The endless battle for civil rights

Is it the "civil" or the "rights" that's the tricky part?

Tony Snow signaled that Bush considers an amendment barring same-sex marriage a "civil rights" matter, then stumbled when asked to define civil rights...

Q You mentioned civil rights. Are you comparing this to various civil rights measures which have come to the Congress over the years?

MR. SNOW: Not -- well, these -- it --

Q Is this a civil right?

MR. SNOW: Marriage? It actually -- what we're really talking about here is an attempt to try to maintain the traditional meaning of an institution that has maintained one meeting for -- meaning for a period of centuries. And furthermore --

Q And you would equate that with civil rights?

MR. SNOW: No, I'm just saying that I think -- well, I don't know. How do you define civil rights?

Q It's not up to me. Up to you.

Also, as pointed out by Stephen Colbert, "Mission accomplished" anagrams to "Cmon, I lied, so scampish." I'm late to that parade.

This is almost reassuring

MICROSOFT executives love telling stories against each other. Here's one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend's wedding reception when the bride's father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Allchin says Ballmer, the world's 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.

He lumped the thing back to Microsoft's headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.

Among the problems was a program that automatically disabled any antivirus software.

"This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world," Allchin told the audience.

If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft's best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?

The Longest Day

True, today's 6-6-06. Meh. It's also, and more significantly, the 62nd anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Normandy. Lest we forget.

So ugly it's coot

If you've ever wondered what newly-hatched cockatiels look like, here's a good photo post. Also (since I seem to be linkspamming today), X-Men 3 script review illustrated (warning: spoilers) and Stephen Colbert vs. bears.

And (from Will) if Rock-Paper-Scissors leaves too much gray area of interpretation, try RPS-25. Twenty-five different choices, including "moon" and "cockroach" and "devil."