Cranezilla --Mark Crane's collection of rarely annotated links

mecran01: It's not so much a money question as an influence question, though, and I doubt the money issue was that big here. Who'd go into academia expecting to make a lot of money? No one. It's a decent living for plenty of people, though. Who'd go into it expecting to influence society in however small a fashion, or to have their words taken seriously by the culture at large? Plenty of people.

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |

Call Customer Support:
For questions about parts, service, owner’s manuals or non-working products purchased BEFORE 12/31/98, please call 1-877-651-6119. For questions about parts, service, owner’s manuals or non-working products purchased AFTER 12/31/98, please call 1-800-999-3756.

# posted by craniac @ Monday, October 28, 2002 |

Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.

Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.'

# posted by craniac @ Monday, October 28, 2002 |

For the uninitiated, keeping a service as complex as Blogger secure is a constant struggle. It is incomparable to software such as MT. While I'm sure they do a fine job, I guarantee we spend more time and money specifically on security than [name-your-favorite-weblog-software-company]. Because we have to: We're constantly being attacked (most, obviously, fail). This is the nature of a high-traffic, high-visibility web site.
And it is the nature of small, underfunded business that sometimes mistakes happen. We fucked up. We got beat. We admit that. But the arrogance of all these people who have very little clue what they're talking about is pathetic. But then, that's the nature of Internet discussions. ;)

# posted by craniac @ Sunday, October 27, 2002 |

Besides, if we all had a buck for the times you gloated about something that Frontier/Manila/Radio/ProductOfThisWeek did better than a competitor who just was caught doing something poorly, we'd all be in a position to afford to buy your products.

# posted by craniac @ Sunday, October 27, 2002 |

Zoe is being released under the Apple Public Source License (actually it'll be the "Rapha‘l Szwarc Public License" but it's the same thing) and we're putting together a SourceForge project to coordinate the future development of Zoe. Our plan is to choose a handful of experienced developers to form the core development team for Zoe. Anyone is free to contribute code which members of the development team will review add back into the codebase. Over time we will invite developers who have demonstrated their interest and abilities to join our core team. We'll keep the mailing lists public and encourage everyone to sign up and throw in any comments they may have. There has been a tremendous amount of interest in having Zoe released as an open source project and we think that this will be the best way to manage all the different voices.

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, October 26, 2002 |

"Just don't mention gun control," the London paper said, "or even a national gun registry. Many Americans--and, emphatically, the Bush Administration --will not contemplate this step. It is not surprising that this was not featured in the Administration's comments on the sniper. Al Gore is thought to have lost Arkansas, West Virginia and his home state of Tennessee--and hence the 2000 presidential election--on his gun control policies."

# posted by craniac @ Saturday, October 26, 2002 |

Tiny cameras, panning left and right, surveying traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view.

Have we entered an Orwellian nightmare? Have the burghers of both towns banished muggings at the cost of creating a Stalinist dystopia?

Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.

Now let's skip across space and time.

At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.

Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

The World's Sniping Rifles: With Sighting Systems and Ammunition (Greenhill Military Manuals)

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

One shot, one kill: the credo of the professional sniper, who gains status with each confirmed hit. But don't worry if you're not a professional; there are still plenty of places where you can learn how to gun down your fellow man.
Information about concealment, marksmanship, penetrating power and customizing your weapon is as close as a mouse-click away. You can even learn the pro's way of killing someone so they drop without a twitch; just aim for "the apricot" at the junction of the brain and the brain stem.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

Lindgren has also contacted historians who wrote positive reviews of Arming America and, according to the Chronicle, "urged them to reconsider their positions--in print." This is pretty much unheard of in academia. Matthew Warshauer reviewed the book favorably in the journal Connecticut History. He told me that Lindgren asked him to publish a retraction. "He added something like he would hate to have this affect my career. I viewed that as a veiled threat." Warshauer is an untenured associate professor at Central Connecticut State University. "I have twelve e-mails Lindgren sent me," he said, "including little ones, like 'where are you at with this?' He definitely kept up the pressure." The anti-Bellesiles campaign didn't stop there with Warshauer, either: One pro-gun website posted a link to Warshauer's graduate history seminar, where Bellesiles's book was assigned reading, and encouraged gun supporters to e-mail Warshauer. The director of the website, Angel Shamaya, even e-mailed Warshauer himself, saying, "If you're planning on exposing Bellesiles as the lying sack of anti-gun excrement he is, good for you.... but if, on the other hand, you're planning to pretend that...he is anything less than a deceitful snake--you're unfit to teach."

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

When the question period came, he started with the first of the four large men. "You say the probate records show very few guns, and argue that this proves people in early America didn't have guns. But when my father died, there was nothing in his will about his guns--even though he owned four of them. But he had told me he wanted me to have them, and now I do. Are probate records really a good source of evidence on gun ownership?"
Bellesiles answered, "I'm sure you're right about your father's will, but wills in the eighteenth century were different. People didn't own very many things compared to today, and their wills contained a detailed list of everything they had, down to the knives and forks. There are other problems with probate records--they are biased in many ways. But I'm confident that if an eighteenth-century man owned a gun, it would be in his will. Remember that we're talking here about wills in the 1700s."
He called on the second large man. "I want to ask about your use of probate records," he said. "You say probate records showed few guns, but my father owned several guns that did not appear in his will when he died. My brother and I divided them up."
Bellesiles paused and looked around the room, where students glanced at each other with stunned disbelief: So this is what it's like when you're the target of a campaign to destroy your work.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

SLCC Registration Forms

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

Office Hours
9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. During the Fall and Spring Semesters, the Registrar's Office is open until 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday. Call to verify that the office will be open.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 25, 2002 |

I had to ride in a white van today and we had to pass by a school. The cops followed us the whole time and pulled us over after we were about 3 blocks away. I so hope they catch this guy soon.

# posted by craniac @ Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |

Less has been written about the way in which Internet-users carried out their own detective work in the hours and minutes following the fatal explosion. Message board members and chatroom users on IRC (Internet Relay Chat - see attached article for an explanation), operating under online aliases, put together crumbs of information and arrived at the name of the culprit well before either the police or the media was in a position to go public. This is the story of how it happened.

# posted by craniac @ Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |

Someday we'll tell our grandchildren about those moments of epiphany, back in the last century, when we first glimpsed how the Web would change our relationship to the world. For me, one of those moments came when I was looking for an ODBC driver kit that I knew was on a CD somewhere in my office. After rifling through my piles of clutter to no avail, I tried rifling through AltaVista's index. Bingo! Downloading those couple of megabytes over our 56K leased line to the Internet was, to be sure, way slower than my CD-ROM drive's transfer rate would have been, but since I couldn't lay my hands on the CD, it was a moot point. Through AltaVista I could find, and then possess, things that I already possessed but could not find.

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

– France alerted Interpol about a French army deserter who is known as a marksman and is missing in North America. A Defense Ministry spokesman said there was speculation of a link to the sniper.

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

The Times also cited unidentified federal agents as saying the note is "very lengthy" and poorly worded, bordering on broken English.

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

Years later, while Mr. Hamid doesn't dwell on his experiment -- referring to it euphemistically as "the field note" -- he doesn't shy away from defending it. "Name me one researcher who hasn't done that," he says. "Isn't that what Marie Curie did with radium? Isn't that what Albert Hoffman did with LSD? You stick your finger in it and put it in your mouth."

# posted by craniac @ Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |

Naqoyqatsi offers an apocalyptic vision: Humans have forsaken nature for binary code, robotics and acceleration. The Miramax film, which opens Oct. 18 in New York and Los Angeles, is perhaps the most forceful critique of technological culture since Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.

# posted by craniac @ Friday, October 18, 2002 |