Charlie [Munger, Berkshire's Vice Chairman] and I are disgusted by the situation, so common in the last few years, in which shareholders have suffered billions in losses while the CEOs, promoters, and other higher-ups who fathered these disasters have walked away with extraordinary wealth. Indeed, many of these people were urging investors to buy shares while concurrently dumping their own, sometimes using methods that hid their actions.
Dave Winer
We felt it should be possible to create a feed like News.Com's, using the browser-based interface of Radio 8, so that's what we did.
George Orwell said: If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them
.
Last month's revelation that President Bush wants hundreds of millions of dollars to invent innovative ways to spy on Americans was greeted not with suspicion, but shoulder-shrugging indifference.
It won't do to point out that Enron was exempt from some government oversight. We live in a regulatory milieu in which people generally believe the government is watching over them. In other words, the welfare state has failed again. Yet unlike anywhere else, when government fails, a deafening chorus arises calling for more power and money. Will we ever learn?
Renderers provide a simple mechanism for formatting text within specific HTML constructs (e.g. a table) without specifying the actual HTML tags.
The average weblog has a relatively simple set of fields for each post: title, author, date/time, permanent URL, # of replies, URL of replies, and main content (I'm sure I'm missing some, but you get the idea). If we could somehow code our weblogs with this structure, Google and other services would be able to see the content as it really is: a loose collection of independent posts.
Interestingly, none of the people who've had the law invoked against them — the professor, the magazine publisher and now the businessman — has been associated with a single instance of a copyrighted work's being illegally duplicated. If the law is meant to stop pirates, why not go after pirates?
The Patriot Act, which incorporates and significantly expands FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] to include American citizens, was overwhelmingly approved by the Congress, most of whom admit they read only a few paragraphs, if any at all, of the 342-page document.
© Copyright 2002 Michael J. Hehir.
