Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Sanchez to start for 'SC

By Brendan Loy

It's official: Mark Sanchez will start at quarterback in place of the injured John David Booty against Arizona on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Stanford's senior quarterback, T.C. Ostrander, is healthy again after missing last week's game due to the aftereffects from a seizure -- but he has nevertheless been replaced by Tavita Pritchard, the redshirt freshman/Czech supermodel/lesbian ceramics professor who led the Farm to victory over the mighty Trojans last week.

Poor guy. Ostrander picked the wrong damn time to have a seizure. Or perhaps the right damn time, from Stanford's perspective, if you believe the stars would have aligned differently and USC would have pulled out the win had Pritchard not been starting. Either way, you gotta feel at least a little bit bad for Ostrander.

Can Sanchez pull a Pritchard, and replace Booty permanently even if the latter gets healthy? Well, obviously it's impossible for him to lead the Trojans to an upset victory on the order of Stanford-over-USC (unless the New England Patriots have any open dates and can squeeze USC in), but even so, I have to believe that if Sanchez proves himself on the field, to the point where he looks signficantly more impressive in his start(s) than Booty has thus far this season (which shouldn't be that hard), Pete Carroll will let him keep the starting job, John David be damned. We shall see.

P.S. I missed it until yesterday, but Casey's post about the USC-Stanford game is pretty funny.

Brit predicts "intimate" relations with robots

By Brendan Loy

Someday, humans will marry robots, says a British researcher:

The University of Maastricht in the Netherlands is awarding a doctorate to a researcher who wrote a paper on marriages between humans and robots.

David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher at the college, wrote in his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners," that trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners.

The robots won't marry us for love... they'll marry us so they can eat our parents' medicine when we aren't looking!!!

36 hours in Tiger country

By Brendan Loy

Florida fan and college football blogger extraordinaire Orson Swindle, of Every Day Should Be Saturday fame, went to LSU's Tiger Stadium, a.k.a. "Death Valley," for the first time ever Saturday, and he wrote a great blog post about the experience. Money quote:

That voodoo’s real. When the “Four Corners Salute” gets cranking, it’s like listening to a 747 made entirely of fired clay crashing into a field of shattered glass. Getting a snap off effectively is in itself a game ball-worthy achievement. Combined with the orgy going on outside the stadium for five miles in any direction, it’s the gold standard for any other college gameday experience. Any of them. It is peerless in terms of demonstrated intensity, lunacy, commitment, flair, and menace. At several points in the day, we were convinced we were going to be killed, injected with creole butter, and thrown in a deep fryer…but only in the most festive and accommodating of ways, of course.

Heh.

AP, ESPN report breaking news... from January

By Brendan Loy

Everything old is new again in the Reggie Bush case, as the AP is breathlessly reporting that Reggie Bush and his family may have taken "nearly $280,000 in benefits" while at USC. ESPN is carrying this story on its homepage, with the headline, "Report: Bush received $280K in benefits at USC."

$280K!! OMG!! Only one problem: it's not actually news. The only new piece of information in Reggiegate is that wannabe agent Lloyd Lake may finally talk to the NCAA (as the L.A. Times and Yahoo! both reported Tuesday, and I blogged yesterday). But the details of what he'll say, including the $280,000 figure, are old news. Yahoo! first reported all that stuff back in January. (You might even recall that I blogged about it at the time.) Babies have been conceived, carried to term, and born since "Report: Bush received $280K in benefits at USC" was new, headline-worthy information.

Personally, I wouldn't trust Lloyd Lake anyway. He is, after all, "home to a variety of non-native, non-migratory birds." That means he's full of sh*t!

iPhones not bricked by Apple, but by bad code?

By Jay Johnson

Seems like the rush to judgment against Apple for bricking hacked iPhones with the latest iTunes update may have been premature and, well, completely inaccurate.

Some now disenchanted former members of the iPhone Dev Team (the team that created the hacks that unlocked the iPhone in the first place) are saying:

AnySIM and iUnlock were patched to make a routine exit with 0 (successful) to unlock the phone. Only problem was that that routine is NOT only called by NCK but rather by about six routines total. The other five didn't expect 00 to be there and were therefore spammed across your BB during upgrade. In short, the wrong bytes were patched and now you're all bricked. No, it wasn't Apple's fault. Rather than figure out how to fix this themselves, the iPhone Dev Team would rather work on jailbreaking the new 1.1.1 and keep accepting your donations. We want this fixed -- we want them to take responsibility for their bunk code.

Unfortunately if you want something done you've got to do it yourself. That's why we're here. We've got the 1.1.1 jailbreak and are actively trying to reverse the Dev Team's damage.

Hat tip: Finis Price, who summarizes the jargon thusly: "it means the original team's poor programming created the broken iPhones when Apple's 1.1.1 upgrade was installed and not Apple's upgrade itself. It also means there is hope for any[one] out there who unlocked his iPhone and cannot use it. ... So all of those 3rd party applications you previously had on your hacked iPhone are about to come back."

While I certainly understand that folks may want to use an iPhone on some other non-AT&T network, I don't have a lot of sympathy for folks who hacked their iPhones who might have bricks now.  The iPhone End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) seems to pretty clearly prohibit that kind of activity.  And, you signed on for it, so suck it up.

[NOTE: Second-to-last paragraph added by Brendan.]

This is a job for the Army

By JLR

Well, that's what the Marines are saying, anyway.

The spin given by the Corps is that the Army can take care of Iraq, but it's messing up in Afghanistan.  By sending in the Marines, at least they claim, the Marines can help fix up Afghanistan.

The other spin (that is, the antiwar spin) is that Iraq has gotten so bad that the Marines just want out.  I couldn't find a link on that, but I heard this argument on the Bill Press show this morning.