The Blog From Another Dimension

Eighty Percent

As you may recall, I broke the fifth metatarsal of my right foot last December, and it's been taking forever to heal. Since it did not heal well by the beginning of June, I started with an ultrasound therapy, and that seems to be doing a much better job. Check out the image below: my foot when I broke it on December 3, again in April (five months later, not very well healed), and then just the other day in mid-July.

The doc told me that the bone is now 80% healed, so with the new therapy, it might be all the way back by the end of August. That ultrasound pulse stuff seems to actually work. In fact, they seem to be finding more uses for it--including growing new teeth. The article, which I noticed a few weeks ago, details the exact same treatment that I'm using for my feet, except instead of SAFHS, it's called LIPUS, and has a much smaller and automatic pulse generator.

How about that?

Publicity Clowns

I was watching a little segment on YouTube about two guys who pulled a strange and unfunny stunt on a live Fox News program. It was about two brothers who made Internet videos about how easy it is to steal a bike even when chained; as one of them demonstrates by using a portable saw to cut through a heavy chain, the other fakes getting injured, falling to the ground screaming, which supremely pissed off the Fox reporter.

Why mention this? Because I recognized them. They are Casey and Van Neistat, the same clowns who made a big splash two and a half years ago by wildly exaggerating iPod battery deficiencies. In short, they used their iPod almost constantly over one and a half years, and then were outraged when the rechargeable battery lost its ability to maintain a long charge (something that would be obvious to and fully expected by anyone who has used rechargeable batteries before). They claimed that it was impossible to replace the battery, and so started defacing iPod ads all over New York; they became famous when their video of this defacement became popular on the Internet.

When it was demonstrated that the iPod battery could be replaced, they countered by buying the most expensive one and badly botching the replacement job, then claiming that an overpriced $100 replacement was impossible to do anyway--when in fact, replacement kits could be bought for $50 and were easy to perform flawlessly.

None of that seemed to matter as the Neistats launched to fame--for at least a while. Now they're in the news again after having made videos of themselves stealing bikes from all over New York, and the Fox segment made a bigger splash--not because their badly-performed decapitation prank was funny at all, but because of how the reporter, Jodi Applegate, reacted to the prank.

Frankly, as much as I detest Fox News, I couldn't find much fault in Applegate's reaction aside from her rather sophomoric use of language for a network news reporter--"That was totally uncool!" "That was not cool, dude!" "They're jerks, and we were totally not part of planning that!" I probably would have reacted much the same way, though with slightly more dignified vocabulary. That said, it is still somewhat her own fault for having these two guys on the air without first checking them out; she could have easily figured out that they were nothing but juvenile publicity hounds.

Good Web Sites

Here are some web sites I regularly visit, but don't link to on my sidebar, at least not at present. They're good regular visits:

Cosmic Buddha: Japan blogger with a good sense of humor.
Crooks and Liars: why the heck don't I have them up on my sidebar yet?
Engadget: a good general tech blog.
FG: a good blog on Japan's happenings (don't make me print their full title).
Pharyngula: a good science blog; often takes on the creationists.
SeanPAune: some good stuff here.
The Straight Dope: fun facts for the day.
TUAW: The Unofficial Apple Website, good Apple tech blog.

Most of these will probably get on to the LinkBoard, once I find the time to clean up the blog some. Should be soon--I just taught my last class of the semester, and with just one final exam to give, some grading to do, and the graduation ceremony, there's not much left before my one-month summer vacation. Ah, the college professor's life!

Why They Won't Ask the Hard Questions

Here's a YouTube post of a segment from The Colbert Report, where Colbert takes the morning news shows to task. Two such shows had bits on Colbert making politicians look bad, and they both asked the question, why would politicians be so stupid as to go on to a show that would ask them questions that could make them look bad?

GOOD MORNING AMERICA'S JAKE TAPPER: But with the reputation-damaging risk associated with an appearance on The Colbert Report, why do politicians keep going on the show?

TODAY SHOW'S MATT LAUER: And yet they keep on coming!
CO-HOST: Why? Why?
LAUER: They think they're being hip, I don't know.

Underlying that question is a dark truth about journalism today: no one on television, radio, or in the print media is willing to ask hard questions to politicians for fear of the politicians avoiding them. They are unwilling to ask questions that might stump the politicians or make them look bad, and when the politician is obviously lying or is avoiding answering a question, they let them get away with it. It also shows up the unwillingness of most politicians to face the public in a setting where their hypocrisy or ignorance could be revealed.

Watching Colbert's segment with the "news" people saying what they said makes this fact evident; they are clearly stumped as to why any politician would appear when the interviewer is not some emasculated softball-thrower. Although Colbert did not mention this aspect of it specifically, the subtext is frighteningly--and comically--clear. And you gotta admit, it's huge fun to see Colbert get Robert Wexler to say, "I enjoy cocaine because it's a fun thing to do!" and to see Colbert absolutely destroy Lynn Westmoreland by pointing out that he was pushing legislation requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in the House and Senate--and then asking him to name the Ten Commandments. Westmoreland could only get out three.

Maybe part of the reason the politicians agree to go on the show is that they think they'll be treated with kid gloves, like with most interviewers. Now, Wexler seems to be pretty hip here--he knew what was going on and easily could have refused or sidestepped Colbert's request--other politicians have done so. But Westmoreland appears to have had no clue as to what he was getting himself into. And that's probably why most people, not just politicians, agree to appear in segments on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show: because they simply don't know what they're in for. The shows are popular, but not so popular (especially with certain segments of the population) that a lot of people who agree to appear don't know what they're agreeing to. That these people tend to be un-hip and often clueless just makes it funnier.

Another Microsoft Demo Gone Wrong

So, Microsoft was trying to to show off one of Vista's cool new features, speech recognition, by having one of their people give a demo.

DEMO GUY: "Dear mom, comma."

VISTA: "Dear Aunt,"

DEMO GUY: "Fix aunt."

VISTA: "let's set"

DEMO GUY: "Delete that. Delete that."

VISTA: "so"

DEMO GUY: "Delete that. I think it's picking up a little, I can hear... Delete--select all."

VISTA: "double the killer delete select all"

At this point, the computer screen reads: "Dear Aunt, so let's set double the killer delete select all" as the audience has a good laugh.

DEMO GUY: (as he manually selects all the typed text and deletes it) "OK, I'm glad you're enjoying this."

Microsoft complained that the software was picking up ambient noise, but that's not much of an excuse--ambient noise is going to be present in most real-life applications. The story and a video (with a huge, distracting watermark on it) are here Update: here's a clean version of the video.

This is simply yet another example of Windows getting stuff long after Apple has. Apple has had speech recognition for many years, and Vista's looks like nothing really new. I sometimes demo the Mac's speech recognition (though the Mac doesn't have dictation, it does allow you to give speech commands) for my Computer classes, and sometimes I have the same problem this guy had; it's a matter of how much background noise is getting to the mic. Though this demo guy must have been wearing a mic headset, ideal for this kind of application, whereas I was speaking into the built-in mic on my Powerbook. So really, I'm not impressed by this. Personal computer speech recognition still has a long way to go before it is really feasible for most users.

GOP Politicians Play Politics with Class Warfare Again

Since it's an election year, GOP politicians are trying to find a way to blunt the Democratic weapon of the minimum wage. Since the GOP has consistently, for the past nine years, killed repeated attempts by Democrats to get a minimum wage hike passed, it's pretty clear in the minds of the working class who's on their side.

The GOP, however, hopes to muddy the waters by introducing a $2.10 (40%) increase to the minimum wage, but only if it is tied to slashing the estate tax, which would represent the Nth tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. Since Democrats have vowed to kill an such estate tax cut, Republicans in Congress know that the minimum wage tax is likely to fail, and so it's safe for most of them to vote for it (though some vow to vote against it anyway, being diametrically opposed to anything with a minimum wage hike in it).

The estate tax cut proposed would boost the exemption from $2 million to $5 million (from $4 million to $10 million for couples), and would cut the tax rate beyond the exemption to 15% up to $25 million and to 30% beyond that.

Hopefully the Democrats will be able to shoot down the GOP poison pill, and the voters will not be fooled by the inevitable subsequent campaign ads portraying Republicans as the champions of the poor and the Democrats as the villains who shot down their pay raises. Whatever the outcome, it was probably the best political move the Republicans could make--their forte (always better at politics than at serving the people's actual needs), and they'll need it since polls are increasingly showing that voters are ready to show the GOP the door this November.

Update: Apparently, Republicans are not being too subtle about all of this being a manipulative political ploy: from the NYT, via TPM:

Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said Democrats were upset with the legislation because Republicans had found a clever way to link the two. “You have seen us outfox you on this issue tonight,” Mr. Wamp told Democrats in the floor debate.

Vista Will Ship On Time... Maybe...

Microsoft seems to be giving itself some elbow room in their claims that Vista will not suffer any more delays. While they still predict a late-2006 release for businesses and early-2007 ship date for regular people, they are at the very same time saying that "Vista will ship when it is ready. Quality is job one," and that Vista will be evaluated "milestone by milestone."

So, essentially, they're saying that they hope to ship it when they said they would, but there might be problems, and if there are, there will be yet another delay.

Short-short version: It'll ship on time, or maybe not.

Well, that's encouraging! Already, the very late OS is still suffering from problems, including core features being axed to save time and late release dates for beta versions foreshadowing more delays; many analysts and businesses are already preparing for the release date of the final product well into 2007. My bet is that they'll release it late and slightly buggy. And even if it does come out on time and is not buggy, who wants it? What features will really be useful for the end user? Mostly new eye candy, some patched security holes, and new versions of Microsoft applications--mostly stuff that's been available with the Mac OS for a few years now.

Other complaints include the fact that the Digital Rights Management is geared for businesses, and not the end user, meaning you will be inconvenienced on the assumption that you've stolen your software and content. The eye candy is reported to take a big hit on computer resources, slowing things down; even for the basics, most existing computers won't be able to run Vista very well at all. And the security upgrades, while not as good as those on the Mac, are already annoying beta users as they are too much in the way. This is the best Microsoft can do after six years of work, and it's probably going to be late and won't work great out of the box.

For this you should pay for an upgrade? Hrmph. Stick with XP for the time being.

What went wrong with these guys?

Now I Remember....

My luck with web hosts has not been spectacular, though it has probably been about par for the course. Although my current web host has done the best so far, two that I stuck with before had to treat me pretty badly before I left. In every case, the thing that has torn it with me with web hosts has been flaky service--site outages and things just generally falling apart. But the two hosts that really let me down went farther than that.

If you like to read people who vent their whining, read on below the fold--I won't inflict my incessant whinging on those visiting the main page. Essentially, I go into detail about how the two web hosts were very, very sucky, and how I had to revisit one of them just the other day, in a way that brought back all my memories of just how sucky the suckers sucked. If you for some bizarre reason don't like to read other people moaning and bellyaching (what's wrong with you?), then just go on to the next post.

The first web host I used was ait.com (formerly named, confusingly, "aitcom.net"). These guys have now been around for about a decade, and even now they're regarded as scammers to a certain degree. When I signed up for them, all was OK for a while, but then I got burned rather badly. It started when my account got suspended due to "nonpayment," rather strange as they were charging me automatically. So I started looking more closely at them. One thing I found out: they swapped out the contract on me. And not just me, but lots of people.

When I signed up with AIT, it was on a monthly contract. Never sign up with any web host who fails to offer monthly payments; it usually means they suck and want to bag you for a whole year before you discover how much they suck. With AIT, they sneak up on you. When they got to be so bad that I considered quitting, I checked my contract--and found that I was not bound to a six-month contract. Whoa! When did that happen? Well, most online companies have a silent-switch clause in them. The clause says that the business may:

make changes to the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time, and to the on-line application to include service pricing, advising of the change and the effective date thereof by publishing it to the appropriate AIT web site.... Utilization of the Service by the Customer following the effective date of such change shall constitute acceptance by the Customer of such change(s).

Essentially: we can change your contract anytime just by changing the long, boring and confusing legalese, and if you don't re-read the contract every month and notice even the smallest change, that means you agree.

Most people accept this as a way for them to make reasonable changes without having to get a positive confirmation from every single member, an impossible task. The understanding is that if there is any change that is significant, the company will at least make a good-fait effort to contact you. They do not expect that the clause will be used to sucker you.

That's what AIT did. They changed the contracts to six-month contracts and didn't tell me or any of the other members I asked. I was getting email from them, and never heard a word about it. Fortunately, I happened to check just as a new six-month contract was about to start, so I pulled the plug and went elsewhere. Not that easily, of course--I had to deal with them overbilling me as I left, with outrageously rude customer support people and maddeningly frustrating run-arounds... until I finally emailed their top execs and threatened to make a big noise to the Better Business Bureau--at which point they immediately coughed up what they owed me and claimed that it was all a big mistake. The whole painful story is memorialized here. That was October 2001.

For a year after that, I used a service called Aletia. They were OK people, but the service got so buggy that I had to bail after ten months. Just as I was leaving, they said sorry--in the form of promising to host my web site gratis, indefinitely. I left my main email domain there, while moving my blog and other accounts to newer pastures. Ironically, after I left, their service got better, and even when they were sold to JaguarPC web hosting, they continued to keep me on as a freebie.

But the next host for my blog was another nightmare: Myacen, an Aussie firm. They were OK for about a year and a half, except for billing problems. They kept promising an autopayment system which never materialized, and the manual payment system was a joke. They kept sending confusing invoices and messages that seemed to say that payment was not due when it actually was. They even sent emails to me noting that many people were having the same problems.

But then, in 2004, they started experiencing major difficulties. Repeated outages, my domain would drop off the Internet repeatedly, settings would be lost, all kinds of problems that would take lots of work to fix. Myacen would change servers, IP addresses, and carry out prolonged maintenance without warning. Worse, their customer support sucked. AIT sucked by requiring international phone calls. Myacen sucked by not reading your "helpdesk ticket." Either their responses were automated or the support personnel never read the tickets well enough to give a helpful answer--and it could take hours to get an answer, after which you would inevitably have to send another ticket to tell them how they got it wrong.

So I wanted to quit. Like all businesses, they will accept the minimal application to start billing you, but they make a huge production out of making you jump through hoops before they will believe that it's really you trying to quit. Further, when I called beforehand to ask about lead time in telling them to cancel my account, they told me one thing. Then, when I canceled my account, they said that because of the billing problems (which they had previously admitted were their own fault!), I was "on probation" and so they'd bill me for an extra month for canceling "late." That was summer, 2004. That lovely story is chronicled here.

One last detail: in both AIT and Myacen's case, they claimed to want your feedback when you left. In both cases, when you tried to go to their "feedback" page, the page was inaccessible. That pretty much sums it up nicely.

It's been two years now, and SurpassHosting is surviving the test of time so far, outlasting the other hosts now with no major problems (oh, they all have outages and stuff from time to time).

But by chance, I had to deal with Myacen again. My father still uses them for his business web site (he signed on before I hit the worst spot with them), and has just left the thing on autopilot for the past two and a half years. Now we need to access his account--and Myacen changed the login system, which apparently erased his user ID and password. We're locked out.

So I submitted a helpdesk ticket telling them the story, referencing emails they sent him about the billing system changing (none of which said his login info would be erased if he did not act), and I specified that the login using his email address and password did not work, and could they please tell us how we could log in.

Some time later, the answer came back. It simply said, "here is the URL to log in," and gave the URL. That's it. Not a word about why the user ID and password don't work. Ah, the good old days. How nostalgic.

In this case, the answer they gave demonstrated a complete ignorance of my problem: the URL they gave me to log in was the same one I used to submit the ticket. Apparently, they thought that I could not find the page that I used to send them the ticket in the first place.

So I sent them another ticket, in the vain hope that they would understand this time and send the correct information. No answer after 8 hours. So I sent another ticket after that, high priority, lights flashing... another 8 hours later, still no response. Sent a fourth ticket. What is wrong with these people?

Finally, I got an answer. Their response? It's my fault because I didn't understand their answer. According to the "support" message, "The page that was linked to you provides users with the oppurtunity to reset their passwords." What is that "opportunity"? The "I forgot my password" fallback. Which, of course, is BS--I didn't forget the password, the password simply didn't work. They forgot the password. And there is no reason to believe that the "forgot my password" option will work anyway--if they forgot my password, why should they remember the user ID? It's a bad answer to try to cover up for the bad initial support message.

Recently, my SurpassHosting account got upgraded, and I got a whole slew of new add-on domain slots, hard disk space, and bandwidth. So when my father's contract with Myacen comes around in December, I'm going to save him more than a hundred bucks a year and simply piggyback his site on my own.

Chuicide

From Wikipedia:

The Chuo Line, one of Tokyo's major train lines, is so infamous for people committing suicide that many English editorials in Japan have taken to using the word Chuicide to refer to the means. Its relative popularity is partly due to its practical ease, and to avoid causing a nuisance to one's family, though families are often charged or sued by the railway companies to compensate for the trouble caused by the accident. A typical suicide may cause delays between one and a few hours on one or more lines and is certainly unpleasant for onlookers who may be present.

Another interesting trend related to train suicide is to wear a brightly colored cap (orange) to help shield your face. This is done out of concern for the train conductors, so that they may not be caused any trauma by seeing the face of the person about to be hit. It is also useful as a sign that the person is indeed intending to commit suicide, and that no one should risk their life in order to save them.

The costs to the surving families by the railway companies' "delay fee" is often in the 100 million yen (approx. 850 thousand U.S. Dollars) range. [Mainichi Shinbun, August 18, 2002]

Now, that last bit is cold. Your family member commits suicide, and the train company bills you close to a million dollars for their inconvenience as a punitive measure. It brings to mind the Chinese government's practice of billing the families of executed criminals for the cost of the bullet. I'm not sure if the billing works as a disincentive--probably not, considering that people keep on doing so in such large numbers--but even if it did work, I'd be squeamish about being so cruel to those who have just lost people they love.

This article in Wikipedia reports that of the 1,210 people who have committed train suicide in Japan since 1995, 156 of them, or about 13%, have done so on the Chuo Line. The article claims that the "high speed and frequency of the trains" is what draws people to it. But such things have their quirks. For example, more than a thousand people have committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge--but only one or two of all those jumpers chose the side of the bridge facing the city. It may be a matter of access, but if you've seen both sides, you'll know that the city side is indeed a far more desirable view than the ocean side--although it's an interesting question as to whether such a thing matters to someone about to leap to their doom.

The Fourth Largest Religion in England and Wales

I hadn't known about this, but during the 2001 census for many English-speaking nations, hundreds of thousands of people gave an interesting response to the query of what their religion was. This was most popular in Great Britain, where fully 390,000 Brits said that their religion was "Jedi."

As such, the Jedi belief ranked fourth, after Christian, Muslim, and Hindu, not counting the responses of "no religion" and "no response." As such, followers of "Jedi" outnumbered those of "Buddhism" (sorry, Paul). Apparently, one out of every forty people in Brighton are members of the Jedi order. The results of the nationwide census:

• Christian: 72.0%
• No religion: 14.8%
• Chose not to respond: 7.7%
• Muslim: 3.1%
• Hindu: 1.1%
• Jedi: 0.7%

I think this is a brilliant idea, and for the next U.S. census, we should pick this one up and run with it.

Agnosticism and Atheism Quotes, Part II

A few more quotes that I liked on the topic. These are less about what I believe, and more about how religion should more be recognized as. I'm an agnostic, by the way.

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

--Stephen Roberts

"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

--Edmond and Jules de Goncour

“A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism”

--Donald Morgan

"It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty."

--Ilka Chase

"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

--Bertrand Russell

"I don’t want to see any religious people in public office because they’re working for another boss."

--Frank Zappa

And this last one is for fun:

"It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."

--Calvin, in “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Waterson

Addendum: Interesting. I just looked up the 2000 census numbers, and apparently, the fastest-growing belief system is... "No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic." Christians dropped from 88.3% of the population in 1990 to 79.8% in 2000; the fastest-growing Christian group is "non-denominational Christians" (+2.5%), with "non-denominational 'other' religions" following close behind (+1.2%).

But "No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic" grew from 8.4% of the population in 1990 to fully 15% in 2000--more than doubling in just a decade. The "no religion" crowd apparently clusters mostly in the northwest, with the greatest number being in Washington state, fully 25% of the population. I wonder how that will look in 2010...

The Diet Is Working

At my heaviest, I weighed in at 206 lbs. (94 kg); that was about three or four years ago. I stand at 5' 10.5" (roughly 179 cm), so that's a bit on the big side. (One doctor, maybe three years ago, didn't speak English very well, so he just looked at me and said, "obesity!" I didn't take that too well.) Before I started my newest slimming-down drive, I was down to about 196 lbs. (89 kg), which was mostly due to mild dieting, but nothing serious.

Starting at the beginning of the year (no, it wasn't a resolution--it was the broken foot that started all this by showing me how out of shape I was), I started on a serious health kick, pretty much eschewing beef, pork, and almost any sugar product. I started eating oatmeal in the morning (okay, that stuff has sugar in it) with berries, a 6" sub sandwich (mostly veggies) for lunch, and chicken and salad for dinner. Along with that, I worked my way up to half an hour of Karvonen-Formula exercise most days of the week, and more general exercise-style hobbying, like my birdwatching.

Put that together, and you get weight loss. I had an initial drop to 83 kg (183 lbs.), but that seems to have been the easy part--heck, that was even before my foot healed and I could exercise. After I could start working out, I got down to 81 kg (178 lbs.) without too much trouble, but then on a visit to the doctor, I was told to drop at least three more kilos, to help get my triglycerides down (I still have a bit of a cholesterol problem, why I don't know). So I lost the weight. From what I understand, the slow way is best--I dropped only a few pounds a week, but it worked and stayed off (except for the temporary salty weight gain, all gone now), and upon seeing the same doc a month later--today, that is--I weighed in at 78 kg (172 lbs.).

Apparently they didn't expect me to actually do that; the nurse who weighed me (and took blood) couldn't speak English, so after I went back to wait in the lobby, she came out with a nurse who spoke English, and they asked me if I was feeling okay--they were actually concerned that I was losing weight unhealthily fast. That was nice. But it was also based on a misunderstanding--the nurse subtracted a kilo for my clothing weight, which the nurse a month ago didn't do, so they were under the impression that I lost a bit more than four kilos (almost 10 lbs.) in four weeks.

The preliminary blood work came in by the time I got in to see the doc just a few minutes later, and my blood levels were all within normal range. The doc even calculated my ideal body weight--at just one kilo, or a few pounds, below what I am now--how about that. I certainly am slimmer than I've been since my early thirties, but that's not to say everything is perfect--still too much of that "ideal" weight on my waistline, not enough in the places where it should be. Buff I am not.

Hey, it's something else to work on.

No Rebates

You know one other thing that's better about Japan relative to America? No rebates. I hate rebates. They're nothing but a sucky scam. At the very least, they represent a dishonest economic trick: speed up the money coming in, slow down the money going out. Instead of actually being a savings of some sort, it's a way to keep money in the hands of the seller for long enough so that in large volumes, they're making a lot of money off of the interest by keeping you from getting the rebate back for as long as they can manage to. Not to mention that they make more money from direct marketing by getting all your personal information and whatever else they can con you into adding to the rebate form.

But it doesn't stop there. They also depend on laziness, impatience and disorganization to simply walk away with your money. They make a big deal about how you get this incredible saving, even to the point of advertising the price-after-rebate in huge numbers, and the fact that it depends on a rebate in the smaller print. That makes you lean towards buying their junk because you now believe in the after-rebate price and usually go for the lower figure. But then you have to fill out forms, get all the required bits and pieces together, mail the stuff, and then you face a 2-3 month wait, minimum (some people wait half a year). If you sent everything in before the time limit written in very small print. A lot of people will say the hell with it, and just eat the $50.

Sometimes people can't get the rebate because they buy the product and throw out the bag and the packaging, leaving the rebate for later--and when they get around to doing the rebate paperwork, they realize that they need the receipt and some obscure tag from the discarded packaging. Not to mention receipts with more than one rebate item on them--you have to choose just one, because they each need to include the original receipt, not a copy. Not that all of this is made clear, you usually then have to go through major hoops to figure out how to handle non-straightforward situations.

Sometimes the rebate process is even more convoluted than that. One of my first experiences with rebates was with Warner Bros. DVDs, but it was so serpentine and confusing that I just gave up on it. Look at the people in this thread... first buy a whole bunch of expensive DVDs, then buy another set, but it has to have a sticker, and there are some forms inside, but not all sets have them, and there's a web site, but it doesn't work... and that's just getting started. You know that there's a very good chance that the rebate will be late or just won't come and you'll have more pain and frustration if you try to track it down. That's when most of the people who paid for the crap in the first place throw up their hands and declare that's it's not worth the freakin' hassle.

This article in Slate goes into some of the details of rebate scams. Ever wonder why most rebates are for $50 for electronic goods? Probably because it's a cutoff point. Some rebates see 90% of buyers fail to cash in; the more lucrative the rebate, the more people ask for their money back. Some rebates fool you with dates, some require near-instant cashing... the scams are varied and creative. You know that every time a "rebate" is constructed, experts figure out the best way to maximize the chance that buyers won't get their promised money. And the scam is growing, worth $1 billion in 1999, and $4 billion in 2003. Rebate scams abound.

That's why I'm glad they haven't caught onto the whole rebate deal in Japan, and when I see a "rebate" deal in the U.S., I treat it as science fiction, and add the rebate to the price to see what I'll really be paying. Frankly, I'd sooner try to check out what that Nigerian oil executive wants with me.

Bush to the Rich: Cheat on Your Taxes, Wink Wink

Kevin Drum noted this story in the New York Times:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

So the message from the Bush administration to wealthy people is, sorry we couldn't get the estate tax repealed like most of your other taxes, but don't worry--just don't even bother paying taxes in the first place. We won't audit you. We fired all the auditors, see? Cheat away!

Why doesn't the Bush administration just drop all pretenses and tell everyone who makes a million dollars a year or more that they just pay no taxes whatsoever, and they'll get a rolling amnesty for as long as the party can swing it?

This violation of the Executive duty of upholding the law is brought to you by the people who have already ignored half the Constitution and most of the laws passed by Congress. Have a nice day.

Noise, Huh, What Is It Good For, Absolutely Nothing

Who needs an alarm clock when they start jackhammering outside your window at 8:30 am sharp every single weekday morning? They've been doing that for so long now, I woke up at 8:28 without an alarm. They're installing decorative tiles. Swell. Why can't they start at 10? And it's been weeks, and they've just been doing the foyer right below me. There are about a dozen more in the building. So apparently, I have a lot of incredibly noisy mornings to look forward to without the chance of sleeping in. With vacation coming up, too.

Who needs %#*$@ decorative tiles?

Chofu Hanabi, 2006

I always do it this way, figuring it out at the last minute. This time, I was washing dishes, and heard some loud pops, like fireworks. It was still light out, late afternoon, so I figured that maybe it was a local display, maybe something inconsequential. But it reminded me that I had not yet found out the fireworks schedule for the summer, and so I checked.

In the U.S., we have fireworks displays usually only at special times--the Fourth of July being the most notable. Sometimes at New Year's, and at special events, maybe at some ballgames, and Disney does it a lot, I hear. But in Japan, it's an all-summer thing. There are big displays, usually on the weekends, throughout July, August, and sometimes later months.

Near where I live, there's an annual fireworks show by Chofu City, on the other side of the Tama River. The display is actually held on the river itself, and is one of the biggest local shows. And all too often, I forget to find out when it is, and miss half of it. This time, I didn't expect it because it was so early--usually this show is later, and once it was in October even. But when I checked the schedule after hearing the booms, sure enough, this was it--and just 20 minutes from when I checked. So I made sure I had a clean flash memory card, packed up the tripod and the camera, and took off. This time, they blocked off the river street entirely, so I had to take back roads in, and got settled maybe five or ten minutes after the show started.

And got these shots. Enjoy.

Often they include smaller shaped shells, including hearts, stars, cats, mice, and as pictured here, smiley faces.

There always seem to be more trains than usual going by during the display--I think that in itself is considered an attraction, to be on the train while you ride by the show.

The people along the river nearby as we watch the show.

Vouchers

I won't say much on it today, because I already made my case in this post seven months ago; if you want to see my full opinion on private schools, vouchers, and how to really make the school system work, then read that post.

But I will note today that the whole private school voucher push from the right wing is not about giving your kids a better education. That was made clear by the fact that the Bush administration is still pushing vouchers even though their own studies say that private schools offer little or no advantage over public schools.

So why are they trying to privatize education? A lot of reasons. One is religion. You can't push religion in public schools because of that damned First Amendment, but privatize and you can proselytize to your heart's content. It's also religious subsidization: churches will boom in the private school market, receiving a lot of money and a lot of new converts. Another is class warfare: privatization and vouchers will finish off the job conservatives have been doing for decades of tearing down public education, leaving a hellish shambles left for those who won't have enough money to add to vouchers to get into a private school. Authoritarians in government and religion have always benefitted from a poorly educated population, with the better-educated living within their own fold.

This is a common theme in the Bush administration, and Republican government in general: dismantle environmental protection and call it "clean air and water"; destroy social security and medicare and say you're "saving" them. The same goes for education. Every system the conservatives want to utterly destroy they first say they will rescue.

Gizmo: Not Very Good, but Free

There's a VoiP program called "Gizmo." They're offering a deal that will likely ratchet up the VoiP war, namely free calls from a computer to a regular telephone. I just tried using it, and frankly, I'm not all that impressed.

First of all, you have to read the fine print. The free calls only apply when you and the recipient are registered with Gizmo, the recipient is in your contacts list, and is in one of 60 countries on the free-call list. I didn't see the first two of those three points until after I made a call to a number in Japan, and after 6 minutes got a robotic and incomplete "You have... seconds!" message twice during the call. After hanging up, I noticed that a charge of 24.5 cents had been noted. Upon researching, I found out that you get 25 cents free--so I was just about to get cut off when I ended the call, it seems.

The thing is, now that I've used it, I don't think I'd really want to. The reason: the quality is really bad, like a bad cell phone connection. Lots of streamed audio artifaction. Even Gizmo points out that Skype--what I'm used to using--has great sound quality in comparison. But the question would be, if I've got Skype, why use Gizmo?

I guess the answer would be, if I needed to call a phone number instead of a computer--like, if I wanted to call my father in the U.S. on his cell phone while he was out of the house. But where Skype is usable, it is of far better quality.

Still, Gizmo has an interesting idea--and it may be a good solution for some of my Japanese students, who will go to live in the U.S., and whose parents may not be tech-savvy enough to allow Skype to work.

Damn Those %#@$ Lip Readers!

From IMDB Studio Briefing:

The executive editor of Frontline, produced by Boston's WGBH for the Public Broadcasting System, has taken exception to a new directive from PBS on how programs are to deal with language that could result in an FCC fine. Writing in Current magazine, Louis Wiley Jr. noted a paragraph in the directive saying that "if the F-word or the S-word were uttered to camera so that viewers could recognize it from the speaker's mouth, the lips must be pixelated." Wiley speculated that at first he imagined such pixelated scenes turning up on the late-night talk shows. "My next thought? If public television producers are forced to not only bleep words but also to pixelate lips, most will simply cut the scenes, no matter how powerful or relevant, rather than see them turned into a joke."

Seems strange to me; with the technology available with today's television broadcasters, wouldn't it simply be easier to do a little Photoshopping? I would think that the main objection by broadcasters would be the ridiculous appearance of lip pixelation, not the offense to deaf people and lip readers. The area of the speaker's mouth, saying a non-offensive word, could be lifted from some other part of the interview and superimposed on the swear word. Unless the available footage had no extra material using the same camera angles and lighting, it wouldn't be too hard, and the end product would be good enough to fool anyone but the experts--and the lip readers, who would see the strange juxtaposition of the non-offensive word ("I don't know what the horse I was thinking!")

Of course, this all is within the context of living in a country with such stupid censorship laws, and such ridiculous fines that can now be imposed. But let's not get into that.

Hirohito and Yasukuni

As it turns out, Hirohito strongly objected to the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals at Yasukuni shrine in the late 1970's--so much so that he stopped visiting the shrine. The information came from interviews between Hirohito and the former Imperial Household Agency Grand Steward Tomohiko Tomita. Ironic that Yasukuni and the people who most strongly support the war criminals being enshrined there also profess fealty to the Imperial throne. But as is usually the case with people of that stripe, there is little doubt that they will easily find a way to ignore, explain away, or otherwise reconcile this information while still retaining their views.

Update: I was right, but it looks like they're not even trying to explain how they reconcile the fact--they're simply ignoring it:

When asked if the reported note will affect his decision on whether to visit the shrine before he steps down in September, Koizumi replied: "No, it won't. (Whether to visit Yasukuni) is up to each person. It is a personal matter." ...

Asked how he felt about the fact that neither Emperor Hirohito, now referred to as Emperor Showa, or his son, Emperor Akihito, have visited Yasukuni since it enshrined the war criminals in 1978, Koizumi said he could not comment on their decisions.

Bush Signs First Veto

Republican porkbarrel spending during the last four years of the Bush administration has been astronomically high, with graft and corruption at unheard-of levels. Tax cuts have abounded for every wealthy person and corporation from every angle, multiple times. A torrent of purely political legislation has been tearing through Congress with Bush's implicit and complicit approval. Bush has never vetoed any of it. Not a single corrupt bill laden with pork.

So when Bush finally does use his first veto in almost six years, I suppose it is only appropriate that he has chosen to use it to stop stem-cell research legislation. After all, it is only an issue that two-thirds of Americans and the vast majority of scientists support, an issue based on good, hard science and medicine, and legislation that could save millions of lives and end the suffering of millions more. The reason? To protect the human rights of a blastocyst ten times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. The same blastocysts that are routinely and legally destroyed anyway (as many as 100,000 per year) in the process of in-vitro fertilization methods. To enshrine those discarded cell clusters at the expense of born infants, of children, of adults of the elderly, of real people in anguish and in peril of death. To pander to the most extreme religious elements of the political spectrum to the detriment of the people as a whole, and firmly set America's medical science in the fundamentalist backwaters of the world.

And it is hardly surprising that the Republicans are angling to use this to their political gain, even after Republicans in Congress shot down any chance of a veto override. Yes, it's a red-letter day for Bush and the Republican party.

Beyond Astronomical

On Saturday, I related the story about how I was hit by lightning, complete with an audio recording of the incident. I was amazed by being hit, wondering what the odds against that were.

Today, I found out something that makes the odds beyond astronomical, almost beyond belief: one of my co-workers, a professor whose desk is right next to mine, was also hit by lightning--same day, approximately the same time, and same intensity of electrical shock, but in a different part of town.

I know, your first reaction will be that they are pulling my leg. No way something that unlikely could happen. Probably they're having fun with me, maybe they didn't believe my story and are being sarcastic. What a sucker I am, right?

I'll admit, I can be gullible, but I can guarantee you that this is not the case this time. I trust this person implicitly; their personality is completely incompatible with that kind of a gag. My brother-in-law, that would be a different story. By this particular co-worker, not a chance. It's true: we were both hit by lightning the same day, at roughly the same time.

My co-worker, as it turns out, was jogging in a park near her home at the time (about 10 km away from where I was). Like me, she had misjudged the weather, and was caught off-guard by the sudden thunderstorm. In her case, it was already raining a little and she was wet when the lightning hit. She saw a flash and felt the electrical shock down her left arm as the thunderclap and lightning flash hit. Like me, she was startled, though my reaction right after that was, how cool was that! whereas my co-worker was much less enthralled by the experience. She ran for the nearest shelter, a small utility shed in the park, and waited out the lightning storm there.

But really, what are the chances? I calculated the odds, very, very roughly, of both of us being hit at 90 billion to one--but that's just for any two people being struck by lightning, and does not factor in the circumstance that we both work together in a small office. I have no idea how to factor that in, but I'm sure that if you did, the odds would go up to the point where you'd need a few sheets of paper just to contain all the zeroes involved.

Stranger than fiction....

Update on Pete, the Gullible Pro-Lifer

Well, Pete Shinn has started to play the martyr, and has now about-faced and says the whole thing about falling for the Onion article was a joke, which "obviously thousands of you didn't get." Strange, then, that his article (now headed by a graphically bloody abortion photo) didn't have even the slightest hint of humor nor any indication that it was anything but serious.

So now, after feigning pre-knowledge that the Onion is satire (while still putting the word "satire" in quotes and referring the the "author" as a real woman), he now proudly makes claims to cunningly "turning the 'satire' right back at them." A rather feeble attempt of covering up his mess, considering that before the Onion piece, virtually no one was reading his blog, and no one from the other side of the debate had ever left a comment or any sign that they were reading the blog until after the Onion piece came out. So if almost no one was reading his blog, and he had no evidence that pro-choicers were even coming close to it, then who was the alleged satire-upon-satire aimed at? Clearly, Pete's lying here.

I will say this: many of the comments left by antagonists on his posts were unacceptably abusive--not the kind of people with whom I'd like to be associated with. I won't defend them, and I will condemn them--they were out of order by far. That said, if I put up a pro-choice post which was as foolish as Pete's and it also became widely known by the other side, I would expect nothing less and probably much, much more in the way of viciousness and threats. Still bad, but hardly the one-sided issue Pete tried to make it out to be.

The comment count was up to a bit over a thousand on his initial post when Pete "shut down" the comments. That is, he shut down the links to the comments on his blog, though the comments still live on Haloscan, which hosts them--but you need the links to find them (here they are).

Pete's excuse for "shutting down" the comments? Someone posted his phone number and home address in them. No explanation as to why he didn't just delete the comment(s) that bore that information (which it seems he did anyway, the information is not there anymore). So what's the real reason for no more comments? Probably the same reason Pete only paid attention to the most vile of comments which made him look good as a victim, and completely ignored the cogent ones.

It turns out there's even more irony here: Pete himself posted his name, home phone, and home address, all on the Internet, easy for any fool to find with a 30-second Google search. In fact, it's still up, on the pro-life "American Life League" associates page, right under his web site address. I won't link to it, but I will ask: how can Pete complain that his detractors were guilty of underhanded tactics when he himself posts this information online, and then continues to leave it up?

Furthermore, Pete had no problem when a much more chilling post was made by one of his compatriots wrote a comment beginning, "I think it is morally jusified to kill a babykilling abortionist if that is the only way to stop him/her from murdering more innocent babies." Again, irony abounds, as the comment was in response to this post, in which he lambastes a liberal radio talk show host for playing a sound effect of a gunshot; Pete sadly noted that "To many liberals, freedom of speech means they can say anything." He apparently had no problem with the commenter then condoning murder. He even wrote that "if" pro-lifers said murdering abortion doctors was OK (as if many pro-lifers hadn't maintained that for many years now), then the pro-life community as a whole would shun them. Well, a commenter immediately said that, and Pete didn't say a peep or delete the comment. Hmmm.

Deepening the irony is the fact that it has long been a strategy for the pro-life side to publish the names, addresses, phone numbers and photographs of those the pro-lifers disapprove of, a most recent example being this guy in North Dakota who has been taking zoom-lens photos of all women who enter a clinic where abortions are performed, as well as photographing their license plates, and then posting them on the web.

In the end, Pete comes across looking like a pompous fool (falling for the Onion article), liar (denying he fell for the Onion article), coward (dumping the comments for no viable reason), false martyr (posting his own personal info online and keeping it up, then complaining when others "post" it), hypocrite (blaming others for his own act of posting personal info; blaming others of "ruining" the comments, while accepting far worse comments and actions from his own side), and clueless (apparently not realizing that the comments were not really shut down, just de-linked from his blog).

Again, I very much don't like the over-the-line abuse that many commenters heaped on the guy. That does not, however, make the guy anything but what he appears to be--which is a mainstream pro-life activist, too wrapped up in his own crusade to be concerned with things like fact or reality.

Soldier Looking the Wrong Way

Here's the heart of a letter sent by a soldier in Iraq to a right-wing blog, addressed to the New York Times, about the banking surveillance story:

You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion — or next time I feel it — I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.

Apparently, this soldier is unaware of the fact that the IEDs that are killing his comrades are not being supplied via international terrorist funds. Instead, they are made from the explosives stolen from Iraqi armories at the beginning of the war because Bush stupidly did not provide for the plainly obvious development of post-invasion looting.

Of course, since soldiers currently serving in the armed forces can be arrested and jailed for criticizing the president, maybe this guy just had no one else to blame. However, seeing as how he sent it to a right-wing blog and not the Times itself tells you something about his built-in bias, blaming the Times for something not even remotely connected to his own situation.

Agnosticism and Atheism Quotes, Part I

I started with just a few, but found too many to put in one post. These are among the many that resonated with my own beliefs:

"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means."

--Clarence Darrow

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

--Susan B. Anthony

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

--Sir Richard F. Burton

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests."

--George Santayana

"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use."

--Galileo Galilei

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

--Cardinal Bellarmino, during the trial of Galileo;
he also said, "Freedom of belief is pernicious.
It is nothing but the freedom to be wrong."

...and quite apropos to the current administration:

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."

--Aristotle

Sources: here, here, here, and a lot more here.

Wait a Minute

Something just occurred to me. In the past six months, we've gotten all these leaks about blatantly illegal spying programs carried out by the Bush administration. I was contemplating the fact that the only reason they have not resulted in impeachment hearings is because the Republicans control Congress and will not allow any investigation or official acknowledgment that the programs are in fact illegal and unconstitutional.

Then I considered if maybe these would resurface next year if Democrats won control of Congress (which, despite the Democrats' best efforts, is looking more and more likely), but I realized that the right wing had invested way too much time and effort into establishing the "we've already gotten past that, so there's nothing there" mentality commonly used by politicians to great success.

How lucky for Bush then, that these were leaked before Democrats took control. And then it hit me: what if luck had nothing to do with it? What if the White House saw a great enough chance that Democrats would gain enough control next year to make something out of all this, and decided to "immunize" themselves? After all, if these revelations had come about with a Democratic Congress, there would have been immediate investigations. Even if the Republicans still held the Senate, a House investigation would hold enough power that it might not protect against impeachment, and certainly would be incredibly damaging to the White House.

So how likely is it that the leaking of these programs was directed by the Bush administration as a way of safeguarding themselves? The leaks have come out at times not too damaging for Bush--beginning with the initial pre-Christmas release, which could not have been better-timed to avoid media scrutiny (the "take out the trash Friday" of the entire year). They have been leaked bit by bit and not all at once, spaced out almost conveniently, giving time for Republicans to downplay, excuse, and tough out the worst of the storm before the next tidbit was released, allowing for the acclimation process to dilute and legitimize each revelation before the next came out.

As a bonus, they got to be indignantly offended at every leak, branding media organizations they do not favor, as well as their political opponents, as traitors. We accepted these over-the-top accusations as Republican chest-beating and as probable projection--but it also brings to mind the Shakespearean adage that the GOP "protests too much, methinks." Even for the GOP, recent protests have been too much, adding to my suspicion that this is more a political game than an actual excitement over national security being violated.

Note also the campaign against Democrats this election year being focused on the "fear" that Democrats would start investigating Bush, leading some Democrats to state positively that they would not do so.

Maybe I'm giving the Bush administration far too much credit. However, the course of events have played out in a way that would be highly beneficial to them in the event of a Democratic win this Fall.

Struck by Lightning

Let me start off by pointing out that the title of this post quite accurately describes what happened to me today, and not in any metaphoric sense. I was literally struck by lightning a few hours ago.

Of course, I was not struck directly--had I been, I would not be sitting at home right now. Let me explain what happened.

This morning, I decided to do some birding around the bay. I was going to make a bit of a day of it, starting at the Tokyo Minato Yacho Koen near Haneda Airport and then making my way over to Kasai Rinkai, near Tokyo Disneyland. The weather was sunny and hot--around 100 degrees when I left.

When I got to the bird park, there were clouds off in the distance, but it still seemed nice. Not many birds were there, however (I'll do a birding report later). I did manage to get some nice shots of a Little Ringed Plover when the thunder really got started. It had been thundering for maybe fifteen minutes, but not very frequently. But then it really started going, maybe three or four strikes a minute. While some parts of the sky were still bright, dark clouds from the north were starting to cover the sky above. With my rainsuit stashed in my scooter (it's always there, for instances like this) on the other side of the park, I figured it was time to get the hell out of Dodge and get to my suit before I got soaked.

Halfway out, the lightning was going pretty steady, bolts flashing all around--which for me, is pretty cool. I love lightning and thunder, and still do. In fact, I've always wanted to get a good recording of that sheet-ripping sound of nearby lightning. So while I walked out of the park, I had my camera on, and was using the voice notation feature as an audio recorder, in case a good peal of thunder presented itself.

At that point, I crossed the bridge which goes over the railroad tracks and roads that lead in to the adjacent shipping/distribution center. I saw a couple with a video camera on the middle of the bridge, and asked them if they were filming birds. They said they were filming the planes going into Haneda. Just after I walked by them, it happened.

Now, remember I said I was recording at that time. Well, here it is:

Me getting struck by lightning (MP3 version, 375 KB)
Me getting struck by lightning (WAV version, 1.3 MB)

Those are two different versions of the same recording. By the way, it sounds best when listened to with headphones and the sound way up. When you listen to it, you'll hear sounds you may not recognize without introduction. First, you'll hear thunder in the background, a previous strike that was still echoing. You'll hear a rhythmic crunching sound, which is me walking on the gravel bridge; I take about five steps before it hits me. Then you'll hear a static crackle, then me yelping in shock as the lightning hits me, then the crack of immediate thunder accompanying the lightning strike. Then you hear my reaction, and I speak to the couple I just passed on the bridge, as a flock of starlings flushed by the lightning can be heard flying overhead.

Here's a longer version (MP3, 580 KB) with more audio before and after the strike. It's also censored--bleeped when I cussed, a version I made for my class (of course I'm going to play it for them). In this version, you hear me talking to the couple before the strike, and you can also hear a few more comments by me as I walk off the bridge.

As I mentioned in the recording, I felt the lightning strike. That was the yelp I made; I felt an electric shock in my left foot, which I presume was the one touching the bridge as I walked. I did not see the lightning bolt, disappointingly--it struck behind me--but I did notice the strobe effect from the flash all around me. Since I didn't see it directly, I don't know how far away it was, but it was probably within ten feet of me, maybe hitting the railing of the bridge. But consider: I was wearing rubber-soled shoes, it was dry, and I was on gravel, and still I got a strong electric shock to my foot.

At that point, I just figured that it was a really good idea to get out of there, so I did, making it back to my bike just after the rain started. I was going to hide out in a tunnel until the lightning stopped, but by the time the rain started, the lightning had stopped, so I headed on home. As it turned out, the rain only lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, but I was wet enough not to want to go on with the birding.

Besides, once you get hit by lightning, isn't that pretty much going to be the high point of the day?

An Elevated, Intelligent Editorial Policy

Via Pharyngula, here is a recently stated editorial policy from a long-established publication:

As politics go, we're surprised so many readers expect us or any publication to provide "balance," which reflects a belief in the fallacy that there are two equally valid sides to every story. You see this in the debate over global warming and evolution. Thousands of scientists stand on one side of the issue, recognizing that global warming is a problem and that evolution is firmly established, while only a few detractors stand on the other.

Now, that's integrity, intelligence, and editorial virtue for you: acknowledge the facts, not the politics. So, where did this paragon of reasoned discernment come from? Who is responsible for having the courage to present a reality-based policy for presenting the fact? Was it the New York Times? The Washington Post? The Wall Street Journal? Nope. It was Playboy.

There is no link provided, so I can't verify this--but in today's world of journalism, somehow this would not at all surprise me.

Japan News

A Japanese judge has ruled that all movies made before `1953 are now in the public domain. A 2004 law extended copyrights for another 20 years, but the judge ruled that the law did not act retroactively, meaning that any movie that went into the public domain before that time will stay in the public domain.

You can fully expect this ruling to be challenged. Film studios have gone to extreme measures to ensure that they hold perpetual rights to content, using the legal fiction that a corporation is a virtually immortal person. In the United States, copyright creep has been going on for some time, the most recent having been a new 20-year extension to the pre-existing law that said copyrights last for 50 years after the death of the author (or 75 years for a corporate authorship); this extension was called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by many, as it was seen to be a means of allowing Disney to hold on to exclusive rights of Mickey Mouse and other characters.

So, if you live in Japan, go ahead and copy all those golden oldies like Gone with the Wind, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Wizard of Oz, and sell them on the street corner--it's all legal now.

Taku Yamasaki of Japan's conservative LDP party has made public statements recently to the effect that it would be unconstitutional for Japan to use its military forces to attack North korean Military bases. Of course, he's the same crazy guy who has suggested that official visits by politicians to Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are enshrined, are also "strongly suspected" to be unconstitutional.

Japan has been considering possible pre-emptive attacks since North Korea seems to have both atomic weapons and the missiles needed to send them to Japan. Japan's constitution forbids any military action except for self-defense (hence Japan's military bearing the name "Self-Defense Forces").

The problem: "self-defense" is a slippery slope. Consider, for example, that Japanese right-wingers often call WWII, including Pearl Harbor, a "pre-emptive attack" intended wholly in the spirit of "self-defense." As Bush has aptly demonstrated, as long as you have a good propaganda machine, any war can be justified as "self-defense."

Use a gun, pay ¥50,000: a Japanese police officer in Nagasaki was in on the questioning of a man suspected in a minor crime (removing the door of a police box). Now, we've all heard about Japanese police officers using violent force to elicit confessions from suspects, causing a great many innocent people to be imprisoned while the guilty parties go free. This case seems to be a classic example of that.

The officer, named Norihiko Irie, got fed up when the suspect professed his innocence. So Irie unholstered his gun and pointed it at the man, threatening him with deadly force. Apparently, Irie also put the gun and five bullets on the desk in front of the man, and neighbors to the police box where the incident took place say that he was also walking around screaming and uttering nonsensical remarks, like shouting the word "Mongolian!"

Later it was discovered that Irie had argued with the man a few days earlier over the man's driving, and had called the suspect and perhaps another man to the police box to accuse him of removing the police box door as well. It also turned out that Irie had been accused earlier of inappropriate sexual conduct (fondling) by a woman who came to the police box to report lost property.

After the incident with the gun, Irie was brought up on charges of "suspicion of committing acts of violence as a public official" and for "violating the Swords and Firearms Control Law." He denied ever pointing the gun at anyone. Although Irie was convicted, the judge suspended his three-year sentence, punishing him with nothing more than a ¥50,000 fine, saying that "There is no fear of him committing the same crime again, and he made an apology."

Oh, well, he made an apology. Yeah, I know that counts for more in Japan than elsewhere, but we are talking about a public officer of the peace threatening someone with deadly force to elicit a confession. Somewhere, I think a line was crossed. Hell, the press reports don't even make it clear that he was even fired. He was transferred from the police box in January, shortly after the crime, but no more word than that. I would only hope that someone convicted of a crime like that would not be allowed to remain employed by the police, and absolutely never allowed near a gun again.

Salty Pounds

I've been trying to lose weight this year, and have been pretty successful. I lost almost 10 kilos since the beginning of the year before I hit a plateau; in the past few weeks I've been on a stricter diet-and-exercise regime, and I was gaining ground--I lost two more kilos in that time. But early this week, I found that I had put those two kilos back on almost overnight. What the...?

It turns out the culprit was... pretzels. I bought some at Costco last weekend, seeing as how they were low-calorie, low-fat, etc.--a good snack, it seemed. At first I was stunned, and couldn't believe that eating a small number of pretzels could increase my weight by several times the full weight of the pretzels themselves. I was still puzzling over it this morning until I figured it out: pretzels are salty.

These particular pretzels were very salty, in fact. That's OK with me--I love salty stuff. But a Biology lesson from back in high school flashed through my mind: when you increase the amount of salt in your body, your body increases your fluid retention in order to balance the saline concentration. I did a quick Google search and confirmed it. So eating lots of salt means you retain fluids, and gain weight. Damn! And I like pretzels, too--I thought I'd found a new good snack.

The good news is that it's fluid weight, not fatty weight, which means (I hope) that staying away from salt and drinking a lot of water should help flush the salt from my system, and the weight should fall off rather easily.

Surprised the hell outta me, though.

Some Buy Into It, Some Don't

Some press outlets bought into the White House lie, simply regurgitating White House press releases:

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the budget deficit this year,... White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than projected six months ago.

The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for the administration and Congress to finesse the past year's run-up in spending.

Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could decline this year.

But then, a few media outlets actually noticed the dog and pony show:

When President Bush releases the traditional midsummer update on the budget today, he is expected to announce that federal revenue has soared above predicted levels and that the deficit is headed for a welcome decline from earlier estimates — as much as 30%, or $125 billion, below the level projected just five months ago.

And the president will likely attribute the windfall to his tax cuts, which the administration says are stimulating economic activity and generating the torrent of tax revenue.

But the apparent good news will not strike some economists as surprising: This will be the third year in a row that the administration put forth relatively gloomy deficit forecasts early on, only to announce months later that things had turned out better than expected. To some skeptics, it's beginning to look like an economic version of the old "expectations" game.

In short, the White House has been underperforming, and after 5 years, still hasn't reached the revenue levels Clinton attained in 2000. So to hoodwink the media and the people, they first predict much lower revenue than expected, then they act like the numbers that come out are miraculously high.

What's more, the White House attributes the jump to all those tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. See? It worked!

Actually, no it didn't. The increase in profits came from outsourcing of labor and paying less than ever before for domestic workers, cutting corners and maximizing profits. The irony is, had taxes not been slashed for corporations and the rich, they would not have lessened their attempts to make money at all (if anything, they would have tried harder in order to meet their goals, but most likely the end result would have been the same), and the tax revenue would have been much higher. Without all those tax cuts, we probably would have a much smaller deficit than now.

As always, it's perception the politicians play on. Reality is a joke in those circles.

Evaluating the Veracity of a Source

All researchers, students as well as professional scholars, need to assess the quality of any work scrupulously before using and citing it. ... Not all sources are equally reliable or of equal quality. In reading and evaluating potential sources, you should not assume that something is truthful or trustworthy just because it appears in print or is on the Internet.

--MLA Handbook, 1.6.1

I teach this to my students, and try to follow it myself, of course. Whenever possible, I cite reliable and non-biased information sources. When I have no other choice, I will cite a biased source if the information given is otherwise verifiable, else I note the bias of the source inline. Once, I almost published a blog post on Michael Jackson commenting that Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory totally creeped him out, before I realized that the source I was relying on was a satire site. So I can almost understand the reason why this guy made such a stupid mistake:

Here are some quotes from a pro-abortion person, Miss Caroline Weber, who wrote an article at The Onion online magazine.

Okay, see his problem already? Now, maybe this guy is just not all that cool, so he doesn't recognize the most popular satire web site on the Internet. You might think that he himself is doing satire, but a close read of the blog entry and the site in general show that this guy is not running a satire site, and the post takes the Onion article completely seriously.

As I said, I almost fell for that Michael Jackson story, but I think I had better excuses. First of all, the story I almost fell for was listed in Google News, and did not at that time bear the "satire" label it was supposed to. Second, criticizing Johnny Depp in that role would be exactly the kind of stupid thing you'd expect a nutball like Michael Jackson to do. And third, I started writing the post based on the headline and first paragraph--often written to appear legitimate so as to make the creeping takeoff funnier--and realized it was satire as I read on. This anti-abortion fellow has no such excuse. After all, even if he didn't recognize The Onion as a satire rag in the first place, you'd think he'd catch on when he hit sentences like this one:

I've got an abortion to plan, and I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!

But nope, he didn't get it. In fact, he put that quote up at the top of his post as evidence that pro-choice advocates love abortion.

Of course, maybe this guy actually is doing satire. Maybe he wrote this blog for an entire year as if he were really an ardent pro-lifer just to set up for this one post. Maybe.

Or maybe this is simply indicative of how clueless right-to-lifers can be, and how their devotion to faith above all else severely atrophies their sense of reason. Maybe.

Nevertheless, I do feel a bit sorry for the guy, in a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God sense. He's now getting hammered with derisive comments, and so far has not commented back or made any note of his error. I think that not so many people saw it until just now--the post had 52 comments when I first saw it about an hour ago, and now it's up to 67; he probably hasn't had the chance to see any of it yet. I halfway expect he'll simply take down the post when he checks his blog next time and sees all the comments. In that eventuality, I've archived the post, just in case.

Tip of the hat to Pharyngula, who got it from someone else.

Update: Well, the guy came back to his site, and responded. The response shows he's even more clueless than ever. He still seems to think that the Onion article was real; he put the word "satire" in quotes to emphasize that he doesn't quite believe it, and continues to address the Onion's "author" by name, assuming it is a real person voicing a real view. He then goes on to claim he's the one who's smart here, saying the joke's on everyone else, because he meets "women like her in the field all the time."

He then relays a conversation where he recounts a "woman" in the "field" who approved of infanticide, according to his (apparently photographically recalled) retelling of the conversation. One can take his portrayal with as large a grain of salt as one wishes; I have heard this claim by many, many pro-lifers. They will tell you that they have met a large number of women at protests who approve of strangling newborn babies and so forth. Strange that I've talked to a lot of people on the pro-choice side and I've never met anyone even close to that, nor have I met anyone who has met anyone like that--apparently they are invisible to everyone except right-to-lifers. Not that such crazies don't exist, but frankly, I doubt that this guy really met someone like that, or that the conversation--if it even took place--went anything like what he wrote. Also, to (a) claim that such a person would be in any way representative of the pro-choice movement, or (b) to claim that this excuses his inability to recognize clear satire, is, shall we say, pro-stupid.

Local Openings

July seems to be the month for new stuff to open in my neighborhood. I'm a bit out of central Tokyo, but not so far; it's a nice spot. 25 km from Shinjuku on the west side of Tokyo, Inagi is just a half hour out by train, closer than Tachikawa or Hachioji, and as such is probably one of the closest-in open green hilly areas in the city. My apartment is a 20-minute walk, or a 5-minute bus ride (if you can catch it on time) from the station. There's not much around here--a big supermarket/home center just a block away, but that's about it. The closest video store is two stations down or a 7-minute drive (which always puzzled me--this is a big housing area, with maybe around 3-4000 units within 5 minute's walking distance of where a video store could be, and more units being built--you'd think it'd be a bidding war for the rights to open a video rental place). So whenever anything new comes up, it's worth noticing.

The first thing to open was the new central library for Inagi City, just a short hop away from my apartment. Their English-language material selection is not great, but not bad; not as good as my own college's library (naturally, since we're an American college), but there's still stuff there. A limited video and CD selection (they have DVDs, but I imagine most are checked out at any given time; what was left included, strangely, lots of Elvis movies), a few English-language magazines, The Japan Times, and maybe 100-200 English-language books.

Their computer search feature, accessible online, is nice, but it has a major flaw: an author search will not reveal English-language materials, though a title search will. Still, I was able to reserve The DaVinci Code; it'll be there for me maybe in a week or so.

Another new opening just this week was the main train station for the city. I haven't used it for such a long time, it was now unrecognizable to me. The station itself got an upgrade, with escalators both ways on both tracks, and a new shopping building was added on, including a supermarket, drug store, bookstore, coffee shop (Tully's, not Starbucks), 100-yen shop, a few restaurants, and a sports club on top.

Still no video rental store in sight. Ah well.

As I mentioned before, the new boulevard through the center of town also opened recently, and now I have found a way around the 5-traffic-light trap. Strangely, a one-lane side street running parallel not only is devoid of lights, but there are no stop signs at all in the direction I go. It takes me just past the traffic-light trap, so that works out quite nicely.

Of less consequence to me, a restaurant kitty-corner to the supermarket a block away from my house got torn down and a new senior center was built, with a swimming pool and other exercise and rehab facilities. Good for them. They also opened a new convenience store on one side of it, but I so rarely use those things now that it also doesn't matter to me.

But that's all the excitement out here in dullsville for the time being. But more will be built, especially as far as roads and public works. As someone pointed out to me recently, Japan's version of the military-industrial complex is the government-public works complex. They're always building some road or bridge or tunnel or new facility or some such, and it always takes them years and years and years to complete. For example, that new boulevard ain't finished yet. The road comes up to just past the city center, but there is a 100-meter stretch still unfinished; when it is, the road will go straight through to Hashimoto, some 15 km down the way. But it will probably take them 3 years to finish that one little bit. Already, I've seen them out there working for the past year on that stretch with no discernible progress. That's what construction in Japan is like.

Gaijin wa Dame, No. 1 Travel-Style

If you're a non-Japanese living in Japan and you fly home every once in a while, you may be getting screwed, according to this article. It seems that foreigners in Japan are getting charged more for airline tickets than Japanese are--perhaps significantly more. The same ticket that costs you ¥70,000 ($608) might be sold to a Japanese customer for just ¥57,000 ($495), a difference of 20%. This is done by selling the tickets via different agencies run by the same company.

In this case, the culprit is No. 1 Travel (the ones with incredibly stupid and annoying animated ads on CNN-J) and its sister agency, HIS Travel. No. 1 sells to foreign customers; HIS sells to Japanese.

A couple consisting of a Japanese woman and an Canadian man found this out when the woman called HIS and asked for a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. She did not say who they were for (they were for her Canadian boyfriend), and the agency assumed it was for her. They gave her the ¥57,000 price. Later, when the agency found out who the ticket was for, they upped the price to ¥70,000.

So how could the agency justify this, when it is against the law in Japan to discriminate in pricing according to nationality or race? The HIS representative explained it like this:

According to Kinokuni, foreigners buy return tickets because they are cheaper than one-way tickets. They then return to their countries and don't use the return portion.

"In this case the airline may charge us the full fare which means low profits or a loss.

"So in order to avoid the risk we restricted the tickets to Japanese only customers, who will definitely return to Japan."

This explanation is, of course, utter BS. First of all, something is seriously fishy if if the airline sells a round-trip ticket for less than a one-way. Even if they can't fill the return seat, there is no logical reason to charge more than the round trip ticket. Second, if someone buys a round-trip ticket, they cannot be forced to use both ways, and charging the agency for the passenger's failure to do so is ludicrous; if it is not illegal, it should be made so.

Third, there is no reason why Japanese would not do the exact same thing; if a Japanese goes to live in the U.S. for longer than an open return ticket would allow for, there is nothing stopping them from pulling the same trick, and they likely do just that. Fourth, you cannot charge foreigners more based on a likelihood; not only are you discriminating by nationality and race, you're also charging the majority of travelers for the transgressions of a minority.

Moreover, the price differential makes it fairly clear that they are charging every foreign passenger the full difference in price, when clearly most passengers (probably the vast majority) don't pull out of the return. In short, the reason is bogus or it is being used to commit fraud.

Here's what I'm going to do when I buy my next ticket: I will get a quote from No. 1--which I usually use--and ask a Japanese friend to get the identical flight pricing from HIS. If they differ, I am going to raise holy hell with them. Unfortunately, I will not have the option of telling them that I'm going elsewhere--I mean, I could, but in the past, all agencies that sell to foreigners sell at the same price. It's not like this one agency does it and no one else does.

That does not mean that you can't threaten them and give them hell for it.

I advise everyone else to do the same, unless you enjoy being overcharged by 20%.

Fake Terror Scare #2

As I mentioned earlier, the fake terror scare is replacing the fake terror alert as a method of frightening voters in an election year, hoping they can be herded like cattle into the Republican fold, while at the same time trying to make the Bush counter-terrorism disaster look like it's actually foiling terrorism. Now there's a new one. FourWorlds pointed out this article by Larisa Alexandrovna at The Raw Story:

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”

Two other intelligence officials with experience in the field on extremist operations concurred--and expressed concern that what could have been an operation to eventually track known extremists (should they eventually make actual contact with funds and training,) seems to have been exposed for political gain.

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media is not picking up on this story, already a day old. It will probably not make much of it, just like they didn't make much of the truth that the Florida "terror cell" was just a bunch of jerk-offs doing nothing and going nowhere.

I expect, however, that right-wingers outraged at leaks that could hurt efforts to hunt down terrorists will call out the political opportunists in this case and brand them as traitors, as the political handling of this case may have prevented the discovery of actual terrorists who present a danger to us.

Snark! Yeah, right. That would call for consistency. As if.

Just for Fun

Something I cooked up in Photoshop.

So He's Not One Himself

This from the New York Times:

President Bush said Friday that the court had tacitly approved his use of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"It didn't say we couldn't have done — couldn't have made that decision, see?" Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. "They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo — whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made."

Mr. Bush's remarks put a favorable spin on a ruling that has been widely interpreted as a rebuke of the administration's policies in the war on terror. The court, ruled broadly last week in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military commissions were unauthorized by statute and violated international law.

The question of whether Mr. Bush had properly used Guantánamo Bay to house detainees was not at issue in the case. At issue was whether the president could unilaterally establish military commissions with rights different from those allowed at a court-martial to try detainees for war crimes.

In other words, Bush is interpreting the meaning of a Supreme Court decision based on what was not specified, reading meaning into it that was not explicitly stated.

So much for strict constructionism.

If the White House press corps had any balls, the next chance they got, they'd ask him if he believed in the principle of strict constructionism, of not reading anything into legal matters that was not explicitly stated; when he replies in the positive, hit him with this.

It's always fun to see the president of the United States stammer and stutter.

Kasai Rinkai, July 8, 2006

I went to Kasai Rinkai with a friend again; this time I chalked up a new life bird. Actually, I had seen the Cattle Egret (Amasagi • アマサギ) before, but in captivity at a bird clinic in Yacho no Rakuen (Wild Birds' Paradise). This time they were healthy and in the wild, at Kasai Rinkai, sitting in trees above the lake at the observation center (where the Cormorants are always hanging out).

So chalk up one more life bird. And I owe thanks to a very nice couple who pointed them out to me--I might have missed them otherwise!--the Kawaharas. They spoke English very well, and are great guides for watching--I hope I run into them again. In the meantime, they run a very nice web site in English for Tokyo-area birders. They also gave me their cards, which had a sweet title for them in the upper-left corner: "a birding couple."

In addition to the Cattle Egrets, we spotted an immature Black-crowned Night Heron, like I did last year:

There was a nice-looking Grey Heron:

A few Little Ringed Plovers:

And a very pretty Black-winged Stilt:

From what others told us, we missed a Yellow Bittern and a nice Kingfisher.

Big Daddy

A bit more than a decade ago, I was walking from class to the student union on the SFSU campus when someone handed me a booklet, maybe two inches tall by four inches wide. Curious as to what it was, I took it and checked it out. I still have it today. Not because I think it's an exceptionally good booklet, but because I think it is an exceptionally bad one. The booklet, in comic form, was titled "Big Daddy?" and featured on its cover a gorilla chomping on a banana. Inside, a fat, balding, elitist liberal professor teaches a class full of brainwashed students about evolution. One student stands up and challenges the teacher, eventually "proving" evolution wrong and converting the students and the teacher to Christianity.

Here are a few pages from the cartoon booklet, as reprinted in 2002 (the illustrations and text are the same; some web-based footnotes have been added):

Notice how almost all the students are ethnic--Black, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic--or are women--and the Christian looks like he could have come straight from the Hitler Youth. The "argument" that the teacher uses to "prove" evolution, as well as other materials attributed to modern science, are little more than creationist straw men. The blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian boy winds up by stating that since gluons are "a made-up dream," God therefore must be the force holding protons together in the nucleus of atoms, citing Colossians 1:17 as proof. Take that, Darwin!

It seemed obvious to me that this guy is a rather standard creationist drumbeater, and the illustrations in this particular booklet have rather uncomfortable racial overtones. The author is Jack T. Chick, a Baptist evangelical who writes these cartoon "tracts" and other fundie publications for a living. He's the kind of guy who abhors being so politically correct as to give respect to other religions, and seems to take particular umbrage against Islam and Catholicism (which he accuses of, among other things, grand conspiracies such as starting the Civil War, creating the Ku Klux Klan, inventing Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Unitarianism, Christian Science, and other religious groups, and assassinating Lincoln).

He also pulls some funny stuff, like disproving Islam by pointing out "scientific errors in the Qur'an," where he shows up Islam by pointing to a scripture that claimed that the sun set in a "spring of murky water," and that this came from the Islamic belief that the world was flat. This, of course, is in contrast to little things like Noah putting one pair of each of the million or so species of animals on earth (not counting fish) onto a 450-foot ark, or how Christians believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. Or how about when Mark says that "the stars of heaven shall fall"? In several places in the New Testament, stars are referred to as things that can fall to Earth. And so on.

But enough ragging on this guy; it's like shooting fish in a barrel. The thing is, this guy is not atypical of creationists. Every once in a while I come across the tract in my belongings and get a good chuckle out of it.

Traffic Cops Have a New Toy

I was having dinner at a yakitori place with my brother a few days ago, and in the far corner, saw that the TV was on. They were showing a story about something new that the Tokyo traffic cops have: onboard radar.

In Tokyo (and probably it's the same elsewhere in Japan), traffic cops are very specific, highly annoying, and completely ineffectual at what they are supposed to be doing. Ostensibly, they are supposed to be monitoring traffic for safety. In reality, it's all a show.

First off, traffic cops are almost exclusively on motorcycles. I have rarely seen a police car pull over a vehicle, and it may not even have been for a traffic violation. Instead, the motorcycle cops, on large white bikes ("shirobai") and wearing powder blue uniforms, take care of traffic tickets.

Second, they are picky about when they serve. They are never--repeat, never--out at night or in precipitation.

Third, they choose their prey with severe prejudice. Motorcycles and scooters are at extreme risk, far beyond the proportions of illegal driving habits. Cars are next in line. If you drive a taxi or a truck, you're golden--they are rarely, if ever, ticketed, despite commonly illegal and dangerous driving habits.

And fourth, they don't ticket you for being unsafe anyway. They ticket you, apparently, simply because they can, and they have a seasonal quota to fill. Let me explain more on this last point. Police don't stop people for being dangerous, just for breaking petty rules. Like making a right turn at a three-lane intersection on a 50cc scooter. If it's 51cc scooter, or a 2-lane intersection, you're fine. Making the illegal version of the turn is in no way, shape, or form dangerous. And the practice of not patrolling at night or in the rain--times when driving is at its most dangerous and the most lives would be saved by enforcing the rules--flies in the face of the "safety" mission. The traffic cops must have a great union.

Furthermore, police here don't monitor traffic at danger points. I know a very dangerous street full of blind corners, where there are no sidewalks, pedestrians crossing all over the place, and cars speeding. To top it off, a big police station is at the end of the street. And the cops never monitor traffic there.

Where do they monitor it? Where it's easy to catch people. At the biggest intersections--not because accidents happen there, but because it is the easiest place to break a law, and since you're going slowly, they can stop you more easily. (Yes, a few will speed past, I've seen it--and the cops didn't do anything.) At overpasses and underpasses--again, not for safety, these are usually safe as houses--but because they can hide very easily, and pull you over just as easily.

And speeding, until now, was restricted to long, straight, empty, countryside roads with no intersections, crosswalks, or cross traffic of any kind, where the speed limit is ridiculously low (usually half the actual safe speed), and where you can't turn off on side roads to evade capture. Shooting fish in a barrel. One guy clocks you, and then down the road, another guy flags you down and sits you at a desk where one of a line of policemen give you your ticket in assembly-line form (usually for driving 40 mph in a 25 mph zone that would be 50 mph if it were in the U.S.).

But now, it appears, the motorcycle cops have onboard radar, so they can officially clock your speed either while parked or while driving. A machine on their dash calculates the speed and spits out a sticker.

So are the streets of Tokyo safer? No, of course not. The traffic cops still stick to the areas of easy pickings. But there will be one small change: slightly more unpredictability. You see, one more point about traffic cops being for show and not for real is predictability. They always patrol the same intersections; the speed traps are always in the same places; they always are out in the daytime in good weather. If you know where they are and when they are there, you can violate traffic laws with impunity, slowing down only when you get to a hot spot. And you can tell this by the way some people drive in Japan.

So the new onboard radar thing will have an effect... but only where they use it, which I will bet you is only on the stretches of the main roads near big intersections, as always. That's where they were doing their thing on the TV show I glimpsed at the yakitori place.

This is one of the reasons why the police don't get much respect in Japan. The low crime rate is not due to their effectiveness, that's for certain.

This is not helped by the licensing system. When I got my motorcycle license renewed, we all had to take a driving test. The test was extremely non-real-world in nature, and penalized you for very piddling stuff--like resting on one foot instead of the other when you stop (your foot near the gear shift has to not be bearing your weight; I suppose shifting weight while stopped is illegal). I saw guys taking the test who seemed fine to me, and they were failed. Beats me as to why--piddling stuff, it must have been. When I took my test, I did fine--but they docked me points anyway, and declared I would have to go to driving school for x number of hours. When I went, the lessons had zero relationship to the things they faulted me for on the test. They made me drive a simulator which felt completely different from a real bike, and which I drove safely despite them throwing unreal stuff at me, until apparently I hit the end of the run and they had some virtual driver blindside me.

So why was I sent to school? Because pretty much everyone is; the guys who did perfectly well but were flunked had to go back to driving school for a lot more hours than I did. They had to pay very high fees to do so. And that's where the flavor of corruption comes in: the schools and the driving center have connections. I was directed to go to a specific school. Just like the motorcycle cops get a cut of the traffic tickets they hand out during "safety drives," money infects the system.

And the punitive stuff if you get tickets is useless as far as safety goes. If you get tickets, then when your license renewal comes up, you have to attend traffic school for most of the day. The school is a video-and-lecture, and doesn't address the violations the captive audience is there for. If you get enough tickets to rake up 6 points off of your license within a certain time period, then you get suspended for 30 days unless you attend an all-day lecture, and must take a test as well. The questions again are pretty much unrelated to your violation.

In short, it's all just for show, and has little or nothing to do with safety. As for the tickets and fines, unless you are a safe driver to the point of neurosis, you are bound to get them. I myself see them as a driving tax; you just get them and there's not much you can do about it.

Links to 3 Again

As someone pointed out, my filters have been aggressive as of late, limiting the number of links allowed. I've reset the limit to 3 again; hopefully, attacks have subsided enough that I won't get deluged...

You Were Saying?

Fundamentalists claim that a merger between church and state would not result in persecution of religious minorities--in fact, they often make the assertion that not merging church and state is tantamount to persecution of Christians. I've even heard people not of fundamentalist stripe say that certain amounts of religion in schools and other public venues is harmless.

If you agree with that to any degree, then read this. I have to admit, I read about this briefly yesterday, but dismissed it as a joke--even I didn't think things could have gone this far.

Here's the story: public schools in a district of Delaware have for some time included a certain amount of Christian proselytization. School board meetings, which students were often made to attend, opened with Christian prayer, as did many sports and social events at the school. Christianity was frequently discussed in some classes, to the exclusion of other religions; one teacher told students that Christianity was the "one true religion" and handed out religious pamphlets. Bible clubs were established, promoted, and given prominence; club members were allowed to jump to the head of the lines waiting for lunch. At least one school distributed bibles to students.

A Jewish family in the district indeed felt persecuted. When school religious activities would leave their children isolated, the school suggested that their children attend the Bible Club. The children were singled out by the religious activity and were bullied; the son was often called "Jew boy" by classmates, who also accused him of "killing Christ." And at the daughter's graduation, the Christian preacher presiding over the ceremony said a prayer that included the words, "I also pray for one specific student, that You be with her and guide her in the path that You have for her. And we ask all these things in Jesus' name." Complaints from the family were ignored.

In 2004, the ACLU threatened a lawsuit to stop the prayer and other religious activities in the district. The Jewish family attended a meeting where the ACLU was to speak, but by that time already was so threatened themselves that they had to ask state troopers to escort them to the meeting, which indeed turned very hostile. Hundreds attended the meeting, where the sixth-grader son of the Jewish family was heckled when he took the stage ("take your yarmulke off!"). Christian parents begged the district not to take Jesus away from their children, others read scripture. The ACLU speaker was booed, and one former school board member even suggested that the mother of the family might meet the same end as an atheist who won a Supreme Court case against organized school prayer--who was later murdered and found dismembered. In the days after the meeting, radio callers suggested the family convert or move, and the family was called and harassed, one caller suggesting that the Ku Klux Klan would be involved.

Then, in the new tradition of the right-wing blogosphere, a web site called "Stop the ACLU" published the home address of the Jewish family, in a new practice the site called "Expose the Plaintiffs." Even aside from the fact that the family was not being represented directly by the ACLU, such a publication of the family's address sends a clear and unmistakable signal: go get them. Harass them. Make their life hell. And if they should suffer from violence or arson, well, we didn't promote that--we just published their address on a web site frequented by extremists, that's all.

The family has since been forced to move, and the web site that published their address say that they are "pleased" they "had an effect in this case."

So to those who would suggest that religion in public schools is harmless, I would only respond with: "... You were saying?"

Double Taxation

Right-wingers go on about the estate tax, calling it "double taxation." Recently, the White House itself said,

"The death tax results in the double taxation of many family assets...."

Aside from the fact that inheritances don't always go to family members and the Bush estate tax repeal would not account for this, is the estate tax really "double taxation"?

Of course not. (What, did you think they were right?) Taxes apply whenever money changes hands from one individual to another. If my father were to give me $2 million, the gift tax would kick in after $1 million (presuming my father never gave any other gifts in his lifetime). If he hired me for 20 hours at $100,000 an hour, income and other taxes would apply.

But if he died and left me the same $2 million, I'd be covered by the $2 million exemption on the estate tax, and would pay no taxes on it at all! So, in reality, the estate tax actually is a lower tax. This guy makes the same point. These "double taxation" whiners leave out the fact that this is one person giving money to another by fiat of death, and instead they act like the money, once taxed by the income tax, should not be taxed again.

By this logic--which follows the money and ignores the transfer between individuals--one could say that every tax is "double taxation." My company earns income and is taxed. The same money is taxed when I get paid. Then the same money gets taxed again when I buy something, in sales tax. Then the company which takes my money must pay taxes on that same money again when they pay their income taxes. And then it's taxed yet again when they pay their employees... on and on and on. It's not "double" taxation--it's infinite taxation! No fair!

On the other hand, expats like me just barely escape real double taxation--because the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that insists on taxing its citizens abroad. I duck under the exemption by a few ten grand, but a lot of people don't. They pay full taxes to foreign governments where they live, and then they pay the same taxes to the U.S. government. But Republicans have no problem with that. No, they object to perceived double taxation, not the real kind.

Certifiably Thuggish

Michelle Malkin now 'allows' that there was no threat from the NYT printing the story. But she persists in seeing a threat. Her reasoning: what other possible reason could there have been to run the story? In her words:

Why?

What news value and journalistic end was served by publishing the Cheney/Rumsfeld vacation home piece and the accompanying photo? "Because Rumsfeld gave permission" may cut it with the moonbats and fairweather privocrats. Not with me.

Has this woman never read a newspaper in her life? More likely, she knows that newspapers sometimes print pieces in the Travel section that highlight the homes of famous people. It happens all the time. But Malkin refuses to acknowledge the possibility, instead seeing a ruthless scheme to terrify and intimidate people like Rumsfeld and Cheney:

Leftists scoff at my observation that there is a concerted effort to dig up and publicize the private home information of prominent conservatives in the media and blogosphere to intimidate them.

Well, there is a reason we scoff: she's an idiot. Look at this page, also in the New York Times. The page is full of articles the Times did on Bill Clinton in his new home in Chappaqua, complete with street names and photos of his house.

So now are we supposed to believe that the New York Times was on a multi-year spree of intimidation against President Clinton? Or is Malkin simply being an idiot? Hmmm....

But here's the punch line:

Conservative readers have asked me to publish the private home addresses of NYTimes reporters, editors, and photographers.

My response: NO.

I refuse to do it. I strongly urge others not to do it. Your home is your castle. It should be, anyway. There are some legitimate, narrow circumstances under which publicizing a private home address makes sense (the Kelo case, for example, or the counterprotest at Justice David Souter's New Hampshire home, or documenting the erosion of the California coastline). But "For The Hell Of It" is not one of those reasons, in my book.

Aside from the obvious irony of Malkin saying "NO" with vehemence and then giving not just one but three exceptions, there is the fact that Malkin herself has posted personal information of people she doesn't like strictly for the purposes of intimidation.

If you will recall a story from a few months ago, a group called Students Against War (SAW) protested at a college military recruitment area. When the students issued a press release with home phone numbers clearly intended for press contact only, Malkin published all the information on her web site, an open invitation for her readers to call and assail these people; no other reason was plausible. She wanted to intimidate people like that, figuring if they were stupid enough to give their home numbers on a press release (as if college students had an office with phone operators), then it was their own damn fault if she published them and they got hammered with threats and harassment. After it was reported that these people were being mercilessly hounded by Malkin's Moonbats, including many death threats, they asked her to remove the information.

Malkin's response? She tried to cover her ass by updating her original post to say that she did not condone death threats, and then she reprinted the phone numbers, spurring on yet more harassment. And what reason did she give for doing so? None. Apparently, she did it for the hell of it.

In fact, Malkin played the martyr today by linking to the web sites of extremists on the left who published her home contact information (in response to Malkin releasing the home contact information of the students)--as if that's the same thing as Malkin and Horowitz doing the same to others on a national platform (and doing it first), or that this somehow excuses her own actions.

Even more bizarre, Malkin herself brings up the SAW incident as if there's nothing to it on her side of things, and throws a confusing spin on it:

The reactions were predictable: the usual moonbats accused me of hypocrisy by dredging up and lying about the infamous episode with UC Santa Cruz anti-military thugs who retaliated against me for republishing their public contact info by broadcasting my private home address and publishing photos of my neighborhood.

Retaliated? Follow the link she gave with the word "retaliated." It goes to another of her posts. In that post, there is no evidence of SAW retaliating against her, just a claim. There are several links on that page. None of them lead to any evidence that SAW retaliated against Malkin in any way. Here is SAW's home page. See if you can find them printing her home contact information. Nothing I can see. Nothing whatsoever to indicate that SAW had any hand in it. Did others post her home information? She does link to that elsewhere, as noted above--but the site linked to has no connection to SAW, except possibly one of sympathy. Not to mention that the people who just as thuggishly posted her home number were in New Jersey, not Santa Cruz. Apparently, people to the left of center all look alike to her.

But she uses this as if to clear herself. So, Malkin is excused for her own thuggery because she was able to find extremists somewhere who did to her what she did to others first? Huh?

But apparently, Malkin sees her own delusion of SAW's activities as a valid excuse for her own, enough so she can bring up what she did and dismiss it by saying that someone else did the same thing in retaliation.

Certifiable. Add another name to the roster: Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly... Malkin. Thuggishly insane people proudly representing the vanguard of the right wing.

If there are conservatives who have gotten this far, kindly tell me: how do you tolerate slimeballs like that representing your side?

Update: This web site shows that incredibly detailed information on Cheney's house was available in news stories and on the web last year, including arial and on-the-ground photos (many listed by the realtor), including exact home addresses and much more. What was available on the web for many months now makes the NYT story look positively obfuscatory.

The Right Wing Declares War on the NYT

The right wingers appear ready to slam the New York Times on just about anything and everything since it revealed that the administration is (probably illegally) performing warrantless searches on international banking transactions (which, if you'll recall, Bush himself broadly announced 5 years ago). They have called the reporting "treason" and much worse, and have all but hanged and burned the editor of the NYT in effigy.

Now the right wing media-punditry-blogger troika is out on a massive new campaign (DKos and others are all over this) against the NYT. Why? Because an article in the NYT Travel section published a photo of Rumsfeld's second home, and wrote on the general neighborhood of Cheney's in a larger story of the town. Right-wing rag Newsmax called it "retaliation" against the Bush administration for objecting to the NYT story, quoting David Horowitz as saying that there is a war, and that "Democrats, liberals and leftists" are "the enemy." Michelle "Moonbat" Malkin decried the publishing of the photo, street names, and "maps" of their homes (the "map" showed the location of the town within Maryland, not anyone's home).

Other right wingers are protesting, claiming that if the NYT were reporting on Jews in Nazi Germany, they would have revealed where Anne Frank was hiding. This blogger, with Horowitz's blessing and support, urged people to publish the names and addresses of the NYT editors and reporters--which in the right-wing world is an open invitation for violence--with this guy even initially calling for people to publish where their kids go to school (before later cutting the call for info on their kids without note). And it goes on, with great numbers of right-wingers outraged at yet another traitorous breach of security by the Times.

The catch? Rumsfeld gave permission for the photo to be taken, and the locations of these homes have previously been published. In fact, Newsmax itself published the location of Cheney's home last Fall. So did Fox.

And yet, most of the wingnuts have not published retractions. Those who have acknowledged the new facts about Rumsfeld's permission are thoroughly unapologetic, like David Horowitz on FrontPageMag, who dismisses the new information with the simple proclamation that we're at war and people like Rumsfeld and Cheney are at risk. So why did he not call for a jihad against Fox or Newsmax when they published the information?

The partisanship by the right wing now seems to have risen a notch: criticize the Bush administration, and we will declare war against you. You are all traitors, and we will hunt you down. Swell.

Update: via DKos, this story confirms that Rumsfeld himself willingly gave permission for his house to be photographed, contrary to Horowitz's suggestion that Rumsfeld's cooperation was extorted. Additionally, the Secret Service itself has confirmed that the story poses no threat whatsoever to Rumsfeld's or Cheney's security.

...And Nobody Seemed to Pay Attention

Even after Symantec admitted in a phone interview that the so called "Trojan Horse" titled "OSX.Exploit.Launchd" is not in the wild--that is, it has not attacked anyone's computer--still, about a dozen sites, like this one, this one, and this one, and many blogs like this one and this one have picked up the story that it is in the wild and that it is a threat, though a low-risk one. The fact is, it is not a threat at all--in fact, despite being a trojan, no one seems to have any idea how it fools the user into allowing it onto their computer.

If any of the news organizations (and to a lesser degree, the blogs) want to maintain credibility in reporting computer news, they had better stop simply picking up news releases from anti-virus companies and printing them verbatim, and start actually checking out whether or not the stories are fabrications intended to stir up business for the companies.

I Love a Good Thunderstorm

We just got hit by a massive sudden thundershower. First, there were repeated lightning strikes. One hit very close, and had that awesomely cool 3-second ripping sound before the main, booming peal of thunder, a sound like a mile-long sheet of fabric is being torn. Seconds later, rain is pouring in buckets, along with a small amount of hail, so thick you can see it swirling and pouring in two or three different directions before it hits the ground. Then the sun comes out only a few minutes later, while it is still pouring, heralding the coming end of the rain as the ground is suddenly covered with small, fast-running rivulets and deep puddles where dry ground was just minutes before.

I love weather like that. As long as I am not outside in it. And even then, I still think it's cool.

Schiavo Coda

Crooks and Liars has a pretty good wrap-up of the Schiavo affair. As it turns out, all the claims made about Terri Schiavo being conscious or aware were false. One of her nurses made claims about Terri speaking and reacting that the autopsy proved to be outright impossible (the nurse now faces loss of her license). Bill Frist's famous diagnosis of Terri as having responded to visual stimulus was thoroughly discredited by the autopsy, which showed Terri to have been completely blind. All 89 complaints against Michael Schiavo, including allegations that he beat and drugged Terri, that he denied her care, and much, much worse--every single one was proven to be absolutely false.

And yet, there are still multitudes of right-to-lifers out there who live in denial, seeing Terri as having been conscious and happy, and her husband Michael being a vile murderer. Such is the fundamentalist mindset, valuing belief over fact, faith over reason, and their own self-serving version of "truth" over reality.

Here We Go Again

Here's an article I spotted on Google News, via Vnunet.com:

Security experts have warned that malware which exploits a flaw in the Mac OS X operating system has been spotted in the wild.

As usual, the warning came from Symantec, a firm that now has a firm track record, like McAfee, of releasing alarmist reports full of exaggerations and falsehoods which try to represent Mac OS X as being vulnerable to malware so they can sell frightened users their unneeded anti-virus software.

So you go to Symantec's page warning of this new "OSX.Exploit.Launchd," and it says this:

OSX.Exploit.Launchd is a Trojan horse that exploits the Apple Mac OS X LaunchD Local Format String Vulnerability (as described in Security Focus BID 18724). It provides root access on the Macintosh OSX version 10.4.6 or earlier.

The thing is, as much as I try to read this report and the news articles generated by it, I can find no description anywhere of how the trojan presents itself. A trojan is supposed to trick a user into opening the malware via social engineering, but there is not a word about how it does so--information which would be vital for people to avoid it. In fact, the Symantec page only will say that the "trojan" will provide root access to an outside user--but the "trigger" and "distribution" info fields all say "n/a." Furthermore, while the report claims that the trojan is in the "wild," it reports that there are "0-49" infections on "0-2" sites.

So guess what? It doesn't exist. That's right--this so-called "trojan" in the "wild" has no actual existence except as a potential for existing. The company has now admitted that nothing more than example exploit code exists--in other words, somebody wrote yet another unapplied and harmless bit of code to show how a certain security hole in OS X might be exploited. Not to mention that Apple released a security update a few days ago in 10.4.7 to patch the exploit.

And yet Symantec's page on this "trojan" still stands, claiming it is a "trojan" (how can that be, when there is no method of delivery?) and that it is "in the wild"--although in a way, their report of "0-49 infections" is accurate in that there have been "0" infections. Incredibly misleading, however, as no one would expect such a classification to be made if there really were zero infections. And yet...

A Nation of Laws, Or Not

"What this decision has done is, it's hampered our ability to move forward with a tool which we had hoped would be available to the president of the United States in dealing with terrorists."

-- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the SCOTUS ruling against tribunals

This pretty much sums up how the Bush administration sees the law: as something that gets in the way.

We are supposed to be a nation of laws. The executive branch is supposed to execute those laws. Bush swore an oath to do so. And yet all they do is break them and then whine when anyone objects, calling them traitors or terrorist enablers.

If you're willing to let the government do whatever they want in the name of public safety, then it is possible for things to be safer (not the way Bush is bungling things, but it's possible).

There's only one catch: you will be living in a police state. Police states have the potential for much greater civic safety.

They are also authoritarian, fascist, and lack freedom and civil rights and liberties.

The choice is yours.

Bush and the Terrorists Will Both Win

The Supreme Court has dealt a blow to Bush's Imperial Presidency. It ruled that the Bush administration cannot create its own courts for Guantanamo or other detainees, a policy which also has been used as the foundation for other egregious violations of American civil rights. Thank goodness that Kennedy has taken over O'Connor's role as the swing vote; without him, the Bush Supreme Court would be no less a rubber-stamp organ than the GOP-run Congress is today.

The larger issue behind this ruling is the nature of Bush's expansion of the executive branch, and the pretenses that have been used to justify it.

In Bush's presidency, we have seen him usurp the legislative branch by simply breaking laws and then claiming he has the power to do so. Bush has in essence claimed 750 new laws to be meaningless in regards to his own actions by issuing a record number of "signing statements," essentially declarations that he will ignore those laws as he sees fit. We have also seen Bush attempt to usurp the courts in the way he deals with "detainees," an ominous term if I've has ever heard one. Guantanamo Bay prison was set up specifically to evade the courts, with Bush instead creating his own "tribunals," shrouded in secrecy and answerable only to himself. Bush has, in these moves, essentially created a bubble government with himself in charge of everything, and uses this independent legal universe to violate the law at will, and remain unaccountable for it.

The pretense? 9/11 and the War on Terror™. And they are pretenses. Excuses. People are scared right now, just like they were when McCarthy was abusing power. But should we be scared? Are we in any more danger today than we were before 9/11? The answer, of course, is "no." We've known for a long time that terrorists have been trying to get us in big ways, spectacular ways. Before 9/11, fiction writers foresaw terrorists doing everything from crashing jetliners into Washington D.C. to unleashing nuclear weapons. We knew that while unlikely, it was plausible. Before 9/11, in fact, one of the major objections to a missile defense shield was that a terrorist could smuggle a nuclear bomb in via a sea port.

9/11 changed that only because it killed 3,000 people in such a spectacular manner. But just as airliner crashes horrify us and make us fear air travel even though it is safer than car travel, 9/11 horrified us into thinking that terrorism is somehow more important than so many other things in life. In reality, we are more at risk from car travel than we are from terrorism.

A lot of talk has been going around about if we do or don't do this or that thing, then "the terrorists win." Well, you know what? If we're terrified, then the terrorists win. And the Bush administration has been making the terrorists win for the past four and a half years. Our own government has been terrorizing us, making us believe that we are in far more danger than we really are. That's the pretense. And the pretense is being used to grab power from the people. The government has been using that pretense to take away the rights we have long treasured, rights which have inconvenienced people in power.

Think about it: the Cold War was far more of a threat to us than terrorism ever could be. And yet somehow today we are supposed to believe that only measures that would have seemed extreme for the Cold War can help us "win" the unwinnable and endless War on Terror™.

The threat of terrorism is far less than we have been led to believe. The actions of the government are wildly in excess of what is necessary to be secure. We don't need to give up our rights and freedoms in the name of Terror; that's what the terrorists--and ironically, our own government--want. In this, they are united.

The Supreme Court decision, in the end, will probably be a relatively small blow. The administration will simply find another legal excuse to do what they want. The Congress, either enthusiastically in support of the new authoritarianism or afraid of being called soft on terror, will go along. The press will continue to be the lapdogs they are, lest they be called traitors and appear as unpopular. And the people, all too many of the people, will go on being terrified.

And Bush and the terrorists will both win.

I Just Got Fed Up

...with those damned hotlinkers. This time it was some guy on eBay in Spanish, hotlinking a photo I took of a Japanese police radar stand for catching speeders. The guy who hotlinked to me is selling a radar detector for cars. This time, I got fed up and did something I've been thinking about for some time but never had the guts. You can check out the resulting page on eBay (it's down now). It's damned funny. You'll have no trouble figuring out which image is the one he hotlinked to.

Days of Wine and Windows

Something that few expected seems to be becoming more and more of a possibility: the direct ability to run Windows programs in the Mac OS, without having to own or boot up the Windows OS.

This year, we saw two Windows-on-MacTel solutions arise: Apple's own Boot Camp, which allows one to choose which OS to use upon startup (but not both at once), and Parallels, a virtualization solution that allows you to boot up Windows within the Mac OS, allowing both operating systems to run side-by-side, or at least Windows-under-Mac (Apple is even touting Parallels in its commercials instead of its own Boot Camp).

But now a third solution is becoming possible: the WINE solution. WINE started more then a decade ago as a way to run Windows applications within Linux and other Unix-related systems. One does not need Windows to open Windows software; with WINE, you can open the software directly within the host OS (images here). One company which deals in this software translation, CodeWeavers, has just announced that they will be bringing WINE to the Mac.

The down side of this is that WINE is not a universal translator--it only allows you to use a limited number of apps (and a limited number of versions of those apps) on the host system. These include MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access), Macromedia Flash 7, Dreamweaver MX, and Shockwave 8.5, Adobe Photoshop 6 & 7, Quicken, and a few other apps.

Obviously, this is not a cure-all. However, it is promising in terms of what can be done, even without assistance from Apple. And despite the limitations, it could be meaningful--I've heard some people say that a few key apps, like Access, have been preventing them from making the move.

But more to the point, if this much can be done independently from Apple, then if Apple worked to include Windows APIs and incorporated WINE, a lot more could be achieved.

In the meantime, virtualization like Parallels offers is quite satisfactory, though it does require one to buy the Windows OS, which adds a few hundred dollars to the purchase of a Mac. You still get a lot more for your money, but the bean counters still trying to defend a Windows-only approach will grab hold of that as a last defense.