Obama is unfit to be president

From Obsidian Wings:

So in addition to being too popular, too charismatic and too eloquent to be President, Barack Obama is apparently too physically fit as well.  Those are some serious drawbacks.

If we can confirm that Obama is also exceedingly intelligent, displays good judgment and is competent, this guy’s gonna be downright unelectable.

LOL

Barry George didn’t kill Jill Dando

Says the court at his retrial. I always thought the evidence against him was flimsy.

Greenpeace’s “Nuclear Reaction” blog

Greenpeace have started a new blog, Nuclear Reaction, which charts “the meltdown of the nuclear industry”. It’s by Justin McKeating who — as some of you know — also blogs at Chicken Yoghurt.

Hu: Don’t politicize the Olympics

Chinese President Hu Jintao doesn’t want people to politicise the Olympic Games:

With one week to go to the Beijing Olympics, Chinese President Hu Jintao has urged people not to politicise the Games. In a rare news conference, Mr Hu said politicising the event undermined the Olympic movement, and called for dialogue to resolve contentious issues.

This is nonsense. The Olympics have always been political. China is hosting them for reasons of status: to highlight that they’re now a rich and important country. There’s nothing wrong with that — China’s economic record over the past quarter-century is magnificent and Chinese people are entitled to be proud of it.

What Hu really means is “don’t criticise China”. He’s being hypocritical, for two reasons:

1. China chose to put the spotlight on itself by hosting the games. They can hardly now complain if the spotlight reveals some things they’d rather not talk about

2. China won the right to host the games by saying they’d clean up their human rights record. They haven’t done so, and it’s entirely reasonable to point out that they’ve failed to uphold their end of the deal.

Why does the British Library hate Britain?

The British Library is publishing on the web facsimile copies of rare books, allowing people to see in close up exactly as they look like. This is a good thing, surely? Well, no it’s not, because the software the BL has developed to deliver this requires that one’s PC runs Microsoft Silverlight.

Which is fine if you have a recent PC running Microsoft Windows or Mac OS (Silverlight requires a high technical specification so an older PC probably won’t run it). It’s not fine, however, if you’re running Linux, because Silverlight doesn’t run on Linux.

MS Windows and MacOS are both owned by foreign companies and you cannot (legally) use them unless you pay a license fee to them. Linux, on the other hand, is open source, so everyone owns it, in the sense that everyone has the right to use it, to modify it to their own ends, and to pass those modificatinos onto others. The British Library is in effect saying that you cannot use their service (created and funded by the British taxpayer) unlress you pay money to foreigners for the priviledge. They are also in doing so harming the British economy, both by inducing people to pay license fees to foreigners for this software (thus harming the balance of payments) and also in the longer term making the UK economy dependent on foreigners for our vital IT infrastructure.

The British Library are evidently traitors who hate Britain and are actively and intentionally harming it. Of course, that’s not true; what’s actually happening is that the BL is run by clueless idiots who have no detailed understanding of information technology.

In the 19th century, someone who was illiterate wouldn’t have been employed to run the BL, and rightly so because wiriting was a fundamentally important technology in the storing of knowledge. In the 21st century, computers are an equivalently important technology, and anyone without detailed knowledge of them isn’t fit to be put in charge of the BL.

(via open…)