Land of the Free

Quickies. Because I’m distracted. The most important post of the day . I will write about this if I can find the time/energy, but go read it. Officer Friendly (not) Outrage fatigue (On discovering that people in government who tell the truth get forced out of their jobs: "It’s like reading that, once again, the freeways are crowded this morning.") Our Air Force isn’t only a home to religious intolerance verging on bigotry, it’s headed by f... more

This is funny. Dreamhost, the cheap but imperfect hosts of this blog, have a blog of their own. And in a recent entry, DreamHost Blog | Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry , they describe their correspondence with a supposedly neutral and objective service that offers consumers reviews of hosting companies. This is how hosting-reviews.com describes itself:Hosting-Review is an independent provider of web hosting reviews. We base our reviews on knowledge, personal experience with webhosts a... more

Further evidence of domestic subversion by our enemies: Moles in the White House killed a (probably) legal NSA data mining project with built-in privacy protections . The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic inf... more

Someone wrote to me once hinting he might offer the high four figures or even five if I would sell him discourse.net. I had no idea if it was real, or some sort of scam, or an attempt to entrap me into something that might be used against me in some weird UDRP proceeding . And since I had no real desire to sell, it seemed safer not to reply and too much trouble to write back with the sort of NDA you have to have in hand before entering into domain name related negotiations. If you beli... more