these are all such meaningless changes. the program launcher gui as a selling point? well, they're an operating system, sure, but it's being a little literal. for years, now, it's like they've been making operating systems the same way they design xbox games.

and how many people are going to turn this all off and go back to a windows xp desktop within ten minutes of powering it up? and, who can blame these people, given the difference in performance?

what about driver support? take a flip through some forums. they broke things as simple as file operations moving to vista (ten hours to copy files?) and never really fixed it in 7 or 8. how about creating a version with an optimally compiled kernel, designed for speed rather than appearance? stripping xp to the core and calling it "windows lite" sounds like a waaaaaay better idea to me....

the share of xp users is actually around 30%. that's more than apple and linux combined. the reason they've stuck with xp is because it's fast and stable, and the "upgrades" are flashy and obtuse. that's a huge share of the market that's going to walk the other way if they don't get something concrete and without frills that they can actually use for terrestrial purposes.

the headline made me lol.

actually, i think we should open a national discussion on pragmatic uses of dead bodies. we waste so much good organic material by dumping it in boxes. it's madness, really.

incinerating isn't as good an idea as composting, granted. but, it's better than burying it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10717566/Aborted-babies-incinerated-to-heat-UK-hospitals.html

i'm mostly not a bentham advocate, definitely not a utilitarian, but he had a point on this topic. robert newman's pope example is not likely to happen, but it would be nice to see some prominent people stand up and advocate for recycling human tissue.

we understand now that a lot of the things we need to exist are finite. it's just good resource management.

the chechnya thing...

the primary reason the chechnya thing is a bad parallel is that it isn't really a populist movement. the fairness of elections is always suspect, but the official results of elections in chechnya have consistently been to stay in russia.

i don't want to present the fallacy that i'm an expert on this complicated conflict, i am not, but my understanding of the dynamics is that it's a conflict between what are basically local tyrants (mostly western-backed islamic extremists) and the centralized state in moscow, with an ethnic group that identifies as neither. that is to say that there really isn't a significant independence movement there, but rather that there are two equally oppressive forces fighting over control of the region. for moscow, it's a slippery slope problem - let one small area break away, and deal with western-backed insurgents at every crossing point. for the west, it's destabilization. for the local tyrants themselves, there may be some religious aspect but it's just mostly about control. and for the people that live there it's about trying to escape...

chechens are caucasians, which are thought by linguists to have existed in the region between the caspian and black seas for upwards of 20,000 years. geneticists may point out that there has been large amounts of migration from arabs (and other semitic groups, like assyrians), indo-europeans (alans, greeks, armenians, persians and plausibly hittites), turks (including contemporary azeris), mongols and others, making the area more of a cultural melting pot. but, one of the arguments for this being the urheimat of the caucasian languages is the diversity of languages in the region. these languages are thought to all be of the same family, but sometimes it's hard to draw the connection. there's no really serious understanding of how the caucasian languages, turkic languages, indo-european languages and basque are related, but one idea is that they all split off roughly the same time through geographic separation some time around the last ice age, but that indo-european and caucasian may share a closer derivation. that is to say that the chechens (along with the georgians and some of the other groups in the region) seem to be the descendants of the ice age humans that lived in the caucasus mountains. it's probably not a coincidence that these isolated language isolates are mostly in remote, mountainous areas that have been able to withstand or ignore colonization happening around them; the colonizers would always argue it was easier to let them be, so long as they didn't bother them. the area was still considered uncrossable, uninhabitable and controlled by savages (i.e. not part of the civilized world) deep into the roman period.

what i'm getting at is that a greater caucasian state is an impossibility. first, you've got iranians on both sides of the mountain. second, you've got turks all over the place. third, you've got armenians, assyrians and various other types of indo-europeans and semites to the south. then you've got the russians to the north. but worst of all is that every city in the region speaks it's own language and has it's own identity. these are very insular people, that *culturally* prefer the idea of withdrawing to isolation to the idea of fighting for independence.

that makes a real separatist movement almost impossible to develop organically. they're more likely to want to define themselves in opposition to the city 50 miles down the road than work together to build a common identity. it's tribalism to the extreme. but, mostly, it's isolationism to the core.

what the chechen people want is autonomy, in the sense of being left to live alone without being forced into any kind of national framework. that is cultural anarchism that is inherently opposed to nation-building types of independence movements and is likely to see a local warlord as a greater threat than a distant oligarch. the results of the referendum are constantly reasonable, in the context of that desire for autonomy. as an anarchist myself, i can completely understand the preference for russian tanks over islamic extremists; one is a more or less benign military occupation that ultimately doesn't care about how i choose to live, while the other wants to enforce laws and dictate it's conception of society.

so, again, election results anywhere are difficult to take at face value, and the context makes them particularly difficult. yet, the idea that chechen citizens would prefer autonomy within russia over independence in an islamic emirate is entirely believable, given all the things i just typed.

so, it's a bad comparison.

hardly commie propaganda:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1440823/Most-Chechens-want-to-remain-part-of-Russia.html

it's so surreal. it's based on a cnn program that may or may not still be on, called crossfire. identical, just competing propaganda...

makes you realize what we're really subjected to.

predictable. the existing pq regime has been horrific. see, they're trying not to "split the vote" by swinging right to accommodate (pun intended) a rising right-wing separatist movement. this is not going to work (when will the establishment learn that the right is impossible to swing because it's tied to symbolic, hierarchical change?); rather, it's alienating both left and centrist separatists, as well as soft separatists.

a certain subset of quebeckers has been complaining about "the ethnic vote" since 1995. it can be xenophobic and astute at the same time. but, it's the modern world, where national identities are no longer correlated with geographic areas.

fuck nationalism.

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/quebec-liberal-party-races-ahead-in-the-polls-1

i'm getting the msn links from the weather network, btw.

the best thing that could happen to quebec would be for the pq to renounce sovereignty and merge with the ndp to create a local soft-left party. the quebec liberals are not left of centre. but the pq have swung to la-la land to dismantle the adq, and there needs to be a solid rejection of this by the quebec mainstream, let alone the quebec left.

it's rooted in the priority of separatism over governance. quebeckers have the right to expect local governance first, anachronistic declarations of nationalism second (wherever they stand on the spectrum). getting that backwards is a fail that ought to have serious reverberations.

as much as i may disagree with the adq on the issues, they are correct that a sovereign quebec needs to have a spectrum of sovereigntist parties. otherwise, it's on the path to a one-party dictatorship. the americans are actually perfectly reasonable in their rejection of this possibility.

so, it's pointless to keep pushing 50+1. when there are three separatist parties in quebec and they dominate the spectrum they will work together on the issue. that's what a real democratic expression of independence would look like.