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I agree with you in general regarding China's pollution problem, but the racist overtones (Egg Foo Young?) are unnecessary.

That said, maybe if you look back at the industrial revolution in "cleaner" countries, we were just as bad. Read accounts of Liverpool in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. Or how about chemical pollution in the US until the 1970s?

China's position on pollution is no different than what other countries went through... the difference is just one of scale.

This does not mean that China's attitude towards pollution is any more tenable, but it helps if we consider the processes by which other countries cleaned up their acts. Of note, grassroots support for a cleaner environment is problematic in China, given their political system, and the ease by which laws can be overlooked.

But it doesn't reflect well on Americans (or other Westerners) to chastise China while ignoring our own sordid past.

From the New York Times comes this tasty bit of idiocy that takes tech too far.

I envision more accidents as people check for spaces and then rush to get to the free spaces before they are available but I guess I'm a cynic.

The iPhone 2.0 software update has been unlocked. Gizmodo has received a test release from the iphone-dev team:

If you were wondering how I was doing push email tests on iPhone OS 2.0 and Vodafone UK, this is the reason why. The code wizard commandos at the iPhone Dev Team have been working on this non-stop since the early days of beta testing. In fact, I had iPhone OS 2.0 running on my iPhone since last week. That was version 5A345, two below 5A347, but identical in functionality.

The iphone-dev team says they are close to releasing an unlock for the iPhone 3G but are not there yet.
http://gizmodo.com/5023971/iphone-os-20-unlocked-yes

carlzum writes "The Atlantic has an interesting article on the Internet's influence on our thinking. From the article:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image... The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Personally, I believe sites like Google, Wikipedia, and Dictionary.com allow me to acquire more diverse knowledge than books do and hasn't harmed my concentration. Has the Internet weakened or strengthened your ability to think?"
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

DesScorp writes "In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd Amendment confers an individual right to own guns, the first time a definitive ruling on the issue has been given in 200 years. The case strikes down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban, one of the strictest in the nation. Legal experts believe the ruling still allows for some level of regulation, but the ruling was a blow to those that say the 2nd Amendment was a "collective right" tied to militia membership, not an individual right."

croftj writes "For us folks who like to shoot cats off our fence as well as protect our homes, the Supreme Court made and unprecedented ruling stating that Constitution gives individuals the right to own guns. http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSWBT00928420080626?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true"

I woke up this morning and saw that the Supreme Court is upholding our Second Amendment rights. Four justices dissented, apparently believing that when the Second Amendment explicitly forbids the government from restricting gun rights, that this does not constitute "limit[ing] the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."

I'm still scratching my head over that one. Maybe it will make more sense when I am fully awake. I doubt it, though.

The next thing I saw was that the WA State Democrats have removed their racist ad against Dino Rossi. The ad featured the theme song from The Sopranos, attempting to leverage negative stereotypes of Italians to help make Rossi look bad.

The Democrats deny wrongdoing, saying, "It's a catchy song, which we thought jibed stylistically with our communication about Rossi's designated attack squad."

Pull the other one.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

krgallagher writes "In a 5 — 4 ruling, the Supreme Court has struck down a DC handgun ban in the high court's first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the majority. At issue in District of Columbia v. Heller was whether Washington's ban violated the right to "keep and bear arms" by preventing individuals — as opposed to state militias — from having guns in their homes. Scalia was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are all considered conservative voices on the court. Justice Anthony Kennedy, often seen as a swing vote, also joined the majority."

penguin_dance writes "The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a DC's hand gun control law and ruled ruled on Thursday, for the first time in the nation's history, that individual Americans have the constitutional right to own guns for personal use rather than tied to service in a state militia. The court ruling was 5-4."

If the Heller case -- the one about the DC gun ban -- goes as expected tomorrow, we will hear cries from the left about "judicial activism."

You may not know what that phrase means, especially in that context, so I'll try to help out.

To a liberal who uses the phrase, a decision they dislike is "judicial activism." To a conservative, any decision which is not justified by the law is "judicial activism."

That means that a conservative can call something judicial activism even if he thinks it is the right thing, but that it was done in the wrong way (e.g., upholding a ban on medical marijuana via "interstate commerce"), while a liberal can call something judicial activism even if it follows the law completely, but they simply believe the law should be something else (e.g., the likely outcome of tomorrow's gun case).

I hope this helps you wade through the discussions tomorrow.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Basically, he's the only Democrat who ISN'T caving right now. And that is a change...

Ummm...the only? The article you quoted has Reid saying he'd fight. Conyers fought it. Nadler fought it. Feingold fought it. Now that it's going to the Senate, Leahy and Dodd will likely lead the charge against it. (My not-paying-much-attention understanding is that Dodd's been pretty amazing about this stuff for some time now.)

There are a lot of Democrats putting up a decent fight. Just not enough. (And to be Fair and Balanced about it, there are some Republicans doing the right thing too, including our usually-hated Senator Arlen Specter.)

Pelosi, however, is made of fail.

Richter X writes "The newest update to the Nintendo Wii's Menu, version 3.3, contains code specifically designed to find and kill the popular Twilight Hack used by homebrewers to play unauthorized code on the Wii. The update also prevents the Freeloader software used to play imported games on the Wii. However, it does not seem to affect the Homebrew Channel in Wiis that already have it installed. The updated code is currently being researched in order to find what code has been changed. So far it has been confirmed that Nintendo included specific instructions to target the Twilight Hack. Work is also being done to update the Twilight Hack in order to bypass this new code."

With these new tools, [Kurzweil] says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves. This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly. "My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer," Dr. Ramachandran said. "You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03tier.html?em&ex=1212724800&en=8f7eabdb7e5ce8d3&ei=5087%0A

James 1:26-27 writes "A bar trial judge has released a report recommending that Jack Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 misconduct charges levied against him. There's a hearing scheduled for June 4th and Judge Tunis will make a final report in early September, but this would seem to indicate that his legal career is in jeopardy. It was, perhaps, imprudent of him to send the court a picture book containing swastikas, a copied dollar bill, monkeys, cartoon squirrels, and a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it to help the court understand his arguments after the court originally found his pleadings to be incomprehensible. When asked for comment on the case, he was quoted as saying, 'I don't have to relive [the nine day trial] for a twit who couldn't care less what really happened there, asshole.'"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080520-judges-report-in-jack-thompson-case-guilty-on-27-charges.html