Month: September 2002

407,791 voices cry freedom. Stephen Robinson at The Telegraph –

407,791 voices cry freedom – one English paper’s report on the
march. Includes a link to “the day in pictures”. [End the War on Freedom]

Another report on the countryside march. This one is clearly supportive of the marchers.

Huge turnout for countryside march. Around 400,000 people from across the country have marched through central London to highlight the needs of rural communities.

Crowds were so big it took people queuing at the start of the official route more than six hours to filter through, according to police.

Organisers say the demonstration, officially called the march for Liberty and Livelihood, is the biggest in recent times. [BBC News]

It’s nice to see such a clear demonstration that England isn’t all Socialist-dominated cities!

Making The Case For OS 9 [MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion]

A debate on the merits of the Mac OS compared to OS X. As a Mac OS user, I simply have no interest in changing to OS X. If I wanted to switch to an inferior OS, I’d switch to Windows.

Online Gaming Illegal (Wink Wink). The U.S. Justice Department insists online gambling is against the law. And some credit card companies won’t finance gaming habits. But that’s not stopping online bettors from rolling the dice. By Elliot Borin. [Wired News]

Since online gambling sites are located outside the US, in countries with more respect for property rights, the Feds don’t really have any say in the matter. Sure they can intimidate US-based credit card companies, but all that does is help companies like e-gold.

A Right to Argue the Justness of Laws. There are laws that many of us find unjust. Some of us find that the drug laws are too strict. Maybe a 55mph speed limit on an open road with no traffic seems a little unfair. Do copyright laws seem a little draconian? Such big fines and jail time for simply copying Q3A and giving it to a friend. It is possible to be technically guilty of a crime and yet argue that the law itself is actually in the wrong. Currently, South Dakota wants to pass an amendment that will give defendants the right to challenge laws. [kuro5hin.org]

Although the kuro5hin.org article doesn’t say so, reading the linked article makes it clear that this is indeed backed by the Fully Informed Jury Association. Defendendants actually do already have the right to challenge the law they’re charged with breaking, but the “justice” system in the US has routinely stomped on that right for about 100 years now. I certainly hope the people in South Dakota succeed in reasserting their rights!

Group: Grave of Stalin Victims Found [AP World News]

Here’s a story that probably won’t receive widespread media coverage.

Firefly Premieres Tonight [Slashdot]

This show might turn out well–the advertisements I’ve seen remind me quite a bit of a typical session of the Traveller role-playing game. Of course, even if it’s good that’s not guarantee of success. Good sci-fi shows don’t do very well on TV, as demonstrated by the abrupt cancellation of Farscape.

Entangling Alliances Distort our Foreign Policy. The root of the problem is our insistence on accepting the concept of one-world globalist government while pursuing unilateralist goals. We participate in globalist institutions like the UN, sign globalist treaties, and send our sons and daughters to fight in globalist wars that have nothing to do with our national interest. Yet we also demand the right to act unilaterally when it suits us, to set all policy in the global arena, and to exclude ourselves from many of the international rules.

This schizophrenic approach inevitably gives us the worst of both worlds. We give up our sovereignty, but fail to win any real allies. We pay all the bills, risk the lives of our young people, and invite UN meddling in our domestic laws, yet still we sow the seeds of discontent and future hostility with the world community. All because we have abandoned our Constitution and the founder’s ideal of noninterventionism in favor of globalism. What is badly needed today is a coherent foreign policy based on American national security and self-defense, free trade, a rejection of entangling political and military alliances, and a wholesale removal of the U.S. from the clutches of global government. [Ron Paul’s Texas Straight Talk]

Brent Simmons: “For RSS adoption to continue, stability is important. Developers should not spend their time scrambling to support new specs: they should spend their time building better apps.” Exactly.   [Scripting News]

The irony of Dave posting this summary and the next was too amusing to pass up.

Discourse in the RSS community has reached new lows, but none of this means that RSS 2.0 will be delayed by even one moment.   [Scripting News]