Party like it's 999,999,999
Dan Dees thinks metacritic may be better than Rotten Tomatoes because "You can more easily tell where the 'mainstream reviews' rank a movie". They also review music and games.
Signs you don't see every day. Oh, my! Some folks may be offended by some of these. I had those soft laughs (hoohoohoohoohoohoo) that tightened up my diaphragm so I could hardly breathe. [brad]
From Quotes of the Day:
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -- Thomas Jefferson
Kevin Tuma - Nearly Extinct - cartoon commentary on the endangered state of the tenth amendment. Would be funny if it weren't so true.
Richard Dawkins at Council for Secular Humanism - Ignorance Is No Crime - Evolution and religion are not contradictory ideas, but some religious folks think they are. [heart]
"It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." I first wrote that in a book review in the New York Times in 1989, and it has been much quoted against me ever since, as evidence of my arrogance and intolerance. Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.
There are two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:
-
What are they going to do, 'take their business ELSEWHERE?' har
har - An email conversation between Vin and a Sprint employee
after they disconnected his phone for paying late, which he did
because they delivered the bill to his home address instead of the
P.O. he had requested, so it got thrown away with the trash mail. Vin
is no longer a Sprint customer.
You used to be able to get away with this "Pay extra if you want your service restored" crap, back when you were a MONOPOLY, but it just doesn't cut it anymore, see? We've had enough of your kind of "service," and the tedious courses of ampiccilin shots that inevitably follow.
Demanding Social Security numbers for non-government business is a FEDERAL CRIME, by the way. In between "I can't believe this; this can't be happening" as they lead you away in handcuffs, remind yourself you were once told that and you just laughed, saying, "It's corporate policy, for heaven's sake; they can't ever hold us PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for violating federal privacy laws ... can they? I mean, we're kind of like concentration camp guards -- just following orders -- right?" -
Who needs the 'Megabucks'? - Clark County's managers are very nice
with other people's money. Sorta like all the doleful folk, eh?
The Clark County Commission has just stolen an unauthorized $178,000 from the taxpayers -- a clear violation of their fiduciary duty -- to retire in the lap of luxury a county bureaucrat they didn't even like. What on earth will they do if a county manager they like ever retires -- just open the windows and start dumping buckets of cash into the amphitheater?
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - End Trade Sanctions that Hurt Texas Farmers - Dr. Paul tells us why we should oppose trade sanctions, all trade sanctions.
So while the economic benefits of trade are an important argument against sanctions, we must also consider the humanitarian argument. Our sanctions policies undermine America's position as a humane nation, bolstering the common criticism that we are a bully with no respect for people outside our borders. Economic common sense, self-interested foreign policy goals, and humanitarian ideals all point to the same conclusion: Congress should work to end economic sanctions against all nations immediately.
There's a new issue of The Libertarian Enterprise, Trust Me -- Call Me! -
-
It's About the Trust, Stupid! by Michael Lorrey - compares the
falls of Athens and Rome with the in-process fall of Amerika. The
problem is the loss of trust, intentionally caused. He then goes on
the discuss the four terms in our constitution whose meaning has been
misconstrued in ways that allow for restriction of individual rights:
"interstate commerce", "general welfare", "well regulated militia",
and "the people".
Current pundits should reflect on this, especially those most aggrieved by the recent presidential election, who demand that we act like the democracy they seem to think our Republic really is. They should understand when these two previously great nations transitioned from Republic to Democracy, that domestic imperialism and fascist oppression were the result.
...
It has historically been a standard tactic of groups and individuals, from Demosthenes to Hitler, that wish to gain power, to dictate their will to the people in a free society, their first goal is to destroy trust in the individual among as many individual members of that society as possible. The policy of divide and conquer works well, teaching those with real or perceived experience of persecution to identify first with their group, with their citizenship only a distant second or third at best in their perceptions of self identity. They use the press to tear down anyone who gains the publics esteem, so that not only do average people lose confidence in those that aspire to lead, but in their own ability to trust their own judgement of others. -
LibBits: Physician, Heal Thyself! - according to the statistics,
9000 times as many accidental deaths are caused each year by
physicians as are caused by gun-owners.
FACT: Not everyone has a gun, but everyone has at least one doctor. Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets out of hand.
Remember: guns don't kill people; doctors do.
John Elfrank-Dana at Politechbot - New NYC Board of Ed. Web Publishing Policy - As of September 1, schools in New York City are required to submit all their web sites to a censor and have them served by central servers. Heil Rudy! [politechbot]
John Leyden at The Register - Intel takes Alpha from Compaq's hands - I hope this isn't the end of the Alpha. Personally, I think Intel should dump it's IA-64 and replace it with the Alpha. Somehow, I doubt they're going to do that.
BBC - Google mulls float plans - The geeks' favorite search engine may float an IPO. Slashdot discussion here. [/.]
Stephan Somogyi at ZDNet - Revolution and evolution in the PC industry - Connectix is now selling Virtual PC for Windows. I just bought VMWare, so I'm not likely to get VPC anytime soon, but it's nice to see two players in this market. Mr. Somogyi successfully installed OpenBSD 2.9 and Mandrake 8.0 as "guest" OSes using Windows 98 as the "host" OS. From the Connectix web site, it appears that VPC for Windows is not yet shipping, but will be shortly. Likely price: $199. [newsforge]
BBC News Dot Life - Party like it's 999,999,999 - In September, Unix will be a billion seconds old. There's a count-down clock in the upper-right-hand corner of www.electromagnetic.net. [brad]
I installed Sun's
JDK1.3.1 for Linux in my Suse 6.4 vm. Had to disable dependency
checking in rpm in order to get it to install (rpm -iv
--nodeps), usually a no-no, but it appears to work
correctly. It ran SwingSet2 exactly as expected, though it was a bit
slower than under Windows 2000. Haven't tested my app yet.
ManPlatoSync for Java is available from IBM's AlphaWorks. It's a synchronization package for Palm-OS hand-helds. May be just the ticket if you need to write a conduit, but would rather program in Java than C. I haven't tried it. [cafe]
