As a pro-gun, anti-campaign finance reform libertarian, I was actually excited to see the National Rifle Assocation debut its NRA News web site. But the actual implementation of the site just plain sucks. In case you haven’t followed the story around NRA News, the latest campaign finance reform bill places additional restrictions on the ability…
April, 2004
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A few weeks ago I was whining that I was to the point of pretty much ignoring my e-mail because of the inundation of spam. Earlier this year it got to the point where I was receiving 400-500 spam per day on some days, and the filtering I was doing was not proving effective (far…
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This Wired story about the selling of items for MMORPGs was simultaneously fascinating and irritating (sounds like most of the people I dated in college). Wired writer Julian Dibbell bet that he could make as much selling items for MMORPGS as he was making in his job as a professional writer. Last month he earned…
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The other day, my wife IMed me a few links to Chopping Block, and I’ve wasted quite a few hours this week reading through the archives of this deliciously twisted comic. I keep reading the back issues thinking, the creator of this strip is a genius, I’m just glad that he’s not my neighbor. Stuff…
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I missed this the first time around, but apparently in late March a local administrator with the Transporation Safety Agency had a plane searched for a bomb based on a tip from a psychic. The search resulted in the cancelling of the flight because it put some flight workers over their allotted work hours. The…
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Yesterday I took the day off to spend with my daughter during her Spring Break. We kicked off the day with some serious cartoon watching in the morning, followed by lunch at Chuck E. Cheese. Then it was on to roller skating and then back home to watch Shrek twice in a row. When were…
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So my laptop arrives back today, but as far as I can tell HP’s repair center never bothered to investigate my major complaint — that the backlight on this laptop is defective. They did fix the fan that wouldn’t spin up and replaced the touchpad for some reason (I never use the touchpad and certainly…
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Here’s a story that’s gotten quite a bit of press overseas but not much in the United States even though it happened in New York. In the late 1990s, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a number of other agencies and companies apparently sponsored several clinical studies of AIDS drugs on children…
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Wired has put Lawrence Lessig’s April 2004 column up on their web site. Lessig’s column is roughly about the decreasing costs of terrorist acts and what free societies should do to minimize the possibility of such acts. Before criticizing Lessig’s views, his column reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of The Outer Limits.…
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Last weekend I finished Lawrence Lessig’s new book Free Culture. Since he made it available free in PDF form, I just printed the whole thing off and read it while half-watching some old Universal monster films on DVD. Lessig’s book was excellent, but I do agree with Stephen Manes that Lessig glosses over a lot…