Overnight Open Thread

Open | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 10:20:42 pm PDT

The best mirror is an old friend.

— George Herbert

The Door Opens - Update: The Door Closes

Open | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 7:55:53 pm PDT

Registration is open for a limited time on a Sunday evening. Read the fine print and do not transgress, lest ye be blocked.

UPDATE at 10/12/08 8:31:09 pm:

Registration is now closed, with 65 hatchlings.

Tighten Up

Video | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 7:39:33 pm PDT

The major-seventh wisdom of Archie Bell and the Drells echoes down through the ages.

Make it mellow, now.

Youtube Video

Presidential Campaign Trolls

Politics | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 6:24:13 pm PDT

Go ahead, Ace. It needs to be said.

Trolls can really ruin your day. And even, your presidential campaign.

Tech Note: Do the Tighten Up

Sci/Tech | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:48:56 pm PDT

In the latest tech note that will inevitably become an open thread, still more outdated code has been trimmed, modernized, and tightened up in the LGF Blog Engine templates. The comment entry form that registered users see is now table-free, using floated elements to create a table-like look for the form inputs, with labels right aligned and fields left aligned on a central point.

There are two areas left that still use tables: 1) the comment meta line with username, icon, etc. (we could do it with lists or DIVs, but CSS vertical alignment within block level elements stinks and it ends up looking lopsided and breaking as soon as the text size is increased), and 2) the Statistics drop-down menu in the left sidebar (because a table is appropriate for that kind of tabular data).

That vertical alignment thing is a sore subject with many web designers; it’s currently the top-rated item on Webmonkey’s CSS Wishlist.

Update: Haider Was Speeding When He Crashed

World | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 4:25:58 pm PDT

An update to the story of the death of Austrian Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider: Austria far-right leader Haider speeding before fatal crash.

VIENNA (AFP) – Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider was driving at more than twice the speed limit after going to a nightclub when he crashed and died this weekend, court officials said Sunday.

Haider was doing 142 kilometres (88 miles) per hour in a 70kph zone when he crashed in the early hours of Saturday, the prosecutors’ office said.

Prosecutor Gottfried Kranza did not say whether Haider had tested positive for alcohol.

Coming Soon: The Pain Ray

Sci/Tech | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 2:54:08 pm PDT

A ray that causes intense pain but (when used as directed) no lasting injury: Army Orders Pain Ray Trucks; New Report Shows ‘Potential for Death’.

After years of testing, the Active Denial System — the pain ray which drives off rioters with a microwave-like beam — could finally have its day. The Army is buying five of the truck-mounted systems for $25 million. But the energy weapon may face new hurdles, before it’s shipped off to the battlefield; a new report details how the supposedly non-lethal blaster could be turned into a flesh-frying killer.

The contract for the pain ray trucks is “expected to be awarded by year’s end,” Aviation Week notes. “A year after the contract is signed, the combination vehicle/weapons will start be fielded at the rate of one per month.”

It’s been a very long time coming. As we’ve previously reported, there have been calls to deploy the Active Denial System in Iraq going back to 2004. But it’s always been delayed for legal, political, and public relations reasons. Anything that might be condemned as torture is political dynamite. Interestingly, the version being bought is not the full-size “Version 2,” but a containerized system known as Silent Guardian, which Raytheon have been trying to sell for some time. They describe Silent Guardian as “roughly 1/3 the size and power of the other Active Denial Systems,” and quote it’s range as “greater than 250 meters.” The larger system has a range somewhere in excess of 700 meters.

Obama Campaign Covering Up Involvement with ACORN?

Politics | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 11:52:09 am PDT

The Cleveland Leader has a series of posts tracking the Obama campaign’s lies and evasions about the candidate’s long history of connections with ACORN, and their attempts to quietly edit the Obama website as more information leaks out: Obama Campaign Involved in More Cover-Ups in ACORN Scandal.

Wikileaks.org has an article from the Winter 2003 edition of the magazine Social Policy (the full article is here, but requires registration), making it very clear that Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN are extensive.

(Here’s our local copy of the PDF file.)

[Photo caption: “ACORN members meet with Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama. Photo courtesy Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.”]

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

Iran Sets Preconditions for US Meeting

World | Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 8:51:49 am PDT

Barack Obama may intend to meet with Iran without preconditions (yes, he did say it, no matter how often he tries to deny it now), but Iran isn’t granting Obama the same courtesy: Iran’s Vice President Sets Two Preconditions for Talks with US.

They’re very simple conditions, really. Just remove all US forces from the Middle East, and abandon Israel to the wolves.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.

It is the Americans who are in dire need of reestablishing ties with Iran, he underlined.

Iran is not obliged to reestablish ties with the U.S., he said. “If they take our advice, grounds for such talks would be well prepared,” he said.

Overnight Open Thread

Open | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 10:09:08 pm PDT

We must believe in free will — we have no choice.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Door Opens - Update: The Door Closes

Sci/Tech | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 6:50:16 pm PDT

Registration is open, the troll early warning systems are enabled, and here’s your chance if you’ve been waiting to join the Lizardoid Army.

Read the fine print. We’re not just sayin’ that. If you transgress the rules, your account(s) will be blocked.

UPDATE at 10/11/08 7:34:56 pm:

The door has closed, with 126 hatchlings.

Tech Note: Tightening the Systems

Sci/Tech | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 5:56:22 pm PDT

Behind the scenes, the LGF Blog Engine code is being radically reworked, especially in pages with comments. By optimizing the HTML/Javascript/CSS design, we’ve managed to reduce the size (defined as the amount of HTML code it takes to render the comment in your browser) of each individual comment by about half.

Half, I say. Half.

This is a very good thing, because until we implement Ajax pagination of comments (on the drawing board), reducing the size of each comment is the best way to reduce the size of the entire page. In a page with a thousand comments, saving 10 bytes per comment results in a 10K savings on the size of the page. (And these changes have saved a lot more than 10 bytes per comment.)

Most of the trimming took place in the various elements that make up the top line of each comment, what Stinky and I call the “meta” line; the line that contains the icon and name of the user who posted it, the time and date, and all those little icons for rating, favoriting, reporting, etc. There was a lot of duplicated functionality in that meta line, and it’s all stripped down now.

The meta line is the only remaining table in our main templates, because a table still gives the best display results in all browsers and resolutions. But this table is about as optimized and CSS-ized as we can make it.

The usual web monkey advice applies: if something exhibits odd behavior or refuses to work entirely, clear your browser cache and refresh the page.

As always with these tech threads, big ups to the grooviest Javascript library in the known world, jQuery, without which this would be immeasurably more painful.

Chomsky on Palin

Politics | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 4:00:42 pm PDT

In a cage match to the death between Germany’s Der Spiegel and Noam Chomsky, who would you root for? Interview with Noam Chomsky: ‘The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System’.

SPIEGEL: Do you prefer the team on the other side: the 72 year old Vietnam veteran McCain and Sarah Palin, former Alaskan beauty queen?

Chomsky: This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars, they would think the country has gone insane.

Saturday Morning Open

Open | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 11:14:44 am PDT

When things get weird, reload.

— Stinky Beaumont

Gawker.com Publishes Fake Sarah Palin SATs

Politics | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 9:20:10 am PDT

Gawker.com, the ethics-devoid pseudo-blog that published Sarah Palin’s private email, is now hawking another creepy little invasion of privacy: Sarah Palin’s High-School Grades?

But this is what happens when you race to the bottom and sneer at ethical behavior along the way; you get taken in by obvious fakes: Nutroots use my SAT scoresheet to forge ‘Palin Grades’.

Idiots.

Austrian Fascist Leader Dies in Car Crash

World | Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 8:46:44 am PDT

Neo-fascist Austrian politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a car crash.

Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a road accident, police reports say.

Haider died near Klagenfurt in Carinthia, his political stronghold. He was driving alone when his car came off the road and he suffered severe head and chest injuries, police told the Austrian APA news agency.

The 58-year-old was a former leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, and was known for his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.

Police investigators in Klagenfurt told the BBC that investigations into the crash were under way.
He had reportedly been due to attend his mother’s 90th birthday celebrations later in the day.

“For us this is the end of the world,” the deputy leader of Haider’s Alliance for Austria’s Future, Stefan Petzner, told Austrian news agency, APA.