If you didn’t hear or guess by now, Last Full Measure will not be made. It was to complete the Gods and Generals – Gettysburg trilogy. Ted Turner pulled the plug because of bad box office mojo.
I was really looking forward to that movie. The other two were so wonderful, albeit long, that I couldn’t help but love them.
Who else had to retrain themselves so they wouldn’t try and select delete from the dropdown list?
(emphasis added)
Jack Cafferty:
The last time we got a tape from Osama bin Laden was right before the 2004 presidential election. Now here we are four days away from hearings starting in Washington into the wire tapping of America’s telephones without bothering to get a court order or a warrant, and up pops another tape from Osama bin Laden. Coincidence? Who knows.
We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence, … I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country.
At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.
You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.
Google has been subpoenaed by the Feds, ordered to turn over search engine results that deal with kiddie porn.
Michael Fortier spent 10 years in prison for failing to tell the authorities about Timothy McVeigh’s plan to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
Google has refused the subpoena. If Michael Fortier was punished for not taking action to prevent the law from being broken, shouldn’t Google be as well? For if, in handing over the search results, Google can assist in tracking down the predators that create such porn, don’t they have the responsibility to society to do so?
Google is a part of society. Therefore, they have a self-interest in and a moral obligation to protect that society. Their excuse for not handing the results over is that it will reveal company-critical trade secrets.
Bravo Sierra. Search queries do not indicate how the results were gathered, only that they were asked for.
Google is putting company viability ahead of the interests of society. They may be free to do so, but there are (and need to be) consequences for their actions.
As Reuters has the bad habit of not archiving their articles, I’ll quote in full here:
Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink
Tue Jan 17, 2006 3:39 PM ETBy Kamakshi Tandon
TORONTO (Reuters) – Internet users can give Web sites a thumbs up or thumbs down in less than the blink of an eye, according to a study by Canadian researchers.
In just a brief one-twentieth of a second — less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.
The study was published in the latest issue of the Behavior and Information Technology journal. The author said the findings had powerful implications for the field of Web site design.
“It really is just a physiological response,” Gitte Lindgaard told Reuters on Tuesday. “So Web designers have to make sure they’re not offending users visually.
“If the first impression is negative, you’ll probably drive people off.”
In the study, researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second. These judgments were not random, the researchers found — sites that were flashed up twice were given similar ratings both times.
They also matched the responses given by subjects who were shown the sites for longer.
But the results did not show how to win a positive reaction from users, said Lindgaard, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. “When we looked at the Web sites that we tested, there is really nothing there that tells us what leads to dislike or to like.”
And while further research may offer more clues, she said the vagaries of personal taste would always be a limiting factor.
“If design were reducible to a set of principles, wouldn’t we find an awful lot of similar houses, gardens, cars, rooms?” said Lindgaard. “You’d have no variety.”
Ah, Pajamas Media: born of a spiteful comment, intent on disrupting the error-prone, biased, babbling Old Media, they strike forth with innovative reporting delivered by the latest technical means by people on the scene. Immediate! Innovative! Intrepid!
And Incorrect! Doesn’t help to copy stuff straight off the wire.
Its official: Sudoku, the number placing game, is dead. Kakuro is the new Sudoku.
On this, the day we remember the acts of a preacher, we would be well taught to read one or more of his sermons.
We should also take note that though he was a religious man, no one thought it unconstitutional that he sought to impose his interpretation of the Bible on society. Let’s take the time today to examine ourselves for hypocrisy, even if we think it isn’t in our hearts.
Especially if we think that way.
As you might expect, I’ve been busy the past few days. However, all is not lost, as there is content to be posted. Here’s a regular expression I managed to figure out pull from the PHP Cookbook for matching email addresses:
/^[^@\s]+@([-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,}$/ix
It looks like gibberish to me, too, or at least it did until today. But if you put it in your PHP code, like so:
preg_match(‘/^[^@\s]+@([-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,}$/ix’, $email)
preg_match will return 1 if $email contains a valid email address, and 0 if it does not. So here’s to hoping Google will pick up this page and help some poor lost soul in his PHP or Perl assignment.
There are few things in life more edifying than giving a gift to a family member that melts their heart. Especially if that heart has been hard and cold in the past. I had the pleasure of doing so this past year.
Read more…
