Yet another quiz, but this one is perhaps guaranteed to piss off the P.C. hiding out amongst us: ALL LOOK SAME.

I scored a 7.

I missed this when it was timely, so here it is only four days late: Happy Birthday Mrs. Dumont.

First the hospitals find themselves unable to upgrade to XP nor could they not upgrade to XP, but now the banking sector is discovering that Microsoft is not their friend. I had previously said that I could only imagine a security flaw so fatal that insurance companies would force their clients not to use MS products could possibly dislodge the software colossus. Apparently, I suffer from a deficit of imagination, since now it appears MS may be actively driving their large corporate customers into their competitors arms (in the back office arena, anyway. on the desktop, there aren't any real competitors)

BWA-hahahahahaha! Ho ho ho! I'm absolutely dying! (Found via American Realpolitik)

Porphyrogenitus has quite a bit to say in response to Lord Robertson's speechifying. His response is, and it includes a bit of profanity towards the end, is we asked you to play nice years ago, and now you can piss off. Hear hear, my good fellow. I also welcome you to the ol' blogroll.

I'd just like to say that, at least once, Jane Galt herself read my page and commented. I'm so thrilled I could just pop. I abase myself at your feet, m'lady. Please forgive me my moment of heretical weakness.

John Robb posts an essay about the big difference between advertising and spam: trust. Not so much about how to acquire it, but rather a small sampling of case studies of companies that have firmly grasped the difference between the two.

Look! It's a box that might have contained the bones of Jesus' evil twin brother Skippy. No, seriously. Okay ... he wasn't called "Skippy", and he wasn't actually a twin, but he did have a brother named Jesus.

I'm with James Lileks: I will not be teaching my daughters to pledge allegiance to soil.

Steven Den Beste reworked his previous article on CDMA v. TDMA et al, and got it published in Tech Central Station. It's a bit less technical and consequently a bit more general-user friendly. He even gets to indulge the all-too-human desire to say "I Told You So ..."

I really do my best these days never to open the case on any of my computers. I'm a developer, damn it, not a wiring monkey. Nonetheless, it's time to buy some new components to build a new machine that will play Jedi Knight II without chugging down. I hear you asking "Mitchell, what have you always hated about computer-y things?" Well, I'll tell you. It's the damned disk drive cables. They're flat, short, and unwieldy, but what are you going to do? Not have a hard drive? No! Get better cables!!! I'll be having a set, thank yew.

Woo-hoo! Rob Lyman opens up a huge pile of commentary. Under the guise of explaining why he calls himself a "conservative" (sort-of) these days, he actually captures in wonderful detail exactly the kinds of things that drive me batsh*t in what passes for political thought, commentary, and "leadership". And don't get me started on the moronic things I hear in the elevators as I come to the office daily.

Egad! Another wired goddess has shown her frailty. I'm ... crushed.

My most admired-from-afar Jane Galt stumbled onto this story, wherein some twit was fired for refusing to remove her eyebrow ring. She sued to be reinstated because she claims she was discriminated on the basis of her religion; she belongs to the Church of Body Modification. Jane develops an advanced form of apoplexy because she thinks that the twit is somehow debasing other religious beliefs, and she even discards her heretofore unsullied upbringing by suggesting that maybe the judge should rule that this isn't a real religion.

Crap. The twit's beliefs don't sound any more foolish to me than does any other belief system constructed around imaginary friends, post-mortem Ponzi schemes, giving your money to <diety/>'s friends/workers/bagmen, etc. If we're going to say "that religion is stupid", then the emphasis shouldn't be on "that", but rather on "religion". They're all stupid.

Please, Jane, tell me this was all a lofty pile of sarcasm and I just missed the joke. Please? Pretty please?

Well, I'm a bit late coming up on this, but better late than never, I suppose. Excellently stated, my good man.

We interrupt this "free speech" nonsense to bring you a very important announcement: you may only speak nicely about the Democrats from now on. Period. No discussion allowed. (BWA-hahahahahaha! I wallow in my evil-tude, now that I know what the shallow end of the gene pool looks like!)