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Tuesday, January 22, 2002
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Thought for the day:
If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Winston Churchill
11:34:55 PM 
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Black Hawk Download: Pirated Videos Thrive Online. "We're fighting our own terrorist war," said Mr. Valenti, whose lawyers sent 54,000 letters to Internet service providers last year requesting the removal of copyrighted material from customers' Web sites. [New York Times]
And who are the terrorists in this scenario?
10:33:08 PM
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Mark Paschal has released a Radio-friendly version of Stapler. I tried setting up a feed for Packing.org, and it seems to be working! You can see it for yourself here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100205/staplerFeeds/Packingorg.xml.
This is just an experiment so far, so please don't rely on this feed. I want to experiment with combining multiple sources into one feed, and the Packing.org feed will probably go away if I can get that to work.
10:21:20 PM
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Barak Calls Arafat a 'Terrorist'. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who while in office offered major concessions to Yasser Arafat, harshly criticized the Palestinian leader Tuesday, saying, ``Maybe he's a real terrorist.'' [AP World News]
Gee, does Mr. Barak really think the head of the PLO might be a terrorist? Next he'll be telling us that the Pope is Catholic! If Mr. Barak's grasp of the blindingly obvious had been stronger when he was Prime Minister, maybe he would still be in office.
6:20:42 PM
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Netscape sues Microsoft. Netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner, files an anti-trust action against
Microsoft, in the latest twist to the internet browser war. [BBC News: sci/tech]
Netscape didn't lose their dominance in the browser "market" because of any illegal actions, they lost it because Microsoft's browser is much better! Even if Netscape had been free and MSIE cost $30, I would still prefer to use MSIE.
6:17:08 PM
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FBI searches Enron head office. Enron says FBI officers are searching its headquarters to investigate
allegations that documents were shredded in breach of court orders. [BBC News: world]
I'm amused and a little puzzled by all the fuss about Enron. They didn't do anything unusual, the company was basically a "dot com!" So their business plan was smoke and mirrors--the same was true of dozens of other companies which have already failed. They used "creative accounting" to look good, so did McAfee. The big difference is that they bribed politicians early and often, but they also did so impartially.
The parasites in Washington can't easily use Enron as a weapon against their opponents, because they all took bribes. Of course, none of them really did anything to help Enron (unlike Chrysler or the steel industry), so maybe the real scandal is that Enron wasted all that bribe money.
12:43:14 PM
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News.Com: Amazon settles music patent dispute. In a confidential agreement, Amazon and Intouch settled a lawsuit pending against the Internet retailer. Remaining defendants are Liquid Audio, Listen.com, DiscoverMusic and Entertaindom, a now-defunct unit of AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group. [Tomalak's Realm]
It's poetic justice that Amazon was sued over obviously bogus patents. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving company.
11:52:52 AM
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Gunman Wounds 20 in Jerusalem. A gunman opened fire with an assault rifle on Israelis waiting for a bus on a busy, rain-slick downtown street Tuesday afternoon, wounding at least 20 people before he was shot dead by police, officials said. [AP World News]
According to the story, the shooting lasted for ten minutes and the armed Israeli civilians on the scene did not fire. Why not, I wonder? Surely somebody had a clean shot!
Update: According to the latest news, the civilians were shooting back, it just happened to be a motorcycle cop who actually got the terrorist.
9:50:18 AM
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Palm Completes OS Subsidiary Spin-off. OS chief calls Pocket PC "bloated" [allNetDevices Wireless News]
This is good news, I think. Both Palm and Handspring are in trouble despite high sales, which made me worry that the Palm OS would be killed by ineptitude even though it dominates the PDA market. However, if the Palm OS is produced by a seperate company it can survive on licensing income from larger companies such as Sony and Kyocera, even if Palm itself doesn't survive.
9:26:10 AM
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Seen on a mailing list:
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and
spotted a woman below.
He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I
promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering
approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees
north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.
"I am, replied the woman, "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically
correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact
is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far."
The woman below responded, " You must be in Management."
"I am," replied the balloonist, " but how did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, " you don't know where you are or where you are
going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air.
You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect
people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly
the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
8:54:10 AM
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Mendocino, CA: Microwave Hot Seat. One man leads the fight to keep this touristy coastal town free of what he believes are the harmful effects of electromagnetic fields. But detractors warn of the harmful effects of denying the bountiful advance of technology. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News]
It's nuts like this that give California a bad name. Somebody needs to point out to these loonies that the sun is a much bigger source of electromagnetic radiation than anything manmade. Maybe then they'd all go live in caves somewhere and stop bothering sane people.
6:32:47 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/14/2006; 6:46:34 PM.
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