Running Commentary
What's going on and What I'm thinking about it.







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Monday, June 17, 2002
 

The Bush Quiz

Courtesy the back page of this week's New Yorker. Come back everyday this week for another installment.

What kind of rights did George W. Bush say are given to the American people in the Declaration of Independence?

(a) "Unalienable." (b) "Inalienable." (c) "Uninalienable." ( d) "Securitized."


9:36:38 PM    

The American Taliban

An early nomination for the most frightening news story of the year, this piece from the Washington Post about how the American conservative christian movement is allying itself with the Islamic movement against international recognition of gay, womens and children's rights.

Look at who their friends are:

But it has been largely galvanized by conservative Christians who have set aside their doctrinal differences, cemented ties with the Vatican and cultivated fresh links with a powerful bloc of more than 50 moderate and hard-line Islamic governments, including Sudan, Libya, Iraq and Iran.

This is an interesting opportunity to clarify just who the real enemy of freedom and democracy is. The US initially took a great deal of flak for being 'anti-Islam' at the beginning of the 'war on terror.' In truth, we'd have been against militant Unitarians if they'd cooked up 9/11. We're against your actions, not your beliefs. We're against murderous psychopaths of whatever creed....

But this new alliance is troubling because it points up that the real threat is from conservative, fundamentalist religious groups of all persuasions. Just as the Vatican is much more interested in it's own preservation than in doing the 'right thing' regarding the more than 1% of it's US clergy who have resigned in the wake of the pedophilia scandal, and conservative Christian group's in the US flock to support Israel not because they love the Jews but because their prophecies say that the end of the world -- and the beginning of the rapture -- can only come when the Jews are in Palestine.

And we've got a president who belives in all this. Yippee!

 

 


3:44:35 PM    

So call off the dogs

Wal-Mart is selling Lindows-based PCs. I guess the anti-trust suit should be over now, as there seems to be viable competition in the PC operaeting systems market.

I wonder how good their customer support is?

For $200 more I can get the same machine from Dell.

I wonder how much Lindows is getting paid per copy?

Interestingly, they feature the system running lots of Microsoft software -- IE, Word, Excel, Outlook....

It seems that to download Lindows, you have to pay $99. You're not actually buying the software -- you're becoming a Lindows.com Insider -- and one of the privledges of that membership is the right to download the software....apparently the GNU provides for charging a fee to assist with the costs of physically transferring the software. God forbid we sully our pure ideology and place a value on the intellectual work of creating software...

 

 

I wonder what their R&D budget is


12:14:35 PM    



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