Month: June 2004

We currently drive a 1997 Dodge Grand Caravan SE. When we bought it we thought it was great. There is still alot to love about this paid off van of ours. It is very roomy for me being over 6 foot and Jeff being about 6 foot. We also have 2 kids in grade school and usually 1/2 a pack of boy or girl scouts that we occasionally carry around.

I recently had a chance to see and sit in a brand new 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan SE. You know the one they advertise that has the seats that fold down into the floor to give you more room. Well I hate it! First of all I have to do acrobatics to even get in the dang car. The head and foot room in the front have decreased by what seems like 6 inches to me. That does not seem like alot to a normal 5 foot something person, but imagine adding another foot and half to your size. Well to get in the door with the seat all the way back, I must tilt my head and shoulders to the side so much that I look as I might be doing some kind of 90’s break dancing. Not very graceful for a mom of 2. I then tried to sit in what they call the captain chairs in the second row. Captain who? Are these seats built for some captain in the Sponge Bob cartoon. (Don’t even get me started on that show). Well anyway, I sit in these and I am thinking these must be a built in car seat. The back of the seats head rest hit me right between my shoulder blades. I am a pretty skinny person and I look down and the seat has disappeared under my legs. Where did it go? I can’t believe that the seat that is about as long as my mid length shorts for the seat part is not even visible. I don’t know how a person would ever be able to put a full size car seat on that seat. I am afraid it just would not hold it. Oh, and for all the moms that like to go through the front middle seats to walk back to the middle or back seats to get something for the kids while someone else is driving, forget about it. They put in a 2 foot console that is good for nothing but a few cds. They blocked the path to get back to the back.

Why I am going on and on about this van, is that we own the 97 version of this van. I thought the 2005 would have the same room and some pretty cool features. Nope they have made a mistake with this van. Not that we would even buy a Chrysler again. Here is a list of reviews that we totally agree with about needing to fix the brakes all the time, power anything is ify at most, and the list of repairs that are usually needed for this model go on and on.
1997 Dodge Grand Caravan SE review

I just hope we don’t crash our van anytime soon, and that we can make enough money each month to cover the mortgage and the repair bills for this van.

The number one piece of advice I give everyone who asks me to fix their computer, or whom I care about (family, close friends) is this: Switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox, even if you haven’t noticed any problems yet. Following my own advice, I don’t allow the use of IE within my own home except when absolutely necessary.

Some people who hear this think I’m going a little too far. Sure, non-techies should switch, but those people who know how to lock down their system should be OK, right? Surely I have the technical know-how to make Internet Explorer safe, right?

Wrong.

Security researchers warned Web surfers on Thursday to be on guard after uncovering evidence that widespread Web server compromises have turned corporate home pages into points of digital infection.

The researchers believe that online organized crime groups are breaking into Web servers and surreptitiously inserting code that takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer that Microsoft has not yet fixed. Those flaws allow the Web server to install a program that takes control of the user’s computer.

[…]

Meanwhile, the average Internet surfer is left with few options. Windows users could download an alternate browser, such as Mozilla or Opera, and Mac users are not in danger.

By the way, number two is: don’t use Microsoft E-mail clients for mail. Why? Well, they rely on Internet Explorer for too much of their functionality, and at least one client (Outlook) is famous for its own porous security protections on top of IE’s. You’re a lot better off using Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or some other mail client not made by Microsoft.

Check out 30 days to a more accessible weblog, by Mark Pilgrim.

So how do I (or, more accurately, WordPress) do? Here’s where I fail:

• I don’t identify my language.
• No special link tags, either, although WordPress does provide a link to the archive that contains the post.
• No access keys.
• I do have some acronyms defined, but I removed some for RSS when looking into adding Atom feed links. Bad me.
• No table summaries.
• No accessibility statement beyond this post, which is inadequate.

Not bad. I was impressed that certain things seem to be done right. Nevertheless, there’s still room for improvement.

If anyone notices anything I missed, post a comment.

MSNBC – Private rocket ship breaks space barrier

This is one of the teams pursuing the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million bounty to the first private organization that can launch a vehicle into orbit with passengers twice in two weeks. This trip had no passengers, and thus did not qualify as a first run for the X Prize; it is a significant milestone nonetheless.

UPDATE: Oops! The X Prize doesn’t require orbital flight, but suborbital space flight (62 miles or higher). I knew that, but must have committed a thinko when writing it up.

Dave Winer, the founder of UserLand, got in over his head when trying to deal with weblogs.com, the weblog hosting service he’s offered for free for several years now. So, he administered the coup de grace, without warning. As can be expected, this generated a lot of responses, not all of them nice.

In my opinion, James Grimmelmann gets it right:

But this isn’t entirely personal. Dave isn’t just a guy doing a favor for the world. He’s a self-proclaimed weblog authority. And he’s a guy with a plan: to build out the Semantic Web with SOAP, RPC, XML, and above all, with RSS. He wants RSS to be universal; he’s out there stumping for his design, and trying to convince us all that he should be calling the shots, that his baby should be the standard. He sounds off on RSS all the time; he tells us how RSS ought to be; he blusters about public use of his words; he suggests the elimination of rival formats. At stake in all of these is his professional credibility.

In all the debates I’ve seen Dave get involved in, I haven’t come away with a good impression. I watched the RSS 2.0 standardization effort devolve into a flamefest, with everyone trying to figure out what the hell was going through Dave’s mind, and being chastised when they guessed wrong. Atom was the final, frustrated response; in fine open-source tradition, the community forked when it became clear that the current maintainer for an important technology was screwing up. Since then, Dave has mostly alternated between slamming Atom and arguing for a merger with RSS, not getting that his own inept communication was the main barrier between the Atom and RSS groups.

His current problems with weblogs.com illustrate his attitude perfectly. Having provided free hosting for all this time, he could easily have traded some goodwill for a little technical help. Even now, he has received a ton of unsolicited free advice, pleas to reconsider, and offers of help. Barring that, he claims that the very act of trying to keep the service up just enough for people to retrieve their data was too much for him. Warnings would have been ineffective, he claims. Worse, his first announcement was made by hijacking all the hosted blog pages, and his second was made by posting an audio clip on an unrelated site; Doc Searls was forced to do the real explaining. Finally, the comment page where people were to ask for their data back, a threat: any negative posts will be deleted. You can guess the tone on that thread: very respectful, very considerate, and very fearful. Does Dave enjoy being feared?

All in all, this vindicates my general distaste of technology that’s too strongly controlled by one person or group, especially when that person or group is not trustworthy. I don’t wish Dave Winer ill; neither do I consider him a bad person for having shut down weblogs.com. I simply see this as another example of his prime failings: pride in his achievments, disdain for anyone who challenges him, and an uncooperative nature. Let us hope that he learns from his mistakes, or at least fades into an obscure retirement.

Steven Den Beste has a fascinating article on the ethics of owning slaves programmed/brainwashed to desire slavery, motivated in part by musings on the ethics of owning sentient computers in the future.

(Personally, I’m not sure that day will ever come, and I’ll be more inclined to worry about it when it actually happens or looks close to happening. Let’s talk after someone produces a computer with the sentience of a chimpanzee.)

He is slightly off, though, when he says:

And it is hard to see how the eventual owner of such a voluntary slave could avoid carrying any of the ethical stain. I think it would also be immoral to own such a slave.

On the contrary, in a society with a permanent slave class, it is entirely possible to own a slave honorably. As an ethical slaveowner, you will treat your slaves better than the slaveowner down the block will, and since the poor slaves can’t escape their condition in any meaningful way, the best the slaves can hope for is for you to keep them. Such rationales were used by many antebellum Southerners who kept slaves, on the theory that free blacks were very likely to be kidnapped and re-sold into slavery (something that did happen far too often).

Of course, such an ethical slaveholder would also work like mad to abolish such a horrid institution as a permanent slave underclass.

Similarly, here’s how you could keep a sentient slave programmed to want subservience in an ethical manner:

Write a contract freeing the slave, but make the contract conditional on the slave’s acceptance of the deal. Sign the contract, and give the paper to the slave, complete with space for him/her/it to sign. From that point on, treat the slave as a full-time, live-in employee. This improves the slave’s conditions to nearly perfectly mirror those of voluntary employment, and give the slave the power to confront his/her/its tendencies towards subservience at his/her/its own pace.

We don’t need any such gyrations in current society because slavery of any kind is currently illegal and/or impossible, which is clearly the optimal ethical case. For suboptimal cases, though, there are often hard problems and trade-offs; failing to respect those can create new injustices.

An old post by Jane Galt (linked by her more recent post here) basically sums up my position on global warming.

Executive summary: The shrillness of the debate and distortion on both sides make it impossible for non-experts (which make up nearly all of us) to know either if there’s a problem or if there’s a viable solution.

UPDATE: This is also a thought-provoking page, though I don’t necessarily claim it’s correct.

Hit & Run: No Facts in the Classroom, Please

Matt Welch’s comment is actually scarier. Firing a teacher for teaching the source of a Shakespearean allegory is stupid, and chills teachers who want their subject matter to be interesting. Firing a teacher for explaining the causes of the Holocaust is dangerous as well as stupid, since ignorance is the best weapon of demagogues against a decent people.

For those of you just joining us from the old site, welcome to the new site. Comments are welcome here for the “Resurrection Redux” post there.