000314.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:00:00 GMT
Stewart Wolfe - My Problem With the Amazon.com Boycott: "...even though I am boycotting Amazon. My problem is that I like Amazon.com; I like shopping there; I like being an Amazon affiliate." Me too, though I never got past the IWBNI stage on the affiliate program. "What Amazon should have done to fight bn.com is to direct attention at their bad behavior. We've seen the power of the public opinion. Imagine if all this negative energy about 'the evils of Amazon for its misuse of patents' was directed at bn.com for being 'cheap rip-off artists who care nothing about the Internet'. Amazon could have been the Internet freedom fighter, but it's too late for this now; at this point it would sound like a poor copout." Yes! [stew]

Doc Searls at the cluetrain weblog - Patent Death Pending: Doc is glad that Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos are having a conversation about patents and glad that Dave Winer continues to force the issue. "As for me? Well, now that I know so damn much about business process and software patents, maybe I can help us get rid of the things. I can't imagine why we need them any more." [script]

View from an Iowa Homestead's John K. VanDyk linked here on Saturday. I'm now "Freedom" in his navigator column. I've added his site to my links page. Hi, John. Thanks for sharing the flow and being open to my wierd ideas.

Angus Glashier of Where's My Latte added me to his bookmarks list. Thanx, Angus. You've been on mine for a while now, though I can't remember how I found your site. [latte]

Dan Burton, Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform - Letter to Attorney General Janet Reno Regarding the Leak of the La Bella Memo: "The release of the La Bella memo shows that something is seriously wrong at the Justice Department; whether it is incompetence, politicization, or a serious disregard for the rule of law has yet to be determined. Since the Department has released the La Bella memo to the press, I expect that you will now comply with this Committee's subpoena for the Freeh and La Bella memos, and provide them to the Committee by Tuesday, March 14... The La Bella memo apparently points out that the First Lady has potential criminal involvement in the campaign fundraising scandal, based on her failure to warn the DNC about the illegal campaign fundraising activities of Charlie Trie." Wouldn't it be nice if this White House of Cards fell right in the middle of Algore and Queen Hillary's campaigns? Washington Weekly has a prettier copy of this letter here. ["ww"]

Richard H. King at Sierra Times - Rethinking Our Plan, Upgrading Our Vocabulary: Instead of guns, call them "insurance policies", "family protection devices", "rape prevention devices", "racial equality tools", "hate crime intervention devices", "alternative lifestyle protection devices". And, finally: [sierra]

One last thing that you can do with tongue planted fully in cheek is justify ownership of "family protection tools" to your liberal friends by saying... "the government has me SO scared of militias, right wing extremists, abortion clinic bombers, patriot groups, the Republic of Texas, Branch Davidians, people who listen to talk radio, conservatives, fire ants, killer bees, stray dogs. Bob Jones graduates and people who attend gun shows that I feel it is insane for me not to protect my family. I do it for the children." Then look at them, wink and say, "feeling lucky punk?"

Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Time to focus on the only choice you'll have in November: well, I guess if I thought it made sense to vote at all (when November comes, I may), and if I could stomach voting for a statist instead of someone who believes in liberty, and if I believed the popular wisdom that it's possible to "waste" your vote on a third-party candidate, it would be obvious to pick Bush over Gore. I love you Charley, but strike three, you're out on this one.

"gushmore"

Bummer, man. The Orlando Sentinel has started charging for their archives, so my link to Charley Reese's archives is now broken. Instead of a nice list of his articles, all you can get is his most recent article from the columnists page. Does anyone ever pay for archived newspaper stories? I don't.

Simpson Garfinkel at Byte.com - Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century Excerpts from his new book, now available at O'Reilly for $24.95. Wide Open News has a review.

MilkSucks.com - Got... Beer? Better than Milk, New Survey Shows: everyone is making noise about PETA's campaign telling college students that beer is better for you than milk. I heard it on Paul Vandenberg's morning drive show on WROW today. CNN has an article [faisal]. I'm no fan of PETA, but what everyone seems to be missing is that they aren't encouraging anyone to drink beer. They're just saying that milk is so bad, that drinking beer would be better, which is likely true. If you bother to read to the end of the page, you find: "Of course, while all this is true, PETA recommends fresh juices, soy milk, and mineral water--even soda--over milk or beer."

Alan Reynolds at American Outlook - The Futility of an Internet Sales Tax: Politicians think they're going to make a ton of money taxing Internet sales. They won't. [/.]

NewsAlert - Sun Microsystems Announces Plans to Release Cross-Platform Java(TM) Development Tool Code to Open Source Community: Forte binaries are already available. Now they're going to release the source. [lt]

Add comment Edit post Add post