The turning of the seasons continues and the cycle begins once again. This page has some interesting comments, as well as some silly questions, like why do son and sun sound alike? implying some deep significance to the answer.
No, No, No, No, No
I heard Bush on the news last night saying that his job is to protect the American People. I believe he was saying this to justify spying on Americans without a warrant.
No, No, No, No, No!
Evidently Mr Bush wasn’t listening to himself when he took his oath of office.
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
You see, Mr. Bush? Your job is to protect the Constitution, not the American People. I think we can defend ourselves quite nicely, thank you.
If Mr. Bush doesn’t listen to himself, why should the rest of us listen to him?
I notice, from the text of a speech he gave this morning, that he is still confused.
Gary Hart Interview
From a BuzzFlash Interview (via Sideshow) I found this quote from Gary Hart to be memorable:
… the reason you can’t mix religion and politics is, religion is about absolutes, right and wrong, good and evil. Politics is about compromise. If you cannot compromise on issues that are not central to a person’s faith – and that’s about 99% of the issues our country faces – then the country doesn’t work. The government doesn’t work.
I think I will have to check out the essay, God And Caesar in America: An Essay on Religion and Politics, that spawned the interview.
Yeah, without compromise, this country doesn’t work.
Frustration
Here I am trying to use my HTML tags to make a nicely formatted article and my browser won’t display them. In the previous article I set up the individual ideas as lists. They should be indented, with bullets. Do they show up that way? No. Look at the source code, doesn’t it show the < UL > tags and < LI > tags?
Silly browsers.
Column from PC Magazine: Pathetic European Attack on Google and the Net
Column from PC Magazine: Pathetic European Attack on Google and the Net
In a headline-grabbing comment last week, Pinto Balsemão, head of the European Publishers Council, said that the Internet cannot continue to be free, as it has been for the last decade. He wasn’t suggesting that publishers make all their sites pay-per-view, but that search engines could not and should not be able to search for content freely.
There is some concern that Google, and other search engines, can run rampant through a publishers library and start providing copyrighted works to the public, for free or a fee.
If this is a real concern, I can think of several ways to stop this.
- Get off the internet.
- Block the bots. I know what bots are visiting my web pages. I could set filters to stop them from accessing pages. Then they wouldn’t be collected, stored, mined, and indexed on the main site.
- Get W3C to add a tag that tells bots that this page should not be indexed. Maybe even set the tag to allow some bots and forbid others, so internal search engines can provide a catalog for the Intranet. (Note: Intranet vs. internet)
- Whitelist allowed users. Only allow valid, authorized IP adresses to access the web sites. In a closed community, this is a lot more manageable than a site that wants to be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
There are so many controls that a user can provide to limit access to files and pages on the internet. Folks seem to have forgotten them, or never understood how the system worked; just following the lead of what was done before, by a bunch of hackers who didn’t really want to restrict access to information, copyrighted or not.
Of course, it will require a lot more work to manage everything. An expenditure of time, money, and effort to limit access to a system that is a free-for-all in its natural state. But, it can be done.
Can I patent these ideas?
Pencil Carving
Do you ever get the feeling that some people have too much time on their hands…
State Department policies on dual citizenship
State Department policies on dual citizenship
This will be of interest to some.
Capitol Hill Blue: Bush on the Constitution: ‘It’s just a goddamned piece of paper’
Capitol Hill Blue: Bush on the Constitution: ‘It’s just a goddamned piece of paper’
An interesting commentary, if true. I ran a quick Google on some key words and phrases, like: Bush, constitution, “piece of paper”, and I couldn’t find anyone else reporting this. I would think this would be a major story for any main stream media org.
Of course the major give-away is Bush’s statement that the Constiution is a ‘piece of paper’. I’m not sure that he even knows that.
An Important Equation
Elevation = sin-1(sin(lat)*sin(dec)+cos(lat)*cos(dec)*cos(15*hour))
where:
lat = latitude on earth
dec = declination of sun
hour = delta hour from noon (i.e. noon =0)
What’s that spell?
Elevation of the sun above the horizon!!!
So at 10 AM on June 21st at my house, the sun would be:
sin-1(sin(39)*sin(23.5)+cos(39)*cos(23.5)*cos(15*2))
= sin-1(.629*.399+.777*.917*.866) = sin-1(.868) = 60.2 degrees above the horizon
Wow!
December 6th, 2005
An interesting, almost historical, day. The day no mail came.
I think that 12/6 was the first day in over 20 years, that Elaine or I have not recieved at least one piece of mail (counting days that we should expect mail delivery. This does preclude Sundays, Holidays and days when there is so much snow on the ground we couldn’t even walk to the mailbox, much less expect a USPS driver to reach it by road. )
What makes it interesting is that yesterday we got a lot of mail and it was in two bundles. And in one of the bundles were several pieces of mail that I was expecting on Tuesday. The other bundle had mail I was expecting yesterday.
So, if I can hypothesize, the USPS driver had bundled up our Tuesday mail, tossed it in the car and then missed it during their round; or, they got sick and didn’t finish their round, went home with the mail in the back of the car, stayed sick on Wednesday, and didn’t show up for work until yesterday.
Who knows what lurks in the minds of USPS drivers?
Tuesday was chilly, but clear most of the day. The snow didn’t start until evening, after the expected mail round. Not that it really snowed. A few flakes, no more than a couple of inches, with drifting. Wednesday was the day that didn’t get above 10 degrees Farenheit. It stayed bright and clear though, and we got mail that day.