Bush Leads, Opposition Mewls | Bayosphere: "I rarely agree with Pat Buchanan, but check out the start of his latest column:

Men who believe in something, even if wrong, will triumph over those who believe in nothing. That is the lesson of the Bush recovery of the past four weeks."

Google Reader: "Men who believe in something, even if wrong, will triumph over those who believe in nothing. That is the lesson of the Bush recovery of the past four weeks."

Weblogs Forum - The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts: "We now know that EJB 1 & 2 were based on an entirely flawed set of use cases. Because of the damage this (still slowly dawning) realization has wrought to Sun's reputation, it's hard to know whether EJB3, which probably should have been called something else to disassociate it with the failures of its predecessors, will succeed, despite the fact that EJB3 is like a breath of fresh air. "

Man is this ever true!

Squeak: Squeak: "'Software people tend to favor the joy of complexity,
yet we should strive for the joy of simplicity.'

- Alan Kay"

A fundamental point about life

Why I Am Not A Java Programmer: "The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil"

Swimming against the Tide: "It's taken 25 years but we're nearly back there."

Alice Kahn Quotes - The Quotations Page: "For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.

Alice Kahn"

Surprise!

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Ag subsidies revealed!!!: "shockingly, countries like France have ignored an EU directive and refused to make their subsidy records available to the public"

Lisp entrepreneur!

Good luck! random-state.net / December 13th 2005: "I've decided to starve.

To accomplish this life-goal and simultaneously bring joy to the world I'm embarking on an entrepreneurial career in early 2006.

The business plan is centered around providing commercial support for Steel Bank Studio, an open source Common Lisp development environment built around SBCL and Slime."

Serious Organised Crime?

BBC NEWS | Politics | Falconer defends new protest law: "Maya Evans, 25, recited the 97 names by the Cenotaph memorial to Britain's war dead in Whitehall, near Downing Street.

She was found guilty of breaking a new law stopping unauthorised protests within half a mile of Parliament.Ms Evans, a vegan cook from Hastings, was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £100 costs after being found guilty of breaching the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005."

The idea that we take a measure, which is a public order measure, designed to protect our Parliament building as depriving us of freedom of speech is ridiculously overdone

How does stopping someone speaking protect a building ?

Linus does not call users idiots

"Users are Idiots"? - Linux@blogweb.de: "But, to name 'Users' as 'Idiots', well, I never expected to read something like this from you. Because the 'idiots' are using (most of the time) your kernel, and with those statements you are pushing the 'idiots' away from using your kernel."

Someone is either too annoyed to read clearly or their mastery of english not as good as Linus'.

Of course, the anti-Gnome point is there nonetheless. I have only recently started using Gnome with Ubuntu - so far it seems nice. I iss some KDE things but perhaps I just haven't looked for their equivalent yet.

Simtec Electronics - AN0017 - A Programmers Bookshelf: "This book just shows the programmers age. Except for extremely rare cases lisp is no longer seen 'in the wild' of interest only to archaeological students."

Finding Lisp: "Next, focus on the foundational balkanization problems. "

Iraq vs. WW2 France

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:: "So the Germans were able to do a somewhat similar job with 7500 people."

To be fair there were also several German Army Divisions as well - interesting that the quote omits that. Looking at it from our perspective today, though there was some very valiant resistance then, it seems odd that Iraq is so difficult by comparison with WW2 Europe. What are the differences? I would suggest: no religious fanaticism, in Western Europe ( maybe not eastern) the ability to live quite well if you behaved ( and weren't Jewish), little prospect of salvation until 1944, and the certainty of dreadful reprisals from the occupier with no moderation caused by the world's media watching.