pinkasphalt

I decided to make one last check of the MSN Music help page that I mentioned previously. And lo and behold, it has changed yet again.

The iPod does not currently support the Windows Media Audio (WMA)

I received my latest Amazon order in the mail yesterday. One of the books was Bushworld, by Maureen Dowd. I haven’t started reading it yet, but Justin found this gem as he skimmed through it:

Back in 1991, Bush I defense secretary Dick Cheney defended the decision not to go into Baghdad, saying that America would simply have installed a “puppet regime.” “How long would we have to stay there to keep this regime in power?” he said. “How effective would it be if it were perceived as the puppet regime of the United States military?” It gets to be a very difficult, a very nebulous, a very long, drawn-out kind of commitment, what I would describe as a quagmire. We have absolutely no interest in getting U.S. military forces involved inside Iraq.”

You don’t say.

Account of climber Aron Ralston’s self-amputation. [via]

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball noted that the MSN Music help page mentioned in a previous post has been changed and now provides the following not-so-helpful information:

Unfortunately Apple refuses to support the popular Windows Media format on the iPod, choosing to only support their own proprietary DRM format. If you are an iPod owner and are unhappy about this, please send feedback to Apple and ask them to change their policy and interoperate with other music services.

There are more than 70 portable audio devices that support MSN Music today, and we hope that someday Apple decides to join with the industry and support consumer choice.

Mr. Gruber put it pretty succinctly I think:

The second paragraph could effectively be rewritten as: There are more than 70 portable audio devices that depend on technology licensed and controlled by Microsoft today, and we hope that someday Apple gives up on their own market-leading technology, bends over, and uses ours.

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator… It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.”

Mark Forscher writes about his arrest during a Critical Mass ride in NYC during the RNC [via].

Why a Schwarzenegger Republican shouldn’t vote for Bush. From Slate.