Thursday, August 24, 2006

Googlebombing

Failure. Still. After all this time. But I haven’t seen any fun successful new ones since.

Yet another battery recall

My Mac is back. I hope to have it configured and back in action tomorrow - 4 weeks to the day after it went down. Better check the battery:

Apple Computer said today that it was recalling 1.8 million battery packs from some models of its laptop computers because of a risk that they could overheat and catch fire.

The batteries were made by a unit of Sony, which also made the 4.1 million laptop batteries that Dell recalled last week.

The Apple recall is the second-largest safety recall in the consumer electronics industry, after Dell’s. Though smaller than the Dell recall, it affects a greater percentage of Apple’s customers.

Apple is recalling batteries from some iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 laptops, representing a third of the notebook computers it sold from October 2003 through August 2006. For some customers, it will be the second recall for the same problem. Replacement batteries sent as part of an earlier recall should now be replaced themselves, the company advised.

Here’s the Apple Battery Recall page.

New Hampshire: Still a primary player

Extended family, today in the Washington Post:

The Democratic National Committee has moved to reduce the influence of the longtime first-in-the-nation presidential primary state: New Hampshire. It has done so by (1) inserting another state’s party caucuses (Nevada’s) between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire vote and (2) scheduling the South Carolina primary right after New Hampshire’s. Political leaders in the Granite State are, of course, resisting the change and threatening to ignore the new schedule.

But in fact, it may be time for New Hampshire to reflect on its traditional role in the nomination of presidential candidates, and perhaps face up to the need for some changes. [...]

Even with the DNC discussing its alterations in the primary process, presidential hopefuls have continued to come to New Hampshire. In fact, the state need not be first, or even second, in the presidential primaries to be an important factor in the nomination process. Its economic standing, its political heritage and traditions, its continuing high level of citizen engagement, its voters’ questioning and testing of candidates, and its current standing as one of the few contested states all combine to make it an ideal testing ground for presidential candidates.

New Hampshire’s retail politics—the level of political engagement—will not be replicated in Nevada or South Carolina. In New Hampshire, more than three-quarters of the electorate votes in presidential primaries. Survey data indicate that almost all voters in the state pay “some” or “a lot” of attention to the primary, and over two-thirds of the voting-age population watches or listens to a presidential candidate debate during primary seasons.

New Hampshire should work with the Democratic and Republican national committees on changes in the nomination process.

Read the whole thing; I’m convinced. Great piece Ross!

Neanderthal men on women

The dinosaurs of unenlightened gender incivility are out in force this week. For starters, World o’Crap points to this pile of it from John Stossel:

Dov Charney is a fast-talking 36-year-old entrepreneur whose company has a loose, sexy atmosphere. As you might guess, some former workers have sued him for sexual harassment.

Charney pays his 4,000 employees, mostly immigrants, an average $12.75 an hour, plus subsidized lunches, health care, and free English classes. […]

Charney feels free to engage in sexual relationships with staff members. “If it’s a truly consensual loving relationship,” he says, “there’s nothing wrong with it. I think that those relationships can be very healthy and are very much part of living in a free world.â€Â�

Says SZ, “Yes, immigrant women, having sex with the boss is very much part of living in a free world.  Remember that!” She’s got more.

Then Rebecca Traister (from whom I lifted the wonderful dinosaur locution above) reports on the much discussed “Don’t Marry Career Women” piece that has since been pulled and reframed as a ”Career and Marriage Debate.” Another piece by the same author, Michael Noer, titled “The Economics of Prostitution” which compares “wives” to “whores” has also disappeared from the Forbes site:

“The story about careers was taken down so we could put up a new, enhanced package which includes Michael’s original story,” said a Forbes.com spokeswoman in an e-mail late Wednesday. She said that she did not know when or if the “wife or whore” story would go back up. On Tuesday, the same spokeswoman had e-mailed Salon to say that “the piece and its sourcing speaks [sic] for itself. Forbes is known for its provocative opinion and Forbes.com’s readership—both male and female—expects nothing less.” Noer was out of the office this week—it has been reported http://www.gawker.com/news/forbes/remainders-michael-noer-computer-camp-stud-goes-into-hiding-196207.php">elsewhere that he was ironically attending a wedding—and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment was also on vacation.

On the merits:

Much of the data on which Noer drew came from conservative think tanks or dubious-sounding publications. The National Marriage Project. “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” a 2006 study that even Noer admitted is “controversial.” Sylvia Ann Hewlett. (He also cited more mainstream sources, like USA Today.) But the traditionalist, reactionary bent of many of his footnoted sources only amplified his police siren of a thesis.

An accompanying slide show listed the “Nine Reasons to Steer Clear of Career Women,” starting with the news that a professionally successful woman won’t want to marry you—“you” being Noer’s male reader; he didn’t bother to pretend that he might have any female eyes skimming his work—because high-achieving women “search less intensively for a match,” and “have higher standards for an acceptable match than women who work less and earn less.”

If your working girl should unwisely deign to hitch her wagon to your star, according to Noer, it won’t be long before she’s cheating on you, a quagmire illustrated by a photo of a hussy lounging in red lingerie, barely concealing her adulterous assets. According to Noer, working women stray when a wife ventures outside the home, because a job increases the chances that “[she’ll] meet someone [she] likes more than you.” That surely doesn’t sound like a stretch in this case.

Then there’s this from the cute little baby dinosaur, Tucker Carlson:

MORGAN: I'm assuming
that she is going to make the run, unless she sees polling or evidence
otherwise right up at the year from now.

CARLSON: Rich, the truth is there are so few men left in the
Democratic Party. There are so many wussies at the helm of that party.

MASTERS: Gee, thanks.

CARLSON: Nobody has the huevos to stand up to Mrs. Clinton
and say, you, you can't win, step back,
you're not running for president. Nobody is in charge. So she just bulldozes everybody. That's
the truth of it. And you know it.

MASTERS: It's not
the truth of it.

Those like Tucker who want women back in the 50s where they belong would do well to remember that “the truth of it” is that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. But backwards and in high heels.