Depressing

Does anyone else find this depressing?

Air France's Concorde made its next-to-the-last commercial flight Friday, an emotional trans-Atlantic journey completed in 3 1/2 hours as the supersonic jetliner nears the end of a pioneering chapter in aviation.

Much like our retreating from space since landing on the Moon, we are now retreating from the sky. Early airliners were noisy, dangerous, etc., but we kept going until we finally created the DC-3. They complained about the Boeing 747, but it created the present age of inexpensive air travel. The Concorde was never meant to be the be-all end-all of supersonic flight, but no one ever followed up on the idea. Instead, we regulated it out of existence in the US...for suspect (at best) reasons.

Cover up

So there's this woman in Florida who insists that Florida DMV is violating her right to religious freedom because they insist she remove her veil for her driver's license picture. How this is so, I do not know, especially given that driving is not a right. If you can't comply with the applicable laws for obtaining a driver's license, and Florida requires a full-face photo, then you don't get a DL. Seems simple.

But no, assorted and sundry lobby and "civil rights" groups feel otherwise. What makes this all the more interesting is the sidebar attached to this CNN article. See, the woman is asserting that revealing her face would violate Islamic religious law, a higher authority as it were. But, the sidebar has this to say about photo ID's in established, Muslim countries:

Driver's identification rules in Muslim nations:
Saudi Arabia: Women aren't allowed to drive
Iran: Women wear a traditional chador, which does not cover the face.
Egypt: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
United Arab Emirates: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Oman: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Kuwait: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Qatar: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Bahrain: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Jordan: Women can drive if their faces are covered but do not cover their face in I.D. pictures

Now, don't mean to hold up any of these Arab states are paragons of human rights, but these are countries where Islamic law is often The Law. And they require the veil to come off for photo ID. So who is the higher authority, the "experts" her attorneys will trundle into court, or the existing laws and standards of Islamic states?

Oh, and besides, turns out she's a recent convert, so who is telling her that it is an absolute, no exception, that her face remain covered for "modesty."

Linux on a Laptop

I've dabbled with Linux before, but this time I think it may be serious. Why? Because I have this little old Gateway 600 laptop and it occured ot me that it is the near-equal of my main desktop computer. So why shouldn't it be able to run Linux?

I downloaded Red Hat v9, burned the CD's, put the first one in the laptop's CD drive and...voila, it runs. Not a single install or operational issue so far. The only feature I haven't tried yet is the wireless NIC. The onboard wire NIC is eth0, and the wireless shows as eth1, so the system recognizes it, even correctly ID's the hardware, so sometime this week I'll give it a shot.

I had a brief issue creating a FAT16 partition that would allow me to move files from the Windows XP side to the RH Linux side. Seems that users under Linux couldn't mount the partition, while the root (superuser) account could. Only root didn't have permission to modify the permissions. Weird. A one minute search via Google provided the answer, the correct syntax to add to the fstab file, and voila, problem solved.

(fstab is the file the system parses on boot to tell it how to mount what filesystems -- drives and drive partitions. The line I had to add was "/dev/hda6 /mnt/fat vfat users,noauto,umask=000 0 0". Don't ask me -- yet. It just works.)

Well, no duh!

Why is 'Idol' beats Oscars in viewers surprising? That show had a veneer pretense of not being manipulated toward a conclusion, whereas the Oscars had a lying bastard win an award for best documentary when the tripe he produced clearly was not.

But, hey, as he says, "How can there be inaccuracy in comedy? You know." (Scroll down a bit to read the relevant transcript). So we shan't take any of his sputters too seriously; in fact, not seriously at all.

Day of Defeat

I play this game waaaaay too much. After most of a week of reading torts, contracts, and crim law (oh my!), few things were more relaxing than charging into Thunder, trusty Thompson in hand, blasting away. If you like first person shooters, own a copy of Half-Life, and are willing to play on-line, then you owe it to yourself to go here and download the Day of Defeat mod. Do it for the liberation of humanity...well, if you play on the Allies side, at least. Remember: Back the attack!

Man in Space

See, I agree with this guy when he says:

The bottom line is that the shuttle is too old. ... It would be very difficult to make sure it is in good shape. We ought to just stop going into space until we get a good vehicle. If we aren’t willing to spend the money to do that, then we should be ashamed of ourselves.

How do you honestly dispute the opinion of the guy who designed the shuttle (and darn near everything that came before it)? This stuff looks far more interesting than just cranking out another Columbia-like shuttle.

Don't shoot me, I only type here

All right, I've shamelessly neglected this site, these pages, and the scant attention I ever attracted. Sorry. Is that sufficient? Apologies always seem to make up for things...don't they? C'mon, it's intentions that are important, not results! Haven't you been listening?

Sorry. Again. First year of law school...done! Study mates are taking a full course load during the summer. They want to graduate a year early, bless their little advocate hearts. I just want to survive, thank you very much. Besides, this is the last summer with my daughter; she wings to the USAF come August, just about the time I start Law School Year Two. So, I think I'll leave myself more or less Free this summer, thank you very much. Again.

Quoting Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive": My my my my my my my. So much has happened in recent weeks. We clobbered Iraq. Oh, sure, that was expected, but this fast? With no significant resistance? We paused and The Media lept upon it like we were staggering from a body blow, but really it was 1) the weather, and 2) some more weather. Then, Saddam did pass from the field. Where is Saddam? Reduced to molecules and floating about, or skulking in a cave of one sort or another. I don't care which. He be gone and that's all right by me.

Ah well. Enough for the moment. Time to peruse the news I've been missing....