000620.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 20 Jun 2000 12:00:00 GMT
Tim Richardson at The Record - BT claims ownership of hyperlinks: British Telecom is claiming that it has a patent on web hyperlinks. They are attempting to collect license fees from U.S. ISPs. Blimey, that's fookin' crizy. [faisal]

What would you like to do? A good answer to Microsoft's infernal paperclip. [tbtf]

From today's The Federalist Brief:

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. (1 John 1:5-6)

Stephen A. Martin at the Hawk Eye - Empty city streets greet state police: Noone showed up in Monmouth Illinois to carry out Dan Shoemaker's planned protest. Mr. Shoemaker faces 16 counts in two counties. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 91 years. All for stating that he would defend his right to keep and bear arms. I salute you, Mr Shoemaker. [sierra]

Joe Farah at WorldNetDaily - Prayer in government schools Mr. Farah comments on a recent supreme court decision banning prayer at high school football games. I agree with him that complaining about this is a waste of time. Instead, take your kids out of the government schools. [wnd]

Lauren Weinstein at People For Internet Responsibility - PFIR Statement on Electronic Signatures and Documents: comments on the Millenium Digital Commerce Act, which will likely soon be signed by Mr. Klinton. The act allows electronic signatures to be used in place of paper, but specifies no standards or method to approve standards, thus inviting fraud. [faisal]

Leander Kahney at Wired - When DVD Is Too Good to Be Legal: A British company is selling DVD players with digital video output. It is apparently illegal to use such a machine. Hollywood wants you to live with a VCR quality signal, so you can't make good copies. [wired]

Ur@eus at Slashdot - Gnucash v1.4.0 Released: the first stable release since they moved from Motif to GNOME. Maybe I'll be able to compile it this time, as soon as I get my Linux system's modem connecting to my ISP, that is. I think it got lightning struck. It's not dialing properly, though it picks up the line. Maybe there's just a tone-length parameter out of whack. I haven't played with it yet to find out. Too easy to just use the Windows laptop and ignore it. [/.]

The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu

Edward J. Erler at the Claremont Institute - A Modest Proposal for Gun Control: The current spate of gun control proposals will disarm the honest citizens, whose only use of guns is sport and self-protection, and do nothing at all about the use of guns by criminals. Mr. Erler proposes a change to the law that strikes at the criminal use of firearms. I don't have a gut feeling about this, but it's definitely a better idea than what congress is giving us now.

Forget the current schemes, then. Here is a modest proposal that goes to the heart of the problem: Any new federal and state law should impose a mandatory death sentence for anyone who uses a gun in the commission of a crime.

Too harsh? If lawmakers are too squeamish for this, or perceive too many constitutional objections to a mandatory death penalty, then the use of a gun in criminal activity should automatically be considered "three strikes."

...

Americans have nothing to fear from armed, law-abiding citizens. Let us direct our gun laws, not against them, but against those criminal elements who use guns as the instrument of their terror and violence.

"XXL is a flexible, high-level, platform independent Java-library. It provides a powerful collection of easy-to-use index-structures (generic tree-class, B-trees, R-trees, etc.), query operators (relational, spatial), and algorithms facilitating the performance evaluation of new query processing developments." I downloaded it, but haven't tried it yet. I did a B-tree implementation for Wood, a lisp object-oriented database that I wrote while working at Apple. It was the most complicated piece of code I've ever written. Glad to let someone else do it. [meat]

IBM Press Release - IBM Triples Capacity of World's Smallest Hard Disk Drive: 1 gig on a disk the size of a quarter for $500. [/.]

StarOffice 5.2 released by Sun. I've attempted to start a download, along with half the rest of the hacker world. [/.]

Add comment Edit post Add post