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Words you don’t expect to ever see together
From Mark Steyn, who has an eye for vivid prose
If you’re going to be attacked, it’s best to be attacked by a relatively advanced enemy. Compared with being force-fed Grandfather Smurf’s genitals, having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.
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As If
In a remarkably shoddy job of reporting, the AJC goes through an entire article about Avondale Estates’ quest for businesses to pay taxes and fill spaces on College Avenue without mentioning that they turned down the Walmart that would occupy the abandoned and dilapidated Avondale Mall.
And speaking of Walmart, in parts of New York, they’re trying not so subtly to ban them from building there.
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Weird and creepy
The EFF does good work says the WaPo
Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color PrintersThe feds claim that they do it to stop counterfeiters, but that seems a bit ridiculous. All the more reason to never register hardware.
Quotes:Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature. “It’s disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity,” Schoen said. And it’s not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week. “We were able to break this code very rapidly,” Schoen said. How long before this code floats into Open Source?
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Grudgingly
I’m starting to like Tom Delay. An example of all is wrong and unlibertarian about the Republican party, yes (except maybe on guns). He is giving us entertainment value for our tax dollars, which is more than you can say about most politicians.For those of you who aren’t aware, this is his recent mug shot.
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Economic illiteracy
For the last time (though not anyone in particular, I’ve just heard this twice today from random people):
Software piracy does not raise prices, it lowers them by adding substitutes, namely pirated copies of the software. It DOES prevent software from being profitable, and hence, created by making it unfeasible to create the software.
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Qutoe of the moment
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
– Laurence J. Peter -
Mystery photo
Who can tell me what this is?
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Random Photo
I thought this looked nice.
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Quick thoughts on Google
While having dinner with Pastras tongiht, I remarked that Google was brilliant because they never did anything hard. That is not to say that the creation of that company did not involve anything difficult, but rather that they use technology in a proper way and never in a way that just barely works.
What is the word for that?
A new word I just learned from the surprisingly difficult to use Volokh site is “Parade of Horribles” which I’ve never heard before.
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Good article on Patrick Fitzgerald
The WaPo has an excellent profile on Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent counsel on the Wilson affair. He is also the bringer of the first indictment for bin Laden as well. He has been pleasantly leak-free during his whole investigation too.