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Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 21 Feb 2000 13:00:00 GMT
Joe Farah - Why Helms is wrong about U.N. Senator Jesse Helms got a lot of flack about his address to the United Nations. Joe berates Jesse because he "sold us short. He tiptoed into the U.N. like an invited guest... Once you acknowledge that there is a proper role for a global agency whose stated goal is world government, the battle is lost. No U.N. 'reforms' can save this hopeless dinosaur. It must be abandoned by the United States. That's not the message Helms sent at all." I agree with Joe and with Representative Ron Paul of Texas who authored H.R. 1146, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 1999. It has 17 cosponsors, but appears to have died in committee.

Senator Helms' speech is much better reading than Joe Farrah's essay about it. Though Helms appears to me to be living in a past where the American Government was limited by checks and balances, his conclusion makes a lot of sense: "This is what Americans ask of the United Nations; it is what Americans expect of the United Nations. A United Nations that focuses on helping sovereign states work together is worth keeping; a United Nations that insists on trying to impose a utopian vision on America and the world will collapse under its own weight. If the United Nations respects the sovereign rights of the American people, and serves them as an effective tool of diplomacy, it will earn and deserve their respect and support. But a United Nations that seeks to impose its presumed authority on the American people without their consent begs for confrontation and, I want to be candid, eventual U.S. withdrawal."

JDK 1.3 rocks! I downloaded JDK 1.3 final candidate 1 a week or so ago, but didn't try it until today. The demo code is much faster than before, and my application is also noticeably faster. Frame creation time for one of my complicated frames appears to be a factor of 2 or 3 faster. Thank you Mr. Unger and the folks at Sun who believed in him (Sun's HotSpot technology comes from Dave Unger's work on the Self programming language). The only thing that broke in my application is the default button code.

Jon Udell at Byte.com - Code Browsing, Dog Food, Cookie Federations, And False Security: Introduces codecatalog.com, a searchable repository of open source projects source code. Another entry for my links page. Jon also comments on the "eat your own dog food" principle. Yes!

F.R. Duplantier at America's Future - Tax & Spend! Tax & Spend! Tax & Spend! Says that the Heritage Foundation's Peter Sperry argues that "The biggest problem with our federal government is that it has too much money to spend... The only services Americans really desire from their duly elected federal leaders,' he contends, 'are national security, an efficient judicial system, and a sound foreign policy -- none of which is being delivered well." Argues for a flat tax. I'd like a flat tax, too. Interest rate: zero.

The Register - Dot-Com firms are hacking each other: agrees with Vin's article, that I linked to yesterday, that most companies that get hacked don't tell anyone about it. "In fact, because it is to a company's advantage to suffer in silence, the real malicious hacking, which would involve the compromising of crucial data and intellectual property by rival tech firms -- and which probably represents the lion's share of online criminal activity -- is kept as a closely-guarded, dirty little secret."

Tom Adelstein at Linux Today - How-to Become a Linux Billionaire: "Okay, here's the secret handshake now open your Kamona". Good advice for hackers being offerred stock options in a startup. Is this startup following the formula for a successful IPO?

Curt Wuollet at OSOpinion - The Best Legislation Money Can Buy: UCITA. "The strongest argument for UCITA has been one of blatant extortion. Pass UCITA in your state or Big Software will move out."

Bob Crispen - Campaign 2000: How the candidates' web sites stack up. Evaluates the HTML on the presidential candidates' web sites. Also identifies their web servers. Entertaining. Covers the web sites of Al Gore, Bill Bradley, George W. Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes, Harry Browne, David McReynolds, Pat Buchanan, & Erik Thompson.

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