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There’s fires in the inland empire and brea, as well as further north. I hate this season.

Fires on 11/15/08

Amazing extremely slow motion video of lighting

One of the email threads turned over during the antitrust case at Microsoft contained this wonderful flame of Windows usability by Bill Gates.

In it he complains of the systematic degradation of windows usability.

In particular this gem,

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

which admits that they destroyed the filesystem as a usable path is telling. The whole thread, which can be read here is funny in a sort of Dilbert sort of way, and reminds me of what it’s like to work at a giant company. The bit where they blame marketing’s control of everything for the bad user experience rings particularly familiar.
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Dan Rather on the state of the press:

America’s biggest, most important news organizations have, over the past 25 years, fallen prey to merger after merger, acquisition after acquisition… to the point where they are, now, tiny parts of immeasurably larger corporate entities — entities whose primary business often has nothing to do with news. Entities that may, at any given time, have literally hundreds of regulatory issues before multiple arms of the government concerning a vast array of business interests.

These are entities that, as publicly held and traded corporations, have as their overall, reigning mandate: Provide a return on shareholder value. Increase profits. And not over time, not over the long haul, but quarterly.

One might ask just where the news fits into this model. And if you really need an answer, you can turn on your television, where you will see the following:

Political analysis reduced to in-studio shouting matches between partisans armed with little more than the day’s talking points.

Precious time and resources wasted on so-called human-interest stories, celebrity fluff, sensationalist trials, and gossip.

A proliferation of “news you can use” that amounts to thinly disguised press releases for the latest consumer products.

Lessig has cleaned up his presentation on change congress quite a bit. Definitely worth watching all the way through.

An intellectual approach.

Many people say that Obama and Clinton are very close on the issues. This is true, their health care plans differ very slightly, although significantly, as well as their plans in education. However there is one issue where they disagree intensely, and it’s the issue which is the most important issue of our time, the undue influence of lobbyists. Lessig decided that without fixing this issue in Washington was a prerequisite to major progress in all the other important issues of our time.

This is the reason I support Obama.

In one of his trademark slideshows, Lawrence Lessig, one of my personal heroes, has announced he is forming an exploratory committee on running for congress in the 12th district.

From Gizmodo we have footage of a new toy “Elmo Live”. For a mere $59.99 you can have this marvel of engineering. Now if only it was programmable…