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Mike Shelton at the Orange County Register - Stop that Woman!!: Mike's commentary on Linda Chavez. Hehe.
And we've got Gray Davis, governor of the People's Republik of Kalifornia, threatening to take over the power industry. You wanna see prices really go up and supply really dwindle? Just let him do that. When I heard him talk about it on the radio, my first response was to hope that somebody shoots that communist in the head, right away. Jerry Pournelle's take (will move : here next week):
And on. The California energy crisis, which was easily predictable given the imbecile terms of the "deregulation" -- let's create a producer monopoly, and set a cap on what the utilities (which distribute but can't invest in production facilities that might let them compete with the production oligooply we just created) can charge, and wait for problems to happen. And act surprised.
Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States - CCOPS' Letter to George W. Bush: This is 3 weeks old, but new to me. A little advice to the new guy in the White House for each article in the Bill of Rights. I won't hold my breath, but it would sure smell sweet if GW were to do even one of these.
Two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:
- The questions that are never asked, Part II - More on the killing spree of Michael McDermott, with law excerpts showing that none of us are legally bound to pay any U.S. income tax whatsoever.
- The triumphs of Big Government - Concerning the Brookings Institution's report titled "Government's Greatest Achievements of the Past Half Century." It really should have been titled "What the Private Sector has Accomplished in the Past Half Century Despite Government Interference".
Brent Simmons has some good notes and commentary about Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld. Looks like Mac OS X is shaping up to be pretty nice, if you've got the hardware to run it. [brent]
Simson Garfinkel at Salon - Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant: Simson Garfinkel hates Java. This article says why. I rather like it myself. I've been programming in it almost exclusively for over a year. I have one shipping application that works quite nicely, and another one under development. The second one is currently too slow, but I haven't done an optimization pass yet, and I'm doing some stuff that's pretty unusual for any programming language. I might have preferred Python to Java for my scripting language, but Java ain't bad. "Java. It doesn't suck." From a Lisp weenie, that's a compliment. [script]
But in the final analysis, Java was nothing more than a ploy to capture the public's interest and, in so doing, boost Sun's stock price. And it worked marvelously. Java's introduction in 1995 marked the beginning of what was essentially a five-year climb in the price of Sun's stock: $1,000 invested in Sun on July 1995 would have been worth $18,535 at the close of trading on December 30th, 2000. Now that's the power of Java.