Filling the pent-up need for a
potato-powered
server. It can handle all of 0.2 hit/second, but has been up
for the past five days.
Please bookmark this page as http://www.redbird.org/yawl.html. (The backup at http://www.altern.org/yawl/yawl.html is having problems at the moment; it's there, but I can't update it.)
Filling the pent-up need for a
potato-powered
server. It can handle all of 0.2 hit/second, but has been up
for the past five days.
We're screwed.
The new "electronic signature" act the president signed with such fanfare doesn't have anything to do with digital signatures. Rather, it lets companies impose the equivalent of shrinkwrap licenses on anyone who clicks on a Web link or presses 9 on a telephone keypad.
Even more disturbing, "The legal effectiveness, validity, or enforceability of any contract executed by a consumer shall not be denied solely because of the failure to obtain electronic consent or confirmation of consent by that consumer...."
I'm hoping that there's a misunderstanding somewhere, but I'm not exactly confident. This is a US law; the rest of you might be better off, or at least have different problems. [via rc3.org]
David Conason reminds readers, and pundits, with
short--or selective--memories that the Clinton administration
doesn't
even come close to being "The most
criminal, most corrupt, most cynical administration" in US history.
The top two were both Republican: Ulysses S. Grant still holds the
records, measured in indictments and convictions, and number 2 is,
of course, Nixon:
More importantly, the Watergate coverup was merely the most publicized offense of a White House that was the scene of a dozen desperate criminal conspiracies, including multiple burglaries of its "enemies"; bribery of witnesses with suitcases full of cash; blatant extortion of milk producers, ITT, Howard Hughes and other corporate contributors; siphoning of illegal campaign money from the Greek military dictatorship; and gross misuse of the CIA, the FBI and the IRS. And that's just the executive summary of Nixonian felonies....He was spared a long prison term only for the sake of the nation's future. (In fairness, it should probably be noted that he never fibbed about a sexual liaison.)
Ecologists value tropical rainforest as high as $1660 per hectare
per year, just for what it does by sitting there. The people
who live near the rainforest, though, get about
$24
per hectare per year in goods from the rainforest. This
suggests that if the rest of us want them to keep the rainforest,
instead of cutting it for farmland, we might do well to pay them
for the services they're providing to the world at large.
One possibility might be a variation on the Nature Conservancy's practice of buying land that is important for conservation: the people who live in the rainforest might sell the right to develop the land to northerners who have little rainforest of our own to preserve, in order specifically that we would notdevelop it, and nobody else could cut it down either.
Six score and seventeen years ago, a controversial politician
gave a
brief
speech,
which has been long remembered.
The blind dolphins of the Indus River are
d ying
from a variety of causes, many of which suggest
that the river itself is in trouble.
While this
summary
of the Supreme Court's recent decisions is only tangent to my
reality, I like it, especially for the short and sweet
ruling on the Boy Scouts.
I enjoyed Chicken Run enough to write an
epinion
praising it. At this rate, I might see as many as five
movies this year.
Jon Carroll considers devotional artworks, and
the value of
forgeries:
We don't expect artists to be good people. I would read the novels of all sorts of people to whom I would not lend my car keys. I would gaze at the paintings of a known embezzler happily -- if the paintings were good.
Does circumcision
reduce
the risk of AIDS? The statistics are suggestive, but even
if it's true, it won't be an easy public health measure to sell in
much of Africa.
"It's fascinating that the one intervention that is simple, apparently effective, cheap and lifelong is the one most violently opposed by men in this field," said Brian Williams, a South African AIDS researcher who is studying the disease in the mining communities west of Johannesburg. Even members of his own government health department do not take the issue seriously, he said. "There is a strange reluctance even to discuss it."
Along with the statistics, the biology of the foreskin may make it especially vulnerable to AIDS. Anti-circumcision activists, however, argue that
The scare tactics are always consistent with the dreaded disease of the times. There was a penile cancer scare in the '30s; a cervical cancer scare in the '50s; and the sexually transmitted disease scare of the '60s.
In discussing
geek slang,
Joe Komenda makes the point that
one must never attempt to define slang (or any other word, for that matter) in the abstract; examples should be given. The most elusive aspect of slang is the context in which it is used, since by its very nature there are no formally accepted rules of usage. This is the major shortcoming of any slang lexicon or dictionary - the failure to recognize that within any distinct group of people a slang term will have different meanings. To properly understand the context of slang, one must hear it in use.[via rc3.org]
The Indian Space Research Organization wants to launch a
lunar
orbiter by 2005. The motives are both scientific--there's
still quite a
bit to be learned about the moon--and psychological; others argue that
the money would better be spent on launching more satellites and
analyzing the data ISRO's current satellites are gathering about
India's resources.
Does the world really need a
Lionel
Fanthorpe appreciation page?
Jane Smiley describes
21st-century
family values in large part as the result of tensions between
market capitalism and intimacy. She's surprisingly optimistic about
the possibilities this leaves:
If marriage or partnership is for anything now, then it is for this: learning by experience how to express love. Compassion, tenderness, patience, responsibility, kindness, and honesty are actions that elicit similar responses from others. These are not bargaining chips; when they are used that way they lose their essence as well as their ability to elicit anything from others but suspicion. Moreover, compassion, tenderness, patience, responsibility, kindness, and honesty increase the happiness of the compassionate, tender, patient, responsible, kind, and honest man or woman.The social redemption of marriage in our time is precisely in intimacy as a countervailing force against the chaotic isolation promoted by free-market capitalism. If we can share with our spouses and understand that we both benefit, then we can share with our children and understand the same thing, and after that we can share with other children, and with our friends, with our communities, and with the larger community that is all around us, now rendered less fearsome by our own choice to approach it with a sense of connection. We can build up a network that reminds us over and over that connection is the very stuff of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The
next
best thing to random passwords--if, as with the truly
random, you can remember them.
Writing in the New York Times, which I don't
think of as a particularly feminist publication, Brent Staples
makes some
good
points about the recent attacks on women in Central Park, and
why men who had no criminal records, and didn't know each other,
would have cooperated to mistreat strangers in this way.
Sheryl McCarthy reminds the police, and her readers, that
lots of other professions also have
low
morale, and get their jobs done anyway.
Another fine day in law enforcement:
Homies Unidos, an organization of former gang members
working to get people out of a life of crime, is
suing
the Los Angeles Police Department for, basically, "acting like
gangs."
Five leading LA lawyers have filed a civil rights case claiming that police from the Rampart division assaulted and harassed members of Homies Unidos. This is a deliberate imitation of a current anti-gang initiative by the police, whereby gang members are served with an injunction which puts them under a local curfew.
Not that all the police news is bad, by any means: it was a positive pleasure to walk down Fifth Avenue in the Gay Pride Parade yesterday, and see the police treating it as just another ho-hum chance at overtime for directing traffic--and even more encouraging to see the Gay Officers Action League marching, by the dozens, in uniform, with a band, as the crowd cheered.
Microsoft wants changes in, or an exemption from,
proposed
new Australian privacy laws, which it claims would make its
undercover anti-piracy investigations more difficult.
It was also concerned that the law would prohibit it collecting information on individuals' criminal records.[via Need to Know]The submission confirmed Microsoft collected information on previous convictions for software piracy as evidence for use in civil proceedings.
From the prehistoric gallery: the
Venus
Moose Trap.
The
identification of
feathers
on a 220-million-year-old fossil flying lizard challenges
the theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs.
Longisquama insignis
lived about 75 million years before the first bird,
Archeopteryx lithographica. (Yes, I know "Archeopteryx" is
sufficient for most purposes, but that species name is too good not
to repeat.) Longisquama was an archosaur, a member of the group
ancestral to dinosaurs and birds--and crocodiles.
For anyone who is confused by recent news
about Texas Governor George W. "Shrub" Bush, I
recommend Molly
Ivins
and Lou Dubose's book
Shrub,
The Short, Happy Political Life of George W. Bush,
not only for the biographical information, but as an explanation
of what the governor of Texas actually can--and can't--do. It's not
what you'd expect if you live in any other US state.
Martian water?
Maybe:
what Mars Global Surveyor has found is evidence of
water flowing on the surface in the "geologically recent past," a
term that could cover anything within human history, if not before.
NASA does say that
The relative freshness of these features might indicate that some of them are still active today--meaning that liquid water may presently exist in some areas at depths of less than 500 meters (1640 feet) beneath the surface of Mars.This page includes some good photos of the sites in question.
The
dark
side of plastic surgery isn't just that it may not make you
beautiful: at least one patient was left with permanent, disabling
pain, and nobody is sure how many die from liposuction.
[via Mouth Organ]
What if the state Motor Vehicles department processed
sex
changes?
This is
a local link to non-local material: this
disclaimer showed up
in my email, and I want to share it.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.