Lost in OK

Following up on my little rant of yesterday, I had started to write my original piece about the eagerly offended agnostic. However, what do I find, but that the ever eloquent Mr. William F. Buckley has once again stolen my thunder (though while talking about a completely different subject):

The opposition to nativity scenes at Christmastime, or to the singing of songs that focus on the manger and the stilled star that hung over it, embraces a wide group of people. Among them are secularists who have drunk deep of ACLU doctrines over the years and have convinced themselves that any theological exercise in public circumstances is both a deprivation of their rights to seamless agnosticism and a personal affront to believers in competing doctrines. In such language you can’t say a Christian prayer without offending the Jew or the Muslim.

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With all of the hype about the security improvements in Firefox there is one thing that they overlooked which is being pointed out by Peter Torr over at ASP.Net:

I personally don’t care if people choose to run Firefox or Linux or any other software on their computers – it’s their computer, after all – but we’ll never get past the spyware / adware problem if people continue to think that installing unsigned code from random web sites is A Good Idea.

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Some people will forever be chasing the chimera of better government. This shields them from the idea that the only option is less government - Peter Gordon.

[Via Samizdata.net]

[Listening to: Bad Businessman - Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hot (03:48)]

Joel of Joel on Software has another fabulous article out on his website, this time on software pricing. It’s well worth a read even if you could care less about pricing because he’s a pretty funny guy when it comes down to it. For example:

I’m going to start with a little economic theory, then I’m going to tear the theory to bits, and when I’m finished, you’ll know a lot more about pricing and you still won’t know how much to charge for your software, but that’s just the nature of pricing. If you can’t be bothered to read this, just charge $0.05 for your software, unless it does bug tracking, in which case charge $30,000,000 for it.

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By a weird coincidence, I discovered a solution to a problem via a blog at the same time I was wrestling with it. I accidentally deleted a document that I was working on which sent me into a conniption fit about having to recreate it entirely. However, a blog post from Crooked Timber popped up at the same time which solved all of my problems. If you have Google Desktop installed on your system (if you don’t, you should), you can find historical version of your documents in its local cache. You lose all of the formatting of the document, but at least get the text of the document. It also lets you see how that document has changed over time. Really cool and a life saver if you lose something important.

Man, this is just starting to get real funny to me. Here’s another great quote from a newspaper editor furious about the increasing popularity and pressure from the online publishers:

In July, he [Randell Beck, executive editor of the Argus Leader] explained to readers that “true believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue. If Hitler were alive today, he’d have his own blog.”

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Well it took long enough, but finally the fight is over. Maybe now they can all be friends:

Reuters - Business software maker PeopleSoft Inc. has accepted a sweetened $10.3 billion acquisition offer from rival Oracle Corp., ending a bitter, 18-month hostile takeover battle, the companies said on Monday.

Even though everyone else and their dog is posting on this, I though I would pass it along for those who are living in a whole. Google has a new beta version of their search interface available called Google Suggest. It’s pretty incredible; allowing you to see what kind of results you can expect from your search string before you’ve even search. God, would I love to see the hardware/software setup on this one. Amazing product, hopefully it will make it to production.

OK, this one was just kinda funny so I though I would pass it along. I was listening to C-Span radio with my new satellite radio at lunch and overheard a rebroadcast of a press conference given by James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis) regarding immigration policy. One of his major points was his desire to see the border fence between California and Mexico completed. Pretty standard stuff overall. However, he makes what I have to consider as the funniest reason to prevent illegal immigration:

As you may have noticed, I’ve released a correction to the background image so that the prominent repeat lines are no longer visible. Thanks to Andy Sheppard for the fix, though I have to say the simplicity of the fix makes me feel real stupid. (See Previous Post)