Moved to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 12 Sep 2004 12:00:00 GMT
From samizdata:
"The plans differ; the planners are all alike..." - Frédéric Bastiat

From backwoodshome:

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -- Cesare Beccaria

# John Silveira at Backwoods Home Magazine - We don't need no steenking 2nd Amendment - great rant. Don't miss it. Good reminder that the Constitution and Bill of Rights don't give us rights, they give the government power and place strict limits on that power. Our rights exist independent of government. [madogre]

"Take it a step further. If the government passed a law tomorrow that said we didn't have the right to free speech, or the right to free worship, or freedom of the press, would those rights no longer exist, or would they be simply denied? If the Constitution is amended depriving us of our rights, do those rights cease to exist?"

"What's the answer?" Dave asked Mac.

"The answer, according to the guys who set up this country, is yes, we would still have those rights. We're just being denied them. Because of that, it's the way we have to look at the Constitution."

Bill rubbed his nose.

Dave said, "Okay, I never thought of it that way, but I'll buy into it for a moment."

"It may be," Mac said, "that in reality, rights are a figment of our imagination. But the Founding Fathers believed they existed and that's how this country was set up. Rights are something that come with being human. The Founders never believed we got them from the government. If and when the United States goes away, the rights will still be there."

Why a Bill of Rights?

"Then why have a Bill of Rights?" Bill asked. The question was posed as a challenge.

"You're not the first person to ask that. Men like Alexander Hamilton asked it. He and many others thought having a Bill of rights was dangerous."

"Dangerous," Bill laughed. "How could it be dangerous?"

"They were afraid that the existence of a Bill of Rights as a part of our Constitution implied that the government not only had the right to change them, but that any rights not listed there were fair game for the government to deny. And, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what has happened. The government seems to have set itself up to be an interpreter of our rights; it acts as if it is also the source of our rights, and whatever rights weren't mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the government has seen fit to declare exist only at its discretion."

# Yesterday, I moved my content to my new site at NearlyFreeSpeech.Net (NFS). Had to learn a little about Apache .htaccess files and fix one of my CGI scripts to use a different version of the Perl "Template" module, but mostly it was just waiting for the bits to go over the wire. I downloaded the free version of AceFTP to help me do this. I usually use command-line FTP or Ange Ftp from Emacs, but I needed to copy whole directory structures. This is the best Windows GUI FTP client I've seen to date. Rock solid. Good time-out behavior, tailorable handling of writing to an existing file. I also got puTTY, a tiny (368K) SSH and telnet client that works well and maps Alt to Meta properly for emacs. NFS supports SSH sessions to your account. They've got emacs and vi to edit content as well as a full suite of Unix tools. Very nice! The only thing missing is log files, and they're working on that.

I then switched billstclair.com to use my site at NFS. It hasn't propagated to my local nameserver yet, but it may have gotten to yours. You can tell if it's there because my home page will say "Welcome to my home at NearlyFreeSpeech.net", not Netherweb. I'll update both sites for a couple of days. NFS doesn't provide email storage, but they do forward email. The domain change has propogated to at least some SMTP servers; lots of my spam came in this morning through my ISP's mail server, forwarded from NFS, instead of the one at Netherweb.

# Fluid Dynamics Software Corporation - Fluid Dynamics Search Engine (FDSE) - a finally found a good CGI-based search engine for my web site. Google and the free engines I've used only do a partial index. Now I can index all 7,072 (and growing) pages of my site. The indexing process works hard to not run its CGI for more than 30 seconds at a time. It indexes until 30 seconds is up, sending output to the browser, then uses HTML redirection to pause for 15 seconds before continuting its calculations. Installation is simple. Untar the archive into a directory with CGI enabled (or untar on your PC and FTP the content up and fix the permissions), and point your browser at the admin page. No files to edit. Not one. The index file for my site is currently about 43 megs. I'm using the free version now, which only allows one search realm. I'll upgrade to the for-pay version soon, so that I can split up my site into different sections and allow you to search all or just one of them. Anyway, the "Search" button in the right-hand column of this page now uses FDSE, or click "Form" to bring up the search page.

Fluid Dynamics also makes a web authoring package (can you say "Edit this Page"?), a visitor tracking package, and a web site error handling package.

Fluid Dynamics Software develops CGI scripts that add value to customers' websites and, by extension, provide value to the Internet community.

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