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It means that this upcoming election, we’ll find ourselves answering to the Shah. 

Because if it’s one thing America does, it’s place oppressive tin-horn dictators in charge of countries that nationalize portions of their economy. So next January, I fully expect to see some ill-tempered military man making sure that America’s Businessmen are protected from the poor people they gouge.

And it doesn’t matter how I vote, because surely rigging the vote is part of America’s Interest. So bring on the Military Man and America’s Mommy.

So after watching the Jon Stewart “republican pundit doublethink” bit, and after hearing that the Fox News team are referring–un-ironically–to Palin as a media “star”, I’ve figured it out; and it’s shocking.

The Republicans can only be The Jedi.

Karl Rove comes on TV and waves his hands and says ‘20 months is plenty experience’ and across this great nation, a hundred and seventy million people mumble along: ‘20 months is plenty’. My god… if he said “you will take me to Jabba now”, I guarantee that we’d build intergalactic time machines to find a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away and take him to Jabba now. Fuckin’ Jedi, man. The spiritual guardians of the Old Republic. …ans. Old Republicans. …Ahem.

Anyway… I mean… it’s either that or the narrow majority of Americans are morons. 

Dear corporate copywriters the world over: Stop using ‘utilize’.

Every day I see “utilize”, “utilized”, or “utilizing” used to mean “used”. You don’t “utilize our partnership” or “utilize the website” or “utilize your desk phone”. No. You use them.

You can only “utilize” something that isn’t really a tool to begin with. Let’s say that your corporate jet crashes on a deserted island. Then and only then may you utilize your phone to crack coconuts; or, utilize your binder as a serving tray for poi. You may even utilize your tie as a makeshift tourniquet. Hopefully on your neck. Because you’re an evil evil person who hates language and clear thought.

So Vista has had fewer security flaws in its first year than XP had in its first year. Because of UAC and IE Protected mode.

…Which is of course an almost meaningless statistic. I’d like to see a comparison of Vista with UAC and XP with LUA, both with IE7. On my computers, I run as a Limited User, in XP. And honestly, I prefer this to running with UAC, since it’s more useful to me to be able to switch to my Admin user, install things, log out, then switch back (with “fast user switching”) to my limited account. Honestly the install procedures with UAC sometimes don’t seem to operate entirely in the Administrator context, and I’ve had permissions end up wonky, and DX10 programs refuse to run.

I’d like to see another option: You get an RDP window to a limited-functionality (yet fully logged in) administrator session, with a wizard like W2k3’s “management wizard”. You pass it the file you want executed, and the wizard sets ownership, installs it, then says “thanks” and logs itself out.

Now, this may be functionally equivalent to what’s going on now, but in my experience, it’s not: There seems to be a distinction between ‘run as administrator’ and even XP’s ‘run as -> [administrative user]‘. (Which may be caused by using a Samba NT4-style domain login…)

1. ‘php-pear’ is secretly an alias for ‘php5-pear’ which, to quote Darth Vader: DO NOT WANT!
   especially since this will remove your entire php4 install
2. your install scripts in apt-get (and dpkg, I assume) expect an ‘exec’-able /tmp. FOOLS!
   real men mount /tmp ‘noexec,nosuid’