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Justin Torres at Conservative News - Civil Libertarians Blast "Draconian" Drug Bill Provisions: More people from all over the political spectrum are coming out against the land mines in the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act. Even Bob Barr hates it. [market]
From The Federalist:
What does a Clinton really believe in? You might as well ask a chameleon to tell you its favorite color. --Joseph Sobran
Rev. H.W. Skipper in a letter to the editor of the Ashville, NC Mountain Xpress via Cannabis News - Legalization is the Only Solution to Drug Epidemic: [cn]
The real threat from illegal drugs comes from the criminal culture that has been created by the black market...There is only one solution: legalize drugs...
If this sounds radical, it is only because we have strayed so far from the ideals on which this country was founded. Our forefathers gave us the ideal of a right to the pursuit of happiness. Many of them grew and used plants which are now outlawed. Would we imprison George Washington because he smoked a joint to ease the pain of having wooden teeth?
Richard Rahn at the Competitive Enterprise Institute - End the "Bank Anti-Secrecy" Assault on Financial Privacy: Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is pushing for legislation giving government even more power over how we spend our money. In my mind, "money laundering" is an invented political crime. There is no such thing. The real problem is the existence of the federal reserve. Abolish it. Return to privately coined free-market money. [grabbe]
We should not allow the Treasury Department to expand its losing war on money laundering at the expense of financial privacy. A civil society depends on a government that does not unduly restrict liberty and economic opportunity. The domestic and international campaign on money laundering is incompatible with a free and prosperous society.
Mike Brunker at MSNBC via ZDNet - Feds: No warrants for Net wiretaps: The FCC has made rules implementing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), that go beyond that bill's language in allowing wire-tapping of internet and cell phone communications without a warrant. One more reason to encrypt all your conversations in all media. [faisal]
BBC News - Students make childproof gun: Two John Hopkins University students spent 8 months and $4500 to invent a mechanical device that blocks the safety switch of a pistol. Their experiments show that children 7 years old and younger cannot work the device, but their mothers can. It locks automatically when the gun is put down. They expect it to add about $35 to the price of a gun. This is the kind of thing that the market might actually support. Now if we can just keep government from ruining it. [faisal]
EtherZone - The Alleged 500,000 Moms at the Million Mom March This Past Weekend: pictorial comparison of the Million Mom March crowd compared with 300,000 Dads at a Promise Keepers rally in 1997. The Moms were less than 1/4 of the Dads, if you believe the yellow outline on the Dads picture. [wnd]
Alan Bock at WorldNetDaily - Million Moms and American Culture: a good piece on the insanity of knee-jerk legislation. [wnd]
The most curious cultural attitude has been noted, but probably not often enough. It is the idea that responsibility for horrific human activity is to be placed not on the human beings who did it, but on some inanimate object. The tendency to see a gun not as a tool or a piece of metal whose use is determined by a human being but as a talisman of evil that creates evil action by its very existence is a superstition so primitive it is difficult to believe anybody buys it. But apparently many people do.(Lest certain readers start to feel smug about those goofy left-wingers with their primitive mental processes, let me hasten to point out that the lust for drug control rises from the same primitive mental process: seeking to blame irresponsible human activity on a chemical rather than on the human being who behaves irresponsibly and imagining that a government ban will exorcise the evil. Maybe it's an American thing rather than an ideological thing.)
Michael E. Cook at Sierra Times - Million Moms Marching Toward War: Gun registration = civil war, and Mike is one of the peaceful ones. Last week while sitting in the Albany airport waiting for my wife to pick me up after my car broke down, I talked with a retired truck driver who grew up in New York City and is now living on a farm west of Albany. He fought in the Korean War. He told me that he will not give up his guns. I salute him. He is not alone, not by a long shot. [sierra]
From Cafe au Lait:
When I first started programming in Java, I read about how awful GridBagLayout was, so I never used it. Instead I used arrangements of nested panels, which sometimes had to be absurdly complicated in order to get the layouts I wanted. Then one day I found a layout that simply couldn't be done in any other way. So I finally broke down and learned how to use GridBagLayout.I'm with him. GridBagLayout is currently the only layout supported by my User Interface Manager (UIM). I may find that I need to add GridLayout to enable a regular grid, but so far GridBagLayout has been good enough for everything. Strangely, Peter Van der Linden, who wrote BeanShell, the Java interpreter that I use in the UIM, recommends against using GridBagLayout in his introductory book, Just Java 2. No capiche.And you know what I found? It was simple! Once you learn how it works, GridBagLayout is easy to use and very powerful. I was able to tear out all my old arrangements of nested panels and replace them with GridBagLayouts in half as many lines of code (and a LOT fewer AWT components).
--Peter Eastman on the MRJ-DEV mailing list
musicTree is a java application that allows you to view and play your MP3 files from a tree which sorts albums by artist. It allows you to easily navigate your music collection and play albums at random, to play all the songs by a specific artist etc. I haven't tried it. It's only available as a .tar.bz2 archive, which I don't think I can decompress here at work (without working to find a bz2 decompressor). Another thing to do at home on my Linux system in my copious spare time. [meat]
My links page and the line of links at the top of this page used to use http://wideopen.com/ for the Wide Open News. Today, that link gets you the top level of Red Hat's web site. I had to change it to http://www.wideopen.com/.
Cryptix 3.1.2 has been released. "Cryptix is an international volunteer effort to produce robust, open-source cryptographic software libraries. Cryptix products are free, both for commercial and non-commercial use and are being used by developers all over the world. Development is currently focused on Java." [cafe]
