Earth: Mostly Harmless

Alberto Gonzales: Treating the American Constitution like toilet paper since 3rd February 2005

Gonzales’ latest remarks are indicative of the contempt shown by the current American administration for one of the greatest political documents and institutions of the past five hundred years.

I Am Not A Lawyer, nor an American, ergo he may be factually and legally correct. But arguing for this position is beyond the pale.

I rest my case.

More TV zen: Stephen Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor

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Oh man, I wish I had been able to tape this. Stephen Colbert was on right-wing francophobe self-evangelising hubris-meister Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News about ten minutes ago. It was gold, pure comedy gold! Colbert to O’Reilly on the Fox host’s ‘liberal’ critics:

“You know what I hate about people who criticise you? They criticise what you say, but they never give you credit for how loud you say it… …or how long you say it.”

If anyone spots it on YouTube or the likes, drop me a line. It should appear in this search at some point, providing somebody captures it.

UPDATE 21st January 2007:

Oh Yes. Here it is. Enjoy.

Quote also updated from the video - I misheard slightly the first time.

See also O’Reilly on Colbert’s show:

TV Zen: Trisha Goddard

Who ever said chat shows were judgemental?

For those who aren’t aware, Trisha Goddard (on the right) is the self-appointed saviour of humanity, casting aspersions on all and sundry who venture into her daytime TV fiefdom.

Captured 14th December 2006

MemoryMiner - the ultimate photo organiser?

This week saw GroupSmarts release an interesting update to their MemoryMiner social photo organiser application. MemoryMiner is a social photo organiser for Mac OS X, allowing users to tag imported photos by who appears in them (the ability to draw a marquee around a subject in a photo is somewhat similar to Facebook’s photo tagging service). Memory Miner also incorporates time-based selection, tagging and geotagging.

If you’d like to see a visual demo, check out MacBreak’s video interview with GroupSmarts [QuickTime movie, 93.6MB]. Warning: Merlin Mann present. I don’t mind him but I know that many do…

Continue reading MemoryMiner - the ultimate photo organiser?…

Whither privacy?

A number of things have popped up on the radar (read: RSS reader) from sources such as 27B Stroke 6, BoingBoing and EFF: Deep Links that have sounded to me like extremely Bad Things from a privacy/individual rights point of view. These sorts of things come out of such sources all the time, but it seems to me that in the last few months some particularly concerning ones have arisen which are either (a) so concerning in the first place that they warrant a Tin Foil Hat and or (b) have conspicuously failed to go away.

Some notable examples from the past few days’ media coverage:

Swedes favour more bugging
Supreme court refuses to hear challenge to air passenger identification requirements
The continuing air passenger data-sharing disagreement between the EU & USA
US Visitor Fingerprints To Be (Perhaps) Stored by FBI
Bush says feds can open mail without warrant

I personally find some of these developments to be more than a little disturbing: however I am conscious that, particularly outside the United States (where many of the most egregious challenges to civil liberties occur nowadays), people don’t seem to care about privacy any more. Or else, they see these developments as inevitable and (to some extent) a necessary compromise.

Continue reading Whither privacy?…