Well we kinda knew that.

12-11-2008 - Levin, McCain Release Executive Summary and Conclusions of Report on Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody : Senator Carl Levin: News Release

Gist: Torture ordered at the highest level.

Executive summary here.

Great moments from The Office

Obama Modifies 'Yes We Can' Message To Exclude Area Loser

The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

"COLUMBIA, SC—In a nationally televised speech Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama altered his vision of a unified America to exclude Dayton, OH loser Nate Walsh."

The Onion's still got it sometimes.

Apture thoughts

Ok so things new things are cropping up on this here little read blog, but I wanted to take a moment to go a bit meta and talk about Apture. All this popping media is embedded via that slick new Websy Deucy app called Apture. According to its developers, "Apture provides the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences." And lemme tell you it does exactly that, and it does it pretty darn well.

Pros:
Ohmigosh is linking to just about anything easy. While writing I still insert my main links via copy pasta or manually, but afterward I publish the post, turn on the Apture editing interface, and deep to my heart's content. I've even started just dropping a marker ^before and after^ what I want to link and then using Apture to put straight web links in after composing.

Link controls... don't want PDFs popping inline? Turn it off in the Apture control panel. Same goes for all the different types of media. You control whether they do what they would normally do, or do it the Apture way.

User generated link database... I like this feature though its eventual usefulness will be a function of scale I suppose. If you highlight words that other users have linked you can see what they linked them to. I can see this being useful both for what to link to and what not to link to. If eleventybillion ppl have already linked to that piece of media, why not choose a different one where appropriate?

Neutral but I think will be a pro:
Wiki mode... Wiki mode allows other users to add links to your page. It can be a "protected wiki" of only registered users, or it can be the beauty and terror that a true wiki is. Anyone can link anything on your page to anywhere. As Wikipedia founder The Virgin Jimmy Wales showed us... Wait. Stop. You see what I did there? That joke, if it works at all, only works because of Apture. That has nothing to with Apture Wiki mode, but hey, get your own blog.

Cons:
Auto popping first links... A'ight I'm gonna give everyone a hint. Do not pop anything up inline in my browser unless I click on it. No no no, I didn't say mouseover. Mouseclick. The first link moused over automatically pops the link. This is annoying and painful -- like having Burl Ives strapped to your back. This is also a trivial coding change I would imagine (which most likely means I am wrong). An option to turn this off would be greatly appreciated.

Default interface placement... Again a niggly little complaint, but I use Blogger (Hello Captain Obvious) and the editing interface pops and wants to stick right over my New Post button in the top right hand corner of the browser. Ideally I'd stick in the bottom right corner of the browser window next to my Firefox extension buttons, but that's me. I'm guessing it would be difficult for the browser to "remember" where the edit interface was, so how about a "4-corners" option to make it pop in any of the corners the user chooses.

Some wonkiness (see Update)... Occasionally I've had Apture tell me to close my browser and retry. This needs to get fixed. As I get a better idea of when it does this, I'll expand on this, as this does seem to be a bug rather than a feature I don't like. It deserves a bit of research on my part to make I'm just not doing it right.

Conclusion:
Apture, despite some interface issues, rocks hard tasty ab style, and it might change the way you think about composing posts. I know it has done that for me.

Update -- from the Apture FAQ

Q. I get the error message "Could not load panel. (This might be because you have other browser windows open with Apture. Try closing other browser windows and refreshing the page, or restarting your browser.)"

A. On a Mac, the Operating System in conjunction with Adobe, only allows a limited number of Flash instances. To fix this, close other windows using apture or running Flash.

That would be my problem.

It's good to be a Red

Through at top of the group to the knockout stages of the Big Ears Cup. A point atop the Prem over the Chavs... life is good.

Auto industry bailout debate

rant: the mistake in bailouts (Lessig Blog)

I don't know enough to know whether it's a good idea, though it would seem that they ask for a pittance compared to the banks, but I know that Lawrence Lessig is against it. This means two things:

1) The legislation is a bad idea.
2) It will pass.

Lessig might as well be the poster child for great workable ideas that will not implemented, or in this case the sentry warning of Bad Things that will not be challenged. Anyhoo, jump over there and read the Good Professor's take on the matter as well comments from auto industry flacks p.r. people and others.

Resign Rod

That is all.

Fitzgerald Presser

Blagojevich's indictment

Blagojevich's indictment is here.

From page 66 of the indictment (68 of the .pdf)

Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the Senate seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”

Also of note is that Senate Candidate 1 is referred to as "her" elsewhere in indictment. Lisa Madigan or Tammy Duckworth? I'm actually going with Duckworth as I think that Madigan would have enough political capital of her own to horse trade with Blago for the seat. A relative newb like Duckworth would need a push from someone else in a "political Senate buying" scenario.

Update: Peter Patrick Fitzgerald is live right now.

Update2: Lots of people are calling Senate Candidate 1 Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett

There's a ninja in this picture too

Photo of a stealth bomber snapped by Wil Wheaton.

Not so stealthy
Originally uploaded by WilWheaton

Daily Drew

This feature is no longer anywhere near "daily" (nor is this blog, but I'm working on that), but here's a bit of eye candy that I missed back during Drew's Gucci jewlery campaign.

Santo to the HoF?

Dugout Central -- Allen, Santo and Torre To Get The Call Monday:

"According to a source close to the situation, the Veteran’s Committee will on Monday announce that Dick Allen, Ron Santo and Joe Torre have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame."

Emphasis mine, but it shouldn't have taken this long.

Update: Nope. Missed it by 14%, and none of the players listed above got in.

Uhm ya

Suzy

Claire in Savanna

Why Apple Should Buy Dell

Why Apple Should Buy Dell:

Almost everyone knows that Apple is sitting on a huge pile of cash, around $24.5 billion. That might be enough to fill one of Scrooge McDuck's cash vaults, but there have to be some other interesting things to do with that much money.

While feeling depressed about how low the value of Apple stock has fallen recently (below $90 per share), I checked out some other companies that are falling due to the same economic worries. There I saw the perfect company that is finally cheap enough that Apple can buy the whole thing: Dell.

After beginning with this non-starter the author, Frank Fox, goes onto suggest several reasons why this would be a good idea and what Apple could possibly do with the Dell brand (the best of which is to make Dell a "Linksys" like low end brand to Apple's high end "Cisco" brand). He does, however, miss the most obvious idea. An idea floated by Michael Dell himself in an inverse way.

Apple should buy Dell and then what?

"Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Gawker gets it so very wrong.

Conservative Crack-up: GOP Wonderboy Is First Millennial Member of Congress:

"A Republican had never won Schock's inner-city district before this election."

Let's take a quick look at that statement (and those of you with half a brain see where this going)... The district in question is the Illinois 18th. Schock is replacing Ray LaHood (R) who served from to 1995-2009. Prior to LaHood Bob Michel (R) served as the Representative from the 18th from 1957-1995. From 1949-1957 Harold Velde (R) was the Rep for the 18th. From 1947-1949 Edward H. Jensen (R) and from 1939-1947 Jessie Sumner (R) repped the 18th. You have to go back to the FDR sweep of the 1932 elections to find James A. Meeks (D) who served from 1933-1939 as the last Democrat from the 18th. So Gawker got this pretty much totally wrong. A /Democrat/ hasn't won Schock's seat since the Great Depression.

The 18th is hardly an "inner-city" district either. Let's take a look at the geography first:



Notice something? Yeah Peoria is a small part of a much larger (geographically speaking) district. Still Peoria must skew the numbers for IL-18 the way Chicago does for the state as a whole, right? Well, not so much, the population for the district as a whole was about 650,000 in 2006. Peoria's population is about 113,000. The Greater Peoria area has a population of approximately 370,000. That's a lot of suburbs for an "inner-city" district. Put simply about 85% of IL-18 lives in either the suburbs or rural areas -- hardly an inner-city district and a staunchly Republican one.

Guinea pig cage hack

xkcd makes me cry

Barack Obama's Election Night

Puck yeah!

2004 Senate Campaign Pics of President-elect Obama

Audblog #5 Election Day