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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: January 2001 (page 1 of 8)

Microsoft is trotting out executives to wage a FUD campaign against Linux. I guess they’re more worried about Linux than I thought.

In Molly Ivins’ latest column she mentions that John Ashcroft is a member of the Council for National Policy, an organization that I hadn’t heard of. Apparently it’s a group of politicians, money men, and hardcore idealogues from the religious right who meet three times a year to work on their public policy agenda. They don’t have a Web site and don’t publish policy papers, because they’re a secret organization. Neither the membership list nor the meetings are open to the public. Sounds pretty nefarious doesn’t it? Fortunately, the Institute for First Amendment Studies is keeping an eye on these guys.

The ACLU has some important concerns about President Bush’s plan to dole out wads of cash to faith-based charities.

How loathesome can the Justice Department get in the Bush administration? Bush is looking to appoint Ted Olson, the attorney who represented him before the Supreme Court in the post-election hearings and worked on the Arkansas Project for billionaire scumbag Richard Mellon Scaife as solicitor general. The solicitor general represents the Justice Department before the Supreme Court, and decides which Supreme Court cases the Justice Department will be a party to. It’s a very important job, and to see it go to a member of the right wing of the right wing and publicly known Vast Right Wing Conspiritor is offensive in the extreme. I get tired of Dubya blathering about the spirit of bipartisanship at press conferences as he shoves ultra-conservative dirtbags like Olson down our throats. I can only see these nominations as the opening moves in a four-year strategy to pack the federal judiciary with as many Scalia clones as possible. Heck, why not? Maybe the people Dubya appoints to the federal courts today can give his nephew the Presidency in 20 years or so.

North Carolina Senator John Edwards has introduced an anti-spyware bill that would prohibit software vendors from automatically collecting information from users’ computers and sending it back to some third party (or themselves). It doesn’t prohibit the use of such capabilities for the purpose of keeping track of software licenses, and does not prevent Web sites from tracking user activities with cookies. Even so, if passed it should provide protection from the kind of spyware that Steve Gibson complains about.

Anyone have a pointer to some Emacs macros for formatting text in email? I’m specifically looking for macros to reflow quoted text (in order to fix things like line length).

Microsoft is sponsoring Windows 2000 installfests at universities. That strikes me as completely bizarre.

Bush’s idea of giving billions of tax dollars to religious groups to provide charity really, really pisses me off. It seems to fly in the face of the first amendment separation of church and state. The idea of subsidizing religious charity leads me to two questions. One, if we give money to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, do we also have to give money to the Church of Scientology and the World Church of the Creator? And if we do, doesn’t this make the idea worse, not better?

Somebody trademarked the emoticon :-(. I noticed that the trademark is owned by Despair.com, but was too lazy to investigate the matter further. Fortunately, a helpful reader pointed out that the trademark is an excellent hack, not a disturbing misuse of the US intellectual property system.

Gamasutra has an article on game programming that’s useful for all software developers (except those who know everything in it already).

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