And another Scalzi post:

Rich’s earlier comment that alcohol is safer than marijuana is fairly well falsified by research. Alcohol is *damned* dangerous and really wallops the human body. But it was easy for pretechnological cultures to produce, so it’s been around for a large chunk of recorded human history. I’ve read some anthropology that posits that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agrarian was largely driven by the need for a stable supply of ingredients for beer — a convenient way of delivering calories that won’t succumb to mold or most pests.

Meanwhile, John’s comment about recreational use sort of misses the point — the self-medicating crowd, by and large, thinks that they are recreational. It turns out that quite a lot of what we generally consider to be moral failings — a tendency to chemical addiction, for example — is actually more akin to undiagnosed disorders.

I was a heavy drinker in college, and then stopped the day I finished grad school. Wasn’t hard at all, I’m just not wired for alcoholism. But just as I don’t think I deserve credit for giving it up, I don’t necessarily think others deserve blame for it.

Likewise, the idea that you’re somehow a moral failure for being unproductive because you spend your life baked — well, that buys into the whole Protestant work ethic a lot more than I think is necessary. I figure anyone in ownership of a brain has the right to decide how that brain should function, with the usual libertarian line being drawn where it starts to hurt others.

For those of you coming from .mil and those special .gov addresses, John Scalzi is giving away copies of Old Man’s War, his recent (and very good) novel set in a future where retirees are retrofitted for interstellar combat. You’re eligible if you’re serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Details here.

Just posted the following to John Scalzi’s comments. Head over there to see the full context.

It always annoys me when Mac zealotry is confused with Mac bigotry. Yes, people who engage in OS wars are annoying as heck. But that doesn’t mean that those of us who understand principles of UI and usability should be required to keep silent when we see the other 97% of you going through needless hardship.

Case in point: was at a friend’s house this weekend and he asked for help fixing his home DSL and setting up his wireless network. No prob, I do that kind of thing for a living. So we banged our heads on a few brick walls for a while, while the Windows geek in attendance tried to detoxify the desktop computer that my friend didn’t know was broken. Six month old computer, occasionally exposed only to dial-up Internet, and the thing was completely hosed with spyware.

So I said, “You’re a casual computer user with no interest in being a hobbyist. You want a computer that just works. You’re the classic example of someone who should be using a Mac mini.” Cue derision from the Windows side of the room.

Yes, there are people who should be using Windows computers. (Windows programmers, day traders, gamers, and masochists.) The issue is that many people who really do not benefit from Microsoft are steered to it by default. When I don’t have my professional hat on, I’ll be glad to argue the emotional positives of the Mac. But as a pro, I’ll be doing a needs analysis and if I tell you to get a Mac, I’ve got good reason to. If you write me off, you’re just being stubbornly ignorant.

Other commentary:

Jim Winter: OS X is based on Next like Windows XP is based on DOS. Certain similarities continue to exist. But the code you’re using has been rewritten from the ground up. It’s more accurate to say that the Next programmers who were acquired by Apple ripped off their own best ideas. If you’ve ever used a Next box, you know that OS X is a heck of a lot more suitable for Mom and Pop.

Mythago: it’s been quite a few years since Macs were more expensive than Windows; true for a while under Gil Amelio, not since. What was true is that you could buy a crappy PC with fewer features, and you couldn’t buy a crappy Mac. But if you took a Mac and tried to build a PC with the same hardware, it’d run you nearly the same cost. With the release of the Mac mini and the availability of the $1,000 iBook, the only way you can still complain about cost is if you want your Mac to come in the bottom of your Crackerjack.

David McNellis: the key to those thought bubbles in iChat, which AFAIK Apple was the first to twig to, is that it’s much better for fluid conversation when the other party knows you’re typing. Another one of those UI features we keep going on about.

RooK: yes, there are many specialized apps that are only available on Windows. So long as everyone in those vertical markets keeps using Windows machines and doesn’t pressure developers for more options, this will continue.

Jill: apologies that you’ve been bored by people who talk Mac. But I work in the industry, there are sound reasons why Macs are better in some situations, and it’s best for my industry (and others who depend on it) that people know what’s good and understand why.

Dave Pollard quotes Bill Maher:

And goes on to say:

The whole essay is definitely worth a read. I don’t agree with his conclusions, but they’re worthwhile and thought-provoking.

From Interesting Thing of the Day, a history of toasting. The drinking kind, not the gooey marshmallow kind. Reminds me of how the handshake has lived longer than the wearing of the swords that engendered it.

April 17, 2005: I set a new personal record. Five visits to four Starbucks in two states, and an indie shop afterwards.

Next time you have 60 seconds to spare, check out Hi, I’m ah… hello? at dNext. Satfeed of GWB as he puts together… well, hell, it’s almost impossible to figure out what he’s trying to do here. But it’s nice to know that he’s having a good time.

You are replacing a bulb in a standing halogen floor lamp that you’ve had since forever. You purchase a replacement bulb and find that it is several millimeters too long for the fixture; the original bulb broke coming out and cannot be used for comparison. Not only is there no manual for the lamp, but there’s not even a manufacturer’s name. It’s after midnight, you just woke up a friend to borrow his Phillips screwdriver, and you want to get this done now.

Do you:

1. Research the Internet for an hour to determine the standard lengths in common use for halogen fixtures;
   • find that the two possible lengths are 118 mm and 78 mm;
   • double-check the Imperial length of 40 mm, just to be sure;
   • resolve that there’s no way this lamp needs a 78 mm, that’s too short;
   • scour the lamp for identifying marks;
   • find the Underwriters Laboratories sticker;
   • search the Internet to see if there’s a public database of UL registrations;
   • having found one, plug in every number off the sticker until you find the right one;
   • trace the registration to a company in Kowloon, Hong Kong;
   • search the Internet for that company;
   • find their American offices in Miami;
   • click every link on the site looking for a PDF manual;
   • and not finding one, write down their 800 number to call in the morning.

2. Press lightly down on the contact point for the bulb and find that there’s plenty of give, allowing you to install the bulb in five seconds.
    
3. Do 1 first, then 2, then feel like biggest schmuck in history.

Great interview on Kojo today with Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats. RealPlayer, jump ahead to minute 33 or so.

Oh, this is priceless:

In case you’re missing the reference, this is a true story.

Addendum, 4/18/05 3:29 AM: Bizarre. I had no idea that 419 is an Ohio area code. I was referring to this.

Susie Bright, of all people, checks in with a brilliant eulogy of Andrea Dworkin:

My only encounter with Dworkin was a debate at Annenberg where I thought she was truly decimated by Larry Gross. I was actually a bit disappointed that the battle wasn’t more even; there’s certainly a rational anti-pornography argument to be made, but that didn’t seem to be her plan that night. It’s taken this long, and Susie Bright, for me to finally hear a positive and comprehensible explanation of what Dworkin was talking about.

Seeing so much well-deserved coverage of StopBolton.org made me a bit wistful for the original version which I helped put together in 2001. Turns out, it’s in the WayBack Machine. Looked better with the CSS in place, but still like seeing an old friend.

Goes to the College of American Pathologists for shipping out 3,700 samples of this lovely item:

I’m not entirely sure why the story pays so much attention to the 61 sample shipped outside North America, seeing as how a) it’s the BBC reporting, and b) last time I heard, our most recent spate of bioterrorism was home-grown. We think.

Sure, the numbers look great for Apple this quarter, but what really jumped out at me — seeing as how I’m not an iPod consultant — was the part that said, “Apple shipped 1,070,000 Macintosh units during the quarter, representing a 43 percent increase in CPU units over the year-ago quarter.”

There are now two different classes of events, both of which can cause huge amounts of damage, but which occur so regularly that it’s barely even a news story.

The first one, of course, is “New Crippling Security Hole Found in Windows.”

The second one is “New Theft of Personal Information of Thousands from Clueless Data Aggreggator”, or its close cousin, “Whoops! That last one was worse than we thought.”

Which raises the question, when the friendlier, smaller numbers are bandied about at first, is that due to incompetence on the part of the companies? Or just outright CYA? One or two mistakes I can accept, but this is a regular part of the meme.

Via Atrios, the Cunning Realist points out that the FBI hasn’t bothered to update its most wanted posters to include a few events that took place in 2001.

Oh, and they also still want a dead guy. Whom we killed.

Boy, it’s a good thing that the Patriot Act has done so much to improve interdepartment comumnications!

Via Engadget, this bit of very good news:

FBI agents demonstrate cracking a WEP wireless network in under three minutes.

…is now 17,651,472,774,995,090,209,190,652,337,069.

Sixteen brownie points to the first person who can tell me why.