The new iLife05 sounds good too - especially of course the new iPhoto with RAW file support. What's ultimately quite annoying for me: I then have to ask myself even more why I actually bought iView Media Pro in the first place - especially since iPhoto 5 now has the calendar view and keyword search has been available for a long time anyway.
I'm taking Pepilog's reaction as a starting point here. Simply because he's someone I read in my aggregator. But what I'm addressing applies to all men.
What absolutely fascinates me about this discussion is the rather twisted argumentation on the topic. The argument of the cuckoo child and the cheating mother keeps coming up—and how a man could defend himself against it, if not through secret paternity tests.
Now let's think about it from the other direction for a moment. What if secret paternity tests were legal? What would the consequences be: fathers could provide material from the—potentially shared—child for genetic analysis without the consent or knowledge of the mother. Mind you, the child probably wouldn't be asked either, which wouldn't be possible anyway at an infant age. But this would apply to all fathers—even those where the father only believes he's not the father because he's pathologically jealous or wants to shirk responsibility or has somehow gotten it into his head that the child isn't his. I'm exaggerating deliberately now—after all, the other side keeps acting like the cheating mother is the most normal situation in the world. But paternity support evasion by fathers is demonstrably a common situation...
The argument goes that one couldn't give the right to authorize the analysis to the woman alone, because then the man would be disadvantaged—he couldn't protect himself against cuckoo children. On the other hand, the secret test completely excludes the woman—how does that fit into this supposedly fair discussion? With a secret test, both the woman and the child are excluded to the point that they don't even know about it—unless the father unilaterally decides what he's doing.
The secret paternity test disrespects the woman's right to a say (it's not about the woman's sole right to decide—it's about having a say!) by completely negating that participation. It also disrespects the child's right—though one could debate whether at the point in time when this situation typically occurs (child in infancy) the child's right to self-determination should be weighted higher than the parents' right to a say.
Additionally, what really bothers me is the matter-of-factness with which the cheating mother is assumed—here something is being demanded that probably doesn't apply in 90 percent of cases—most couples probably still know quite well that their children are theirs together.
Actually, the whole thing is the archetypal self-reassurance obsession of men who, in every restriction of their absolute freedom, immediately suspect they're being discriminated against—something like an emancipation envy spreading since women have been fighting for their rights.
Sorry, but I have to tell us men something: a restriction of freedoms to protect the rights of others is not necessarily discrimination against yourself!
And it's precisely to protect the rights of the woman—namely her right to a say in matters concerning the child—that secret paternity tests definitively violate. Because no matter whether the father is the father or not: the woman is demonstrably the mother. Her rights are in no way in doubt. But they are violated by the secret test and denied to her—on the grounds that the man has no other way to defend himself. Poor male society, if such fears move us...
Appropriately, the Federal Court of Justice says it also doesn't think much of secret paternity tests. At least in court, they are not admissible as evidence.
It's certainly reassuring to see how parties take care of their politicians. No, that's definitely not corruption, you can't even imagine such a thing, that politicians are corrupt and that corporations expect benefits from blowing money up politicians' asses.
I've written a small Wordpress Plugin that implements a glossary similar to Radio Userland or PyDS. The glossary simply replaces text that is delimited by | (pipe) symbols with replacement text (which can also contain XHTML markup). Saves typing ...
The plugin installs a small management page in the Wordpress backend, so the whole thing only works with Wordpress 1.5 (or possibly 1.3). The required database table is automatically created upon plugin activation when you first access the management page.
How companies try to compensate for their incompetence through power. I hope the French court decides against these absurd demands. Full disclosure is often the only way for customers to defend themselves against stubbornness and unwillingness on the part of manufacturers - you can see this nicely in history, how companies (even industry giants like SUN) refused for years to acknowledge bugs and only were ultimately forced to take action through mailing lists like Bugtraq.
Companies must finally understand that security doesn't work in a quiet back room, but is only real security when it can withstand public scrutiny and analysis. Security by obscurity is no security at all ...
Since comment spam has been increasingly occurring on WordPress blogs lately and I don't want to have to react only after it lands in the spam folder, I've proactively installed Spam-Karma. It's a pretty powerful tool where, fortunately, you can disable a lot of options. I hope this will prevent what will certainly be an onslaught on my comment function at some point.
Of course, such a tool always has potential negative side effects. So if you can't get a comment through, there's still the regular feedback form which sends a completely normal - and unfiltered - email to me. As long as it makes it through my mail spam filter, I'll know what's going on (with 300-400 spams a day just at home, I can't guarantee that I'll notice an email that was mistakenly flagged as spam - though apparently not much gets lost that way, statistical spam filters do their job).
It's kind of strange how we have to artificially neuter our communication tools just because people tend to exploit anything that can be exploited eventually...
Update: after it ate a trackback from Schockwellenreiter, I've disabled it for now. The main problem was that the trackback was eaten with an error message that supposedly was fixed in exactly the version I'm using.
Business as usual at Team Telekom T-Mobile. Wild rumors, silly ideas (Zabael not going to the Tour? What nonsense) and a too-fat Jan Ullrich. And the competition is laughing up their sleeves again ... Well, if Armstrong really doesn't ride the Tour, at least one of the other riders (Klöden or Basso?) has a chance.
Second p0st: cElementTree now has a C variant to speed up execution. This makes it a real alternative to other DOM implementations.
symbolics.com is the oldest still registered domain. Very cool. By the way, I have a Symbolics sitting in my room.
My mobile phone contract was about to end again and T-Mobile was eager to get me to extend it. So they threw phones at me. A Motorola E398 is what I ended up with - hey, my most modern phone was a Nokia 6110 and Jutta grabbed that one so I was left with just the S3 Com if I didn't want to use my work phone ...
Well, the E398 is nice - it has everything you can imagine. And a bit more. If you want to know the technical specs, Motorola will happily tell you. I'm really only interested in one thing about all this fuss: Apple can exchange data with the phone and use it as a modem, but iSync only synchronizes with it via cable. Why must everything in the mobile phone environment always be completely illogical, complicated and confusing?
Oh yes, and the fact that the Motorola manual contains a lot of text but explains nothing in many parts, I don't need to mention separately. The documentation of all the options you can set is crammed in there: these options are listed again in the manual. And named. And that's it. No explanation whatsoever of what exactly you're supposed to enter there and where you'd get the information. And of course everyone immediately knows what to make of APN, IMPS, etc. Just like you naturally know straight away which IM technology the IM client uses when it doesn't say anywhere. Only with Google's help was I able to figure some things out.
Mobile phones are stupid.
Verizon proves its incompetence once again. Verizon's spokesperson Edwards suggests alternative communication channels to customers waiting for mail from Europe: "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call," he said. Sorry, but if it's really important, you'd probably be better off switching providers right away... (via Schockwellenreiter)