Amazon Honor System? Fire Sale at eToys
TheSpark.com's Gender Test guessed that I was a woman with 80% confidence. Not! [notsosoft]
Neal Boortz - The Chicago Plant Shootings: Neal comments on Monday's shooting at an engine plant outside Chicago, and reminds us that the only practical effect of gun laws is to disarm the victims. Tell your browser to find "plant" on the page. This page will likely move here in a day or two. [will]
What it boils down to is that there's no law the anti-gunners can put on the books that would have prevented the shooter from killing four people yesterday. The laws were already there. They weren't followed. Criminals and people determined to kill don't worry about the laws. The only thing that the law really accomplished yesterday was to make sure that none of the potential and actual victims were armed to defend themselves.
Kent Snyder at The Liberty Committee - Challenge to America: A Current Assessment of our Republic: Ron Paul will give two special-order speeches in the U.S. House of Representatives, today, 2/7, shortly after noon eastern time and tomorrow, 2/8, soon after 10am. C-SPAN will broadcast the speeches.
Associated Press via Wired - Game Over at EToys: eToys.com will run out of operating cash in March. Their stock is selling at twenty-eight cents a share. They're laying off their employees, and don't expect any more investment money. Their web site says "HUGE CLEARANCE SALE! EVERYTHING at eToys up to 75% off!" [irights]
Harry Browne - Do you have too much freedom? Mr. Browne quotes Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who characterizes GW as a "communitarian". Socialism by any other name... Harry stands on the soap box and extols the virtues of a Libertarian America, rather nicely, IMHO.
There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise: Food and Drug. It contains letters, two Vin Suprynowicz articles that I've already published, and LibBits. Hmm... wish I had an idea for an article.
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Letter from Harry Browne dispelling a few myths about his opinions
on gun laws. Mr Browne toes L. Neil's line on this one. Good for
him. Harry sums it up nicely with a statement he "made frequently
during the 2000 campaign":
You should never be prosecuted for what you own, for what you believe, for what you think, or for what you put in your own body. You should be prosecuted only for the harm you do to others. And if you do harm others, you should be prosecuted -- whether or not you use a gun, whether or not you're high on alcohol or drugs, and whatever your motive happened to be.
- Letter from Jack Jerome implores us to lay off of Harry Browne and talk about important things.
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Letter from Bill Butson: Oh my! What an idea!
When I go to pay the ever increasing tax bill at the county office building, I first ask them a question like: "Did you do something wrong to get put in this job?"
"No, why do you ask?" she/he/it will say.
"Because stealing or extorting peoples money isn't something you should be proud to do." I respond. "There is legal and illegal plunder, and taxation is legal plunder because although the county or state says I have to pay you I don't want to give you my money to pay for more welfare hags to sit home and watch TV or get pregnant while I have to go to work. And if I don't pay you I'll get a call from the Sheriff and then I'll have to shoot him and then it will get real complicated."
By this time she/he it's passed out, got the shakes real bad or gone to get her supervisor or best of all copped the attitude that says: "I'm just doing my job!"
When they say "I'm just doing my job!" I have the perfect reply which is: "The Nazi's tried that excuse at the end of World War 2 and it didn't work for them because they were hanged by the neck until they were dead, what makes you believe it will work for you?"
I've been escorted out of the building the last two times and I love it. Special attention by the blood-suckers to a special tax payor.
- Letter from System Attendant: apparently, somebody at army.mil subscribed to TLE. Their mail filter bounced the issue because of " Dirty Words". Hehe.
- We've Got a Lot of Work To Do with 'The Children': John Taylor gives his short, sweet, libertarian answers to some questions that teenagers asked GW.
Dave Winer's DaveNet - The real work begins now: Microsoft and Sun have bought in to SOAP. They're still both trying to own it for themselves, but Dave's working to keep it open. As he said 3 years ago, "It's RPC over HTTP via XML."
JSR-000101; Java APIs for XML RPC: this is the start of the process of integrating SOAP into Java. [cafe]
Where possible, the JSR will attempt to use or learn from existing work on Java XML RPC systems, especially work such as the Apache SOAP project.
Jacques Surveyer at Internet World - Why the Sun-Microsoft Settlement Hurts: Microsoft will not ship a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with Internet Explorer 6. Ouch! [script]
EVHEAD - Thoughts on Amazon Honor System: Amazon.com has started a payment system similar to PayPal that allows you to wire people money over the web. They're charging quite a bit more than PayPal, however.
Troy Wolverton at News.com - Amazon debuts Honor System: not as good as the Evhead essay. Dave Winer wonders if they've filed for a patent on this. Good question. [script]
QuakeForge "is a 3D graphics game engine based on id Software's legendary Quake and QuakeWorld game engines. Our purpose? To improve the state of the game by improving the engine and making it accessible to the largest number of players we can." Warning. Time sink ahead. [meat]
