Month: March 2003

Sign the petition at originaltrilogy.com to convince George Lucas to release the original, theatrical release of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, not just his remastered, bastardized version. Go ahead and put on your “director’s cut,” but please PLEASE let us see the originals on DVD!

Because apparently in this time of multiple international crises the federal government has nothing better to do, “U.S. government officials are discussing the current five-color terror threat alert system to determine whether… a slightly higher warning level [should] be added within orange if the U.S. begins military action against Iraq.” I so want to make fun of this mercilessly, but it’s really a sad indication of bureaucracy gone awry. Even a little change to this system means millions of dollars in publication, administration, and other associated costs. And as if that isn’t enough of a waste, precious time and resources are being diverted to work on an endeavour that will ultimately mean little to the average citizen, and more than likely will confuse people on what is already (justly) perceived as a capricious and arbitrary system.

Update: After consulting my box of Crayola Crayons (as I know W and Tom Ridge must do during their play dates high-level meetings), perhaps “Macaroni and Cheese” and “Atomic Tangerine” are appropriate replacements for the boring “Orange” level. See, I couldn’t resist making fun of this mercilessly

Time for some Friday Flash Fun! Spacerunner is a simple, but strangely addictive game. Enjoy!

After three and a half years and “more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.” Although this is definitely a milestone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the project is on the verge of a breakthrough in its search for extraterrestrial life. In fact, UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werthimer, SETI@home chief scientist, says, “I give it a one in 10,000 chance that one of our candidate signals turns out to be from ET.” Still, if nothing else, “SETI@home has performed the most sensitive and detailed SETI sky survey to date, has demonstrated the power of the Internet for doing scientific distributed computing, and has allowed the general public to participate directly in an exciting research project.”

After my two “pro-war” posts, I felt I needed to balance things out by making fun of W and the impending conflict. The latest set of cartoons at “Get Your War On” are hilarious.

I don’t want to make this page into a “pro-war” screed, but John McCain has a well-written editorial in support of the war in The New York Times.

In an op-ed article in New York Times, William Safire reveals some ulterior motives for France (and China and Syria) wanting to block the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq: “the three nations may not want the world to discover that their nationals have been illicitly supplying Saddam Hussein with materials used in building long-range surface-to-surface missiles.” Apparently, France and China have been using Syria as an intermediary for some time in order to supply Iraq with 99 percent unsymmetric dimethylhydrazine, an advanced misisle fuel, and HTPB, a transparent liquid rubber used as a binder for solid propellant whose sale to Iraq is specifically forbidden by the United Nations. If these allegations are common knowledge to arms dealers, as Safire suggests, then it provides some damning evidence, to say the least. Safire concludes, “This detail about the France-China-Syria-Iraq propellant collaboration makes for dull reading, but reveals some of the motivation behind the campaign of those nations to suppress the truth. The truth, however, will out.” Let’s hope so.

The BBC reports on new data that suggests the presence of briny water flowing across the surface of Mars. The article says, “It is bound to increase speculation that life may exist near to the surface of the planet,” but although I am by no means an expert I submit that *if* this proves to be water, it’s still to early to predict the presence of life. Although that would be pretty cool and might actually spur NASA on to a long-overdue Mars Mission.

Just to annoy Driko, I’m going to beat him to the punch on announcing that Mozilla 1.3 has been released. :-p As he has mentioned in the past, it is full of nice features like pop-up blocking, themes/skins, fast page rendering, tabbed browsing, and more. However, they inexplicably left out an important feature: you can’t import your IE bookmarks. I’m baffled why they left that out of this release – it has worked in the past. I’m going to say they won’t win many converts this round, but we’ll see what they do with version 1.4.

Has anybody been using the Mozilla Mail feature? It has a nice layout, and the bayesian spam filter sounds pretty cool. From what I could tell with a quick test, it can’t alert you to new incoming mail unless you have a window open for it at all times. Surely there is a way to accomplish this?

I suppose we should be happy that they finally got to play China after 30 years, but the Chinese Ministry of Culture is censoring their performance, not allowing them to play “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Beast of Burden,” or “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” all of which contain “sexual references.” Whatever…