Happy Birthday, Randomonium!

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 16 Mar 2001 13:00:00 GMT
randomonium is one year old today. Happy birthday, Monde! Wow man, thees eez good sheet (he said, while faking a toke).
Please take a nice deep toke in its honour. (Or, if you no longer imbibe, hell, just fake it. What harm could it do?)

Alexander Cockburn at New York Press - Global Warming: The Great Delusion: commentary on the Third Assessment Report of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Guess what? We don't know jack about global climate. If you think that GW should do something about carbon dioxide emissions, I advise you to take the bull by the horns: stop breathing. [lew]

As Sprey puts it, "If there's a warming trend now, so what? These changes are due to causes that they don't know and we don't know and are very small in terms of earlier changes. For their 1000-year period they're basing their numbers on tree ring, coral and icecap records before 1861, which is when people began to keep extensive thermometer records. But if you look at ice cores, tree rings and coral across longer periods, there were times when it was vastly hotter and vastly colder. This is like a pimple on the ass of climate change."

I sent the following letter to the Albany Times Union:

Stopping School Shootings

Yesterday's Times-Union (3/15) contained an editorial proposing more gun laws, as did a recent op-ed. Great idea! We've got to protect our kids from gun violence. I'm sure more gun laws will work almost as well as the drug laws. If 20,000 gun laws don't keep our kids safe, I'm sure that 20,001 definitely will. Not! According to Census Bureau estimates for the year 2000 (www.census.gov/population/estimates/nation/intfile2-1.txt), America has 51 million school-age children (age 5-17). My memory says that about 50 kids per year have been shot at school recently. Tragic yes, but it means that kids are ten times more likely to die traveling to school than they are to get shot once they get there (www.schoolbusinfo.org/intro.htm). If I were worried about my kids' safety in school, which I'm not, I'd work at getting teachers and administrators to volunteer for training as safety monitors. All the laws in the world won't stop a crazy person intent on hurting my kids, but one man (or woman) equipped with training, determination, and a single gun, can stop that killer in a second.

Bill St. Clair
New Lebanon, NY

Bruce McCarthy at etext.org - Manufacturer's Statement of Origin -- Key To Ownership: a long exchange of letters between Mr. McCarthy and some Missouri public officials concerning title and registration of his new car. Conclusion, you have a right to drive a car without title or registration and without drivers license, but convincing officials and cops of this may be difficult. Your browser will probably want to read this with Microsoft Word, but it's really plain text. [MfM]

Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - The Fed's Con Game: how the fed caused the most recent boom and bust cycle. [lew]

Tony Smith at the Register - Napster gags Aimster anti-filter app: someone must have threatened Aimster bigtime. They've pulled their PigEncoder software.

Tony Smith at The Register - Catnap fills Aimster's anti-Napster filter shoes: but wait, the copy protection war escalates. The catnap napster proxy scrambles file names invisibly. Hey Napter. Hey clueless judges. Hey MPAA. Copy protection doesn't work. Get used to it.

InternetNews - NCR Sues Palm, Handspring on Patents: And where was NCR for the last 5 years? Waiting for Palm to get big enough to get some really big bucks out of them? Two thumbs down to NCR. Maggots. [internetnews]

There are two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

I played with Radio some more. Last night I discovered the workspace.userlandSamples.manilaToBlog script in Radio.root. It is a good first try at converting a Manila database to Radio. I'll have to forego the translation of paragraphs into posts (flSplitMessages = false), since that makes my multi-paragraph entries come out in reverse order. I've also got to figure out how to use the glossary in Radio. I'll be lost without it. And I don't think manilaToBlog handles my pictures yet. Lots of work to do.

Version 1.04 of the Bouncy Castle Crypto APIs is available from The Legion of the Bouncy Castle. They added a few new features and fixed some bugs. It "works with everything from the J2ME to the JDK 1.3". [meat]

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