29 Jun 2006
Priest: Buffett is 'Dr. Mengele of philanthropists'

Bill the CatACK! Screed alert! I can't believe this! How hypocritical and detached from reality can people get? Gates and Buffet support family planning - that is, they support contraception, and the concept of a husband and wife having sex without makin' the bacon every time. They (well, the Gates Foundation, anyway) specifically forbid their funds to be used for abortion services. And for this the "right to life" movement goes bonkers!

That's because the "right to life" movement has little to do with anyone's life, and everything to do with a continual breeding program for humanity. They're against abortion, sure. But they're also unalterably opposed to any act that may prevent a baby from coming into this world - even if that child would be born into a grinding poverty the likes of which we in the West can hardly imagine.

"The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world," said the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, a Roman Catholic priest who is president of Human Life International.

What spells doom for the families of the developing world, you ignorant twit, is your idiotic religious insistence on their dropping babies like bunnies. You, sir, and your church's dogma of unrestrained reproduction are the direct cause of poverty and pain in the Third World. The foundations are trying desperately to alleviate the pain you are causing, and for this you compare them to the most infamous murderer of the 20th century?

"Some of the wealthiest men in the world descend like avenging angels on the populations of the developing world," wrote Population Research Institute president Steven Mosher, a frequent critic of Gates and Buffett. "They seek to decimate their numbers, to foist upon vulnerable people abortion, sterilization and contraception."

Excuse me? One of the wealthiest institutions in the world has already descended upon them, destroying their native cultures and threatening them with eternal hellfire unless they continually breed themselves into misery and poverty. You guys really like poverty, don't you? Poverty and fear give you power. With the Western world sloughing you off as irrelevant, if you lose your iron grip on the Third World who will fill your churches (and your coffers)?

If you're truly interested in finding the 21st century version of Josef Mengele, may I suggest you start a bit closer to home. Forget Seattle. Skip Omaha. Try Rome.

Warren Buffett's new philanthropic alliance with fellow billionaire Bill Gates won widespread praise this week, but anti-abortion activists did not join in, instead assailing the two donors for their longtime support of Planned Parenthood and international birth-control programs.

(link) [CNN.com]

21:00 /Asatru | 3 comments | permanent link

FireFox 1.5 Upgrade

I finally got around to it: I've upgraded the browser on my Windows box from FireFox 1.07 to the new, improved FireFox 1.5. And I wanted to detail my experience here, mostly because I was intensely annoyed, but also as a counterweight to my frequent screeds on Microsoft products: it's really not the company I object to, it's their poorly written software and lapsed security. But they are far from being the only software organization with "issues"...

First off, I should say that FF15 really is new and improved: the various updates and patches that'd I'd applied to my old installation were beginning to show signs of wear and tear: pages wouldn't load correctly sometimes, and the browser would occasionally die for no apparent reason. The new implementation is, as far as I can tell, virtually flawless. A few handy new features were added, too. But the problems with FireFox are not really problems with FireFox the software: they're problems with the organization and distribution of extensions, and problems maintaining a consistent API for the writers of these extensions.

FireFox extensions are applications designed to plug into the FireFox environment and add certain functionalities, and they supply some incredibly useful tools. For example, the spell checker that I'll use when I complete this post is an extension. Even more useful is an extension I have that synchronizes the bookmarks on all three of the computers I use at home. Another favorite is a XML formatting tool that let's me view RSS feeds in a coherent way within the browser.

When I installed FireFox 1.5, it cheerfully informed me that these installed extensions were incompatible with it, and disabled them. It seems as though some API calls had been "rearranged" between versions, and many extension authors had not updated their code accordingly. Shit! Technically not a FireFox issue, but it certainly impacts my use of the browser!

Alrighty, then. First thought, revert to the old version. Easier said than done, unless I wanted to lose my stored passwords, cookies and other data (except bookmarks). OK, so let's see if there are replacement extensions that offer the same functionality, perhaps by different authors, for the ones that were disabled.

After about an hour and a half of searching and scrounging, I had all of the updated versions of my disabled extensions installed and working perfectly. It seems as though they existed after all: the FireFox updater just couldn't find them, or didn't know where to look.

The spell checker is actually better in this version, highlighting misspelled words as they're typed. The bookmarks synchronizer no longer returns various spurious errors on closing (which I suspect was the cause of some of my problems with my previous installation). So I'm happy.

But I'm incredibly annoyed that it took a manual search and install effort to find what should have been apparent to the FireFox updater. This isn't a software problem, it's a problem of organization and coordination, of maintaining websites and links, of updating lists and doing a bit of QC on submitted extensions.

I know FireFox is Open Source, and coded and maintained by volunteers. Nonetheless, if you're going to climb in the ring with the Big Boys (and M$ is a BIG boy), you've got to make sure your ducks are all in a row. If I had the time, I volunteer to do it myself: but with the volume of FireFox installations, that would practically be a full time job. And they couldn't afford to pay me, since the browser is given away, and they're dependent on contributions (which I have made in the past) and volunteers. With lots of free time.

This really leads me to question how well open source software scales in the real world: not from a coding standpoint, but from the organizations and structures needed to support such an effort. Open source coding (or information efforts like Wikipedia) work because the number of volunteers required is relatively small. Distribution and organization require much larger numbers, and I'm not sure they're available.

I'll stick with FireFox because I consider it a superior product. But I'm not sure I'd install many extensions for my mom, nor am I sure I'd even tell other folks about the wonderful added functionality they offer: which is a shame, as they're one of the reasons I use FireFox in the first place.

Are we going in circles yet?

09:53 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

Ethanol Fraud

The real title on this piece from CNN/Money is "Ethanol War Brewing", and it's written from the standpoint of investors trying to decide into which ethanol companies to sink their funds. But the relevant part of the article details something far more nefarious, something that most Americans are blithely unaware of, in the media hype over "reducing dependence on foreign oil" and "cheap bio-fuels for the future".

You see, ethanol currently accomplishes neither of those: it takes nearly as much energy to create and distribute it as it saves in "foreign oil", and it sure ain't cheap:

The price of the stuff has shot up 65 percent since May from $2.65 a gallon to $4.50, largely thanks to the oil companies who have started to put small quantities of it in our gas as a clean-air additive (most cars can handle a blend of up to 10 percent ethanol in their tanks).

That means the fuel for our cars is now about 60 cents a gallon more expensive than it would be if it were just gas, according to analysts at JPMorgan. As drivers, ethanol is lightening our wallets; as investors, though, it could well fatten them.

Which immediately brings to mind an old libertarian slogan: TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!

Grain alcohol is seen as the new gasoline. But which recipe is the one for investors to bet on?

(link) [CNN - Money]

09:23 /Agriculture | 1 comment | permanent link