The Obama dream comes crashing back to reality as the current Democratic contender for President votes for the immunity for telecoms companies who spied on Americans. Guess Obama is just one of those “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” zombies after all. One day the Democrats will nominate a pro-Constitution candidate. Obama is not that candidate, and the FISA immunity bill really is the litmus test.
If you are in any doubt as to the irrelevance and bureaucracy of DataPortability.org, check out their new official bylaws. Can you imagine any hacker worth their salt wanting to spend any time with these bureaucracy-addled pencil pushers?
Jeremy Keith has a write-up from OpenTech 2008 last Saturday.
Just been listening to Richard Dawkins and John Lennox’s latest discussion. It’s mind-bendingly amazing the weird things that Lennox believes, and PZ’s analysis is spot on.
Aral Balkan has a superb post about the problems with Google App Engine. I’ve tried it - and I even have an application stored on it - but having Google host your web applications is a bit silly if they can’t scale upwards. I’ve also been playing with Heroku, which is like Google App Engine but uses Ruby on Rails, and Amazon’s Web Services platform. This is what scares me a little about Google App Engine - if I build a Rails app and host it on Heroku, then decide that I don’t like Heroku or they don’t do what I want, I can take my app and host it on any number of alternatives. The same is true of the LAMP stack, the Java stack, even the .NET stack. This is part of what is most useful about widely-implemented open source platforms. It’d be nice if there were some other people who would do AppEngine hosting besides Google, if only to keep Google on their toes.
Americans watching more television than ever, although the Internet is catching up. Of course, feel free to get even more depressed when you remember that almost half of America doesn’t read books. Things are better here in the UK, but not dramatically better. Citizens of my country did give the world Heat magazine, after all. Sorry ‘bout that. Speaking of which, who wants to get together and try to find a way to destroy celebrity culture?
