A town in Italy has banned people from keeping goldfish in bowls.
…
The council in Monza believes fish get a “distorted view of reality” if they’re kept in a bowl.
…”You have no idea of the hygiene problems caused by animals and people living together and we don’t want to see animals treated like objects any longer.

(Thanks to: Tim)

I recently had occasion to configure my first Windows 2003 server, so I decided to write down some guidelines to aid the configuration and keep it secure. Before long, I had a lengthy list of boring rules, so I decided to make a list of commandments for managing web servers. Here is the result – the Twelve Commandments of Web Server Management. If I left out anything, thou shalt leave me a comment! Continue reading →

I’ve posted my latest post on my forum: Aids Reduces African Life Expectancy To 33: What are the root causes of the crisis?

Two cool tricks: put your Firefox install on a flash drive, and get a notification agent for Gmail.

If you are a TAMU student, I highly recommend participating in the economics experiments this summer and fall. Two years ago, I made boatloads of money ($50-$100/session) in the experiments with a bit of game theory and basic knowledge of human psychology. I’m not sure what this has to do with economic theory, but if the department insists on wasting $ on experiments that demonstrate the obvious, I’ll be glad to help them part with it.

Update: I started an album for my Auburn photos.

For anyone interested in such things, here are photos of beautiful Auburn, AL and my beautiful new laptop:
Continue reading →

Children as young as 10 are being recruited to fight for the Palestinian cause.
…
The recruits, some of whom are dwarfed by their AK-47 assault rifles, are taught how to carry out ambushes.
They are also made to do an obstacle course, crawling under barbed wire and leaping through hoops of fire while their instructors fire live bullets overhead.
The camp is run by a group called the Popular Resistance Committee, which said the next generation of Palestinians needed to know how to fight the Israeli “occupation”.

I haven’t blogged much lately, so it’s time for an update on the recent goings-on in my life. I mentioned a while back that I had a great internship coming up in San Antonio. Unfortunately, the company reneged on their offer on the last minute, so I took summer classes and worked for the first half of the summer, which kept me very busy, but will allow me to graduate in August. Fortunately, I found another internship working on the website of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute in Auburn AL, where I am currently staying and working. I will be here until the end of their summer conference, by which point I hope to find some long-term employment.

The more immediate reason for the lack of updates is that I wasn’t able to take my desktop with me, and due to a combination of lack of planning and the incompetence of Dell customer support, I won’t receive my new laptop till at least Monday. My email access will be sporadic for a while, but I can be reached at heroic(at)gmail.com or veksler(at)mises.org

Jonathan Hoenig on SmartMoney: Get Off Our Backs!
Found via my daily fix of AR.

Things that give me a greater appreciation for the 4th:
China is planning to begin censoring and monitoring over 220 billion SMS messages sent each year by cell users. It already censors email traffic and web sites.

In an all-to-common incident in Israel, “four gunmen from an armed group in the Fatah movement loyal to Palestinian Athority President Yasser Arafat” gunned down a ‘collaborator’ in a Palestinian town “who was accused of betraying the whereabouts of wanted militants to Israeli forces and of sexually molesting his two daughters.
The man, Muhammad Rafiq Daraghmeh, 45, was riddled with automatic weapons fire after he answered “yes” to both accusations and a hrong of onlookers chanted, “Kill him, kill him!” Relatives said his family had disowned him.”

Typically, the MSNBC article containing the story was titled “Israel kills three in Gaza Strip” I suspect that the elderly and frail-looking man was only guilty of one of the “crimes,” but that was more than enough for the Palestinian lynch mob, which has a habit of tearing apart martyrs and victims and taking home body parts as mementos.