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Via mph at puddingbowl: Driving Votes - Visit a Swing State, Get Out the Vote! Register voters to defeat Bush
A list of all the stupid crap the current administration has perpetrated on the country. Read, get mad, let yourself be filled with righteous vitriol. Admit you'll do anything to defeat Bush, even stuff baby squirrels down the throat of blind nuns. It's all Clenis' fault, damnit.
Mark Bernstein: The Blogosphere's Bad Behavior
I don't even know what to say to this, it's so smug, elitist and anti-free speech. This is the same gentleman who has recently advocated dropping weblog comments and trackback, so as to better promote "civility" in the blogosphere. Which is just another way of saying that he belleves in free speech, as long as it's speech he approves of. And as usual, any plan which posits that someone, somewhere gets to decide which speech is acceptable and which is not is inherently flawed and will be routed around as damage.
Again. Free speech is inclusive. It doesn't mean only things you like, agree with, or whose tone you find sufficiently "nice." I happen to find Mr Bernstein's smug, condescending tone irritating. But I would never presume to say that we should "pull the plug" on him. Get it? It's called the First Amendment. Some of us take it seriously.
Remember, the corollary to "Users of free services can't complain about the provider" is "Providers of paid services can't complain about the user." Part of what I'm purchasing is your silence and compliance.
Anil's tedious little linkblog:
Nice ageism there, chump. Good to see you learned a lot from almost tanking your company.
Reagan Revisionism (washingtonpost.com)
They found their way to do it. They dwell endlessly on the man's smile, his sunny personality, his good manners. Above all, his optimism.
Man, the wingnuts are stretching to maintain that persecution complex when they complain about the manner in which the lapdog liberal press is praising Reagan.
From Slashdot, Parenting and a Career in Coding?
Some interesting posts, though it skirts the age discrimination in IT issue. Also features the obligatory 20-something complaint about carrying the family man. Worth a look.
Yeah, Dean was the front-runner too at one point. There's a big danger with this "stick with the main purveyor of syndication goodness since 1999" stuff: the web is littered with the husks of the next big thing that failed to adapt and thus died. You can make the case that Atom only even exists because RSS was declared "frozen," at least for you, that is, and thus the only way to get further features into syndication was to create a new format. This new "clarification" is even weirder - if there'd been the willingness to listen to developers and do this a few years ago, and do it right, with attention paid to extensibility, backwards compatibility and none of this "tee-hee, guess AGAIN!" childishness about "funkiness," we'd all probably be raving about how cool RSS 2.5 is and how it's poised to take over the universe. Instead, we're only really getting the "clarification" because RSS crapped the bed when Reuters tried to use it to display characters generally thought of as markup, despite not using them as such. Whoops. Unfortunately, comparable glitches will bite RSS in the butt more often as companies start using it more, at which point arguments for "simplicity" like "You can author the feed in Notepad!" will garner the eminently reasonable response "Why would you want to do that?"
Sidenote to advocates: Generally, it is not a good idea to use the doctor joke punch-line "Don't do that" when a user says, "It breaks when I do this." Especially when your purported reason for dumbing down the format is for the users' sake in the first place. Whenever you ask that question, you've failed somewhere.
But she's a girl: Why WordPress? via birdhouse.org: MovableType 3 Sting
I haven't really considered this point before, but reading it now it makes a lot of sense. dynamic db-backed systems make a lot of sense for me, especially for content which changes fairly frequently.
Also given the whole GPL vs proprietary distinction, I have to say that WordPress is starting to look better and better. I installed it on my laptop copuple weeks ago. I've played with it, but haven't really had time to go into it. I'm off to Ireland next week, so it'll have to wait till I get back - I don't even want to think about migration, though from reading the birdhouse.org post, I get the idea that it's pretty doable (i.e. other people have already done it, you lazy bastard.) And it's just the one blog I'm moving anyway.