“Given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”
-Barack Obama, June 2006 (boldface mine)
I was introduced to this quote by a document, ironically, titled Barack On Faith. In it, he lays out a careful recognition of God and faith, of inclusion among faiths, and of separation of church and state in respecting faiths. At the bottom, it includes a mention not only of the nation’s different faiths, but also specifically mentions those of no faith.
Sure, David Silverman over at AA’s NoGodBlog takes issue with Obama’s repeated use of the cross and his own faith in his campaign, and hints of using his faith as evidence of his morality. But this overlooks the big picture (which he also points out) — that despite Obama using his faith in his campaign, none of the other frontrunners throughout this campaign year — Clinton (member of ur-religious group The Family), McCain (weirdly supersitious), Romney (Mormon) — have been nearly as recognizant of atheists.
Do Google searches for “Atheists for Hillary” versus “Atheists for Obama” and you’ll see the forest beyond the handful of trees.
Yesterday I said that Clinton could stop Obama from getting the nomination if she got 59% of remaining contests and remaining supderdelegates. Well, today, with some superdelegate updates, that’s not quite enough.
Also, it’s pretty unlikely. To date, Clinton has 51.2% of the pledged superdelegates. Assuming she maintains that percentage (which, again, the recent trend does not support this) of superdelegates, she needs 70% of remaining contests to stop Obama. Not to win, mind you, but to stop Obama from tying it up. (She’d need 86% to tie it up herself.)
Let’s take the possibility I alluded to, that Clinton already has the remaining 270 supers in her pocket, waiting to be dropped like a bomb on the primary campaign. Then she would only need 40% of the remaining contests to win. Is that likely? Not sure. The trend of super endorsements is still higher for Obama lately… most of Clinton’s super endorsements were early as she was an early frontrunner. But the continued silence of the remaining supers is getting unnerving.
Just for fun, lets say the remaining supers are in Obama’s pocket. Then the game is over. In fact, with as few as 74% (200) of supers on his side, the game is over.
This delegate calculator at CNN is enlightening (and fun to boot).
Through this, we can learn the following:
HRC needs 74% of remaining states and superdelegates to win the nomination.
HRC needs 66% of remaining states and superdelegates to beat Obama.
HRC needs 59% of remaining states and superdelegates to prevent Obama from getting the nomination.
Scenario #1 is incredibly unlikely. Scenario #2 is highly improbable but believable. So my guess is, at this point, given her numbers, given her track record to date, she’s now banking on scenario #3 — just keep Obama from getting the nomination, and hope for a Hail Mary (like seating Michigan and Florida delegates, or flipping a ton of O delegates) in order to prevail.
But with Hillary currently slipping in the superdelegate fight and even bleeding superdelegates, she’s unlikely to win a majority of the remaining players, unless she already has such a majority up her sleeve, sitting quiet until she needs them.
Via Lifehacker: WinDirStat is a whiz-bang tool that scans your disk and organizes your filesystem in order of file size. The greatest feature here is that it also provides an incredibly intuitive at-a-glance display of just how your used disk space is allocated among your files.
Above is a shot of WinDirStat showing the disk usage on my system. The large blue area at top left is World of Warcraft (a lot of patch files hanging around there!), the red area in the middle is MP3s, the light blue areas are image folders. The green monsters at bottom left are my hibernate and paging files. Purple files are DLLs and yellow files are executables. Every directory is a rectangle of space, which is further divided into smaller rectangles of space for subfolders and down to individual shaded boxes for files.
Using WinDirStat, you can quickly assess where the big space users are, and delete them at once. It’s a much faster and prettier method than my previous technique, which involved copious manual use of du -h |sort -n in a Cygwin window.
While the new Zune software leaves a thing or two to be desired over the previous one (album info updating, ahem), it does make it a lot easier to explore and subscribe to podcasts. Not only does it provide a searchable showcase of popular pods, it makes it a cut-and-paste operation to add a new one, and from then on, the Zune software will automatically download and sync new episodes.
Thanks to Woot I’ve upgraded from my $40 SD-based MP3 player to a refurbished brown Zune. It’s a great deal and a handy device, especially for the price ($100). I’ve easily put my entire MP3 collection on it, plus a dozen or two of my favorite CDs.
A really nice feature of the Zune software was its auto-rip mode. Setting the software to rip automatically when a CD is entered, and eject when done, made it fairly whiz-bang to copy CDs onto. Insert, close drive, wait a few minutes for drive to eject, put a new CD in and repeat. Sync when done and they’re all on the Zune.
One disappointing fact about the Zune is that despite its ability to play video, it’s really hard to find video to put on it or otherwise get videos onto it. The Zune Marketplace, M$’s answer to the iTunes Store, has no video available on it at all. Just music. The Zune website suggests you do a search for “viral video” to find the gobs of free videos out there. I don’t know when they put this together — the Zune was originally released in late 2006 — but nearly every “viral video” I know of these days is on a flash-video streaming site like Google Video or YouTube. And M$ doesn’t have a comparable video sharing site yet.
There are solutions to this, but none are easy. I’ve tried to find answers to two questions: getting Tivo movies onto Zune, and getting YouTube movies onto Zune. With only free options. There doesn’t seem to be a robust, working free solution to the first problem; the best bet is probably shelling out $25 for Tivo Desktop Plus, which converts its movies to iPod-compatible format, which is also compatible with Zune. As for the latter problem, so far the best answer has been the Videora iPod Converter, from which you can search YouTube and automatically download and convert videos. The software expects to be synching to an iPod, but close out the error popups and dig up the output folder and import it into the Zune library.
While Zune has its limitations, hopefully M$ will get wise and make the Zune more interoperable with the next upgrade. Some rumors say that the next Zune firmware update will allow the Zune’s onboard WiFi to connect directly to the Internet, which seems like a no brainer.
A few months ago we added a G3 350 iMac to our home network. Ever since then, we started seeing network blips, where our WRT54G would occasionally reset itself. It didn’t happen often enough to see a correlation. Over time it got worse, but not debilitatingly so, but we’d managed to suspect the Mac was at fault. Since the WRT54G had a real bad habit of “losing” its static WAN IP setting whenever it blipped, we went out and replaced it with a new WRT54GS. Things seemed to get somewhat better though not completely; there was still periodic problems when the Mac was being used.
Well, the user of the iMac went away for a week, came back, rebooted — which kicked in an update to MacOS 10.4.10 — and the network started having fits, the WRT54GS resetting itself every three minutes to the point that nothing of any practical value could be done on the network as connections kept getting hosed. The short-term solution was to pull the Mac from the network (though the problem was pronounced most when the Mac was surfing).
Over the next day or two I wracked my brain trying to think up options. I didn’t want to get a new router. I considered hubbing the network between the modem and the router, hooking the Mac straight into the hub (we have a spare IP from our ISP). But I couldn’t find my hub. I did find our old BEFSR41. And I thought, just for fun, why not see if the BEFSR41 hooked into the network will at least isolate the Mac’s damage to a second subnet.
So I wired the BEFSR41 straight into a free port on the WRT54GS, set it up as 192.168.2.* (instead of 1.*), and plugged the Mac into that.
It all works great now. I don’t know why. And I don’t dare update the FW on the second router.
The model names are all Linksys home routers. WRT54G is a 4-port wired/wireless device, as is WRT54GS; the latter claims to have some sort of enhanced speed. BEFSR41 is a wired-only 4-port device.
