The Art of deception and Bush

I respect true Republicans and what they stand for in terms or protecting the constituition and advocating small government etc etc. But Mr. Bush is just a dumb bastard (with all due respect Sir) who seem to want to take away the freedom that America represents. Anything and everything he does seems to take away the bill of rights and the constutuitional protection that people have in this country.

Something that upset me quite a lot is the recent revelation that his team is using the Air brushing techniques to re-write history just as in the past Soviet repressive regimes did. It was considered unacceptable and deceptive back then when communists did it. But do we hold ourselves to the same values? See it for yourself:



Here are some links to learn more about Air brushing..
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

Can a beef producer test all its cows for Madcow if it wants to?

We are talking about a meat producer in capitalistic and free market economy? The answer is "NO". This is happening in America and the Feds are fighting to keep the producer from doing it. What the fuck?

News link here

Excerpts:
A beef producer in Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows. Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well. A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The ruling was scheduled to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal, effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge has played out. The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the U.S. meat industry. U.S. District Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government lacked the authority to restrict it.

Now we have 3 presidential candidates who don't believe in

Science. That is right. There are 3 GOP candidates who don't believe in evolution but instead believe there is a higher power that created all. The three stoogies have been identified as Sen. Sam Brownback, Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Rep. Tom Tancredo. What is quite perplexing about this whole thing is that America is the high tech nation and once of the most advanced societies. These are the people who is going to lead the nation that has a huge stake in World politics? I sincerely wish Jesus doesn't vote for them or let people vote for them.

How many more have to die before we realize it?

It just pisses me off so much. The concept of people invoking the second ammendment to carry weapons that have no real use what so ever (I am talking about assault rifles et al) is just absurd. The rest who claim that the hand guns are for self protection don't understand that the concept of MAD (mutually assured destruction) just makes the world a sick place to live. I really wish that some law is passed such that it makes it real hard for anyone to own a gun.

What am I so pissed about it? For obvious reasons like the latest killing spree that took 32 innocent lives. I have seen enough of damage and lets not aggravate the situation by pouring more guns into the hands of people (good or bad).

Is Microsoft really that evil as some people say?

I leave that to the reader to make the decision. But I am disappointed with Microsoft on what it decided w.r.to the Gears of war downloadable content. I consider myself a pro gamer loving my XBox360. Most of all, GOW is one of the few games I played twice (Normal & Hard difficulty) and finished it. Having said that, Microsoft's decision to charge folks for the downloadable maps after paying $59.99+Tax for the game is ridiculuous. If Money can buy good brand image or public image, Microsoft should be ranked higher than Google or Apple for example. It is the loyal customer base you stupid Microsoft.

To give you some background, here is what the Epic top brass has to say:

"Epic thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to give the maps away for free and Microsoft thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to sell the maps," said Rein. "So what we've agreed to do is to put these maps on sale at a reasonable price then make them free a few months later. They did this with the original Halo2 map pack and it was a huge success. Lots of people bought the maps and lots of people downloaded them when they became free. That's what is going to happen and it seems like a fair compromise for both companies and a win-win for Gears players."

In this case, I side with Epic.

Is Microsoft really dead?

I don't normally miss out on reading Paul Graham's essays as they are very well written and thoughtful. I infact recommend to folks I know who haven't heard of him. But I think in his latest essay he contradicts himself and went down the path of ranting with his essay Microsoft is dead. If his point was to convey why Microsoft doesn't matter anymore because desktop is dead and web 2.0 is taking off, then why go into lengths about why Apple is so great ignoring the fact that it is also a desktop operating system. I did comment on the essay and let me see if it gets any response or gets deleted. Here is what I exactly commented:

Paul, I have great respect for you. But I think you contradit yourself a bit when you say this "..everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop". That by itself is a accuate and I can agree with. But you go on to rant about how Apple has put MS on the run and how you fund people that use Mac etc etc. Don't you consider Apple a desktop too??

Oh, you should watch this!

My everyday ritual is to watch the right wing talk show O'Reilly Factor on Fox and then switch to the left wing talk show by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC to get a fair and balanced view. Note that I consider myself in center left and because of that I am having a world of fun hearing views from far left and far right. I have to admit though that I disagree with Mr.O'Reilly most of the time since he does not reason which is pretty typical conservatism.

This clip of O'Reilly tops everything and you probably have not seen anything like it yet. Have fun watching the hypocrasy in action. I give thumbs up to Geraldo for holding the ground.