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So, a couple of days before the first referendum, Jean-Claude Juncker, the “president” of the European Union, let French and Dutch voters know how much he values their opinion:

“If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again,” “President” Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don’t worry, if you don’t, we’ll treat you like a particularly backward nursery school and keep asking the question until you get the answer right. Even America’s bossiest nanny-state Democrats don’t usually express their contempt for the will of the people quite so crudely.

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“When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantánamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: ‘That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.’ ”

– Husain Haqqani, Pakistani scholar

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Recall from an earlier entry in this list that during the boot process, Mac OS X no longer displays status messages telling you which processes are starting when. It ends up that in Tiger, the progress bar you see while booting is a complete sham � it’s just something to look at while you’re waiting for the loginwindow process to start. (Cf. Charles Miller’s “The Placebo Mini-Pattern” if you’re curious why Apple would bother with this sham progress bar.) The progress window is displayed by the aptly-named WaitingForLoginWindow process.

(It’s even documented by a man page: type man WaitingForLoginWindow at a command-line prompt.)

The pace of the progress bar isn’t measuring anything � it’s just a guess as to how long it will take until loginwindow is ready. When loginwindow appears, it kills the WaitingForLoginWindow process. When it exits, WaitingForLoginWindow stores the number of seconds it ran in a text file here:

/var/db/loginwindow.boottime

The next time it runs, WaitingForLoginWindow uses the number of seconds stored in this file to set the duration and pace of its progress bar animation.
Examine the contents of this file to see how long WaitingForLoginWindow ran the last time you booted. (On my iBook it was “20.711155″, but the next time I rebooted, it dropped to “4.642473″; on PowerMac G5s, it’s generally 1-3 seconds.)

The fun part is that you can launch WaitingForLoginWindow at any time. Using Terminal, execute:

/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow

Up pops the “Starting Mac OS X�” progress window. It’s harmless, pointless, but kind of fun. To quit it, you can type killall WaitingForLoginWindow at the command line.

When you’re playing around with it from the Terminal like this, WaitingForLoginWindow doesn’t write to the loginwindow.boottime file because it needs administrator privileges to do so. (If you launch it with sudo /var/db/loginwindow.boottime, however, it will write its run time duration to this file.) If you change the number of seconds in the /var/db/loginwindow.boottime file, you can change how fast the progress bar moves the next time you boot. This has no effect on how long it actually takes to boot � it just alters the pace of the progress bar.

and it takes a while before it is able to duck a jaywalking fine

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That’s what the Senate Homeland Security committee heard Wednesday from John Stedman, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who’s responsible for an eight-person team of intellectual property (IPR) investigators.

“Some associates of terrorist groups may be involved in IPR crime,” Stedman said. “During the course of our investigations, we have encountered suspects who have shown great affinity for Hezbollah and its leadership.”

Even though Stedman’s evidence is circumstantial, his testimony comes as Congress is expected to consider new copyright legislation this year. An invocation of terrorism, the trump card of modern American politics, could ease the passage of the next major expansion of copyright powers.

Maybe we should cut off the income stream of the terrorists by spreading pirate copies for free over the Internet. I hate to do it, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for my country.

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Workshops held by the UK Patent Office (UKPO) around the country have found that the definition of technical contribution in the software patent directive would let through too many patents, according to the UKPO on Friday.

The minister for science and innovation, Lord Sainsbury, and the UKPO agreed to hold the workshops after a public meeting at the end of last year, where software companies and developers expressed their concern about the directive, officially known as the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.

The conclusion from the 13 workshops, which were attended by over 300 people, were that the definition of technical contribution in the directive is “ambiguous and too liberal”, the UKPO said.

The attendees of the workshop discussed in groups a number of fictional patent claims and assessed whether various definitions of technical contribution would allow these patents to be passed. Of the nine fictitious case studies that the UKPO said should not have been patentable, four were let through by the directive’s definition and only two were disallowed, with the remaining three leaving the workshop attendees unsure, according to the results on the UKPO Web site.

Steve Probert, deputy director at UKPO, admitted that a better definition may be found by modifying the current definition but said the UKPO cannot change the UK’s political policy on this.

“As far as we’re concerned there’s nothing more we can do at the moment,” Probert told ZDNet UK. “It is very much a political football between [European] Parliament, the Presidency and the [EU] Council. As far as I know the government still stands fully behind the text agreed by the Council.”

It’s unclear why the fuck they bothered to do the workshops, if the outcome was clear from the start. How typical of government – “sure, we’ll listen to you. And afterwards, we’ll ignore you.”

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France’s stunning rejection Sunday of a new European constitution was, most of all, a noisy protest against the disruptive, leveling force of economic globalization. You could see that in television images of the “no” voters as the result was announced — burly arms raised in the air, fists cocked — as if by rejecting a set of technical amendments to European rules they could hold back a threatening future.

And you could see the result on the faces of the losers — glum establishment politicians being interviewed after the vote, trying to put a brave spin on a devastating defeat. For this no vote had been opposed by nearly all the luminaries of the French political class in both the socialist and conservative parties.

It was a no that resonated on many levels: a rejection of the document and the wider Europe it came to symbolize, a rejection of a market-driven way of life that’s taken for granted in America, and above all a rejection of President Jacques Chirac, who tried to trick and cajole France into embracing the realities of the global economy, rather than forthrightly explaining them.

Fear of the future is always a powerful political force, and one that often has unfortunate consequences. And it’s hard in this case to see much positive coming out of the French no. Europe will go on as before, but European politicians will be tempted to waste even more time soft-pedaling the fact of global competition rather than helping their people adapt and change.

Chirac will be a chief victim of Sunday’s vote, and he richly deserves the scorn that will be shoveled his way. His mistake was far larger than what commentators were citing Sunday night: his decision to put the constitution to a vote even though that wasn’t technically necessary. Chirac’s real failure was his inability over two terms as president to level with the French people about the changes that are needed to protect the way of life they cherish. He played games with economic reform — tiptoeing up to the edge and then pulling back at any sign of public displeasure.