Bush’s Backward Sprint To The Finish

In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of "midnight regulations" — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush's legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

"These humble little bees have an innate ability to work out the location of a food source from its position in relation to the sun. They do this even on cloudy days by reading the pattern of the polarization of the light, and pass this information to other bees. In the dark of the hive, they transpose the location of a food source in the horizontal plane through the famous “waggle” dance into communication in the vertical plane of the hive."

This, then, is my current thinking about embedded web fonts: FUCK THE FOUNDRIES

What Ubuntu Server *could* be

Ubuntu Server should be a product that delivers a cool, integrated, sysadmin-friendly server experience. I want us to innovate. I want us to boldly go where nobody has gone before. I want Ubuntu Server to be something, rather than be anything. We should have a product that implements industry best practices, rather than just making them possible. Having configuration files under a revision control system, users always defined in a local or distant LDAP directory, screen on network shells, LVM always configured… We should deliver and integrate the right software solutions rather than just making all options available.

More troubling is a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that suggests Apple may be embracing the authentication model after it pushed other industries to abandon copy protection. The EFF points out that several of Apple's core products have some sort of DRM or authentication chip embedded in them, including iPods, the iPhone, OSX, and video ports on the new MacBooks. In its report, the EFF accuses Apple of trying to "shove competitors to the fringes and wrest control out of the hands of users."

Privacy groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation on cloud computing services—especially Google's. If the FTC finds that Google isn't doing enough to protect user data, one organization suggests that the Big G's web-based services should be shut down.