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Saturday, January 04, 2003

Dan Bricklin: "The Pew Research Center continues with yet another in their series of wonderful surveys showing the role of the Internet in the lives of regular people in the USA. The latest one, Counting on the Internet, looks at people's feelings about finding information online." [lawrence's notebook] 11:03:08 PM  Permalink  comment []

"Why is this guy peeing in my water bowl?" In Daniel Pinkwater's Uncle Boris in the Yukon, the author does a great job of capturing dog thoughts: "if I pee on this rock, then other dogs will come by and know I was here." On the Pinkwater site, they've had a contest to come up with the best dog thoughts. The winners are now posted. The winning entry seems more apposite to cats than dogs, though (at least in my house). 10:41:31 AM  Permalink  comment []

Limbaugh: A wild hair Why didn't Rush Limbaugh get drafted during the Vietnam war? Either it was an ingrown hair in his behind (i.e. a wild hair up his ass) or he had a pilondial cyst. Snopes gets to the bottom of things. 10:31:09 AM  Permalink  comment []

Jeff Caldwell writes about why he has started learning and using Common Lisp. [Chris Double's Radio Weblog] This is a really interesting piece, and makes a great case for Lisp, which I haven't worked with in years and years. I always really liked that language which I came into via Logo. I've been spending a lot of time with Python which has many of the same benefits listed for Lisp in this article. There are so many great resources for Python that it's been easy to get going and I've written quite a few programs that I use regularly. I'm also interested in Ruby and want to spend a little time with that. I will, though, read through some of the articles and books that are mentioned here, particularly this one. 9:56:37 AM  Permalink  comment []

Rolling over and playing dead giving up freedom. Glen Martin is professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University, wrote a stunningly simple piece on loss of freedom of American citizens. [via caught in between] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] Today, people of the United States have given up their rights through the "Patriot Act," the "Homeland Security Act" and the Pentagon's new system of "Total Information Awareness." The astonishing thing about this "land of the free" is that most Americans now have no effective rights and do not care.     As long as they are free to shop in department stores and have traffic in the streets (with automobiles burning oil stolen from dying Iraqi children), they do not care. And to a greater degree every day, those few who do care about our liberties and rights are too terrified of our government to speak out.     The so-called "Patriot Act" expanded our government's secret search and wiretapping powers enormously. It empowered racial profiling as a recognized police practice and allowed broad sweeps of people of Middle Eastern or Asian origin. It effectively abolished immigrants' rights, allowing noncitizens to be held in secret locations on secret "evidence," without right to an attorney, for as long as the government wishes. It's really depressing how true this seems to be. What can we do about it? Freedom-loving Americans can support (financially -- come on, the chips are down) politicians willing to speak out against this travesty. Freedom-loving Americans can support (financially) organizations like the ACLU and the EFF which are standing up against this anti-American law. 9:37:38 AM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.