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katlalog
010928 20:43
America edges closer to fascism:
Make-believe patriotism? Dissenting voices not welcome in a flag-waving chorus.
010928 20:14
Bush leads the The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism . (via camworld)
010926 14:14
Things are looking up :)
Ditch Microsoft IIS now, says Gartner (Register, via camworld)
The key point of the advisory is that Gartner has lost faith in Microsoft's ability to patch and fix the IIS.
It recommends holding off from .NET products too, or at least those that are based on Microsoft's IIS until the latter is "completely rewritten".
010926 13:27
Capitalism just spoiled my lunch:
Not a drop to spare. Why privatisation of water supplies is a global growth market. (The Guardian).
The supply of our basic ultilities should under no circumstances be left to private profiteers. Even in this oh so advanced country that i currently live in (England), a number of people die every winter because they cannot afford to heat their houses because of gas and electricity privatisation.
010926 12:49
a challenge to Google to open a door out of Microsoft's walled garden. (WebWord)
i'm not a fan of rollovers but i just learned a neat little trick: creating rollovers using the Span tag and JavaScript Event Handlers.
010921 14:50
Patriotism in capitalist times: Americans stealing flags from their neigbors to sell them to other Americans. I'm glad they're still getting their priorities right. (via boingboing)
010920 22:45
Userfriendly is laying off people (message from 18 Sept.), but I refuse to add my favorite comic to the RIP list [?] just yet. Life is depressing enough as it is at the moment.
010919 16:45
'Schadenfreude' is a word that comes to the mind of all accessibility and usability experts when we hear about how major news sites went into 'crisis-mode' in the wake to the WTC attack, meaning that they stripped all the graphics from their pages to make them load faster - or at all.
010919 11:29
what do they call the @ symbol in other languages?
010914 14:22
010914 12:57
this can't be emphasized enough in these headless situations: you must balance the mass media views with alternative sources! develop a truly informed opinion.
Indymedia reports that the TV pictures of celebrating Palestinians might be faked.
010914 12:12
what is the point in increased surveillance? how are Echelon and Carnivore going to pick out real threats from the WTC / terrorists / bombs and explosives traffic going around right now. everybody is taking about it and everyone is using the keywords that normally ring the bell at the FBI or NSA.
010914 00:02
i hear the word 'war' an awful lot at the moment.
So ask yourself something. Do you object to violence? Really? Or do you object to "their" violence. Will you object to the American military striking back? Bombing Kabul or Khartoum or Tripoli. A tactical nuke on northern Afganistan? Will you object if the Israelis open up on the Palestinians? Will you? [source]
010913 22:56
boingboing refers to this as 'Welcome to the Kristallnacht II rehearsals'.
010913 22:24
Angeblich kam aus Deutschland Warnung vor Anschlägen in USA (Yahoo.de)
010913 11:57
as business tries to return to normal:
the end for Scoot?
010912 12:51
i think my own attitude is obvious by now. here's a comment from someone on /.:
Re:The Day Innocence Died (Score:3, Insightful)
A well-written tale, to be sure.
I just get a little miffed by the title - One thing I have not seen at all on any of the network broadcasts yet is someone talking about "Why would someone want to do this?". When you ask that question, you can find many answers, answers that might shock you. The American government has done some pretty gruesome things in the name of "Democracy", and continues to do so. Innocent? The government, the corporations... no.
Americans are the most genuinely kind people I have ever met. They just seem to be completely oblivious to the world around them, except when wars or terrorists bring it home.
I'm not defending the terrorist attack. I just think that it needs to be looked at in a greater perspective.
010912 12:20
From the sept11info mailing list (via nyc.indymedia):
Whoever did this, it is most likely they began as creatures of US policy, training and money.
010912 11:51
The mood in the UK is mixed. The shock factor is compared to Princess Di's death. Yesterday, among reactions of shock about the atrocious loss of life, there was a lot of smugness, even on TV. Disasters (natural and man-made) happen all over the world all the time, but suddenly 'freedom' and 'civilization' are under attack. A lot of people feel insulted. People are also scared that this 'standing side by side with America' will be dangerous once the US starts retaliating in its typical arrogant manner. The general understanding seems to be that this was an attack on the United States and their economic and foreign policies, so keep us out of this!
010912 10:30
is ESR calling for vigilante action??? and he thinks that's a better idea than some stupid government led retaliation, which will undoubtedly mean more surveillance, more big brother laws and quite possibly military conflict?
Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists.
010912 08:10
3 am in new york. cell phone calls coming out of the rubble. creepy.
010911 23:17
when i first heard about the WTC blowing up today i wasn't too worried, they'd do a 'seven days backstep' on it... (tv is seriously bad for you!)
now there's rumors of missiles flying in Kabul. i have to go to bed soon and hope when i wake up tomorrow morning everything will be normal... and it's tuesday again.
010911 22:36
More voices of reason:
D.C. Declared State of Emergency; Activists Call for U.S. Restraint
and
Compassion and Realism After the US Attacks
010911 19:58
not really necessary to mention this at all, as if you hadn't heard already, but what kind of weblog would i be if i didn't mention the event that brought the internet to a crawl and the world to red alert. finally found a weblog reporting about Manhattan under rubble without bloodshot eyes:
i took some time to look through blogger 's search engine for blog coverage of the attack on World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A lot of what I saw makes me sick. I understand that people's first impulse in a crisis is to be angry or lust for revenge. But get a grip people.
here's another one:
The jingoism is driving me crazy. This is an attack against US, for God's sake, not democracy itself.
010911 12:14
010911 11:37
I believe that all we need to solve the world's problems is Star Trek's replicator technology. This should deal the death blow to greed, money, social injustice, capitalism. We just moved a step closer. (via /.)
010909 19:06
Wouldn't it be nice, if just once a company could really acknowledge and reward customer loyalty? This item is on the verge of being good news: Lego, intellectual property and open source (business2, via /.):
Mindstorms, Lego's high-tech robotics kit, was an immediate hit. And after hackers cracked the operating system, it became an even bigger hit. Now Lego is left with a conundrum: Leave well enough along, or sue the bastards?
010908 22:18
A depressing look at mainstream Internet.
010908 19:52
Some serious protest against the DMCA [Background]
010908 19:02
They got to be kidding (Yahoo News) :
Around one million British school children succeeded in causing an earthquake on Friday, jumping up and down simultaneously in the world's largest scientific experiment.
Fortunately the world didn't split in two as one of the children surveyed before the event believed would happen, nor did the Earth leave the Sun's orbit as feared by another.
The implications could be mind-boggling. I couldn't possibly talk here about the ideas that came into my head.
010907 22:56
More Internet deaths? [?] Regional Altavista sites not updated since April.
010907 21:58
Daypop, a weblog search engine with some interesting comments about weblogs in the creators own.
010907 20:44
YES!!! Making money from cutting advertising out. The monster is eating itself?
Their website gets an F for accessibility though. (Thanks for the good news, BoingBoing.)
010907 16:03
Some absolutely beautiful Burning Man 2001 pictures at Wired. More here.
010907 15:11
Fantastic idea: Breathalyzer build into cars to stop drunk drivers. It monitors "air in the vehicle cabin for the presence of ethanol vapor concentrations". (via /.)
010906 19:44
I recently put my RSI resources list up for anybody interested. I distributed this at a talk I gave about RSI at my place of work on International RSI Awareness Day, 28 February 2001. For those in the UK I can highly recommend the RSI-UK mailing list which is populated by extremely caring and knowledgeable people.
010906 18:12
From Rory Litwin's Library Juice 4:31 :
"There is only one kind of internet filter that works - conscience."
- Cuban Library Association President Marta Terry, quoted by Dale Vidmar in his Cuba diary, available at http://www.newbreedlibrarian.org/archives/01.02.apr2001/feature1.html
010905 11:44
Someone thinks they're good for something:
Make your own smart tags.
010905 10:39
Urbanization of wildlife. (BBC News)
We have foxes living in our garden in the middle of Manchester. They smell, but nobody uses the totally overgrown garden anyway. The yearly batch of cubs are great fun to watch and the only disturbing thing about them is the occasional noise they make in the middle of the night when - according to Ben - they're only playing. It sounds like they're skinning a bird. 2 years ago a drug-crazed neighbor jumped over 2 fences to get into our garden, wielding a big plank of wood, and went after the fox cubs, allegedly "getting one right in the head", as he claimed in his adrenalin rush. Trying to defend them I was attacked and threatened too. I don't think he had anything against the foxes. He just "wanted to kill" (his words!).
010904 11:33
RIP Internet. [?]
Internet pioneer and ex-CEO of Network Solutions Jim Rutt thinks so. He says:
Mostly all I see in the Internet's future are mundane business applications, ad-driven content that will drag the intelligence of the Net down to the lowest common denominator, and the ever-growing selection of mostly boring porn.
In 1999 he was still more optimistic:
I would argue that the essence of the Net value system is to be found at the intersection of almost total freedom with voluntary and truly consensus-based cooperation. The Net's freedom provides the most unfettered workspace ever created by or for the human mind. Cooperation on the Net allows us all to work together to make the whole so much greater than the sum of the parts. When the cooperation is truly voluntary, the free market in ideas allows the best models to prevail. [source]
010904 10:49
Interesting morning on BBC News:
Small group size is vital for decision-making.
Eat less, live longer.
This might send the wrong message to anorexics instead of the right message to the rest of us.
010903 12:29
Scott Andrew defends 'HTMLers'.
010903 12:15
burning man going the way all things going mainstream do: philosophy, ideology and community die. i wonder how long they'll be able to keep 'leave no trace' up before they have to raise prices even more to pay for outsourcing garbage removal. is this more proof that communities can only stay healthy up to a certain population size?
010903 11:04
more on 'doing your exercises':
...do it for the side effects!
...if you're 40 years old, and you exercise 15 minutes a day from now until you turn 65, you'll have spent a total of about a quarter of a year exercising in those 25 years.
But, if by exercising you manage to live 3 years longer, you're ahead by a total of two and three quarters years by age 65--1000 days. [source]
010902 01:07
ok, i've finally figured out why people type urls into search engine boxes. i thought that's just newbies. but now it's happened to me. several times. i type an url in the location bar, not really looking at the screen, while this damn drop-down box asks me whether i want to search google for www.whateverimjusttyping.com. then i just - somehow - brush past the down key on the way to enter and in 0.01 seconds i've searched google for whatever.com. i feel embarrassed. it all adds to the statistics. i wish mozilla didn't try so hard to be like IE.
010901 21:12
new bird in ufies
great storyline developing
010901 04:28
do your exercises!!!
How Technology Has Influenced Worldwide Obesity
in a discussion on slashdot a while ago the usual sex-starved whining was going on about the lack of geek girls with which one could not only share the body but also the mind... when one of the geek girls pointed out that although one would think that a geek girl should have the pick from this huge pool of males, it's not much easier for them either, because "the odds might be good, but the goods are odd."
i burned that one to memory :)
more on the subject:
No sex please, we're geeks [salon.com Jan. 12, 2000]
quote of the month
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges