New Shotgun
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it. -- Moses Hadas
From brad:
Scientists for Health Canada suggested that men should take a look at their beer consumption, considering the results of a recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer. The theory is that drinking beer makes men turn into women. To test the finding, 100 men were fed 6 pints of beer each. It was then observed that 100% of the men gained weight, talked excessively without making sense, became overly emotional, couldn't drive, failed to think rationally, argued over nothing, and refused to apologize when wrong. No further testing is planned.
Mike Shelton at the Orange County Register - The Surplus is Gone! - Cartoon commentary on why the feds are out of money. Hehe.
Kevin Tuma - Sharks - cartoon comentary on the Klamath Basin, etc. Too true to be funny.
I bought a new shotgun. Click on the link or the picture below for more details and a higher resolution version. It makes that satisfying kerchunk (MP3, 19K) that lets intruders know they should skeedaddle.
David Grenier - David Grenier: Domestic Terrorist - one man's account of police violence at a "Reclaim the Streets" party in Seattle. [unknown]
But you know what the real fun thing is? The real shits and giggles part of all this is that there were two groups on the street that day. One group carried guns and clubs, used chemical agents on unarmed civilians, made up laws as they went along (you can't share food in the park, for example), and used violence to advance their boss' political career and try to intimidate folks from exercising their freedoms if those freedoms conflict with commercial interests. The other group gave food out freely, tried to avoid conflict by staying on the sidewalk, and was armed only with puppets and costumes. Yet the cops are praised in the media by the politicians, while the FBI has labeled Reclaim the Streets a terrorist organization.
Only in a country as built on Orwellianism as the United States could this happen.
Brad King and Michelle Delio at Wired - Sklyarov, Boss Plead Not Guilty - Dmitry Sklyarov pled not guilty yesterday to violating the DMCA. Bravo, Mr. Sklyarov. Even more unusual, however, his boss, ElcomSoft President Alexander Katalov, came to America to plead not guilty for Elcomsoft, also named in the indictment. [wired]
Stephen Shankland at ZDNet News - Rallying cry in open-source war - Lawrence Lessig blasts the DMCA at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. [newsforge]
The DMCA is being used "to scare you away from innovating without permission" of entrenched companies, Lessig said. But the precedent is foolish; a more reasonable approach would be to prosecute those who misuse technology rather than those who create it, he said.
"Employees at Smith & Wesson don't worry if guns kill police officers," Lessig said. "Some uses are illegal and some are not. But if you wrote code that could be used for good or bad, you're arrested and sent to jail...There's something screwed up about that."
Robert Klassen at LewRockwell.com - Literacy - Mr. Klassen elucidates the reasons that so many Americans, even college educated Americans, can't read. [market]
I found a good article on the Internet called, Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Education Malpractice? written by Robert W. Sweet, Jr., a former professional government education bureaucrat. Roughly a third of American adults are functionally illiterate, meaning they cannot read better than a third-grader, while government spending to combat illiteracy cost the taxpayers $463 billion between 1966 and 1996. Obviously, throwing money at the problem doesn't work.
Mr. Sweet explains that the problem began with a proposal by Horace Mann in 1837 to stop teaching reading by the phonetic method and to begin teaching reading by the "whole-word" memorization method. Mann’s method didn’t work, so it was adopted by teachers’ colleges all over the country. Mann’s method still doesn’t work and it is still taught in teachers’ colleges all over the country. There seems to be something stubbornly perverse about this.
Geoffrey Forden at the Washington Post -
The Pentagon And the Professor 
- Guess what? The ABM system that
Mr. Ray-gun spent so much effort and that GW is pushing, has no chance
of working. But you knew that. However, when Theodore Postol, an MIT
professor, used information from a Russian web site and some high
school mathematics to make this fact crystal clear, all his material
about it was declared secret by the government. Heaven forbid that
anyone should think about anything without the government's
approval. [market]
Segfault - Skylarov Lawyers Arrested for Circumvention Attempt - pokes some well-deserved fun at the DMCA.
According to the Justice Department, not only is it illegal to commit a crime, but it's also illegal to try to avoid prosecution for said crime. Said a spokesperson, "while we realize that any child could have mounted a defense against the Sklyarov charges, it is a criminal offense under the DMCA to defend oneself with the express intent of circumventing prosecution."
