(Saturn 5 liftoff courtesy NASA) I’ve read some excerpts and discussions of Newt Gingrich’s speech about settling the Moon and allowing the colony(s) to become States of the United States. He’s gotten a lot of flack from all sides on that, a disturbing amount coming from the conservative blogosphere. It’s like so many Americans don’t want to think about a future that might involve doing something we haven’t done before, because “it’s too crazy” … Read entire article »

Our Government is about to take away most of our rights on the Internet, all in the name of preserving the profits of the movie and music industry, two groups that have already made copyright a permanent thing, even though it spits on the memory of the Founders. The idea of making some money off of a creation is okay, but the Founders understood that society and the US in particular would benefit if that time was limited. But after Disney and other companies became powerful (by using creations that were freely available) they were able to “persuade” (buy off) the Government into making copyright permanent, so that creations never become free to use by the next generation of Disneys. Regular people will lose their rights, all in order to … Read entire article »

I’ve just spent the last two days fighting a software problem at work, one that has kept me from making any progress on the task I was assigned. It wasn’t a problem with the program thatI was assigned to fix, it was a problem with the tools I was trying to use to find the problem in the program in the first place. The fact that the tools are also software, and the fact that the tools also have bugs has been causing far too much stress, mainly because it was so ultimately wasteful of time (and of my limited sanity!). As I drove home last night, after 10 utterly fruitless hours spent trying variation after variation of settings and configurations and watching them all fail to … Read entire article »