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Just had another unwanted debate with an Apple fanboi about malware in another forum. Someone asked if you needed anti-virus software on the Mac. I said it wasn't a bad idea. Said fanboi chimed in to insist there are no viruses for Mac. I pointed out that it was naïve to assume that it would stay that way as Apple's market share climbs out of the single digits. I was duly informed that I was a Windows partisan and that said person has had a Mac for three years and never had a problem. I told him I just bought my tenth Mac in 17 years, and he finally shut up.
Then it hit me: I've had quite a lot of Macs, now that I think about it.
Mac IIsi Performa 630* Performa 6200* PowerMac G3 MT/266 PowerBook "Pismo" G3/500 PowerMac G4 2x450 MHz PowerMac G5 2x2 GHz iBook G4 1.2 GHz Mac mini G4 1.2 GHz Mac Pro
* - OK, technically these two were bought by BoE at the time, but she got some of my Macs in return. :-)
plus ones I got for free:
PowerMac 9600 (later bumped up to a 500 MHz G3)
iMac Rev. A
LC II
...making thirteen in all. Of those, four are currently in service, and only one actually broke down (the G5). The Pismo is at my out-laws', the iMac I sold off years ago, and the rest are sitting on shelves in my workroom.
Plus I have four PCs of varying ages and conditions.
Ye gods I have a lot of hardware lying around here.
...is available on their site -- but be forewarned, the free video is (at least in North America) very much Noogie Snoogie Foogie Woogums. (Lotsa nekkid Icelanders running around.)
The song, Gobbledigook, is definitely a bit of a departure for them. Haven't made up my mind about it yet.
It might sound macabre, but one of the best reasons for reading The Economist is the obituaries. The last article is always an obituary, and theirs are some of the best you'll ever read -- not least because they find people you've probably never heard of, and make you wish you had; or write ones for truly infamous people, and tell you things about them you'd never have guessed, and give the person that much more depth.
Here are some recent ones, each of which is worth reading all the way through -- perhaps more than once:
...or, how religion provides evolutionary benefits to believers -- contrary to the claims of antireligionists, who'd have you believe religion is the cause of all wars and unhappiness and what-all else that plagues the world and therefore we'd be better off without it. Or maybe not.
Once again, the Anglican Bishop of Durham (home of my favorite cathedral), the Rt. Rev. Tom Wright. Here +Tom discusses his ideas on the afterlife. As it happens his concept of "afterlife" is much like my own, and is also strikingly similar to physicist Frank Tipler's conjectured Omega Point.
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.
I've seen some nonsense floating around the Web that John McCain supposedly doesn't qualify to run for the Presidency. Whatever you may think of him, it's simply untrue -- the result of a common misconception.
The premise of this is that McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone and not on US soil. To wit:
7 FAM 1116.1-4 Not Included in the Meaning of "In the United States"
(TL:CON-64; 11-30-95)
a. A U.S.-registered or documented ship on the high seas or in the exclusive economic zone is not considered to be part of the United States. A child born on such a vessel does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of the place of birth (Lam Mow v. Nagle, 24 F.2d 316 (9th Cir., 1928)).
b. A U.S.-registered aircraft outside U.S. airspace is not considered to be part of U.S. territory. A child born on such an aircraft outside U.S. airspace does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of the place of birth.
c. Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.
Sounds damning, doesn't it? Well, it isn't.
Ius soli, the "right of the soil", is only one way to become a natural-born American citizen. The other way is ius sanguinis, "the right of the blood". Since McCain's parents were/are American citizens, he therefore is a natural-born citizen.
Similarly the Confessor is a natural-born American citizen and has American citizenship because I'm an American citizen. See US Code § 1401 (g):
(g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years...
Won't BoE be pleased to know she is an alien. Well, I always knew that, but I married her anyway. As for McCain,US Code § 1401 (c) says:
(c) a person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom has had a residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, prior to the birth of such person...
German citizenship law is pretty much ius sanguinis only, but since his mother is German, he thus also gets German citizenship. Currently Gloriana only has German citizenship, but she is entitled to American citizenship as well (we just haven't bothered to go to the embassy to claim it). Should either child live continuously for 14 years in America, and reach 35 years of age (as per the US Constitution, Article II, Section 1), he or she would thus also qualify to run for President -- just as John McCain does now.
Check out this PDF file (in German, but still readable enough for English speakers). It tracks the number of people who are either Protestant ("evangelisch"), Roman Catholic ("römisch-katholisch"), no affiliation/non-believing ("ohne Konfession"), Muslims ("moslemisch"), and Other ("Sonstige").
The basis of this data is the official registration of each person. In Germany, you have to declare your affiliation for tax purposes, so that your church or other group gets their share of the tax support (if they collect it). There are predefined abbreviations to use for each major religious group. For those groups that do not actually collect church tax, there is still usually a separate registration to track them.
One thing anyone will notice is that the two mainline church groups, Protestant (actually an umbrella of the main Protestant churches, but not counting "free churches" that don't receive state support, such as Baptists) and Roman Catholic, have lost huge chunks of the population over the last 50 years, going from roughly 45-50% each in 1950 to in the low 30s today. Thus on that score, those who are fearmongering about Islam taking over Europe would seem to be right, in that mainline Christianity is indeed collapsing in Germany (a bellwether for Europe), and the trend is accelerating.
Muslims went from not even being on the radar in 1950 to 3.9% of the population today. That too seems to support the fear expressed that Islam is taking over.
However, note two things. One, Islam is growing, but its growth is dwarfed by the "Konfessionslosen". Two, the study notes that the data registers "Muslims" as being such not just by tax cards, but also by origin -- so that many people who are registered as "Muslim" are not actually believers, but are culturally Muslims, such as Turks. They estimate that no more than half are actually in any Islamic groups of any kind, and the bulk of them are in a Turkish Muslim association mainly noted for its mild form of Islam. And many Turks have actually registered as being "Konfessionslos", that is, officially nonbelieving. Indeed there is even a Central Committee of Ex-Muslims (the name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Central Committee of Muslims and Central Committee of Jews in Germany).
Of course, before the atheists among us get too slap-happy, I should note that the "Konfessionslose" statistic is itself somewhat misleading. It primarily registers those who do not wish their tax money to go to the churches or organizations in the church tax system (though the churches that do collect church tax require their members to pay it), not what they actually believe. Thus not all those people are actually atheist or agnostic -- not even close (though that group is indeed growing dramatically). Anglicans in Germany, for example, do not pay church tax -- and thus aren't listed in the statistics, and my tax card claims I'm "Konfessionslos", even though I most certainly am not. Same goes for Baptists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and many other Christian groups not in the church tax system (while Buddhists, etc. are summed up under "Other"). Put them all together, and you get pretty significant numbers.
The other hitch with the "Konfessionslos" numbers is that many people game the system, a side effect of the church tax. There is a loophole in the law that is increasingly being exploited, where married couples with only one income earner (which is still very common in Germany) have the non-earning spouse register with the church, and the breadwinner declare himself or herself be "Konfessionslos" -- thus entitling the family to weddings, baptisms, outreach and so on, while not paying any church tax. The churches know about this and are trying to figure out ways of "fixing" the problem (such as it is), but even so, there are very many supposedly non-Christian people who are, at least notionally, Christian.
Even so, these numbers do put the phobia of a supposedly soon-to-be Islamic Europe into perspective. Not only is Islam still tiny in Germany in spite of generations of massive immigration from Turkey, what little Islam there is -- no more than 2% of the population, roughly in line with the percentage in America -- tends to be of the very mild variety. There is little chance of extremist Islam taking root.
As a followup to this blog entry, The Economist has an interesting article on the arrival of large numbers of (largely quite nonreligious) Russian Jews, who are radically changing the landscape of Jewry in Germany.
(Indeed it is interesting to note that the website of the Hannover synagogue is trilingual -- English, German and Russian -- and, before it went under construction, most of the names of people on the site were clearly Russian.)
This is a Flash site I bookmarked ages ago, and just came across the bookmark again. Beautiful and haunting photos -- and some are even interactive. Wonderful site.
OK, I'm not normally one for conspiracy theories and generally get annoyed by those who insist there was something more to the JFK assassination. But Jeremiah Cornelius posted a video that is, well, bizarre:
Whatever the explanation, it is strange that the video was suppressed for so long and that the Secret Service was apparently called off.
In any romantic Bollywood movie (i.e. nearly all of them), any time the main male and female protagonists are the focus of a scene, their hair is being blown in the wind.
I came across this image on the German edition of Wikipedia.
The funny thing is, you don't even really need to understand German to get the point. (It's a ballot for the "referendum" in Austria regarding the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938.)
The wording of the question is pretty off the wall, too:
Plebiscite and Greater German Imperial Parliament
BALLOT
Do you [informal "Du", interestingly enough -- has a commanding tone as a result] accept the
REUNION OF AUSTRIA WITH THE GERMAN EMPIRE
completed on 13 March 1938, and vote for the party list of our Leader
ADOLF HITLER?
no (tiny circle)YESno (tiny circle) (big honking circle)
It would be really very funny if it wasn't for the knowledge of what came after. (I especially like the way it asks people to approve something that already happened.)
Of course, I'm forced to think of electronic voting machines, ya know? :-P
There is a brouhaha over here about a well-known German TV presenter, Eva Herman, who for some time has been pushing her ideas about how women shouldn't do careers, should stay at home and just be good mommies. It began, oddly enough, about the time she had her baby; then she began praising breastfeeding on TV, and gradually she started a sort of mommy crusade, culminating in a controversial book, The Eve Principle ("Das Eva-Prinzip"), where she called men who didn't provide for their wives "wimps" and laid out her belief that it is a waste of time for women to pursue a career (pretty rich coming from a wealthy career woman who is still working after becoming a mother).
In other words, she is having a mid-life crisis and is doing it very publicly.
The crowning glory, though, was her recent assertion that the Nazis had a good family policy. (To quote: "...much was of course bad, such as Adolf Hitler, but some things were also very good. For example the high esteem of mothers. This was gotten rid of by the 1968 generation, and that's why we now have our social mess.")
When her employers demanded an explanation, she offered a half-hearted apology (or non-apology -- more like an attempt to explain it) which only served to tick people off even worse, and her state TV network, NDR, promptly sacked her. And sure enough, neo-Nazi parties such as the NPD are claiming her as an icon.
Yesterday's edition of our local paper has an editorial that is suitably acid (quick and dirty translation by yours truly):
Please stop babbling!
People say a lot about women. For example, they like to say that women talk too much. There was even a scientific study recently that took up the question and recorded the flow of speech of men and women with a stopwatch. Without scientific aid, a prominent TV presenter has offered proof that not just men, but women too should sometimes rather remain silent. Eva Herman could have saved herself -- and her public audience -- a lot of trouble.
But she didn't do that and impudently blabbed on about what was supposedly "good" about the Nazi dictatorship. It resulted in her dismissal by the public TV networks. Rightly, in spite of her proffered apology. For a little basic knowledge would have sufficed to expose the reality behind Hitler's praise of the family for what it was: a façade, hypocritical and part of an inhuman racial ideology that removed the rights of families and destroyed them. Even in the rearing of children, parents were mistrusted: Jungvolk (German Youth), Hitler Youth and Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) were there to twist them to the will of the Party. Ms. Herman's problem is not so much her sloppy handling of the blackest chapter of Germany's history, but rather -- see above -- her loquaciousness and her strident crusade for home and hearth. Both paid off well until now. In talk shows, in which endless babbling and shallow provocation are of the essence, she made a name for herself as the jokester and big mouth. With books about God-willed gender roles, she became a leading woman for all those who dreamed about returning to a time when women would clear out the dirt without complaint and wouldn't compete with men for jobs.
What went wrong, Ms. Herman? A PR gag turned into a campaign; the campaign turned into a mission. For applause is addicting. That it came increasingly from the far right was -- apparently -- unimportant to the author and antifeminist Herman. For every provocation -- that's the rule in the media circus -- wears out. She had to lay it on again to secure her own success. And keep on babbling -- preferably that which Joe Sixpack also says. That the 1968 generation is to blame for everything. That not all was bad "back then"...until the gaffe that didn't even get the point across.
Men, according to Herman, are unfortunately sometimes wimps. Nonsense. The men at NDR certainly aren't. They fired their employee. Now Ms. Herman can live the life that she proclaims -- a life for the family, without a career. Wanna bet she doesn't make it? (Gabi Stief)
