Chicago Boyz

EU Stares Into the Void Without Constitution with Karzai begins debate on Afghanistan future, which appeared simultaneously on Google News at midday Central Time (UT – 6 hours). Looks like Afghanistan will have a constitution before the EU will.
One is tempted to advise certain people to read this …

One good ace-of-spades reference deserves another …

The above image is from Saddam’s capture gives major boost to Coalition mission in Iraq, in Jane’s Defence Weekly.
Now to keep up the momentum; as Iraq settles down, we can start dealing with the source of the problem and the WMDs we actually know about (80 kB *.pdf).

They got the last ace. Bravo and high-fives to all the soldiers who have worked so had to run Saddam down. They’ve brought justice to him, as W likes to say.

My hope is that there will be a firing squad staffed by the new Iraqi army, soon.

I’ve got no more information than anyone else in Blogistan, so I’ll spare you my opinions for now.

All morning I have been breaking into a smile and Motorhead’s Ace of Spades has been running through my head:

I see it in your eyes, take one look and die,
The only thing you see, you know it’s gonna be,
The Ace Of Spades

Glenn Reynolds has a thoughtful post, with many links, on this subject. There are arguments.

Most of the arguments are silly. Use the technology that’s best for you. Image resolution is far from being the only dimension of comparison or even the most important one.

I carry a camera partly to capture interesting sights and scenery that I run into, but mainly as an aide-memoire. Keeping a record of where I’ve been and who I’ve been with seems increasingly important as I get older. So while the easy workflow of digital cameras is important for pros who make large numbers of images, for me it is most important to create a permanent record. Film, especially conventional B&W film, is good for this. (Digital archiving requires, at best, regular attention to transferring files as computer equipment is upgraded and standards change.)

For the unplanned slice-of-life and people photos that I like to make, small digicams are too slow to use and have mediocre viewfinders and too much depth of field, while digital SLRs are too big. The kind of camera that best suits my needs is the old-fashioned compact rangefinder, for which there is not yet a good digital substitute. I suspect that such an substitute will be introduced eventually, and when it is another bunch of film diehards will painlessly convert. This kind of switch-over should occur with increasing frequency as photographic subspecialties catch up with technological advances in the mass market.

However, some people will probably continue to prefer film, if only for its archival properties. For this reason alone it seems likely that film, particularly silver-based B&W film, will be available for the foreseeable future, even if only as a boutique item.

Also note that whatever cameras people use, the files generated by scanning film are practically the same as digicam files. And note that Photoshop and similar software are already well on their way to replacing the traditional darkroom. In other words, much professional and high-end hobby photography has already been digital for years, so does it really matter what kinds of cameras were used to produce all those digital files?

(Ref this earlier post.)
After we buy that MiG, let’s get this, which I saw mentioned over on Dave Barry’s blog.