As an American I am sometimes confused and fascinated by laws in Europe regarding assault, defamation, slander, and offensive behavior. We have some goofy ideas about the definitions of these things, the Europeans do too. I am used to ours, not theirs. I sometimes think there is a happy medium between our freedom of speech and their slander laws. I am not sure where this story falls in.
There is an ongoing duel between Lance Armstrong and Italian rider Fillipo Simeoni that started (at least publically) with Simeoni declaring Lance used drugs. In the last Tour de France Armstrong chased down the Italian in a break-away late in the tour and immediately afterward Simeoni pressed charges either for something Lance said on the road in France or him simply saying that Simeoni is a liar for saying he used drugs. I'm not entirely sure why an investigation was opened to be honest. However, today Italian rider Mario Cippolini was questioned in regards to the case. Its all very complicated but it certainly feels like Simeoni is charging Armstrong for wrongful chasing down in a competitive bike race. What a tool.
Tonight Cate and I watched "The Aviator".
What a giant turd of a movie.
I find this story about two octagenarian WWII soldier emerging from the mountains more than a bit odd. For me it immediately brings to mind an issue that really bugged me back in the 1980s, that being the MIA side of many people's POW/MIA fervor. There were a great number of people in this country who believed (and possibly still do believe) that American soldiers were still being held by the ruthless and maniacal Vietnamese in secret camps in the mountains. There were also good stories about soldiers being slaves. Chuck Norris was smart enough to cash in on it but he probably helped solidify the idea.
I suppose I don't need to tell anyone that I didn't agree. Even as a hormone-filled teenager (who was so damned SICK of hearing about the Vietnam war) I was skeptical enough to know that there were no secret prison camps in Vietnam, Korea, or even the fields of Belgium where 100+ year old WWI prisoners were enslaved into making leather-goods. Well, OK... no one made the last claim.
So while they still aren't sure these two old guys are who they say they are, it is odd that they sat in the mountains for so long not understanding that they woulnd't be courtmartialed for abandonment this long after the war. I guess there are no televisions in the Phillipines? No news reports? Odd. Very odd.
I find it interesting how many news outlets have headlines that definitively say Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is injured despite the fact that the news is based on a claim made on one website.
Some reports say the website is al-Quaida's, some say it is an unknown muslim news site. Some reports have even claimed that al-Zarqawi's group made a statement (huh??). It seems that in this case the intelligence community is taking the safe option of saying "it could be a ruse, we'll reserve judgement". But how many readers of so many sites understand it could be a ruse?
I bet Newsweek doesn't report it.
Being one of the first people to read a lost text by Greek mathematician Archimedes has to be an amazing feeling.
This story is really cool as the text had been erased by a monk so he could make a prayer book (things haven't changed much, huh?) and with a particle accelerator the Stanford scientists are able to make the erased Greek text glow on the pages. Super cool.
Every now and then I will ask my friend John a serious question about journalism. I do this because a) he is a good journalist b) he is a good person c) he is smart d) he allows me to ask my journeyman questions.. so far. The other day I started a short email discussion with him about sources in reporting. If you recall in my previous post I was more upset by single source reporting versus anonymous reporting. I now think that it really depends on the story yet John did point me to a couple of good debates on anonymous sources (which he is very much against and does not use in his work).
Today on Poynter Online (a journalism professional's forum) there is a quote from an exchange at the White House (full text may be found on the White House's press briefing transcript) that I will quote here, I think it is quite telling and I hope more reporters will do exactly what this one(ones?) did:
REPORTER: In context of the Newsweek situation, I think we hear the caution you're giving us about reporting things based on a single anonymous source. What, then, are we supposed to do with information that this White House gives us under the conditions that it comes from a single anonymous source?SCOTT McCLELLAN: I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to.
REPORTER: Frequent briefings by senior administration officials in which the ground rules are we can only identify them as a single anonymous source. ...
Later in the briefing:
REPORTER: With all due respect, though, it sounds like you're saying your single anonymous sources are okay and everyone else's aren't.
McCLELLAN: No, I'm not saying that at all. In fact, I think you may have missed what I said. I think that we should move away from the use of -- the long-used practice of the background briefings, and we've taken steps to do that.
I was checking out Dan Gillmor's new collaborative journalism effort, Bayosphere, and came across his own personal thoughts on the Newsweek debacle. I agree with him about the unnamed source part but looking at their apology it also seems as though this is a story from one source. I did not attend journalism school but isn't the idea of having corroborative sources part of the whole 'pillars of journalism' thing?
Obviously this story shows how dangerous getting a story wrong can be but I've been beating my head for 5 years now over the laziness of reporting in this country. When people are allowed to repeatedly tell lies to the media (recent example being that filibuster was never used in judge nominees or republicans didn't block any, etc) and then the media simply repeats the lies with no attempt at checking the statements there is a huge problem. Except dorks like me, the public generally doesn't have the luxury of time to check statements they hear in the media, that's why there is supposed to be honor in the profession - its a national trust. What's going on in journalism schools? How does this laziness continue?
Journalistic note: it only took me a second to find out how to correctly spell Dan Gillmor's name. if I were a full-time journalist I bet it wouldn't take me much longer to find out how many judges Republican's blocked from reaching an up-or-down vote during Clinton's presidency.
A couple minutes later I have already found out that "Doctor" Frist voted for filibuster (attempted but failed) against Clinton's nominee Judge Richard Paez in 2000 - all this shit is recorded for posterity. Its easy.
I have seen a few soccer matches from Spain this year and have seen a bit of their problem of racist chanting. It disturbed me to no end that my favorite sport is being tarnished (again) by this sort of thing. I have done a bit of reading about the problem and it certainly isn't a soccer problem in Spain, and other European countries, its a social problem that is living within their cultures.
Today there is a good article in the Guardian that has drawn similar conclusions. This article also goes on to address English soccer and how it is not immune either, but to me the crux of the article is in the beginning when the author describes the small Spanish town of Getafe. Its a sorry and disgraceful description of a society that should have learned from history that this sort of behavior has no place in the modern world.
These are the battles we should be committing ourselves to. Darfur is in the midst of a genocide that doesn't even get a mention on the evening news. Europe is seeing the reimmergence of racism and we know where that lead last time. Our own citizens' ideas on the Muslim religion is further away from the truth than is healthy. Yet we are throwing ourselves into battles over science versus religion, saving the life of a Florida woman who is brain-dead, and deciding that two men marrying is more dangerous to marriage than Rush Limbaugh's 4th engagement.
We have some seriously fucked-up priorities.
Yesterday I installed Tiger on my Powerbook. It was one of the slowest installs I have ever experieced with any OS. For what its worth, DVD verification should be optional.
There are two things that blow - Safari's RSS stuff and Dashboard:
The RSS feature is the most user-unfriendly approaches to RSS I have ever experienced. After a good 10 minutes looking at it I still don't quite understand it. Luckily for me I am a firefox user.
Dashboard is simply dumb - what good is an info widget if I have to hit f12 and watch all my other windows dim away? I can see the weather in better ways. By the way, does anyone know how to turn the damn thing off?
There are also things that rock. In particular, spotlight is phenomenal. I remember when we worked on quick filesystem searching at Red Hat and what we learned was that it is not a trivial problem. Apple has solved it with kernel level tweaks and this, to me, shows off a fundamental flaw in Linux development - the divided camps of development. For us to have done anything as cool as what they have done to the filesystem and desktop would have meant playing the politics of linux kernel development. The plan would have had to have been accepted by the majority of kernel developers (most not working for Red Hat) and then slowly integrated (with us integrating it first and getting all sorts of shit for doing so). The fact is, the majority of kernel developers had/have no interest in the things that really interest the regular user which resulted/results in these technologies being routinely rejected. The sad part was that the community's divided development had also worked its way into the Red Hat development organization as well. I will always see that as our biggest failure as managers.
But I digress... even if you aren't an Apple user you should go down to the Apple store and enter any search into the Finder search input. It is simply brilliant. If infrastructure things excite the geek inside of you you should run out an get Tiger. If you are more concerned about good interface and tools that help you work I wouldn't worry about it.