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DMT is targeted to middle-level individuals who wish to hold anonymous, but transferable assets in the one thousand dollar to several million dollar range. When members of this group seek out "privacy havens", they are apt to find themselves the prey of private or government scam dogs. And they are frequently not able to afford the expensive lawyers and bankers who know their way around the sometimes treacherous off-shore scene.
The Photon Micro-Light is a single-LED flashlight. It comes in many colors. Battery life is from 17 to 200 hours, depending on color. I haven't used it, but it looks neat.
Michelle Stevens at the Chicago Sun-Times - Law abiders under fire: It is illegal to carry a concealed handgun in Illinois. Christopher K. does so anyway. He is disabled, so he can't run if attacked. He has shown his gun twice since he started to carry it, and that was enough to thwart his attackers both times. As the old adage goes, better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.
And remember: A gun is just an inanimate object. It is only as evil as the person carrying it.
Fulton Huxtable at Fatal Blindness - Rx: Repeal Prescription Drug Laws: It's been a while since Mr. Huxtable's last essay. Glad to see it. High prescription drug costs were caused by government programs. The way to fix the problem is to eliminate those programs. That means the end of medicare and medicaid, the end of the prescription drug laws, the end of ALL drug laws. This article proposes only the end of prescription drug laws. I interpolated to the rest.
Alarmingly, we now have the spectacle of both major candidates for president arguing over how much the government should pay for prescription drugs, not over whether it is right for the state to forcibly take other people's money in order to redistribute it to others in the form of payments for prescription drugs. This unseemly--and, more significantly, unashamed--advocacy of the plundering of your bank account has pushed this nation one more step toward the totally socialized society. This is the politics of plunder, brought to you by both Gore and Bush. Each is vying for the top spot over which one of them can forcibly yank the most money from your back pocket.
Larry Salzman at the Ayn Rand Institute - New Eminent Domain Assaults: Taking Private Property for Political Elite: it used to be that eminent domain was used to establish rights of way for roads, utilities, and the military. Nowadays, it is another of the myriad of ways that the politically powerful take advantage of the political weak. Mr. Salzman provides examples and proposes that we end eminent domain, completely. Sounds eminently reasonable to me.
Joel Spolsky at Joel on Software - Painless Functional Specifications, Part One: Why Bother? Joel will be reminding us this week of why we should ALWAYS write functional specs before writing code. He starts with a contrived example that nonetheless illustrates his point very well.
The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything. Oops. No, that's not what I meant to say. The moral of the story is that when you design your product in a human language, it only takes a few minutes to try thinking about several possibilities, revising, and improving your design. Nobody feels bad when they delete a paragraph in a word processor. But when you design your product in a programming language, it takes weeks to do iterative designs.
Anna Marie Stolley at Bloomberg News via posetnet - Amazon-Barnes & Noble dispute goes to court today: Amazon and Barnes & Noble are duking it out over Amazon's 1-click patent. Hopefully the court will see the light and knock down the patent. [/.]
Declan McCullagh at Wired - U.S. Picks New Crypto Standard: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) chose Rijndael (pronounced Rhine-doll) as the new encryption standard, as predicted by many Slashdot comments. The NIST press release is here. [cafe]
"We chose this system because of its low memory, its easy access to parallelism, its fast key setup and easy implementation," said National Institute of Standards and Technology director Ray Kammer.
Joel Miller at WorldNetDaily - DOA: Adios, Juan: The first in Mr. Miller's series of Dead On Arrival articles, about killings by police in the war on freedom, er... some drugs. Juan Mendoza was a drug dealer, but this was still no reason to break into his house in the middle of the night and shoot him dead. My take: Darn tooting. This is cold-blooded murder any way you slice it. String up the entire SWAT team. [market]
As bad and dangerous as drugs may be, police are proving more and more every day that the measures used to stamp them out are worse by far.
swissinfo - Cabinet comes out in favour of legalising cannabis use: the Swiss may legalize marijuana. [market]
The Seattle Times via The Dallas Morning News - Alaska initiative just says 'Yes!' to marijuana use: if Alaskans pass this initiative it will not only be legal to use, own, sell, and grow cannabis, they will free all the prisoners. Go, Alaska! [market]
"In most places, you have to pass a pee test in order to work there," says Soren Wuerth, a former head of the Alaska Green Party who works at the Free Hemp in Alaska campaign office in Anchorage. "In our place, you have to fail the pee test to work here."
Sean Scully at the Washington Times - Gun-control lobby runs out of ammo: Democrats are having a hard time pushing their gun control measures this election. Good. [market]
Henry Bowman at Sierra Times - A November to Remember: Of the candidates running for president, Mr Bowman thinks that Buchanan is the least bad, but given that it's a near surety that Bush or Gore will win, he considers Bush to be "the only viable alternative to national political suicide." [sierra]
One thought that just won't go away is the one that leads me to believe that our nation may not survive the next four years, if the socialists win the November election. "But, Henry," I hear the great unwashed murmur, "the economy is so good. How can you say that?" My initial response is to point out that if you cut the metaphorical candle in half, and then light both ends of each piece, you might find it hard to believe that the darkness will ever come because at the moment there's so much light.
