Random Opinions
Time to get a new passport, before the RFID ones make you wide open to identity theft.
Bruce Schneier – The ID Chip You Don’t Want in Your Passport – washingtonpost.com.
The latest orchestrated war-speak from Bush Administration officials, as they ramp up their oratory for the mid-term election, has recast Islamic militants and terrorists as “Islamic fascists.”
FindLaw’s Writ – Dean: Why Are We Suddenly At War With \Islamic.
Washington’s response instead reinforced the dangerous view that laudable ends can justify brutal means.
The Wrong Lessons from September 11 (Human Rights Watch, 9-9-2006).
Never forget what? September 11th is a ridiculous day to “never forget” – especially in a campaign against terrorism, because it’s probably the single largest terrorist victory to ever occur against the United States. Rather than “never forget”, perhaps it’s a good time to sit back and look what we’ve apparently learned from that day:
America’s reaction over the last five years is depressing. This is a nation that is flailing about like a dog stung on the tail by a bee, trying to catch whatever is causing the pain and end it. This is a nation where the major political parties are so busy trying to convince people that each can protect the voters so much more than the other that neither has the chance to step back and ask exactly what is protection and what is oppression. This is a nation that has lost it’s way and has no one to guide it back.
On the bright side, democratic nations sit in a relatively stable equilibrium. Things do eventually right themselves as people start to wonder what they really were thinking. Freedoms given up during blind panic are slowly won back by those brave enough to stand up for them. It takes decades, but it does come good eventually.
So, what should be never forgotten on September 11th? Nothing. September 11th is nothing special beyond a temporary victory for a terrorist group that isn’t even well supported by America’s enemies. It’s a day that one day I hope America will forget. That one day the self-pity, the fearmongering and the overreactions will end and people will wake on a September 11th and all I’ll have to think is that it’s the birthday of my best man at my wedding, and not the day America temporarily lost itself.
I took a lapse of common sense and went out to get a new joystick, which I’d been looking at for over a year now trying to figure out if I really did want it or not. Turns out I really did want it, and while I was at Best Buy I decided I’d pick up a new flight sim at the same time, to test out the joystick with. Looking through the selection, which consisted of about 3 titles I didn’t already have, I quickly grabbed Blazing Angels as it looked like it had the most recent video engine of anything up there (I’m really looking forward to FlightSim X) to bring home. Figuring that Ubi has gotten past their love affair with the nasty copy protection hackware called StarForce, things should be ok on my x64 system.
Well… I was wrong. Installed the game fine and it even started up fine (but required a reboot to install whatever their latest copy protection idiocy is). Went to play the first mission and it just hung on the loading screen viagra tablets india. A quick trip to their support boards located some patches, which I dutifully applied to no avail. Then I noticed that there were a number of posts with other people complaining of the same thing, with no comment by Ubi and apparently no resolution. This was almost a mirror of the nightmare I had with Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory (which works nicely now thanks to a cracking group that removed the StarForce junk preventing me from playing a game I legally bought), and I decided I wasn’t going to put up with it.
Best Buy were great – I’d prepared for a big showdown on trying to return open software but they happily accepted it when I explained it didn’t work on my x64 system and they exchanged it for a game that did (Microsoft’s Combat Flight Sim 3). I’ll definitely buy from Best Buy again. I might even buy Ubi games and return them if they continue to ignore their customers and ship faulty games, just to make it look bad on their balance sheet.