Monthly Archives: September 2004

It’s Gone and Nothin’s Gonna to Bring it Back

This entry was posted in Archive.org Information Music Technology on by

Well, maybe there is a way to get back that old file that you can’t find. Especially if it was ever on the WWW. Kim’s story (shortened a bit):

I have a client with a site that’s been in operation since early 2000, and we recently discovered that a couple of archived issues of her newsletter from that time were missing. We’ve ported the site over to several new designs over the years, ….
I was convinced they were simply gone for good, but then I had a last ditch idea: the Wayback Machine. I went and put in her site, checked back to one of the 2000 versions, and sure enough, there were the missing archives. I recreated the pages on her site, and now I’m a hero.
The Wayback Machine definitely has practical applications.
Yep, another great use of an already indispensible resource. I use the audio section of Archive.org to listen to and download great music on a regular basis. And there is much more.

Fox News Amazing Success

This entry was posted in Television on by

Well, not really. Here’s the story:

For the first time in its history, Fox News Channel beat the combined competition in primetime during the third quarter of 2004, with major headlines of the summer including the national political conventions and a brutal string of hurricanes.
According to Nielsen Media Research, Fox News averaged 1.8 million viewers, while CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and Headline News averaged a combined total of 1.7 million. The quarter ended Sunday.

Paul, posting at Wizbang, tells us:
Amazing.
I’ll probably have to defend this point later but this really shows that FoxNews is not the “far right wing” that the liberals love to call it. In fact, the opposite is true. When a single news source gets over half of all viewers, it is, by definition, in sync with the population at large.
He’s right a little defense is in order.
Let’s see, the US population is somewhat over 294 million. About 1.7 million watched Fox. That works out to a little over 1/2 per cent of the population. Hardly what I’d call “in sync with the population at large” and clearly Fox, while large in comparison to other cable news channels, is serving a pretty small niche market. It is not at all unreasonable to think this audience is primarily of one particular persuasion.
Update (9/29): Paul defends by saying “…the defense writes itself.” I don’t see any sign of it though….

Wishful Thinker

This entry was posted in bush Election 2004 on by

g w bush is a wishful thinker. Mark Kleiman tells us about w the wishful thinker:

That’s what the President’s fiscal, environmental, and foreign policies have in common: a gay willingness to believe that things will turn out for the best in the teeth of logic, and that they are currently turning out for the best in the teeth of the evidence.
Wishful thinking isn’t seen as a horrible moral defect, like cowardice of meanness or dishonesty. It’s just a human foible, perfectly consistent with being a decent and likeable person. (No, you don’t think Mr. Bush is either decent or likeable, but you aren’t the audience for this message.)
And yet everyone knows that wishful thinking is the road to disaster; everyone with children has warned them of its dangers. In a military commander, in particular, wishful thinking is horribly dangerous, as it was when Mr. Bush ignored the National Intelligence Estimate that largely predicted the current disaster in Iraq.
This pretty accurately describes the guy O’reilly interviewed and I suspect the one that will show up at the joint soundbite presentation Thursday night.