Nobody likes brutalism.

The Obama administration is now arguing that it gets to keep people locked up as long as it wants to even if they've been acquitted by a court.

Tags: hopey changitude

1. Windows 7.

Don't mock. The desktop runs XP, has done so for about two years, and it's about time for a fresh install. But with 7 coming out in a few months, I don't want to do that. Hurry up and come out already.

2. A new iPod Touch.

I dropped mine on the floor, and the screen started going wonky. I've got two black horizontal lines across the screen, and you can see the LCD material bleeding into adjacent cells. The interface on the iPhone and the Touch is so superior to this creaking UI on the hard-drive based players that there is no way I want to buy another one of them, but the current Touch is only 32 gigs, not big enough to hold all my stuff. Despite that the iPhone is also only 32 gigs, I'm very tempted to buy one for two reasons: It's $100 less than the 32-gig Touch, and it comes with what's apparently a pretty damned decent phone camera. My hope is that the next round of iPod announcements will foretell a 64 gig model with the camera, in which case I'd buy it instantly. Hurry up and come out, already.

3. Diablo III

4. The Pacific

It's Band of Brothers II. It's still produced by Spielberg and Hanks, so I expect the same utterly top-notch quality, but instead of following the 101st Airborne Division in Europe, it follows the 1st Marine Division. That's Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa, New Guinea. This is going to be absolutely amazing.

Seems like work just decided to block forums.somethingawful.com. This is most disappointing.

I've gotta give AT&T credit for having a pair. Everyone thinks they're evil, so they go right ahead and put a big pair of horns on their building.

Tags: nashville, photos

Got to play around with a Dillon M134DT today. Not, like, actually *fire* it or anything. But "play around with": got to heft it, take the safety cover off, turn the barrels (empty, of course) and see how it feeds and cycles and so forth. The DT's *way* lighter than you expect it to be when you pick it up, titanium's funny that way.

So, let's say you have about 5 hours to kill in Nashville. What do you do?

NB: "Kill myself" is not a helpful response.

Anyone up for a trip to Udvar-Hazy on August 8th?

Anyone who doesn't love this movie is an evil soulless alien who has a straight-backed chair reserved for him in whichever circle of hell it is where they do nothing but endlessly loop Michael Bay movies.

I'd give a lot more of a shit about Michael Jackson if the House didn't just pass an energy bill destined to make Smoot-Hawley look like a well-reasoned and sagacious piece of reasoning.

It calls for dropping our per-capita greenhouse emissions to, oh, about those of fucking Sudan by 2050, and that figure assumes our population stays constant. If you thought American manufacturing was moribund now, just you wait.

Enjoy your refrigerators, food supply, and vaccinations while you can, folks. You can take a quick visit to Haiti to see what sort of emissions levels are going to be the Law now.