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Sunday, May 6, 2007 |
The new Musicmoose site is up. Get your free guitar, mandolin, banjo, (and more) lessons here. They are great.
11:20:25 AM 
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If you are studying Japanese, here is a fine tool for you. It only works with Firefox, but you will know by now that Firefox is the best browser around at present.
Rikaichan is a popup Japanese-English/German/French/Russian dictionary extension for Firefox.
You want to install the main extension, one of the word-dictionaries and the name dictionary. And it works fine. It shows you the kanji and the kana with the translation of single and combined characters. You can toggle it on and off in the tools menu or in the control-click menu.
You can try it out on my uisshurisuto (katakana - rendered here in romaji - for 'wishlist') and while you're at it, won't you please order one of the books for me? Doomo arigatoo gozaimasu.
11:17:17 AM
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ArsTechnica: "Retroactive immunity from prosecution is a beautiful thing if you're a major telecommunications provider in the US, and phone companies are about to receive it if the Bush administration gets its way. The administration's new appropriations request for intelligence agencies was recently disclosed at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and it includes a massive gift to the phone companies who have been (can we drop the 'allegedly' at this point?) helping the NSA and other agencies.
As the government explains later in an analysis of the bill, 'companies that cooperate with the Government in the war on terror deserve our appreciation and protection - not litigation'. Any court case dealing with the issue would be thrown out of court, and the protection would include all phone company interaction with the intelligence community since September 11.
With Congress unwilling to figure out what was going on, individuals and advocacy groups began filing lawsuits against the phone companies. The EFF and others argued that communications privacy laws had been violated, but the government countered by claiming that a 'state secrets' privilege meant that the cases should simply be thrown out."
The biggest state secret - though it is out by now - is that the US government is a rogue government. The only reason for its secrecy is the criminal nature of its dealings.
11:02:15 AM
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TimesOnline: "Labour suffered a bad night at the polls, losing its historic dominance in Scotland, overall control in Wales, and nearly 500 seats in England.
But its strategists were able to point out that it had lost fewer seats in England than had been predicted and that its share of the vote had slightly increased - by 1 percentage point. Tony Blair suggested that the elections had given Labour a 'good springboard' to win the next general election."
More.
10:53:57 AM
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