Posted 10:52 PM by Floyd

The San Jose Mercury News is a lazy monopoly newspaper whose employees have learned nothing about politics since 1968. The Merc offends me in a lot of ways, but what I object to most is that the paper's values and ideas don't match up with those of Silicon Valley.

But the Mercury News does have one Silicon Valley characteristic down pat: It can bash Microsoft with the fervor of Scott McNealy. Here is a recent editorial, which advised the European Union to break out the thumbscrews and rack when investigating Microsoft's "anti-trust" behavior:

VALUABLE REMEDIES

• Forcing Microsoft to remove its Media Player from Windows to give rivals a chance. The bundled Media software in Windows gives Microsoft a huge advantage in the battle to dominate software and programming for music and video.

That's an interesting stance, considering that Mecury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor, whom I assume has a hand in editorials like this, had the following to say about bundling last August 31:

It's almost criminal that all digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable-modem companies don't give customers firewall and e-mail virus protection as part of their services.

There are companies that produce firewall and anti-virus software as their main product line. I doubt they would appreciate being undercut in this manner. And the ISP's, such as AOL and SBC, are pretty damn big companies. It's the height of evil for giant company Microsoft to bundle software, but if giant company SBC does not bundle software, little Nell will lose her mortgage as the train runs over her. Okay.

I would like to thank the Mercury News for being so steadfast in looking out for my interests. Given as to how about the fourth or fifth thing that I am likely to do after unpacking a new computer is to play a song or a movie on it.

There are people who make their living selling and installing car stereos. Maybe we should prohibit auto manufacturers from offering radios and CD players as options.

• Force Microsoft to provide extensive disclosure of its software interfaces, so rival software makers and their customers can inter-operate easily with Windows PCs.
  

Yes, Microsoft's behavior with respect to third-party Windows developers is horrible. Remember when Microsoft sold UMAX a license to produce Windows clone machines? And then refused to renew the license, putting Umax out of business?

Oh wait, that wasn't Microsoft who did that. It was Apple. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, just a few miles west of San Jose. You never hear the Mercury News complain about Apple's anti-competitive behavior.

Just coincidence, I expect.

• The EC is considering slapping Microsoft with hefty fines, which would put a dent into ill-gotten monopoly profits. Even huge sums -- in the billions -- would be a small price to pay for Microsoft, which has amassed some $50 billion in cash.

Yes, I know. It's jarring, but you have to get used the fact that at any moment when reading a Mercury News editorial, you will lose your moorings entirely and drift off to fantasyland. Does the editorial writer really think that the US would stand for a multibillion dollar fine levied by the EC against an American company? Does the Mercury News think it's a good idea for political entities to levy multi-billion dollar fines against foreign companies? What if the US Congress decided it disapproved of the Swedish welfare state, and told Ericsson to pay up a few gigabucks?

And has there been a freedom-fries loving, frog-bashing, German-beer-boycotting blogger who thinks as little of Europe as the Mercury News? Imagine, a collection of nations with over three hundred million citizens, containing some of the finest minds and most respected technology companies on the planet -- all held hostage by some 50,000 Americans!

Posted 11:30 PM by Floyd

I am continually astonished by the success of the American abortion lobby. The most visible and vocal of the pro-abortion groups use arguments and propaganda suitable more for feeding persecution fantasies than for changing opinions. Yet access to abortion is unlimited across the land.

At first glance abortion would seem to be a fertile area for compromise. A fetus at, say, two months is tiny, and not recognizable as human. A fetus at the end of term, seven or eight months, could survive independently outside the womb. In my opinion, viewing early term abortion as murder is ludicrous; you might as well feel guilty for slapping on a rubber. Late term abortion, on the other hand, appears to me the cruellest of technicalities: "Hey little guy, I'll bet you wish you could make it out this fifteen centimeters of birth canal, huh? Then you'd be a person with rights!"

Yet the abortion lobby is intransigent. President Bush just signed a law banning late-term abortions. Three federal judges rushed to file injunctions. In the one case I heard about, the judge issued a stay because the legislation did not consider the health of the mother. I wasn't aware that this was a constitutional right, or for that matter was relevant in any other kind of criminal law. (When some nut drowns her kids in the bathtub we don't expect her to go into court and say that murdering her kids was necessary for her health.)

Militant abortionists can also rely on puff pieces from sympathetic journalists -- this piece is an excerpt from tomorrow's Mercury News:

Young take hard-won right to choose for granted
By Sue Hutchison
Mercury News

Erika Jackson is wondering if the events of this month will serve as a wake-up call to her classmates that they're in danger of losing one of their most fundamental rights. Maybe this is what it will take for them to finally get the message.

Jackson, a 27-year-old student at San Jose State and president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance on campus, is getting her group ready to launch an informational blitz on the threat to abortion rights. President Bush supplied the rallying cry last week when he signed the first law banning a specific abortion procedure since the Roe vs. Wade decision granted women the right to abortion in 1973.

Maybe Jackson's classmates don't know that ``partial birth abortion,'' which the new law would ban, is not a medical term but a propaganda phrase. Maybe young women think the ban could never affect their lives.
...

So "partial birth abortion" is not a medical term? What on earth does that have to do with anything? The president, senators, and representatives deal with the federal legal code; other common legal terms such as "homicide" and "assault" are not medical terms either. Let me know if Bush et al agitate to teach at Stanford Medical School.

Of course what really sticks in the "Feminist Majority Leadership" craw is not that "partial birth abortion" is propaganda; what offends them is that it is effective propaganda. (So was the locution "killing fields," which described Khmer Rouge death camps. Shall we abandon that phrase because "field" is not an agricultural term?)

Incompetent argumentation by pro-abortion forces has been the norm for at least a decade. Consider the venue of bumper stickers. The only pro-abortion slogan that I found compelling was "US out of my uterus". Other popular catch phrases included:

• "If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?" We do trust mothers with their children -- but if they kill them, we prosecute them. This would be a fine slogan if pregnant women were kept under 24-hour watch for fear that they would visit an abortionist. The anti-abortion riposte -- "it's a child, not a choice" -- was devastating. (The abortion lobby's fanatacism prevents them from making the powerful argument that early term fetuses are not children; they would then be exposed to the counter-argument that partial-birth abortion is equivalent to killing a newborn, and some 0.5% of abortions would be in jeopardy.)
  
• "If men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament." If men got pregnant they would be ... women. This insults women who are anti-abortion, and men who are pro-abortion for that matter. There must be some leftist guideline that if you have the choice between persuading and insulting, choose the insult.
  
• "Every child a wanted child." Surely the most vile of all the pro-abortion slogans. Why not "Every Jew a wanted Jew"?
  

Posted 9:20 PM by Floyd

Colby Cosh linked to four pages of the worst hockey logos ever. This stuff is so funny it will induce seizures, so take care.

I was surprised at the number of professional, albeit minor league, hockey teams that were supported by cities I had never heard of. For example, the Brandon Wheat Kings. What is a Brandon? I guessed Nebraska, but actually Brandon is in Manitoba. It lies 120 miles west of Winnipeg and has a population of about 42,000.

Then there were the Johnstown Chiefs. Any guesses? I was wary of my guess of "New York," figuring I had conflated Johnstown with Jamestown. Johnstown is actually in Pennsylvania, between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Johnstown had 29,000 residents in 1990, but only 24,000 in 2000. I assume the residents were despondent over the inconsistent spelling of cities ending in "Burg/Burgh".

The Fayetteville Force: I remembered that Fayetteville is in Arkansas. It is in the northwest corner of the state and has 60,000 people.

Then there was the Kelowna Rockets. I could not even begin to guess where Kelowna was, and Googled my way to the town web page. There I discovered that Kelowna is "the largest city in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley." What is the second largest city in the Okanagan Valley? Here are some quick facts about Kelowna:

• Kelowna is home to 96,000 people.
  
• Kelowna is well known for its hot summers and temperate winters.
  
• The average daytime high during July and August is 27.40 C.
  
• The average daytime high during December and January is -0.30 C. The average low is -7.70 C.
  

27.4 Celsius is 81.3 Fahrenheit. I guess you could own a pool. -7.7 Celsius is 18.1 Fahrenheit. I guess you could ... freeze your dick off.

Anyway, what's up with these Canadian city websites? The Kelowna website had none of this data on the front page and I had to search for it. The website for Brandon had no information on population at all, even through the search tool, so I gave up and Googled it.

Posted 9:11 PM by Floyd

So today I was driving to work and listening to the CBS radio news. One of the main stories at the 10 o'clock news hour was that it was Veteran's Day. There was some coverage of parades, and Bush's speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then a reporter decided to take the pulse of veteran opinion. He did this in the time-honored way, with two soundbites of contrasting opinions.

One veteran was quoted as saying "No matter what your opinion on Iraq, you have to respect the soldiers who are over there."

The reporter then shifted points of view:

But this soldier at the Vietnam memorial was not sure that America should be in Iraq. "I'm not sure exactly what our business is for being over there."

There may have been more reportage, and I may not have the words exactly right, because I swore and turned off the radio.

I object to the stupid and stereotyped manner in which broadcast media present contentious matters of policy, as if there were exactly two sides to each issue and that the public were always divided 50-50 between them. It's like pretending that you can view a landscape by closing one eye, looking at it for a few seconds, and then moving to the opposite end and taking another quick view with your other eye.

I object to the way in which the media manipulates the "balanced" ritual of opposing viewpoints for their own ends. The reporter balanced one person saying that America should not have invaded Iraq with another person saying that regardless of our views, we should support the troops there.

I am thankful that I live in an age where the broadcast media are not my only choices. I can benefit from the efforts of myriad reporters, fact-checkers, and critics.

Posted 10:57 PM by Floyd

Michele Catalano (of A Small Victory fame) has had to shut down comments on her posts because the various participants were a nasty and insulting lot. When she closes down comments for this post, it will be for a different reason: Because she is inundated with geeks proffering advice on board games.

I quote Michele:

I got bored of playing Monopoly with my son. I need some variety in my life and his idea of variety was alternating between Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly, Yankee Monopoly and NHL Monopoly.

So we went through our other board games. Operation: missing pieces. Scrabble: too boring for DJ. Outburst: played all the cards already. Same with Scattegories and Pictionary.

Rather than take a trip to Toys 'R' Us for a new board game - where I would be distracted by all the action figures and DJ would be distracted by all the video games and we would come home at least $100 poorer and still without a new board game - we decided to go to the next best place: my mother's attic.

...

And then I hit the jackpot of bad memories. My parents' cocktail parties/board game extravaganzas came flooding out of that place where you stick memories that make you embarassed to have been alive in the early late 60's and early 70's.

They were always playing Probe. The women with their bouffant hairdos, the men with ridiculous sideburns, the peanuts and drinks like White Russians and Brandy Alexanders and the kitchen filled with smoke. And how they would laugh and laugh at things I wasn't supposed to know about, like the sexual connotations about the word probe . How amusing it is when you have a friend sleep over and your parents are having one of their board game soirees and there's fondue and bottles of rum on the table and suddenly your mother shouts "Her word is fucking!"

Anyhow.

I was holding in my hands a dusty, dingy, but otherwise near mint condition 1964 original version of Probe. Of course I took it home. ...

When I an adolescent and first started to play games, in the late 70's, there were three kinds of board games.

First, there were a lot of random silly games. A perfect example is Life. Life is played by spinning a wheel and moving your little plastic car the indicated number of spaces. You then do whatever the space tells you. You have a very limited number of strategic choices; as I best remember my last game, in about 1978, it behooves you to go to college and to purchase whatever insurance is offered to you.

There were a whole bunch of games like Life. As you can tell, I didn't like Life. Nor was I enthralled with Parcheesi, or Sorry.

The second type of game was just one game: Monopoly. Monopoly acts like it's a trivial little roll-and-do-it board game, but it's cheating. Monopoly takes much longer than the simple board games I listed, and winning demands intelligent play, not merely lucky die rolls. Monopoly was created during the Depression, by an unemployed man named Charles Darrow. As far as I can tell, every other board game of the period was a triviality such as CandyAss, I mean CandyLand. Darrow's creation was an anachronism, like da Vinci's sketches of helicopters.

Risk is another game which is somewhat complex and skill-based. But Risk strikes me as a game which could be so much more. The strategic options are limited to taking an easy-to-acquire continent, like Australia. Also the constantly increasing value of card trade-ins makes the game inflationary and dilutes the input of sound play.

The third kind of game was the hard-core strategic simulation. This genre saw the light of day in 1958, with the publication of Tactics II (about which I know nothing; I believe it was a combat simulation involving individual units and tanks). The first such game that I played was called D-Day. My dad had an old set, probably from the original printing in the 60's. The board was a big hex map of France. The Germans, colored pink, set up their defense. Then the Allies, colored blue, invaded. Each turn represented one week. Combat mechanics were rather strange; if you moved adjacent to a unit you had to attack it! The pieces were marked with military symbols (an X for infantry, a TV oval for armor) and the effect on my 11-year-old mind was both intimidating and dazzling.

When I was in sixth grade and living in Denver, the great Steve Jackson was making his mark on the game scene at a company called MetaGaming. MetaGaming sold little "MicroGames" which consisted of small dozen-page rulebooks, a sheet of counters, and a paper map. The whole package took up as much space as a folded road map. The games sold for $2.95, and I saved up my newspaper route money for them. Some of the games, like Black Hole and Invasion of the Air-Eaters, were real duds. But the futuristic combat of Ogre and GEV was well done. There was a fighting game (Melee) and spellcasting game (Wizard) which were made into a role-playing game called The Fantasy Trip. (Many Melee/Wizard elements were incorporated into Steve Jackson's current GURPS system.)

While these games were cheap and relatively simple, they were still strategy games with odds, dice rolls, and paper bookkeeping.

I followed up my experience with D-Day when I got Third Reich in 1979. Third Reich is a full strategic simulation of World War II in Europe. This was a game that was impressive, but rather frustrating and exhausting to play.

I don't remember any good games coming out when I was in high school. As I entered college, Milton Bradley released Axis and Allies. This was a very simplified World War II game, but it did have an economic aspect (you had an income derived from your total territory, which paid for your forces) and cool little plastic soldiers.

When I got out of college I was finally exposed to other board games. At first I played complex Avalon Hill games. For awhile my favorite thing to do on a rainy weekend day was to play Civilization. This was a great game, but it was long. If you cracked the whip and hustled the players along, you might finish a game in eight hours. This was the problem with many of the classic board games, including also Diplomacy and Illuminati: They were long games.

In 1996, a friend turned me onto a game called Settlers of Cataan. He had the original German version, yclept Die Siedler. This is a game set on an island with big hexes producing sheep, wheat, bricks, wood, and stone. Each hex has a number on it, and every turn two dice are rolled; the hexes with matching numbers produce their commodity for the players who have settlements on them. The object of the game is to use the raw materials to build roads, new settlements on those roads, and bonus cards. You trade your commodities with the other players. This was a new kind of game: It had fun mechanics, took some brainpower to play, and could be finished in an hour or two.

After the success of Settlers, many new games hit the market. Many of these games, like Settlers were originally German; the Germans seem to have a real gift for devising clever but simple games.

When Sherry and I moved into our current house, we bought a lot of furniture. One of the pieces we bought was a six-foot tall cabinet with three drawers on the bottom and some shelves that are accessed by two glass doors. Some silly people might use this item for displaying china. I use it for my games. Here is an impromptu review of some of the games in my game cabinet (and a few others that my friends own and I play frequently):

Settlers of Cataan I have already described. There are many sequels to this game; most I have not warmed to but Seafarers (which adds ships that can link to isolated islands) is reasonable. Settlers plays with 3 or 4 (and there is an expansion for 5 or 6). The two-player version of Settlers is quite good; so is the two-player Starfarers (a high-tech sequel to Settlers).

Acquire is an Avalon Hill classic from the 70's that was recently republished. The board is a grid of 12x10 squares, and every turn you play a chit onto that grid. Two or more adjacent squares represent a hotel chain. When a chain is created, stock is issued, and on every turn you may buy stock in whatever chains have formed. If you play a square that joins two chains, you have merged them. The majority and secondary shareholders in the smaller chain are paid off, and that chain may be recreated later. This is a fun game for 3, 4, or 5.

Ra is an interesting Egyptology game that consists of auctions. Each player tries to collect sets of monuments, rivers, pharaohs, and gods. You have three or four money tiles that have a value between 1 and 15. Each time some goods are auctioned off, the winning money tile is placed there -- and the money from the previous auction is taken by the winning player, to be used in the next round. Ra is short (45 minutes) and can be played by 3, 4, or 5.

The Bean Game, also known as Bohnanza, is the best card game ever created. The deck consists of types of beans, each marked with an even number which is the count of those beans in the deck. For instance there are eight red beans, and twenty blue beans. You have a hand full of beans. Unlike any other card game you have ever played, you may not rearrange your hand. Each turn you plant the beans that are at the front of your hand, trade other beans in your hand, and draw more beans into the back of your hand. You have only two bean fields and each field must contain beans of the same type. Because the beans increase in value as you collect more, you will be frantically trying to arrange your hand so that you can continue to grow your fields. Great fun for 4 to 7 players.

Puerto Rico is a longer and tougher game. I have won, but never feel like I am sure what the right strategy is. You build up your plantation by acquiring crop fields, workers, and special buildings. This is a game with lots of interesting options: You can try to specialize in high-value goods, or you can deliver lots of cheap goods. Puerto Rico can be played by 3, 4, or 5 players.

Carcassonne is a fun game where the board is different every time you play. Each turn you draw a tile, which contains a road, city, and/or farmland. You may place this tile anywhere on the board, as long as its edges match those of the tiles it is placed next to. You place your markers on cities, roads, and farms, and collect points when a feature is completed. This is quick fun for 3 or 4 players. I've taught my seven-year-old nephew to play. He's pretty good!

For you Lord of the Rings fans, there is an excellent board game based on the movie. LOTR is fun because it is cooperative: All the players help each other out in their quest to destroy the ring. The game consists of several scenarios (four in the basic game, six with an expansion). In each scenario, the players must use cards to move a token along three main tracks. This must be done before the main events marker is moved too far -- the events towards the end of this event track are really nasty. LOTR is fun because you constantly feel that you are on the brink of disaster. LOTR plays well with 2 to 4 players.

Posted 12:54 PM by Floyd

Oh yeah dude.





(Link via Michelle Catalano.)

Posted 12:36 PM by Floyd

And now, another round of Fisk a Mercury News editorial!

It's time to protect teens by targeting alcohol ads.

It's time for a newspaper to inveigh against free speech.

The Marlboro Man and Joe Camel are gone from the airwaves, but the Coors twins and the Labatt bear have become fixtures on TV, hawking another product that is lethal and illegal in the hands of teens.

Lethal when misused. And hardly illegal; teens can drink at home under their parents' supervision.

(Did you think it was remarkable that a Merc editorial displays factual ignorance in the first sentence? It's not.)

A new study out of Georgetown University found that a substantial amount of beer ads on TV and in magazines reach an underage audience, despite industry standards that prohibit marketing to kids.

As a result of this study, children will be prohibited from watching adult television. All dramas, comedies, news, and sporting events will be rated NC-17.

It also found that the industry's ``drink responsibly'' commercials are more likely to be seen by parents than by the teens they are supposed to reach.

Georgetown University found out that adults are more responsible than teenagers. Learn the names of these researchers now so that you can make intelligent conversation when the Nobel Prizes are handed out.

And it found that drinking is too often promoted in films aimed at teens. Last weekend's top grossing film was ``Scary Movie 3'' which features the sexy Coors twins. The movie is rated PG-13.

Scary Movie 3 will be retroactively rated XXX. All teenagers who saw it will brainwashed into the belief that the Coors twins died in the movie due to cirrhosis of the liver. Also, all models who appear in beer commercials will be prohibited from appearing in movies. They will be kept in special underground chambers away from the public eye. Otherwise a child might see them!

Their guards will be childless, and sterilized.

(Did you think it was remarkable that Mercury News editorialists treated Scary Movie 3 seriously, as if it was some kind of cult recruiting propaganda penned by L. Ron Hubbard? It's not. To be a Merc opinion writer, it is necessary to lack perspective -- the world must look to you a Picasso painting.)

For years, the alcohol industry has policed itself, banning ads that feature young-looking models or explicit sex. But the Georgetown study shows it's time for independent oversight.

The alcohol industry does not "police itself". It attempts to persuade consumers to buy its products. Does the Mercury News "police itself" when it decides not to publish sexually explicit or graphically violent photographs?

(Did you think it was remarkable that the Merc -- which would shriek like a wounded eagle if the state or federal government attempted to censor it -- so enthusiastically calls for the censorship of law-abiding manufacturers? It's not. I would call these people hypocrites, but I wonder if they have the intelligence or perspective to see that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.)

The National Academy of Sciences recently found that teen drinking costs more than $50 billion a year, including $19 billion for traffic accidents. A National Institutes of Health study last year linked drinking on college campuses to 1,400 deaths, 500,000 injuries and 70,000 sexual assaults annually.

Publication of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf were linked to fifty million murders and as many assaults. We must do something about publishers!

Yet public efforts to keep kids from drinking pale compared with campaigns against tobacco and illegal drugs. The feds spend only about $70 million a year to teach kids about alcohol abuse, compared with $1.8 billion on drug abuse and $100 million on smoking.

Let's devote the entire federal budget to convince teenagers not to be inexperienced and foolish.