Friday, October 11, 2002

Okay! Who remembers "Kung Fu Master"? Almost as good, and no quarters required!!!!
Dan Bricklin, one of the pioneers of the PC revolution, pens an essay about how copy protection robs the future. The applicability of this to the current discussion about digital rights management is, I hope, obvious.
BWA-hahahahaha! HOWTO produce a techno song.
News flash! Important evidence as to why Congress voted to authorize force! Hooray for my fellow citizens!
Larry Miller publishes a correction to his previous article. It wasn't the Buzzcocks that got booed after dissing The Prez, it was Blink-182. Go figure.
Well, I'm delighted to find that our elected representatives did what I wanted them to. "Regime Change" is our next stop, I think. Furthermore, it appears there is a post-war plan. Things are really looking up.

Thursday, October 10, 2002

Oooooohhh!! In a universe of marketing-driven <scare-quote>needs</scare-quote>, we finally have something that solves a real problem that I have: I hate vacuuming.
Ugh. I'd hate to think that this is true. I'm awash in debt, and if my income is going to decrease, I'm going to be in super-hot water (instead of the normally hot water I'm in now).
Mother of <diety/>!! Please make me stop playing this stupid helicopter game!!!!

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

I might have to actually bookmark this: Apple publishes their User Experience documents. I'm enjoying the comparison between Winders and Mac OS X especially.
Another Boutique presents The Best English Ever! After a stint in alt.religion.kibology, I wandered around for a bit saying things like "please to keep in polybag when Jesus not in use", so I found this nearly irresistably funny.
Hmmmm ... I've got my own pond, and three and a half pounds of sodium metal. What to do ... what to do?
It will soon be illegal to store or manipulate medical records on computers running Windows 2000 SP3, or Windows XP. Unfortunately, it also might be illegal not to do so. I've got an idea so wild, it just might work: how about you don't use Windows? Maybe Apple or Red Hat could sell you something to replace it?
I am not a lawyer (duh), but I was under the impression that people were allowed to use their own names, and someone else having a trademark was not sufficient to prevent that. That is, if my name was "John McDonald", then I would be allowed to open a restaurant named "McDonald's" and Ronald and crew couldn't do a damn thing about it. Apparently, however, it doesn't work like that in Los Angeles. There, big-money automakers are allowed to actually own an entire family name, and the other members of the family can go pound sand.
Okay ... one last bit about the onerous CBDTPA from Ed Felten: Fritz's Hit List #13:
Fight piracy -- regulate Christmas ornaments!
BWA-hahahahahaha! Larry Miller pens another gem, including this:
Not bad, eh? I know, I know, it's not exactly parliament shouting down Clement Atlee, but, all in all, not bad. Americans can always surprise you, for good or ill. Jim McDermott and David Bonior are Americans, and they surprised me by making me think, "Gee, I didn't know I could throw up that much."
It's all good.

Update: The article has been pulled, apparently. It turns out that the Buzzcocks say they didn't make any such slurs, several other concert attendees agree that the Buzzcocks didn't make any such slurs, and nobody else has come forward to say it did really happen. Good for the Weekly Standard to pull the story until they can verify if it's true.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

BWA-hahahaha! Just a little something to tweak the God-bothering people's noses. I expect this to turn up on Lee's page at any moment.
Holy crap. Great. Now I have to go buy a frickin' Mac. Super. Thanks, man.
BWA-hahahahahah! Photoshopping rules!!1!
Ooooh!!!! I don't currently have a need for my own high-performance cluster computing lab, but I'm trying desperately to manufacture one. When I succeed, I now know where to find the technology to build it.

Monday, October 07, 2002

Look! Make your own film online!! Found via Jim Treacher.
From the inestimable LawMeme: Law School in a Nutshell, Part 1: how to read a brief. For geeks only, supposedly, although I thought it seemed pretty straightforward.
Corsair has his say about the whole Fallwell/Muhammed brouhaha. Lovely, I say.
Man! When does he find time to sleep? Steven Den Beste emits a huge demolition of anti-war arguments again. I'm getting tired just trying to read it all, and he finds time to actually generate the text in the first place. I am completely humbled by his voluminous output.
Warning! Warning! Geek alert! Steven Den Beste opens up a can of whoop-ass on the assumed superiority of GSM over CDMA. Have some, boyee!
So it's come to this, has it? You can't just say "I like sex", or "I like getting stupid", you have to actually claim that it all means something, in a realpolitik sense? Bah.