Other peoples’ money

“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.

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Categorized as Politics

The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand

Some drastic change of direction is about to take place in Nokia’s smartphone strategy. We can predict this because Nokia has shut down the Symbian Foundation. What we can’t tell yet is what direction they’ll jump, and there are at least four somewhat plausible scenarios. I’m going to list them in what I think are… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand

If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system?

I’ve written software for a lot of different reasons besides pure utility in the past. Sometimes I’ve been making an aesthetic statement, sometimes I’ve hacked to perpetuate a tribal in-joke, and at least once I have written a substantial piece of code exactly because the domain experts solemnly swore that job was impossible to automate… Continue reading If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system?

It’s good to be ubiquitous

So, while trying to discover the minor version of the Android 2.2 running on my G-2, I touched the tab labeled “Open source licenses”. Scrolled down, and “Eric S. Raymond” popped out at me.

I join the not-flying list

Count me with those who will not be flying until the TSA procedures requiring either a full-body X-ray scan or a grope are rescinded. This is meaningless security theater taken to a Kafkaesque extreme, and I won’t consent to it even passively. When the airlines feel enough pain from refuseniks, they’ll push back faster than… Continue reading I join the not-flying list

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Categorized as Terror

Why spamrape happens

One of my regulars writes, re the recent spam-raping of the blog >I’m still trying to figure out what the attack was. All the comments were replaced by spam? No. What happened was that on Sunday night I caught a bot in the act of replacing real comments with spam, oldest first. It was working… Continue reading Why spamrape happens

The Rape of the Blog

(Part of this is a repost. The problem it described have been solved, at least until someone finds the next hole in WordPress. I have restored it to keep the record complete.) Sometime late Sunday night or Monday, I wrote: My blog is being raped by a spambot. I first noticed about a half an… Continue reading The Rape of the Blog