Posts

Found at K5: AT&T; has been busted for aiding and abetting spammers. Does George W. Bush believe in evolution? When asked about George W. Bush on the Jay Leno show last night, Martin Sheen discounted him on the grounds that he lacks intellectual curiosity. That’s exactly the problem I have with Bush, I could just never put it into the right terms. The problem I have with Gore is that he’s a shameless panderer (I’ve never had problems figuring out the words for that one). ...

Four ICANN “interim” board members have decided that they won’t leave after all, having changed the bylaws governing the organization so that they can stick around. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. Speculating that free software hackers might have been behind the Microsoft break-in got Andrew Leonard into hot water with his readers. I wonder if comparing the ideology behind free software to a parable told by Chairman Mao in this article will help his cause … ...

Nordstrom (the upscale depart store) suffered a black eye when they commissioned a commercial email campaign that targetted people who had shopped in their stores. They paid Acxiom to match Nordstrom’s customer list with a database of email addresses and then fired off the SPAM campaign. Unfortunately, it blew up in their face. Hopefully this will serve as a cautionary tale for other companies that think using such services is a good idea. ...

Steven Baum’s research into the Social Security “crisis” over at Ethel the Blog turned up some fascinating information about future insolvency and also provides some interesting observations about privatization. You have to love it when people actually research the facts … Law.com has an article on the current status of UCITA, the evil software licensing law that the software industry desperately wants to see enacted so that they don’t have to take responsibility for their mistakes and so that they can abuse their customers at will. ...

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

Brock Meeks on the money politics that steer ICANN. 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. 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. ...

I managed to download Groove last night and install it, and it looks really cool. I haven’t had a chance to collaborate with anyone else using Groove yet, but hopefully I’ll get someone at work to install it so that we can play with it. What I’m really interested in is developing some new tools to use within Groove, that I’ll discuss on this page later. For now, I’m reading the Groove Developer’s Guide. ...

I haven’t been paying attention to the problems at Pacifica radio lately, mainly because I live in an area that has no Pacifica affiliate (much to my chagrin), but it looks like the corruption of Pacifica’s original mission persists. Monkeyfist reports on problems between Pacifica and Democracy Now, one of the best radio programs currently aired. In my opinion, Democracy Now is an essential part of the media landscape, and the idea that it’s being harassed by higher-ups at Pacifica is deeply disturbing. Kendall’s report on Democracy Now took me on a brief trip down memory lane, and reminded me that the show had a large role in molding my current political philosophy, back when I listened to it on the way to work in rural Pennsylvania. ...

This morning I heard on NPR that ads for the presidential campaign are only being run in about 17 states – those states where the electors are still considered to be up for grabs. This comes on the heels of a discussion I had at work yesterday about the Electoral College. It seems to me to be a truly outmoded concept. Right now, if you’re from a state that’s certain to go one way or the other, your presidential ballot doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter that New York has millions of people who vote Republican, or that Texas has millions of people who vote Democratic. The presidential candidates don’t even want those votes, because the Electoral College throws them away. Seems kind of odd, doesn’t it? ...

Britannica.com offers a weekly rundown of the references Dennis Miller makes in his commentary during Monday Night Football. I don’t even watch MNF, and I still find the wrapup fun and educational. Today, LaunchCast played the song Jump Around by House of Pain because it’s recommended by fans of Merle Haggard. Oddly, I like both House of Pain and Merle Haggard, so this association worked perfectly for me. Such is the power of data mining! (Of course, the weakness of data mining is that even though relationships like this may turn out to be common, it would still be dumb to put the House of Pain CDs in the same bin with the Merle Haggard CDs at a record store.) ...