Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Check out these Satellite photos of North Korean prison camps.Then read this: Death, terror in N. Korea gulag.

This is interesting: “State computer with confidential medical data put up for sale.A state computer put up for sale as surplus contained confidential files naming thousands of people with AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, the state auditor said Thursday.”I’ve been trying to buy up some old hardware from Texas A&M’s surplus auctions myself. Wonder what info I’ll find…

Here is a quote from an email I sent out on the Brazos Valley Web Design listserv regarding Microsoft’s lack of compliance with the W3C standards:I think that it’s helpful to realize that Microsoft’s browser is in effect a de-facto standard, which by overwhelming user preference is preferred over the W3C-compliant Mozilla. If you think of MS as the U.S. and W3C as the U.N., it’s easy to see that the “consensus” of a bunch of undemocratic, oppressive regimes is not any more valid that the individual judgment of the freest, richest nation on earth. The analogy is better than you might imagine, since both the US and MS are being derided precisely because of their virtues …

Check out this blog from initium:In 1977, Congress passed the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, a law intended to make life easier for FTC and Antitrust Division officials in deciding which mergers to prosecute and stop. Under HSR, all mergers worth at least a certain value (approximately $50 million under the current law) must be reported to the government prior to consummation. This “pre-merger notification” grants the government a waiting period to decide whether they wish to act against the merger. In most cases, the waiting period is terminated early, and no official action is taken. In a handful of cases-less than 2%-the FTC or Antitrust Division will seek conditions to allow the merger or attempt to stop it outright. Such official action …

If you’re a carefull reader, you’ve noticed that thanks to my genius both Laurel’s and my blogs now have comments. I couldn’t figure out how to run code in dynamically-generated text, but I randomly came across a tutorial on Using JavaScript Includes to Manage Content and did just that!

It seems like every single blog on the internet has an ode of some sort to the downed space shuttle. Not all are positive—Laurel things that it’s time to privatize (i.e. close) NASA because it’s a waste of taxpayer’s money. I think it’s important not to confuse the spirit of discovery that allowed man to go to space, and the particular method by which that is being done today. The International Space Station, (whose massive cost overruns may well have caused maintenance failures that caused Columbia to blow up) is a perfect example of the wrong approach to take to space exploration. The ISS is a typical result of multinational bureaucracies trying to …