Software Update for 10.4.9 happened to me today while I was busy making other plans. Usually, I trust Steve implicitly, and consider him my spiritual guide and cult leader. Today, out of pure chance, I actually looked at the update:

The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently running Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.8 and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes or compatibility updates for the following applications and technologies:

• RAW camera support
• Handling of large or malformed images that could cause crashes
• Image capture performance
• Mouse scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
• Font handling
• Playback quality, and bookmarks in DVD Player
• USB video conferencing cameras for use with iChat
• Bluetooth devices
• Browsing AFP servers
• Apple USB Modem
• Windows-created digital certificates
• Open and Print dialogs in applications that use Rosetta on Intel-based Macs
• Time zone and daylight saving for 2006 and 2007
• Security updates

Doesn't that sound entertaining. I'll have to check that out, at the expense of my three-week uptime.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Suck it Bill

Libertarians, and especially the likes of Neal Boortz, like to short-circuit arguments relying on the tenets of democracy as irrelevant in American politics. The reasoning behind this, according to Boortz, is that the United States is not a democracy, seeing as democracy implies the rule of the majority at the expense of the minority rights. This has become a popular meme among Libertarians and Individualist Anarchists alike. According to Boortz' own take on President Bush's State of the Union address in January:

Democracy: Four references to democracy. In one passage he referred to the United States as "a great democracy." Our founding fathers warned us against the establishment of a democracy They were very clear in their fear of democracy. Historians of that era loudly warned against the creation of a democracy after the Revolutionary War ... but here we are in 2007 listening to the President of the United States referring to us as "a great democracy." I know that, thanks to government education, not one one hundred people in this country have a clue why our founding fathers abhorred the idea of democracy ... and that is no accident.

This is obviously more of a pet peeve than an intellectual argument, and it's typical among those who define democracy strictly as "majority rule". Many Libertarian and anarchist sites, for example, harp on an old U.S. Army document that supposedly listed democratic governments among the enemies of liberty and freedom, describing them as "a government of the masses". I say 'supposedly' because I've yet to see a citation to an official source of this document, but we'll assume for the sake of argument that somebody, at some point in time, actually saw a copy of this document, and the information has been preserved through its numerous retellings. Not to mention the fact that the Army withdrew that document, and in my opinion never should have released such a thing in the first place. The Army should not be in the business of defining American political philosophy, any more than policemen should write the laws they enforce.

This definition of democracy as "a government of the masses" is a redefinition of a) the prefix demo-/dema- to mean 'masses', as in demagoguery or demography, when it actually means "the people"; b) the people as "the masses", which is a rhetorical trick to negatively transform constituencies into monolithic systems; and c) government into law. The problem with using old texts as scripture, especially ones that have been retracted, is that they eventually become anachronistic in their language, their symbols, or both. The fact is that democracy, as a system of government, is not defined as "majority rule" any more, if indeed it ever was. For example, the current Oxford Dictionary¹ defines democracy thusly:

democracy |di?mäkr?s?| noun ( pl. -cies)

• a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives : capitalism and democracy are ascendant in the third world.
• a state governed in such a way : a multiparty democracy
• control of an organization or group by the majority of its members : the intended extension of industrial democracy.
• the practice or principles of social equality : demands for greater democracy

America fits snugly into the first definition. By most modern definitions of the word, democracy covers systems such as republics, representative republics, and the bizarre, three-tiered social oligarchy that exists over here in Germany, and also in most Western European governments, in conjunction with the hinky, dysconstitutional spectre of the European Union. As much as I enjoy listening to Neal, his argumentativeness over the word democracy as meaning "mob rule" is intellectually dishonest, because it redefines the agreed terms of discussion in the middle of the debate. He will also slip up every now and then, describing the goal of the Iraq War as the building of a democracy in Iraq, which is supposedly the last thing we'd want to see happen. It reeks of desperation and defeat, distracting as it is from the real point of Libertarianism, that the protection of individual rights and freedoms should be the major role and purpose of government. And that is an argument that doesn't need to hide itself behind pedantic word-play.

Since I finally cleaned up my desk, in my preparations for the selling thereof, I get to see what it actually looks like. Once you get the old coffee cups, whiskey bottles, condom wrappers, and used hypodermic needles off, it closely resembles a healthy, productive environment. So let's see what's on Rube's desk!

(click image for full size)

As you can see, a lot has changed since the last time I cleaned my desk.

I just realized something. I'm moving to England in 12 days. I need to get cracking!

Technorati Tags: England, Moving House

Dax is a Linux guy now? Good luck, man, I'll be right there with you in a couple of weeks, at least at the office. But at home? I'd rather take a poke in the eye with a sharp stick than run Linux as my day-in, day-out desktop. But the price is right, and the licensing terms are more than agreeable, so if you have the time, and hate playing MP3s and games, Linux might just be for you. Naturally, my first instinct as a smug Apple Fanboi is to rip out my hair and say, "DAX, MAN, WHY YOU HATE YOU'RE FAMILY GET A MAC! OMG!". But he knows about Macs, and still decided on Linux. His reasoning, however, piques my interest:

Not that I’m going to become one of those freaky Apple people, mind you. After all, I like to actually run more than a handful of programs. However, I have downloaded Red Hat Linux. Let the learning begin!

"Handful of programs," I thought to myself, and hit the F9 key on my keyboard, bringing up Exposé:

Doing! That's gotta be like, 500 windows there. Has that crap really been running in the background all this time? I need to close a program every now and then, methinks. I know that document window in the bottom left, with the red header, has been open at least a week. That's when we printed the flyers for our apartment. It gets away from you sometimes, that desktop management thingy.

Then, of course, there's all that Dashboard crapola that's running in the background:

Is that really a modern impression of the Macintosh, that you can't run a lot of stuff at once? I guess that was the case back in the Multifinder days, but take a look at what ps ax spits out on my laptop:

[75 lines of meaningless code deleted]

I would say that's more than a handful. Or maybe Dax is talking about program availability. Like the ability to walk into a store and pick out shrink-wrapped software to take home with him. That would make sense, seeing as the acceptance of the Macintosh doesn't compare at all with that of Windows, especially in the retail space. But then, he's switching to Linux. If he thinks he's going to find software for Linux at Best Buy, well.... BWWWAAAAHAHHHAAAHAAAAHAAA!!! Talk about a rude surprise in the waiting.