are angry for reasons not necessarily related to politics.This crowd, after all, is pretty darn colorful and makes for good entertainment.Americans live in real places, and their candidates tend to be familiar figures they have coffee with. Scozzafava had served as a mayor and state assemblywoman. She was not some cartoon character on which the opposition could safely launch its childish attacks.No electorate approves of carpetbaggers. If any word describes what Tea-Baggers tried to pull in upstate New York, it was an outsiders' takeover of a local race.]Hoffman clearly spent more time visiting with Glenn Beck than reading the local papers. And his Tea-Baggers were also moneybaggers. On Election Day, when Hoffman seemed to have a slight edge, the Club for Growth proudly announced out of Washington that it had dumped over $1 million into his campaign coffers."Hoffman's cash didn't come from somebody in Hermon or Hopkinton or Adams Center or from anywhere that cares about the country," wrote Jeffrey Savitskie, a Watertown Daily Times editor who had planned to vote for Scozzafava, but then moved to Owens. "It came from folks who know so little about the North Country that they would likely believe it if you told them Alexandria Bay was an exotic dancer."Independents should welcome the outcome in upstate New York, not because a Democrat won, but because the American two-party system needs to offer them a real choice. It can't please them that New York state will now have only two Republicans in its 29-member congressional delegation, or that New England has none.The Republican Party has been torn by a civil war between its establishment and insurgents on the right. The battle of New York's 23rd could be the Gettysburg that determines the winner. The right-wingers lost badly in what was a reliably Republican district.But questions remain whether the Tea-Baggers will retreat -- and more unsettling for mainstream Republicans, who the Tea-Baggers thought they were fighting.My reply to Froma Harrop (Yes, I swear, that's her real name.) --TO: fharrop@projo.com re: "Insurgents on the Right Lose Badly"Ms. Harrop,Your concentration upon the ingredients of the stew in NY-23 has caused you to miss the point of making it. For all the mistakes that Mr. Hoffman and his supporters made, they were successful at getting the attention of their target audience: the old bulls of the Upstate New York Club of The Dead Elephant Society, who chose their candidate without reference to the desires of the people. (And, of course, the other targets were the national so-called leaders of that exclusive club).Now, your bias is evident by your use of the leftist gutter sexual term for the Tea Party folks, so I'll get right to the point.May I refer you to a truth uttered by a character of Frank Herbert's in Dune?"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides The Tea Party folks actually won on the only battlefield that matters nationally to them: the few inches of battlespace between the ears of the national GOP leadership. They demonstrated with the Hoffman campaign that they have the ability to bring down the Dead Elephant Society's power. Do you think that such a raw exercise of arrogance by these GOP mandarins will happen again anytime soon? Do you think that any group of the Dead Elephant Society anywhere in the country will once again try to shove their wishes down the throats of the newly-energized base?The Tea Party contingent now has the power to destroy the GOP's hopes for recovering national power. They just demonstrated it. Whether the Dead Elephant Society is smart enough to recognize it or is too moribund to understand they must adapt and regrow a sense of principles that they long ago abandoned are the only pertinent questions.Your mistake is that you think this is a parochial fight about "New Yaarker" politics. It isn't. It is an existential battle for what kind of country we will have at the end of the Obama era, and the essential question is whether it will be settled by politics or by violence.If the GOP recovers its senses, it may yet be settled politically. But Americans, being a practical people, will make their own arrangements if the previous forms fail. We did it before and we'll do it again if necessary.Food for thought while you contemplate the error of your analysis.Mike VanderboeghThe alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.PO Box 926Pinson, AL 35126sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

Hoping to captivate a new generation of fans, the upcoming site from the publisher of Fantasy Magazine will serve up a brainy mix of original fiction, classic stories and insightful science journalism.

Bulgarian Surplus - 149gr FMJ CW/BE/CO

Remington Subsonic - 38gr HP BR/RF/NC

Brenneke Sabot Slugs - Sabot Slug --/--/--

Czech Surplus - 149gr FMJBT CW/BE/CO

“…men of strong zeal and devotion, who in spite of the passing of time have preserved their love of freedom, still remain ineffective because, however numerous they may be, they are not known to one another…”  Étienne de la Boétie Many of you have probably seen this already as Brad Spangler has posted it to his [...]