They call it "taking them to task" Today at Tom Tomorrow's blog, Tom's blogmate Bob Harris posted a series of articles that all start with the phrase "They call it". Bob takes the administration to task on supporting our troops, Iraqi freedom, fighting terrorism, and homeland security. Particularly damning is the report by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared". Here are four facts from the report that should concern you:

• On average, fire departments across the country have only enough radios to equip half the firefighters on a shift, and breathing apparatuses for only one third. Only 10 percent of fire departments in the United States have the personnel and equipment to respond to a building collapse.
  
• Police departments in cities across the country do not have the protective gear to safely secure a site following an attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
  
• Public health labs in most states still lack basic equipment and expertise to adequately respond to a chemical or biological attack, and 75 percent of state laboratories report being overwhelmed by too many testing requests.
  
• Most cities do not have the necessary equipment to determine what kind of hazardous materials emergency responders may be facing.

Of course the Dept. of Homeland (in)Security spokesman says that the recomendations in the report written by a former senator, 4 former Whitehouse advisors, 4 former military comanders and 3 Noble Laureates was "grossly inflated".  ¶ 12:26 PM

  Desktop Wars Part II: Linux vs. Mac John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has written a great column about Paul Boutin recent story in Salon entiled "Flipping the Switch". The gist of Boutin's story is that Linux is going to take over Mac in terms of market share and people will start switching from Windows to Linux rather than Windows to Mac. He thinks this will lead to software publishers similiarly abondoning the Mac platform for Linux. The good news is that Gruber disects and refutes this piece of crap story paragraph by paragraph. In the end I was satisfied that my original decision not to read Boutin's story was justified.

Also, I thought it might be fun to test one of Boutin's claims. In paragraph 4 and 5 of his article he compairs a $1,999 1.6Ghz G5 desktop to a $248 Walmart Linux desktop. Gruber correctly condems this comparison as unfair and compairs the $248 Walmart Linux desktop to a Apple eMac at $799. I thought it would be fun to compare the 1.6Ghz G5 to a Dell Precision workstation with a 2.0Ghz Intel Xeon processor with Red hat 9.0 installed. The Dell Precision came to about $1,700. There are a few things missing from the Dell workstation. First, it doesn't have the DVD burner the G5 has. Also, as far as I can tell it doesn't have any Firewire (IEEE 1394) ports. Finally it has a standard ATA-100 IDE rather than the G5s faster serial ATA drive. If you add a DVD burner and sound card with Firewire to a Dell Precision with Windows it would cost an additional $240 (although this is not an option on the Linux version). This would bring the total cost to $1940. This is only $59 cheaper than the G5. So contrary to Boutin's assertion, comparable Linux and Apple workstations are similiar in price.  ¶ 8:48 AM

  Now Hear This Bill Moyers (of Now with Bill Moyers fame) recently gave a speach at the Take Back America conference. It is one of the best speaches on the progresive movement I have ever read. It is inspiring and made me believe that I could make a difference again. This is something you need to read!

Read it Here  ¶ 5:06 PM

  Blogrolling Test I know this is probably a "bad thing" to do, but what the hell. I need to see if the BlogRolling Update Form is going to work.  ¶ 8:59 AM

  Impeach Bush I know that the impeach Bush campaign has been at work for pretty long time and has collected many "votes" from many people (such as yours truely). But today I read an article by former Presidential counsel John W. Dean that lays out the arguement for impeacment based on the most recent revelations relating to the lack of weapons of mass destructions being discovered. If you are still under the illusion that A) the U.S. has found weapons of mass destructions in Iraq or B) that the Bush administration was open and honest when trying to justify this war then you must read this article.  ¶ 8:41 AM