The soccer-boys managed a 1-1 tie last night against the heavily-favored italians! It's almost as impressive as the 1980 Lake Placid victory against the Russian hockey team. And, like that victory against the Russians, the hunt for the gold isn't over. Back then, we still had to beat Czech for the gold. Now, we just have to beat Ghana, Ecuador, and about 30 other Banana Republics.
It was an impressive show, all in all. And big props go out to Brian "Bleeder" McBride, who took an elbow to the face at the 30 minute mark. There was blood everywhere, and maybe even a couple of stitches. But big Bri marched off the field under his own power, let the medic take care of him, and was playing in the "Match of Shame", as the Times called it (dicks), in less than 2 minutes.
Now, for those of you who've never watched World Cup Soccer, it's kind of like basketball. Played by a high school Drama Club. The absolute lack of honor in the game is astounding. Apparently, one of the rules is that if somebody so much as breathes on you, you flign yourself to the ground, grab your ankle, and scream like a girl. Then, the referee feels bad for you, blows the whistle, and gives you an Icee. I saw people trying to draw fouls last night that should be ashamed of themselves. The Italian captain, for instance, threw himself to the ground once in the second half, although nobody was anywhere near him. There was no foul. He held onto his leg like he'd been shot, screaming and rolling around on the ground. He actually carried on like this until they came out with a stretcher and hauled him to the sidelines. Where, of course, he stood up, stretched a bit, and was back on the field at the next whistle.
This is because soccer is the only sport I can think of, besides basketball, that doesn't have a built-in justice system. In ice hockey, if you stop play by faking an injury just to draw a penalty, your ass better stay down, because the next time you touch the puck you're going to find yourself sailing over the boards with a skate up your behind. In baseball, if you're showboating like the Italian last night who did a pantomime violin performance in the corner after scoring, you're going to get a Dickie Thon fastball* to the face next time you're up. In soccer there isn't even a delay of game foul for faking an injury.
These pussies will literally lay on the ground, howling, stop the game, let themselves be carried off the field on a stretcher, when the replay shows clearly they never got touched. Then, they come right back into the game like nothing happened. I broke my hip playing ice hockey in college once, and still skated off the ice under my own power. Then went to a social at my girlfriend's sorority. In a tux! The problem is, doing this crap in soccer brings you an advantage because the refs reward it. If the other team's doing it, you've got to do it, too.
The Americans, thank goodness, don't really play that game. In North America, you'd get booed off the field, no matter what sport you're playing.
You can read more on the pussiness of soccer here.
Cross-posted at Sistaweb.
* - Mike Torrez, 1984. Man, was that really 22 years ago?!
If you're not an experienced computer geek with scads of free time on your hands, just stay as far away from Linux as you can. All the openness in the world will not buy back the hours lost in frustration and doubt, as you attempt to do even the simplest of tasks.
I just spent the last two days fighting with Ubuntu's sound support. If you're not a Linux gearhead, you'll probably be surprised – nay astonished! – to learn that there's no freakin' way to easily configure your sound card. This process still involves firing up your favorite text editor, pummeling Google for How-To's, and duking it out with 70s-era computer philosophy over who bears the burden of peripheral configuration, the user or the operating system. Things haven't changed much since the Slackware 1.0 days.
Case in point: Running MythTV on a Ubuntu box. Result: "/dev/dsp cannot be initialized: device or resource in use, Sound Disabled". This is still an issue in 2006? Even using the ultrahypermodern advanced ALSA drivers? I guess ALSA's intended for use in single-user, single-tasking multimedia appliances such as iPods rather than Linux. Which is a shame, considering it's made specifically for Linux!
Fact is, the user should never have to worry about sound card locking. There are no data integrity issues with a user hearing more than one sound at a time; the human ear is made for that, so sound card-locking should be considered a bug. The OS should queue up the requests for the driver, which should then schedule them to be sent to the hardware in an orderly manner.
Under Ubuntu Linux today, renowned as the User-Friendly Linux, the default configuration doesn't enable sharing your sound card among applications. If you're using KDE with the ARTS server running, a common scenario, and you launch Quake 4 or MythTV or any other program that requires sound, it'll bomb out with a "device busy" error.
There are workarounds, of course. You can create a down-mixing pseudo-driver in your ~/.asoundrc, if you can stay awake through the 3500-word how-to. This worked for me, at least for a bit. Once I rebooted my computer, my USB webcam's microphone and mixer had remarkably taken over the Card #0 slot, my USB speakers were Card #1, and my onboard sound had become Card #2. This order changed with every boot, in seemingly random fashion, so it meant I had to manually reassign card numbers in the .asoundrc file. This is also necessary whenever a USB peripheral is plugged in or out.
In addition to its not working, there are some other issues to consider:
It's user-specific
you have to be root to make it system-wide in the /etc/asoundrc, and, since there's no configuration utilities to speak of, you'll be mucking around /etc with a text-editor, a limited knowledge of the subject matter, and an appetite for self-destruction.
It's fragile
You use card numbers instead of GUIDs. If you've got USB sound devices, like speakers or a USB webcam, there's no predictable way to know which card number which device will have. And, of course, they change when you plug a device in or disconnect it. And they're different every time you reboot, for whatever ungodly reason.
It's not automatic
The default configuration for ALSA is that you have a single sound card and mixer that never changes; in addition, it will never be accessed simultaneously by multiple processes. The how-to (linked above) says the following:
NOTE: For ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don't need to setup dmix. Dmix is enabled as default for soundcards which don't support hw mixing.
LIES!
When the operating system detects a sound card, it should automatically configure it to a) work, b) be accessible through an easy-to-use interface, c) be optimally configured for output quality and compatibility, and d) be accessible by multiple programs. For the OS, this should be easy: Set up the values, activate the hardware, and write out state to a configuration file automatically. Ideally, it would also send out a system notification that hardware was added, and the user's environment could deal with the information as it deems fit.
Linux unfairly places this burden on the user. The OS currently does nothing except load the bare-metal driver for the device, and configure it in a way that makes it almost useless. The existing environments, like KDE and Gnome, offer absolutely no hardware configuration interfaces, and the CLI offers nothing more than a text-editor and 40 man pages and a pat on the behind for luck. In fact, KDE (and I assume Gnome) compound the problem by loading an outdated "sound server", ARTS, which provides a lackluster facility simulating concurrent sound-card access with terrible latency, and then only for programs specifically written for ARTS.
For the record, I have never had a problem with this under Mac OS X, BeOS, or any Windows since 95. In fact, the only weirdness I've had under OS X is with the Videolan client. Sticking to its Open Source roots of user hatred and bad interface design, it makes the user put in a sound card "number" to play sound through external USB speakers. No drop-downs, no sanity checks, and no hint as to which number belongs to which card. Pathetic.
- If you configure it to use the second sound device, for example, it will still attempt to use it even after it's been removed, and there no longer is a second device.
If I learned anything from watching old cop shows, it's this: If you know something about a crime, and you don't reveal the information to the police, you're guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal. Of course, there are ways around that. For instance, you could just blog it!
Why are journalists, and now bloggers, above the law? Shouldn't they be liable for illegal knowledge they receive from sources? What exactly are the limitations? If someone is planning, say, to assassinate the president, and gives a journalist the information beforehand without saying where or how, is the journalist required by law to reveal his identity to the police? It certainly doesn't seem like it nowadays. Anybody with a Myspace account apparently has carte blanche.
Apparently, an unnamed, unconfirmed source on the ground in Baqouba says, "U.S. troops may have beaten wounded al-Zarqawi before he died". I actually made a joke about this happening, when I was watching the news conference. And I was right.
The witness, who lived near the scene of the bombing, claimed in an interview with AP Television News to have seen U.S. soldiers beating an injured man resembling al-Zarqawi until blood flowed from the man's nose.
Can you imaging getting 1000 lbs. (907kg 453kg) of TNT dropped on you, and then the guys who dropped it run up and punch you in the nose? What a bunch of dicks!
I guess this is the point where we're supposed to curb our enthusiasm, look at the ground in shame, and then kind of snigger unter our breath when the Sanctimonious Sympathy Club at the AFP isn't looking. I feel horrible about the whole thing.
