...more recent posts
I was mentioning this crazy scheme last night to Alex, so here's the link for documentation:
The White List (or "clean list") is proposed policy which will extend government and corporate control over the possession, importation and movement of anything that is alive - plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, everything.In other words, it's not obnoxious enough to make certain plants illegal, they want to make everything a priori illegal, and then make exceptions for just certain plants.
The Plant Protection and Quarantine Safeguarding Review recommends that the United States Department of Agriculture "Consider adopting a modified 'clean list' approach for propagative material, specifying what is permissible subsequent to risk assessment, rather than the current 'dirty list' that prohibits or restricts specific articles only."The cover is that this legislation will protect us from evil invasive species, but you'd have to be pretty dim to think this is trying to protect anything except unbridled profiteering. Look who's behind it:
"Monsanto, DowElanco, American Cyanamid, Zeneca, Dow AgroSciences, SePro, Helena and other herbicide manufactures and "life patent" corporations have funded tremendous propaganda in recent years hyping a spurious "invasive species" threat to natural ecosystems in order to sell more herbicides.(via ethel)
There must be a catch. Silk is a freeware program that enables Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 in all Carbon applications. Mozilla looks amazing with Silk installed! Best upgrade ever. But why doesn't Apple enable this?
I like Silk so much I'm not even going to make fun of them for calling their programs Haxies.
I haven't been too motivated lately. Hopefully that will change soon.
Mozilla is finally done. Officially. Good luck getting through to their servers though. If you want to grab it, try the mirrors.
Apple released a (so far minor) update to X (10.1.5 now.) Stable on two machines so far. Apparently iDisks are much faster, but I can't confirm that personally. If you're running X (sarah, stephen...) click on 'software update' in preferences (that's the light switch icon, don't ask me why) and then click 'update now'.
Apple also released a "public preview" of Quicktime 6. This is built on the new Mpeg 4 standard. Here's a short interview with Jobs. I don't recommend installing this yet, but you can start to work up a little interest. Much better quality at much smaller file sizes (for video and audio.) Now if they could just work out that license fee issue with the MPEG-LA. The also released Quicktime broadcaster looks very interesting too.