In the Slashdot story “Wikileaks a Clear and Present Danger says WaPo“, a commenter named GameMaster wrote quite succinctly about controlling information for the sake of opinion management. Here is his comment in full, which can be read with on the site or without context below.

Time and time again, over the course of many decades, the US military has show that it is completely willing to miss-classify information as “secret” if there is even a slight chance that it will be embracing to them, either individually or as an organization. Specifically, from the Vietnam war on to today, they have made it very clear, publicly, that they actively try to manipulate what information gets out for no other reason than to manipulate public opinion about their operations.

The US is a representative democracy. It’s one of the things we are most proud of and most defines us as a country. We don’t get to micromanage what our elected officials/military do, but we do get to exert control over them every few years at election time. You can not have a functioning democracy if the government, actively, works to hide the truth from the voters. The entire concept of “controlling public opinion” should be considered a form of treason. If public opinion of a war or administration is only positive because the voters don’t really know whats going on then what you have is a de-facto dictatorship/oligarchy.

Wikileaks is a small group of people dealing with lots and lots of data. It’s not surprising that they screwed up and released papers with personal info in them. The main point here, though, is that if the US military limited their “secret” information to only what was directly, operationally, vital and released all “secret” info in a timely manner when it didn’t, absolutely, need to be confidential any more then there wouldn’t be a need for Wikileaks. Like the release of the Pentagon papers before this, groups like Wikileaks have to exist, regardless of any collateral damage from mistakes, until such time as the people hiding the information start treating “state secrets” in a responsible manner.

Thus far I’ve completed 3/3 pomodoros. I do appreciate this technique, and I find that the ticking really does help my focus.

I couldn’t agree more with Geist’s call to remove foreign ownership restrictions, but I’d like to see some requirements for communication companies to share cell towers.

Additionally Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Shaw need to be “relieved” of their last mile ownership of communication lines going into people’s homes. Most were built up with public funds, but sold wholesale to a private company. Last mile could be a municipal utility where the telecommunications giants have to pay for the same access as the tiny-telcos like TekSavvy.

The CRTC is excellent at protecting the big telcos, but terrible at protecting the Canadian consumer. The original reasons for foreign ownership restrictions in Canada no longer apply post-NAFTA, and I’d hate to see the big three be successful at stifling competition because all the bad parts of globalization were allowed but none of the remotely beneficial aspects were allowed. We need to increase our anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws first, though.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Barack Obama is a coward for not trying to bring in single payer — It serves Canada so well to have everyone insured through progressive taxation but it just irks me that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey calls Obama’s cop-out plan “socialism” and a step towards “government takeover of health care.” Tort reform and the creation of a competing government option isn’t socialism nor is it take over. Phooey. Steven Harper would jump on the opportunity to introduce private options for health care in Canada. The long and short of it is I don’t know what to do with my Whole Foods habit now. A boycott? Maybe. Signing back up for SPUD? Absolutely.

And if the first point wasn’t bad enough — and it was very bad (I tend to pause Countdown when I get frustrated because of the show — which is a lot) — out comes SFU as the World’s Best Person on Countdown. Apparently our creation of a grade worse than “F” has caught the mighty Keith Olbermann’s attention. Enough said, just watch the clip.

Mark and I were talking on Skype so he can vouch for my almost terrified reactions — unlike the glee expressed whenever Canada is mentioned on The Daily Show.

Vancouver Cityscape / GeekTools Desktop

I’ve constantly been enamoured with what keeners have done with GeekTools as seen on Lifehacker, and the recent Mario desktop got me going. The major project was to reduce disk and memory usage summaries to percentages. The hard drive one was easy enough, but the memory use percentage was headtumper. Nobody, as I could find on the Google, had done exactly what I wanted. I did the math fine (didn’t take long), but adding the percent at the end was the bitch!

GeekTools apparently operates slightly differently in shell, so I had to go step by step and think around this one. I originally had the shell line as "top -l 1 | grep PhysMem | tr -d 'M' | awk '{print $8/($8+$10)*100}' | awk '{printf "%2.0f\n",$0}' | sed '$a%' | tr -d '\n'” which didn’t quite shake it. Sometimes the simplest way (which pulls it off) requires some sleep and time away.

The desktop I found using CoolIris — and as much as I meant to save the address I didn’t. I don’t think the image is licenced for distribution, so three cheers for fair use! The fonts are Betty Noir and HaraldSquare.

Vancouver Weather (shell):

curl --silent "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=CAXX0518&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|C<BR)' | sed -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/<description>//' -e 's/<\/description>//' | tr -d "\n" | sed -e 's/:/ : /' -e 's/Current Conditions/Vancouver Weather/'

Day Name (shell):

date +%A

Date (shell):

date +%d

Abbr. Month (shell):

date +%b

Time (shell):

date "+%l:%M %p"

Text (shell):

echo HdMr

Hard Drive Usage as Percent (shell):

df / | awk '{print $5}' | sed -e 's/Capacity//' | tr -d "\n"

Memory Usage as Percent (shell):

top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {printf "%2.0fper",$8/($8+$10)*100}' | sed -e 's/per/\%/'

TweetDeck the memory hog

TweetDeck, a simple twitter client based off of Adobe Air manages to gorge itself on over 200MB of memory, and have a VRAM footprint of over a gig? What the hell is up with this? Are all Adobe Air applications this much of a pig?

What really gets me is that my nightly build of Firefox (Called Minefield) comes in a respectable second in footprint with 25% less memory usage.

I’m floored, yet this explains why TweetDeck frequently becomes unresponsive with the Spinning Beach Ball of Doom!

A ladybug on Main Street