Posts

Did you know that rc3.org is #74 on this list: The World’s 100 Best Real People Websites? Me neither. A friend sent that link to me.

Cg, the new graphics programming language from nVidia, looks interesting.

Linux Weekly News is going away after next week’s issue. I hope they keep the daily edition – it can’t be that much trouble to maintain, and it’s highly useful. Producing something like the weekly edition, which has real articles, seems like a lot more work.

Salon is having a banner week. First they unveil a weblog hosting service, and now they run their first column by Keith Olbermann, their latest columnist. (By the way, here’s a free suggestion for blogs.salon.com: give your readers URLs that people can remember.)

Last week we learned that the idea that AOL had acquired Time Warner was a myth. This week, we learn that AOL’s pretensions toward IM interoperability were a myth. No person who has used Trillian (or one of the many other generic IM clients out there) can buy the idea that interoperability is too difficult to achieve.

Christopher Caldwell takes a look at the roots of President Bush’s personal fortune. Just something to keep around for the next time somebody challenges me when dispute the fact that President Bush’s sole marketable commodity in life is being politically connected. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

The House has written into its corporate reform bill a provision stating that attempting to break a federal law is a crime. In order to give you a sense of how crazy this is, it’s an attempt to generalize all laws so that they work like drug laws. That can’t be good. The real bonus here is that violating the new “attempting” laws would carry the same penalties as successfully violating the laws. It sure seems to me that the creation of “attempting” laws should occur on a case by case (or rather, statute by statute) basis. (Via the estimable Bashman.) ...

Salon rounded up a bunch of economics eggheads and asked them how to fix the economy. All the article really proves is that nobody knows the solution (not a surprise). Some people say that we need to control deficit spending, other people say that we need to blow out the deficit and stimulate the economy through public spending. One of the logical ideas that is proposed is using federal money to prop up the various state and local governments that are really struggling for air right now. The last person mentions that we need to help people out with consumer debt, and that deflation is currently a much bigger risk than inflation. I tend to agree that a bit of inflation would be helpful right now. It seems that we’re a nation of debtors currently, and inflation is great for people with debt. It hammers the people who have a lot of cash assets, but that’s not our biggest worry right now (in my unlearned opinion). I shudder to think that we may find ourselves in a Japan-like situation where capital is essentially available for free and there’s just nothing to spend it on. ...

The BBC has an article on the Ragefire spawn in EverQuest. If you don’t know what that is, then consider yourself lucky.

There’s a new email virus that infects WebTV boxes. It reboots the boxes and then has them dial 911. Police have actually responded to the calls.