StarfishOne, on X300 versus MacBook.

A small anonymous correction -- hey, editing the Tibet article probably isn't controversial, flamewar-prone or likely to open me up to retaliation against my IP address, right?

I find most of the anti-M$$$$ snickering here to be utterly dim-witted (see last week's "In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation...", but Source Fource really is pretty embarrassing. It makes their new webcomic about "Lord Firewall" look good by comparison.

Kickersny.com, on Sun/Innotek

The collection of script kiddies who "declared war" on the Church of Scientology last week instead harassed and threatened a California couple they mistook for one of their adversaries. An "Anonymous" spokesh4x0r apologized, setting off a lively debate between dueling cliques of hackers, joined by Scientologists. In hindsight, "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" seems like an odd omission from the tags on the original story here.

I can't access the journal, but the best article title I've seen in a long time:

Female-limited polymorphism in the copulatory organ of a traumatically inseminating insect

The Related Links have some similar gems: "Reducing a cost of traumatic insemination: female bedbugs evolve a unique organ"

I was walking back from the gym, and passed by a conference for the Association for Global Sustainability or something like that. (I forget the exact name, and the MIT calendar for today doesn't mention it. They do list "Breakdance 101 & 202" and "Esperanto II (intermediate)", though.)

Anyway, the Global Sustainability folks had -- two large coolers of bottled water! Uh, hello?!?

IBM Developer Works has an article on 10 Good UNIX Usage Habits, for efficient command-line work. You'll probably find some of it familiar (I'm an xargs fiend already), some of it new (You can mkdir a whole path at once?) and some of it unnecessary (Ehh, I'll keep piping grep to wc -l anyway) but most users should get at least one thing out of it.

Weird song I just heard -- a dancehall attack on (if I'm understanding correctly, which is always doubtful in my interpretation of dancehall lyrics) the teaching of evolution. If the song takes off, maybe he can buy that mastodon skull!

I tried to link the lyrics but Google can't find them.

Via Reddit and The New Freedom: Richard Stallman and a group of MIT students make Steve Ballmer look like T.I. As a YouTube commenter astutely notes:

dat iz dah bezt song ever GO RED GUY OMG YOUJ RULE THE INTERNETS

I know, spelling flames are tacky. But this one made me laugh, and I'm flagging it out of amusement, not malice.

Just this week I had a issue with someone deciding that email made a good real time alert system from an external customer. Problem email isn't real time and/or reliable. So every hick up in email is an issue.

I had to reread that a couple of times before realizing that he wasn't complaining about hillbilly users.

• I was just walking through MIT and saw, for the first time, someone working on an OLPC. Seeing the thing in reality, I'm even less convinced by the conspiracy theories about how a terrified Bill Gates is trying to destroy it -- it looks like a pack of Altoids with a monitor in the lid.
• The slow-motion trainwreck of Gentoo continues. It's sad, as Gentoo at its peak was a great distribution and one of the most helpful communities in the open-source world. Back to CentOS for me, I think.

This one made me laugh, though. This, too.

...but this guy makes me want to climb through the monitor and smack him.

Really, if you're going to try to pull rank on 12-year-old girls, you need something in your own pocket a little better than freaking Radiohead.

I'd never heard of One, Two, Three until it was on TCM last night -- absolutely hilarious. I agree with the IMDB reviewer who said: "This, and not Doctor Strangelove, is the supreme satire of the Cold War."

I guess it was filmed right before the Berlin Wall was built; I'd never seen the Brandenburg Gate area without the wall.