Say what you want, but this guy is a moron.

There’s a useful thread at Advogato about common mistakes that make your code difficult to maintain.

Cathy Young’s article in Salon about Social Security makes a good case for reforming the program, but makes no case at all for the Bush plan. I agree that Gore’s position on Social Security is cowardly and stupid, but I don’t think that Bush’s plan to put government in bed with the investment community makes sense, either. If the government believes we should manage our own retirement funds, then just cut our payroll taxes. If that’s not enough, why not require employers to provide employees with 401k programs and make them mandatory?

I received a couple of really good links in response to my off the cuff remarks about the electoral college the other day. The first is an old article from Discover about how the electoral college actually amplifies the power of individual voters. This quote contains the crux of the argument (backed by a mathematical proof):

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blockquote> His starting point was the concept of voting power. In a fair election, he saw, each voter

Thinking about the good old Amiga led me to wonder about Be. I had such hope for them back when they first unveiled the BeBox and turned out those snazzy BeOS demos. Do they have any customers for their Internet appliance product?

Get this, there are still plans to build a new Amiga. Truly dedicated Amiga fans should write the book on unrequited love. The latest plans involve a PowerPC-based computer, which seems bizarre to me. I can’t imagine building a “new” computer system these days and not basing it on the x86 architecture. It’s cheap, fast, and thanks to AMD (and soon Transmeta), there’s real competition.

AOL is going to force its users to view the AOL home page every time they log in with version 6.0 of their software. It still shocks me that AOL actually has customers.

Brock Meeks on the money politics that steer ICANN.

New poll question: I’m thinking about offering rc3.org Daily coffee mugs (assuming I can get someone to create a cool design for them). Are you interested? I’m don’t really want to create a source of revenue, but I’d like a mug for myself, and figured maybe some readers would like them as well.

Permanent links have arrived. The little blue diamonds next to the daily labels are links to the archived version of that day’s entries. I’m going to create permanent links for the entries themselves, as well. If you think the little blue diamonds are lame, I invite you to submit an alternate icon for permanent links. The little blue diamond was easy to create.