Month: December 2004

Mac Wack Keyboard Attack

For the last few days, approximately once a day, my keyboard has completely stopped working on this Titanium Powerbook G4/500. I can still switch apps with command-tab, but I can’t type any words. Anywhere.

The first time this happened I was running several exotic enhancers, like DragThing and WindowShade X and uControl and stuff, so I toasted ’em all (especially uControl, as it is a kernel-level hack that affects the keyboard). Now I’m not running with anything unusal except Quicksilver (which I wasn’t running before), and I’ve had the same thing happen a couple times. Suddenly, no type-ee, no how. And a reboot fixes it.

Anyone ever heard of this?

(No, it’s not the numlock key. I do that sometimes, but this isn’t that.)

Yahoo! News – U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture


Yahoo! News – U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

OK, let’s be fair. If American military tribunals under Bush’s oversight weren’t allowed to use evidence obtained under torture, they’d have no evidence at all. You don’t want to cripple our nation’s defenders do you?

Like I always say, Bush will go down in history as The Torture President.

Part of a general pattern: Illiberals (known colloquially as “conservatives”) generally think you can solve problems by hurting people. They don’t like laws that keep them from doing so, because when they are unable to hurt people, they don’t know where to begin.

Why Things Are Probably Going to Suck Soon

Two words: Peak Oil. What do Dick Cheney, Michael Moore, George W. Bush, the vice-president of the Iranian National Oil Company, energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, one of George W. Bush’s energy advisors, and many others agree about?

We’re past Peak Oil. Starting in the next few years oil prices will skyrocket and a lot of things which depend on cheap oil (like the U.S. economy) are going to break irrevocably.

With regards to oil, we’re a lot like a lottery winner who didn’t invest a dime, and is just burning through his cash, buying more and more, and then it starts to get scarce, and he just tries not to think about it… Until it all falls down. If he’d invested in something outside of his lottery stash, he could have been set up for life, but it was easier to just spend the ready cash. (I speak as someone who would unfortunately probably behave this way if he won the lottery.)

What if the fall of civilization that the older ones among us expected to happen because of nuclear war happened anyway cause we didn’t plan for what happened when the oil was gone?

I’ll tell you, I’d sure suck at eking out a living in a desperately impoverished post-industrial Dark Age.